 Thank you and welcome to the December 5th Select Board Meeting. Tonight we have an honor that we have every so often, which is to host the ceremonial swearing-in of some of our public safety officers who have recently been promoted. Tonight we have the honor of witnessing the swearing-in of Jerry Malar to position of Lieutenant and Todd Lang to the position of Sergeant. Mr. Musanti, would you like to tell us about this? Yes, I'm really pleased to have the ceremonial swearing-in. These promotions have been in effect since August 31st. And one of the many pleasures of being in my position is to work with one of the finest police departments in the Commonwealth. And Jerry and Todd exemplify the best of the Amherst Police Department. Jerry Malar, on the Midnight Shift, in a very, very important role, providing leadership and mentoring to our officers and Officer Lang, taking advantage of his many skills and taking on more of a leadership role in the role of Sergeant. So I'd like Chief Livingstone to say a few words and then we'll do our ceremonial swearing-in with Town Clerk Sandra Burgess. So welcome and thank you everybody, friends, family members and colleagues of the Amherst Police Department. The Town Manager put it fast. It's always a difficult process for promotions in Amherst, in light of the fact that the officers involved are obviously well qualified. So the Town Manager, as they do, took a very active role in the emotional process. And we feel very confident in both Lieutenant Miller's and Sergeant Lang's abilities and we really look forward to what they're going to bring to the table. So welcome all and congratulations, guys. You should be very, very proud. So welcome. Okay. Do you talk first? Okay. So if you would raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear or affirm to faithfully and impartially perform the duties and come in upon you by your appointment as a Sergeant for the Amherst Police Department? I do. Congratulations. Thank you very much. And Jerry, if you would raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear or affirm to faithfully and impartially perform the duties and come in upon you by your appointment as a Lieutenant on the Amherst Police Department? I do. A couple things to be thankful for for me. For having this position is obviously the opportunity to be here as Lieutenant. Working for the town I actually grew up in. My family here in a row. My wife, my daughter, my son, my brother, his family. It's all very important. And of course, my second family back here. Now it's cute, but... I don't think it's cute. So I just want to say thank you for this privilege. Hopefully I'll come to a rise to an area where its leadership is my expertise. Thank you. I would like for your support, not only for myself, but for the department that we're going to receive. You'll appreciate it and know it. I would like to thank my family for coming up and for their support. And also for the members of the department. I appreciate you all coming up here tonight. And for my wife for continued support. And then, Mary, Lieutenant Miller's remarks. I do appreciate it. And I look forward to working with everybody. Thank you very much. I apologize to Lieutenant Miller. I mispronounced his name in the beginning. It's the Kevin Millar Red Sox. Thank you all for coming in for this occasion. Larry Kelly, Tick Toff Citizen. Speaking of public safety, Saturday morning, very early, say around 3 o'clock, 3.30 a.m., if you had need of the Emerson Police Department for an emergency situation and you called APD, you would have had to wait because we had five officers count them five at 202 College Street for a party house, which had gotten out of hand. In fact, it had gotten out of hand so badly that they had to call for backup. So who did they call? UMass. Well, guess what? UMass was having their problems too, so they couldn't come. So we had Hadley, two cruisers from Hadley, two cruisers from Amherst College responded. In fact, we should send them a thank you note. So they did an excellent job helping out our police department. But this is getting out of hand. I mean, we had a police officer assaulted with a dangerous weapon with a stick. And that's at 3.30 in the morning. Now this, I mean, the last time I came here to complain about this, the last time I was ticked off, was in late September, early October. And what was that incident? The Meadow Street riot. We had rocks and bottles thrown at police officers. You got to do something. You got to do something before someone gets seriously injured. Now let me shift gears for a second. That ticks me off. But what scares me, what scares me as a family person born and raised in this town, if you had called for an ambulance at around that same time, early Saturday morning, you had a medical emergency and you needed help immediately, you would have had to wait. Because we had three ambulances tied up at UMass with ETOH students. ETOH is shorthand for drunk, passed out drunk. But you have to be careful because they can die. They can choke on their own vomit as we saw in Florida a week or two ago with that hazing incident. So I'm not saying we don't transport them. By all means, we have to transport them. But we had three ambulances tied up at UMass for that. We had one ambulance tied up at Amherst College for a student ETOH. So that's four out of our five ambulances. The fifth one was preoccupied with something you would expect. Someone fell and was injured and needed an ambulance. But at that point, all five ambulances are out. So if you needed an ambulance, you would have to wait for Northampton to respond. And in medical emergencies, you don't want to be told by the 911 operator, well, sorry, we'll get there when we can. And God forbid if you had a major structure fire at that same time. Because as I'm sure you know, our ambulances are manned by the firefighters. So at that point, A, all our ambulances are tied up. B, we have no professional firefighters. So we had the entire town was being protected by the student call force. God love them, but they can only man one pumper. And in a major structure fire, that's not enough. So if my house is on fire at three o'clock in the morning, I want some of the professionals to respond. So please, could you do something? Thank you. Thank you very much for coming in and expressing your thoughts about that. This is a very serious issue. It's an ongoing challenge and we're continuing to try to address it. But thank you very much for coming in. Anyone else for public comment? Okay, let me note a couple of things about the agenda this evening. We have sort of a strange agenda. As of Wednesday, there were two additional things on here that are on here now. One of them came off before the agenda got posted. And the other one has come off since then. That is the 645 public hearing for propane storage. That originally had been postponed because it had not been, the abutter notices had not gone out. But now I'm assuming that the abutter notices didn't go out because there was a question raised as to whether or not this was even within our jurisdiction. The new information is that it's not because it's state property. It doesn't actually require select board permitting on this. Only a, or I guess it was a license, not a permit from the select board. But a permit from the fire chief is required so that what had originally looked like it would be postponed now is canceled entirely. Select board is not expected to see that issue again. So now we have no timed items until 7 o'clock, which is way more time to fill than I would like to have. So we're going to talk about everything very slowly and in exquisite detail until then, okay? All right, let's see. Let us start with the acceptance of affordable housing restrictions. And I know Mr. Zomek is here to comment on that if we need assistance with that. At town meeting just a couple of weeks ago, town meeting gave us permission to accept the affordable housing restrictions on two units, or the units, it's four units altogether, I believe five through 11 at Olympia Drive. These are managed by the Amherst Housing Authority and town meeting approval is required in order for the select board to accept the affordable housing restrictions on these. You'll recall that during the discussion of that issue, folks were wondering how come the affordable housing restriction that we were accepting was only 15 years? How come these were not actually being put into an affordable, an, a permanent affordability restriction? How come they weren't there already and how come we weren't going for something more than 15 years? I've had discussions with Mr. Musanti about this and my understanding is, and Mr. Zomek's memo speaks to this also, which is in our packet and is available online for folks, that as part of giving money towards the rehabilitation and improvement of these properties, the folks giving money, in this case, the Department of Housing and Community Development, DHCD at the federal level, requires a restriction to be put on it. It's kind of that, that's the return for the, for the loan or the, the grant of the money. If we were to give away the whole restriction, if we were to permanently restrict the housing now, then we would have kind of no leverage to get money in the future. So the 15 years gives DHCD something that they're looking for and lets us keep the ability to, to extend that restriction in the, in the future for, for additional funds. Mr. Zomek, would you like to correct anything wrong that I've said there or add any additional information? No, but I'd be happy to come up here and say a little bit more about it. I'm hoping we don't go into excruciating detail to, to fill time. It's all you, 20 minutes, here we go. I'm hoping this, Mr. Musanti said this would take five minutes. So yes, in large part you are correct. Let me just back up a little bit. I have not been involved at a very deep level with this particular restriction, but I did talk with staff a little bit today and we've been in touch with Coleman and Page, but let me just quickly summarize. So the restriction that you have in your packet was developed by Attorney Sharon Everett at Coleman and Page. It was approved as to form. The content is in line with other restrictions required by DHCD for the use of CDBG funds in the other mini-entitlement communities throughout Massachusetts. And the restriction you have before you is in keeping with our past practice at other projects where we, through our mini-entitlement status, through using CDBG funds, have rehabbed other properties. For instance, at Chestnut Court and Pomeroy Village and similar projects. The purpose of the funds is really not to purchase or buy a restriction. That is something that DHCD requires, but the real purpose of the funds is the rehab of the four units. For that investment, you are correct, Ms. O'Keefe, that it comes with a 15-year requirement. Other DHCD programs, Mr. Rosenblatt, for instance, reminded me that we use CDBG funds to rehab the North Amherst School. Those capital funds only came with a five-year restriction on that particular building. So it is to, in part, get that restriction so that for a period of time, the property is guaranteed to be affordable at the levels outlined in the document. So the real purpose of the funds is to pay for the work. The restriction essentially needs to come with it. Unlike CPA, the CPA legislation requires a restriction in perpetuity, and that covers the three major categories, recreation, conservation, and historic preservation. So we have sought, using when we've used invested CPA funds, restrictions in all three of those categories. So town meetings question to us, because what they did is they gave us permission to accept this restriction, and their question was, why isn't this property already restricted in perpetuity? Why wouldn't we want to, as a town, take steps to assure that this is always part of our affordable housing inventory? Why would we only protect it for 15 years? So that was what we were talking about, and I thought that the answer was, in part, this is sort of some leverage on our part, too, as something that's attractive to the donor, the lender, the granting organization, and that's why we don't restrict it permanently. I think that's part of the answer. The other part is that, in essence, any property held by the Amherst Housing Authority, their purpose and mission covers the affordability piece of having property, having housing units in town be affordable for residents who are living here now and in the future, in the event that, in the next seven, eight, 10, 12, 14, 15 years, the Housing Authority, for some reason, ceased to exist, this restriction would live for that period of time. If we were to seek a restriction in perpetuity, I think there would need to be some sort of greater payment, if you will, because the purpose of the CDBG funds are not to guarantee in perpetuity these properties. You'll also note that in the exact wording from DHCD, the Rehabilitation Assistance for Investor-Owned Properties is referenced, and so housing authorities are a little bit of a, they're a different kind of being, we can invest CDBG funds in private properties, and what we're getting out of that is a 15-year restriction, after which the property then could go back to market rates. In this case, that's not likely to happen because it's owned, operated and managed by the Amherst Housing Authority, and as part of their mission, it is to provide housing for people in various categories of income in Massachusetts and in the region. Any questions or comments from Mr. Zomek on the Affordable Housing Restrictions? Mr. Hayden. Just one quick comment. I, you know, I'd heard the request that the town meeting made for the permanent restriction and, you know, sort of noticed the 15-year, clearly that's what sparked the question. I'm wondering if it's a coincidence that after 15 years, these units will probably need to be rehabilitated again. I mean, typically kitchens and bathrooms after 15 years need significant remodeling. I want to, I imagine for a second, as the chair was speaking, that 15 years are now up and this facility has a permanent deed restriction for cannolidol lower income people. Where would the funding have come from? You know, would it have come from DHCD? Could it have come from CDBG, I guess? I mean, does that complicate, you know, in that cycle of rehabilitation, which is, you know, it's imperative that these cannot be substandard in any way and letting it go for 20 years or 25 years might leave them that way. I honestly don't know the answer to that, but I think your conclusion, the two conclusions reached here are in all likelihood true, which is after 15 years they will need rehab again, 15 to 20, and the idea of leverage or that the town getting something in addition to that adds a little incentive to do that yet again in 15 years. The other piece of this is that, you know, we are dealing with a large state agency who is accountable to an even larger federal agency and, in fact, this is the minimum standard that, you know, the select board could, you could, it is within your purview to say we'd like a restriction in perpetuity. We could then go back to the housing authority and move through that process, but this is what DHCD requires of the agency based on the investment of $364,000. Mr. Santy, anything you want to comment? Yeah, I would just reinforce Mr. Zomek's comments that, you know, we're comfortable with the 15-year restriction and a key difference on this project compared to many others is that the units that are being rehabilitated with the CDBG money are owned by the housing authority. So they're in the affordable housing business. So the housing authority has great control over the future disposition of these parcels and presumably in the timeframe we're talking about there'll be additional renovation or remodeling work that is required and there'll be a new restriction potentially placed on the units if and when we do that. So I'm comfortable with it knowing that these units will remain in our affordable housing inventory. So I have to assume that this would be somewhat less attractive to CDBG to give the money to if the restriction didn't go along with it. Well, it's a minimum requirement. Right, but the whole point of if we had a longer requirement on it, then the idea, as I was saying and as Mr. Hayden was saying, you know, in 15 years when these need more money for rehab, they might say, you know, they already have what they want, the program wants, which is the restriction. So why bother investing in them if we had a longer restriction at that time? So I'm thinking that the restriction goes along with that's what CDBG is looking for out of it. Right. So, okay. All right, so that's good enough for me. Anybody else have questions or comments about this? Ms. Stein, would you like to make a motion? Looking over it. Oh, good. I move that the select board accept the affordable housing restriction and deferred payment mortgage for number 5 to 11, Olympia Drive from the Amherst Housing Authority on behalf of the town of Amherst as authorized by Article 7 of the November 7, 2011 special town meeting. Second. Further discussion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. And that is unanimous. And I have those for us to sign, so I'll make sure no one leaves tonight without signing them. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming and I appreciate your help. Okay. That was it. Oh, we got seven more minutes. Let's see what else we can do here. Yes, you can. Why not? Why not? So one of the things we'd ask for when we thought we were still going to have to do the gas thing is we'd ask for some guidance saying what do we even do with these? Because we haven't had to do one before. And we got this piece of information that I'm guessing may have come from Copeland and Page. It doesn't say. And it's not dated. So yet another wonderful mystery document. So I wonder if we happen to know where this came from so we can label it appropriately. Once it went off our agenda, I stopped paying attention to it. Do you know? There is a copy of an email from Attorney Riley at Copeland and Page. Yeah, I missed it in the middle here someplace. Blah, blah, blah. Stan Sheffitz, Brian Reilly, the B of CMR. Yeah, okay. I still don't know. But you know what? I could probably just ask Deborah. That might make the most sense. Okay. There is this, yes. There is this email from Brian Reilly here that talks about it. But it doesn't say, by the way, go look at this other thing. You got to talk into your mic. Yeah. So my problem is that, you know, we have this guidance document that I was going to file away for future use, but I don't know where it came from, and I don't know what the date is. So we will see where that came from because I'm sure Deborah will know. I'm sure she will. Awesome. And now she's collected a folder about the select board's role in propane storage licensing. Which is great. Because you never know. You'll get it again. You don't need to file it this time. You'll get it again. All right. Excellent. All right. Other items we have. All right, let's do the easier stuff. First, how about anything easy? Yeah, let's do the licenses are pretty easy unless people think those are complicated. Can we go through the license renewals? Okay. So December is the time of year that we renew the annual licenses. These are all of the licenses that the select board has to approve each year. These are for various kinds of business licenses, alcohol licenses, taxi business and driver licenses, secondhand sale licenses, common vitrular licenses, all kinds of things like that. There are so many of these that happen that they have been broken into groups based on how much the office could get done in time for this particular meeting. So at this meeting we are dealing with, we have two sets of licenses that are essentially alcohol related and non-alcohol at this point. Next week we will be doing taxi licenses and when we deal with the taxi licenses we will also be talking about some planned new taxi policy for the following year, 2013. But at this point we have just the business licenses that are non-taxi and they are separated into two packets. As I said, the ones that include an alcohol license and the ones that don't. Does anybody have any questions about the two packets of information, Miss Stein? I just wondered about the pending insurance and... Certificates of inspection. Yes. So that's the status of the renewal process within the office. So even if we approve it, no license can be granted until all of their paperwork is taken care of. Okay. And would you like a motion? Sure. I'm changing it slightly. Okay. Just slightly. I move that the select board renew the list of alcohol and non-alcohol license presented dated December 2nd, 2011 subject to receipt of documentation noted as pending for the calendar year beginning January 1, 2012 through December 31st, 2012. Second. Further discussion? Mr. Hayden. I'm... The pending insurance is up to the... each of the firms to... to secure, of course. I'm concerned about the number of inspections that look like need to be done before the end of year or these businesses might have to close temporarily until those inspections are completed. Are we going to be able to get to all of these? There's a lot of them here. Yes, Miss Ante. My understanding is that's not an atypical number for this time of the month. And it's anticipated that they'll be done. Further questions or comments? Miss Stein, could you clarify where your change was in the list? I just...it's a simple one. It says that the select board renew the list of alcohol rather than have renew renewals. Okay. That the select board renew the list of alcohol and non-alcohol and so on. Approve the list. We don't renew the list. Approve the list. Approve the list. Okay. The motion did say renew the list. Approve the list of alcohol and non-alcohol licenses. Licenses renewals. Licenses presented. Okay. Okay. Very good. All right. Further discussion? All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. That's unanimous. Thank you. All right. So as I said, we'll have another whole bunch of those next week primarily taxi driver and license business. Okay. So we have a total of 659. So 659 as we like to say is the same as 7 o'clock. And for our 7 o'clock item, we have a public hearing, our annual public hearing on property tax classification. And we have a great deal of information in our packets also on the website, both in our packets and on the assessors site to talk about valuations and tax classification information. So as we talked to us tonight, we have Principal Assessor David Burgess. We have Chair of the Board of Assessors, Carl Maylor, and we have Finance Director, Sandy Pooler. And I'm going to call this public hearing to order at 7 o'clock. And welcome. Thank you very much for coming in. This is something that the select board has to do annually that sets the tax rate and does a couple of other things. And this year is a revaluation year. So that makes things a little bit more interesting as far as people paying attention to all of this information. So why don't you kind of give us an overview of what's going on? And then we will ask our questions. Well, if you bear with me, I'll just give you a quick overview of the revaluation first off. As you said, this is a certification year. Every three years, we have to certify values with the Department of Revenue. And we just got a final word today that the Department of Revenue has accepted our final values and they've accepted our new growth. So we're all set with that. This was an unusual year for the second time since I came here 21 years ago. We have lowered the values on the residential properties overall. Not everybody's value went down, but about 90% of the residential properties did go down in valuation. Those that didn't go down, their market values were holding, so they stayed up. And they also have some properties of new growth and, of course, properties that were built this year, such as the Lord Jeff. They went up in value quite a bit, as you can imagine. The nuts and bolts are that with the valuations going down, the tax rate has gone up. After settling the values finally today, I estimate that the tax rate will be $19.65 cents per thousand, even though it says in your book 1963, that was an estimate early on in the game before the values were set. This means that even though values have gone down, most people will still see an increase in their taxes. By my estimation, unless your value went down by at least 7%, you will pay more in taxes than you did last year. And commercials, because they only went down to about 2% overall, and residential went down between 4.5% and 5%, they will see a bigger increase in the amount of taxes they paid this coming year. This coming year, the commercials will be picking up 10.15% of the base instead of what was about 9. something last year. So they're also picking up slightly more. Part of that is due to the fact that Western Mass Electric Company had a large increase in their new growth, which about 6 million dollars, which helped us greatly, or else we would really have trouble this year with new growth. That in a nutshell is the revaluation. I don't know if you want to ask any questions about that, or just go straight into the classification. Let's start with questions on revaluation. And before we do that, just to point folks specifically to a couple of documents on the website. One of them is this great colorful document, everything you always wanted to know about real estate taxes in a declining market. That was an adaptation, it actually said in the market. And the other one, I don't know if I have the hard copy of, but it was something similar like, it was a description of how the tax rate is calculated. It's a bit more realistic, it shows the values, using the actual values and the actual levy for the town of Amherst and how we calculate the tax rate at that point. And it's a bit more in depth, a little bit more serious than the photographs. They're both good things for folks to take a look at. Those are on the website. And I encourage people to look, because this is always confusing to folks. It's confusing in all kinds of different ways. And so I really appreciate all the effort that was put into trying to explain all of this this year. I just mentioned one other thing. It's very important for people to realize that the valuations are based on properties that are sold in 2010, not 2011. The assessment lean date is January 1st, 2011. So people are going to see their houses are selling now and they may still be selling for even less than they did in 2010. But for the purposes of appeals and this year's revaluation, only the properties sold in 2010 were used. Those that are selling in 2011 will set for the FY 2013 taxes. Thank you. I apologize. I'm kind of stuffy today. I'm getting stuffier by the moment. Okay. Excuse me. Questions or comments from the slide board? I thought it was very clear. Mr. Hayden. Just a quick question about the process. If a homeowner were to want to discuss with you their new valuation, how would they go about doing that? Well, at this time, it's too late to discuss it before the tax bills go out. So what they'll need to do is when the tax bill goes out and not before but after the tax bill goes out and on or before the 1st of February when the third quarter tax bill is due, they will have to file an abatement application. I would be happy to discuss it with some timely and we can act on it rather than not file it. Talk to me and then say not to file it and then think about it later and not have time to file it. I prefer to have it and deny it instead of them not getting the opportunity to file. Thank you. At the risk of setting myself off on a choking spasm again. Letters went out to folks starting in North Amherst this year about having the assessors go door to door. I'm sorry. I was just going to say what's the status of that? Not everybody's gotten those letters. Some people said no one's ever come to my house and checked out anything. What should people know about that process? That is the problem. We haven't gone door to door in about 20 years and we need to do that. The department of revenue reckons that we should do it every 10 years. The condition on the age is showing a little bit of wear on some of the properties and so they've actually gone down a little bit those properties. We may go in and find out there's not the number of bedrooms and bathrooms that we thought there were and honestly in some we've gone in and found out there are more bedrooms, more bathrooms, there's been additions put on, basements have been finished and those properties have seen an improvement. It's good that we can inside them and generally it'll benefit everyone. It will equalize the values. We are about 20% finished and I would hope over the next two to three years, probably two years we'll finish the whole town. Obviously this year Mrs. Turatti who worked for me did most of the work I was tied up with the re-evaluation but her and I starting in the spring and I think that's a good thing. Thank you. Mr. Poehler. Mr. Poehler is telling me I should tell you where you can find some information on the web. If you go to the assessors web page you can go right in there and find it. They're also on the front page of the agenda of the web site. There's a banner that has a picture of Mr. Poehler. I forgot to mention Mr. Miller and Mr. Poehler. I mentioned it at the beginning. Any other questions about the re-evaluations? Moving on. As you said, this is the time of year that you have to the slack board make the decisions and you are the only people that can make decisions on whether we're going to split the tax rate. In other words have a higher tax rate and grant a small commercial or residential exemption or grant an open space discount. That is why we're here tonight that you have to decide on those. It has been the history that we have never split the tax rate. I can walk through this presentation with you. It's a little bit different than it has been in the past. I think it's a bit clearer. But in effect the first two pages are showing you what the impact would be of a split rate on their properties. If we move 25% increased the tax rate by 25% on the commercials it would drop the tax rate for the residential by about 56 cents and increase the commercial by a little over just under $5. If we went to the maximum which is 175% the tax rate for residential would be $17 and 96 cents. In other words it would be saving about $1.69 and the commercials would be $34.35 up about $16. So it's a big big difference. And this year in particular with the swing on the valuations what we're looking at the average single family home in 2011 was valued $334,600 and paid the tax this does not include CPA of $6,090 and the commercial property was valued at $359 and paid $6,534. This coming year the average single family property will pay $6,268 or roughly $178 more by 2.9%. The average commercial will pay $6,965 that's up $697 or 11.12% over last year so they've taken a big increase. So that is one of the things you'd have to weigh if you decide to split the tax rate. We do not have any open space we class it all under and so they already get a discount and that's included in the tax rate we have now. That is an assessor's decision whether to have open space or not. The residential exemption which we've talked about many times means that we can shift 20% of the average assessed valuation up to 20% of the average assessed valuation and take that off the property values this would mean we would change the tax rate on all properties within the residential class and at the midway point or slightly above it properties that are owner occupied would pay more than they would do under that even though they would qualify for the exemption. The exemption is a flat exemption of 20% of the average residential property that is not based on the value of the property itself so it's not 20% of your individual assessment it's 20% of the overall so everybody gets the same amount of the advantage. This means that the lower valued properties that are owner occupied would see as savings but those that are not owner occupied would see a large increase because they wouldn't get the exemption and the ones above the median point would see the increased tax rate as well because the exemption would be the same and have less impact for them. You also have the small commercial exemption which is on properties of a million dollars or less and it's up to 10% and they have to employ five or more people. I don't believe we have any properties in town where the business owns the building so this property would not qualify. Most of our small businesses are on properties that are owned by large property owners so the property owner would not get the exemption because it goes with the business not the exemption not the property. Those are the items you have to vote on. This year I have attached some additional information for you. On the back there's exhibits A, B, C, D and E exhibit A is the LA-4 showing a total valuation of all classes of property in time exhibit B shows how we calculate the levied limit for this year and how we do it every year. Exhibit C is simply some helpful definitions such as levied limit, levy ceiling things like that. D shows us the last year's tax rates and tax shifts for some of the neighbouring communities and exhibit E shows the breakdown of the property class since 1990 for the town of Amherst and covers the wide spectrum just to show you what the split has been for the last 21 years 20 years. Now it's all yours. Questions or comments from Select Board? First on any of these items. Public questions or comments? Select Board? I'm just going to ask Mr. Burge to reiterate something that he's already nicely covered on page 4 and then also it's helpful if people out there in the public heard part of this and wondered what it is. When we talk about we don't have a discount for open space, people are like wait, we have all this open space but as you've put here it's land that's not under 61A, 61B as a permanent conservation. So when you look at all these reasons we don't have any land as you've stated here that actually falls under that and if people are wondering about where that property shows up so to speak in the listing that you've put up in this exhibit that you've attached for us in a general sense because it does show on this exhibit A the chapter 61A, chapter 61B land, et cetera. So it's not that it's not doing anything, it's just that it what we call open space in one sense perhaps in one conversation is not the same as open space as defined by the assessor. No. The open space that we're talking about that would apply for the discount or access land on properties over and above the buildings over and above, in our case two acres, we take the first two acres and everybody gets priced in that and after that everybody pays last on a discounted price for the acreage over two. That does not qualify for 61A sorry, let me rephrase that that may qualify for 61A or 61B or 61 but the owner has chosen not to put it under those chapter and at the moment it is not buildable until the plans or one thing or another if I don't at that point we would consider it completely taxable land. Okay. Thank you. Mr. Hayden. I wanted to express jealousy of my colleague Mr. Wald last year when we got this presentation we didn't have all of these wonderful presentations these are very helpful and I do appreciate that Thank you. I know that he can't because he didn't have the hour long presentation we had last year when he asked all the questions and tried to figure this out. Thank you very much. Thank you. Mr. Kelly, did you have your hand? What was the new growth that the state certified? $473,000. What's that as a percentage? Percentage of... 2.5% is 965,000 so new growth is 1.25% That's down considerably from our heyday of about a million dollars. Yeah. Other questions or comments? You're welcome. So we do this every year. I think this is the 6th one of these I've sat through even before I was on select board and the issues are exactly the same every single year. I'm looking at the notes that I brought to the 2008 discussion just because I happen to have those. So the split tax rate it comes down to because of the distribution of the residential and commercial property it is such a small benefit to each residents and such a huge increase to each commercial property that every year it's been decided to be not worth it and also that that discourages business when we're always trying to encourage business. So nothing about that has changed. Residential exception that while it sounds good it is it's untargeted it there are a range of income and need levels across all property values another issue is the rental properties are about 60% of our housing units are ineligible for the exemption so it shifts the burden to them so the rental folks who you think are typically the lower income folks bear a bigger proportion of the property tax situation because of course it gets passed on to them that that is something that works well in vacation communities when you have second home owners but that's not the situation we're in this year and that if we were to give it a try which is sometimes put out there as a possibility there would be such a big change that it would make it very difficult to switch back because that would mean for the folks who had their property taxes lowered under that change it would make for a very big increase if we were to switch back. The small commercial exemption as Mr. Burgess noted there's just nobody who qualifies for that and people typically small business owners of very small businesses don't also own their properties and the open space thing we've talked about that plenty so nothing changes the recommendations are the same every year and does anybody have any reason to make a decision other than the same decision we make every year so let me just ask then the one reason the one area that's always a concern of course is the fact that we have such a high student rental population first of all tell us how those are I know the answer to this because I asked the question but tell us how the properties are assessed whether they're assessed as residential or commercial for apartments and single family houses that are rentals they're all classed as residential based on their use Massachusetts if the property is occupied for residential use except in the case of hotels that is residential the same with rooming houses and they're all residential hotels are commercial but the others are residential and so the reason that's interesting is obviously we have the same tax rates so you say who cares but it's a question of how you then determine the valuations on them so a commercial property is determined by not it's comps and it's sales the way houses are but about the the income that it brings in commercial and multi-family residential properties not single family residential they're based on the market still because we have enough sales of single family residential to do that we really don't have any sort of a commercial market or a multi-family residential market so we have to use what we call the income approach to valuation in Massachusetts we're allowed to use three valuations cost, market, which is obviously the market and income with being no market we have to compare the cost of what the property would cost to build, replace and the income we always have to use two values the income approach to the value is quite simply we go out and we send letters to everyone in town and we did this here who has a commercial property and a multi-family residence and by multi-family residence I mean more than four units, three units that are still under the market value they return the income value to the forms to us this year when they did it we had an 82% return from the commercial properties and a 78% return from the residential properties that in part is because the law has changed we are now able to put a money on the people that did not return their forms to us and they will lose their right to appeal to the appellate tax board there's no longer shall they will lose the right to appeal so that has helped us get these forms back what we do is when we get the forms back we look at the income that's generated the total gross potential income which is all the properties valuation from rents to linear income from such things as they might have for parking spaces and or laundry rooms in the property any income that comes into the property from the property we also look at any expenses they will have such as snow plowing electricity utilities that are paid by the owners of the property insurance of course which is a big one and any capital expenses they may have for roofing or repairs that have to be made so we take the gross income we find out what their vacancy is for the year all the properties tell us how much the gross income is and what their net income was so the difference is the vacancy rate we apply the vacancy rate which is about 5% in our case to the gross income so it's reduced by 5% we take away the lovable expenses from that figure and that leaves us with a net income net operating income and the formula is the same for both residential and commercial and then we apply what is called a capitalization rate which in a short means it's the figure we use that gives you a return on the investment that people use and the capitalization rate will be made up of the interest rate or mortgage rate they may have on average that we calculate the tax rate and a certain amount of time for depreciation factor usually in a 40 year life 2.5% of the property within the tax rate we divide the net operating income by that figure and that gives us an income evaluation to the property and we compare that to our cost we estimate the cost to be and to satisfy the department of revenue we have to be within 10% of that value we create various tables for various types of property there could be apartments there would be a I can't read my own writing professional properties, medical buildings, hotels retail, office and other types of gas stations they all get their own different tables applied to them based on the number of units square footage or whatever the unit may be that we choose to use and then we generate the income from that because we don't have a market and that's the only reason we do and so do you have any means of verifying that information so for example for the multi-family properties four or more units can you check the rents that are being advertised or whatever we do check and rents are being advertised by the university housing people who have lists of available rentals and of course the bigger like the boulders or south point they're always in the paper if someone's getting 90 and there's colonial village or Puffton they're all easy and same with the downtown businesses you're able to check the rents or verify them and look at them as best we can when we see them on the newspapers and we do look at the listings that the realtors have as well we're quite active in using their web page the slide board always gets the leases as part of new liquor licenses we end up with the full lease that a business has with the property owner and so it's interesting to me to think about the information that we get that way that's the actual agreement between the tenant and the property owner and what the property owner is reporting to the town I'm not sure if I can use that legally I would have to check I never heard of anyone using that but it would be a good source interesting thank you other questions or comments? I may have missed this the percentage of our rentals are by students does anyone have any idea? I don't know just curious given the extra costs that are being incurred by some of these students I'd almost vote for a differential tax rate for that it's very difficult because obviously there are a lot of low income families that are part of that you'd really need to know very specifically and you'd almost need a way to offset the extra burden that you were putting on those folks so that's something that the select board struggles with every year that concept is there a way to get a little bit more from these properties that are in fact costing us more in some ways that is made up for in the market value of the properties themselves so anything that is just a single family home is included in its market value and those do turn over fair amount and in fact a lot of them have been bought lately but all of our housing prices are dependent in part on what our potential rental value is so that is kind of captured in some way with single family houses but a lot less so in other situations so it's complicated Ms. Brewer I know we didn't want to get into a big long presentation and I may just be confused and need to ask you about the soft line one of the things we were talking about here is we were discussing how we do the commercial because of course things don't turn over the way they do with individual single family residences thinking about single family residences with single families in them as opposed to those who are rented out when you mentioned the return rate on the questionnaires you mentioned 78% residential and 82% commercial when you say residential in that context are we talking about a couple of different things that are called residential because I'm getting confused because we're not asking single family homeowners to return any of this information so you're talking about like a Barts ice cream versus a place that you know has six rental apartments in it that's what we mean by residential versus commercial in this context and when I'm talking about residential and commercial I'm talking about anything over four families right but families meaning there were residential questionnaires and there were commercial questionnaires but they're all within kind of the business side of things because they're more than four units four units or more okay thank you Mr. Wald I believe Mr. Bridges also made reference to the vacancy rate which I know can mean different things in different contexts but could you say just a few words about that there's been so much talk about housing in town recently and also with regard to certain we have this proposed housing study to analyze the housing stock and needs just explain what that means in your line of work well the vacancy kind of a different meaning because we have so many seasonal rentals we know two to three months of the year we could rely on some properties being vacant which is unusual normally what you'd be talking about from a vacancy is when when somebody actually has a vacancy they're actively trying to fill a lot of our apartment complexes I'm not talking commercial at the moment I'm only talking apartment complexes at the moment they're not actively trying to fill them for those two or three months unless the people have got a years lease and they might get a sub lease on that they themselves are then trying to do so we're counting that vacancy as about 5% at the moment overall if we took the three months it would be 25% and that's just not realistic is there any way to compare that with other communities or regions or broader averages yeah yes it would be possible to compare it I mean the assessors are always willing to share information with each other so we could find that out it'd be easy to find out from Northampton which is probably the biggest and closest to us thank you other questions or comments other questions or comments from the public all right then this public hearing shall close at 7.30pm and we need to vote to close the public hearing second I I I I mean it was close public hearing at 7.30 and now it's time to deliberate so Miss Stein would you like to make the motions on the tax rate sure I move that the select board accept a minimum residential exemption for fiscal year 2012 and that no open space discount be granted second further discussion all in favor say aye aye that's unanimous next I move that the select board not adopt a residential exemption for fiscal year 2012 second further discussion all in favor say aye aye that's unanimous I move that the select board not adopt a small commercial exemption for fiscal year 2012 second further discussion all in favor say aye unanimous once again we've accepted all of your excellent recommendations and we very much appreciate all of the information you continue to really kind of customize to questions that come up and trying to provide more information to us and to the community which is very much appreciated Miss Brewer before they leave and just to reiterate the figure that appears in here over and over again but people always like to be sure and they know is the rate is now 1963 because we actually vote on that 1965 exactly because we needed to correct all the Mr. Moussanti has a form that I need you to sign so I can forward to the Department of Revenue and I can just pick it up tomorrow morning just want to remind them thank you thank you very much thank you Board of Assessors and everyone for all your hard work on that and for all your good information alright 732 our next item is the 730 item which is consider an updated complete streets proposal and we have various folks here to talk about this with us it's a good point in our packets and one updated piece of information on our desks a bunch of statements regarding the complete streets support primarily support and we have the updated proposal itself some months ago I meant to check exactly when it was I can't remember when it was Mr. Crowner came before us with a proposal and we said okay yeah we got to keep thinking about it got a tweak it's got to go to complete streets et cetera and we now have a new updated proposal so Mr. Crowner Rob Crowner is here to talk to us about this and thank you very much for coming in thank you for the information you provided and why don't you start by telling us what's different about this proposal than the last time we saw okay so I'm Rob Crowner I'm representing the complete streets task force of the public transportation and bicycle committee and that's the subcommittee so what we found when we went out and talked with other committees and talked with people is how important streets are to everyone for a variety of reasons it's the way that people get from one place to another however they go whether it's by car or walking or whatever you're going to be on the street in some form it's also it's also where we have control over our tree canopy we have trees in the right of way and that's an important part of what the streets are about another thing that you may remember from a month ago is village centers when we were creating zoning for village centers we were really looking at the way the public and the private realm come together at the street and that's where the basis of form-based code starts it starts at the street and works back so streets are very important they're more important than just a place for cars to go and so that's what this proposal is about we tweaked the proposal in several ways primarily by adding language that specifically addressed trees and specifically addressed disability access committee's concerns and we also put some language in there that explicitly recognizes that the slide board is the keeper of the public way so those things were missing that the other committee told us about brought us to our attention and so that's what we're returning to you an updated version and let's see other overview stuff that you'd like to mention for folks at home who maybe haven't read the document yet what we're asking for is for the town to adopt the policy that that we take a complete streets approach to our road network and that means that when we're designing a street when we're planning how to repave a street or what a street is going to do we're looking at it holistically and not just looking to fill up the potholes and smooth it out we're looking how do people use it what can we do with this street is there an opportunity to put some trees in there is it heavily used by pedestrians or bicyclists and in need of infrastructure to accommodate those people so this policy says adopted would say yes we want the town to look at streets in a complete way to attempt to design and manage our streets in a complete way and it offers some questions that would help guide a decision or guide a thought process on how to evaluate a street it calls for the town to develop a plan about what streets should be complete how they should be completed and for we assume that that would be part of the transportation master plan and that going forward when a street when the road repair schedule is presented to you that the Department of Public Works and the various committees will have evaluated the proposal from all of those perspectives and present you a plan that takes that into account it doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be able to accomplish everything that we want them to accomplish but at least an attempt will be made to look at it in that way thank you so this information as well as everything we talk about here is on the select board's web packet so folks can read this at home questions or comments about the policy as proposed from select board members currently okay so I have some questions and some comments the it talks about in the opening paragraph that it references at the end of the first paragraph through the application of complete street design principles and those aren't referenced anywhere within the document is that referring to anything in particular outside of the document or is that something that would be created in the future where are those principles outlined okay the answer is actually both there are complete streets as a tour of art for public works professional and also for planning professionals it's well known what that means now so you could refer to any number of books or websites whatever manuals that would describe what complete streets are so you could interpret it in that way you could also in the last paragraph I believe it is we suggest that perhaps the town could develop its own complete streets standards so based on national recommendations or whatever that wouldn't necessarily have to be a part of the policy or the plan but it could be the key is that that complete streets standards exist or principles exist and they can be followed either at the macro level or the town could develop its own okay let's see our word related okay so the part about clear process for granting exceptions shall include review and approval by appropriate town officials this is towards the end of the second page town officials and relevant boards and committees with final authority resting in the select board the reasons for an exemption shall be documented and noted in the public record so I'm I'm totally in favor of this concept what my only concern is that I'm wondering and that's kind of about my first question about complete streets is how rigidly we're locking something into this so the idea of an exception and whether the whether the policy would be waived it just seems a little bit strict to me when the when the concept is something that we're clearly trying to implement anyway and I just don't want to make the idea of of making exceptions to it to cumbersome so I'm just a little bit worried kind of process wise how would you envision maybe you could just talk about what how an exception would would work and what a waiver would be like and thinking about there the remember that the reason that we started this initiative is because the bond authorization or the bond request that came to town meeting last fall specifically said this is for paving streets and nothing else and we think that's the wrong approach the approach that we would like to have is that we're going to pave the streets and while we're paving the street we're going to also look at these other things that might need to be done so all it means is that when the proposal is brought forward when Mr. Moreing brings the street plan to you he's going to say these are the streets that I want to pave and these are the additional things that should be done and can be done in the scope of the project and with the limitations that I have budget topography all these things the whole package is before you and he will say I imagine the way it would work he would say I would like to put sidewalks on this street but I cannot do it so rather than just say this is the street I'm going to pave it and not say anything about sidewalks I want the you to expect that he will say this is the entire project that I'm doing and this is what I'm not doing this is what I am doing and so that's what I would like you to approve rather than just the streets that are going to be paved so I would expect that you would develop a protocol or expectation that is what is being brought forward and so those are the reasons why you would be why Mr. Moring would say I can't do this not that you're going to second guess what he's doing unless you want to but that was thought beforehand it says a clear process for granting exceptions shall include review and approval by appropriate town officials and relevant boards and the committee's with final authority with select board whatever so I'm a little bit concerned about the idea that it doesn't have a particular street can't have a bus shelter added and public transportation committee objects to the fact that it doesn't so they're saying you can't make that exception and it can't be made but I guess if it's ultimately coming to the select board we say sorry we know you wanted a bus shelter but it can't happen or you say you want to have a bus shelter also so it's not that anybody's veto power along the way it's just that it's a feedback mechanism exactly right the way major road projects happen now at least I believe they happen now is that there is a public hearing process just similar to the way the state runs its hearing process so all those committees should be you know should be informed of when the hearing is and be able to check in and make the recommendations at those 25 percent 75 percent hearings and so that's when it will be vetted hopefully and yeah they might say we regret that there's not what we want here our recommendation is this but if Mr. Moreing is not able to accommodate that then he can't to your point earlier about the road bond before saying this is for paving but nothing else in fact because of this whole discussion because of your coming to select board because this discussion is happening in other places that road bond did improve in the complete streets manner a lot of those streets that got a repaved Meadow street Amity street various places had bike lanes added and bus shelters where that was possible so and speed tables on McLellan which we appreciate right so I like to think that this is kind of working to to formalize and codify the fact that this is kind of the east of the town right now but what I don't want to do is put something in writing that ties our hands you know what I'm saying like we don't want to have unintended consequences of a really well-intentioned policy so we have to just kind of be troubleshooting it for the future and not just saying yeah yeah this expresses everything that we like Ms. Purr. I'm wondering and I don't want I I want to simplify I don't want to oversimplify all the hard work that's gone into this I wonder if we're at the point where we would feel comfortable with the checklist I know that's something we seem to have an aversion to at some levels in town hall and amongst volunteer committees but something that would basically cover these things much in the way that we eventually developed thanks to our now town manager a way of looking at our capital projects within a framework of questions whereas before it had always been kind of how they always did it before as opposed to something to lead out that basically anybody could look at and have an understanding of what categories things fell under and so Mr. Moran could attach to a project you know the first ten things are checked off and the other three things says cost is too great this is this problem is that what I I understand I think what you're saying about not making the process too cumbersome I also don't want just a long verbal report telling me why we can't do certain things because that's just out the window until we go back and watch the tape and one of us understands it one way and one of us understands it another way and that just seems like a lot of effort on everybody's part but in terms of trying to make relatively little effort associated with this since we've already seemed to have a lot of buy-in from everyone including Mr. Moran Public Works Department as to how we want to approach these things in terms of just showing that I wonder if maybe the manager would be interested in addressing the idea of something like a checklist that we could just all see and then it would you know would go up on our website so everybody would see okay these are the things that we're agreed upon that are proposed these are the things that are not covered in this particular one oh well that's too bad or oh well I have to really go and talk about that to somebody without it becoming a really long report every time somebody wants to I mean we don't do these every day but at the same time I don't want to have to write extra pages of text for a particular report either so I'll note I'll let Mr. Musanti respond but I'll just note that with the section that's called design guidelines in here which I'm not sure that's the right term but I think that's kind of doing a lot of what you're talking about and to me that reminded me of section 10.38 or something in the zoning bylaw that's the order of conditions that for special permits and for site plan you know these are the criteria that have to be considered and met so I think that's largely doing kind of what you're talking about I think the guidebook checklist concept that you're talking about is one of the products envisioned as part of the transportation master plan update that TAO meeting supported I think last spring the funding for that and so we have an ad hoc committee of committee members from public transportation and bicycle committee planning board public works committee and others and part of that will be a street by street inventory of design elements that the town should actively consider next time the road is being renovated or reconstructed so it would not be that would as we're at the beginning of the design process or planning process for road improvements in the future you'd have this guidebook as opposed to it being a more ad hoc process so that's looking at things very street by street kind of as opposed to this design guidelines checklist type thing that Ms. Brewer is talking about Mr. Croner maybe you could talk about that implementation section because that really is what our understanding is with the transportation master plan so there's this group that's going to create the same thing that was like the pavement improvement plan from a couple years ago but that you're saying these other folks would weigh in on how do you see that interacting with the transportation master plan task force situation because we think that's about to happen. I think exactly what Mr. I think that is the transportation master plan is the implementation I mean the policy is a statement by the town that this is important to us so that's what this is about. So the implementation paragraph at the end says a complete streets implementation plan shall be developed by the public transportation bicycle committees blah blah blah blah that's really what's going to be created by this transportation. I understood the request or whatever for funding for the transportation master plan for the public transportation bicycle committees I think that's why we're referencing it like that I mean I guess it could be done some other way so at least in the wording I think that would need some incorporation of the concept of what's about to happen sure yeah okay other questions or comments Mr. Hayden just sort of in wrestling with this it's very interesting one of the first things that I did when I joined this August body was to talk about coordinating road projects between the various groups that need to talk about road projects the very same groups that are mentioned here with the addition of the public Shade Tree committee disability access advisory committee and the public works and others as needed that was sort of a nascent concept none of this happens in a vacuum and this so this seems feels like a culmination of that seems like sort of that that effort rolling along we talk about checklists we talk about all kinds of things but I was just trying to sort of get my hands about what this is doing and really what it's asking us to do is well first of all you know ask the public transportation bicycle committee to ask this great plan but that great plan does asks in essence it asks 10 questions of any piece of street and it applies to each one of those 10 questions 3 tests you know local context tests and the appropriate tests and the reasonable effort tests and then it applies to those 30 combinations for possible exemptions which all kind of sounds like something to do for any roadway project so the question really I guess to us is whether this is the way to implement that kind of series of tests screening design criteria in fact you know when I think about the roads that we've seen that have been whose design we appreciate this is exactly what's happened I'm thinking of the the rotary at UMass for instance I'm sorry it's around about at UMass some other little you know pieces of the project on Meadow Street for instance so that's what I'm feeling like we're wrestling with right now other questions or comments okay so I have just little thoughts about a little bit of wording a little bit of prioritization I really like the concept and I appreciate what you're saying about you know you have a policy that helps to guide the implementation and I like the idea of this helping to guide what the expressing the town's values to help guide what the transportation task force is going to then create and I know that when you were here last time I specifically said if people had feedback for you for any changes they should get it to you so you didn't come back and give you more feedback on changes and I don't know if I wasn't paying enough attention last time or if you've changed it significantly but I would like to give a little bit more feedback on changes to you and I also want to express great appreciation for how open you and all the committees have been to all of this all of the changes and feedback and incorporating all of the the priorities of things like disability access advisory committee public shade tree committee outside what some folks might think of as part of the general realm of what you're talking about when you're talking about complete streets because a lot of times people are thinking bicycling and pedestrians but it's a lot more than that so I think it's wonderful that you've been so thorough with this so I think and I apologize terribly would like to offer some tweak suggestions not here but an email see what you think of those and and then I think that this is very simple and I would like us to make a statement of support of the concept again Mr. Musanti how do you see a policy statement like this helping or hurting what you're envisioning for the plan of the transportation which we call what task force task force I think we are in sync conceptually you know there may be some concerns about some of the details about process but I think we're in sync and that was manifested at least in a limited way through the pavement improvement bond for some pretty major roads in town Meadow, Amity next year lower Main Street with community development block grant Monday money has barrier removal and sidewalk improvements and things like that incorporated into the design so I think we're getting close I'm not sure it's ready just yet for policy approval okay so I think it's not 100% ready for policy approval either but as far as the policy interacting with kind of that implementation part like I like the idea of having a policy that helps to guide that but I don't want to also be tying the hands of a group that is about to do a ton of analysis of street by street what everything needs I don't think it necessarily would do that but I'm wondering if you have any concerns about it doing that I think the policy can exist before that happens I don't disagree with that and that work of that master planning group for the transportation will be many months in length so you're probably already going but I have a question associated with it too so I'm kind of seeing this as don't like that the vision word but I'm kind of seeing this as part of the preamble or introduction or whatever of this transportation master plan that will be worked on and because this is just so core critical to what we're talking about doing and sets it up nicely in terms of a big cohesive effort what I am concerned about though is actually the body that's going to be doing the work and if I understand it correctly we're talking about hiring a consultant and we're talking about sort of a task force that's a committee representatives different committees are they going to be subject to open meeting etc because we need to make sure that happens I'm if it was the one two thing because you were meeting to pick a consultant but I'm feeling like this is a public process so where does this fit my understanding is they would be subject to open meeting and they will become aware of that because this isn't something that's being appointed through the select board it's being it's one of yours it's not something that's on our list is what I'm saying and so as long as they are aware and have been directed that they will need to post meetings etc have they started yet has anybody missed anything I think is part of the question here too where are they they've met a couple of times so far okay I just know that based on our past experience sometimes people don't realize that if they haven't seen a charge and a book and they they're just meeting they don't realize that yes they still have to follow all those same rules and although they might seem a bit cumbersome once you get used to them they're not too bad and that would give the public an opportunity if they were particularly concerned to talk then rather than to come to us when it's all finished and say why didn't you think about this and bearing in mind that this is made up of representatives from all these different committees who would presumably be talking about it at their meetings would be discussing it all the way along because as you said it would be a several month process this isn't like a two meeting deal so okay so would you mind terribly if we tweak the language a tiny bit more and then you know I'll be in touch with you about that if anybody maybe nobody else has any tweaks but we'll kind of see where you are with it and then we'll take the final stab I hope at proving the policy okay anybody else want to say anything about this who's here, Mr. Snow and then Mr. Zomei Hi Ellen Snow, Tree Warden so I just want to give my two cents on the complete street concept I'm all for the movement of people and merchandise and whatnot across our roads in a very environmentally friendly manner and what I'd like to do is is take it a step further actually and really make it a complete street and include the green street concept if we're going to go forward with a process to look at our streets in a way to make them better let's really get serious about including the green infrastructure with the gray infrastructure so that we could capitalize on stormwater cleaning and filtering at the source we can improve more trees along our streets in the appropriate areas improve the neighborhood home values business values complete streets should include the green infrastructure as well as the gray infrastructure going forward I'd just like everyone to keep that in mind if possible as we do that Is that a specific concept that you've talked with Mr. Crowner and others about? It was mentioned at the Shaitree meetings in the past and do you think that as written this doesn't address that sufficiently or it does? Well this is again this is just a concept so I would like it as equally balanced moving forward in the concept stage so that is weighted equally where appropriate the Mentor Street was a project that was just finished which is pretty close to being a complete street is a sharp contrast to what it used to be as a street and it really has a different field to it now than it did before so if we could capitalize on that green infrastructure concept as we were doing these projects I think we could reduce that kind of shock as we change to a more complete street approach we have scenic roads and I think that's addressed in the complete street literature not every road needs to look exactly the same and we just need to keep that in mind so Thank you Mr. Zomek I just happened to be here for another article and heard another issue so I thought I would and I apologize to Mr. Crown I was a little busy earlier this fall so I might have missed some of the public process that went into this but I had a couple of comments one is in quickly reading through the policy echoing a little bit of what Mr. Snow said it does seem like the references to natural resources historic resources and scenic resources are a little bit light in this document itself I know that there's deeper background materials on complete streets but I don't see scenic resources referenced anywhere in the document and that would be a little bit concerning to me thinking more broadly about some of the impacts to things like potential impacts to APRs conservation land wetlands I realize that will all be taken in account through a matrix and through a series of decisions and the transportation plan itself as you assess various streets presumably all that will be taken into consideration but it gets very complicated I think we just need to juxtapose Meadow Street for instance with Pine Street and you have a much different layout of land public land natural resources on the eastern section on Pine Street versus for instance on Meadow Street and again I apologize because I haven't been that involved but I wondered if Mr. Crowner could tell us has this gone before the planning board and gotten input from the concom and say the agricultural commission because I would think those three bodies would want to give feedback and again I was acting town manager and I was a little preoccupied with those duties and haven't been in touch with this process very closely so I apologize if that has already happened Mr. Crowner you want to speak to planning board agcom concom and whether or not they have or will provide an input we do not take it to the planning board or to the conservation commission agricultural commission they I think that's I appreciate the comments and I think I agree with them those are all like I said at the beginning everyone is invested in the streets so I guess we could take this to every committee and ask for feedback but then that's sort of getting to rewriting the master plan or re-evaluating them taking another look at the master plan which is reasonable all of our decisions are guided by the master plan recently we think about what did the master plan say about that when we look at any kind of proposal so I think that's it's not unreasonable to think that these other boards might have something to say about it I don't think that and maybe I'm wrong but I don't think that the plan ignores those committees it just doesn't mention them or it doesn't ignore their concerns it doesn't mention them I think but I think it's I think it's implied but maybe it does need to be more explicit I don't know so maybe you can think a little bit more about whether or not to bring it to them and maybe obviously you are part of one of those and Mr. Zomek helps with two of those can see if those bodies would like to weigh in on this concept so I can appreciate that Mr. Craner and other members of the subcommittee who have been working on this so long might be a little bit frustrated and you certainly come up and speak I would just say that this is this process is it's like all good you know so we keep talking about these things and even by having the discussion again it kind of keeps adding to informing any project that's going forward and so even though we haven't gotten to something that we're you know finally approving at this point it still is adding to the conversation and just making this part of what we do in Amherst so this is all valuable even though we're not coming out here tonight with the policy but yes please as far as the task force that you I forget your last name I apologize you could identify yourself Lynn Gorbowsky thank you Vice Committee and with the subcommittee with Rob the Complete Streets when you mentioned the task force which is supposed to be two members of the Public Works Committee the Public Transportation Committee I forget what other committee but to my I was one of the volunteers from the transportation committee along with another member to be part of that task force and to my knowledge there have been no meetings we haven't been informed the last time we brought it up with Mr. Moreing it was supposed to start in August but that it hadn't yet started so I think this is a point to be made of implementation of the Complete Streets policy is that all of these committees need to work together towards the same goal of the master plan and the guidelines exist in many different places already with the DOT whether they call it Green Dot or the newest incarnation that they use for new construction at least if there is a bridge built say there has to be accommodations for bicycles and pedestrians so not to repeat all that but just hearing that about the task force lets me know that there are some loose ends that need to be tied up and that I think that the checklist is a good idea like all of the committees could go over the checklist and say are we accommodating all of the users for our streets whether it's pedestrian cyclist ADA compliance for wheelchairs just everyone included that Mr. Zomek would bring up the concoms and cultural aspects I think that would all be included also so I think implementation a checklist would be good in that all of these committees need to work together towards the same goal thanks okay so we'll keep plugging away at this and hopefully the next time or soon thereafter that we see this we will be ready to all approve it thank you again for bringing it in it helps to bring it here and kind of publicize the discussion so that we have all these other ideas that go along with it so again thank you very much for your work on this and we'll be in touch thank you since you're working on these comments that you're planning to send along if you would clarify in the comments and it sounds like you probably were going to anyway under the implementation section what this policy is used for so the policy is therefore we have this little pretend policy book some day policy book but that it doesn't just sit in there that it's part then of this transportation master plan I think that would be helpful so people know what does that mean so you said all these really great things but what do you do with it now okay alright next up we have thank you first I'd like to talk about a couple of parking related issues that occurred subsequent to your last meeting but needed action prior to tonight so in keeping with our policy the board's policy about parking approvals I want to bring two of those to your attention one I approved Thanksgiving week Monday through Thursday the bagging of three meters directly in front of the Starbucks store on North Pleasant street to accommodate the renovation work that was undertaken at that location and that required three spaces to be taken out of service for four business days and I wanted to bring that to your attention the second item was related to the Mary Maple celebration downtown last Friday December 2nd your vote at your last meeting was for to allow sleigh rides by Mr. Roberts along North Pleasant street he came to contact the town manager's office subsequent to that suggesting that revision of plans to do the sleigh rides within the Spring Street parking lot and I gave them permission to do that so they were not on North Pleasant but they were on the Spring Street lot and Spring Street like I think they went all the way down to the Amherst College lot and turned around between Boltwood and Churchill next Lord Jeffrey in update that project is nearing completion it's been a tremendous investment of time and money on the part of Amherst College and they are in the home stretch they are in the midst of gaining final approvals from our local building and health departments related to the various inspection permits there was another meeting today related to this project with Amherst College representatives and they are looking to secure final approvals on the inspection side, permit side in the next ten days or so and that both the inn and the restaurant are aiming to open to the public on January 5th the website is up and running I'm told and people are able to begin making reservations and there'll be Amherst College is planning a series of events in the run up to the grand opening on January 5th so we're tremendously excited about that and looking forward to it next also related to the downtown we are continuing our work with the downtown business improvement district that you approved the creation of at a meeting earlier this fall the 30 day period that allows the 270 or so property owners in the district to opt out of being a member has passed the vast vast majority of those who indicated they would participate as members remain so the business improvement district steering committee is working with town staff to and the town which will be the billing agent for the district they'll be planning a property tax bill a separate bill to go out on or around January 1st which will be the first bill related to the getting the district up and running that will be the effective date of the district is the date of your vote back earlier in the fall so that's happening and we're excited about that and we're looking forward to the next election on that front in the coming year what else war memorial pool update we are still waiting for word from the state whether or not our grant application which would fund up to 70% of the project cost will be funded we are in constant communication any day now it's been any day now for about 5 weeks we know that the final approvals for the grantees award list was hung up as part of the state's overall capital budget planning the capital budget bottom line has been approved at the state level so now it's a matter of allocating capital monies within that cap the I have appointed gilford mooring our dpw director to be the project manager for this project so he is an overall charge of bidding procedures and the actual construction management that will occur we expect we've been waiting to hear about the grant because we are being very conscious of not awarding contracts or spending money on things that could later be ruled ineligible if we award those contracts prior to the grant award so we're getting down to the wire here where we need to get moving and really our window here is really between now and the end of next week so we're very hopeful we'll hear before the end of next week on the grant and then we're in a position to move on what needs to be done we have a project timeline that would result in construction work being completed on or around June 1st which then leaves the month of June fulfilling the pool the balancing of the chemicals for the pool water those types of things and final prep with the goal of having our opening at a regular time for next summer that last week at June questions or comments about the pool? okay so next week's meeting you will know hopefully you may know about the grant always hope you know about the grant and whether you know or not you'll know kind of what this town's plan is because it doesn't know about the grant if it doesn't the town meeting vote was clear that the money was appropriated for this project with or without a state grant so I want to be clear it's our intention as a town to complete this project so that the pool can open at the end of June so we're we are trying to minimize the cost to Amherst taxpayers we think we've submitted a very competitive grant and we're cautiously optimistic we'll be funded we just haven't gotten the official the official word yet from Boston but we're committed to the project the town meeting is committed in a unanimous vote at the November town meeting to proceed with this project recent and upcoming activity I just wanted to note I know the board is aware of this Tim Banks an 18-year town of Amherst Employee for the Department of Public Works passed away on Thanksgiving Day a number of us attended the services for Tim he was a long-standing employee had leadership positions in the union at one point and was a was a very well respected employee for the town and we'll miss his camaraderie and his service greatly other personnel issues we have a vote enforcement officer in the building department we are in the midst of interviews for that position I expect to be able to make an appointment announcement within the next 10 days to 2 weeks and depending on that person's transition and availability we hope to have the person start with us sometime in the month of January there's much work to be done we're eager to move forward we're encouraged by the caliber of the pool and you'll be hearing an announcement from me shortly other things it's kind of behind the scenes thing but I'm heavily involved with Sandy Pooler our finance director and department heads and staff in budget development for the fiscal year that begins in July I'll be presenting my recommendations in mid January and I know that next Monday select board meeting I'll be giving you kind of a big picture status of where I am in the planning and talk about how that is responsive to your budget guidelines that you've developed and that's it thank you any questions or comments thank you excellent and moving right along member reports we have first up is the BCG update you have on your desks a hard copy of something I forwarded to you earlier today budget coordinating group met specifically to discuss the other post-employment benefits or OPEB obligation liability that the town has and this was the first discussion we've kind of had presentations on this we had a very big presentation on this a year ago at our four boards meeting but the finance committee really wanted to have all the different elements of the town budget making groups talk together about what kind of a policy we might all agree on for funding this because these are employees of the town schools and libraries and and because the region is also the regional schools is also a significant portion of our current employees and our future retirees to have that be part of the discussion so there had been thinking a while back that at this fall town meeting we might actually have a recommendation on how to start funding the OPEB trust fund that the town meeting established last spring but because this whole discussion hadn't happened yet they put off that recommendation so last week we met to talk specifically about that and to try and make sure that we're all kind of on the same page with what the OPEB obligation is and that's all about paying for health care the employers share of health care benefits to retirees and that cost is estimated currently to be $74 million the summary points for this BCG meeting just kind of outline the basics of having us all understand what the obligation is and then about what the some of the questions are for establishing a policy going forward so I won't go through all of the summary points in detail because you have them to read but as I said the first one is really all about describing it and then the questions of the policy decisions that will ultimately have to be made the we're very much in the education phase of this right now where we're talking about it at the different boards and committees select board has spent a little more time on it than other boards and committees it will also be an issue on the agenda at the four towns meeting the first four towns meeting will be January 7th folks probably already have that on your calendars I hope you do because you're notified of it a long time ago but this is the region the meeting that the region hosts the school committees finance committees and select boards of all the towns in the region so we'll also be having an discussion there as well and so some of the things that we're talking about as we think about how to create a policy for funding this going forward is does this become something that is funded across kind of evenly across the whole budget or is it looking specifically at apportioning it within the different operating budgets so which is to say you know would you sort of take it off the top that X number of dollars comes off the town budget before you start going into the different budget areas or would this be something that you're saying okay well you know X percent of this is really covering school retirees and X percent or whatever so that's part of the policy discussion and also making sure that the other towns in the region are thinking similarly about this because how you would assess that the payment for the region if it were to set up a trust fund similar to what the town has done will be a big question and a significant issue for each of the towns who are participating so they all need to be part of the conversation. I'll just note that the regional schools were to entertain I believe it's this week a recommendation to establish an OPEB trust fund just like the town of Amherst has done and so again they will need to answer the question of how to fund it as we go forward so these summary points were just to kind of bring us and as I said that really a lot of it is the other boards and committees who may have not paid as much attention to this as we have up to speed on things but if you have any questions or comments about it that Ms. Brewer and myself could bring back to BCG then do let me know and does Ms. Brewer or Mr. Musanti have anything else to add to the summary of what happened at BCG? I don't just reinforcing that we really are on the education phase on this issue and I was the town obviously have spent quite a bit of time on this subject as has the finance committee I was very very pleased and encouraged to see the regional school committee and the Amherst school committee through its budget committee really beginning to grapple with this and it's great because we're really now getting into the nitty-gritty and the dialogue about how to approach this so it's I think we're off to a good start. Is there anything you want to add on that? I'll stick with that. Okay. So any any questions or feedback about the BCG summary points? Okay you'll be hearing a lot more about this as time goes on that group meets again at the end of January and I don't hear anything about it until then but we'll meet again after the governor's budget but you can expect more of this conversation that select board is involved in at that four towns meeting in January. All right other liaison representative reports? Anyone Mr. Aiden? Just one it's unfortunately this happened after our last meeting and before this one but this weekend the public Shade Tree committee sponsored a workshop to help people who've had trees damaged on their property by the storm and it was an excellent thing I just wanted to mention that they're very active in that Alan Snow who was here earlier and could have spoken to it maybe described how to take it this storm had a particularly devastating effect on trees in that it tore the limbs off which is very damaging and he described ways to handle that kind of damage specifically as well as teaching you how to handle your chainsaw safely. Was that well attended? I couldn't make it so I don't know yes of course. It's a wonderful thing for the town to have offered and I hope that folks were able to take advantage of it. I guess I should report on the progress with the flag which is that Barry Moser has in fact come up with nine designs possible designs and they have been forwarded to the historical commission and the design review board for consideration and choice and there could be some tweaking amongst them. So it's nice to know after all these months that progress has been made. What's the expectation of things going forward? I don't know. It's time DRB and historical commission had a joint meeting and discussed it but at the moment it's the individual committees groups that are going to discuss it and I really am not sure it's ultimately we're going to get a recommendation which we can approve or not approve but it's at least moving forward. Wonderful. The designs are very lovely. Questions or comments on that or anything? Mr. Walden. Both those committees to which I serve as liaison meeting this week so they have been as Ms. Stein mentioned they've received the designs and these are on the agenda and we're assuming there will be a joint meeting at some point too but they just have to process it first. I don't know so I'm going to try to ask this week about a specific schedule and see if I can find out what they might do. Great. Thank you. Other liaison representative reports? Ms. Burr. I have a long list and you don't. That's so unusual. That's so odd. A couple of things I'll try and be succinct. The new housing and shelter committee still needs applicants. I'm still looking for suggestions as to how we find some of the people that have the qualifications that we suggested in the charge because just you know saying hey we're accepting applicants isn't doing anything on the other hand I do understand that during this holiday season is really not people's first thought is let's go volunteer on a committee. The first thing that that committee would really want to do would be to weigh in on the CPA proposals that will be starting to be looked at in the new year and we don't know of anything huge coming through housing-wise but still that would be perhaps one of their first tasks so please bear that in mind and looking for people associated with that charge. Along those lines we have all received my request a list of the committees and boards so that we can kind of re-familiarize ourselves with where we are with that in terms of possible vacancies etc. because we've been in with so much else going on with town meeting etc. it has not been a major priority of myself in this time to get those committees fully populated. One and to mention that leisure services commission one of the things that I have been serving as liaison for them to do was actually to kind of push them along a little bit from the standpoint of taking more advantage of the commissioners work and how do I want to say possible promotion opportunities themselves such that so that when a budget for example is presented by leisure services director or presented to the town meeting that the leisure services commission itself would say you know we've been talking about these projects we're community members and we think these are all really good ideas rather than them just kind of being in the background somewhere so they in fact were able this time this year to talk about the budget before it fully got presented by the director to the town manager so we are making progress in that area and so that's good to see and taking full you know using our committees in ways that maybe doesn't sound great but I think are important pieces of their charges community development block grant advisory committee is trying to set up a meeting before the holidays although again obviously time is getting tight so that they can make sure they don't lose the threat of conversation about what they want to look at in the spring in terms of data review so that they have the information that they'd like to have next time they're ready to review application so that's good to see keeping focus on that despite all the other things that are going on the regional school district planning committee that I am serving on as your select board representative and Andy Steinberg from finance committee and Catherine from the Amherst school committee is also trying to set a meeting for the week of the 19th so we'll see how that goes and as you may recall there was very specific in the town meeting motion that ended up being that there were going to be six meetings focused on these particular issues et cetera but Ms. Appie is in charge of that right now and we'll get us started on that questions or comments from Ms. Brewer anyone else is on reports I just wanted to mention that the recycling and refuse management committee are planning an exciting trip to the MRF the MRF the something recycling, the musical recycling facility which is just by way of saying that they are getting, they're engaging with the issue of what to do what creative things can be done when the landfills are all closed as they will be very soon our transfer station goes away under two years now I think we'll no longer able to operate it which means that the refuse is going to have to go some place we'll find out where that is pretty soon why can't we operate it after two years I don't recall what the issue is there I'm embarrassed to say I'm hoping that John does that's far from a done deal but the main issue is where we ultimately bring our non-recyclable waste a number of the regional landfills that we bring our waste to will be reaching capacity that are closing such as Northampton and a few others so that's impacting our cost projections going forward yeah there was we had a forum several weeks ago about that day the refuse and recycling management committee and what I hadn't understood hadn't thought about actually is the impact that the cost of non-recyclables has on not only the home owners clearly we all have to get rid of our garbage somehow or other but also on businesses in town it was well attended by business by contractors for instance who would come in and remodel your kitchen changing a kitchen or building a family room or whatever creates a large amount of refuse and that's what would be sort of the thing that would be most impacted by having to travel so much further to get to a landfill and one of the gentlemen at the forum mentioned his recycling project he just basically takes construction waste and dumps it on the floor and sorts it out so it can all be recycled it can either be taken for scrap wood or concrete can be turned back into aggregate and plaster can I don't know what they do with plaster they do something with it as well as the other obviously recycled materials like glass and metals more as that develops I actually do have a question that perhaps the town manager could put on his list for a someday item which is the letting us know a little bit more about the transfer station because there has been this sort of underlying concept that it's one thing because I think of it as a lot more than just the contractors being able to dump their stuff and individual people taking their one little bag of garbage there every so often it's of course the recycling ability as well as the bookshed and all that kind of stuff and if people are time out closing that in two years versus not closing it I've already heard some comments from neighbors that of course that thing is going to close soon and we're not going to have and we won't have to hear those trucks anymore and I was like not really clear on where we are on that and two years would be here before we know it so we just have sort of an idea of where we're going because of all the different issues that are involved in that some update that would be great. Any other liaison reports? I'll just note Campus and Community Coalition I didn't mention this at the last meeting but they we learned there that campus-wide through the I think it was through the Student Affairs Office they put together what you probably read about in the paper last week this I can't remember the name of it now but it was like our campus our night or something like that thing for Friday night that they were working to put together a whole bunch of activities that was essentially starting with like the hockey game and then going into all kinds of late night stuff. They were doing like an amazing race team that was doing fun things through campus they had karaoke they had a bunch of different musical acts they had just cupcakes they had all kinds of different kinds of food and entertainment and that was all in direct response to the fact that the town has been saying through our public safety through different campus and community conversations that that there's a big sense out there that there isn't enough to do on campus when you get these kind of marauding bands of students just walking down the street looking for something to do so there isn't anything to do too often and that's when some folks get into trouble. So the police chief and the fire chief have been saying and Mr. Moussanti and I have been saying well can you do more stuff on campus what would that look like how would that work out and that means obviously a whole lot more work for people during times when they're not usually working but they really embraced that idea and I didn't even realize that they were going to do it until the last meeting. I have no idea yet how it worked out obviously Mr. Kelly was here for public comment it didn't keep every single student on campus and behaving that night but I know that the police chief was going to look at it and see what kind of a difference it made. Now obviously this was a cold weekend in December which is not the same as a beautiful weekend in the spring but I think that this university should really get a lot of credit for doing a test run of that saying okay you know here's something that the town is telling us that we need to try more of so now we're going to try this we're going to see how it works and see what other things we might be able to do for the future so I just want to thank them for being so responsive for really saying okay yeah what would that look like and giving it a shot and I hope it was successful and I hope it's something that could be really expanded on for the future because yeah you know when people get bored they tend to make their own entertainment and that could go well or go badly so uh so who knows so I'm looking forward to reports on that and I like I said I don't know how it went but I do want to give them public credit for doing that okay I don't have any other liaison reports Miss Brewer anything on open meeting law yes and then I have I wanted to backtrack for just a moment actually for open meeting law no except that if you are subscribed to the MMA website notifications you've seen that they've finally put that up that the regulations were put out and um they I still want to ask some clarifying questions but hopefully they'll do some of that for us so yeah on yes exactly associated with remote participation I'm kind of waiting for us to not have to be the ones to nag about this let somebody else try and get some of these clarified so that would be good um one thing actually a couple quick things I wanted to mention because I know we're all tired but when you brought up campus community coalition I also wanted to mention that in addition to that being really great that the campus um was so responsive to that is the campus community coalition continues to do all these little things that we don't necessarily hear about at this meeting and Miss O'Keefe hears about them but for example on greeting card day I saw they released t-shirts that were starting to circulate around town that um associated with campus community coalition about 96% I think of student drive of students who go out to party get a sober driver you know and that they they make positive choices like that and so having those messages out in the bars that they're out in seemed like you know it's just like they just have these continuous things that they're always trying new things even if we don't necessarily hear about a particular promotion for bring that up if I could just emphasize that a little bit before you go on and so this was a project of that came out of university health services and their basics program but it was a project of that program that was working with the retail partners so these are the liquor licensees um most of whom attend the retail partners meetings but also those who were getting to try and be part of retail partners so they uh it was liquor stores bars and restaurants had people wearing a light blue t-shirt saying that that message about you know that that you mass students this is part of their social norming campaign they and this is the same as like the messages you see on buses and stuff that you see among the student body and they might say oh you know everybody you know drives drunk or whatever that you know nobody ever gets hurt well that's not true in fact 95 96% get a sober driver make sure they have a sober driver so they use that kind of social norming messages to um to try and change the perceptions out there and so it was really wonderful that so many different establishments did participate in that I really appreciate you're mentioning that um folks who didn't have didn't wear t-shirts because it didn't go with their you know some places have to wear sort of a certain uniform they would wear light blue buttons that had the same message on it but really it was a terrific uh it was a terrific thing for the retail partners to um participate in and and help support that sober driving message so thank you for bringing that up thank you I wanted to um completely randomly ask uh the town manager to mention which I will now mention that the um big wide traffic light is not finally going to be getting installed on Wednesday which I heard from UMass which I thought was interesting because UMass likes to put out these great notices that say the town of Amherst is going to be doing something called them if you want to complain um it's great though that they get it out there because people travel that area that just work at UMass you don't necessarily live in this area so uh that traffic light is something we've been much anticipating and after the storm we knew that you know the schedule got screwed up so if that could happen before big snow falls even that would be wonderful kudos to UMass for assisting with that announcement there was also an announcement uh today I believe from the DPW the work I believe is scheduled uh for this Wednesday yeah people can watch for that I think that's really important and if I might so keep one other thing I wanted to ask about parking since we had the you know the follow up associated with trying to tweak that to get it just right and come next year we'll know it out again be saying exactly let's do it exactly this way I'd like to um mention and I did speak briefly with chamber director last week whose responsibility this whole project really is from the standpoint of promotion I think the select board does a fine job in trying to figure out the best way to make it clear what we're approving of and to make it be something that will be useful to merchants and to downtown visitors but yet at the same time although of course the Gazette did very accurately report on what we intended to do with our parking the greeting card that is a Gazette promotion not a chamber promotion doesn't say anything about free parking on it when you get it and the chamber has not always gotten right on top of promoting that either and yet at the same time we're all volunteers and like the reason we have paid parking is so that parking turns over it's not like our job I think to promote that we have free parking so I hope that the community will think a little bit about how they want to hear about it and then talk to merchants and advertisers newspapers about how they can best get the information rather than saying how come I didn't know about this because I'm not really convinced that it's my fault they don't know about it I think we've done about what we need to do and so I'd like to see some because why are we you know struggling with it and taking the hit on the dollars when people don't even know and they're putting money in the meter anyway or whatever seems a little silly so I'm hoping that that will get handled elsewhere rather than that we need to make a bigger deal of it here within the select board so I think I think this that kind of falls victim to what happens with a lot of things that you do over and over again and you just sort of forget they're doing over and over again you're not really kind of looking at them anew and so so I have a note because Ms. I have had this conversation already I have a note in the master calendar for next year to communicate with the chamber in late October early November and say okay how do we kind of take this up a notch how do we get the most leverage out of the efforts that the chamber the Gazette and the select board the town is putting forth to promote downtown businesses on these these various days and during this time period we all need to be kind of you know getting credit for the effort but also but not not for the sake of credit but so that so that the public knows this is this joint effort among all these folks to try and promote business and to try and help people to shop locally and enjoy their time in the holiday season downtown so so I think it is kind of a instead of just saying okay here we are again we're doing the same old thing it's like stepping back and saying okay how do we do this better next time noted thank you all right other issues before the chairs report okay I wanted to note that in your packets you had because Mr. Brewer pointed out that folks hadn't received a hard copy of the budget guidelines that we had approved previously in case you like to keep copious folders full of these things now you have your hard copy so that's why you have them just to make sure they had them vice chair rotation schedule so this is just something that I was thinking of lately the way our schedule works is we rotate the vice chair alphabetically every month which works very well for us and it's like it's been doing it for years I was just wondering if you might want to do anything that would have you sort of skip a month or do whatever such that you ended up with different months because at this point you always have exactly the same months every year and that might be fine you know so everybody gets three months of being vice chair but sometimes you might have a month where we meet all the time or you might have a month that we meet very infrequently but the nature of our work is so cyclical that a lot of times we're dealing with exactly the same things in exactly the same ways during those time periods so I'm throwing it out there to you folks if you wanted to instead of starting January with whoever is next you know you would skip that person or you kept Ms. Brewer is currently at for two months or something just so that your months would be offset a little bit and maybe this doesn't matter to you at all but I just wanted to throw that out there to you if that was interesting it doesn't matter to me at all whatever you want Stephanie it doesn't make any difference to me every month is my month I always go on a certain month to tell you the truth so I mean maybe somebody else cares but I don't does anyone care no one cares okay very well Ms. Brewer well I just want to compliment you on bringing it up because back in the day when it used to be that certain things went with that say for example committee appointments there used to be this concept that the vice chair dealt with committee appointments well it was pretty crazy to have the same person always be doing June then because that didn't make a lot of sense but we've changed other things associated with that and I think that certainly at this point this board feels collegial enough that if we have a thing we want on the agenda whether it's our month or not we say hey we would really like to have this on the agenda so I know that passports haven't always felt that way but I think it is it's a useful sort of brain thing to bring along because we know you're going to be chair for the next 50 years but 51 year that people do keep this in mind because everybody doesn't get along as beautifully as we do they may not feel that openness to being able to discuss that and it is something that's worth mentioning every so often because if you really are tired of having August as your month maybe you can switch it out just throwing that out there if you ever want to change it ok anything else in the chairs report recent upcoming activity this week I think it's tomorrow actually Mr. Musanti and I are meeting with the new vice chancellor for administration and finance of the university just to meet them and make that acquaintance so we can have information about that next time I don't think I have any other particularly interesting recent upcoming information I think we have another untimed item or two to deal with before we get to calendar preview Ms. Brewer is it time yet on our schedule to in terms of our monthly schedule to add the budget update to untimed items simply because for example the thing I made a note of while they were here and then totally forgot while the assessors after they left is that because of the recommendations we saw that they received from the state which said that it was based on their own recommendations I was a little confused by that but all these 2015 recommendations some of which will clearly require some resources associated with personnel or money that's the kind of thing that we could now start saying are we planning that these will be done by 2015 are these even in the pipeline et cetera you know that kind of hear their sorts of questions that we can check in with the town manager on. So I think what we've done in the past is that after the budget has been presented to us then we always have the budget update because it's either us asking questions as we've had a chance to read more and more of the document or the fact that things are happening at the state level you know that we need to be updated on Yeah just reminding you that the budget proposal itself will have both performance objectives for the next fiscal year but also long term objectives so if there are long term objectives or needs such as the one you just mentioned in terms of how we do this measure and list program for example for all the properties in town that will be referenced in long term objectives and if there's a budgetary potential budgetary impact we're going to try to flag that as part of that one of the things we've been able to do successfully in Amherst is to do our revaluation work almost exclusively with in-house personnel at a savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars every single revaluation and that you know but I have the DOR advice there as well and so we'll address those in the budget document I hope in terms of the law so yes and yes we'll have the budget update information on the agenda and the issues that you're talking about to frame it so thank you alright let's see so we still need to do the special liquor license so I do it please I move that the select will a special wine and malt license for Sarah Rodriguez on behalf of Amherst College for karaoke night to be held at the Keith campus center from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. December 7th, 2011 and it was noted that too was an hour later than usual but I didn't see any problem with it so I made the motion as it's doing thank you for the discussion Mr. Hayden and the Miss Museum matter well I will say that I work for Amherst we grant them all kinds of special licenses yeah but thank you just to mention just making the point that on the 2 a.m. time requested our staff including the police chief have reviewed that I'm comfortable with the license as recommended I also follow up further with the office on this today to have them check with the fire chief in case they were concerned about ambulance impacts the kind of thing Mr. Kelly was talking about in public comment they had no problem with that for school sanctioned events and additionally in case anyone was wondering how many licenses had been granted to Amherst College under this person's name I think this is the information was that this is the second or there have been two previous but anyway it's way below the limit alright for the discussion all in favor say aye aye is unanimous and we have a committee appointment I move that the select board appoint Siren Hakim Amherst to the Human Rights Commission effective December 5th 2011 for a term to expire June 30th 2014 we have a discussion all in favor say aye aye is unanimous okay did we get every one of our necessary motions I think we did alright looking ahead calendar preview next meeting is our last meeting we hope unless something weird comes up of 2011 at this point we are expecting the budget update we talked about more license renewal talk about taxi business plans also at this point expect an executive session we're probably going to have another collective bargaining update at that point so just so you can plan accordingly also I've talked to the office about talking to the folks at UMass in particular but also Amherst College about trying to get any special liquor license applications in knowing that that's our last meeting you know we have parties and everything and we don't want to convene a whole bunch of quickie meetings just to do special liquor licenses but yeah never know so then that gets us to January and January will be a whole new year whole new bunch of issues and big focus on the budget at that point so things are kind of quiet for the next couple weeks but then we get seriously into budget time Ms. Brewer will probably know this but the we had originally talked about we saw some email go back and forth about the personnel board and the fact that it you know for various reasons it wasn't going to work out for them to come tonight do did that go to January do we know a date certainly January it will be January and I'm sorry I didn't mean to it will they are actually making some amendments having some discussion just that came in at the last minute about the library trustees and that sort of thing so it probably won't be until that 23rd meeting then looking at this list at the moment I would guess because one of the things we need is an opinion from council and it could be therefore a long time since some of us have been waiting six months for an opinion from council no comment beyond that no four months let me not exaggerate okay so it's in the pipeline probably right but it's not yeah it won't be like it isn't going to be one of those first meetings because of the other things going on right originally I thought we would do it next time but it's not going to work out those are anything else anybody needs to talk about before we meet again in seven days this is one of our meetings close together times if not then without objection this meeting adjourns at 8 57 second thank you good night