 anytime. All right we're recording go ahead Andy. Okay so I'm going to call the Finance Committee meeting to order 9 a.m. on May 26, 2022. Pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021 extended by chapter 22 of the acts of 2022. This meeting will be conducted by remote means members of the public who wish to access the meeting. They do so by Zoom or by telephone. No in-person attendance and members of the public has been permitted but every effort is being made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceeding in real times via technological means. I'm going to proceed to go through the committee list again alphabetically by last name and make sure that each member of the committee can signify that they can hear and by their response we know we can hear them to assure their participation. So let's start with Lynn. Present. Bob. Present. Matt we said is not present and that's what Matt is here now. Matt can you hear us? Andy I'm here I'm sorry give me one second. Okay that's okay you got it. Bernie. I'm here. Michelle. Here. Kathy. Here. And Alicia. Here. Okay so all members of the committee are present and all have signified that they've been able to hear and we've heard their response. So I want to make sure that Anna can hear us even though we don't have a quorum. Good morning. You know keep an eye out if we get any additional attendance from members of the committee. The council will need to call it as a council meeting in addition. The agenda today is to complete the presentations of departments and when we will that is the first agenda item to discuss and then there were some general questions that were posed by one member of the council that Sean is going to see if he can tell us what they were and address them to the best that he can. And we will build public comment into the agenda somewhere along the way probably around that point. And then we're going to conclude by seeing if there are any definite requests by two members of the committee for items for consideration on Monday. We will start Monday by making that possibility or Tuesday rather Tuesday's meeting 31st. We will go back to do that again on Tuesday but to the extent that we can identify issues today that would be helpful for preparation purposes. Lynn we have one more member of the council who's joined us. Jennifer do you want to make Yes Jennifer can you hear us? I can hear you thank you. Thank you. With Jennifer's arrival I want to call the town council to order for the committee of the whole meeting in relationship to the finance committee meeting. Thank you. Okay thank you. So with that and having reviewed the agenda are there any questions about the agenda itself? And I'm aware Rachelle that you have questions about future agenda placement of some issues and that will be when we get back to setting the agenda for next week and after we will get back to that but I just wanted to acknowledge it. So I'm turning it to Sean because you have an order established that you you've arranged with our staff and I'll let you take take the lead there. Thanks Andy. So Jeremiah LaPlante our facility manager is here. He's going to lead us through the sort of general government facility section and also the police facilities and for those who are following in the budget document the general facility starts on page 106 the snapshot of the department. So with that I'll turn it over to Jeremiah. Morning Jeremiah. Yes so as Sean said that I'm going to be discussing general government and APD budget and I think good news is is not a lot has changed with our operational budget for those two two areas and this comes with our our look to the future with expanding and welcoming the addition to the North Amherst library. Finance and I are following some trends particularly in the utilities. At APD we have seen a decrease in our electric bill and I can say that that's safely say that that's probably attributed to some of the upgrades that we've we've done through the green communities program. Over at Bangs community center we've seen a fairly sharp increase in our water usage but I think this is even though it sounds negative I really believe that it is a positive. This is this results from the increase in programming and the Musanti Center health center becoming much more active. This this increase comes at a time where we are really seeing the Bangs community center sort of transition from a community center to more of a social service center. We have the senior center the health center public health and eventually we're going to see the Crest program so we we see this transition happening. So yes we are we are seeing an increase in the utilities but it really is a positive. The Bangs community center is brightening up and we have all these wonderful programs there. Moving on to some of projects that we have we're closing out FY 22. We had a bunch of projects that we completed or in in we're working on over at the North Fire Station. We upgraded all of the garage bay doors making it much more weather tight increasing our efficiencies. We're expanding the building access controls across five different buildings and this allows for greater flexibility and security in our municipal buildings. We're working on repointing a bunch of town hall. This will help with our grant our granite facials. We have a Bangs accessibility improvement and this is through our MOD grant that we are awarded. So the whole front section of Bangs is being reworked to make it more accessible and to clean up some of the findings that we had through that accessibility report. And we're developing developing and renovating the third floor of Bangs for the Crest program which is really exciting to welcome them into the building. Looking towards FY 23 that'll look like HVAC at Monson, HVAC and North Amherst and one of the biggest projects that we're focusing on is replacing the chiller over at the police department. That that'll be one of our our big focuses. All of these will be done through our in-house and and trying to capture as much funding as we can through math saves. All this year math saves is offering wonderful rebates for upgrading and eliminating fossil fuels. So we really need to do our best to utilize those and sort of get back some of this money. So that's a quick snapshot of of the budget and all the projects. Is there any questions for me? Andy there were some questions sent in that maybe I, Jeremiah I don't know if you have that in front of you but I can read them if you don't. Yes. Okay who is the one who sent it? Michelle sent them in. Michelle sent them in. Okay thank you. So the first one Jeremiah is there a plan to update the facility's inventory report? Yes yes there there isn't a plan to update that. This this year the focus is 12 12 buildings. So there's I believe 60 or 63 buildings in total on that report. So just sort of picking away at it. I have 12 that are end works now and each year I will build upon that. Some of them will go a lot quicker than others. So the 12 I have now I would have to say are probably some of the bigger ones. So how do you expect deferred maintenance of how do you expect the deferred maintenance of buildings how will that impact the budget in coming years? Well I think if we keep focusing on some of these larger projects and getting some of those taken care of then this that I would imagine or anticipate some of these deferred projects capital projects to sort of less. So I know that right now our capital budget is quite large and as we move on you see that decreasing and that that is just really a result of prioritizing some of these big projects and making sure that we get them taken care of. And just adding to that not everyone here is on JCPC. So we do have a line item that we sort of been increasing the liberty each year that sort of general facility maintenance and it's to tackle these deferred maintenance projects as they come up. And so Jeremiah has done a good job of sort of listing out what's on his radar. Are there general ideas about meeting our climate goals within facilities? So Jeremiah I know you you think about that a lot. I do I do I'm always thinking about that with any of the projects that that I'm trying to tackle. I have Stephanie right beside me and she is she is my best resource her and I collaborate on a lot of these. I ask her you know if there are any things that I can do to help us achieve these goals. It really is on my mind. So I just work with all these all the different individuals to ensure that I am is we really do need to push we need we need to push as far as we can with every project. So it is important. So Andy there's a number of hands raised we have one more facilities question but probably go to the questions first. Okay and as always recognize any questions from members of the council and members of the finance committee in order to hands up here Anna. Yeah mine's actually a quick comment. Thank you Jeremiah that's really helpful to Michelle's two questions. One of the things that I'm working on with the chair of ECAC as their liaison is ensuring that the categories we're asking for in those inventory reports align and give us the information we need on JCPC to make those decisions and so that's something that I'm working on a memo that you'll see that I'm going to send to finance once we've wrapped it up so I think Jeremiah and Stephanie are doing a great job and I think there's some additional things we can continue to do on our inventories to give us that a little bit more info than we've gotten in the past to make those decisions. Thank you. Thank you Lynn. I would actually be fine if we go ahead and deal with the last question and then come back. And Kathy did you have something you want to raise now? You're not you're muted but I'm assuming that. I'm the same as Lynn that I'm fine with the last question I have some different questions so let me see whether Lynn Michelle asked. Okay what was the last question? Yeah the last one is are there specific challenges with respect to the disability access in our facilities? I would say one of the challenges is probably prioritizing and part of it is prioritizing not only the need for the individuals who are utilizing our buildings but also there's a financial piece to this. An example could be maybe an elevator door that's slightly narrower I mean maybe it's supposed to be 36 inches and it's 35. That's something that you would have to look at and weigh it as a priority going is this the best use of the money or is there others? I just use that as one example. There's signage that's cited there's transitions that are cited so I think one of the challenges is just prioritizing that so I'm always trying to look for what is the greatest need and sort of what is the biggest bang for the buck. We want to have the funding that we have set aside go as far as possible and really that that's I would say that's a challenge. Thank you Lynn. Thank you. Okay I'm going to apologize in advance if this is a little long-winded for me. We have recently had a couple of situations where abandoned buildings if you will buildings that we are not using to have people in them have come up you know one for example came from the conservation commission another one is under the purview of the conservation commission that's the another one is the South Amherst school okay so as we as the town continue to I'm sorry to say this have people dump abandoned property on us leaving us with the maintenance challenge. I think it is important that we have a policy about whether or not we're willing to accept some of these buildings because then people get mad at us for not using scarce town dollars to maintain them and then somebody says oh I want to use that building and now we go out and we look at that building and we say well it's going to cost x y z amount to use that building and then you know one of my colleagues pipes up and says well why didn't we maintain that building to begin with. So this is a longer range issue you know we recently for example voted a couple years ago on East Street School we actually gave it forward to the housing authority or the housing trust and they're now making use of it by having it rehabbed at some level and added to but the acceptance of buildings by the town is leading to us having a bunch of really badly in need of repair buildings on our books and I want to figure out how we deal with that whether or not we should accept those maybe we don't have the option and if we do have the option what should we do and what should be our attitude towards the ongoing maintenance of buildings that other people have basically said we can no longer use these to inhabit people with the people so a little energized over the issue thank you. Alicia is in the attendees good pardon. Alicia is in the attendees. Thanks I'm bringing her in. Alicia you're back. Lynn I just want to go to that and I know that I've been working with closely with Dave and Dave and Rob and Paul on this and I'd have to say that you know for for my piece of it for the facilities pieces is looking at some of the major systems major utility systems and trying to maintain those as well as well as I can because like most things if they're if they're left to sit then it's much much harder to sort of spark the life back into it so it's a lot easier to keep some of those major systems going and then more falling the rest so so that there is not an ongoing expense so that's that's really might have has been my approach but I but I agree there is there is a bigger conversation a broader conversation that that should should happen. Paul. Yeah thank you Andy so I think Lynn you identified an important comment which was these are buildings that were determined by the school committee that they are no longer needed for educational use then they go back to the town as ownership it's not like they're giving it to it it just reverts to the town for our ownership typically buildings are move away from them because people have deferred maintenance previously or that there is no need for them be or because the expense it's so expensive to bring them back up to code or whatever would need need to be done to them the same happened with the Hitchcock center which is on conservation land it was our land that was used by the Hitchcock center when they built their new headquarters they said we don't need that building anymore we prioritize our capital our very you know we're very frugal with our capital funds and we put those into buildings that we are using we don't put the money into abandoned buildings basically until there's a need we look for creative reuse of buildings like we did with the east street school and we're happy that that's being reutilized as a for affordable housing but then when we go to look at these buildings and Hickory is another one it's a building that we're we purchased but we know that it has it's has its own weaknesses and the building commissioners has already gone through it along with the fire inspectors you know there are some they become liabilities and so I think that that's something that we are aware of but when we get a building that we can use actively reuse like the North Amherst school that's actively being reused for a daycare center in for in for archival storage for personnel records and things like that. Lynn, do you have any follow-up before I go on? I'll have more later. Okay, Kathy. I would I just want to underscore I agree with Lynn I think we need a policy and Paul I don't disagree with anything that you just said you know we we it's easy it's easier to accept and then four or five years later figure out what we're going to do with it you know I was struck by the old Hitchcock Center that we're paying for the demolition of it as an example I guess we knew that was coming so I have completely unrelated questions on the the health center that's in the bank center do they pay us rent? Yes and does that show up I see there's rental contracts so somewhere in the budget there's it's in the it's in the rent line item in the in the revenue section of the budget it's they're one of our one of our renters okay you know and it's just you know Jeremiah you said we're transforming banks from a community center to social service I think it's partly during COVID there were some steps and pre-COVID we brought in the health center and that was pre-the council but are we is there a plan when we lose the community space to say Jones is going to be our community space Jones library which will have a community room if we lose the community room and banks would we have to pay rent to Jones if and you may not know the answer I know Jones is not on your list um so that's a second question related to the loss of one kind of use and where we see the second and then my only other one is on this is a picky one but on utilities you listed a lot of buildings that are in the utility is the north little north Amherst library also in that list it's just it's missing from the list the library the library pays those utilities now that may be changing in the future okay okay so that's why they that's why the maintenance and things like that have never been part of our capital reports okay okay fine because I know where one of the things with the gift is that that it's an upgrade of those um right each fact system that should lower utility so we wouldn't we won't see the we won't see that one way or the other in our budget not right now but again that may be changing the future where you might see a coming going forward at a certain point okay that that's my question um and I just want to underscore I think what Anna and others said Jeremy Maya came to us with an amazing list um at JCPC where some that address some of Michelle's where it's five to ten years of a plan on when are we doing which HVAC system when are we doing which things so you can see a on climate action and and upgrades what's on the list or what isn't on the list so it's probably a good thing to somehow flag when we write this report just cross-reference it to a page because it was extremely thoughtful on this notion of there is a larger maintenance list as well as well as a climate action list with a really good and I just thought you've done an amazing job Jmer Jeremiah so thank you very much yeah thank you um Paul and Dave both have hands up so I don't know which few between the two of you to respond to some of you go with Dave first I think okay Dave thanks Andy I'll be very brief I just wanted to build on what Paul said um you know listening to this conversation and others like it that have happened over the last couple of months I think part of it might be really um more a communication uh gap um between staff and and committees and boards about some of these buildings um you know we we talk about them often I work with Rob Jeremiah Chris Brestrup um in the planning department and of course Paul and uh so so I think we need to do a better job at communicating kind of what some of the vision uh might be for these properties and and maybe that's part of the the disconnect here um um you know these decisions to to mothball if you will some of these buildings were you know have been very deliberate east street school south Amherst campus uh south Amherst school as I like to call it not campus um as Paul said we've we've made deliberate decisions not to invest in those buildings uh or at least parts of those buildings because um they are so expensive to maintain um and and we don't think some of them have a long term future but the land that they sit on is very valuable and and Paul referenced the east street school property um if we hadn't maintained or or invested minimally in the east street school property or had divested of it um the way finders project for 70 new units of housing never would have happened so so there is a plan I think we need to do a little bit better job communicating to the council and and to various boards and committees um south Amherst campus is a great example excuse me south Amherst school is a great example um um we think part of that building could be salvaged it's very historic but the south end of the building probably doesn't need to be but the land that it sits on could be something very creative for the town it could be another housing project in the future um so I just wanted to put that out there that there are plans if you will um and we need to do a better job at communicating to you all what those might be and and get feedback and input from from various boards and committees and and the council so thanks is there um while you're here is there a quick explanation of the history of the Hitchcock center building and which sits on conservation land as to who built the building originally did it revert it was built by the town yeah sure very quick sure andy the quick quick skinny on the Hitchcock center building so um large hill the conservation area at large hill which is associated you know adjacent to the common school is maybe the oldest piece of um the first uh or second piece of conservation land the town ever purchased we collaborated with the common school um to purchase the land the common school was looking for a place to to live and be and um the town collaborated at that time this was 50 odd years ago with an organization called the long plain nature center which eventually morphed into the Hitchcock center for the environment um so the town bought the land that the Hitchcock center sits on that was a a barn essentially a carriage house for the house that the common school is in common school has since um expanded their their buildings and their their footprint um and the Hitchcock center lived there operated out of there for 50 odd years as Paul said before they built their new building down at Hampshire college so we've owned it for 50 years it was there were two additions to it one in the 80s and then one in the 90s but again this is an very old barn building poorly insulated if any of you ever took had programs at the Hitchcock center or went there it's a lovely old building but it is not a building that we ever intended to invest in um it's an old barn and when you walk in there there's no insulation the HVC HVAC system is extremely old the the the basement fills up with water it's on an old septic system all of these things that we in facilities and and planning know and that's why we we came to the conclusion um some years ago that when when Hitchcock was going to move out that that building was not a good investment for the town it does sit on conservation land so it is highly restricted what can happen with the building or the land so the movement is toward removing that removing that structure repurposing some of the old timbers etc and um and and that land would revert to simply being part of the conservation area that it is part of and has been for 50 odd years so hope that helps okay thank you Paul thanks I'm glad Dave as one of my suggestions was to get the history of the Hitchcock center two things one is I want to second Kathy said we're really fortunate to have Jeremiah on our team now um he's been spectacular at sort of analyzing every building and you know the previous facilities report was a pretty quick snapshot of what was there he's doing an intense deep dive on every building so we really know what we're dealing with and I really appreciate and it's you say 12 buildings in a year because he's got a million other jobs on his plate so getting this in and having a target of that I think is really a good plan the other thing I want to mention is that the banks community center the the second floor which used to high it was used to hold offices for the center for new americans and for big brothers and big sisters those leases were termed and then that's why we have that space available for the crest program these are offices that are now being transferred into offices for town purposes so that was not you know this is not sort of program space that we use previously the one space that was taken out of circulation was the pole room which you heard people talk about at sometimes with the seniors center will say that's a difficult room to utilize for dances and stuff because there are poles in the room but that's now been dedicated to our civil war tablets which has become sort of a real magnet for people to visit so losing that room has been significant and I think the other frustration with the bank center is that it's been used as a community center so there is you know the one of the things you'll hear from the seniors center folks is that there isn't dedicated space for seniors as opposed to space that they can reserve and then that's a major difference in how they're able to operate and then the last thing I want to mention is that in many of these situations we're very opportunistic in terms of you know having the east street school building you know putting that together with the space the land on belcher town road let us build get a big enough project that enticed some developers to come in either one of them by themselves wasn't attractive enough or big enough to attract a good developer together they made sense so sometimes we hold on to these buildings and you know always are looking for future uses of them until something becomes economically viable okay thank you Bernie two observations one another term for deferred maintenance is broken so we need to really and I'm glad Jeremiah I'm glad you're watching that because that's always a problem yeah the other thing is we should not be afraid to bring the bulldozer I think we got lucky with east street school I think we may have had other prospects had that building not existed in that space I'm glad people were able to reuse it but when when I walk by the the the south amherst school because I live down here I'm looking at it and I'm wondering why are we saving it because we could be using that for something that's even more immediate more necessary like housing and I'm glad to know that we're willing to to take down old structures and not simply as a sort of knee jerk reaction said thank you thank you Lucia thank you I'm wondering if there is I've heard mentioned before a property disposition committee that looks into these kinds of things and whether or not they have a process in which like we will be able to pretty much like stay on top of these things and not be determining them after the building's already abandoned per se and just sitting there and that we have like a forward thinking plan ahead of time is what I would think that the committee would be doing because while I I do agree with Bernie and that there are some properties that we probably shouldn't be keeping in terms of our finances there are probably also some properties that may be more financially responsible for us to invest in rather than having the bill for a completely like the demolition and a new building and if there are a committee or peoples that keep track of those things thank you Lucia yes um there is a committee it's not in a formal form but but it includes myself and and Rob and the planning staff and and Jeremiah but I I do think going back to my earlier comments about communication I think bringing that group together this we we created some structure around this I believe just probably in the year or so before the council before the change in government so as the select board was was nearing its its end they adopted I believe a policy a surplus property policy which included a a group of of staff looking at these buildings and reporting out on them so I think I think my earlier comments are kind of stand that we should do a better job of communicating to to committees and boards as well as the council on some of the analysis of these buildings and then our recommendations for what to to use them for so whether it's a Hitchcock Center or East Street or South Amherst school yes we will we will do that in the coming year okay um I mean since I was on that select board yes we did pass that surplus building policy and I might look for it in at least get it out to the finance committee so that Lynn can decide whether to go to the full council but it was adopted by the select board when I was on the select board anything else facilities Jeremiah this is hard to do it you have you've really covered the police station there was nothing else you wanted to say about the police station um I think that's it just that we are looking at the police station and focusing on uh replacing those that big system over there on the chiller that's just the priority and we'll continue to watch the utilities and hopefully continue to watch them go down everybody thinks that it's a new building but it's actually getting some age now so is there anything else on facilities I'll go one last round to see if any hands go up and if not then I'll turn it back to Sean to move us to the next step oh Lynn oh first of all again Jeremiah thank you I think we know more about our facilities today than we've ever known and we know more about particularly plans going forward that support sustainability and Michelle thank you for your questions I think they were excellent right on I just need to be brought up to date did we replace the roof on the police station and there's a there's a project to and then I think it's next year on the capital plan another year after um to request funds for the roof okay and does the cost for that project also then include mounting solar on that roof um Jeremiah can weigh in more on this I think it remains to be seen we're doing that solar assessment right now um with Stephanie where they're looking at municipal facilities and determining which ones are good candidates for solar um I've heard some uh you know different opinions on whether the police station is actually a good site for solar so um but that assessment should be done by the end of June where we'll have a good a better sense Jeremiah you may have more information on that not really any more than that um but we do have funding set aside for the engineering study that would also support that so if we um it is it is absolutely something that we are considering um but but I I felt that uh uh moving or sort of trading the place of the chiller and the roof was wasn't important um the more immediate need is the chiller and then I see the roof as a secondary um to to that to that project thank you Jeremiah thank you very much really appreciate it uh and appreciate all the work that you're doing so thank you thank you Sean thanks so um so Jennifer Brown from the health department is going to go next okay Jennifer hi thank you you're muted Jennifer thank you so much um good to be here I'm Jennifer Brown I'm the health director and still the public health nurse I just want to give a brief overview of what the health department does and then I'm going to highlight three important things the function of the health department is to promote health and well-being of the Amherst community and we do that through five major service areas the first is assurance to make sure that people have access to health care this is something that was really important during COVID something we did well I'm very proud of that we were able to link residents to receive the appropriate services and supplies that they needed second thing is infectious disease control obviously we have COVID and we'll talk more about that but there's other things that go on in in town we've definitely had less infectious disease there's been less transmission but we still have rabies and we have a good working relationship with the Amherst police department with that and we have foodborne illnesses and we thank Rob Mora and his team for inspections of restaurants and and contact tracing for that we provide health promotion different services and educational pieces to residents for example ticks are being identified as a real issue we sure see that with a number of Lyme disease cases that we have health policy continues and thank you the board of health we have five members there we look at our existing regulations make amendments to them and continue as new things are added for example tobacco is something we continue to to work on and then emergency preparedness so that's something that we've always had good community partners with to help us with so for example the HPHPC that's the Hampshire Public Health Preparedness our EMS system Tim Nelson fire department we really have been prepared public health to expand and contract if there was an emergency and that's what we did during COVID we really had great teams working to make sure that we could do what we needed to do during this ongoing pandemic I want to move into three initiatives I'm just highlighting these there's definitely other ones one thing I think we'd like to continue to see the Amherst health department do is continue our COVID vaccination clinics when we started a year ago we were the game in town you know along with our partners UMass and other health departments but we provided 17,000 vaccinations now it's very different for example we can call the base state bus and they'll come up to the schools and provide vaccine but we really have an emphasis and a duty to eliminate health disparities so that's something that we take very seriously how are we going to help vulnerable populations and that's where the health department will come in with our vaccinations I like to continue our rapid antigen tests we don't have the community PCR I love rapid antigens and continue hope to continue to get them from the state you know as we are moving to a model of people becoming more in charge of risk management those rapid antigens are important then the other thing I want to highlight is to hire and train a public health nurse and create a strong workforce in the health department so here we are we have an offer out to a great public health nurse and I'm checking my email I'm hoping that we're going to get a yes soon but we really need to look at what we have for our department if you look at our page 174 you can see what we have in existing employees so we have the health director who's 1.0 FTEs the nurse who we don't have and then we have a program assistant who is through ARPA funding right now and a contact tracer through ARPA funding so that's something that you know I always want to make sure and they can plug for the public health nurses 0.8 FTEs love to see that increased at some point to a full-time position I think it's a really important time right now in public health to make sure that we have a well-trained workforce and that we have ample employees to provide the services like I said expanding and contracting that's what I have I don't know if you want me to continue on or if you have some questions well thank you Sean were there any questions came from Michelle or others that you've received in advance now this this isn't general government anymore we're in the community services section and there were no questions sent in for this department thank you Lynn um Jen first of all thank you for everything you are doing and I want to make sure people remember that during COVID you had over 200 volunteers from the community and our staff that were helping you and I just really appreciated that your appreciation event that took place to thank those many volunteers I hope they continue to be available to you if you had a full-time nurse would you find a different pool of recruits and is that is that is that differentiation an important issue not just for level of service but for recruitment so the way I'm going to answer this I hope I can answer your question is a full-time nurse is going to be able to do more outreach so pop-up clinics go to the mobile you know food markets so and to the schools for example really going to be able to expand our services there to our vulnerable population still very much need our COVID ambassadors that's something I didn't mention we rely on them as well for registration during the clinics and our vaccinator volunteers and other volunteers are just just so important so valuable to us they show up promptly with a smile they're skilled provide really good service so that's something we hope to continue I don't know if that answered your question and Lynn just to add to that so we are using ARPA funds to make this a full-time position the public health nurse a full-time position through the end of FY24 so if the candidate wants full-time not all candidates want full-time but if the candidate did want full-time there are funds to keep make it full-time for the next two years thank you for that information Sean thanks yeah I just noticed that the the number of childhood vaccines and children immunized has been declining over the years since FY17 and I know some of that was obviously related to COVID but it looks like it it may be a broader decline than that I'm wondering if there's some issue with communication is it anti anti-vaccine kind of stuff or what's going on there so the childhood immunization that was a program that we had here in the health department we had a little or a small immunization clinic that we would work directly with ARPs with the schools and we would take folks that have arrived in Amherst had children they wanted to get into school and they had to comply with the immunization the vaccine requirements we could take them in within a day get them vaccinated get them into school so I love that program I tell people that it was one part vaccine and nine parts getting them oriented to the the town I love that type of communication and interaction so we get the parents and hey this is where you can sign up for health insurance bring them down to the Misanti Health Center hey Center for New Americans let's get you hooked into that so that's a program we don't have now it's something I've been speaking to the school about and they feel it's something we'd like to bring back so I'd like to see that happen but not sure the status of that yeah I'm looking see if there are any other hands I don't see any at the moment so I'm not sure if there's anything else looking around yet to see if there's any final questions or comments Jen thank you very much I was extremely informative and extremely helpful and I know that health department has been through a difficult period with transitions and with um trying to get us through the real health crisis like we've never dealt with before we really appreciate all the department has done thank you so much thank you very much and I'll just echo really what Lynn was talking about it's just we have such support um and I just appreciate everyone from DPH just just on down it's just been great teamwork and collaboration thank you Sean yeah so I was going to look at Hailey and ask her if she has any time constraints because I um I guess Rob has a time constraint so I was going to move inspections next but only if Hailey's okay with that yeah I'm fine with that okay Andy I also want to note that we no longer have a quorum of the council in the room I'll leave the meeting open on case that changes but we really might need to adjourn the council okay well I'll leave it to you to let me know um what you decide to do in the meantime I guess so we'll turn it over Lynn are you want to adjourn first or you're gonna wait I'm gonna wait it's at least it's seeming to have some connectivity problems and that's where the difference is thank you okay um so Rob uh who's our building commissioners we'll be just going to talk about the inspections department next okay and Rob thank you for coming back I'm so sorry that things got messed up but appreciate your being here let's just start all right uh yeah thank you Andy Sean Hailey for letting me go first appreciate it um good morning uh so just a little bit about inspection services uh and our uh very talented dedicated 10 uh full-time employees and two part-time inspectors uh we are uh you know I've grown into quite an interesting department uh you know our core services of building electrical plumbing and gas permitting programs and inspections is is where this department started uh now 10 years ago when I came to work for Amherst but we do a lot more now uh we handle all the uh licensing and support for the board of license commissioners uh we manage a rental registration program uh now seven or eight years since its adoption uh we oversee the environmental health programs anything related to septic well food service common vic camp licensing often all fall under the the health programs we're really heavily involved with facilities and assisting uh Jeremiah when we can uh with capital projects and we coordinate weights and measures uh with the city of north Hampton's staff that actually conducts the inspections of our devices through the town so we are in the midst of a very busy time uh there's more large commercial projects under construction uh at one time than we've seen in a really long time uh you might be familiar with them uh the Newman Center uh one U Drive south uh the the Amherst College Lyceum uh southeast commons the east gables uh and 11 east pleasant street is just about to start construction in the next couple of weeks uh 26 spring street uh so all these are in various stages of construction um and uh and as a reminder we do uh all the electrical permitting and inspections for the university we do not do building inspections we do not do um plumbing inspections there but we do all the electrical work and as you know there's several very large projects going on there um we are uh trying to catch up on a few things so we're still recovering from uh some of the delays that occurred during COVID particularly with our certificate of inspection program that is our periodic inspection program with certain buildings schools educational buildings assembly spaces religious buildings uh as you can imagine for one reason or another we weren't entering those buildings for a period of time uh some of them weren't in operation at all anyway uh so we're still catching up on those and those those pro inspections occur some of them occur annually some of them are on a two-year cycle uh so that's uh a little bit of a backup for us at the moment um we are working with the CRC uh to uh who is very dedicated to a review and possible rewrite of the rental registration uh regulations and doing what we can to assist with that uh effort um let's see we um have some really good news about uh enhancement to the department over the past year we uh transitioned to a new permitting and inspection management program this was uh you know long awaited and very much needed and has you know been great so far and thank uh not only my staff but it staff that was very helpful in selecting the product and building it and getting it up and running this is allowed us to go to online permitting for the first time there's a nice way of communicating with the applicants now through this program that we've never been able to do before literally an applicant can apply from their phone you know on the job site and respond to questions or ask their own questions of us and uh you know so you can imagine with that use of technology coordination efficiency has improved greatly uh as you know most of the users and and permit applicants um have really appreciated uh that new program uh so that's that's about all I have uh right now I'm happy to answer any questions Andy there were um questions in the packet from last week so if anybody wants to see the questions that Bob submitted with the written responses they're in the packet and I just wanted to quickly echo what Rob said about the the new software they're using that's one of the real success stories a lot of times software vendors sell you a bill of goods and it doesn't quite work out the way you you wanted it to but I think we're getting every dollar out of that software that that we invested you know plus some um and just for the committee's uh uh benefit I don't want this to go to Rob's head but Rob's apartment brings in a lot of money for the town I was you know person for person in terms of the number of people in the department especially in the last few years with all the building projects that are going on um you know they were they've been working really hard to to get our revenues where they need to be so thank you for pointing that out uh Rob yeah I just wanted to echo the um what what Sean said I think the the electronic permitting system is probably going to save the town a lot of money and save the department a lot of headache and I think that's a very wise investment and I thank Rob and the IT department for doing that I also just wanted to say that you know my own personal experience is that Rob is very responsive to complaints about buildings from neighbors and I didn't complain but one of my neighbors complained a year or so ago and the response was very rapid so I did want to commend Rob and and his staff for for being very responsive as well yeah thank you darling yeah I'd like um Bob to highlight any questions and answers that he thinks the committee might be most interested in I'm I have to admit I didn't go back and find that packet I could share it and if you want I have it on my screen if you want me to share it real quickly okay go ahead so I won't read them all but I'll leave it on the screen if anybody has any follow-up questions yeah the the first question was just a clarification of there was a bit of a mismatch of a couple of charts um and I the second one referred to the permitting system which I we've already we've already talked about um and the third was really just more of a you know kind of what what's going on I mean we had a decline in permits for a while and now obviously think things have taken picked up so I just wanted to kind of get an understanding of the the flow of work from from fiscal year to fiscal year then I have some follow-up questions I just didn't want to be repetitive um so when we take on something like the Newman Center or something on the Amherst campus on the Amherst College campus they're paying the same fees that I assume they're paying the same fees that somebody who is developing a property that's on the tax rolls in the downtown or someplace else and some of that's my first question is that assumption correct and then the second assumption is shouldn't we be charging them more since they don't pay taxes on that building and taxes are also what support this service uh yeah so the first question is that's correct the fee schedule is set without any differentiation between uh ownership or location so it's type of building uh and the fees are set by either square footage for the cost of the alteration if it's an existing building I have not seen personally and maybe Sean or others have an opinion on this I've never seen a fee schedule that applied differently to either nonprofits or tax exempt institutions in fact if there are um fees other than building permanent fees usually they're they're less for those for those types of uses so I haven't seen any building construction fees that would be higher and honestly never considered that so maybe others have an opinion on that I imagine that the nonprofit would the argument would be used but then this should this is something that should be brought into our negotiations of our agreements with the with those higher ed institutions it's a good point and other questions from the committee this point because I know I think that there's a change ahead that I'm but I don't think that we really have enough that we can form it now it may not be a 23 issue it may be more 24 issue but that is I know the group of counselors who are working hard on trying to revisit the rental registration program and that that may have budget implications both needing to address on the revenue side as well as expense side but I assume that you're working with the along with the counselors who are addressing that issue to try and make sure that it goes in an orderly fashion yeah yeah the the CRC has a very aggressive complete schedule for the rest of the year working through a new potential regulation and you also know that recently the council adopted a new fee schedule for the current program that does produce new revenue so there's opportunities to either take an incremental step over the next year with enhancing the program or waiting for the counselors to finish up their work and decide what the what a new program could look like and you know we're excited and anxious for either in both situations and you know attending the CRC meetings and doing what we can to support that effort so I think I'm going to leave in then with one observation unless Paul has something to add to it and that is that if there are changes that need to be made to the 23 budget in cycle that we have a process to do that if it's not necessary and that's something that has to be just monitored and we will deal with it in course and Jennifer yeah I guess just echoing Bob and I know Michelle will you know concur with me that we do Rob and his staff have been working very closely with the CRC as we're looking to revise the rental permitting bylaw we really appreciated that and John Thompson attended a large neighborhood meeting on Fearing Street last night and he really has the trust and appreciation of the residents so we really appreciate Rob's staff I just wanted to add that thank you Rob and his staff thank you thank you so anything else looking for more if there are any other questions don't see any hints raised at this point so Rob again thank you appreciate your working with us and I know you sounds like you have something else you need to get on to okay thank you okay thank you so I guess are we at this point for Hailey is that next yep we have two more Hailey for the senior center and then after that Steve for the veterans so we'll start with Hailey okay all right well thanks for having me you know the senior center we work really hard to make sure that older adults have a place in the community and that they're they're active they're aging in place so I can talk about some of the recent accomplishments in the last year you know we had a pretty seamless pivot to remote operations we onboarded lots of zoom programs we're able to keep critical supportive services at the senior center reducing social isolation and maintaining health of seniors we did to-go meals mask deliveries we booked vaccine deploy appointments for seniors you know lots of again online programming utilizing both zoom and Amherst media through a grant we were able to create a technology loan library so individuals who didn't have a device could get one from the senior center and still participate in our programs and activities we strengthened the diversity of the council on aging with four of the nine board members representing the BIPOC community and we secured grant funding for caregiver bereavement and resilience groups and you know and continued the the farmers market token program which gives five thousand dollars worth of tokens to seniors and Amherst to use at the farmers market some of the key challenges on the long-range objectives for the senior center are to secure a sustainable stream of revenue to support a transportation program for activities of daily living and medical rides we're looking to identify space for an exercise gym and coffee cafe and both of those will strengthen resilience and reduce isolation in our older adults we need to maintain fundraising capacity with the friends of the Amherst senior center increase the capacity to loan equipment like technology you know iPads computers and also durable medical equipment and we're also looking to increase BIPOC leadership through recruitment outreach and services at the senior center in the coming year some of the objectives are going to be to obtain age-friendly and dementia-friendly statuses and we're currently working with the PVPC and the planning department to accomplish that we're going to perform a programming and services review so that we can understand how to better meet the needs of the BIPOC community and we're going to establish or we're going to look to establish a dedicated space and fund exercise equipment and then we'll also be providing input to the planning department on sidewalks and how to make them safer for our older adults and of course we're already in the process of reintegrating more in-person activities at the bank center and scaling up as we kind of step out of the move to remote participation and that's what I had prepared to me you know I was working with Helen on getting this budget document together and the only other thing I want to emphasize is that the staff Mary, Beth and Jen who are no longer with us and of course Helen worked very hard to get vaccine appointments for seniors you know if anybody remembers what it was like to get those appointments in February they would be posted at all hours of the day and night and so that the team had to work really hard to make sure that our older adults had appointments and I can take any questions and any there were no questions were sent in for the senior center ahead of time so. Okay so is there any members of the committee or the council who have any questions? Bob? Yeah I'm just wondering if you could elaborate on the issues with transportation for for seniors and whether that you know there's there's something that we need to be thinking about as the as the Finance Committee and Town Council. Sure so one of the things that we had been doing before COVID was offering medical rides or assistance with medical rides here we have too many vans currently at the senior center so that was a really well used program you know a lot of folks have difficulty getting to and from their doctor's appointments um one of the needs that we do have is looking at something that's ADA compliant and we're currently working with the PBTA to get one of their retired vans so that we'd be able to offer non-ambulatory seniors a way to get to and from medical appointments good because the the mini vans don't have a way to accommodate walkers or wheelchairs. And just adding to that Haley I think you're working with Doug Slaughter is that correct? Yes that's right. So for everyone who knows Doug Slaughter he knows the business manager for the regional schools but he also um I think he's on the the board or the president of the board for the PBTA and he kind of queued us in that you know they have a much more regular retirement schedule for their vans and that they sell them off and that that might be a you know there might be a good value to be found there. And the one thing I'll add to that too is we did allocate some ARPA funds for transportation and I think some of it depends on getting this fan or but maybe you can elaborate a little bit Haley on how those funds will be used. So the ARPA funds will be used to pay for drivers so when we get the van you know we'll of course need somebody who can drive it and on that it'll help us you know step away from having volunteers while we do utilize volunteers in a number of ways at the senior center for rides you want a little bit more consistency and so having the ARPA funds to pay someone will give us that. Yeah I mean as Sean I sort of Haley just said I speak my interest because I think that we're doing a lot of things right now with ARPA funds to support operations which is really valued but gets into the question of what's the long-term plan. Yeah yeah no no I think some of the things like this they're not meant to be permanent they're meant to be responses to the pandemic and support people as they come out of the pandemic and get them back out there and then if the town does decide it does want to make it permanent we have time to consider that and see if there's funds in the future but pretty much all the things that we've described except for the firefighters none of them are meant to be permanent. On the other hand we could build a real reliance of our senior community on services that they would want and expect to continue so it's not yeah again this is this is a new you're right well if the monitor as we go forward you know there we've had ways of doing this in the past without those funds but again we're trying to put a boost into it now as we come out of the pandemic to get people back out using the programs. Yeah somewhere between a half to a quarter to a half of the nursing home admissions because people aren't able to manage the medications so I'm wondering what our senior services might be doing to work with elderly folks like me and to help manage those medications and and interface with the with the doctors to prevent nursing home admissions and if there's any other any other efforts in that in that regard I mean it's horribly expensive to have and painful to have someone go into a nursing home it's much cheaper to keep them in the town so I'm wondering what's going on in that regard. Sure and that's you know that's a really great point because many seniors would actually prefer to age in place and they don't want to go to facilities like nursing homes so one of the things that we're doing you know is again scaling up programs and activities and certainly we do have a focus on making sure seniors have educational workshops that they can attend and you know thank you for bringing that up because that's an excellent thing that I'm happy to reach up to doctor's offices or work with the health department or some of the nursing homes in the area and we can bring in instructors who can assist with that we can certainly look at caregiver type grants that may be able to provide you know families with some support for helping elders manage their medications. Well one of the things that we were able to accomplish one of the things that we're doing is to have our public health nurse have regular conversations with seniors and then interface with that with their permission with the doctors to help manage medications so that's an active case management strategy. Are we doing anything like that? Not currently but it has been fantastic to work with the health department you know they've they've been really great neighbors and we're very fortunate to have them so certainly that's something I can talk to Jennifer about and see you know what we might be able to do to better serve the seniors. So thank you. Couple questions. First of all I let me this is more a statement the Amherst Survival Center learned the same thing about drivers it's better to have consistent drivers than volunteer drivers and so I think that's a good move however I do hope we can figure out in future budgets beyond DARPA how to continue a service like that. My question really is are you collaborating with Amherst neighbors which is really focusing on seniors and trying to increase if you will the volunteer nature and then I have another question but why don't we stop with that one. Okay yes I've met with Blindetary a number of times you know since I started here and I think it's you know again they're a really pivotal organization they started from grassroots and they've become a really important lifeline in the community they're able to assist seniors who currently need transportation and they offer opportunities for people to get together with social programs so there's more collaboration to come. They did co-sponsor a workshop on hearing loss at the senior center we had invited the audiologist at UMass to talk about what is hearing loss how to adapt and navigate and different types of hearing aids so let's just one program that we've collaborated on right now and there's certainly more to come. And then the other thing is I applaud the senior center on trying to do as much as you could through zoom and you know other electronic means remote remains during COVID I actually encourage that you continue at least some of that in a mixed mode because of the isolation that seniors feel and maybe they don't have the time or the inclination to physically come and join you or maybe they're afraid of ongoing COVID so that's just an observation and a question about your plans to kind of continue to provide both virtual and in person. Great question so yes we do still offer zoom programs we have several zoom exercise classes we have a cosmology group that meets once a week that's on zoom you know I in talking with the community there are folks who miss coming on site and getting together with their friends you know at the open house people talked about I haven't seen this person in years and how wonderful it was to catch up with them but not everyone feels that way and I you know I want to be sensitive to those needs as well so whenever we can offer you know a hybrid option or doing a special zoom program we're you know we'll certainly do that. Thank you and thanks for everything you're doing. Yeah Kathy I know you have a time constraint because of an MSPA meeting so I was going to. No actually I went and came back and you might see I'm so I've been so quiet you didn't know I was going but I'm back you can Michelle can go up first she had her hand. I noticed Kathy yeah I just Haley I want to really thank you for your leadership I feel like the seniors are often you know sort of unseen and I just really appreciate you being a voice and leadership in that department and I had a question about crests and seniors and how if you see any possibilities for crests to be supportive or helpful to the seniors in our community. Okay good question and before I say anything I think it really takes a village you know I I can do what I do because I have a great staff I have great volunteers I have great support from the town so that really without any of that I couldn't do what I do and crests plays a part of that so coming up in July and August we're actually going to have two programs with crests a meet and greet and then a logo contest because they're they're looking for a new logo and we're going to have seniors vote on what that is so we're already collaborating and I see crests as really being another way to perform you know in just one sense like wellness checks you know I might be able to say to a crests responder you know hey I haven't seen this person and they're usually here every week for this program you know can you go and follow up with them or you know in another example might be somebody is experiencing dementia and they're they're not quite themselves and they're you know sometimes we'll have cases where the person thinks they can still drive and they can't and the family member has to kind of tell them that and that doesn't always go over very well a crest responder might be able to mediate that situation and help diffuse it and you know and keep the person at their house and not make it so that they need to be removed to another location. Can I just jump in on that the first second? So yeah just credit to Hayley who reached out to Earl when he first started and she and Earl have created become regular companions and meet regularly usually for lunch but really formed a really strong team at the at the bank center so that's a really good relationship building being built by Hayley and Earl. The role of the bank center. Kathy? Yeah I just wanted to you know I could also just send this by email to Hayley but that what Bernie brought up about medications there have been a few very innovative healthcare programs that use public health nurses or AIDS but whoever was in the person's home with their permission took an iPad and took pictures of all the medications in the cabinet because one of the things that happens is people don't throw out their old meds and so not only is there confusion but it took a picture with their permission to share it with the doctor and the in New York when they this was more connected with the primary physicians they were asking the doctors to guess how many meds the person was on and they were never right literally never right and it was always on they thought fewer so trying to think of this multiple who's in the home and the opportunities for someone who's trusted I think is is really important. It is clearly not everybody but it's it's you can kind of get a sense in the rural south this was huge people were bringing in shoeboxes with medications to take a look at them so it's it just I want to underscore that because it it leads to dementia and mental issues that end up being a hospital or a nursing home issue. Absolutely you know so the the police department does a drug take-back day every every April and October and in Hampshire County we had a ton a literal ton of medications dropped off at the various police department so those are you know like you're saying it's very important to clean out those cabinets. We no longer have a quorum of the council so I'm going to adjourn the council portion of this meeting not the whole meeting just the council portion. Okay Matt. Thanks Andy actually not a question just a quick comment just want to thank Hailey for all the work that you do with the seniors and and especially the flexibility that you've had and creativity that you've had through the pandemic we I was just looking the cultural council did have we funded a the hip hop dance for seniors which I know was over Zoom and kind of a mixed format thing and I and I just think you know being creative and collaborative and find ways to reach folks who who may not want to gather in person right now is is super important so I'm just appreciate what you do. Thank you. Yeah I guess so are there any exceptional challenges that you're having to think about as you try and move back to more traditional meals and wheels program? Challenges with programming in general or food specific? Treatment also? I think that you know the challenge is really just knowing what tomorrow is going to bring you know sometimes you're you know you make a plan and you think I'm going to do this program and then you you find out all cases are climbing and it you know wouldn't be a good idea to do it this particular way. The listening sessions for the Agent Dementia Friendly Project are a great example we wanted to do some of those in person and now we're kind of thinking we might do more virtual just because of the trends in COVID cases so I would say you know that's a challenge you know I'm thinking ahead the holidays are coming up and how are we going to get seniors together how are we going to socialize in safe ways when there's a reasonable expectation that you know COVID cases will go up at that time you know typically we see a lot of the flu anyway during the winter. So does that answer your question Andy? Yeah no I was just thinking about it because I had friends who had been volunteers in the old program and what they always said was is that it was a program that not only got meals to people but also got contact isolated. Oh the UMass Meals on Wheels? Yeah that was um so unfortunately that was suspended during COVID but I have reached out to the Executive Director of the Auxiliary Services for UMass and I'm hopeful that we can you know relaunch that program at some point this year because like you're saying it Meals on Wheels is really important because sometimes that's the only contact a person is going to have all day. That individual is you know homebound they're not able to get out and just having that volunteer go and talk to them for five minutes can be can light up their whole day and not only that but it provides meals and my understanding of the UMass program was that it was an entree and a lunch so people got two meals through that program at a very reasonable rate so certainly food is a big passion area of mine and I you know like I said I'm going to try to relaunch that program with the support of UMass. Okay thank you. Anything else on seniors services? You know just to keep your eye out you know we have like I said a lot of activities a lot of programs coming up collaborations with um you know with APD with Cress and the recreation department you know we we really want to get out there and get involved in the community and just help our older adults you know there's a lot of older adults you know like I've said before 5200 people are over the age of 60 in town so we want to make sure that they they know that they're welcome and they have a place. Okay um anything else uh I'm looking to see if there are any hands that go up because I think the only other thing that I would say is that during the hearing we heard several comments um and um they were regarding the need for space in the senior center and uh the programming that goes with it and um to think be thinking about the whole need for a new look new location or new space plan and just when it was sure you and everybody that it was a hearing but we heard. Yeah I think um there's been a lot of support from in the community for this and I'm I'm looking forward to you know seeing what the next steps are you know working with the town manager's office in the finance department um you know we'll certainly do our you know our work to get on the the joint capital plan and you know this is my first go around for any of these cycles so I I'm really happy to have the guidance and uh and support of town hall for that um you know because like you said there are some challenges that we're experiencing but the best way forward is it's coming together as a community and as a town and getting a solid plan together. Thank you so if there's something else I guess Sean we're ready for Steve Connor. Yep yes so the last department to go is Steve Connor for the veterans. Hi Steve. Good morning everyone um I just made sure my I was a little late getting on because my zoom is working sometimes and not others but today it's working so uh I'm not a great tech person so um so um it's been a challenging year um and uh I foresee the coming year also being challenges and the reason I say challenging is because uh very much the issues that Haley is speaking about are happening in my world because so many of my veterans are aging um if you look at our numbers it's it's very deceiving um we run a program of benefits under chapter 115 law that for indigent veterans um senior veterans who are low income um those numbers are down they're down statewide because of COVID we believe some of it's though also the aging of large majorities of of veterans and now we have Vietnam veterans going into that group um but the need of veterans in the community have gone way up so my senior veterans um their needs have gone up immensely and I've had a heck of a winter in spring uh with some of um some of the veterans in Amherst um because of their needs and as I do that it's coordinating services with my office with well whoever else can help and that's many times a VA but not always and so um it's staying on top of things and some of the other a lot of the cases that I'll have won't be people that I'm giving them benefits under the state program because income they're doing fine they may be a hundred percent service connected veterans but the hundred percent service connected veteran doesn't get money from me but they need a whole lot of services from me and whether it's they they need home modifications done and that's a whole process and and it's paperwork and bureaucracy that they don't understand um you know there is some tax issues that we help with but that doesn't seem to be a big deal either the other thing that's going on is the people that um through the VASH program and for those that have never heard of it it's called the VA supportive housing it's a program to end veterans homelessness and it's been around for about 14 years um 13 14 years and it's been very successful it's taken formally homeless veterans out of shelters and out of those gpd beds and put them into permanent housing well there's hundreds and hundreds of placements in our area and I've helped place many of those people um and many do live in hammers what has happened is is after a while once they seem to be stable they are dropped from case management the VA says they're doing fine we can now concentrate on more people and they get new vouchers and these other people are left to be stable well we discovered this year that there's a problem with that system in the sense that as these veterans that were formally homeless age there's challenges and they don't have a case manager I know about them because they may be on my benefits they're still low income that's why they have this subsidy um it's a section eight subsidy I had a veteran that I was working with trying to get him a service dog I got that and then I didn't hear from for a couple of weeks and I thought that was kind of weird and I got a call from Cooley Dickinson Hospital that the veteran had um had a stroke and that he was there and I'm like oh okay well that's really great that the hospital told me I think the hospital was trying to tell the VA hospital that information because what ended up happening is he ended up in a hospital then he went to rehab in Ludlow he was out of his apartment for five to six weeks and nobody knew it except certain people and nobody connected the dots the veteran then was brought home released from rehab and not even to his house but to his girlfriend's house and I get a call four days later that that's happened I'm like oh okay well all right um and services the person who called me said well yeah I'm the one who goes in and does occupational therapy I just went there I think somebody has to go um work with him because he hasn't eaten in four days and he doesn't have his insulin and I'm like what his girlfriend couldn't get it because she's in a wheelchair and his apartment isn't accessible he couldn't get it because he was still confused and could barely walk and they released him and it was crazy I went and found old medicines found all kinds of stuff but he did go four days without that so I ended up having a meeting with the VA in in Leeds about this very thing since that happened they have created a new position they've hired on a new social worker who's only there now to check on all the uh VASH people that have been released from case management that might need support again um but so it's it's it's this whole crazy system of meeting the needs of my veterans um and now they talk about potentially closing the VA up here which now has freaked out a whole lot of my people district wide Steve can you explain what the impact would be if the hospital was closed on the region I mean aside from obviously the hospital being closed but what would happen um to all the the veterans that are being serviced by that hospital it's what what they're what it would happen is is all the veterans that are relying especially in the rural communities are relying on that hospital to be there to meet the need they're talking about closing it and building a bigger facility into Springfield now take just the gentleman that I was just mentioning he's formerly homeless he doesn't have a vehicle so if he has to go to an appointment at the VA currently he can get on one of the buses and it goes all the way up to the VA if they move it to Springfield he either has to take a Peter Pan bus and then a smaller bus to get to wherever they're going to build this place or he can take the PBTA and it'll take him three and a half hours each way just to get to an appointment so that's not going to work I met with Congressman McGovern about this and we're really fighting it we came up with a plan of action he's had a listening session um but yeah it's it's going to be a really hard hit from my senior veterans and my disabled veterans so uh we're fighting it it's nine to ten years into the future one of the things that the when they made these recommendations to this air commission um what they didn't what they had used as data was that 125 million dollars in repairs and updates need to happen up there and that was a report that they'd done in 2013 well what they didn't say in this finding is that they've already spent a hundred million I don't know if anybody here ever goes up to the VA but it's been under construction for years all the underground work has been done all but two buildings have been redone they've just done in the biggest building half of it has been gutted and they're redoing it and they're going to keep going for the next several years so we're really trying to convince the administration and congress that they can't close this hospital it as is they're already reducing the amount of services they provide um so veterans are going to have to travel but even more importantly um you know if they close it completely my my veterans just aren't going to have access and they're going to go more and more into the community and I will say again and I'm running uh I'm working with a group called the Just Ask campaign medical facilities do not know how to work with veterans especially disabled veterans um if they have PTSD or traumatic brain injury or other issues and so we're trying to address that as well so as they shrink the VA and throw my veterans into the community the community is not ready for them and don't necessarily understand how to deal with their issues and so uh it's it's a frustrating um experience but I guess we're fighting it see what we can do so just adding to what Steve said just for new people to the committee so the VA section of the budget has sort of two primary expenses it has the assessment we pay to the central hamster veterans service district of which Stephen is the uh the lead and he has staff there and they do all the engagement and outreach um and we're a member with several other communities and then the benefits that um Stephen administers and pays out to veterans is the other big chunk and we get um both of those figures we get from uh Steve each here so Andy I guess if you want to turn it over there were no questions sent in ahead of time for the for the veterans group so if there's any questions now yeah would you see if there are any hands that don't have these questions oh the one thing I did want to say while people are thinking about it just um we are continuing to get our 75 reimbursement and that's we've not had any issues with that so we are getting our state money back but as we have lost some of that caseload our application for disability with the VA system for some of our veterans has gone up and so has the money that comes in so I've got a record that last year um money that's coming from the VA to veterans or their spouses through DIC or through their pension program for aid and attendance if they need you know people coming into the home keeping in there uh we brought last year it was $211,000 um per month that is coming into the VA into the town of Amherst for those veterans so that's uh that number's risen since I started here so um so one level is going down the other one's going up you very much Steve I'm going to ask a question that we asked of Haley um we have a new program called Cress and one of among the many populations that we wanted it to be able to serve for people with um post-traumatic stress syndrome um you know acute mental issues that aren't well dealt with so I don't know to what extent you Haley and then eventually Earl have shared lists of the kinds of people we're talking about you know so um some of the vets are probably homebound you know when we talked about homebound but just you're thinking that the per the the human being might fit in multiple categories um and that they're they're both this that and another thing and I know you know if you don't get veterans benefits if the VA hospitals and around the Medicare program is not as robust as what VA does to rob around including drugs um but I just so this is just uh to the extent some of this can be coordinated so we have um at I think of it kind of as an at-risk list list that someone's paying attention to so whichever resource um so it's a comment rather than a have you done this I mean we the program's not even been running yet so you wouldn't have been able to do it right so um as I've been running around because Memorial Day is coming up and I'm everywhere in the district and trying to do all these things I did run into Town Hall and I saw Earl um I worked with Earl previously in our homeless program um so he and I had worked on it and so I said after Memorial Day I would love to sit down and go through you know what's going on with my veterans and of course I also get some of the veterans go into Craig's place and so um and those are usually with significant um mental health issues so we are gonna I'm hoping to meet and I'd love to sit and meet with Haley as well because one of the things through the years is I've been working more and more with Helen on some of the same people she refers them to me I you know we we've coordinated pretty well so um yeah if I can get to Memorial Day I would love to have some more connections with people but it's just exhausting right now um Steve would you be able to give us a little more of a sense of the profile of the vets in Amherst based on age race and their vets of which wars so um there are still you know one of the one of the hard things is to get a handle on all the veterans because so like the VFW was closing they had younger vets but now that that building is closed and the post isn't very active they're dispersing and so it's hard to keep track of them the older veterans at the American Legion aren't coming in as much so trying to keep tabs on people I went it took us I worked with the Legion we had one gentleman who was one of their officers he had some health issues I worked with him in the last couple of years about it and I was trying to find him housing and then we didn't hear from him for five weeks the Legion kept trying to find him I was trying to find him he wasn't answering his phone well it ended up he moved back with his sister under the cape but it took us weeks to figure that out um so so just that that's the struggle I have with any community is keeping tabs on them because they don't have a central place anymore like they used to that they go to um but I kind of look at the veterans in Amherst we have those that have basically went to war came back resided in Amherst and stay in Amherst those are the people who don't need my financial services so much but need other supporting services like getting them into the VA health getting them disability pays all of those kind of things and and helping them plan their funerals I've got a few of those this year and and so I have that and then I have those veterans and a bunch of them are Vietnam veterans that have been homeless for decades and now they're in but everybody knows most of them are African-American they move into Amherst because they feel that that's a warm feeling for them because they they see community there in Amherst in certain parts of Amherst where they're not going to see that in Williamsburg or you know other places so that's a good population in Amherst they need both my financial assistance but as they're aging they need a lot of connecting to services and also as they get older they keep forgetting things so I've been work trying to get my paperwork for some of my veterans it's taken me five months to get one guy's paperwork done so that we get the 75% back on his money because he has a phone I got him the assurance phone they used to call him the Obama phones well that was great it's free but he can't work it and I've been trying to teach him for five months how to work this phone he's just never going to get it he's 83 years old so I have to drive to go see him he lives over at the village and I have to always go and see him so some of my veterans I actually have to go in person to connect with so it there is an array like in every community but I'm hoping and I think one of my objectives is talking about doing more outreach I did start and it's on the town site I have a new show about outreach and about conversations about veterans benefits and services and I'm trying to get it I'm going to talk with the folks at Amherst Media to get it on the regular television but it is on the website and I'm going to be doing those monthly and talking about the different issues but every time I talk about what we do and what we can provide because I know there's a need out there but finding all those veterans or the surviving spouses of veterans is even more important because they don't even know I exist and that I can help them so hopefully that answered your question in a very roundabout way yeah and just it does I mean I think what we need to remember is veterans go beyond Vietnam oh yeah they're not just old Vietnam vets anymore and unfortunately we continue to not necessarily honor people in our service but more importantly Steve there'll be at least five counselors on Sunday on Monday yay all right that's great that's great and we actually I think it's going to be a nice program because we have an old friend who just wrote I haven't gotten through the whole thing but he wrote a new book about a Amherst college student who left college to become an officer in the army to fight the civil war and he's going to talk a little bit about that book Mr. Romer and I think that's inspiring for Amherst that he keeps bringing the the history of the civil war and how the african-american population in Amherst had a central role in all of it and I also want to commend the town I love where the civil war tablets are and I have some people come over and say I just wanted to go see the tablets so that's a great thing that that's back up you're muted Andy sorry there was noise in my background so I chatted off for a minute um so any other questions on veteran services if not um Steve thank you it's always good to see you and look forward to Monday very good and I think it'll be a good day and no rain so you know so far so good thank you everyone for listening you've got this one fixed it looks like so thank you very much I appreciate you're being here thanks um so where we are in the process and I want to get the public comment too because I know there are a couple numbers in the public here who may wish to make comment we have three things we want to accomplish now one is the public comment of course the other is is the get back to whether there are any last overall budget questions that I know we have received some from one counselor who's not present today but did send them in and Sean was going to at least point us in the direction of what the questions were and what he provided today so that that's two and the third is that we are setting up the process because Tuesday is going to be the committee meeting where we're going to make the decisions going to review the budget and what we wanted to do was identify issues that members of the committee want to discuss in more detail and that will require particular focus and I said that any if any is supported by two people on the committee that we will schedule time for the discussion of that section of the budget just remembering we are focusing on the town managers f y 23 budget during this discussion so that those are the items that those are the subject matters that we will be needing to consider and then it is a part of that if there is a motion that is consistent with the charter and state laws to what the council might be recommended to the council for action on any particular section of the budget that would then flow from those discussions so I was trying to identify today any that might arise though there will be an opportunity on Tuesday next week to do that again so those are the three things I'll start with public comment and if there's any members of the public who are present who wish to be recognized to speak to the committee should raise their hand we asked that you limited to three minutes and but we very much want to hear from you and I noticed that Tony is Cunningham is and brought into the room because she did raise her hand and Tony and unmute your mic and welcome thank you Tony Cunningham Owen Drive I wanted to comment on the discussion earlier about surplus town property it would be great if the property disposition advisory group were formalized and their meetings made public on June 13th the elementary school building committee will select the site for the new elementary school having followed the process closely from day one I am convinced that Fort River is a far superior site for a school for almost 605 to 10 year olds this would leave Wildwood for other town uses I would like to encourage the town whether that's this body JCPC Jeremiah LaPlante or Rupert Roy Clark to prioritize the improvements needed to the school building that will remain and get those improvements into the 10 year capital plan with the most urgent needs starting in FY 24 good planning will ensure there is no gap in occupancy between when the school moves out hopefully in June 2026 and when other groups can move in Wildwood is absolutely habitable if it wasn't my nine and 11 year olds wouldn't be spending six hours there every day as you know many community needs have been identified as priorities for residents including more space for a senior center a cultural center a youth empowerment center space for the performing arts and education collaborative etc I hope that the comments made by members of this body about dumping abandoned property on you and seeing property as a liability we're not referring to the remaining school building as an 82,000 square foot town building with parking is an incredible asset that cannot be replicated to purchase property and build any of these centers from scratch would cost many many times more than the cost of the repairs needed to the school building in the 10 year capital plan in the FY 20 budget priority repairs to both Fort River and Wildwood were included once the site for the new school is selected on June 13th the highest priority improvements to the remaining building need to be added back to the capital plan thank you okay thank you appreciate it anything else anybody else who wishes to be recognized thank you I appreciate the public comment and Sean you received some questions from Andy Hanna key sure so I will go through these Paul feel free to jump in or Sonya feel free to jump in if you want to add anything so the first question was what hard decisions did you make in funding various departments in order to present us a general government budget within council guidelines so from my perspective and others may have different perspective I think it's that we weren't able to invest in areas that a lot of you have heard about throughout these meetings we've heard about a number of departments that have been stretched during the pandemic or have taken on more responsibilities that you know if we you know if we had no restriction on funds we would probably look to add to those departments some of the ones you've heard about our facilities facilities obviously there's lots of needs there our IT department you heard from in terms of supporting meetings and all that goes along with that we heard from our recreation department and I think the last one we've also heard about again is public works and you know the issues they've had attracting people and retaining people so so I think there's a number and there's you know every other department has needs as well but I think those are some of the ones that we heard through these processes that if there was no limit to funds you know we would look to look to do something more Paul so any you want to add in now good okay what isn't funded how much would it take to fund them so just the things that I just described I mean depends what we did but you know it'd be we'd be looking at probably at least $300,000 more for just the government the general government budget or the municipal budget not the schools in order to do you know add positions and fund different things and again it would all depend on what we did and these questions are not all on one topic so they may bounce around a little bit it was an email of several questions so the next question is senior services library and recreation all have friends of groups how much of the operating budget for each of these departments do the friends of groups provide how did this reliance come about why are these departments forced to rely on fundraising but other departments are not so we don't have super satisfying responses for that one you know I've talked to Sonia she's sort of the office historian for me in terms of how this how things came about you know no real you know Sonia unless you want to add anything you know there's nothing that stood out as noteworthy how these things came about they just happened the you know one thing we stopped doing because it wasn't part of the manager's budget but if like I'll give people a sense of it now in terms of how much funding is provided these are not funds that the town receives these are funds that belong to the friends of groups so we don't have great you know we don't know exactly what they're buying we don't know I'm sure the people who work in those departments have a better sense but we don't have an accounting of that per se but we did get some of that information in the past so the senior center is probably the one that we have the most information on because it used to be part of the budget book and so I think the friends of group in FY 18 just to give people a sense of magnitude fundraised I don't know if they spent this much but they fundraised about $26,000 so I don't know about recreation I don't think we've tracked that or have that information available and I'm not I think the library budget chair and may report on that a little bit so again not great not a great response to that in terms of how it came about why that's the case you know the only thing I can think of is these are all those three areas library recreation senior services they're all departments that provide programming and programming can be scaled up it can be scaled down it's one of those things that if there's a certain type of program people want that may not be within the existing operating budget they could fundraise for it and over time you know things change and and scale up that way I think the departments that don't have friends of friends of groups are the ones that sort of provide you know it's not a programming service to the public necessarily the next question so additional programs departments or department objectives include several additional programs the senior services area an exercise gym and more programming the recreation department a youth empowerment center the fire department mentioned the community paramedic initiative and the communication center mentioned a newly dispatched position how are priorities for additional programs determined across departments and how are these decisions the council should be making or advising the town manager on so the one I'll pull out is the youth empowerment center so that's such a large decision that that would be you know community decision a council decision a town manager decision that would be a much broader conversation if that was if we move forward with creating something like that the other ones in terms of an exercise gym the paramedic community paramedic initiative lead dispatch if that's thing if those are initiatives that can be added within operating budgets or incorporated within existing operating budgets then that would fall into the town manager if it's something you know we each budget gets the government budget gets some new funding each year so if there are things that can't be handled within existing operating budgets but maybe the process we have with departments is they're able to propose additions each year so when we review their budgets they send in an addition form if they're going to propose any additions all those get added together and prioritized by the town manager and a lot of that prioritization is you know it's compared to what new funding we have available so the first thing we have to do is from the new funding we have available take off contractual steps and colas and things like that and a lot of times that takes up a big portion of our new funding so there's not a ton usually left over for for new things this year in particular there was no money left over for new things because any money that was left over for new things we put towards the Crest program and DEI so this year in particular very there was there were no additions but that's how those things would happen if there were was a new program or a new initiative and new funding was needed it would be requested and then it'd be prioritized I'll stop there because I see Alicia has her hand up Alicia yeah thank you Sean I was just wondering if you could specify what leftover funds were applied to DEI and Crest that you're referring to so when you take our two and a half percent I can try to get the exact number but when you take our two and a half percent increase to the to the municipal budget we first roll everybody up steps and colas anything that was left over within that two and a half percent increase was combined with the three hundred thousand dollars that was added to the the municipal operating budget to fund the ten new positions within the operating budget and I think it may be I think it's in the the introduction to the budget so hold on let me see if I can find that real quick if I can't find it quickly I'll email it back to the group after yeah let me email it to the group after but for some reason then the number three hundred and sixty thousand sticks out in my head is what we had to add to this year's budget for Crest we know that we went three hundred thousand dollars above the regular two and a half for Crest so the the balance would be the difference of the sixty thousand or so that would have come out of the the two and a half percent which is our regular increase I think it was I think it was 371520 if I'm looking at the right thing okay but we can send the I'll send the exact numbers after thank you so Bernie yeah I just thought I'd announce the formation of a friends of the finance department group so we can make sure that everybody in the finance department has an ample supply of coffee and headache relief we've actually decided Bernie the next year we're going to sell the budget books so be prepared it's going to be a ten dollar fee for those and okay as long as you're available through Amazon we can get them the question I do have though and I'm sure it exists that I just have found it or have ignored it but it'd be very helpful to get an ARPA spending plan so we know exactly where the ARPA money's going and where you know we'll be looking in the future to replace ARPA money with taxation or some other some other forms because I think your 300,000 dollar figure Sean with all your respect is a little low I think we've gotten a substantial my guess we've got a substantial boost from ARPA and that we're going to have to make some painful decisions going forward about about this I appreciate all the work that's going into it's it's a it's a huge amount of work and it's a real balancing act and lots of lots of stuff has to a lot of a lot of nights spent thinking about this I'm sure but I would appreciate an ARPA spending spending plan and we'll we'll say thanks yeah so I'm just going to share my screen real quick so Bernie this is page 269 of the budget document so this gives the the categories or the the projects that ARPA funds have been allocated to you can see it's a very wide you know pretty much every department one way or another it has some connection to some ARPA funding affordable housing homeless homelessness we're sort of the two big ones that Dave Z and his team are working on the fire EMS staffing one you can see there many of these projects are over multiple years so I don't want you to see the 875 for fire EMS staffing I think that's one year that's three or four years worth of funding so the annual amount is lower the sixth grade transition most of that is for for one-time cost to support that transition to the middle school or one-time cost to the town at least economic development mental health so again we can you know at some point I'm sure actually I'll just do another plug each of these there's project descriptions that are starting to go up there's I think there's over 10 of them now they're up on the ARPA section of the webpage where you can dig into more these and more detail and see the more specifics about what's what's being funded and what the benchmarks are and things like that so many of these are up there there's a few that are still being developed so they're not up there yet but here this is the plan again and I'm sure in the future we'll you know there'll be more questions on this yeah some some of this is some of this is one and done and some of this is going to cause some degree of ongoing spending and that's the ongoing spending piece that I think we're going to have to focus on in future discussions right and actually you know as you look through it too you know I'll just point out try to know areas where we actually hope it creates more funding for the town you know it's the projects are intended to generate economic development or development of housing things that will actually bring in more money to the town sure thank you okay so let me keep oh Kathy has her hand up yeah I just want to build on what Bernie asked because I know we had that page but um I think of it is some are one and done some if we that money's not there we have a hole in an ongoing service you know something that we're supporting and some is potentially creating a new demand on the operating budget and I would just like it sorted out because um we didn't we we had a discussion on that list we didn't have a long discussion on that list but as we think through it um I we when we first saw the glimpse of fy 24 25 26 the tightness of that and when I start to remove those phones so it's a different way of thinking about it Sean um from uh this is a one-time thing that money goes away that's fine and I appreciate the economic stimulus we don't we might be spending money and getting more money because of that but so I I just would like to be able to think that way about it more so I just want to build on Bernie's point not to say that that list isn't a good starting point but to be able to look forward the other is um on Mandy's list of uh possible things that departments have mentioned that or others have mentioned that we might want to do um several things came up in this budget cycle one of the ones I found particularly intrigued intriguing was the EMS fire discussion of what uh a staff trained as more as paramedics and what they could do with homebound is really extension the health care system I have no idea what that might look like but it's a waste of money the way we're doing it now the the care system maybe not town money to drive someone over to gully Dickinson drive back and then drive them back again um you know if if we could be do something to stabilize them so I I found and the comment was that unless they had to be staffed differently to be thinking about providing a different kind of service and I wasn't sure how much was billable you know so you wouldn't want to add that without knowing you can bill for it so I think some of this is not a a quick discussion it's it's a more exploration and I have no idea whether mean there are municipal governments out there that are doing anything like this that if we weren't thinking for next year for two years from now but it goes with everything we just heard with the VA and and seniors um so I was really struck by the waste uh particularly amount um around mental health um repeat admissions where our ambulance is driving back and forth and only getting partially paid for that amount of time so it's it's a comment to flag the area that Mandy picked up yeah this is actually kind of looking to next year and to ARPA and that is that as we look at the number of buildings that are being built and are going to come online during this year therefore bringing in more taxes I think it would be important to um begin even next year to take positions that are being funded by ARPA and start moving them on to the regular operating budget like the police positions etc and the reason I'm saying this is right now we've added 16 positions in this budget that is a lot and as we go into future years trying to figure out how we're going to even be able to maintain those 16 positions is important now I also have a you know slightly secret plan of what I would like to see us do with that additional ARPA money and one of those ideas is to help use it toward our school to the extent that we can so that we can help reduce the tax bill coming to people but I just want to start thinking about how we look at ARPA money now and how we look at ARPA money down the road and how we look at how to wean the town of ARPA money because for operating because it is a serious issue down the road thank you yeah no I think you're right Lynn I think if we see that revenues are doing better than um you know better than forecasted and we can have higher increases for operating budgets um we will certainly look to do that try to bring those things into the operating budget sooner um and if we free up ARPA money that's great um I think that applies to both the town and the schools right because we've heard about the schools and you know ESSER and what's going on there as well so so I think that's definitely on our radar of if we can if you know state aid comes in better or other things come in better we'll look to do that quicker so yeah Sean um so for the ARPA funding it I from what I could tell both the the government and the treasury had certain categories for allocation um and I'm just wondering uh with respect to localities how closely our categories have to match up to sort of those broader categories and if I assume that you've gone through that exercise I'm just I'm curious about yeah yeah you'll see that again on the the project snapshots on the webpage what categories they coincide with so um smaller municipalities have a lot of flexibility with how they're used because one of the categories of ARPA is what they call revenue replacement and they've given every community a 10 million dollar allowance for revenue replacement and since our allocation is only um 12 million dollars essentially 10 million dollars of it we can use for anything that governments are allowed to spend money on um that being said the whole point of ARPA was economic stimulus and helping recover from the pandemic and so you know when you look at our plan that's really what we've tried to do with it it's we've tried to you've spent it on things that help stimulate the economy um deal with some of the major issues that the pandemic showed us that we had like mental health or public health um and tackle some of the long-standing issues that the town has identified um like like housing and the homelessness um allocation so those are sort of three buckets we've tried to tackle um and again there's other things we could do but you know this list came out of listening to the community working with department heads working with stakeholders um you know we worked with the council you know we shared this with the council and got input from the council um back in early mid mid 2021 or so and then I think it was approved not approved but it was we asked that there were objections in November and there were no objections so yeah I mean the other thing that we've learned over the past months has been the effect of inflation on our costs and our construction costs which is where it comes back to the elementary school and uh what extent we can use ARPA or have other plans to address those issues because some increases in costs we hope are temporary but some increases in costs may not be so temporary yeah I think one of the things we weigh is impact um so I you know I hear Lynn's point about using to reduce the the school um that exclusion especially because it's higher than what we expected to be um you know we've looked at the numbers of you know every million you shave off the debt exclusion what impact that has um again I know it might be symbolic and it and it's important for the town to do everything we can um but the impact is very small because it's over 30 years um you know it's of a large number it's a small piece of it so it's something we'll we'll certainly look at um and we do have about some something north of two million dollars that hasn't been allocated yet that we'll be looking to allocate this fall um and I'm sure that will be one of the part of the conversation okay uh Bernie yeah one of the challenges here has been that the the the feds have pushed this money out the garbage they want to use quickly and everything's done on a post audit basis and they're just slowly as I'm seeing they're like drips and drabs of audit standards are being and are being released so um I appreciate I wanted to raise that because I appreciate how people have to dance around this to make sure that we're not running a foul of a standard that doesn't quite exist yet right now that's especially true of the CARES Act um and that may be some of what you're seeing as well um the CARES Act some of the audit audit standards are coming out now um you know months after the the funds have been spent or months after the grant has ended um so so I'll keep just a way in on that you know Sean has been very careful to check in with the administrators every time say is this an appropriate expenditure and has that in writing from folks for the most of the major expenditures I think we're in good shape he's been very diligent about that so I'll keep going through the question so um the next question it appears you've proposed a budget that does not use our entire property tax levy capacity there was about 165,000 of excess capacity um what is the reason behind that and how much would each additional sector get if we'd use the entire levy um so there's a couple pieces to that um what we've done is we kept we've kept the excess levy the same as it was the prior year um or approximately the same as it was the prior if we were to use all that now um two things one it would it would mean a larger than normal tax increase for this year um and one thing we thought given inflation and um everything else going on going larger than typical is probably not the best idea this year um the second thing is that number isn't set until we do the recap so that number is going to fluctuate a little bit if we see a revenue that we don't think you know something between now and the recap is done um whether it be our new growth number or other local receipt numbers that may not be coming in the way we thought they were coming in that number sort of the the offset and would plug that and then the question about um how so if we were to allocate that to the general government elementary schools only and the library um it'd be 75 80 thousand dollars more for each of those budgets and about six thousand dollars more for the library that being said I'm not sure that's the way we would do it if we were um we're using about 500 thousand dollars of reserves to support this year's budget um and and the capital plan so I don't know if necessarily if if we were to exhaust all of that if it would actually go straight to departments or if it would go to reduce our dependency on user reserves this year the next question is um is the 500k budget from the stabilization the planned user reserves to boost capital spending and borrowing for the large projects um and yes it is uh so that is if you look in the other financing sources section of the revenue um you'll see there's a use of reserves and that was um that's what that's for why are local receipts being budgeted for less than fy 21 amounts uh which was a hard covid year should we be higher than fy 21 so if you look at fy 21 closely um you'll one thing will jump out to you and this is actually the next question and that's the fees line you'll see there's about 237 thousand dollars worth of fees and fy 21 actuals but zero for the budget and that's because those fees are impact fees for short-term rentals and for cannabis and they're restricted in their use they're not they're not truly general fund revenues in the sense that we can use them to support the overall budget um Sonya and I are looking at ways we may be able to set up a revolving fund or something separate to track those um because it causes some issues one it causes this issue of comparing year to year where it's not going to be budgeted um because it's not unrestricted in that way so we're thinking looking at maybe set up a revolving fund of some sort the other issue it causes is each year those funds fall to free cash they're still restricted um and so we so we have to keep a running tally of our free cash um or our reserves that are from that source so that when we do have a plan for how to spend those funds um you know we know what the balance is and we make sure they're spent on the right thing which is another argument for having a revolving fund um so when you actually look at our reserve balance it's a little bit inflated because it has those funds in it that aren't really general reserves um the a couple other reasons why fy 21 um may appear uh or why fy 23 may be a little lower than fy 21 is uh we had a really high supplemental tax and fy 21 that goes year to year um there's some years where it's really high some years where it's nothing or really really low um and the pandemic impacted that a little bit so so we don't assume really high supplemental taxes in the budget and then cannabis tax i think is the other one it's down a little bit we're projecting a little bit of a decrease for fy 23 from fy 21 that's because we're experiencing that now fy 22 um we saw a big drop in our cannabis revenue um and that may bounce back with some of the new dispensaries coming on but um our our recent experience is that it dropped off the second question against its related fees this line is zero for fy 22 and fy 23 which are the budget years but it brought in over 200k in the prior years which are actuals do we budget this line and again we so we don't currently budget that line because that's restricted in its use um and we're still developing a plan for how to use those impact fees again they're restricted to only being used on the impacts of the dispensaries that pay them um we're one of the things we're trying to look into is like how strict is that and could they be used for broader um broader social um activities that might be able to help some of the things the town has been talking about whether it's crest mental health services other types of things um so we're still trying to it's get more information on whether it could be used for that um next question new mass strategic partnership is listed at zero when is this new strategic partnership going to be executed why aren't we receiving funds in accordance with the expired one has failing to execute a new one actually lost the town money because UMass isn't paying based on the old one um so we're currently having those conversations um the exact timing of when a new one will be executed is to be determined but we are well into those discussions um and you know we'll have more information when there's something that we can report back um in terms of whether we're uh whether we have lost money or if we're receiving money based on the old one it's sort of yes and no so the town is actually getting more money than we used to under the old agreement um the town is uh the two things that sort of swapped is that under the old agreement the town used to get $120,000 of sort of general fund revenue that has been replaced by $185,000 going directly to the schools so the town general fund budget sort of the you know the money that we have to allocate that has gone down by $120,000 but in terms of the net money that comes to the town it's actually gone up because that $185,000 now is going directly to the schools and that's a new revenue for the school department starting a couple years ago um and then the ambulance funds which is the other big piece of that that continues to be paid based on the the prior strategic agreement so overall again I would say it's a net increase um but the money that you know you see here in the budget in terms of the local receipt section it's dropped finance why are collection rates for motor vehicle size parking tickets and ambulance billing so low compared to property tax and water sewer collection rates what can be done to increase those rates um so property tax and water sewer collection rates are they're always going to be you know pretty strong because they're tied to the property um and they're eventually paid uh when those properties turn over um and our our collectors office does a good job working with um residents that may be in a plan or needs you know uh help getting uh paying their bills um motor vehicle excise and parking those are also eventually paid um they may not be paid in the year that we you know issue them um but they do get marked with the registry motor vehicles and when the individual goes to renew their registration or to renew their license they have to address any of those outstanding tickets or that are over I don't know if it's six I think it's six months old or something like that um so so those are eventually paid it's just the timing maybe a little bit of a lag um the ambulance ones I think are probably the ones that actually you know we're not collecting um to some extent and there's a couple reasons for that I think you know we have a very our population don't they don't all stay here forever right they come and they go and so it they're not always here um there's not as much we don't have as much leverage with the ambulance bills as we do with the other ones where there's something we can you know we can attach it to that when you know they go to renew or they go to sell their property we collect it we don't have that same uh ability with the ambulance billing we did we used to do ambulance billing in house same issue low collection rates um several years ago we decided use a third party biller to see if that would help it hasn't so much help from what we can tell and we do use a collection agency for bills that get over a certain certain amount outstanding which helps collect some of those really old bills they're a little more aggressive than the town or or the third party biller um and you know one of the things we are going to look into more just to see if we can parse it out from the numbers I talked a little bit about with Jen and um I need to talk about with Jeff Olmstead um and you heard about this during the fire EMS uh presentation is that some of it is just um Medicare or mass health they don't pay the full ambulance bill and so I asked Jen you know is that part of the collection the gap in our collection rates is just that these billers aren't going to pay our full rate and therefore we're going to always whenever uh you know we're billing those um providers we're never going to collect 100% of it because that's just not what they pay um and she thought that might be part of the issue so we're going to see if we can parse that out because that's a little bit different than if somebody's just never paying the bill if it's just there's a fixed amount they're willing to pay um and maybe have better information on that next time and then the rest of the questions are about the regional school um and I've got some answers and some I've sent off and I might have to send them back to the committee so the first question is how much time salary expenses does the town spend to maintain regional school owned property and so we don't have an exact number for this but I think Gilford mentioned it is a significant portion of time um by the tree and grounds department during the spring summer and fall to prepare fields um you know they do some of the mowing they do a lot of the the preparation for events um they do the seating things like that um so I'd say you know it is a significant portion of time and they also help manage the pool I think I mentioned that last time they do the the chlorine um management they do the testing and if it needs additional chemicals they add those um and they're and and so for the labor and uh that is associated with those activities the region does not pay the town for that labor um they provide the supplies if there's any supplies needed if again if it's grass seed or fertilizer um or the or the chemicals for the pool they will buy those um but they don't pay for the labor um what type of support from the public health department is given to uh the Amherst uh regional public schools do we receive any funding from the region for these services um so Jen Brown didn't answer this one early this morning so no services at our support at this time and then therefore no funding is going back and forth she said during COVID the contact tracer was more involved with them up to the end of the calendar year and that contact tracer was funded by either CARES or vaccine reimbursements um but they have no direct interactions now um and so I don't know if she didn't talk about prior to COVID if there was you know a lot of exchange of services but my recollection is there there was not and Lynn's got a question Andy. Yeah I need to call the council back to order again because we have seven in the room and I need to check to see if Dorothy Pam can hear us and we can hear her. Yes I can I'm sorry I was at another meeting. Thank you. Um okay I'll keep almost done what other expenses does the town incur in its own budget that would normally be funded in the regional schools operating or capital budget and the examples given were paving vehicle maintenance certification supplies for field repair payroll for staff time etc um so my understanding again talking of Gilford is that the region does pay for the materials for the paving um for paving or pothole filling um they the region does handle its own vehicle maintenance I know that and they handle their own certifications I believe they pay for inspections um I think the DPW may do some of those inspections but they pay the the inspection fee um the region pays for the supplies again for the field repair maintenance but the the DPW provides the the labor and Kathy has a question. It's actually a comment um on this last set of questions I think it's pretty clear one of the things Mandy's trying to do is create an accounting system that says we're giving services that are worth money so that when we're negotiating what the assessment method is um people have a tool to use so I think it's less about this budget this FY 23 budget and it's more looking forward so I think I mean that's that's where that set is going and I think it's a really good idea you know whether um you know I had notes that pulled we don't bill back normally but it's more to make the case that you're getting services from the town of Amherst period you know and and they're of value to you it's not just um so the other the other point on some of the other questions um they were clearly a very close read on the revenue side and when I used to actually teach public budgeting one of the things I said is you always try to be conservative on the revenue side and on the expenditure side because you don't want to be wrong so you've got to build on a margin we can't come back later and I think some of this is just prudent management of our budget so I appreciate the questions um finally one more just general comment um I think we need to be really careful with reserves and pulling anything out of reserves because I'm extremely worried about the price tag that we're going to show on the elementary school budget that we need to go out for debt exclusion so protecting as much as we can and Linda's already spoken on ARPA money that is not yet allocated to the extent it fits the category trying to bring down what we're going to have to ask for tax for tax things so I want to protect those reserves I mean that's why we've been building them up but particularly with the school coming down the pike I think it's even more critical so to extent we have savings I want to offset the draw on reserves would be the other way of saying this I think it's a good idea to be doing that to to be building up our ability because it's only we will be out in this the way things are we're hoping that we will reach an agreement on a site that MSBA will agree with us that things will go and it's we're going to be we're talking about spring of 2023 when we're going to have that number so it's it's not in the distant horizon but in the very soon horizon that's it yeah and so Kathy's exactly right I'm like the rest of the questions I've sent off to the region the one question that's just sort of counterbalances the previous questions is in exchange what expenses do the regional schools pay for that would normally be funded from the town's operating budget my recollection is that's primarily use of space and the town using space for different events and activities but I want the Doug Slaughter and Rupert to verify and see if they can provide more information on that because because they do charge for some use of space but I don't believe it is all use of space so they'll when I get responses to these other questions I'll send it to the committee and that's it thank you are there any similar questions of people from the committee or the council have about general budget issues so because we'll move to the last item otherwise because I think I've said this before so I don't really need to go on to again but we really do need to get back to a revisit of the building plan for the major projects and and how that has changed and get into the explanation to newly elected counselors who haven't had that thorough explanation of how that whole analysis works and how we came to the plan to begin with I think it's a good refresher course for current counsel for counselors for Terry over an important one for the ones who are serving for the first time this year and we need to get those figures updated so we need to get that on the horizon at at the reasonable point when this that makes sense what I wanted to just conclude with then is to take a few minutes to sort of organize ourselves for the next steps as far as what issues that we need to anticipate for our next meeting and if there's an agreement on issues we'll automatically place them on the list again we can come back and add on the 31st but if there are things that you know that you want to have discussed in more detail for either you because you're considering making a motion regarding changes to the budget within what is permissible under the Charter and State law or because you would like to have a further explanation made to the council in our report and you think that the discussion is discussion is important for that reason that we try and identify them soon and the one that I was going to just start with an alternative to Lynn is that I think we have to address the elementary school budget question that has been raised by the school committee though it would take one other person to agree to have that placed on the agenda for the 31st since I'm just one person but I'll start with Lynn. Andy I fully agree that we have to discuss the elementary school I would like to also there's two other one other place where we've had a request with regard to the FY 23 budget and that is reparations and so I think we need to place that on the list as well thank you Michelle this is more of a procedural question you had said that we need two people to support something being discussed Andy was that is that in our rules somewhere or is that just a no we just said that we would do that as a matter of course that you know it's not in the rules but it was just that we wanted to try and have some sort of process to get forward and if there weren't two people who thought it was worth spending the time on that we would note that by the way I might as well ask right now since Lynn has put has mentioned reparations can I put you down for a second so that we can get past that of course you can okay so that's on the list then do you have others the other things you've thought about for I turn it to Kathy well I support you and Lynn on the the school conversation absolutely but that's all I have for right now okay Kathy um yeah this is um short thinking as I understand this the short version of the report before the version that has all the sections in it is what I'm thinking is I think we need to have a paragraph or two and I wrote way too much for you on the discussion we had with um public safety but we had a series of voices uh asking to reduce the police budget specifically so I think we need to include a paragraph so if we are doing everything but the schools we're we're saying yes to I think we should do a paragraph or two on why we're endorsing what's been proposed to us and I tried to pick up as much of a flavor of that conversation um because I thought it was a really good with Earl's voice I'm talking about moving a program in developing a program so I just think it would be good to just acknowledge that we had had that but keep it short so it's not so much sing sing leg out and just on reparations I know Lynn you wanted to put it on but I I think it's a more of a future issue but um I'll look forward to the discussion uh okay is I agree on the public safety by the way so I'll make that a second uh just to get it on there because I do think that there was a we do need to pay attention to the public hearing and um it was one of the issues that was raised significantly during the public hearing and uh therefore it has I think it has to come forward um there was another issue that I think was raised during the public hearing that I was thinking about but it really has to do more with the capital um improvement plan and future capital planning in that senior center space um we do need to acknowledge that we had comments about that but um I'm not sure that it's an operating budget question and this really is um we need to focus on the operating budget Michelle I just I would like to respond to what Kathy just said about reparations um and just really clarify what the requests are from the African Heritage Reparation Assembly for this body so there are two requests the first is that the town council will agree to have free cash moved in to the reparations fund as they did last year in part as part of this discussion and then there's the discussion the second request which is for permanently earmarking cannabis tax revenue for the future FY 24 and on so I also want to remind folks that we were charged with identifying a funding stream and our charge is completed in June 2023 so that's what we're trying to do um so the the conversation that we're that we'd like to have and that we'd like for the finance committee to have is in two parts the first being moving free cash the second being the cannabis tax revenue thank you I think that the uh complication in uh John or Paul can um or Sonia can add to this and explain it too the transfer of money um to stabilization funds is not ever a part of the operating budget that's being proposed for the next year because it's really funded from the prior the current year it um what happens at the end of the accounting process for the present year since there's no um place in the budget that says transfer any funds to stabilization funds it's not included in the budget and um since our responsibility is to say what we're recommending to the council that it can do and should do in relation to the budget which is either to accept the budget or to propose a reduction but except for the one in piece which is the elementary schools if requested by the school committee we can't add it makes it hard to um say that that's really a FY23 budget issue Sean do you think I stated that right or yeah I mean I guess I'd want to hear from Michelle if she means the same as last year meaning the same timing as last year which again is when we do the the free cash transfer transfer or if she means as part of this discussion if she means now um yeah thanks Sean so I recognize what you're saying Andy and I understand the way the process works and I'm not requesting um that Paul or Sean or that any of us make a motion to change the budget budget with respect to reparations what I'm asking for is for this body to have the conversation now and make a recommendation so the town council can as they did last year approve moving money in the fall into the reparation fund I don't want to push that conversation off if you feel like it's not part of sort of the box that we're working in right now I'm okay with that I just want a commitment from you and from the committee that will have that conversation along with the second request about the cannabis tax revenue um so that it can get back to the town council to vote on so that that's that's the I hope that makes sense and answers your question Sean and Andy no it does and um Sean uh last year we were doing something at this time of the year because the action it was taken at this time of the year it doesn't have to be repeated which was to create the fund yeah but we didn't fund we didn't fund it until the fall so we didn't fund it until right Paul so the recommendation that was made to the finance committee and then through the finance committee the council last year came up in the fall after free cash was certified yeah I mean I think my recommendation is to as Michelle said have it on an agenda there's going to be other things we need to meet about in June I already know a few that are sort of outside the budget process but we'll need to go to finance committee one is the centennial funding um that we've or learned you too so we're going to have meetings in June and I think having this be separate from the budget process because it's not in the budget but having it on those agendas I think accomplishes everybody's goals. Sonia I just wanted to remind everybody that until the books are closed and that usually happens like August-September time we won't even really have the final number for um what came in for for cannabis revenue taxes until then so we normally don't have any conversations about any transfers from free cash until it's certified and then we have all those numbers so we'll know whether we have 150 or 175 that's getting transferred so just want to remind everybody we won't have those numbers plus uh first certification and you had reported to us at the time that you discussed the third quarter budget report for the current year that we have certain concerns about what is going to happen within the fourth quarter in the year end uh because of all of the inflation that we're now facing right so Kathy I think I'm going to be echoing what's being said but I just checked because I want to check my memory we had this discussion after we put the budget to bed last time we had it in June um it it's on the June it because it got referred from the council on June 4th was on the finance committee's agenda the AHRA proposal so we were we were first getting the budget done and then we were having this discussion so I I'm not saying not to have the discussion and not to schedule it but we it was separate because it actually the referral came in and we we had those two very long meetings um because we had a whole meeting around Crest too so I was just looking at when it was on our agenda last time and we'd done the budget piece first um before we came and looked at what I what I meant about future it's because it's an allocation of uncertain amounts of money when we're sitting here talking about it so it was in a slightly different time period but very close to first doing the budget I want to be very clear my reason for requesting it is because it was requested of us so in my mind it fits into the same category uh as the other two items they they're outstanding questions they were advanced to us we can have the discussion we can either make a decision or defer a decision but we at least need to have the discussion that's my only basis for bringing forward both well for bringing forward reparations thank you so I think that the the the difference is getting a narrower because it's not a question of discussing it it's a question of whether to discuss it on May 31st or um put it into a June meeting but there's no disagreement that it should be on the agenda for discussion is that fair summary so is there anything else that um you want to identify now for uh the 31st so let me leave it as as I said before um please give careful consideration to whether there are other sections of the budget that you feel need to be um talked about further either so that we can have an understanding of what it is that we want to say in our report or because you might want to consider um actual action and be prepared when we start the meeting on the 31st to talk about that um if not I think that we um certainly um anticipate that we will have discussion about what it is that we are going to recommend to the council on the elementary school issue that was raised by the school committee and that we are going to talk about the public safety issues in general um in order to make sure that we as a committee are comfortable with the response and Kathy actually has done some significant work on this already and I think I will need to talk with her about whether to just send that to to the committee in advance or but I'll leave that for a separate conversation. Lynn? I have a it's a process question uh first of all on the agenda uh even though we may list these three items can we make sure we list another item that's broad enough that anything can be brought up under the discussion uh and the second is are we going to be looking at the draft on the 31st or how are we going to complete the draft so it's prepared to go to the council um in within the required time period. Okay it's a good question I'm just repeat what I said before is the proposal is that a deal with us this year and that is to do a brief report to the council on our recommendation for the budget and I mean it can be as simple as a page saying that we recommend approval of the budget as recommended by the town manager or that we are adding in any exceptions that arise from motions on the 31st and that that can be sent so that we meet the 30-day deadline and then indicate in that there will be a more complete report forthcoming and I was not anticipating at this point scheduling a meeting that if there's a request to schedule a meeting to talk about the draft we can do that otherwise I would choose to report draft in a more similar format to other kinds of reports we've been doing Michelle. My question is right along those same lines so I remember you saying that we would take our assignments and create some paragraphs or one paragraph for and so what exactly would you like to see in that paragraph I know you I think you sent an example and when would you is that part of the bigger report what's the deadline on that? That's part of the bigger report and so you know it could be like later next week is fine for that like Wednesday or Thursday but I think that what we really want to do is avoid repeating anything that's in the budget itself you might refer to it but I don't think we need to repeat what's in the budget because the budget's already been completely written and it's very extensive but if there's information that we received during presentations that was additional to what is already in the budget book that that's the key so if you post questions and or answers to questions that it provides additional information that that's the subject matter in that way we can keep the whole thing briefer all the way through trying to make sure that and what I'm going to do is work on sort of key overarching issues and try and get that draft out fairly quickly so that there's plenty of opportunity to respond to anything else okay so to get to the I have to see if I can find it quickly but we already posted excuse me that posted there is yes we did post the we had to post the 31st already because since Monday is a holiday it made the posting time requirement this morning so Athena's already posted the meeting for next Tuesday and the way that it reads since you may not have it is that we would start with the public comment after convening the meeting and the reason for putting public comment at the beginning is that if there are members of the public who want to comment on any budget sections either that we've identified or not been identified that we really should hear from the public before we get into the discussion rather than after under the circumstance in the next item is sort of the general overall budget review questions discussion item that I have put into every agenda during this last period and the reason is just so that we can continue to have general open discussion about the budget and the third is FY23 budget review budget recommendations to report process so those are the items that are on the posted agenda and it is already out there so anything else see there's no hands up I think that we have completed our business for today and we know what the task is for next Tuesday and once we get past public comment I think we'll go we'll start with the school budget so with that we'll consider this meeting adjourned and thank you