 Good evening and welcome back to Byline. We're here at Amherst Media, a public affairs show sponsored by the Amherst League of Women Voters and our local cable TV station. And we're helping you get to understand and get to know our new town councillors, our new legislators in Boston. And tonight we have two guests, the two district councillors from District 4. And we want to welcome Evan Ross and Steve Schreiber. And oh gosh, this goes very fast, you know, we've only got 27 minutes together. So I'm going to try to keep this moving. So Evan, you're a millennial and Steve, you're not. And Steve, you're a boomer and Steve, you're a department head at UMass and Evan, you're not. I am not. But then again, you're a millennial. So you're just getting started as a lecturer at UMass. Environmental sciences is your specialty and architecture and regional planning and those sorts of things is your specialty. Architecture is in the regional planning department or is it separate now? Architecture is a separate department. Separate department. Or in the same building. Very good. So you each bring something different to the table and most of the community were focused on the at-large and the people in your district were focused on you guys. But the rest of the town doesn't necessarily know who you are. So give us a little bit of your background by focusing on what you bring to the table that you hope will make a big difference as a member of the council. So why don't we start with you? Yeah. So I have lived in Amherst 13 years. I was recruited to work at UMass to lead what was then the architecture program in the Department of Art and now is the Department of Architecture. So I pretty quickly got involved in Amherst politics by running for and being elected to town meeting and then also being appointed to the planning board. And so through both of those I think I brought a lot of expertise particularly in the planning slash design areas. So when the change of government came about I was deeply committed to really helping this town in ways that I can. And I saw that among those 13 it would be great if someone had design planning background. So that was the primary reason that I decided to run. Great. And there are a lot of issues in town that feed into that from economic development to housing, et cetera, et cetera. We'll talk more about that as we go along. So Evan, what do you bring to the table other than your youthful experience? I like this. So I came to Amherst about eight years ago now originally for graduate school at UMass in the Department of Environmental Conservation. But before that I was living in Rhode Island working for the state government, the Department of Environmental Management. And while I was hired there predominantly as a field tech role I fell into the role of community outreach and community engagement. And in my time there one of the things that I worked hard on was sort of identifying stakeholders in the community and trying to build relationships and collaborations between stakeholders, citizen groups, universities, nonprofits. And so when I looked at what I could bring to the council that was one of the things that I thought would be really valuable was the ability to identify stakeholders, work with stakeholders and try to figure out what are the competing visions and where is their compromise within those competing visions. Which has nothing to do with my environmental science background but his experiences I've had just in the environmental field. So that's a way of doing business but what's the content that you want to focus on? Because I noted in your introductory comments at the first organizational meeting of the council you spent your entire time talking about climate change and I didn't surprise me as a young person because it's a big issue and your generation is going to be responsible for helping us fix this. We certainly are. I also noted that during your campaign you focused on other issues as well and maybe more heavily on some other issues. So what's the content? Right, so currently I've been working with councillor Dumont on this climate committee charge and that is something that we are starting with and it makes sense given my background to work with her on that. But certainly one of the issues that got me into the campaign and has always been my focus has been housing. I'm the only renter on the council and that was what drove me into this primarily because being a renter in Amherst is very difficult. Our housing market it's difficult to find available affordable and adequate housing and so my hope is among the many issues that I expect the council to tackle is that housing will be one of them, housing production and affordability. And is that only for millennials? No, in fact I think that impacts millennials quite a bit and that's a big chunk of our renter population but we also have young families who are looking to move here who aren't quite ready for a starter home and certainly as we become an increasingly retirement destination we have seniors who are looking to downsize seniors who don't want to take on the responsibility of a house and the lack of a rental stock hurts them as well. So it's really, it's not confined to one generation even if my experience is within my generation. And I'm assuming that you've checked out the town's existing master plan with regard to what it says about housing. What's that look like to you? Right, so you know the master plan said we're going to conserve these areas and we're going to develop these areas and we've done a great job of conserving the areas that we said. I don't think we've done as good a job in production of housing in the areas and the village centers that we said we'd focus on. We're starting to see some projects come up but we're not quite there where I think our demand is still far outstripping our supply and I think that a big focus is going to be on how do we boost that supply so that we have a better balance between supply and demand. So speaking of master planning, how does the master plan, the town's existing master plan look to you to the extent that you're familiar with it and where do you think we need to go, isn't that one of the responsibilities and functions of the town council to ensure that we have good planning in town, how is that going to get done in the future as compared to our historic approaches to planning in town? So one of the unique things about the charter that was passed and caused the town council to be formed is that the town council has almost equal responsibility with a planning board of being keepers of the master plan. Keepers of the master plan, developers of the master plan, whose job is it? But basically the town council has to approve it but the assumption is that the town council will also have a role in developing and updating it. So we're not ready for a completely new master plan. The last one was approved 10 years ago but by master general law it's the planning board's responsibility to basically create the master plan to go through the public hearing process and ultimately it's their vote which puts it into law but by our charter and I don't know how unique this is in Massachusetts, the town council also has to, I think the word is indoors. So it's very much an interest of all of the town councilers and we are having some discussions as to whether or not we'll have our own master plan update committee or something like that. But I think the master plan is incredibly comprehensive and it took a very long time to get to what was approved 10 years ago. It has been, parts of it have been added to and explained better through in the ensuing 10 years but I think that maybe one of the issues is that it's too general in some ways. So if you read parts of the master plan you can read many different things into it and that becomes then contentious when there are issues of zoning bylaws or what do we mean by housing production? What do we mean by open space? So I would love to see a master plan that became more specific. So I think that the general bones of what we have done are great. I do think a lot of it needs to be updated because of the urgency of climate change and issues like that. And I also think that we can be more specific in some parts. Typically how long should a master plan last and be viewed as being relatively current if not immediately current? You know, I think that the typical master plan probably has a 25 year shelf life and I might be awful a little bit on that but 25 years is about right. So it should be updated. If it's about 10 years old. So what does then the next iteration if you're not gonna do a new one completely for 25 years, what does review and revise activity look like? Given that we've still got another 15 years to go on that one. So to be discussed. So this, you know, the town councils is we're trying to find our wings right now. I know that this is an important issue. If you're really, you read all. I'm hearing a lot about wings, airplane. Exactly. Flying while you're building the airplane. Yeah. Okay, you guys are, you're armed with the wings. And I think that if you read the campaign literature of everyone who made it onto the council, I think we all mentioned the master plan in one way or another. So I think that there is a desire to update it, to understand it better to, but whether or not we're ready to start that process of completely doing a new one. The master plan has to be directly linked to the zoning bylaw. And that's been the case forever. But it's not clear to everyone that there is that connection. So there's also discussion about updating the zoning bylaw. So I think that the master plan and the zoning bylaw, that can happen in, as a parallel effort. And you're hoping to be one of the leaders of that effort on the council, even though everybody wants to be part of it. And I've noticed from watching the meetings, you're also engaged in every subject. It feels like you all want to be on every committee. We all want to be, we want to be. And you all want to be a committee of the whole on every subject, which of course is not practical, it's great that that means everybody does want to engage. But you have to be able to trust that a group of five or so members are going to do quality work that will help the council have a constructive conversation on it, because we don't want to repeat this idea that we've heard so much about in the past that committees do a lot of work. And then it doesn't get added to by other people, it gets destroyed by other people. So so far the, I think the process has been very effective. So whether or not all the committees need to be five people and we need to have what the right number of committees is, that needs to be, we need to have a shake out on that. But so right now I'm on the committee of governance, operations and legislation with Evan. Evan's the vice chair of that. Vice chair, right. And the climate change committee is our first action that we're sort of working our way through. And I think the conversations have been great, in terms of taking a piece of legislation that was really authored by two counselors, bringing that to a group of, expanding that to a group of five who have input into that. And then eventually to the group of 13, to me that has been a very effective process. But whether or not we need five people to do that, whether it could be a smaller group, say three. So sometimes three, sometimes five, maybe sometimes seven. Maybe. You're beating my mind. I'm impressed. You're beating my mind. So let's focus for a couple of minutes on this committee that you're both on. Governance, organization and legislation. You got it. Okay, and you're Mr. Vice Chairman. Correct. So what lies ahead? What's the big challenge before that committee? So I think the big challenge before that committee is the committee figuring out what that committee's role is. Don't you think every committee's got that problem? Of course. But I think one of the, we've had two meetings now and they've been focused on this climate change committee charge. And so we're doing this thing where we're trying to figure out what our role is and how we make decisions based on this charge. And sometimes it's really useful to figure yourself out by actually doing something. But it also creates some challenges sometimes because you have these questions of, are we making this decision just because of this charge? Or is this something that we're setting a precedent that we're gonna apply to all legislation in the future? And so at some point we have to figure out how do we decide policy? And also how do we make sure that we're restricting our role? We're charged with making sure that the content and form is consistent, clear and actionable. So we're not charged with evaluating the substance of any piece of legislation. But that boundary can be very blurry and a lot of our conversations have been, are we discussing something that's actually substantive right now? Is this a technical change? And sometimes that line isn't clear. And so I think one of the major challenges this committee will face is figuring out where that boundary is and being able to check ourselves and say, we're going outside of our purview right now when we perhaps are treading into substantive territory. So that responsibility is not to make judgment on the content of the legislation. It's to set up a process that's transparent, clear, that follows a certain form and orderly process so that the petitioner knows what they have to produce, how they produce it, how they submit it, and then how it will be considered. Is that basically it? So it's process, not content. Right, and it's content insofar as does this, does this have all of the content that's needed for this to go forward, making sure things aren't missing, but also making sure that the content doesn't perhaps present a logical problem that's inconsistent with the charter or perhaps inconsistent with a prior decision made by the council. So content's evaluated, but not necessarily for substance or intent. So to make sure that if there's going to be a penalty, if there's going to be something that will be determined that you have either violated or not violated something in town. Correct. Is there a penalty section, so we know what the sanction is, as opposed to what the sanction is? I think it's more trying to make sure that it doesn't violate anything before it even comes to the council. Because the council has often gotten wrapped up in some of these debates that are fairly technical, that are time consuming. Anyone who's watched a council meeting knows they've been lengthy. And so part of it is using this committee to hash out problems that we see in legislation before they go to the full council. So the council can work more efficiently. Okay. Steve, do you have some observations about what you're hoping that committee's going to be doing and possible reactions to what Evans just said? And we're brand new. We've had exactly one test case. So I think that there probably will be a difference eventually between legislation that's proposed by the councilors themselves versus legislation that's proposed through the petition process by people outside of the council. So in the case of the latter, the petition articles or whatever the proper term is now, I think it's very important not to deal with the substance. So in other words, if someone thinks that there should be legislation that there shall be no kite flying on the common or something like that, I don't think it's the position of the counselors to pass judgment on whether or not that's a good idea, but to help them through this process. I think that when we propose our own legislation, whether it be a group of one person or two people, then I think that it becomes kind of a different conversation because it's basically council proposed legislation. And in that case, I think discussion of substance is actually very helpful. So it's in a way, it's better to have that discussion at the committee member as at the group of five rather than really for no other reason for saving time, rather than at the group of 13. But we'll work our way. We'll work our way. Anything to be said about the governance and organizational aspects of the work of that committee, more routine, more detail oriented, yawn material, inside ball game, not that critical for the public to be focusing on that more, they should be focusing on the legislation or their components of governance and organization. We haven't gotten specifically to the governance and organization part of that, and that really has to do with the internal, more or less the internal operations of the council itself, which in turn will give us rules for how even this committee can operate. But I think in a way this may be one of the committees where the action happens. So the analogy might be the zoning subcommittee for those of you that like inside baseball, it'd be the perhaps the equivalent of the zoning subcommittee of the planning board. So it was the zoning subcommittee that was essentially the governance, organization and legislation committee of the planning board, but that's where petition articles came to be vetted and the zoning subcommittee would work with the petitioners not to pass judgment on it, but to help make the best possible legislation. But it also was the group that generated legislation that then when it seemed to be ready would then go to the whole planning board, for action and the action was whether or not to advance it to town meeting or not. So it's a committee where review is done, a decision is made whether it's ready for prime time. And if it's not, then you work with the petitioners helping them understand how it needs to be improved, not necessarily the detail of it, but what's missing or what could strengthen it as it goes forward so that you're not wasting the time of the council in reviewing it and then sending it back, you bring it as a better and stronger product to the full council. Impossibly, we have to work through it. And see if that works that way. Okay, and Evan you're on another committee, communications, outreach and appointments. Correct. So what's up with that? So that committee has a pretty broad charge, everything from trying to engage residents, working with our new community participation officers, and also figuring out what our role is in the appointment process. So the council essentially has appointments that they make themselves to planning board and zoning board of appeals, but we also have a role in confirming the town managers appointments to committees of the town and also department heads. And so part of what we need to figure out as a committee and figuring ourselves out is what is that role? A lot of I think how we've thought of, how do we operate is based on perhaps how the select board may have operated. But this is a different animal, the select board was an executive body. And so perhaps when it comes to how we handle appointments, what our involvement is in that process, we need to separate ourselves from that and think about what is the role of a legislative body in appointments that have to be confirmed by that body but that are made by the town manager. And I think part of that is just as I talked about establishing boundaries and governance, where do those boundaries lie? I don't necessarily think we want to be a committee that just rubber stamps every approval that comes to us, but we also want to make sure that we're respecting the authority of the town manager and that we're not as a legislative branch stepping on the toes of the executive. That said, the charter gives you authority and responsibility as a council. And therefore, while they may not have wanted you to be a rubber stamp, they wanted you to exercise judgment or they wouldn't have put them before you. So it's a matter of thinking through and understanding where that line is is what you're trying to. Right. And so how do you see the council looking at those appointments? What's the process and the method? If you're not rubber stamping everything and you're not questioning everything, what's the mechanism to balance those two? Right. So that's a great question. And that's what we're grappling with. Right in progress. I don't have an answer to that. So our first meeting, we sort of sat down and said, let's think about how perhaps we can diagram out a decision tree for how we deal with appointments. There are five members of that committee and there were five different opinions of what that should look like and... They weren't seven. Thank goodness. And so, you know, to a lot of people, a decision tree of how we handle appointments by the town managers is something that is unsexy, right? It's not something that is gonna get people super engaged, but it's important. And we're establishing some precedent here where we're establishing how we function as a committee. We all have different ideas. And so it's going to take some time for us to figure out, one, what our role is and how we interpret what the charter says is our authority to review and confirm. But also what's the process by which we do that. And we have essentially, when it comes to town manager appointments, three actors, we have the town council, we have the town manager, then we also have the resident advisory board that's there to advise the town manager. And so understanding what the relationship is between those three actors and making sure that we have a process that works for everyone that's clean and efficient. And it's gonna take a little bit of time and probably some trial and error. And so these are several examples when we were talking about the planning and you were talking about the appointments. There are existing historical structures that are still in place. They haven't been all wiped out, but there have been some new structures added in addition or revisions of the relationships and roles between some old structures and some new structures. So this is a reminder that we're very early in the process of getting our town council up and running. And so this idea of trying to fly the airplane while you're building it is actually, it's actually, it's funny, but it's also true and real. That there's a lot of work and detail that has to be worked out and figured out as in order for this thing to function properly. And so there's a lot of examples of that in today's conversation and others. So we only have a couple of minutes left. So I wanted to get your thoughts and reaction because neither of you are on the finance committee. Is that correct? Correct. So one of the most important products that any legislative body produces is their budget because it's a reflection of priorities, values, how you're gonna spend, what you're gonna invest your limited resources in and lots of decisions get to be made. There are five people who are gonna sit on that finance committee. There's a number of other mechanisms that are out there. How do you see your role? So when I say some other things is the capital committee then there's the coordinating committee and the participatory budget commission. So how do you as councils who do not sit on the finance committee and you're one of only 13, you're not a town meeting of 200 plus. How are you seeing your role in the budgeting process and what are you hoping for given that you're not on the committee? And we've got about a minute and 30 seconds. So you each get to give a quick thought about that. What would you expect as another member of the council? So one characteristic of that I brought to town meeting was to follow and trust the processes that came before town meeting. So we've always, town meeting had a finance committee and that meant diligently working with the town manager and with the other relevant departments to craft a budget to bring to town meeting. So I would follow that. They would, the planning board had a role in that process. But so then having followed that process all the way up to the time that it came to the legislature at the town meeting, I felt very comfortable on voting in a particular way on the budget. Because you had been following the detail of it enough and you felt you had enough input even up to that point, Evan. So it was stated earlier that one of the things this council is gonna have to do is build that faith and trust in its committee system so that we're not creating a committee of 13 for every issue. And so I think that my role as someone who's not on the finance committee is to have that faith that the finance committee is doing their due diligence and taking a very deliberative approach. It's also my role as a councilor however, and a district councilor especially, to be there to advocate for the priorities that I wanna see in the budget, both to the council and also to the town manager. So you'd hope to have input along the process as well from with the town manager, with the finance committee, and then have your voice at the table as it comes time to do the final vote. Correct, but also making sure that we have faith in our committees. But also respecting the committee and the hard work they will have done. Well, that's it for tonight. Thank you so much for joining us and Evan and Steve for great first conversation and continue the great work on the council. Thank you so much. Thank you.