 It's October 3rd, 2022, based on a July 16th, 2022 act of the legislature. They have suspended certain provisions of the open meeting law. This allows us to continue holding meetings remotely without a form of the council physically present in the room. However, I do want to note that audience is now allowed to be in the room. This meeting is accessible in real time via Zoom, by phone and on Amherst media. Given that we have a quorum of the council president I'm calling the October 3rd 2022 town council meeting to order at 632. I'll call upon each counselor by name at that time you should unmute and say present and then remember to mute again. Shawnee Balmille. Shawnee. President. Pat DeAngelis. Present. Anna Devin, Gothier. Present. Lynn Griesmer is present. Mandy Johannicky. Present. Anika Loops. Present. Michelle Miller is not here yet. I'll come back. Dorothy Pam. Here. Pam Maroney. Shane is not here yet. Andy Steinberg. Present. Jennifer Todd. Present. And Alicia Walker will be here, but she will be a few minutes late. We're going to go to the announcements and keep an eye off Michelle. Can you hear us? Michelle Miller, can you hear us? Yes, I can hear you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We're going to go to the announcements. They're on your board. I want to just add or highlight a few. The one I want to highlight initially is the public dialogue on rental permitting bylaw, and that will be at the beginning of our meeting two weeks from now on the 17th at 530. I also want to highlight the fact that the community resources committee is holding a meeting on Monday, April 24th at seven. And the finance committee, in addition to the meeting that's listed here is going to have a committee of the whole on October 18th at three. At that time, there'll be a more in-depth discussion of the major capital finance model and the options. We have two districts meetings coming up. District two is meeting on October 12th at 630 via zoom and district four is meeting October 23rd from one to three at the Amherst History Museum. I'd like to ask Nika, because she has expressed interest in making a statement about Native American Heritage Month. Nika. Thank you. So I will say that I had missed the confirmation, but I will ask and state that we do acknowledge where we are, where we stand. I will not offer a land acknowledgement, but instead invite us all to do our own research as to who was here, learn about them, pronounce the names correctly and go from this space on on because we can really go to all corners of this island. I would also ask that we hold space with those that these upcoming days are not a celebration. And acknowledge that, you know, we do where our beloved town is named after one of the first persons to participate in biological warfare. With that, I ask that we all be curious that, you know, we make sure that we are aware of the difference between appreciation and appropriation when we deal with Native American communities and make sure that we're reaching out to those who are on the ground who are actually working with their communities and building, you know, workforce building collaborative relationships that are really important to all of us understanding each other and moving forward with peace. Thank you. I just want to confirm Kathy Shane is joined can you hear us Kathy. Yes, I can I apologize for joining late. We're just getting started. All right. There's no hearing tonight we're going to go on to general public comment. If you are in the audience and you would like to make general public comment please raise your hand. Are there any other people who would like to make general public comment. Okay. Welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at the end based upon the number of people who wish to speak. The council will not engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter raised during general public comment. At this point there are two hands. I'm going to call in Keith Nesbitt and ask him to enter the room, state his name where you live, and then proceed. Can everyone hear me. We can Keith, thank you. Hi, Keith Nesbitt 490 Middle Street. I am the current president of Amherst about a chance. And on October the 15th, we are holding our 50th fall foliage run and cider walk. Just wanted to take this moment to make the council aware of that date and that event. Those who have attended in the past know that it is a beautiful course that is designed to run through Amherst colleges campus. And some of the wooded areas of our town with events on the common that day that include a lot of family freely activities. I just wanted to make sure that those who may not be aware are aware of the date and invite everyone to attend and participate as a runner or a Walker, or just come out and have some fun with family and friends on the common on Saturday, October 15. Keith, thank you for sharing that with us. There was another hand up. But I don't see it now. Are there any other public comment at this time. Okay. See not we're going to move on to the consent agenda. And the following items were selected because they were considered to be routine. And it was reasonable to expect. They would pass with no controversy to remove an item from the consent agenda for discussion later in the meeting, ask that it be removed. That does not require a second. So I'm going to make the motion, then look to see who wants to remove what, and then we'll proceed to move the following items and the printed motions they're under and approve those items as a single unit. 8 to a referral of creation of capital stabilization fund the finance committee. 8b referral of proposed amendments to zoning bylaw article 51112 and classification table, proposed revisions to adjust sunsetting of article 14 temporary zoning community resources committee, governance organization and legislation committee and planning board. Adoption proposed amendments to general bylaw 3.39 street numbering of houses. Adoption of 2023 town calendar meeting town council meeting calendar. E authorization for town council president to submit the following correspondence on behalf of the town council I can want to point out that you can remove one, two or all of them. UMass Amherst Chancellor search committee letters to legislators regarding MVLC funding for johns library response to community safety, safety and social justice committee letter. 11 a to C is approval of the following town council meeting minutes, September 19 2022 special town council meeting minutes, primer on the master plan. September 19 2022 special town council meeting minutes public forum on the master plan and September 19 2022 regular town council meeting. I'm going to call first on Andy Steinberg. I request to remove HC adoption proposed amendments to general bylaw 3.39 street numbering of houses. Okay. Kathy Shane. I would like to remove the letter responding to community safety and social justice committee. Okay. Dorothy Pam. The same item that Kathy mentioned. Okay. Lisa. The Chancellor search committee letter. UMass Chancellor search letter. Okay. And I'm aware that Alicia would like the letter to legislators regarding the MVLC funding for johns library removed she will be joining us later. Are there any other comments at this time you do. Nobody needs to comment on why they're moving anything. They just need to ask that it be removed. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Dorothy and Dorothy you still have your hands up. Thank you. Okay. I'm looking for a second to the motion. That motion now does not include HC. Adoption of proposed amendment to general bylaw 3.39 street numbering houses and eight E all three letters. Is there a second. Second really. Thank you. And. I'll start with. Pat de Angelis. Hi. Anna Devlin got here. Hi. Lynn grease prison. I'm Andy Joe Hanneke. Hi. Anika Lopes. Hi. Michelle Miller. Hi. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Pam Rooney. Hi. Kathy Shane. Yes. Indy Steinberg. Hi. Jennifer. Hi. And Alicia Walker has. Not joined us yet. Okay. Thank you. So it is 12 in favor and no. I'm sorry. Shalini. Yes. It's 12 in favor. No opposed. And one. No abstentions and one absent. Okay. So given that we have. We can take the consent agenda down. And. We have no. Proclamations. And so we're going to move immediately to presentations and discussions. And so I'm going to call on Paul. And Sean McGonnell. This is a night of serious education for all counselors. And the beginning of some significant fiscal decision making. And so I'm going to call on Paul. And Sean McGonnell. And Sean McGonnell. And Sean McGonnell. And so many of them are automatic. In fact, some people have asked why aren't all of these things on for the vote. And that is because. We actually have an automatic referral for most things that go to the finance committee. But the one item that does not, we did have a vote. You just voted that on the consent agenda. So with that, Paul. Thank you, Lynn. So every fall. We have a lot of questions for the town council after we have free cash certified. And we look to move money into stabilization fund, things like that. And that's what we're doing tonight. These are things as Lynn said, we're not asking you for to act on these other than to refer them to the finance committee, but we did want to take the opportunity to be able to explain them to you. Today we send you a written memo that sort of summarized everything, but you don't have to have read that in order to understand what we're asking you to do tonight. So I'm going to go through the recommendations that Sean will lead us through of course. So, Sean. Yeah. So which one would you like to start with? I've got three ready to go. Do you want to start on the budget process. And your budget process. Okay. Let me pull that one up. And share my screen. Athena, can you enable a screen sharing? All right. Can you see it on the screen now? Yes, we can. So this first one is on the budget process and I have a short presentation to go through it because I feel like a lot of this is going to be a discussion and back and forth. So our budget process is, you can kind of break it down into four phases. The first phase that we are about to enter, we have just entered as the engagement and direction setting phase that leads us into developing the budget. And that's our next phase. Once we have developed a budget, we're going to start with the initial phase. So we're going to be presented to you all and we move into sort of the review and approval portion. And then there's an implementation phase. So there's really sort of four distinct. Sort of. Phases to the budget process and the good news is we're at the very beginning of the initial phase. So this initial phase is engagement and direction setting. And this is where we get all the feedback and the input that will lead into the budget that will ultimately be presented to us. So one of the first things we do is the resident capital request. We have this, I have this in October. I'm not sure if it'll be October this year might be a little bit later, but this is one tool we use to engage with the public where anybody in the community can submit a capital request that will go to the town manager and go to the joint capital planning committee for review and for consideration. We are working to refine this process this year. There's it's worked. We've funded a number of projects through this mechanism, but we also have gotten some feedback that there are some improvements we could make. And so I've worked with Kathy Shane and, and on a Devlin got the air to make some improvements to it that we hope to roll out this year. The next couple of things that happen in this phase is the financial indicators presentation. This is the big presentation that's scheduled I think for November 7th right now, where we'll share a number of different criteria that we, we measure benchmarks that we measure for our budget and how we compare year over year and how we compare to our neighbors. Things like expenses per capita revenue per capita, economic development. I think there's 20 or 20 slides, something like that. So there's a number of variables that we, that we present. And then after that presentation, we share an initial forecast of revenues and expenses for the following year. And that really kicks off the, the budget guideline discussion and the rest of the, the early phases of the budget process. And then at that, I think it's at the same meeting. Lynn, I think it's also the seventh. I know there's back and forth between the seventh and the 21st, but. Support is going to be the 21st. It is going to be the 21st. Okay. So shortly after the financial financial indicators, we'll have the public forum. This is an opportunity for the community to come and provide input and feedback into the budget. What they like, what they don't like, what they want to see in the next budget, the next budget that's being proposed. And then we'll have the public forum. So this forum is really held early before there's really any work done on the budget so that it can be considered when the council creates its budget guidelines. And when they establish goals for the manager. So this forum is really one of the key dates in terms of engagement is, we'll be on November 21st this year. So the information from the public forum, the financial indicator sort of naturally leads into the development of the budget guidelines, which is the same thing that we're doing in the budget. So we're doing that initially by the finance committee. And that, those are. Set the parameters for how we develop the budget. You know, we get a lot of our. Cues for what we should make sure is addressing the budget. If there's, I think an example this last year was. The latter truck was specifically mentioned in the budget guidelines and so that we knew that was a high priority. So we take, we take the budget guidelines very seriously. And the same thing with the town manager's goals, which are usually more specific. And we want to make sure that the budget supports those goals or supports making progress towards those goals. So all that engagement sort of is synthesized into the budget guidelines and the town manager's goals, which are the two key documents that we use when we develop the budget to make sure the budget reflects them. Any questions on the engagement direction setting or lend, you want me just to finish this, this first portion? I don't see any hands. Okay. So all that is done. And then we move into budget development, which is roughly from January through April. And this is a lot of the internal workings. And I'll just kind of give a few highlights of the things that we do with staff here at town hall. So we develop our initial projections. And most years we will get a state aid. Projection in January. I think this year will be later because of the change in governor. But that's usually a key date that we look, look to to get an indication of where state aid is headed. And then we will get our early projections on health insurance, which is a key indicator in our budget process. All of that sort of folds into this refined projection that we do in January. We also draft a preliminary capital improvement program. And we review with departments any fee changes that they are considering making for the following year. In February, the joint capital planning committee will begin to meet. That's a committee comprised of town counselors, members of JOVE and library trustees that review the preliminary capital improvement program and we'll make recommendations to the town manager for potential changes or things they'd like to see improved. And that same committee will also review the resident capital request that come in. And then we will have a number of meetings with departments to review their budgets at a much sort of more nitty gritty level, their staffing levels, what happened last year, to get into the details. In March, the Joint Capital Planning Committee will wrap up its work and make a recommendation. Any additions or reductions that are being considered for the budget proposal will be sort of finalized at that point and we'll draft by the end of the month sort of a rough version of the budget proposal. And then in April, we will incorporate any of those recommendations from the Joint Capital Planning Committee into the capital improvement program. There's always a number of recommendations that make a lot of sense that we fold into that plan that ultimately goes to the council. We'll incorporate any votes by the school committees or the library trustees. Those votes happen in March. Usually those numbers that are approved are consistent with the budget guidelines, but not always. And then we will review and finalize the budget proposal that will be given to the council on May 1st. That leads us into the review and approval phase. For those of you on finance committee, you know we spend about 30 to 40 hours reviewing the budget at public meetings during the month of May, meeting with every single department, going through their service levels, their history, asking questions, getting answers, looking at their goals and objectives. And so all those meetings are very productive. The region budget for the regional schools is typically approved in May because of the relationship with the other towns. Since the other towns have their town meetings, the town council will typically approve the regional budget in May as well. And then we will start using some of our engagement tools, like Engage Amherst, and we've done some Ask Me Anythings to engage the public and share information on the budget. And then in June, there will be a public hearing on the budget, which again, at this point in June, it's sort of reactions to the budget proposal, not as much input into what's gonna be in the budget. It's really reacting to what has been proposed. And there will be a public forum on the capital improvement program, and then the council will review all of it and vote. And then once you vote, that leads us into the budget implementation phase, which is mostly closing out the previous fiscal year and starting the new fiscal year. So how to participate in the budget process. So there's a number of ways, probably one of the best ways is just direct outreach to town counselors, school committee members, library trustees, the town manager, depending on what the budget issue is and what portion of the budget it rests and who has supervision for that area. The public forum is sort of the key point if you have input into the budget that you want to see reflected. Again, it's ultimately up to the council to determine if feedback is appropriate to put it into budget guidelines or into goals, but that public forum is early enough for that to happen. The public hearing is great for reactions to the budget proposal. Engage Amherst is a good two-way communication tool that we really encourage people to use. It's really user-friendly and it's a great way to log questions. All the finance committee meetings in the month of May are really anytime, but in particular the meetings in May, there's public comment at every one of those budget specific meetings. And then same thing with joint capital planning committee, there's a number of meetings there that have public comment and then public comment really at any town council meeting. So I think the last thing, this is important for, I think we all sort of know, but just to sort of state that Amherst, our revenues, we don't see huge increases in our revenues year to year. Our revenues are primarily property tax driven because we don't have a lot of commercial activity in town or other economic activity in town. So our property tax revenues are capped by proposition two and a half, which Michelle Miller sent out some nice videos for anybody to watch it. Those are really helpful sort of overviews of how the different components of proposition two and a half work. And so our base levy limit can only go up to 1.5%. The good news is that's in addition to any new growth that we have during the year and we have had quite a bit of new growth over the past five to 10 years, which has been really important for our budget. And that's one of the reasons why we really stress the importance of economic activity and development. We've all seen the new buildings that have gone up around town. If we didn't have those, there's no way we would have the budget that we currently have and be able to fund the programs that we currently have unless we were to do something like a tax override to make up the difference. The other things that go up are state aid. It's usually pretty modest. We had a slightly or larger than the typical increase for FY23 that you'll hear about in a minute or in a couple of presentations, but typically state aides pretty reliable but pretty moderate in terms of increases that we get year to year. And then changes in local receipts. These are things like motor vehicle excise taxes, permits, fees, penalties. These go up, they go down. They're what we call elastic revenues. There may be years where they're really good. And then they kind of snap back after a period of economic sort of boom, they might come back down. So we're particularly careful when we budget local receipt revenues because we wanna make sure we don't increase the budget to a level where then it's gonna come back down and we have to decrease the budget. We don't wanna have that sort of yo-yo effect. So on the revenue side, those are sort of the major ways that revenues go up. On the expense side, we have to account for salary increases in any particular year, rising health insurance costs, liability insurance costs. We just got a liability insurance quo and that's an area that's going way up because of the cost of construction going up, the natural disasters we're seeing. That's a huge driver in our budget right now. Rising pension costs, which we'll have for at least the next 10 or 12 years where our pension system, the assessment that we have is gonna continue to go up. And then the thing that we've seen more recently, which again, we'll talk about in a couple of presentations is inflation, which fuel and utilities are really being impacted hard. So whatever new money we have, these are things that sort of are the first things we have to make sure we pay for because we don't really have much of a choice. So the end result is just that there's really limited available resources each year for any new initiatives, which is why we stress the importance of sort of prioritization and setting direction to help guide the budget process. And that's it. Happy to take questions. Andy. I just wanna point one thing out and then Sean can follow up on it as these terms necessary, but a lot of what was described in process comes not just from creation on a local level entirely or by the council, but by state law and the charter. So that this process is heavily regulated by things that are set forth in state law and the charter. If that comes up, I encourage Sean to point it out. If not, it's an irrelevant point. No, I think that's right. I think one, just a couple of things I'll add, I'll say Amherst is used at least by some as a model for its budget process. I think there are some things that are sort of prescribed, there's a lot of things we do that not every community does. Our Joint Capital Planning Committee is an example. Our budget coordinating group, that's in our charter now, but that's an example holding the public forum early before the budget really starts to be developed as another example. And then I think sort of one of the best examples is the financial indicators presentation, having this sort of baseline understanding, meeting early in the process to make sure everybody's on the same page. Again, that's not something that's required, it's something that Amherst has done for longer, longer than I've been around, so. Okay, Michelle. Thank you, thank you for the presentation. So yesterday, the AHRA began its boots on the ground work and just bear with me for a second, I am getting to this, but what was really clear as we went out into the community and knocked on doors and particularly going to the apartment complexes is that there are lots of residents that really don't know what's going on in the community. And though we're offering all of these ways like the community forums, the various listening sessions that I know that you've hosted last year, the Engage Amherst page, we're still, I think, somehow missing reaching these folks, particularly in the apartment complexes. So I'm just wondering if we might be able to brainstorm some ways to get out during the engagement periods of this process into the community more and even if it's partnering with management companies of the apartment complexes and trying to get the word out about the forum and ways that people can engage. I don't have the answers, but I just wanna pose the question. And I think it's a really important, this is such an important part of the town government, this budget process. And I would really like for us to find ways that we can reach more people, so thanks. Shalini. Yeah, I was going to also emphasize the period of October to December engagement time and Michelle already spoke to the residence aspect. And I think partnering with the local agencies like maybe the family outreach or survival center. And that was one way we had gotten more participation when we were doing the rental registration initially. So that's one idea. And the other thing is of course as town counselors in our district letter, newsletters, we can definitely have. And maybe if there's a way that Sean, this was such a great, really simplified. I don't know if maybe this is my fourth year, so I'm getting it better, but it seemed like a very simplified explanation of the process. So I think I might share this or some parts of it so that residents can understand. The other part that I wanted to ask was about the committees themselves, like the town committees, like the ECAC or CSSJC, the TAC, the disabilities committees, are we inviting them to share because they are also on the grounds looking at where funding is needed. So are we systematically reaching out to them to also participate in this process? That was one question. Yeah, a quick response. I think we can, if we haven't, we can be more explicit about inviting them to the public forum. I think the other thing about those committees is if we have a staff liaison, a lot of times we get feedback through our staff liaison. So through the ECAC, we get a lot of feedback through Stephanie Ciccarello, through the disability advisory committee. I know we've gotten guidance through planning in terms of our capital improvement program. We incorporated feedback from them this most recent year. So for some of the committees that have staff liaisons, we get feedback that way as well. And the last question was about the Engage website. When will that be up for us to start inviting feedback on that? Yeah, so we could, you know, it may make sense to start that when we do the financial indicators presentation around that same day. We could open it up, post those materials, and then turn on the Q&A feature and the comment feature. Thank you. I noticed that, Paul, you have your hand up. So let's go to you and then come back to Pat and Anika. Thank you, Lynn. So I just want to respond to Michelle and to Shalini. Yes, we can reach out if there are ways that you can suggest to us or connect us with communities that you're already working with. That's the best way to do it. If you, sometimes if you put out a call for, you know, we're doing a budget forum someplace, people don't want to show up. But if they feel like there's somebody that they trust who's saying you should come to this, that's really helpful to us. So we're open to that. And as Sean said, usually on that, the November 7 financial indicators is when we launch the opening of the Engage Amherst, we do the Ask Me Anything page electronically and open up a lot of different avenues during November and December. Yeah, and every committee has a staff liaison and they're aware of all these processes. So, yeah. Pat, you might want to go to Anika. Somebody's leaving a message on my phone and I don't want it to shatter in. So I'll follow Anika. Thank you. Thank you, Anika. Yeah, so I know that this has been brought up since for a while and before my time, which is the implementation of the interpretation services or software, which would also be helpful in reaching broader community, in my opinion, and also ways to be able to engage with the middle and both that sometimes are left out between either the audience that does come to council meetings and follow us or apartment complexes, survival center, if family outreach, it seems to just go from one, from council audience and those that are following local government again to just jump to survival center and apartment complexes. And I think there's great partnership there, especially in combination with the community officers that have been on the ground in those complexes for some time, but also to be able to just focus on the vast amount of residents who, whether we find different areas that might interest people or just broader ways to communicate with that missing middle, so to speak. Okay. Patty, are you ready? Yes, thank you. I'm echoing Shauna and Anika, so I'm not gonna speak very long. The one thing that they haven't said is something about us reaching out, going out to some of the complexes. And we did that when we were creating the mobile market and it was extremely effective. I know that involves staff time, but I think it would really be possible if there were a location where we could have a meeting that was easy for people to walk to and so we can get input from the people who live in the boulders, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you. Thanks, Anna. Thank you. Our staff liaisons are phenomenal and their roles are much more expansive than their committee work. I'd like to emphasize the opportunity to work with the committees themselves as specifically an engagement opportunity and echo what I believe Michelle and Shalini mentioned as well. This isn't just about ensuring input on a specific topic, this is about engaging as many folks as possible. And while our committees would have input on a specific topic, that speaking with them is an opportunity to reach that audience and also demonstrate care and commitment to the committee work that's happening. So I would like to not necessarily lose that regardless of the fact that our staff liaisons are phenomenal and do a good job. I don't wanna totally pipeline that as much as I think has been done, it'd be great to open it up a little bit more. And even if it's about inviting committees to attend one of the info sessions or something along those lines, I think specific targeted outreach to committees would be a really, really beneficial component of this process. Thank you. I do wanna note that there are various members of various committees in our audience tonight. We have 18 people in the audience and there's also a few staff who are staffed as committees. So we're reaching some people directly and we never know who's on Amherst media. Jennifer Taub. Yeah, just quickly kind of echoing Pat. There's also, counselors are very busy but I guess maybe as time permit, there's no substitution for kind of just pounding the pavement and going door to door. I mean, I know sometimes like Amnity Place in my district, I don't know as many people there as I like to. So sometimes I just go knock on doors or leave some leaflets, I don't know. But sometimes, and I guess as Michelle said that you were doing earlier this week. I mean, sometimes just when we can to go out and maybe having a list of like what part of our district we might be able to walk and spread it out over whatever time, but sometimes I don't know if that's the old fashioned way of doing outreach in the community, talking on people's doors. Okay. Are there other comments on this part of the presentation? Just trying to see whether there'll be shows. Okay, with that then let's go on to the capital projects model or presentation, thank you. Sean? Okay. And let me just start by saying this is the presentation where we will go into more depth on at the finance committee, which will be the committee of the whole and that is on October 18th at three o'clock. Yeah, so for tonight we have some brief project updates and we'll discuss the modeling a little bit but as President Griezmer said, we're not gonna dive into the models themselves tonight. So on the elementary school side, same sort of not to exceed budget for the project, $100 million right now, hoping it comes in less than that, but we'll get more information at our next independent cost estimate, which is around January of 2023 when we'll have those numbers. At that same time, we expect to have a better estimate of our reimbursement rate for the project. Currently we think it's gonna be between 30 and 40%. The biggest thing that's pushed our reimbursement rate down or not maybe not the biggest thing but one of the biggest things. Sean, I'm going to interrupt you for just a moment. Alicia's in the audience. Would you bring her in? And then I'll make sure she can hear us and we can hear her. Alicia, can you hear us? Yeah, yeah, how are they doing? Great, thanks for joining us. Please go ahead, Sean. Okay, so what I was just saying about the reimbursement rate is that one of the major drivers why the reimbursement rate feels so low is that construction costs, inflation, the construction costs and market have gone way up while the MSBA has maintained the limit that they will reimburse for construction costs. And so as the costs go up and their limit stays pretty flat, the gap of what they'll reimburse is widening. And there is some efforts on this front to advocate for an increase to what their construction cap. Another update is that there's been a CPA proposal submitted by some community members for portions of the project. The CPA committee will be reviewing proposals in November. There is a new timeline, I think was in the packet tonight, developed in conjunction with our designers and our project manager based on the MSBA board meeting schedule that was released a few weeks ago. The next council action as it relates to the elementary school project is anticipated to be, I think it's February 6th, 2023, right, Lynn, at this point. And that would be a vote on the debt exclusion and also potentially a vote on the debt authorization at that same meeting with a town-wide vote to be held on May 2nd. And we are exploring a number of alternative financing funding options for the whole project, but really where we're seeing some glimmers of hope is the greener elements of the project. We had a good meeting with Eversource last week to talk about some of the rebates they have for the green energy we're building into this project, like the ground-source heat pumps and the solar panels, there's some incentives or some rebates that we could help get the overall cost down. There's also portions of the Inflation Reduction Act that, well, it's still early and we're still monitoring how it will play out. It seems like there's potential to get some offsets to the cost there as well. So we're gonna try to find as much as we can to reduce the overall cost of the project to the town. On the Jones Library Front, the current estimate is between $43.2 million and $49.6 million for a range. This includes budget reductions that have already been approved by the Building Committee. Our next cost estimates for this project will be at the end of design development and at 75% of construction documents, and that's around October of 2023. And our next council action for this project is gonna happen sometime between October 2023 and January of 2024, and that would be to approve any required increase in the debt authorization. And you can see a breakdown here of the funding sources based on whether it's the low estimate or the high estimate. For public work, site exploration is still underway and our DPW superintendent is working with Wesson and Sampson, who's the designer for the project to update their work based on sort of our fiscal realities and what we can allocate to the project, but also the fiscal realities of the construction industry and what costs are doing out there. And for the fire station, the current DPW site is still the preferred location, so there's some limits to what we can do with that project until we know the timeline for public works, which is still being developed. So we're gonna shift to the modeling. So because of the rising construction costs, the high increases to interest rates, we've sort of taken a little bit of a step back and we sort of recalibrated what are the things that are most important about the plan and to address all four projects and what can we use to evaluate different models. We've done this a little bit from the beginning, but we wanted to take a fresh look and this is what we'll do with the finance committee. Tomorrow is look at a number of different options and use this framework to evaluate them against each other. So I'm gonna quickly go through the things that we've determined to be sort of key or very important for considering each model. And then again, anyone's welcome to watch the meeting tomorrow. So the first one, I think everyone's aware of is urgency. There's, this has been from the beginning, one of the key factors is how quickly can we do all four projects. One thing that has changed, I will say, from two years ago to now is that the timeframe for what's quick has definitely gotten longer. When costs were lower and interest rates were low, we had models that were much quicker than they are now. So just to kind of set expectations and in light of the new fiscal realities, what is quick is longer than what was quick maybe two years ago. The second is impact on bond rating. The time has a very strong bond rating. No matter what we do, when we take on debt for two or three of these projects, it's gonna impact the bond rating, but there are some models that impact it more than others. And so what we wanna do is look at the different models and how it impacts these different factors that influence our bond rating. Those factors are budgetary flexibility, which is essentially how much reserves do we have. Liquidity is how quickly can we access those reserves? Are they tied up or are they fairly liquid or we could use them to make payments if needed? And then debt service and total outstanding debt. So debt service is the annual cost to finance the projects and then total outstanding would be the life of the project, how much debt is outstanding and for how long. The next is overall cost. So this would be looking up the total payments the town would make for a project, principal and interest. There are definitely some models that are less expensive than other models, but it may make sense in a particular circumstance to go with a more expensive option if it's stretched out over more years and it allows the town to accomplish other goals in a particular year, which leads us to the next one which is funding for other capital needs. We've heard from the council and from others that it's really important that we continue to maintain our other assets, not just focus on these four building projects, but we need to continue to invest in the buildings that are not gonna be replaced. So that would be the fourth one. And then the final two, so usage of reserves. So here we're talking about how much we're using but we're also talking about how we're using reserves. Are we using reserves in one particular year or two particular years and then it's done? Are we using it every year for 10 years well into the future? And there's definitely a predictability issue if we're going with a model that says we need to use reserves 10 years from now. And then the last one is flexibility. We can build different levels of conservatism into different models so that if costs come in higher, interest rates rise, if economic conditions worsen, there's some ability to stick with that plan because we have some buffer built in. But there's also models where we can put in less. And so looking at where those areas of flexibility are in each model is one thing we'll evaluate. And that's it. Before I go on to questions, I just wanna confirm with Andy, the chair of the finance committee. It is in fact October 18th of three that we're going to be taking up the models in a committee of the whole. Is that correct, Andy? That is correct. And I was just looking at the agenda for tomorrow to make sure that of the same question, but yes. Okay. We wanted to make sure we scheduled that far out enough in advance so that counselors who want to be there can be if you are able to. And if you aren't, there'll be a taping of it just as we did when we did the session, well, all sessions, but we did the session back in July. With that, Kathy, let's go to questions. I've got a couple of comments and then a question. First, the comment is, Sean, thank you for doing this. It was excellent. And I just, I want to underscore he was highlight a couple of things he said. One was the potential for some green money for the schools, the ever source incentive that is linked with ground source heat pumps if we build an efficient building is actually a $1.6 million outlay directly to us. So it's not a, it's not, it's a big amount of money. And what's in the federal bill is for both PV, photovoltaic and for potentially for ground source is allowing public entities who don't pay taxes to get a tax credit, a direct payment of a tax credit. So it's, we just don't know when those are coming in in terms of regs. So Sean, my comment question is, there is a really important amendment on the voter before the voters in November called the fair share amendment. And if that went through, we have a resolution in support of that. It, the money raised by that extra 4% for people for income above a million dollars would come directly to schools and to roads. So one of our issues in your modeling has always been that 3.2 million for everything else. You said vehicles and buildings, but it's got our roads in it too. And I think roads, when I knock on doors, aside from personal things, everyone shares a concern about roads. It's on everyone's. So I think all of us need to be doing what we can to let the residents of Amherst know that this is a direct benefit to them. I smoked to a small shopkeeper the other day who didn't even know it was on the ballot. And roads were immediately on his list. So my question on it is, if it passes, we'll, I'm assuming we could go back once you know what the terms of it in and relook at some of this and whether it's a, we have to apply for the money, but it creates a flow. And I don't know on education what the flow would look like, but on roads and other that may help us on the capital side. So you're just staying tuned to that. That's it. Those are my interactive comments. Yeah. No, those are, that's a great point. I haven't seen any projections or I don't know if there's anything available about what it would look like. Paul, I don't know if you've heard of anything through the MA. On the school fronts, my optimism is a little bit tempered because I know how the chapter 70 formula works. And if all that money just goes to the chapter 70 formula, it may not be as big a boost to Amherst specifically as it may be to some other communities. Not to say, you know, you shouldn't vote how you vote, but I would just, until I see what it would mean in terms of numbers, I would caution on the school front, on the roads front, if they follow the same allocation method they use for chapter 90, then we might see some bigger contributions there. But if we see a projection or if I hear anything, we'll certainly factor that into the planning process. Because the estimates are, I mean, you saw it in the memo as much as $2 billion annually. So it's not a, again, it's not a, and that's the whole state, but we get some, we presumably would get some piece of that. So I just think we've got these unknowns that are quite helpful to us in the otherwise extremely tight modeling that you're looking at, yeah. Okay, Mandy Jo. Yes, thank you. I was dismayed to see an election date already chosen for the council when the council in theory is the one that gets to set that election date. So I was not happy to see that someone sort of already put a date out there without the council even discussing that. So in some sense, I'd like to know how that happened before it even came to the council for a discussion as to when we'd want a special election for a debt exclusion override. In conjunction with that, two weeks ago, Kathy, as our school building committee rep, said that there were two votes, that we could, two dates for the MSBA that we could be aiming for for MSBA votes in early March and late April. And the new schedule came through with the late April one, which does really hamper when we potentially choose to go out for the debt exclusion override. So why are we not aiming for the early March date for the MSBA? Public works and fire, we still don't have a DPW site. And so is it about time maybe that we find another fire site because the fire station's about ready to fall down? It can't wait for another five, 10 years for us to find a DPW site. I've been on the council four years now. The entire time I was on the Charter Commission two years before that, a lot of the time I was on town meeting. Fire sites been set, but kept saying, well, we need a DPW site, but we don't have one. And we're nearly a decade or more later. It seems a shame to make the fire department wait while we struggle to find the DPW site. So I'd like to know whether there are other options or whether even looked at other options for the fire site in order to be able to move that one ahead of DPW. And then I would like to know what options have been considered for splitting DPW among multiple sites that the town currently owns like the transfer station, Ruxton sewer treatment plant. Those are just three that came to mind immediately, such that maybe we can actually move DPW forward sooner because we split how much land we need or what has been considered to modify our zoning because my understanding is that part of the problem for DPW site is our zoning lock coverage maximums. And so have we actually considered in town asking the town council to modify those lock coverage maximums to free up more locations to build DPW sites. Mandy Jo, let me just pause for a moment and say the issue of the timing is in your calendar is in your packet tonight with the expectation of a discussion. We can have that discussion now or we can do it when we talk about future agenda items, whichever way or the school update, whichever way we want. So with that, let me just go then back to your other questions because I think it would be useful for Paul to weigh in on issues of DPW and firesite. Lynn, Lynn, could I just answer her question of why we didn't choose March versus April? It's a longer conversation. So let's just stick with the sites and then come back to the timing. Okay. So on the sites for, we have had them sequenced the way you explained with DP with knowing that the best location for the fire station was at DPW. I would argue that the DPW building is in much worse condition than the fire building is significantly so. That being said, we will, we're at the council president to put us on the agenda for the 17th to discuss DPW options with the council and executive session because we have a property transfer property option that we would like to review with the council and we can explore more of that then and at that meeting, I think we'll get some feedback from the council as to which direction you'd like to go. Mandy, Joe, anything else you want to ask on that? I mean, it sounds like I'm not going to get any answers until executive session. Is that correct? Yeah, because we have to lay out what the, we have a real property option that we'd like to review with the council and executive session. Now, the question is, should we pause this and go to the school discussion or come to that later? I'm open to that one way or the other. You're the president. I didn't know it was on the discussion for agenda, future agenda items. That makes, that's kind of confusing to me because it came up in these presentations. It actually came up two weeks ago and took me off guard. So that was part of what happened. But I guess my question was basically, why did a date get published and put out there before the council has even discussed it? It's proposed. That's not what it said in any of those presentations. Okay, fine. All right, Paul, do you want to stop and discuss the school thing? The school dates? Yeah, I think. And we might just go ahead and pull up Athena, the schedule of, that shows the two different schedules. Pam. So are we tabling the conversation to thank Sean, or not Sean? No, we're going to go to the school question that Mandy Joe has raised and then we'll go back to the rest of the conversation. Okay, because there were several hands up that presumably were on the previous presentation. Right. So this isn't it. Paul, do you want to go on this one and Kathy? I think Kathy had raised her hand previously on this one. Kathy. So Mandy's question, what's driving dates, whatever we then decide, was that the MSBA March 1st meeting or March 2nd meeting, they surprised the designer and the OPM by saying, they always in the past have had the materials for that do six weeks before instead they said, if you want to make that meeting, everything has to be in by December 28th, which is instead of the anticipation was in January. And that would have left very little time to get good cost estimates and do community, some community engagement on where we are with the building. And so the schedule on, if you look at the where, the yellow and the red and the purple are, forget where the green is. The work that was going to be done doesn't really push off the later dates, but that extra month of going for the April meeting rather than the March meeting gives time to get really good revised cost estimates with a design where we're working through right now with the building exterior interior, some of the site costs. So we get a much more solid cost estimate. So it lets us have two more weeks or three more weeks, which they always thought they were going to have until MSBA did December 28th. And MSBA didn't have a really good reason for that since their staff isn't there during that time period, why the materials had to come in then. But we, so that scrunched the timeline, Mandy, that it really would have been extremely difficult to get everything done at the level we need to get it done on. So that pushed us into the April meeting. And as Lynn said, it cost hers by surprise, but it caught everyone by surprise because they don't publish 2023 with the due dates until very late in the year. So that news about everything had to be in by December 28th was major news as opposed to on the April one, everything has to be in by the beginning of March. And we have plenty of time to do a good job with you all knowing what this building might look like well before we're submitting. So that's the basic moving. And then when we as the council do our votes or when the town does, that's up to us to decide. It's just the timing needs to continue to allow our designers assuming it passes time to design the thing, go out to bid and stay on the school opening in 2026. So we want to keep that timeline if we can. So that's that early May date, Mandy, which is as soon after MSBA meets as possible. But clearly that's a decision we can make as a council on that timing. If I can chime in on this. So one of the I think one of the driving forces on this and the way Kathy explained it is correct is we believe that there's a staffing issue at MSBA and they're trying to elongate the processes to push things down the road in terms of because they're going through a lot of staff turnover and they're trying to recruit people to review all these projects that are in the queue. So we felt that it was important to go to the later MSBA date because the council would rightly expect to know what the MSBA decision would be and what their percentage would be before you were willing to vote on a project and also decide to put it on the ballot. You can choose to put it on the ballot if we're going to go for a debt exclusion override at any time. You don't have to wait for the MSBA in some ways. But I think that to the public, they're going to have as much information as possible. So pushing it out further seemed to make sense and it didn't impact the end date of the project at all, according to our designers. So originally the plan and can go back to this plan was that we would come to or the everything would come to the council in December with the idea that they would the council would vote by December 21st or 19th, I think is our date, and that it would go on the ballot at the end of March, March 28th. Now the proposal that's in is, I'm sorry, it doesn't say draft, my apologies, but the proposal that's in your packet has it moving out to the council beginning to discuss this in January. And then voting February 6th and then it goes on the ballot for a date of May 2nd. And during this discussion, I wanted to make very sure, and I have, that the higher ed institutions are still in classes. They're not even in exams, they're in classes. Amherst, UMass Amherst is in class until the middle of May, Amherst College is in class until May 9th. Obviously the schools are still in session because what we don't want to do is run into that issue where faculty and staff and students are starting to leave campus. So we can discuss the timeline further now or in future agenda items, but that's, I sat in this meeting whenever we were here two weeks ago, I guess, and all of a sudden I'm hearing that something has just happened and I'm going really, then we need to find out what happened. So questions? So I appreciate the explanation. I still, it shocked me when I pulled up that updated timeline and there was no proposed draft anything. It had a big green highlight that said this is the date and the council hadn't ever discussed when it wants it, whether it wants it before or after the formal MSBA vote. We've been told we could choose either and any of that. And now there's a date out there. And I feel like we can't even choose another date because that's the date that is on documents that doesn't even say draft. That was my big concern. I'd love to discuss more. I'm not sure this is the right time. I think a separate meeting agenda item that has things like when do we want to put it is appropriate. That's probably not this meeting because I think all the counselors have to think about it. But like I said, I was, I was flabbergasted when I saw an actual date out there instead of, you know, we're aiming for the end of March, early April, or early April, late April, early May. And even in your future agenda items, two weeks ago, it had all of the other ideas, you know, proposed future agenda items backed into December, moving on to March. And I'd have to go look at the actual documents. But I believe they were put in under future agenda items. So that we can have further discussion later on about this. But that's, that's what happened between last meeting and this meeting was MSBA. We learned that MSBA had changed their schedule. Cathy, did you have a further comment on that? Just, just I wanted to say one more thing. As Paul said, Mandy, we could go before the MSBA vote, but there's this hope springs eternal is one way I would think of at it when they meet on March, that date, they could increase the cap on a cost per square foot. If it does, it changes how much money we get. And so that's a maybe we don't think they're going to, but we are trying to say there are a lot of towns and cities in the same situation. So we'll have a good sense by the second week in January of what or share would be if they don't change the cap. We won't know whether they said they, it's not on their agenda right now, but there is that chance. So just that's the, there's that one piece of uncertainty. I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about it, but going well before the meeting, we wouldn't want to miss the opportunity because they never go backwards. So if they did increase the cap, they don't go backwards and give it to you. So that was just the other little bit of a slim chance, but maybe a chance. I'm also hearing Mandy Joe suggest that she feels the council needs to discuss all of the options as to when we go out. Do we go out before? Do we go out with this? Do we wait even longer? So that's part of the discussion. Yep. Am I? Yes. Okay. Going back to our previous conversation, we can take this down. And Dorothy, you have your hand up. This is, we're now on the capital projects. I would say that I was not happy with the previous discussion because it's not the clarity that I have often heard from Sean. And it kind of, he was much too neutral. It sounds like, well, we can have everything if we do it this way or that way. And there was no real sense of limited resources and what the impacts could be. It just reminded me of talking from the past, the housing market, I think in the 2000, when it was crazy heated up and we were told, you can have the house you want, how the big house you want, it all depends upon how you finance it. And we had things like the balloon mortgages and all kinds of models were thrown at us. And it's like, oh, these are all okay, but they weren't. They weren't all okay. Some are good and some are not good. So I'm hoping that when we're presented this, because it made a person like me, I'm just a regular person when it comes to these things, feel like this is all like magic. And would make me feel not capable of making an informed decision. I'm hoping that we really get the information we need as to what it means to us, the town, if we reduce the reserves, if we spread it out longer, if we pay a higher interest rate, all of those things really matter for the future of the town. And I think we have to be aware of limitations. That's my thoughts. Okay, Pat. Quick, one, thank you for your work, Sean. I think that everything that Dorothy is asking for will be coming forward. As you presented, it was clear that we would get more and more detail. So thank you for your work. The other thing I want to bring up quickly, and it probably mostly needs to be reserved for executive session, but Hickory Ridge, we own and is a really good spot for a fire station without negatively impacting conservation area or even possibly some affordable housing there. We've had multiple conversations with the fire chief about that site. It is an excellent site and we own it. So it seems to me we need to maybe give up the idea of moving the DPW, but work on the building. I am concerned with the ongoing expenses of just maintaining even in a shabby poor state, both the firehouse and the DPW. And so I really would like us to be able to move forward on that. Thank you. Anna? Oh, God. Hang on. Too many things open. Like I lost my note thing. This is why I need a notebook. Okay. Not like the notes app, notebook. All right. So I think I wanted to echo. I can't remember who I'm echoing, but thinking about when we think about DPW and fire. Oh, Paul, it was Paul. The state of the DPW building and the need relative to their both high needs. I think that's been very clear. And I think that we can't let go of one, honestly. So I also I wanted to thank Sean for doing his job really, really well, which is to provide us with models that show us how to move forward while trying to accomplish all the things we want to accomplish. That is some magician math that I do not have enough knowledge, skill or degrees to do. And so this is why Sean is here. And I'm so grateful to you for staying neutral and providing these models. These are things that the council has been talking about and prioritizing as capital needs. And so we have asked you to create models where we can do all of this. And you did that. And I am very grateful for that as well. I think you've been very realistic and pragmatic and it makes sense to be providing an overview now and then to be getting down into those details in the future. So I wanted to make sure that was very clear. Thank you. This is a ton of work. I'm also very excited about some of the other things that you've brought to us today, but we'll get to those later and I will be excited later as well. Thank you. Are there any other questions on the capital presentation at this point? Okay. Then let's go on to the FY23 appropriations and transfer. This is an automatic referral to the finance committee. And again, I'm calling on Sean. All right. This is the last one, I think. So we have a number of actions that we're proposing. We do this every year. The past couple of years, there's been a little bit more than typical, but we feel there's really strong reasons for why we're proposing these. So quick overview. We are proposing three supplemental appropriations, one for the operating budget, one for roads and sidewalks, one for the reaching track and field project. We're proposing the creation of a capital stabilization fund and then we're proposing a couple of transfers that are somewhat contingent upon the vote on the capital stabilization fund to transfer into other stabilization funds and I'll clarify that in a second. So the first one is for operating budgets. So we are... Sean. Yes. I'm going to pause for a minute and ask for you to go back a little further in history. And that is that all of a sudden we're talking about supplementals. Where did the money come from? That's a good question. So every year, we have to certify our free cash and free cash is, as you know, we typically keep it around 5%. At the end of the year, we close out our books. Any excess revenues go into free cash. Any savings on our expense budget go into free cash. And there's a number of other adjustments that are in a complicated formula that Sonia puts together that comes to a number. And so if we have a year that is where we have sort of a strong budgetary performance where we bring in more than we expected and we don't spend as much, our free cash increases. And our policies say that we will keep 5% in free cash. And then anything above and beyond that we will transfer to our General Civilization Fund or we potentially could appropriate for sort of a one-time use type of thing. So that's on some of these free cash transfers and these supplemental appropriations. The source that we're proposing for those are from free cash. And it's the free cash balance that was just certified about a week ago. And the first one, the supplemental appropriation for operating budgets, that is a recurring request for recurring appropriation or increase in our operating budgets which is a recurring expense. So the source for that is state aid coming in higher and I'll speak to that more in a second. Does that answer what you were looking for, Lynn? Yeah, it's always in the street of people where money all of a sudden appears from. Yeah, again, this is a once a year when we close out the previous year's budget where we do these sort of one-time transfers. And the detail will, if time permits, we're planning on doing the fourth quarter budget report on October 18th potentially as well. And that's the fourth quarter of FY 22 where Sonya will go into detail about just what I just said, what revenues came in better, what expenses, where did we see savings on the expense side and you'll get a much better idea in your head about where those savings came from. So back to the first one that we're proposing which is a supplemental appropriation for the operating budget. So we're proposing a half percent increase which is about 351,938. This increase would be for the town, the schools and the library. The reasons why we're proposing this, there's really three main ones. One, we have a number of ongoing expenses that across the schools and the town, maybe the library, but I don't know as much about the details of their budget right now, but we have a number of recurring expenses that are being funded by federal grants and we've talked about trying to transition away from those federal grants. And one way we can do that is to get our operating budget up. So for the town specifically, we're talking about the fire and EMTs that we hired last year. We added four right now, they're being funded by ARPA and increase in our operating budget, that limit up will help us phase them into the operating budget. For the elementary schools, it's that arts position. You may remember when we talked about the budget in the spring, there was a lot of discussion around revisiting it in the fall, depending on how state aid came in and this is us revisiting it. And then the last one for the regional schools and talking with the superintendent and their business manager, they're funding a number of mental health activities that they would like to be ongoing. They're being funded by federal funds right now. They're ESSER funds and increasing the operating budget would allow them to continue some of those as well. The second reason why is inflation. Inflation is, we talked about this, the timing of the budget. We would in fact, there are a lot of inflation into the operating budget. We did more on the capital side and we have seen rising fuel costs and utility costs. I was just on a meeting late last week about the price of electricity and I think we've all probably seen the newspapers or heard about that, but electricity costs are really expected to go through the roof this winter and that's something that will impact all of our department budgets. And then the last one is our operating budgets, during the height of the pandemic, we held them flat the really bad year where there was a lot of uncertainty. We held operating budgets flat and costs continued to go up, salaries still went up, health insurance still went up, but we didn't increase our operating budgets at all that year. And that was very unusual. And we never made up that flat year. The next year we did a 2% or so increase and then a 2.5 the next year, but we never made up for that last year of increases while our costs continued to rise. And so doing this half percent is sort of a first step at trying to get that back, that year of zero percent increases to operating budgets, which is one of the reasons why we stressed it so much in the budget proposal this year that we're hearing a lot from department heads about the struggles they're having with their operating budgets. So how would we propose to fund this when we propose the FY23 budget? We based it on the governor's projection of state aid for municipalities. The legislature had a much higher projection and that was ultimately what was approved. And it was approved rather late in the budget process. So it came, it was approved after the town approved the FY, or the town council approved the FY23 budget. So that increase in state aid, and I think in the packet tonight there's a memo and in the back of that memo there's a projection. So you can see the increase in state aid and how it would support the increase in the operating budgets. So that's number one. Number two, like last year, we're proposing a million dollar allocation to roads and sidewalks. This, there's the reasons why I think most everyone knows these, but it's been identified as a high priority by the council and manager. There's a large backlog of repairs needed. And this area two has been hit hard by inflation where we just can't do as much as we used to be able to do. I'd like to be able to say this million dollars will go really, really far, but I think it's going to help us just get back to what we wanted to do, maybe a little bit more. But again, roads and sidewalks are driven by oil prices and things like that. And then so this is one that would be funded by the amount of free cash that we have above that 5% that we keep. And you'll see a, you'll see a grid at the end that kind of summarizes all this. The next one is $900,000 for the region track and field project. So the regional schools put together a financial plan for how the contributions from the four member towns would work to fund the track and field project. This is the larger project that would take care of the field as well as the track, not just the track. And the council has already approved sort of the first two legs of that funding plan. You approve the debt authorization in May. And then over the summer, you approve the CPA request. And so this would be the third and final leg to fund the town share that was outlined by the regional schools. If this is approved, the next steps would be in the hands of the region to work with the other member towns to raise their shares. And for whoever's going to be leading the fundraising process to work on fundraising. And this two would be from, oh, sorry, this two would be from free cash. And this will be discussed when we do the fourth quarter report for FY 22. One of the reasons why our free cash came in higher this year, so that we have some to transfer, is that it included 400,000 of returned assessments from the regional schools. When a regional school district has so much of its own money and reserves, it has to give some back to its member towns. And so they exceeded a certain amount a couple of years ago or so. And so they returned some of the assessment to us, which wasn't expected. So in some ways, about $400,000 of this transfer request is really regional school money that was given back to us that we would put towards this project. Creation of a capital stabilization fund. So several years ago, the town considered a capital stabilization fund. At that time, our reserves were a lot lower. We feel strongly that send this fund out would be a really helpful planning tool, not only for myself and the town manager, but we think it would be really helpful to the community to kind of see what we've set aside specifically for capital. Some people do this in their own personal finance. They'll have a Randy Day fund. They might have a home repair fund or so. This would be like the home repair fund. This would be how much are we sent aside specifically for the four building projects. And if this fund is approved, we would recommend a policy that would state any reserves in excess of 15% of and Andy caught me on this while he was reviewing the PowerPoint in excess of the operating budget. But specifically when we say the operating budget, we mean the operating revenues that support the budget. Any amount of reserves in excess of 15% of that figure would go to the capital stabilization fund to build that fund up. And we're proposing that after the decisions are made on the other orders we're proposing here tonight. Why are we doing this? The town is, as we discussed, is undertaking a significant challenge to replace all four buildings as quickly as possible. And this fund would aid in the planning process. It would also distinguish for the community, what reserves do we have for sort of economic fluctuations in revenue and downturns? And what do we have specifically to support these projects? And as I said, the funding for this would just be any amount in excess of that 15%. The next one is a transfer and appropriate to the Reparation Stabilization Fund and if approved, the Capital Stabilization Fund. So the first, there's two actions within this order. The first one is to appropriate 134,330 from free cash to the Reparation Stabilization Fund. This is the amount that's equal to what was collected in cannabis tax in FY 22. Staying with this one, this was the plan that the council agreed to to basically set aside annual amounts that are equivalent to the cannabis tax revenue received and make those contributions to the Reparation Stabilization Fund until the balance hits 2 million. So this would be the FY, the contribution basically for FY 22, what was left over from FY 22. And all that would be done if the town was determined to be in good financial standing, which I think we are at this point. The second order here would be to transfer 1,678,120 from free cash to the newly created Capital Stabilization Fund. And this is that amount that's in excess of 5%, which is what we like to keep in free cash. This is the amount that's in excess of 5% of free cash when taken into account all the other orders. And I can show you a sort of a breakdown of that later. And so, yeah, so that contribution will go right into the Capital Stabilization Fund. So that's really just moving, this order here is really just moving money from free cash into the two stabilization funds. And then the last one is to transfer and appropriate 7,815,456 from our General Stabilization Fund to the Capital Stabilization Fund. So again, if our policy would be to keep 15% in reserves, that would equate to 5% in free cash, which is our policy to keep 5% in free cash. And then that would mean we'd keep roughly 10% in our General Stabilization Fund to add those two to get to 15%. And so what this would do is transfer the amount we currently have in General Stabilization above that 10% to the Capital Stabilization Fund. Apologize for the complexity. I know it's a lot of percentages and different stabilization funds. And so again, this would be to build up that Capital Stabilization Fund in anticipation of the four building projects. I think this slide will make it a little clearer. So this is the summary. So you've got the different actions that are being proposed, the order numbers that are in your packet, pending Sonia's review, she's on vacation. So if I mess something up, she'll let us all know. You've got the amounts that are being proposed. So they all have amounts, except for the creation of the Capital Stabilization Fund. You have the funding source. So the funding source for the first one is state aid, as I explained. The next few would be free cash. And then the last one is again, the amount above and beyond having 15% reserves, which would come from the General Stabilization Fund. And this town, school operating budget one, it's recurring in the sense that the state aid is being built into the base and that base will continue going into the future. It won't be a sort of give it to the school budget and then take it away. The other ones would be one time, except for the reparations, which is it's sort of recurring as we will consider it every year. It'll be a decision every year, but it'll be recurring that we'll consider it. And that's it. A lot of information. So we tried to package it all together for, try to get it all, a lot of it's related. So we try to package it into one conversation, but I understand it's a lot of percentages and numbers. Could you put the chart back up? Mm-hmm. You just showed us. When the Capital Stabilization Fund, the second from the bottom, wouldn't we be doing that on a recurring basis based on free cash? It would be an annual decision every year. If we had the free cash to transfer, then yes, but at this point, I'm not presuming that we would have free cash to transfer every year. Okay. That's my only question this time. Anna. Still typing. All right. First off, I am so thrilled to see a proposed Capital Stabilization Fund. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is something, you know, I'm just, this is necessary for the bill that Mandy Jo and I introduced because we said that a lot of the money would go into a Capital Stabilization Fund. So we were hoping that one would show up. So that was great. We weren't hoping we knew it was coming down the pike or we'd heard rumors or we would introduce it. I really do want to strongly emphasize my support for this. I think that, you know, obviously the four projects are the biggest and the longest draw from that stabilization fund. And I'm curious, you know, if you have ideas of what might be supported by that fund in the future, for example, you know, inflation has hit things like roads and sidewalks and like vehicles and like all of these other elements that come before JCPC. And so that fall under that idea of capital and obviously a Capital Improvement Stabilization Fund is slightly different from that. And so I'm curious what you see is the really, really long-term objectives of that fund. And then I also just wanted to commend you for the track metaphors in the slide about the track. So thank you for that. Although Mandy did point out, relays typically have four legs, so you can add one more, one more in there. Thanks. It's okay if I quickly respond, Lynn. Sure. I think, you know, I think our vision for the Capital Stabilization Fund is primary objective would be the short term to help support the four building projects, but that it would continue to have a purpose after that, just to support. We know there's other capital needs that are sort of right behind those four building projects that we've heard about. And so we think this, you know, it's a good idea to have this regardless of the four building project plan that it's nice to have a place to put money for the capital repairs that we know will be coming. So thank you. Pam. Thanks. And thanks, Sean. This is a very complete presentation. Even if it's a little general, it's a really good starting point for a lot of us. Question on, for instance, the track that was mentioned. So if $900,000 goes into this project, is that $900,000 that would come off of the intended borrow that we were originally looking at? Second question, the operating budget, you had the half percent that was going sort of across the board to all of the operating budgets for the schools, the municipal budget and library services. I recall a fairly active conversation last fall when we talked about the $50,000 that was requested by the school board for teacher, art teachers. And the message was pretty clear that we thought that there was enough money in their fund, in fact, to handle that. So it's interesting that we're now seeing that just $50,000, but we're actually seeing $125,000 in this. I really appreciate the fact that between you and the finance committee that the town has operated very conservatively and had this kind of free cash residual. So I really appreciate that work. And I would ask that the finance committee in discussing this gives some consideration to these questions. Kathy. So I want to echo Anna that I like the capital stabilization fund concept a lot. So I have a question that I think might help those who are also listening, Sean, how much is in the stabilization fund, not capital, at 15 percent? Because I don't want to give the impression that we're taking all the money and put it into capital fund. You've left a 15 percent. Do you often have that number? So if we move this 7.8 out, what's left in? Because that money could be used for capital. It can be used for and then do a long list of other things that can be used for. But we're not taking all the money away. You're leaving a huge amount in. And so I thought that would be useful. And then press number one and then two to build on lens in the future. If we have dipped into that 15 percent and there's free cash, this most of it would go into the general stabilization fund, as I understand it. It's only when we're generating free cash that's high enough that stabilization hits it. So it will be it will be it's basically hard to predict where this is in year two, three and four. I can understand that. But I just want to know how much how much do we have right now is my question. So we're not when we take 7.8 away. What is what are we taking it away from? Yeah, so great questions. So one thing I'll give you those answers in one second. So one thing just to be aware of is we track year over year, how much we add to free cash and how the budget does. I would say that the last this year and the year before, not what I would say are typically years. We've had larger increases to free cash than general. And the number one reason for that is COVID. We've been much more conservative in our budgeting. You got to remember the FY 22 budget was developed in the spring of 2021 and the fall of 2020, which different time than where we are now in terms of what we're seeing out in our downtown, which is definitely rebounded. And so that's the major reason why the last couple of years we've had these sort of bigger than normal free cash transfers. Now we've hoped to be able to keep building a capital stabilization fund, but I don't anticipate it'll be to the same amount that we have been these last couple of years. So to answer your question, if we were to keep 15%, that would be a total about 13.5 million. And again, that would be a split between free cash and general stabilization, but it'd be about 13.5. And that would still allow us to transfer about, what is it, the 1.6 or 1.7 plus. That would allow us to transfer about nine and a half to the capital stabilization fund. So we keep the 13, sorry, go ahead. Right now, if I add the 7.8 in, so we've got over 20 million in the stabilization fund with, yeah, okay, thank you. Yeah, to start this year, we were at about 25%. I think when the last number we saw, we were at about 25% in the general stabilization fund. So this would be transferral. But again, as we described, the reason why we're there is because we've built it up for these projects. This would allow us to pull it out of there and put it in a place that's clearly marked for capital. Mandy Jo. Thank you. I also really like the idea of a capital stabilization fund. One of the benefits is when we were looking at just a stabilization fund and then looking at the models, you went through just a couple minutes ago. As a counselor, it was always hard to guess, well, how much can we use from the stabilization fund? Where is that line? What is that? How much does it put us at risk? And so if we're just looking at one fund that already has the money in it and we know we could, in theory, draw it down to zero, that helps us evaluate those models so much easier than it did when they were combined with our savings account for rainy days. A couple of questions. I asked this at the BCG meeting, but the region appropriation order, we had talked at BCG about it not necessarily being part of their budget for this year, that it would be more of a potentially go-to-the-track project or some other thing, and then the overall number, that 85,000, be included in what we base the increase on next year, but because the region budget is so difficult, we can't change their full budget. So I see it in the draft order that it would be a supplemental to them, and so I'd like to know more about what the draft order actually means in terms of where it goes and how it goes and what other votes we might need, or whether it should not even be included in that, and it should be included in a separate financial order completely for some other reason. The track. I like that we'll have funded pretty much our entire share, but I'm curious about, I hope, I don't know whether you guys know an update on how the rest of the towns are doing and how the fundraising is doing, because those were a large part of getting to the project we really wanted, and I'm worried that that might not happen, mainly because at least for the fundraising, I haven't seen any movement by the boosters for seeking money. I've been at athletic events where they've asked for contributions to the boosters, and they haven't mentioned the track project at all, and then do we know whether that budget is still about the same, or are we going to be, has that also ended with an increase somehow because of all the other inflations we've seen? It's okay if I respond to that, Lynn. Please. Yeah, so no great point about the region. We can't increase our assessment officially to them this year without all the other towns revoting their assessments and voting higher assessments, which is not likely to happen. So there's really two options that to your point, Manny Jo, this order might change a little bit. The two options we have are the first one that you described, which is we could potentially just put it towards the track and field for this year. We would build it into their base for next year, but for this one year, the increase would just go towards the track project, which we know they're still looking for funding. The other option potentially would be to donate it to the region. They've reached out to their attorney how that would work, and they've also talked to Mark Abrams, who's a regional school district guru around the state. And so one option would be to donate it to them, not officially give it to them as an assessment, but almost like a gift. So those are the two options that would be available for this year's funds for the region, again, but with the mindset that we would build it into their base for the following fiscal year. I have not heard any updates about the other towns. I don't believe any have made any additional commitments to funding. I know they're talking about it, but I haven't heard that any have approved any additional funding beyond what one or two of them did for CPA originally. And then I do not have an update on if the price, the cost has changed, but I can check in with Doug Slatter from the regional schools about that. Are there other questions again? Remember, this is just the opening discussion. Are there other questions about this piece of the financial presentation? Is that really covers three and four in your agenda? Okay. Before we take a break, I just want to see if there are other questions in general about finance and other requests in general about finance, given the fact that at the very beginning of the meeting, Sean laid out kind of what's to come. And we had some good discussions about further outreach. Then we also particularly, he particularly went on to the capital projects and there's going to be a more in-depth discussion with actual model scenarios from what I understand on the 18th. And then this one, which is what was being referred to the finance committee, all of this is referred to the finance committee. So, Michelle. Yeah, I had a couple of general comments and observations about process, but I was hoping to bring them forward in finance tomorrow. Is that, is that a good approach or will there be an opportunity in finance to talk about process? Andy. Yes, I assume that that is a major part of the discussion tomorrow. Okay, great. Okay, thank you. Is there anything specific you wanted to mention, however, tonight? Well, I need to get my thoughts together, but one of the things that comes to mind is with the turning over of a council, a portion of the process happens prior to that, and then the new council on boards in January. And then the rest of the portion of the process happens. And just from my personal experience, I just, I had some observations that I was going to share in finance about that and maybe ways to manage that. That's the first only thing that's coming to mind right now. But as long as I know there's going to be a place in time for that tomorrow, that's great. It's a very astute observation, however, that I think particularly six counselors are sitting here going, I came into this story halfway through. So that's, we, we fully sympathize with you. We came into the story even in a more interesting moment. Let's change processes all together. Because now we're a city known as the town of. Dorothy. You may not have meant this when you said any other requests. This is probably not the right time. But I know that I've heard from a lot of people that they would like to add money to the town budget for tree maintenance. We at present don't have any steady source of that funds. People are very interested in preserving trees. And to do that in a consistent manner. We need to have a maintenance, more money in a maintenance budget for trees. Andy. Yeah, actually commenting on just the last two comments. One is that what Michelle was raising is a difficult problem. What happened in the last round is the select board had to start with the process and hand it over to the council so that the first council was dealing with what select board had started. And because the guidelines really came out of the select board. So except for this brewer and I, there was no carryover between the two. And that was hard on love another counselors and which gets back to the point that I raised very much at the beginning. But to a large extent, we are a victim of the charter which is in itself a victim of state law because this charter was developed to be consistent with what the state requires. And we can talk about it tomorrow, but it just in general, it is important to recognize that we have to have a process that coincides with what the state provides is to how and when budgets are developed for cities. And why it was done the way it was is an interesting question. Because every city must face the same problem that they're holding elections in November and doing inaugurations at the beginning of January. And there's mandates of when the budget has to be developed and how much time it takes. And that's the one of the things that I was referring to there. And as far as the comment that came from Dorothy about trees, I mean, it's really helpful to know what people think is important. And so I really welcome that. We are stuck with something that you pointed out, Michelle, and that is two and a half and the limitations because our budgeting doesn't start with our needs. Our budgeting starts with what we have available. And what we know is the cost of continuing programs that are existing. So that is just the fact that we've always had to deal with as long as I've been involved with that, which is four years from now. Are there any other comments or questions? Sean, thank you. I think that we asked for a budget overview. We've seen operating. We've seen capital. And we've seen what happens at the end of a budget year when you have a balance left. So this is the beginning of the budget season. And you put a lot of thought into this. And we really want to thank you for putting it out there the way you have. And we know there's much, much more to come. Yeah, no, thank you. We'll be discussing it tomorrow at three o'clock or three thirty three, three o'clock, three o'clock tomorrow. Thank you. Okay. We're going to take a 10 minute break and then come back. We'll be back at eight thirty. Wow. Please turn your video off and your audio off. As you return, please turn your video back on so that I can tell if you're here. I figured you all needed a very generous break because that was mind boggling numbers. And we'll do that. And we're going to do that. Okay. As you return, please turn your video back on just to start moving on. Item eight C was removed from consent. And Andy, you were the one that removed that. So let's it's a second reading. Would you like to speak to your question or whatever or the whatever? The reason you would like this removed, I'm sorry. You shouldn't. Okay, let me explain. It came up very quickly this time and it looked like a very simple change to something called street numbering. And then when I started looking at it a lot more and thinking about it, I realized that this is a fairly significant request that we are making of all of the homeowners and all of the property owners, business property owners in the town. And the question then came as to whether this was the best way to solve a problem. I think that the problem is important and I really appreciate the GL identified it because as was indicated in their cover memo, it's really important that the FIRE EMS staff and other first responders be able to find a place when they are sent out by dispatch as quickly and as easily as possible. And I think that in general, it's always important that people be able to find what they're looking for. And I was sort of reflecting back as I said to Michelle when I was emailing back and forth with her about this a little bit since she's chair of TOL. When I campaigned, if I went looking for a particular house on a voter list, sometimes it was easier than other times. And the difficulties that I have were several. One is for homes. It really depends upon the particular neighborhood and even the particular house. Some houses have numbers on them. A lot of houses don't. Some houses are built so that you can't tell where would be the best place to go looking for a number to begin with. Some people don't use the front doors as their main entrance. And so they put numbers around in various insides. So the real important question then comes to that all that provision, which is having the number be, if it's not visible from the front of the house, that it be on the entry of the, where the public way. And that also depends very much upon what the property is. If the mailbox, for example, is right in front of the driveway, or in the driveway is going to a single house, it's pretty easy. If there's a long driveway shared by a number of different homes, and there's five numbers down at the bottom of the hill, or whatever the entry may be, and there's multiple houses, then is it easy to make sure which house is which as the emergency responders looking. So there are just a whole lot of questions plus the whole question of how commercial properties are identified and how dispatch identifies commercial properties. Do they identify by a street address or the actual business name, because a lot of times things are identified by the business name and are known by the business name. So I think that there were a lot of questions. And when I was asking whether GLL had considered all of those things and had received specific advice from from the like the dispatch fire EMS, the bid, the Chamber of Commerce for the business sense of it, the answer was no, was there any effort to reach out to people who are just general residents to let them know what we're thinking about and how they would identify. It seems that there hadn't been any work on it. It was just something that was created by the committee and I appreciated their effort in doing it, but I'm not sure that I feel that it was a well researched and something that had been floated to the community with community input that is going to have a fairly significant impact on the community. And that's the reason I wanted to bring that up and bring the whole thing up today because I would urge that we not vote on it tonight, but that we vote to refer it back to committee. I'm going to ask if that's a motion. I will make that a motion. Okay, so your motion is to refer this back to GLL. Correct. Okay, is there a second for that motion? I'm going to second it for the purposes of discussion, just to put it there. Okay, Mandy Jo, you and Michelle and Pat, we're all on GLL, so which one wants to go first? I'm happy to let the chair go first if she'd like to go first. All right, Michelle, you get fingered on this one. Thank you. Well, first, I just, I really appreciate the thought that Andy put into this. I really, really do. And I think, you know, the bylaw we previously had was one sentence, I think. So I think there's at least some agreement that maybe getting a more robust bylaw that takes into consideration some of these matters that Andy brought up. We attempted to do that. We did consult with the fire chief who was supportive of the language that we propose. But I think that the points that Andy is making are good. And I'm not sure, and you know, this is for the town council as a whole, I guess to consider, but that GLLs, I mean, so is there another committee, given what you're saying in terms of what I'm hearing Andy, the level of outreach that you would like to have happen on this particular bylaw, be, you know, the business community. I also heard you mention reaching out to residents. We would normally do that through some sort of public hearing, which I is just beyond what I had ever imagined on a bylaw like this. However, if, for example, TSO would be able to consider these things, I'm not sure that GLL necessarily would be the right committee. And I don't know what other committee members on GLL feel about that. But given the concerns that you're raising, it seems like another committee may be the better committee to look at it. I'm not turning away work. I'm just putting it out there. So that's all I got. Mandy, Joe. Yeah, I wanted to give a little history as to why this is in front of the council. Back when the bylaw review committee reviewed all of the bylaws for the changeover of government, this one came to the council as a, we're not going to change it, but we think it needs looked at further because it's very vague. And do you, should we require it not just for residential buildings? There were two things we were asked to look for. What does by figures mean in terms of how to indicate a house number? And should it include not just residential buildings? Should it include more than residential buildings? And so that's why we're here tonight. We believed it should include not just residential buildings, which is what the current bylaw does include. So in terms of to respond to Andy's concern about homeowner issues, well, they already have to post somewhere visible to the street. So now you might have to add it to the house. But if you're not, you know, in that shared driveway, a house number on a house is really important to figure out if you take Lynn's house, which house has the number when there's five at the bottom of the street? And, you know, or a supplemental dwelling unit or something to have them on the house, it doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have, it could be on a door, it doesn't have to be drilled into brick or anything. And in terms of expanding it to residential, from residential to all building owners, not all commercial buildings have a big sign out front identifying them as Dunkin Donuts. Many commercial buildings are just a big office block that doesn't always put a number on front. And then you sit there driving down the street hoping you've got the right building. And so what we tried to do was clarify to expand it to everyone to make it more easy to find building numbers. But to clarify that figures really does mean numbers, not words written out to describe those numbers. Because we felt universally it's much easier to read the Arabic numerals 413, for example, than to read 413 in script, say. You know, that makes it less accessible. So that's really the goal behind all of this. And then if you'll notice there is non-criminal disposition added, there was no enforcement mechanism in the current bylaw. So it was there, but there was no way to enforce it because there was no enforcement mechanism or violation mechanism. So, you know, the goal is not to find people. You'll notice that it's a very small fine. The goal is to get them to put their numbers on if it becomes a problem, which is why the first violation is basically a correction notice. Please add your numbers. So that's sort of a little bit of the history and why we've proposed it this way. Dorothy, question, comment. I would like to suggest that we consider what they do in Norfolk, Connecticut, where I live for a number of years. It wasn't up to the individual homeowners. They had their numbers however they wanted them. But the fire department EMS had a particular style of, I think it was a blue thing. They, and they put the numbers on them and they placed them where they needed them, because the idea was that if you have an emergency, they need to find your house and then you define it quickly. And that gets rid of the question of who's doing what and where because they would do it. Now, this obviously takes the time of some town workers. So you could say, this is something that would be implemented over a period of time. And they would do the ones, the areas that they felt were most in need of clarity. Because right now, if they can't, I'm sure they would take, lose up very important time trying to find houses the way we have our Hickley Hickley numbering system. So that's my suggestion. Thank you. Just to clarify, Mandy, Joe, nobody had house numbers on their houses until we moved there and made them do it, including at the entrance to the driveway where we released them all. Paul. Yeah, I just want to bring to the council's attention that the salt council, which is a seniors in law enforcement together, has a program to provide numbers to anybody who would like them. And they charge $7. And it's done by volunteers from the salt council who will take the put the number on a, you know, four inch tall numbers onto a stake and put it in front of a metal stake, metal numbers, reflective numbers, and they can put that in front of your house. Anybody can go to the police department's website and look up the salt council. And they are always willing to do that. And $7 is what they charge. Pam. I had exactly that times three. And, and every time those wonderful post posted signs on my front lawn walked away in the middle of the night. So it's a really, really great numeral and it's really visible, but they do walk. So so the motion on the floor is to refer this back to GOL. And yet we heard from one person in GOL that perhaps this isn't a GOL issue. And so I want to also you know, mention other options. And that is can the town develop, I want to say guidelines because regulations may be what I really mean. Can the town develop guidelines and do some kind of joint program with the group that helps people do this so that it, these numbers are in fact quite visible. I mean, you know, if you're using your GPS on your phone, and all of a sudden it says the address is there and you're going really, I didn't know that. So is there some other solution we can suggest besides developing a very complicated bylaw that starts saying things like, you know, if your house is 25 feet from the street, then you should have a street marker and those kinds of things. Because I could just see, you know, that being the kind of thing GOL would wrestle with, well, or some committee, Michelle. Well, just as you were talking, Lynn, I was thinking if it does go back to GOL, one thing we could do is explore what other communities do with respect to this, there may be some model out there that works really well, like you're describing. And so that's something I think we could look at. And I just differentiate that from what Andy's talking about, which is really about getting public input and engagement, at least how I heard it, from the business community and from residents. So I just, I'm not sure that piece of this would be a GOL matter. Andy? Yeah, I don't think that it needs to be made too complicated, but it would be really helpful to know from dispatch what kind of information they receive and how things can be identified, which is really a question for the first responder departments that then provide the response after dispatch is to what information that they have that is helpful and when it is not helpful. As I understand the question that was asked to Chief Nelson was, do you like this? And he said, yeah, and he was probably saying, gee, it's better than what I have now. But it wasn't really an investigation of what is the best proposal, the best proposal came from the committee itself. So I just didn't feel it had gone far enough. I'm not sure that it needs too much else. I think that we've probably done enough discussion that we should have done during first reading that the community may become aware of this. And we might hear from people anyway who have strong feelings and people who don't have strong feelings. Well, and we should just do it, is really in the best interest of the first responders. I was concerned about, Nandy touched on this, is putting it on having to mount it into brick or some other surface that is difficult to mount it into. Even doors aren't made of wood anymore. And so, you know, how things get fixed done, not even sure that I'm the expert. But I think we talked to the hardware store to find out that answer. And so I just felt like it was worth making sure that there was more community awareness about this, and that there was some effort to give some thought to what is the best way to do something that's really important, which is to make sure that houses get identified for first responders and for the community at large. Michelle. I see Anika's hand too. But I just quick response that I do actually, I did wonder about that. I did wonder how it would, how the information, if the bylaws approved will be rolled out to residents and building owners. And that would be, I would imagine a town staff matter. So we didn't really address that so much. So that's a good point. Anika. I was wondering if it would be possible to maybe list on the town website, if it is something that we're seeking input on to differentiate between that and it being an issue of safety. I know myself, I had to go ahead and put like the larger numbers out that for various reasons and personal reasons I wasn't, I wasn't in love with the idea of doing, but I do understand that it is, not only just helping people know where they're going, but especially in the event of an emergency. I guess the question would be, would it be sufficient to have those questions or at least have a mention of it on the town website that encourages people, if they feel one way or another about it, they can reach out to, to see if there even is broader interest. Shalini. Yeah, I want to, I appreciate Andy bringing up this discussion and the safety aspect of it because I think if you position it that way, many more residents are likely to look at it because I'm now looking at our house and I'm like, sometimes it doesn't show up on GPS and now if we had an issue with the police and fire find us and so I'm already thinking about it. So I think it's a discussion worth letting the residents know about, not just in the rollout, but I think up front, I mean the rollout definitely, but also before that and I had a related question then because as we are, we are working in TSO on the outreach plan, community engagement plan and one of the questions then is if a committee like in this case, GOL is proposing a bylaw change, should they be doing the outreach or is that supposed to go to TSO and I think from the TSO side, we would feel that the outreach has to be with like CRC is doing the rental registration and they're doing the outreach and so GOL is proposing then and that's kind of the way we are designing the template, offering it to the town council to look at it some future day, but that would be the idea, but I think that will be a clarification that would be helpful to TSO also as we design the outreach plan is the relevant committee responsible for doing the outreach. So Michelle. Sorry if I could just respond briefly to that, I do think that GOL is a little bit different in the sense that any, the bylaws can have a spectrum, they can impact a spectrum of matters in the town and so if we were to take on the engagement piece for every one of the possible matters that could come across in a bylaw revision situation, I think we would be way outside of our workloads, so it almost feels like what you're saying Shalini is and you guys are working on this, there's going to be a need or there is a need or we're consistently talking about the need for more outreach to happen for any sort of changes and measures that are brought forward. So how do we address that in as a system, you know, to have a process for that as opposed to, I can't imagine GOL really being able to do and have the capacity and the systems in place to do the outreach for any number of bylaws that may be revised, you know, as a referral to us. Jennifer. Just seconding what Michelle just said. Yeah. All right. So the option, there's several options here, one is there is a motion on the floor, the motion on the floor is to refer it back to GOL. At that point GOL could do any number of things including come back and say gee, I think this also needs to be considered by another committee. Another option is that we go ahead and we vote on this, which means that it goes into effect. And then we look to the town manager and say, how do you want to inform people of this new requirement? And is there a plan for outreach and implementation through the town? I'm just throwing out options at this point because the one thing I want to recognize is that the bylaw that we had in place prior to this was woefully poor. Okay. So sometimes we want to, it's better to at least put in place a slightly better bylaw while we maybe work on other options. So that's just something to think about. The motion on the floor, however, is to refer back to GOL. The motion's been made and seconded. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none, then we're going to vote on the motion to refer back to GOL. And I'm going to start with Anna Devlin-Gothier. No. Lynn Griesper is a no. Mandy Jo Hanneke. No. Anika Lopes. No. Michelle Miller. No. Dorothy Pam. Abstain. Pam Rooney. No. Kathy Shane. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Jennifer Taub. No. Leisha Walker. No. Shalini Balmilne. Yes. Patty Angelis. No. Okay. There are three yeses, 12 noes, one abstention. I'm sorry, three yeses, nine noes, one abstention and no absence. So the motion fails. Andy, you have your hand up? Yes. I'm going to be voting no on the next motion. I don't expect that I'll necessarily be in the majority when I vote no. But I really am concerned that we are passing something that is going to be the final decision. It's going to require that people put large numbers on houses that don't have and go through the responsibility to do that and to place the entrance to the public way, which may or may not identify their homes. And for many people, they have identification of the public way that does identify their homes and the necessity of putting the numbers on the house is pretty close to zero. I just don't find that it's a well thought out proposal that is going to solve the problem we're seeking to solve. And for that reason, I'm going to vote no. Kathy. I'm going to echo Andy's and I wish I'd read it closer to see whether there's some simple edit I could do. But if I go up and down our street, many of the houses can't be seen from the road, but they have a very prominent number at their driveway. And so we're asking that house to also put a number on the house. Historic older houses, my constituents will say, why did you do this? Why didn't you just say you have to have a three inch high thing saying where your house is or on your house? So we have a and on on the building and outside. So I'm just saying there are driveways that go up a hill. So it's asking people to go to an effort where you may not need the extra effort. So I will vote no on it as it's currently written. Okay, Mandy Joe. I'm going to make the motion and move to amend general bylaw 3.39 street numbering of houses by inserting the language shown in bold red font and removing the language shown in red strike through font as follows. Do I need to read the whole thing? Yes. Okay. We're getting rid of the word houses and adding buildings to the title and then adding penalties for violations of the street number of buildings bylaw, non criminal disposition for first violation, warning and correction notice enforcement by building commissioner inspection services fire department, non criminal disposition for second and subsequent violations $25 enforcement by building commissioner inspection services fire department. The leading the sentence homeowners shall indicate the street number of the house by figures at two and one half inches high and so located is to be easily seen from the street and adding the phrase or clause or multiple sentences. Building owners shall post the numeric street number of the building on the building and if necessary to be easily seen from the public way at an additional location easily visible from the public way using figures at least three inches tall. For clarity purposes, 413 a is the appropriate posting not 413 a. Okay. Would you please put the motion up on top on on the screen and Mandy Joe, I want to make sure that for all of us. Yeah, we need to see. There you go. What of this motion that's on the you did you change anything. No, okay. So this is the motion that is on your motion sheet. Is there a second. Second Miller. Okay, many Joe. Michelle, I just wanted to briefly respond to Kathy Kathy you know where I live. And I just wanted to give you an example of at the bottom of the long driveway. You know, I could have posted my house number which I do on a tree. But I have an accessory dwelling unit. Okay, so even if both 374 a and 374 b were posted at the end of the driveway. If somebody needed to reach either my children in 374 a or somebody in the accessory dwelling in 374 b unless they were properly identified on both of the houses when they came down the driveway they wouldn't know which house it was. So that's just one example of where it could be detrimental if it's not placed both at the end of the driveway and on the particular building that it's matched to him. I think I'd like to make a friendly amendment to change the word. It's in the second line of the main text. The building initial post the numeric street number of the building on the building or if necessary to be easily seen from the public way at an additional location easily visible from the public way. It's you know in many cases it really is sort of an either or and maybe both is a little overkill. Is there a second for that? Second. I'm going to speak against that and the reason I am is because when you go up my driveway there's four houses and how do you know which one is mine and the way you know it is because we have postings on trees we have postings on the house and we have a posting at the beginning of the driveway. So you're covered so you're covered. I'm covered but I don't I if you have more than one house as Michelle was just mentioning not putting a number on the house or on something right near the house doesn't help the fire in the lease and EMS. That's why I'm I've said my piece. Are there any other comments or questions? Shall any? Yeah I just wanted to share my position why I will be supporting this and normally I like I'm all about the community outreach and understanding the impact that this might have on residents and businesses and however keeping the safety factor in mind that I think the fact that this should be in place as soon as possible in case there is an incident and so I'm keeping that in mind and which is why I am in favor of getting this passed and making it all the houses safe and easily accessible. However I would like the town manager to then have a way to let everyone know that and I think the fact that there is no immediate fee fine there's you know there's a letting people know so I think it feels like it's being taught through so it's not going to have and have a really negative consequence so I think we're pretty good just let's do this and let and maybe to again coordinate a little bit through our district newsletters and all of that let people know that hey for your safety please do this. So thank you. Andy. I think that we're getting into minutiae of trying to write something on the floor which is never a good use of time and which is why I was preparing to get it referred back to a committee I was not trying to necessarily require all of those things but in any event what I think is really what we're trying to get to is we want every owner of a building whether it be a home or commercial to have visible from the public way and in additional locations sufficient signage so that people can easily find the building or residence involved and it's really varies a lot by property for the various reasons that are brought up to today but I was I think that's what we're after doing and I'm not sure that is the way it's written now that it necessarily achieves that and is putting requirements on people to do things that may not serve that purpose. Alicia. Thank you and yeah I think I at first didn't really understand what Andy was asking but also a couple of things have come to my mind during this conversation um and that is that like it really does differ and is specific to property and so like wow your house and Michelle's house might need those markings like there are some houses that might not need two markings because it would be very clear from the one by the street in the public way that it was identifying their house because of the proximity to the street or the proximity to the house or what have it because all properties are so different and requiring those people to do that may not be like a significant like roadblock however I'm wondering about like the time frame in between different penalties because if it were a financial issue and they don't have the money or maybe it's a timing issue and they don't have the time to be able to add the markings right away and they've already gotten a first warning and now there's a fine on top of the already whatever difficulties they're having like is there a time frame in between when someone can receive the first warning and the second warning like are we giving them more time to get it done if there's a specific reason or is there a way to make it so that this is specific to individual houses and not just one that covers all people that might not actually need it is there any comment regarding Alicia's statement Mandy Jo um normally and I can't totally speak for inspection services or anything but normally when they issue correction orders they put time frames on them and so the first warning the warning and correction notice would likely come with a time frame to do so you know there are reflective stickers that go on mailboxes that can go on houses that cost like 80 cents per number you know I think we're making this much more complicated than it actually is in terms of fretting about how much it costs to put a three inch reflective sticker on a mailbox or on a house somewhere um they are very sticky I've tried to get them off my mailbox when they've faded and they're extremely hard to get off your mailbox they'll stick on wood on a house you know it's not an expensive proposition and it adds to the safety and Chief Nelson has said he likes the changes we've made so I'm going to vote against the amendment too the suggested or yeah that was a friendly amendment it's been it's been taken back uh Dorothy Pam I want to remind people that the purpose is safety and the ease of finding the number by uh first responders and I think that that is best done by them deciding exactly the size the color the reflectivity and the placement so they don't have to figure out look is that on the tree is it on this isn't that when you want to get there fast you want us to do it and it works in other towns and I think that's a good way to go thank you okay there's a motion on the floor the motion's been made and seconded the motion is the one that is at appears on your motion sheet Alicia you still have your hand up yes um I just wanted to talk really quickly again sorry I'm I'm not even necessarily going to vote against this um because I do see the benefits and the safety but I also think that like when we are talking about finances and other people finances it's really important to be cautious because not everyone is in the same position and something that might be very simple and sustainable for you might not be the same for somebody else and people are living on very tight budgets but even a five dollar expense to throw off all of their monthly budget um and the other important thing is like timing like I have a super busy schedule so something I have to plan for something that's going to take like I have to be home or I have to be able to go to a store I have to call somebody to schedule something that I have to actually schedule that in my calendar to be able to do it because I don't have a lot of free time so I was just trying to be mindful of different situations and different circumstances for other people and maybe putting in something around like we recommend or suggest giving people like 30 days between the one morning to the next morning like might be something to protect other vulnerable people okay Kathy uh well what just occurred to me I can do about my next door neighbor and several others who will be furious with this is I'm going to buy those cheap stick-ons that Mandy just talked about and I'm going to revisit people that I haven't seen for a while and give them them because one of one of them has literally said he will do everything he can to move out of Amherst because of all the rules that every time he turns around there's another rule and if I just bring him his sticker I can not have him be angry once again um so I'm just saying that he has a very clear marking on the street and his house is very visible but he does not have a number on his house I just will I'm going to bring him this number and I have a few others I can bring their numbers to it will be a good community outreach exercise for me. Shalini and then Anika and then I think we need to bring this to a close okay so two things I'm hearing is about the timing and like the timing the time that's given to people to correct the issue and that needs to be lenient and spacious and understanding now is that a decision we need to make the town council or the staff or so that's just for me I'm not sure what the answer to that is and who's making that decision does it need to be made and put into the bylaw itself and the other thing that I heard that I think is worth uh figuring out is what should we hear from the fire chief or the police or whoever where it should be placed so everyone puts the signs on at the same place so those are two things that I want to know. Paul did you have any comment with regard to timeline? So typically you know as I think Mandy Jo mentioned when there's an enforcement order they give them an adequate amount of time to comply with the order and I think in this situation they would give them plenty of time I don't know what the time frame would be but you know it could be a couple weeks to comply with the request. Okay in my mind we pass by laws and the town figures out how to implement them okay and whether that's through education and outreach and then over time you know fines or whatever but I for us to get into that means we've done we've gone into administration and that's not our job. Anika? I just wanted to quickly clarify Kathy I think that it's great that and and very generous that you will buy stickers and give them out I think that is wonderful but you know to Alicia's point not everyone can do that whether it is a time or cost so my question just to clarify through Paul was the the program that you were talking about are those numbers available for free and is that a free service? No the Salt Council charges seven dollars and then they come and put the they put it basically a stake in the ground that has your number on it like a flag that it's weren't just tall I believe it is and I just want to know that this bylaw there's already a bylaw requiring people to have numbers on their houses so this is not a new bylaw it's just changing where the location is and that would apply to all property owners not just homeowners to comply. Okay and it's also conceivable that the town would develop some guidelines you know for example if there are four houses on this then you need to do this or you we recommend you do that I would like to just bring this to a vote at this point if everybody's okay no more questions. Was the amendment withdrawn? Yes the amendment was withdrawn thank you. All right we're going to begin the vote with I guess we're up to Griezmer so I'm voting yes Mandy Jo. Hi. Anika. Hi. Michelle. Hi. Dorothy Pam. No. Pam Rooney. Hi. Kathy Shane. No. Andy Steinberg. No. Jennifer Tob. Hi. Alicia Walker. I'm going to vote yes but I also just wanted to say this is a very good example of small things that we do know. Thank you. Shall we vote no. Yes. Pat DeAngelis. No. Anna Devlin-Goth here. Hi. I'm going to ask the clerk for the vote. I have nine to four. Nine in favor four opposed no abstentions and nobody absent. Okay we did approve the town calendar I want to thank Mandy Jo for her scrutiny of that calendar and that's why you ended up with two different amendments today. We are going to move on however to the correspondence and we're going to go through each of them and then we're going to have a motion to pass or authorize me to sign all of them. So we're going to start with the university the one regarding the chancellor search and let me just mention this came about because I believe all of us received an invitation to the search committee. They had a 30 30 minute period of time where some of them were in present and you know if you showed up you could talk well Anna and I showed up as did Molly Keegan and so I had prepared some statements but it seemed to me like it was a good idea to put some of those statements in writing so that it could be shared more broadly with the rest of the search committee and that's my attempt and so forth. I'm certainly open to additional changes so let's just go through and see if there are some. Mandy Jo? Yeah I have a lot of questions and then some things I didn't like about it. The first one was it was very confusing to figure out who this is actually from and on behalf of. The from line says you and Anna the second paragraph implies that it's you and your personal capacity Lynn. There is never a signature that says it's on behalf of the council but there's a lot of we and if it wasn't on behalf of the council we wouldn't be voting on this letter so I think that needs completely clarified throughout and that was one of the reasons I was pulling it off was I just it wasn't clear. Yeah so that was the first major comment. The second one is about the new addition at the very end of the first page. I think we have to be very careful as to the way we refer to rentals that are dwelling units that are rented to students. The phrase student rental has a negative connotation. I would change that to rentals to students which is a little less negative but the whole added sentence the steady growth of UMass's student population feeds that demand so increasingly more neighborhood find themselves serving as proving grounds for young renters transitioning into adulthood a position few neighbors relish that does not sit well with me at all. It almost seems derogatory to the adulthood level of young college students or young people in general even if they're not in college and so I don't want to see that sentence in this letter at all. The third full paragraph on page two has that weird sentence we are at home and our home that's just a weird sentence I don't even know what you're going with but then there's the many faculty and staff live in our town yet earlier you said that many can't live in our town because it's too expensive a little contradictory there um utilization of road sidewalks bike lanes first responders is not limited to those who live in our town all of the employees and students and graduate students and everyone who works or attends school at these campuses use our roads sidewalks and bike lanes so it's not just those that are living in town same with the public safety issues and then I thought we could be a little more stronger on our need for a chancellor to be a true community partner so I have some language to add to the ask for questions to cover the following things and I can read my language I'm not stuck on my language but I thought what I've felt we've been missing is that true community partnership between the chancellor and our town so what I came up with briefly was the need for the chancellor to be a true community partner with the town to address as a partnership the challenges faced by the town as a result of the university's presence in town and the decisions it makes with respect to schedules student enrollment building construction parking and student housing so I would like to suggest based on the extent of those suggestions that we not act on this tonight that I collect individually but not replying all various changes and I bring it back on the 17th and the reason I'm suggesting that is because there is not the urgency on this one that there is on others okay and the only thing I would like to ask and that is I'm more I'm more than glad to have this be from the council and on behalf of the council unless you tell me you don't want that I just wanted to clarify I'm I managed to be on behalf of the council so I'm unless there's further comments about this I'm going to send something out to counselors I'm going to take suggestions and come back on the 17th with a something a revision how's that Pam Maroney for your consideration of that of that material the the recognition of of inadequate and you would put it much more positively inadequate pilot payment or other alternative compensation to the town would be of interest I totally agree with the with the seeking a candidate who has proven exemplary in in sustaining and supporting the host the host communities are working in collaboration with I think that the quote about the transitioning to adulthood came directly from the chancellor's community breakfast talk right it may not be the way to use in there however here Michelle just I have a general comment about the process here so while I appreciate that you wrote this letter Lynn on behalf of the council I think was the intent I think we were individually invited to come to listening sessions and whether we did or didn't we may have particular vision or recommendations that we would like to provide individually to the committee and I think that in particular this is a really political matter in some sense that we all have different viewpoints on and it's very difficult to create one letter that would capture all of that and have all of us feeling like it accurately represented our voice I don't feel like this letter it gets to some pieces of how I might express myself but it doesn't accurately represent my voice in this matter completely so my question is if we are to have a letter sent on behalf of the council first of all I'm not even if you take all of our input it's going to be really difficult I would imagine to put it into one letter but I'm wondering if we are not prohibited from writing our own letter from our own personal self right to the committee you are never prohibited from writing your own letter okay and in that case would we write it as a resident would we write it as a town counselor or both and is there just any sort of guidance it doesn't matter it's it's but I think you should identify who you are yeah yeah absolutely that's you know a resident and a district one town counselor got it okay I'm not I'm not I haven't even like thought far enough to think if I would write a letter I just want to kind of put that out there that this is a tough one I think to get this council all in one letter and so I wouldn't want any one of us to feel like it didn't accurately represent our voice or our concern in in this matter thank you Athena you wanted to chime in sure I just wanted to point out that the counselors could write their individual individual letters and indicate that they're counselors and residents but not that their viewpoints in the letter reflect that of the whole council they could write a letter on behalf of the council yes so only the chair can write a letter on behalf of the council and even that comes with some approval process by the council that's correct getting okay and the and the only time that I have ever not come and come back is if we've already voted and all of a sudden a hearing gets scheduled on an issue then I will go ahead because we have voted okay in this case we didn't vote so is there any other questions or comments in that one okay then we're going to go on to the next one which is you're gonna have to pull it up on the screen I guess I didn't copy the right oh no I did this is the one that would go to various members of the senate and the house in massachusetts it is in support of adding funds or otherwise to the m mass board of library commissioners coffers so that they in turn could give us and 11 other towns money to make up the difference that we're all experiencing because of inflation this was also a letter that several people that you all got an email encouraging individual letters and so this is you and some of you have already sent those individual letters I know of one counselor that has I did not receive copies from other counselors and if you did that's great but this would be on behalf of the council so Pat yes I had a resident who requested that I vote against this against sending this because they were concerned it might have an impact on money coming forward ARPA money coming forward for the school building project do you have any idea whether that that there there is that those two things are connected they're not connected per se but there is a growing effort to try to get mass school building authority which drives its money elsewhere it derives it from a sales tax to increase their levels of funding that they also could be looking for money from ARPA but it's there the way that mass school building authority is funded for the project that we are seeking is the sales tax is that correct pal yes so it they're different pots of money per se thank you okay are there other questions or comments alisha you specifically asked that this be with taken off consent um so the reason why I wanted to be taken off consent is because like I just myself don't agree with it and so I don't think that anything should be sent on behalf of all people who don't all agree like I think even one person should be not on behalf and if everyone feels very strongly about it then everyone can write their own letters um I also like specifically don't agree with the mentioning and the specification of the ARPA funding um because I personally believe that ARPA funding was prioritized for other things even at a federal level and should remain prioritized for those other things um and so I just prefer if counselors to send their own into the door letter alisha I maybe other people are not having problems but your voice is not as clear tonight as it has been other nights and so I'm hoping I understood that but I'm not sure I did are you using ear earphones or something yeah that is exactly I've been also having like connectivity issues um and so I was hoping that this would help um because like can you really not hear me or do you want me to say it again or do you want me to try to tell me in a different way yes if you would please I'm sorry I I just can't understand sorry can you repeat yes go ahead can you not hear me or if you want me to like try to go without my headphone so it's it's like a muffled connection but alisha can I try to summarize what you just said and see if that is correct um yeah that would be helpful thank you what I heard was that you don't agree with the letter and therefore you thought it was inappropriate for the council to send a letter on behalf where the president to send a letter on behalf of the council if even one counselor disagrees with it um and if if it's not a unanimous vote then it should only be on behalf of the counselors who voted for it um that was the gist of basically what I got and then I think there was something in there about reasoning why you didn't agree with it that you thought there was ARPA funds for that should be used for other reasons and maybe not this one but that one was where to me you know got muffled even more alisha does that capture what you were saying yeah I apologize but yeah so the beginning is spot on and the second part about ARPA funds is also spot on just that I just don't agree with that specification of funds okay um I'm sorry I I think we I think we have it other people had their hand up jennifer yeah so I just had a clarification getting back to pat's question um because I had a constituent expressed the same concern so for the um for the school so they their source of funding is it's not ARPA funding but the town might still go and request ARPA funding for the school just like is that because we the library's getting funding from the master's sport of library commissioners and we're also going for ARPA funding the funding for these schools for the school construction project comes from sales tax okay that does not prevent mass school building authority from seeking additional funding however at this point we are not aware that they are actually seeking additional funding okay so I guess my question so the town would never be writing a letter like this for the school if I guess that's if the town wrote a letter it would probably be in conjunction like this with other school other municipalities that are seeking money for schools and it would probably be to the mass school building authority asking them based on inflation to consider some changes in their formula appropriation of their existing funds that does not mean that mass school building authority when asked for ARPA funds but that's not where their funds come from thank you and the town it wouldn't even be worth the town asking the state individually for ARPA money it would only be if there was a collective effort okay thank you Andy yeah I I guess I have two things that I need to say in response one is that the council takes all sorts of actions on behalf of the town that's what we were elected to do we just passed a by-law where there was a split vote but we passed it and it was we were making a collective judgment and when we state an opinion about a matter that affects the town again it's something we vote on but collectively that's what we're elected to do so I as a matter of principle felt that I needed to start with making that point as you know I'm on the MMA financial policy committee we've talked about this a lot at the financial policy committee I think we all have to recognize is that we were led to believe by the mass board of library commissioners that we received some of money that was a percentage of the construction project and as that chart showed the construction costs increased significantly the MVLC did not increase its share and put the entire burden of paying the difference on the library and the town and it has been what has caused all of this recent agony that we have been dealing with and I think that it's important that we do something to say that we really support the any effort that's possible to get the mass board of library commissioners money that they are directed to use to take its share of the cost increase and not leave it to the towns and I think that that's an important statement also to be made for the schools which is subject to we've discussed also the financial policy committee but it's a different funding source it's a different issue it's a different set of problems the MVLC has additional money it's a question of how it chooses to use it as opposed to the board of library commissioners which gets an appropriation that's a flat amount of money and it has no you know it can only go back to the legislature so they are different funding mechanisms that get to those two entities but I think that it is quite possible and if it happens we should support an effort also for the schools I don't think that they're mutually exclusive I feel very uncomfortable tape making that choice I think that you know they're both important projects both important funding sources and even if we didn't have any stake in the game I would still feel the same way I don't think that I would want to choose choose one over the other Dorothy well my question here is you have ARPA funds or any other available state funds and I guess I'd prefer to have it other available state funds because and please correct me if I'm wrong but I'm kind of feeling like Alyssa that ARPA funds are perhaps more suited towards the school many people do see these projects in conflict with each other but Andy just said that the MBLA does have other money and the library I just feel that we don't want to pit things against each other I do agree we should join with the other towns and ask for more money from the board of libraries I totally agree with that but I'm wondering whether we want to say ARPA funds in that sense that's my statement it's really my question too some of this goes to the background of the joint efforts of the 12 towns okay there is presently a supplemental budget which is considered it's quote considered the close out supplemental budget that is presently under debate there is the outside possibility that there will be another supplemental budget before the end of December and then the third option and in supplemental budgets generally we're talking about using state revenues not ARPA revenues per se on the other hand there's also a the economic development bill and the whole proposal that was between the governor and the legislature that dealt with ARPA money specific that included ARPA money so the reason the letter and I actually added the words or any other available state funds because the original letter said only ARPA the reason I thought it was important to do that is because at a minimum you're trying to hit two if not three funding opportunities between now and the end of December Michelle I wanted to clarify two things the first Andy when he started talking about the council I think being elected to represent the town or to send something on behalf of the town I'm not sure if that was in response to what Alicia said but what I heard Alicia say was not whether or not the council is representing the town but whether the president is representing the council so I just wanted to clarify I don't know which is which but that's how I heard two different things and then the other thing is so did the treasury earmark these ARPA funds specifically for library construction projects because the way that I'm reading this is an additional 87.7 million of ARPA money earmarked are you asking that they do earmark the pool of ARPA funds for library construction or is there already a pot of money that has been earmarked for library construction that you're then asking for additional monies to be made for that to the best of my knowledge there is no present ARPA money earmarked for libraries this is a request to earmark ARPA or other funds for additional library does that answer your question I think it does I'm not sure it's clear but in the letter necessarily that that's what is being said but yeah yeah that's just I wouldn't have read it that way like I would have read this saying that you're asking for an additional 87.7 million of ARPA money earmarked for library construction projects like that it was already an earmark but just for transparency what we're saying is we're asking for an additional 87.7 million of the ARPA money that's already been you know like which category of the treasury does this fall into you know the treasury had categories for how the ARPA funds were supposed to be used which particular category does the library construction projects fall into let me suggest an edit and see whether this helps okay so that in the third actually what's fourth paragraph the 12 libraries have collectively sent an appeal to the governor and lieutenant governor to include an additional 87.7 million of ARPA money asking that it be earmarked for construction yeah or to be earmarked something like that that that clarifies it for me much better definitely okay all right I agree with that are there any other changes and going back to Alicia's comment I certainly appreciate uh various uh counselors and their vote but in the past our vote of majority vote for proclamations of a majority vote for resolutions and a majority vote for letters means that it is on that is in fact on behalf of the council if you want to change that would mean a rule change Alicia hi thank you I hope you guys can hear me I just wanted to state this because a few people said my name on that my name is Alicia um so I hope that you can correct that also that um yeah so I was making the statement not for a rule change but in this region because I was trying to clarify why I asked for it to be taken off the consent agenda is because I don't agree and so like I understand and I I thank Michelle for the clarification because that was caught on in terms of what I was trying to say um and like I understand these things come on behalf of the council and that we are advocating for the town but I am also advocating like individually myself and if I don't agree and if doesn't follow my viewpoint that is why I'm taking it off the consent agenda because I don't agree and I don't think that anything should be sent on behalf of the council when when everyone doesn't agree it's different when we're voting for something that has to be passed than writing a letter for recommending certain funds we appointed for certain things that I don't agree that those funds should go to those things anyhow um and so it's just I feel like a very different thing and I understand that this is a process but this is my reasoning for this specific act to take off the consent agenda thank you thank you so are there any other questions on this letter there has been one change and that is in that fourth paragraph where it says 87.7 million of ARPA money to be earmarked for library construction projects Kathy I just have a question Lynn on focusing on that sentence we have already I understand this that we have already asked for this this letter is now to Joe and Mindy is that who it's to for ours it's actually there's a whole list of people at the attach to the letter and it goes to the president of the senate the speaker of the house the head of ways and means on both the house and the senate then it goes to members who are either ranking members or head of library caucus and then Joe and Mindy okay that you answer my question so it's they're already out there working for us on this our representatives and absolutely are and the governor and lieutenant governor are aware of this and so this letter is going to a broader audience and I assume the 87.7 which is a very specific number was calculated to was that calculated to get back up to the percent we thought we were going to get where did that number come from it was calculated by being in touch with each of the library projects taking what they were given by a mass school building or what the total project cost was when they either got their grant or would be slated to get their grant then an estimate or in some cases real numbers could now tell us what that project now cost and the 87.7 million is the full amount not just to bring to the percentage so it's the full amount so we're so in the case of Amherst we're asking for all 10 million if we say it's 10 million more expensive correct yes okay it was the idea as you asked for as much as you can and then you see what you can get and and do you expect that anyone will that you're writing this too will understand that's how you came up with 87.7 I leave I leave explaining that to the okay senator and representative who okay have requests in to meet with the houseways and means and senate ways and means thank you I'll be more than glad to accompany them if they need it they're more than capable of doing that Anika so I have a question asked for clarity I'm not sure that this would be able to be answered here but you know I know clearly there are you know we have residents that have concerns with use of the ARPA funds and what that entails however you know when you look at the list of who this letter is going to these are people where they're you know outreach of her views beyond the the the town of Amherst so my question is and even so they would not be the people personally writing the check if this were to happen so my question is where this money was cut where this money would potentially come from is there any question whatsoever that those sources would not as well I'm seeing as their people are looking at the state would not be aware of the impacts that this could have on the school or any other important projects that you know affect people and you know so I'm just wondering because I know you know just what what has been stated that this could this money potentially take from other important projects so and I'm just wondering like how especially with this list going on that we would have money being you know that just overall outreach and overall outlook in answering these questions would not account for what other projects statewide would be affected by this because unless I'm wrong and I've missed the memo do we have any clear facts yet as to how any of these of the four capital projects within Amherst could trickle down and impact the others do we do we even have that yet I hope I hope that that was clear I know I probably asked about four questions in one let me try to back in the only place that the town would be getting state dollars for any of our capital projects at this time are the school elementary school and the library there are no state funds a pot of funds available at this point for any other municipal buildings so they won't be competing with the two other projects two of the four okay your question about would it be competing with other requests to ARPA yes and that's why this goes to the legislature and that's why they spend hours and days and weeks debating this uh this is a pile of requests and they get to figure it out shallony um I'm just speaking I suppose um like in my mind I was a little conflicted whether the letter comes from the council or do we send individually and um and I I feel that as a council they're going to be you know differences in our points of view about certain issues and once we come to a decision as a majority and I think it's important to hear all the different concerns and I think this has been a very helpful discussion to at least get some sense that we are not you know it's not competing necessarily um the school funds are separate and the library and there are 11 other municipalities who are already going ahead and asking for those and it's kind of to me it feels that we are part of a larger community of municipalities who are working together to make this happen and to have some portion of the ARPA funds go towards the libraries I feel that as a council we have um even though there were differences we pat you know we supported the library to the next phase uh that we made and so I feel that the letter should come from the council in if it passes as a majority vote right now it should come from the council because um you know we are supporting the project up to a certain level that we just did then our vote on this letter ensures that we are doing everything that we can as a town to try and get funding to make that project happen and that takes into account that we will have different points of view and that's okay so that's why I will be supporting the letter thank you Pam um question about you know if this request comes in from Amherst clearly we're in collaboration with a number of other towns but if it comes in from Amherst what is the time frame that we would conceivably be going back to the legislature asking for supplemental ARPA funds for the school what what is the timing of that request if it were to happen that's a very good question with an answer that's not known there is a request uh to meet with Senator Comerford and Representative Dom regarding additional MSBA appropriation but it's not even clear that it's to go for ARPA so in other words we're paying attention to that issue as well but if that request may be more of trying to get MSBA to use some of their existing funds to help increase the formula for what they support for square footage the fact that they do not support but yet they herald um green schools and they uh only reimburse up to eight dollars a square foot I think it is for site prep so there's kind of three basic things not right about the formula for schools but again their money comes from a sales tax and if there's any additional money that they want from ARPA that's that decision hasn't been made can I follow up please so presumably they um they have a set budget like everybody else in the state government so they have a certain amount of money coming to them for MSBA and and the ability to borrow um they're they're very rigid they've they've proven themselves extremely rigid I'm I'm not excited about waiting on them for you know change of heart um if you will so I'm I'm still really really toying with you know with or playing with what the chances are of MSBA revising and increasing its funding to me it seems fairly uncertain they actually have increased their square footage reimbursement about every year or two so I'm not as negatively inclined to believe they won't do it again if you look at there at that chart that has all the dots all over it that's on reimbursement they they have changed um but that doesn't mean that ARPA is going to solve it for them because the fact that they already have their own source of money is probably doesn't put them high in the pecking order for additional state appropriation and I don't know what their revenue looks like I'm told it's it's significant so I don't Kathy I guess I guess I think the only answer on this what could ARPA mean for the school is we don't know because and so are we competing the state only gets x amount of ARPA funds I don't know how much they've already designated um you don't even know what the pot looks like the the mblc yes it has increased so it went from 330 dollars to 360 at a point all the schools were coming in at 500 and 600 so it doesn't come anywhere for square foot it hasn't come anywhere close and it's one time had a graph of three years so would mblc be more willing to move quickly if they got an infusion of ARPA funds I think I would say maybe you know so I think we just don't know because the Lynn you're expanding it to any other state funds is a good one because ARPA is a fixed amount of money whatever it is and if there's other money you know so I I don't think there's a clear answer to this that we're not competing because it's we're competing with housing for example ARPA money can be used for affordable housing and they could they could give the town of Amherst more ARPA money except that I think we've already got our designation and they they divvied it up among the town so I it's I don't think there's a clear answer here that we're not competing I think it's I think it's uncertain yeah and you could one could argue we are because it's a fixed pot so it's good that it says other state funds I mean in many ways one should say then we should submit letters for the 10 projects we would like ARPA to fund and let the legislature decide because frankly whether we write a letter or not isn't going to influence right them saying yes or no yeah it's going to it's basically putting our stake in the ground that this is one of the things we support that's it but if you have a crystal ball maybe you want to predict what the legislature no I have no I have no crystal ball I'm just saying that that's the question being raised and we don't have an answer that says these are different issues they're they're co-mingled yeah that's why you want to make what you want to make people understand what you want yeah and then they get to decide you don't always get to decide um Jennifer I hope this is a quick question um yeah I hope it's quick question uh so if we are successful and get some ARPA funds that I sounds like it would come it this may not matter whether it comes directly to Amherst they give it to the 12 how it gets divvied up but let's say there was a change in how the library project proceeded are the funds for the library no matter how we go if we you know ultimately do you know maybe can't add the total square footage but some lesser amount I mean once we get those money that money is it tied in the same way that like the mblc money I don't know if you can answer that are you talking about school or I'm sorry library library okay this request is for the library the library has any an agreed upon plan that was based on specifications from the mb mess mblc okay that is the basis upon which they gave us a grant but we can't change the square footing right but this request I said we get ARPA funding it's funding here it's totally separate from mblc great no this request would the money would go to mblc and they would then allocate it out oh okay actually this is not a request that says write the check to Amherst it's a request that says write the check to mblc and I also there has been a very significant meeting of legislators from all 12 of the towns with the mblc to make sure that they're in agreement to receiving this because one of the other things that happens with these kinds of funding initiatives is is you want to make sure you don't offend and do something that the agency that has to administer it is not willing to do and the sense that mblc has given the legislators from the 12 towns is that they're very willing to go along with this if the state wants to give them more money but it would all come through mblc not directly to the town thank you Anna I'd like to make a motion yes I move to authorize the town council president to submit the letter to legislators regarding mblc funding for the jones library second no is there any further discussion or question michelle just a quick question is there any sense that because so this is a coalition of 12 municipalities coming forward that are all in the same boat so to speak do we know if there's a similar situation with the schools that are receiving the grant through the school grant program so it's possible it's it's it's we can assume that there is a possibility that this could occur similarly yes okay perfect I I hope it will thank you okay the motion's been made it's been seconded there any further discussion or comment thank you then we're going to move to vote and this is a vote just on the letter to legislators regarding mblc we're going to start with mandee joe hannacky hi anika lobes hi michelle miller hi dorthy pam yes Pam rooney I abstain kathy shane I abstain indy steinberg hi jennifer tov hi alisha walker no shallony bomen yes pat de angeles hi anna deboling goth here hi lindry smir is an I so it is 10 in favor one opposed two abstentions and no absence correct thank you we're going to move on to the letter to the css jc and in your letter in your packet is the letter from them and then they also appeared before us back in august and the letter that you have in front of you is draft and so um a couple different people I think wanted this pulled are their suggestions for changes Dorothy do you want to go first I did not like the language relevant to the police report it just sounded like a rehash of all the reasons that police departments don't give reports and don't respond to the public and I I do feel that the css jc is is correct that a lot of time has gone by and um you know it's like it's stonewalling why can't there be a report so that I don't paragraph I don't like your so you're referring to page two at the bottom of the page where we start while we support the release of investigative reports we are aware that there are various rights and responsibilities the town is required to honor including personnel rules collective bargaining agreements and personnel personal privacy information that is correct that mean those reasons may all be valid but still is there is there any kind of response is there responsibility to the people in the town and that just tells you why you can't get an answer and I think that the committee has very clearly stated that they've waited a long time and they wanted to have a report and this is just the language that says we're not going to we're not going to do it um so that doesn't make it go away that doesn't make the people who really feel they would like to have a report not want one you know it gets makes it worse so I'm interested in peace in the town I mean I so I would just really state that very strongly I'm very interested in peace in the town and I think that some kind of police response to the request would help create that is there a way in which you would like to modify the letter I would like to say that you are that you would be that you're hoping that such a report comes soon why why do they alone not have to give a report I mean the other things are also the timelines are just so so stretched out it's going to take what two years for the police oversight of board that's a long time and here it sounds like it's never for the police report so I I'm feeling that there was a lot of frustration amongst the committee members because they felt that they had been respectful and they had asked for things that were reasonable and yet they felt they were being stonewalled and so I am passing that on to you okay Dorothy what yes so you would like us to request that a report be released a report was released from the police department was a report the DEI officer gave a report right she gave a report which we said at that meeting I mean I certainly originally praised that report then after hearing listening to the response from the citizens of the town I agreed with them that it was a good start but that it was incomplete and they I thought that we were going to get a more thorough report and that there'd be some report from the police department and that hasn't happened and there seems to be no plan to have such a thing happen so I'm just saying that if you want people to feel positive about the town and positive about the changes that we're trying to do there has to be more response than that okay I'm I'm trying to come up with a sentence maybe Joe did you have your hand up on this one particularly well I just wanted to respond and say I think the way we've worded it or the way Lynn worded it in this draft is perfectly acceptable you can desire all you want about all sorts of things in this town but it doesn't mean it's legally possible and you can't always get the release of an investigative report just because you want it there are legal requirements which are set forth in here that might be the reasons why you an investigative report cannot be released there's personnel requirements there's privacy reasons there's and the privacy might go to also the people who were involved not necessarily the workers the staff members who were involved the DEI director gave a fantastic report in my mind about what whether there was a violation of civil rights um there in my mind there isn't a need for another report um because she answered the questions that were out there was there a violation of civil rights she answered those questions in a thorough report she talked about them we're not necessarily entitled to things we want just because we want them and that's what this letter says and it may not be a satisfactory answer but it is an answer and I'm not sure we can go much farther than that Jennifer so then I by the way I would like to stick to this issue before we go on to any others okay Jennifer so so then are we saying that there won't be a report because we already got one I mean just what Dorothy is I agree with Dorothy that we there should be some a report or some information coming from if so what what um Councillor Hanneke just said is we got the report so then that does contradict what's in here saying a report will be coming which I agree is too vague but um one or the other I mean I don't think anybody believed that the the that we have already gotten a report what would you call what we got well I mean it says here the town manager has agreed that the extent possible or the town will make information available as requested so sounds like can I I just want a man was saying he was requesting it it just seems very open-ended about when we'll it will come so the CSSJC in their letter specifically said in addition the CSSJC would like to recommend the following once an investigation occurs we want the report immediately released to the public so I wrote a sentence that was not specific to this report but to all reports all investigative reports and couched it in the issues that we have to all respect and then the town manager has agreed that to the extent possible given the issues that are stated there the town will make information available as requested so I'm trying to answer the question that they asked and not it and it was not they wrote this letter before the report was released I mean I agree with uh Councillor Pan that we want to reach a place you know a piece in consensus but I think I think what she's saying is that when because we can't because of privacy it also is not conducive to a certain accountability because it was and if there's a way and I think there's a feeling that there hasn't have been a full reckoning of the situation that occurred on that night I'm waiting for edits Michelle I appreciate that you're waiting for edits Lynn I also think that it's not that cut and dry for us to just provide edits in the moment here I think it's a bigger discussion so I'd like to share my perception in terms of the reports I see two different reports I see a report from the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Director and I just I want to say that Pamela came into this really she just started in her role and came into this and I'm not privy to what led to the direction that she took in terms of making a determination in her report but I want to share that from my perspective what that report would have done from a DEI director is to give an analysis of how the situation was experienced by the people involved and how those experiences impact diversity equity and inclusion in the town of Amherst so while I appreciated what Pamela put together and again I'm not privy to what gave her that direction in terms of making a determination and making the report really focused on a determination in the future if a situation were to occur in this you know and I hope that it doesn't but if it does and I think I said this from the very beginning what I would have liked to see in that report is really an analysis of the experience the perception the way that this impacts our goals in terms of diversity and equity and inclusion because I don't think I think that there's there's a lot that wasn't that wasn't expressed with respect to how this situation has impacted us as a community and then a separate report coming from the police department that gives more of an investigative idea about what occurred and while I hear what Mandy and others are saying about the limitations there might be I would like to know more clearly from either Paul or Chief Livingstone or whomever really not just to say there are limitations because of privacy but to really understand what type of investigative report can the police department release to the community within the limitations that are being set out and then I also just want to say that I really would have I really wish that the police department and Chief Livingstone would have spoken to this or made a statement much sooner I know that we talked about it in a council meeting maybe six weeks after the incident occurred and Chief Livingstone did speak there and I appreciate that but that piece I think sort of set the tone for all of the rest of the way that this has moved those are my comments thank you I'm sorry they're not edits but I hope that you will incorporate what I have said and what others are saying somehow into this Alisha so I think just saying on this specific topic that much Michelle stated very well a lot of what I was going to say so I won't say it all over again but just in addition that I think during the conversation that we had that included Pamela Young and the police chief and where we were all present in the BFFC that there was a specific request set forward by them to be able to sort of continue to work on the report with the DEI director as they thought that that would be part of their role as a committee and I think that we talked about that possibility but never came to an actual resolution like yes that is possible or no that is not possible and I think that we should also address that because I think that we I also agree that I feel like we're kind of like leaving them hanging not giving them enough information and it feels like it's really incomplete what putting this forward and I have other specific things but this is the only one for this specific topic so if that's okay with my idea we'll talk again later about the other things if that's what you wanted okay Alicia I'm going to do my best to recap and tell me if I missed something please please please so you're saying that you were echoing what Michelle was saying and that you also added there's the other element that the CSSJC wanted to work on the report with Pamela and you didn't want to ignore that request as part of this discussion and then shoot there was something at the end to anybody was then that's that's what I got and of course sorry no yes that was everything and just that I had other comments about other sections and I was sure Lynn wanted me to wait for those things Alicia also has other comments that she'd like to share but she will respect if you want her to do them now or wait if they're about this particular paragraph and the reporting that's what we're going to stick with now and then we'll come back to other comments we should there'll be plenty of opportunity okay so then that is it for now just that I wanted to like honor and acknowledge the request of the CSSJC to be working on this alongside the BEI director as they expected that that would be their role as the committee and to see if we can also add that to this discussion because I think I personally think we should allow them to do that but I think there was no actual conclusion to that suggestion you wanted to acknowledge that CSSJC had had believed that part of their role would be to write and and work on the report with Pamela and Alicia believes that they should be doing that and wants us to have the discussion as to how how to make that happen I think and Alicia correct me if I missed something okay I'm going to try and see if I can make myself clear yeah this might not completely be about an edit I have a question for Paul in the letter Lynn you state and I felt comfortable with but the the town manager has agreed to the extent possible the town will make information available as requested and it does it was a while ago when the community safety and social justice committee sent this letter so I'm wondering why we don't have answers and I'm asking Paul this in essence I think why we don't have answers to their questions um has outreach occurred to the youth and their families by the town has the chief of police filed a report or issued a statement regarding the abuse of power demonstrated by his officers and were the officers removed from active duty or suspended those are questions that and we haven't gotten that information so the to the extent possible I'd like to hear some of the answers to that Mr. Rockwell yeah so outreach was done to the families I won't speak on any kind of actions that were taken with employees that's not considered public information um I believe and I will talk with the chief if um I think is his intention I believe to put something in writing to the human rights commission because they've written to him directly and I think that's that is his intention thank you that's helpful okay um ma'am thanks I do appreciate the effort in putting this letter together I think I'm not comfortable enough with it to put my name to it for all of the reasons that people have brought up uh earlier um my understanding was that well first of all that the police oversight advisory board it was something that but I'd like to stick to this issue if we're done on reports well okay so is there any other comment on reports okay if we're talking specifically about the reports it was my understanding that I think it was stated in the meeting with chief Livingstone that the very clear what I would call a findings report by the new DEI director was was very helpful very clear but that in fact there was going to be additional information forthcoming from the police chief and that I don't think any of us have have seen I would agree that in in some part of this document that we would acknowledge that we want we want to understand how the town has learned from this experience and what what steps we we would want to be seeing and that's that's a poor way of wording it but um you know let's let's say to the committee we acknowledge that we've been slow in pushing through the legal and and administrative hurdles to provide you with real information and real feedback and we have not adequately included your feedback and your input in the solution so in essence rather than giving the reasons that we can't provide all the information we should be acknowledging that we kind of haven't acknowledge that I'm that we that we sort of haven't provided um much we haven't made much progress and acknowledge that when people say we haven't made much progress it leaves me with questioning being more specific meaning we haven't I mean but let me just take that back I I'm I'm trying to do something that I don't think we can do so let me just rephrase that that we acknowledge that we need to be pushing through the legal and administrative hurdles to and work with the committee to incorporate their input and their and their experience the experience of the community in a more complete report Dorothy I appreciated Pam Rooney's suggestions I just want to make a very simple point that we should not be hung up on all the formal and legal reasons why we can't do something and remember that we are town counselors we represent the people of the town and we're seemingly getting caught up in protecting town workers but ignoring the children and my responsibility will always be to the children first and it's been well three or four months and it's been a very traumatic event and we're just you know talking about things and not doing actions and I think it's time to really move forward and I think we have to acknowledge that we have not we have not done some of the things we should have done. So when I think of what happened here and I think of compassion as at the heart of this work that we're doing that CSSGC is doing and to me compassion means understanding the causes and conditions that led to the event to take place and so in the 53 second video it does not capture for me the context within which those statements were made and and without knowing the context or what led up to or what were the causes and conditions that led the police to make that statement was it stated in a certain context and and if not what led to those statements being made without knowing what led to those to that event we can't solve for it and just as an example if the context was you know if the statement was made in a certain context explaining that's a different situation but if it was made out of the police people being overworked or it was too late in the night or they were in their third duty or you know like I don't know what led up to that to me is the compassion piece that allows us to then not us but the police and the staff to kind of provide the kind of support that's needed to deal with that whether it's training whether it's we need more staff or and so to me we don't have enough information to really solve for what's happened that's one thing and and I understand that you know there is we are working within the system that has been created in the past and we're bound by it legally and and there's the trust of people involved it's a delicate issue and there is youth involved and what was the impact on them so my question was more around the youth also that there was outreach done and can we I mean I it just feels like I that there's not enough information for us in council to to support the youth in a way that supports them without knowing what harm was done and and so do we have a sense from the outreach done to them what was the harm done what is being provided to them as support and then from the police side what was the context what are the cause and conditions and so it just feels like we're sort of in the middle in a vacuum not knowing and we're trying to and in the least I'm hoping that we can create a safe trusting space to have a conversation with cssjc with the police with with the different people involved here so those are my questions andy well shallowness really said a lot of what I wanted to say and so I'm not going to repeat it but I just want to add that yes we do need to be sensitive to the residents in our community and all residents in our community to make sure that they feel heard that they feel respected that they feel supported but that's also true of our employees because if we fail to support our employees and make them feel that they have been treated fairly heard and respected we're not going to have any employees anymore and we need to make sure that we're looking at the entire community and setting a sense of values for the entire community and recognize that our employees are a part of that community and so I when shallowness was describing because what I was thinking too is that what we espouse is the sense of values and that we should make sure that we're clear about our values and then we make sure that our values are equally put across the entire community and that we recognize that all employees are there too and I sort of keep thinking about this because someday somebody's going to be unhappy about what our Crest responders do and how do we want our Crest responders to handle that situation respond to the community support the community but also feel that they're respected too and so I think that we really need a broad look at this and I hope we get there Jennifer and I guess to respond to Shalini or in response to Shalini I guess that's for all the questions she raised is why I think we're looking for you know a fuller report because it was what happened did go before you know there was something before and after the 53 second video so again that's just why we're asking you know for a full report you know and if CSSJC working with the DEI director and the police department could come up with that could create that report would be really helpful for everyone in town. Alicia. Okay I hope you can hear me a little bit better now so I hoping because I have a lot of challenges with this letter and a lot of things I would want to change but most of them all like follow back to the action or inaction of the council and not necessarily like the content of the letter but rather that the of how the content of the letter relates to like the reality of what has happened and what is going to happen and so while I don't agree with the contents of the letter and I hope we can change it it also is because I hope that we can change what our actions are in response to this letter and that that in turn will change what we have to write in the letter and so this conversation is kind of strange because I know like the whole vote is whether or not we agree with the letter and I don't agree with the letter because I don't agree with how we as a council have responded to the situation and so what I'm hoping will come out of this conversation is not just like yes we agree with this letter and no we don't agree with this letter but like what are our concrete next steps as a community and how can we better respond to these kinds of situations because again let alone from the content like it took a very long time for them to even get a response to this which is a serious issue and should have been prioritized and so like what changes can we actually make and then circling back to what I said earlier in terms of the CSSJC did have a specific request in our conversation to be able to revisit the report with the DEI director and sort of fill in pieces and we say that outreach has been done to the family and so is that going to be included in the report is the report going to be updated I think there are still a lot of things that we don't know again which I think a lot of other counselors have also said but and so aside from just approving the wording in this letter what are we actually going to do like can we actually allow the CSSJC to work on this with the DEI director and I'm looking for like a response to this question not that we just move on to the next counselor because I already asked this but I want to know what we can actually do aside from changing the wording of this letter one of the difficulties in writing in drafting a response and I'm just going to be honest I probably have gone at this thing 20 times it's the most difficult letter I've ever tried to put together and while I tried to respond to their letter what I'm hearing from the council is you wanted more you wanted me to respond to the situation and you wanted me to lay out things that should be done and yet many of the things that I'm hearing are not the job of the council they're the responsibility of staff that we hire and we evaluate and in the letter we've I've tried to lay out what our role is and some next steps but there was no way I was going to be able to write a letter that says the answers all of the many things that you've now raised and yet I also feel that a response was needed to this letter as even well before now so I'm feeling caught between a response to their letter versus I think what people are asking for is a response to what we've heard so far and to the situation and I that's not what I tried to do I tried to write a response to their letter not to what should we do how should we move forward and whether or not we should be telling people that we are part of our staff how they should behave and I'm I'm just saying I want to just tear the whole thing up and start over again and yet that doesn't get us anywhere it it means we have no response to this letter and I'm I'm just sharing I it's I have as much many strong feelings about this as each of you do about the people involved about the youth involved I also have very strong feelings that we need to figure out a way to move forward and we need to figure out how to say this happened this is what we're doing we value our employees we value our residents but we need to move forward and we have already put in place enormous and I mean enormous steps to help us move forward we have voted for Crest we voted for DEI we have put money and budgets for all of those but we're not going to heal this town if we as a council can't figure out how to move forward and if we just get stuck on well the report should have said this or we need this done to this report versus what kind of training what kind of things but also what is our role as a council versus the people who work for the town and in the process we have also said things that lump all situations with all of our employees and particularly our police and other first responders and it's come across as totally devaluing everybody and frankly when we devalue everybody we devalue ourselves so what I need from this council is do you want a response to this letter and if you do we need to deal with the letter or do you want some other conversation but I really need you to put it through the filter of what is our role I'm sorry I I've just spent too many hours trying to put forward some words to help us move forward I need to call a break let's do five minutes thank you for doing bits come back at 1046 thank you it's exactly right as you return please put on your video to let me know you're back I'd like to ask counselors to spend a moment reading the letter from CSSJC and then reading the letter the draft I have no problem with people wanting to change words in drafts the purpose of this discussion was around the letter it was not for the purpose of rehashing again what should have happened didn't happen what needs to happen but the the lens that you need to look at this letter with is what is our role what is the role of the town manager what is the role of individual committees and what is the role of staff none of us work full-time for the town some of us may feel we do but none of us do okay so Michelle are your comments about the letter well you know I have enormous amount of respect for you Lynn and I just respectfully disagree with this approach I really think that we're digging ourselves into a bigger hole here I think I appreciate that you wrote a letter in response I appreciate that open meeting law doesn't allow us to communicate in between meetings I had offered to look at this letter you know and and and offer some feedback to you and I really think what the approach is is we need to have a conversation about how this council wants to respond to the situation and then from that conversation be able to draft a written response to sort of enshrine and formalize what we've talked about as a council and if and I appreciate what you're talking about in terms of the lens but we are we how do I say this was up without sounding so Paul in a sense reports to us so if we're not in a sense but he does and so if we feel like there's something that is not within our purview to address but we feel strongly about it we need to be able to communicate that to Paul and I don't think that we have had that discussion as a council I don't think that we have talked enough about how we want to respond to the matter what sorts of reports we want what sorts of timelines we want to offer how we want to engage with the community safety and social justice committee in the future I don't think we've had any of those discussions so writing the letters sort of like I don't know I just feel like it we need to do some more work before we can write a letter in response and that's so I would ask that we include a conversation it's 10 50 at night I think we're all tired I think we all care a lot about this and I would ask that we have an agenda discussion at our next meeting where we can talk more about this because I won't support this letter as it stands right now so and I don't think it's just about editing some language in a sentence I think it's a bigger discussion Anika sorry so I I do agree with a lot of what Michelle just said at this point I know that we did come looking at editing this letter but like the letters that we have seen before personal opinions and accounts are coming into account I think that for one Pamela Young is is not with us and just you know a quick reflection on the last meeting I think that we did all see Dr. Pamela come in with the information that she had and during that she gave her report and then at that time there was information that was brought up that she was you know told wasn't included but she didn't have the information to include you know I just I think that this is a packed and loaded subject we have not been able to respond I am you know being open and honest I don't know where we are confined with open meeting laws how we've talked with to each other we have you know on one hand the pressure that we do not need data to to care for or respond to a community and and on one hand it's confusing who are we not responding to because we're hearing that the the parents and the youth involved are traumatized and they are not reaching out or speaking to anyone besides members of the CSS JC correct me if I'm wrong with that and if that is the case where is it in our purview that we at some point we are talking about legal implications we are talking about reports and what is in our purview what can what can we actually release so and I would and I would imagine as as Pamela is a direct report to only poll that is there some way that we as a council can help to facilitate so at least and if she doesn't she may have this information so at least there is someone else that is communicating or at least building a relationship to communicate with the parents and the youth involved here because at this point it says if we're ignoring people who haven't responded you know and I know for myself my lens with police and what can happen with the police good bad and ugly is not a response to you know 2020 you know I it's you know a little difficult for me if I'm going to pick in get into this letter but I think that you know some of us were dealing with some people here who have probably only witnessed some of what we're talking about through videos and through the internet and really you know have seen and had this in their lens after after 2020 and it's I don't mean to sound cynical I think this is very important and there was no one who would tell me I do not care about you because I've dedicated so much of my life to this but I've also dealt with a lot of these situations where unfortunately there are some ways that you are tied that legally we have to have certain information that I think that we are blurring here in the council so I do think that we're having two different discussions one is like response and demand for information and the other is like you know I think it's very important for us to be clear what are those legal implications that we are or administrative hurdles what what pending reports are there that haven't been released to make sure that we have actually all that information and most importantly can start to build a relationship so the the parents and the youth involved are not just anonymous I understand that youth names can't be out there but you know how do we really move forward if it is just on the CSSJC to read letters anonymously you know how do we get to the the people involved I would just imagine and in my opinion that would be uh through Dr. Pamela but you know again I think this is a circular conversation at this point at least for me I'm feeling like I'm rambling and it's not intentional but I do think that what started out as a letter and I do understand and I absolutely respect all the time that you put into it Lynn I think just it's a spiraling effect from all of the letters today they've all been inclusive of our opinions and and this is one that I would imagine is the monster of all even thinking about getting reflecting all 13 opinions and feelings behind this letter thank you I'm not worried I'm just trying to figure out where we're moving for next I mean probably taking the letter off the table and we'll see what goes on next Pat well I said to you in after I read the letter in the packet that I thought it was a good letter I think I even said it was an excellent letter because it generalized what the council response was I'm gonna ramble but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do it for very long but and I still actually stand by the letter as it's written what we have not done is really address the issues and that's got nothing to do with the letter we don't look at ourselves as a community as a council as individuals very often and really address issues of white supremacy or structural racism we have and we hear anger on the part of some people of color people of African heritage Latinx people we hear anger and it feels like a tax and we run for cover and comfort so and we get too shy to say where we agree and where we disagree with those voices even among ourselves so