 for recording. Hey, I'm going to follow the finance committee meeting of May 23, 2023, the order. And the meeting, I think we have a quorum present. And so I'm going to make sure that everybody can hear and be heard. This meeting is being held via Zoom. Members of the public have access to the meeting through the Zoom program. And through Amherst Media, please be advised that this meeting is being recorded. So going through members of the, to confirm that people can, members of the committee can fully participate. Let me know if you can hear me and we can hear you. Anna. I'm always first when I was unprepared at that time. I can hear you present. Lynn. Present. Present. Matt. Present. Bernie. Present. Debbie. Here. I think the only one we're waiting for is Alicia, who in your keeping an eye, I see the PAM is here. I don't know anyone else from the council is present. Who's not a member of the committee. Jennifer. Tab is here as well. Okay. It means we have six. So as soon as one more person, council arrives, we have a quorum. Okay. And then you'll check on whether people can participate at that point. So the meeting order of the agenda today is, as usual, we're going to go into departments in a moment. I don't see any members of the public president other than somebody, I think, is from one of the newspapers. But if there's any members of the public president who would like to offer public comment, please let me know by raising hand. Seeing none, I'm going to note that we did make the request. I may ask again later if there are more people present, but the first part of the meeting is to complete our presentation of budgets and as usual, Sean has established, I assume, an order and therefore takes over and both recognizes the order that we're proceeding and says anything about prepared questions that he's received in advance. So Sean. Sure. Thank you. Yeah. So tonight we're finishing up the departments. I spoke with Dave Zomek before the meeting. So the order we're going to go in is inspections first and then planning and then conservation and sustainability. And then from there, we'll go to fire an EMS after that and then wrap up with public health. So Dave and Rob, the format we've been using is just sort of going through the questions that were submitted. So I'll sort of run through the questions. I'll turn it over to you after each question to give you a response. OK? You want to let Lindsay and Tim know that if they wanted to come back in a little bit that they can because we... Yeah. I think they were aware of that they were not the first agenda, but Lindsay, Chief Nelson, if you guys want to listen in or do whatever you'd like for probably about an hour. Oh, yeah. I'll mute. You want to hear me eating the dinner? Thank you. All right. So the first question, Rob and Dave, is for rentals and inspections. Sir, Kathy, do you have a question? No. Chris just had her hand up. Oh. Chris, you can eat too if you want. So I just wondered if you are not expecting any kind of presentation because you had said you wanted a three minute presentation from each of us. Yeah. You know, the format in the past has been that, but I think because we had sort of a compressed schedule with departments, we've sort of hopped right into questions. So I think, Chris, any prepared remarks you want to make, you can make them. I'll ask you the first question and then you can go ahead and just, you know, incorporate what you'd like. OK. But first question. So rentals and inspections, are we assessing the cost of ramping up inspections? What, you know, are we doing spot checks? Why not? You know, is there a list of problem properties related to health and safety, noise, overcrowding, et cetera? Hi, everyone. Rob, more building commissioner. So the draft bylaw of the expanded program is currently under review by the CRC and intended to be brought to the finance committee specifically to discuss the program costs and potential fees. So that's something that, you know, is ongoing. And as recent as the CRC's last meeting included a discussion on the current program is complaint response only with one code enforcement officer, as everyone knows. So there's, you know, no kind of program for addressing problem properties or repeat violations, which is really kind of the reason why we years ago have been asking for this bylaw amendment in part anyway, to address that or provide that opportunity. Rob, the the increase to and this is your question, Andy, that you sent me earlier, the increase to the rental registration fees that happened, I believe, last year. Did that, I can't remember, did that include any increase in staff responsibilities or was that just a straight increase to the fee levels? That that was a straight increase to the to the fee levels. It came at a time when we were launching our new permitting program. So there was a significant amount of work, but it would have been needed anyway to transition to our new OpenGov program. And that happened. The fees for the last renewal were connected, were collected under the new schedule. And, you know, in about a couple of weeks, we start renewal again under that same current fee schedule that was revised last year. So to your question, Andy, there's nothing in this budget yet about increased staffing for the inspections department related to new responsibilities because theoretically, or technically, those aren't in place yet. If that bylaw passes, then we'll have to revisit that. But as of right now, there's no additional staffing related to that because that first fee increase that you asked about didn't include any additional staff requirements. Lynn. Basically, you just answered the questions that I had because if we're anticipating this, we can't put it in the budget if it's not passed, but we may have to come back to it based on whatever the implementation date is to it. But I guess the other question and this is, you know, I if I start asking other questions, it would actually be going off script from what is the finance interest versus the interest in the bylaw. So I'm going to stop there. Thank you. All right. So I will go to the next question. Kathy, these are yours, right? Yes, the next one. The next one about feedback from small property owners. Do you want to elaborate a little bit more about that? Yeah, I Rob, I just was wondering whether small owners and by the small, I mean, I might have just one rental unit might be in my house or detached unit versus large multi unit. Do you get any feedback that it's easier or harder to work with you depending on and one crude way I'll do it is what I've heard is if you have clout versus you're the little guy, it do you get get any sense of that, you know, either on how often they're inspected or when they ask for something with a driveway or something with a porch? And these are all I'm just focused on rental units right now. Andy, before we proceed, Alicia's joined. And so you need to check to make sure she's can hear us and vice versa. And I need to call the council to order. OK, well, Alicia. Yes, thank you, Andy. OK, so back to you, Lynn. You know, given that we have a quorum of the council, I'm calling the council to meeting to order at five forty. And I would like to make sure that Jennifer Taub can hear us. Jennifer's screen occasionally seems like yes, we can. My screen's frozen. I'm going to OK, I'm going to resign on ice. Well, the other option, Jennifer, is to just not show your face, but somehow show that you're there. OK, sometimes that takes pressure off the connectivity. Pam Rooney here. OK, thank you. I'm done. So I think we were where we met. Question, Robert, OK, I just want to get the prompt to go ahead. So the feedback from the smaller property owners is typically related to the costs of the permitting. That's what I would say is probably consistently discussed or brought up, you know, the small property owner paying the same fee as the large multi unit property. I don't hear any feedback specifically regarding access to inspectors or, you know, permitting process. It's all really the same. You know, it's in with the online option now, which has gotten a lot of great positive feedback, you know, really, really makes things efficient, not only for our staff and to be able to turn out permits, but also for the user. So that's all been positive. So I think really the only feedback I hear is related to fees. And that is something that, you know, is also being discussed specifically by the CRC is, you know, how to how to charge a fee for the for the size of the unit. We don't do inspections. So it's really it's all complaint response. So once a once a permit is issued or renewed, most property owners don't ever hear from us throughout the course of the year. Thank you. And I'll give another plug for Open Gov, our permitting software. It's not often that we put a software in place and it does exactly what we wanted to do and potentially more. And this is one of the times where between Rob's office and our Mike Warner and IT, it was a really systematic and smooth transition. And now we're looking at it for things that we never even thought we would use through Open Gov, like field rental rentals and things like that. So it's that has been a big, big improvement in efficiency. The next question, Rob, I know we talked about this during our budget hearing. The number of inspections appears to have gone way up. But I think you're going to talk more about Open Gov and more about this program that we've implemented over the past year, year and a half. So we were really able to accurately track every kind of move we make with inspections, and this is mostly built out in the building, electrical plumbing permit pieces of the program. And a good example of this would be something like the Amherst College Lyceum, when the construction is going on there, there could be two, three months worth of inspector concrete inspections almost daily to see the various pieces of concrete and steel. And in the past, that would have been an inspection type that eventually got checked off as a complete. In this new program, every time the inspector makes a visit, it gets documented as an inspection. So it accurately reflects the actual activity of each inspector. So it's it's been really valuable that way, where in the past, it would have been like a handwritten note or something that we would have had to keep track of all of our visits. So, Rob, just on so on the inspections that I was the one where this came from, to it's a you know, it's a it's a jump of about five hundred from where if I do it all, is that mainly new construction where, you know, knew either that someone is building a whole new wing on a house or or someone is building a whole new building? Yeah, I would say it mostly relates to the larger projects because that's where we do many, you know, multiple inspections of each inspection type. In addition to a home, there's going to be a visit for each stage of construction, maybe two, but these buildings downtown, Spring Street, Southeast Commons, you know, they're daily inspections for many parts of the project. OK, thank you. The next question, Robin, I don't know if this falls under you or not, but do we track when homes are sold to LLCs? And do we track if permit if somebody had a permit and then withdrew and chose not to reapply? Yes, so I'm kind of going to break that up a little bit. So the the tracking of the homes to LLCs, what we get and we for years have gotten a monthly report that the assessor's office prepares for us of every transfer. So we'll look at that month to month. There could be anywhere between 10 or 20 properties that transfer. And we'll look for those, you know, those new owners that might not appear to be owner occupied. If we find something, you know, sometimes it's an LLC we recognize or an owner, we know that's an investor. We send out a letter or contact them to make them aware of the program to make sure that they're either transferring an existing permit or applying for the new rental permit. So that's something we've always done and are doing currently. The second part of that for a permit set of withdrawn or not reapplied, the answer is also yes. So we have an active list of properties that we follow up with after we get through the renewal period. And I'll remind you that in the past, before OpenGov, the renewal period was very long. It would take all the way to almost October for us to get through processing the renewals. Now it's done much more efficiently. So we can spend that part of the year following up with permits that didn't get renewed. We are also comparing properties ownership location and mailing address through the assessors records. And we're also looking at assessors records for all the multifamily properties that transfer or don't have permits. So we have an active list of properties that we work through when we have time. So again, we got one bill, one co-enforcement officer and when the building inspectors and health inspectors have some time, they'll help out, office staff will grab a list of them and make phone calls and find out. I did kind of a summary today. We have 1,256, and I'm moving into the next part of the question about the increase in the number of permits to explain that. But we have 1,256 permitted properties today active in the program, which is up about 100 from last year as a result of that work that I just explained. We are permitting 5,232 units within those properties. 139 of those are owner occupied. And just as a reminder, when we established the fees last year, the increased fees, there's a reduction for the owner occupied properties. So 139 of them fall into that category. And if I didn't just say it, there's 54 properties that are on our watch list, the checklist that we're following up on that we haven't got resolution on. So there's 54 properties that are to us at the moment unknown that we're working on. And then I think the last question and then I've got another additional question, Kathy, when you say how well does the online work? Are you talking about OpenGov or are you talking about like GIS and a different program? I guess it's the whole piece, Rob. You know, you've got online for permits then you're just talked about inspections. I think you've basically answered it. Just does it decrease the amount of staff time compared to what you used to have to do or does it at least allow other kinds of efficiencies? So I just wanted your own assessment of the systems you're working with. Yeah, so the OpenGov has absolutely increased efficiency. I mean, it was at a point where all staff in the office would work on that one particular program for months just to get it processed. So the efficiency has been outstanding with OpenGov and just kind of switching away from rentals for a minute. It's been really, really helpful and attractive to contractors and homeowners applying for building permits or electrical plumbing permits. It's all online communication. So there could be a note left during lunch by a contractor from their phone and we can respond. So it has really made things much more efficient. It's made communication better with the applicants that we didn't have before a lot less visits to the office. So all those things have added to making the less stressful in the office for the support staff that does that work every day, which is very high volume when we look at licensing and permitting and totals for the department. Pieces of your last question though about kind of talking about maybe what we have lost in where there might be some disappointment in the online presence. I do think we need some help with our web pages, updating them, keeping them current, making them better, more options available. It's just something that staff, we talk about it year after year and we're just not able to do either by our in-house ability to work with the program and build the systems online or just the time. So it is something that we definitely need help with making better. Some of you may know that in the past, we had a lot of great information listed in the mapping system through our GIS. You could get old permits, you can get all the history of complaint response. If a ticket was issued for a violation, all that would be there. And we unfortunately lost that. It's something I can't explain. It's IT related and security or something related that I know IT is aware of it, concerned about it and looking for better solutions to offer that again, but that's something that we really miss and the public misses. And the last thing is that we never completed our project to make all of our records digital and readily accessible. So we have some of them done, we have some of them indexed properly and available and we still have paper copies in storage in North Amherst and it thoroughly do a search of a record of a property it takes going to all those places in a lot of time. So that's something that's kind of on our request list. If that last one was a request from us, that's, you know, those are the things that we're hoping can be improved in time. Thank you. So Rob, the bonus question is how will the new building code and energy code impact your office? Is it going to require more new training, new expertise? Is there more work as a result of that? It seems like there's a minimal information maybe out there on it right now, but what do you see coming down the road for that? So we've been through it a few times. So, you know, every time there's a code change there's absolutely, you know, some education involved. There's a lot of time, you know, taken to work with applicants at this stage early on. Of course, we don't have a date for the new building code yet, but anticipated sometime between now and January. You know, this is the time where we hear from architects and engineers because they're designing projects that won't go into construction or permitting until next year. So, you know, that is something we're already working on. There's a lot of anxiety over the new energy codes that are coming out. We're looking at those in pretty good detail now, focused on the smaller builder, perhaps, you know, that's going to be having the most trouble to deal with this and maybe homeowners that might not be suspecting additional costs and work. Our staff will likely in the fall get in, there'll be some more training opportunities coming in the fall, I'm told, for a number of these subjects that our staff will be getting into. So, yeah, I think it's, you know, there's a lot more to come with that, with a possibly January building code update, and then big changes mid next year, 24, in the energy codes. Thank you. Lynn? First, I need to make sure that Dorothy Pam can hear us and we can hear her. Dorothy. Let me deal with that. I want to actually go to a question that's related to this. We also put into place the whole issue of maintaining home ownership for parts of buildings where we put in ADUs or something, I'm trying to remember the exact title, I can't come up with it. And I'm not sure of the implementation date, but I wondered if that was rolled into your property transfer numbers earlier and how we're doing on the implementation of that, because as I recall, that had to also be checked through the records deeds at the county level. So, about a year ago, we adopted new regulations for ADUs. If I remember correctly, there were maybe 11 or 12 that have been processed through that new bylaw. As an administrative approval that would have otherwise gone to the zoning board for a special permit. So, it's not unusual to see one of those now with the deed restriction that gets filed at the registry. That's something that is checked prior to the, in some cases, it's at the permit stage. If the applicant's comfortable doing that, but certainly by the certificate of occupancy, we're confirming that those are recorded, that those deed restrictions are recorded. And then those properties are given its own classification in our permitting system. So, they're easily reportable. They're relatively small number at this point. And those are looked at when we see the transfers month to month to confirm that they're still being occupied by the owner. To my knowledge, we haven't had one that's been in question yet, we haven't seen one that's transferred, that's been granted an ADU and haven't had to follow up on that. In some cases, they're permitted through the rental program and some cases are not. And I'm vaguely remember that we grandfathered previous ADUs through so that they don't have to have an owner occupied unit there. If the deed transfers, do they now come under the new law? So, no, the new law doesn't affect something that was in existence at the time that new law was created, but the old law did require owner occupancy. So, that's not really a change. So, it would have been granted a special permit. The special permit would have been recorded at the registry and it would have had an owner occupancy requirement as well. Got it, thank you so much. Welcome. Any other questions for inspections? Well, I think that's it then, Rob. Andy, I'm gonna try one more time. Dorothy, can you hear us? Okay, we'll try. Rob, thank you. You're welcome to hang around and see what other questions come up for planning or conservation because sometimes that falls under your area as well. So, next up is planning and we have planning director Christine Brestrop here. So, Christine, do you wanna make a few remarks before we dive into questions? You're muted still. You're still muted. I could note some accomplishments that we're trying to... Yeah, sure you could. Yeah, so we finally completed the FEMA flood mapping project and we had the town council adopt the zoning amendments that were associated with it and we're really proud of that and pleased that that project is over. We also completed food and drink establishments, a zoning amendment that reorganized the use categories and permitting paths for these uses that will make it more easy for them to establish themselves and we created at least one new category and that zoning amendment was also adopted by town council and we have the new preservation of historically significant buildings that we wrote last year and town council adopted it which was the old demolition delay bylaw that went from the zoning bylaw to the general bylaw. In addition to that, we've worked with a structural engineer to complete a structural analysis and study of the boltwood garage to assess its potential for expansion and we'll be sending that document to Paul Buckleman for his reading it and then dispersing or distributing it as he sees fit. We have also completed the design and hired a contractor to fabricate and install the way finding sign system and one of the questions I think has to do with whether there will be parking signs and parking signs are definitely part of that project both pointing in the direction of where parking can be found in the downtown and also identifying certain parking lots with signs. So that'll be a really good addition. We've also been working on the solar bylaw with the solar bylaw working group and we've completed the solar site assessment. So that's really exciting. And we're finally getting ready to put out the RFP for downtown design guidelines. So we're hoping that we'll have a contractor on board by the end of the summer or the beginning of the fall to start that project. Let's see if I had anything other things. CBA is really busy with solar projects, a solar battery installation as well as a large scale ground mounted solar project that's coming along. So we're gonna be busy with that. And the CBA also has a comprehensive permit coming on the horizon at Ball Lane. And I think you're all familiar with that but that's really exciting because it's gonna be 30 home ownership units and they'll all be affordable. And then last but not least, we've been working on a zoning amendment with two members of the council who put it forward earlier this year. So the planning board and the planning staff have been working on that amendment to try to understand its implications and recommends some amendments to make it work better. So that's all I have to say in terms of an introduction but I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Chris. So the first question is do you know how many or do you track how many staff hours are spent on council initiated zoning measures? Do you track that? No, we don't really track our hours. That's more typical of consulting firms and attorneys firms but we just work on whatever needs to be worked on and we don't track our hours but we have been working with the counselors, the two counselors who put this forward. We've been meeting with them and we've also been meeting with the planning board to understand what this amendment would do, what its implications are, what if it has an unintended consequences and it's been before the planning board multiple times the next time it's coming to the planning board is June 21st. So yes, we've put in a lot of time on that but I can't tell you exactly how many hours. Then there's a question about decline in grant funding. I'm just looking at that. Kathy, I imagine that's from the grant page. Yeah, I just, I don't know whether there really has been Chris because you've also brought in some really big ones. I know in terms of your staff, I've always thought you're remarkable of for finding things to apply for and actually writing it up in a way that someone gives you the grant. So if it was just pure numbers that looked like it was down but I don't, so I should make the question bigger. Are you staffed in a way that enables us to go after whatever is out there? Whether it's roads, sidewalks, you know, when you look at the range of what you've been able to bring in, it's impressive. So we have achieved some really big grants in the last year, $750,000 mass works grant for sidewalks along Belcher Town Road, $250,000 housing choice grant for a sidewalk along Boltwood Avenue, $75,000 community planning grant for streetscape design in the downtown area, and $827,000 in land and water conservation grant for work on the North Common. And that's gonna be combined with the Community Preservation Act money that we already have. So I'm not sure why it appears that our grant funding is lower than it has been in the past. I could say that the shared streets grants are no longer available. So although we had $500,000 in shared streets grants in previous years, that was really associated with the COVID epidemic and the state was trying to give money to the towns to improve their streetscapes, to have more walkability and outdoor dining and things like that. So those grants are not, as far as I know, available any longer. The other thing that might have affected the numbers is that the Community Development Block Grant Fund is now a two-year grant rather than a one-year grant. So we used to get $825,000 a year as a mini entitlement community. Now we have to apply every other year and we get roughly twice as much money, but it comes less frequently. So that's what I can say about grants and maybe Dave has his hand up. He may have some other ideas about grants. Yeah, quickly before Dave goes, Kathy, just that chart is an actual spending chart. It's not necessarily the volume of grants that were awarded or overseen by the department. So I think in terms of actual spending from grants, that can sort of ebb and flow from one year to the next in terms of when the money's actually spent. So I think to Chris's point, I don't think there's been a decrease in the number of grants, but FY22 might just have been a down year in terms of the things actually going out the door. Dave? Yeah, I just wanted to piggyback on Kathy's comments and compliment Chris and really the whole functional area because it's not just the planning department, it's the entire functional area when we're going for funding at the state or federal level. And yeah, I honestly don't look at the overall number of grants too much. I do pay attention to the kinds of grants we go for and of course, all is involved in all of those and has to sign off on all of those applications. And we've been very fortunate the last three to five years to bring in a tremendous amount of money across the board, whether it's for Hickory Ridge or conservation or sustainability. And of course, working closely with DPW on, as Chris mentioned, mass works, sidewalks. The challenge right now, and I think Chris may have slipped Chris's mind, but we have been two planners down in the department for some months. We have luckily brought on Rob Wichila who's been great and been here a couple of months. But frankly, we are stretched as is DPW to actually carry out all these grants. So the remainder of 23, we're not saying we're not going for any more grants. There are opportunities we're looking at right now, but we've got to carry out all of these projects, including the North Common, which has been on the radar screen for many years. So it's going to be a busy 23 and a busy 24. And I think you've probably heard that from Guilford-Moring as well. So we're still in the hunt for more grants, we've got to carry out all of the ones we have committed to so far. And we're going to keep being aggressive in 24 and going for more funding. Glenn? First, I want to just make sure that Dorothy Pam can hear us and that we can hear her. And can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you. I could hear you before. I was on the phone driving back from grandchild picking up, but I couldn't get the mute to undo. So that's what I did to you very nicely. Thank you. Nice to see you in person. I do want to go on to a question that really builds on, David, what you're saying. And that is that are you experiencing difficulty hiring the people you need? And because one of the things, it's one thing to get the grants, it's another thing to perform on them. And I share your concern about that. I don't want to take too much time because I know we have more to cover here, Lynn, but it's a great question. We lost Ben Breger some months ago and many of you interacted with Ben. He was terrific while he was with us. We are certainly feeling his loss even to this day because Ben was shouldering a lot of things, kudos to Chris and Jeremiah and Stephanie and Nate Maloy, who is phenomenal. Nate has stepped in and filled a lot of these holes. So we're going to keep all these plates spinning. We're going to move them forward. We're committed to MassWorks grants and park grants. We're trying to move forward on the work outside the Bank Center, outside room 101 at Bank Center for that new courtyard patio project. And we're working, as I said, with Guilford and his team, Jason Skeels and Paul Dethier and Amy Rizecki and others. Beth Wilson, we just put in a grant that Conservation and DPW teamed up on for looking at a culvert replacement on Potwine Lane. If you know where the Plum Brook comes through on Potwine Lane, it has been a problem. It overtops, it floods, and we just put in a grant to the federal government there, which we think we have a good shot at. So we're still in the game. We're still being aggressive out there and going for money. But yeah, as Lynn said, we've got to, once we get the money, once we get the grants, we have to perform. And that means contracting and bidding and all of the project management that goes into these things. So we're feeling it, but if we can get through 23, I think 24 and 25 will be hopefully even better. Thanks, Dave. Bernie? OK. Thanks, Sean. One thing I've learned in multiple years on the Finance Committee here in Amherst is that there's never any doubt that planning or, in fact, anyone who works for Dave Zomac isn't busy. They're always busy. They're always out. They're always doing stuff. And I have it in a good report that they all get to sleep between midnight and 6 AM, so there's still some additional capacity there. The question I had for Chris is, we belong to a regional planning agency, and are we getting any significant level of assistance from the RPA in terms of some of the grant writing or in terms of some of the grant management or in terms of some of the research that your staff has to do in terms of the bylaws and the like? May I answer that? Yeah. So yeah, we do get help from Piner Valley Planning Commission. We just finished a listening session and development of an action plan to make Amherst an age-friendly community, which is something that AARP is promoting. I believe Northampton is already an age-friendly community, so we should be getting our designation as a result of having this plan in place. We're also working with Piner Valley Planning Commission on an update of our historic preservation plan. So when we identify something where we think we can get help from them, we do that. We worked with them last year on a zoning amendment to help us to figure out how we can permit certain kinds of uses that are temporary in nature, some of which may have been able to be permitted with Article 14, but are no longer able to be. And others are that have to do with entertainment, things like wineries and breweries, and maybe one-time events or events that happen five times a year, something like that. So we have been working with Piner Valley Planning Commission on that. We haven't put that forward yet because we've been doing so many other things, but that will be coming along. So, yes, we do take advantage of them, and they're very helpful. Yeah, great. Thank you. So, Chris, the next question is, what would you say the top priority of the planning department is? Is it housing something else? If it is housing, what areas of town in particular? Yeah, I think it is housing. I mean, I think that we really have a housing issue that we have to solve somehow. We need housing of all different types and all different price points. We need housing for students, and we need housing for families. We have managed to produce, I believe, it's 800 housing units in the past six years. So that's a tremendous number. I believe we have 9,000-something housing units all together in town. So producing another 800 in six years is pretty good. We're currently looking at East Village as an area that can be planned to have more housing. The way it's currently zoned is not that conducive to the types of development that we think could happen there. We have some willing landowners, but their properties are locked in a certain kind of zoning that's outdated as far as we're concerned, and so we need to look at that. We also see the completion of Amir's new building, and Amir is planning something on the other side of Southeast Street, so that'll be coming along soon, and Colonial Village is slated to be expanded. We've been talking to them about their addition of I think it's 84 units that they're proposing, and 10 of them are gonna be affordable. So we have kind of a continuous stream of housing that's coming through the permitting process, but we'd like to encourage more by looking at some zoning changes. And as you know, we also have wayfinders that is developing affordable units on Belcher Town Road in the East Street School site. So East Amir seems to be a real hot area for housing development, and it's not five-story buildings that tends to be lower scale, and I think it's a pretty exciting area that we need to study and promote housing development via some zoning amendments, some clever zoning amendments in that area. Dorothy? Just thinking of all that development there, there is great need for a grocery store in that area. And I don't know what role the town can play in that, but all this talk about neighborhood centers and village centers and walkable, this and that, if you don't have a grocery store, it doesn't really work. Is there anything we can do to get a grocery store in the East Amir's neighborhood, which is really expanding? Well, yes. And one of the things that people have been looking at is actually expanding the geographic borders of the East Amir's Village Center, maybe even going as far as Maplewood Farm and trying to figure out how we can maybe turn that into something that would be an active place again. So we are considering that as an issue that needs to be addressed for the Village Center. Sounds interesting. Thank you. Lynn? I want to go back to the discussion on regional cooperation. Is Pioneer Valley addressing the issue of housing as a regional issue? This particularly came up on Friday at the round table that Mindy Dam held. Alicia was there as well as Anna. And the fact that, for example, Hadley, which is right on literally some of the university sits in Hadley, yet they aren't willing to step to the plate and build a multi-unit buildings as if somehow another Amir's should be the only place that absorbs that population. So I'm just curious when we go back to the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, whether any of those are active discussions at all. I know that they have a regional plan for the area and housing is part of it, but I don't think that they take on a role of kind of encouraging or, what should I say, identifying individual cities and towns that they think need to take action in some way. I think they more respond to cities and towns coming to them and saying, we need help with whatever the topic is or whatever the issue is. So that's kind of how they've been working. But maybe they need to approach some of these cities and towns and say you need to do your share. Well, yeah, Eastern Mass did it, but they did it with state law. All right, the next question is about impact or linkage fees from new developments and are there any discussions going on about possibly requiring that in the future? I know we've discussed it. Yeah, to my knowledge, Massachusetts hasn't really supported imposing impact fees on developments. There may have been some recent changes and maybe Rob would know about that, but in the past, Massachusetts has not really encouraged that and I believe it's actually against the law. But if you can prove that a development has an impact on infrastructure, like roadways or particularly intersections, then you can get a developer to pay for improvements to those intersections. The problem is it's kind of hard to show that one particular development, unless it's really huge, has an impact that it would lower the level of service that is currently at a particular intersection. And traffic engineers are pretty clever about proving that their projects don't have an impact on level of service, but that is one place where you can often get developers to pay for some infrastructure improvements if you can prove that their level of traffic has gone up that much or will go up that much. Andy? Yeah, Chris, on May 4th, we got the newsletter from the Division of Local Services of the Department of Revenue and it was regarding linkage fees and promoting the use of linkage fees in Massachusetts and they seemed to think that it was absolutely legal. So I will forward that to you after the meeting today and put it in the packet for the Finance Committee members to see that, but I got a very different message when I read my regular DLS newsletter. Thank you. Andy, I just pulled it up. It does seem like it has to be through special legislation. If you pull that up, it does seem like in order to get them in place, you have to have special legislation. Lynn? Yeah, this is actually a combination of Chris and Rob, but it relates to the issue of impact and that is that I can only give you an example, but I know there's others. A builder spends a lot of time building a new property and in the process tears up the road in front of the property. Do we require them to pay for the road repair? If they damage the road or the sidewalk, then we require them to rebuild it to the state that it was in previously. Is that stated anywhere in our permits? It's not stated in site plan review or a special permit, but I don't know, is it stated in a building permit, Rob? No, it's not stated in any of the permits that we issue in conservation and development. It could perhaps be part of curb cut permits or utility connection permits that are issued from DPW. I would personally, I'd wait to hear from the town engineer that something's been damaged and needs repair and then I would pursue getting it fixed, leading up to the end of a project prior to releasing the final certificate of occupancy would be the opportunity to make sure that happens. Thank you. All right, the next set of questions are on the North Common and downtown. So, and Paul, you may wanna jump in on this as well. The first one is about loss of parking and how that may impact this parking in general downtown losing the main street lot. I think that Dave Zomick may be able to address that better than I can, but I know that the DPW is always looking for on street parking and they're pretty clever about finding it here and there. They've done a good job about finding some on Spring Street and Dickinson and other places around downtown. And I know it's probably not replacing what was at 29 spaces, I think, out in front of town hall. But we are also, we have a request in for a capital, capital work, I think it's $50,000. And part of that, we've requested that we be able to hire a consultant to help us look around downtown to see if there are other locations besides Boltwood Garage and North Prospect Street to provide us with a location for parking. I was not part of the plan where back in parking was taken out of the North Common Project. So I don't really understand what the discussion was about that, but my understanding, I guess my sort of just looking at the plan, I would imagine that they took it out because it was too close to the bus stop and too close to the intersection. So I think it was only seven spaces. So that's why the back in parking was taken out. And yeah, so I guess that's what I have to say about that. Yeah, so just adding to that. So we are looking at additional, where we can find additional spaces to accommodate the loss of the current spaces. So it's lower than 29 because it's, we were to just repave that lot, it would be lower than that, right? It's not a one for one because of its sizing things. The other thing is to help to educate people about where parking is available. And that goes with the signage that we've been talking about because there is, you can come downtown, you'll see a lot filled, but you'll see two lots virtually empty, like the one behind Town Hall and the CVS parking lot. So we've looked at different options available to promote those slots and to make them easier to get to. So I think that's all gonna be part and parcel of the common work. We've also discovered recently, I must say that Emerson College lets people park in their alumni lot at night when their people aren't there. So anybody who's coming downtown to have dinner, who's able to walk can park there and go have dinner or go to the movie theater or whatever. It's a kind of a secret, but now you all know that. And there is a plan to bring back some proposals for additional parking in the summer. They're not necessarily downtown, but they're not far away from downtown to expand the supply of parking. Dorothy. We had the special parking district downtown before the new apartments got built and that lot still is not fully developed. Just wondering, is there any move to drop that? Because that's caused a lot of problems for a lot of people and has pushed a lot of parking from the people who live in those buildings into the residential neighborhoods. So, cause I know there's more building planned or it's coming along. Well, I don't know, but I suspect strongly. Is there any, just move to say, okay, we did that and we got a lot of new building. Now let's say that if you build, you must provide some parking at least. I think there's a need to reevaluate the municipal parking district. So that's a project that we need to think about managing, taking on in the future. Thank you. The next question related to the North Common is the, these are just sort of topics, has it been discussed the impact on downtown businesses? What is currently the thought process around the timing of when there will be a disruption? That's probably a Dave question. So, yeah, just quickly, we've had a lot of discussions with and through the bid in the chamber of commerce. Paul and I met with a bid in chamber members probably six weeks, eight weeks back, had a really good discussion with them in the town room, representation from a lot of different businesses. And yes, we spent some time on the loss of parking. As Paul said, we're going to continue with DPW to investigate finding, looking at reorienting and restriping where we can to pick up spaces around the edges. But by and large, we feel as though the outreach to businesses has been done over the last five years. And then in general, there's kind of an anticipation that this is going to be a good thing for downtown as construction begins to happen. And just a quick update on that, the project will go out to bid any day now. We will likely, again, we don't know whether it will start this fall or in the spring of 24 at this point. We know there are some one important element of the project is granite. And we know that there is kind of a backlog for granite. We're going to need a lot of new granite curbing and walkway curbing. So the project is likely to start in the spring of 24 and we'll work with DPW on kind of managing that disruption. So I don't think there's any plans to close that parking lot anytime soon. And that'll be up to Paul working with DPW. And so we'll get that out to bid and then bids will come back and we'll decide on the lowest qualified bidder later this summer and go from there. Can we get anything done in 23? Possibly, but more likely the bulk of the construction will happen in 24. And we'll have to work on around graduation and other major events on the common farmer's market, et cetera. The lowest priced qualified bidder, lowest priced. I'm sorry, what did I say? Lowest qualified, but I know what you mean. Lowest, yeah, lowest bidder. Chris, you already mentioned this a little bit. Can you talk about the timing for design standards and how they may impact new projects that are being proposed? Yeah, so Rob and Nate and I just had a meeting today looking at the draft RFP for design standards. So we have $100,000 from the town and we have $75,000 from the state, from the community planning grant to put together to hire a consultant to help us with design standards. And we're thinking that this RFP is gonna go out very soon as soon as we can work with accounting to put it out on the street. And the hope is that we would have a consultant on board by the end of the summer or the beginning of September. And at that point, it would be, there'd be a big community input effort to hold forums, to hear from everyone about what they like and what they don't like about the downtown and how it can be improved. And it's gonna be probably a two-year process to work through that, but I'm very excited about it. And I think it's gonna be really a good process for all of us to have our say. So the next question, Chris, is around Fort River School intersections with a new school approved and a new housing going in there. Are there any plans for applying for grants for that area for intersections or sidewalks? The Fort River School is part of the East Village Center. So I think that if we can tie work on the streets to commercial projects in the Village Center, we have a better chance of getting a MassWorks grant. I don't know if a MassWorks grant would be would be looked at in the positive way if it were just associated with the school because you have to show the state that there is a commercial benefit and that there is job creation as a result of what you're doing. So, we can certainly look at that and think about that. We did get a MassWorks grant for the sidewalks along Belcher Town Road and we use the Colonial Village expansion as one of the things that was going to be benefiting from those sidewalks. And so, there may be other projects that we can bring into an application process for a MassWorks grant in the vicinity of the Fort River School. So we'll have to think about that carefully. Kathy. Chris, just as I said, I think you all are masters at getting these grants there. When you and I listened in on a session with the state, one of the things they said is there was a grant program for intersections near schools. That was the one that like my ears went up when it said that specifically for schools. So it wasn't so much for job development but for the safety of kids. So it might be good to just put that on the radar screen in combination with the housing that's going in there because it's, we've got two that are near the school. So thanks. And just to add to that DPW, I mean, part of the work is to have the engine and engineering firm look at those two intersections. And now that we know sort of pretty much how the flow of traffic is going to flow into the school because that work is pretty much done now. DPW will begin doing some engineering analysis of the impact because we want, again, we wanna be consistent with it when the school opens that the traffic doesn't become a nightmare immediately. So we wanna be have address that prior to that. So the last question is around the North Amherst Village intersection with the new Ball Lane project and I guess planning and what your thoughts are on that intersection and what's in the development up there. So we applied for a MassWorks grant. I think it was three times and three times probably not in a row, but yeah, we know that that intersection needs to be improved. We tried to tie it to the North Square development, which we thought was had a pretty good chance of being accepted, but that wasn't good enough. So the state, as I said before, really wants to see some kind of commercial development associated with MassWorks grant. And so, I know that landowners up in that vicinity have plans for their properties. And as those projects develop, we can see how we could tie those into a MassWorks grant. I'm not sure I have more to say about that, but that certainly hasn't fallen off our radar screen that the issue is there. Thank you. Any final questions for planning? All right, well, thank you, Chris. Again, welcome to hang around. So our final functional area department is Conservation and Sustainability, assistant town manager Dave Zomek and sustainability director, Stephanie Chickarello, are here. Dave, Stephanie, either of you want to say anything briefly before we dive into questions? If I could, John, I think enough has been said about the functional area. So I will not add anything to that, but I did maybe want to give Stephanie a chance to kind of lead with sustainability here. I can move through the conservation questions fairly quickly, but I did want the group to kind of hear all of the amazing work that, not all, some of the amazing work and projects that she's got before us. She's working with a number of different committees and boards. So if Stephanie could have a couple of minutes and then you could present some of the questions you might have to her. And I'm happy to cover conservation at the very end. I'm sensitive to the time at 6.36 as well. So if that works for you and Stephanie, that'd be great. That sounds good. And just a reminder to everyone, Stephanie was helpful at putting together a new section that will stay in the budget going forward around all the town sustainability initiatives and sort of an update on those projects and the different, Stephanie is a master of juggling multiple things all at once with no money, or no town money. And so you'll see a list of all those things on that on those couple of pages. So Stephanie, go ahead. Sure. So thank you all so much. I feel a little bit like the department head without a department, like the person without a country. But I really appreciate all the support that Dave's given for the sustainability work, especially, Dave's been really great in championing a lot of the work with me. And I feel like we've accomplished so much in this past year, the highlights are really, certainly the solar landfill project, which I think everyone knows about, but we're moving forward with our community choice aggregation effort. And that's working with two other communities. And that will have a town-wide impact. So we are looking to launch a community outreach event, and that's going to happen on June 6th. Our community comment period will begin June 1st and go through June 30th. And that will really be the start of really formalizing that process moving forward. So that will have, I think, a big impact on the town. We just recently completed a solar assessment with the help of GZA Consulting. And that work was done in collaboration with both the Energy and Climate Action Committee, as well as the Solar Bylaw Working Group. And that was to look at the feasibility for solar development within the town. And it wasn't just looking at ground-mounted, large-scale solar, it was really looking at the feasibility for any solar within the town. And we sort of were able to identify about a third of the town that's left that's sort of feasible for development. It doesn't say exactly where it can go, but it sort of moves that process forward. And that's tied with the Solar Bylaw that is being developed by the Solar Bylaw Working Group. And I've been working with Chris Brestrup on that initiative. I think there's a lot of focus now moving forward on implementing the ARPA funded projects. So right now we're going to be looking to create a community dashboard with the information for climate work and sustainability efforts will be on the town website. And we're also looking to get some inventories done. We're looking at, I'm sorry, if you hear my dog whining in the background, I apologize. We are having a few inventories done. One is for a building inventory of all the municipal buildings to look at the HVAC systems and transitioning those buildings to electrification away from fossil fuels. And then we're also going to be doing an inventory on our fleet vehicles. And that will give us a sense of where we are with greenhouse gas emissions pertaining to our fleet. And we're looking to see how we can transfer those and transition those away from fossil fuel use again towards electric vehicles. And there'll be kind of a timeframe laying that out as well. There are other initiatives and I could keep going, but I don't know if there are specific questions. So I just wanna let you know that moving forward, I think we're looking, I'm looking to really collaborate more with the Energy and Climate Action Committee on implementation of the Climate Action Plan. So there's one submitted question specifically around sustainability and then maybe we'll open it up for if there's any other committee questions before we go to the more conservation focused questions. Stephanie, can you talk about some of the grants and the process you use for applying for those grants? Is it one person applying for them as a team effort? And do you feel like we are missing any potential grants due to staff time restrictions? Sorry, I wouldn't say that we're missing grants. I feel like we have to be somewhat strategic in the grants that we go for even with the green communities funding, it doesn't always make sense to apply every year because that funding is somewhat limited in the maximum amount that we can get. So I'm working very closely with the facilities manager on our next round of funding because we wanna look to electrify town hall and that would mean creating and moving town hall to being a net zero hold on. So that's something that funding will come. So I don't think that's like a lack of staffing. It's just more strategic timing I would say. And as far as other grants, it depends on what the project is. I know for instance, there's a resiliency project, an MVP grant that I've worked with Aaron Jacques on. It's really kind of been more of a department effort looking to get an MVP grant which is a municipal vulnerability preparedness grant for the resiliency of Puffer's Pond in the surrounding area. That will be a really big effort. And again, that was kind of a team effort in getting that grant proposal submitted. And that was also we hired a consultant firm, Fasin O'Neill to work with us on that effort. I think other, again, like I said, ARPA funding, I think is something that was somewhat of a team effort but I think implementation, I will certainly be overseeing those projects that are related to sustainability. But I, again, at some point, if we have more staffing, it would certainly help. But I don't think a lack of additional staffing has hindered our ability to access any grants at this time. Thank you, Stephanie. And I've heard that noise before. I mean, it's dinner time for your dog. That's what my dog does. And I apologize for scheduling this during the dog's dinner time. I'm so sorry. That's fine, Pam. Thanks. I was gonna ask if there's a status update on the survey or the study of the underutilized town-owned facilities. Where are we on that? I think I had volunteered to be part of that if somebody wanted me, but I haven't heard anything. So we are bringing in a fellow from the University of New Hampshire Sustainability Institute this summer who is going to be doing a whole-scale inventory of the municipal buildings and will be identifying the HAC systems and then creating kind of a timeline of transitioning those buildings away from fossil fuels. So that's moving forward this summer and we'll have the fellow from June through the end of August. Right. And Dave, you were gonna update the policies and procedures or take a look at the policies and procedures related to vacant buildings, right? Right, this is kind of an interesting dovetail. I'm not sure, Stephanie answered a corollary question. I'm not sure it was Pam's question, but it is great to get an update on looking at all the current systems in all of our buildings, but we're also, Pam, I think it came up at a council meeting, I don't know, a month or so ago. So I've been tasked with looking at our current surplus property policy, which was developed a couple of years ago. I don't think it needs a lot of work. And then, particularly Rob and I working with Nate Malloy and with some input from Chris are looking at some of the buildings that would likely be logical places for reuse, i.e. the East Street School for many years was kind of sitting idle. And now we know that that has been folded into the Wayfinders project and that'll have six affordable units in it. And we don't have a lot of surplus property, but the South Amherst School comes to mind. There are some acres off of Strong Street that come to mind. Of course, we're gonna talk about Hickory Ridge in a few minutes, but we'll look at all of those properties as part of that process. Are there any, I was gonna try to keep us on sustainability for now. Are there any questions on sustainability? Andy, is your sustainability question? Well, mine's sort of half and half. Okay, go ahead. Something that Stephanie I've talked about before, which is the status of the bike share program and the fact that the provider, the company that has been running and felt bankruptcy and Northampton is renegotiating. Is there any risk that in the renewal that the town share of the expense will increase? And is that something that we need to at least be aware of as a possible future cost? So, yeah, I'll jump in on this one. So there is some litigation being examined by the various attorneys for the various communities. So at this point, that's sort of where this situation is with the valley bike. So anything you wanna add, Steph? Yeah, I would say that moving forward, I think one of the things that we're understanding about bike share systems kind of whole scale is that the operations piece has been something that often isn't accounted for with the municipal participation unless you have a really big network sponsor like a Nike or a Citibank, it's also a challenging piece to fund. And I think moving forward, no matter what model that we look to, it is potentially an increased cost in the future, the operations piece. So, but again, we don't know what that would be. I can't tell you what that amount might be, but I think it is something that we need to be cognizant of. And the group is really looking for creative ways to see how that might be covered. So as much as possible that it doesn't fall squarely on the shoulders of the municipalities that are participating, maybe through other agencies, but it may at least in part fall on the shoulders of the municipalities. So again, I don't have more than that at this point, I'm sorry. That's great, thank you. Dorothy? Three quick things and one, just on the bike since you were talking about it, I never had a sense of how much they were used. When I would go by, I'd often see bikes parked there. I know you have to have a credit card in order to do it. So that gets rid of a lot of people. Was it really high utilization? Oh yes, absolutely. Especially with the UMass campus, there was a lot of usage with the UMass campus being involved. And at times we were the second, depending on the season and the time, sometimes we were like the second largest user of the entire network. So we had quite a bit of user and part of the reason you see bikes in the stations all the time is because they're supposed to be bikes in the stations. So that's part of the operations piece and I'm glad you brought that up because they actually need staffing to go from station to station and balance the bikes if you will and make sure that there's at least a certain number of bikes in the stations at all times. Okay, so that sounds like really in terms of reducing student need for cars, that sounds like a good solution. That was one of the reasons why we pursued it. That was a big reason actually. So my second one is when you talk about making the town buildings net zero, you don't mean you're converting from oil to gas. You mean you're gonna do it with heat pumps and solar completely? Not completely. So when I was talking about the town hall, I was specifically talking about moving to electrification. And if we have a more greener electricity supply, then that reduces the reliance on fossil fuels and sort of counts towards greening if you will, the building. Okay. Though I do remember there was a time when the last thing you wanted to do was to buy out an all-electric house because that was a disaster, but that was a bit of a... We're moving, yeah, we're not in that time anymore. We're doing entirely the opposite. Okay, so the last item is I had a guest from out of town here this past weekend did a lot of driving around with her. And her one big comment about this town was she loved the trees. And I see the trees as being really important in terms of reducing the need for air conditioning because we don't need it. We have them, but we don't have to use them more than maybe five days a year. And also in terms of heat. So I just wanted to put in a plug for trees that she was just amazed. She just said the trees are astonishing. And she loved it. I just wanna make sure that we keep the effort on to keep our trees. I know it's a challenge. I know it's a challenge. I think that as a member of the conservation department and having been working for that department for a total of 26 years now, I agree we love our trees. And there is a lot of value in trees. And just so you know, the TSO committee is looking to have some targeted discussions and trees as one of those targeted areas they wanna have a discussion about. Any other questions for sustainability? All right, we'll move on to conservation questions. So Dave, the first conservation question is about how priorities are set for trails and minor bridges and how do users, how do users of trails let conservation know if they find planks are broken or there's damage at a trail? Very great, great question, Sean. So first off, there's a couple of ways that people can let us know. There's a place on our website where you can report trail issues, bridge issues, trash. We also have a conservation general email where we get concerns, complaints. And then we get a fair number through C-Click Fix that comes in through DPW where people are a little confused as to who has responsibility for what. And then frankly, we all in the department including inspection services, our central office staff get inquiries or concerns. So eventually they all make it, many of them make it to me or to Aaron Jock, our wetlands administrator. And then if we can't address them, they may be something in the field. So Brad Bordewijk, our land manager gets those. He also gets them on his phone, which is out, his office is out at Cherry Hill Golf Course. And so there's four or five different ways that people can get concerns and complaints to us. And then we address them as they come in, depending on the priority. The first part was how our priorities set. They are, it's kind of a combination. Again, it's a collaborative effort in the office. We have lists of priority projects based on, excuse me, based on complexity, based on how much permitting the project requires. Some of the priorities are set based on the, how many people use the, typically these are trail related projects or puffers pond related projects. So sometimes a project that has high visibility, high usage, a lot of people use trail X versus trail Y. Oftentimes that project will be a higher priority. We are like any other project in town, we're running into challenges with cost escalation. So bridges that might have been done, 10, 15, 20 years ago and cost $2,500 might now cost $15,000. So we try to permit all of these. So they go through the conservation commission, if they are near a wetland or over a river or stream in a resource area. And then in recent years, it's been great working with Rob and he has gotten involved in some of these projects and helped us to both design and permit new parking lots, improved parking lots, bridges, things like that. We also work with the conservation commission. So we update the conservation commission. Aaron and I meet with them twice a month and we update them on projects, get their import on projects that need to be accomplished. So there's a series of lists. I wish the list wasn't that long, but they are very long and very expensive. I mean, right now, it's a couple of years out. We have that much of a backlog to get all of the projects done. Keep in mind, there's 80 miles of trails over 2,000 acres of land, non-pollocks, buffers pond and the list goes on. So it's a big list and we try to work through it. Thanks, Dave. Can you talk about community gardens at Fort River and potentially a bridge to the fields? Sure. First of all, Stephanie's been very involved and done amazing work with the garden committee. I may not have gotten their official name right, but there's been a tremendous amount of resident involvement in the planning and organizing and carrying out that wonderful new garden at the Fort River farm off of Elchertown Road all along. And I can remember presenting the project to town meeting. I talked about the opportunity to connect the conservation land, the community gardens and the trail there with Fort River School. This was long before the decision was made to move, excuse me, to put the new school there. So yes, it's absolutely a connection between the new site, the new school and the conservation area is and has always been in the plan there. At one time, I actually had a donated bridge from the university in mind because there was a professor there, I believe he was an engineering professor and he had collected old bridges. I think those bridges have long since moved on to other places, but anyway, the plan is to connect the conservation area with the new school. The plan is also to try to make a connection between the conservation area and the wayfinder project so that residents of that project can make their way down. It's a pretty easy walk, but we'll do the best we can to, we got a couple of years here before those projects come to fruition. Thank you, David, it looks like volunteers decreased and your service level charts. Do you have a plan to expand? Can you talk about how you recruit volunteers and could there be community or teams in particular areas of volunteers? Yeah, I don't have those figures right in front of me, but honestly, I think we went from an estimate to more realistic data collection on how many volunteers we were actually looking, interacting with every year. So I think that's really, it wasn't a precipitous fall-off, it wasn't a cliff, we're not working with volunteers. I will say, and we're challenged by, the opportunity to work with volunteers is town-wide. It's a wonderful thing that thing we're challenged by with only two FTEs in the department is simply time. It'd be wonderful. Again, ideally if the town had a volunteer coordinator, I think our community outreach folks, Angela Mills and Jennifer Moisten and Brianna Sinred have done a wonderful job and they've really increased the opportunities for volunteers, but it's really just a time and a time management situation. The volunteers need communication, they need constant and consistent coordination and organizing and we often are simply trying to get things done. So in the last year or so, we've partnered with the Kestrel Trust, they've been wonderful and we've had a number of volunteer projects happen out there. In fact, there's some wonderful things going on on the Robert Frost Trail out in the Lawrence Swamp. We've had some for-profit businesses volunteer, their staff on certain Fridays, they come out and build bridges. You may all know David Mullen, who is a very active member of our community and he has organized some terrific events working on raised boardwalks in the Lawrence Swamp area. So, and we just had a volunteer cleanup at Amethyst Brook in Puffer's Pond. So we do what we can with the resources we have. It'd be wonderful if we had a volunteer coordinator, I think they could help a lot of departments, but we're doing the best we can with who we have now. Dave, did something happen to the, we used to track watershed acres managed and then we sort of stopped tracking it. Was there something with the collection system for the data that we changed? Yeah, it wasn't so much a data collection issue, Sean, as a couple of years ago, and I don't have the, which fiscal year it was, but we actually for as long as I can remember and beyond me working for the town of Amherst, our land manager used to assist in the management of our watershed lands in Shutesbury and Pellum. And, you know, during Paul's tenure and working with Gilford Mooring, the superintendent of Public Works, we decided a couple of fiscal years ago to move that under that management under DPW fully. You know, our land manager will help when necessary, there's a lot of collaboration between and among departments. So that data or that change in the reporting simply reflects moving that fully over into DPW's Bailiwick. You're just getting these things, Dave, because I stared at the table on page 167. And, you know, volunteers went from 225 down to 75. So that's a data issue. And then land managed went from well over 3,000 to none. But thank you. I'm just making notes on the table. Yeah, thanks. So we didn't know, yeah. In short, we didn't abandon managing our watersheds. We just shifted that responsibility to other staff. Thank you. In DPW. And we help, you know, it's not like we don't help. It's just more accurately reflected the way it is. So Dave, before we get into a discussion on Hickory Ridge, the last question before that is how you collaborate with DPW and, you know, do you share any, I think this is referencing, do you share any equipment, tools, things like that? Sure. You know, across the board, there's a lot of collaboration. You know, I'm looking at the two chiefs in the waiting to follow us. And I was just thinking of a project we just, you know, we just collaborated with Amherst Fire. They were fortunate enough to get the dive team from the region to come and train at Puffers Pond. So, you know, there's all sorts of opportunities for collaboration and they happen fluidly within the organization. You know, Rob works with the DPW electrical crew and their team. We work on, we collaborate with DPW around testing for Puffers Pond and some of the swimming areas along the Fort River. We collaborate, you know, monthly with Alan Snow and his team and we share equipment when we can. I will say that the ongoing challenge always is when they need the equipment, we need the equipment. There's a very small window of field season here in New England that may be changing given climate patterns. But for now, we need to get things done between April 1st and November 1st. And so when the grass is growing, the trees are growing, there's people out on our parks, our commons and our conservation land. We simply need to get things done. But again, Brad Borderweek, our land manager, Alan Snow and his crew have a great working relationship and they collaborate where they can. A great example is right now we have, Brad is the only staff we have in conservation. So we have a couple of dangerous trees to take down and Alan will collaborate with Brad on taking those down with the bucket truck because of course conservation does not have a bucket truck nor do we need one, but there are complex tree removal and tree safety issues when you need to take one of these down. I would say right now on trails, we probably have, I'm gonna say we have 50 trees down across trails. In many cases, they're not a big issue. Brad and his team will get to them and again, prioritize them based on how active that trail is and whether anybody can go around them, go over them or if they're dangerous. It always starts with our, are the trees hung up on other trees? That is a high priority. We get to those, we take them down. But if it's something that somebody can jump over or walk around, they may get done in turn a little bit down the way. Stephanie. Actually, I can wait. I just wanted to make a statement of clarification before you all finished after Dave is done. You can do it now if you wanna, we're gonna go to Hickory right after. Okay, sorry, I just wanted to go back and I wanted to apologize about my dog. I made a statement that I referred to the Town Hall project as being a net zero project and what I meant to say was a fossil fuel building that was gonna be our first initiative to be fossil fuel free and to be 100% electrification. So I just wanna apologize. I got very distracted by my dog chewing on my arm. So sorry. No problem. Thank you, Stephanie. Thanks. Bernie. Yeah, Dave, I'm not gonna mention Bernie. I just wanna point out that the trail system that we have here and this goes to the larger question of recreation as well. It's a real trip generator. It brings people into town. And so the work that Dave does in terms of the and his crew does in terms of conservation and the trail system has a direct economic benefit to the town and we should probably think of ways we might direct people into the town center or into one of the neighborhoods. Based on the activity that they've been having and visiting us and walking on the trails. And so thank you. Great. Yeah, if I could just say it reminds me of a comment Rob made a few minutes ago that oftentimes we're so busy trying to get the work done and Rob mentioned websites. We, Aaron Jock and Brianna and others have done their very best to update our websites but that's a wonderful way to promote the town. And I think we could do honestly a better job on the conservation website really promoting all the assets we have. They bring in visitors. They, you know, the trails and puffers and Mount Pollux and others, other areas bring in repeat visitors, families, generations of families. But we honestly could do a better job at promoting those assets. They're a tourist attraction and we don't do a good enough job I think kind of promoting those. And, you know, we certainly could spend some time on that when we have a moment. Stephanie, is it a new hand or authentic? So Dave, the last question is around Hickory Ridge and can you discuss sort of the status of Hickory Ridge as it relates to possibly affordable housing, the fire station, other ideas and how public input has sort of been incorporated into that process? Sure, very quickly. Cause I know you want to wrap and get to fire. There's a lot happening at Hickory around Hickory. I will say the major focus right now is the solar, the initiation of the solar project by AMP Energy at Hickory. It is a major project on town land. It will be under construction, I think likely through November of this year. So it's a fairly long duration project. We also have the ADA trail project that we got a park grant, a state park grant to do. That is under design right now. Hopefully construction will start in the fall. We are designing the core trail that will take visitors from Pomeroy Lane and the Village Center all the way up to East Adley Road and the neighborhoods along East Adley Road. And we're also in the process of finishing the comprehensive plan that I talked about once we purchased the land. That comprehensive plan will include all the baseline information. We've done a tremendous amount of work. We've already completed a full wetlands assessment of the entire property. We are nearing completion on an ecological restoration plan for the entire property. We are nearing completion on a massing study looking at the frontage along Pomeroy Lane. This will look at the opportunity for a fire station, the possibility of locating another modest building there. It could be a community center. It could be a senior center. We could look at needs for other community buildings after we get through the four priority projects we're talking about. And of course that massing study will also look at co-locating affordable housing there. I have been talking about a senior affordable housing there as a really good fit, I think. So I think Paul and I have talked about me coming to do some sort of an update for the council in the fall, which I think makes perfect sense. But behind the scenes we've been doing a lot. We've been really pulling together all this information that we didn't have before we owned the property. And then we will, I think the fall would be a good time to begin to face the community again and jumpstart our kind of interactive phase with the community. And starting probably with an update to the council and then some community meetings around next steps. So that's kind of where we are. I'm just skimming those questions. I will say that the community solar, the solar that is going on there now is a really intense project. So Aaron Jock, myself, our inspectors, the fire department, we are all out there keeping a very close eye on town land. As you know, it is a very high priority, high visibility project for the town. It's also a high priority for the town. It will bring in a significant amount of money in a pilot, but we wanna make sure the project is done right and done well and safeguards all the sensitive ecological areas out there. So a lot of things happening out there, I guess I'm asking for everyone's patience. We're going probably as fast and as furious as we can on Hickory Ridge among all the other projects we're managing. Happy to take any questions on it. Any questions? Pam? Hi, thanks. I'm really delighted to hear that all the wetland and environmental studies are being done there. It's such a beautiful piece of property. One of the things that caught my attention was an email from, I think, was one of the co-chairs of the housing trust. And they sort of said, you know, we're hearing about, almost like FEDA complete proposals for use of Hickory Ridge as kind of a response to their question about housing and was there opportunity for housing at Hickory Ridge? And it keeps feeling like the cart coming before the horse, the comprehensive plan isn't done. And yet, you know, there are often all of these references to will that's probably where the fire station will go. And yet we, you know, none of this was determined yet. Is there an issue with the order of this or, you know, you don't try to keep things secret. It's not like you're gonna unveil a big plan in September, but... Well, I can answer that. Yeah. I think we are going to, we are going to present a comprehensive plan in the fall. I didn't commit to September one or anything like that. But in the fall, we are going to present a comprehensive plan for the property, which will include many options. I think that's the key. I will say that I did see some of those emails today. I thought they were actually unfortunate. Jump to some conclusions that are, there is no FEDA complete. I do think the fire, to be perfectly honest, Paul, myself, frankly, the council, it has been brought up multiple times at council meetings. In fact, it's been mentioned multiple times in local newspapers and the press that the possibility, a strong possibility exists that Hickory Ridge could be a compatible site for the fire station. So for folks to be surprised by that at this point, I think is, I don't know. I don't know where to go with that, but I will say that there, it has not been decided. That will be a decision that goes through multiple layers of decision making and consideration. And ultimately, if that is decided on the space, our job as town staff is to look at the feasibility. And that's why that massing study that we are engaged in is looking at will a fire station fit on the available, developable frontage. And I think the short answer is we believe it will, but it has not been decided that there will be a South Amherst fire station there. So I'm committed to working with the housing trust. I haven't reached back out to the co-chairs yet, but I think some education and information for the trust would be beneficial for them to understand what it means to do a plan with multiple options for the property. So nothing has been decided. Solar was predetermined when we bought the site. So that project is moving forward. I think there was broad community support. In fact, I would say the community support for public access and trails was probably the number one use of the site. So that's why we went forward with the trail grant. But other than that, there has been no major decisions on the outcome, particularly of the frontage. Does that answer your question, Pam? Thank you. Dorothy? Well, I personally think that you have, at least to us in the council, communicated these possibilities. I think the problem is that the idea of the fire station has met a great need since we couldn't seem to find a place for the fire station that if that worked, that would be great. But it also the possibility of affordable senior housing has been very attractive at the same time. And I guess we can't have the two of them on the same property. So because it's been in the air, still under study and the housing thing was put out, some people just kind of, I think latched on that. But I mean, we in the council know that we've got to find a place for the fire station. And I've certainly come to believe that where DPW is is the best place for DPW to be since it doesn't seem to bother anybody and you can't even see it when you go by. So it's just one of those things. But I do think that, you know, I was always aware of the two possibilities and that we didn't have it decided yet. So, you know, don't say. I would just kind of wrap by saying, I understand we staff have kind of gone into a quiet phase of working with some of the consultants on some of the design for trails and massing studies and all of that. And I would just ask for your patience as we pull that all together again, you know, some months ago when this was all launched, we also lost two of our planning staff. So we've been moving at a pace that we're comfortable with and can get done. But I understand people are kind of saying, well, what's happening with Hickory? I haven't heard much about it in a while. So I think what I'm saying is fall, mid-fall would be a good time to say, okay, let's present to various boards and committees including the housing trust, the council, perhaps CRC, others, and say, here's where we are. Here's what staff have accomplished. Nothing, you know, has been decided about the fire station or the frontage, but now is the time to begin to re-engage with the boards and committees, the council and the community. And we did promise that, we did promise. I just, we've gone into a little bit of a darker phase, if you will, of gathering information and getting those plans all together. I will say that I met with the solar company recently and they would like to do some walkabouts and take people to the edge from the old clubhouse to the edge of the solar project and talk a little bit about where they are. So I'm working with Aaron Jock to schedule those and we do a series of them, maybe three or four of them where council members, committee members, community members could come with us and it'll be kind of a nature walk but also a chance to see the solar going in up close. We will not be in the construction area but it'll also be a chance for anyone on this call and the community to ask AMP and their team questions about the project. And right now where they are, they're doing road construction, they're doing fence, they're erecting fences and then the solar panels would be some couple of months away before they even came in. But I think that would be a great opportunity for the public to kind of get out there and meet with staff from the town as well as the team that is installing the solar. So I understand and I think, you know, mid-fall, Paul and I can plan for some presentations in the mid part of the fall of this year. Andy? Yeah, I just want to take chair responsibility of urging that we move on to fire as soon as we can because it is getting late and I appreciate all of the time from conservation development that you've provided, but I wonder if we need to move on so we can get to our last sections of our meeting. Sure, I guess any final questions? I guess if there are final questions, you can email them to Andy or I and we can get them out to department heads for answers. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Stephanie. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thank you, Chris and Rob as well. Thank you. All right, Chief Nelson showtime. Do you want to say anything to begin or do you want to hop right in? No, why don't we just roll with it and get right into the work order questions and anything we might want to add will come out in the course of conversation. Okay, give me one second just to find the fire questions. All right. So have you? Before you go on, I just want to note that Alicia is no longer connected. Okay. Three, four, five, six. We still have seven counselors. Good, okay. Chief Nelson, can you discuss the impacts of UMass extending their term into late May and have you seen impact on your volume of calls? Well, you know, we've only got a really short window to compare, pair or two, you know, from the last say five, five, five years or whatever. In these additional two weeks, two weeks ago, there's only a six call in increase and last week it was 17 calls more than a year previous to the same period. I would beg to say that that came about because of weather. Two weeks ago we had a pretty crack or crappy week. Last week was better weather wise, we had more folks out and about and that type of thing. So we didn't dig down into what type of calls were more in this and that, but in general, it's very small in increase. Our main concern was the additional, I think three to four weekends, you know, we thought we'd see an increase in calls and so we put on additional staff, Friday and Saturday nights and during the day on Saturday, you know, the afternoons on Saturday and Saturdays. There's a slight increase in activity as you might expect on a weekend. Typically it was weather driven, but at the same time, we covered all the calls because we went and added with a 12 person staff on shift and that made the difference. So. Chief Nelson, is Cress impacting your operations in any way? Not really. I mean, you know, we interact with them, we support them in that type of thing, but right now it's not any emergency response responding to emergencies that we go to or the type where they're gonna call, call us to respond. They're not at that point yet. So, I mean, we've gone to calls and made referrals to them to assist with some, you know, with an individual or something like that, but it's not really, it haven't changed or amended our operation yet. Next question is about service levels. Do the levels that are in the chart, do they include responses to Leverett, Pellum and Shootsbury? Yes. Okay. You can see, and we break it down on our, we have a one pay page that we do each year that would break that down, yeah. Great. Fire rescue calls have significantly increased since FY18. I think we talked a little bit about this last year as well, but can you expand upon the- Yes, for that. It's pretty much, you know, the same, same thing. And I'll have, I'm not sure if Jeff is still on. I think he jumped off. Yeah. He's set up, set up a seminar or so. But, excuse me, Jesus. Again, it's same thing. One of the reasons, a couple of reasons, we went to a pair of, pair of, pair of, pair of, pair of medic equipped engines six, seven years ago. So that's one of the increases. So we're doing more, more there. One of the other things is that we're sending there, we usually come up with a Slato's hierarchy, QD calls, where we send an ambulance and an engine company. And there have been studies done that show that the outcomes are better, more and more hands you have on scene. Some, sometimes it's about moving a patient from a carrier's position or a difficult lift because of the weight of the patient. And sometimes it's, you know, trying to navigate a stairway or something like that. And the more, more hands, you know, the more, the more work is spread, the more weight is spread, the more stress is spread, spread out over many folks. One back injury can cost a town thousands of dollars. So that's one another big reason. But the main reason that we see better outcomes for the patients, you know, you have most of our personnel are medics. So eyes, more eyes and I guess, experiences that you get to get on scene. Again, you have more, there's more help, there's more assistance, but you know, some someone is gonna see something that someone else might. So we've found that that it makes a big, big difference. It really does. And I think what we discussed last year is it's, it's not an increase in calls, but it's an increase in the level of service provided. Yeah, yeah. Sure, I mean, yeah. And that's, and that's, you know, we're not, you know, we're not about calls. We're about providing services as you said, you know, so. So the next question is about patient contacts. Again, I'm sure Jeff would have been, had this answer to his tongue, but there's been an increase in the. We have it all. He, I had him send this, send this, send this, send me his, his, his treat, treat us all on this. And plus I had one of our care, care, care, care captains do a deep dive on all, on all this. So it's, and, you know, what, what Jeff sent Purdue pretty much supports with, with the care and captains out of the Valley, so. And so around the increase in treat no transports have gone up significantly since FY 18. Yeah. And part, part, part of that is one, we changed our, our, our reporting sauce, sauce, sauce, software, and it's, and this came up last year, I believe we changed our reporting software and the new sauce, sauce, software is better, but it reports things differently, accounts different things as, as, as, as a patient contacts in that, in that type, type, in that type, type of thing, you know, there. And one of these, the other things is we are, you know, we're becoming a younger department. And what, what you'll find is season, season, you know, the medics will, they, they, they may go, they may go, go to a call where they treat a patient. And, but, but it doesn't want a trend, trend, transport. And, but, and they'll mark, mark it down as a no, no, no, no trend, transport with our, with our new newer medics come, come, coming in, the trend is to, to log the fact that you did treat, but you didn't try and try and transport it. So that's, that's part, part of that's part of it as well. You know, so I mean, we, I mean, we're, we're still pretty much trying to transfer reporting at the same, same percentage that, that we have over time, we're transferring anywhere between 76% and 74% of our contacts. So that's still happening. And I think the committee will notice this in lots of departments as we modernize our data collection systems. Sometimes there's these little hiccups but they'll eventually even out. I think we've seen this in lots of places where we're sort of in this transition period of collecting things one way and moving to different ways of doing it. One of the nice things about the transition is that we've got a lot more in information that Delvin, we can get a really comprehensive look at what we're doing and how well we're doing. Dorothy? I'm not sure. I got that change in software. Has things been counted differently? I thought that I heard at the CCC meeting at UMass that there had been an increase of transfers in the last couple of years from our fire department, from Hadley fire department, and it wasn't really an increase. It was a software change. No, I was talking about this one particular piece. Overall, actually our volume has gone, gone up, it's gone, gone up, all over. But so our volume has gone up but we still transport the same percentage of people. Oh, I got it. Thank you. Sure, no problem. So the last formal question is around mutual aid and ambulances going out of Amherst, significantly increasing since FY 18. I know you and I discussed this a little bit. Can you talk about the trends and mutual aid? The trends are pretty much folks are catching up to us. In the past, we received what I've characterized as a disproportionate amount of mutual aid in the town. It's just that we've been traditionally a high volume service. Because our staffing levels traditionally, I'm not talking going back at least 30 years, past 30 years did not match the volume. Now that's changed. We've added more positions. But now we're up against the fact that you can't find quality people to fill those positions. And that's just the way it is all around, actually around the world. So there's been a shift and other cities and towns are experiencing the same thing. Their volumes have gone up quite a bit. So they're looking for help even more. There's another little quirk in that as well, state law change so that if we used to be able to hold back our last staffed ambulance, and that was fine. But now the law changed last year saying that if you have a staffed ambulance and mutual aid is requested, we have to send out our last ambulance. So that's going to add to our mutual aid out. So again, it's just been a shift over time. Whereas we were requiring more and more in, now there's been a shift and we're sending more out. Yeah, chief. I saw that one of the challenges you were facing was call staff. And I was wondering if you could say anything about how you're utilizing and relying on call staff and staff whether that is getting to be a challenge to the point where you're going to have to think about how the department is structured differently. Well, we will have to think about that. But Wednesday's bail, the Baili-Wexwell shift. Sure. Yeah, we are concerned about what I'll call the health of our call force through various dynamics things outside influences on the department that are going on regionally, not just to us. As the chief already mentioned, full-time we're facing the situation right now where we have a number of open vacancies. We have hired four new people, which will be starting in June. That still leaves us cheap. But I think what up to four more vacancies. Yeah, we're still four short. Yeah, so and that's because our regional shortage, as the chief said, with paramedics and EMTs. So our full-time force, we're seeing that our student force, by contrast, our UMass student volunteers were fully staffed and that's mainly because we have a fresh crop coming in every semester. We get thousands and thousands of more students coming to this university every semester. We're able to keep the student force up and running. So that's held on very well. The call force, which is our part-time firefighters, town residents, people that work in town. Again, following a national trend is extremely hard to get people to commit to being a call firefighter these days. Again, that's a national problem, not just here. So our call force right now is at 50% strength. We should have 20 to 24. We have about 10 to 12 active. We tried to hire some more last year. We were willing to take as many as 10. We ended up with four ultimately being hired. So it is definitely a concern. Our student force, if you will, carries most of our coverage load during the school year. And by that I mean when the full-time firefighters are tied up, mostly on ambulance calls. The student force is here every night during the week, seven days a week and 24 hours on the weekends. So they become the next in line. They are our coverage company. The call force handles the day times, weekdays, but we don't have a lot of that as much activity then. During the summer, which we're starting now this weekend, through August and also in January, there is no student force. Our call force carries that coverage load. And it is definitely a concern as to their ongoing ability to do that. We've discussed hiring, recruiting, things that we can do for that. We have a proposal out to raise their wages. We did a comparison of our call force wages. They're paid hourly when they're called in and for training to neighboring communities. Levertootsbury, Hadley, Pelham, Belcher Town, and we're actually the lowest. So we have made a proposal to try to bring that up, that hourly rate up to make it a little bit more attractive. I think that needs to be done. I do not think that will solve the problem. So short answer to your question is yes, we are concerned about the ongoing viability of that group. We want to see it continue. If not, I'm not sure where we go with that, honestly, as a department. What? I noticed that Hadley just went through approving actually of some small force that they're adding to the group that they already have that are in Hadley. And the impression I got at least from the newspaper article was they were doing this they didn't have to rely on mutual aid as much. Do you see that impacting our relationship with Hadley, which of course changed dramatically when they went to their own for your own contract group? I don't think they're going to change things much because they're not adding to their ambulance service and that's where pretty much most of our mutual aid goes. It's not firefighter. It's not adding more ambulance crews. So I would think we're going to still see the same rate of response to Hadley for mutual aid, EMS. Yeah, thank you. Sure. Jennifer? Yeah, I just my question, I don't know if it makes sense, but like when they build open a new building like the fieldstone complex, those two dorms that are opening on Mass Ave and Lincoln, they're huge building and there'll be 800 residents. Does that, will that measurably could it impact? I mean, is that something that you prepare for? You anticipate that? Sure. The easy answer is that as that's proper property growth and adds more and more to people, it's a small, small city. We should add a proportionate amount of personnel to you know, to respond because of the growth. And we need to prepare, we study where we're in on the ground floor for, you know, no pun pun intended. When they build that, our prevention bureau is great, great, great. It's staying a breath of the building that goes on and why as it progresses. And we, and we were, I guess you say we're intimately involved with all, with all, with all build the building that happens at you, which is a good, good thing. We have a good relationship there. One of the nice, nice things is that all their buildings are sprinklers and sprinklers. That's a great, that's a good, good thing. But at the same time, as you add more people, and it's just a function of adding more people, you're going to get more calls. And that's just the way it is. You're going to get more, more, more alarm. You're going to get more folks that are going to trip and fall. You're going to get more car accidents. You're going to get more things that are going to be a cause for us to, to, to, to, to respond. And it's not because it's UMass, it's just because there's just more people. And that, and that, and that is the key. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Thanks, Sean. Yeah. Chief, thanks so much for this presentation and for all that you guys do. So, and this might be more of a Sean and Paul question than a fire chief question, but I just wanted to sort of open up the discussion a little bit on the plan to transition the four new positions over into future budgets. And then also, as I understand it, we, the ladder truck is borrowed and we've begun paying on debt for the ladder truck. And there's one more pumper that's being borrowed this year and another pumper in a couple of years. Is that, is that accurate? Can you just correct me? Yeah. So the ladder truck has, the funding has been approved. We haven't started repaying it because vehicles are taking multiple years to get. So the Lindsay, do you have an update on when we might actually see the ladder truck? Yeah, the ladder truck, we're looking at June of 24. So just over a year from now. Yeah. And that's the problem with vehicles is when we bring it to you, it's probably another two years from when we bring it to when I say you mean the council by the time it actually arrives. So, so the debt will start after we receive it. And same thing with the pumper truck. So there was a pumper truck approved maybe last year and Lindsay, do you have an update on that one? Yeah, it starts to get blurry with the FYs, but I think FY 22, we approved the money for a pumper that was supposed to be delivered this coming September. It's now been pushed back to February of 24. So it's crazy. We're over two years on some of these, but again, that's national. And then this year's capital budget, right? We have a pumper which would take another two years before it's delivered and we start paying on. And that one's already, you remember what year that one is that we're, we brought forward this year, the age of that one. Yeah, the one that's being replaced first is the 1999 and the next one is a 2001. Right. So by the time we get it, it'll be 24, 25 years old potential. And I think I've said to this, Chief Nelson and Lindsay that there was sort of this wave of new vehicles or wave of heavy equipment that we bought in the late 90s, early 2000s, and that that wave has sort of come back around for replacement. Dorothy? Or Matt, sorry, did you have any follow up questions? Yeah. You have another piece of that. Firefighters. Just speak to the firefighters briefly. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, so we have funding through ARPA and we've been using ARPA to pay them. Our plan is to transition them sooner rather than later into the operating budget. And the hope is we'll be coming back to the council in the near future to kind of elaborate more on that plan of how we would do that. But future wise. Say it again. Sorry. Not in FY24. Potentially. I think that'll be part of the conversation. Okay. But it'll be from I don't want to spoil the surprise. So we'll talk. It should be in the near future. Okay. I will stay tuned. Thank you. Dorothy. Okay. I just have to take the opportunity to thank the EMTs. They did come from my husband sometime this spring and he was having a symptom that really scared him. And the minute they got here, it was just so professional, so smooth, so wonderful. And when he was telling a friend about that, he'd had a more serious call recently and had the same response. Absolutely. The top of professionalism and friendly and warm. So it was it was really, really great. So I just wanted to say that whatever you're doing, whatever your problems, you're doing a great job. So thank you. Well, thanks. Oh, pretty sure that I'll pass that along. I mean, for us, that is the norm. We hire good people. And, and I said, I said to said it many times, we have, we have, we have great, great training, we have great, great, great equipment. But the key is, you know, we have all this whizbang stuff. But the key is we take care of people. And first and foremost, it's that, that, that is our charge is taking care of people doing what we can. Sometimes, you know, it's case where someone just needs a friend from friendly face, you know, because at times we, we might be the best part of some, some, someone's day. You know, so one of the things that we encourage is that when folks, when our folks run or run into a case that's not even emergent, but it's just someone, you know, just, just wants to want to see, see a friend, friend, friendly face. They take the time to just kind of, you know, just spend, spend a little time and be, be human, you know, and that's, and we hire those kind of people. We demand, that's one of the things we demand. I mean, we have, I said, I've been in chat, chat size of times in meetings and all that, but I've said from day one, we are the pre preeminent fire rescue EMS department in, in, in, in the valley, in, in all of, and I, and they say, in a bragging, if you can back, back it up and we back, back it up every day. Lynn. And my family adds your thanks as well for coming up the driveway twice in the last couple of months. Thank you. No problem. No problem. Bob. I want to echo the thanks. My wife was involved in a very serious car accident in early March and the EMTs were kind and professional and helped her out a lot. So thanks. Thank you. Good. How's she, how's she, she, she doing? She's doing okay. I mean, she's recovering. It's, it's, it's been a, it's been, I wouldn't say that it was the best day part of her day, but she's doing, she's doing well and she's, she'll be fine. One day at a time. One day at a time. Yep. Okay. Good. Good to hear. Are there any other fire questions for fire EMS? All right. Well, thank you both for hanging with us for the past hour and a half and answering those questions and we'll appreciate your time. All right. Be good. Yep. I also want to thank you for all you do every day. I'll pass that. I don't want, I'll pass someone. Thanks. Appreciate it. Take care. Take care. You too. All righty. So I'm going to be at this point very quick because I know it's getting late and I, but I, and so I'm going to include the rest of the meeting as quickly as possible and we have one, we have one more department, public health that I think we, I think we'd go through it quickly. Jen Brown is not able to attend with, there were a couple of questions that I can respond to and Paul will answer any other questions. Is it okay if I go through it quickly? Yes. Go ahead. Okay. So the two questions that came in for public health, I think these were from Matt. One was, is it accurate that we are looking at a $26,871 increase in personnel costs that reflect increased salary for the public health nurse? How much of this is additional part-time staffing? And so just to clarify, so there was a, one of the areas that were, that this budget proposal added to was public health. It's not all an increase for the health nurse though. It's, there was a $20,000 increase in the extra help line and the background around that was the previous kind of organization for public health was the director worked a part-time schedule. There was a full-time public health nurse and because the director worked a part-time health schedule or part-time schedule, there was funding there to fund extra help. And so there's been extra help in the health department from that, in that way. Through the pandemic and transition health directors, we increased the public health director to full-time and kept the full-time public health nurse. And, but we still needed a funding source now for the extra help. And so this $20,000 increase essentially funds something that's been going on, but was sort of covered a different way. And then the other piece, the other piece of the increase to public health relates to the mosquito control program. The council had to make a decision a couple years ago how to participate in mosquito control or it would have to sort of accept spraying. And so we opted into a regional program that has a $5,000 annual assessment. It was unclear. We didn't budget it for FY23 because the timing was unclear, but we are proposing it in the FY24 budget as a new recurring item. And there's no, there's no state reimbursement for it, unfortunately. And so, yeah, those are the two, two questions. If you have any other questions for Sean or Paul about public health? Bob? Yeah, I don't know whether this is, well, anyway, we have a serious problem among our teenagers, especially adolescent girls with social media and other kinds of issues that are causing them great harm. And I'm wondering whether the town is involved at all with dealing with this crisis or whether this is kind of something that the school, the school system is dealing with. In other words, is our public health department dealing with this at all? I'm not aware of the public health department working on this at school, certainly are. This has not been, I don't think this has shown up on the radar screen for the health department though, but I understand what you're saying. Yep. Okay. Thank you. And I'm in favor of the ban until you're 18. I was a father of three girls. Dorothy? So on the mosquitoes, if you let the state, if we did spraying, would that be free? Would the state pay for it? That's a good question. I don't know if they would pay for it or if they would still assess us, but I think, I mean, the council may remember the conversation better than I, but I think there was a sort of objection to sort of the spraying, aerial spraying for mosquitoes and worry that it might not land where you want it to land. So the issue was whether the town controls what happens within its borders or if the state is going to control what happens within its borders. And so that as we went through this, we had a lot of advocacy from people who did not want spraying in the town unless it was really an egregious situation. And there was not confidence in the state that they would, you know, follow the same kind of values the town had. So joining the regional group, which many local areas towns are involved with seem to be the right path. Yeah, I agree in not having the mass aerial spraying, but I just seemed unfair of the state is what I'm getting at. Yeah. And what we get now is, you know, we get a report. I mean, we get a variety of services. But one thing we get now is a testing program where they do different types of testing and mosquitoes throughout the year to see if there's any type of viruses that are concerning. And then we would be notified. This has been an issue that Senator Comerford has taken on as well. So she's pretty knee deep into this stuff as well. Thank you. Any other public health questions? I'll just give a plug. We do have a translation service now. One of the ARPA funded initiatives was for public health specific translation program. So if anyone calls with speaking different language that needs the translations, they have a at their sort of fingertips, a way to access a variety of different languages. And then there are some additional staffing that you don't see in the general fund budget that ARPA is continuing to support related to the pandemic. And that'll be something that we wind down over the next year or so. All right. I guess I'll turn it back to you. Okay. So as far as the process is concerned, we're not really going to get into discussion tonight given the hour of how we're proceeding now to make decisions on the budget as a finance committee. So the next meeting on Friday will be finance committee only. What we first will have to do is to decide whether there's sections of the budget where any members wish to raise questions and with the assumption that there are no questions to be raised and that we're probably in a mode where for that section of the budget, there's going to be agreement across the board to just accept that and section of the budget or to at least identify areas that need to comment. Then the one that I was working on is one where we know we're going to have to discuss it. And that's education public schools and the elementary school because of the request from the school committee, which was the unanimous request to us. So that is one. So what I'm going to be doing at the next meeting, and I'm going to send an email out tomorrow to the committee in which I'll describe all of this so that Alicia is aware of this too, is to suggest that if there's a request for any other topics that need individual discussion for any reason to just let me know so that I can schedule it appropriately for the meeting. And then that'll enable us to have discussion of each section that needs discussion. And if it ends up that there's a motion that gets made at the end of those particular discussions or more than one motion will of course deal with those motions one at a time, which will then enable us to see if we've arrived at a agreed position in the finance committee on what our recommendation is going to be on the budget, which then turns us into making sure that we get the draft written and to give it to the council with the deadline in mind knowing what happened last year. We were delayed a little bit, but at least I'm going to make a proposal that we can discuss also fairly early on Friday as far as because you'll be able to see it and think about it. But if we're going to make the deadline for the complete report, I would really need to get drafts of all sections by the 26th or 27th, no later than the 27th, and so that we can get a mastered draft put together and then get it to all of you on the 29th so that we have a meeting scheduled on the 30th that we can discuss the draft as it's been put together and make any changes that need to be made and get it out on the 31st, which is actually the deadline date for the, if we're going to adhere to the 30 days. So that's a fairly ambitious plan. If necessary, we're going to have to leave some sections to be written after the fact with just a notation within the report, but we do need to by the charter get a report out. So that's pretty much what I was going to put out there. I think the other thing that I just wanted to let you know is that we are going to have to recognize that there's going to be variants amongst sections. We'll explain that to the council in the report that different sections were written by different people, and we did not make an attempt to have them all be uniform. I think that it really is going to depend upon who's writing the report and the nature of the area. And I did do the schools draft, first draft, which I can't complete because we have a discussion on it, but right now it's running at about two pages, and I don't think it's going to run too much longer. I think that that's actually, I'm thinking one of the longer ones that we're going to have because it's dealing with a lot of material that's not within the budget book that the council has. So there was less ability to make direct reference. I could only do it by including a link and there's some complex material in it. So I don't think that there all need to be that long, but I just wanted to give you a sense of where I was at. I decided that I didn't want to send it out necessarily, because it would throw things off. So are there any comments about what I just said or questions about the process that we're going through as far as our next stage? So if there aren't any, then as I said, I will do that. And the other thing that I was going to do is Athena had asked me about three sets of minutes that was on the agenda for previous meeting earlier in the month. And in the minutes that she was talking about were December 6th, January 10th, and January 24th. And I'm going to try and I asked her to go ahead and put them back in the packet for the 26th and get them on the agenda in the packet then. And I'm going to make an effort to let you know if I spot anything in advance this time and see if we can get them done. If not, we'll push them off to the 30th. Paul? Yeah, I just want to note that I will not be at the meeting on Friday, as some Sean is going to be in town that day. So just so you know. Yes, well, I gathered that from the fact that you appointed somebody to be acting you. Anything else that anyone was discussed today? Because I know it's getting late and that's why I'm trying to close this up as quickly as possible. And I have no unanticipated business, and I will assume barring a hand going up that nobody else has unanticipated business. So I will get that memo off to you if you have any comments about the process. When I get that memo off to you, which I will try and do first thing tomorrow, then don't hesitate to get back to me about it. And we'll make our best effort. I thank everybody for what they're doing. And I guess we're adjourned.