 all right we're recording all right um thank you uh we have um a meeting this evening it is 640 at on uh July 20th and we are having trouble with Amherst media and so um I regret for those of you that are trying to watch this through Amherst media if you know somebody that can um that would like to watch it and you can give them the web address uh please do so uh we are in the process now of of meeting Governor Baker has allowed us to do this um we will go through the roll call and make sure that people can hear us and we can hear them and then we will also um let you know that if we have trouble with this connection obviously we have trouble with the Amherst media connection we will if we have to pause the meeting and then come back on so with that let me start with the roll call please unmute let me know that you can hear me I can hear you and we will continue shallony ball melm yes here it's a brewer present pat de angeles present d'arcy du mont present lindy greasmer is present mandy joe hannacky present present d'arcy pam present ebb and ross present george ryan george george ryan sorry lind the problem with my machine i'm here no problem kathy shane i'm here see schreiber present andy steinberg present and sarah schwarz is not here okay um we're going to put up on our screen uh the agenda so that you can see the announcements and uh and actually this is the agenda that basically is the order in which we're going to do things tonight so um i just want to point out that we are actually going to be discussing the covid update and the election timeline and then we will be going to the fy 21 budget whether we get there by a 30 or not is our hope but we'll see and then we will proceed on with the items and back to the town town manager's self-evaluation um we are um i'd like to quickly pause if you will for a moment and call upon d'arcy pam i just want to briefly say a few words about john louis and ask for a moment of silence um in the 1960s the student on violent coordinating committee or snick confronted racism in the most violent segregated parts of the south places that many other civil rights groups considered too dangerous to go john louis is one of its strongest leaders participated and led many of those events facing racism and brutality with non-violence and love he understood that it was the hard daily and often unheralded voter registration in marches that would build a black movement that could revolutionize the south in 1961 he was one of the original freedom writers 1963 helped organize the march on washington and in 1964 coordinated the mississippi freedom summer he led the way and continued to lead throughout the rest of his life in the fight for justice and dignity for all in his over 30 years in congress he never wavered or flinched from doing what had to be done he'll be greatly missed now let us have a moment of silence to remember john louis thank you thank you um so we are now we do not have any hearings tonight and i want to just point out for those of you that have friends that are watching through amherst media they can now see on the screen from amherst media how to connect to this meeting through their um on their phone and or through their uh computer so we are going to have general public comment at this point this will not include comment on the budget that will be later this will this is comment on anything else except the budget and so i would like to see hands of those people who would like to comment on items other than the budget at this time or any people who would like to comment on items other than the budget at this time okay i'm seeing no hands and so we are going to go on to the consent agenda and its consent agenda is very brief this time it only includes minutes of the council and so the following items were selected because they were considered to be routine and it was reasonable to expect they would pass with no controversy to remove an item from the consent agenda for discussion later in the meeting ask that it be removed when i list it the request to remove an item for the consent agenda does not require a second so the motion is to move the following items and the printed motions they're under and approve those items as a single unit the approval of minutes for june 17th 2020 joint town council and governance organization and legislation meeting minutes june 29th 2020 town council meeting minutes june 26th 2020 special town council meeting minutes july 13th 2020 special town council meeting library update minutes july 13th 2020 joint finance committee council fy 21 budget hearing minutes is there anybody who would like anything removed if not i've already read the motion is there a second second the angeles thank you is there any other conversation about the minutes at this time did kathy she raised her hand yeah kathy yeah i i just had um on july 13th on the budget i had won what i think is a minor edit when it went through the issues that were raised um by public comment on the budget on the police and it was that there's a mix of services including mental health and other issues um is that um could i just send that later to athena because it's not mentioned in the list or at least i didn't see it let's accept that later into the minutes thank you okay okay are there any other comments serene seeing none i'm going to move to a roll call vote elissa broor elissa broor sorry i'm having to shift my position here i no problem kathy angeles hi darsie damont yes yes lin greece burge yes manager hannicky yes northy pam yes ebb and ross yes george ryan yes kathy shane yes steve schreiber yes andy steinberg yes sarah schwarz is absent and uh shallony ball mail yes the consent agenda passes 12 400 and one absent okay i'm going to move into the discussion about covid and i'm going to call upon the town manager at this time who is also got has with him julie fetterman thank you len so this is uh we've been we were doing these updates on a regular basis and we've taken a break but it's time to give you a new update so um next slide please serge so tonight we follow the same format we'll give you a quick status report quick town operations update and then updates from julie fetterman and then what we're looking at coming up for the fall winter in the next few months next slide so um so again we are this is the head the accounts for total cases again 102 total cases in amherst we'll talk a little bit more about that since the beginning of the year very low we are one of the lowest uh incidences and uh the state of massachusetts uh outside of like uh nantucket and martha's vineyard next slide so i'll give you a quick upper operations update so the uh these are all the things that we check in on on our regular basis our core team continues to meet regularly we're down to about two or three times a week previously we're meeting seven days a week but again our core team which includes the health director the police uh police chief the fire chief emergency management director the finance director um sonia aldridge and uh our superintendent public works and the assistant town manager and again this is where we sort of sort through all the issues that are coming up facing us with with covid when we look at our first take on things we talk about force protection which is are our staff um healthy and safe and able to deliver services to the people and across the board we're in very good shape our police and fire emergency first responders are all in good shape um the treatment plan operators for the water and wastewater all doing well um there have been um we're doing regular monitoring of all of our staff that if there is anybody who's in uh who's been exposed there is testing that's readily available to all of our staff um and so i think that we're going to all systems go on this front so just move forward to the next one um so again just trying to stay have people stay in touch with the town we have our covid 19 website we have a weekly call-in event on every thursday at noon and we've broadened the topics a little bit this week we'll have um we'll have we will have we're reaching out to members of the police department and health department see if they can join us and to be talking about um you know uh code enforcement issues and then thursday we have our um or friday we have our um cup of joe with paul and we'll i'll be joined by our the the chambers director and the business improvement district director that's friday at eight a m and those are times when people can call in through via zoom the links are on the website and you can participate in that conversation next slide so i give you some recent updates and um i'm gonna get to the next slide and julie do you want to take it from here okay so um first of all i wanted to make sure that people are familiar with what this is the mass department of public health has a covid 19 dashboard which anyone can go to in the public town council um i recommend it a lot of people are starting to go there because they're really curious about statistics so what you can see here is statistics by town the the dashboard has it by county you know the has hospitalizations has all different types of data if you're really interested in data so what we've got here is um number of cases that there have been and the number of total tests over time i'm going to take you to column five which is total tests in the last 14 days so we've had 482 tests and a total of positive cases in the last 14 days of four um so i think this demonstrates that we still have um not that many people getting tested um and not that many people coming back positive so there's a couple of things about that that are interesting so first of all is the concept of well how readily available is testing out here um and i'm happy to say that unlike other parts of the country um massachusetts in general and especially right out here in amherst and in hampshire county there's a lot of testing available so um as always it's best for people to go through their primary care provider if they have one to get a test because you can talk through with your primary care provider um you're going to either go through very likely coulee dickinson hospital or bay state depending on where your provider is located um for folks who don't want to do that or don't have a health care provider cvs is doing testing cvs in north hampton and also cvs in amherst you can go online to sign up for that they'll ask you a series of questions um the cvs in amherst is open nine to one and two to five thirty for um drive up testing um again i do encourage people to go through a primary care provider if someone doesn't have a primary care provider this is a great time to be getting one um so testing is is readily available in this area so the other thing that i'm sure everyone has heard about is that um of course many people are asymptomatic um so they're not getting tested um one of the things that we're seeing emerging around the country is a demographic that is starting to um test positive and either become sick or have rates of being asymptomatic are those between the ages of 18 and 30 um so we are concerned across the country about our young people um we know that many young people will be coming back to amherst soon to attend college or university um i think this is something that we're looking at sort of across the board in massachusetts um so i'll get back to that a little bit more and talk about that a little more i also want to say that when you are looking at data i'll sometimes have residents emailing me saying well what does the data mean i think it's also really important to not just depend on this data because again there are a lot of people who aren't getting tested and so you can't necessarily rely on COVID-19 data to completely tell you what the incidence of disease is in in your community including in amherst i think that it's still important for everyone to remain vigilant that's how um we really have kept things how we beat things back in in massachusetts we decreased cases we decreased hospitalizations we decreased deaths um and then you saw us opening up and going through the phases so um while this is all really good news and really good news for our economy and folks to be able to be able to get out and about it doesn't mean that we should change any of our habits it's still really important to have six foot social distance physical distancing between others and when you can't especially inside to be wearing a mask the other thing we've sort of not sort of the other thing we have been finding out about transmission of this disease is that more and more during this good weather around the country we're seeing that transmission is really not happening outside you probably all have read in the news how much concern there was about how many people would be testing positive after these large large group protests around the country including um in massachusetts especially in the eastern part of the state where there were a lot of people massachusetts and many other states offered free testing and what has come forward is uh no spike in an increase in positive cases and so that's giving us an incredible amount of data about how this disease is transmitted so um again it comes down to social distancing um and using a mask if you're going to be stationary waiting in line i love to say when you're waiting in line to get into antonio's six feet apart you know wear your mask when you go inside um and of course continue to wash your hands um and to use common sense if you're not feeling well yourself you need to stay home and check in with that healthcare provider um so i have a number of things i wanted to bring up so um another thing is that people have been bringing up the concept of do we need to have a mask order in town um what we're doing in the town at this time is putting up signs throughout the downtown those are um being fabricated and putting up being put up in the next week um they're blue and white signs that will be uh asking people to keep socially distant and to wear masks the bid also has complimentary signs that are up on the doors of businesses asking people to use masks when they're going inside um we'll also be putting we've ordered 40 signs and there will also be signs going up at some of our fields um so that people understand and remember that when you're outside if you are going to be stationary in a group and you're doing something or you're watching something that you still need to be either using social distancing or wearing a mask um i've had the opportunity to work very closely with the schools um i'm really excited about how much work the superintendent the school nurse manager the school committee it's and all the staff etc have put into creating plans for how to keep our students healthy when school does open um i think we are incredibly lucky with the team we have there and the the close communication that they have um with uh myself and our public health nurse jennifer brown um and so that leads me to the the final topic i wanted to talk about which is our university and our colleges um as i mentioned earlier we have a demographic in this country um many of whom will be returning to go to college many of whom will be returning from vacations in other parts of the country and coming back to amherst to work or to be living in their family's homes um some will be off campus for school some will be on campuses uh and so uh the health department myself and jennifer brown have been working closely with the university and the colleges to talk about how how testing of students and contact tracing will happen um in fact tomorrow we have a five college meeting that will be uh the three health directors from the three towns the public health nurses um and medical and public health staff from all five entities of higher education where we'll be talking about issues around contact tracing and interfacing with town health department and public health staff and amherst we're very lucky because we've had a unique relationship for two decades with umass uh myself and the primary public health nurse there at umass and becker um worked closely with the state when the state was rolling out their electronic disease surveillance system which i've mentioned before it's called maven um and we really created a uh a unique system because maven was created for all the 351 local boards of health to find out electronically when there was a one of 60 communicable diseases in their town but what we realized was that the university um i love to call my large village in this town and that we work so closely together um so we petitioned the state that it would be great if both of us public health professionals could see the cases in the university and in the town and so we've been doing that as i say for two decades uh and sharing in confidential HIPAA protected public health information back and forth between us um because there is often of course overlap between students and those who work in the community or live off campus or perhaps are um interning in our schools so we have a long history of doing this um and uh we're just building on that with uh how we will be responding to and the university will be responding to COVID-19 cases contact tracing and the need for isolation and quarantine um um the university has uh health services has had a long a long history of working with Amherst College and Hampshire College also um Amherst College now has their own standalone um public health response for communicable disease and we work very closely with Amherst College also Hampshire is still closely linked with the university so we're all communicating and um um we're working on how to improve that um over the next six weeks five weeks um as students come back into town and we anticipate um a lot of testing going on and uh positive cases that will need to have very quick and efficient contact contact tracing so i've said a lot and i'm thinking maybe i should take a pause here so let's finish our the rest of our presentation then while you take a pause if you can go the next slide sir search so want to note that we are in phase three step one of the governor's plan for reopening and um you know and that's sort of where everybody knows where we're there where we are on that so next slide so i want to update you on um sort of where we are in terms of phase three step one um that our local facilities the swimming pools are open the puffer's pond is open farmer's market is open so each one of those things says oh that's good but there's an enormous amount of staff work that went into making sure that every one of those facilities and um operations were open with support from the town uh extensive new staffing models um and people pitching in from lsse to the inspection services to julie to everybody weighing in on these things so that was that's been a big uh big effort local economies you saw the zoning change that you approved the resilient amherst initiative which has been working with the bid in the chamber we have secured a solomon foundation grant for ten thousand dollars we have a grant in into the department of transportation for a much larger amount of money to continue with the work that the solomon foundation grant started um we have allocated cbg funds for business uh for small businesses um we approve the public way used we have rent stabilization funds through the housing trust fund um outdoor dining and so a lot of things happening on the local economy level and then at the town government as i mentioned earlier that um you know we are continuing to maintain all of our services we've expanded our online options including with the inspection services and the town clerk's office in particular and then we continue to support uh the zoom meetings as you as you see them tonight so next slide so we want to talk about a little bit about what's coming up in the in the fall in the winter so next slide so as julie mentioned the k-12 schools i mean that is an enormous challenge for the district and they have got about it very deliberately looking at going down every path to determine what is the best safest route to educate our children in the fall and you know there have been their meeting tonight to talk about different options available to them again so again kudos to the superintendent and his team trying to engage with the unions and listening to parents and their concerns and guardians and their concerns um so we're going to talk about colleges and university we will see an increase you know just normally in the fall we see an increase in student populations on campus and off campus and we have definite public safety and public health concerns which were articulated in a letter that i wrote to the chancellor um about eight days ago um and for the town government section we want to continue to expand our online options we have serious concerns about elections which is why the town clerk is here tonight to talk to you about some options available to you in that uh in that vein and then we are looking at you know should we or are we in a position to start holding in-person meetings um and that's another discussion down the road so next slide so i just want to update you on where i understand the colleges and universities to be as of today so amherst college uh they're all all three institutions are opening around the third week of august and closing right before thanksgiving they have slightly different schedules for the spring opening up in February or mid january for amherst college they anticipate about 12 to 1250 students on campus that's about 60 occupancy uh hampshire expects to be about 50 occupancy and i think in umass is still trying to determine how many students are returning the uh and i think july 30th is a deadline for students who are first year students coming into the campus how many are going to be on campus amherst college has a statement of shared responsibility which every student will require be have to be signed hampshire college actually has a statement like that as well but they have not uh released that yet uh and umass has their umass agreement um it's in for amherst college if you when you come on campus you're required to stay on campus um and very little interaction hampshire college you're required to come to quarantine for two weeks on campus and then you're supposed to limit your travel on and off campus and you mass again they want you to stay on campus as much as possible so in terms of the uh health monitoring uh you know i think july mentioned what what amherst college is doing hampshire is relying on um but but uh amherst college has inq shelters for all their students available to them they've made arrangements on campus and elsewhere hampshire feels that they've got ianq ianq is isolation and quarantine um they have that availability on campus they've reserved some dorms for that purpose um and umass will be health monitoring and they have isolation quarantine shelters for those students living on campus um when we asked the three institutions how many were living off campus you know amherst college said less than 50 um hampshire college is again less than 50 i think they're in like the 20 to 30 student range and we're trying to get a grasp on how many are off campus um with the university and a good thing that the university is doing this year is when you sign up under their electronic system they're asking for a local address where you will be staying this this um fall semester which would facilitate contact tracing for them so next slide so we have many concerns coming forward and we can talk a little bit more about this um in terms of um the uh just a large number of students returning to town you know i think someone said it's like having a cruise ship dock um in the center of town and with and and that's not far from the truth so we are have as julie mentioned we have a very low incidence of uh covid 19 infection um but we'll have a lot of people returning to town and it's it's not just students it's also people who are who've been elsewhere during the summer and things like that we are a mobile population so um we are thinking about that and trying to prepare for that um we worry about um if there is an outbreak our our biggest concern is in the public health of our of our community we we our concern is that uh there will be spread of the disease that if the disease spreads at a um very large rate we worry about the capacity of our local medical facilities to handle that kind of surge um we worry about any kind of spread community widespread on our k to 12 school system um and um and then i think we'll we will notice most likely um and we're already starting to see it that many of our year-round residents are seeing um small-ish parties and by amor standards um but people are starting to call and say there's a party on this at this private house and they're not social distancing they're not wearing masks and normally that person might have just walked by or driven by that household has been a normal student party but in this day and age it's a different feeling for people because people are noticing student behavior specifically and so that's going to create additional um drain on resources for the town and responses because we respond to every call and we worry about possible friction if police are are asked to respond to each of these situations it's things that they normally might not re respond to so these are the the kinds of concerns that prompted me to write the letter um on july 10th to the chancellor now this afternoon you all received a response from the chancellor and they had a press conference so it was the first that and i've been in meetings all afternoon so i really haven't read it super carefully um so but um we have we do have a meeting scheduled with the chancellor tomorrow and so i'm looking forward to sort of digging more into what he's saying in his letter um i think the devil is in the details i think it's a really it's a it's a good uh response i think they they have heard our concerns and they've addressed some of them but i think we have additional concerns that we want to make sure to emphasize with the chancellor and his staff um so um and what are those concerns the biggest one is that um we believe that they should be treating all of their students the same whether they're on campus or off campus uh there's really not going to be a difference in real life between students who live on campus and students live a few hundred yards away off campus so we want them to provide the same kind of health um protections and um support to the students who live off campus to the students that live that are living on campus i think it's a false division that they're making and i don't think it's a good one um and i i think that um the the fact of the matter and we all know this is that students are going to socialize that's part of what young people do and that's a great thing about young people but um but it's a thing that we have to recognize um we want them to make sure that every student uh who is enrolled signs the UMass agreement that's a it's an important tool that the university has that because that UMass agreement is tied to their code of conduct we also would like them to vigorously enforce the UMass agreement because we don't think that that kind of enforcement has to needs to fall to the town uh that's exactly the type of situation we don't want to put our police or health inspectors in it's something that we were happy to work with the university on but we think it is a responsibility of the university uh to take this on i think if you saw the letter that Tulane University sent to their students it was unambiguous and clear and right now i feel like a lot of the messaging from the university isn't as crystal clear as we would like it to be um we i believe that they should provide isolation and quarantine shelters on campus for any student it's unrealistic for students to believe that for this university to believe that if you live if you're four students living in a two-bedroom apartment and one of you gets covid positive that you can we legitimately go back to your apartment and isolate or quarantine successfully it's unrealistic we need to provide support for these students that they are they maintain they're able to maintain their health and prevent the spread um the other thing another thing we want to talk to the university about is the metrics and this is really complex science and so um they have many more experts than we do in terms of what are the what should we expect in terms of number of infections coming into the town based on the number of students that they're anticipating coming in and where they're coming from because there will be an increase we should be all be recognizing that because anytime you introduce a large population into another population there will be this increase that's not we're not saying there shouldn't be but we want to project out what is expected and what's beyond what we expect um and so basically our message to the university is that we want to continue to work together julie identified a lot of really positive ways that we have worked over years with the university which has been a really terrific we're working relationship we want to build on that these are different times we can't rely on our old standards of of of you know responding to house parties it's going to be a different way to doing doing things so i know a lot of the counselors have ideas and thoughts and so julie and i are here to answer any of your questions and i think you can take the slide down chart search okay so um the town manager did mention that we have an upcoming meeting tomorrow with the chancellor and you all did receive both the letter that town manager sent a week and a half ago and you've received the response from university dorthy you have your hand up i think that the most important thing is that you must must provide the isolation and quarantine for the students which uh town manager was stressing um i i just also think that we need to be very very careful that things match up for example i don't think i remembered any statement about students quarantining as they're coming in from all over the u.s which has got some many hot spots in the world um was there any give on that question that umass would require some quarantining once they got here before they joined did anything else mr bach yeah i i know hampshire and amherstarr i don't recall whether umass is maybe julie knows the answer that correct hampshire and um amherst college are are doing that i have not seen that explicitly in umass's plan i think umass did say they would test everyone upon arrival or prior to arrival into the town so everybody will be tested whether they're on campus or off correct steve schreiber so the chancellor literally maybe an hour ago sent or the i'm not that chancellor but the umass literally an hour ago sent a a email and i don't know who got it about this issue of coming in from out of state or out of country and what the quarantine rules currently are and what the expectations are for that i don't know if prospective students got that or was addressed to student faculty staff but that would that's an excellent point and and i hope you talk about it tomorrow so i also read quickly the chancellor's statement and you know first of all thank you to paul and all for the letter to the chancellor which then led to the clarification of what the expectations are but i think so they talk about sort of the if students living in amherst or students living in the amherst area so to me that could be much more specific like students living within blank miles of the umass campus ten choose a number because amherst area or amherst that can mean many different things and i know that we're particularly concerned about our town but i think that should be much more specific that if you live within a certain range you you will the assumption is that you will have interaction with the main campus that's it but thank you thank you all uh george ryan thank you lin some of the suggestions i've heard from people in my district um involve ideas like mandating a a mask zone in other words uh sort of requiring certain things uh that have to be done my sense listening to julie and and listen to paul is that we still are kind of following a process of more education and um persuasion um there seems to be and perhaps rightly so a reluctance to sort of have edicts from from the health department but rather using signage and so forth is that fair to say right now that the emphasis is on that and so the idea of establishing like a you know a zone where everyone has to wear a mask and it's by edict um is really not under consideration at the moment another suggestion was using a police officer at least in the first couple weeks just patrolling the downtown um just to be a presence not to you know hassle people but just to remind them the officer could even carry extra masks i think the bid is going to have them anyway available to people um obviously manpower is really rare it's something precious um but that was another suggestion so just some thoughts on sort of our overall approach is it more um you know mandates edicts and then enforcement or is it more encouragement um education and persuasion thank you for the question george um i think it's a really good one because we are constantly reevaluating that um we have talked um about the concept of should there be a mask zone for instance in downtown um and so that may be a decision that we make what we thought we would do is start with the signage as i say there's signage on all the buildings there'll be signage hanging downtown again you know as every week goes by the science is showing us that it's really not about walking by people um it is about being in stationary groups and so again if we're seeing that oh that's happening in downtown then we could have we could create a mask zone i think we have we have definitely also talked about should we just have the whole town be you gotta wear a mask um and we always come back to know we don't need to do that because this is a very rural area there are so many parts of town where you can be out walking about you can have your mask with you and you can um just put it on if you happen to be stopping to want to have a conversation with someone um and so i i think that you put it well that we're still at that point where we want to educate we want to have people comply but then we'll we'll evaluate and if we need to do something otherwise we will because there's always that tension between when you make as you say an edict or a regulation or a bylaw you've got to enforce it and you have to enforce it evenly and what we're looking at is that each thing that we attempt to do whether it's just open puffers pond or have the pools open it's taking a lot of people power and a lot of thought to put the plan into place so certainly at that moment where we see that this isn't working well then that's absolutely one of the tools in the toolbox to have a mask order um the other thing that you mentioned the concept of maybe having a police officer walking around town um i think we have talked about the concept of maybe some type of staff person that could walk through town or an ambassador or working with the university on again if we're looking at that there's going to be a lot of young people in our downtown is this one of the places where the university could help us do they have staff do they have um student ambassadors who could help with that um so i think those are definitely two active ideas i think i think the university has been pretty unambiguous and a lot of the colleges are saying this that when you're leave your dorm room you put on a mask you don't take it off until you return to your dorm room and like we are not saying that for our town and you know i think julie has a more nuanced view of it and i think one of the reasons is being a rural town but also being in a lot and allied with where the um state is because once individual communities start putting up you know different having different standards i i cross the line and the hadley i don't need to wear a mask it just gets confusing to the general public because people don't know where the town lines are so i think again we're monitoring this and welcome feedback along the ways asi you have your hand up yeah i had a couple questions um umas health center are they going to be able to uh administer tests so the testing testing capacity as students come back and you mass does have a health center and there are people who work there so that's one question and then um you know i i put i had sent an email to paul about a resident who had an experience inside a small store where it wasn't posted you had to wear a mask people in line weren't wearing a mask and at least some of the service people so i'm wondering if we have and um so i emailed her back but do we have some place where people can clearly see what those rules are like a bc you know if you go inside you're supposed to wear a mask and i saw the state has a poster any employer can put up on the workers rights you know what they're supposed to be doing but i think if people knew there is a free sign so our little lakins that's now closed had a very clear sign you can't enter without a mask you know it was just there on the door um that's the policy but trying to make sure people know they don't have to go out and print these signs we can give you these signs and that inspectors so somehow we don't have i don't mind handling individuals this way but people should know what they could do to get action on stuff because you have a lot of people willing to take that next step i can tell you where to get a sign i can tell you who to call so those were my two questions and i guess paul has already mentioned his his letter was stronger i mean it's a good first step the chancellor's letter but his code of conduct suggestion is that potential suspension applies on campus and off campus as does isolation um you know so it was pretty clear that there's not a double standard on whether you're within the university or outside but we didn't quite get that back in that letter so i'm not asking a question about that i'm asking the first two yeah okay so kathy um so tomorrow when we have uh so there are two meetings happening tomorrow there's one that's with upper management at umass and then i've got one as i say with the folks who are um getting contact tracing up and running and so um i will be confirming tomorrow i believe whether it'll be just uhs doing testing or if umass did sign a contract with the brode institute who's helping many of our um institutions of higher education with their testing so one way or the other i will say that um umass is definitely going to be on top of having enough testing um currently they're able to be doing testing you know for example the football team is on campus they're being tested um so i'll be confirming that tomorrow the last i had spoke with public health folks at umass about 10 days ago um that was still being confirmed how they were moving forward with that um your other question about small businesses so i think there's a couple things there and you know paul can jump in too um i believe the bid is working really actively with businesses to give them signs um there are also free signs from the state you are correct um in terms of people going into a business and having a problem um many of those um complaints have come to various ones of us what of us whether it's the council or health inspectors or myself or the town manager's office uh we are going to be meeting i believe it's later this week with inspection services and rob more the building commissioner which is where all the inspectors sit now even the health inspectors and talking about um how we want to um do we need to sort of streamline how complaints go and perhaps then be able to advertise how folks can do that um but we certainly um all of us are getting um various you know concerns about well i shouldn't say that there's so many but you know when there's a concern about a business it goes through inspection services and then an inspector follows up um and does um an onsite inspection a phone call a variety of things to see what kind of assistance that business needs because we know that it's also and really we've seen this more in other parts of the country but um that there can be problems with getting people to comply with how they should be behaving in inside of business so i hope that's not a problem shallony yeah i was wondering if we can reach out to um landlords because i was speaking to one landlord and they mentioned that when they heard a complaint from the neighbor they actually actively reached out to the students and were very clear about you know what the policies are and that they would be asked to vacate if they did not follow torrent i'm wondering if but i don't think all landlords are as conscientious i'm wondering if it would make sense to actively reach out to landlords and have a clear policy uh with them and the second thing i was wondering is if we could hear from maybe uh the bid and and or the chamber about what they are hearing or what are the problems that businesses are encountering and and and what are the fears that consumers have i mean we're all hearing that as a town council but also i see that there are some members of the bid and chamber here on the call if you feel like we want to hear from them what is the perspective of businesses and consumers yeah so there is a meeting um we have a regular meeting around this time of year with the large landlords not all this it's mostly the ones that run the big uh have the the largest landlords and that happens every year around this time but this year will be different because we'll be talking about COVID-19 and what the expectations are and what they're hearing and things like that um so i think that that um you know i think that that's so we will be engaging with that conversation and you know i think that the bid and the chamber have been very good about reaching out to all their individual businesses and saying do you need signs we've got them for you if you want them i mean it's almost like um let's just think about this as we're talking like we should have signs say no no shoes no shirt no mask no service you know almost type thing you know right if people are used to bring some humor into it but also be very clear about it well people are used to seeing that sign and nobody objects to that they just don't go and say i don't i want to come in and i have a right to not wear my shirt um so listen i didn't think it would be my turn yet i'll try and talk fast um when it comes to the things we've been talking about so far i'm really glad other people brought up my same concerns i do want to go on the record of saying oh i hate when people say that i do want to be known as saying that i while i do understand the need to enforce right you don't set up a rule that you can't actually enforce and i most definitely do not want officers with sidearms doing the enforcement i don't find that appropriate but at the same time i disagree with our path on let's be lenient now and see if we need help later i would much rather we were strict now before the students come back on august 24th we can always relax our standards later trying to convince them in september or october that it's not quite time to close the university but we need some stricter controls downtown see is just not the right path i understand it but i disagree with it i also do want to make sure i appreciate that you have worked and inspections has worked with um members of the community who've contacted you because i've referred them to you and they said i was in a store and the management said we don't really feel like we can throw the customer out and i said well go see if maybe they'll feel like they can give them the strength to throw the customer out so i appreciate that if we're going to talk about umass at the same time i'm assuming if that's all right len um okay so that i don't talk more than once um you mass reopen it as you all know i have a disclosure on file that shows that while i work part time on the campus i'm not employed by umass my husband is employed by umass and i just want to make clear that while we're playing super nice here about our relationship with umass which has been really important to me because i've been an at-large elected official since 2002 we've worked so hard to make a really effective relationship through all different kinds of changes at both the university and the town and at the same time i am just despite how overwhelmed we are i'm disappointed umass is not being our partner here 10 days for a response no acknowledgement no we're writing a really big thing we're gonna have a press release you know please be patient with us while we get the rest of the details together nothing and then we finally get something 10 days later yes i appreciate that they've been meeting with us yes i appreciate that they took some of the edits that the town manager offered but it is not realistic to expect the students that are coming from those 42 states who are going to be living off campus to actually volunteer to quarantine themselves for 14 days so i look forward to that guidance steve said he saw that shows how they're actually going to enforce that because i'll be fascinated to see that but in the meantime the state the statement as as paul's already mentioned that students engaged in remote learning who choose not to return to campus or the surrounding area are encouraged to sign the agreement as well is in a word garbage we already have students who are treating their prepaid rentals i mean they're paying for their lease they were either here all along or they're getting ready to come back as party shacks there are people being invited from all over to attend parties there and if they live in let's not pick on a community but chicopee if they live in chicopee they take their classes online the way this is currently set up despite our talking to each other is to say not chicopee's not a surrounding community probably therefore it's totally fine that kids from chicopee come up party do whatever they want because they're not subject to the same code of conduct and when we talk about the code of conduct that's like really all well and good but when the code of conduct talks about persistent and egregious violations we don't want to send our cops out to be the ones to enforce that umass has volunteered nothing in terms of enforcing it themselves off campus this is not the partnership that we need i understand our community's frustration i'm really disappointed in where we are so far and i hope that that's made clear tomorrow at this meeting that they are in fact during a public health emergency responsible for their off campus student behavior this is totally different than any normal year where it's just like hey you're a taxpayer you're a renter you're just a regular resident like everybody else this is not the same and so i really hope that that's emphasized with them tomorrow thank you pat yeah i'm gonna be redundant and um a little redundant i'm very glad that there was some thought given to not using armed police officers to patrol the streets um to ask people to wear masks uh the very fact that you thought that that maybe we should have a police officer deeply upsets me because it is exactly the kind of inappropriate use of police officers that has gotten us in the trouble that we are in as a town uh and as a community and uh you know and i'm mm-hmm it is inappropriate it's wrong and it can those kinds of decisions need to stop being made and they need to be stopped being made now um and joe yeah so um i'll try to cover things quickly ditto elissa and ditto pat um but a couple of things um i delved into the UMass agreement last night which i hope gets some serious changes to it um and then i read the letter today which seems to somewhat contradict the UMass agreement and the FAQs um i am concerned when they say that their testing strategy will mitigate community spread through early identification yet we know that many people are asymptomatic carriers and they have no information on their website and have never mentioned anywhere of an employee testing strategy so we have no idea whether they're actually going to test any employees that are on campus especially employees that are not showing symptoms we do not know we now know based on the letter today that they intend to test students once a week uh whether or not once a week only if students live on campus have a dining pass or have a class on campus that does not include all students and we know students are some of the main asymptomatic carriers yet they'll only be tested once a week according to what they said and there is a study out there by Yale University that modeled potential infection rates in congregate housing at universities with an assumption that 5,000 students are on campus and only 10 of them come in positive and if you test weekly in a base case scenario meaning five outside infections each week to those 5,000 students that live on campus and an r value of 200 2 and a half even with a 90 percent accurate positive testing test at weekly testing 1,600 of those 5,000 students under this model will become infected over the course of 80 days assuming that UMass is going to put 10,000 students on their campus that's 3,200 positive tests of the on-campus students alone if you go to a larger outside influence of infections you have every student every single one of those 5,000 infected if you only test weekly so I am deeply concerned about only testing weekly and only testing those that actually have interactions on campus I am deeply concerned about the fact that their literature says that they encourage those who are on campus that test positive and those who are off campus that test positive to isolate themselves at their home wherever their parents may be if they can have private transportation there this is not the position of a partner to the state keeping infection levels down or our town keeping infection levels down basically what they're saying with those statements is if you're infected here go to your home in Andover or you know Agawam or Boston and go isolate there and infect that community that is not a partner in this state they need to take responsibility for the entire population on their campus to isolate anyone who tests positive so that those tests that test positive do not spread the disease with that in mind I'm wondering the state itself set up testing sites in those areas of the state mostly in eastern Massachusetts for free testing of any resident at any time with I don't know how many their hours were recently in those areas that we're having higher positive test rates when can we get a test like a site like that in Amherst given the fact that we're looking at potentially on models thousands of positive tests in Amherst alone when students come back and that's assuming decent amount of compliance by students and faculty and staff and residents in town with masking and social distancing so those are my concerns nothing about staff and anyone else on campus I know we don't have answers but that's what I want brought up tomorrow I don't think they're a partner with not only us but the entire state keeping this under control I'm going to take a moment and since I I figured out I can raise my own hand so I've been taking copious notes and agree with every statement I've heard so far particularly the act now instead of wait until later and I want to just carry forward a conversation that I had with Julie a little earlier today and that is what is the role of the board of health and what can we ask them to do at this point and is that something you need the council to talk to you about thank you Lynn um no as I mentioned earlier I'm happy to bring this all back to the board of health they are of course very closely monitoring what's happening in our town around coronavirus they too are concerned about what it will be like when we have many many students come back to town so I can certainly bring this back to the board of health the the chair and I had had a conversation about 10 days ago about the concept of perhaps having a zone in town that was that required masks so this can certainly be brought back to the board to discuss with them I appreciate that I also want to correct one misperception university may open on the 24th but they start bringing students back into the dorms on the 15th this is less than one month away we have passed the point where we can wait and pause anymore to get what we need with that I'm going to go to Evan only because Shalini and Kathy have already spoken and I want to try to use our rules so Evan so I just wanted to to raise two things needed which are questions so sorry so so one is regarding mandatory mask order for the downtown this is something that a few I talked to me perhaps two weeks ago I probably would have said eh I don't really think that we need one many of you know I just spent a little bit of time in a lovely gay community which has a mandatory mask order on their main commercial strip I wore my mask every time I stepped out onto the street which I do not do in this community I'll admit and it made me feel actually a little bit better they had ambassadors who were very plain clothed volunteers who were going around who had masks on hand to hand out who were making sure was enforced certainly not police officers in fact I don't know that I saw a police officer my entire week there but I think part of it is is public health and I appreciate a Julie's response but I think the other part of it is people's confidence in coming into town I think that there are people who will come into town especially vulnerable people who if they see people not wearing masks are going to say I'm not going to make that shopping trip to Zana or I'm not going to go out to eat or I'm not going to grab that takeout um but we'll have confidence knowing there's a mandatory mask order that they can actually go into town I think there's an entire group of people that if we don't have this we'll ignore our downtown completely and so I understand that there's some uncertainty in the public health side I don't think it's just a public health decision I think it's also about the message we're saying sending to people who want to come into our town um that we're taking this seriously that we're all going to do our part that we're not going to leave it up to the individual to decide whether or not they want to wear a mask because I'll be on when I'm when I don't have to wear a mask it's hot I probably won't but I wore one every day on commercial street because I had to they had a 24 hour mandatory mask order um so I hope when we're thinking about this going forward we'll consider that it's not just about the public health evidence it's also about the confidence of our population when they come into town um regarding some of the UMass stuff I'll keep most of I feel I have fewer concerns than the members of this council about UMass's reopening plan and I really appreciated the chancellor's letter um today which I think clarified a lot of concerns that I did have but I do just want to point out and I and I know everyone knows what I'm going to say here that I hope in all of these conversations we all start from the place that students are a value part of value part of this community um a lot of the emails we have received have painted students returning as if it's the apocalypse returning and I think our message needs to be we have some concerns but we're happy you're coming back because you are members of our community you add vibrancy to our town you support our economy we want you here we just want to do it safely and I worry that some of the tone that I've seen and some of the discourse not necessarily in this council but on occasion um has not uh conveyed that message has been students are scary we're scared of these people coming back to our community it's going to be a disaster and I hope that we always send to the conversation around we want you here we want you to be part of our community we see you as part of our community you pay money to rent here you have every right to be here as every other member of this community as every homeowner as every member of this council but we want to make sure that you're doing it safely and I hope that what it doesn't result in and I would have real concerns about is students being overpoliced um I know there's there's two houses uh nearby me the students are often in the front yard um drinking and it appears to be a big party but it's a house that has a no two houses next to each other they both have a number of students that have been living together I don't care if those two houses get together and drink in their front lawn and I don't want the cops being called on them because of that and so I hope that we're uh we think about our language I hope that we make sure that we make clear that students are welcome here that we're not trying to police them when we're not trying to villainize them but that we're doing our best to make sure our community is safe during these times thank you um shallony you have your hand up again yeah I was just um just a spinoff of what Evan was saying I really appreciate what he said and I wonder if you could have a campaign that's um really when the students are coming back like a welcoming campaign with signage or whatever and encouraging them in a playful fun direct way to remember to wear the masks and on another side note we were out hiking along Pelfers Fund and we went to jakes and I was really happy to see that the young students were actually wearing the mask that came to jakes and it's a surprising maybe not surprising that there were many older people actually who were not carrying masks with them so that's you know so there's that misperception misconception we have that it's just the students so just putting that but the other thing I wanted to say was that from the business side where the bid has provided posters to put outside their doors about wearing masks and some of the businesses are not putting those posters up could that be enforced by the town as part of the health kind of like what Lynn was alluding to that could we as a town be enforcing businesses to put those mandatory signage outside on the doors business doors Dorothy move your hand up okay well building on what Evan said and shallony I think maybe we might need to have some new posters made which would say welcome we're glad to have you back and would have a variety of mask students maybe with some smiles drawn on their masks and I think that's the kind of sign that people would want to put on because it's encouraging students to come in shop be in town so I mean it maybe somebody's maybe the bid has already made them like that but if not I think we should seriously consider putting those up and I do agree whatever we set up when the students come back that's the situation so I do think we want to make masks required hopefully it'll be self-enforcing if we do it in a positive way Kathy okay I just I I'm really glad that both Mandy and Alyssa spoke out so strongly I spoke out I felt weaker because I've also heard about the party boxes that that Alyssa talked about that so it's not just two neighbors getting together so my my concern and when you go into these negotiations is picking out pick out the weak language in the Chancellor's letter for example when it comes to off campus Amherst police and Amherst inspections will do this work I mean they were very careful to say you know not UMass students ambassadors the kind of thing we're talking about with smiling faces you know we're going to work together to have people do it so that you can have enough people going out with these kind of very positive messages and the person who called me is a cancer survivor with very low immune rates and she's always held welcome parties for students so she's totally welcoming of students I mean she loves them in her neighborhood but she's just in a panic with 30 in the backyard only some of whom lived in the house with no one with a mask on so she just she wants to you know this this sense of overflow particularly if more students are living off campus and we're not monitoring or don't want to monitor how many people are in a house so I just think that notion that it's going to be the Amherst staff as opposed to the UMass health staff the UMass ambassador to staff that this is a team and we need their resources because I don't think police are the right ones but you know a nurse coming in or someone with a white coat coming in you know just something like you know you're part of our community so it just it's echoing what other people said but let's be creative here and really challenge the places where part of this was good but part of it was very weak and the university ought to be able to do better on helping us with resources. There's still some confusion in my mind and they probably shouldn't be but it's still there about large public gatherings and what the actual rules are at the moment given the governor's guidelines what's the limit is there a limit we've been through a summer we've had a number of but I would consider largest gatherings in various places more than I think are usual in the summer without masking and I've been telling people they should call the police or make a complaint so I just need to get a clear sense on what the actual rules are and whether we're encouraging people to do this discouraging them and if we are encouraging people to do this how would we plan to enforce the rules so I guess the question is what are the rules and then what follows from that? You need to unmute. Okay so there's a few things there so there's what are the rules and that's probably a little much easier because the rules are the rules but then what are we going to do is more complicated we don't have the police chief here with us tonight so I don't want to stray into his area but so in terms of the rules so we're in phase three now so in phase three as I was mentioning before you can have a lot of people outside so for example in a I want to get my I don't have it right in front of me but I want to get my language right here in a large enclosed outdoor area there are some metrics so you're allowed to have x number of people per thousand square feet I'm going to say like it's eight for a total of a hundred people so for example when someone is saying we'd like to have an event at Mill River which is you know it's a park and it's bordered by trees so it's considered to be an enclosed outdoor area but it's big enough so we don't that metric that they have of people per square feet is kind of a weird one most folks are kind of like I don't really want to use that so we're able to say it's a hundred people now a governor didn't ask me how many people but that's what the governor said we're in phase three when it comes to inside the number was 10 people it is now 25 but again these are these are reopening guidelines what happens on private property what I've heard the police chief saying and you know the town manager will jump in here is that for and we're not talking about having the police enforce these things we do know that for various reasons that's not what we're really looking at but for example they can't go on to private property and say that this is what I've heard the chief saying they can't go on to private property and say you can't do that so I think that if this gets back to we really want to work for instance with the university around how can there be some partnership how can they have so if a complaint comes through could the university respond I must say Kathy it did not occur to me to send a nurse but you know could people go out who are connected to the university who are like hey you know this is not what we're expecting of you this is not in the code of conduct you are now exposing too many people to the virus and you must you know stop doing this and X amount of people have to leave or you know I just I don't think we have the answer yet to how we're going to address those and Paul you know correct me but yeah so like on the police thing we have no intention of sending police out and the police do not want to have this as a responsibility of course if we say you have to do it they will but it's not a responsibility we want the police to have in terms of mask enforcement or anything like that you know we thought about the ambassador approach which would make sense if that you know just to help businesses downtown with masks and things like that but you know and again with the parties on east pleasant street for instance if that's what we're talking about rather than have a cruiser show up because someone has complained because we try to respond to the people who are complaining if there's a university official who showed up that would be much we prefer that all the time the problem we get is when that call comes in at 1230 at night you know who there's only one phone number to call and you know and we have the choice of saying well that's not in our bailiwick we're not going to respond or the police say we'll send someone to check on it for you typically what happens right now is that the externality of noise emanating beyond the property line is what triggers a visit and then they can give a warning saying you're making too much noise you're interfering with your neighbor's sleep and they can sort of say you should really should quiet it down that's usually their typical approach but it's the thing that emanates beyond the property line if people are quietly gathered in a yard and they're not socially distanced they're not wearing a mask I don't know what authority we have to go on someone's private property to do anything about that and it may give us discomfort but I think you know and there are there are limits to what policing can happen in a small town government so I think that that's you know I want to be clear that no intention of having police enforce mask rules or anything like that we don't want to be enforcing mask rules but we would rather be on the education end of things and we hear pretty clearly that I think it's a you know we'll take that very seriously about educate and and put the enforcement in earlier than later so it doesn't feel punitive that we do it earlier I think that's really good advice George move your hand up if I may and just briefly um well I just need to be able and I know you understand this to to explain to my constituents what they should or shouldn't do and what I'm hearing and I that's all I'm concerned about right now is not the merits demerits of the particular policy but what I'm hearing is that look if it's a noise nuisance violation that kind of thing then you should call the police but otherwise there's really nothing that you I mean you can call but you shouldn't I should advise them not to because the police really have limited if no authority do anything about it but if it's a noise violation if it's a nuisance violation then as in the past that is something that I can call in and and I've complained about is that is that a fair I mean it's pretty crude way of putting it but I just need to be able to tell people what they shouldn't shouldn't do I know you know people will continue to call and they continue to call and I would like to be able to tell them what they shouldn't shouldn't do um whether they follow that advice or not I don't know but I'd like to give them good advice what would you advise me to tell them so this is where we'd like the university to step up and have those complaints especially if they're students of the university and some people you might not know who they are right you don't know if they're automatically young people are defined as university students maybe they're not maybe it's just a bunch of young people so we'd really like to be in partnership with the university the university taking the lead on this on those types of calls they don't show well we'll talk more about this with with the chancellor tomorrow uh Dorothy um I'd like a definition of private property uh a business is private property but we have rules for them restaurants are private property uh so the university is not public well UMass is but Amherst college isn't it's private so or you when you say private property do you mean a home and a yard this that's what I was referencing yes like okay Alyssa yeah thank you following up on that I just wanted some quick clarity it doesn't have to be tonight but maybe just uh you know a sentence from the police chief because we do break up parties of a hundred people now and so I don't know why we wouldn't do that I mean again I don't want to send police with guns to enforce I get that but the police don't just go because it's noisy they go because there's a hundred people streaming around people are assuming there's underage drinking that there's no keg license and so the cops go and check it out and then they decide what to do from there so I'm not sure it's entirely just defined by sound because it can also be defined by just it's disruptive to have 15 cars parked in front of your house when there aren't normally so maybe just knowing what that line is again so that we manage expectations like George said and then the other thing is this concept of party registration just seems to fly in the face of what we're trying to do so like we're going to encourage people to continue to register parties but we actually don't want anybody to have parties so but we're saying but really it's okay to have party what so um it would be worth finding out what the plan is associated with that too because that's referenced and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me even though it was a great program um so under our agenda this is not in the action items but in fact there's been a suggestion that the town council may want to pass a motion in support of the town manager's letter and encourage it so we have drafted such a motion but before we can do that we also have to move to suspend rule 8.4 so I'm asking for a motion to suspend town council rules or procedure rule 8.4 for the current agenda item is there a second second mandate okay and then I do need to do a roll call is there any further discussion on that item okay so I'll start with Pat D'Angeles yes Pat I didn't hear you yes thank you Darcy Dumont yes Greece Merseyes Haneke yes ma'am yes Ross yes Brian yes Shane yes driver yes Steinberg yes all-mown yes and brewer yes okay and so it's that has passed so this is the wording of the motion the way it presently stands to support and endorse the requests detailed in the Amherst town manager's letter dated July 10th 2020 to Chancellor Subaswanam of the University of Massachusetts Amherst asking for critical changes to the university's plan for students return for the fall 2020 semester and given the urgency of matters we call on the university and Chancellor Subaswamy to partner with the town to amend its plan for the fall 2020 semester as soon as possible to ensure those plans protect the public health and safety of all residents of Amherst including all students whether residing on or off campus is there a motion so mandate okay and a second second okay is there any further discussion Evan Ross so when I read the original letter there were a number of things that were being requested if you mass that I agreed with a couple that I actually didn't necessarily agree with I found the Chancellor's letter today actually addressed many of the things that were brought up in that letter and of course we heard now that there's a meeting happening tomorrow and that there seems to be some willingness for the university to work together given all of that I don't particularly feel any need or any real impact of this body endorsing that letter and so I just wanted to put on record that I'm sorry Alyssa the on record plan on abstaining from this vote okay George I think I share Evan's sentiment we're asking them to amend something but it's not clear what it is we're actually asking them to amend I have full confidence in Paul he's heard our concerns he's going to negotiate as he's done um probably does it hurt does it help it just seems like a gesture that has nothing really to it I put my confidence in Paul and his ability to to to make a strong case and since maybe I misread I misheard obviously I'm not looking at a written text maybe I just misheard it but I don't see anything very specific in this that says you know you must do this this and this and that's what we're asking you to do it's just saying you got to do better Alyssa rather than amending the motion which already took a big lump of work to put together to show that and including everything we said Monday night I absolutely believe that Paul will represent as well I know he would have done that whether we endorse this letter or not that's why he didn't have to bring us the letter in the first place because we knew he'd do a great job but I do think it sends a message which I also don't like the phrase of but it does in fact make clear that we have grave concerns we may not all agree with every one of those concerns but we do have grave concerns and they need to be shared and it's not just the town managers representing it's that the town council is also hearing this and we have expectations of the university and I think that's entirely fair are there any other comments at this time okay then we're going to move to the question and we'll start with Darcy Dumont could you read it again when yes to support and endorse the request detailed in the Amherst town manager's letter dated July 10th 2020 to Chancellor Subaswami of the University of Massachusetts Amherst asking for critical to the university's plan for students return for the fall 2020 semester and given the urgency of matter all on the university and Chancellor Subaswami to partner with the town to amend its plan for the fall 2020 semester to as soon as possible to ensure those plans protect the public health and safety of all residents of Amherst including all students whether residing on or off campus excellent no we're asking them to amend their plan in addition to having just endorsed the town manager's letter yes um yes okay um grease mercy yes panicky yes ham yes ross abstain ryan yes shane yes yes shriver abstain steinberg yes steinberg was that a yes yes thank you shall any ball mill yes rower yes and the angeles yes votes 11 zero one abstention one absence no there were two abstentions there were two abstentions 10 with two abstentions and one absent who was the other abstention i'm sorry even evin shriver and ross i'm sorry thank you i didn't i heard the same and it came after shane zing yes thank you the vote was 10 for no against two abstentions and one absence thank you for the correction okay we are going to move on to the issue of voting and paul i'm going to turn this back over to you so we have a slight deck for this uh search and actually it's uh this is um our town clerk shavina martin who's here tonight to walk you through what she has come up with in terms of options for making our voting safer in the coming in the and these elections that will help be held in september in november so shavina so tonight i have i am before the council because we have to respond to covid surrounding our elections and so we are unable to utilize the north fire station as one of our polling locations and so paul and i had assembled the team paul had assembled the team and we looked at many locations and came up with a plan to relocate all all 10 of our voting so on this slide here um it outlines our upcoming election dates which our primary election is september 1st and then we have our general election on november 3rd and so looking forward on july 6th the governor passed the bill with legislation surrounding early voting and the election season and so in that legislation we are going to be having early voting um prior to the september 1st primary and it's going to be beginning saturday august 22nd through friday august 28th august 22nd also will coincide with the deadline for voter registration and so then for our november 3rd election um our early voting has been expanded and it's going to run also september uh excuse me saturday october 17th through friday october 30th and it will coincide uh we will have the deadline for voters to register to vote for the october 24th or if they want to make any changes to um political parties or to um their address moving on to the next slide it is just informational with where our current polling locations lie so currently we have our polling locations are located in seven different locations so they consist of two churches two elementary schools the fire station a library and then we have three uh inside of the bank's community center and so um we have a limited number of buildings that we can use in town for our polling locations and um right now we can't use the fire station so that made me look at all of them actually we were able to get confirmation from the two churches so we were able to uh north zion church agreed to allow us to hold elections as well as immanuel lutheran immanuel lutheran has some very strict guidelines if we are to hold elections um because neither church has been having uh in-person services and so they've given us very strict guidelines um and protocols if they have to appear and um we also if we go to the next slide i've outlined here that um we have some serious concerns with um holding the elections at the schools always there's always a concern about bringing the public into the elementary school and also the banks is currently closed to the uh public so that would um eliminate three of our polling locations they have three precincts in the bank so we have precincts four five and ten are held there and so um not being able to utilize that space would greatly affect how we're able to allow in-person voting while we have a major push for vote by mail the law did not change in regards to us being able to offer voting in person and so that's the reason that i'm before you tonight and so my recommendation on tonight is that we move these ten precincts into uh the amherst regional high school the superintendent has partnered with us he has been cooperating with us along with fire chief our facilities maintenance manager and the superintendent of public works and we've all worked together to come up with a plan um we've gone over to the high school to map out you can move on to the next slide to map out traffic patterns to map out the layout the two gyms at the high school have adequate spacing to accommodate all polling locations there's um ample space for social distancing we're able to have a single entrance exit that traffic pattern and that traffic pattern also would require no travel through the school building and there's also plenty of parking both handicap parking where there are curb cuts and any overflow parking for any additional voters in addition to our election and so the advantages of us moving our precincts to the high school and we can move over to the next slide and we can go a little further is it would again it would create the environment where we are able to control uh everyone we it's a controlled environment for the in-person voting excuse me it eliminates confusion um for our voters as to where they vote and the reason I thought of this um I was in conversation with Athena about six weeks ago and she was telling me that uh in Greenfield where she lives everyone votes at the high school and my co-workers both Amber and Sue they live in Belcher town and everyone votes at their high school so everyone just knows that there's a one polling location and that's where everyone goes on election day and so I thought we could create that same kind of atmosphere here in town it provides greater and consistent oversight by our office we're able to respond if there's ever any issues with the high school being right around the corner from town hall we can get right over there it also creates cost savings currently we have to pay a building rental fee for the churches and so we would be able to eliminate those fees it would also reduce the number of constables we currently have 10 constables and we would be able to go down to just one to two police officers there it would also limit in this season it would limit the exposure to COVID and it would also centralize the possibility for contact tracing if we needed it and on the long term of it it would resolve the ongoing concerns that we've received over the years with having um elections in schools with student safety with parking even in the locations where we've had it in the schools um and then in addition to that this year our election calendar is in a line with when there's no school and so it works out well and Superintendent Morris has agreed that in the future he would allow there to be a professional development day on election day so that that would also eliminate students from being in the building um at the high school on election day we can move to the next slide we have taken some time to consider some concerns and to come up with some possible solutions to some of the concerns which is the question of if relocating the polling sites will inhibit turnout or voter suppression and so to address those concerns again I the marketing strategy is that if we have any one location we can get families to go together again people know everyone knows it's going to be at the one location it's not going to suppress voters one of the things that it would do is you know it would need more communal the change of the location may confuse long time voters but the way we uh anticipate or we plan to address that is signage at the current polling location so all of the other locations we put up signage just to redirect voters to the high school and then access to new polling location by public transportation so when I was going through town and looking at the various buildings and even with the high school I did I am aware that there are there's no close pvta bus stops and so one of the things that Paul and I had discussed is the possibility of either offering band service to the high school or contacting pvta to see if they would offer a election day shuttle to the high school so those are a few ways that we can address the public transportation portion of relocating the precincts and that we also know that moving polling locations from neighborhoods can cause concerns and so with that my in my opinion I think that moving them from some of the low from the neighborhoods again will cause a communal effect because neighbors can remind each other like hey have you gone over to the high school and that's just what I'm hearing from people who again for my co-workers that that's just how they you know how they do it on election day when they run into their neighbors at the grocery store it's something that's kind of a conversation piece and so that's how I plan to address removing it from the neighborhood and then adding distance for travel for people to vote the furthest distance currently would be for our voters who vote in precinct one at the north Zion church so they would have to travel 8.7 miles to get to the high school and so I do I am aware that that can seem like it could be a discouragement to voters but again if it's something where someone can't make it out to their polls they can you can always request to vote by mail and so that way you're you're still able to catch the vote that way without going out in person and then we can move to the next slide and I have pledged because this is just where I am is that my role my job is to ensure that all voters are able to exercise their the right to vote safely and efficiently and so I've you know coined this pledge where I will encourage and I'm going to facilitate vote by mail and it's my priority to safely to safely set up a polling location or a method for voters to vote in person and where that is safe I'm going to always educate our voters about our new polling location and I also plan on formulating outreach to students and those who aren't regular voters so we have a lot of people who are inactive voters people who you know they're this year and especially so state and federal years are always popular election years and so when we have our town elections that's when we usually see our lower turnout and so I anticipate and plan on creating special outreach to capture those voters who aren't regular voters or only say I only vote in presidential elections and all of this is to increase voter turnout that's the goal is to increase the voter turnout additionally this afternoon I sent the email over to Athena to forward it to everyone on the council the secretary of state released the guidelines for polling locations for the selection season and so the requirements all of our polling locations normally would have to have a minimum of a 36 inch clearance of path for voters to be able to travel through the polling location and now they're requiring six feet between voting booths and between check-in tables and between the travel and so they're asking us to reevaluate all of our polling locations and make sure that we have the proper signage for social distancing and and if that includes that we have to limit the number of election workers and so it's it's it was it's an extensive guideline that they rolled out it came through late this afternoon closer to 4 p.m. and so that's why I didn't have the opportunity to get it to you before tonight's meeting but so these are the things that we have to take into consideration and so it is my proposal and and my my hope that you all will consider voting because the requirement is in order for us to change a polling location the council has to hope to move to approve the move and so that's the next step I wanted to bring it before you and answer any questions or concerns that you may have thank you I was muted we're going to have some questions but I also want to just point out is that we do not need to vote tonight although we certainly need to raise issues and questions ultimately the town council shall determine that the public convenience or public health would be better served and we have to evaluate and report on whether such change would have a disparaging adverse impact on the basis of race national origin disability income or age and that that report must be published three days before a vote so and the I'm sorry the secretary of state expounded on that as well that report does have to um has to be submitted to the secretary of state as well okay thank you from the from the council so pat you have your hand up carol can you sorry carol's running a blender um can you hear me yes I am concerned I have been working with people who live off of east Hadley road in south point and the boulders working on mobile market and things and one of the things they live very close to the malls and therefore the grocery stores however because of the lack of consistent or regular or public transportation it can take them an hour and a half to get from east Hadley road to the grocery store so even though the distance is not great so and I hear you're talking about shuttles and things like that um I think that aspect of this really needs to be worked out or there's going to be a whole contingent of people who we are trying to get to vote who won't be able to make it or it will cause real hardship so I agree thank you for your work I agree Melissa I apologize for the delay my mouse has decided to stop working so I'm trying to struggle with the trap pad I think this is incredibly comprehensive I think it addresses so many of the concerns we've had in the past associated with voting in schools and then what would that look like and the fact that these are professional development days etc absolutely agree that we need to have a shuttle and but the important the the biggest thing that we need to get across to people and I think this report does well is that people are supposed to vote by mail they're not supposed to go vote in person this is a different year they're supposed to go vote by mail they got their things in the mail to do that to request their ballots I know that's not going to be comfortable for some people some people don't like early voting for the same reason you know they like being there that day but we are in a bizarre global emergency I'm not sure we'd be quite ready to do this if it wasn't for those circumstances we might not be ready to shift to one polling place but given the circumstances that we find ourselves under and the fact that we can vote by mail we don't have to just show up for early voting I think is incredibly important I had passed along just some minor questions and checklist type items to the town manager just before this meeting and he and those will be fine and addressed and like I really appreciate for example the idea of signage at the old polling place that says remember we told you to go this might be one of those times we use the reverse 911 call we use that very rarely but to remind people send in your ballot by such and such date or you're going to need to go to the high school instead and as it turns out we have a shuttle for you for that purpose and I think that it sounds like you have got all those things under control the only minor quibble I actually had with it was who prepared the report I literally think you've basically already written the report and I think we need to not make the report into a big hairy deal I think we need to find a way to just basically have someone sit down and write it and then say yep that's these bullet points there in the slide these are the exact advantages disadvantages this is what we're going to do about the shuttle the only question I had about that is and I don't see sending that off to committee because we just don't have time but aside from who will actually put it together is the action of since we just got that email come through tonight is there wasn't really an indication there that they had to approve the plan just that they wanted to see it so do you figure that like they'll just tell us hey that plan stinks but it's not like we have to wait for them to tell us we don't have to wait for them and the email does say that they will do it in in lieu of sending someone out in the past they've had someone from the secretary of state come out and evaluate polling locations and that's not the case um Kathy um I I want to second what Pat started with um with vans you know we have several neighborhoods we're just on district one um where people just walk they don't take any buses and it's a short distance from several housing complexes um as so so if we're if we're going to do this I think there have to be vans and that's how to get the information out then I also had a question on the vote by mail I think absolutely put encourage people so there are three people in our house and all I'm the only one who got the postcard saying vote by mail at what point should people be worried that they didn't get it and so there's something wrong with the list and we we went down and confirmed our addresses um with the census and other pieces um so I'm just wondering where where the other two people are um and so I so that is the case oftentimes so on last Wednesday on the 15th the secretary of state sent out all the to every registered voter in the state their vote by mail postcard and as with anything once you pop it into the mail it's in the hands of the post office and so you may have just gotten yours first a lot of residents who have been keeping up with the legislation just called us and asked us if they could get we already have the 2020 vote by mail application up on our website you can fill that out so you don't have to wait until you get the postcard okay that then answer my question so same with other people if it just doesn't come there's some glitch yeah and we can get it because this was nicely printed with my name and my address okay yeah you can always call us we have I do think for for people who don't do this you know so some of the people um are are are older they don't have cars they're too big complexes we've got to do you know a few bands a day you know like shuttling back and forth because it's not just um the high school I was just actually looking like applewood it's five four miles away from applewood now applewood can bring people up to vote um so they have their own band but the other places don't um so whatever we do to facilitate in case they forget to send it in yeah yeah and those are our voters those are those are our voter voters excuse me that who are encouraged to vote by mail because they are probably most likely at in our vulnerable populations or we want them to vote by mail yep many fail you have your hand up yes um I echo the concerns about getting to the high school especially with no pvta stop nearby um so I support working with the pvta to figure out how to do that and vans um I had a couple of questions the one is I wasn't sure whether this was going to be a permanent change or just for this year and so if you could clarify whether this is intended to be just for this year because of the covid stuff and trying to consolidate or whether this would be going forward for indefinite if it works um and then I know at the bank center that has three polling locations there are three separate lines and there was no indication on this whether we would end up with 10 separate lines um no separate lines one line going in that social distance so I'm I also have concerns about the length of a line if we don't have a lot of people voting by mail um especially if the line is one big long line instead of 10 separate lines so if you could talk about the plan for that and and also um what that might look like if the line does get long are we good how are we going to provide seating or are we um how is the social distancing going to work and things like that and then I was wondering if I know we have to vote on this by august 3rd will we have an idea at that point um how successful at least this initial round of mail-in balloting application has been thank you okay so I will address all of them so it would be a permanent change um it is something that um our superintendent is strongly in support of because he has fielded many complaints about having um voting in the schools he and I spoke briefly the last week and he says if this passes if you all vote to approve it it would be such a relief for him and so it would be a permanent change um and as far as lines so yes the setup and in the and towards the ends of the slides are the pictures inside of the gym we sort of we don't have the the layout just yet I would have that prepared before the 3rd for you um but I took some preliminary pictures when we met and went over to the high school so as you know the high school has two gyms so we would use one door and we'd walk into the first gym it would be kind of a staging where voters would go and find out where which precinct where their precinct is and so then they'd be if we go to the next slide so they come into this excuse me I'm sorry can we go back one so they'd enter in through the door on the right and then they'd exit through the door on the left and so the line would in essentially go behind right here where the tree is and then there's the separate line the traffic flow out through the left door on the bottom slide should a line form we would have social distancing to have the line kind of go up the sidewalk there along the side of the building because it's paved and it's kind of hard to capture it in in a picture but it's paved along the um the school building there so should we have a long line we would have it socially distanced with six foot markings all the way out if we move to the next slide so voters in the top slide would come in through this door here this is the smaller gym this is gym one and this is where we would have someone there normally in a multi precinct location when they have it they usually would have what we call on wall list where voters could go up and just look for their street and know where their precinct is many clerks said that they're going to do away with the wall list so people aren't touching it and also so people aren't commingling and so we're going to have someone that will one or two election workers that will kind of be like air traffic control one of the changes in legislation this year is we'll be able to use poll pads so we won't have paper lists so people won't be flipping so to be an ipad so we can just look a voter up that way so to be electronic so that would mitigate lines and then on the bottom slide voters would enter into the actual polling location through those um through those teal colored doors and if we move to the next slide please um and this again they were having um the locker clean out there so it's not set up but as you can see based on the size of this gym which is 86 by 92 feet it has sufficient enough space to hold 10 precincts with social distancing and so the way that we are going to Jeremiah had did a preliminary um a preliminary site plan where we can have an eight foot table so that we can have our election workers six feet apart and then we put in about four voting booths that are six feet apart and then we have our tabulator and it would just be in a single file line and so we're going to also have a single entrance and exit point so voters would walk all voters would enter into the booths in the same direction and exit from the booth in the same direction so that they could deposit their ballot and then they would we have an exit so if we go to the next slide they would exit out of this door on the top which brings them back into gym one and they come out of the doorway on the left and we're going to have that taped off or stanchioned off um if we go to the next slide they would exit through this door here which goes into where the weight room is it seems like a lot of walking but it isn't and then in the bottom slide they come through those doors and it brings them right back out to the sidewalk so that there's no overlap so that's the preliminary plan um and then the actual setup for the 10 precincts um that is something that Jeremiah and I hire are working on. We can take the slides down at this time. Evan Ross you have a question? Yeah so uh first thank you Shivina for all that work um that explanation just now is incredibly helpful and showed uh that a lot of thought has been put into this uh I do share the same concerns about transportation so I'm glad that's being thought of uh I've talked in the past to both Shivina and Paul about my interest in seeing Amherst move to at-large polling locations and so this is quite what I envisioned but this is sort of a step in that direction and I'm hoping that if it goes well many asked if this was a permanent change I'm hoping that if it goes well we can have a bigger discussion about at-large polling places which I think would do a lot especially to increase student turnout. Speaking of student turnout my question is I know there was an early voting location on campus for the presidential primary. There had been discussions about having one for the November election. I'm curious if there's still an intent on having an early voting location on campus for the general and also previously the students wouldn't have returned to campus or have would be just returning when the primary is happening now they'll have already been there um so if there was any consideration of an early voting location on campus for the primary as well. So out of them out of an abundance of caution we will not be having early voting on the college campus this year. We will we're looking at a few locations in town for early voting for um August and October and especially not for October because October early voting is going to be held for 17 days where normally it's held for 11. Are there any other questions of the council at this time? Let me just follow up with two. So this will have to come to the council by August 3rd at which point we have to vote to approve is that correct Shalina? That is correct. Okay and the second thing is we have to have a report filed with you for the purposes of this and does that have to be done by August 3rd? You know that has to be done three days before the change goes into effect so before the September 1st election. Okay so um I want to go back to the council and just say the issues that we have to address are public convenience and public health and thus far on the public convenience I've heard issues around having some additional transportation provided vans obviously would need to have social distancing etc. Public health nobody has expressed interest in that and nobody has and people have expressed concerns about the adverse impact on the basis of race, nationality, disability, income, and age. I'd like to hear other councilor comments on this. Mandy Jo? Yeah um no I am I just wanted to check on the date the report needs to be filed because the the way I read the um slides was that the report needed to be posted three days before the council votes to change the polling locations which would mean that the report needs to be posted by July 31st. If we're going to that doesn't include the weekends it might mean that it needs posted if we vote on a Monday it might need posted no later than the Tuesday beforehand which would be July 28th so I I just don't want us messing this up if we're going to do that um and that's in a week and a day so I think we need to just figure out who's writing that report. I can read the language from the change in the law if that helps yes okay and so it reads in making a decision to change a polling place the select board board of select man town council or city council shall evaluate and report on whether such change would have a disparate adverse impact on access to the polls on the basis of race national origin disability income or age and not later than three days prior to changing a polling place shall make publicly available on its website and at the office of the town or city clerk a report on its evaluation this is you have to write the report only if you if you vote to approve it so if you all do not approve it then you don't have to write the report but if you vote to approve it then you'd have to write the report and this report would have to be posted three days before the change the change would go in effect for September 1st but the the change would be voted in on I don't interpret those words the same way I interpret it but that um at the point we're voting to change we would have had to post a because once we vote it is changed that's the way I interpret it it's why interpret it too um I emailed the second I emailed the the league council for the secretary of state on today I haven't heard back and then this was the report that we received this afternoon but I can call her um tomorrow to get the clarification and provide to the council all right mercy uh just a quick thought um I'm thinking if I were myself and I'd forgotten to do early voting I wouldn't want to get into a van but on the other hand I wouldn't know how to get there so remember those the I guess it's the the bid has an open van um a trolley we drove around on those open trolleys wouldn't that be really the best thing to ride to the polling place during COVID-19 as opposed to a closed van I'm open to all suggestions Darcy please unmute I I um it seems to me that this plan is incredibly reasonable and makes so much sense it's so simple and elegant and thank you so much Shaveena for coming up with it um and I I do I do agree with the idea about getting more transportation um and the you know East Hedley Road is in district five so you know I would obviously like to have transportation for those people who live in um on East off East Hedley Road but I would point out that in district five we have currently we have Crocker Farm and the Munson Library and the Munson Library along with other polling locations currently have no means of public transportation to get to them so I'm I'm guessing that this will be an improvement for people to be able to get there and have you know some unified way to get the word out to people about how to get to this one location um because there is no way to get to Munson Library right now um if you live in Amherst Woods there is no way so um anyway I think it's a great idea Shaveena thank you um Alyssa you have your hand up yeah thank you so much for saying that Darcy because you know North Zion for example when I have to go there the parking's a nightmare and no I don't really walk from my house because I have to walk past a manual to get there so we don't have neighborhood polling places just like we don't have neighborhood schools that's the reality and we don't have transportation to them now and this is a great opportunity for us to be able to manage that transportation more effectively to one place from a lot of places but to one place rather than all the ride sharing that individual organizations have always done in the past whether it's UMass Dems or whatever I appreciate Evan bringing up the early voting on campus I was part of making that happen the first time I think it's so important and I just think we can't do it right now um and I think that this is great I did like your original slide about July 28 I still think that that is a better way of approaching the plan and having the plan ready which like I said is pretty much written already because then the public is also much more aware of it than if we really technically don't have to do it until later I think we may as well do it now to show the public we thought these things through we may not have the final answer on the vans or the the pvta or the trolley but we'll at least show the public we've thought of these things and to add to that there is a lot of things um Paul and I were in conversation on Friday there are a lot of things that the legislation changed and it would make things more relaxed but in my opinion I felt that the public deserves more notice and so I'm I would agree if the council decides to write the report early that I would not be opposed to that there's a lot of things that I I just me and my personal opinion um I like to provide more information to the public so that they are well informed so that they know their options they know their rights and so um I'm not opposed to doing things well in advance Steve Schreiber yeah um not to hop on the bus conversation but there there is a bus top right on the edge of the basically in front of people's bank and I think it's probably a quarter mile from people's bank to to the the gym and that bus at the serve by most of the bus routes actually in Amherst but especially the it comes from east Hadley Road and I'm not saying that we shouldn't do the bid open trolley or any of these other things but it's not like this is a complete PVTA desert compared to Wildwood which is in which is in our district which is a PVTA desert okay so um I'm hearing a couple things one is that we will move to vote on Augs 3rd that we as a council feel it would be best to post our report before that vote and it would have to be posted on the 28th or the latest I think on the 20 morning of the 29th but the 28th would clearly be preferable and uh that at this point the major thing I'm hearing is that we feel that with regard to health it is fine that there will be proper social distancing monitoring at masks etc and that with regard to making sure that we are not excluding um people based on uh race national origin disability income or age that we're looking at any number of transportation options including the fact that there is a stuff that is one fourth mile from the gym itself any other key points that people want to make sure I make Andy you had your hand up yes um several people have brought it up but you never put it into the list of issues which is um early voting for students on campus and uh I think that in addition to the reasons that have been put forward by my colleagues that we also have for this year um the university plan to try and encourage students who are living on campus to remain on campus and uh if we don't provide a voting opportunity on campus then we're reducing that opportunity so I would add that to the list of issues that we need to address so in fact you you want to make sure that we do have early voting on campus although the plan right now is not to have it I think we should revisit that question um I think two of my colleagues have raised it already and I'm adding a third voice on it with a slightly different reason and then we're also encouraging mail-in ballots is it sufficient to have this report written as a memo this does not have to be a 10 page report does it no it does not then I think based on the conversation I mean we could refer this to a committee or based on the conversation I would write a one to two page memo and bring it to the council questions other thoughts some committee that would like to take it on okay we will have a memo in your post and publicly and in your packets by the 28th and we will vote on um august 3rd shabina thank you so much for your you're welcome hard work on putting this plan together and I would like to before we close on this I would like to add the secretary of state is providing PPE for our polling locations for the entire election year and we as the town we're stepping up Jeremiah and I have been working to add additional so the state will be supplying um gloves mask and cleaning supplies we're going to also do additional cleaning supplies um and we're also going to have the plexiglass thank you sorry I just thought I'd take the opportunity to ask shabina if um we need poll workers uh with this always and and when the applications to do that would be in and and everything like that and another plug thank you so much so our application has been up all year the secretary of state has also been doing the push for poll workers um and so yes because we uh we we sent out correspondence to all of our active um election workers today and we've been getting responses back slowly and so we may have adequate staff for September but I always anticipate we're going to need an additional staff by November in addition to we'll need staff for early voting and so I want to address early voting at the campus so early voting in and of itself is a whole election day so it's us bringing a whole polling location every day so we have to set up break it down and bring it back and forth and I don't foresee the campus wanting us to bring that's us bringing bodies so we have to we have to bring vendors to come and set up so we have to bring books we have to bring a voting booth we have to bring all the supplies you have to take it down and then bring it back each day so we'd have to do that for the whole nine days in August and then we'd have to do it for 17 days in October and so that's why there's such a great push for vote by mail especially for students because students are subject to staying on campus if they're on campus and if they're staying home if they're doing remote learning they can still cast their vote from home so that's why the Secretary of State is mailing out the postcards to every voter to capture every voter so that every voter has knows that they have options and so they pass in person early voting just for anyone who may be apprehensive for going out to the polls on September 1st for November 3rd and and then measure to alleviate the possibility of lines on those two days. Okay anything else right then I'm going to suggest that we take a quick five minute break and we come back at that time. Mandy Jo you're on TV. As we return please open your video back up it's a way for me to see that you're actually there. Okay I just want to make sure everybody can still hear me and we can hear you so Shalini, thank you. Alyssa? Present. Patty Angelis? Yes. Yes. Grace Mirzi? Yes. Hannake? Yes. Dorothy Pam? Yes. Evan Ross? Yes. George Ryan? Present. Kathy Shane? Yes. Hugh Schreiber? Here. Andy Steinberg? Yes. Okay so we're going to move on to the budget for FY 21 and we're going to start with the finance committee report and then the council will have their discussion. There will be a period of public comment I'll be asking to see hands before we decide how long and then we'll move back to motions and vote. So Andy as chair of finance please proceed. Well I'm going to not be very long because the report was provided in writing and I hope that all of my fellow councillors have had an opportunity to see it. I apologize that it took until Friday afternoon but we were under quite a bit of pressure to produce a report in 20 days which the charter allows 30 days for. I think that the key point is that we used the provisions that we had already agreed to as a council in the guidelines and the amended guidelines to provide guidance to us on standards to apply. We spent a considerable time in a very short period meeting with the heads of every department and asked them questions and really got to an understanding of what was already a rich amount of information that was available. We realized after the public hearing that there was a lot of concern about the police department funding question and a request that have been put forward. There was three meetings that really concentrated not entirely but fairly heavily on the question of the police department funding issues. We tried to explain the reasoning that we applied in making the recommendation to go forward with full funding with one additional piece that was very important to us that you've all seen which is in an additional motion that we suggested that was achieved through the second and third of the three days that we talked about it in the first day. We tried to identify the number of positions that are vacant within the police department and then talked about what that meant in the final day realizing that what the council had already been talking about was to have a process that would allow us to work with the community to delve into the issues that were raised and to look at the questions or policing that we use the opportunity to ask the town manager if two of the anticipated vacant positions in the police department budget could not be filled for a period of time so that money would become available through that vacancy. We don't know the length of the vacancy because but we know that it would be for at least a specific period of time and that there would be an understanding that we would be able to provide or get a report from the town manager to the actions that had been taken by a date specific so that was what we agreed was a motion that we would suggest for the council to consider for taking action on the budget as a whole. The other thing that I just wanted to touch on is that we do need to recognize that any funding that is not that would not be voted does not become available for other purposes because no money is if a money is removed from a budget then you don't raise that money by taxation and the money therefore is not raised and available and then if later in the year additional funds would want to be used that it could only be used by going to reserves. The way that it works is that once a budget is passed then the commonwealth department of revenue certifies the amount of taxation that can be raised in order to meet the budget requirements and if you don't include money in the budget then it is not available to be raised and I think that basically touches the high points and at this point I really want to just get questions from my fellow councillors. Thanks Andy. Kathy Shane. Thank you Andy. Andy summarized very eloquently where we ended up. I was there was substantial discussion and we actually started out with cutting two positions in the budget in the police department and then it was explained that if we cut them we lost the money so this not filling them having learned that there are vacancies and there's no one in the pipeline to come into these that's already in training and we see this um and this was part of the discussion there's a very good page that a lot of the public comments drew on on page 52 of the budget but the types of calls the police are now responding to and there's a mix that could potentially be handled by people other than the police when we're talking about mental health social some social services but we don't know exactly how that mix might be and it was pointed out that the one thing we the police now are is they are around the clock service so if someone calls in the middle of the night there is someone there to respond so I think we need time to figure out what the alternatives are and the the motion the contingency that's put on the approval of the budget is that by the end of January the town manager would come back to us and talk about what to do with those two positions having had a lengthy discussion and having had time we've heard several communities beyond the one in Eugene Oregon are thinking of what does it mean to to be policing what is the kind of a modern uh a different kind of potential mix there are other places that are thinking about this and we need time to assess them and think about them so I thought it was a um it's a potential pathway to thinking about um where we want to go as well as assessing the kinds of concerns that were raised to us about profiling about different neighborhoods being treated differently so I think we really need time to digest that so I just want to say it was a it was a lengthy discussion on this um coming up with this um not filled two positions and the vacancies um and the other thing about what's happening over the coming year is there will be at least one more vacancy as as they currently know and there may be some retirements as well so there's this is the beginning of opportunities to be able to think about this while preserving as Andy said while preserving the money so the money is still sitting there in the town manager's budget so I just wanted to give a little bit more um to the background of this uh not filled two positions and um until we get a report back by the end of january okay not de angelo should have your hand up yes I was um part of the compromise um to basically freeze these two positions and give ourselves six months but I've been sitting for the last few days uh uh in conversation with a lot of people uh and I feel strongly that this is a time not to freeze them but to eliminate them I say that because we are in a process or have the opportunity to begin the process in a relatively painless way to really look at what public safety is what we mean what we envision as a community that safety is and I realize uh it's very possible over the course of six months or this next year that we completely restructure how we are um meeting crisis how how police are operating my hope is that they be go around unarmed that would be dramatic but I feel like not taking this small symbol symbolic action of not funding even if it impacts our tax base not funding these positions I think is is a really important thing norton yeah um I think that it's uh we've been told that there are several resident committees who have already been meeting and working on ideas about the police and it was presented to us that if we the council made big changes now we would be in fact short circuiting that process and um that would that would not be a good idea um we do acknowledge many of us that is definitely time to rethink how policing is done and that this move that we've made to do a temporary freeze on these positions while we're waiting for those committees to report uh and seek and think about study how we could do some restructuring in terms of delivering uh services through mental health and public health professionals instead of police but working and coordinating with police as appropriate so I feel strongly about that and I also wanted to say that um demands are necessary to change and expand the terms of debate but in a democracy that's not the whole thing you just don't go in and say this is my demand and you have to do it but it's a way it's a place to start talking and I think that we've got some processes going and we've been talking about more being done in terms of civilian without I don't want to use word civilian I'll say resident um overview of how we do deliver these services in the town of of Amherst um so because of recent events this is a great opportunity so I do agree with Pat on this it's a great opportunity for us to really look at to look at policing which has changed greatly over the last um well certainly in my adult years so let's say 20 30 years it has greatly changed and we've seen what happens when people want to reduce the use of guns we then find use of physical force that are unacceptable which luckily are not allowed in our police department but we also have the um tasers didn't exist when I was young they're supposedly an okay weapon but they killed some people and I think that we would not none of us would want to be tasered so we have to kind of think about how we go about it and be glad that we live in a town which is so peaceful okay but when it comes down to the after we get this done and hopefully be able to hire more people in public health we have so few people serving those needs in Amherst we need a budget shifting a restructuring we do have to remember that in these difficult times when you when you want a first responder for certain emergencies and problems the 24-7 Amherst police department is somebody is a group we need them we need them so I just want to say that we need this the police department but that we should not be afraid to look at examine and change how service is delivered and to incorporate more use of of non-police but public health and social workers as appropriate thank you George Ryan I don't know if you can answer this but I'm wondering what the uh if the proposed freeze is put in place what would be the force level of the police department my understanding is the budgeted at 48 officers I think one of those positions are currently unfilled we just reduced the force to 45 but reduced to 46 or does anyone know I'm going to ask Paul and Paul for that question would reduce the force obviously two positions down which I think brings it to 46 correct that's my understanding Paul but I didn't want to Darcy yeah um I I agree with um the coalition who has come to comment to us in principle um I have really been very moved uh not only by the the uptick in the Black Lives Matter movement but by the testimonies of the many folks who presented comments to us in testimony and I'm I'm excited that this issue is drawn out youth and people of color interested in how we govern in this town and I actually hope that's some of the people who have come out are interested in running for time council in a year but anyway I've always heard that um state reps will listen and act if they hear from five constituents so so now we've heard um from 45 people at least at which um one of the constituents pointed out is about one tenth of a percent of our population here in Amherst so anyway I agree with Dorothy that we do need our police department but I I agree that we do need radical change in our budgeting and um to transfer funding so that it could be used in a program like Kahootz and I would support Pat's suggestion of defunding rather than freezing the two APD positions I'd actually even support a 10% shift as was done in Northampton and would be interested to hear if there's any support for anything like that I think we need a citizens committee to make recommendations on how to shift the funding um or whether to adopt something like Kahootz and um I recommend also that none of the $80,000 set aside for racial equity work be used to fund um the APD sure are you still there did you lose oh no no you're here you're here then you're muted Lynn is listed as being there but wait I'm here shallony I must have muted I'm sorry shallony it's your turn yeah I just um again echoing a lot of what we're hearing is I want to acknowledge so many different people different backgrounds who shared their comments and it's been really moving and inspiring and and I feel like we're really in a positioned well in terms of a community that's impassioned they're very passionate and compassionate and they want change and we're in a place in time where we have a community that wants change we have a police department that's been showing up despite the difficult conversations we've been having they are showing their willingness to be there and work with all of us we have a town manager we have a town council who is clearly very passionate and listening so I really feel we're in a place where we can make really good thoughtful changes but rather than jumping to a solution which is abandoned which seems like this is what we need to do I really do believe we need to look and study this as a systemic problem not just in policing but the disparities that exist in our community with respect to education and health and housing and so I would like us as a council to commit to creating a community with residents with diverse skills and backgrounds and maybe use human centered design where we are looking at at the issues from the perspective of the lived experiences of the people that we're hearing from which we never hear from so this is like amazing we're in a very critical time period where we can listen where we can create a committee find out what are the sources of problems and then fix those rather than have blanket solutions because there are systemic problems and then there are problems related to specific police people like the police who man who murdered George Floyd and that's a different issue from the systemic things that exist and we can't clump all the problems together and have a blanket solution so I really urge us as a council to commit to taking out time and figuring out when are we going to have a discussion about I know this is a finance budget issue but just because we are not cutting it doesn't mean this is the end of the conversation I don't believe pushing the budget forward by a month is going to get us a solution which is why I'm willing to support the budget as is for now with the freeze I don't want to eliminate those positions because then we cannot get that money from the taxes so I feel we need to stay open to that and do a thorough study research and then figure out what the solutions are but I really want everyone to know that we are listening and we are acting we're not letting this go that's all. Alyssa. Thank you so much Shalini in particular it's great to be able to follow that I also want real change and I think that some of the things we're talking about are symbolic to do and don't actually create real change cutting them from the budget doesn't create real change appointing a committee doesn't create real change doing what Northampton does is not something Alyssa ever wants Amherst to do period end of story they made a bizarre 10 cut based on nothing that now they're struggling to figure out what does that even mean to their reality I of course the items listed in the recent Gazette article of all the things we depend on the police to do as we've been talking about at length already I go down that list and I think don't need a gun don't need a gun don't need a gun but they're the only people we have ready to do those things right now we do need to make a huge shift there's no question that the way we do things in this country and we can start with this community to do it differently but we can't do it differently in six months we cannot in fact redo the entire police department even in time for next year's budget that's the reality but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be working right now to make all of these things happen it's not painless to to remove the items from the budget just as a symbolic thing I don't think that's going to work but at the same time I'm not sitting on this until January I'm not waiting for January for the report I'm expecting that we're going to hear at every town council meeting where we're at and we're going to hear that from staff from whatever staff Paul wants to send to us and we're going to keep hearing it from the community and we're going to hear it from whatever organizations that have already organically arisen to work on this to tell us look you said you were going to do x by x date where are we in august where are we in september we can't say well this will wait till after the election we're at a horrible time with the pandemic with staff trying to work remotely trying to work in person it's such a challenging time but we can't let things wait and so I want everyone who hears us talking about January to understand that we're not talking about not doing anything until January we're talking about doing a ton of things so that we're prepared in january to say okay those two positions we froze do they even need to be police positions do they need to be public health positions what kind of positions do they need to be and we'll know that at least for those two positions perhaps by january but only because we've done a ton of work in the meantime we don't have any details by our professional staff on what cuts would look like on the ground we don't need committees right now what i mean by that is we don't need official town committees i know north hampton is going through this elaborate process and driving themselves crazy how will we find the right people to be on the committees it's going to take weeks how transparent will it be we don't need any of that we've got organically arisen committees that can continue to work with the staff that they're working with right now and when they say to us you know what we could use some of that 80 000 for we want facilitation of this kind of discussion somewhere in the community and we want to be able to pay you know the stipend pay for childcare that sort of thing or we want to use a portion of it for this i want to hear that from them i don't want to sit around and say well let's try and define the perfect committee of those folks i think those folks we're already here and they're already talking to us and we've got great support already from our town manager from our chief of police and from other staff who are like let's do it let's talk about this let's try and figure it out so i want us to go ahead and make sure there's never been any indication that we were going to spend that 80 000 by giving it to the police or giving it to hr i do want to hear from the organically arisen groups who tell us what we should do with that money and i want to hear back from staff every town council meeting how far along we are in this process because if it turns out that say september october it's like well you know we've been really busy and we have good intentions but we didn't actually have any meetings then i'm going to say you know what you're done like you're not taking this seriously but i think people will take it seriously and i think we will continue to bring focus to it and we will actually be able to make real change not just say oh we appointed a committee oh we made a cut and then say oh look we did our jobs we have a lot more to do than that evan i always hate going after elissa um because i agree with everything she just said i just want to first thank andy for the finance committee report um i i was uh unfortunately unable to attend the finance committee meetings last week um first read about the recommendation in the gazette and was very confused about what happened and his report provided a really really clear explanation um and rationale behind the recommendation um which was especially valuable for me as someone who even though we're already a year and a half into this job is still very much a novice when it comes to municipal finance i'm finding myself frustrated uh now with the constraints that are placed on us by state law and also by the charter um because my first reaction was as the council why don't we just move those two fte positions somewhere else um and then someone reminded me that as the council we don't have the authority to do that we can't reallocate funds we can't transfer funds um we can't increase funds we can only uh did reduce or eliminate budget items and that that really limits what we can do here because i think in a perfect world i would be here speaking in favor of transferring the money that would be spent on those two fte somewhere else and so we can start to put into place the vision um of community response that relies less on police for response to mental health to homelessness uh to neighbor disputes noise violations um but we don't have the ability to do that and so my my concern with simply cutting the budget now my concern with simply eliminating those two fte positions is that as others have said is that we lose that money that could once once it is appropriated could be transferred or reallocated and so um i i intend to support the recommendation with the expectation that that and and perhaps it's a false one with the expectation that that money will never actually be used to hire the two fte police officers but that it will be available in the budget so that down the road we could see it reallocated somewhere else to better response but if we just eliminate those positions or cut it's not like i keep hearing defund the police and when i'm asked what that means i hear reduce the police budget and reallocate those funds to uh places that serve the community uh but if we were to cut the budget we'd only be doing that first half we wouldn't actually be freeing money to spend elsewhere and that's actually very frustrating to me um but we have to work within the system uh that we have and so i've been sitting in i spoke to to a couple people about this today with a lot of discomfort over what our options are um and a lot of discomfort with a vote that has the optics of us doing nothing of just appropriating the money as uh originally planned but i think what we need to make clear is one we're under a lot of constraints by state law and by our charter about what we as the council can actually do that if we just cut the budget we lose the money that could be and i hope will be reallocated and transferred to other purposes and that all of these discussions will go somewhere productive and one of the first places i hope we see this um as i know that gol is working on town manager goals for the next year and this is something that i expect will be worked into them this should be a priority goal of the town manager um to work on how we can reimagine policing and amers to be responsive to all of the public comments we've we've received and i echo uh darcy's comments that i've been so thrilled to see um public comments from a more diverse uh racially generationally socioeconomically group of people than we get on on most issues and certainly than we've ever seen on the budget i'm very happy this year our budget uh hearings were dominated by people talking about racial justice as opposed to uh what they were dominated by last year which was sort of the opposite um and so i i i support the recommendation with a lot of discomfort but knowing that or feeling as though it's the best course forward given what we all want to do as a council george you have your hand up i actually think there is some wisdom in the state law that keeps the 13 of us from just uh sort of deciding what we want to do with the budget um so i don't share quite any view on that um i also hope that whatever conversations take place whatever these organically arisen bodies may or may not be that we hear from the men and women who have served this town and continue to serve this town every day in other words you hear from the police department and their experiences because they work directly every day with these communities of need and i hope their voices will be given will be listened to and their experiences will be listened to and respected and also i think we need to hear from the social agencies and the service providers with whom our police department works with again on a daily basis and have been doing for many years we need to hear from them as well um simply a group of concerned citizens no matter how passionate and no matter how uh idealistically driven we also need to hear from the people who actually do this every single day mandy joe you have your hand up thank you um i'm going to echo a lot of what's been said um we heard a lot about many issues over policing um in certain areas of town from the residents um and residents who feel intimidated and harassed when officers drive by in their cars um we've also heard from residents how the police help the neighborhoods address issues of noise and large gatherings and i don't think we can forget what we've heard from the police um that many of the calls they receive are for non-criminal issues mental health medical um but we've also heard from the chief that our department doesn't participate in military surplus programs um that they don't go to large gatherings wearing riot gear um because they have found that that type of response is not helpful to de-escalating situations and that we do not own tasers um i think one thing that hasn't been acknowledged in all of this discussion is the good our police department has done in responding to the community sentiment in the past particularly with regard to student gatherings there was an issue in a Blarney blowout seven eight years ago that got out of hand um that was not what this community wanted to see our police department responding to and how they were responding and they changed they listened and nothing like that has happened again in terms of how our police department has responded and i think we need to acknowledge that um but i think we also need to acknowledge what we've been hearing from the black and brown residents and like what they're experiencing and that it needs addressed um but i'm concerned that any cut to the budget wouldn't actually address those issues cutting a budget especially by the 52 asked without a plan in place doesn't get us where we want to be which is to have a community safety plan that has non police responding to non police matters because we can't reallocate that money because if we cut that money now there is no money to reallocate without going to reserves and if we cut that money now the 52 percent i'm not talking about the two positions we don't have enough officers to respond to crime we don't have anyone to respond to mental health calls we don't have anyone to respond to medical calls if our EMTs are busy we've heard that the police respond to some of that we don't have anyone to respond to noise complaints on a regular basis and without a plan a cut is just a cut um i think we need a plan we need to go forward with the plan we need to find a plan so we have to whether it's a committee whether it's the ones that have come together and formed and are doing the talking we need to figure out the alternatives come up with a plan figure out how to implement that plan fund that plan that might actually incur more money than we can cut from a police budget potentially um and figure out how to do that that takes time but between now and the time it takes to do that i do not believe cutting the police budget is the way to go because it would leave us without anyone to respond to some of these issues that we know we might not want police responding to now but they're not doing an awful job they're doing a good job from what we've heard responding to mental health complaints it might not be what we want as a community in the future but i think we need to support it now um so for that reason for the flexibility i i'm going to vote for the budget as is we need the flexibility to be able to reallocate that money we need people responding to mental health calls now we need people responding to noise complaints and right now the police are all we have we need to work on figuring out who can do it in the future but until then we need to fund the people that are doing it beef shriver you've not spoken yet i'm going to call on you yeah so when i ran for office i um one of my mantras was that i am not the expert in any of this i'm not the expert in policing libraries schools but i'm willing to listen to the experts and we're in a situation right now and i know there's a national crisis that is amplifying what's happened at a local level but i'm this quite frankly is um i don't have enough information yet about really what the issues are uh i think that the testimony that we've heard from the public is you know riveting and important but we really haven't we haven't had that debate and discussion where i'm prepared to make major changes to the budget right now i completely agree that those discussions need to happen that they're they're urgent um for so but one thing for me the issue is scaling so if we had exactly one police officer the assumption that that police officer would have a gun but that police officer would respond to everything from a cat in a tree to you know a bank robbery to they basically respond to everything so as you scale up your public safety i totally agree that some part of that public those public safety officers should not have guns and i don't know if the amherst police public safety department has gotten to that scale where we can have so my wife and i've talked about the fact that in a town that we used to live in a city that we used to live in they had the noise police so noise police that's all they did they literally would go around with a book of tickets and write noise summons for noise complaints they had the water police the water police would do the same thing so amherst isn't i don't know if it's amherst is at a scale of where we are that specialized that we can have you know those sorts of divisions i'm very willing to listen to that conversation i think that we probably possibly are at that breaking point where there are fewer public safety officers within the police department that don't you know that are that are unarmed as previous counselors have talked about i'm totally um i think that this is an extraordinarily important conversation to have i'm not positive what the best way to force the conversation to happen in a relatively short period of time but i'm i'm prepared to vote with the finance committee on basically vote with the finance committee recommendation um i'm going to go ahead and use my opportunity as a counselor to make a few comments first of all um i actually sat at the end of my driveway today waiting for you to come to visit and i'm sorry that you didn't because i had hoped that i would also be able to listen to you and also um talk with you about maybe how to get this kind of thing done and that's what makes this very difficult because it makes it sound so bureaucratic but it it's what government it's how government works and so i have a vision the vision is that amherst has a very very decent place to start from that decent place in fact includes people with a voice many of whom we've heard both for and against cutting the police department people who have a vision of what that money should be used for that there's really no consensus about that vision the most strongest consensus is something to deal with mental health we have a budget process budget process begins now for next year that budget process includes sometime in December January the council establishing guidelines for next year's budget and that budget will then reflect the changes that we want to see and as so many counselors have pointed out those changes will hopefully reflect the conversation of these various groups of people who have been talking about this issue and will reflect the issues we've heard but the problem is and this is where people have been saying this if we take money out of the budget now we will not get that back in addition to we will not get that back is we will not get back the tax base that it builds on every year and so the way to achieve change in this case is to keep the budget i'm all in favor of freezing the two positions if there was a way to do more fine but i want to freeze the two and have the conversations and come forward in such a way that we can begin to make changes as we move through next year and as we move through the end of this year and as we move into next year's budget and that is going to require a conversation that's honest thoughtful respectful among all people in this town and that is my vision earthy i i agree with what lin is said i do support the budget with the freeze of the two positions but i also want to say i really like the sound of what mandy joe said the community safety plan uh that has non-police staff responding to non-police problems and what we're going to be looking at is what the correct balance is all right and we're going to be talking to the experts now i just want to point out there are two kinds of experts there are those who are experts in how you deliver those services and experts in what it feels like to receive those services and then many of the people who've responded to us are experts in what it feels like to either be overpoliced or to feel that they're being overpoliced police cars go by my house all the time but i live on a main road so i always assume they're on their way from one place to another but if i lived in a off of in a cul-de-sac and i found police cars creeping around a lot it would make me feel weird it really would so i do understand what people are saying and i understand the idea of preventive policing but we have to always remember to look at things from two sides at points of view one is from the efficiency of the service deliverer and the other is from the person who is receiving that service so i think we have work to do and i think that we're willing to do it and we will come out with i hope a better balanced community safety plan that will work for all the people of Amherst and i look forward to helping work on it everyone is spoken once uh pat you would like to speak again yes thank you this has been an incredible wrestle for me i am going to take a dramatic leap of faith and believe in this council that we are making a real commitment to doing to changing the way we live in this community and and so i will support the budget as written and i will hold us our feet to the fire because we need that Melanie um yeah i am like i said in favor of accepting the budget as proposed by the finance committee but i would also like us to commit to our next steps in terms of having the conversation about what is our intention as the town council because i'm not completely clear if all of us are on this on the same page whether we're just talking about policing issues or are we really looking at racism in our town and the disparities that BIPOC communities encounter with respect to health education um housing business opportunities youth empowerment and there are all these so i mean where are we as a town as it pertains to all of these issues secondly um who's going to be doing um the work on studying these issues are the town council is going to be involved or just the staff and residents or is it residents and all of us and so that's something we need to agree on and when are we having these conversations so while we accept the budget today can we also agree upon fixing a time and place for when it's not placed that time when we're going to have this conversation i would suggest that we put aside some time on the third of of august to begin that conversation okay and so my job to put it on the agenda i will do so okay that's our next meeting okay we have some public comment i'd like to call on let me just state residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at the discretion of the president of the council based on the number of people who wish to speak right now i only see two and so three minutes seems fine the council will not engage in a dialogue or comment or a matter raised during general public comment uh curry kouts could you please state your name and where you live hi i'm curry kouts um i live in district two um i feel like you guys know this feel um so i've been listening i have made lots of notes some in my head some not in my head um right now i'm like a little bit confused because at one point that was speaking it almost sound like she part of her speech was um something we wrote um which is like it's fine to cite us but that was kind of weird because since it was published anyway it was weird um i have a little thing written and i will get to it um i did want to talk about um the real fear of um COVID-19 and mostly um the bad choices that UMass has made um and i'm gonna say that as a student there who um doesn't really not as probably as big of a fan of Swami as you all are um thinking yeah anyway it's irresponsible um that they have put you in this position where you thank you me police um yeah um sorry i am still not exactly i wrote a few more notes that i wanted to talk about um i think that um i wanted to know when we did come visit some of you and sorry that we couldn't honestly visit all of you because i think if we had had more conversations i think it would have been a lot nicer um hopefully we can have more conversations in the future and i did really appreciate you guys um like taking this somewhat seriously um i don't know if you if it was much of a choice but um i don't know i think there was some of you who are more strongly for it and others who weren't um but i think you guys have actually really tried to make this more of a democracy um which i don't see in a lot of governments um so it's kind of cool um i am a new i am a student of amherst um so i also do a lot of um organizing around um um PD and their stuff and that in itself is also trying to raise a lot of um knowledge about because we like the way that amherst's run does not help the students and it doesn't help the town um this is umas um yeah and so we have done a lot of work as organizing has you seen um organizing can do a lot and that is happening um maybe even ross knows about it i don't know um i don't know if i said your name wrong um anyway uh i when we said if you i just want to remind you we said if you vote yes um damn i kind of wish i could call him like georelidia uh anyway um at one point we said like if you vote no um we will support you um and i just really want you to know that that is serious um and uh maybe if you can pull off a no in a way that we that you are actually highlighting us um and there are a few people um who i would like to know um pat uh dorthy and kathy um i think all spoke wonderfully and i thank you um i was the one who actually spoke to pat so that was kind of exciting to feel like you knew a little bit of um abolitionist stuff and i think um i do agree with getting rid of weapons um i would like all weapons gone um but i would also like police gone at some point so that is what i am doing a lot of my work on um but yeah i think those are most of my notes on the presentation um there are quite a few more things that are not as nice but um i think i'm gonna work on that a little bit better because nice things i can give out like without thinking about but the things that are critical i want you to actually understand so i'm gonna work on that a little bit more but you will probably see it at some point so thank you thank you uh lydia irons please state your name and where you live hello i'm lydia irons i live in amherst i'm in district four i just want to start off my public comment with a james baldwin quote and that quote is you always told me it takes time it takes my father's time it takes my mother's time it takes my uncle's time my brother's time and my sister's time how much time do you want for progress and i want you all to sit with that quote and i want you to sit in the discomfort that i hope it is causing you because what you are saying about pushing the budget through is you are asking for more time that the people in this community do not have we do not want it we do not want to be spending more time in these discussions the us versus them attitude with the students will escalate because of the covid crisis and calling the cops feels like the only option in this town for many of the white and wealthy residents but you have other options you could fund active bystander training then people can feel empowered to speak directly to the students and as was quoted by the chief of police students who live in quote nuisance houses the way that the amherst police department speaks about the students is alarming at best and disgusting at worst i also want to speak on behalf of all of my fellow residents who have showed up at these meetings time and time again despite having to put their children to bed despite having worked long days in food service that don't talk down to us about how the budget works or about how our town government works we've done our research we've put in our time for free and we have showed up every single time now i want to talk to a couple of you town counselors directly evan you express discomfort with not being able to reallocate money paul bachleman has that power he can reallocate that money in our town budget and guess what he doesn't even live in our town that i find extremely disturbing pat thank you thank you for voting to not fill those positions and to freeze those positions permanently we showed up at your house today and i am feeling really grateful that you stepped up tonight and spoke about how we can start to move towards a better amherst you spoke towards a dramatic leap of faith in voting for this budget i hope your dramatic leap of faith pays off dorothy thank you for trying to empathize with the experience of the people who spoke out in all of these meetings but this is not a both side situation one side has power one side does not and i really want you to think about that as you move forward in your position of power and darcy you said you were glad so many people of color were interested in our town i find that insulting this entire process has been insanely difficult to crack and participate in and it took so much mobilizing and so much bravery shillini thank you for talking about continuing these discussions but i want to point out that you said taking money away is a bandage it's not a bandage it's the first step in confronting the problem of systematic racism thank you for wanting to commit to these next steps but how much talking do you want to do before you make a real move you heard where we were as at it as a town were you not on those calls mandi joe they did not have riot gear on but they had it in their cars ready to go the way they speak about the students should discuss you they have an obvious warrior mentality around our students and that's disturbing you kept saying without a plan a cut is just a cut make the cut then make the plan elissa i'm the only one i think i should have some time elissa you said that the money doesn't change anything i wonder if you've ever been poor taking money from police is not symbolism it's an actionable step what these what are these organically organized committees you speak of are they me are they being paid i also want to talk to george real quick you're not here to represent the police you're here to represent the citizens you sent an email to one of your constituents that said are some neighborhoods and emers being police differently than others are you currently believe that that's so i'm not sure for starters i would want you to find out from the apd and from finding out given that there are only usually four or five officers on duty at any given time it doesn't seem like they're patrolling anybody's neighborhood end quote were you not listening to all of the people who bravely stated their names their addresses to the police wrap up or i will have your mic cut off i don't care if you cut my mic you heard what i had to say thank you bailey please state your full name and where you live hi my name is bailey batty i live in district four um i want to be clear i'm like was not planning to talk today i threw these comments together really quickly and i i don't know why i feel the need to say this but like i am speaking solely on behalf of myself and not on behalf of defund 413 um this is all just i don't know an immediate reaction from my brain um i want to make clear that when i said in my first comment to defund the police and reinvest that money in the community and education um in other ways to dismantle systemic racism the focus was on defunding i felt like it was important to have like a concrete suggestion of where that money should go because frankly as has been said several times in this meeting there's a perception that we're like coming from this without having done our research and that we're not giving you a plan that we're not giving you concrete suggestions that we're just saying defund so that was coming from the expectation that you would think we were uninformed um so beyond that the defunding is the important part um saving that money and being able to reallocate it would be great but i really think it's more important to be preserving the safety of our community members um and and if we lose that money i think it's worth it to to be keeping people safe to be not giving it to an institution that is targeting and hurting our community members um so presenting this not filling the current vacant positions as like a concession um it's not really a compromise it's my understanding that these positions are vacant they haven't been filled so you're not decreasing the number of police on the streets out policing people um it's purely a budget move and i know this is a budget discussion but this is this is not going to change the policing in any way this is not going to decrease the number of cop cars driving by people's houses um and again sort of about the plan idea what we're proposing right now i think there were some some adjectives used to sort of imply that what we're proposing is like crazy and and unthought out and radical um we're really not asking for anything that radical i think there are a lot of radical ideas that we do have but we have not started by throwing them at you we are asking for some initial steps um and to the conversation that this is not going to solve everything it's not going to solve everything that's correct these are initial steps these are small actions that we suggested because we felt they could be taken immediately with this budget we know this budget is not going to fix everything it's it it was never any suggestion that that the suggestion to defund would do that it just is the most concrete thing that can happen literally right now you could do this now um and make it happen anyway that's the end of my notes um thank you thank you we're going to move back to the council at this time there's no other public comment so we are now going to move to the motions and andy i'm going to ask you to start the motions if you would or if you would prefer i will do those i didn't start the motion uh and uh the first motion that the finance committee is offering is as follows the approval of the f y 21 2021 operating budget is made with the explicit understanding with the town manager the two upcoming anticipated vacant positions in the police department's budget not be filled until the town manager in consultation with the town council and residents of amherst has fully explored alternative options of providing services and presented the results to the town council no later than january 31 2021 is there a second okay pat de angeles is uh confirmed i couldn't unmute quick enough but thanks but is there any other discussion at this time then i'm going to move to the boat and i'm beginning with uh yes myself and the answer is yes anarchy yes earthy pan yes evan ross yes george ryan yes uh kathy shane yes deep schreiber yes andy steinberg yes felony ball mill yes uh elissa brewer yes pat de angeles yes and darcy dumont darcy dumont sorry yes that road passes 12 with no no opposition no abstentions and one person absent next motion andy next motion is to adopt appropriation and transfer order f y 21 04 b in order of appropriating the town of amherst f y 2021 operating budget is recommended by the finance committee and shown on pages seven and eight of the document entitled town council finance committee recommendations on fiscal year 2021 budget and additional orders is there a second second i believe that was dorthy yes it was thank you any further discussion all right begin with mandy joe hannity yes earthy pan yes evan ross yes george ryan yes kathy shane yes deep schreiber yes andy steinberg yes felony ball mill yes uh elissa brewer yes pat de angeles yes darcy dumont yes Reese mersey yes votes 12 0 0 and one absent next one andy i'm gonna go back to uh second i can get my sheet up the next one is regarding um the capital projects for the enterprise funds for the water and sooner enterprise funds i believe that there's at least one member of the staff present from that department if there are additional questions the motion is as follows to adopt an appropriation transfer order 21-09 in order of approving and authorizing borrowing to fund capital projects bond authorization is required by is recommended by the finance committee and shown on page nine of the document entitled town council finance committee recommendations on fiscal year 2021 budget and additional orders is there a second second it i'm sorry i do i do want to note that this would require a two-thirds vote because it is bonding authorization this is second okay this does require a two-thirds vote it's a bonding and it is all for either sewer or water um is there are there any questions kathy um it's not a question it's just a comment um for people who are listening and for also for counselors when we voted on the coming years rate increases for water and sewer we were given a five-year budget that showed this these capital and the impact of it so we in effect have seen um and and discussed this which is one of the reason um one of the reasons we can come forward with the appropriations now and anyone who wants to see uh what those spendings are and when they will hit the budget can look back at when we were discussing the rate increases for the coming year are there any other questions or comments being none that i'm going to call the question and we move to Dorothy Pam yes ebb and ross yes george ryan yes kathy shane yes see you schreiber yes andy seinberg yes shall any volume yes elissa brewer elissa brewer elissa can you hear us doesn't look like she hears this you know i don't know what's going on i'll come back for her uh pat de angeles yes darsie demont yes and grease merges yes hannicky is yes okay elissa are you able to connect trying to reconnect because she just disappeared from the list i'm going to give her a moment to reconnect i'm trying we hear you it literally just crashed like normally it says something but it went boom so yes is the answer okay thank you the vote is 1200 and one absent and the last financial one andy you want to make the motion and we'll get a second and then explain it okay um um i moved to adopt appropriation and transfer order f y 21 11 in order of proving the acceptance of optional tax exemptions for fiscal year 2021 is recommended by the finance committee and shown on page 10 of the document entitled town council finance committee recommendations on fiscal year 2021 budget and additional orders is there a second second andy andy joe seconded that andy can you give us just a brief explanation of this one um yes um this is a standard order in the sense that town meeting every year voted on a similar motion as a an article at the town meeting there are provisions in state law for providing tax relief for um certain people um because they are either veterans or spouses of veterans elders or people with um severe sight impairments is defined by the statute and towns can provide additional um tax relief um on an annual vote basis by each town um in order to uh increase the the benefit of the people who qualify um this has been done every year for a number of years um originally by town meeting last year by the council um so we're again back with asking for what's really a standard amount the um information on the amount is uh shown in the finance committee report any questions comments okay seeing none then we'll move to the vote evan ross yes where's ryan yes yes you schreiber yes andy steinberg yes chelony bowman chelony yes elissa brewer yes pat de angeles yes garcy demont yes ring grease mercy yes mandy joe hannacky yes and Dorothy pan yes the vote was 12 to 00 with one absent we are done with the budget and we're going to now unless the council has other thoughts try to plow through the rest of the butt of the meeting yes means we don't come back tomorrow i'm seeing no hands so we're going to move on um the uh first agenda item up is agenda item eight a it is zoning bylaw 11.250 i want to point out that we'll have discussion about this tonight we do not vote until the third of august this is the first reading and it is oh well i'll all change so uh christine gray mullen has joined us she is presently the chair of the planning board and she's going to make a brief presentation about this we also do have a slide and it's in your packet christine hi um hello uh i'll try to keep this very brief i um know you all have okay great so we have the uh proposed change to the bylaw up there this is concerning the site plan review or SPR as it's called you should have gotten a memo from the planning board on the discussions and the votes that we're taking particularly at the joint meeting with the CRC which i think you also got a report from the CRC and you've gotten some other documents i'll speak on the planning board memo report uh both chris bestrup and i worked very hard you try to incorporate all of the pros and cons um and the differing opinions on this for the most part it's very well supported uh we voted five to two in support of this a proposed amendment did come up to add the minimum of four and that also um was a five to two but saying that they did not want that added on so it stands the way it is um i'm excited uh that this is the first non-temporary bylaw to be coming from us to you all and i hope it's the first of many um i don't know i hope a few of you or all of you maybe even uh watched any of the joint meeting as it was the first one on amherst media so that would help you um get a lot of the dialogue and what was discussed the SPR just as a reminder is a site plan review and the key is that it is a review and a lot of people say well why are you even considering this because they're always approved and in a way that is what an SPR is they are always approved because it's a process where the planning board really gets into the design details and tries to foresee and understand what might be negative impacts of this project and then through discussions with the developer or contractor owner or what have you there's a push and pull back and forth to try to better the project as best as it reasonably can for things like traffic parking signs um anything that uh might impact or have a negative impact on the community or the neighborhood and um these are very rigorous for buildings when these applications come to us it that never happens in one night it's two three four five you know it's been up to like seven meetings where this is discussed and then there's finally a vote so it isn't like it just comes to a meeting once and people vote and we really do try to schedule it on a meeting where there's as many members as possible because usually with buildings there's also a special permit that's also involved with it and special permits are still quite rigorous and harder to get approved as they are a super majority and that requires five minimum of five of the seven members voting in approval so with that I hope that gives you a little bit of insight on this and just to remember that it's we're trying to if anything make a make this a little bit less hard for the planning board to always have it scheduled and have members there um because we do want it to pass uh and um I'm sorry so we we just um it's a tool to make the project better not to stop it and that's what you have to remember about this and just one last thing I did a table which I hope you all see of the site plan reviews that came to us last year there were 15 of them and if you look at those 15 only two of them were buildings and both of the buildings were involved with special permit also and so if you look at the other 13 four of them were modifications of these same buildings that had already been approved that when they make little tweaks and changes they have to come back to us so again there's even there's continued dialogue and rigor to try to make it the best project possible and then if you look at the other things just remind you it's everything from athletic fields to sports fields parking lot uh reduce or improvements and it can even go down to something like last year we had um in a subdivision somebody's three season porch that was under site plan review so you only want to make it so rigorous because you can't just think about the buildings it's also about all the others so north hampton does this and east hampton and they're having great success and it never comes down to these tiny little dots of people fear so um thank you for your time and um good luck thank you christine um maybe you have a CRC report yes um thank you uh this report was included in both tonight's packet on the packet from a couple weeks ago um we as christine said we held a joint hearing on june 17th um to accept public comment there was no public comment at that joint hearing the hearing lasted approximately two hours and that was a discussion between the planning board and the CRC on this and as i said without any actual public comment um after discussion christine covered it pretty well in terms of what the discussion was um in terms of the members who were in favor of this change um other towns are doing it um it is a site plan review it is not a special permit um so it is meant to be a little easier to to get passed um and and their concern was that even adding a not less than four would potentially and depending on how many voting members are present at the planning board would make it more difficult than a special permit um and so and one of the other reasons to approach this was because of the charter change and the reduced in planning board size um those that um were against the change were concerned about the optics of potentially only having three members vote um in favor of a site plan review instead of four um because three members four members voting three in favor would represent less than a quorum of the full body even though it would be a majority of the members voting that was the main argument against the the motion as the amendment as it stands the CRC voted four to one to recommend this amendment as it stands the CRC also faced a amendment made by councillor Swartz to add the not less than four in the vote was four to one against adding that in i will do my best since councillor Swartz is not here to indicate um her reasons for voting for the amendment and against this vote um as it says in the CRC report um she believed that the body should respect the opinion of the staff keep consistency in the bylaws and believe that if major concerns with respect to obtaining quorum potentially if there are those which was one of the reasons forth for uh moving this down to allowing just a majority of those present that maybe the process itself is broken and that would require potentially other things beyond just amending this particular bylaw and so i think that that covers my report for now i will be happy to answer any questions about the conversation as it comes up george ryan uh governance organization and legislation committee thank you lin gill met on July 15th um and voted unanimously five zero to declare this amendment to be clear consistent and actionable uh christine um restrip i know you're in the attendee group did you want did you have any comment would you please raise your hand if you do okay none uh is there council discussion i see two hands kathy shane yes i i'm going to speak in favor of what i understand was uh sarah's attempt to amend this um and put the not fewer than four i see you know that is still a majority it's a simple majority of the seven so it it stays with it doesn't go back to the two-thirds wording which would be a much tougher standard um and i i think you've got two kinds of wordings in there that's very concerning so if abstaining voters are not counted in the vote i mean we're we're counting abstains when we vote as a council so we have to have a majority of everyone here we don't just throw the two abstaining people away so you could have all seven people meeting three yeses two against and two abstain and it passes the way this is set up because we don't count the abstainers at all so you get a simple majority of the people who are left and when i raised this concern about abstaining a few weeks ago when this came up one counselor said but that's like throwing your vote away um we've had instances of abstainers tonight and it's it can be not that you're uncertain and you're not ready to vote for or against it that you've got some doubts and i think that should give us pause so i would um when this comes up for a vote i'm going to propose an amendment that says not fewer than four keeping the simple majority wording and striking the language on we don't count abstaining so i want to count everybody in the room as how i get to the majority so if there were five people i would count all five so that i just want to signal um and i when i was reading um the background information and i did i just want to say i did listen to the entire hearing and i would have made a public comment but i didn't think counselors are allowed to make public comments when other counselors are in the room so i stayed silent okay um the only thing i ask is that you submit to me in advance your written um proposed change before the meeting next week i'm third of august i will steve schreiber i'm yeah so i would urge my fellow counselors to vote for this as is so one of the discussions that came up on the planning board is this idea of an overwhelming majority so um we all know what a simple majority is we all know what a quorum is so if you have a body of seven a quorum is four and a majority of the four is three so really we could also be silent on this this particular issue and it would default to that so abstentions do not count they don't count towards the vote so three people abstain they might as well not be in the room so that is correct whoever told you that that would that is correct but i urge you to uh go with to basically to support the will of the planning board who voted for this five to two so that's an overwhelming majority of the planning board that supports this so for me that's decisive that if um there that's decisive that they that they think that this will help them do their work more efficiently it also said at the discussion of this is that if you want to participate you need to show up so if all seven show up an all seven vote then there you get to your four then four votes are required if six people show up then your four votes are there if five people show up then it defaults to three so really if it's an important issue you really hope that your planning board shows up and votes thanks steve uh dorthy pam i'm sorry i skipped over you earlier okay well i very strongly support sarah's wording and um i think that the idea that three people which is 42 percent would decide this is not a good idea we started out by saying hey we mistakenly put it so it was two thirds and we really we really don't need two thirds we just need a bare majority and then the next thing i know the bare majority is cut down and cut down so that um it could be 42 percent of the people there so i really i really don't approve of this at all um i think efficiency is not the only thing to be concerned about when you're talking about the planning board so um i think you should just leave well enough and own and keep the words in i i don't like the phrase of those participating and voting because that limits it so that what you do is you open yourself up for playing games political games and i you know they do these all the time in town after town and i don't really think that we need to increase that in our planning board situation so i urge you to add the words at least four because that would be 57 percent which is just a little bit over the bare majority and meets the um i read through all the reports and the idea was it should be majority is half plus one well 57 percent is as close as you're going to get with a seven member planning board arcy demont yeah i uh would agree with kathy sara and doracy um that that four should be the minimum number and um what really convinced me was that um chris press trip would urge that that there be a minimum of four um and you know this really you know it feels the whole thing feels pretty partisan to me and i i think that chris initially brought it up because of the change in the number of people on the planning board and um but that she she was careful to say that she thought that four should be the number the minimum number um so um i hope that that we we keep that okay we again we're not voting tonight so mandy joe you have your hand up again yeah um i just want to bring up a few other things that were mentioned in the hearing about this minimum of four um one thing that was mentioned is to why three might be okay which could be consideration of adding language of not less than three instead of not less than four was that our until the charter changed the zoning board of appeals was actually a three member body um as that three member body they actually had to vote unanimously three out of three but that meant that special permits under the zoning board of appeals were actually being voted in and approved with three votes um of a body so three one of the arguments made and one of the things mentioned was that three is not an actual unusual uh voting number in this town for um site plan review for that was actually special permits because they don't do site plan review um and site plan review is supposed to be a lesser uh standard and the other thing that was mentioned was the possibility that you know we're all thinking about this is seven with people potentially abstaining but um one thing that was mentioned in these hearings was that at one point this council um had to actually approve the participation of a butters and a butters to a butters that were on the planning board in actual site plan review matters because they were otherwise conflicted out and because of voting requirements in our charter in the bylaws including this one that required two thirds not less than five there were too many a butters and a butters to a butters and some people not and not a full planning board that they didn't actually have enough votes and enough people able to participate to get to that the current requirement five and so we had to approve people participating despite being a butters and so some of the planning board members mentioned when you change planning board members and we have potentially three vacancies coming up that you can't actually do the Mullins rule which is go back and listen to all the hearings because you weren't a member of the planning board at the time some of the hearings started so it's not always a matter of members not being there and missing a meeting sometimes it's that they're conflicted out they might be a butters or they might not actually be able to participate and when that brings a seven member board down to say five suddenly a not less than four uh is an 80 percent margin and which is it would require you know in some sense is well over a supermajority and and so I just wanted to mention some of those other items that were talked about at the hearing. Shalini you've not spoken yet. Yeah I just I think I wanted to draw attention to the UMass a lot not UMass I'm sorry to the hold on hold on I'm finding the website it's the mass.gov and it's the smart grows smart energy toolkit modules that talks about zoning decisions and this is coming from the executive office of energy and environmental affairs and in that they recommend they say that approval of site plans is usually a simple majority vote of the leading of the lead reviewing agency which is the planning board here so I just want to say that we you know if you're moving in that direction this is not a special permitting process that is still in place this is a site plan review which all other towns our neighboring towns are passing with the simple majority and then we should have you know follow the same thing and yeah that's all. Dorothy a brief comment. Okay I'm standing for a simple majority a simple majority would be at least four it was a bit it was a bit of sophistry I think that Mandy Jo was doing showing that because three when three was unanimous for the ZBA then that's way stronger than anything that we need to do so I also believe that if somebody has been unable to attend all of the meetings for a site plan review if they say they have read all the material they're allowed to vote at least that's what I saw at some meetings I attended okay so I think it's not that hard to get at least four I think it's a good idea to do that a simple majority of 57 percent not three which is 42 percent and then the fact that not too many things came up with difficulty of this in the past we may be having many many more things coming before the planning board in the future when we get through this COVID bump okay and I think that we want to be able to to exercise do care. Andy you have your hand up. Yes just have a couple things one on the question of to care I think we have to remember that this is about site plan review not about special permits but the other thing that I wanted to raise that I don't think has really been talked about much and maybe either Mandy or Steve can respond to this a little bit more fully but if we have a vacancy on the planning board at the time that it comes up then putting a minimum of four actually alters the requirement because it may make the amounts greater than a majority and I don't think that that's what we're after doing. Steve go ahead I just wanted to remind people we're not voting tonight Steve. You know we can think of all the scenarios possible so actually one of them is the Amherst college fields which is a real case that actually had to come to us so the Amherst college wanted to do horizontal construction basically resurfacing of their fields at that time the planning board had six people because one person had resigned two more were butters so and the butters really I think it's by state law are supposed to be recused that's different than an abstention they're supposed to be recused so that really only left a planning board of I'm doing four people so they basically could not even hear this particular circumstance because they didn't have enough they didn't have enough people so that's one of the scenarios so so it helps the planning board do its work more efficiently not all site plan reviews are really exciting some site plan reviews are resurfacing the fields there was another site plan review that was resurfacing the tennis courts behind the middle school so again for the critical issues you your planning board members will show up you will have six or seven people there voting so the number four will be the number that they have to use to get the majority so really three is the default if through vacancies or through you know something else that they can't muster seven or six voting people that they have to go with five voting people if one person in who has filed a minority report and I Michael you please come forward state your name where you live and briefly tell us what additionally you have to say beyond the minority report oh yes thank you very much can you are you hear me hearing me because I can't thank you for letting me address you with our concerns during your discussion of the proposed bylaw amendment rather than as a part of the public general comment and I assume you have read our minority report which is included in your packet for this meeting and I will not rehash those arguments I would I would hope that you would look at them again in light of many of the things that have been said tonight already which which I think our argument contradicts or answers but basically site plan review is often although not always concerned with large projects which promise a significant impact on the community and when that is the case we believe that it is best if the town and its residents are in general agreement that the impact of the plan will be beneficial in most respects a consensus is the best way to get to that point but a narrow majority would be would be problematic in my view the planning board of course is not a representative body but anything less than two-thirds of its members voting in the affirmative should be a strong signal that the project in question has serious defects and lacks general community support lacks general community support I do want to emphasize that the current voting system requirements for site plan review work well the system is not broken there is no need to fix it site plan approval has been granted in all cases since the planning board was reduced to seven members there has been no difficulty if you are concerned that the planning board may lack of full membership well you can easily remedy that by your powers of appointment so I urge that you would vote down this amendment or at least take up the amendment that is being offered as a substitute and allow the planning board to continue basically as it has been functioning which has been efficient thank you thank you for your comment Alyssa you have your hand up so it's late and I was not going to speak until there was the insistence on speaking about the minority report of course it's always ideal to hear from everyone who's been part of a conversation but there will not be a future written minority report from the planning board on anything because the planning board writes a report there was obviously miscommunication because of COVID because of not knowing what agenda was going to be on and in fact it did take the planning board a month to write the report after the hearing we obviously saw the CRC report well before that but there is not a thing that is a separate written minority report in the future but I'm always happy to hear just as I was at town meeting from the people who voted in the minority as was the case here I just reflect back to you and I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this and that I don't compute the percentages the same way some of my colleagues do and I'm incredibly offended by the colleague who said that this was a partisan issue this is not a partisan issue this is having looked at the totality of the information looking at what our neighbors are doing looking at the fact that we do in fact often struggle to fill planning board seats including right now then I would say that this is not a problem this is not a problem to do this it's a simple majority for something that people have the right to do but we make the design better by a simple majority of the planning board helping them do that so I will definitely be voting in the affirmative of the original article at our next meeting I'm going to have us move on to the next issue we're that this is on the agenda on the third to vote on we've heard various opinions and it is getting late and we are moving on to the Valley CDC project at 130 junior thampton road the issue is before us because one counselor in particular wanted to make sure that we actually discussed the local option at the time that it came before us I don't think we had all the information we need there is now something in your packet about the local option and chris breast strip is here to answer any additional questions are there questions about the local option chris would you like to come in and give us any additional information yes okay yeah thank you are you so I just wanted to give you a little information about the local option it's really up to the zba to decide whether they want to require a local option or not and what a local option means is that people who either live in town or work for the town or work for a business in the town or have children in the school would be considered to be local residents and the local option um is a mechanism by which the zoning board of appeals requires that the first round of of tenants who come into a building up to 70 of them may be may be considered to qualify for the local option um and you know some cities or in towns would vote for less than 70 so that's also an option but more often than not when we have discussed local option with the zba they've gone for the 70 percent there is a concern when you do this that you may be cutting out some minorities who are protected by the fair housing laws and therefore if you if you have a certain demographic in your town whereby you have a certain percentage of people who live there or work there or have children in the school there and the pool of people who qualifies to be in the local option 70 doesn't include that percentage of people who would be considered under the rubric of the fair of the fair housing market fair housing act um then you can take people from the larger pool of people who are applying to be housed in these units so that would include people who don't necessarily live here but that's kind of a complication that you may not need to think about tonight um so really it's just an opportunity for the first um round of people who live in affordable housing in town to be local people and then after that it's open to anyone who applies so um I think that's kind of a good first pass and if anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer their questions at the end of this oh yes thank you I have I'm assuming um I guess my first question is where do homeless people fall they don't have an address necessarily and how would that they be affected that's one question the other thing is if we're talking about regional solutions to homelessness uh don't local preference options defeat the regional need for below market housing and the other thing that I want to say is the reason I'm not I will not support this local option is because I've heard it over and over again in meetings about 132 North Hampton Road is that people from outside Amherst will come they will come and what we're talking about when we're when we're when those kinds of things are said and there are many others um including I don't want to see people like that walking up my street then we are hopefully eliminating the very minorities that we need to support in our community so I am opposed to this local option because I think that because of the people who are many of the butters etc who are supporting it are supporting it for the very very very wrong reasons um so but I would like answers to the homeless question and the regional solution question Chris do you have a response on the regional and the homelessness well I do have a response on the homelessness it's um there are various definitions for homeless and some definitions include people who just don't have a house currently but are living with other people that they know relatives etc and it can also include people who may be in fact absolutely homeless but who have an address at the survival center or something like that so I think they can be proven to be local people even if they are homeless as far as the local option it defeats the regional need argument I think that's one side of the coin we have to prove that there's both a local and a regional need in order for this um application to really go through that's one of the parts of the public hearing process that's very important that the applicant and um supporters of the project demonstrate to the zoning board of appeals that there is a local and a regional need and that's because we already have over 10% of our housing as affordable and so we have to support the necessity of having this um this development built in our town even though we're over 10% by stating what our local and regional need is so um you may argue that um the local option would defeat the regional need but I think given the fact that it's just um a first round of tenants who have a priority I don't really think that is a problem in the long run and then in terms of people from outside Amherst who will come I think there's an aspect of this project that not many people understand we we have not yet calculated exactly how many people from Amherst might be moving into this development but we do know from talking to the developer that they need to build a development that has at least 28 units in order for it to be financially feasible for them to get um financial backing from the people that they're looking to get money from they they really can't build a development that's much smaller or possibly even even any smaller than this so um to the extent that they're able they'll they'll fill it with local people if that is what the zoning board of appeals um wants them to do but otherwise they'll fill it with people from the region and that's that's the way affordable housing works so um I think I'll stop there Chris before you stop could you just give us a sense of where the zoning board of appeals is on this project this time how many the zoning board of appeals has um gone beyond the point where they would say we're not going to listen to this public hearing we're not interested in this project there's a point at which I think it's um within 15 days of the opening of the public hearing they have to declare that Amherst uh has um I forget the exact phrase but essentially it is that we have a safe harbor and our safe harbor is the fact that we have over 10 percent of our housing as affordable and yet the zoning board of appeals um agreed to go ahead with the public hearing process that doesn't mean that they're approving this project at this time it just means that they're willing to hear about it and eventually once they come to a vote then they'll decide if they want to approve it or not so I can't really tell you know um I can't I wouldn't say that they're definitely supportive of it but I would say the indication that they've voted for safe harbor and yet are still interested in going through the public hearing indicates that they have open minds I'm frankly more interested in how much longer you think the public hearing will remain open a long time I think it's going to go for probably at least four more sessions um today we talked to the chair of the zba about scheduling those sessions into august and september so it's going to be a while okay thank you alissa thank you for asking that question because that gives us a sense of how quickly we have to decide this um I just want to point out that I agree that it's really frustrating to agree with to agree to support something that people are supporting for the wrong reasons and in our principal view but that doesn't mean that I can't still support them the fact that the state does have the adjustment for demographics I think is incredibly important but I also am not interested great quote I guess I'm not interested in meeting the regional need until we check and see what the amherst need is and when I say amherst need I mean people who are already living here in unsafe conditions living on a couch and employed in amherst I am interested in meeting that need first and that's entirely why I support local preference knowing that the state will require the adjustment to be made if it's not reflective of what's still being called minority residents the other thing I wanted to just ask chris while she was here is in this article this information that we just received today and so we haven't had a lot of time to process it given everything else that's gone on is there are the four items listed that you went over chris and you included all four of them I thought but so please correct me if I'm wrong that the following paragraph explained you don't have to give preferences to all four of these but what you can't do is you can't tighten up any of the four so for example if I wanted to drop the one about having children in our schools and I thought that was really important to me I could suggest that but I would not do as they suggest in the example you know 10 miles or something like that but there is not in fact a requirement that if you do a local option it means all four of these you can actually say it's one two three or four of these is that correct I believe that the zba can decide which of these four categories it wants to include yes it can choose to include all of them and we would normally recommend that they do include all of them us staff we as staff that's correct yeah you have your hand up do I did I know is that for me Dorothy you have your hand up yes okay so this is a question if not enough people with some kind of local tie apply or perhaps more seriously pass the screening test wouldn't the next step then be to cast a wider net I mean this says you try at the beginning to include local people who meet certain criteria have local ties but because I think you know when this was originally quote sold to our town it was used local examples were used such as workers at UMass even adjuncts at Amherst College and people who are homeless or under housed now I know that from talking to somebody else in this business that qualifying people can put themselves forward but there are many criteria they have to meet to be able to actually make it through the process so there's no guarantee that 70 percent of the people with some kind of local tie would even make it to that point but if it's it's it's a theoretical limit possible and this is also the first round which means this is when you first do the movement of the 28 apartments after that I think they will be sponsoring an agency will fill the vacancies as they see fit with the people who have applied so I see I see no problem supporting the local option and I don't see that it is discriminatory to other people people from outside the Amherst area will be included into this project I'm sure I'm going to make the decision that we are not going to vote on this tonight but we don't have to vote on the delay and since we have time to get it there but since we have Chris I'll take a couple more questions and then we need to move on shall I respond to what Miss Pam just said sure I just wanted to make sure that you understood that they cast a very wide net originally and of that net they make two different pools and one is the pool of local people who qualify for one of these local criteria and the other is the larger pool so it's not that they only go after the 70% initially they go after everybody initially good thank you thank you very much Melanie yeah I want to suggest that we do work regionally with this issue because when we spoke with Chief Livingstone in the last finance committee meeting and you talked about how we need to work regionally even though that was in the context of addictions mental health care but we can't be selective that with mental health care we're going to work with you because we need you but this we're not so I think we really do around these issues of homelessness racism addictions mental health that we do the better the more we work together as regionally the better off all of us are. I'm just looking I just had a quick comment looking at the four possible criteria the fourth is children in the school these are units that can only have one person in them so I the only way you could have a child in the school would be you were the parent of a child that the child's not living with you you know so I just you know it's a it's an odd concept but I just want to point that out that you because one of my one of my concerns it's always been is that this is only designed for single people and if someone has a child they have to move out so the fourth criteria is a little bit of an interesting one so the mom who has the kid can't be in this get this affordable housing but maybe this other spouse and that's just assuming the kids with the mother but so what when this gets considered maybe going down Alyssa's pointing out we don't have to do all four we might think about what these criteria are George I think that this will eventually address the regional problem I think it's pretty clear but also considering the amount of money that the town has committed to this project it doesn't seem to me to be at all unreasonable to at least in the first round give a preference to local residents Pat yes I since we are not voting on this I need to leave I have preparation to do for surgery tomorrow so I'm just wanting people to know that's why I'm leaving the meeting thank you good luck thank you all right um we're this will come back on the agenda on the third and by then people have more of an opportunity to study the material we've been given and also decide what other criteria if we're going to put a local option on this we will want to state and then also the other thing we want to think about is what percentage if we in fact are going to do this um having said that I'd like to go on to the town manager evaluation um let me just briefly use the opportunity to just say we're moving along as planned and this is Paul's self-evaluation and Paul do you have any particular comments you would like to make about it at this time um just to say that you know it's a 13 page self-evaluation plus the goals that you have established that should speak for itself um you know it's uh it's been a long journey in the last five months since the goals were set to where we are today um it's a journey that I've engaged with with a lot of really talented people what I've really come to understand with this process and what I've been with the years with the town um that it's the people that you work with and the systems that you have in place and I think this town has really superb systems in place and really excellent people working and it's those two things together that has us in such a stable environment right now during a pandemic both in managing the pandemic and on also managing our budget and that and I relate that to our our major goal which is public health and public safety and I feel we're in very strong positions for those things so um we talk a lot and I talk a lot in the self-evaluation but it really is um I always go back to those fundamentals of having really superb systems that have been built up over years of leadership by the town and also just really strong people in the position so um I don't think I have anything at this hour I don't have anything else to add to that any questions at this time shall we no question but I cannot not comment on the fact how much I and I think all of us appreciate your values and and your commitment and work that you've done so I just had to say that that's all thank you thank you any other comments at this time not to cut Paul short but it's now 11 o'clock um very quickly we're moving on to appointments George uh Ryan we the only appointment we have as a non-voting member of the finance committee yes um you've got the geo report hopefully people had a chance to look at it I think that a couple of keen eyed counselors pointed out that there might be some obvious confusion because there are only three SOIs and three CAFs in your packet that's because after of the interviews and after the vote one of the candidates withdrew so there are only three candidates now at this point but the report actually reflects the discussion and debate when there were actually four and by apologize I should have made that clear in the report so we have three candidates still active and as you can see from report during the deliberation it was actually quite challenging quite difficult because we had four excellent candidates um that all brought a wide variety of skills background etc and kind of wish we could choose all four of them we couldn't so um it took us quite a long time and the report basically spells out for you how it broke down there's a three to two vote um so it was not it was not a it was the majority but just barely um for Bernard Kubiak um and the argument in favor of Mr. Kubiak was essentially one of experience and the report that spells out is rather broad level experience there were two candidates who brought a lot of experience to the position and he had a slight advantage which felt in the by the majority in terms of his experience with other town governments and in town finance in general um and so um he was favored by three of the members of the committee two of the members of the committee um were looking for uh new faces a sort of fresh perspective they felt that there was sufficient uh expertise on the committee uh already and that um they were looking more for a new face and a new perspective and so they um voted not against Mr. Kubiak but they voted rather in preference for that that perspective again back to the majority view I think the general feeling was that we're going into extremely difficult and challenging time and we felt that and I voted with the majority we felt that the Mr. Kubiak brought a great a level of experience and and in dealing with these kinds of issues over the years that would be extremely valuable um and so that was the way it broke out so three to two vote um and with four excellent candidates and no matter what happens uh tonight or whenever we finally vote um in my communication to all of these individuals I will be encouraging them to continue to apply certainly they'll be considered for any future finance vacancies since they hold CAS for three years um and I will alert them to that fact but um they were four very impressive individuals and unfortunately had to choose one and as you can see the vote was uh was close questions Darcy yeah I um I just want to note that um I'm going to vote against these appointments not because I think Bernie Kubiak is not qualified but really as a protest vote because of the fact that there wasn't any transparency around this appointment and this to me this is like a really good example of why we should not have ditched our community activity form process and just as I had predicted if you recall the process recommended by OCA and adopted by GOL involved not only no notice to the public who the of who the applicants were but no notice to us the counselors because the new process doesn't require applicants to file a CAF which we in the past which in the past counselors would have received in addition the so we didn't get any of the CAFs because those three people had all applied last year or Bernie applied back in 2016 um in addition the SOIs provided by the applicants I felt in no way replicated those received by the school committee which I think is what we were going for they were brief and in my in my pardon me in my opinion didn't give the amount of information a CAF could give um and so anyway I believe our application and interview processes shouldn't be different processes determined by our different committees but should be uniform in our rules of procedure because they affect us all and they affect all of our constituents I want to make a comment and I also have a question um I listened I did get the SOIs and I actually found them to have a lot more information than CAFs have had um a lot of people have not been filling out many of the fields in the CAF and I don't get a sense of who they are but so in this instance I I wish they had been longer but the interview process itself pulled out a lot of information um you got a really good sense of the people and I certainly agree with GAOL this was an extremely difficult decision because you had excellent candidates um and you were just choosing two two ways of going so my question is if if um you want to vote or if any of us want to vote for the candidate that got two votes as opposed to three do we have to first vote against the candidate that got the majority and then propose the other or how how what's the mechanics of that and I just want to say the reason I I agreed with the reasoning of the two counselors who were for the other person and it's because um I think finance is a potential route to someone getting interested enough to run for a council seat I do think there's a learning curve but I also personally have found that if you're willing to commit to it it's not like years and years and years and I think it's a breath of fresh air when someone hasn't been through it over and over again because they look at everything with a new eyes I found that with one of our residents now non-voting members he asked questions that haven't occurred to other people and I think we need to keep doing that and we we have a lot of depth on the current finance committee and if you listen to our meetings it ends up a few voices tend to dominate for that reason so I don't think we need to reproduce that so my question is on the mechanics of this if you're not I I wouldn't be voting against the three to two choice here I would be wanting to vote for the person that got two votes and I I don't quite know how to do that this would have to come do a vote the vote would have to fail and then you would have to make your proposal okay thank you um Evan comment yeah so a comment and then a question for GOL so as a comment as you all know I worked with Mr. Kubiak excuse me on the bylaw review committee and on that committee found his deep experience in municipal government to be incredibly incredibly useful and so when I read GOL's majority opinion citing that experience the reason for recommending him I understood it immediately because I saw firsthand how valuable he is as someone and my thought was that his value the the value of his experience was twofold one was that we are in a very difficult time economically and budget financially and that we would really it would be useful to have someone who had that experience um the second thing I thought was that uh finance committee per the charge resident appointments are two years and that if he was appointed for a two-year term we'd have someone who had a lot excuse me a lot of experience um that that's term of service would exceed the term of service of our current counselors and so if we did have a big c change in the next town council election and lost the expertise on the council um we would still have someone on the finance committee who brought a lot of experience but then I was surprised to see that the motion is only recommending his appointment to June 30th 2021 and so my question is why is it only a one-year appointment when finance committee appointments are two years appointments and wouldn't it be smarter to do a two-year appointment so that we have someone whose term exceeds the council so that we have that continuity of institutional knowledge I believe the motion is wrong that is correct the motion is wrong it's a two-year term it should be 2022 well then I retract my question and say that that is a great idea and he's a perfect person to have go between council terms given that we can be guaranteed that someone with a whole lot of experience in municipal finance will be continuing on even if all five current members of the town of the finance committee get booted out in the 2021 elections are there any other comments from counselors let me just say while I voted one way in the finance committee I will be voting for the candidate I never had any doubt about his qualifications um and that is where we are right now Alyssa oh I just wanted to say quickly that when it comes to process that of course the statements of interest were in fact attached to the GL meeting posting just as they used to be for just as the equivalent because we weren't doing it exactly this way with the OCA process so it isn't that the public wasn't informed or that the council wasn't informed it's true that no one spoon fed us the information but we'd all been told for weeks that this was this process was going to take place and so all we did was subscribe to the notice and sure enough there all the statements of interest were and in terms of the length of the statements of interest although even in the short ones we in fact got more information than we used to on the CAS of course the the process is always up to be adapted in terms of just saying you need to cover these three topics in your statement of interest that's not difficult it's just a decision for the committee to make in the future okay if there are no other comments I'm going to ask for a motion George if you would please okay Lynn um promise I don't have a motion sheet in front of me I have it right here so I'll just I'll make the motion you can second to appoint Bernie Kubiak Bernhard Kubiak as a non-voting member of the finance committee per charter section 5.5 effective immediately for a term to expire June 30th 2022 as recommended by the governance organization and legislation committee is there a second I second that thank you Lynn any other comments then we will move to a vote lost track Evan Ross yes George Ryan yes Kathy Shane no see Shriver yes Andy Steinberg yes Shalini Balmille yes Alyssa Brewer yes Patty Angelis is now absent Darcy Dumont no Lynn Griezmer is a yes Mandy Johanna key yes Dorothy Pam I'm staying okay so we have and two three five six seven eight in favor two knows one extension and one absent and it passes so two absent two absent I'm sorry eight in favor okay I'm sorry two absent so eight in favor two against one extension and two absent did I go right that time yes no yes I did okay got it um we are going to move on right now to committee reports and just if you don't really have anything to add at this point and that you have a report file please indicate so CRC Mandy Joe um just that the current report for tonight's meeting that was drafted and submitted for tonight is includes the adopted CRC process for appointments to planning board and ZVA I encourage you to read that if you're curious what the process was that was appointed it includes the process and the deliberation around what changes we made and how we got there um Mandy Joe in the interest of transparency um do you where were you be moving now with the ZVA appointments nowhere was ZVA ZVA is full planning board for planning board tomorrow CRC has a meeting um at that meeting it will be discussing whether the pool is sufficient to move on to adopting selection guidance draft selection guidance is in the packet for tomorrow um if we determine the pool is sufficient we will move to discussing that draft and potentially adopting that draft and then I presume if if that goes well we would also discuss when we might do interviews if all of that happens and one statement of interest might be due on all so we are moving forward but we won't have a decision until tomorrow at the meeting on whether the pool is sufficient and to Andy Steinberg who we owe enormous gratitude for persevering in a 20 day period to get us through a budget so Andy anything else on the finance committee no thank you um GL George anything else nothing to add no okay Kathy JC PC's not met PSO Darcy we're meeting on uh Thursday evening at 6 30 and talking about our our review process okay on the area of liaison reports uh George anything particular on the board of health I had a question I don't want to take up our time now um I have written something up I'd like to submit it maybe I should wait for the next meeting and just submit it then and that would be that that would be fine okay Kathy anything on community preservation no okay any other liaison reports at this time okay we've already done the minutes oh if anything you'd like to highlight for the town manager I apologize for the late hour no it's it's written we've talked a lot about a lot of things so if there are questions I'm here to answer are there any questions of the town manager on the town manager's report I just want to note that he's learning new technology skills so how so he can now link things in his report to things that we would like to find and he's learned this from his daughter truth be told Athena did it this time Athena did it this time and um we appreciate that Paul thank you very much Darcy questions yeah speaking of it I'm just wondering if there's been any progress made on um making the public visible during our meetings um that's really a question to me not to Paul so I'll address that later Dorothy he did mention it that's why I uh right but it's I've really had the conversation with the staff although Paul if you want to speak to it go ahead I that the report was referencing all committees not the council in particular so it's how how we're addressing and supporting all the different committees out there um I do note that we've had multiple meetings that have been zoom bombed that have created crises for people and that's why we are really careful about this so I think it's a bigger conversation with the president Dorothy um I just have a very quick question to Paul I'm assuming that that's a very bad sunburn I hope so puzzling and puzzling I'm I'm following Evan's lead okay well I hope you feel good great George all it looks like the cdbg cares act funding is is presenting a bit of a challenge or maybe that's not the right way to put it but we didn't get all that we were hoping to get um I know you're looking into that is that something you can report back to us at some point as to what the rationale was or what because obviously we're counting on this money when we don't get what we expect that's going to cost us so yeah I'm just worried about that I guess but I know you're worried about it more than I am yeah so we didn't get everything that we asked for we uh we have a meeting on Wednesday to go over what the reduction and what that means and how we will approach that um and I think you know there were a number probably about seem like 10 communities that didn't get everything that they asked for um we were one of the things that they prioritized was regional approaches and we did not have a regional approach we focused on our downtown area and other other services as well so that's what their explanation was everything do you still have your hand up from before okay and George your hand is okay any other questions from the town manager all right moving on uh town council comments so I probably at probably every two weeks I have another round of conversations with IT about trying to figure out how we might make our meetings so that people can come into them and be seen and be heard without subjecting us to Zoom bombing and um I at the after the last one did write up a summary and I realized now I failed to send it to you um and the the bottom line is that it can be done with additional staff sitting here the entire meeting and being prepared to shut people off and so then we calculate that up across all of our meetings and it would probably mean close to an additional staff person in addition to that I've learned that Northampton is actually of thinking of moving in the direction we've moved because of zoom bombing and I think this is a much longer discussion than we have time for tonight it's not for lack of exploring or looking into it or trying but I do think there are some serious trade-offs and some some things we need to consider before we would ever push for anything beyond what we've been able to do Darcy uh yeah just on that it seems like there are situations where um when a person has provided public comment more than once and we are we know the person I don't know why we wouldn't be able to make that person visible I know that's you know that seems like a strange standard but it did occur to me tonight that we we knew all of our public commenters from past experience there was really no reason why we couldn't turn their cameras on but anyway that aside I just uh I didn't have a chance back when the town manager when we were talking about the town manager evaluation I couldn't get it together to get my comments ready in time okay I just have one thing that I I was hoping that the town manager could could give us more information and um about two big a little a which is um you had said that for staff you had published um the importance and priority of the goal that's climate action goals um and to ensure the goals were included in decision-making and I just wondered if you could give us a little more on that by the next meeting or something so that we just could see what you've been doing thank you okay George councilor comments yeah just quickly I I think that it might be helpful this is obviously for you to decide along with the rest of my colleagues but to invite um people like Tony Maroulis and perhaps Bill Laramie and a few other the individuals that will be responsible for the the community over the next few months particularly from UMass community but in general if they could be present for an opportunity for us to talk to them and ask questions and hear a little bit about where they're at I don't know if August 3rd is possible but certainly before the students all begin coming back I would just suggest that as something to consider as an agenda item because it's an excellent one it does raise another question because August August 17th is set aside strictly for the evaluation of the town manager and students start arriving on the 15th so we either put it on August 3rd or we have it as a separate meeting which would have to be August 10th yeah I heard that sigh Kathy let me look at the agenda for August 3rd I know that we jammed we take we threw a lot of things off of this agenda into that one because of this and we will be talking about that on Wednesday and George I totally agree with you um we also will know more after we meet with Chancellor tomorrow and also after Julie meets with the healthcare people okay so we'll look for okay Dorothy is it true that we have no meeting tomorrow night it is true okay great thank you because you plowed through tonight like the troopers you are not sure we had a choice but are there any other comments that people would like to make at this time hearing none thank you everybody for your patience and endurance the meeting is adjourned thank you thank you everybody thank you Lynn thank you Paul night