 So, I'm going to call the Finance Committee meeting of Tuesday, May 14, to order at 2.05 pm. Thank you, everyone who's here for being here. We do not have a quorum of the Council, so we won't call a Council meeting to order unless another member of the Council comes. And just for notes, so everybody's aware, we do have somebody who's taking notes. And the agenda item about the local option community impact fee for short-term rentals, we're going to take up after we take up the budget because I want to not exhaust the staff by talking about something other than the budget that they're here to talk to tell us about. And therefore, we'll start with the budget and immediately go into discussion of general government and start with the term manager. And I wanted to see if there were any overall questions. I have one regarding page 14 before getting into the very specific line item budgets. And it's a fairly straightforward thing, but under licenses and permits, I wasn't sure what portions of licenses and permits end up in general government and why there's the precipitous drop in projected revenue for whatever that portion of the budget is. Okay, so to repeat that, thank you very much. I appreciate that. So on page 14, the point was that because of the change in government, liquor licenses are now issued in a different way, and therefore that's what the licenses and permits section is there in the general government. It's not money that's lost to the town, it was just no longer under select board because the select board is no longer in existence as the licensing authority and it's mid-move to inspections. So that explains that changed line item. So thank you very much. And are there any other general overall questions before we turn it over to Paul, who's going to talk to us about three sections starting with town council on page 16, the town manager section on page 18, and then jumping to the legal section on page 27 of, so you know, where to look for in your budget for the items that he was going to talk about. Paul? Well, actually I'm going to ask Sonia Aldridge, our interim finance director, to speak first if that's okay with you. Certainly. Okay, I'm going to try to go through a whole overview of all the general government departments and if you have any specific questions, I've got all the back up behind me to answer all your questions. But I wanted to start off the whole thing with accomplishments this year and I wanted to say that this year has been a challenge and I feel our biggest accomplishment was getting here to the point where we are here presenting you our budget and all the hard work everyone put into the change in governance in the transition of this room and how did we get here, the endless hours that you all put into this, the town manager and his staff support and I really don't think Paul has a life outside of town hall. The IT department for all the tech support and patients for all of us, the facilities department including inspections and public works who made this room so awesome. The town clerk's office for their endless hours of work and dedication to keep everyone organized including me and most importantly the finance department, David, Sherry, Jennifer, Holly and all of our staff in the finance department, sorry I keep forgetting I can't turn away from this thing. We kept the town running by assessing, building, collecting, investing, procuring, goods and services and paying our employees and the bills. We did all of this and created the budget you see in front of you. I'm extremely proud to be a part of this team. Moving forward we will be without a key person behind the scenes that pulls most of the budget documents together for us. Her endless spreadsheets and charts, Maria Raca who has been a part of this team for over 28 years. The last two working remotely from her home in Maine. Her last day is tomorrow, May 15th. We had hoped to get her here today so you could meet her in person. And I wanted to say thank you, Maria. I also want to recognize the person who worked with her for the last 10 months sorry. Trying to learn to navigate through all the spreadsheets and multiple parts that make up the document you have in front of you that has not been an easy task. Not for Holly who did this or any of us sharing the same office space. Thank you for all the things. That was very true. Sean then got enough from the school. It's always a pleasure working with him and we very much appreciate all the work he did on the capital plan. Now I'll get into the budget. I felt I needed to say that. I'll just pause for a second and just say that at least for me who worked with Maria over the years in the old finance committee and otherwise extend her best wishes on whatever goes forward from here in her life. I'm going to miss her knowing that she's there. Thank you. So in the town council budget, which starts on page 16 and the finances are on page 17, the significant change there is that it's new. In the budget includes salaries of 67.5, which is per the charter and operating expenses of 32.5 and this is just an estimate from the half a year that we've been in place now. So that's going to change as we get more trend. It could go up, it could go down depending on what the needs show. Should I stop at every single one and give you a chance to ask questions or just keep going? If you're not coming back to town, to the town council page, I guess I would stop to see if there are other questions. I have a question about the money for training. I assume that the conference in Boston took a good deal of that. I'm just kind of curious to know how much. I can't answer exactly how much the Boston trip was, but the expenses to date have been around $15,000. And the other meetings that we go to, MMA, we don't have to pay for those or do we? Or do we have a big dues to the association? So out of the town manager's budget, we pay the dues to the mass municipal association. Included in those dues are membership in the mass municipal councilor's association, which is what you go to a lot of times. So the MMCA tends not to have a fee for attending, but if there is a fee for something, that is something that would come out of these expenses. Well, I do say they are useful. And I haven't had a chance to read most of those magazines, but I picked up one and started reading it, and I said, oh my God, and I discovered a bill that's coming through, which I'm very upset about. So if there were more time, we would probably learn even more there. So I guess I would say, maybe I wouldn't mind if you drew our attention to some of the articles in there that you thought were particularly timely. That would be useful. Sure. The next budget would be the town manager's budget, and that starts. I just staying on town council, rehabbing of this room to make it where we are. Have you put those expenses under town council or have you put them under general? So those would be in a prior fiscal year, a current fiscal year. So those are expenses that came out of capital money that we have. So they were out of the last year? Not under town council. So you're not expecting any future ones in terms of town council specific? So the computers we're using and other things we've invested in us? Yes. And you'll be here for three years. So we don't expect another investment in time in computers. Other than a person to take down a minutes, we still have that expense to be added. That's right. Right. We have not put that in this budget at this point in time. Okay. Which expense, I'm sorry. For minutes, someone to take down. So for the town council minutes, those are being done by the clerk to the council. But for all the other committees, we're still working on a solution for that. Okay. Which I know is a high priority for the council. Okay. Thank you. Town manager's budget starts on page 18. Finance part is on page 20. The decrease in salaries here is due to the elimination of the select board in some staff turnover. We also moved $1,200 from extra help of the operating budget for travel expenses. That was a little short, so we moved that there. Then the next page 21 is town meeting budget. This is here for historical data only. That will eventually go away. Any questions on the town manager's budget? Come on. You've got to have a lot of questions there. I know that staffing is always a question of both what we need and what we can afford and you look at both of them very closely as you develop the budget plan for the year. It's always been a concern formally of the select board and now it becomes a problem of the town council as to whether you have enough assistance within your office and whether that is a decision that you're making based upon need or based upon resources and what we're losing if it's based on resources. Also a big component of the job from the town manager's office which is the licensing function has moved to the second floor. So that's less work that is being done by our office. The more work that has been taken on is the community participation officers and there's two people in our office, one in IT who are taking the bulk of that work on. I think we're still sort of sorting out what the level of work is going to be and we have pretty much daily conversations with the clerk's office about who's doing this or that trying to make sure that we can keep the website up to date and at the level that you have expected to be. There's a lot of moving pieces to it and the new thing that we're sort of trying to manage is SharePoint which you've all actually come to master pretty quickly in trying to make that communication from SharePoint to the website to our archive folders is just a cumbersome task at this moment in time. We're looking at legislative solutions to address that which would be a software solution but we're not there yet. So in terms of staffing I think we won't know for until next budget year exactly how this is all going to work out if the appointing three people to be the CPO's was kind of a test to see if that was a good model or not if that met the needs of the council and the town. I think it seems to be working pretty well but basically the budget that you see is sort of a status quo budget of just moving forward with what we have now. I was going to ask a similar question just building on the draw on staff that have other jobs to do both from your perspective and then I think at some point what are the best ways to get it from the council's perspective. So the issue of minute taking or SharePoint is a software that is extremely useful but it also has some quirks that we're all doing workarounds on them. So just over the next year I think we need to figure out you know how well it's working and if it's not working well you know what is an alternative. Agreed and I think that you'll hear more when we get into the finance work. We're pretty skeletal have a skeleton staff right now and I think you're going to see that with the clerk's office that they have taken on an enormous amount of work with the existing staff that they had previously and the work that they've taken on is more than what town meeting had them do it's significantly more. And so the staffing in that office will have to be reviewed we're we're still looking at the staffing we're down to major piece of people in the finance department and so that's put a burden on a lot of our staff there and they have stepped up clearly in doing the work but we are advertising for one new position that did not new position fill a position right now in that office. But there's some long term things especially with Maria Rocca moving on that we'll be looking at how to fill that that kind of function as well. So we have the resources and within the budget to do these things but in actually getting that going forward will be something we'll want to talk about. Now my favorite department the finance department and it starts on page 22 I always jump to the finance pages just what I'm drawn to so that's on page 26 on the significant changes in personnel services in the finance department are with the FTEs if you notice it's up point three this is the net of many changes that happen in the finance department first the position an in-house position for ambulance billing was eliminated because we started outsourcing our ambulance billing then we added a point six position for customer service at the counter downstairs and we share this position it's a full-time position but we share it with leisure services registration then we added a point five position for our payroll and benefits coordinator and she's been here with us for 30 something years but when we went from self-insured to being fully insured we lost half the funding for her position because she was being paid out of the health claims trust fund and even though we're not self-insured and we're fully insured and we still have all the same work still needs to be done for that and then we added a point two position for procurement officer we had we were sharing the procurement officer with the school department and they had some tough decisions to make for fiscal year 19 so they reduced that that financing for them and we picked that up which gives you the net of point three for FTEs the increase in the operating budget is a result of what it of the ambulance billing we're now outsourcing so it becomes an operating expense instead of a salary line that's pretty much it for the finance is there any questions within the departments there I just need to understand better the the outsourcing has moved from the personnel line item to the operating expense line item it used to be yes an employee so it used to be in salaries we had to move that from salaries to the operating budget because we're now paying a company to do the outsourcing to just a shift which which makes it difficult to sort of comprehend is when you look at the percent changes they look so one looks so large in relation to the other but that's because of the size of the budget line itself right yes there's another when you sorry when you switched that ambulance billing it actually increased did it increase the total cost for that service or is it just it you know where are we saving money by outsourcing it well that's to be determined enough trend to really for me to really answer that at this point in time we just started in March last year so that's to be continued I believe we are saving but so along with the finance department goes the employee benefits would start on page 34 and this budget is where we pay all of our benefits from such as health insurance life insurance Medicare and where we hold our salary reserves for unsettled contracts once the contracts are settled we move it to the appropriate departments the net increase is a result of salary reserve increase in our health insurance changes which was only 0.06% this year another part that the finance department handles is this is not part of general government but I thought it was appropriate to put it in here with the finance department is that's our debt service if you look on page 115 of the budget book this is where we pay our general fund debt service from it's a list of all of our outstanding payments that we need to make the principal and the interest for all the projects that we currently borrow for debt service is provided for in the capital plan so when we do the nine and a half percent of the tax levy we subtract what our debt service is going to be and what's left is what's available for new capital but this is where it gets paid out of that line item other expenses which is on page 117 and 118 this includes our OPEB which we contribute to our OPEB we started off with a hundred thousand and we increased a hundred thousand every year until we reach the 500 mark and we're staying steady at 500 hope we can continue that as we go forward this is also where we used to have our reserve fund transfer which tell me we used to vote about a hundred thousand dollars a year which was in the custody of the previous finance committee so if we had an emergency in the middle of the year and we needed to do some funding they could transfer that to whatever appropriate department we mostly use that to cover our snow and ice deficits if we had it and then there's the assessment section on page 120 this includes any of the cherry sheet assessments our retirement assessment for the general fund portion only the enterprise funds pays their portion out of their accounts and then there's the regional county lockup fee which is run by the Hampshire County Sheriff and the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission assessment for regional planning services another part of the finance department is general services and these budgets pay for our annual audit our property and casualty insurance our postage our copier services and supplies and central office supplies and small equipment I'm sorry page 47 starts so let's stop for a moment and see if there are questions about the sections that we've just described and one thing that you touched on was how snow and ice and other which is the most frequent emergency but not the only that has ever happened but I guess the question is what would be the where are we for the current fiscal year that's ending and snow and ice and what would be the mechanism for dealing with it under our new form of government well I talked to the town manager about this this morning we have a approximately a hundred and fifteen thousand dollar deficit in snow and ice we have enough savings in general government to cover that so we'll be coming to you for an FY19 budget amendment which will move that money from general government to public works and there may be some a small transfer into conservation and development but I'm not sure yet I'm still waiting to see how much savings we have there am I correct that we don't make those adjustments till after the close of fiscal year it used to be done at the annual town meeting and it should be done before before June 30th okay thank you I think in the future it depends on how we vote our budget if we vote our budget is one number then that we wouldn't have to have an order to move money around it could just be done with the notice to the council yes Mandy if you want it done in June we just need to be aware of the charter requirements for separate hearings on that different I think there'd be a charter requirement for a finance committee hearing on that or a town council hearing for the separate appropriation or change we should just check that and make sure we meet those deadlines all right I have a question is there any reason why we couldn't just add it to the orders for this budget I mean normally it used to be on the warrant it just said the previous year's budget amendment so if we write the orders up and have it be part of this whole budget process do in can it be a part of the hearings that we have already in place or does it have to be totally separate that I don't know I'm reading the section in the charter that says when the town manager submits a request for a new appropriation of any some either as a supplement to some item in the annual budget or for an item or items not included in the annual budget is adopted then it has to go through the whole finance committee process so the question would be is it a new appropriation or a supplement or is it just a transfer that doesn't have to just a transfer so maybe it doesn't need a separate hearing thank you anything else the next is the HR budget and it's on page 31 Evelyn is very new to us and she wasn't here during the budget cycle so she asked me to point out any of the changes to the count to the finance committee and she's here to answer any follow-up questions the increase in HR salaries in FTE is the HR manager that that was previously funded from the health claims trust fund as well and is now part of the general fund so it shows up as a new FTE even though it's not a new position it was an existing position it's just the funding that changed so when we calculate whether we're saving by health insurance so we is that being factored into the calculation into the into the into the assessment of how much money is being saved from the prior year on health insurance costs not sure I'm understanding but I know that because we had such a great savings and our health insurance premiums this year increasing only point zero six it made us made it possible for us to transition these positions into the general fund I guess I assume that those were individually reflected in each budget under employee benefits health care health care yes but you're talking about the position I guess I'm curious about the question yeah I know it's just a question of how to think about a position that it is is administering the health insurance budget and what what that if that was an expense that was originally being borne previously being borne by the self insurance plan and is now being borne by the town and the total cost of our insurances premiums were our share of the premiums plus that position correct I don't think there's too much else we can say on this point just to understand that next is the facilities budget can I just ask the the we're bearing the town is now directly paying the full cost the person has is no longer doing the claims related costs so there was other work that there was for that person to do right they're still monitoring the claims they're still doing all the billing they're still enrolling people they're still making all the changes they're still doing everything they were doing it's just it just wasn't cut it's covered we're no longer the insurance company now which is basically what we were we were paying premiums to our health insurance trust to pay all of this now we're paying Maya but we're not paying them for some of the stuff that's still being done in-house George is kind of near this budget to and he kind of got thrust into this so I can I can talk on the changes and if there's any there is no changes in the facilities budget actually I was looking through it there's no increases to the operating budget but I also I wanted to point out that we're expecting increased cost and utilities for fiscal year 20 we didn't make any adjustments in this year but later on in the year if we don't have enough savings some other areas we may be asking for supplemental appropriation but this is very early in the game and I can't say we'll be doing that for sure I just wanted everybody to be aware and George is our new facilities director I'm not sure what the change what the changes were I figure the town manager could elaborate on that a little more yeah I can do that so when our previous facilities director we know moved on we worked with the library to secure George to work part-time at the library part-time for the town so we have a shared position now which gave enhanced responsibilities to George and by combining two positions we were saving some funds in the in the meantime so George's responsibility now includes continuing work at the library plus overseeing the maintenance staff for the town he's been doing a really terrific job and we really appreciate him taking on the new responsibilities and we also appreciate Sharon Sherry for being open to having the conversation with us we are able to keep them whole by giving them some additional maintenance support in terms of just day-to-day cleaning and we are able to utilize George's higher level of of skills to oversee some of the major project larger projects that we have coming in through the town's facilities and the town's facilities include town hall banks community center police department months in library North Amherst school I guess pretty much captures most of the buildings that were responsible for I lied there is some savings in the facility's budget from the staff turnover of a little over $15,000 so the increase in the utility costs that are projected is because of just energy cost projections of what we would need to pay yes I'm right to the point yes yeah I do have a related question that is truly I don't know the town manager and instructor have gotten into this question yet but we're getting we've had this discussion about developing our new buildings as being zero energy and increasing opportunities to do things within existing buildings to take advantage of solar and other opportunities and I was curious whether there's any thought has been given as to how we are going to measure and report the effects of those kinds of changes whether there's going to be any way that we can really determine whether the zero energy bylaw for example has after it's an operation has achieved its goals well we can certainly measure the kilowatt hours that we're using and that translates into actual dollars that are being saved so if we start to implement energy savings into any building we we track all that all the energy usage by building and I think that goes into the larger calculation that Stephanie Chikarello has done previously in terms of our total carbon footprint and the amount of energy that we use as a town that will also be relevant as the climate and no excuse me energy and climate action committee starts establishing and recommending to the council to establish goals for the council so it's similar tracking it's not the same it just it looks like you can also track to the extent it's not that I know that we're doing that much but if we insulated the buildings better or made them more weatherproof that we're using less oil gas you know some of the other utilities that wouldn't just be kilowatt hours you know just I see you're tracking each so we'd be able to see dollar-wise that our cubic feet wise that we were you have something Dave I was just gonna add that George and I will be working closely with Stephanie Chikarello to do assessments of all of our existing buildings we have some funding through the green communities grants and we'll be applying for more of that funding to complete those assessments because really you need to be able to compare kind of apples and oranges what what are we currently doing what is a building drawn on energy in previous years and then through improvements to energy efficiency both through insulation new heating systems etc we can then kind of compare where we are today to where we could be if we enhanced for instance insulation at the Munson library or put solar on the police station all of those things George and I will be working on looking with our building commissioner with our staff and in particular through Stephanie I think it'd be it's important for the community as a enterprise to make sure that what we think we're saving is actually there it is a savings but I think it's also important for the council who's going to have a great interest in raising these questions we'd be prepared to answer questions that are likely to arise yeah given this I think it was that I read that this spring is the wettest spring since they began keeping weather records has water and is has this been causing any problem with town buildings nothing of significance as of yet but we are watching it and I can't say like the Jones building parts of the basement typically are wetter than normal but I haven't seen anything significant as of yet anything else okay turn back to you I think I'm done okay I wanted to say thank you to everybody for being so patient and it's been a pleasure working with you this year and I look forward to another year thank you I think it goes the other way thank you for your patience with us no I was just saying thank you also I Sonya has been fabulous to work with thank you and your all your department head yeah I appreciate all the finance staff have come today and you and prior presentations done such a great explanation of the work that your department does we appreciate what all of you are doing every day for the town and the education that you provided for the council to help us understand the important functions that we need to understand fully and here all of you thank you markets up next for the town clerk and yeah so I just want to mention one last thing David Burgess who's here has announced his retirement but we will have David to kick around because hopefully he'll be holding on for a couple you know an apart time basis going forward so he's already been thinking about the classification hearings for next fiscal year and so he's all still contributing on a daily basis so okay earlier Paul mentioned the significant amount of work that has shifted to the town clerk's office you'll see the town clerk and elections and registration budgets on page 38 to 43 of the budget book overall the town clerk's department 1161 has increased by 0.3 percent or $1068 for next year elections and registration shows a $5075 increase or an 8% increase and that's due to elections that I will explain chair Steinberg finance committee members madam president council members thank you for giving me an opportunity to share the town clerk department's FY 19 accomplishments and challenges and anticipated FY 20 challenges from a budget perspective on February 6th along with others I briefly introduced the council to the town clerk's department responsibilities it bears repeating that many other responsibilities of all Massachusetts city and town clerks regardless of the municipalities demographics excuse me focus on the population whether in its entirety or as a voting population for voting purposes I certainly don't need to inform you what you already know that Amherst has a highly mobile population that it is similar to just a handful of other Massachusetts municipalities and that serving this unique population requires sufficient staffing resources the FY 19 town clerk budget funded three full-time positions the clerk the assistant clerk and a management assistant this has been unchanged since the funding for a part-time position was removed from the budget several years ago the recommended FY 20 budget again includes funding for three full-time positions in the coming year in addition to my department's mandated routine duties including but not limited to annual census vital records registration and issuance passports dog and other licensing and permitting etc we will conduct two elections one in November for all elected local officials other than the council and the other a march 2020 presidential primary which by all accounts is going to draw significant voter interest it is entirely possible then that the law is going to allow for early voting for all state elections if not state and local elections federal census day is April 1st 2020 as with prior to senile census processes and is required by the job description the town clerk is going to be needed to assist in the coordination of the process locally and will then represent the town in the redistricting process throughout FY 20 the town will likely proceed in earnest with the ranked choice voting initiative directed by charter section 10.10 in order to implement our CV in time for the 2020 state primary and the presidential election as the chief elections official the town clerk must be an active participant throughout the entire process charter section 10.12 also directs that the council and manager investigate lowering the voting age for town elections which the legislature is also looking at and permitting non-citizens to vote in town elections and to seek and hold town elective office. The nature of these initiatives will also require active participation by the town clerk as the chief elections official. I'm probably the smallest piece of the general government budget but I'll probably be the department head that speaks the most and I have to say first of all that I appreciate the many many conversations I've had with Paul about the shift in work duties to the clerk's office. FY 19 has been extremely intense and challenging year for the department to say the least. From the double elections in September and November to the governmental transition at the beginning of December my department's two employees and I have been thoroughly immersed in town clerk work and since December have added town council support duties. Since being appointed as clerk of the council my daily work has shifted almost entirely to the town council and I'll speak a little bit more about that later. Since August 1st when I came back to town I've earned more than 100 hours of additional compensatory time with more than 60 of those hours to council support. Athena O'Keefe full time management assistant in the town clerk's office and the town's only passport acceptance agent yes that service is high in demand has earned over 30 hours of compensatory time and 28 hours of overtime since December 1 to help me with council duties. Additionally part-time extra help needed to assist the department while Athena and I do council related work has totaled 176.5 hours since December 1st. Make no mistake I am honored to have been appointed the first clerk of the first elected town council in the town of Amherst. Personally my work in support of the council has been both challenging and rewarding. The governmental transition has been a new experience for everyone and frankly the amount of work the council president counselors the town manager myself and many others have dedicated to the council success has been unprecedented. It has taken a monumental team effort led by the manager to coordinate all administrative duties in support of this transition. After nearly six months however it has become clear that the level of staff support the council will require on an ongoing basis cannot be sustained by one person this person who has additional full-time duties. Since the council's establishment I've dedicated the vast majority of my regular work hours and all of my additional hours to accomplishment accomplishing as much as I can to support the council as its clerk. However it has been at the expense of some other important responsibilities to my full-time town clerk position and my staff regrettably. Many of my town clerk duties including vital records registrations ethics and OML compliance and others have shifted to SUA debt the assistant town clerk. I've had to delegate some clerk of council duties I'm unable to accomplish in my regular and additional hours including drafting the full council's minutes for council approval updating records of orders and votes and occasional meeting preparation and coverage to Athena during her regular clerk work hours when we have extra help in the office and during additional overtime hours when we don't. My staff and I regrettably again are straining to complete some town clerk duties in a timely manner such as public records compliance which which we're on sometimes by the skin of our teeth but we're on it and managing voter registration files and others other other tasks the responsibilities cannot be completed currently such as month-end records management processes and updating permanent records including those relevant to prior town meetings and elections. I simply ask and Paul has already noted this that there is a recognition for a staffing needs moving forward I simply ask that the council remain cognizant of its staff support needs moving forward so that a long-term sustainable solution the council deserves and requires can be funded and implemented meanwhile we'll endeavor to support the council to the best of our collective ability. Thank you. Don't don't believe quite yet but some of the questions that follow up will go to the guy sitting to your right arm our left of you because the budget proposal for that you've given to us Mr. Bachman does not propose any addition for this department and we're talking about a budget year that begins on July 1 and runs till June 30 next year is our is there any capacity to address the issue that was just raised and I think that all of us have probably thought about to some extent. It's not included in this budget. We were stretching to stay within our budgeted amount for this year. So there weren't extra funds to be allocated. It is something that I felt like we needed to figure out where the status point was going to be for the for the council because I feel like the first 6 months is going to be intense. We all understood that it could be the first 9 months. I would like to revisit this in the fall after Labor Day sort of sense. What is the what is the expectation of the council are we going to have as many meetings going forward as we have scheduled recently. I mean you're meeting 2 and 3 times a week. And so until I understand what that is going to look like going forward. I wasn't going to propose a new new position and if I were to propose a new position is going to be at the expense of what other position really because we're a position heavy organization. Appreciate that. And I think that I'm going to turn to other members of the committee in just a second. I see that there are other hands up. I'm not ignoring you. The question that you've raised I think is important when I don't know if you have any speculation. I think all of us are speculating to some extent is to what our second year is going to be like as a council and whether we've been incurring our time in your time and Paul's time and because we are in transition and learning or and whether it will change as we gain familiarity with what we're doing or not. I'm not sure that I have an answer. But that is a thought that I think is in all of our minds and sounds like you're thinking along similar lines and I've recognized how much of a strain it's been. So I was going through the budget. I was very curious whether we were going to have to be thinking about additional positions for your office. But as one member of the council, I want to just say how much I appreciate what you've done for us and it has just been tremendous in getting us to where we are. So I thank you. I'm gonna recognize my colleagues on the committee starting to my right and then go in a full circle so that everybody has a chance to speak before we go on to other topics and start to learn. So during the budget process was I was asked by the town manager to look at a new line item which is called town council. I specifically raised the issue of the town clerk's office and I'm still very concerned and feel that going to a year round government has not only increased the burden on both the town manager and the town clerk's office but has raised the expectations of the public to a point that we then have to turn to you for those responding to that expectation. Expectations of videos of meetings we never used to video that didn't even exist. Expectations of minutes of meetings. Expectations that you know in some of the new rules that are being proposed that we post votes which I know we did with town meeting but it was only the vote. It wasn't the minutes. So those kinds of expectations are not just because we're starting up but they're because we have a public that is watching and at the same time we have the pressure of people saying oh look at this town council look how much it's costing us. Well you know what I hate to tell you I figured out how much I earn an hour and you don't want to know and you're coming close to that. So as much as I hear what the town manager is saying and we'll wait till September I want to make sure that we don't lose sight of that that we really do need to revisit this. We don't know what a second half of our year will look like. We don't know we don't expect another year like six months like this because we're making up making it up as we fly the plane as one of our counselors regularly says but I do at the same time want to voice another serious concern and that is the decennial census is no small deal. 140 some federal funds depend on our census council and who enter a decennial census year without some assistance to the town clerk's office I think is jeopardizing our own take on federal dollars. So I only I want this to be looked at from at least those two perspectives as we go forward. Thank you. And and let me just say if I hadn't had you to call on I wouldn't have known what to do. Thank you. So I'm building on everything Lynn said. I think it's great you're tracking the OT and Compensatory time and that you should be doing it for you and because we may already be paying for one whole person extra it's just it's out of your two you know working around the clock so I mean trying to think of quantifying that and I I understand that adding a person brings on since I used to work in the private sector like there's a fringe benefit side to you know working people extensive overtime saves costs rather than another but I think we need to be looking at we're incurring some of that anyway and any shirking of tasks you really need to do that aren't just counsel we shouldn't be treading over that line. I have a question and a point right now I think Goodwill reigns I think the public at least those who communicate with me are pleased with the council. So I think this is the time to add a staff person. The workload is not sustainable. We are extending time and effort beyond anything we thought we would have to do. We're doing it. We expected to get a little bit better but it's not going to go away and there's the understanding that if we just get through this intense first part then we'll be able to do some kind of a manageable thing. So it's both burnout on the town of the terms of the town staff burning out and it's burnout on counselors. If we want to encourage people to participate and run for office and I don't think we're all going to run again in 3 years then the job has to seem like something that a regular human being can do while perhaps having a job in a family. So we need more help. We need help with minutes and I think we need it now and I think what Lynn said about the census and the elections and the craziness that's normally part of the town clerk office is it's very big. Now that's my statement. My question is comp time is dealt with differently in different places. In some places if you're called management you don't get money. You're told oh you just get a bigger vacation sometime in the future. How is it dealt with here? That applies here to management positions. Yes. So that means that you work very very hard. You don't get paid anything extra and you don't have time to take the time. I've managed to find a few slots of time to do what I enjoy in life which is beyond work. So that does apply and comp time would be credited to any kind of leave that I take. I want to clarify. I appreciate all your comments and I want to clarify my comments or my statement. Paul and I have had many conversations. I know from my prior career I do understand the budget process and I do understand where some of his concerns lie. My intent was not to say I want an additional person now. My intent is to say think about the future. Think about what the council needs in the future and then plan accordingly. I know Paul is thinking about this and I support that. I just wanted to make sure that that was clear to the council. So comment and question. Comment is just it's very heartwarming and inspiring to see all of you all working so well together and I feel really proud to be part of this town council where we have a team of people who are so supportive and you know it was really amazing. So congratulations. And my question was about ranchways wooding. I don't know if you mentioned that already about the machinery. Do we need that? That's going to be beginning in earnest with interviews being held in the very, very near future for ranked choice voting commission and the clerk is going to have to play a critical role in that entire in the ranked choice voting rollout. So that's going to be another process in addition to the federal census process and everything else that's coming in the coming. That's going to be happening in the current coming year. So I was glad that you brought that up because I was actually going to be my next question which is really going to get into voting. So I'm going to come to it and then get since we're now there it is about the voting machines. Our voting machines are getting kind of up there in age anyway. And so you know there's a question of what is the remaining life of the current voting machines and how to rank choice voting and then I think the other pieces from the JCPC side. I think we put it's in the long range capital plan probably needs to be in the long range capital plans. So it's not it's not planned for FY 20 it's planned for FY 21 I believe. So any kind of machine purchase would be not in the coming year I don't believe it would be in the following year where the machines would first be implemented in the fall of 2020. To the current voting machines they are I don't want to say they're on life support they do require an awful lot of maintenance after some of them are I believe well some of them we had when I was here last so I left in 2003 and so they are I was here when we changed voting equipment when the town switched over from the big lever machines to the AccuVotes. So they are getting up there in age and not only that it's highly unlikely that the machines that we have now are going to be able to accommodate rank choice voting. That said this there are a couple of systems that the state has approved voting systems the state has approved that would be able to handle rank choice voting. So that's something that the commission is going to have to look at. Yeah. Do you believe that it's honestly feasible to implement it by the spring election? It wouldn't be the spring election it would be the fall elections of 2020. Oh okay thank you. At the earliest. And the voting machines are on the FY 21 capital plan. So we could purchase those in July 1. Yeah. I think because there's another question regarding elections and that is that we know that there's been a lot of anxiety amongst the elementary schools about continuing on as voting sites and whether there any time factors that you need to work into your workload or capital costs that need to be put into the capital cost side as that question is being addressed. Well and I have talked about this numerous times as well polling locations potentially centralizing some polling locations to align with the five with the five districts and many other options. We do understand there is a concern with the elementary schools. We also have a number of polling places that just simply are not are not adequate. One of our precincts operates in the Bay of a fire station. We have another that has a lot of accessibility issues and others with parking issues and that's something that's on our radar and we'll continue to discuss. Just looking at my committee to see Paul. Just you know one of the things we have talked about is some communities have just one location for the entire town. So you go to one location all you still have the precincts as required but it's in one centralized location where there's adequate parking there's adequate staffing everything is in one location. So that's one of the solutions that is an option for the town whether that would be acceptable to the council or not is another question. I'm trying to imagine where that could possibly be. So the I want to make sure that as we thank you for everything we also thank Paul and Sonia who I think and Sean sitting there over here dealing with all of our technology problems. This has been a challenging year. Transitions in government are not easy and the requirements of the charter added things to the needs of government and yet the budget has not increased to accommodate those and I think that those that is part of what we're seeing is trying to squeeze it out from an existing budget that includes things like the community participation officers of the additional work to you the additional work to Paul. So the change in the financial cycle and I think that as we look at the budget we have to look at that because the people of the town voted for that. Thank you all. Thank you. So if we're switching to IT I just remind everybody that that's go backwards in your book to page 35 if you want to get to the right place. I can keep mine a lot quicker. So the significant changes. Excuse me are mostly around personnel. We had our network system administrator who was half police department and half IT is now entirely IT. So that's why you see the increase of half a position in IT. We also had a shift in our community communications manager Brianna who's still funded entirely out of IT. But she is half essentially half community participation of their half IT. She's doing a lot of the web work and she's moved up to the mezzanine. So you see an increase of half. We essentially IT has the same number of bodies. The other exception or the other change is that Maria Rocker who is moving on as of tomorrow was also historically half IT. So she would provide some support for us in units. The other change in our budget is our operating increased about $18,000 or $18,000 as a result of licensing renewals. So all pretty much all the software that the town pays for or any department outside of school is captured in that light item. So that's why that increases across the different software packages. And that's why you see the increase there. That's what I got. Paul. So I do want to mention that as the world changed a few years ago about moving from purchasing software to software as a service. So our operations have switched as well to purchasing software as a service. A lot of those things were in individual budgets and independent individual departments were making pretty big decisions based on their operating budget because software as a service is an easy thing to start to take on versus a major capital thing. Capital investment in a whole new software package. So Sean has done a really good job of sort of capturing all that. We wanted to make sure all that was captured in the IT service. So there wasn't overlap in that there was a coherent decision making process when we were purchasing a software as a service because once you purchase something as a service, you're pretty much stuck with it. Even though it's a little bit every month, it's there for a long time because you're not going to switch up your operations again. So he's worked really hard with all the other department heads to bring that to try to centralize some of that stuff. The only thing I wanted to clarify is that the only change in salaries is moving the funding source from the police department from public safety to general government. It's been a position that's there. So if you look at the public safety budget, you'll see a .5 reduction. That's the IT person moving to the IT budget. We just thought it made sense to put it where it belonged. The applications manager, which is an adopted box. Yeah, could you talk about that? Yeah, that position shows up in a dotted box with .33. That position exists entirely within IT, but it's funded by water and sewer. Historically, that was a GIS administrator, which does a lot of support for water and sewer department. So water pays for sewer third and general government a third. So they do work on other applications and the identification of appropriate applications? Yeah, so that's Mike Warner. And so he exists entirely in IT, but is funded by water and sewer. Do we have, I know you have is an FY20 objective to install fiber optic network to replace Comcast, fiber INET. And that's really into the capital side of the budget for a large part. But the staff support, do we have the staff support that's needed for that? For the installation of the fiber, that's something that a contractor is going to do the majority of that. There will be some management of that by IT. I would say it's any more significant than some of the other projects that we take on in terms of staff time. I know that some people have raised the question of whether there is any town provided broadband capacity that could be added in there. And is that something that has been considered? It's something that can be considered. It changes entirely the process of getting on the polls. If we were to go on the polls as a service provider, we were to do that right now. We would have to negotiate with Eversource and Verizon to attach to the polls and where we are on the polls, which could potentially delay that with us putting the fiber up there for town use. We can use the existing municipal space that select board and now anytime there's a new poll that's put in, that would be town manager now, I believe. The agreement is that there's a certain amount of municipal space that we can be on that poll. So we can go up, essentially we can go up there without negotiating with Comcast and Verizon right now, or Verizon and Eversource right now. If we were to put it up there for to be a service provider would change that attachment and potentially delay us getting on the polls. So we can go up there. That being said, in the future, if we decided to look into doing that, we certainly can. So the decision we made was to move forward with replacing the INET as it is now, because we can just do it as of right. Down the road, if the town chooses to go into a municipal broadband, that gives us the opportunity to do it. It doesn't preclude us from doing that, but we didn't think that was something we thought the permitting process was going to be delayed. And by the time we got there, we have a deadline with Comcast to replace that on ARD, and they've given us money to do that. So we have to abide by that. And I guess my other question, and I'll say it with a hand, Dorothy, is the downtown public Wi-Fi, is that moving along or do we have the capacity within our current operation to correct those issues? Yeah, we're planning within the month of May, getting the bank center garage, the upper level of the bank center garage as a pilot, get two units up there, and then the plan is to do the rest in June, the rest of downtown, swap those out in June. Dorothy. This is about high speed internet. I think there's more than one way. I mean, what I say may be totally wrong, but I was just in Sunnyside, Queens, and there's a major project going on by a private company that is digging in the streets, boxing off all the trees, and you can't park in any of the streets. And I asked my friend who lives there what's happening. She said it's a company. It's not the city. The city is not paying for it. A company has gotten permission, probably paid money to the city, to dig up on the roads and the sidewalks to install it, but it would be up to individuals if they wanted to connect. She was not planning to connect. She was sticking with Comcast. But your situation here is that the town puts it in if it's going to happen, or how's that go? So as of right now, if somebody wanted to come and compete with Comcast, they could. If Verizon wanted to offer BIOS to residents, they could. Yeah. I think Verizon makes a decision based on population and essentially, can they get enough subscribers here to make money off of it all? It all comes down to whether there's money in it for them or not in the same way that Amherst has one cable provider, Comcast, there's nothing that prevents another cable provider coming in and negotiating to be up on the poles as well. But there's such a cost to that that essentially Amherst isn't big enough for Charter to come here and compete with Comcast. So there's nothing preventing another vendor coming in from doing that. And it's one of the things that after we get past getting our fiber installed and everything, then it probably will make sense at that point to start looking into if it doesn't make sense for the town to offer some service or try and leverage something we have to offer service over that. I don't know if that answers your question. I don't really need you to give me a long answer on this one, but observing in some places in Vermont where multiple towns have been together on the more community, what you said, become a service provider, would we at some point, once we've done our INET negotiations for the town, is it a difficult, a lot of time to explore the potential benefits of regional or other towns? Because some don't have any services. Their only route is to bring something in. So it's sort of a scale issue. Do we get to a point where we could do it for less money for all the town people if we did it as a larger group? Yeah, that's certainly a possibility. You'll see when Leverett did it, they had Hoyo Gas and Electric come in and provide part of it and they have Crocker as a private internet service provider, essentially providing, Hoyo Gas and Electric provides a pipe, Crocker provides a service, does the billing, Crocker is who you call for support if your iPad can't connect to your Wi-Fi, those kind of things. Something like that is certainly an option. There's a lot of things that could be looked at at that point. Anything else on IT that anyone wants to ask? We really appreciate all that you've been doing for the council to get us up and going and to answer our questions and provide us with support that has enabled us to really dig into the work and not have to think about the pieces. So thank you for all that you've done for us. Thank you. Thanks for support and patience with me and my staff. Thank you. So are we ready for Dave to take over? So to remind people, when you're looking at your budget book, get to page 84 for conservation, 87 for planning and 90 for inspections. Oh, great. Thank you very much. Pleased to be here. Joined by Rob Mora and Christine Brestrup. Happy to come talk with you about conservation and development. We like to talk about this area as a functional area. We believe it works very well together. We brought together a team of professional staff that work very well together, serve the community, our developers, our citizens, our residents. And today we're just going to talk a little bit about what we do and answer your questions. I think I'll ask Christine to begin and then Rob and then we'll end with conservation. I think just looking ahead to the next fiscal year, overall, you know, we're excited to be working with the town manager, with the council, with the CRC, the ECAC on the shared goals that we are all embracing for the community. So that's our job and we're excited to be working with all of you and the town manager and the rest of the council on those shared goals. So I'll turn it over to Christine. Hello. I'm Christine Brestrup, Planning Director, and I'm happy to be here with you today. I wanted to just tell you a little bit about our department, sort of reiterating some of the high points that we talked about last time. We have a staff of five people in the Planning Department, Planning Director, two senior planners, one associate planner, and an administrative assistant. We share a permit administrator with the Inspection Services Department. We're governed by state laws and regulations, and we're also governed by town by-laws, regulations, and standards. We provide support for or act as staff liaison to many of the boards and committees in town. And I won't list them all, but including some of the highlights would be the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, Design Review Board, the Community Development Block Grant Advisory Committee, Historical Commission, Local Historic District Commission, and on and on. One of our primary activities is to provide support for boards and committees that are land use permitting boards. These are primarily the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals, and the Historical Commission. Another thing that we work on is projects, and we have a long list of projects. We shared some of them with you last time, but just to remind you, Graf Park is one of them. They're working on Graf Park improvements right now. We worked on the design and planning for that project. The Dog Park, which is a project that's coming up and we'll get some highlights in probably sometime in mid-June. Downtown and Village Center Planning. We're working on sign projects with way-finding signs as well as writer's walk signs, and soon-to-be recreational area signs. We have a big flood mapping project that's coming to an end, I hope, soon. Historical projects funded by CPAC, and we've also worked on a Bicycle Pedestrian Network Plan with Pioneer Valley Planning Commission. We've helped the Amherst Municipal Housing Trust with their project on the East Street School trying to get affordable housing there. We're hoping to start an ADA, Americans with Disabilities Act transition plan soon. We have a plan already, but we need to update it. We also work on grant writing and administration of those grants, among many other things. We're also committed to reaching out to the community to educate community members about what we do to explain zoning bylaws and other regulations to inform people about town projects and provide information about private projects that are going through the permitting process. We welcome community members to call us or come in to meet with us to ask questions about projects and applications. We try to put information online as much as we can. We hold frequent community forums to get input from the community on projects that we're working on, such as Improvements to Graf Park and the latest one that we are working on, which is the possibility of establishing a 40-yard district somewhere in town. In addition, we have a wealth of information about things that are going on in town, both online and in our department. So some of the next steps that we'd like to take for our future would be to work with you all and the planning board to review the master plan, which we started to do last week, and then decide about whether we wanted to update it at this point. Another thing is to rewrite parts for all of our zoning bylaw, and I know that's something that you're all interested in. We also want to engage the community in our ongoing projects, such as work on the community field, which is over by the high school, planning for our village centers, building projects that we've already planned, such as we hope eventually to build the North Common Improvements, applying for more grants and finding support for future projects, and collaborating with other town departments, particularly the DPW, on project review and implementation so things can run smoothly. So some of the highlights of our FY20 budget are that our staff has essentially stayed the same in terms of the number of people over the past year. However, we've had some changes. We recently lost an administrative assistant to the building commissioner, who hired him to become the new license coordinator to work with the licensing commission. But we've gained an administrative assistant who has a wide range of experience with the health department and also inspection services. Her salary as a result of her longevity and experience is higher than the previous administrative assistant. So that's added about $10,000 or $12,000 to our budget. We're very happy to have our new staff member and she's very well organized and she's an asset to the planning department. You'll probably see her on television because she comes to the planning board meetings. Our challenges in the coming year include helping town council to create our new form of government, including establishing processes for updating the master plan and amending the zoning bylaw. Responding to the increasing complexity of private development applications, many of them are unusual in their scope and unusual in their presentation. And also in responding to the public permit review process. We also need to redistribute our workload among our staff members to be able to accommodate the needs of our type of government. So we look forward to working with you as we plan for the future of Amherst and I hope that you will come to ask us questions when you need to and find out information from us. Thank you. So, let's do this plan, Kathy. I'm going to try to quickly organize my thoughts starting with, I live in North Amherst and I'm a district one counselor so I'm looking at the future plans and thinking in several projects that I know have been in the works and that are collaborative. So replanning the way the roads flow and thinking about the intersection. So I've never quite understood the extent to which planning, conservation and DPW work together on thinking about what all of that would look like in terms of flows of people, flows of cars, future development. So anticipating what's going to be happening and not just responding to what's going on now. And so I don't completely know that. And then the other piece is where community input would be useful as opposed to you've already got some helpful. So for example, when we went to an MMA recent meeting on economic development the state said if you're going for a mass works grant if you can get some testimonials attached of entities that might not otherwise venture in because of traffic concerns and flow concerns, it's helpful. So before it happens and we're facing an after it happens issue but it looks like there's a lot of interest. So it's just that understanding that collaborative process and thinking forward. So I think we work pretty well with the DPW. I attend most of the Transportation Advisory Committee meetings so I keep up on what they're doing. They have a recent report that's been prepared by CDM Smith about the traffic issues in North Amherst particularly with regard to that intersection of Montague Road and Cinderland Road as well as the intersection of Pine Street Meadow and North Pleasant. I think that the TAC Transportation Advisory Committee will be looking at that next week at their Wednesday meeting. They're going to be taking an initial look at that and then thinking about where they want to go with it. We did have a series of planning forums back a number of years ago that some of you participated in and we zeroed in on one configuration for the intersection up there but we think it's going to take a further look and we want to reintroduce people to that project and bring people together to get your input. So we are working collaboratively with DPW and we will be working with conservation as well because we'll be crossing there are two river crossings up there. So if there's any disturbance of wetlands or river bank or anything like that the conservation department will have to be informed and involved. We are also hoping to have $40,000 to hire a consultant to start thinking about a little bit more in depth about the planning process for that area exactly where would various uses go what would sidewalks look like what might we do for streetscapes and that would all involve public participation to really zero in on what is it going to look like and what are people going to be able to do there. That's not something that's going to be solved by the DPW alone that's going to be solved by planning DPW and conservation and the public all coming together. That's very useful and the issue that came up this weekend just as an example is the development opens up and the bridge finally opens up to be able to exit. There's a concern that because the intersection is still as crowded as it is, summer and the other streets will become the speedway to avoid the intersection and it's a small street very residential with a lot of kids on it that's what I'm thinking like thinking of this is potentially going to happen so how do we either as it starts to happen what do we do about it so that we don't create a problem and not have a potential way of working on it until we get alarms raised. I know you're already looking at the intersection at 116 as the new marijuana facility opens up and you can't walk across the road there's not a pedestrian crossing so someone alerted people about a wheelchair to get across which is not it's that whole area which was built for horses and buggies not crowds so trying to think what all of that feels like. So I think we are going to be focusing on that in the next year or two and it's a very important area that's receiving a lot of attention various landowners up there have future plans for development of their properties and so things will be changing up there and we recognize that and there are a lot of things coming together at this one time and so it is certainly on our radar screen and there are conversations going on about that. Paul. Just on that intersection the meadow street north meadow street 116 intersection that is a state intersection it's not a town intersection and so it is something that they are monitoring. It's all part of this picture and I didn't mean to don't just an oriary but I think this anticipating when when the housing stock or development changes everything else changes too and we tend to change the other things after the fact just because of the they are not always can't be planned at the same time. One thing that I was thinking about as I was reading the budget preparation for today's meeting and then you touched on it too is that you mentioned in the budget the housing production plan and the need to update the housing production plan and there is also mention of the master plan and a much more complete and well appreciated presentation to the community resources committee which you talked about the amount of expense that's involved in that process as well as your own staff time and have they been factored into future budget planning and I think the other question that is a more general piece is to when and how do you make the decision to seek a consultant to assist you as opposed to taking something on in-house? So consultants really are very helpful in bigger projects that require a lot of public input one of the things they offer is they have experience in a lot of different cities and towns that they can bring to bear on our particular town and its issues they also are neutral I won't say bystanders they're neutral participants they don't have anything to gain positive or negative from the outcome of a project and so they tend to be more people tend to look at them with more trust I guess I would say what they're doing is completely neutral they don't have an axe to grind one way or another and so it's really their experience and their neutrality that I would say is particularly useful especially in a planning project where there are going to be people who disagree about a potential outcome Anything else on planning? Okay thank you Chris I appreciate it Rob more a building commissioner talk a little bit about inspection services we have our core programs having to do with building plumbing electrical permit and oversight of inspections we also have the management of the environmental health programs so that can be anything from restaurant related license and permitting to livestock or tobacco many other licenses across the town code enforcement so that is where we are managing and overseeing the residential rental property permitting and registration program zoning enforcement and general application of the zoning bylaw and then new to us this year is licensing so all those licenses that were previously issued by the select board town managers office have moved into inspection services and as Chris mentioned earlier we created a position this year called the licensing coordinator who is handling the processing of all those applications and along with myself working closely with the board of license commissioners to create rules, regulations, policies, guidelines and update all the license permit and applications one other thing we do we are responsible for an inspection services but don't actually perform the work overseeing the weights and measures program so we do engage and hire the city of North Hampton's inspector to do that work we collect fees and monitor the status of those inspections here but everything else is done in the field by the North Hampton inspector some of the recent projects that our inspectors have completed this past fall included the Amherst College Science Center which is a very large project the completion of one East Pleasant Street was last fall as well some of the current projects that we're working on include North Square that's 130 units with about 20,000 square feet of commercial space and then University Drive is one of the other larger projects that's another mixed use 36 units for affordable under construction right now looking this year couple projects coming up that we expect to start is the mixed use building Spring Street and also Aspen Heights was previously in front of the zoning board for an amendment to their proposal and have indicated that as long as their settlement follows through as expected they intend to be in construction this year as well so we're looking at those two possible starts some of the challenges as I spoke about this year is really working on that licensing we're trying to focus how to incorporate that into our department and provide a good complete service to the applicant who is also visiting our department for probably many other things so just trying to create that coordination between the various inspectors across the department and administrative staff as well as providing the support that the Board of License Commissioners needs to create their we are hoping for a permitting program to be purchased this year we've been told this is something that is one of IT's projects and they are in sounds like maybe the final stages of selecting a vendor so we're really excited about that our program right now does not provide the efficiency we need to issue all the licenses and permits we have is pretty limited on some of the field so we're looking forward to seeing that come together this year as far as our budget itself goes really the only thing worth noting is the increase in the full time health staff line item and that was a result of a most of that was a result of a vacancy of one of our entry level administrative positions taken by a staff person from another department who had longevity in the town which accounts for a significant amount of that increase so happy to answer any questions yeah I I know there's actually a question over here I was interested in the comment about the needing to update our software I thought Munus did everything in the world but I guess the answer is Munus does a lot of things in the world but not everything but I did see that on both the IT side and your side question that I had is that on page 90 where the status update of the objectives is listed one was to establish a policy relating to bed and breakfast licensing pending state code changes and is it strictly bed and breakfast or does that apply to other types of short term rentals other than traditional hotel and motel businesses that is strictly bed and breakfast and that's referring to there was mainly our sanitary codes our health codes that define when or when a license by the health department is needed that is something that has been unclear up until recent change in the state regulation state sanitary regulations as far as defining the number of rooms or the number of guests that would stay and when where the trigger is and there's always it was always difficult to respond to the larger bed and breakfast that are in the community when there was this unclear threshold of when the smaller establishments should have licenses so we feel like we were able to clarify that now with the change that occurred and be provide clear I guess advice to applicants and how to deal with licensing both on the health and zoning triggers which are different are there any burdens that fall on inspections because of other kinds of the housing side of the rentals the Airbnb's the VRBO or home away kinds of things in the housing side of BNB's so we respond to complaints we respond to every complaint that's made unanimous or a written complaint called in whatever it might be and there are a handful of complaints that end up being an Airbnb whether or not it's actually a bed and breakfast serving breakfast is always the question we're trying to define it but an Airbnb application could be parking could be just the different type of activity that's occurring that has a butter asking or inquiring about it so we do respond to those we have I guess within staff my recommendation is that that's a good enough reason to consider licensing them in the future in probably not much different way than we do with the residential rental properties now in fact there's a way to work that nicely into that bylaw I think for short-term rentals but of course we're just beginning that conversation now yeah the I was curious whether there are any costs that you've noticed associated that are not covered by fees and fines no I don't think there I would be able to say that there's costs associated with it there are some number of them there it's not a large number that I would be able to associate with those types of uses and unless we were to ever get into a a mandatory inspection program I don't think there would be any recognizable cost I'm mixing agenda items on our agenda a little bit I know but I just want to recognize that because you're here because we are later going to have to talk about the question as to whether a community impact fee is something that we would recommend is justified and recommended and so I was looking to see about the community impact question from your perspective generally in my last question that I was going to turn to my colleagues on the committee too have you done any just general revisiting of what we're charging now in our fees and levying and fines to know whether they ought to be revised because we're not entitled to use it as a profit enterprise but on the other hand we are entitled to have fees to meet the costs of providing service and have any of the fees been re-evaluated recently so we do look at the fees schedule every year we're preparing the budget I didn't feel like there was a need to recommend any increase I think because of what our overall receipts are for the department I think it does become questionable where breaking down where additional fees would be justified so I didn't make any recommendation in that area I do have moving forward suggestions on ways that the rental bylaw specifically could see improvements and how to deal with repeat offenders and make them a little bit more responsible for fees moving forward and maybe the rest of the applicants less responsible and so a different type of structure but nothing that is on paper yet or been presented that's a perfect segue to what I was going to ask I've heard more than once from more than one area that we have often rental properties that there are potentially unsafe conditions crowding conditions violations and otherwise and I know you respond to complaints so one of the questions was was there a way of gradating the fee that you charge for rental to have there's the regular fee and then if you do spot check inspections so it's not just respond and it's just got a clean record for 10 or 20 years they get what I call regular and if it's many response problems they get a warning or there's a red green blue light or something and then they get a doubling of a fee and then they get a tripling something that says make it a bit more painful and at some point the license gets pulled and what I'm hearing is that some people are afraid to complain or it's cheap where they're living but they're living in pretty awful conditions and they're not sure they feel this is a multiple unit couple places that it's a place that they feel that they might lose their lease for the place so it would be easier to know and so I'll stop there but just give my own background is that some states did this with nursing homes where they had some periodic inspection and then they only went after the ones that were standing it was inspected by exception so not harass everyone and they would say let's go to the places that we know we've had problems with so it conserved and the fees paid for what might be extra inspection time so it's thinking that way about being kind to everyone who's running a great place and then being tough for them where you have mounting evidence over time yeah so and these things were discussed you know back in 2014 when we were creating the program what's great now is we have several years now of data of what's happening out there and where these situations occur so I think it is now appropriate to start to have those conversations and I think we can look at alternative types structures like that like you're mentioning now that we have this information I will say that the properties that raise concerns are very few in numbers when you look at the whole the total of the properties so it does present a challenge as far as maintaining the revenue for the program that we are collecting now because they're just aren't that many of those those properties that have the repeat or the and that's why I was thinking spot check and so you're not using a lot more people and you're targeting them and that was what states had to do with nursing homes they said 80% we're not having a problem 2% we better go there more frequently and we have that information now at least five years worth I will also add that you know the program still is very new but you can see in our in our service levels there's been a shift so it started off in the early couple of years where most of the complaints and violations had to do with zoning related items mostly because we were doing drive by inspections of these various properties and dealing with things like cars on the lawn or signs that type of activity it's shifted significantly to the majority of the violations are now code related which is your health and sanitary and building and fire codes and we are seeing a lot more more and more every year calls from tenants from parents of tenants from you know people who just you know friends and it's a little bit different than it was early on where we're not just responding to complaints from butters to the properties that have the issues so I think we're getting we're moving in the right direction. Yes I have a couple of questions about that too many people have complained that there are too many people in the apartments and I know that you have records that they say how many units or how many people they're supposed to have but the complaints say there's too many cars out there and they should go in and take a look and see why there's so many cars and often this is in areas where there's also too many cars parked on the streets that do not belong to the other homeowners so that is kind of like a spot inspection you have the paper that said you're going to provide four apartments or four people and there's eight cars out there do you ever do that, will you check it out? We do that all the time and you know that trying to prove the number of occupants in a unit can be very time consuming and difficult sometimes although we do have many cases where with the participation of the property owner or landlord that it gets resolved or at least temporarily gets resolved and what you're describing by that drive-by site visit is exactly what we do and take note of what we see and we'll do that multiple times over some period of time and if we see consistency in the vehicles that are there in the excessive number of vehicles then we go to the next step and that might be asking for the lease the bylaw allows us to require the lease the landlord and they're required to provide it to us so now we're seeing at least the paperwork is in line for the right number of occupants and then we start asking the landlord to do something to respond to this and ensure to us that the property is being properly managed and that their tenants are being educated the way they need to be educated about the number of occupants now we as this goes on for a long period of time in some cases collect enough evidence where we're in a position where now we could actually do something if we need to go and get some sort of a court order or do something as far as our own local enforcement 90% of the time it's resolved before that but sometimes we don't find enough evidence to really take the action any further and then the other question that people have asked me is I don't think you call it a three strikes rule but if somebody doesn't live up to what they said or what the law is a certain number of times something bad happens but if a landlord has registered has many different addresses and many different entities each one of those entities can be a separate count do you ever pull it all together so you actually know who really owns what building we generally know that with the cases that we're dealing with we do try to separate and look at the property and the issues that the property is having and not you know look at the property in light of what we might have dealt with in a different situation so they're not for enforcement purposes or penalties they're not combined but we are very much aware of the property owners that have multiple properties we will use them as examples with each other with the property owner when we're dealing with an individual as far as something that we might have dealt with on a different different location I do want to complete by saying that people have noticed an improvement a very definite improvement but there's still some stubborn cases here and there anything else on inspections so what is the timeline for getting permits I know you've mentioned there's a permitting program you're getting which is with the hope of improving the efficiency of the permits but what is the timeline and how we competitive with other towns I'm sorry the timeline for getting permits so we generally issue our permit we review and issue our permits within 10 days of receipt our building code regulation we have 30 days to respond we're much quicker than that the majority of them are reviewed we have such great staff that most of the applications are given to the building inspectors for review in a very complete way so all the materials are there a lot of the questions have already been answered the applicant is very well prepared so those applications get issued pretty quickly in any case we respond within that timeframe and sometimes the larger more complicated projects will produce a list of questions or additional information that's needed and then we wait for an architect or the contractor to respond to that so the related sort of related question regarding the health and safety laws how often are those reviewed can you imagine their new materials that are available now and might be more cost effective for businesses so how often do we look at these laws so health and safety laws are updated on some sort of schedule depending on which ones we're talking about for example the building codes are usually every three years fire regulations are every year health codes I mentioned earlier that there was a new code this year it's been a long time 20 plus years I don't even know exactly how it's been a long time since that was seriously looked at but generally most of our codes that we deal with are regularly updated anything else Karen I just I think you probably know this but building on Chelene's question there's a perception that we are slower to let a new business open up you know it just harder and a business that has the equivalent thing on a route 9 in Hadley and is now opening up on our part of it so and it's never been clear how to bring those to someone's attention because sometimes the people that are concerned don't want to say anything because they would like it just to go through you know so they're in the midst of it so how is there a way of you know getting a general sense of either the IT part of it of streamlining it of coordinating teams so that it's not team member one then two then three because there is that perception so right and I and I think what I was responding to I think is very different so that's that's very specific to a building permit application what I was you know what I was mentioning the time frames what you're talking about is includes a land use permit most likely could be a zoning board of appeal right and they're a new restaurant right so they've got a restaurant they bought and they want to continue doing something and they have to go back and get the permits for each piece of it or for an auto supply store you know just name and it's this is more coming from the business the side of things although residents will also tell you I'd rather not expand the front of my house because someone will know about it I can do a porch and back and then just do it like it takes too long so we have I mean we have a process in staff to be really proud of in this area so we have what you know it's called the permit administrator we created this position several years ago and that's the first point of contact for somebody unfortunately somebody that comes into the office sometimes has no idea the scope of what is needed for the various license and approvals and most of those have some sort of a timeline associated that's dictated by state law not by anything but locally here and to help them get prepared and go through that process and be successful with it does take time what's great is that we have staff here that is always willing to meet with that person no matter how many times it's needed and help them and guide them through that process but you're absolutely right there's lengthy process depending on what type of business is being looked at for opening it could be it could be lengthy some of them as many as 90 days this really does relate to our later agenda item but it also relates to the existing rental policies and that is talk about the extent to which the police DPW and inspections work together when the ongoing violations are identified we have now for I've been here seven years we when I came here we started what we call the joint inspections team so not only are our inspectors out there in the field together say we're looking at a fraternity inspection that we do twice a year that's done jointly with the fire department a health inspector and a building inspector we do that in all of our projects DPW you know we're in constant communication because of driveway permits and parking lot resurfacing we work with the police department we often attend roll call and we'll talk about some of the things to look out for when we're not here at night and they're working and where we can be helpful and they do the same so there's a great great amount of communication between the various departments with inspection services if I could just add something to the earlier response about complaints or concerns about our process I know that I've had a number of conversations recently with Paul and also Jeff Kravitz our economic development director so I think the bottom line is we've gotten better we can always improve any city or town can improve their process and we want to be open to feedback from the community from the bid from the chamber from individuals without that fear that there there might be a compromise permit in the future or something like that so we're looking at that we're talking about that internally how can we gather that input and apply it to some of the things we're doing Rob spoke about updating our software clearly that would be a major improvement for our process if Dave Zomek can fill out a roofing permit at home and send in his application and pay his fee get it reviewed by an inspector and have that without having to come into town hall that saves Dave Zomek or applicant ABCD from time and energy they might spend here so we're open to that we're open to looking at how our process may be improved so I think that's certainly something we're going to look at in 19 and 20 beyond well thank you that we can get to conservation sure I'll be very brief I'm conscious of the time and the time you you all have spent here today reviewing these departments so I sit in this unique position as assistant town manager and director of conservation and development it gives me the opportunity to work with wonderful folks like Rob and Christine and staff and planning and inspections and conservation it also affords me the opportunity to work at the direction of the town manager on special projects throughout town but I also directly oversee conservation department which is seated within this functional area as I said earlier I think we've done tremendous work to try to bring these departments together communication collaboration information sharing helps us serve residents developers new restaurants all the people we serve our taxpayers much better by having these departments all in one an inspector can walk across the room and talk to our wetlands administrator who can walk across 10 feet over and talk to an inspector who can talk to a senior planner about a project that's coming before a boarder committee so I think it makes a lot of sense we're improving it every day in conservation the main areas that we focus on our sustainability wetlands permitting and land management I won't go into a lot of detail you've heard a lot of presentations from us and other folks happy to take your questions at the end but I think for FY 20 we'll be focused on a number of different areas within those main categories under sustainability we know that the ECAC is kicked off clearly that is going to be a major focus point for the remainder of this year and well into the years ahead looking at how we can reduce our carbon footprint and achieve carbon neutrality. Stephanie Chickarello will continue to work to get green communities grants this is state funding that we can bring into our town to help with building assessments to help with building upgrades we are working very hard behind the scenes on our solar project at the north landfill Stephanie and I have been in the trenches shall we say on that for a number of years it is alive it is well and we believe we will be bringing that project to the town in the coming months so don't give up on that landfill solar it is coming maintenance and enhancement of town conservation assets so are my staff out in the field work both on conservation land which includes all of our 80 miles of trails as well as our watershed lands up in Shootsbury, Pellum parts of Belcher town and parts of Amherst so that is over 5000 acres of land that that staff manages they manage it for timber harvesting they manage it for rare and endangered species for the ecology of the area and of course they manage it for people I couldn't do a talk about next year without just touching on Puffer's pond and some of the changes were proposing up on State Street I have been working very closely with Gilford mooring our superintendent of public works and his staff on some really much needed changes up on State Street to make it safer make it more sustainable make it easier for people to access the pond in a reasonable way so you'll see those happening in the coming weeks and months we'll be working a lot on trails and parking and making our trails more accessible to people we'll be improving our bridges all of this of course is predicated on having funds to do that we submitted recently a very large grant with the Kestrel Trust was a wonderful partner out there in the community to improve the Robert Frost Trail which is our major trail used by both residents and through hikers and we really hope that that grant is going to bring much needed maintenance money for bridges and the trail within Amherst to us it will also pay if we get the grant for additional staff time so we're not just depending on the money we get from the town we're also always looking for grants and other ways to supplement our budgets and then finally we do have some pending acquisitions that I know you know about through the CPA dollars three very exciting potential acquisitions I would just highlight the Hickory Ridge Golf Course as probably the prize in all of that they're all spectacular but that one clearly stands out if that moves through the process and we acquire that it's a very exciting opportunity for the community to bring activity to many residents of East Adley Road that currently do not have access to green space and walking trails, hiking trails and picnic areas etc finally just in terms of our FY20 budget I'm grateful to the town manager and finance staff for some modest increases both in operating and capital on the operating side that will allow us some modest increases in summer staff we can't do it all alone I have 1.75 FTEs in the field so that's one and three quarter people to manage roughly 5,000 acres of land and 80 miles of trails so in the summer we hire high school students and college students to help us with that work so there's a modest increase there and then on the capital side I presented to JCPC some weeks back and talked about fixing some of the bridges we have very significant bridges you wouldn't think so but we've got some doozies and they're big bridges and we're not talking hundreds of dollars to fix them repair them some of them have been washed out by recent storms and a bridge might cost believe it or not 20,000 dollars 25,000 dollars to replace so some modest increases there so I think I'll stop there and take your questions thank you so I'm going to start with a general question or comment and then turn it into a question the comment is that page 85 where you we're listed as some of the accomplishments and objectives at the top of the page and then service levels at the bottom some of the things that have to do with new initiatives that are climate related sustainability related are not reflected in the service level and of the report and for future years I just just giving you some thought the one that sort of tripped my head immediately was bike share that you know I was curious to know whether how the bike share went the first years the numbers and certainly would like to be even more interested next year as to whether we have more bike share participation in the second year of operation unless we get that information to us so that was one a general comment the other thing getting back to bike share and I'll also ask it in relation to the dog park statistics and maybe if you can count the number of dogs that do whatever is that whether they're staffing or budget consequences to the bike share programs or the dog park that is coming online hopefully soon that we should be cognizant of in the budget process well I'll start with bike share I think the reality is that you know the town has devoted a significant amount of staff time to bike share both really in three departments one would be conservation another would be planning and the third would be DPW so at the very least we have dedicated staff time to helping to bring the grant money to the communities that participated in bike share and then to physically the program to be situated in Amherst so Stephanie Christine and Gilford mooring staff and I'm sure Tina Shen in the inspection services department also so around the edges there's a number of staff who have touched that program and brought that to them to us and the other communities we've tried where we can to not take on the capital costs of that program grant paid for some of those costs we've had some modest costs related to the installation of the bike share units and the physical infrastructure I certainly have asked Stephanie about some of the data some of the early responses we got and Chris may know better than I but we let's put it this way we hope for better data in year two than I think in year one because it was a little hard to tease out the Amherst data there's data for all the communities but it was a little hard to get the Amherst specific data on usage so we'll certainly press for that in the future your second question was related to dog park dog park so our goal is to be under construction with the dog park in the fall of this year so we would not see any usage of at the dog park until probably late spring early summer of 2020 so I don't anticipate there being much direct staff costs other than time for planning this year all of the construction costs all the building costs for the most part will be absorbed by the grant and CPA dollars certainly many departments will contribute to that including planning my time as well as some time from DPW but we're trying to minimize that and offload most of that and pay for it with the grants from the Stenton Foundation in the long run there will be some costs to that certainly Carol Hepburn's position as animal welfare officer will have a role in helping to manage some of the week to week or month to month activities there there is going to be a very active friends group coming out of the dog park task force and Jim Pistrang and others really hope that that friends group will do a couple of things one is that they will be kind of an on the ground eye every day every week every month there helping with cleanup with enforcement of rules and regulations and also fundraising so we'll be putting together a budget we don't have a budget for that probably until FY 21 which would be kind of the first full year of operation the park itself will sit for a number of months really will watch the grass grow because you can't let dogs and people on there right as that new grass is planted and growing you really need to try to leave it for perhaps the fall and spring of 20 before you let people on there or all that grass will be having grown for not so so we will look at some of the costs in FY 21 and beyond and I'll close the test saying with my understanding and only speak if I'm wrong that some communities have a system of charging fee for use of dog park that's not anticipated by our dog park committee they did look at that but the strong feeling was that this should be open without a fee to all at least initially and I think do some assessment after some years the Stanton foundation does in terms of the capital the Stanton foundation does allow for subsequent grants if they fund the design the construction they then allow you to apply in subsequent years for improvements or maintenance money for the park so I've already talked to the Stanton foundation reps and they're more than open for us coming back in future years if we need an enhancement or if something doesn't work or breaks or what not Kathy you had your hand I have two questions that are quite different from each other so I don't know whether I should ask one and give someone else time to ask another and come back but my first is related to how you make a strategic decision or with the town manager on a I want to dredge puffer pond I need some expensive trail maintenance where I'm not going to get a grant for it so I could go to CPA for some of this because it fits I also want to purchase more land for conservation so watching where the requests have come in and as we're ever tighter on the JCPC side of capital it occurred to me when I saw CPA there are a lot of opportunities for drawing on CPA funds to maintain conservation land or recreational areas that we always have so that kind of balancing out which source of funding if you haven't identified another source like you said Robert Frost might have another source which clearly would be great so that's my first question my second is can I answer that one? I'll come back to it maybe and everyone come around so I think I would start by saying we all know that land is finite so much land in the town of Amherst we have really tried in recent years since I've been here to simply prioritize there was a time when Amherst I think was actually believe it or not buying a lot more land than we are now for conservation purposes that was during the 70s and 80s when I think people were very afraid of subdivisions and sprawl and the town changing too much in one direction so now we really stick to our open space and recreation plan so we talked about this before under the master plan is the open space and recreation plan and I would encourage anyone to look at that plan look at those maps and see you can see very clearly that any acquisition that we propose is clearly identified as a priority area under the open space and recreation plan I think our program is winding down frankly and I think within the next three or four years we will be seeing a shift from acquisition requests to management requests and this is just a natural progression in any town or any organization that stops acquiring land but then needs to maintain it and I want to be crystal clear and I've said this many times but it's really important most of the money we need to spend on our land has to do with people so if we acquire 100 acres and we don't create any trails and we allow informal access that land really doesn't cost that much at all in direct costs but something like buffers pond something that has trails something that has a recreational component then all of a sudden you're talking maintenance you're talking bridges you're talking tree limbs you're talking tree removal when a big storm goes through and we have 100 trees fall over trails that takes a lot of time, energy and money so I think you'll see something like this our land acquisition going down but our request for maintenance will go up they won't go up into the hundreds of thousands of dollars but it's just a natural progression in town that you know we've acquired what we want of those lands we think they're important in the mosaic of town land and town amenities but we don't need to acquire any more and frankly we need to up our game in terms of maintenance so I think you will see more requests if I'm here you will see more requests to see back and likely JCPC to maintain those lands I will say our history in Amherst on CPAC funding and Sonya might be able to help me out but it's only fairly recently that towns and cities have been able to use CPAC money to maintain conservation land is it a couple of years perhaps Sonya prior to that it was not an allowable use under CPA law so now that it is I think our request this year was for 40 or 50 thousand dollars it got reduced to 10 I'll be back next year to ask for more money and I think that will become one of the stable sources of funding to maintain our land if we want to do significant improvements that say Puffer's Pond other places we'll have to look at multiple sources grants capital money and perhaps CPAC the huge limiting factor on CPAC funds is you can only use it on land CPAC dollars so that's a really important distinction so something like Puffer's Pond was acquired by gift or purchase without CPA funds so we actually can't use CPA dollars for the most part there may be some creative options there but for the most part we can't improve land that wasn't purchased with CPA dollars so so anyway in terms of dredging, dredging is on our list and I'll be working with Paul and others we are doing some of the pre-dredging work we're looking at the depth of sediment in Puffer's Pond and we're beginning to formulate a plan on for dredging if you get out there this year you'll see that given the winter we had and the water levels we had the sediment levels have changed pretty dramatically out there it's quite interesting to see what a dynamic system it is out there but there'll be a lot of areas for waiting for children this year given all the new sediment that came down that Cushman brought I hope that answers that question could we get an estimate of how much land is conserved right now and my other thing is can we utilize residents for trail maintenance and seeing that that was such a success what we did with the cleanup so could we involve residents for trails maintenance as well so we know exactly how many acres we own and Amherst it's all in the open space plan it's all online so we own the numbers are just over 2,000 acres of land in town and then we also have worked with farmers to preserve their land many acres of farmland that's still privately held so it's active agriculture we don't have any rights to walk or hike or do anything on that land other than the development rights have been sold so in terms of volunteer efforts we do volunteer efforts all year long I think we need to do more the Friends of Puffers Pond is a wonderful group they have been raising money out of Puffers Pond for 27 years and every year they donate between $3,000 and $6,000 to the maintenance of Puffers Pond they're going to take a little break this year they're not going to have the pancake breakfast this year but they're going to try to raise some money anyway so you'll see more coming out on that but yes we do need to engage more volunteers we have a number of Friends groups and they kind of adopt an area like adopt Mt. Pollux adopt Large Hill Conservation Area let's move along because we do want to spend a few minutes on the other issue we're going to build on volunteers this week and I heard you have volunteers who would help you do trail maintenance in an active way and Central Park does trail maintenance so does Appalachia a group suggested you could have some trash warriors the amount of trash we found around Puffers was amazing but there's a group willing just to do it in a very organized ongoing way so I'll send you some of the ideas that people came up with there were volunteers in the room but it wasn't purely hypothetical would that be great so anything else that you had Kathy or someone to move on to that was the big one because I thought you've got willing outdoors people who would love to help maintain some of these lands and trails being cliched they're the future of maintaining these lands and they are a public asset well thank you I appreciate your presentation today I appreciate what you do for us every day thank you yes okay so in a couple minutes break yes but I just wanted to give my thing in for the studio that's private you don't want we just go to the last page that's what your options are for maximum for maximum that's my option I'm leaving but you know if we rate this researcher on the economic cost and benefits of Airbnb and I can send that to you all but it might be too late but just based on this my opinion was to charge because it's benefitting more the Airbnb benefits the rich of people and it adds more burden to the town and for the renters so it's fair to charge 3% or whatever so that was the argument I had I'm going to make a note right now that Shalini is having to leave because she's teaching a class she is going to submit something to us for consideration which because of open meeting laws needs to be recognized in the minutes and needs to be included in the packet and it was a study of the economic consequences of Airbnb rentals I can just summarize my perspective based on that which I'll be sharing is that it looks at who is it benefitting and who is it what are the costs so the Airbnb does benefit upper richer people at the cost of the town and renters so it recommended charging the fee to offset that so that's where I stand on this I appreciate your finding that and we'll make sure that it gets appended into the minutes so that we take care of that, Paul Thank you so we're not going to do this full presentation you have it in front of you we'll be uploading it as well in some the state passed a law in December that allows the town to collect taxes on Airbnb type short-term rentals much like we already collect taxes on hotels and motels so I'm actually going to so it applies to short-term rentals I'm going to race through this if you have questions you've got it in front of you can ask me them the state room occupancy tax is 5.7% the tax is paid directly to the department of revenue and this will require Airbnb operators who have rent more than 14 days a year to register with the department of revenue this is the definition of how they defined short-term rental which I won't go into there are several options available to the council this one we already do we've accepted the room occupancy tax this change in law automatically applies to Airbnb so we don't have to do anything on this the date is important in that if you want this to go into effect on July 1 you have to the council will need to adopt it by May 31st if you don't and we move it if we do it later in June or July then it will go into effect on October 1 if we've already accepted it which is like I said it automatically goes into there's no action required by the council for the regular room occupancy this is doesn't really apply to us the item for you to consider today is if you want to do option 2 which is the local option community impact fee this is up to 3% of the rent for transfers of occupancies for certain types of short-term rentals there are two different types that will go through the first but it requires a separate vote for each one and again depending on when you adopt this it's when it will become effective it says only available if the city town has accepted local option excise under 64G3A we have already done that so the first option for you is a local option community impact fee which applies to professionally managed units one or two or more short-term rental units in the same town not located within a single two or three family dwelling so those are things that are in larger buildings the second option is if you say no we do want to apply those to two or three family dwellings that includes the operators primary residents so you can do these are supplemental and Jeff can help me if I get this wrong so you can do one and then you can do two as well the way this works in the provincial law since December they the department of revenue will collect the fee and then distribute it when the money comes into the town 35% must be dedicated to affordable housing or local infrastructure projects you can do more but you can't do less than 35% and this comes straight into the there's some rules about how the comptroller will have to handle this these funds when they get reported the third option I'm not recommending you do anything with now this is to accept to adopt ordinances or bylaws or regulations to regulate these I don't think we're in a position to do that at this moment but I think you know as we have talked about with the building commissioner these are some things that we're going to want to be reviewing in the relatively near future so this is the last slide that you need to look at these are proposed motions and the first one applies at a rate it sets the rate at 3% which is the maximum and it applies to one of two or more short term rental units in the same town the second one is again the 3% and this is for the smaller buildings that this would apply to and the third option would be to say that we will dedicate 35% of the community impact fee to affordable housing or local infrastructure projects someone may ask well why would you do it for smaller units and I think we feel like that the impact of an Airbnb has the same impact whether it's it doesn't matter who the ownership is or how big the building is or whether it's a single family house or a two family house that has a unit that's used for Airbnb type structures that there is an impact on the neighborhood with additional cars coming and going additional concerns by the neighborhood that might wind up in a police call which happens fairly frequently some people say I would see an unusual car going in and out of this house well it turns out that it's a short term rental so there are things that impact the town that's not the case I get that just one clarification the 35% is only 35% of the additional 3% it's not on the 6% that's automatically included so I've done a fair amount of reading about this the last day or so to get prepared including looking at the statute and this is labeled as a community impact fee because I recognize that these rental establishments have an effect on the community have an impact on the community the cost, the communities are bearing costs which is what Shalini was referring to and she was looking at her paper the one thing that I found confusing about what I was looking at and I don't know if you have an answer to this Jeff is that they define professionally managed units as one of the more short term rental units in the same city or town operated by the same operator and not located in a single or two, three family dwelling that includes the operators residents so if one person owns just one house that they rent out through Airbnb that's not also their residents that seems to escape both sections which I found to be an oversight by the great and general court but it didn't make sense to me so Andy you're reading that and it has to be both things they've got two or more and one of them they live in and then the second one would apply only if they live in it so we've missed the place where is that the way you're reading it I think that seems to be the only way to read that and I was trying to see if you had any other thought on that or if that's the way you interpret it it's just a gap that may have been unintended and we may want to bring that to the attention of our senator and representative if indeed that is what the circumstance is but it's not a reason not to go forward the other thing that's obvious is that you can adapt the first and then choose to adapt the second you can't adapt the second without having adapted the first that's the way I would read it that if you adopted both you could separate so if one person owns one that they live in and another they don't live in the first one applies to the one they don't live in the second one applies to the one they do live in say you've covered an instance where three, four or five properties any property they're not living in is the first and any property they're living in is the second I think I could read it that way I read the second the short term rentals located in two or three family dwellings that include the operator's primary residence is similar to a neighbor of mine who owns a house with an apartment in the house that the neighbor rents out through Airbnb when the opportunity arises but that is also her principal residence and that's where you're either choosing to include or not include is where Zed you're understanding Jeff? Yes, that's my understanding as well that basically it's saying the first step is we want the 3% excluded from charging the 3% are single, two or three families where the owner lives in the building and then the second step is if we don't want that situation the town council would adopt the second provision which would allow a collection of that 3% on two or three families where the owner has their principal residence. So I think one thing to take into consideration is that this state law has a giant impact on Cape Cod and that's where most of the energy for this bylaw came and it might be that they're exempting people who own vacation homes there by doing this that's the only thing I can think of for that exclusion. That just makes no sense. Yeah, but it is something to investigate and then the last the other question I have looking at the draft motions that are up there is the third motion required that we do now? And because we may want to have more than 35% of the fee going into local infrastructure roads which are used by people who rent. So you don't need to take any action on that. It will automatically go into that. The category is 35%. And once it's in the other 65% we'll go for general use. So you can use that however you want. It gives you the maximum flexibility for the use of the revenue. That's why I would keep whatever it is at 35%. You could do nothing and it will happen automatically. Or you can say I don't want any more than 35% to go into that. But you still have the other 65% coming in for general purposes. And the other note that Jeff pointed out is that these are not actual motions. These would be recommended from the finance committee to the full council. In the same vein the question of whether the 35% or more goes to infrastructure goes to affordable housing is not a decision that needs to be made at the time of adoption. So I think this wording in the third implies only 35%. So if we don't say anything we could go higher, we can't go lower. Correct? So by not making the third motion someone wanted to push hard for 50% of this to go into this. But it leaves both the option once it's 35%. I'm asking as a question if we can get it set aside all of that could go into infrastructure rather than affordable housing. All of it could go, it's optional rather than required. It's just 35% get set at what side. But this I think caps it at 35% if we do it. I think otherwise because if we're silent it's always at least 35%. So the reason I I'm always looking for a council, a town can do whatever it wants with it. I think you will see a push for someone to say if I were in a different seat I'd say let's make 70% go to affordable housing period. And I try to drive away from dedicated sources of revenue so the town can make informed decisions on what the needs of the town are. So I want to make sure. This law does not affect single homes that are done for Airbnb. Or our ability to tax those do not are not affected. It depends on how the council votes. If the council accepts the first oh no I'm sorry yes single family homes if they own one same owner only owns one single family home in a town they would not be subject to this. Second question is there any revenue sharing with 6% the state already collects except how it might come back to us from general funds? The revenue from the rental tax would go right into the general fund. The state collects 6% we are entitled to 3. What benefit do we get from the 6%? So the 6% is the same as the hotel tax and it comes in from DOR to our general fund. We get a portion of hotel and motel tax that goes directly into the general fund. But the 35% only applies to our 3%. And I'm going to just be very clear I totally agree with the town manager in keeping it at 35 and remaining keeping the rest as flexible as possible. So I think that yeah I just wanted to say that I support the second motion for two and three family dwellings even if it's the operators primary residence because I could just see how many people were used terribly. Three family party house you have no idea how many people I mean a lot of Airbnb people just are doing couch surfing they're not even getting a room and they share bathrooms I think we've got to include that even if somebody is listed as an owner operator in the premises it has got to be covered. Which is then to support both first and the second motion. Or it's a package right now of three motions and I'm in support of what Lynn said that I think the third piece is important and I always assume the first two went together. We need both. Otherwise there's a loophole in it. We need to make clear that the council needs to make as far as the accepting the local option potentially two motions where it seems that the consensus is running to suggest two motions that we recommend and then the question of the third motion is a separate issue but a valid question too is to whether to put that before the council now. Do you want to move them individually or together? The first two. I think we need the council to take two separate votes so that however you word it as far as a motion from this committee it needs to be clear that you're recommending two votes from the council. I move that we recommend to the council that they accept both the first and second motion as presented at this meeting to us. Your second. Is the motion made and seconded? Any further discussion? The wording when she said we talked about having two motions but one motion would be one and two and the second motion would be three. I don't think that was clear enough. No, we're moving that the town vote one and two. We're voting to move to the third one we haven't moved at all. We've moved on the professionally managed units as defined in the statute and short term rentals located in two or three family dwellings that include the operators primary residents and that's clarified. So we are recommending those to the council act on both of those motions required under 64 G3 D which is the new statutory section. So discussion any further? All in favor indicate by raising hands 4 to 0 1 member absent. Going on. I'm going to move that we recommend to the council the third motion which is that 35% of the community impact be collected by the council. I'm going to move on to the second motion. I'm going to move on to the law chapter 64G section 3D be dedicated to affordable housing or local infrastructure projects and the balance of the funds be a general fund revenue of the town of Amherst that may be appropriated for any municipal purpose. I second the motion. I'm going to move on to the second motion. I'm going to move on to the third motion for nothing member absent. The comment on that last motion is that we could if we chose make a further motion right now that is to whether 35% should go into local infrastructure recognizing local and committee action. I want to leave it as flexible as possible. I would just note that any funds that are in that account would be subject to appropriation so the council would have to say there's 10 million in the account we want to spend all 10 million on local infrastructure. I like your numbers. I like your numbers too. I want to point out that it does need to come back to the council for future vote so it has to come back to this committee so that we can reserve our discussion on this for a future day with more notice. We did hear one presentation at the council meeting arguing one position on the use of funds but we don't have to touch that. So I think that we're done. Just for the minute's sake we looked at them so could you send me this presentation and I can just refer to it in terms of my minutes because I can also if you send it I can copy and paste exactly what's written here. Otherwise it says we move to accept the first and second motion so I don't want to write them out. Thank you. Any budget updates at this point? I don't see any recognition. I don't see any comment. We're not needing to act on minutes at this time so we can do a motion to adjourn. So motion. Everybody agrees we're adjourned by consensus at 4.50. It's been a long day and I thank you all very much.