 And we are recording is not in my usual spots. Okay, I'm going to call the meeting order now. So it's May 24th. One minute after 9am. And I'm calling the finance committee meeting to order for today's meeting. I'm going to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021. Extended by chapter 22 of the acts of 2022. This meeting has been conducted by remote means members of the public. Wish to access the meeting. Can do so by zoom or telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public has been permitted with every effort. To ensure the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time where technological means. And as is required by the rules of the procedure, I need to check with members of the finance committee to make sure that they can hear me. And we can hear them. And then I will turn it over to. Lynn, because she needs, I think, to call a meeting of the council to order also. So that said, I'll go through to confirm that everybody can hear and be heard. We can hear them. So learn. Present. Present. Matt. No, Matt, you're here. I come back to Matt in a minute. I'm here, Andy. Okay. Great. Thank you, Bernie. Present. Michelle. Yeah. Kathy. I'm here. And I think that Alicia is still. Not at the meeting, but when she comes, we'll confirm her. So with that, I think that we're ready to. Turn it over to Lynn for a moment to convene. We don't have a, we don't have a quorum. You don't have a quorum. There are only six counselors in the room at this time. So. Until there are seven, we won't. Jennifer. Yeah, but until Alicia shows up, we don't have. Oh, correct. You are correct. I take that back. I apologize. Okay. So keep an eye on it. And if you need to call a council to order. Then. Please do so. So just to go through what is planned for today. We're running in a very. Difficult to tight schedule. As I have explained to the finance committee, I have a problem with the public. Once a month, I have a problem with the conflict. That takes about an hour of the Tuesday morning. Away from. Ability to participate fully in. The finance committee meetings. Because I was appointed this year. To be one of the three Western Massachusetts representatives on the. I'm going to talk about. Mutual associations, financial policy committee meeting, which is scheduled to 10. So. From about 10 to 11. It's usually about a one hour meeting or less. It was actually even less than an hour. During that period of time, Kathy will. Take over and be chair of the meeting in her. And then we'll come back on the. Plan is that we're going to do budget review. Of general government and then conservation planning and inspections. We will later in the meeting have a public comment period for any members of the public who wish to address the committee and raise any issues. So. I'm going to talk about what we're planning. In order to complete. A relevant to the committee's work. And. At the. Later in the meeting we, when we talk about next agenda preview. I will say a little bit about what we're planning. For Thursday and next week in order to complete. The committee's process and make recommendations and how I think we'll be able to complete the agenda. Until Thursday is meeting the process. The process discussion will actually. Take place on Thursday and we can talk. I can preview the agenda at that point in time. So. Are there any questions about. Our thoughts about the process as I've laid it out for this morning. So saying none. Yes, Sean, then. If you have an order that you have. I want to propose. For consideration of general government budget. Yeah, so. So I think the order we'd like to go in is just basically the way the budget flows, which would start with the town council. And when and then go to the town manager finance. Human resources DEI and so on. So I can. Introduce each department if as we go through. So we would, if it's okay with. You Andy, we would start with one. Okay, so. Do you want to do any introduction. As we. Get into general. To the general fund section. On town council. I'm not, I don't really need to spend any time. It's pretty self-explanatory. I do know that Michelle had one question. And that was the increase. And I just want to note the footnote or not the footnote, but the. Significant changes note. And that is this year, another 3000. Was added to the base of. 139,139,000. And that was to cover all of the school committee people. Their stipends are in. They're not in the school budget. And then the other increases were basically to cover 75%. Of any step increase due to the. Town clerk of the town council. And then other general. Increases. As it relates to, you know, inflation and so forth. This item covers things like. Counselor attendance at MMA. The purchase of a councilor table, for example, at the. Annual. Chamber of commerce meeting. It covers the stipends for the counselors. And it covers the stipends for the school committee. So there's not a lot in here. And it's basically. The increases from your year have essentially been about the same. As a whole increase of 3000. That was to cover the full school committee. And Michelle, you asked one other question. And I just want to see if we should go ahead and address that while we're here. And that is. The issue of the amount of stipend counselors. Has come up from time to time. There is something in the charter. And I'm going to pause for a moment and I'm going to come back to that because I want to now call the town council. To order for the committee of the whole. And I need to check on a couple of people to make sure they can hear us and we can hear them on a devil and got you. Good morning. I can hear you. Thank you. Jennifer top. I can hear you. Thank you. Thank you. And Dorothy Pam. I can hear you. Thank you. And that completes that. So going back. The charter does allow for a by a majority of vote of counselors to increase the stipend for counselors. The question that you specifically asked. Is with this increase. Allow us to attract more people that might otherwise not be able to be part of the council. And I have several thoughts on that. A modest increase. Might help people who need additional help with childcare or family care. Or additional help with supporting the community. Or additional help with childcare or family care. Or additional help with supporting. Other kinds of expenses related, but I do want to point out that for the public that. Counselors are provided with. Computers laptops. There's a discussion underway about the possibility of counselors being able to join their own events. We are. Our way to the MMA Nash, the mass municipal conference is paid every year. As well as the expenses associated with that. So a modest increase might. Allow a counselor who has more family expense. To be able to join in order to get a serious. A serious strain on the budget. It would almost have to be equivalent to a salary. For somebody who otherwise has to work. And that level of increase is would. It makes serious. It causes serious strain on the budget, to be honest. I totally hear you, Michelle. And I think this is a dilemma we all face. I mean, I think the compensation for a counselor is significant. Sometimes, for instance, I think Boston is somewhere around $75,000, but it's also considered essentially a full-time job. So that's, it's a dilemma. It's an ongoing dilemma. There is a mech mechanism to do it. It has been. It has been suggested in the past. The way the charter is written. It has been suggested in the past 18 months. Of a council being sworn in. And it does not apply until the next term. So we can't vote increases in our existing salaries. I hope that's significant enough of a. Response. Okay. Thank you. Other than that. Yes, I do. Thank you. Go ahead and. Thank you. Yeah. And I think the council, I think that Athena put together the town council. Pages for the document. Dorothy has a question. Are you entertaining comments on what you've just been talking. Talking about. Yes. I think that we should be very thoughtful about comments. the wisdom of the decision-making process. I think that that's actually something that belongs to the entire council. I don't know whether we should do, it should be scheduled at the council meeting or whether you'd rather start it at this meeting, Lynn, just to give us some guidance. If somebody wants to raise the issue, we can decide. Okay, so why don't you go ahead and just for the record, I want to do two things and then I'm going to call on Dorothy since we've addressed that question as limits and we're not going to place limits. Two things, one is that for anybody who's following along in the budget book itself, is the budget document. We're starting on the item on page 70 and as Sean indicated, we're just going to go in order sequentially through the general government section in each section that follows in the order of the book. The second thing is just as a reminder, as I said, every meeting that I chair that the process that we've always had is that any member of the council or any member of the finance committee can raise hands and that I will do my best to address people in order in which hands go up in each section. So with that, the only hand up is Dorothy. Dorothy, please hear the floor. I just had a budgetary thought on the topic of remuneration which is there could be a small stipend for committee chairs. I know that I am not teaching this semester at HCC and I'm a committee chair and I'm managing but I think that I would have to not do both. So I think that that's something that is symbolic. As Lynn said, we can't do real salaries but I think that would be a symbolic thing. That's my thought. No response to that. I mean, being a committee chair does add additional burden. This would be an issue that would have to be brought up and taken up by the council. And I would also suggest that it not happen in this fiscal year. Or Franko, in this- I can't, I can't do it this year. Right. Andy, I think you called on me. Yeah, I just wanna say that this was my first time doing this exercise. It was an excellent exercise. I really appreciated it. But if there are any questions that don't feel like they are directed enough for our discussion that I've posed please feel free to let me know and move them on to something else. So I just wanted to make that clear and just that I really appreciated doing this. And also really appreciated the sense of how much work is happening in this town and going through each of these and really all I could think about was the people and how much amazing hard work is happening in all of these departments. So thank you. Let me just mention on this one, it's correct. If we voted a increase for chairs, it would have to be, it could not be effective until January 2025. Okay. Okay. So anything else in the town council section of the budget? Sean, are you presenting on the town manager in his absence? Yes, but I see Dorothy has her hand up. Okay. I went to a meeting yesterday and Nate was running a breakout group using post-its or whatever. It was a computer technique which I could see could be very useful for a town counselor in running their district meeting. I know that individual help is available to counselors but I think there could be a good argument to be made for a Zoom and computer, a specialized course for counselors on ways to run a good Zoom meeting. So that would be an added, I don't know what's a budget item or not, but it's a training item that I think would be useful. That's it. Thank you. So Andy, for the town manager's office, I wasn't going to present necessarily, but I was going to go through the questions and then see if that stimulated any additional questions. Is that okay? Okay, that's fine. And then I'll see if Michelle has any follow-up since she's the one who is assigned for general government. And Michelle, all the questions look good from what I could tell going through them. They're all budget related, they all make sense. So the first question for the town manager's office was where do we stand with respect to the strategic partnership agreements with the higher ed institutions? So staff have been meeting with UMass representatives over the past few months, been good meetings, productive meetings. There's no agreement in place and the meetings continue, but I would say we're getting closer to something, but we're not there yet. So but those meetings are ongoing and with all the institutions in town. I see Kathy has her hand up on that. Yeah, I realize that. Kathy? Just a quick comment on that, Sean, particularly with one of the institutions that has an enormous endowment fund, and Paul is not here, but I've been wondering, and this isn't to be answered now, would it help if you weren't going in alone, if we recruited some illustrious alums, some others to make a case? So that's just on a, and whether it's a one-time ask or an ongoing ask, and I'm thinking of the elementary school as the piece. So it's just, is there not even a strength in numbers as much as strength in a united, we need it kind of feeling rather than just the manager and staff. Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. I think I'd like to see how this process plays out and then that might inform how we do this the next time around. Yeah, Kathy, hold that question. Paul did indicate that if there were leftover questions that we weren't able to address that he would pick them up on Thursday morning and we would allow a little bit of time for that. So I think we can do that. If you wanna re-ask the question, please do so on Thursday and Paul has indicated his presence will be that we'll be able to do that. All in. Yeah, I just wanted to mention that in a conversation, I think it might have been just last week, but that Anna was able to join Paul and I for with Mindy and Joe and their staff. It appears that the pilot legislation this year is not going to move forward. However, Mindy is very interested and will begin working with us on a version of pilot legislation that is applicable to Amherst as well. So thanks. So the next question was one of the key challenges, objectives is to work with the bid and chamber to promote economic recovery. Do you see opportunities to promote economic growth and sustainability that would have budget implications? So we do partner with the bid and the chamber often. I think the most current example is the use of ARPA money. So we're partnering, we partnered with the bid on two ARPA initiatives, the downtown improvements, which helps support the drake and obviously that so far has had a positive impact on downtown and the small business grant program, which is either live or about to go live pretty in the near future. And that will provide startup grants and growth grants and some technical assistance support for small businesses. The bid obviously has a better understanding of the business community and their needs. So partnering with them made a lot of sense on those two initiatives. And there's one more initiative, the economic empowerment allocation that we're talking to them about too, to see if there's ways they can help us with that. So all those things do have budget implications. We're hoping they have positive budget implications that anytime we have a robust economic atmosphere downtown or throughout town, that helps many of our revenue categories, specifically in local receipts, new growth potentially could go up if there's building and development. The building permits section with our, if it's electrical fees or plumbing fees or the actual building permits themselves, that's a big economic driver for us. Parking when we have a lot of activity, like we've had recently that drives up our revenues, meals at hotel hotel and motel excise. All those are major economic revenues for us that we see go up when times are good. So we're hoping that what we're investing with ARPA now will pay dividends in the future. And the economic empowerment one, I think is probably the most exciting or equally exciting, because that's more of an ongoing economic presence over the next two or three years. And we hope that all of these will, again, help the town into the future. Andy, I just wanted to point out that Councillor Walker has joined us. So if you can confirm that she can hear us and we can hear her. Okay, Alicia, welcome. As Athena's indicated, we probably need to just check to make sure that you can hear us and we can hear you. Hi, everyone, I can hear you all. Thank you so much. Okay, thank you. So as you've been probably recognized, we're just working our way through in order that it's presented in the budget book through the general government sections. Kathy. These are great questions, Michelle. Thank you. Sean, and now it's more something to think about as we look at those efforts, if we could set up something, are there baseline metrics we could look at? So, this is sort of priming the pump is what I think of what we're doing. And we'd like to know whether the pump then has a yield at some point because it's a forward looking if when ARPA money runs out are there state grants and others that could continue to do something similar that become stimulus, but you'd like to know that the stimulus is a net yield. So, it's a point I've made before that when we do net growth only on revenues, to the extent there's a cost, I don't know how to capture it, but there are things like more cars on the road is more wear and tear on the roads. So, that's just one example of it, but it's not a dollar in is a net dollar. There may be more, whatever. So, I have never known how to capture that, but I'd like to capture it, think of capturing it at some point. Yeah. So, partially there's two ways we can partially do that. I think you're right, about higher traffic and the impacts that has and utilizing EMS services more, utilizing police services more, DPW, those things are hard to capture, but each of these grant programs does have benchmarks set up and those are posted on the ARPA page for the projects that are moving forward. So, they do have benchmarks that we are required to measure. And then I think the other area that we'll want to, we can look at closely and maybe draw some correlations as the financial indicators report, as we go through, if we start to see it won't be a one-to-one, but we do have a slide specifically on economically driven revenues that we can monitor each year and see if we see those go up in the coming years. That would be a positive sign that some of these programs are working. Thank you. So, the next question is, there's been some concern about how the two new departments will impact the budget in future years. Is there anything you can share about how you plan to budget for Cress and DEI over the next five years? So, Paul can shed more light on that one. I will say that. So, we have funded a 10-person Cress department and a two-person DEI department and that's all within the operating budget currently. We know that the operating expense side of those budgets, not the personnel with the operating expense side, those will have to be adjusted as we go through this first year and we get a better sense of what are their annual needs for expenses. I know that's a question that's gonna come up in a little bit too. But we know those will probably change. Major changes to those budgets will have to be handled through the regular annual budget process. So, if there's an increase in demand and the staffing levels are not sufficient to meet demand, then the town manager will have to do what he always does, which is look at the budget where there is we can save or there's what new revenues are available and prioritize that against other needs in town. So, unless there's some major change in revenues, I would say that would go through the regular budget process each year. It's going forward. Thanks, Andy. I'm gonna ask a question. I dropped the red flag I threw up last year. And it's a question of span of controls was triggered by the mention of two new departments. My count before I finished my first cup of coffee this morning was that Paul has at least 12 direct reports. And then there's the council and then there's boards and committees. So, my question is about the sustainability of the town manager's office itself. That's all the workload is not getting any lighter. It's concerned at some point we're gonna see drop the responsibility. I'll mention that again, Sharon, maybe I'll mention it again next year. The other thing was in terms and Paul can maybe take this up is, I mean, the council and the plan is to hire eight street level positions for crests. And I would hope that that hiring is paced by some measure of demand because we're not staffing. I hope we're not staffing this department and again, building off the lead document. We're not staffing the department with what we used to call hospital shifts. That there'll be some flexibility in staffing to match demand. And I'd like to know that the intent is to hire eight positions that may not happen in this current year because of phase in and the demand for service. Yeah, I can win briefly. I think I do think the intent is to hire the eight positions sooner rather than later. Earl, I can follow up with Earl or Paul. I know the answer to the schedule piece of it. I don't know that off the top of my head, but I do believe they're trying to move forward and fill those positions pretty soon. Okay, there is this dynamic staffing model that emergency departments use. It's based on actual needing experience. I would hope that we'd look in between our director's expertise of our emergency service staff expertise and the leak report that we'd look at a dynamic staffing pattern rather than fixed set of FDs. Thanks. Should we give any follow up here or do you want to just go on to the last question? I'll go to the last question. That's Jen, I saw your hand went up if you wanted to add anything. No, okay, I didn't voice that. Yeah, no, I was just going to say that the hiring process has started for the eight responders already and so that they should be all hired. They have a rigorous eight week training process that they have to go through. So that has already started. I want to echo Bernie's point about spanner control. This is something that I have raised with Paul in my one-on-one meetings with him. It's something I raised when we did the needs assessment and for the council priorities. And it comes out of my own background in organizational development and running a large organization. 14 people or whatever it is is way too much. And if we were to have to for some very unfortunate reason replace Paul today, I would assume that the next person would come in and reorganize if they knew anything about organizational control and heaven forbid, I would hope that we would not hire a town manager who did not understand those kinds of issues because management experience just says that's way too many direct reports. And I'm echo Bernie's concern, but I also echo a burnout concern and a replacement concern. So. Can I just go back quickly to what Jennifer said? Jennifer, to clarify, did you say that the eight responders had already been hired? No, they're in process. They're in the process. Okay. All right, great. They'll be hired before the end of the fiscal year when it started. Yeah. Matt. Thanks, Andy. Sean and Sean and I have had a lot of conversations about this on the cultural council too, but you indicated some excitement about the economic empowerment piece. So I just thought maybe you would share a little bit more about that with this group. Yeah. So again, we're still working through exactly what format we'll take. The sort of the initial concept I think was born of two things. One, that the economic development director was reallocated to fund the DEI director. So that was a loss of the position dedicated to economic development. And when we did the input sessions around ARPA, I think it was the chamber that proposed the idea of this economic empowerment type position. And then when we started thinking about what the job responsibilities would be, we got a lot of input from the cultural council and the group that Matt leads and going to one of their sessions, they talked about the major struggles that the arts community has faced throughout ARPA. So when we thought about this position, we tried to keep it targeted on three things that are really specific to the Amherst community and haven't really tried to hammer those three things. And so the first one is supporting local artists and cultural organizations. They're a major driver of the economic activity downtown and one of the reasons why people come to Amherst and one of the things that we heard from the cultural council is that there's not like a central point of contact for people to go to for different issues they may have, to rent a stage, to schedule an event or to find out how to do things in the right way. And so this position would help promote local artists and cultural organizations and will help provide that central point of contact. The next one is working with the higher ed institutions. We know that's another major driver of our economic activity. We know that there's a balance there about what we do with them and how that impacts the town. And so this position would look at ways to maybe bring students into downtown, but also maybe ways to bring downtown to the students and try to, again, strike that right balance and do it in a way that everyone can support. And then the third leg of the stool would be entrepreneurial entrepreneurship, sorry, entrepreneurship. There's still some vacant storefronts out there, there's still areas where things, where new businesses can come in. And so, and one of the things that we've heard from the business community is that the town's process can sometimes be cumbersome or confusing in terms of starting a new business and who do you need to go to to talk to you about different things. And so this, again, this role or this position would help meet with those interested in starting a business, help guide them through the process, help broadcast what's available on Amherst to the broader region and beyond, that there's opportunities in Amherst and try to bring people in. And I know it sounds like a lot, but those are the three things we're hoping these funds can help accomplish. Andy, can I just ask a follow-up? Is this idea is an ARBA funded, contracted individual or institution? Do you know yet? Yeah, so again, the shape isn't 100% set yet. Originally the idea was a person. We've gone down the road of potentially partnering with the bid and or the chamber. So it could potentially be multiple smaller positions. It could be one, we haven't worked out the exact structure, but those three things are the things that we need to be accomplished and that we would track and measure and ensure that they're happening. We wouldn't want just an extension of things that are already happening. We'd want, again, this added focus on those three areas. So I know that's not super satisfying. So I'm hoping sometime in the next 30 days we'll have much more clarity in terms of what shape this project will take. So can I go to the last question? Yes. So the last question was operating expenses in FY 22 were budgeted to be much higher than in previous years. And this is talking about the town manager's budget and 80,000 was reallocated to DEI in FY 23. Was the FY 22 operating expense budget high or did something get dropped to allow for the reallocation? So I think this is just looking at the history of the operating expenses and noticing that there's some variants up and downs there. So just the history of this. So in FY 21, $80,000 was added to the budget that year for racial equity and DEI work. It wasn't initially added to the town manager's budget because we weren't sure exactly again what form that was going to take. During FY 21, we just, it was determined that it would go into the town manager's budget because much of those funds was going to be used to support the community safety working group. And Paul was the liaison or one of the liaisons for that committee. So those funds were actually put into the town manager's budget. They stayed there for FY 22, the start of FY 22 that they stayed in his budget. So that's why you see the budget go up. And then for FY 23, it's been reallocated to help support the DEI department and can crass. So that's why you see sort of that up and down but they should be settled going forward. If you have some shell. No, thank you. Okay. So are we ready? Unless I see other hands going up, I think we're ready to go on to the finance department, Sean. Good. So thank you for having the finance department here. We have three wonderful department heads in addition to myself here today. Sonya Aldrich, who's our comptroller in charge of the accounting department. Kim Yoo, who is our principal assessor in charge of the assessing department. And Jennifer LaFountain, who is our treasure collector in charge of central services and everything treasury and collection. Two of them have been here for a really long time and have tons of experience with the town. And Kim, who's newer to our team comes with a lot of experience and we were super, super lucky to get her. And very grateful that she came to work for us because the assessing field is very thin right now and very difficult to find people. Especially people who come in having training and that skill level. So very excited to have all three of them and they make my job a lot easier, quite frankly, having them here. So I'm just gonna give a few highlights of some of the things we're working on in each of these departments and some of our major issues that we're dealing with. And if there's any followup questions, they'll take them directly. And we do have some questions from Michelle that we'll go through. So I think in the assessor's office, obviously the housing market has been really volatile lately. So that's something that poses some challenges for Kim's office, cause we have to value that and make sure that it's within a certain level of whatever the market rates are. So you saw some market adjustments last year where levels across the board were brought up, housing assess values were brought up across the board. And you'll probably see that continue at least one more year because the market has gone up so much. And so again, that's just all work that Kim has to do in addition to the regular cyclical valuations that she has to do, which are these periodic points in time or everything has to be updated. The accounting office, Sonya obviously keeps very tight control over the budget and again, really appreciate that. One of the things I think is a particular challenge and I'm glad Holly. So Holly Drake is also here. She's the assistant comptroller and she also does an amazing job and really contributes heavily to the budget process. But one of the other things that both Sonya and Holly contribute to significantly are all the grants that we're getting. All the grants are great. And I think, Cathy mentioned this a little bit earlier, it's great bringing all those grants in but it does have some cost associated with it and managing those grants is a lot of work whether it's the rotary for the Pomeroy Village intersection, if it's ARPA or FEMA or you name it, we've got grants for everything this year. So that's a major challenge for them and really appreciate the work they do. And then collection and treasury. So Jen, I don't think people necessarily realize that when you walk into town hall and you get greeted by whoever's working the counter that's Jen LaFountains department. That's sort of central services and they're the face that greets everybody as they come in. She does a good job going after all the money that's due to us. You'll see we have some questions on that coming up but there's a lot of different revenue sources and a lot of different ways money comes into the town and we need somebody on top of all that to keep it organized, keep it in the right category so we can monitor it year over year, make sure there's variances we can understand, we know why and Jen does a good job of keeping track of that. And then she, and we'll talk more about this, one of the questions was related to this, she's also on the treasure. So once that money comes in, it's put in the right place, Jen's responsible for making sure that it's invested the right way whether it needs to be liquid where we can pull it out easily. If it's longer term monies that we can invest in something that has a higher return, she does all that. And then the big thing that's coming up for Jen that we've done always done a little bit of but it's gonna be a major undertaking in the near future is the debt and the borrowing for the town. So we always do that bond issuance or band issuance every year but as we take on these four building projects, it's gonna be much more important as these are long-term high-cost projects. And so maximizing what we get for interest rates in terms of keeping them low and balancing the cash flow needs of the town is gonna be a major responsibility for Jen. I'll say overall for all three departments, I think there's been lots of staff turnover like you heard from DPW and in other places. I think as of last year, we lost three or four employees to retirement. Not early retirement, just retirement, they were ready. And between them, we lost about a hundred years of experience in the finance office. Our principal assessor, our treasurer and payroll and accounts payable, we lost significant experience. I wanna credit Sonya, Jen and Kim that, well, I'll credit myself for Kim but just Sonya and Jen that we've brought on really great people. I was a little nervous when all these retirements were happening, but now that we've brought people in and seeing that they've come in with a lot of eagerness, very intelligent, they fit in perfectly with our office and they've contributed already in major ways. I'm feeling much better about the trajectory we're going but there was a point in time where I was like, how are we gonna keep this thing afloat with losing all this experience? Again, having Sonya, having Jen, people who have so much experience where they can train every single position underneath them has helped to make that a smooth transition. So I think I'll end it there and I can go through the questions that were sent in or we can open up for questions. So why don't you go ahead, since we don't have any hands. Oh wait a minute, I guess Dorothy, I do see your hand up. So if you're calling on me, a constituent came up with a suggestion of a way to increase tax revenue in town, which I'm sure I will not express as well as it should be but businesses, we do not have a special commercial rate but businesses are assessed something to do with the amount of business they have or the money that's flowing in. Adding to that category, the suggestion was houses, non-owner occupied houses which were used as multiple rental units and therefore you could base the assessment on that property not as a single family house which is used just as a dwelling but as the same way that you do other businesses in town. So then conveying a suggestion that was made as a way of increasing tax revenue for the town. Kim, do you wanna speak to having a split tax rate between commercial and residential and whether it's allowable to treat rentals as anything other than residential property? Sure, so if we do a split tax rate that would increase the tax rate for the commercial, industrial and personal property accounts that we have which would in turn lower the rate for the all residential properties regardless of their status. With Massachusetts general law you have to treat residential properties the same whether it be a giant apartment building or a single family home. Speaking to the point specifically of single family homes being rentals versus actual residents of the owners, we could look at valuing them with the resident or with the income and expense method. However, we'd have to also look at the cost of what that would entail because it's a much more lengthy in depth. We'd have to really, really have a lot more time to be able to spend and potentially another person to be able to do all that work. So completely understand the suggestion but that may be a little bit more cost-worthy than you would think. But the split tax rate would, like I said, for the commercial, industrial and personal property accounts that would increase the actual rate and lower the rate for the residential. And then if we were to also do the residential exemption then that would potentially change if it were owner occupied they would get some sort of a discount versus if it was a rental then they would get, they would not get that exemption. And just adding real quickly to what Kim said, what we've looked at in the past with the split commercial rate is the split between commercial parcels and residential parcels is so heavily weighted towards residential parcels that it would be a very large increase for commercials for a relatively minor increase on the residential side. It's not like Hadley where there's a bigger, there's more of us even split than Amherst or some of the more urban areas. Right, right. And if you, it's hard to get started with the split tax rate because like Sean just said, if you did such a minor increase, you know, the first couple of years it would be like more work than it's worth because you're not really getting that much more from the commercial industrial properties. But as you go along, every assessor who I know that is in a district where they do the split tax rate is trying to figure out a way to get out of it. And every assessor's or town's, they wanna get into the split tax rate. Everybody advises them, you know, just be really careful because once you're in, you're in and you can't get back out. So there's a lot of controversy between the two. Yes, but I thought that the proposal that I put forth was not splitting the tax rate. The tax rate as it is, but treating non-owner-occupied rental houses according to the money brought in, okay? And so along those lines, you know, again, like I said, that would have to be, we'd have to study first to see if that would be beneficial because the income and expense method would be much more difficult on those properties. The way valuation is done currently is based on neighborhood, single family versus two family versus three family, so on and so forth. And even broken down farther into the specific type of home. So Cape versus a raised ranch versus Victorian, so on and so forth. So to pull out those individual ones who are not owner-occupied, we would then have to do another study based on those particular properties and along the same lines to make sure that they're not overvalued based on that. So I totally understand the thought process on that, but I think that budgetary-wise, we might need to look at that as well if that is a method that we want to use. But I'm not sure that the state would be too thrilled with that either. I think they might tell us that we would need to go back to the way we're doing it now. Yeah, I think. One is just a comment to build on what Kim said. I think at some point, a few of us would benefit from, there is a methodology that's an income and expense method which was used for the large rental properties, but just going in and getting a tutorial on how these work. I don't want to take the time now on it. So I had a separate question, Sean, you talked about turnover. One of the turnovers was in procurement and am I correct that we have one procurement officer? Is that right? And so does that mean that person is doing contracts, whether it's going, is that person handling when we go out for roads or when we go out for the Jones Library or when we go out for the Little North Amherst Library? But I'm just thinking the scope of work that one person is handling. And training time, lead time because you had someone who'd been doing it for, and I know the procurement used to work closely with Sonya on CPAC, on Community Preservation Act. At least the person used to. So just assess, trying to get a sense of how stretched you are or how much people are really quickly learning. I'll say heavily stretched and Sonya, if you want to add to that, you can. While she's unmuted and I'll just say that we hear from departments all the time that so the person we hired is great and they hear that there's more that they would like this person to take on that they have historically done because they have more to do. And so, things like getting prevailing wages and helping monitor the contracts. And we have some new requirements with the responsible employer bylaw that was passed that poses some new significant workload on both the procurement officer and departments that it is an area that we're feeling the stretch right now. And I think it would be helpful for us. I was on the Responsible Employer Act and we were worried. The question came up on how much work that is. And we thought once it started, people will get used to it. But I'm just looking, you're down one person from five years ago or four years ago it looks like one FTE, more or less. And it feels like we're asking all of you, you're on two building committees. There's a lot of activity, which is why there's more. So just a sense of how stretched your staffing more committees when you're talking about new people. I know how often you and Sonia are with us in finance or with us multiple times. So just some sense of, is that kind of working? Are we worried about burnout at the manager level but at the staff level? So did you wanna start with that? Well, I'll be straightforward about burnout possibilities here, there is a lot more work since we've gone to the council government form a government. It's a lot more people with a lot of different agendas which all trickles down to the finance department in the end. So there is a lot more work with new bylaws and regulations put in place that puts a strain on procurement as well because they have to add all these other steps that departments have to take and they're not happy about it most of the time. I think Simone, our procurement officer has done a great job. She's very organized. She tries to get back to everybody as quickly as possible. She's fantastic with that. She still has a lot to learn and she's really cooperative with all departments but she is stretched. There's more and more now with a $10,000 threshold you have to go out and get three written quotes or before you could just get three phone quotes that puts a lot more pressure on her to enforce that with all the departments. I don't know, did I answer your question? And there's just a lot of big projects going on. There's a lot going on. There's the Danvers Library Project. There was the Belcher Town Road. Those were two really involved procurements that take a lot of time just to develop the documents that go out. So I think Kathy, your question's perfect. I think a lot of the things going on are really exciting and they're the things that make our jobs rewarding like the building committees and some of these things but it is a lot on top of sort of the day-to-day stuff. So it's always striking that right balance and we do our best to try to balance it. And I just want to remind everybody we are getting a lot of grants but there's a lot of procurement that goes along with those grants. So that adds on more. And just to a little more specific to answer Kathy's question is, yes, Simone, our procurement officer is involved in every single one of those bids that goes out for asphalt, for buildings, for small projects, for window replacements, store replacements, paving, sidewalks, professional services, every contract she has her hands in somewhere. And it is a lot of work and she's doing a fabulous job but there is still a lot to learn because they are all very different. So I'm gonna call on Lynn and I just have to remind everybody that I'm gonna have to leave the meeting in about two minutes. And so I think after I call on Lynn, I'm gonna designate Kathy to take over as the chair of this particular meeting for the next approximately one hour. And I'm gonna duck out and go to the Zoom meeting of the Biscal Policy Committee for the State. So Lynn. I just, this is a good time for me to say Michelle has worked hard on her questions. My questions actually follow on with hers. So I'd like to suggest we go back to Michelle's questions. Andy, do you wanna, do you want me to go through them first or do you wanna hand it over the chairship to Kathy? And I'll go through them. I'm gonna do both at the same time. Why don't you go ahead with questions and I am gonna leave the meeting now and Kathy is as of now the chair. Okay. So maybe I'll just go through these all together and then see if there's questions. So the first question was what contributed to the downward trend of investment income since FY20? So actually FY19 and FY20 were probably two of the better years we've had in a while for investment income. CD rates were really high. They were over a percent at that time. When we go to forward to FY21 and where we are now interest rates on, sorry, when I talk about interest rates we're specifically talking about CDs. We put big chunks of our reserves into CDs. And so the CD rates I think back then were over a percent. The last rate we got, sorry, the rate we were getting FY21 and early FY22 was 0.3%. It was a third or a quarter of what we were getting back then. So I'd say generally interest rates declined. We're starting to see that go the other way a little bit which is positive news. So I think Jen just got a CD for 1.2, Jen, was it 1.2? 1.3 for a year. 1.3, so I've made it a goal for Jen to beat the prior treasure in terms of the best investment income year that she had. They're good friends, so it's a friendly competition, but that is something we carefully monitor is trying to maximize the money we bring in on the money we have. And I don't think we've ever had more money. That's the good news we've had. We have as much money as we've ever had between the ARPA money, the MVLC grant money's coming in, our reserves obviously are in a strong place. So it's actually quite a balancing act to manage all that money and keep it, you don't want it all in one place just for security reasons and if anything, what they can ensure. So it's a balancing act and Jen does a good job of that. The next question is one of the key challenges is to continue to refine the budget cycle and process under the charter form of government. Are there changes that you think would make the process more transparent and equitable? One thing I mentioned this during the participatory budgeting process that I'd like to do, I wanted to do it this year and just things got out of the way for me that I wanna try for next year is meeting with some of the advocacy groups and stakeholder groups earlier in the budget process and just having sort of informal meetings with those groups and explain to them the budget process but also hearing from them what are their concerns and a lot of times there are areas that we can address, they may not be the major areas but there's smaller things we can do to make progress than some of the ideas that they have. This is something I did at the schools that was helpful meeting with like parent groups and special education advisory groups and so on. So that's something I'd like to try for up by 23 is in the fall having some of those informal meetings with stakeholder groups around particular areas of the budget. Personnel services are down due to retirements. Do you see an opportunity to consolidate in any area or do you foresee increases in the future? So because, so this is one thing I mentioned before. So we used to have a separate treasure and a separate collector and there were four department head level positions in the finance office because of Jen's initiative to learn the treasury role during the last couple of years when the prior treasure was here, we were able to consolidate that into one position. So instead of having four department head level positions, we only have three. And so that produced actual savings because there's the same number of positions but fewer of the higher level. I don't see much changing in the future in terms of the staffing levels. We are looking for ways to be more efficient and to move more things online but there's always added work coming to the department as well. How much did the town receiving grant money across departments in FY22? Have you considered hiring a full-time grant writer to identify and apply for grants across all departments? So I don't have the exact amount but the FY22 grants are listed on page. Where did I see that? Oh, sorry, page 249 has a list of all the grants that were active in FY22 or the major grants that were active in FY22. And it's really high this year because of the ARPA money and the MBLC money that's come in. But there's a lot of extra grants that we received. We also got some earmarks from our legislators for Cress and for community engagement that were great. I see the benefits of a full-time grant writer. I think it would be great to have somebody to do that. It's the two challenges I worry about are, one, I think a lot of the grants that we've received are because we have really skilled department heads who really know that particular content area. And I don't know enough about whether a single grant writer would be able to write with such authority and such knowledge in the different areas like DPW versus police versus Cress versus public health. I imagine they would still be working very closely with those department heads to put together a strong grant application. That being said, again, not against it if that was ever to come our way. And then the other just thing I worry about is, again, when we get these grants, we then have to manage them. And implement them and have the staff and resources to achieve the grant. And they usually have very tight timelines when we get these grants that put a lot of stress on departments. So again, it's a balance of, we wanna get as many grants as we can possibly, that we can implement and manage well. And this year was a really good year for that. Real estate collections have been great. The town has a really good track record of collecting real estate taxes. And I know just in the past year and a half since I've been here, there were some long-time outstanding ones that were collected. The properties turned over and the outstanding taxes were collected during that time. And so Jen's doing a good job keeping that going. And then the last one, I will turn over to Jen, which is do we work with a third party agency to deal with uncollected bills like ambulance and parking tickets? Okay, so for ambulance, I'll start with them. We do use ComStar for our billing. The fire department turns over all the runs that are billable to ComStar and they bill and collect the money from the insurance companies or the patient. And then they turn the money over to us to post on this side. We also use Greggill, their collection agency for it's mostly bills that are six months or older. One of the assistant fire chiefs and I review anything older than six months to send to collections and they help us get some more money out of that. And we also use Art Jones, he's our deputy collector. Any excise bills that are past the demand stage get turned over to him to help us collect the money. There's two fees that he puts on them. And his payment is a portion of those fees. And he also helps us with collection of really old parking tickets. And that's it for questions for the finance department. Oh, I'm cheer. That's right, looking around, where's Andy? Lynn, please go. Right, first of all, I wanna thank you all for the outstanding job you do. Every year, the audit is clean, but I also wanna mention a caution and that is if you're understaffed, we need to know about it because the first time a clean audit doesn't come through, then we have a problem and we don't wanna be in that problem. So, Sean, I'm just gonna really encourage that you speak up. I admire the way the transition and the retirements have gone, but finance is not an area where any organization and particularly a municipality wants to mess. We always need to know where the money is and that it's being handled properly. I do have several questions that really relate to the grant side of our work, which is where I spent most of my career. I personally have always gone back and forth as to whether a grant writer in an organization is useful and Sean, it's for exactly the reason you state. Identifying an opportunity is one thing, writing the proposal is another. And so if there was a way to have somebody who could help identify opportunities, I think that's terrific. If there's somebody who can help behind the scenes and making sure all that additional paperwork that gets attached to a proposal is done so that the person writing the proposal doesn't have to do it, but you're not gonna replace adjacent skills when it comes to knowledge of engineering and roads, when it comes to actually writing the proposal. So it's how do we support our existing staff so they can actually write proposals? And all I can say is you guys must be doing a phenomenal job because this municipality has really hit the mark on proposals. And I wanna use an opportunity to recognize Joe Comerford and Mindy Dom support for those proposals as they're submitted. This has been a priority of the town manager, it's been a priority of me to make sure they know those proposals are going in and it's been their priority to make sure that they're there with their handout saying we want this for Amherst. And it's really been a great working option. I do have a question about whether municipalities can have a negotiated overhead rate. And I honestly don't know, I know higher ed institutions can, but the reality is that if we are going to be managing as many grants and contracts as we presently are, we need to look into whether or not there is either a preliminary rate and or a negotiated rate that should be placed so that that money is then used to support the functions of administering grants. It's questionable whether it can be used in writing them but definitely in administering them, okay? And also the other issues that go along with that. And again, I'll be glad to help investigate that but I don't honestly know whether municipalities can have a negotiated overhead rate. Do you want me to answer that one first? Yeah. So we do and Holly, I can see is unmuted and she's ready to go on this one. So Holly, we call it indirect. Yes, right. Holly, do you want to speak to what our rate is and how it's calculated? So it depends upon the grant is really the first thing. Some allow for fringe benefits, some allow for a sort of straight overhead. I've seen very few grants that allow for a straight overhead. They're usually fringe benefits. So they do reimburse us for a calculation of Medicare taxes, retirement, unemployment taxes, et cetera. And we have a calculation that we do based on an average salary but it really depends upon the grant. Like, again, some allow, some do not allow for it. And you know, I mean, it costs money to take money. That's the bottom line in terms of the whole grant and contract world. So in the negotiated overhead rate, I would be asking, talking about is not around fringe per se but it's around the people who support the grant operation in terms of actually managing the grant. It would pay for the people in finance who are doing that. And then finally, my other question is, do we have an investment advisor and are we restricted as to the type of investments we can do? And I'm glad to see that the CD rates have gone up and that we're taking advantage of that. But it's really, that's my question. Investment and allowed investments that we can do. Yeah, so the town has an investment policy and we have an investment advisor who's worked for the town for many years who represents Abbey Capital. And they help invest our long-term, most of our long-term funds. Other funds that are invested that they help manage for us. They invest, I think it's about 20% now are actually invested in what people might think of as the stock market. And there is a list of what's legally, there's only maybe 20 or 30 on the legal list of what our advisor can invest in. And I can send it off to the committee later, it's on the website. So they're very restricted in terms of what they can invest in. They, aside from the stock market, they try to earn as best a return as they can off bonds and money markets and different things like that. There is a movement among some municipalities that we might want to at least have the council consider. And I think it's called the Prudent Investor, something I can't remember the exact name of the change but their municipalities can adopt something that allows the investment advisor to invest in a broader collection of companies out there. The argument for it is that they can generate a much higher return by having more companies at their disposal. And I think some of them will, some of the advisors will argue that it's actually, sorry, gotta echo, some of them will argue that it's actually safer because they can diversify more than they can diversify now because they're so restricted. We haven't brought that forward yet. I think Jen and I are still considering that and seeing what other communities are doing, but some communities I believe have already taken that step. Jen, do you wanna add anything, Jen? Okay. And I would assume that the Prudent Investors would avoid the kinds of things that higher ed institutions, for example, have divested from like fossil fuels, et cetera. So if we were to go that row, and I was actually at a conference last week talking to a treasure from another town about it, if we were to go that route, we would have to, I believe, put much more criteria in our investment policy about what types of things the town wants, feels comfortable investing in right now. It doesn't get into that specific level of detail because they're so restricted already. But if the town was ever to adopt this and open it up, I think we'd have to be much more clear about not investing in fossil fuels, for example, or not investing in this or that. There would need to be more work done on that. And do those towns that do, all the Prudent Investors, do they tend to have investment committees that advise? That, I don't know. I can look into that. We can find a couple. Again, our advisor has done this with a couple other communities, larger communities. So we could talk to some of them and see how they manage it. That's not uncommon in the nonprofit world. Okay. Thank you. Ernie. Yeah. Lynn captured a lot of what I was thinking of and I'll just let it go by saying that even though we're a city, we're still creatures of the Commonwealth. And we have to worry about what the rules and regs are from the States. So how we buy stuff, how we spend our money, how we collect our money, how we raise taxes, especially the legislature is very, guards very yellows the ability to raise taxes. It's all state driven. And so while a full-time procurement officer might not seem like a visionary idea, it may be very much a necessity given all the rules and our activity. And people are right to focus on grants me. There's a lot of work involved with the grant. And as someone who made some money in the past, managing grants, I can tell you there's a lot of work involved. The question I had about grants and maybe this can't easily answer it is, how are potential grants identified and prioritized? You know, is there some, does each department maintain a list of priorities? How much of this, especially with the DBW, how much of the activities is already planned and shovel ready? I would hope that we're not looking to grants just purely opportunistically that there's some planning and involvement around. Yeah, I would say most grants that we get are what, you know, they're from regular recurring sources. So the state has a number of grants, you know, it's a line item in the state budget that they give out every year and communities can apply for. An example is like the community compact IT grant. So we've gotten that in the past. We just got another one for downtown Wi-Fi. These are recurring things. I think every department, there's some state level department that has a grant program that they check periodically and can apply for different funds like the Pomeroy Village Intersection, that's I believe a MassWorks grant. And that's again, that's a grant program that we apply to pretty much every year for different projects. And we've gotten more than once in the past conservation and planning. They look for part grants that's helped fund Kendrick Park. That's again, another recurring one. So I think most departments know the large grant funders out there and they try to submit applications every year. In addition to that, there's lots of private grants that is probably where a grant writer might be more helpful or the non-recurring sources are the ones that are a little more distant from municipalities that are really open to anybody. Those are the ones that we don't bring in as much, I would say, but in terms of finding the grants, most of it's not available on the state website or federal websites and departments have a good sense of the pulse of those grants and what their cycles are. And then the last thing I'll say for grant writers, we do expect there's gonna be a big influx of grant funds starting pretty soon in the next couple of months into the fall because of all the infrastructure money that's been put out there and the emphasis on sustainability and energy efficiency improvements. So that's one of those areas where we get constant information from our legislators and from the federal government about the different opportunities that are coming up and when they're gonna become available. Thanks. Yeah, I just wanted to echo Sean and Lynn's comments that when you're writing a proposal, I work for, I'm gonna bring the private sector into this. I work for a company for about 35 years and my company had a group that was a help with the grant with the either grant or contract writing a process but mostly from a process perspective and a compliance. Is the proposal you're submitting compliant with all the requirements, laying out a schedule, driving the process but it was up to the technical people to actually write the proposal because the technical people really are the ones who know what needs to be said and knows what we can do as a town in order to meet the requirements of that grant proposal or whatever. So I do think having a centralized grant writer just wouldn't work. I support the idea of having someone who can help identify opportunities and help drive the process but you need the technical people to be involved in the writing. And I'll just put a quick plug in that I love talking about finance and I'm not trying to pull us off the stage but I just wanna recognize we do have some other departments that are here. Okay, yeah. So I see two more hands up. Let's try to keep it brief so we can move to and let finance people go back to their jobs, which we hear there nonstop. Michelle. I'll just make a quick suggestion on the grants that I've been thinking about in terms of our town committees and maybe finding a way to have our town committees or have a person on our town committees identifying grants. It's amazing how many emails we all get a day and I get emails about different grant opportunities. There's so much low-hanging fruit out there and I totally hear the side about how much it is to manage all of it as well. But in terms of identification, that might be one possible way to identify or at least for a town committee to know that they could send those opportunities to certain folks in the town when they come across their desks. So that's it, thank you. Thank you. And Lynn. Just one other quick thing and that is that there's also grant writers for hire, which sometimes they can be specialized and I happen to know we have a fair number in the Valley. So thank you. Sean, with that, I think we can move to the next on your list and I apologize because I don't have the list in front of me. So I'm turning completely to you. Yeah, so it's DEI is our next department, our new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion department. And Jen Moisten, who is the assistant director is gonna give a overview of a very new department. So it doesn't have a lot of content there yet, but it'll get built up every year going forward. Welcome, Jen. Oh, good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here, thank you. So yes, the new DEI department is here and our director will start on July 1 which we're all very happy and excited for. And so I think that the team between she and I will work very well as she has the implementation skills to end the background for that. And I understand the culture of the town and then the local government. So we're hoping that that combination works well and helps us succeed. Similar to what it says in the budget book that we will be, you know, a lot of the some of the stuff that's in the budget is already currently being done, you know, the celebration of cultural heritage events. You know, I do work with departments when they have particular initiatives that they wanna move forward or try to move forward. I do work with HR in helping to diversify our staff. I still sit on hiring committees currently. And the one thing that's in the Human Rights Commission, Donna Ray and I, both Donna Ray is the director of human resources. And so she and I work together to investigate any of the human rights complaints that we receive here for the town. The one thing that's, and then I sit on several boards and committees as staff liaison. So the Human Rights Commission, the AHRA and soon to be June 1st will be the first meeting for the CSSJC, the Community Safety Service and Justice Committee. And then, you know, further down the line, we will have the police resident oversight board. And so that's new. And working with the Disabilities Access Advisor Committee will be something that's new for this, or for me and for this department too. So that's kind of where we are right now. Things are ongoing and have been happening and, yeah. And so there was one question, Jen, maybe I'll start and then you can add to it. The question was about the level of the operating budget. So $7,500 and then it might be low. I think, so we looked at some other smaller departments. You know, it's in line with some of the other smaller departments like Accounting or Assessors Office, not the Assessors Office. I think this is an area where, there's a little bit of a gray area because where the cutoff is between the human resources budget and the DEI budget, I think it's something that still needs to be worked out this year. And so I think this will be a year, like I said, we're seeing progress where we'll monitor that closely and determine whether that level needs to be adjusted for the following budget. The good thing is we do have some grant funds this year that can help supplement if there's initiatives that have, that need to be done. We've got that earmark from, for community outreach and engagement that can help support DEI activities. So, so I think we'll be okay from a funding perspective but we will monitor it going forward. Any questions or comments? I have just one, Jen, as what struck me as you spoke and also I was looking at what, I know what you've been doing up until now. And I feel like you have been doing this as you, what one of your comments is some of its ongoing work and the way you've worked with human rights. So as you move forward with the two-person team, I think a year from now it would be great to get a sense of how this works as teamwork across the whole scope of everything we do as a town. You know, cause I think it is intermingled whether it's hiring, bringing people on, dealing with some things not going well or exit interviews, why are you leaving? You know, trying to get a sense of that. And it would just be good to get a report back because we feel like we're adding something that is high value to the town and just to get a sense of how is it worked is where I'm going that you can't answer now because it's you're new. But I think teamwork, what you described sounds fabulous because it's not gonna be just a single person but it's intermingled with all these other committees as well. So thank you. Lynn, I see your hand is up. I have a request of Jen after saying first of all, Jen, thank you with half-time position, you've been doing amazing work. One is that I understand that you do a regular training with staff. And at some point we might want to do that same training with counselors. And then the other issue is whether or not it's time to identify another longer training for counselors in general around DEI. Okay, thank you. And so training is one of those things where it can't just be once a year. And so one of the things that the new director and I will discuss is how to create a year round training program, I would say instead. So it's very important that people are aware that you can't just have like one training a year but that it needs to be followed up continuously. Is that my first budget hearing? I'm very excited. And just to clarify, Jen is full-time. I don't know. I know she wears many hats. I'll say she does a lot of different things for the town, but she's half-time in this year's budget from the operating budget and half-time funded from ARPA and FY22 and fully funded from the budget and FY23. I had this clarification. I had the split position prior to where I was half town manager and half human resources. Thank you. Thank you very much. And we're excited to have you. So Sean, I think we can move to the next. So the next department is human resources and Donna Rae Kaneli is here to talk a little bit about that budget. And you need to unmute. I've got great to see you all. So I have a little kind of quitsch feel. My name's Donna Rae Kaneli. I'm the director of human resources for the town. It's been about a year and a half since I've come to the town. And I will tell you that HR in Amherst does a lot. Although we have fewer than 300 employees, we have six labor unions and then non-union employees and the personnel board. We recruit, we hire, we onboard. Unfortunately, we off-board. We mentor, work with payroll. We deal with discipline. We are constantly looking to ensure the town's compliant with the alphabet soup of various labor and employment and benefit laws. We update or in some cases, we write policies where appropriate and we keep our HRIS data system maintained. We maintain recruitment of their personnel records. Most importantly, we're constantly supporting our employees. Employees are really the most important asset to the town and they need to feel valued and they need to know that their employer is looking out for them. And HR, this is what we try to do. We promote a culture of transparency and support. We have worked really hard to let employees know that we're here to help. I think it's important to remember that COVID's been really stressful for our employees, for many of us personally. And so HR I think is a source of support for employees to navigate the healthcare system. Sometimes the EAP to deal with the stress of things and all the other benefits. We look at professional development opportunities. We have recently set up a mentoring program for department heads and I think that's been very helpful. We hope to spend a little more time training and supporting managers. We're always supporting health and wellness initiatives. We have an awesome wellness committee for the town and I am very happy to tell you that we've received two wellness grants over the past two years for $20,000 each, which has been huge because we've been able to offer fresh fruit delivery. And just yesterday we got the supply of these vodapods and the theme is drink more water. And those grants are so helpful because they help us in HR to promote employee relations and that helps with retention. So again, we're just here to promote a positive and supportive work culture. You probably know that nationally COVID prompted what's been called the great resignation. So a lot of onboarding and offboarding. I was an early person who changed jobs fairly early in COVID to come here to the town for a promotion. And you will see that Joanne Masiazic is here with me. She's currently our HR manager and she is now leaving the town for a wonderful promotional opportunity. She's going to be the director of Human Resources in Belcher Town. Great loss for the town here, but great for her and she will be very difficult to replace. So anyways, that's my little intro. Hi. So, Shawn, did we have questions submitted for this? Should we do those first? Yes, Donna, do you have them or do you want me to read them? I have them. So the first one is with changing trends in the job market, do you anticipate challenges hiring across town departments? And absolutely, since I've come here, we have been experiencing these challenges really across most departments. I think DPW in particular. If do you want kind of a recent challenge that's kind of like a microcosm of what we're going through, is there time for that? Yeah, I mean. So for example, the town has these pay scales. They're predetermined, their pay scales, there's different levels. And so typically prior to the changes with the job market, I think people generally came in at a step one or a step two on that predetermined level. Well, with the challenges in the marketplace. For example, this has happened in the last week with both an operator position and administrative assistant position where if we try to offer someone those lower steps on the scale, they won't take the position. And so you, okay, go a little higher on the scale, but that creates an internal equity issue because if we bring someone in at a five, someone who came in at a one and who's been here for five years is also at a five. And I do realize that sometimes knowledge, skills, ability, experience kind of call for them to come in higher on the steps, but it causes this equity problem. So it's a challenge. Yes, so we are having those challenges. Then another question is along the same lines, are you aware of innovative methods of attracting potential workforce in this new landscape? I can tell you in the town manager, I meet with him weekly, if not more and we talk a lot about different things that we can do. We've talked about more of a hybrid remote work situation. Of course, you know that many town positions can't do that, you know, a firefighter can't fight fire from home, but there are some positions where that might be more available. So we're working on a more formalized program. We've talked about referral bonuses. We've talked about hiring bonuses. It's just a matter of, you know, funding. We work really hard on offering the best benefits for the town. We review our benefit program. We've partnered up with Maya. We get the economies of scale from, you know, that group where we can get the best benefits for lower prices, which I think was a great decision. I can't take credit for it. It happened before I got here, but it's a nice partnership. Another question that you put forward is, is there a way to collaborate with neighboring towns to offer additional and attractive benefits? I think, you know, the Maya partnership helps us with that. And I was talking with Joanne who's here with me about what you might, what else you might have meant. And I mean, I suppose we could do like reciprocal relationships, like maybe Belchartown residents could get a discount on Amherst recreation or something like that. We'd be wide open to anything like that. And then finally, your question is there's almost a 10% increase projected. And I think it's best practice to have, you know, to be cautious in our projections. So I do want to speak to the health plan, for example. We look to what's happening in the marketplace. We look at what other plans are seen for increases. Of course, most plans including ours are experience rated. Don't forget when COVID happened, a lot of people just stayed home. They put off a lot of their elective procedures and now they're getting things done, that knee replacement, that hip replacement. And so I think that we, you know, we very likely could see a big health insurance premium increase for next year. So it makes sense to, and while believe me, we frankly, we fight like heck to keep it down. We talk to the actuaries. We make sure that they're rating us correctly. But I think it's a good idea to prepare for the worst and that kind of an increase. And maybe that was Sean's question to answer, but that's all I got. Everything you said was 100% right. And there's one big thing that's unusual for FY23. And that is that we're in negotiations with the unions. And so we don't budget the cost of living adjustments in the salary lines at this point. We have an estimate and a contingency for them. And that shows up in this employee benefits. We have a control account. So the reason why, so everything Donoray said was right. There's also in addition to that, we were adding the 10 new positions for Cress. That also comes with an estimate of for new plans, which drives it up. But the biggest piece that's driving that increase is this contingency for negotiations, which once they're settled and finalized, it'll get moved up into the department accounts. And you'll see those other accounts go up and the employee benefits go down. Sean, can I just clarify? So does that mean the page 92 on employee benefits where they temper, you've got those numbers built into that line? Is that- Yeah, there's a control account in that line that carries a contingency. Okay, thank you. Bob. In our conversation with CPW this year and last year, they have expressed an issue where they hire somebody that doesn't have a lot of training. They spend the time and the effort to train them to get them licensed and all that. And they just move on to a different jurisdiction. And so normally, I mean, I come from the private sector, normally if you were to do something alike, put a requirement in that if you get a certain amount of training, then you have to spend another year here working or something like that. That's normally done kind of centrally through HR so that no one department is sort of sick different than other departments. And I'm wondering if there's something that we can do in order to make it reasonable that if we invest in someone for a certain amount that they have to then pay us back by extra service. That's a great idea. We've thought of it. That is a bargainable issue with our labor union. So for example, with the fire department, we put forward, if we pay for you to go through the fire academy and then you leave us within a certain amount of time, we wanted to kind of recoup some of that. It's just hard to get it through the negotiation process. That's no easy feat, but we're thinking about that. And I think management fully agrees and would like to do that. And it's also hard for the other, the membership of the union because they go through the process of training someone and then they leave. So we are working on that. We do add it to our wish list and negotiations. We will see how those work out, but we've been thinking about that Bob for sure. Great, thanks. Alicia. Thank you, Kathy. Thank you, Donorai. My question is in regards to the internal equity in the salary for employees and new employees. And I'm wondering, because I sort of also saw that challenge play out when we were creating the new departments. And I'm wondering if there is something we plan, like if we plan to address that, is that something that the DEI director is going to help look into? Or like, are there any steps we're taking to address that challenge? Well, I mean, you know, we are, we've asked for some money in this budget, John. And I don't know if it's approved or not approved, but to do kind of a review of the positions to, and I'm not sure exactly, I guess which positions we look at depends on what kind of money we get. But to try to look at that equity and kind of review to see what are other towns doing? What are the exact essential functions of the job description? And it's such a balancing act. What's the market paying? What are the other municipalities paying? And then kind of balancing that though with what's fair for what we already have. And I remember Alicia working with you and saying, gosh, I would love to, that makes sense to pay the position more, you know, in the marketplace. But if we're paying all these other town employees at a lesser rate, how unfair would it seem to bring other people in higher? So we have to always think of that internal equity and we are trying to take steps to get a consultant. And I guess I'll just throw out there because I feel it and I wanna say it. We have two people in this department that are full-time benefited. And then we do have some extra help. Thankfully Kay, a retiree comes in and we do, we replaced Jen Moisten with an awesome HR assistant, Ian Nguyen. But, you know, there's two of us and we're trying to, you know, you can see we're doing a lot of hiring, a lot of turnover. We created two new departments and all that. So we're, yeah. I'll just add that that study is in the capital plan. So it's not approved yet, but it is in the capital plan that will go to the council. And you may have mentioned this, Donna, or I think the other pressure that everyone's feeling is that minimum wage is going up. And that definitely causes the compression where there's just people are taking other jobs because the, you know, pride or target or whoever, you know, some of these places are paying more than some of our starting rates. And it creates a real challenge for us. Definitely. I mean, you know, we saw the sign at Popeyes, I think it was down the street. It was like $18 an hour. And, you know, that's really hard to compete with. You know, we want our summer attempts to come out and do some, you know, hard sun labor work. And for paying them $14.25, that's just hard stuff. So I think we're trying to at least go to 15, but it has been quite challenging. Oh, but we try to do also, you know, first of all, Amherst is a cool place. We have other things that we can use to promote ourselves and we, Bre has been helping us with social media, marketing posts, we're trying to, we're not just sitting back and doing nothing about it, but I guess I'm just stressing the challenges of it to you. Bob, it looks like you're hitting it down. I just wanted to echo that the internal equity issue is an issue that everybody struggles with, every organization struggles with. And for the reasons that you pointed out, I mean, it's just, if you have somebody you hire them and they're there, they work for two and three years, you hire somebody else, you gotta pay them a higher wage and then you get into that back and forth. So I do understand that. And I think that we just have to collectively work through these things and make sure that we're doing the best we can. Thank you. Yes. One thing I'll just add because I've worked with several different HR directors is that I feel really good about Donna Ray's ability to manage that. I mean, Donna Ray has brought an intense focus to that when she came in. I, you know, she reviewed all the different positions, people's experience, and she's made that a high priority of, you know, looking at our existing staff and making sure that there is equity among our existing staff. And if there were areas where somebody was lower, then, you know, we couldn't justify in any, you know, anything by their job description why they were lower, she's taken steps to fix it. So it is a major concern. And I feel really good that Donna Ray is well suited to help manage it going forward and get us on the right track. That is so nice, Sean. I thought you thought that I was a giant pain in the butt, but here you are. Well, you're human resources, I've got to be nice, so. So any other, any other hands, you know, I'm sure, I'll just make a comment, Donna Ray, I'm sure you're doing this already, but we really have an excellent benefit package, especially compared to on the health insurance side, what I've seen happen in the private sector. So people don't always value that, you know, until they get sick. It's almost like you were listening to my phone call just before we got off the phone, we're trying to hire this public health nurse and I had said to the department, I had said, can you ever call me so I can talk to her about the health insurance? Because I know, you know, the competitors at the local hospitals, they might pay a little more and a lot more in wages, frankly, but look at our benefits compared to them. We don't have those high deductibles, our premiums are low. So that is really, I think that's been a saving grace. I can tell you the pension is, it's good, but it's not, the attractiveness of it has a little bit dwindled for the lower paid employees, because don't forget that, talking about that $18 an hour position, Kathy, that person gets to come in to Popeyes or wherever and they can either put money in their defined contribution plan or not. We're pulling 9% out of their pay whether they like it or not towards the pension. And some people, especially, you know, with the price of gas, they'd say, you know what, I don't want to participate in that and it's mandatory for us. And so that's actually been a problem too. That's not a problem with the temps or, you know, summer health, but it is a problem for the full-time positions. And you would never think our beautiful pension plan would be a problem, but when someone's living, check to check, it's a hardship. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I agree, you know, just health insurance. When you look closely at what's happening in the private sector, it's terrifying what people don't know what they're gonna get hit with when a bill comes in. So I don't think you could oversell our plan, you know, in terms of the protection it provides. And the beautiful way we treat retirees, it's I feel so good to work here to kind of see how we care for our retirees. That's not the case in the regular world in many ways. So it's a good thing. I think I'm not seeing any other hand, Sean. So I think we can, thank you very much, Don Array, for joining us and keep up the good work. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Take care. Bye. Give us a lot of money if you can. All right. And thank you, Joanne, for helping us out for so long. Yes, thank you to Joanne. We're gonna miss her. So the next department is IT and Sean Hannan is here to give a little overview. And I believe Sean, you have the questions. You can just address those directly. Yes. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. I'm Sean Hannan. I'm the IT director. I'll run through what's in the budget book real quick. Then I do have some questions and then obviously any additional questions. So another busy year for us. Still, we're still doing the effects of COVID and all the changes going along with that. Like I was mentioned in the finance section, several grant opportunities that we got. And it's hard to say that spending the money is a hard thing to do, but it's created a lot of work for us. So just quickly what some of the questions and stuff we've done this year, we've made a lot of infrastructure improvements, which is largely the switching, network switching, they connect to our buildings. A lot of work on our phone system, we're moving off of a legacy phone system that we've been on for 15 plus years. It was started having problems with upgrading internal wifi and several of the buildings. A lot of work with public meetings supporting them, the transition from Zoom to hybrid back to Zoom and what a lot of you have experienced with that and I expect that to continue certainly through the summer. A lot of work with getting stuff set up, equipment and systems for Crest implementation and the DEI, some of the systems there. We, as Sean mentioned early on, we did get a grant for the downtown wifi. So we're in the process of trying to procure that. We ran it to a roadblock with supply chain issues with what we originally planned on. So we were working on potentially switching over to something else that we can get more readily. Also wrapping up the fiber iNet replacement that started at the beginning of COVID that we've run into different physical infrastructure and supply chain issues. So I hope I got that wrapped up. Onto the questions, the questions and I appreciate getting the questions at a time. That's helpful. The two questions that I got, one was cybersecurity saying including domestic terrorism on the rise. Do you see future about budget implications to manage these concerns? So the short answer is yes. We're fortunate that in the short term we received for a second year in a row a state grant to provide cybersecurity training for all of our users, which is helpful with the requirement of most cybersecurity insurance. It's good practice. It's having an educated and vigilant user basis probably our best defense there. Just to plug that we're more than happy to get emails from anybody saying, hey, this looks weird. Do you mind looking at it? We'd much rather that than cleaning up something after that. So in the short term, we're lucky to have that. We have some ARPA money set aside towards cybersecurity improvements as well, which again is really helpful. In the longer term, there's two challenges there. One is that like a lot of other departments for us, one of the things security is one of those things that we almost can't spend enough money on. It's, we certainly could put more into it and then more importantly with that is the staffing issue that it just becomes, it becomes staff intensive to monitor stuff, to implement stuff, to continue to provide user training. So it's a staffing issue as well as like all the other software that we buy now, most vendors and the industry shift with so many things, it's subscription based. So whereas in the past, we could just go out and buy a software package and then pay for support on it. Essentially everything we buy now is software as a service and a subscription. And so we pay a little less upfront, but we certainly pay much more in the long run. And that's applied to nearly everything that we've bought recently in our backup software that we, luckily purchased and we own and we pay for support on their shifting to doing that as a subscription model. So it's not hitting us just yet, but it is something that in future years it's going, it will be an issue. So that was on the budget of the cybersecurity. And then the second question was, do you expect the remote trend produced as a result of the pandemic will continue? And if so, what are the budget implications? So as Donna Ray mentioned, it is something that it's seen as a benefit to other departments. So as to whether it will continue or not, it's, that's largely up to town manager, HR and the individual departments. IT is certainly here to support it. In terms of budget implications for it, I don't see it having a huge implication. We get a good number of our users set up to work remotely for various reasons, whether it's snow or health or whatever reason they're going to work remotely. So once a user is set up, there's not typically a lot of support required by us. And in terms of equipment, for the most part, we, what we provide to users for remote work, we're very fortunate that we were able to buy a good number of laptops who cares funding. And I would expect we'll get, we'll get a number of years out of more years out of that as well as what maybe provided to somebody working from home, does it have to be the latest and greatest so oftentimes what they can be sent home with is something that's kind of a hand me down. So in terms of budget implications, I don't see it having a big implication for us from staff or equipment costs. Thank you, Sean. I see two hands up. Michelle, you came up with the original questions and then Bob after Michelle. I just have a comment. I just really want to thank you, Sean, for all your help at our council meetings and being behind the scenes to help with various issues. So thank you. Thank you. Yeah, and I didn't mention it in the beginning, but I'm very fortunate to have a fantastic staff. So I think most of you have had the opportunity to deal with some of them on a regular basis. So that makes my life and job much easier. Thank you. Bob. Yeah, one of the challenges with IT is that a computer has a limited lifespan and you always have to be replacing them on a regular schedule. What's the schedule that we have for replacement and is that within the budget or do you need to go outside the budget in order to get the funds you need to maintain a reasonable replacement schedule? So we are very fortunate there that we, typically we try and go about four years on a computer. Sometimes we stretch it a little further depending on the computer and whether we can get support on it and the software that's on it. But typically we go about four years. We're fortunate that the capital budget with few exceptions has continued to support that for us. The proposal this year, our capital request is considerably lower, but it does take into account that we were able to purchase a good amount of equipment for people working from home with CARES money. So we're continuing to see the benefit of that. So yeah, we try and go about four years. Sometimes we stretch it a little bit, but it has been supported and funded through capital budget pretty consistently. So I appreciate that. Okay, thank you. Thanks. I'm not seeing any hands. So I have a question. You are staffing all committees in a very different way when I say all, because we can all be on Zoom now and so you're taking our Zoom recordings and putting them up in YouTube, which I feel like is a gift because we can actually not go to a meeting and still see it. Is that a lot more work for you? Is there any expense in the town to taking a Zoom recording and doing something to it that turns it into a YouTube? And then the last question I have is related to finance. At various times we've had an Amherst media presence here, but I haven't missed having Amherst media because we've had Zoom and I can go to YouTube if I don't miss finance committee meetings, but I actually go back and I can throughout time look at them from Amherst media. So it's sort of a, are we replacing some of what we had to pay for before would be my related question? Yeah, so there's a few parts there. I think in terms of staff time for Zoom, it absolutely has, it's added to our workload just either being present for council meetings and we are very lucky that we have great staff liaisons for most boards and committees. And I see Athena's on this call. She's someone who's kind of taken the Zoom thing. We've provided some training, but she'll staff a lot of the meetings, I think for the Board of Registrar's meetings who are that staffs those or her staff manages those. So it is a burden on us. It's more training staff and getting them set up to create, to post the meetings and to staff them. As far as posting them to YouTube, I think we've gotten in a room more of a routine with that. We now do it Friday mornings. I can find out exactly, search does it. It's my understanding is it's two to three hours of time. So it's two to three hours of staff time a week. So that's really the only, that's the real only cost for Zoom or sorry, for posting them on YouTube is the staff time. There's no fees or licenses we pay for that. We do pay for the Zoom license. We, when we first went on Zoom, we use CARES money to fund that. I don't believe that that's available anymore. So that's, there is a cost and it's significant for our Zoom licenses to be able to run the webinar and everything. So there is a cost to that. As to any cost savings or changes in terms of that contract with Amherst media, I'm not aware of any changes that I don't believe there's any savings to us by not having Amherst media cover some of the meetings there. We have their contract and I think that's pretty well established what they receive from the town on that. Thank you. That answered everything. Yeah, it did. Dorothy, I see you have a question. Yes, when you said it took two to three hours, you mean to post all the meetings of the week or each meeting? Correct, all the meetings. Yeah, to clarify, it's all the meetings we, again, we're really lucky with the staff liaisons who run a lot of these meetings. They've done a fantastic job of starting, starting the recording when the meeting starts and stopping it when the meeting ends. That makes it easy because if we don't have to edit the video, if we don't have to clip anything out, then it's as simple as downloading a file, uploading it to YouTube. So it's four or five minutes maybe per meeting to do that. It gets a little, it gets more time consuming if there's any editing involved, but that's certainly the exception. Well, I appreciate the ease in watching a meeting now. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. And it's one of those things that, it's gonna be hard to back away from that as people go back more in person someday. So Sean, I'm not seeing any other hands up, so I think we can thank our fabulous IT behind the scenes and often with us department. So thank you very much. Thank you everyone. Thanks Sean. So the next department is the town clerk who's gonna give an overview of the town clerk's budget and also elections and registrations to probably just do one overview of those three areas. I will, thank you. Thank you Sean and hello everybody and those who may not know me, I'm Sue Audet on the town clerk. And I realized I didn't have to be here from the very beginning, but it's been really enlightening and it was a good experience to listen to all the other departments. So I'm, you're probably sick of looking at my face, but I will leave after this. So anyway, quick overview of our department for the last year. And we've had a couple of major things, as you all know, have been going on. The Districting Advisory Board looked at all the precincts and the polling locations and had to make changes based on the federal 2020 census. So that has taken up probably nine months of my time. We're not quite done yet, we're almost done, but that involved multiple areas and different people being brought in and notifications to the public. So we're wrapping that up. And one of the biggest exciting things of our department is we've been fully staffed for a whole year almost, it's coming up in about two weeks. So that's been wonderful because prior to that, it's been kind of a roller coaster. And we're also, a lot of things are in limbo for us because vote by mail and the whole election reform law is still pending in the legislation. So we are not quite sure what's coming down the pike as far as what we're gonna have to be mandated to do. So we know there's gonna be something, but we're not sure. And so we're just kind of waiting. Let's see, we have the ranked choice voting is still also pending. And so we're still waiting on that. I know some of the things I spoke to in the objectives and things coming up for this coming census, or census, sorry, election. Sorry, I'm listening too much here. I gotta think now. Budget year, I know we've listed training for ranked choice voting, education, all of that. That's kind of sitting in the wings too because we don't wanna proceed until the law has passed. So, but it's there just kind of waiting. And we always continue to look for more areas of things that we do in this office to be more efficient. We have started looking at a dog licensing database with IT and we kind of determined at this point that what we currently have is still more efficient than that. So we're gonna continue to look at more programs which would speed things up. And I think that's just, that's all I wanted to say for a wrap up, but I also too wanna say the questions, getting those ahead of time was extremely helpful because one of them required a bit of research. I didn't know the answer. So the two questions I'll start with the first was do you see opportunities to increase voter turnout? So yes, so a lot of overlap here again. So in the Districting Advisory Board and the whole outreach of the new precincts and polling places involved, reaching out to the three universities, which we've done. And we're currently in talks of being on campus when the voter registration, when the students come back to school and doing outreach at that point to encompass many areas, letting them know about the new polling places and precinct numbering system, also registering them to vote. And thirdly, checking at that point that they are in the place that they are living as, you know, this is one of the highest areas of conflict for us is people showing up to vote in the polls and they're not living where they are registered to vote in, which makes it harder for them to vote. So we're trying to knit that in the bud, get it before it even happens. So there's that. And we also are in the process of looking at a lot of signage because of the polling place names changing, we have to change all of our signs. So that's, we're gonna use some of our existing budget money this year. I have a little left to purchase some new signs. And then next year to continue that before the state primary in September. I don't know if you all can hear that there's a plane going over. There we go. And there have been a few things. The police station uses, I haven't asked about this yet, but it's in the back of my mind. The police station uses those solar powered, you know, those electronic boards that sit out on the curves. I think it would be wonderful if we could get ahold of one of those to announce that there's upcoming elections so that it's out in the public. So that's been in the back burner. And also to get people to polls for those who may not have transportation. I've talked about this before and I'm not sure how we can do this, but I thought like school buses would be a great idea. So that's, you know, I have a lot of ideas just in I'll keep the channels open with the town manager and how we can implement them. So the second question, is there a stipend for the board of registrars and election workers? Or is the stipend mandated by the state? So those are two separate things. Election workers are employees, they're hired. That happened a few years ago, probably back in 2018, 19. Our treasurer at the time went to a conference and found out that election workers should not be independent contractors, they should be hired. So the changeover happened then. So now anyone that comes on board as a worker is hired. So it's not a state mandated thing. And the board of registrars, that's the one that I had to do a little digging. That's why I appreciated the question ahead of time. I see Michelle smiling. I know we pay them $200 a year. I just know that, I do that. Don't know where that happened. So my research this morning was through town meeting records and I found that it started in 1965. It's found under the part-time compensation schedule by town meeting to pay them $100 a year. And then in 1983, it changed to $200 a year, which is what we're currently paying them. And it hasn't changed since. So yeah, and for the amount of work that they do, I don't know, that would have to be analyzed. Is that fair, something to just to talk about in the future? What else here? I think that was it for your questions, but I do, I'm not sure where I will be proposing this, but I would like to propose a fee increase in one of our services. We currently do a lot of notarizations. And I found that it's because Hastings used to do them and they've stopped doing them. And there are some notarizations that the banks will turn customers away on. So they all end up here and we only charge $5 per notarization. But a quick analysis, and I know it's hard to compare it to last year because we were closed part of the time, but I think what we had in the, yeah. Surface levels last year was like in the double digits. Oh, I can't get the numbers right now. This year, it's so far like 1,100 notarizations we've done to date, yeah. That's huge. It is huge. My management assistant spends at least half her time at the counter doing notarizations. So at $5 per notarization, it's just a lot of time consuming work for very little return. And I would love to, that's $10. So I think that's all I had. If anybody has any questions. I see Lynn's hand is up. And after Lynn, Bob and Dorothy and Lynn, you're muted. Thank you. So Sue, in all of the many things you've done this year, I think the redistricting turned out just phenomenally well. And then I just want to add. So last night in preparation for our district meeting for district two, the patent I had last night, we went on the website, we found the thing where you say what street you live on and then that goes directly to, oh, and therefore I vote here. And I have since sent that to all of the other district counselors so they can use that new tool in their meetings. And then I just want to support Sue, Sean, let's look at that fee for notarizing. So just so people know, we have a process for increasing fees. So we look at them in the fall and propose them and then Town Manager will evaluate them and approve them for the ones that the Town Manager can approve. So I agree with what Sue said, it looks like that's a fee that needs to be increased. This is a little, a very small point that I just happened to notice that the number of dog licenses sold like dropped it by about half in FY 20. And you know that Town Hall was closed, it was at the reason or did somehow the dog ownership decline in Amherst, which I can't say happened. Oh, I can speak to that. So a lot of things slid due to COVID. Where'd you go? I keep looking for people to keep moving around. So it was COVID, it definitely was COVID related. We have, we work in conjunction with the dog officer. She wasn't knocking on doors. Carol Hepburn is phenomenal. And, you know, we let a couple of things slide because of COVID not being able to reach out to people in person, things like that. You know, we can reach out by mail, we can reach out by phone calls. We can do things like that, but it seems the in person, you know, is the most effective. So she just, you know, health reasons, she let that drop. This year, we're just on the verge of when the late fees gonna kick in. I've done three pushes now to license dogs. We're currently at about 720, I'd say today. We've licensed so far this year. But in the, you know, you can see past year is 1200, 1400. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know, and Carol's not going to do her push this year. She's already said, I'm not doing it. She's, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we can only push so far and if there's no repercussions, people are just gonna let it go by. Yeah. I don't want to use the dog park. You know, I don't know. Thanks. Okay. Dorothy. Sting operation at the dog park. I just want to think, I think I remember paying $15 for a notarization a number of years ago. So I think 10 is, if you're gonna go through all the process that Sean says you've got to do a fee increase, I think you should do a higher fee. That's it. I'm not seeing any other hands up. So I just want to make one comment and again, it's a kudo for you. So we have a dog being able to do it online, what made it so easy. Now, I know not everybody likes to do things online, but just so people know what you used to have to do is get an envelope, put another envelope inside your envelope with your address on it. And the first time I did it, I forgot to put a stamp on that other envelope and I never got my license. And they said, it's been sitting here waiting for you in town hall for a really long time. So you streamlined it and maybe we can make sure that people understand it's become a lot easier. And I appreciate that. And this what Lynn showed last night, whatever brain, whoever brainchild it was to be able to show people where they vote is great because we have a lot of streets that shifted and it helps to be able to just click on your street name. So thank you for both of those. It's a really, it's a service to the rest of us. My one question was, I think a year ago you told us or half a year ago that we had a purchase order for new voting machines which were gonna be critical for ranked choice voting but you were having trouble getting them or is it, are you still having trouble getting them? No, we're not. We found out that there was stock. We've actually just started the process again for a bid. We, I've gotten a new quote. It has gone up a couple of thousand dollars because and mostly not because of the price of the equipment that stayed the same but because of the trade in value has gone down since time has gone on. Yeah. There are other communities. I just sent this email to Sean last night. So he just found this out. And so that's rolling. We're gonna be getting the equipment hopefully soon. Fingers crossed. We're out for the bid process right now. So Simone is working on it. Thank you. Lynn, your hands up. Yeah, on the issue of ranked choice voting this is something that I bug our legislators about once a month. And we're, we keep getting extended. The hearings already happened. It's being held up by the whole debate that Sue has mentioned and that's the mail-in ballot. However, I wanna be very clear ranked choice voting will not apply to this coming election. The first election that it will apply to is the town election in the fall of 2024-23. No, 20, yeah, 20. God, do we have to run again in 23? You do, every odd year. The 2023 election. And the worst thing that could happen is that it doesn't get through this legislative session and we will immediately as a council turn around and refile it. So that's where we stand. There is a little tension in the state house over ranked choice voting because as you remember as a state we turned it down. But we're not the only community standing in line for a home roll on that one. Thank you, Lynn. And I think that's it for town clerk. And I see that Andy has rejoined us. Are we moving now to conservation and planning? So Andy, if you wanna take back your chair roll that's where we are. So you came at a juncture where we're moving to a new topic. Okay, well, thank you. Michelle, do I see you're here? Yeah, sorry to jump in. There was also facilities. I don't know, was that, I had a couple of questions there. I don't know if that was being handled. Facilities is in our next meeting. Perfect, okay, great. Okay, so Sean, do you have an order that you wanna proceed with? Yeah, I think Dave Z is here. I think he's gonna give an overview of conservation and the other departments that he oversees. Okay, Dave. Great. Thank you, Andy. Good morning, everybody. Happy to be here with you. Yeah, we'll try to be as brief as we can and open it up for questions at the end. I know that Bob did submit some questions that we responded to in writing and we're happy to elaborate on those at the end of our presentation. And again, we'll try to be brief. It's nice to be here. I'm joined by Christine Brestrup and Rob Mora. I'll turn it over to them in just a minute. Our plan was to really, I was gonna give a quick overview and then I'll roll right into conservation department. We'll then move to planning and then Rob will bring it home with inspection services. And again, just wanted to emphasize today, we're not gonna go into a lot of detail on the staffing in our functional area, but you hear a lot from the three of us, but we're supported by about 20-odd folks in our functional area that do the lion's share of the work and they do amazing things in planning and inspection services throughout town. So kudos to them and credit to them for their professional and dedicated work. Our functional area just as a quick review, it covers a lot of ground. So I have to remind myself sometimes. So I'll just rattle these off, sustainability, conservation, planning, zoning, inspection services, some functions of health and health inspections. And then Michelle just referenced facilities. So facilities is now under this functional area. We added facilities a couple of years ago. It's not always been the structure here in town to have all of these departments. Under one umbrella. We did this a couple of years ago and we think it's been working really well. The purpose of bringing up, and when I started here, all of these departments were their own standalone departments. What we decided to do was bring them under one roof, one umbrella and try to promote efficiency and collaboration. And we think we've done a pretty good job of that. We always have room for improvement and we're always looking for ways to innovate. And I'm sure Rob and Chris will talk more about some of those initiatives. Today, conservation and development is involved in a wide range of projects and initiatives. Our goal here really is to make our community a better place to live, work and play and to also make it safe and healthy. And I know Rob is gonna talk about rental permitting in a few minutes, so I won't go there. But keeping our rental units and our homeowners and our families and our apartment complexes and everyone in town safe and healthy through better permitting and better planning is always part of our goals. So really just a quick smattering of things that we work on under the sustainability heading, supporting the ECAC, a big initiative and Chris may say a little bit more about the solar bylaw working group. We know that that is gonna be a big focus for the remainder of the calendar year and probably into the new year. We're kicking off solar at the landfill. So we will be flipping the switch on the solar landfill project that is about 10 years in the making. And I'm sure most of you will get an invite to that project in the coming weeks, but we hope to do that within about 30 days. Under recreation projects like the dog park, the growth park stray park was designed by collaboration between planning and DPW. I'm sure you'll have questions about Hickory Ridge. Hickory Ridge project is clearly one of the largest and most complex projects that we're working on right now. Affordable housing and homelessness, Rob and I, Nate Maloy and I with input from others and from the housing trust are working on, the East Street School and Belchartown Road Project, which we hope will bring about 70 new units of affordable housing to town. We're also searching for a new shelter site, which is a huge initiative and Paul has authorized the use of and supported the use of about a million dollars in ARPA funds for that initiative. Chris will talk more about grants, but many not, I wouldn't hazard a guess to say most of the grants that the vast majority of grants that the town rights come from this functional area and Chris will talk more about that in a few minutes. Of course, zoning is a major focus of the functional area last year, working with the planning board and the town council. I believe the number was seven amendments to our zoning bylaw that were passed by the council. So, you know, we feel very good about that. And Chris and or Rob may talk more about those, what's ahead on the radar screen. And of course, land use planning. And again, I don't want to steal their thunder, but a big part of what we do in this functional area is land use planning, whether it's working with homeowners, university and colleges, developers, the bid and the chamber, you know, a lot of work is put in supporting the ZBA, the planning board, the conservation commission, historical commission, and the list goes on and the committees and boards we work with and liaison with. And, you know, exciting projects coming down the pike. Obviously you heard about the Drake opening recently, but the permitting for the Drake all came through this functional area, the new performance space that'll be on the main part of the comment. Again, working with the bid and the chamber on that, new restaurants, new buildings coming to our downtown and village centers, all of those projects come through this functional area. So we're happy to be here this morning, talk about anything you'd like to talk about in our budget proposals or in current projects. We're always happy to talk about that. So if that's okay with you, Andy, I think I may roll right into conservation and try to keep things moving for you. I know you've had a long meeting already. Yes, go ahead. So again, I'll be super brief on conservation, you know, just as a quick review, you know, the department manages over 2,000 acres of conservation land, about 80 miles of trails. It includes places, you know, kind of the iconic places in Amherst that so many people talk about and enjoy. Puffer's Pond is visited by thousands of people every year. We had a big weekend, this past weekend with temperatures in the 90s. Mount Pollux is another very popular location. Thousands of people visit Mount Pollux every year to enjoy the views and picnic and things of that sort. And then of course, Amethyst Brook is one of our major off leash, not dog parks, conservation areas, but is enjoyed by so many people. And I know actually Sean was saying he was there recently with his kids playing in the Amethyst Brook, which is a wonderful setting for kids and families to kind of enjoy the outdoors. So looking ahead to FY23, we have a number of initiatives and a number of focus areas for conservation. Obviously, sustainability is a huge piece of that. And Chris may talk a little bit more about the solar bylaw working group and that work. But again, Stephanie Ciccarello, working with the ECAC will have a lot on her plate with regard to sustainability. We're focusing this year on access, access to conservation areas, to trails, improving parking, making trails more accessible. We'll be replacing the bridge at Amethyst Brook, the long-awaited bridge over the Amethyst Brook. It's been down about four or five years. The complexity of some of these projects and the funding for these projects can get a little overwhelming. That bridge will probably be in the order of $20 to $30,000 when all is said and done. So these are not inexpensive projects when you wanna replace bridges over perennial streams. We're kicking off new community gardens at Fort River Farm Conservation Area. They're about 80% done at this point. With new raised bed gardens, we're working with Healthy Hampshire. And again, that's a sustainability effort coming through Stephanie Ciccarello. And then projects like completing the Fearing Brook Restoration Projects, which was about three quarters, excuse me, a quarter of a million dollars, trying to clean up pollutants and make the Fearing Brook, which drains about 50% of our downtown, a cleaner, safer, healthier stream, and hopefully improve the water quality in the Fort River. So I think I'll stop there. That's kind of a good overview of the functional area and then conservation in particular. And again, I gave everything almost equal weight, but you can imagine clearly the priorities being things like moving forward with a comprehensive plan for Hickory Ridge Golf Course, the former golf course, and of course, working on the solar bylaw and the solar siting study. Those are gonna be huge initiatives, as well as moving forward on the 70 units of affordable housing at East Street School and Belcher Town Road. So quick overview. I talk fast, I think, and I'm happy to take questions about the functional area or conservation. And then when we're ready, we'll turn it over to Chris. So I see that there's a question already, so go. Already, you seem so surprised. All right, so given the town's commitment to sustainability, why are we, I'm not gonna say limited to only a coordinator because Stephanie does an incredible amount of work and a wonderful job, but as you consider staffing, is there a strategic plan? What would be your ideal strategic plan? Let me rephrase that. What would be your ideal strategic plan to look at staffing around sustainability efforts, considering either adjusting the current position to be a director level or adding a director level position? And then the other consideration, I've been looking at comparable towns and noticed some other places are doing hiring planners specifically for sustainability planning. And as I look at the budget, we've got requests for consultants that are doing planning work specifically for things like a solar bylaw. And as we look at continued efforts towards our sustainability measures, at what point does it make sense to hire a planner? That is specifically focusing on these types of initiatives and that is well-versed in sustainability and climate action. So I'm curious, the big question is staffing and those are the two routes that at least I was, that came up for me is either sustainability planners or a sustainability director. And I'm curious what your ideal vision would be and if there's a plan to move down that road. A lot there on Anna would love to have those kinds of in-depth questions in advance if possible. I'm sorry, I thought of it this morning. So I guess I would say this. First of all, I think there have been discussions, Sean and Paul and I have discussed titles. I'm not that concerned with titles. I mean, I think Stephanie Ciccarello, we made that position a full-time sustainability coordinator. You may recall that Stephanie's position for years was a part-time position. We restructured the department a few years ago and made Stephanie 100% focused on sustainability. And I am quite pleased that that sustainability kind of crosses departments and functions. It is not specifically focused on energy, energy consumption, energy conservation and diversification. Stephanie is involved in everything from creating new solar opportunities for us, for instance, on the landfill but also community gardens, resiliancies. She's also working closely with Rob and Jeremiah LaPlante, our facilities coordinator on making buildings more efficient, also getting grants for sustainability. So coordinator director, Stephanie and her work is being integrated across the board and across departments. So to me, that shouldn't be the real focus. I think it's more how do we take the climate action plan and translate that into, and actually there are goals and objectives already in that document. And I think it's incumbent upon me, Sean, Paul and Stephanie to really say, how do we build this program over time? So I would see, we're gradually allocating more money coming in both in the overall budget of the town but also in terms of grants to these initiatives. So I see it growing on over time but I don't think we're quite there yet. But I think that will happen over the next three to five years. Do we need additional staff? Again, that has come up in budget hearings. We've talked about it. I don't think we're there yet. I don't know if Sean wants to jump in there but I think right now is a good time to kind of assess that for the next few years. In terms of planners or a planner, we do a lot of collaborative work. So Rob, Jeremiah, Stephanie, Nate Malloy, Ben Breger, you know, even Aaron Jock are all integrated and involved on the second floor in this functional area. That's one of the advantages I think we have. So whether we bring somebody else on, I think it's a good question for future fiscal years but I don't think we're quite there yet. But I would say that we have a piece of Rob, a piece of Jeremiah, a piece of the planners all working with Stephanie on these initiatives. So I hope that helps. It does and I know it's a big question and I didn't anticipate it being for this fiscal year question, right? It was more of just a kind of long range consideration and I'm happy if you have other thoughts down the road. Feel free to email them. Yeah. So I think it's a good theme to look at to say, do we have enough people power to achieve our goals over the next, you know, at least the near term goals over the next three to five years? And I think each fiscal year, we will reassess that. Great, thank you. Yeah, I have some thoughts on it. I'm gonna save it for a little bit later. Sean, did you have something you were gonna say on the subject or? Yeah, I was just gonna add one thing. I mean, Dave touched on it a little bit. I think one really positive relationship that's in place now that hasn't always been the case and not everywhere has this as our facility department between Rob and Jeremiah are fully bought in on, you know, improving the energy efficiency of our buildings and making upgrades, you know, we've all heard Jeremiah talk probably at various meetings and get really, really excited about different energy efficiency initiatives that he's implementing, which hasn't always been the case. And I think one thing that goes hand in hand with the staffing issue, Anna that you identified with sustainability is on the facility side and do we have enough staff on the facility side to implement to get to all the projects? We may have money to do things, but if we can only do, you know, a couple of year because we don't have enough staff in that department, then it doesn't really help us to have the money, right? The money's just sitting there. So I think that's an adjacent conversation is do we have enough staff to implement these different initiatives? And funding for training those staff as well. Yeah, thank you. And I wanna be really very clear this was not at all a critique on our current staff who I think are doing a phenomenal job. It was not at all that. It's more of what do we need to make sure that no one's burning out and we're still able to reach those goals. So thank you. Sean, one other question. Did you get questions from Bob? Yeah, so what I would suggest is for these three departments, if we just go straight to questions from the committee, the questions that were submitted have been posted in the packet and in SharePoint with answers attached. So I think in terms of time sake, it would be best to just start with committee questions. And then if we have time, if we wanna go back to those written responses, we can. But the questions and the written responses are both are posted in both places from Bob. And he sent several questions for each department. So the questions are available for committee members on SharePoint, they're available to the public. And I guess Athena will know, but if only committee members can get to this SharePoint, all counselors can get to the packet through the website. Bernie, you had a question? Yeah, I wanna acknowledge Dave and his willingness to reach out and collaborate. And he's a guy in constant motion. I understand that you are sleeping between the hours at midnight and five a.m. So you've got a couple of free hours in a day. I wanna thank you two for mentioning Fearing Brook, which is one of those environmental issues that is literally underground, but has a significant impact and town has gotten noticed for the work that's been done to try and identify sources of contamination of Fearing Brook and ultimately fix it. My question for you, Davis, is, and I almost hesitate to ask this because you've got so much stuff going on, and that's municipal aggregation to allow homeowners or businesses in town to buy green energy through an aggregation process. It seems to have, there was sort of an attempt to recreate Cape Light. That seems to have dropped off at least my radar. So I'm wondering who we're at with the possibility of municipal aggregation. Yeah, and you may have caught me flat-footed on that one, Bernie, and I know Sean has been working a little bit with Stephanie on that, but I have not been as involved, hands-on with that, and I know Sean has been working through some of the legal steps, and I wonder if he could jump in here. Yeah, that should actually be moving very, very shortly. So we did a procurement. The biggest step there was to get a consultant on to do the municipal aggregation and develop the program. That procurement went out. It's been a little bit of a slog to get the contract signed and finalized and all the participating member communities together. There was talk of first, we were gonna try to get the joint power entity formed, but that was gonna take too long. So we've ended up going an MOU route between the communities so that one person can be the lead and sign the contract so that the consultant can get going. The last I heard that is with attorneys for one last review and then is going to the approval process. And once that MOU is approved between Northampton, Powell and Amherst, that consultant contract will be signed and we'll get to work. So that should be happening, I would say by this fiscal year. Are you able to say who the consultant is? So the, I don't wanna get the name wrong, but I can email the group. I mean, I can tell you who, yeah, who we're working with to get the contract signed. I think there's only a couple of them in the, in the state, the one, the person that we're working with is Paul Gromer. I don't remember the name of his company, but he's the individual consultant that will be working with us, assuming we get the contracts settled. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, I have two different questions. One on Hickory Ridge, one on the Fort River Plains and Bob, actually I did get a chance to read your questions and the answers. So I'm gonna build off of those. On Hickory Ridge, when, way back when, when we, you came to finance and we were talking about improving the CPAC money and improving taking money out of reserves for the purchase, we had said, could we move really fast with a plan on what to do with the developer areas? We had like six to seven acres. And I understand the purchase took forever, but one of the questions we had, and this is Kathy just thinking in terms of we need revenues in town is would we be thinking of a development that would turn that into either multi-unit housing or if we weren't gonna go that route, even sell the land to recoup some of the money we took out of. So I'm just wondering how long you expect, when response to Bob's question, you talked about an extensive staffing and we're gonna be going on, are we gonna be seeing it's May? Are we gonna be seeing the outline of a plan in the next couple of months? Are we gonna be seeing it in a half a year, just some sense of the timeline on that one? That's, I'll just do both questions, Andy. Then my question of Chris is Bob also asked about floodplain and the redrawn maps, in particular as it relates to the Fort River potential school site. And we know the floodplain, you answered there's more developer areas, the flood plan has been drawn back. However, there's still river and there's still wetlands. At some point it would be, we've got our designers doing where they think they can build and where the wetlands start. And if there is more that we need to do before we make a decision, I'd like to know about it. Because I know what happened up here in North Amherst with a potential eruptor project when they actually got out on the land, they had less land to work with than they thought because of wetlands issues. So it wasn't a floodplain issue, it was a wetland issue. So that's just a request. And I know that's not you so much because it's the wetland administrator, but it's, so that's a request. That's what's not, the flood plan moves back, but the land is still wet. It's not a flood plan issue, it's a wet issue. So number one was Hickory Ridge. Sure, thanks for the question, Kathy. So, yeah, so we are, I would say we're moving as quickly as we possibly can given all the other commitments we've made in the functional area. So we've owned Hickory Ridge for about 60 days and there's been a lot to do and we have a lot going. Let me just tell you what is already in play. So we are moving forward with, we have CDBG funds available that have been approved by the state. We also have CPA funds that the council supported for the trail system. We're working on permitting central trail system north and south and throughout the property. I have a meeting this week with the Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program. This is as we all know an extremely complex site and every move we make on Hickory has to be approved or go through the Natural Heritage Program. We're kicking off the solar with AMP Energy. We've already had an initial site meeting and all indications are supply chain notwithstanding that AMP would get going on the site in roughly do the startup probably startup of onsite work construction mobilizing in September. In terms of moving forward with the final determination of possible uses of the buildable land. In all honesty, I believe I made all those presentations but I am not rushing to make a decision on the buildable land. I think that needs to be part of the comprehensive plan. I think we have done extensive outreach to both the communities to the north, Mill Valley Apartments, the Brook as well as Orchard Valley and we need to do more of that because we haven't got as many people involved as we had hoped. So I think my plan as you suggest is there will be a comprehensive plan outline we hope more than an outline by the end of this year but there won't be a decision on how much or what to do or recommendations on what to do with the buildable land earlier than that. So I'm looking at this as a 50 or a 100 year decision. So I appreciate that the town needs revenue. The solar project as soon as it is up and running will bring in, can recall the number but I think it's between 60 and $70,000 a year in a pilot type payment. So the project is going to be generating more revenue than it did before when it was just a golf course. And then we'll, as part of the comp plan and the community decisions about the site, those will come out of the comprehensive plan for the site that we hope to have at least well underway by the end of this year. We are hearing from a lot of people that they want more involvement in kind of the overall plan. And so we're trying to be mindful of that as we go forward and not make assumptions about what happens. Does that help end of the end of this year? A date, you did what I asked. I just asked for a date and the first two, I'll just make a comment. The first two were in additional investments by the town. I think of CPA money as town money and I see BG. So it's the question, it wasn't just us but there were a couple of residents who were saying buying the land, let's have a plan of what to do with it on the developable side. So you did answer it. Thank you. Yes, and that is coming. We're also looking at potential other revenue sources and the plan will outline those as well. Lou? So I had the second question of Chris. It was actually, I guess that my second question is more of a request, Chris, you don't have to answer it now yet. Can you clarify the question? So it's the floodplain moves back on Fort River but we still have, your answer said, we still have state river and local wetlands restrictions on what's developable and just is there a point at which we will know exactly what those restrictions on acreage are? And I know there's the FPC line we discovered that you've already described to me but up here at the eruptor, less of it was buildable and usable than people thought because of the wetlands restrictions. So it's tied up with the decision about the site. So if we're pretty much okay as we want it, I can send you the maps again. If we're okay, if we've drawn it then I don't need to know more. We don't need to know more now. I'll resend you the map. I could give you a short answer which is that the floodplain is different from the bordering vegetated wetlands which is different from the riverfront area. So I think what would have to happen is that someone would have to go out and map the wetlands on the Fort River site and that's done by looking at plants and also looking at soils. And once they've done that, they'll know what the wetland restrictions are and the riverfront area restriction has to do with distance from the bank of the river but it also has to do with area that's already been disturbed. So these are questions that would really be answered by the conservation commission and I think it would be hard to answer them in advance although Aaron Jacques, the wetlands administrator would probably be able to give you better guidance on that than I can. Thank you. Anything else, Kathy, or can I call one? That's it. That's good. Those are my two videos. Yeah, this is financial. Down the road, it's definitely financial. On the Fort River site, the sooner we know, the better because there's no sense going forward with the plan if we've got a problem. And I know we have to go through permitting and that's a whole process but I'd hate to see us go through permitting and then end up that the site, if it was chosen, isn't the site we can actually use. Separate from that and the reason I had my hand up was David, I do encourage a thoughtful process. I hear from constituents regularly that they want to be involved with how Hickory Ridge is used and how the excess land is used as well. Thanks. That's all. Absolutely. Can I just make one comment on the Fort River site? I think it's really important and we need, without a delineation of the wetlands, I don't want to put Aaron Jacques in a position of taking a look at a conceptual site plan and saying, this will work. I mean, there's been no delineation of wetlands on either site, so there's nothing to respond to. I mean, the conceptual plan is simply that. So we can talk generalities. We kind of know more about the floodplain, I think, than we do the wetlands. There's been no delineation as far as I know. So there's nothing to respond to there. So happy to talk with you offline about that, Kathy Moore. Okay, I tried, if I could, I got a, that would be great. It's just what Lynn said, we can't make a decision to choose this site and then discover a month later that we don't have what we had. So trying to figure out how to do something sooner rather than later on that delineation because our design team can't do that. So I'll talk to you later. Andy, just want to point out, we've got about 10 minutes left and we're almost done, but we still have planning and inspections. I know, I thought I had the same thing. Could I just ask Andy before we launch into the next department? I just, I know we've taken up a lot of time with questions, important questions, but it doesn't seem like we'll have enough time to do both inspection services and planning. Could we do planning and then carry over inspections to your next meeting or vice versa? Sean, we can... Yeah, if somebody, if one of them want to come back on Thursday, sometime between nine and 11, we could add them to that agenda. We're getting to the crunch time to the 30 days that we're allowed. Yeah, no, I just want to give adequate time to Rob and Christine. Yeah, Rob or Christine, are one of you available to come back on Thursday morning? If that... Christine is muted, so we can't hear you. It's fine with me. Yeah, okay. Okay, so Rob, thank you. You've been really patient with this committee and I really appreciate that because I know you've been here once before. But why don't we... I'll work with Sean so we can set up a very exact time and we'll just hear to the time so that you're very time limited on your commitment. And Bob, did you have something with... Because otherwise I want to get to Christine. Yeah, no, I just want to say that whatever, in terms of getting the report put together, I'll do what I can to... I will get the paragraphs ready in time so even if we have to go into Thursday. Okay, so we'll do that then, Rob, thank you. And I'll check with Sean and through Sean. We'll come up with a very exact time and then hear to it so that we can limit your time on Thursday and really work with you. Thank you very much, Christine. So good morning. I'm Chris Brestrup, the planning director and I want to tell you about the work of the planning department. We have five staff members and we share a permit administrator with the inspection services department and our staff is really talented and energetic and they're very dedicated to the work of the town of Amherst. So in terms of accomplishments that we've done over the last few months or year, we've accomplished the construction of the playground at Kendrick Park and we're working on completing the dog park which is very close to completion. We worked with the town council and the CRC to adopt seven zoning amendments last year and we're continuing to work on the flood insurance rate maps and associated zoning amendments and we're hoping to have those done by the fall of 2022. We're working with the facilities department under the direction of the building commissioner on implementing the ADA transition plan and we're using various grants and capital funds provided by the budget to make that happen. In terms of grants, the planning department is pretty good, has a pretty good track record of applying for and receiving grants and in the past year and a half to two years we've been successful in applying for and receiving about $3 million worth of grants. One of the grants is this community development block grant. We get $825,000 a year and the town uses that for infrastructure projects, social services and some personnel costs associated with the planning department. The Mill River Lane sidewalk is currently under construction and that is a CDBG funded project. I'm going forward and we'll see improvements to crosswalks and sidewalks on Kellogg Avenue, which is sorely in need. We received over $500,000 in mass DOT shared streets grants and those have paid for improvements to downtown outdoor dining, sidewalk and crosswalk improvements, including RRFBs which are flashing lights to allow people to cross. The ramp at the bank center, which Rob worked on, bus shelters and pavement repair and pretty soon you'll be seeing new furnishings in the Boltwood Plaza area that were paid for by the mass DOT shared streets grant. We work in cooperation with the DPW on most of these projects. We partnered with the bid to obtain a grant for $80,000 to construct parklets, three ADA accessible parklets in downtown Amherst and at least one of them is up and operating and it's quite beautiful and lovely. In terms of housing, we've been working on improving housing opportunities in Amherst. In last summer, we helped the town council to pass a new inclusionary bylaw, which requires that most developers of housing in town provide affordable units as part of their developments. As Dave said, we support the developers and permitting boards going through the permitting process and some of the projects we've worked on recently are one university drive, which is under construction and has five affordable units. Center East Common, which is currently under permitting review, that will be down near the railroad track on Main Street and they're going to have three affordable units. I'm not telling you the total numbers, but just the affordable and 11 and 13 East Pleasant Street, which is a new building that's going to go up in downtown. They'll have 11 affordable units. We've also worked on the Belcher Town Road street school project, putting out the RFP to find a developer and there will be, according to Nate Malloy this morning, 70 units with 45 affordable. So we're very pleased about that. Current projects that we're working on are that we have developed an RFP, which we've shown to the planning board and we'll be issuing this summer to hire a design consultant to work with us on drafting design standards for new buildings and renovations of existing buildings in the downtown, as well as standards for streetscape improvements. We'll be working with the sustainability coordinator, Stephanie Chickarello, and the solar bylaw working group on drafting a solar bylaw and developing a solar assessment to help us determine where and Amherst solar arrays should be built. We've asked for funding to work with the technical expert on the drafting of the solar bylaw, particularly with regard to things like battery storage, which we aren't as familiar with. We provide ongoing support to the CBA and the planning board reviewing new developments and two of the new developments which are coming before them are a project at the corner of Fearing Street and Sunset Ave, which some of you are familiar with, and a new apartment style dormitory that's being proposed for Olympia Drive. On the North Common, we're working with DPW staff to develop final plans with the goal of putting the project out to bid in the winter and starting construction next spring. We're finishing up design on a wayfinding sign project, which we hope to put out to bid this summer, which will provide information for visitors and others about downtown and points of interest. We've asked for some funding to hire a structural engineer to evaluate the Boltwood garage to determine if it can accommodate additional stories to help us solve the parking problem downtown. And we recently received a DLTA grant from Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, and we've been working with the senior center to take the first steps in making Amherst and Age and dementia friendly community. We recently launched a survey and we received 800 responses, so over 800 responses from people about topics such as housing, transportation, social contacts, and health issues as they affect aging people and Amherst. And now we're engaged in listening sessions and the first of which was yesterday and it was well attended and we received a lot of good information. In terms of zoning, we're engaged in ongoing work on zoning, including making permanent some aspects of the temporary zoning that we put in place in 2022 that helped us to pivot to the successful launch of outdoor dining during the COVID epidemic. We've been working with the historical commission to have a new preservation bylaw adopted to preserve historically significant buildings that are over 75 years old and we will be working with town council and the CRC members on other zoning priorities in FY23. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have. Thank you. Thank you. So I'll open it up to questions. Thank you. Bob, you have anything additional that you didn't put into the post-it document? The only thing that I would ask is, and I want to preface this by saying, I think we've done a very good job in, you all have done a very good job in increasing the number of affordable units that are coming online. But I am very interested in any opportunities to increase home ownership among economically disadvantaged people. And if there's anything that planning can do or that working with other parts of the town can do in order to promote that. Would you like me to answer that? So we have received some inquiries from Valley Community Development Corporation. They are aware of the issue of affordable home ownership and they've been looking at properties in town to find out if those can be developed for that type of development. One issue that comes up is that affordable home ownership doesn't necessarily mean that people are going to build equity in their homes because the way things have been working in the past is that when someone goes to sell an affordable unit, he isn't allowed to reap the benefit of inflation and house prices going up. So the state is working on, I think they've actually established a new type of financing for affordable home ownership that only has a restriction for the first 15 years as far as selling it for the restricted price. And then after that, the homeowner can reap the benefit of that. So that's something that we feel is really important to allow people to try to build some wealth via their homes just like other people can. So that's all I have to say about that now and if you'd like to talk to me about it offline sometime, I'd be happy to. Thank you. I just want to take the opportunity to thank David's group in the planning department for everything you do. Last year was an amazing year. We ran you and the council through their paces with regard to zoning. And I know we're approaching something that looks a little bit harried like that as well. And you know, I look at Chris and I say, and all of you, I say, Chris, what you just shared with us about affordable housing and home ownership is an example of the kind of research and information that you're always readily looking for. So I just want to say thanks. Other questions. I, we no longer have a quorum of the council. So I need to. During the council. Okay. So noted. So. Chris, I'm sorry that you got pushed off as this, but to give you an opportunity to spend a little bit less time answering questions. I think that what I just want to do really quickly is touch on process. And. Sean's posting different additional times, but we have posted the meeting for Thursday because it had to be posted by this morning. And it is going to allow us to finish up on the last of the presentations and begin the process of. Doing the hard work of the finance committee, which is when we're going to have to actually have a discussion about the budget and make our recommendations. So what I had proposed to finance committee. And my thought is, is that I was going to send a memo. If there's no objection to the entire council explaining the process so that the council is fully aware of how we're, how I propose to proceed. And that is. That on Thursday we will begin the process. By identifying issues that require separate. Consideration. The goal is that in the end. We want to have. Conversation about. Any sections of the budget that. Require that special attention. And focus on, on those identify them and focus on those. And then at the end when they are resolved. And we have been able to make recommendations on those and decide what we want to include. In the report on those particular items. We have a single motion. To recommend the remainder of the budget and all of the sections. That we have identified. And the process that I had thought about was it's just, if two, any two members of the finance committee. Requested an item. Have consideration for further discussion. And I'll give you the one obvious example in a second. I would. Take that up. And then. If there is a motion that's made in second. To. Very from the town manager's proposal. In accordance with what. The charter and the law allows. That we will let take that motion up and discuss it and vote on it. As a committee. The one obvious one. Is that. I think it's pretty clear that we're going to have to have that discussion. Regarding the elementary school. Budget and the request from the school committee. But. Others in that. That. The sections that we want to, to focus on. It will give a higher level of notice that. Those sections of the budget. Are going to be discussed and. Make sure that. There's an ability to at least participate in the discussion. So if that process seems to be. One that's sound to the rest of the group. Then I'll go ahead and send a memo to the entire council. Explaining what I've just explained. So that. Any counselors who. I would like to have the finance committee, but think that there should be special focus given to a section. And would like to have the finance committee's input on this particular section. That the council can make that request to. The finance committee and we will have time to consider it. So that, that is what I'm thinking about for a process. So the finance committee, because. If you know, I really need you to think between now and Thursday about the sections that you would propose to put on the list, because we'd like to get them as identified as quickly as possible and figure out how to proceed. So it's not something that's happening today, but it'll work for Thursday. Okay. Thank you. Lynn. That's your hand up. Yeah. When do you want our drafts for our sections? Well, to the extent that I could have it. For the weekend. It would be helpful, but if it's not. You know, if it's early next week. That's what's going to have to be. I think that what we may have to do in order to satisfy the 30 day requirement is. To a brief report, which just out. Notifies the. Council. Of what our recommendation is as a whole. And the complete report then come in a few days later. But I think the charter is very clear that there's a 30 day limit. For making its recommendation. So we probably do need to. At least. Do something to respond to the. To the recommendation part, even if the complete report. We take a few extra days on. Sean. Thanks, Andy. So just to clarify. The plan will be to meet on May 31st as well. Most likely, right? I don't be sufficient time at the neck on Thursday. So I'll work with Athena to get, make sure that gets posted. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Lynn, thanks for asking for deadline. I'll try to write up mine. But I think what I've heard is we've gone through all of these for the most part, the recommendation. Will be. In support of what's been proposed to us with the one exception. I'm not saying it's exception that we wouldn't be support, but we have. I'm wondering how we have that discussion. We have the school proposing one in the town manager proposing another. And. So I may be wrong. I mean, I didn't hear anything. I had. Community responders, police, fire, you know, so I can write up my sections, but it's, it doesn't seem to me that we've. Focused in on anything else that we'd be, we would be deviating from what has been proposed to us. So I just don't know when we're going to have that discussion. That's what I'm asking for. Yeah. Thursday is when I want to have the discussion about. What sections we would like to have further attention to. And I think. It's partly. What it is that. Whether we may have an exception from what the town manager. Has proposed, but then there's also the question about. Whether. There needs to be some additional discussion built into the report. About a particular. Recommendation that has been made. For example, the example that I gave, I think to the finance committee is. So we had a lot of public comment. About. The police budget. And. I think that the committee needs to decide. Whether it wants to have a. A response wants to have a discussion. Of that issue so that it can be built into the response. And which is why I think, you know, we did have a forum. We did hear from. Community members and. Whether we want to be thoughtful on how we deal. With the community input we received. So that's another element to it. Bob. Yeah, I just wanted some clarification as to whether we're only going to limit our discussion to this budget, or we're going to talk about things that we might want to consider in future budgets. The. Focus needs to be on the budget before us and. You know. We don't have to deal with the question of future issues. Necessarily at this point though, if there's a, if you have something you want to talk about, bring it up. Bring it forward and we'll do the best we can with it. Well, I'll bring it forward now. I was just wanting to the sort of suggestions and discussions came up about fees for summer camps and for. Athletic participation. And I'm wondering whether over the next year or whether. In the next year's budget, we could consider. Whether we could somehow eliminate those fees or. Find some other way of funding that. We could do that. Rather than just going to the parents that we can discuss that later, but that was. Not something for this year, but something for next year to think about. Okay. The other process that we have, as you know, is the. Recommend the guidelines to the council. And. Our future goals. I think that the other thing that we. Need to be considering an honor really brought this forward a little bit in her question. About. You know, the. ECAC issues and the kinds of whether there's enough staffing to support that work. And. I think it's this question of we have created. Through the council over the. Years that we've had a council. The number of really. Important initiatives, but. We're not really necessarily allowing sufficient focus to the cost of implementation. But I think it's something that we need to think about. And how we're going to deal with that. And what we want to say. About that issue. Something that this committee needs to think about too, because I think it is something we're beginning to. Really recognize substantially. More as we go. So anything else today because I do want to. Michelle. I have to. So if we need to do public comment, I wasn't sure if everyone needed to be here for that. Yeah. Thank you because I had looked at earlier and there was no one in the attendee list. If the person who's here with the phone numbers and attendee. Wishing to make public comment. Certainly entitled to do so. So if you have a question, please. Raise your hand since you're on the phone. I believe that it is. Star nine. In order to. Do a raise hand function. If we don't see a hand going up, then we'll assume that. Do not have a desire for. Making a public comment. So seeing none. The hands of that go up again. Is what you would do. For my telephone. And. So anything else about, and thank you Michelle for pointing that out since that. Did somebody is now here. Anything else about the plan for the next week. And I will stop. I'm going to write a. So the memo to the council just to make the council aware of how we're proceeding. So hearing none. Anything else that people want to raise today or ask today before adjournment. Otherwise. I'm going to declare us adjourned. Okay. Sean, I do need to talk with you about something. So I'll give you a call. So thank you everybody. We're adjourned.