 All right, I am going to go ahead and call us to order. Welcome, Dr. Shabazz. Thank you for joining. And I am calling to order the August 28th meeting of the African Heritage Reparation Assembly at 2.04 PM with the extension of chapter 20 of the acts of 2021. The meeting will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so via Zoom or by telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means. This meeting, as Jennifer said, is being recorded. I'm going to do a quick sound check, and then I'm also going to check in with Jennifer. What we have here on the agenda in terms of approving these minutes, which were also on the agenda last week and we did not approve, are they already still to go? Is that still the right dates? You're muted, Jennifer. It's only been like four years now. 731 through 821 are new, and you guys haven't received those, but you can approve the 64, 611, and 612, 710 meeting. Then it's that we're in the back end. Great, OK. So let me make sure everyone can hear and be heard. I'm going to start with you, Hala. There you can hear me. Excellent, yes, thank you. And Dr. Rhodes. I can hear you, and I hope you can hear me. Yes, very well. And Dr. Chavaz. Yes, I'm here, and I will establish my video connection when it's finished. No problem, no worries at all. OK, and we can hear you. So I'm going to put a motion on the floor before we go to our first period of public comment to approve minutes. The motion is to approve the June 4, 2023, June 11, 2023, June 12, 2023, and the July 10, 2023. Is there a second? Second. OK, Dr. Rhodes seconds. Any discussion? OK, so I'm going to do a roll call vote, and I'll start with you, Dr. Rhodes. All right. Hala. Aye. I'm an aye, and Dr. Chavaz. Yes. OK, thank you. So those minutes have been approved. Just so we have for the record here, Ms. Bridges and Yvonne and Alexis are unable to join us today. So I'm going to go ahead and call our first period of public comment. And if you would like to make public comment, please use the raise hand function, and I will read our statement. During the public comment period, the chair will recognize members of the public. When called on, please identify yourself by stating your name, pronouns, and address. Residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at the discretion of a chair based upon the number of people who wish to speak. We will not engage in a dialogue, but we will be listening closely. So I'll just wait a second. OK. So I'm not seeing any hands right now, but we will come back for our second period of public comment later. OK. Woo. Breath. So today we have some very important matters to discuss. So I'm glad we were able to get to a quorum here. The first thing that I wanted to go over with you all is the timeline. Given where we're at in our process and when we're expected to publish and present on our report, I put together a timeline that I would like everyone to take a look at, and I'm going to share my screen in a second to do that. And then beyond that, we have the discussion of our recommendation on the fund. And Irvin and I had a very productive meeting this morning with Paul Backelman and with the chair of the finance committee as well as the town council president. And that was very helpful. And so we'll talk with you about that. And then we have to decide on our successor body charge. So that's something that we have a template for, but we haven't really filled in the blanks. We haven't really deliberated on that very heavily. And based on the timeline that I put out for you now, we can decide how we want to approach that. We also have one outstanding recommendation that I wanted to make sure we concluded today, which is in relation to health. We began that discussion last meeting. And I just wanted to make sure that we have a solid understanding on that. And so we'll move into some of these other. There's other kind of little pieces such as I'd like to get your permission to share the report with select folks for some feedback so that we can incorporate any sort of high level feedback that we might get from some folks. And I'll explain more about that. OK, so let's start with any questions on any of that. That was a mouthful. All right, so I'm going to just share my screen. I think I should have the ability to do that. Looks like I do. And let me make sure what I do with it. Oh, here it is. OK. All right. Oh, no, that's not it. Hang on. Oh, there we go. All right. OK, here we go. All right. So let's start here at the top. And already you'll see in this timeline that one of the pieces of the timeline didn't happen yet. And there's a good reason for that. So I was hoping to circulate the draft, the current draft to you all on Saturday. But given circumstances of having this meeting this morning, I decided that it would be best for Matia to incorporate whatever our recommendation is going to be there, as well as continue to incorporate some of the other pieces and then to circulate the draft. So our goal is to come out of this meeting to get the rest of the recommendations in order and then circulate the draft to you all this evening. So you can just assume that. So here we on today, I had the 10 a.m. meeting. We've already spoken about that. We have the word says MK edits. This means that it's sort of going into the process with Matia and we're editing based on what we've discussed and deliberated upon. So we have our 2 p.m. meeting. I'm just going to move through this pretty quickly. The most important thing that we need to think about is the next few days. Matia is going to be unplugging starting in the afternoon of August 31st for some personal matters. And so we'll be available again on the 5th. So let me just stop the share quickly to say that in the meeting this morning, Lynn expressed that given what we have going on in the community right now, particularly the resignations on the school committee and having to have special meetings and provide additional agenda items for that. She is asking for our flexibility in the case that we may need to present our findings on October 2nd as opposed to September 18th. And I just wanted to put that out there to the committee. I think that she would make it happen for us on September 18th if she could, but it will be sort of a full agenda as I understand it. It's also the night that we have the public forum on the master plan. So October 2nd would be the next meeting and that does not mean that we can't finish our work before then, but it just means that we have to decide on when we would like to have it published. And then if October 2nd is the date, that's the date. So any objections or concerns or considerations that we should be thinking about with respect to that? Michelle, what is your inclination? I hear what Council Member Grismar is saying. It sounds eminently wise to me and also the logistics of what else is on tap for that September meeting, but what is your own recommendation? My recommendation is that we stay the course in terms of our work because there are members that are already sort of like unable to continue to attend because we're beyond the timeline that we had discussed like Yvonne sort of struggling to fit things in. So I think this is great in the sense that it gives us a little extra cushion, but we should still stick to a timeline here and so that we can sort of finalize our piece of things. Does that make sense, Dr. Schwarz? So just understanding. So stick with the timeline we're pushing for, but at this point going ahead and accepting the October date that's been proffered. Yes, if Lynn responds to me and says, hey, you know what? Yeah, I think we need to do this October 7th. I'm not gonna, I don't think we should make an issue at all of that. I think we should go with that and certainly respect there's a lot going on right now. Does that work okay for you, Dr. Schwarz and others? Just speaking for myself, I think it works fine. One of the things we talked about was the opportunity to have more of the university and college community present when the meetings would happen, presenting the report to the community. And I think this actually works better because it gives us a little more time to begin to notify members of the campus community and get them tuned in than if we proceeded with that September date. Folks will have only been back about a week by that September date and we'd really have to ramp up to begin to even kind of, and we'd be letting people know in the midst of all the noise of the start of the new semester. So I think for those reasons that we previously discussed, I think going with the date certain there in October is perhaps even better for those purposes. Those are great points, absolutely. And I guess I would just be curious what the committee feels about how in advance of the presentation to the town council, do we want to publish the report itself? So we can think about that. I always intended to publish at least five days prior to that meeting because we want to give the council and the public an opportunity to look at it before we present, especially if we may or may not have a specific period of public comment. If Lynn is open to that and we want that, we may be able to incorporate that into the agenda as well so that folks who would like to speak. So in that case, getting it out there before that meeting might be is a good opportunity to allow for that to happen. Any other comments or questions about that piece of things? Just a quick comment on that last piece. One thing that might be good to go out even prior to the five days that you're talking about which would probably be like September 30th or 31st as if we had coherent around the executive summary part a little sooner, we could perhaps go ahead and release the executive summary and noting that our larger report will be coming out at the time of the scheduled meeting. That's an interesting thought and that's actually I'm really glad that you brought that up Dr. Shabazz. Matia and I have been discussing the executive summary quite a bit and it was on my notes to discuss that with you all. So let me just do that now while we're on that topic. So I have been thinking, I've looked at a lot of different reports and trying to understand really what the purpose of an executive summary is. And oftentimes an executive summary is just, it's for that. That's for like executives or sort of like in this case, the council to have a high level view of what's in the report. And I have sort of a gut feeling really that we may be better just to not have an executive summary at all and really create a circumstance in which people if they want to know what it is that we're recommending and what our findings are that they will have to read the report. So I'm curious what other, I think that it's been a very traditional method to use an executive summary in reports and I understand why it's done but I'm not necessarily tied to having one. And so I'm curious what other folks feel about that. Dr. Shabazz. So, you know, we could even by my standpoint just kind of throw out the language of executive summary. What I really have in mind is a message that digest what is the, you know, what to expect in the report. And so for example, that can be said, Dr. Rhodes once commented that I speak in paragraphs. So, you know, that can be digested into one paragraph that what is forthcoming is a 1000 page report that will, well, inclusive of the appendices but is a 1000 page report that addresses the charge of the AHRA in terms of recommendations of an ongoing or successor structure, the financing of a local reparation program relative to the $2 million fund previously created by the council as well as other comments on financing and a compendium of the recommendations and points raised about the harms that a reparations program should address that we heard and have discussed and analyzed after X number of community listing sessions, a robust community survey process involving so many respondents, you know, work done nationally with leading reparations organizations and even internationally to consult for best practices and ideas, boom, that's the paragraph. You know, so it's just basically, you know, digesting what's coming, why you want to read it and what are some of the ways in which it will be speaking to our charge. So that may not be the traditional executive summary idea but that's really what I have in mind that could perhaps be released in advance. Excellent, okay, that's really, really great. Would anybody like to add to that or comment on that? I think that's a really excellent suggestion, Dr. Schbaas. Okay, great, so let's go with that. And so now that we've moved from this agenda item of talking about the timeline, let's continue on. I'd like to share first, what has been added to this draft that you will receive or will be added to this draft that you will receive this evening. So based on our discussion today, we will firm up the funding recommendation. We've also worked on the concentric circles recommendation to incorporate the conversations that we've had about eligibility. And then I have added an additional recommendation that I wanted to just quickly get feedback on here. It occurred to me that we did not have a recommendation in the report regarding continued education to mostly the non-black community regarding the importance of reparations. This is really integral because in order to sustain support for reparations and Amherst, as well as to develop support, we need to be cognizant that education is a critical element there. So the Stolen Beam series, which many folks have either participated in or are aware of is what I wanted us to consider recommending, not exclusively, but that it be used as an example. And the question I had for the committee was initially I had thought that any, the Stolen Beam series is free, but any sort of resources that would be committed, say toward marketing that series, I thought initially, okay, we have the reparations fund to cover that, but then I thought would it make more sense for the recommendation actually be that the money comes from the DEI or from some other source given that it is not going to necessarily directly impact black residents, the way that the other recommendations are. So the floor is open, if anybody would like to comment on that. Don't you kind of think the allyship of the non-black members kind of is equally as important as that all the other recommendations to continue the reparations? Absolutely. But what do you, do you mean like in terms of where the funding for that? Oh, I see. Well, I mean, I think if you can link it to the DEI department or to the HRC or to the, like if you have the HRC or the CSSJC be a co-sponsor of the events and it can easily come out of their budget. Okay. Does that from a philosophical perspective land, you know, as opposed to using money from the fund, whatever it is that we have on an annual basis. And again, the resources, it's a free program in that case, but maybe marketing it will have some, you know, resources attached to it. The only thing, so I hear sort of two parts. So to the first part, I think, and I thought we maybe even had already, you know, agreed that that kind of ongoing educational work is definitely something that we want to recommend and ask the council to in, you know, whatever ways. But it sounds the second part of what you raised, it sounds like specifically more about a, particularly budgetary aspect around the marketing piece. And, you know, I think that is a, is probably really more an item that the successor body could really reasonably, you know, reconcile or address. I think it's sufficient, in my view, I think it's sufficient enough now to recommend that we, you know, that the town would embrace all such educational activities and support accordingly. You know, it could be something that our marketing division from within the town, Brianna Sunrid and that area may have ideas and resources that are cost or no cost that could really help to market and to amplify. So I think rather than right now have to load up a recommendation that, you know, calls for a particular monetary support around marketing. I think it's sufficient to simply say that we're recommending support for educational work, such as Stolen Bean series and others, and that the town would, you know, in look at how to support in ongoing ways, whether, and again, its own marketing division through PTI, HRC, as Jim Furze raised, you know, Jim Furze raised, you know, but that we could just kind of leave that open-ended rather than trying to, you know, nail down calls for a specific budget amount or support for a budget amount of this point. Excellent, excellent, okay. All right, great. And so if there aren't any other comments on that I'm gonna move on to the fund and I would like for Dr. Rhodes and I to share with the committee the sort of summary of what, of our discussion this morning. Dr. Rhodes, would you like to do that or would you like me to start off on that? Honestly, Mr. Albert would like for you to do it. I have two more meetings today and I'm fading rapidly. I know, I'm so sorry. Oh my goodness, we're just, it's not an easy time right now. So absolutely. Let me try to summarize what occurred today. So we had a very productive meeting. We shared the two possibilities. So essentially I started the meeting by saying that when we started talking about this two months ago, what we talked about was the need to have meaningful money now for initiatives. So we went to Sean and we said, hey Sean, we recognize that the current paradigm basically makes us wait 10 years before we can start pursuing initiatives. And that within the sort of context now of these recommendations, particularly given the recommendations are in many ways, companions or in collaboration with other initiatives that are already ongoing in the town, we would like to have meaningful money now to begin our work. And so Sean came back to us and he said, I agree essentially and why don't you recommend accelerating the growth of the fund? And so then we came back and we said, okay, what are the options for accelerating the growth of the fund? The first option that I had put out there was to move the balance of what's left of the full $2 million commitment from the current reserve account and just sort of like move that money into the reparations bucket. And again, for anybody who may be watching or isn't clear on this. So this has always, we've talked about this fund being like an endowment fund. So only the investment income off of the principle will be used on an annual basis toward initiatives. So the first option was, okay, let's move this money from this bucket to this bucket that's labeled reparations. And then on an annual basis, the town can pay itself back into the reserves and then we'll have the income there to be able to begin pursuing initiatives immediately. The second option, so we went back to Sean with that. Sean also thought that was a good idea but had some concerns that were more related to precedent setting and some other things. And he said, instead, why don't you consider picking an amount of time that is less than 10 years, so like four years and saying, we recommend that you accelerate the growth of the fund and get it to 2 million within four years. And so you divide out the 1.6 that's left and would have to through certified free cash, transfer that money over on an annual basis for the next four years. Both of those options were well received by the people that we met with this morning. And then there was a third option that was presented. The third option was the possibility of, okay, right now we modeled the annual contribution off of the cannabis tax revenue and we know that the revenue is declining. So the option to explore is, let's say it's $100,000 this year, that cannabis tax revenue is $100,000. And so it comes time for certified free cash to be transferred into our fund. And so what we do there is we say we've determined that X number is needed to meaningfully create reparations initiatives on an annual basis. I'm gonna use $50,000 for that. So that meaningful number is $50,000. And so of that $100,000, we're going to take $50,000 and we're gonna use it. And then the other 50, we're gonna put into the fund. So this is gonna mean that the endowment itself is gonna take a lot longer to grow to that $2 million figure, but it's also going to mean that we have the funds available to us on a regular basis. And it's also going to mean that we have the funds available to us immediately to begin pursuing the initiatives that the black community chooses to pursue. So that's a third option. And so what sort of came out of the meeting is and what I would like to recommend to the committee is that we include in this recommendation an example that identifies the problem with the current paradigm, identifies the need, meaning what is our funding goal that we feel is significant on an annual basis. And then outlines these three options and asks that the council take those to the finance committee to review and explore and determine what would be the best way for the town to meet our goals. Another mouthful. Sorry, I'm just full of them today. I'm gonna pause and see if there are any responses or how folks are feeling about that approach. I would just ask if Irv is able to, if he has anything to add or amend to that. No. Dr. Ritz. Michelle did a tremendously good job of summarizing all those options. And I particularly like the one where we get it all up front and the other one is that like also we take part of what would be coming to us now and spend it targeted for expenditure and the rest will be done as a contribution as we would have already done. A lot of this is one of the ideas and one of the two of those ideas are all based upon the discounted fast flow model. And I think all of them have an opportunity. I, as I stated to both Paul and Len, want to have something nailed down that is agreed on so we don't have to depend upon the actions of future councils. Thank you. And thank you both for the beating and for this presentation. I am just kind of mulling it over right now. I'm also attracted to the idea of the upfront option. But I just wanted to raise a question relative to that. What I heard as the challenge relative to the upfront is the way some council members might look at it as a precedent setting move that they might not support. Could any of you expand on where that idea as you understand it, this fear of creating a precedent? Yeah, I can share that, you know, when it came time to make decisions on funding the new elementary school building project, for example, there was a call from the community to take some of the funds from the reserves to, to make the, what we were going out to the community less essentially. And so that precedent already got set. I believe we agreed to move five million from the, from the reserves as well as ask Paul to find five million somewhere else. So I think that Sean's concern was if we continue to take from the reserves in this way, are we setting a precedent that I think in particular would put us in a position where we would be oppositional to our financial policy, which our financial policy asks that we keep a reserve of a certain percentage. And so the other piece I think that he was concerned about is will the council remember to pay itself back? I think they will. But he had that concern. And I think that, you know, given that this is the principal would remain intact, no matter what, and if there was an emergency even that the town would have the same mechanisms and controls to take that money and move it elsewhere for whatever it was needed for. I don't think that concern is as. I think. I think this precedent setting is the is sort of the, the biggest concern from a practical and political perspective. Does that answer your question, Dr. Spas? It does. And what I hear you say is it's not the fear of creating a new precedent. It's a fear of building momentum around a precedent that was recently set. That was, you know, that had some folks not really fully agreed on board. And probably it would come up again that they, we're going down a road that, that, you know, we've, we've done once and we don't want to do again. Is that, is that along the lines? I think that's exactly right, Dr. Shabazz. And I think. Because we would. Presumably have to consider the bulk of the reserves now is in this newly created capital reserves account. And so we have some very serious needs in, in the way of a DPW and a fire station and. Real people are being impacted on a daily basis in our community because of the condition of the DPW and the fire station. And so there's going to be both practical and political. Concerns raised. To have public reserves that could potentially be used to fund one of those other projects or to partially fund. However, I did not get this sense. And maybe Dr. Rhodes has a different feeling on this. I did not get the sense that either of the two options we presented or the option that Paul thought of. They were all on the table. They were all very, you know, they even. that they appreciated the creativity and they appreciated the sort of critical thinking that we've put into this. So I think that they will seriously consider all three and I think the finance committee is the place for that to happen. And that doesn't mean that there can't be public input when that occurs and there will be I'm sure and input also from this group. So my preference is not for us to draw a hard line in the sand and only put one thing and say, this is what we want and this is all we'll take because the reality is that's not what we're gonna get necessarily. So I think if we put, if we show, if we demonstrate that we have thought this through, we understand the larger context, we understand the other competing demands and here are the options that we would like you to consider. I think that that approach will get more support than a singular recommendation. Can I be heard? Yes, you can. Please. Because my, everything looks like this keeps going in and out and I can't get my video back. I can't see you just so you know. Yeah, we can. I can't get my video back, I don't know why. Maybe it didn't like the way I looked. Anyway. You're on, Dr. Rhodes, we can hear you. Did you wanna? No, I didn't. I just wanted to confirm that you could hear me. Okay. So are there any other, are there any objections to that approach? And of course, wait until you see the language, wait till you see the way that we've sort of framed it and then we can of course, if there are, if there's any opposition to that, we can certainly come back to that and discuss it. Sounds good. Okay, excellent. And Hala and Dr. Rhodes, I assume I don't see your hands raised so I'm gonna assume that it's safe to move on and please let me know if you'd like to come back to that. So the other two pieces that I wanted to make sure we covered today, the first is the health recommendation. I wanted to get some more clarity from the committee on that. We agreed last week that we were going to recommend or endorse at least the Board of Health statement on race and health disparities in Amherst. And I've sent that all to you. And so the question here is in other places in the report where we've endorsed something, we have a recommendation tied to it. I recently did receive the community health assessment that the Board of Health did and it has some very interesting information and I don't think that it's been formally published yet but I think it's safe for me to send it to the group and take a look at, but I'm wondering if that, if it's only going to be an endorsement, might we consider including it somewhere else in the report as opposed to it having a standalone recommendation or does this committee feel there is a particular recommendation around health that we would like to make that expands beyond endorsing that statement. And maybe the answer is that you need to look at the community assessment but the floor is open for that. Okay. Well, I will send the community assessment and if there are thoughts on that, then we'll have to discuss that the next time we meet. And for now we'll do our best to put that recommendation into some language that makes sense within the context of the report. I'm also going to because I'm sensing, I know Dr. Rhodes is not feeling well, I know Dr. Shabazz is also has some stuff going on. So let me just put out there that the committee charge that we're recommending has not been approved by this body yet. I can do some work over the next few days to put based on my understanding of committee charges and based on all of our discussions here, I can put something together and I can send it to the committee for review and feedback. As always, you would just provide that feedback to me and Jennifer and Pamela. And then we can make a final approval of that. And at the same time, Mati and I will be working on concluding statements and acknowledgments for the report. We'll have a whole page of acknowledgments, I'm sure, as well as sort of the visual aspects. I'll be working on a power, not a PowerPoint, but a slide deck for us for our presentation as well. So really the final matter that I wanted to cover before we call one more period of public comment is, I would like the committee's permission to share the report with some folks in the community. And I'm totally open to who others on the committee would like me to share, us to share the report with if there are folks that you think would look at the report and be able to provide us with some feedback. And particularly black folks, whether they're within the community or not, that might be able to and willing to read the report and offer us feedback. So I first wanna ask if I have permission to share it, if there's any opposition to me sharing it with a few people, please let me know. And I can share who those people are if you reach out and you have any concerns. And I'd also like to ask if there are any particular folks and you don't have to answer that now, but that you think would be good to provide the draft to for some feedback. And Jennifer, I know you and I had talked about that at one point, so we can talk about that again if you have anybody in mind. Okay, so I'm not seeing any opposition. Thank you for that and for trusting me to share it with some folks. I will check in with other committee members who are not here just to ensure that that's okay. And we'll just, we'll go from there. So I'm gonna go ahead and call the second period of public comment. So if you would like to make public comment, please use the raise hand feature and I will bring you into the room. Okay, so I'm not seeing any public comment. And so before we wrap up, I just one more time would like to review this timeline for myself. So we are unable to meet, of course, next Monday due to the holiday. So I had proposed in this timeline that we might be able to meet on Tuesday the fifth. So I will do a poll. So we don't have to do that right now and see if that's a possibility. I know probably some folks are getting back. Dr. Shabazz might, the semester might be starting, I don't know what others have going on, but I'll do a poll for that. Are there any other member comments or questions or anything at this time before I adjourn the meeting? All right, it looks pretty quiet out there. Well, thank you all really appreciate it. And we will see you next week, next time. Thank you, adjourning at 2.50. Good week, everyone. Thank you, you too, Jennifer. Bye.