 We'd like to especially welcome our young guests from Crocker Farm, their principal, their parents, their teacher, and we will be hearing from them very early on in the program. So at 6.30 we're calling the meeting to order seeing that we have a quorum of the council present. I would like to have the first slide and if you look up here, several of you, meaning my fellow councillors, have been suggesting we begin being a little more strict on time. And so I challenge you this evening, if you look up here, and if you follow this and you keep your remarks brief but pointed, we might actually get out of here before midnight. So I'm going to try to keep us to this schedule. It's very aggressive, but I understand the rules of procedure are planning to ask for something aggressive like this anyway. So let's move on. First of all, a couple things I'd like to note on your calendar. The May 4th, we have a cleanup of Amherst. It's an event that's both councillors and our community participation officers and others are participating in. And if those of you sitting here tonight that are under 18, if you'd like to participate, you have to bring your parents with you. Okay. Second of all, on May 21st at 6.30pm, we have a finance committee public hearing on the FY20 budget. And then finally on June 10th at 6.30pm, we have a public forum on the capital improvement plan. As I mentioned earlier, I'm going to take the liberty of changing the order of the agenda, and we will hear from the Crocker Farm Read-Around Town Project book box. And after that, we will have time for a public comment and move on through the rest of the agenda as it has been laid out. With that, I would especially like to ask Ms. Kate Perkins, who is the teacher of this wonderful class, to come forward. Hi. I live on Station Road. Thank you so much for inviting us tonight. And without further ado, I'd like to present the fabulous third grader. My name is Sophie, and I live on 57 Glendale Road. Reason one, people who are learning to read need to have their eyes on text for 20 minutes every day, and a bus ride is a perfect time. Can I go to Crocker Farm? Reading for 20 minutes every day builds up your brain. I'm Clara, and I live on 30 Orchard Street. Here is some research on reading and brain development. Why read 20 minutes at home? You can read this later. My name is Lucia, and I live on Spring Street. Reason two, little free libraries at bus stops will provide easy, convenient access to books for everyone. My name is Morgan, and I live on Woodside App. Reason three, people are addicted to their phones and often don't know what to do instead. Books could be the answer. What can I possibly do on this bus ride instead of being on my phone? I'm Tim, and I live on 16 Whipple Tree Lane. We hope that read around town will get people off their phones and inspire new learning and conversations. We hope to offer books for all ages, both fiction and non, and in multiple languages. Reason number four, reading would keep people quiet on the bus so the driver can focus, and this is super important for everyone's safety. Reason five, we hope that read around town will inspire other communities to join us in our effort to get lots of books into the hands of all their citizens and to get kids involved in local change, making endeavors. Who will pay for the project and how will they pay for the project? Our class is currently selling our great changer cards and proceeds will fund the project. In the past years our fundraisers have generated $300 to $500. We've already received several money donations in support of the read around town. We've received donations and materials to build the library. These are our beautiful great changer cards. Freezer basket in the Crocker Farm office. We are sponsored by UMS5 College Credit Union with a $250 match. Thanks UMS5. Which bus stops will have little free libraries? We would like to install little free libraries at the following bus stops. Bus stop number 221 at West Street and Potline. Bus stop number 179 at West Street and Pomeroy. Bus stop number 166 at the bottom of the Crocker Farm driveway. This is bus stop number 221 at Potline Drive and West Street. This is bus stop number 179 at Pomeroy Lane and West Street. This is bus stop number 166 at the bottom of the Crocker Farm driveway. These are the plans. We're just going to skip right over that part because I know you've had time to look at them. Here's the size comparison. We think an average adult is about 510. So this is how big a library is. Who will build the libraries and install them at the bus stops? Mr. Tom Joy has offered generously to build with our help. We are exploring the idea of reaching out to local scout troops and vocational schools for help with building. Third graders will decorate the library so that they are a source of beauty and pride for our community for many years to come. And class parent and community volunteers will dig holes and add quick concrete so that the libraries are anchored to secure our materials. I'd like to ask counselors if they have any comment or questions at this time. I have a comment which I think this is an absolutely wonderful project. But I also have a question. I have a lot of books at home and how can I get them to the small libraries when I'm in that neighborhood or bring them to the school? You could drop them off at our school. Are there other questions from the council? Yes. Dorothy. Is there any particular age range? Is this for all people or particularly for young phone addicted people? This is for all people. All right. Excellent answers. Do we have any other questions or comments? Then I'm going to exert my privilege as president of the council to place the following motion before the council. And I'll be seeking a second. The motion is... Oh, Pat. Pat wants to second it. I know she does. Okay. The motion is to approve the request of the Crocker Farm Elementary School third grade class to install three free little libraries on Amherst public ways. One adjacent to bus stop ID number 221 at the corner of Potwine Lane and West Street, Route 116. One adjacent to bus stop 179 at West Street and Pomeroy Lane. And one adjacent to bus ID number 166 on West Street at the bottom of the Crocker Farm driveway. Do I hear a second? Pat. Is there any further discussion from the council? Then all of those in favor raise your hand, please. I'd like to note that that is unanimous. We want to thank you for being with us today. And we hope you'll come back for more civic education. Okay. Thank you so much for having us. We are going to continue with our agenda. If you'd like to, if the students and their parents and so forth would like to get home to do their homework, that'd be great. We are going to proceed with general public comment. As you may note on the agenda, we have several times during the evening that we will be receiving public comment in relationship to agenda items. Specifically, those items are 6a, 6b, 6c, 6d, 7a, 7b, 7c, 7e, and 7h. If you have a comment that you would like to make in regard to any other issue besides those, please raise your hand. Yes. Come forward, please. State your name, where you live. My name is John Griffin. I live in Greenfield. I work at UMass Amherst, but I'm here in my personal capacity, not in any official capacity. I would like tonight to tell you about a young man. This young man is 24 years old, computer science graduate student at UMass Amherst with a bright future ahead of him, or at least at once until his life was tragically taken by a motor vehicle on Friday, April 12th on North Pleasant Street. This young man's name was Jasgar Anseng, and his death made headlines internationally in India where he was from originally. As reported, the driver stopped and cooperated with police, and no charges are being filed. No further news has been published on this locally since the 12th, and it's impossible to find any details on why or how this tragic event happened. It has been 10 days since the crash. Surely the police are able to investigate a crash where the driver stopped to cooperate and no charges were filed in this amount of time. We should know what happened so that we can prevent it from happening again in the future. Without the details of this accident, we can't know the speed at which the driver was traveling or if they were momentarily distracted by something else in the roadway. But let us assume for a second that the driver was traveling at the posted speed limit of 35 miles per hour, ignoring for now that most people travel at least 45 to 50 miles an hour down this roadway most days. According to a study of pedestrian collisions by ProPublica and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the average 30-year-old individual has a 22% chance of being killed when struck at 35 miles per hour, which rises to 31% for all ages. Whereas for the same 30-year-old pedestrian, there's only a 7% chance of dying from a collision with a vehicle if that vehicle is traveling at 25 miles per hour or 12% for all ages. At 20 miles per hour, that risk falls to 3% or 7% for all ages. In other words, your chance of being killed by a vehicle traveling at 25 miles per hour versus 20 doubles, and your chance of being killed by a vehicle traveling at 35 miles per hour compared to 25 miles per hour more than doubles again. North Pleasant Street is a thickly settled residential street with cars, pedestrians, buses, and bicycle traffic. 35 miles an hour is simply too fast. I respectfully urge the Town Council to adopt Massachusetts General Law Chapter 90, Section 17C, which allows Town Councils to, without further authority and without the standard DOT review process, unilaterally change the statutory speed limit for thickly settled roadways to 25 miles per hour townwide. I also ask the Town Council to establish a 20-mile per hour safety zone as allowed by Massachusetts General Law Chapter 90, Section 18B for all town roadways throughout the UMass Amherst campus and North Pleasant Street in downtown Amherst. According to mass DOT crash data, a pedestrian was fatally struck in a hit-and-run accident at North Pleasant Street in Kellogg Avenue in November of 2016. Mr. Singh's death makes two pedestrian deaths in three years, in addition to the numerous injuries that happen on UMass Amherst campus every year. I ask you to help stop the next death before it happens and to adopt lower speed limits in town as other communities are doing under this law, including Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Concord, Lexington, Lynn, Revere, Salem, as well as Chickpea, Folio, Springfield, and Pittsfield, amongst 39 total cities and towns that have adopted MGL 9017C so far. Thank you very much. Thank you for your comment. Are there any other comments at this time? Okay, if not, we'll proceed with the agenda and we will move on to item number five, which is proclamations and commemorations. The first one is on Arbor month proclamation. Is there anyone here to speak to this proclamation? Please come forward. Just wanted to thank you for taking this time for the Arbor month proclamation. Okay, thank you. Are there any other comments on this particular proclamation? The counselors have this before them. Yes, Mandy Jo. I had sent some spelling revisions in. Just make sure we get them spelled correctly before we sign it. Okay. We will do a spell check on that and do so before I officially sign it. Don't worry, Margaret. I'll be back tomorrow so I can sign it then. Thank you very much. Thank you. Great. Oh, I'm sorry. Are there any other questions this time? All right. Then all those in favor of the Arbor month proclamation, a motion. I'm sorry. Do I hear a motion to accept? I shall move. Thank you. And all those, and the second, we'll move on. Okay. This is to adopt the Arbor month proclamation as presented. All those in favor? Okay. That's unanimous. Thank you very much. The next one is art week proclamation. And Sarah, the core is with us this evening. To speak on behalf of the art week proclamation. However, we would like to take this opportunity to thank her upon her decision to leave the bid. She has made a significant contribution as executive director of the bid during her tenure. She's worked diligently on the mission goals and action steps set forward in the bid five year implementation plan. This work includes bringing new events, programming and special projects to the organization and the town. And as compared to other bids across the state, we are considered to be one of the strongest bids. During transition times, the transitional time for the Amherst Chamber of Commerce, she took over many of their responsibilities with regard to the visitor center and the taste of Amherst. She stabilized the bid, aiding them to become a true partner into the town and representing the interests of the downtown businesses and all businesses. She also was enormously successful in obtaining renewal of the bid for the property owners who are required to pay extra to have a bid. This is a mark of a very successful group that are willing to tax themselves more for the services they are receiving. So with that, we're interested in hearing about the grant and art week. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. I didn't expect that. Thank you. Sara Lacour, Executive Director of the bid for another five weeks. I'm also wearing another hat, the Amherst Center Cultural District, which is managed by the bid on behalf of the town. And I'm president of that organization. And it's through the cultural district that we received a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. And one of the things we decided to do with that was a coalescing event. And we decided that it would be very significant to us to sign on to Art Week Massachusetts, which has been very successful around the state. So this is a week that has been happening across the Commonwealth, but we're putting our own twist on it. And so it's Art Week and Amherst, the art of. And we've led businesses and organizations and nonprofits go with however they wanted to go with this. And it's been really exciting. We have a poster out. We've gotten a lot of press. We have a poster with all the, you'll see, we also have a sign up at Rens. We have coasters that are out there. And so there's a lot of really, really interesting diverse events happening. It's April 26th through May 5th. And we also got some great press in Boston. We are on the marquee of the Bach Center in downtown Boston, our cultural district group. We have a cut out of Emily with us and we're holding signs. So we're famous in Boston. And so we're really, really excited about this project. We hope it to be an annual event through the cultural district. And it's been a great way to engage all kinds of sectors throughout downtown. And we're really looking forward to, to having this event happen this year. And we hope many more. Thank you. Thank you. Other questions from the council? Okay. We have a motion to adopt the Art Week proclamation event. And second? It was seconded by Sarah. Are there any further questions or comments? All those in favor? That's unanimous. Thank you very much. So please come and attend some of our great events. Thanks so much. And our final proclamation is from the VFW, Veterans of Foreign War. It's a citation. Is there anybody here representing that group? Okay. Let me just point out that the citation, it perils the efforts of VFW district commander, Jamelia Rosa, and district auxiliary president, Carla Jane Dunn Watson. This event will actually take place on, I'm sorry, on May 5th. And maybe Johanna Key will attend the dinner on behalf of the council. Other counselors are also invited to attend. Are there any questions? Yes. So I have a question about proclamations in general. So Arbor Day we do every year, Art Walk is a new, Art Week is a new thing, but replicating previous. But when it comes to things like the skating club of Amherst, just something like the VFW, things that are near and dear to many of our hearts. So what's our expectation as to where is the line drawn in terms of how those things work? Now I appreciate that we were engaged in participating in the dinner and certainly recognizing an anniversary is always very valuable. But before we get too far down this process, I'm just trying to understand if someone will be coming up with some sort of standard as to, just so I don't want people to feel bad, but I also don't want us to do 25 of these every week. So just trying to understand. Perhaps this is something rules of procedure might include. Did we take care of that issue? Thank you. Any other questions? I'm trying to stick to that timeline gang. Are there any other questions? So the motion is as follows, and that is to approve the award of the Veterans of Foreign Wars VFW Citation as presented. Is there a motion? Mandy Jo is second. I'll second. Dorothy is the second. Any further questions, comments? All those in favor? It's unanimous. Thank you. We are now going to move on to presentations. And our first one is on the Community Preservation Act. Mr. Backelman, is there any introduction you want to make to this? Yes. Anthony Delaney, who is our procurement officer and has been staffing the Community Preservation Act Committee this year, has prepared a brief presentation on an overview of the CPA, how it works, but we know that we're on time constraint, so he'll be extremely efficient, which he always is. Okay. Let me also mention that the reason we're doing this tonight is because later on in the agenda, you will see that we received the recommendation from the CPAC, and we will be referring that to the Finance Committee and the CRC, Community Resources Committee. Anthony. Thank you. My name is Anthony Delaney. I'm the Procurement Officer for the town and one of the staff that's been assisting with the committee. Do I need to call up the presentation? Okay. So I will proceed briskly here, and if there are questions at the end, we can circle back on anything you want more information on. I'm going to start with the issue of the CPA process and the committee's role in it. So the Community Preservation Act is Mass General Law chapter 44B signed into law in 2000, last amended in 2012, which allows cities and towns that adopt the act to set aside a reserve fund for community preservation purposes. The town adopted it in 2001, levying a 1% surcharge on property taxes above $100,000. This was last increased in 2015 to 3%, which is the maximum. The act identifies four areas of funding, community housing, historic preservation, open space and recreation. And each year, 10% of new revenue must be, four CPA must be spent on each of community housing, historic preservation, and open space and recreation combined. So eligible projects. There's a, I won't go through the whole chart, but under each category, there are various things that are not acceptable. You can acquire all four, items under all four categories, but you can't create an historic artifact with CPA funds, somewhat axiomatically. In addition to the above, CPA funds can be used, can be set aside for later spending, interest payments on borrowing for CPA projects, damages to property owners or eminent domain, for eminent domain takings, grant matches, property acquisition expenses, and administrative expenses for CPA, not to exceed 5% of annual revenues. They may not be spent on replacing operating funds, routine maintenance, gymnasiums, stadiums, or artificial turf fields, or any project without a public purpose or public benefit. The committee has nine members, conservation commission, historical commission, planning board, LSSE commission, and the housing authority each have one person on the board on the committee, and those five slots are set out in the mass general law, and the town bylaw also adds four citizens to the committee at large, appointed by the council, and nine is the maximum size of the committee. So the CPA process is, this is kind of the ideal process, we were a bit compressed this year, but we had issued the RFP in September with the proposals due back to the committee and by December. Those proposals are then vetted by committees that specialize in that area. The committee writes questions and submits them to the proposers who answer in writing. In February, the committee starts scheduling presentations over several weeks where they are presented by the proposers and there's a verbal Q&A. These presentations are followed by a public hearing. Then the CPAC votes on what projects they recommend and writes a report, and then it's sent to the council with the finance committee and then the full council will vote. The community resources committee, I understand is involved this year, I'm not sure if it's going to be a permanent part of the process or not, so they're not reflected, but the council, when they receive the recommendation from CPAC, will find new projects, debt service on old projects, the administrative expenses and any reserve funding. The council can approve, reduce or reject any proposal that may not increase funding or add other projects to the project slate that the CPAC did not approve. As part of their award, the proposers receive a contract, a letter and any applicable restrictions like historic preservation restrictions or affordable housing restrictions. The proposers or awardees will submit their invoice to the town offices who will review it for compliance and then reimburse the awardees. When the project is completed, the town closes any remaining balance and returns it to the funding source where it is then available for the next round of CPA funds. So this is just a bar graph of how we've been spending since inception, broken out by area and lifetime spend in each area. Other there is administrative costs. So in each of the four areas, we've had some notable work. The city of St. Louis housing has the goals of addressing the somewhat skewed housing market in the town. And Olympia Oaks, Rolling Green, Habitat for Humanity have been some of the most notable projects in this area. Historic preservation, Dickinson Plot, the Tiffany window with the Unitarian Universalist Church. A number of open space projects currently about 30% of the town is permanently protected in some way. And the Fort River Farm and steam property were acquired with CPA funds. And recreation, both passive and active spots. We target them hopefully in our population centers, renovating old areas and purchasing new. If you are looking for further CPA information, the CPA website, the town's CPA website has all of our, has about 10 years of previous projects, timelines, forms, other resources. The community preservation coalition is an advocacy group and has also a lot of CPA information, legal information and opinions. And the town's master plan, housing production plan, preservation plan and open space and direct plan also inform the CPA process. So. Are there questions from the council? Alyssa. My questions for the town manager. It is not my belief that the town council will make the at-large appointments. It is my belief that the town manager will. But I realize that the bylaw that we passed said select board. So this is one of those. It has to be chosen. And I wondered how far we have gotten associated with. There is no automatic assumption that select board means town council. And so I wondered how far we have gotten with that conversation. So the bylaw hasn't been changed. It is in the bylaw review committee. But I think the assumption that the town manager because the town manager under the town, the new charter appoints all multiple member bodies. Okay. Are there additional questions? Yes. Kathy. On one of your slides, you said that council can approve, reduce or reject, but not increase. If there were an instance that a project was questioned in terms of reduce, would you be able to go back and find an alternative use for the money in the current year or would become a reserve for the following year? Or something else? I believe it is also in your power to remand the issue back to the CPA to do something with. Given the timeline, I am not sure that the CPA could make a new recommendation. I assume if nothing happened to the money, it would just stay in the fund for next year. There is no deadline for the council to act, so if you decided in the fall that you wanted to again do another issuance of CPA funds, if there were funds available, you could do that then. It is not once a year. That is correct. It is something we would like to talk with the finance committee and start to structure our whole budget process that CPA has handled at a certain time, capital projects so that the council and the finance committee and staff are not burdened with everything coming together at the same time. May I state that that has been noted by the finance committee? Are there other questions on this? Yes, Evan. That was a really quick overview. I saw that schedule. There are two things that I would just like to hear a little bit more about based on not just this presentation, but also the recommendations we have from CPAC. So one is the ability to borrow versus just dispersing funds that are collected. How often that is used, when, why. And then also the existence and use of the housing reserve. If you could just speak to those two means of funding. So the bonding is done based on the decision of the committee. They decide what projects would make sense and it is usually something that they feel confident or strongly about. And certainly this year that is the case with the one project that they are recommending borrowing. The length of the budget, whether it is a 5 or 10 year borrowing is administratively, but whether to borrow is a committee decision based on available funds and needs and trying to make all the numbers balance. The second question was just an explanation of the housing reserve. So if the committee does not have substantial leftover funds they might elect to, but not a project they want to fund with the budget. So they decided to reserve the money for either general use or a specific use. So this money was set aside previously because there weren't housing projects that they wanted to fund that year but they wanted to set it aside for a larger or prominent project in the future. So we are expending that this year to address the housing ones. There is a small expected balance that will be a general use for the actual action that will be taken as 7E. So if you would like to ask questions about that at this time, that would be fine as well. And that actually lays out the projects. But as I understand it, since I was liaison to the committee, there is also a written report that describes these projects. There is a written report. It is nearly done based on internal information. It will be distributed before the subcommittees before the resource committee meets on Wednesday so tomorrow. But the report is not quite ready for primetime tonight. Thank you. But we will be receiving it and when we do, it will be distributed not only to those committees but to all Councillors. Yes, Mandy. If we can ask about the recommendations that were not related to the CPA recommendations, that it would that project, that Valley CDC project was actually being recommended because that line item was actually blank on the recommended side even though underneath it said recommended for borrowing. So one of my questions is can you clear up whether it is being recommended or not? And then I would like the historic preservation amount met state requirements of a minimum of 10%. So can you address that too? So the Valley CDC project is recommended and they took two votes. They voted to recommend it and then they voted to recommend to borrow for it. And that is the reason there is no amount on the sheet. It is current year expenditures and the borrowing, we will not start paying on the sheet. It is not dividing by the wrong thing and I am not entirely sure why the spreadsheet is set up that way but the 10% is only on new revenues and our new revenue number is I believe 10% of our new revenue now is I think 106,000 and we are spending 150,000 on historic preservation. So we are not meeting 10% of the whole expenditure but we are meeting it based on new revenue which is what the budget is going to be. Thank you. Any other questions? Shalini. Could you tell us a little bit about the process of how these projects are selected and I also just wanted to understand the eligible projects with the word support means and for example community housing is yes but the others are no. So again just a little bit what that means. So the statute definition of a historic artifact or for the open they are vetted by the basically statutory compliance and that is kind of the first round. Then basically the committee asked the questions to determine, they start to form opinions based on how valuable the project is, how much of it is going to return on investment whether the in some cases whether the project is going to have a permanent affordable restriction or it might only be a short term benefits. There's a number of factors and those are kind of worked out in the quite Q&A and the presentations and kind of over a long period of time. And then in the end it's a long discussion about what is and isn't support. Mr. I'm going to weigh in on something prior to that. So there's a general call for projects early at the beginning of the process. So it's been published and anybody can submit a proposal or a proposal or a proposal or a proposal or a proposal or a proposal or a proposal or a proposal or a proposal and anybody can submit a proposal. And there are lots of proposals that are submitted, some are withdrawn after they have additional conversations to see if it meets the basic criteria of falling under the requirements of the state law for this support. I don't know if I have a good answer for support. I can get you some of that literature later. I don't know if you would like to get a question about the city, the city housing. Okay. Yes, Mandy Jo. When we get the report from the CPA will it also discuss why certain projects were not recommended or will we only see the recommended side? The committee this year decided to add rejected projects and a brief explanation of why. It will not include any withdrawn I have a question, but it's more for, I guess, you, actually, which is when we eventually take these up, is it the intention that we take them up as a package of recommendations or would we be voting on each of these individually? So the process after tonight is that this will be referred both to the finance committee to look at the financial side of things and to the CRC community resources committee because so many of these areas really fall under the charge for the community resources committee. And it's, while they're just beginning their process of organization, it's an opportunity for them to at least look at this year. Both of those committees will come back to the council with recommendations, and the council will then take it up and make decisions. We do not need to accept carte blanche. We can do individuals as Anthony has described to us. Yes, Kathy. Okay, to follow up question on Evans, I have a series of questions about some of the criteria that was used and the distribution that I see here. What I was thinking is I might write them up and get them out in advance. So when this comes to finance, people will have thought about them because they're more global rather than about a specific project. But an example would be a criteria for land acquisition. And when we buy it as public, it takes it out of the tax base. Do we worry about that? So I have some generic questions, recreational fields, what gets in, what gets out, can I see what's gotten in? So I thought I'd type them up and share them with both committees so that. I think that would be perfectly fine. And then as we come back for the full council to look at it, we can also look at the responses. Are there additional questions at this time? Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Moving on with our agenda. The next item is the recommendation on request for use of public ways. And we're trying something a little new tonight in that I've taken the liberty of the reports that were sent to us in advance. And develop slides so that the public can see in summary what we're talking about with each of the reports. And Mandy Joe, I'm going to turn this over to you for the presentation. Thank you. So the council had referred the town manager's recommendation on how to handle public ways to governance and governance over the course of three meetings. Discussed that recommendation and its own sort of thoughts on public ways. Spoke with a former select board member Connie Krueger about her thoughts on handling of public ways and also then forwarded a draft proposal to the town manager seeking comment from him. He had referred that and sought comment on his own from many different people that would be involved in this. So it has been through and received before coming back to the council a number of sort of thoughts and reviews. In the end, the governance committee generally adopted what the town manager had requested in his initial report to the council on who would handle which ones, which requests. But we also added a full section, which is the town commons, which is the one right up here that is shown right now. That the select board had not generally handled event requests on the common. And the GOL committee believed that we should sort of formalize what gets handled by the council and what gets handled by the town manager or the town manager's designee on those issues because the commons are technically in the public way. So for the town commons, as you can see up here, short term event requests like the taste of Amherst, the sustainability festival, that the common portion of those requests would go to the town manager. Less than three months of use, specific events. The ones that would stay with the council are long term event uses. We couldn't really, as a committee, actually come up with something that might fall under that category, just so you know. Because even many of the holiday structures that go up are fall under the three month timeline, but we figured we had short term and we had permanent and we were missing a category. So for now that one stays with the town council to be comprehensive. Long term uses associated with specific events. And then the third category is pretty much everything else that is meant to be sort of permanent. That would include what the, I think it's the bid is looking at and had some contests out for a band structure. That approval would come back to the council if that ever moves forward. Paving of sidewalks within the common, if they wanted to redesign that, that north common that's sort of on hold right now. All of that would come back to the council for things. The third category does exempt maintenance and repairs at the request of the manager. And it made sense to governance committee to exempt maintenance of benches on the common and stuff like that, that they could just do that with the town manager's sort of approval. The governance, you'll see in all of this that all requests that go to the town manager and the town manager has authority that we would delegate to the town manager. He has to report back on everything on that. We know that is over, it's actually more than the town manager had recommended. And you'll see that throughout. But we as governance thought this is a new thing for the council to be delegating, we should know exactly what's coming. We can always look at this policy later to see whether we want reports on everything or not going forward, but to start with it all. And then you can always go less from there. So that's the comments. If we can go to the next slide, we'll see the parking. Thank you, Margaret. The parking is, was the one that we had the hardest decision and most discussion about in a committee, in the committee. We ended up going with the town manager's recommendation with a change, which is all short term requests would have a report. And the manager had recommended that those that only had, I think, one to three parking spaces for less than 14 days would not be reported to the council. And we combined that with his other one. So that all short term requests, cumulative or consecutive up to 14 days, would be delegated to him. Long term requests, we added that category in, separated it out from permanent. We, as council, the governance recommends the council keep those requests. And permanent, again, any type of permanent parking changes, the governance committee is recommending the council keep. The discussion on this one, as I said, it was the one that we had the hardest time on. We were split on the committee as to whether we should make the delineation based on length of time for the request. So the days or whether the split should be based on number of spots. Because there's a recognition in governance that a large number of spots, say the entire North Main Street parking area requested for one day can have a substantial impact on parking in town. That type of request would under this recommendation go to the town manager. And would not come to the council. And but yet a request that was for one spot, say on a street to hold a dumpster for 15 days would come to the council. That one has a much smaller impact on parking in town, yet it would come to the council. So we had a large discussion as to how you could split it based on impacts. And we couldn't really come up with it. And in the end, the majority of the governance committee said go with this day split instead of the number of spaces split. There was one member, Councillor Evan, who wanted more of a number of spots split instead of a number of days. So and when I'm done, he can speak to that more if he would like. So that's parking. The next one is roads and sidewalks. And temporary closures, the governance committee recommends that it be left with the department head most in charge of that closure. So fire department, police department, DPW for things like maintenance or safety. Short term closures that aren't the safety and maintenance and all of that for planned events would fall to the town manager. Again, a 14 day split. Long term closures would come to the town council and permanent or other requests related to sidewalks or roads would come to the town council as the recommendation of the governance committee. During, and I'm just gonna say one more thing that pretty much covers everything in this recommendation that we are forwarding on to the council. We came in during the discussions with this. It was mentioned that the select board didn't fully, potentially didn't fully complete the food truck bylaw. That there is one, but it might not have been fully studied and fully implemented or fully written. And there was a recommendation to maybe go back to that. That does not fall under governance. So governance will not be taking that up. Governance also said because of this impact issue and to give guidance to not only the council when deciding public way requests, but to give guidance to the town manager for those that we would be potentially delegating to the town manager. That maybe the council should work on coming up with a guideline for reviewing public way requests and determining whether or not they should be granted with some sort of guidelines that relates to impacts or something like that. Again, GOL did not believe that fell within GOL's charge. But we also did not feel like we had the right to tell another committee or bring it to the council to tell another committee to do that. So my recommendation on things like that and again, a fee structure. Things like that is that maybe there's a committee out there that might want to take some of that up. My report talks about that. And so I'm just going to mention that. And I'm going to give Evan a chance to talk more about parking if he so wishes. And then we'll take questions. I don't think I need to speak to this. I think if you're interested in where my position lay, you can read it in our report. But I don't necessarily see a reason to re-litigate that issue. Are there other members of the committee who would like to speak to the report? Okay, are there questions? Yes, Dorothy. When I read this, I thought, oh, it says all non-banner events. And it crossed my mind not for the first time. Who decides what are the banner events? Mr. Prockelman. I'll address that. It was probably not worded well. Banner requests are the banner that goes across. So the banner request is just that banner. The policy recommendation is not to make the town manager report on every request that comes forward to put a banner across the street. So that is a public way request for roads and sidewalks. And so we exempted that out in a very not so word-friendly way, apparently, when I re-read it. But that, so any request that doesn't relate to flying, posting that banner? Would be reported. But the question I think is who does approve banners? That's the question. The town manager would. Okay. But that was not as part of this public way discussion. Mr. Prockelman? I'm not sure if I understand the question. Was it, was this a, was there a recommendation in your original memo about banner permission? No. Okay. Alyssa. There was nothing about banner in his original thing, just as there was nothing about the common in his original thing, because he inherited a system under which previous select boards prior to my service had delegated the common and the banners to the town manager, which is why I specifically asked that G1GL look at this, that they include common. I think that they, we might have an additional discussion about banner as to why we are choosing to delegate that or not. I think there could potentially be additional discussion on that. But those are things that, as I said, historically weren't, and so they weren't in his recommendation to us, because they historically had just been ceded over to the town manager many years ago. Let me just take this opportunity to mention we are not voting tonight. We may choose to refer for additional discussion of GOL or to some other committee, but we are not voting to accept this tonight. Dorothy. I would really like to have a, I'm sure, I don't know when the planning is done, but I'm sure it is because there's so many weeks in the year and there seems to be banners up a lot in the nice weather. I would love to have a list of banner events with the dates, just so I have some idea of what's coming. I'm always surprised. And I say, oh, it's this, why is it not that? And, you know, I'm not saying that I don't like what is a banner event. I'm just saying I'd like to know what they are ahead of time, if I could. Okay. Kathy. I have just a question by setting up this grid. Am I right in interpreting it that for the short terms that we, at several meetings has spent time saying, are we okay with force parking spaces or two? Those won't come to us anymore? Correct. If we would approve this policy. We just note that there is a, it should be A, B and C, not A, A, B. Okay. Yes. But to clarify, we would receive in a report. We would know, we would know about them. We just wouldn't approve them. Yeah, I just meant it facilitates our agendas if we don't have to discuss one space, two space, force it. Yes. Right. Are there additional questions, comments? Yes, Pat. In term, this is probably a question for Paul. In terms of our being responsible for the public ways, we are then, are we also then responsible for speed limits, et cetera? Yes, you are. Yes, we are. Are there other questions or comments on this? Going forward, I'm sorry. I was waiting to see if anybody else had anything. Lunch carts, I would indicate that we did in fact finish everything we needed to finish as a select board, except we were waiting for staff. We were waiting for staff to delineate for us back when we had a number of approved lunch carts, which I know other people call food trucks because that's what they look like. But they're technically called lunch carts in our regulation, is that we said they could be in certain parts of town. And then we realized, ooh, what if two wanted to be next to each other because you can't use up the whole sidewalk, right? You could say one or you could fit or the other of you could fit or maybe two little ones could fit. And that was going to just have to be something that was worked out. And then it just kind of fell lower on the list because nobody really wants to be having a lunch cart right now other than the one that's in front of you, you. So that's kind of on the hold list to be dealt with because that is the public way, but we also need Rob Mora and his staff to tell us what's the right fit for these things. So you're not obstructing paths of wheelchairs and, you know, next to crosswalks and that sort of thing, curb cuts and everything. So the overall regulation was done but should be looked at again next time somebody wants to apply for one but in terms of where we could put it was getting confusing because we had limited to very specific places in town and we weren't sure where the color forms fit on the map as to how many people could be in each of those. The other thing I just wanted to ask about is that we go ahead and I'm glad we may have additional conversation at a different level associated with some of these issues. One thing I would like to just add somehow and I'm not sure quite how to put this into the wording and ask that you all consider that or whoever this is referred to is that one of the things that has happened in the past again that this town manager inherited is that when contractors are working on long term projects they do not generally speaking always work effectively with staff as to so they're not feeding meters. They're just parking for hours down at wrong direction. At Kendrick Park for example, 11 East Pleasant Street was being done and so nobody was paying for those meters. Those meters weren't bagged. Those meters hadn't been reserved. Contractors just parked there and so that I would like it to somehow be covered that if we're ceding all this to the town manager that in fact there will also be some method of follow-up where whoever parking enforcement belongs to right now reports back to the town manager and says you know there are all these trucks parked there and these contractors we should work out something right whether it's bagging those meters or working out a fee for a particularly long time because these tend to be long-term sorts of things. This has happened many years in the past well prior 20s Pleasant Street where you would go into the banks and there'd be trucks everywhere and nobody was paying for anything so. Okay so let me suggest the following. We have before us a report and a recommendation which we are not going to vote on tonight that but we will bring back up and I would suggest that we would probably want to go and at least in a future meeting maybe even as early as May 6th go ahead and vote on this portion of this. And then there are other issues that have been raised. One is around construction related to I mean parking related to construction. Another is the one about food trucks and the third one is around banners and it does seem that all of those are related to public ways and the question really is whether or not that should go back to GOL or it should go back to GOL and also with advice from CRC. I'm sorry Sean. And just the I mean the speed limits question as well and no. Let's not deal with I think speed limits has to be dealt with separate than this. And what about the rates? Yes. Rates and you know how much we're charging from who and what the process is for parking. How much are we charging for parking. Yeah like you know we've been making decisions about different events that are happening and so the process for that. I think again that's a different discussion than this. This is a matter of who's going to grant it. OK. And then those other questions are what speed limit do we want to set. Separately in what areas. Another issue is what should we be charging for and to whom for parking but not part of this particular effort. This is to be I see this as a opportunity for us to relieve our agenda of some items that frankly take a lot of time. Those other issues I'm sure will take a lot of time for discussion too. So this is going to come back at a future meeting possibly as early as May 6th. If there's anything that GL wants to amend in terms of wordsmithing or anything else. And then at that point we will take up the issue of where are we going to refer the other three items. And if possible we may also at that point say and we'd like to have an opportunity to come back on speed limit and parking rates. OK. Anything else. OK. Moving on. Council liaisons to committees. Alyssa you are the chair of the rules of procedure. And so as I did in the other thing I've created a slide using the charts that you provided but you might want to give a preliminary to this. There's a lot of material in your packet associated with this. Hopefully you had time to look at it. Our liaison discussion was based largely on a the charter because the charter allows us to have non voting liaisons to various committees. Multiple member bodies and the school committee and the library trustees which are called out as a reminder to everyone because they're not identified as multiple member bodies in the charter. Although by law they are considered multiple member bodies in terms of things like open meeting law and ethics. But the way our charter treats them they are treated somewhat differently. Nonetheless we could assign self sign non voting liaisons to those committees. So we looked back at what the select board was doing in terms of again select board was an elected body that was sending non voting liaisons to some committees. If you looked at old select board agendas you would see on the reverse of that all of our assignments and we would sometimes report out on those during meetings. So what you see there is actually a list of priorities. But what I want to speak of first is what is the purpose of liaisons. And so that's on your actual report from the committee on the letterhead that we talked about this in general at a previous council meeting on the first and then we added in a draft rule that will appear in the rules document that you will be getting in just a matter of weeks as it comes down to it. And talks about what liaisons do. And so that's what we talked about in terms of what the role is and then we got rather specific if you move on if you can scan down to the next part of that which is associated with liaisons items A through J on the report. It's the next slide. We did not rehearse the slides thing at all. I'm just really pleased that we have them. So thank you for making them. So liaisons I'm not going to read all this to you. But basically what the deal is let me just make it simple liaisons are not members of the bodies that they go to liaisons are there to be a link between that body and the work of the council. We all are terribly curious about what all these different bodies do. We all have limited time and we also need to not insert ourselves in the middle of their work but we were looking at priorities in terms of bodies that are likely to bring us things. So if they're likely to bring us something to work on then it seems wise to have at least become aware of what they are doing prior to them doing that. So it's not a big surprise to everyone when they come to us. We talked in here specifically of course liaisons can't commit the council to a course of action not all bodies would have liaisons. We said and we even debated for a moment whether or not people should be allowed to request them for their committee but we wanted to give people that option. We might very well have to say no because we don't have enough time. We have to talk a little bit later about a method of drawing straws if more than one person wants to serve as a liaison because of course each body would only have one. We would inform people annually on all these different bodies who their liaisons were. We would have the president write them a note that says by the way these liaisons are signed. We're sorry for the other committees but we don't have time to go to all of those. The other thing that we didn't really get into in terms of workload is that you may be terribly interested in what a particular body is doing as a town counselor and as somebody who might be serving on a council committee that feels like it's related to the work of the other committee but if they meet at a certain time that you teach a class well you're not going to get to go and so that doesn't mean you couldn't be their liaison in theory because you don't have to go to all their meetings but you would need to keep in touch with them otherwise. You need to get their agendas, get their minutes, talk to their chair offline for example. So you have to take into account not only what is interesting to you but also what actually fits in your schedule because they're not going to change their schedule to accommodate you. In terms of the priorities of the committees which we could go back to that slide because I know we're racing here because we want to get a lot done tonight is these are the item, these are the groups that seemed most likely to be some group that we'd be interacting with at some point in the near to short term future and so given all the choices of workload, et cetera, this seemed like crop one. This does not mean some committees are better than others, it's nothing like that. It's simply who we think we might need more interaction with at this point and some of these things are in flux like downtown parking working group we thought was going to be done a year ago is still now working with a consultant and will eventually in theory be absorbed into transportation advisory but in the meantime downtown parking working group is going to be sending us some recommendations. So there's actually and we've also seen an email from downtown parking working group that asks us to have a member. So some things are not quite as clean as others because we have short term needs that are coming up. Other things are things that we just simply want to be aware of. So community preservation at committee, a number of people on rules brought that up as being something, hey, we just talked about community preservation earlier tonight and that that's going to be a big focal point for a number of people. School committee issues, redevelopment authority issues. There was some concern expressed about elected bodies versus appointed bodies. So I think everybody needs to think about their comfort level associated with that because if people are elected on a ballot that doesn't mean we can't talk to them but it was something that we specifically held back on as a select board when we were in executive branch but it is in fact called out in the charter that there could be a non-voting liaison to elected bodies like the library trustees and the school committee. So I think we just have to decide as a group where our comfort level lies. Then there are additional sections to the spreadsheet and the spreadsheet is in fact available to you just play with as a spreadsheet, not just as a PDF spreadsheet so that you can sort it by all these different columns because when I first showed this report to rules they said really why do we have all these columns? There's so much stuff here but that's so that you could play with it a bunch of different ways whether or not they have liaisons, who they're appointed by now, who they were appointed by in the past and then there's actually a whole section in the spreadsheet that isn't shown here because we don't need it tonight of what our current assignments are in terms of our committees so for people to be thinking about their workloads and things that might be finishing up and things that you might be wanting to transfer to. Are there other comments from the committee? Kathy? This is a good slide to point this out. There are a few of these so the very first one listed affordable housing trust. It has had a trustee that was a select board member and I believe bylaws is looking at whether it would have a council member as a trustee. So in these instances it says liaison or possible member because we weren't sure where this would come out. You know that there was a direct link as a voting member so if you were on as a trustee you wouldn't be a liaison you would be a voting member of the group. The other one on this list is the parking group. It has a voting member and they actually wrote us a note that they often have trouble getting a quorum because the select board member who was on it went off so they're down on numbers. So a few of these are interactive with is there going to be a council member on them and then if the answer was yes presumably we wouldn't also have a liaison. So there's an interaction on a few of these not very many and this group has two there are a few on the second tier. Are there additional comments from the committee? I've heard a couple of council members who have attended meetings not necessarily as official liaisons but out of their own interest in the area and it would be useful for me and the rest of us to hear their perspective on how that has been received and their interactions at those meetings. George? Well I would fit that description I sure others would as well. I have out of interest and the district that I serve I have been attending the what's called the CCC it's at the very bottom of this long list but it's essentially the campus and community coalition to prevent underage drinking. My experience it's very impressive body I've been well received we've had actually in the past we've had members of the select board as active members of that committee so that's a case where we might have to discuss if this would continue. One of the reasons I believe actually for that is that at that time the select board was responsible for the issues of licenses and so it was appropriate for at least one or there's actually two I believe who served on the CCC because of their role as the basic of the board of licenses. Now that that is a duty that is not our responsibility they've actually expressed in interest in approaching the board of licenses and asking someone of them would like to come. But my experience has been very positive I find it extremely helpful and enlightening and I've been well received by other people there. I make it very clear I don't speak much but when I do speak I make it clear that I'm mostly asking questions but I don't speak for the council. So that's one example. Additional questions or comments observations of your experience. Yes Kathy. I've gone to a couple different ones actually George was at one I went to with the Transportation Advisory Committee and I would second how useful it is because in that case the particular day had a agenda that was very rich with priority setting and a better understanding on how that committee might interact with the Joint Capital Committee in terms of projects that would be coming and they're trying to think of their recommendations so getting an early view of that I think would be useful for the council as they make decisions. So that was one and this when we put planning board up there we put the planning board zoning subcommittee and Steve will know a lot about this but it's been meeting quite some time and started last summer and they are looking at potential amendments to the zoning law that they will bring to the council so you get a chance to see an emerging document and in both instances they were very welcome just having a member of the public to just sit there and take documents away and listen. So again it's a very early window into and the second case something they were saying six months or later once the council sits these would come forward but that sense of early warning and information I thought was very useful. Other observations? I will, yes Pat. I've gone to several different kinds of meetings but I'm particularly going to talk about the Housing Trust and the Affordable Housing Coalition because on the Housing Trust meetings I'm there as an observer I'm taking notes for myself I'm not speaking for the council and the coalition those of us who have gone to those meetings are much more actively engaged in the conversation we're not speaking for the council. We have certainly been well received and we've been Evan and I particularly have been investigating different things that have come up in the coalition to see how we could support different things. So I understand the importance of a liaison being a neutral party really but that will be I like the engagement that we can have when we can have it where it's clearly defined and acceptable. I will relate my own experience. I've been liaison to CPAC they did get to their point of their final report recently and they were going to not share with us the people that had applied and whose applications had been forwarded but they decided not to fund and I said you know I actually have to say I think it would be useful for the council to have all of that information and thus they are including that. Thank you, Anthony. I also had an experience as chairing the DPW Fire Station committee where Andy Steinberg was liaison to us. Now this is during that period of our government where we had town meeting and his one of his major roles was to make sure that he could help us meet all the guidelines and the steps to get to the point where we would meet the deadline for town meeting some of that has changed but we still have a whole process by which something then comes to the council and so that would be part of what a liaison might help with without kind of taking it on themselves if you will and of course checking with the president of the council and the town manager. So those and Andy was very useful in that regard extremely useful and frankly especially as we came down to looking at the zero energy rewrite of the bylaw and so forth so those have been my experiences. I personally am going to say until we have an opportunity for bylaws and so forth to look at possible members on these committees. I prefer that we stay to liaisons but that is a personal opinion. It's not telling you what you should do. Pat, did you have something? Okay. So yes, Mandy. I'm on rules committee so this came out of a committee I serve on but I want to before I understand we'll be voting on this at some point soon so I want to put out there that at that committee I'm still not confident that this is the right group whether two is the group. You know there's so many choices to make that I'd like the council to really think about what they might want in terms of committees and all but I want to also put out there that between the ones and twos there's 19 committees on that list. Even the ones are eight committees and my biggest concern with any of this is time and I know we don't if we're liaisoning don't have to go to meetings. But I also know that going to the meetings is what helps you figure out what they're actually talking about and what's coming back. Reading an agenda is not as helpful and reading minutes is not as helpful. Speaking as a former charter commissioner the goal of the council was not to have the counselors have full-time jobs or even heavily part-time jobs as counselors and I just want to put this right up there of the more we put on liaisons and add to our workload the harder it is in the future to have a good representative body of our town. So I think we should really consider whether liaisons are what we need or want and which bodies if we do want them are absolutely necessary versus potentially not. Dorothy. Well my thought about liaisons as I look at my calendar and I write down four or five meetings on a day that I would like to get to is that it's not possible but I have thought in terms of the community resources committee that we should amongst the members have a discussion of some informal liaisons who to try to cover some of the key committees because there's so many committees that relate to the CRC. And that way so instead of it being me just kind of putting down or individuals putting down thoughts and preferences but within committees if they had coverage of some of the key committees through the committee members that might help out a lot. Steve. Yeah so I was looking through this list and I'm now looking through the CRC community resources lens and virtually all of them are directly related to the mission of the CRC but nor do I think that so we know that the CRC was down five people ten of us volunteered for that. So for coronation purposes it would make sense that some of these like the planning board be a CRC member but on the other hand I can make the exact opposite argument to spread the wealth and to not you know sort of consolidate you know power and knowledge into one group. I have a while I have the mic I have a structural question so the one that doesn't fit for me actually is the planning board one. So I always thought that the select board was a liaison. There was a select board liaison to the planning board I thought. OK because the zoning subcommittee as a construct is created by the planning board and so they created it with a liaison for or we come well we they whoever created the zoning subcommittee and they said there shall be a select board liaison because that was a construct of this of the planning board itself. If we don't have a definite answer we'll just leave that for the moment. I did have a follow up on that so to be clear in my understanding which former planning board chair may have a different understanding of zoning subcommittee hasn't just been meeting since last summer they've been meeting for years. We've had a zoning subcommittee of the planning board for many years and they are currently looking at changing some bylaws but that's always been their focus point and so they just now have the added impetus of doing it because the form of governments changed and whatever other things were on their plate but the zoning subcommittee has been meeting for ever. One of the reasons the select board was sending a liaison to the zoning subcommittee was much as what Lynn mentioned earlier in terms of DPW fire stations. Not everybody who's on planning board was a member of town meeting wasn't particularly familiar with some of the town meeting things and so it was a good conduit of information to make sure everybody was on the same page plus the select board was going to be making a recommendation on planning board work. The reason we didn't actually send a liaison to the planning board was because that seemed politically fraught and so that's why we didn't do it. So we went to the zoning subcommittee because that was more about the bylaws rather than permits they might be working on or something like that. On a different topic in terms of expressing interest on these and that was an interesting idea about the CRC too and with the caveat that you mentioned that maybe if you couldn't get on the CRC but then you wanted to be a liaison to a committee that was important to the CRC then that could all work together very nicely. I know we aren't planning to decide this tonight. I think it's important that we get feedback on the rule associated with it because that's something we're going to be bringing back to you. We might as well deal with it now if you have questions about it but it does but we did talk tonight a little bit about expressing interest and also I think Mandy Joe raised it very well and I wanted to follow up on that. I don't think we're in a position of requiring anyone to do anything. I think it would be a little weird if we sent somebody off to be the liaison to the sister city committees and didn't have anybody liaisoning to any of the housing groups. Like that would be a little strange to officially do that rather than just people showing up because they felt like it because we should have priorities but I'm not sure we're yet at the point in terms of workload given all our intense committee work that we're ready to say these six groups have to have a liaison, somebody has to do it. Like that feels uneasy to me. Other comments? Kathy? The only comment I would have is I think some of us have direct interest in a few of these so if you were thinking at the next council meeting if you find out whether people had strong preferences either on a grid where we just sent them in or not. Or are we just going to, because there are few I'm just going to keep going to but I'm not officially anything other than a resident of Amherst right now. Let me suggest that first of all I don't see us sitting here at a council meeting saying, who wants to do this? Not going to happen. So I'm hearing a couple of things. I'm hearing first of all that maybe we need to go back and look at one and two. Probably not three. That it would be useful to have some sense of where the council feels it is most appropriate to have liaisons and where maybe it's not as appropriate for whatever reason either it's not as high a priority or it's a politically charged situation or it's an elected body and we're not elected or whatever the reason might be. And then finally it would be interesting to know even if we aren't going to do any appointments of councillors as liaisons at the time being to at least understand people's interests. And I would do as I've done in the past and that would be done with a poll that I send out to you and you send back to me only to me and I then present the results of that publicly so that it's never with full transparency. Meantime however I've also heard the suggestion that CRC might need to look at this list especially with that idea of those questions that I just asked which are most important and so forth. Again we're not voting on this tonight. So I would suggest to go it look at CRC however I do want to go back to the slide Margaret that you just had up there. Not that one, the one that list right there. This is really the proposed rules of procedure for what liaisons are. And so at least I would like to make sure when we come back on May 6th that we look at this and decide if there's any changes that we would like to make. So that at least we keep moving this along. Now suggestions? Yes. So in regards to that polling one of the things that we try to differentiate at rules is that this would not be president appointments but we really appreciate that you should be willing to coordinate them. We did do the horse trading when it was a five member select board. Don't think we should try it for 13. Don't think that was a good, it would be a great idea. But that was one of the reasons that the spreadsheet in spreadsheet form has spaces so you could you know at least sort of line yourself up before you answer the poll as to where you think you fit most appropriately. I think in terms of where rules is at in terms of us having a draft ready, I'm not sure that we need to look at this separately. We, it's going to be in the rules. It's going to be in the rules that you're going to get pretty darn soon actually. So if you have particular feedback about this we should go ahead and either hear it tonight or get it to me and we will discuss it as a group because we're meeting every week to try and meet our deadline to get things to you so that we meet our deadline of six months. But at this point unless there's something egregious that you see here that you see that we need to be words meant, obviously you will see it again as part of the larger document. But I'm thinking we don't need to revisit this list outside of the larger rules document. Thank you. And so I will amend that. We will see this list again if you have any feedback individually only to elicit this chair. But we will see this again when rules comes forward. And at that point we'll move through the adoption process. I want to say that there may be an official liaison but that other council members can attend any committee that they want to. So to me the chief thing that makes a liaison is that they must receive all the official papers, documents and notifications of the committee. But beyond that the difference between them and a council member attending the committee I don't think is that much different. Just there is one there's only sorry the extent there's something to report back. There is an obligation if there would be some you know early alerts is the only difference. If we were just casually doing we wouldn't be doing it as much as the way we've written this. Okay George. If people are attending as Dorothy suggested some of these meetings is that of use for counselors to notice is that something that would be useful if somebody is constantly going to say TAC or in my case to CCC or whatever apart from whoever gets established as official liaisons whatever but is that something the council would really like to know or just going to leave it maybe it's appropriate just to leave it informal. But if you know that someone is regularly doing this or is sort of the person who goes regularly you could always reach out to them if you have questions. So maybe the information I collect is threefold. What committees have you been attending? Which committees do you feel should have liaisons? And which committees are you personally interested in? Okay. And again not presidential decision to be brought forward to the council for your decision making. Anything else? Okay then I'm going to suggest we move on we have now gone over a time frame and I'm the next person up so here you go. These are let me just give you the history on this town coals. We began this conversation at our retreat which was an open meeting it was on February 2nd. Since then we formed the ad hoc committee on goals and that group has now met four times and what we have before you is at this point our recommended set of town goals. Town council goals these are ongoing year one and then year one and beyond. We are not voting on these tonight we would certainly like your feedback. Some of you have already because I sent this out to you ask specific questions. For example where does town manager evaluation fall? Well it falls under Amherstown government and other ones that you've asked about I believe are things like public way and again it falls under one of these others. So the second thing you received in your packet is a overly ambitious work plan. So if we can just look at that for just a moment and let me just say this comes from my years of writing proposals so just accept that flaw. And it basically each of these goals is now being referred if you will to one of the committees. And that committee will then fill in the work plan as they see fit. And we'll provide you with some information about how we'd like you to do that. And then you'll come back to the council with that. We'd like to go ahead and approve the goals not tonight but at a very future town meeting. I mean town council meeting and that would be useful. But it would be also best if you look at the draft worksheet or work plan before you even do that. Are there any questions at this point? Nothing please note that on the worksheet it says suggested activities. And on a number of occasions it says etc. Which means we know it wasn't complete. Okay. Yes Alyssa. I really appreciate the worksheet and that because those that's wicked squishy. I have no use for that. Establish a new form of government. Yay we did that. No we didn't do that. What does that even mean? So that's why I think your worksheet is really well laid out in terms of considering what the activities would be, the timeline, who's responsible, how will we know when we did it, you know kind of thing. And so I appreciate that you start there and turns into that. But I would actually, I don't want to vote on that. I don't like that. But I'd be much more comfortable with the way the worksheet, that's the way my brain works in terms of actually evaluating our progress. I will say that in anticipation of the worksheet CRC is already taking this up on Wednesday. And they have several things on the worksheet by the way. Yes George. And the hope is that the other committees would do likewise. Yes. That they would take the worksheet. Yes. So OCA, GOL. Right. And we're also going to finance. Finance. Ad hoc rules. Right. Where they appear in the worksheet they would take a look. Right. Again I think it's behooping on our committee to send a set of instructions if you will about what each committee should do in a sense of the timeframe. Mind you Joe. So I liked the worksheet. I had some questions when I went through the worksheet about things that might be missing. I know GOL isn't really a part of a bylaw review for zoning. But GOL will would get under the charges those. And so that was one set where it wasn't even mentioned in the goals that I think we should at least be mentioned since it would have to come to us prior as the last sort of site. In the comprehensive capital plan, JCPC seemed missing from that discussion completely and we can't really leave the library trustees and the school committee out of a 10 year comprehensive capital plan. And also I would recommend putting JCPC in there somewhere. The FY21 budget guidelines which was a I don't know what section it's in but BCG, the budget coordinating group probably needs included in that somewhere since that's the big group that tends to do something with it. Although with the change in government we're not exactly sure what BCG will do. And then the income resident appointments seemed missing from the public engagement section with OCA. I know we're in the middle of trying to figure out how that's gonna work. But since it has to be a rule, it just seemed another one where we should put it in there as creating that rule and figuring out how that's gonna work. So it sounds like there's a couple things. First of all, if anything's missing and there are tons of things missing from this, we would like that input. And again, if you could do that in track changes and or dialogue on an email and send it directly to just me. The second is directions that we would provide people for each of their committees and say, here's what we would like you to do and here is when we would like to have it. And then I'm hearing from at least one counselor but I'm also hearing implied in that is that in many ways the worksheet is what really puts the meat on the bones and makes the goals actually be real. And so moving forward with the worksheets is probably our best step at this point, okay? Any other comments at this time? This is between you and your bathroom break. Okay, bathroom break will be reconvening if you will at 816. Okay, our agenda starting at 8 o'clock, although it's 816, is to move on to proclamations. No, I'm sorry, it's to move on to action items, thank you. Action items, we have already done 7A. So we're moving on to 7B, which is the in on boltwood. And is Robin Brown here? No, okay, we do have slides for this. And we'll wait for Margaret. The slides were also included in your packet. And so I can address it if you'd like. I can start to address it if you'd like. If you would please. So this is a request to reserve a large number of parking spaces on boltwood avenue. They would pay the $10 a day, which is the normal rental fee it's on Tuesday and Wednesday for a relatively large conference that is being held at the in on boltwood. And so they've requested to reserve those spaces highlighted for the two day period. And I understand they pay for them. They do. Okay. Are there particular questions about this one? I have a question. When you have such a number of spots not available, is it possible to have a temporary sign to random parkers who would be caught on our wares as to some other place they could go for parking just on a temporary basis? We have not done that in the past. I think because this is on a Tuesday and Wednesday, these are spaces that typically aren't parked in any way at this end of boltwood. If they were looking for the main street parking lot, then that would be a bigger issue. I don't have a question. I just want to make my general announcement about, no, not about that. That the in on boltwood is an Amherst college subsidiary of some sort. And my husband is an Amherst college employee, but I am not conflicted out. It's just the appearance of conflict statement. Are there any other comments on this? So the motion that I'm going to ask somebody put out is to approve the application of the in on boltwood to reserve 40 meter parking spaces on the east and west sides of boltwood avenue between the intersections of spring street and college street on May 7th, 2019 between the hours of 6.30 AM and 7 PM and on May 8th, 2019 between the hours of 6.30 AM to 2 PM at a cost of $10 per square per day per space per day for a total of $800. Is there a motion? George. That's no move. Is there a second? Zero. Any further conversation questions? All right. All those in favor? It is unanimous. Okay. The second next request for the use of the public way is the Amherst Rotary Club Community Fair. This is the one where it always rains. And we have to repair. And we have to repair the grass afterwards. Is there anybody to speak to this at this time? I will speak to it. We go every year and the children do the rides. So I love this event. Okay. Maybe then you would like to put the motion out there. All right. There we are. I move to approve the application of the Rotary Club of Amherst to place no parking signs at four meter locations on the easterly side of south present street south of the taxi stand from 8 AM to 11 PM on Thursday, May 23rd, Friday, May 24th, Saturday, May 25th and Sunday, May 26, 2019 and from 8 AM to 5 PM on Monday, May 27, 2019 and to reserve 21-meter parking spaces on the westerly side of Bultwood Avenue, starting at College Street, moving northally to Spring Street from 12 PM Monday, May 20th to 5 PM Monday, May 27th, 2019. So I call the question. No, no, no. You made the motion. Okay, great. Is there a second? Alyssa? I have a question. I need a second for the motion first. George Ryan is a second. Alyssa, your question. My question actually is for the town manager. I don't believe, I meant to double check today, but are the taxi stand signs still there? Yes. It is. They are still there even though we stopped using them that way. Okay. So then the reference still works, so it works for me. Me and Jim. I have a question about two things and I don't know, since no one's here to speak to it, whether anyone can answer. And the first one is the no parking, the four spots south of the taxi stand. What's the purpose of needing those reserved? Because if they're only reserved during the sort of fair operation, not the setup and cleanup, I couldn't figure out why they're needed. So that was my first question. My second one is, have we ever explored requiring events like this to find offsite parking for the full time for sort of the storage of the loading, unloading things? Because I think that's the purpose of this reserving of Boltwood Avenue is the storing of just the trucks that come in to unload the fare. It doesn't seem like once they're unloaded, they need to be that close for the whole week to take up all that parking. So have we ever sort of explored mandating they find places other than right next door for those things? And then I'm just going to assume they're not paying for the parking either. Mr. Brockman. In reverse order, correct on the assumption. In my time, we haven't asked them to seek out other locations to store their equipment. And the first one, I'm not sure why they have the South Pleasant Street parking reserve. So I don't know the answer to your first question. Can I just point out that during the time of this, there's a lot of parking space at UMass that's not being used and that we might want to consider that particular idea or something else. Is there anything? Any other questions? Yes, Sarah. Can I make the very unprofessional observation that going to the fair with young kids? I mean, obviously, this is not why the road is closed off. But I know that a lot of people park behind the police station at Amherst College. There seems to be a lot of traffic, not just at the crosswalks, but little kids and people with strollers. And so in some ways, it makes it a lot easier for throngs of people to get safely across that road. But that is not a professional opinion. Yeah, in many ways, the same way is when we do taste of Amherst. The road is not closed, though. The road is still, at least this request is not a road closure request, so it's still travelable. I guess just because there's not parking, I don't see a lot of trolling. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's not a lot of people slowly going through trying to get in or out. Any other questions, comments? All right, we have a motion and a second. Is there any call to question? All those in favor? That's everyone, all those opposed and abstained. Mandy Jo is in our position. The rest of us were in favor of it. Thank you. We are now moving on to the fiscal 2020 regional school budget adoption and regional assessment formula. And I want to just state in a preliminary to Kathy Shane, who is going to speak on behalf of the Finance Committee, that the assessment process was first of all discussed over a period of couple months with representatives from the four towns. It was agreed to by the four towns at the March 2nd four towns meeting and was unanimously supported by all the counselors who were present. We had a quorum of seven people, as well as the members of the school committee who were there. The alternative method was not at all favorable to the town of Amherst. And we are greatly encouraged by the support of the method proposed here from all four towns at that meeting. Kathy, do you want to speak to this particular item? Are you asking me just to speak to the assessment method? Actually, it's to the whole issue. This is the fiscal year regional school budget adoption and regional assessment formula. OK, so that's what I was prepared to. We held a briefing at the finance committee where we first heard from the regional school committee where the superintendent came and explained the budget to us and our share and the assessment method. And then there was a public hearing. And then we came back and we actually had a vote on the motions that you have before you tonight. So you've got multiple pieces versus an approval of the overall budget and the Amherst share of that budget, which is determined by the assessment method. So we are also approving an assessment method that allocates the town's share. And as Lynn just said, that goes through a negotiation every year. And this assessment method we're hoping will hold for two years. So we won't have to come back to it again next year. But there's a motion both to approve the budget and our town share of it, and a motion to approve the assessment method. And separately, there is one other piece to this. The middle school roof needs a new roof. And right now we are not, in the current fiscal year, the coming FY20, we will not see the cost to this. But it will be coming to us as they initially do a bond securing. And the hope is that we will get a school bond that will pay for half of the cost of it. And then Amherst share will be determined proportionately for a bond that would go for the town share, the district share, the annual amount. So we don't have an exact amount yet that we will be paying. We know the total cost of the roof. And we approve moving forward on going to get the grant and then allocating the shares. OK. As Kathy indicated, we're going to be dealing with this in three different motions. And in order to ask questions about those, let's deal first with the regional school budget. And that motion reads, I move that the town council approve the Amherst Pellum Regional School District operating and capital budget of $32,167,342. And that the town raise and appropriate $16,444,272. As its share of that budget is, would someone please make that motion? I move that we do that. Dorothy, is the moving second? I second it. OK. Are there questions about this part of the motion, of the discussion? OK. All those in favor, raise your hand. That is unanimous. Moving on to the next one, this is about the assessment formula. And the motion reads, I move that for fiscal year 2020 only, the alternative operating budget assessment shall be calculated as 30% of a five-year average of minimum contributions with the remainder of the assessment allocated to the member towns in accordance with the per-people method found in Section 6E of the Amherst Pellum School District agreement, the five-year average of minimum contributions will include the five most recent years. Are there questions or discussions about this? I need a motion. OK. Pat, a second? Sarah, any further discussion? All those in favor, that is unanimous. And the third one is the roof repair. And Kathy's explained that, well, this does not tell us exactly what our amount is. I do want to ask one clarifying question of the town manager. Is our, we, every year in our assessment, I believe we put aside money for capital. Is that correct? That's correct. Will our share come from that, that we set aside every year? Yes. Because it'll be an on bond repayment schedule that will be incorporated into their budget. OK. All right. So that's how we'll see it. That's how it will show up for us. OK. So the motion is I move to approve the $3 million aggregate principal amount of debt authorization by a vote of the Amherst Pellum Regional School Committee on March 12, 2019 for the purpose of the middle school roof repair. Is there a motion? Pat, and the second? Chaloney? Yes. I guess I'm looking for a little more clarification. I think Lynn had a similar question. And so that answered some of it. But when they bond it, is that portion that we end up having to pay, as it's included, in the regional school assessment and budget that we just passed, per se, this year, even though it's not in the years, does that bond amount come out of the town's maximum bonding authority, or is it not charged to the town's sort of debt limit? Someone explains how that works. The way I understand it is the regional school district has its own bonding authority. This actually doesn't require you to act on it. It just, typically, these questions would come to the select board, and they would say, do we need to bring it to the town meeting or not? If you do nothing, this happens within 60 days. But we thought it was more affirmative and sort of empowering by the council to actually take action on it. So it does not count against our debt limit, was the question. OK. Are there other questions? Yes, Evan? So I just want to make sure I understand what we're doing. So the $3 million that we're authorizing would be the maximum that we would borrow for this roof. With the understanding that we're applying for a MSBA grant, and should we get that grant, this amount would be lower. But what we're doing is we're committing to the roof, regardless of whether or not we get the grant with the hopes that we will. That is correct? Yes. And just to be clear, this is very different than the MSBA application we just voted on a couple weeks ago. Anything else? Any other questions? And just what I'd add is there is a separate category of MSBA for major repairs where roofs specifically fit. So it's different than building a new school. So it's also not competing with the elementary school. OK. Thank you. Any further questions? Then call the question. All those in favor? And that is also unanimous. OK. Our next item on the agenda is engagement of an auditor for audit of FY 2019, which is the year we're just finishing up. And I'll read the motion, but I specifically want to ask Pat D'Angelo, who is now chair of the audit committee, to speak to this if she so chooses. So the motion is to authorize the town council president to execute the audit engagement letter, indicating knowledge of agreement with the arrangements for Melonson Heath's audit of the town's financial statements and compliance over major federal award programs for FY 2019 as recommended by the council audit committee. There's a motion. Pat, do you want to make the motion? OK. And a second. OK, Sarah. OK, questions or comments? Yes, Dorsey. I just have a quick question that was posed to me by a constituent about this agenda item. And the question is whether this, and I look through this list of items that the auditor would do, and I'm wondering if the audit would look at past appropriations to the capital budget that have apparently carried over from year to year and whether or not the money would be used for the purpose for which it was appropriated. And if not, what, where it would go? Yes, Mr. Brachler. So they do look at all of our finances prior years as well and to look at anything that's outstanding. They can recommend that older funds be used or closed out. It's not their job to tell us to reallocate the funds. That's really up to the comptroller. And she does that on a regular basis. If there's funds from several years ago, she'll be pressuring people to either spend it or only close it out and then it returns to free cash or wherever it came from. OK. Are there other questions? And Pat, can you remember the date and time when the audit committee is meeting? Your mic, please. I believe we're meeting on the 26th at 9.30 to 10.30. And at that time, the auditing company will present this year's audit. Yes. OK. All are welcome to join us. OK. We have a motion on the floor. It's been made and seconded. And this is to engage Melonson Heath for the upcoming audit of FY 2019. All those in favor? OK. And opposed? We don't. OK. Sonia will be very happy. Item E on your agenda is the Community Preservation Act. This is the proposal that we received. Our job tonight is to refer this along with the written document we are told will be coming. And to refer it first to the Finance Committee and also the Community Resources Committee. So the motion as it reads is to refer the Community Preservation Act Committee proposal to the Finance Committee and the Community Resources Committee. Is there a motion and a second? I'll move that. Mandy Jo, is the motion, the second? Pat, questions and comments? Yes. I just have a question. If it's going to two committees, and are they going to have to come and present to each of us separately is part of my question. And then if we have similar issues or questions, it's an efficiency question on two different groups of five people. With some overlapping members, by the way. Some overlapping members. Some overlapping members. We would expect a recommendation from both if there is a problem, if there's a difference in the recommendation, then we would just bring them to the council because the council ultimately makes the decision on this. Did you have any question about that? Okay. All right. Any other questions? All right. Yes. Just for clarification, what are we asking of CRC? Just whether or not they think these are good projects? Yeah, finance really looks at the financial issues, including the fact that we know that one of the projects this year would in fact be bonding money. And in this case, that does go against our debt ceiling. So that does have to be considered. For CRC, however engaged they want to get this year in the future years, they certainly might become more engaged as to whether these projects fit in with what their vision for the town is. I was just gonna add that we would be looking at the impact positive and negative on the town in different ways. Right. And I think that's critical. And in fact, somewhat applying to kinds of criteria that we saw in the TMAC proposal, okay? Is there any further question or conversation? Okay, so the motion has been made and seconded. All those in favor? Okay, that's a referral and it was unanimous. Okay, the next two motions, in fact, the next two sets of motions really deal with cleaning up committee charges. There's nothing startling in them as I can tell, but the first one is around the finance committee charge. And the motion is to approve the revisions to the finance committee charges recommended by the governance organization and legislation committee. Is there a motion and a second? I'll move. Okay, a second. George. And further conversation. Yes, Kathy. When I was comparing the track change to the final recommended, I only saw one thing that I thought was substantive. So I have a question on why. And I know that it was actually, since I typed the sentence, it was a little bit hard potentially to understand what we were suggesting, but we were thinking that the very first time the non-residents were appointed, they would serve a three-year term because it would be six months after we go off our term so it would carry over into the next council and thereafter it would be two years. This now makes it two years. So the first group will go off six months before the end of our time and we'll be potentially appointing a new group. And one of the reasons we had that initial longer period was the idea that it takes time to learn this, but if we got new counselors on, it takes counselors time to learn it. So trying to keep people that have deep knowledge on it and you would need at least a year so that first group was unusual because afterwards you'd always have a full two years. So it's been rewritten now to eliminate that starting point being... The charter had it as a transition the first time. So that was the only thing I thought that was substantive. And did you? I'll address that. Yes, GOL, and I did point that out in my report from the GOL committee. GOL did remove that sort of line or sentence, I don't know, from the charge. GOL has made a decision that as many charges as possible that charges should not have wording in them that almost immediately becomes irrelevant. So dates that we saw this with the ECAC committee and others where things are in there that only apply to the first time of appointment or the first thing that happens. What GOL is recommending after having removed that from the charge is one of two items that when the charge is passed that the motion to pass the charge could include language that says that when the non-voting member appointments are made for the finance committee that those appointments have an end date of that three years later. And then when those non-member appointments, so the motion tonight to pass this charge could have that language in there taking that. So it's in the motion, it's not in the charge itself. And then the other option is when the appointments come before the council to be appointed on however we're doing those appointments that the motion to appoint those members have the end date being three years out, not two. So that, because GOL's going to recommend that any time an appointment be made that the appointment come with an end date and a start date for that appointment so that we're clear for resident appointments and even councilor appointments to committees when the appointment is over what the term is. So the recommendation is that the motion to appoint those members include the end date and that that end date be three years out instead of two years out and that potentially the motion tonight, if desired can now be amended because I think we're in the middle of the motion to include that the first set of appointments for residents end after three years instead of two that would be July 30, 2021. 2022. 2022. 2022. That the charge motion could also include that but that was the reason it was removed from the charge itself. So there is a motion on the floor. It's been made in second is to approve the revisions to the finance committee charge as recommended by GOL committee. Yes, Alyssa. I know you've worked on this a lot but I still think that I would ask you to go, I will vote for this but I would ask you to go back and look at this as more of a scrivener's thing than anything else and I'm not even referring to the missing period after SEC. Not even talking about that. In the section under the charge where it says hold a public hearing on the budget proposed by the town manager and thoroughly review and I'm not sure why that's one sentence instead of two and we definitely need the reference to the required forum included in that. I don't know why that disappeared because the reform is absolutely required and it doesn't say section 5.5a whereas everything else seems to have a charter reference next to it. And the other question I had is just in regards to parallel construction where it starts with review any requests for new appropriations. In the middle of this you're saying finance shall report back and I think that similarly to what you did previous one either turn it into two separate bullet points or make the sentence longer but you've already got a heading that says finance does this, finance does that and saying finance in the middle comes off kind of weird like it means something as opposed to just how we changed the way we were doing references halfway through writing this. So I think that's fine but I do think it's more important in the first one where it's talking about holding the public hearing I think it needs to be really clear that that's a required, what's required and what's like just preferred. Okay, we're accepting those as the edits at this point. Okay, so the motion has been made and seconded. It's been pointed out that as the actual we can either amend the motion now that would deal with the length of terms for the first appointees or it can be done at the time that their appointments are brought forward to the council. Either it's fine it just as long as when I would read this I would read it as non permissive. So now we're saying it's permissive the first term be three years so. Okay, we're going to vote on, I forgot my button. We're going to vote on the motion as it stands. Are there any further questions? All those in favor? That is unanimous. And then the second motion related to the finance committee is to approve the revision of the special municipal employees section of the finance committee charged as recommended by the governance organization and legislation committee. And Mandy Jo, can you specifically speak to that? Yes, when a committee is designated special municipal employee committee under state law there needs to be a separate vote to actually establish that committee. So we don't think we voted that for the finance committee the last time we adopted the finance committee so we need to vote it tonight. Okay, any question? So the motion I need a motion and I need a second to approve the revisions to the special municipal employees section of the finance committee charge as recommended by the governance organization legislation committee. It's not the revisions it's to designate the finance committee as a special municipal employee committee. So the motion needs to read to designate. I would have thought that the charge revisions we already took under account already took care of the fact that we needed to specify that even though finance committee member the finance committee as special municipal employee the counselors can't have special municipal employee status that was already as far as I was concerned part of the charge we just voted. It's the actual designation of finance committee as having a semi status which we're not sure we remember doing before so we may as well do it now. Do we need to change in the motion? What I hear, I think what you wanna do is you're designating the finance committee as members as special municipal employees, non-council members of the finance committee. So I think the motion would be to designate the finance committee as a special municipal employee committee. Okay. Is there a second? Sarah. Any further conversations? These are similar to ones we've done before. Okay. All those in favor? That is unanimous moving on. The energy climate action committee charge. And again, this is similar in terms of both revisions based on format, et cetera, and it comes to us from GOL. So it's to approve the revision to the energy climate action committee charge as recommended by the governance organization and legislation committee. Do I hear a motion? Evan. And a second? Mandage out. Mandage out, you wanna speak to this? Is there anything specific? So there were a couple of scripted things to as we've gotten this template finalized to fix that. But the main point purpose of bringing this forward was for the SME status. The state law states that a committee as a complete entity must have the status, not individuals. The way the charge was written before didn't quite comply with that. So we rewrote that section to comply with that so that the committee has the status. And then we added that asterisk to clearly state that counselors by under state law are not allowed to accept that status even when they are on that committee. It's a state law thing. It doesn't, this revision does not change the intent of the charge as originally written that the residents will have SME status and the counselors will not. It's just bringing it up to entire compliance with state law. Okay. And then the second motion is I went back to the minutes and I didn't see that we'd actually voted to designate the committee as an SME committee. So that's why the second motion is in there too. Okay, so the first is to approve the revision to the energy and climate action committee charge as recommended by GOL. And it's been made in seconded. Is there any further conversation? If not, all those in favor? Okay. And the second one, is this the motion we need or is it a different motion? It will be, I moved to designate the energy committee, energy and climate action committee as a special municipal employee committee. Okay. The motion's been made. George is seconded, isn't it? Any further questions or discussion? All those in favor? That's unanimous. We're moving on to drinking water. Good evening. Dave Zomac, assistant town manager, director of conservation and development. I am here with a bit of an assist for DPW. We have some good news coming from DPW and that they have received a competitive grant from the state to purchase some water supply protection land up in Peleman, Shootsbury. And I believe you had before you in your packet a very thorough memo by Amy Russecki, assistant superintendent of Public Works. And I'd like to spend a minute or two just telling you a little bit about the grant and then take your questions. I realize that this is somewhat of an unusual, this may be your first land acquisition project as town council. It's a little unusual, I realize in your process and I wanna preface my comments by saying we're under a very strict timeline by the state. Normally we would want much more time to move this grant forward, however the state has given us until the 24th of April to get all the paperwork in and close by June 30th, which is an extremely tight timeline or they will not give us the matching 50% grant. So very quickly I think you have in your packet a memo and some maps. Amherst as you know has about a 40 or 45 year history of protecting ground and surface water in Amherst as well as Pelham and Shootsbury. This is a competitive grant as I mentioned before. We have a very compressed timeline. The award was just sent to us about a week ago and as I said we have to close by June 30th. It includes a local process but we also have to go through a DEP public hearing process as well, get all the closing documents together and actually purchase the land by the end of June. Map number one, there's two maps in your packet. In general what they show you is the acquisition or the proposed acquisition of land in the headwaters of the Hills Reservoir which is one of our Pelham reservoirs outlined in, is that magenta? I'm not sure what that color is. But that shows that line is the watershed land. So essentially any drop of water that falls on the land you can see actually will end up flowing through the tributaries outlined in blue toward the Hills Reservoir. This grant is a particular note because of the importance of zone A. Zone A is 200 feet on either side of any perennial stream. So the, you can see outlined in blue is zone one and this property includes some of the main tributary which is up to the north of the Hills Reservoir. I think the other notable thing on this map is that the land in a tan color with crosshatching is the land that we already own and essentially the goal here is quite simple. The more of the land that we can protect around the main waterways, around the tributaries that feed the Hills Reservoir or the Atkins Reservoir or the Holly Reservoir, the more likely we are to be able to protect this surface water source in perpetuity. We don't want development near that source of water in the form of herbicides or pesticides or groundwater contamination potentially through septic systems. We have a willing seller and we've gone through a competitive grant process with the state where we have competed against many other municipalities and the state has said this is an excellent acquisition for the purchase price that was outlined in the memo. So I'm happy to take your questions and I'll stop there. Questions. Yes, Evan. So I have two questions. The first one is just a clarification. So in the memo, there's a discussion of zones A, B and C and the statement is the property is located entirely within zone C. The map, it looks like it is half in zone A, half in zone C and I'm wondering if that was just in error or... Could you, in the memo, oh, I'm sorry, on the second paragraph, let me just review this. Third paragraph, the last sentence. Yes, I think that is a typo. Again, Amy wrote this memo, but the key is that it is A, within the watershed and B includes a main stem of that tributary. That blue cross hatch, that would be that zone A. That zone A, correct. So this does include that. Yes. And you'll note also the line coming across the top of the map, we didn't give you the detail, but there's actually two parcels that we're purchasing. So one of them is a tiny sliver on the Pelham-Schutzberg line and then the 14 plus acres is wholly in Pelham. And just second, just out of curiosity of the history, is this a, I guess, is this a property parcel that Hound's been working to acquire for some time or is it all of a sudden just came on the market in 2017? What's the history of this? I spoke to Amy today and part of the reason is really opportunity. So when opportunity knocks and you have a willing seller and you have a potentially developable piece of property, you do an analysis to see A, you start off with an appraisal. What is the property valued at? What is the potential threat to the property? And then can you acquire it using either local funds or state funds or a combination? So I think DPW took a look at all of those factors and said, we have a willing seller. We have a property that contains a significant amount of acreage in the zone A. We should try to buy this and add it to, as you can see, it's a puzzle piece on the northern section of Pelham. So the goal is simple. If you look at all of the uncross-hatched parcels, the goal would be to try to fill in those zone A parcels first, and it's a fairly reasonable price for the acreage, and that's all done by appraisal. So it's not what the owner wants, but what the appraiser says the value is. Additional questions. Yes, Dorothy. Just to be sure, when I look at the map, if it's got the pinky beige cross-hatching, you Amherst already owns this before this deal. Or is that what we're gonna, then the white stuff is what you're acquiring or the white stuff is what you're not getting yet? So it looks brown to me, but brown cross-hatched is what Amherst already owns. And that's so that's not part of this deal. The only parcel we're talking about is outlined in red on the map above. Okay, very good. And it's actually two parcels. We didn't break it out because the one in the Shootsbury is right on the Shootsbury line and it's a tiny sliver of land. I think Amy included the breakdown. It is 0.55 acres in Shootsbury and 14.5 acres in Pelham. So it's actually two parcels. And so everything that is not cross-hatched is owned by private landowners in Pelham or Shootsbury. And we may or may not seek those lands. It really depends on an analysis done by DPW with assistance from DEP and the state as to how much of a priority they are. You can see that in blue, some of the parcels don't include any tributaries. So those would likely be lower on the priority list. And we may not even acquire those. What this doesn't show you is topography. Everything does flow toward the Hills Reservoir. This next map does show topography. It's a little hard to read at that scale, but everything does flow south and then west into the Hills Reservoir. Additional questions. I do have one. Is this the type of thing that we then pay taxes on? We do pay pilot payments to Pelham. Okay. And I would point out that Amy did include the motion, which is a four part motion. Yes. If there are any questions about the motion, I'm sure Mr. Backelman or I could help with those. Okay. Pat, you had a question? Are there additional questions? Yes. So the land that was in white on the other map is developable by a householder not for profit developer or anything else. It could be purchased and built on. It's a great question. What ski, there are many factors and I know a question came up earlier about conservation land acquisition and I'm sure there'll be time to cover that later. But many factors go into the analysis of whether a piece of property is of value for protecting for water supply or water protection because we protect land both around our wells and well heads as well as our reservoirs and their tributaries. So in this case, you can see that this land actually has frontage off of Schuetsbury Road, whereas some of the other parcels don't have any road frontage. So that's one of the factors that goes into the analysis. Is it developable? It needs frontage. It needs to be not too steep. It needs to be able to have a well up this far up in Pelham. It would all be on septic. There's no sewer there. So there are a number of factors that go into the DPW's analysis and then having a willing seller often helps. Back to the earlier question that Evan asked, sometimes we're working on these projects. I've worked on projects that took 20 years for the landowner to be in that willing category. We do not take land for watershed or conservation purposes or any other purposes for the most part. But so it can take five years, 10 years or more until a landowner might be ready. And again, we can't force anyone to sell to us. Just to follow up or clarify for myself, I understand the parcel that we're talking about purchasing. I'm looking at the other white blocks of land which we don't own, so can they be developed? Certainly many of them can. It really, as I said, it goes back to road frontage or the ability of the landowner to put together based on the zoning in Pelham, based on the topography, wetlands, streams, all of those factors. If one landowner owns multiple parcels, they can go through one parcel to get to another. Again, most of the area up in Pelham has high water table. It's one of the reasons why it produces such great water in the Hills Reservoir is a lot of it is wet, but certainly there's frontage development on some of the roads in Pelham and Shootsbury. Any further questions on this? We did list this for public comment. Is there any public comment? Yes. Please come forward to the mic. Please come forward to the mic, sit down, state your name and where you live. Thank you. Hi, Amy Zuckerman, K-Mear 74. As a record reporter, this is interesting. I work with developers, investors, and Larry Miller of Jones has been working on selling a lot of land in Shootsbury, along with Subwiki, et cetera. Can I just get a sense of where this is in Shootsbury and Pelham? Because I live in, I'm just curious, weird as I'm a little bit confused to the location. Are these the reservoirs we're looking at? David, where are we? David. So this is in the very northern portion of Pelham off of Shootsbury Road, the Hills Reservoir is actually in the lower left-hand corner of this. So the Hills Reservoir and Holly Reservoir are very close to Amherst Road in Pelham. So this is due north of that area. Actually, look there, interesting. So this is where the three little reservoirs, two little reservoirs are. Yes, there you can see the Hills Reservoir that's on the left as you're going up Amherst Road in Pelham. So the island is conserved a little bit? I'm sorry, ma'am. It's really public comment. And we're not obliged to respond. If you'd like further information, please be in touch with us. Thank you. Okay, any further questions on this? Yes. I just have a question about how much farther north from this parcel is the source of the little river creek? Waterway, tributary. I'm just going by the map that was provided by DPW, but you can see that where the lines for the watershed, the magenta, if that is magenta, lines kind of will go. It's a couple of miles maybe north of there. I don't know the exact part of the watershed. But again, all of our watersheds are mapped for Atkins Reservoirs, the Hills Reservoir, the Holly Reservoir, or Lawrence Swamp. So DEP wouldn't even consider this grant if we were outside the watershed or even just outside the watershed. Again, we've been very prudent about going after parcels that, and in this case it's really in kind of the headwaters where these streams begin. So this stream is likely, it might be as wide as this desk at that point. This is narrower. And it is very swampy up there, bogs, and that's where good water often begins. It's journey south and then west to the Hills Reservoir. Any further questions? Okay, this is a very lengthy motion. I will read it. It's the motion is required in order for us to accept the grant. And so the wording of it has been carefully crafted to meet that requirement, okay? And the motion is to acquire as the board of water commissioners by purchase, gift, and or eminent domain for drinking water supply protection and land conservation purposes under the provisions of general law chapter 40, section 39B and 41, two parcels of vacant land, one located in Pelham, containing 14.5 acres, more or less, and another located in Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury, containing 0.5 acres, more or less, both described more particularly in a deed recorded with Hampshire Register of Deeds, in book 7621, page 224B to appropriate and transfer the sum of 82,600 for the acquisition of such land and costs related there too for the water fund surplus from the water fund surplus. And C, to file and authorize the town manager and such boards or other officers as they deem appropriate to file on behalf of the town. Any and all applications for funds, gifts, grants, included grants of reimbursement under the Massachusetts Energy and Environmental Affairs, drinking water supply, protection grant program in any federal and or other state program in any way connected with the scope of this acquisition, which grants and or funds so received shall be used to repay all or a portion of the sum transferred from the water fund surplus here under and D, to enter and to authorize the town manager to enter into any and all agreements and execute any and all instruments to effectuate the foregoing acquisition provided that such funds shall be expended only if prior to acquisition. The town has received a commitment for funds under the drinking water supply protection grant program and or any other federal and or state program in an amount equal to at least 50% of the amount appropriated under this article, which may be in the form of a reimbursement grant. Is there a motion? I so move. A second. Second. Evan, second. Further questions? It's okay. Okay, all those in favor? Okay, thank you. Thank you very much. In the future, we certainly will do our very best to bring these to you as soon as we possibly can. Again, our hands were tied with a very late turnaround by the state and we appreciate that DPW kudos to DPW for getting the grant. This is what departments do as they go out and find money and try to match it locally. So thank you very much. It's perfectly understandable. Okay. The last item under action is to actually defer to May 6th, 2019, the item regarding the appointment process for non-resident finance committee members. This was deferred from the last meeting to this meeting. Andy's not here. And so I, the motion is to defer it again. Is there any, so the motion is to defer to the May 6th, 2019 regular council meeting. Motion, George. Second, Chaleney. Any further conversation? Yes, Kathy. Well, I assume there's still gonna be time to interview people so we can make the appointments. Oh yeah. Okay. I don't, I mean, I was just, I was able to attend the meeting today that Oka had and they are moving right on through. Great. Yes, Alyssa. So I'm not gonna, I'm gonna assume we don't actually have a live motion that says we're deferring action on something that we're just stating that. Yeah, we're just stating it. And the idea that we talked about last time was that Oka had their input, rules had input, finance committee had input. We wanna wait for Andy to get back and then we will make a decision as a council as to who's making those appointments. Correct. Okay. So as you pointed out, we don't need a vote on this. Is that correct? No? Okay. But the minutes will show that we're deferring this until May 6th. Okay. We're moving on to committee reports. We're now 15 minutes behind. And since many of you have already done major pieces of your committee reports today, I will just quickly go through. Pat, anything from bylaw review? We're working hard. We're working consistently. I think the group works very well and we have compiled a list of bylaws to have the KP law look at. We have some changes that we think are necessary, but they would come to the council. Evan or Alyssa, anything? I really think, yeah, I don't have anything else to say. Okay. Moving on, council goals ad hoc committee. We've already basically given our report. Anybody from that committee? Finance committee, either Kathy or Andy. Kathy, no? But people know about the special meeting next week and the week after. Yes. Right. Which we've been posting as committees of the whole so that if counselors come that are not on the committee, they can feel free to participate and ask questions in the same way as the committee members would do so. GOL? Nothing more than we've already reported. Rules of procedure. Outreach communication appointments, Sarah? So I don't have anything written, but we wanted to just, we met this morning and we agreed that OKA would take action. Every time I go to do this, I completely blank. Okay, and these recommendations. During our next meeting, which is going to be Monday, April 29th, we will finalize our process for ultimately recommending town manager appointments to the town council. Because town council only has 30 days from the time the names of the appointees are filed with the town clerk to either confirm, deny, or let the clock run out, OKA will present our decision as well as our process to the full council by the council's May 20th meeting. Similarly, OKA also received the CAFs for the planning board and zoning board today. We have scheduled interviews for these committees this week on 425 and next week on May 1st. We plan to bring forth final nominations to town council by May 20th. Okay. Yes, Kathy? So I just have a question on the second part of that. Are we going to have an explanation of what the process is and why? For planning and zoning board in particular. And one question I then would have whatever the recommended people are for the committee, will the council know the full group that has applied for those positions? Will it be public information? And if not, why not? So Sarah, do you want to speak to that? Yeah, I will start. And then if anybody else in the committee would like to add anything, if I miss it, that's totally fine with me. So when we bring you forth names or recommendations of any, whether it's the town manager appointments, for the town council to then look at, we will be presenting to you an entire packet. We will be giving you a report that tells you what our process was. We'll give it to you in a narrative. We'll give you a decision tree. We will let you know all of the materials that we used. We figured out a packet to give that's informational to each person who's interviewed. You'll be presented with that. Interview questions are actually going to be made public. And then we will give you for the town manager, the town manager has already put out a report that we have about how he has done his process and certain pertinent information. We can't give you anything more than what the town manager, those are his appointments that he's given you, but it does include his process and the information that he has there. Similarly, we're still, we will by our next meeting know what demographics we will be sending you, but you will definitely have a large amount of information and everything that we have used. As far as I know, you will not be receiving all of the CAFs for the entire pool. So I don't need to prolong tonight, but I would like to know why. I mean, in this case, the Charter said the town council appoints and I didn't think we were completely delegating, even knowing who had applied. We might be delegating 13 people, can't interview everybody. So I always assume we'd have a small group doing the interviewing, going through it, but not that we, if there were 12 people applying for three slots, we wouldn't know the nameless of the 12. So I would just like to know why. And then I'm also curious because the, when I looked at the Northampton CAF down at the bottom, it says if you apply anything you put down, will be a matter of public record. And I'm assuming that we don't do that, but at least for the ones where we're the appointing authority. So I just would like a longer discussion on why and why the 13 of us couldn't know who was in the pool. And then here are the reasons that you then interviewed and came up with the decisions. I think we can all be in the room together. Listen. We have been discussing this nearly every week for many weeks and that will be part of our report to the full town council that goes with the names that we are recommending action on, whether they are town manager appointments or in the case that you're referring to, actual town council appointments. We are not giving the entire town council those CAFs and we will give you a thorough explanation of why that is true in there, but we're not changing that decision point tonight based on that input. We will in fact be explaining all of that at great length in the narrative report. As you indicated, Northampton does have that disclaimer. We do not. We've talked about having that disclaimer in future. It does not currently exist. We have chosen not to go with the public process at this point. And so that will all be explained in great detail then. You may not agree with it, but we will definitely have a long explanation of it. Darcy. I just want to say that as a group, as a council we have not decided that this is the process that we want because we haven't voted on it. So I think you all know how I feel about this by now. But I also really feel strongly that the full council, well, I actually feel that the public should receive the CAFs on all the appointments, the town manager appointments and the town council appointments and that I don't really understand why Amherst is different from other towns that do that. Sarah. Okay Darcy, you helped me to make sure that I answer every single thing that you said. I definitely, I know how you feel. We did, when you gave your minority report, the council did vote for us, for OCA, to go through with its process without presenting it at that time. When OCA brings nominees forward to the town council, we were going to give a plethora of information about how we got to where we got to. I mean, I think that we've also discussed the fact that Amherst has tried very hard and this is why it took us so long to come up with this practice is that we are really trying to be able to protect the privacy and I'll even go so far as to say feelings of people. It's a small town to a certain point of getting to the nominees. Once it's brought forth to the full council, no one on OCA wants this council to feel that they are going to just be rubber stamping anything. We want to make sure that we give you enough information that you feel informed and we fully expect if we have not done our job well and all of you think that it's terrible and you think that the names we brought forward is terrible, that's why not only do these names in the process have to be sort of worked out and fought with within OCA, we bring them to you guys and then you guys can fully rip the whole thing apart, tell us how you feel, that's how we want to do it but the reason why OCA itself decided to do it this way was to balance transparency, which we want but also to have a good, healthy, large pool of applicants who are not intimidated by at least the beginning process. Dorothy. Leaving aside the particular people you're gonna put forward, I guess I have been expecting that we would have a chance to vote on a policy because I'd hate to have a start that committees could make major policy decisions on their own without it coming before the full council for a vote. So we did have a vote. When Darcy brought this up, the town council voted whether or not to get that process before or after and the town council voted that they would let OCA go through with that process. So that's what we have right now and then if we want to take it in a further direction, of course that's up to the entire council. What I will say to you is that time is of the essence, we need to have these decisions made by the last, sorry, my voice is going. In order for us to be able to discuss and get the names and then have the committee up and running for the first of July, we need to start getting all of this done. So I totally understand people's concerns. I welcome people's concerns. I would just say as we discuss it and as we're thinking about how we wanna deal with this as a council, I could think two things. One is taking a look at the timeline that we have and that we do wanna do our job. And I understand that. And then the other is the way that OCA has written this is that it is a practice. I mean, this is our first time out for everybody. So none of us feel that this is written in stone. In fact, it was written into our practice and in our notes and how this is that this whole process will need to be reviewed. And if it's reviewed and we say this absolutely did not work and we wanna check and we'll do something differently next time to see if privacy concerns were as dire as we thought we can do that. So I'm just gonna tell you where we are right now and then you can go from there. Kathy. I can only somewhat accurately remember the discussion last time this came up because I believe we were having it around 1130 or 1115 at night. And we were asked to wait until tonight to consider the process. Because you were gonna get me getting near. But I don't think I ever understood with I'm gonna separate town manager appointments from town council appointments for planning board that on places where we were the appointing authority and picking something as important as a planning board that we would never get to see the pool. I think I understood that we wouldn't be part of the group doing the interviews but that we wouldn't know. So if we need to wait until next two weeks from now to have that discussion again, I would like to have that discussion. That's what I'm asking for. Many towns have people run for planning board. They raise their hands and say I wanna be on it. We don't have an elected planning board but it's a very important entity in town and we were given it so Steve. Steve. You know I'm torn because I fully understand what the urgency of this is. And but I also, so when the charter was being proposed, I had imagined a fairly public process in which candidates for the zoning board of appeals and the planning board would in a sense make themselves public. And you know, not necessarily campaign but that, so we would be the electors in the same way that a house like a, the state, hmm, I'm not gonna use, I'm not gonna come up with a good analogy but I had imagined a process that would be more public that people would have, the people that wanted to be on planning board or zoning board of appeals would make themselves known and that essentially we would have an election. So it wouldn't be an election of the town which happens in a lot of our neighboring towns but it would be election by this board, by this council. Evan. So a few things I wanna address. So one, this idea of the council voting on our process and the discussion we had last time, I think we need to make clear our charge of our committee was to make recommendations to the council regarding all appointments. We are working to do that but I don't think that we would expect the council to vote on the internal workings of our committee of how we decide to make those recommendations in the same way that I wouldn't expect us to vote on the process by which rules decide what rules to put forth. We would vote on the recommendations, rules brings forward but how that committee comes up with those rules is the purview of that committee. How we come up with the recommendations which is part of the charge is our deliberative process. We have been working on this since January. We have been holding a meeting every Monday, save for I believe three Mondays since early January. Every one of those meetings has been almost exclusively about this. I would encourage you if you have input onto how you would like to see us come up with that, you are welcome to attend one of our meetings but I am struggling sitting here after months of deliberation to hear the ideas that people have for how we might go about doing this after we have already adopted a process and after that process has been adapted after tens of hours of deliberation. What I would ask of you as the council is to trust the process that we have adopted and when we bring forth recommendations, look at those recommendations as far as are they qualified to serve on planning board and ZBA and if they are, then we have done our job and if they are not, then you can tell us that and we can figure out where to go from there and then after that, as our committee decides whether or not that process worked, you are welcome to give your input but at this point, we are moving forward. Sarah has interviews scheduled and it would be really difficult at this point for us to reverse course and so we are meeting on April 29th at 9.30 in the morning in this room and I would ask that if you have input onto our process, we will see you there. Further comment? Ma'am, did you? My comment relates not to this issue so I've been holding it off if there's people with comments related to this issue. I'm happy to wait a little bit more. Dorothy. I thought that the vote that you referred to was let's the committee get started because time was of the essence but at some point there would be something for us to, that would be proposed to us as a policy that we could vote on. People ask me how the appointments are made and all we've said is a committee is working very hard. We all know the committee has been working very hard but I do think we need to have a clear policy that we can actually tell people so that they know how the appointments are made. Sarah. So if you look at the minutes from when we discussed this and voted on it in a roundabout way, both Alyssa and I actually just closed to you exactly our process. Also, if you would like to see it on SharePoint, you can see it on SharePoint. Also, I described the entire thought process and where we were going in my byline with Stan, which might be more fun to watch and listen to than actually read the minutes. And I totally understand what everyone's saying and I think just as my son always says to me, what is it with you Gen Xers? You always are so competitive and you wanna check off every box. You love a work list, right? You love a checklist. So I think because I know the time constraints in order for the town council to actually have two weeks before our deadline to appoint people, right? Just two weeks to talk it out, look at everybody. We need to have final nominees, even if it's all of us together publicly by May 20th. So I would say just think about that and we don't actually have two weeks to have a process forward. So I would say if you now are feeling that you're not comfortable with the process, I would look at the time constraints and decide if you want to take it over now because really I have interviews and we all need to follow that same timeline. So if you would like to take it over as a committee of the whole, I think tonight's the night to do it. Steve. So here's the thing is that we're, it's all theory right now because we don't know, you know, we don't know exactly, we don't know exactly how this process will play out. And I think that, you know, I will certainly have a different opinion. If we move forward with what you all are proposing, then I might have a different opinion. You know, once I see how this process, once theory becomes practice, the, I think this is the place for these conversations to happen because we really can't have them at your committee meeting because as far as I understand it, council members who are not members of the committee that attend, other committee members are really there more or less as members of the public. Unless I misunderstand. Unless we call it a committee of the whole. Yeah. And at that point we all sit equally. Shalani. So I just, what I'm hearing is that time is of essence and so we're gonna go through the process and when the appointments come forward to us, we will then have an opportunity to look at the process and understand the logic and at that point make recommendations to make a change. Is that right? You cannot just ask, but we will never know the full list of names. We're only gonna know the names that you're recommending. And again, I'm focusing mainly on planning and zoning board. That's correct. We'll never know the list. The way the process presently stands, the names of the people who apply will only be known to OCA. And they may not discuss them or exchange emails about them or texts or anything else. They may not discuss them and they may not deliberate. That is the way the process stands at this point. Pat. It seems to me that you're following in a certain way the work that this, the way the select board work, they all got to review the CAFs. They didn't talk about them. They didn't email about them or anything else. And I guess I don't feel the need for every one of us to know as long as there is a group of people who do know who is applying. So I guess I'm saying have a little faith in the people who've been working on this and let's see how it goes. And did you? I'm gonna ask my question, which doesn't relate to the process. You mentioned ZBA and planning board. Where does the process for appointing right-trace voting commissioners and participatory budgeting commissioners stand? I know that's even weirder because you're probably gonna have to work with the town manager, but I'm curious where that process stands. So in making this decision tree, we're also like working really hard so that other appointing authorities also have a decision tree, right? So we started on this knowing that this would be a template, a jumping off place and also something for other appointing authorities to use. We would use this same, okay. So in striving for consistency, I have said I think that we should do that the same way for all the committees that we are bringing to the town council to appoint. Some people have suggested that planning and zoning are different or are special and that they should have a more complex decision tree and then maybe all the rest should be done out the open. I will tell you just as my own self, I am not speaking for my committee. I think that we should strive for consistency in whatever we choose. We do for every committee and board across the line because I don't think one is different or special from the other. So once we get through planning and zoning, which are huge, then I believe we have the decision tree and I believe we could go fairly quickly. So we're moving on it. We have it. Are there further questions at this time? So the way it stands now, the as we voted before, the process will be described in the appointment, in the recommendation of the appointments for the planning and zoning board and the full council will not receive the CAFs. Okay. All right. Audit Committee, Pat DeAngeles. The Audit Committee met for the first time on April 11th. We elected a chair and a vice chair. We also, you also passed the motion that we recommended about engaging Melonson Heath. We and set a date for presentation by the auditors, which is April 26th from 9.30 to 10.30 a.m. here in the town room. We're also gonna be looking at the process and developing the process that we will use to hire auditors, municipal auditors. There are only two in Western Massachusetts and we have been using Melonson Heath, I think for about 15 years and we are thinking that it might be time to change but we will be sending out probably in the fall the RFPs to encourage people to propose to us what work they would do for the town and we will go through a selection process then and move forward. Okay. But for the time being we are staying with Melonson Heath for this coming year. Okay. Any further comments on committee reports? Yes, Steve. I noticed the... Oh, CRC wasn't on here. Excuse me. Apologies for noticing that now. So should we discuss that now? Please, please. So community resource. So chronologically we met just before the audit committee. So we also met on April 11th and we elected Dorothy Pam as vice chair, Steve Schreiber as chair. We decided to meet every Wednesday until the end of time. So every Wednesday... Starting at, next meeting is at 3.30 this coming Wednesday and then once school ends we're gonna start meeting at 2 p.m. So the first few agenda items, our first few meetings will be focused on primarily on information, information on the master plan, information on planning and zoning but we'll also be considering the Community Preservation Act recommendations at this, at our next meeting this coming Wednesday. And your work plan. Oh, and our work, yes. What she says. Your goals and your work plan. And our work plan. Okay. Are there other comments or any other committees I've asked to discuss? President Grease-Mayer is available for hire to take minutes at any committee meeting. So she did a great job with our minutes. I happen to show up for two meetings and as I have done in other committees for their first meeting, take the minutes. Okay, we're moving on to approval of minutes of the town council. I'd like to do this as one vote, not separate. So do I hear a motion to... So I will propose the motion, we'll have the motion and then we'll go through whether there's changes to any one of these in the order that they're listed and then accept them as a group. Do I hear a motion to accept the minutes of April 1st, 2019, April 4th, 2019, and April 13th, 2019? Is there a second motion at this point? Pat, a second? George, are there questions on the April 1st minutes? Changes, corrections? Okay, are there questions on April 4th, changes or corrections? And are there questions on April 13th, changes or corrections? Okay, then the motion's been made and seconded. All those in favor? Opposed? Abstain. We have two abstentions, one is Sarah Schwartz and the other one is Alyssa Brewer. Okay, town managers report. Thank you, so you have, I won't reiterate things are already in report unless I think they're really important. First one is reminder of the cleanup day, so I appreciate the counselors who have volunteered to be team leaders. We will have a group of counselors at each of the three locations. We encourage the public to show up and help. We've got lots of different locations where people have already directed us, saying there's a lot of trash or there's work that needs to be done in these very areas. So pray for good weather. Our community participation officers will be helping to organize that and they'll be in touch with all the counselors who've stepped forward to talk a little bit more about how you'd like to work in your specific area. Graf Park has continues to move forward. That's really exciting for us. We anticipate that the Mill Street Bridge will be opened relatively soon. We've asked the state to let us know in advance. Sometimes they just sort of walk away and say they're done and the door, the road's open. We'd like there to be some kind of ceremony for the council to participate in. So we're working on that. Working on delivering the FY20 budget and the capital plan to you prior to, by May 1st, as required by the charter. Our goal is to, again, just like you've already led the way to have this be an electronic presentation. If you need or would like hard copies, we will produce that. We prefer not to, but we will. But there's some people on my staff even who want hard copies. So we'll be in that mode. We'll have some available if you ask for that. Finance committee tomorrow is, if you're really into some of the details, our actuary will be here talking about OPEB and our financial advisor will be here talking about debt, really about our bond rating. It's gonna be really a rich discussion if you're interested in that stuff. If you know the restaurant Porta, they had their license suspended for three days. The board of license commissioners has scheduled another public hearing or a public meeting to review their license again on Wednesday at 1 p.m. There's been another series of issues that have been identified by the police department. And so this continues to be a challenge for the town and I think the board of license commissioners will be, since they just had them, had suspended their license and they continued to violate their licenses, I think they will be not happy depending on the testimony that they receive from the police officers. So that's Wednesday at 1 p.m. Earlier today I sent you my appointments subject to council approval or not approval or no action for the Energy and Climate Action Committee. I just wanted to read the names off for the public. So it's Laura Drauker at 57 Rosemary Lane, Ondra Rose 64 Amity Place, Jesse Selman 216 Potwine Lane, Dwayne Breager III Thistle Lane, Darcy DeMond who's a town counselor, Nikki Robb IV Holst Road, Steve Roof 1680 Southeast Street, Ashwan Ravikamar of 99 East Pleasant Street and Evan Ross who's a town counselor. I've given a memo that describes the appointments, the process involved and a thumbnail sketch of each of the applicants and the OCA received it today. They didn't, they discussed it for a few minutes but they really intend to discuss it next week as to how to handle this. People talked about how are we managing a lot of the appointments. So it's a very time consuming process because we are, I strive to interview anybody who's put their name forward to serve on a committee. So we've already done the Board of Licensed Commissioners and ECAC was the next highest priority. I am working on now on Council on Aging, Historical Commission, Historic District Commission, the Human Rights Commission, not just because they're all ages, it's because they all have needs, they're lowering down in terms of getting quorums. So those are the next four that we're interviewing. Currently, Conservation Commission again is with the recent pending resignation will be near barely able to get quorum. So that's the next one that's coming up. So those were sort of sequencing these out just to manage the interview schedules for me and for the residents and members of the residents advisory committee and other staff in the committees. So that's the work plan as you will send. I will use this and serve as a model for the type of memo that the OCA will receive. If you recall, the council said it can be an automatic referral to OCA, but I will follow the same process as required by the charter that I file with the council and with the town clerk simultaneously. And that's my report. Do you have any questions? Are there any questions? Yes, Dorsey. I just wanted to thank you for all the work that you did on the Energy and Climate Action Committee interviews. I'm sorry that we don't have a process where the council gets the CAFs, but that's not what I wanted to comment about. I just wondered if you could update us on the videotaping of the council committees since we've probably done three or four each week since January and there's quite a backlog. So many of, okay, it's a little more complicated. So it's not just video, the council's been really good about taking over the technology and videotaping, that or videotaping recording, they'll say. And that's been really terrific. We thank you for doing that. Then there's about an hour and a half or two hours worth of work for every one of those things. We don't just put them up on the web. They have to edit them. They have to put a footer in or something like that. Amherst Media is, for the certain committees that they've agreed in their contract to do, they're willing to do that. We're in discussions with them about doing more. We have limited staff to put that kind of work and you, as you know, are having a lot of meetings. We have some up, there are a lot of problems with it we're still working on. We have some up on the town's YouTube channel. That's not where people are going to look for them. We have to get a better system and so I don't have a better solution for you at this point. The person who's, well, I won't give you excuses, but we are working to that. I know that's an urgency for the council and for the public and that does a lot of work happens at your committee meetings. So there are some up of the council committee meetings? Yes, but not on the Amherst Media channel because that's where most people go. It's on the town's YouTube channel because that's what we have access to. So I can send you the link on where they are and we can start to put that out. And we don't have a good spot on, we're not doing it well on our website. There's a lot of problems. Yes, that would be helpful. I would like to have them up purely for selfish reasons because it would be really good for us since all of these actions are interrelated that the different committees do. It would be really helpful for me to be able to watch the committee meetings of the other committees because I can't go to all of them. Sure, so I'll send out the link to where some of them are currently and we can put that on our website. It's just not a clean and intuitive thing for the public and we don't wanna roll out something that's so discombobulated, which is what I feel it is now. We're not there yet, but I'm happy to share that with you. Dorothy. Well, we're gonna have all those minutes posted and some of those minutes, what, 18 pages, 20 pages? If people wanna know what we've been doing, looking at those minutes will give them a very good idea. And so I love the minutes. Kathy. I just, I wanna comment on something completely different on the cleanup day. I think it's a terrific idea and I'm one of your captains or whatever, slave labor. But I had at least one resident say, she'd love to just have this be instituted. That she's regularly seeing a place where people dump trash, she goes down into a ravine and then she doesn't know whether to tell DPW or conservation but she picks it up, she moves tires out to the street. She's a, but she said she'd be on a regular cleanup team if we, I think there's people's willingness to do activities like this. And I was just recently in Central Park. Central Park has a conservatory of a bunch of volunteers who help clean up the park. So I think there's a way of not just on committees where people go to sit, but the way we plant trees that there may be a way of doing this year round. And I heard some people talk about like with the schools even you could do a spring and fall, help clean up your schools, which might just be mops and pans. But I think it's a building of community that's a really healthy thing. So I love it that we have this two hour stretch. Any further comments at this time? Yes, Shalini. Could we get an update on the station road bridge beyond the fact that we purchased one? Could we get a sense of timeline with when it's gonna be installed? I don't have that, Mr. Moring's been on vacation but he'll be back on Wednesday. So I'll get an update from him then. You can wait till then. Okay. Okay. Any further comments, questions? All right, then we are at the point of town councilor comments. You've already been made aware of the fact that we did receive the ECAC appointments. We had already voted as a town council that those appointments memos would automatically be transferred to the Outreach Communications and Appointments Committee and that was done so at the same time it was received by the council. I have no other comments. Are there any future agenda items? Yes, Alyssa. Several. One, just follow up for the town manager's report is to make sure that that ECAC memo is in the online packet for the public for tonight's meeting, just because it's another place to put it because people have heard us talking about it. In terms of lowering the speed limit, I was going through my email to go back to January of 2017 which was six months after the Municipal Modernization Act was passed. Some information's been updated since then but I have several references I can provide to you in future agenda setting because it sounded like several people were interested in that and I will say that when the select board brought it up we were basically told, no that's a bad idea and so not by this town manager. So, but by staff member. And so that is something that maybe now that more communities have adopted it because at that time there were only four and now there's a long list and I can give you the links that people can look at associated with that so you don't have to look it up yourselves because I still have it sitting there from 2017. So that sounds like a conversation that people wanna have at some point. The other two things I wanted to ask about is one is looking at our council schedule. When we voted on the council schedule I asked that we change the date of November 4th meeting. I thought our minutes indicated that was going to happen and then I found out later that no it didn't happen and I want to again put in a plug for the fact that we should not meet the night before elections. That's just not something the select board did. It's not something town meeting did. We didn't meet on the Monday night before a Tuesday election. Yes, there's a holiday in November. Two holidays actually that makes it complicated but we might as well get used to it now. And so I would really like us to change that date, that being not time sensitive obviously because that's November. And the other comment that has been made to me as we all talk about going about our daily lives. One of the reasons I think it would be really helpful to have those tapes available beyond the fact that we've all been making them is that I am hearing some criticism that so many of our meetings are during the day and that very few people feel like they can take the time off work to come to our daytime meetings. Nearly every council committee is meeting during the day. This was a major criticism back in the old days if a new committee started and wanted to meet during the day people said, oh, that's terrible. They shouldn't meet during the day. And now we're all meeting during the day. So we might want to think about that as our workload evens out a little more if there are ways we can come up with a more with a regular schedule that isn't every single week for the rest of our lives. I feel like it feels like it is now for many of our council committees and see if maybe we can switch it up a little or different meetings can do at a different time. I don't think it's something we need to discuss soon but I think it's something we all need to be aware of because it is a change in the way things work. Are there other future agenda items? Evan? I don't know if this falls in a future agenda item is more of a comment. So my understanding is that finance committee meetings until the end of June will be posted as special meetings of the council for us to go to. And I think I would personally benefit from going to some of those as someone who's never gone through a budget process. I don't know that I could go to all of them. And so I'm just throwing out the idea that I don't know how organized y'all are with regard to if you already know what's happening in each meeting, but it would be useful from my perspective if I sort of knew ahead of time what might happen to each and what were the key ones. So tomorrow you're meeting with the actuary and about debt. Is that like if you're gonna go to one you should go to that one because it's really important or is next Tuesday you're meeting. It'd just be nice to, haven't ever gone through this knowing I can't go to all of them, it'd be nice to know, are there some that are more important than others? Are there some that you should definitely be at? And do we even know this far in advance which ones those would be? Let me comment just briefly by saying we do have a full calendar. We'll make sure that you get the updated one, but there's also some CRC meetings that we are now making as committee of the holes. For example, if they're going to discuss and learn about the master plan or discuss and learn about zoning, it's an opportunity for all of us if we can become available. Kathy. And Paul has done us a service. Evan, if you go to the very end where he goes upcoming meetings, I just saw that he's listed each of those. So on finance, you can see on May 7th that we'd be looking at public safety conservation departments. So if there were particular department issues we're taking up by different parts of the budget that you were more interested in, the content is listed there. We're meeting twice a week in May. The other thing about finance is that we have the benefit of Emerson Media films us. So those tapes are up a couple days, they're up really fast. So to the extent you just can't make all these meetings but you wanna listen and watch the discussion, they're quite accessible. Further more, after May 1st, when you see the title public safety, that means we're gonna be taking up that part of the town manager's recommended budget for FY20. And that's when we'll be discussing that particular part of the budget, okay? Further comments from councillors? Agenda items for the future, okay? Then I ask that a motion be made to enter into executive session. May I, so have we done 12 C yet? Because we were on 12 B, future agenda items. At, we were kind of lumping it all together, but please go ahead. So I just wanna make a plug, if I may, before we go into it. I just wanna make a plug for something else on May the 4th, at the same time as the cleanup, unfortunately, but this is an architectural tour of downtown Amherst, organized by the Public Art Commission. Hi, Bill. And Bill was very nice to ask me if I would lead this tour. So if you're not busy cleaning up, please join the tour. We'll meet right here at the front steps of town hall and we'll walk down north, walk around the common, walk down North Pleasant Street, and I'll learn a few things. So. What time does your tour? May, 9 a.m. Identically. Identical. Okay. Perhaps you will do it again at another time. Thank you. Any further comments? All right. I asked that a motion be made to enter into executive session for the purpose set forth in the agenda items 14A and 14B. The motion reads, I move that the town council meet in the executive session, pursuant to the provisions of general law C, 30A, section 21A6, to discuss the purchase, exchange, lease, or value of real property, if an open meeting will be, we'll have a detrimental effect on the negotiating position of this public body and further move that the town council meet an executive session pursuant to the provisions of general law C, 30A, section 21A7, to comply with an act under the, comply with or act under the authority of any general or specific law or federal grant and aid requirements. Is there a motion? Okay. Second. Mandy Jo's is second. And then I hear by the clear that an open meeting on the purchase, exchange, lease, or value of real property would have a detrimental impact on the council's negotiating position. The council will not reconvene an open session. And so therefore the meeting of the town council will resolve after the executive session. A roll call vote is required to enter into executive session. So I'm asking the town clerk to read the roll call. Councillor Balmille. Yes. Councillor Brewer. Councillor Diengeles. Yes. Councillor Dumont. Yes. Councillor Chrysmer. Yes. Councillor Hannake. Yes. Councillor Pam. Yes. Councillor Ross. Yes. Councillor Ryan. Yes. Councillor Shane. Yes. Councillor Schreiber. Yes. And Councillor Swartz. Yes. I failed to have a vote on the previous motion. Should we do that? Okay. Got it. Thank you. We adjourn at the end of the executive session but we will not be reconvening in public meeting. Thank you.