 Get going. Welcome to the Amherst Historical Commission public meeting on Wednesday, February 16, 2022. My name is Jane Wald and as chair of the Amherst Historical Commission, I'm calling this meeting to order at 631 PM. Pursuant to chapter 20 of the Acts of 2021, this meeting is being conducted by remote means. As no in-person attendance is permitted, every effort is being made to ensure that public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means. In addition, this meeting is being recorded and minutes are being taken as usual. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so in the following manner. Open the town's homepage on an internet browser, navigate to the town calendar at the bottom of that page, click on the historical commission meeting link. Zoom and telephone connections and the meeting agenda can be found there. So let's take attendance by roll call. So board members, as you hear your name called, please answer affirmatively or raise your hand. Patricia Off. Present. Katherine Davis. Present. Robin Fordham. Present. Becky Lockwood. Present. Janet Markwart. Hedy Startup. Present. And Jane Wald. I'm present. Opportunity for public comment will be provided during a general public comment period listed on the agenda and at other appropriate times throughout the meeting. Please be aware that the commission will take note of comments, but will not necessarily be able to respond to them during the public comment periods. Please indicate you wish to make a comment by clicking the raise hand button when public comment is solicited. If you join the Zoom meeting using a telephone, please indicate you wish to make a comment by pressing star nine on your telephone. When called on, please identify yourself by stating your full name and address and put yourself back into mute when finished speaking. Residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes and at the discretion of the commission chair. So let's see, first on our agenda is to review and discuss the preservation plan update and RFP, which we have gotten in the meeting packet. So we've had a chance to comment and send Ben feedback. And Ben, do you wanna comment on the RFP draft and what is needed? Awesome, yeah, thank you very well. So I guess just a little bit of background, there's $25,000 that was allocated in CPA funds, I think, I don't know, back in 2018, 2019 maybe. And it's for the purposes of updating the 2005 preservation plan. So fast forward to now and we're, you know, with COVID and everything put the brakes on a little bit, but now we're ready to put together the RFP for the preservation plan update. And, you know, I approached it as, you know, I'm thinking of it as an update to the plan, but it really, it should be a document that can kind of stand on its own. And, you know, and, you know, it should be a, yeah, it should be a standalone document, its own plan, but it doesn't need to recreate the wheel per se, you know, it can build off of the 2005 plan. And so I'm hoping there's a cost savings with that too, because they don't necessarily need to rewrite the history of Amherst section or the, you know, history of, you know, the historical commission section and that level of detail. But, you know, I think the goals are to, you know, do an inventory of what's been done, you know, do, you know, public outreach and stakeholder meetings to kind of gauge what the, you know, goals are and, you know, what's valued in town and what needs protecting and kind of what are the, what are the kind of like, yeah, preservation goals overall. And then secondly, it's just identifying very actionable items that can guide the work of the historical commission and really the town in general for the purposes of historic preservation. And I think, I think Jane has brought this up in the past, like the previous plan was, you know, very wonderful, and it identified a lot of goals, but sometimes it was a little bit hard to like figure out, like, okay, like literally, like, who do I need to contact at the state to like get this done? Like, so we wanted to make sure, like, you know, grants are identified, like key people that we need to contact at the state or, you know, federal government or like are identified and there's very clear, you know, implementation steps and, you know, I think that was another goal for this. And I think we've talked about this before, previous meetings, I think it's important for the town to also use this up as an opportunity to kind of just address and incorporate the history of underrepresented populations and minority populations in the town historically. So, you know, going back all the way to Native American populations through the African American populations through the town's history. So I think the role of the preservation plan is to identify where are the gaps in the quote, history of Amherst as we know it now, and then what are actionable items to help preserve and tell that history. And so, yeah, that's what I tried to, that's what I tried to incorporate into the scope of work document. It's a lot of, it's pretty dry. It's like, talk to this person, prepare this section here. But I think a lot of that also just gets translated, you know, transmitted to the consultant through conversations and meeting with them and talking about, talking it through. So that's kind of the background. I will say the, I guess just even in the past like a few weeks since I posted the packet and everything, I've, I've, talking to Nate and the planning director, Chris Brestrup. We were thinking one option instead of kind of putting this out to bid to the world, if you will, or to consultants around New England, we could also contract directly with Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, CBPC. And that is often a much simpler option because we can contract with them directly. It's through like an intra-governmental contract as opposed to a competitive bidding process. And so that saves us time in general, but also, you know, we have full faith that the planners at Pioneer Valley Planning Commission could do a superb job because of their, you know, they have historic preservation planners there. And, and obviously just have done a lot of work with Amherst and surrounding communities and know kind of the landscape, if you will, of historic preservation in the state, what tools are available, what grants are available. So that's, so I feel like with the RFP I put together, the scope of work is still really important because even if we go with CBPC, the scope of work is we wanna make sure that we're all on the same page about that. It's just, I wouldn't necessarily need that second section with qualifications and submission requirements because it wouldn't really be a competitive bidding process, but I will assure you that the PVPC does meet the requirements that I put on there. So they are definitely qualified to do this work. So. And Shannon Walsh, is that right? She's the one who did our outbuilding inventory, right? Exactly, yeah. So it would be Shannon Walsh would take a lead on it and she's done a lot of work for Amherst. I also think that we've had a little conversation about, well, you said it earlier, Ben, this would not be reinventing the wheel, but now on the other side of cost escalations, if this were a competitive bid, what there might be some concern about, not meeting that $25,000 fee, but I think PVPC would, we could have just a sort of a forthright conversation with them and they with us about how much that would cover. Yeah. Yeah. Your call makes it look like an awfully lot of work, but in fact, it's all intrinsic. I mean, anybody who does this as a general world is going to do all these steps and they all feed into each other. So it's not, you've broken it down really beautifully, but it's not like each of these things is a separate project. They're gonna be doing it all at once and updating and rewriting sections as they go. So it's, I don't see any reason why that wouldn't fit into a timeframe for that budget. Looks pretty straightforward to me who do this. Yeah, I guess my, to Jane's point, I did get in contact with some communities in Eastern Massachusetts who have done recent updates to the preservation plan. And that was like a year ago and their cost estimates were like 30 to 35,000. And I imagine, yeah, just with, I don't know, it seems like the price of everything is coming up. So I don't know. But were they starting from scratch? Yeah, so that's a good point. They were starting from scratch, but just, so it's a ballpark. But I do think PVPC can offer a competitive, can get it done for $25,000. And if anything, it actually, where we have said that we have a good working relationship with the planning commission there. So if they need to offload a bit of the work onto town staff, then that's easier to do if it's PVPC as opposed to a private consultant. We just work well together. So there may be sort of two questions here. One, do we want to just go ahead with PVPC? Second, maybe, is there any other comment needed on the draft RFP or in this instance would be kind of scope of work? So, Robin. I wanted to say that I just wanted to underscore that one of the things that when this particular CPA award came up, the diversity and equity focus in terms of history was something that I really spoke about and convinced a lot of people on the committee. So that's a, I think that's great that we have that as a focus. People couldn't understand why we needed to update it. And I was able to explain to them our impressions of history change over time. And then the only thing I think in terms of substance that I found, I don't know if you saw it in the last minute, but it's just some, mostly punctuation and changes kind of things, but they won some sort of comment that I made which is around whether we needed to have one in most threatened focus, which some communities have, and it would be an interesting thing for our committee to know what five items are most at the risk of losing without, or that was just one thought that I thought that we might include, that's good. That sounds like a good idea. Most threatened gets attention at different levels of government by different organizations that could work to our advantage. If there were some other resource out there, we could tap for protecting what's threatened. That could be a really contentious list though, right? Everybody won't agree. What is, so what isn't? Well, I mean, I would just say that that's our, is that not our job to determine what we're here for? Yeah, unless we ask for community input. Well, we can, you know, I mean, I haven't been at this long enough, but I've been at it long enough to say that, we can ask for community input and take that in advisement and then make our recommendations. It's just, you know, it seems to be something that, I mean, it's what mass preservation does. It's, you know, the idea is that you focus on the things that you could lose imminently. I mean, I don't think, I think that's relative. Their importance might be in question, but their threatened stuff is. Well, isn't it too part of this, that this group, whoever we hire will hold some public meetings and get some input. So that would be certainly part of that, I would think. I think it would be, I think the key there is not to leave it too late, is to collect that opinion along with other information and then evaluate it, but not but evaluate it along with everything else. And I think you have one public meeting in there. Is that right? Yeah, actually I'm looking through it now. I think, yeah, so it's outwardly participating in one public meeting during the outreach section, but then I think there's also a, yeah, there's a present the recommendations of the plan at a public forum towards the end of the process. Right. So they have get feedback when it's kind of in draft form. So it's a full plan. And there's getting input from a variety of, well, from different categories in addition to the public meeting. Robin, were you suggesting that we start with a list that the planning folks would start with and bring to a public meeting or? No, I was suggesting the meeting would generate it. I was suggesting that the consultant provide recommendations for threatened resources. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely it makes a, it's a compelling part of a plan. And I often think of plans are great to help set direction and goals, but it's also always something that we reference back to when we're writing grants. And if we can say, you know, the X number, some house is the third most threatened or identified as the third most threatened house in Amherst or something, or put a number to it. It's that list that creates a compelling narrative, I guess. Well, and it reinforces, if I'm learning anything from my studies, it reinforces the notion that it's not an arbitrary decision. It's something that ties it back to our mission and purpose. As a part of a strategic plan. Yeah, I'm sorry, as a group, we decided that we were going to participate with the local historic district to consider preservation of the houses on the west side of North Pleasant Street. So, you know, those are threatened with development and they're historic. And so, you know, I mean, I'm thinking in terms of lists like that, there may be one specific or two specific places, but there could be a neighborhood, a block that we would be concerned about. So that was why I was asking if we should do it a seed list and let the consultant go from there. Yeah, I don't know what other people's thoughts are. My thoughts are that it just be something that comes out, that the list itself is something that comes out of the plan process, but I'll leave it at that. Eddie? I wonder if it would be possible to, once the plan has been revised, to take it to the village clusters that are referred to in the plan, or even talking about underrepresented communities to somewhere like Hazel Avenue, which I have only just recently learned is really kind of important in terms of the African-American history of the town. And I'm shocked at myself that I didn't know that before I've been here a few years now. You know that it's sort of an awareness thing. Maybe we could do some walks in neighborhoods and bring a stack of the plans or have some kind of online link that people could reference and just see who shows up. So that would be post-planning outreach, sounds like a lot of that. Yeah, yeah. Becky? I think if I remember a part of this process is also to identify what kinds of public things we could do, which goes right along with what you said. But I have another question. So the 25,000 figure, what happens if you go to the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission and they can't do it for that? I mean, do we know? I guess we'll just deal with it if that happens, right? Yeah, we could always modify the scope. Okay. Yeah, but that was a good point. One of the things I was reading was all of the information where we've got incomplete sort of information, addresses that's quite lengthy, that just needs checking and cross-referencing. I don't know how important that kind of thing is, whether that should be prioritized in terms of how we talk to the people at the Pioneer Valley Planning Group. That was just something I noticed. How current is the information in the plan in terms of it being a really useful resource for making decisions? I'll make a comment about that. And that is, we have a, we do have some work to do to tighten up the inventory of historic buildings and significant buildings. I think a goal for us or for the Historical Commission can eventually be to have that fairly complete inventory so that it can be used as a outreach and communications tool with homeowners and with potential purchasers and to implement as smoothly as possible the preservation bylaw. If we can refer to, we know what our historic structures are, we know what the criteria are and that removes some of the subjectiveness of a demolition, what now is demolition delay hearings. That would be, I think that would be a neat goal. I'm not sure that can be comprehended under this, under this particular scope of work. Oh, Ben, what do you need from us? Do you need, do you need an end of experience or? Yeah, I guess just support for the idea of contracting or if we have the Honey Valley Planning Commission and if there was any major red flags with the scope of work. Okay. And I don't think that requires a vote. So we can just give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down. If anybody has anything to add to, to Robin's comments about. Additions or amendments. Robin, perhaps you have one. I just wanted to clarify, I just looked it up on the document. It's to add that. Most threatened to the project objectives to add a number seven, I think it would be. I don't know. I don't know. As of most. And then that's in my notes and the version. So just to be clear, just to throw that. Okay. Okay. Okay. So you've got a thumbs up from, from me. And Pat. Robin and Catherine and Becky and Jan. Okay. Oh, one more. When was our last. Plan been. The original plan was in 2005. Hasn't been revised. So can we. I think the general. Advice to revise. Clearly not this deeply. Every five years. Can we put that into our. To our historical commission. So that we have this on our timeline to. Not let it go. How many years has been now, 16, 17. 17 years. You, you moved to my screen then. Yeah. That's my last comment. I think it would be a lot easier to update it every five years. Because it would be more incremental updates than. It's probably the case right now. Right. Yeah, I agree. All right. So next up is a policy on historic preservation restrictions. And. This is a nice. Account of what the issues are here. So if you want to. Say any more about it. And then we can, maybe we can. Go to the questions. Sure. Yeah. So obviously this is kind of a new. This is a discussion topic that. Has emerged recently, I guess, for the commission. According to Nate, this was a discussion topic, maybe. Five to seven years ago, but there wasn't really any clarity. So the. What we are looking to do is to establish a. I guess the, in simplest terms, a new policy. That kind of encompasses various different elements of. Historic preservation restrictions. And just so we're all on the same page about historic preservation restrictions. You know, they're. Pretty similar to like a conservation restriction that you might put on a, you know, piece of conservation land or an agricultural preservation restriction that you put on farmland. It's a historic preservation restriction you put on a property or a building and it kind of locks that. Structure into looking. As it does today in. Potentially in perpetuity. So it's in the, it's a binding. You know, deed restricted legal agreement between the property owner. And in this case, it's the town and it's the historical commission acting on behalf of the town. So. So that's kind of what a historic preservation restriction is. And then. There's numerous different ways they can be triggered, you know, a land owner could just donate a preservation restriction to the town. If they were feeling philanthropic and wanted to. You know, preserve their home in perpetuity, but usually there's some sort of trigger and it has to do with, you know, receiving grant money. And so in this case. CPA money, which is community preservation act. Is obviously public money that's allocated each year from the town to, you know, for historic preservation, conservation, housing and recreation. And so within the. I guess legislation for CPA. Because it's a state program. Or state enabled program. It's required that, you know, if the town acquires an interest in a property, then that interest must be protected with a preservation restriction. And so. I guess different towns. I don't know if they purposely left it vague or not, but different each town, as far as I know, kind of interprets what it means to acquire an interest. In a property. You know, in the, in the most explicit sense, it means, you know, actually the town is actually buying the property. And that's, you know, acquiring interest in it. But for others, it's. It's, you know, for example, with the Jones library or for the chase Jewish community of Amherst, the town gave quite a bit of money to repair the building. So it, you know, for, for the sake of historic preservation. And so. So yeah, I guess we are trying to under so and then I guess the final point is that preparing a historic preservation restriction takes an incredible amount of work. And it often falls to me or whoever's in my position as the staff liaison. I don't know, maybe in other towns, they, you know, offload that work to consultants. I don't know how it's done, but it is. A lot of work involves numerous lot of meetings with lawyers and from both groups and numerous rounds of revisions, but because the state historical commission has to approve it and they have very specific requests often for all the details. And so we were interested in kind of establishing a threshold for buy for when a permanent restriction is required, which needs to be approved by the state versus when a local restriction is required and a local restriction can be for a maximum of 30 years. And it doesn't require involvement from the state. Which makes it a lot easier to implement. And, you know, 30 years is the term limit for by which the town can hold a restriction. So we would be going to the maximum for that. So I guess that's a lot, but essentially we're trying to establish a threshold to determine when a permanent restriction is required versus a local restriction is required for the payment of CPA funds. And so, you know, there's numerous ways to do it. Nate and I talking, you know, we just, we used a financial threshold, just, you know, the actual amount of the grant given to the applicant. We said $100,000 could be a cutoff, but it could also be based on the value of the house or value of the structure relative to the grant amount. Or, you know, the relative importance of the repairs being made, if you will. So we just thought it was simpler to take a nice round number and start there. But we are definitely curious to, I think we want obviously the historical commission to adopt this policy. So we want to know, you know, get some guidance from you all. A couple of just sort of framing questions and then Robin's got her hand up. But what, do you have a, like a time frame for how you want to consider this and when, you know, when you want to adopt it? That's a good question. Yeah, not really. I think ideally, I guess maybe before the CPA funds are allocated for the latest round, which would be in July, I guess, could kind of just, it would be good to maybe just be cleaner to have, have a policy in place when the funds are allocated, but I'm not sure it really matters. Okay. So Robin. Hi there. So many questions. So I'm just like really narrow and first question is, what does the CPA require? The second question is, and a lot of this is just really informed by the classes I'm taking. Yeah. You're in Vermont where I am right now. They don't recognize the term preservation restriction. They have preservation easements. And the easement is held by a third party and the third party is responsible year after year for affirming that the entity is confirming to the easement that they're not, you know, building on conservation land or they're not altering the historical structure. So that's, those are, those are my questions. I mean, you know, I had, I had understood in a very vague sense that anybody who received CPA funding was required to have a preservation restriction. And, and then I guess my third question is, why is it so complicated and the Syrabiqis letter and the issue with the easement library is sort of like, I imagine that it should not take a decade or more. It should probably take what six to 12 months. And why aren't we, you know, using CPA administrative funds or something to outsource this to make it faster. So there's a whole bunch of stuff all at once. Sorry about that. Yeah. So I guess just to, just to clarify what we are, it's always required to have a restriction in place when CPA funds are being given out. We're just making this distinction between a local restriction and a permanent restriction. So I hope that maybe that was not clear in the policy statement. The idea with that was that every, whether you get a dollar or a half a million dollars, you're going to have a restriction in place. The question is whether it's a 30 year restriction that we just can handle internally and not involve the state or whether, or at what point do we need to make it a permanent in perpetuity restriction and bring the state and make the process much more complicated. So I think the thing is like, for example, I always talk about the Goodwin church where we gave them, I think 12 or $13,000. And is it worth me spending, you know, potentially a year to prepare the restriction and go back and forth with the state. And make it a permanent restriction or for $13,000, can I get the restriction done quicker? And just have it be a 30 year restriction. Okay, so Catherine, did you have something you wanted to say? I'm percolating, but thank you so much, Jane. I'm listening to all of the things that Ben, that you are saying, and I'm, I have future questions and or just statements to make. Becky. I guess my question is in determining the amounts of CPA funding, like you're going to put a limit on it. Do we have, I am not sure how you chose those, I guess. I mean, I'm not questioning it, but. Do you have a sense of how many, how many properties involve over a hundred thousand CPA funding in three years? I guess that's my question. Do we know how many this is? Is it just a few? Just to kind of understand the scope of, of, of what needs to be done. Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the year. But I would say, you know, typically there might be. One to two projects below, you know, in, in the, you know, below like in like the $20,000 range. And then, and then every, every year where there's always a few big projects that have six digits or more. I mean, yeah. My question is, is then if, if you set a dollar amount. That makes sense. As you just gave the example of the Goodwin church. But if you put a preservation on it for 30 years. Is it, can that be renewed in 30 years. Locally. So it becomes important for perpetuity, but, but with less onerous process. So it can be. So I mean, yeah, there's always all these hypotheticals. Like if they, if they apply for funds during that 30 year period, say a year 20. Then I think it would just be extended another 30 years from 30 years. From when they receive the funds each, each time. Maybe my guess, you know, and maybe that's part of the policy, not to get too nuanced, but like, you know, what if they apply for funds in year three over 30 year restriction, then we really have to go through the effort of extending it. Three years. On the other end, you know. Jan. I think that the dollar figure. Isn't a good measure, but I haven't come up with an alternative. If you think of what I was thinking at a house that Bruce wrote about the, what's it called. North Amherst Community Farm. You know, there was an example where they've come back every few years to work at the farm. They've come back every year to do their work. They've been working for years for more. And what would you do? Would you start it over? Would you have to do all the work again? But I was also thinking how different kinds of buildings and different projects, just. Different. Amounts seem small or large, depending on the project. So there's this barn, you know, charges for stabilizing it, for roofing it, for replacing the windows, not anything to do with restoration just to keep it from further deterioration. And just the stabilization is 125,000. So if you put together a package of the most essential things to conserve it and then say, and as property owner, I will then take it further, repurpose the building or paint it and do something with it. And you ask for something like 125,000, that would trigger a permanent restriction. And you're talking about a barn. That's gonna take, I would think, an enormous amount of effort to get approved, right? And I don't think, I can't imagine the state wanting to go over every barn, but those are that expensive. I mean, when Hampshire College came to talk to us about that one that's on the roundabout by Atkins, they were saying over 100,000 if they were just gonna keep that barn in shape, right? And so I think those kinds of buildings, 100,000 is small change. That's why the number doesn't really feel like the right measure to me. My comment about that is that it's the nature, the nature of the restriction comes into play here. It's a permanent restriction doesn't need to be onerous. It can just be permanent or a permanent restriction can just trigger some kind of review when the owner wants to make changes. So that's there, I think there's some latitude in there. On the other hand, what is kind of difficult and onerous is when the nature of the restriction, when there's too much latitude, because if there's a whole lot of room for negotiation, then that's where all the time gets spent and it just spins and spins and spins. If an applicant understands what the nature, or if there are certain options for restrictions that are already established, an applicant or an owner can understand that at the outset and be able to determine whether that's a good, whether CPA funding is gonna be a good fit. That might sound a little bit vague, but I think I'm interested in sort of digging in a little bit into what the nature of the restriction should be. I think we're not quite there yet in our conversation. So I did see Robin's hand, and was there another one? Catherine, can I turn my head because I'm trying to formulate my thoughts? Well, I'm actually okay for now. I, one of the questions I wanted to follow up and sort of just a dialogue with Jan and then bringing some of the things that you were saying we will hopefully get to later in our conversation. I also don't think the dollar amount makes sense. And I'm trying to figure out myself like what would be a solution to this so that you are not spinning your wheels and doing all this time. And then we also aren't covering all the things that Jan just said. So, but I don't know what that is yet. I know that obviously you and your team have been thinking about this and these are the solutions you've come up with for now. And that's why you're bringing it to us. I just feel like the mechanism, we can continue to talk about this. Okay, so I'm going to take the opposite tack. I'm going to say that the restriction should be in weight against the town's investment. So $125,000, whether it's to stabilize barn or to bring something into full adaptive reuse, regardless the town's investment is the same 125,000 dollars. And it may be that we can't, we just, as much as I'd like to it, maybe that we can't afford to save barns that aren't going to go into adaptive reuse simply for their physical presence in the environment or that if the preservation restriction makes it onerous, I think what I'm getting from Jane's side is that preservation restriction for a stabilized barn is just to keep it in a stabilized state, which shouldn't be too complicated. But, and the other piece that I would say is that, it's this tricky balance between the town and its resources in terms of staffing and our opinions about what should be done like I feel like we have an opinion what should be done in an ideal world and the town has to live in the real world of how much time they can actually put toward this effort. So I want to defer, I want to defer part of the conversation back to the town to say, well, you guys are, you know, we will, our positions will shift and we will come on and off this committee, but the town staff will be much more stable and you'll be the ones responsible for doing the bulk of the work. So I'm comfortable with the financial threshold. I don't know if it's 100,000 seems, I don't know if 100,000 is right. I mean, I think 10,000 should be local. 20 probably local, it's 50. I mean, I guess that's what I'm asking from my question from that. What do you on the town side feel like would work well with balancing the interests of being able to realistically put these preservation restrictions in place because if it takes a decade, what difference does it make? And being able to achieve what it is we're trying to achieve here. Anne. Yeah, I just have one other point about, I think Robin stated it well about kind of the, one of the purposes of the preservation restriction is, you know, it's first and foremost to protect the town's investment. And so it's, you know, it obviously matters what the funds are being used for, but at the end of the day, you know, it's, you know, $125,000 on, yeah, like you said, stabilizing a barn versus, you know, doing the slate roof at the Konke house or something. It's the same funds. But I also wanted to say kind of just putting ourselves in the applicants shoes for a second. You know, for the, we want to encourage people to apply to CPA funds, obviously. And a permanent restriction can be a kind of a scary thing for applicants. I don't know if like, obviously no one's thinking about the indefinite future forever and you know, it's a lot to take on to plan that far ahead for your organization or your nonprofit or for your church. And so, you know, I think it's also important to not just support the really big, you know, $200,000 full restoration projects, but also the, you know, $10,000, $20,000 smaller projects. And so, you know, again, I don't know if a hundred thousand dollar number is where is the right number. You know, I feel like it's good enough for now, but I think that's kind of the other part of this is being able to encourage smaller projects to apply and not requiring them to get a full permanent restriction because that's, it's often a deterrent. So, if we agree that there should be this division of local and state, that can be kind of a starting place for us if we agree that that's a good idea and then details can come. I don't know about, I don't know about July then, but. So Catherine and then Heddy. So, I'm going to lower my hand, Ben, and you know, fellow commissioners, I don't know if this is actually something we could do and it's smart, but I just want to riff on this. Could we just have it be a local restriction? Everyone has a local restriction, knowing that some of these folks within a 30 year period, so we can get the ball rolling so that nothing can change the property that these people are probably going to apply again and it'll encourage people to be able to go after these funds and for that 30 year period, we would have got the restriction through on a local level and we don't have to bring in the state and then we set up some sort of mechanism that we check in with people as it is already and that no one they're probably going to apply again within 30 years. And so at that point we figure out, I just, I think what I hear from you and I may be wrong is that it just is taking so long to get these restrictions in place and in that time period, you know other changes could be made or it's deterring people from applying for funds to buildings that are going under sort of neglect or require maintenance. And so we just had it be a local restriction. Would it cause more people to apply and then the solution for your team is that you get this paperwork through and the restriction is in place already. And I mean just problem solving I don't know if this actually makes sense. I'm curious to hear other thoughts but I know how I feel about it. Kelly. Just a couple of things. I used to work for an organization that had in its purview and a staff member wasn't their only job, but they would be the person to go out and on an annual basis, review what were known as easements rather than restrictions. And I mentioned that because I think the word restriction just sets people off in a particular way and maybe thinking part of our brainstorming might be to brainstorm the word easement, which is nationally recognized by preservation or conservation organizations as a useful term. I also wonder whether something to consider is that maybe instead of the dollar amount it could be determined by architectural significance or historic significance. Maybe there's some kind of, I know that's how when I worked for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy which was a national organization which had easements on its properties and we worked with property owners in some cases museums like I was at the time. We were dealing with Frank Lloyd Wright, was like, but I think what might put people off is that they aren't in that category with their mid Victorian house in the downtown. So I'm not really sure I'm going with any of this. I'm speaking a little bit before I've kind of completed my thoughts, but the easement versus the restriction thing I think is something that we might give a bit of thought to for sure. Becky, I'm going to pass for now. Ben can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in Massachusetts that's how we do it. You don't do easements, we do restrictions. Yeah, nobody in Vermont has heard of a restriction. I mean, it seems like a very state specific thing. I don't know that there's that much difference. The one question I had in follow-up was again, with the restriction you literally have an entity that comes and does an exception every year. And is that in the towns area? Like, have we done that? Do we just kind of keep an eye on the Jones Library with its pending restriction? I mean, I learned recently that there are organizations who will buy easements or who will take easements. I can't remember how it works, but they know that it is there for their responsibility, that this is the work that has to be done that goes along with that. And I know from my work up in Greenfield that there's preservation restriction on the First National Bank, which no one comes to see every year. And it's been in place since 1996. And I believe it's from the Mass Historic Commission. So I lean toward less complicated, given the size of our town, less complicated. And I think 30 years is a great term, the less we have to kind of decide this way or that way between properties and the more streamlined it's going to be. So I would be comfortable, unless there's some sort of preservation practice and that Jane would probably know better around this that suggests, oh, no, that's not, that's the other place I would defer to is, what are the professionals that would work well for a community of our size? It seems like a local 30 year restriction in our area would probably be a really good fit. Yeah, I think I agree with that. So I can say a little bit about the restrictions that I work with. So both of these houses and all the grounds are under permanent restrictions. And nobody from the town ever checks. Maybe once every five years, someone from MHC comes out and does a site visit, but it's really self-regulating. So we, our restriction is largely sort of three areas. One is minor improvements, one is major improvements and by improvements, I mean repairs and other things. And then the third is subsurface work. So subsurface work often triggers archeology. Minor improvements, we don't, that's at our discretion. Major improvements, we always have to send in our plans to MHC to get reviewed. And sometimes they might request changes. Your restriction is held by MHC. They are the holder of the restriction. Yes, but... So it's their responsibility to make sure that you honor the terms of the restriction. Yes, but this has, it was quite complicated because the restriction originated with state funding. Then we got some federal funding. So the restriction had to be extended to the department of the interior. And then we got some local funding from CPA. So then the town had to get involved and it was the same project. The town and the feds funded the same project. So do you have three separate restrictions? No, they all had to agree on the single restriction. That took three and a half years. Yeah. So yeah, so I mean, it seems like the CPA funding, the local 30 restriction was, but I guess that would be my question for Ben to take back to the town is, could the town please explain to us what the enforcement mechanism is on the restriction? I'd be happy to have a 30 year restriction that said, there would just be an annual restriction by the town. But if there's no mechanism for enforcement, like I've seen up in Greenfield and again, that's an MHC restriction, then what is the point of restriction? Why do we tire ourselves and not? So one mechanism could simply be the preservation order. When someone wants to make a change on a preferably preserved or a historically significant building, we know from say the property card that there's a restriction on it. That seems pretty easy to me that it's flagged when it comes up for some other kind of review. Right, so the only thing I'm thinking about like if we gave $120,000 to preserve a barn and the barn just sits there and nobody fixes the roof over that 30 year restriction period and you're not really honoring the intention of the restriction was to keep the barn from falling down. That's where it gets more complicated. So in an established structure to not change it as one thing, but for something that could fall victim to demolition by neglect, not intentionally, but just that it doesn't have to be a lot. Just somebody's eyes on it once a year. Yeah. Janice, your hand anew. Yes, I was just gonna say another mechanism might be any time a permit is requested, a building permit, because you put a roof, you put a chimney, anything that you wanna do, you're gonna have to ask for a building permit. And the same thing you were saying about the property card with a significant building, could it also have the restricted building? And so that would also clue the planning department that it should be seen. Now, that doesn't take care of what Robin was talking about with neglect because if they're neglecting it, they're not gonna be asking for building permits. But it was just another way of not having to worry about maybe annual inspections if we don't have the staff for it, but something that would bring it to the attention of the staff so that they would then notice it's been restricted and pay attention to the work that's planning to be done. And Ben, can CPI administrative funds be used to support annual inspections? I don't know about that, Octane, but I can say that we don't have an enforcement policy of any kind right now. And part of the policy statement I put together for review today was that there would be a new mechanism of annual monitoring. I don't know, take a nice day every fall and go drive around each of the structures and restricted structures and Amherst. And there would be a baseline documentation as part of each restriction. So you can kind of look at, see what it looked like when you put the restriction on and then see what changes have been made and what the condition is. So that was, and the same thing happens with conservation restrictions. Like our conservation department is just kind of getting a policy together as well to do more routine monitoring for conservation lands. For example, Kestrel Land Trust might hold some of these conservation restrictions in Amherst and they, because they have the staff for it, that's part of their routine is doing that monitoring. So I think it's something we're improving on in the town and I think hopefully with guidance from this new policy we'll kind of become a more routine thing that, there is this annual monitoring. Not to be a wet blanket, but I think it would be more than just driving around one day, you're gonna have to contact the owners and get access to go inside because it knows. The roof is leaking, you can't necessarily see that from outside and it could be riding away the floor and you need to really go in there. Yeah, that's good. In quiet situations. Yeah, maybe to Robin's point, it does require more of a expert who we can bring on to look at these things. But it sounds like, Ben, you're saying that the town is already thinking about that annual, at the very least an annual baseline, which sounds like a big improvement over what has existed thus far and my understanding from what I'm learning is that that's the expectation that when you hold an easement, you hold a restriction, you're in charge. And so that's what we should understand as a committee. It's that the town holds the easement, it's in charge for making sure that the conditions of the easement are met on some sort of regular basis. Are there any that actually have gone into effect that have passed through all that paperwork and that we hold? Yeah, there are a few. I don't know them off hand, but I know certainly the Dickinson Museum and the Evergreens, I think the Strong House I think the UU church one has gone through. I will say another issue, not to add another complication to this is that another issue with it taking so long to implement these restrictions is that the applicant needs to be a willing partner as well in this whole thing. And if they've already expended the money to do their repairs, which in most cases it's an emergency and they need to do an ASAP, they lose that incentive to sign their restriction. And so obviously, the Jones Library, they're part of the town and they're fully willing and ready to sign the restriction a decade later, but we run into that issue with some of the other applicants because they just, they nitpick it apart and they have no reason to accept the restriction anymore. And because they've done a lot of the work already. So yeah, part of this policy is hopefully to really make it clear that you can't get the money until you sign the restriction, which then puts it back on staff to get the restriction done. You know, I'm already starting to get back for the conference house. And to go back to what Jane said, then we should talk about what the restriction really involves, you know, try and make it less onerous to an owner and make more sense, be more transparent. Um, so let me sort of take a time check here. And are we generally in favor of proceeding with a local and permanent restriction policy? Or- I like Catherine's idea of just local. Me too. Me too. I mean, the Jones library got a million from us. I mean, that's for the special collections, but I mean, do we want a really high threshold for a permanent restriction? I mean, you know, just like we make it easy on ourselves to a certain point, but at a certain point, you know, is it $250,000 that warrants permanent restriction, $500,000? But that was sort of what I was thinking. Like what's this, what is the mechanism? I don't necessarily know that the financial threshold, but like perhaps something is written into this policy that says like, you decide like this sort of building, if it's this, I mean, if it's truly a million dollars, if there's like a bonded process, like that would be something that is a mechanism that it becomes, you know, a permanent restriction, but I don't know. For a percentage of the worth, you'd said something about that then. Right, that's the formula used for like the, I think like the mass architectural advisory board. If it's, if whatever the work is going to be is worth 30% of the value of the property, then that kicks in a whole set of other requirements. So it could be something like that. But I, well, I'll say this. I think we should proceed with this. I think my feeling is we shouldn't kick out the permanent restriction yet until we talk about what the nature of the restriction might be. But Bendy, you have some questions on the last page of this. Are these questions that you would like for us to discuss tonight? Okay. Let's see, what were my questions? So yeah, I think there's just kind of a general question from, you know, the town manager's office, kind of like who, if the historical commission agrees on a policy, who, like who owns that? Is it, does the town council need to get involved? Is the CPA commission need to be, you know, ratify the policy or so kind of just, and this isn't, or is it just kind of town staff, like procedural kind of thing? So we don't really have an answer on that yet, but it's just maybe just a question I had in mind. Well, the historical commission holds. Yeah. We are the town body that is, that authorizes or signs off on these restrictions. So that seems pretty clear. Yeah. Yeah. There's no doubt that the historical commission would need to adopt the policy. I guess it's who else needs to be informed. You know, at a certain point you bring in too many different committees and boards to put together a policy and it just gets harder and harder and harder and so. Well, we had experience with that this past week. Yeah. Yeah, I think all the other questions were, you know, we've kind of touched on them. Yeah, I guess there's another thing that often comes up in preparing these restrictions is whether it's on the property or just the building and that's kind of often what gets tangled up. You know, for example, the conky house, trying to figure this out now, it's part of the entire Salem Place Condo Association. And so it's like somehow we need to stipulate that the restriction would just be on the conky house and kind of the historic, you know, grounds around the conky house, but, you know, the Salem Place Condo and they can do whatever they want. So it's like, and then obviously that's kind of a very unique situation. But, you know, I think M8, the State Historical Commission wants restrictions to be on the entire property. So finding a way to do that at the conky house is proven tricky, I guess. That's interesting, yeah, because that's where local versus state, local versus permanent, that's another aspect of that. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so I think I'm fine to table this for now. I think those, I'm glad we were able to bridge the topic. I will check with my colleagues just to figure out kind of when the state does need to get involved. I think they do need to ratify or they need to approve of permanent restrictions. I know that, but I don't think there's anything that says they have to approve of projects up to a certain threshold, you know. I think over in Northampton, they, in Northampton, they typically, they apply for more state grants from the State Historical Commission. So they get a lot of surveying planning grants and historic preservation grants from the state and those come with the requirement for a permanent restriction. We don't get as, we don't often apply for those grants because we have, you know, CPA can cover a lot of projects here, but in Northampton, they often, I'm sure Robin would love to hear this, they often leverage a CPA funds with state grants. And so they almost, or they often use a permanent restriction anyway, but that's a requirement from the state because they're getting state money as opposed to the other. Right, they're getting that state money so their CPA money can go somewhere else while that's a little later. Yeah, yeah, I think there's some of us who have a lot to say about that. I'm not gonna say it right now. Actually, I wrote it down for unanticipated items. Oh, good. Yeah. Okay, so this is great. I think this has been a really, really interesting and useful discussion. So we'll forge ahead with this and maybe next time we discuss it, we can sort of just take a couple of prongs of it and wrestle with those and then move on to the next prongs after that. Super. Okay, the preservation by-law proposal. So we have a new, this looks like a, this looks almost like a typeset coffee copy. What happened here? It's getting to look professional. Oh, great. Does the Jane or Jan want to give a recap of the planning word meaning? I think what was that, just two weeks ago? I don't think my heart can take it. It's interesting. Yeah. Well, in some ways, it was, well, I think it was an effective presentation. We sort of did a tag team with me and Jan and Ben. There were, of course, a number of questions about certain parts of it, some that we were expecting and I think had, you know, had addressed already in the text of the by-law and then others that came forward. Jan, how's your heart doing? Okay, I'm trying to remember what the big one was. I just realized I completely blanked it out. Yeah. The big one, which we couldn't answer and is still outstanding. I'm just totally blanking. I think I'm repressing it. What was that? My recollection is, you know, one of the themes was just how homeowners know about this process in general and just the planning board encouraged the Historical Commission to, you know, or, you know, refine and finish and the town inventory of historic structures and kind of use that as a basis for the determination of significance. And maybe that's a long-term goal or medium-term goal to get there, but they encouraged us that that might be a better way to kind of give homeowners some clarity and assurances, you know, one way or another, which way it's gonna go. Well, they were, that was sort of like the nice part of saying that we, I got the impression that we don't inform homeowners soon enough that if they wanna do something, they're going to have to go through us. And we kind of came to a, I think, kind of a stalled point where we were just saying, we're here once somebody applies for demolition. And they're saying, they were saying that we should somehow have already let people know that their structures could come under our supervision. You know, like, like, well, remember I talked about maybe we need to do newspaper articles about if your house is this old or if your house is in this district or something, because people don't know it. But that felt like one of the things that we couldn't kind of resolve, right? I sort of felt like we came to not a complete resolution but that we were headed in the same direction. I mean, I don't disagree that there has to be a better way for homeowners and potential buyers to know the potential status of their home or the changes they wanna make. And that I think is going to become simpler with the preferably preserved status. But I thought that I thought we sort of sent the message that yeah, we wanna finish our inventory. We have a lot of structures inventory but there's still a bit more to do and that's going to put us in a better position to be explicit about buildings that for owners, more explicit for owners about buildings that may fall under this bylaw but that it's gonna take some time. I hope they understood it's gonna take some time. I felt like towards the end Tom Long kind of brought everything together and seemed more positive towards us because there was quite a bit of opposition and then he kind of wrapped it up better by the end but I know there were other things I just can't know what they were. Frank, can I jump in for a second? Yeah. I had an experience. I'll practice this by saying that I think the expectation that a homeowner knows exactly what is coming down the pike is unrealistic and an unfair burden to place at our feet. And I will say that I had an experience where I owned a two-family home. I was on town meeting when a bylaw was adopted that said if you were an owner-occupier of a multifamily property I don't know if it was two-family or more but I was a two-family, you could not sell your property to someone who wasn't an owner-occupier. And I'd forgotten even though I was in that town meeting I was never delivered anything to my mailbox that said that this bylaw applied to me. I knew it did because I was in town meeting. I'd forgotten about it. I went about to sell my house and I had to go through a review process that was delayed twice due to just people not being able to come to a meeting and make form. I waited five months or I didn't have rental income coming into my property because I was subject to this bylaw and no one ever made any apologies to me or an expectation. It's just part of what happens. And I think it's fine for us to want to do as much as we can to inform people that things come up. Like it's just the nature of things. I mean, it was a very frustrating painful experience and I almost didn't get a waiver to sell my house due to opposition. So I think, we can kind of forward think these things to the point where like the homeowner is always so burdened by our expectations but it doesn't happen just in our area. There are other things that can come up and I just wanted to share that. It sounds awful but you understand that what we're doing is we're trying to get the planning folk to approve this, to take it to town council. So we just have to. I know, I know. I mean, all right, fair enough. I just, you know. I also think that, you know, if we made that effort and if we succeeded in having an inventory that actually, yes, that's a big bonus. Yeah, yeah, no, I think what I'm saying is that it's better than, you know, maybe other people, you know, under other, under other bylaws experience. And we can make it a positive thing. I mean, we can get that inventory done and then the town can send out a letter to everyone of those homeowners. This is congratulations. You have a home that is considered significant. It happens to restrict you to these situations but. I love it. Catherine. Nope. Ben. Yeah, I guess that was kind of my main take away from the planning board meeting. I will say subsequently from the planning board meeting, I think the town staff, the building commissioner, planning director, we did take a closer look at the bylaw. I know, you know, I'm familiar with it in and out, but I think, you know, it only the building commissioner and others have only taken a super close look at it now that it's kind of getting out into the public a bit. And so the building commissioner and planning director and even I, to a certain extent, do have some concerns with a few parts of the, actually maybe just one aspect of the bylaw that I was hoping to bring up today with it has to do with the definition of demolition. And we did talk to Jane about it last week. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was part of this discussion. And I think there are some, you know, I'd like for Ben to kind of take us through what town staff are concerned about. Because if we back this whole process up to its point of origin, where, you know, an application for a building permit or a presentation or comes in, you know, what are the sort of practical steps that depend on clarity of definitions and process? And so I think there is a good point here on potential solutions. So, yeah. Yeah, so I guess I'm looking at this as like, obviously the preservation bylaw is, you know, one of the more important tools that the historical commission and the town have for historic preservation. So it's, you know, I think, and we recognize that in town hall. And so I don't want you to think we're trying to detract from it in any way. I think we're all, I'm also looking at it as like, okay, this is a policy that I'm implementing and the building commissioners looking at it that way as well. Whereas, you know, he's technically the enforcement officer for all, you know, the code enforcement officer. So, and his staff is the one who kind of is the first point of contact for a lot of homeowners. So it just kind of occurred to us that, and I can share my screen just so we can all look at the language, the demolition definition part C focuses on, so part A is the total demolition. Part B is, you know, 25% of any facade. And then part C is the act of changing, modifying or removing important architectural elements from a building, which elements contribute to the historic integrity of the design, including but not 112 walls, roofs, structures, doors, windows, tubes, porches, chimneys, et cetera, et cetera. And so like Jane said, I guess if you back this up to actually thinking through how this bylaw will be implemented, you know, so when someone is, you know, as homeowners, you probably already know this, but you know, if you're looking to make a change to your house and it's something that requires a building permit, you know, you or, you know, your contractor working on your behalf would submit a building permit to the town. You know, we, that then comes into one of our permit administrators who reviews it and kind of sends it to the, to the right, down the right path, whether it's to an inspector or to a planning department staff. And so, you know, the way it works now is, or I guess the way it will work if this bylaw is in place as it is now is essentially the first flag would be, is the structure, is the building 50 years or older in question here? And then if not, you know, it goes right along, but I think the first threshold is if 50 years are older and then if so, is it for, you know, essentially, is it for a building permit that has anything to do with an exterior change? And so, I think it's, you know, we ran some numbers just last week and, you know, we estimate that could be over 300 permits per year that kind of meet that criteria. So over 50, yeah, over 50 years old and for exterior alteration. And so the concern is, is that, you know, that's potentially like five to six a week, for example, that would need to be, would need to go down this process of first determining if it's a significant building involved. And if not, then it can just move right along. And if it is, it would be reviewed by the historical commission at a public hearing. But I think even just the idea of, you know, potentially 250 to 300 projects needing to be reviewed for significance because they involve changing or modifying an important architectural element, you know, involved in this list, for example, just seem like it's, it's, it would be a lot of work added workload. And I think we don't want to, this is, I mean, we all, I think we in town hall certainly recognize the importance of this section because it's not just full demolition. That's important for preservation. It's not just, you know, 25% of the facade, but, you know, there's certain elements like the, you know, cupola on a building or, you know, really nice trim that are, you know, integral to the property. But so we're just trying to find a balance between finding a way to protect those details but also not needing to potentially convene this group to determine significance like five to six times a week, which is not, I don't think what anyone had in mind for this bylaw. So there's a few ideas we had. One, you know, I think we struggled to find a way to like clean up the language to make it clear. I think, I think we can, there's only so much we can do to clean up the language because at the end of the day, we're not expecting our permit administrators to kind of like be the ones to interpret this. They just need to know where to send it quickly. And so we had suggested maybe we use the town's inventory as it stands now as, you know, say, add some language in here that say that this section only applies to structures that are on the town's inventory. And obviously that inventory is going to change over time. Hopefully get to a point where it's finalized. But for now, we thought that could be a way of kind of filtering out when those changes need to be reviewed. Another option could be also to kind of just have a separate age threshold for Section C. Maybe this is only for pre-World War II or pre-1900 homes. I think that creates a little bit of confusion, but that could be an idea for filtering as well. But yeah, so I just wanted to present that. Change and, you know, I think we want to make sure it's addressed kind of before the. Bylaw moves along too much further. And no one brought it up at the planning board meeting, but which I was surprised about, but we kind of realized that after the fact it was an issue. Okay, thanks. There will be one other thing we want to specifically talk about that did come up at the planning board meeting, but focusing on this first Robin. I would just say that if there were an additional threshold for a separate threshold, I'd be more comfortable with a rolling threshold. Anything, you know, not a 60, because that will just have to be changed later. That's my only comment. Sorry, the rolling threshold. But you said that you said, you know, you said, you know, it might only apply to free world war. I'm not sure which role or, you know, as opposed to picking fixed date pick a, a number of years. If it's different than the regular threshold, if it's 75 or 75, 75 years instead of 25, but that way every year automatically refreshes itself. We don't have to go and revisit it later. I kind of think it would be confusing to have two separate. thresholds. I kind of lean into in favor of that. The language that includes. It might be something like the act of changing, modifying or removing important architectural elements from a building listed. In the macros database. Or the town inventory, because I'm not sure they're really identical. Except for exemptions as found, blah, blah, blah. I'd rather see that than a year. Used because we already have the 50 year mark. And if we start saying anything more modern than X year. It has a different qualification. Then we're not really serious about things. That aren't as old. And then something like changing windows. On a mid-modern house could be a major. You know, redesign. So I prefer what Jane is suggesting to a year. Cutting off, cut off point. I agree with that. Yeah, there's not in the head. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. But I think we should. Use that kind of wording and description. Okay, that's super. That's great. We'll meet with Janet McGowan about her detailed. Concert. So yeah, Chris. Breastrup and I did actually yesterday. Okay. In the morning and. Yeah, she presented a whole, you know, track changes. To me with a lot of her edits incorporated. And so I just. I responded to them, you know, in the meeting, but I just haven't had time to fully digest all of her suggestions and the. And kind of incorporated into a clean copy. A lot of them were. Just pretty helpful, you know, Clara tips about clarifying the procedure and kind of who needs to be. Notified when and. And kind of. Especially like how the dates, you know, the completion of an application is one day. And so we kind of walked through that and I was really helpful. But I just, I haven't had time to kind of. Really go through them and adopted into a clean copy. Janet. Had one other suggestion, but I wanted to let Jane go first to answer that. I just wanted to. I just wanted to see. You had mentioned there was something else from the planning board. It might be the same thing that you're thinking about. It's down here. In the definition of significant building. Yeah. Yeah. So there was some, you know, concern about. Okay. If it's just one. If this first. This first pass. And finding a building significant is if this is just handled by. Planning department staff person and one. Commission member then. The concern was about. The historical commission not having. Enough. Kind of influence over that review. So the idea was to. Not pin it down that specifically, but put. Change the wording as you see it here and what Ben said out. A building found by. At least one member of the commission. So that, so that there could be more than one. So that the. Specifics about the. Composition of that first review group. Are flexible. Instead of. Fixed. So it could be like that one member meets with the town's planning staff member, but a notification goes out to the whole commission that this is coming up. And they could, can everybody can look at it before it goes to them or something. That's one possibility or it could be say two members, two commissioners meeting. Planning. Department staff. Yeah. Just to, just to, you know, expand the role of the commission a little bit. I think that's a good idea. This, I don't know. This seems to me to be nicely. Flexible. Sure. Yeah, I think it's good to have flexible. Language in a bylaw because it's such a pain to change it as we've gone through now. So it's. What another, actually in our meeting yesterday with. Janet, she had suggested. That the commission or it's designees. So it even allows for the full commission. Right. I mean, we might lose that and get some schmuck in his place. Right. Yeah. We'd have more. We don't want to have an even vote with him. We want to outboat him. I mean, not you, the person who might. Yeah. You know, and I think it's good to kind of, there might, yeah, exactly. There might be a time where the commission does want to kind of retain the. Power to the responsibility to determine significance. Maybe that's at a public meeting as opposed to public hearing. Or something, but. Or maybe it's the, you give it the responsibility to the chair for a little while or something. So it's. I think I will say not to always point to Northampton, but I think it is how they do it. They have kind of like three different options laid out. And I think they, their staff person kind of determined or in conjunction with the chair, they kind of determine which. Whether it rises to the occasion of the full commission. Whether they can. Their commission sitting around, sit around saying, you know, an Amherst, they do it this way. Yeah. I'd be curious whether we're a model for anybody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I, I, I agreed with. Sentiment that just adding flexible language. Could help. Yeah. I mean, you know, I left that. I mean, you know, I was just thinking that, you know, this was, this was getting better and better. And, you know, we've made progress and it's, it's probably. In its final stages of adjustment. So. I know that the, the, the planning board wanted to see it again. Before forwarding it to the town council. So I think that's where we are. Yeah. You get to make all the edits. Congratulations. You've been selected. But we have to meet with them again. So, you know, Jane, you and I can't go off this commission for at least another five years at the rate. They're going. No, this will, this will, this will come through. And it does. It'll be. You're next in line, Jen. You're the era parent. I've been on longer. I'm the, I'm the, I'm the. Disapparent. All right. So, uh, we can go on to the minutes. Approves a minutes from January 12th, 2022. I second. Okay. Thank you. I would just like to add Cindy Harbison's last name. Oh, and could you correct my last name spelling? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, it's funny on the, sometimes on zoom calls. It was just Cindy's. Yeah. First name, but yeah, I can definitely. I didn't know it was. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And I should note the, the preservation. Historic structures report. I just, I put together a web, a web page. For the final document and for the video and for the PowerPoint slides. So that project is squared away. We'll get the hard copies the next week or so. Okay. Yeah, I'm still like, so I was so blown away by that presentation. Yeah. Yeah. That's really good. Yeah. Let's see. Okay. So now we vote. Unless there are any other comments. Yes. Second. Okay. Is this to the minutes? Minutes. Okay. So all in favor. Say, I think we're all on the same, we're all on the same screen so we can raise our hands. I'm in favor of that's unanimous. Thank you. Thank you. So. Is. Is there any. And did you do these minutes? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Is there anyone who would be willing to take minutes. In the future. Coming from Robin it. I will, I will have to, I would say I would in my heart, but I'm not good at being present and typing on a computer. It's just. My skills. Yeah. I mean, I actually don't have a huge issue doing it. I am. It's, I just kind of have the agenda up right here. I'm just kind of filling in notes as we go. Okay. If I, if I seem distracted, that's what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing here, but. Usually. Oh, that's good to know. Like I'm watching. He was watching TV. Okay. If you're okay with that, then that's fine, but I don't, you know, I don't want you to have to like do everything all at once. Yeah. I appreciate it. If there's anyone who's really excited about the opportunity. I would invite someone to. Yeah. I did my time in Greenfield. Yeah. Okay. So now we get to public comment. And I don't know if there are. Let's see. Here. Would you like to make a comment? You have three minutes. Yeah. I was talking about macros and I've been spending a lot of time. Playing with the interactive maps on, on macros for various articles that I'm writing. And it occurred to me while I'm listening to you talk that. In the downtown central has central historic local historic district. There's like green dots everywhere of houses that are on the macros. Inventory. I'm thinking that at the time that the sunset link and historic commission study committee was set up, we had asked for one in North Amherst to and, and Pat Holland was working on her book and had history on all kinds of houses up here. We have. Lots of old houses that don't appear on any inventory, including my own and, and all of these Roswell feel Putnam houses. Up here that aren't protected. And so they're not on macros and not on the local inventory. How did they get, how do we, how do we get our houses saved? That's, that's what I'm curious about under, under these various bylaws. And what's happening with demolition by neglect. I mean, thinking of one famous barn up here where the owner refuses to fix the roof for more than 30 years now. And it happened to be her grandfather's favorite bond. How do you, how do you make. These. And on, and on every time I drive by the North Amherst church, I get hot sick because the pain is peeling so badly. And part of the woodwork is rotting off that and they're not maintaining it. So, I mean, weird things like that fit in these various bylaws that you're working on. That's the issue I wanted to bring up. The North Amherst church is obviously in a historic district. So that is semi protected. But the, I don't think. I don't know. I don't know. Things, maybe the, the Putnam houses, some of them are included. I don't remember where the line is. But. Certainly there are, you know, the 18th century houses that have passed summer street. So somewhere I want to know how that's going to fit in down the line. That they, that they don't. Get demolished by neglect or whatever. I don't know. Do you. Do you have your hand up from. Yeah, yeah, I was just going to say, I imagine some of the direction on. Demolition by direct neglect is going to come out of that preservation plan that we talked about. I didn't hear what you said. Oh, I said that. Direction for the historical commission and the town on a property. Presumably a separate standing bylaw with the direction for that would come out of. The update to the preservation plan that we just talked about. Because it is a long and complicated process. That's was the demolition, delay or preservation by law. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. To tell the truth. Anyone can submit a form B. Yeah. Any property. So a homeowner may do that. Yeah. So he'll do. Does do people know each other? Some of these that own these homes. Could they get together and all fill out. A lot of them are rental. Like along summer street. Yeah. They were all mill houses when they were mills around. Yeah. But any, any active citizen can submit. A form to macros, right? It doesn't have to be the owner. I believe that's correct. And. You know, thinking about the homes on summer street. A lot of the. A lot of the narrative that. A form B needs. Can be. Basically the same narrative for every one of those houses. Yeah. So. I don't know. A little bit of a little bit of specific. Information about each and metal street looks terrible. That's totally gone. Yeah. We've lost that one. But the assessor cards also can be a source of information. To be transferred to a form B. That's right. Oh, thank you for bringing up the assessor cards, I'm not sure that's correct. I'm just going to ask Rob more, and, um, Mr. Restra, I, I asked how easy it would be to get. To get this. Designation information. Onto an assessor card. You know, like if it shows up in Macras, or if it shows up in the town inventory, or if we've said it's preferably preserved. And, um, It's, it's not difficult at all. give the town a list. So that's that's pretty great. Yeah. Yeah. And when one can access assessor cards online? And so it's possible if there's a question to see what's already there and then recommend what should be added. Are you saying assessor card and you also mean property information card? Same thing. Same thing. Okay. Okay. Okay. That means that you could go ahead and fill out a form B for your house. For anyone's house. For anyone's house. Yeah. We're going to go on to unanticipated items. So we have an email from Bruce Colton about North Amherst community farm barn. Basically, they thought they could, you know, repurpose some of the wood from the barn with the assistance of Community Preservation Act funds. But that was not granted. So Robin? Yeah, I read Bruce's comment and my response to it. And Jane can weigh in with very much more expertise is that I mean, first of all, that CPA is for preservation, restoration, rehabilitation or acquisition. Is that right? I can't remember. I can't remember the four R. Yes. But it would have, but none of the activity of disassembling a barn and reassembling it into a different entity just does not fall under the category of preservation. That's not a preservation practice. It's a fabulous repurposing. It's a great last resort for building that has reached its end point, but the purpose of CPA is for preservation of things that are in existence. And so I would disagree. I am fabulously impressed with the work that they do there. And I would disagree with his assessment that that that decision was made an error. I think it was absolutely the correct decision. And my understanding is that even disassembling something and reassembling it somewhere else is not considered preservation in the field. So this would be one step further away from that. That's really unfortunate because that's something that's really being pushed now is to reassemble, repurpose, reuse. I mean, I think that that's, I think that we all, certainly our commission appreciates that. And we encourage, you know, our properties that we that we give permission for demolition. We really encourage that. The purpose thing of the materials, the trick is that that the legislation is very specific. And the purpose of it doesn't fit the purpose of the legislation. So it's disappointing in the regard that there is an other funding for that, but it's not disappointing in the sense that it's just, it doesn't fall under that law. Let me get the law changed. Well, you just get a different funding put. Any other comment? Bruce Coulom's email does indicate that they will be working with a barn deconstruction group. The material will be salvaged, but not used for their use, but not used in the way that we discussed about constructing a smaller structure. And it'll probably go elsewhere. Won't be there at that time. That's too bad. Okay. Then let's see. The other unanticipated item was a discussion at the finance committee, the town finance committee meeting. I believe that was just yesterday. Was that just yesterday? Yeah. Sarah Marshall, the chair of the Community Preservation Act committee, let us know that there were some concerns on the part of the finance committee about probably particularly about the Conkey Stevens house CPA proposal and maybe slightly somewhat less concerned about the Amherst women's club proposal. These being private properties, although the women's club is actually a 501c3, but significant concern about directing CPA funds toward a privately owned project. So Robin wrote something very persuasive about the nature of preservation and how difficult a concept it can be to understand if that's not sort of what you think about all the time. And I tried to write something else, but Robin really covered the whole territory very nicely. Then I had to get off and go to work. So I can't really talk about what the rest of the conversation was like, but please, Robin, go ahead. So I stayed on and I listened after Jane and I spoke. I think a couple of the members made statements where they said they were quite clear about appreciating all our arguments and sort of being in agreement with them. And yet there was, and I'm just going on memory, I didn't take notes, but there was from Lynn, is it Grace Meyers at her last name, a strong statement from her about a tremendous amount of discomfort with this amount of funds, a suggestion that perhaps, I don't know if she was specific, I mean, she must have been specific to historic preservation, that maybe they should put a cap on how much we could spend on it. Sonya Aldrich did correct her at one point to say that the town council could limit, the rules are that when the CPI puts a recommendation forward for a certain amount of money, town council can lower that amount of money. They can't increase it. They can never increase it. They do have the ability to lower it. And the finance committee decided to set the two historic preservation projects aside. There was discussion about, there was some anxiety or concern about the nature of the preservation restrictions to protect the town's investment, which was another argument. But I was concerned about this idea that I think Lynn went further to say, in my mind, she suggested that maybe we shouldn't fund these two projects because what other projects might come forward next year that we need to fund, which I found was not in alignment with the purpose of the CPA committee and its recommendations. I mean, town council does, they have a vote. I don't know what that ends up looking like, but there was just a tremendous amount of discomfort with these projects. And the only thing that I wanted to add to this committee's discussion is that I'm also a little unnerved by the lack of structure that goes around these, particularly these large grants. That I think the Hills House only had one estimate. They sought advice from the town. The town at that point was Anthony said one estimate was fine. We don't have any definitive guidelines, but I think guidelines to suggest the same way that you do kind of generally a procurement is you seek three estimates, whether we should have guidelines about seeking estimates for these big jobs from preservation specialized firms, at least one. We had no capacity for comparison with Hills proposal. So I personally would love to see more clarity around the CPA process, particularly around historic preservation projects, especially as they get at these higher financial levels. There is the issue of the preservation restriction. And there is also my question for Ben. I've probably asked it before and I'll ask it again, who is supervising the requirement that the work conform to the Secretary of Interior standards, which I'm learning all about this semester. So you guys will get really tired of me, but I'm not I wasn't paying close of attention and I'm not on the committee, but and I don't know that I would have before this semester would have known enough to say, okay, does this who is the person? Is it someone in the town? Should the town be putting CPA money towards a preservation specialist to fill in that piece so that the work conforms to the standards? So there's a whole bunch of that stuff that I agree that we would really benefit with more clarity around. But I don't I felt very uncomfortable with the idea that Council would bow down these two projects, or at least one member might on the basis of freeing up more money for projects that we don't even know, existence or, you know, in a worst case scenario that the town knows are coming, you know, they have to be evaluated on their own merits. So that's that's my understanding this concern with private ownership. It was only two years ago that a member, I think it was a member of the CPAC committee got in touch with me as head of district five neighborhood association to ask that they could advertise to homeowners that they want more personal private applications instead of just, you know, business and entities. And now they're saying they don't want I think it's just finance committee is yeah, some members of the finance committee are objecting to private ownership. But in fact, said during this meeting that, well, yeah, this property is eligible. But I'm not sure we want to spend our CPA funds that way. In other words, I mean, I think the point that I was trying to make probably not very well was that, okay, the property, the owner is eligible. And the work they want to do is eligible. So if this has been endorsed by two separate town citizen committees, how can the finance committee reverse or just sort of delete that kind of project? Yeah, and I can say that in the CPA committee, the concern which both Heddy and then I made, I made a point of making public comment to craft was the idea that you can't fund a private entity. And then the further point that I made at the finance committee was this really challenging aspect of understanding that, yes, sale in place is going to benefit from these funds to improve their building, to repair their building, but that the CPA funds function in this overlapping way that that money also provides the public benefit to the people of the town to experience the building. And that is the hard thing that's hard, the thing that's hard to understand is that the public view is a public benefit. And that is what I spoke to. And it seemed like once Jane and I got done talking, they were like, okay, we totally agree with you. But this is at that point, I felt like they were like, this is too much money to spend on historic preservation. I mean, that was my takeaway was that there was this like gut instinct of like, you know, we have to we have to make decisions about who, you know, eligibility and being worthy and being able to not fund everyone if you want to hold things in reserve. And by the way, I think there is still a $600,000 reserve. So that's not a very good argument. It was interesting that they played it played off against the track, which it, you know, just it's like, I felt apples and oranges, you know, I'm sure that's that was the sense that I got that the track was sort of the track is this huge project is the track funded yet? Is it been approved? I can't remember then, you know, any do you remember? Did we did CPA? I think they still need to establish an orientation and a plan for the right, so it still hasn't been approved. And I think maybe that might have been like, you know, the thing in the background of saying there's this huge project coming and how can we give. This is all my interpretation. I'm reading into it, but it was this feeling of like, we have, you know, we have big projects coming and how can we give. And they're down wide sports oriented things, which is more important than historic structures, right? Look at as it is, you know, so I think, yeah, I think they be, you know, I mean, I, I made a couple notes that I thought that, you know, we might have to speak again at the, at the next forum, you know, just to make those points. I mean, that was, how do you also, you listen to the deliberation? Yes, I stayed until about 1115. And, and it was really helpful to hear, you know, the context and the history that, you know, I just joined very recently. So, and I, I feel like there's a lot of context here that, that maybe we should be privy to. I mean, there was clearly a reference to an earlier CPA funded historic preservation project. I think the Jewish, I knew you were going to say that. Yeah, they've been fighting us all this time. But I think, yeah, I think it was, I think it really just, it's really hard to conceive of this very intangible benefit of the public view up against a church, you know, or a, you know, even the Hills House, like, during what I made public comment in the CPA committee meeting, it was clear that members of the committee thought, Oh, well, because Hills House is a nonprofit, and because you can go inside it, it's more worthy of CPA funding. And I, you know, tried to make a point that it's like they're equal, you know, whether you can go inside or not is irrelevant. It's all about the public view. The work is on the exterior. You know, there's questions. I'm listening, Robin. Sorry. Well, that's okay. And I just think it's a really, I think it's a really hard concept. And, and it's challenging to look at $100,000 for a privately held entity for people who are outside of preservation and understand that this is perfectly worthy. And it, you know, it needs all the qualifications and it's, you know, and the merits. And I think that's the challenge. I'm going to ask Kenny to speak. She's been trying to get in. I think I think it was really interesting that the points that Robin was making about this idea of the, the town of Amherst being sort of like a museum that sort of unfolds as you drive or walk around it, is an argument that Jan actually made in the context of the Amherst Writers Walk where she talks about how, you know, this is this is such an important kind of work to do because it's not happening in a history book. It's happening in material reality around you. And it's sort of one way to kind of offer public history for want of a better word, you know, on view. And, you know, when I think about that, that drive into the town from, from the East Village, you know, the, the JCA building with its beautiful spire and the Conkley-Steelins House, you know, and the Hills House that they're all incredibly important in terms of why people, you know, are attracted to Amherst. So it's just that it's, as you say, Robin, it's, it's, it's sort of ephemeral. It's hard for them to really kind of get it in the same way that you can get, you know, doing the track by the high school, which, which I get, I get that. I mean, I think if I was a parent in town, you know, and I did have kids who were really sporty, you know, that, that would be, that would be hard. You know, there's only so much money, I hate that pie though, you know, the pie comes out and it can only be cut in so many place ways and it can't go any further, you know. That, that's not, I don't think that's how this works. I just don't, I actually don't think I understand the sort of mechanism well enough, you know, to maybe turn, turn the opinion around. I mean, it doesn't sound completely hopeless, because isn't there another meeting where this will be reviewed again? I just, we just need to be ready, I suppose, and maybe have some other people who could, could speak to, to speak to this. Maybe make the economic argument that I was making at the bylaw meeting with the planning group that it's economically valuable to the town to have an attractive historic street view, because I definitely spoke to that in my comments. So one, I want to go, sort of go back to the beginning to, I was kind of saving this in, in case it became completely irrelevant or we ran out of time, but Robin, you mentioned, you know, being a little unnerved by the, the size of the projects and the lack of sort of stringency around how they are estimated and brought in and sort of qualifications around workmanship. It's in, I think it's incredibly difficult to get three bids on a small project by qualified tradespeople. I think that's going to be kind of unrealistic. I mean, they're, they're, you know, and it kind of depends on the, on the building climate or the construction climate, because we had this project, you know, more than a million dollars and there are some people who just didn't want to bid on it, or who bid it way up so that, you know, we wouldn't come back to them. Well, I mean, can I, I just want to interject really quickly. When I say three bids in, in my experience in community development, it's the attempt to get three bids. It's an attempt, you know, to, that, that, you know, for our contractors there, or, you know, our projects there, you know, if we put, we put out, we put in an, out an announcement to 10 contractors, and then if only one of them showed up and took the one bid, but to have a homeowner call three contractors, is that not something that we can expect? I don't, I don't think so. I mean, I don't think, I don't think a homeowner could do that in, in like the climate of the last year. They would get, they would get home back. But that would be, that would be the, that would be the attempt. You make a phone call, you don't have to call that. You just put that in your application. Yeah, I think it would actually be, I think it, I think it would be better for them to get the qualifications of the firm from, from whom they've received the bid. And that that gets to be part of the review, like, like the bidder could be, you know, can't you find, can't you find somebody who knows how to do this work, especially when Secretary of the Interior standards are involved. So I don't know, it may be a thing that's similar to, you know, the, the local restriction has a certain set of criteria and the, and the larger permanent restriction has a different, something different. Anyway, that's just, I'm sorry, that's, that's three whole cents. I'll just do three. Well, are we ready to leave this and perhaps to leave the entire meeting? Next meeting date? Yeah, March 16. Yeah. And what are we going to have in April so we can plan ahead? Because I don't have one down for April. I may, I believe I have a conflict on the 16th. So if, March? In March. Oh, wait a minute. No, I don't. Okay. Or maybe, all right. Well, if it turns out that I do, I'll be in touch with you, Jan. I bet you will. I'm not opposed to moving the one on the 15th. I won't technically be in California, but I'll be working at my partner's parents' house. But I'm, I'm, I'm planning to work that day. And if anything, I'll actually, the meeting will be at 3.30. What date are we talking about? March 16th. Okay. But I'm happy to keep it on folks for now. But was Jan asking for an April date or did I hear that wrong? Yeah, I just wondered if we're just going to go with the third Wednesday in April, I just kind of liked to plan ahead because, you know, that would be great. I have it in my calendar actually. Yeah. So 20. Okay. Okay. So I'm sorry, it wasn't March. It was that April date. April 20. But we're good for March. But I'll be, I'll probably be done at 7.30. So I can join Lee. You know, we had, we had a meeting on my birthday and now you want me to run a meeting on my half birthday? You, you do not know how long it took me to figure out when you're what my half birthday was. I love it. I'm still waiting for the chocolate cake you promised me in October. Yeah. Are we talking about the 20th of April? Yep. Okay. Okay. Now you all know when my half birthday is. Okay. Great. Shall I make a motion to adjourn? I second. I haven't made it yet. Do listen carefully, Jim. Okay. Hey, is there a motion to adjourn? There is. Oh, who's making it? I am and Pat's seconding it. Super. All right. A second. So we have a second. There's, as I've, I don't know whether this is true, but I, what I hear people say in meetings is that the motion to adjourn is not debatable there. All right. Take care, everyone. Good night.