 Hello, my name is Ivan Vapean and I'm running for the Amherst Select Board. You might want to ask why I'm running. That's a pretty good question. But I want to start off with conveying my support for the town of Amherst and for all of our workers, especially the public safety complex and EMTs and all the people that make sure that we're safe in this town. I want to thank our school system from what I've heard from talking to our constituents is that we have a wonderful school system. There's a lot of talk about this new charter and the idea that in order for us to make progress as a community that we need to tear down what we already have. If you think about it, we've been talking for 12 years about building a new fire station. The EMTs and the public safety complex and the schools could be staffed more. We want to develop new buildings and build a new school and renovate the libraries. But why does it take so long for a project to come out of the boards and go into development and come from its beginnings to its finished state? And this may be one of the problems that the charter commissions are trying to address. But as a community, you have to think that we can do better than silencing out the voices of the majority of the town and the minority voices by eliminating town meeting to make it so that we can get things done. I think as a community, we can do better than that. One of the things that I might suggest is that if it hasn't been tried before, is maybe have town meeting meet four times or six times a year so that budget allocations when we have emergencies and snowstorms can be made and executed. I'm sure the town manager has one heck of a job. And I know a lot of work went into this new charter proposal this year. One of the biggest problems that I've seen this time around was with communication. And that communication broke down. It broke down between town meeting and the charter committee. Town meeting and the charter commission became polarized. The charter commission went here of having town meeting anymore and town meeting has turned against the charter commission. The problem seems to me is in communication, is that we have to work out our intercommunication skills between various bodies and entities in the town. There shouldn't be such a conflict between development and the processes and the way things always have been here to cause a complete breakdown such that we would need to restructure the entire government. And that's why I oppose this new town charter. When it came across my desk and I read it, it just looked to me as if it were some kind of a coup that consolidates political power with the elites and kind of silences the majority and the minority voices and down. And that's not who we are, Amherst. We can be better than that. We are better than that. Thank you very much. Also, if you want to know more about my platform, just Google search the two words Amherst Mutiny. Thank you.