 Okay. Hello everybody. I'm Paul Backelman, town manager. Thank you for being here. We are recording this for people who aren't able to be here. And it's one of those few opportunities where our department heads get to sit at the big kids' table, and the council candidates are all in the audience. So thank you for making time for being here. We have about an hour-long presentation. We have a whole bunch of slides. Everybody has a lot to tell you, but we're trying to keep them all to be like a minute per slide, so we're going to race through the slide deck. And then we have plenty of time for conversation afterwards. And then also, we will end by 7.30. And then if people still want to hang around, you can hang around, but we'll stop the recording at 7.30. And some people have to leave in between. They have other meetings to go to or other things to attend to. So once they do the presentation, they may head out. So it's not a judgment on our presentation or anything like that. So next slide. So tonight's agenda, we're going to do introductions. We'll run around the room and just say who's who. We'll talk about the charter and the council. You probably already know a lot about that. We're going to do an overview of the town departments, which will take the most time. We'll wind up with campaign election and information. So just say your name in your department. Guilford Moring, Public Works. Suadette, Town Clerk. Gabriel Ting, Police Department. Kim Nelson, 5G. Kiko Malin, Public Health. Ray Harp, Recreation. Kim Mew, Assessors. Jennifer LaFountain, Treasure Collector. Holly Drake, Comptroller. Pamela Young, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Cress. Chris Bristrup, Planning. Stephanie Ciccarello, Sustainability. Dave Zomac, Assistant Town Manager. Thank you. Welcome, Hala. Next slide. So this is just sort of the fundamentals. We have a 13-member town council. What starts the town off is our town charter, which was passed by the voters, which established our form of government. The form of government includes the legislative branch, which is the town council, and the executive branch, which is the town manager. The town council is comprised of 13 members, 10 are from five districts, two from each district, three are at large. There's a president who presides over the council and there's a vice president. The president and vice president are elected by the council at his first meeting in January. The first meeting of the council was held December 3rd of 2018, and the first meeting of the new council, when you're all elected, everybody's gonna get elected, on January 2nd, 2024, and on that agenda will be the first item of business, will be the election of the president and the vice president. And the map on the left shows you the different districts and where the voting locations are. Okay. So, and this is the organizational chart. It shows the voters at the top. They are the highest level of people that we report to. The voters elect the members of the housing authority, the library trustees, the school committee, the Oliver Smith-Will elector, and the town council. The housing authority hires an executive director, the library trustees hire a library director, the school committee hires a superintendent, the town council hires the town manager, and the town manager hires and appoints the department heads and all the employees of the town, and also appoints the boards and committee members subject to approval or review by the town council. The town council also directly appoints the planning board, the zoning board of appeals, and the clerk of the council. So, do you wanna talk about the CPS? So, Angela Mills is one of our community participation officers, and she can talk a little bit about this slide in the next one. Sure. Thank you all for being here. I'm Angela Mills, and this is? Sean Hannon from IT. So, Jennifer and I have lots of titles. Jennifer's the assistant director of DEI. She works with Pamela, and I am Paul's executive assistant. And in our role as CPOs, we support outreach, cultural activities, and proclamations and celebrations that happen near and around town. Next slide, please. The CPO position was written into the charter, and it wasn't very specific, whether it had to be one person or it could be lots of people, so I'm happy at lots of people. We, Jen and I both live in town, and we are both really active with the public schools, and we both do other things in addition to working at town hall, we are both involved in several boards and committees, but these are the ways that we try and keep people in touch with what's going on here with municipal government. We ask people to sign up for alerts, and it's pretty simple to do through the town website. We also issue pressure releases, and we try and get out into the community through lots of different events that are hosted by UMass and their off-campus housing office, and then also through Amherst College, I was recently at a community engagement fair that they held, so trying to get out there, we try and get people engaged, and one of the easiest ways for people to get involved, as you know, many of you have served on boards and committees and commissions. That's always our big push, we always have some vacancies. Right now, we're looking for people to serve on the Energy and Climate Action Committee. At the end of this month, we'll host interviews for the Affordable Housing Trust Board of Trustees, so those are just some of the things CPOs do. Thanks, Angela. So we were really fortunate at the beginning of the charter, knowing that we didn't know what the CPO position was, and so having Angela and Jennifer and at the time, Brianna Sunrid, step up and say, we're willing to take on this role, was really a powerful tool for us to engage with the community. And she talks, Angela said, they all three lived in town, they're graduates of Amherst College and UMass children school system, graduates of the school system, having grown up in Amherst and so, and had served on boards, a survival center, things like that. So just a wealth of experience within our own staff. And so it didn't make sense to me to bring someone outside in. So, but it's a work in progress. We keep talking to each other, is this a good model still and we're gonna have that conversation again with Brianna's resignation. So I'm gonna go through, run through some demographics is what we are. Amherst is 28 square miles. Some people say 28 square miles surrounded by reality, but we don't hear. Next slide. So our population is 39,263, that is what from the US census, we are the largest community in Hampshire County, we're the 41st largest community in Massachusetts. Holyoke for reference point is 38,000, slightly smaller, North Hampton 29,000, Greenfield 17,000, East Hampton 16,000. Our numbers are a little bit different. You'll see through the age demographics here because you'll see so many of our residents, 60% are under 24 years of age. That means there's a large percentage of college students who are included in that number. And we will share out these slides with you as this as well. So our median age as a community, and this is what is official, because this is what gets reported on that date when they count everybody's where they are, what bed they're sleeping in that night. Our median age is 21.8. So it's a very young community according to the census. We look at where is our housing? We have 10,684 housing units, 1,252 of those are affordable. This is affordable by the state and the DHCD standards, which gives us 11.72% of our housing units listed as affordable units. Under the state law, if you have 10%, you are exempt from developers coming in and seeking comprehensive permits against the town's will. But we have used the comprehensive permit, which means, which takes over from all the other zoning to our advantage. We speak a lot of different languages in the town. 77% of our population speak only English at home, but 23% speak a language other than English at home. So language diversity is a big piece of our community as well. So we're next going to go to conservation and development. We're just going to just pass it along. Thank you, Paul. Again, my name is Dave Zomek. I'm the assistant town manager, and I have the good fortune of overseeing a functional area called conservation and development. It's fairly rare too, when we all get together like this. And I just wanted to say at the outset of my remarks that I'm proud I am to work with all of this group. If you are elected to as our highest officials, you will get to work closely with many of these folks. And it's an amazing group of people. Some department heads couldn't be here tonight, but I'm very proud to work with all of them and all of the staff that we have here. They do an amazing job serving our community. So thank you. I'm joined here tonight by two department heads that I worked very closely with in this functional area. Stephanie Gigarello is our sustainability director and Christine Brestrup, our planning director. Stephanie will make a few remarks in a minute. Rob Mora, our building commissioner, could not join us tonight, but I'll say a few words about inspection services. And then Jeremiah LaPlante, who is our facilities director, also works within this functional area. You can see this covers a lot of ground for the town. We work collaboratively with many of the departments behind me with residents, with the colleges, with developers. We work on open space preservation, master plan implementation, and the list goes on and on. Next slide, please. Inspection services, is that we have a very robust inspections program here. I should say in the functional area, we have about 25 full and part-time staff. Many of them are in the inspection side of things from electrical inspectors to building inspectors plumbing. We also do a lot of work with permitting restaurants. Our licensing commission falls under this functional area, as well as at the bottom, overseeing all of our town buildings from Munson Library, Town Hall, Police Station, Bang Center, and the list goes on. Our goal always with inspections is a safe and healthy community. At the end of the day, that is what we try to do. We work very closely with someone wanting to add a deck to their house, to Amherst College wanting to build a state-of-the-art science center on their campus. So we run the gamut with the kinds of projects we do. And again, we have very talented people who work in this department. Next slide, please. Under planning and zoning, as I said, Christine oversees this department. And again, in those three bubbles there, zoning amendments, we work very closely with the council on various zoning amendments that may be needed to help our community move forward. We're actively planning for village center enhancements, both downtown and in the other village centers around town, listed before you on the slide are a number of projects we're working on from accessibility to growth in various village centers to projects right out in front of our town hall here, the North Common Renovation and Restoration. We also, this department in planning has an incredible team that has been very successful at getting grants. So stated up here on the slide, over $2 million in grants over the last few years, from road improvement projects to North Common, to playgrounds, to parks, those are the kinds of things and grants that we seek. This department also oversees our community development block grant program, works extensively with the Community Preservation Act projects, as well as developing affordable housing. And I'll say a bit about that in a minute. Next slide, please. Conservation, I think you're all probably familiar with our many conservation areas. We have over 2,000 acres, 80 miles of trails from Mount Pollux to Puffer's Pond to the Mount Hoyoke Range. We have accessible trails. We own and manage and maintain a number of bridges over those trails and rivers and streams. We have two full-time staff out in the field that maintain those resources. We also work very closely with the farming community on agricultural preservation restrictions. So the Conservation Commission, working with conservation staff, helps to create kind of a robust agricultural community here in Amherst. Next slide, please. We are always working to... Paul mentioned our housing numbers. We're always working to increase the number of housing units we have in town in all categories. We work very creatively with the state and federal government to try to seek grant funding to improve and increase those numbers. Right now, we're working actively with Craig's Doors. We support Craig's Doors shelter on a weekly and monthly basis. And then we're out there also always looking for new opportunities. We have an active project right now with Wayfinders developing 72 units of new housing down at the East Street School in Route 9 on the way to Belcher Town. And then we recently purchased the VFW site right down the street here on Main Street for shelter and supportive permanent housing. So all of those things are the kinds of projects that we're actively trying to pursue and move forward with. Next slide, please. This is just an overview of some of the projects that have come through the planning department, the zoning, the folks in zoning from Hickory Ridge, the acquisition and the development of Hickory Ridge to playgrounds at Groff Park and Kendrick Park. The North Common Project was one that we sought funding for and we're collaborating with DPW. Their staff did the design for the North Common. I think we're on about the 11th year of that project. So there's shovels in the ground now. So I think I'll stop there. Next slide, please. Turn it over to Stephanie Cicarello. Thank you. Thank you so much. So sustainability actually has had a presence in town for quite some time really since 2000 was when I started doing work as the energy task force coordinator. But we more recently have three guiding documents which basically sort of dictate the work that we're doing now. The first of those is the town of Amherst Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory that was done in 2017. It looks at 2016 as our baseline year. So moving from that, we then had, we applied for an MVP grant and we were looking to become a municipal vulnerabilities preparedness community. That funding allowed us to move ahead and then develop our climate action adaptation and resilience plan affectionately known as our CARP. And in that, that document actually has an equity lens posed to how we approach doing sustainability projects to meet our goals in the community. I will refer to the next two charts which come from the 2016 inventory which show that transportation and stationary energy are the two biggest contributors to climate action, to climate change, I'm sorry, to greenhouse gas emissions specifically in the community sector and in the town municipal sector. I will mention that the municipal sector for greenhouse gas emissions in the town is very tiny. It's all of about 3% and it's really the sort of broader community that we really need to sort of make a dent in addressing our greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The town council that was convened around 2019 supported goals that were put forth by the Energy and Climate Action Committee. Those goals were a short-term target for a 25% reduction below that baseline year, 2016 emissions by 2025, a midterm target of 50% reduction below baseline year by 2030. And then the long-term goal is to have 100% reduction below our baseline year emissions by 2050. I don't expect you to be able to read that chart below for the town sustainability initiatives, but I just wanted to sort of at least highlight that there are numerous initiatives, programs, projects, regulations that have occurred over the course of 2000 to present day. And those are just some, those are kind of the larger projects. There's a lot of little ones that sort of interspersed in between there, but I just wanna say that this work is really not just the work of an individual, it's not the work of just a singular committee nor of a specific body or a legislator or administrator. This is the work of the entire community and sustainability really is about the community of everybody, everyone has a role to play. It's not us or them, it's very much us all together. So that's how we, at least I believe this current seating of the Energy and Climate Action Committee are really seeing this as we are working together to try to address this very large problem within the community. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Stephanie. Now, you can tell, I've told people you have like a minute per slide. So everybody's been talking really fast and so we'll get through a lot of information. And so, and I also want to echo what Dave said, I should have done this earlier, is that this is an amazing group of people the department has in our community and the employees in our community are really what make the town function in terms of our operations. What impressed me, I came here in 2016, what hit me and I knew from talking to other people I had worked at the MMA that we had really strong department has but what really sunk home when I got here is that we also had the seconds and the thirds in command really strong people. I think the B department has in any other community and many do move on to advance their careers but the town has always attracted and retained some really strong leaders in our community. And so I just want to recognize everybody who's here and Kiko Malin who is our first is our latest and she's here this is her second week, day seven and she's learning about the town as well. So she's here as much as a consumer as you are. So Pamela Nolan Young who has wearing a couple hats tonight. All right, hello everyone. So the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion came into being on July 5th of 2022. The slide is a summary of the diversity, equity and inclusion statement from the town and that's really the foundation for the work that we do. So education and programming providing inclusive and equitable access and that's to all town services, a commitment to accountability. One of the things that the department did in its first year was to ask each of my colleagues here to do an equity assessment of their departments. We work both internally within the town and externally and the overall goal for the community is the recognition of all aspects of human differences. So internally we've have been working on creating a strategic plan for the town. One of the things that we're very committed to is being involved in the day to day operations. So working with my colleagues to review policies and procedures. I would say in this past first year it's been primarily with HR but also with other departments. The department provides DEI workshops or internally and externally. So all of the departments with the exception of the ones that are here in town hall have gone through an initial round of anti-racist training. When the town hall and WREC are complete that first year of anti-racist training will go back around and start another round on a different DEI topic. The department supports four boards and they're explained more in the next slide and externally the department which you have heard earlier consist of two people Jennifer Moistad and myself have worked to do workshops and trainings with the broader community. And one of our charges is to make sure that the broader community is able to engage and DEI work. And most recently that took place with two days of liberatory visioning workshops that were held by Dr. Barbara Love and those will continue over this year and into the future. Next slide. So the four boards that we support are the African Heritage Reparation Assembly which has just completed its work and will be publishing its final report this month. The Human Rights Commission, it would say when you see Jennifer and I in town with cultural events or doing workshops it's primarily the work of the Human Rights Commission. The Human Rights Commission also receives complaints or allegations of discrimination. There's a very broad bylaw in the town that allows it to receive those types of complaints. The Disability Access Advisory Committee works with both the planning department and other departments to review building projects that are happening in town to make sure that they're ADA compliant and then the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee which has a number of different goals and objectives including the Resident Oversight Board, Youth Empowerment and Overview of the Cress Department. So a look at Cress. So Cress was established in July of 2022. In fact, the DEI department and Cress were sworn in on the same day. Next slide. As you know, the Cress is currently being led by an interim leadership team. That team consists of myself, Sergeant Janet Griffin, Chief Nelson and Kat Newman. There are currently five responders working for Cress. Cress typically has eight responders but unfortunately we have three vacancies. There are plans with this leadership team to hire at least one additional responder so that we'll have three complete teams of two. The other vacancies will probably stay until there is a leadership change. So what has the leadership team or the interim leadership team been doing? We held a one-day retreat on September 19th. We introduced ourselves as a leadership team to all of the responders. We talked about expectations, a review of the department's missions and values and had a restorative justice circle. One of the things that the leadership team has tried to do is to institute a weekly in-service for our responders so that we can have ongoing training for them in their areas of expertise. So as you'll see, radio review, so there was a joint meeting with the responders and dispatch and IT, trauma-informed training on intimate partner abuse that was led by Sergeant Griffin. CIT, which is the crisis intervention team, hosted a training on intervening for youth and as you can see the list goes on. So the plan is to weekly have an in-service. The way that we're currently leading is that the leadership team meets daily, especially those of us who are onsite, so that's Janet, myself and Kat. And then following that meeting, we will have a meeting with the responders to discuss their activities for that day and for the week. Next slide. This is an overview of the call types from day one until 10-10, so 766 call types. The majority are citizen-assists, so our responders are responding to assist community members and that can really vary from working with inspections with an individual who's boarding or helping with wellness checks. We've also had business and town department assist and worked with a number of different social service agencies in town. So the Amherst Survival Center, Craig Storrs would be example of that. I'm right. I guess that's it for me. Wonderful. Yeah, that's right. So Pamela has taken on, and I also wanna recognize Tim who's here for stepping up and taking on the interim leadership role at this time. They continue to emphasize to me that's interim and that is going to end. They, the intent is to have the, they don't intend to be doing this as having two jobs doing this. So, but really appreciate strong leaders at the helm of the Crest Department. Tim, Tim likes microphones. What's the answer? Hey. Good evening. Hi. How you doing? Yeah, I'm the fire chief here and our break down is right there. We're made up of three, three, four forces per permanent call as a student. Most, most of our, well, all of our students are volunteers. Most of them are from UMass. It's been in, that program has been for since 1953, I believe. Actually, yes, because we were celebrating ourselves seven years now. We've got two assistant chiefs. I'm trying to often train each training, either EMS and preventive intervention. We also also have a very robust elementary school program as part of our prevention. Four, four shifts, minimum staffing, seven to eight, we have a total authorized component of four, four, four, 46. We're down a bit in injuries and that type of thing, but we're in the process of hiring, looks like we're gonna hire four, which is a step in the right direction, so. Crest grants, let's talk about Crest grants, okay. Yeah, I get to be your Vanna White. All right, so yeah, I was surprised that that didn't pop up. So there are two grants that I think are really important for you to know about. The first is the Harvard Kennedy School, government school, government performance lab grant. So it's a non-fiscal grant that allows the town to work with the Kennedy School as part of a community of practice for other communities that are engaged in Crest-type work. So around the country, different municipalities call this work different things, but everyone who's in the cohort is involved in alternative response in some way. There are two monthly meetings by Zoom where we meet as a community of practice to talk about the work that we're doing and then a second meeting also on Zoom with members of the Kennedy School to provide information. And then beginning in January, the Kennedy School will provide one-on-one site support so they will come to work with us. The cohort that we're involved in is primarily focusing on dispatch calls. That is the current hurdle that we need to get over. So we're really looking to get expertise in that area so that we can overcome that. And then the second grant is the grant that has primarily funded the department and that's from the Department of Public Health. We most recently had a site visit. So an annual site visit. All of the responders had an opportunity to meet with the representatives from the Department of Public Health. So they got to speak with everyone. They also met with the town manager, the leadership team and members from accounting to go over the grant parameters. So those are the two things that are really shoring up the department as we move forward. Again, look at us. We serve three other towns for EMS in addition to the town town, the town of Amherst. And the last line, we are essentially the leader for Fire Rescue EMS in Eastern Hampton County. As my dad used to say, it ain't bright and bright and if you can back it up, so it's true. So look at our call volume for the last three years. You'll notice that the EMS calls steady rise but we had a bigger jump in our fire rescue calls. 21 was of course a down year, it was a COVID year and then we had a very big, big jump in 2022 and this past this year, a little bit down. But again, our fire rescue calls are going up steadily. So again, what we're about is we're hiring, looking at higher, higher, higher, for the additional fire department of EMS. We have a new latter truck on order, a new pumper truck and a new ambulance, sort of all came together at the same time, which is great for us and great for the town. Yes, we do need a new fire station and that's a work in progress. Majority of our runs are for EMS and that's a trend throughout the county. That's the way the way it is again throughout the county. You know, folks like to think that the students, students are the main pusher for that but they are our greatest growth in EMS and that's runs are folks that are over 55 years old. So we train a lot. We have great equipment and we do do do training quite a bit, which again leads to the fact that we are the, I believe the preeminent fire rescue services in really in the county. And we are, we tend, we are a regional asset. Most of the towns around us are called volunteer. So if they get any kind of instance at all, they're called calling us. And the biggest part for us is that the town has high expectations for us. And we like that. We have a very high bar and we tend and we live up with that every day. And we're here because we want to be here. We want to serve and what we do is we hire really good people first. That's what we look for is really good people. Thank you, Tim. And one of the things that Tim mentioned is that high expectations. So we have parametric level responses for and we have very high quality ambulances because we have a long run from Amherst or any of our surrounding towns that we service to Cooley Dickinson. So we really invest in high quality ambulances. So our people are comfortable in the back and our paramedics can operate. As Tim mentioned, many of our surrounding communities have basic or EMTs who are responding to your call. We have people who can distribute drugs or in constant contact with the emergency room and the emergency department if you get called. And that's one of the things that I think the town has really said very visibly many ways that we value this. So great service. Interim Chief Ting. Thank you, Paul. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for sharing this night with us. I just want to talk a little bit about the Amherst Police Department. I think everybody here pretty much knows what a police department does. Certainly in our town, we have 46 sworn, proud women and men that make up our police department. Amherst Police Department is an accredited, fully accredited agency that's been accredited since 2002. And the makeup of our agency is we have two captains. Once a captain of administration overseas our investigations and detective bureau. The captain of operations is basically the captain that oversees all of our patrol functions. And that's what my current position is along with the interim chief's position. And we also oversee park enforcement, animal welfare and our dispatch communication center. And we have several collaborations with all of the agencies that you see before you. Next slide. Look at Amherst. We have roughly 15,000 calls for service annually. I think we're a little bit above that. It indicates here major responses, motor vehicle violations, traffic enforcement, traffic investigations, but we certainly do a lot more than that. What's interesting is, as you all know, this is a very unique community. And we've always pride ourselves in touching a little bit on everything when it comes to community engagement and enforcement as well. The town itself is kind of unique in the sense that we run three shifts in our police department, our day shift from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., 4 p.m. to midnight and midnight to 8 p.m. And each shift has its own unique specific flavor. Certainly in the midnight to 8 shift, the town gets a little bit rowdy than usual. Next slide. So some of our primary initiatives, we pride ourselves on being a welcoming community. We have several outreach programs. We focus on problem-solving for quality of life support. Again, we mentioned investigations of major crimes. We get a little taste of everything because of the diversity of our population. There's a lot of large-scale parties in the fall and the spring that we try to mitigate. So we have a lot of partners with the university, not only with the police department, but also with their staff as well. We also try and incorporate all of our other departments to try and mitigate these issues. A lot of quality of life issues that are really important to those who live here permanently, neighborhood disturbances to try and solve those problems. We have a lot of neighborhood liaison. We have a neighborhood liaison officer. We have bike and foot patrols and other specialized units. One of our largest focus is also on on-house residents. We try and support that. So we do have a strong collaboration with Craig's Doors as well as the Assistant Town Manager, Zomac. And we really do appreciate the community in their input and their support because without the community, we can't do it all by ourselves. So we really appreciate that. And I certainly appreciate you folks for giving us the opportunity to kind of talk a little bit about ourselves. Thank you. Gabe also grew up in town and went to Amherst schools as well. Thank you, Gabe. So our next person is Sharon Sherry who's just came out of a Board of Trustees meeting. So she's joining us via Zoom. Hi, Sharon. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for having me and thank you all Councilor candidates for being here. I'm Sharon Sherry and for the past 12 years, I've been directing the Jones Library System, which is made up of the Jones, the North Amherst and the Munson Memorial Libraries. Next slide. Under the management of our six elected library trustees, I am responsible for overseeing 50 employees within 12 different library departments from youth and teen services to ESL and special collections. It's an incredible library entirely because of the staff. And libraries are about people and the staff are committed to providing exceptional customer service to all our patrons. So what can you do with a library card? We're a member of the CWMR's Library Consortium, which means that your library card is accepted at over 150 public libraries throughout Central and Western Massachusetts. So you can check out books and magazines and musical instruments and Wi-Fi hotspots and museum passes, as well as request items from across the state, across the country when necessary. And often your interlibrary loan items are delivered the next day. If you don't have a card, I urge you to stop buying it once. The Jones Library is one of the busiest libraries in the state of Massachusetts. We are second only to Springfield and Western Mass. We are the 22nd busiest public library in the state, which means that over 340 public libraries circulate less than the Jones does. In terms of our operating budget, 75% of the library's $2.9 million operating budget is paid for through the library's annual town appropriation. That pays for the majority of the library's personnel costs. The remainder of the personnel costs that are not covered by the town appropriation is paid for using our annual state aid award. The balance of the library's operating budget is covered by two other primary sources of income. The trustees take an annual 4% draw from the corporation's endowment, which is worth approximately 8.5 million right now. And then there are the fundraising efforts of the Friends of the Jones Library system. They're invaluable. Last year, the Friends raised over 110,000. This year, their goal is to raise 168,000. I wanna talk briefly about the importance of state certification for public libraries. So state aid to public libraries is an annual program administered by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, which distributes local aid to municipalities. To be certified each year, Amherst and the Jones Library, we have to meet statutory and regulatory requirements, such as we have to meet a municipal appropriation requirement, there's a formula, and we have to meet minimum standards of free public service. We have to be open a certain number of hours and days each week. We have to spend a certain amount of money each year on circulating materials. And so as long as we're certified, we can continue to receive our annual state aid award. For us, it's a little above $100,000. We will continue to be eligible for grants, such as the construction grant. And probably the biggest benefit to being certified is that your Jones Library card gives you access to millions of items, dozens of databases for free. Next slide. And then there's our building project. In April of 21, town council voted to approve our expansion and renovation project for the Jones Library. This vote was the culmination of more than a decade of careful planning, extensive deliberation and consultation and continuing commitment to make sure that Amherst libraries serve the needs of all residents. The project calls for expanding the children's room, providing a much needed teen space, dealing with the inadequacies of our special collections and ESL facilities, and making the building handicapped accessible for all residents. It will make the library a model for sustainability. Through the purchase of offsite renewables, it will be net zero. It will be net zero. While preserving and restoring the unique history of the Jones Library. In addition, the expansion renovation project will address the serious maintenance and structural problems which plague the Jones. In order to pay for this project, which is now estimated at 43.9 million, the town will bond for only 15.8 million. The cost to the town has not changed nor will it. The remainder of the cost will be taken care of by the MVLC grant and our capital campaign. And to date, the trustees and friends have secured over $37.6 million towards this project. We expect to go out to bed in January 24, sign a contract with a general contractor in March, spend 18 months operating out of an interim space while the construction occurs and then celebrate the grand reopening in December of 25. Again, thank you all so much for your time. And thank you Sharon. Okay, probably the biggest department in town. And if you drive around town, you see the DPW workers working. They're the ones who are always in the public eye. And if you see projects in place that you might see projects going on, you might not see projects that are going on. They're still major projects. So Guilford Morning is our superintendent of public works and in charge of all that. Good evening. It's nice to see you all and I hope you all win. Yeah, you can all win. There's nine of you. There's 13 seats. Oh, districts, like Hunger Games, right? Tested districts. Okay, so we're the department of public works. I have a crew of 65 people. We have interns at workforce as well and we have some co-op students as well. So you may see more than that every once in a while if you actually count bodies. We work out of three areas. We have our operational group, which is mainly headed up by Amy Roseki, my assistant. We have an administration group, which manages all the payroll, all the contracts, all the payments for stuff and all sorts of little things that go on every day. And then we have the engineering division, which is headed up by Jason Skeels. And they actually handle all our contract work and all our design work. Like Mr. Zomac says, we actually design the North Common. Paul Death here did most of the design work with input from planning and public works and other groups. Yeah, the department actually designed the roundabout at Pomeroy 116. We actually did that one. We didn't use an outside consultant to help us. We did it. It was really cool. So we have a lot of talent in this department and we do a lot of work and we save a lot of money by not having to hire a consultant. Although we do hire consultants. So these are our major divisions. Just to let you know, water, for our water department, we serve Pellum. We serve a little bit of Hadley right now. We serve Leverett and we serve Belcher Town. And so we just actually went into Leverett. We helped them with a little problem they have when we serve Leverett now. Wastewater, we serve a little bit of Hadley. We serve Pellum and we serve Amherst. We're working on a project that may expand our sewer system into Hadley to help them. And we also have a water project with Hadley which would give us some more resilience in our system that we're looking on working on. So we're working on a lot of different things. We work with a lot of different communities. Our highway division sometimes gets called to help other people. Our electrical division gets called out to help other people as well. So we have agreements with different communities and we have MOUs with some. We work with South Deerfield, water and sewer. We work with, like I said, Hadley. And then we are basically Pellum's water and sewer company. Next slide. This is just a breakdown of what's in the, in each division and what they do. Like I said, administration does a lot of the paper pushing. There's three people in that group. Engineering, like I said, they do most of the design work and construction management. And we usually have interns and the interns come from UMass mostly. We've had a Smith College intern. We've had interns from UNH. We've had a couple other interns, but it basically college students. So we put the work with us. Solid waste, transportation, vehicle maintenance. There's three mechanics. Next. Highway division. Highway division basically does the brunt of all the work on the roads and all the snow and ice plowing. When it comes to snow and ice, everyone in division can be pulled into plowing. Everyone has a, just everyone has a route and we take a lot of the people that would not normally be in a highway truck and they're plowing. So it's a combined effort. There are no, we use no contract employees for plowing the snow and maintaining the snow and ice. Traffic lights, street lights. We have two electricians. This year we actually teamed up with Dean Boak and Bully Oak and we've had two co-op students from Dean Boak. We only have one now. She's a senior this year and she's doing her co-op with us. Pathfinders trying to get one of their co-op electricians to work with us as well. And we also have a Smith Boak co-op student who comes to the highway division. If you really want to talk about helping out people and getting people to know how to do municipal jobs, putting more money in like a co-op program where we can hire students from these programs to come work, they're looking for work. They're looking for places for experience. We just don't have enough money to bring them in. It helps diversify our workforce and it also helps us to bring in younger employees. So it was your, we're just not the meat and potato guys that do the basic work. We actually reach out and do a lot of the things and help a lot of people. Trees and grounds. Trees and grounds does all the grounds maintenance at the parks and the commons and also maintains the street trees. And then we talked a little about the water and wastewater divisions already. They're pretty big divisions. Good thing we have our wastewater permit in hand. We will get the final permit in a couple of weeks. So we know what our next wastewater world is gonna look like for the next five to 10 years. We're waiting for our water permit. When we get that, we'll know what our water world will look like for the next five to 10 years. So a little bit of closure coming and some of that uncertainty we have next. So these are our projects that we're doing right now. Like it's the end of the year we're wrapping up. We're wrapping up and starting a few. This picture on the left is actually Pomeroy 116. So we have a little more work to do there but it's pretty much 90% done. And then this is the other stuff we have that's already gone out to bid and is already underway with construction. So probably our biggest project is Centennial. It's probably the biggest one I've done here. My 23 years is 22 years is that one. We got a grant from the state and we get loan forgiveness, 19% loan forgiveness on that as well. So that's kind of everything in a nutshell as quickly. I know you'll have questions later but I'll just stop now and pass it to the next person. Who is the lucky person? So Haley's not available to us. So the senior center is an important location at the Banks Community Center. They have developed a lot of programs and they have a weekly cafe, rainbow coffee hour, exercise classes are really popular. We provide, they manage our meals on wheels program as we provide hot meals every day to people. And the biggest thing for the senior center has been, one of the biggest things has been transportation and Haley was very creative in getting a PVTA van donated by the PVTA and it secures funding to be able to have a driver that provides people with rides to health appointments or to the grocery store, whatever. And I think what she has identified as high priority for the senior center has been transportation and then socialization and exercise. And so we're really focused on those three things. And she's really been a dynamo in that role. Ray Harp, recreation. Good evening. I am Ray Harp, I'm the recreation director and what you see here is essentially a slide that presents our logo. First and foremost, it presents our logo. Our logo is our five pillars. The best way to describe what we do and how we do it is to look at those five pillars. In my office, I manage three operating budgets. The third and fourth pillars up there are the first two. Oh, we operate an operating budget for Cherry Hill golf course. We also operate an operating budget for the two swimming pools that we operate during the summertime. Those two budgets for us present themselves with a lot of challenges. They present a lot of opportunities to engage with the town and to give people opportunities to find their recreational opportunities, to find their chances to go and engage and do the things that they want to do. Those two budgets, like I said, they present us with challenges, they present us with opportunities. Inside of them, we have a lot of users. We have a lot of public users and their two assets of the town has that I'm happy to be in charge of. I'm happy to be programming in those two relatively speaking small operating budgets. The third operating budget that we run is the larger general recreation budget for Amherst Recreation. We are, depending on what your point of impact with us is, you might think of recreation as being old LSSC sports programs. The fifth pillar there is our sports programs. We have youth leagues that serve a large number of people in the town. A lot of kids that are in sports, a lot of kids that are looking to try and play sports beyond, a lot of kids are playing sports right now. Our engagement with kids in youth leagues has been consistent, has been strong for a number of years. We do clinics to try and teach people. Maybe just trying to sample what is field hockey? What is tennis? What is swimming? We have youth clinics, we have golf clinics. We have a bunch of clinics that try to introduce sports to people. And with our summer, during the summertime we run a number of different sports clinics. And then adult leagues. We also have golf leagues and softball leagues and we are expanding our adult program to get people involved in sporting opportunities. For some people that's what they, for some people that's what recreation is because that's the main point of impact with our department and the town. Looking at our first pillar, which is our special events, we are the ones that bring you Halloween, which is coming up very, very soon. Operating out of the bank center. We have our Halloween spoof tactic coming up and that is a chance to bring the whole town together to have a celebration, to do the trick or treating thing, to look at each other, to share with each other what the experience of Amherst is. We operate in connection with other agencies in town. We operate a large part of the Winterfest, which is another opportunity to bring the town together in winter programming to celebrate Amherst in the winter. We have a sledding kickoff and a party at Cherry Hill to open that. And so Winterfest has been a part of Amherst's community for a very long time also. Another chance to bring a lot of people together and then we support the rest of our towns, Winterfest initiatives also. And then of course, in Appendance Day, our Fourth of July celebration is large. Thousands of people at UMass, my department heads that, that a group of people in the town of Amherst that brings that into being. And so that's where our special events and a number of different smaller opportunities, my department is responsible for putting those basically Amherst parties on. But then the rest of that in our Amherst operating budget is what we call the seedwreck. And that is for some people, that's what you know about us. That's the part of Amherst recreation that is your thing. This is where we're talking about building those relationships, building those important opportunities for kids especially, but not only kids. We do summer day camps and our after-school program, which is a chance to support families and to give kids some socio-educational programming to give them a chance to unwind and have different opportunities to go away from, away from their schools, doing field trips, doing different types of engaging projects with them to bring a lot of people into their lives, to sort of give them guidance. We do a lot with kids and childcare along those lines and trying to increase that experience outside of what they have to do for some of them. They have to do that also, but this is our chance to meet a lot of people where they are in the community. And then we also, at seedwreck, we also look at our other community seeds, which would be the Amherst Community Theater, which has come back out of the pandemic with some, with large musicals operating out of UMass, which are long, year-long processes, putting those together. That also gives us a chance to look at our expanded community-ed program. And so with those three budgets and all of those opportunities, I did wanna just point out that we do, one of our main, our underlying roles in the community here is that we also are, we hire, our rec staff is essentially eight people. We have a support staff of volunteers, part-timers, and seasonal staff that is, when you add them all up, it's about 350 people, it's 350, 400 different people who are employed by the town of Amherst through our programs. And so one of the things that we do, we offer people their first jobs, in some cases. We offer people opportunities to come in and find out what they're doing and how they're gonna do it. We put people in connections with, in some cases, with the types of opportunities that are gonna move them through their futures. And just by saying that our goal is to try to, we're hosting a wide variety of public opportunities for recreation, wellness, and community engagement. All of this is an opportunity for us to increase public engagement, to increase people's access to their own communities and to try and do it in as expansive and as equitable a way as possible. Thank you. Thank you, Ray. And one of the things Ray emphasized was partnerships and I think everybody in this room partners with somebody else in this room. Ray talked about running the pools, but the DPW maintains the pools about scheduling the fields, but DPW and the school department maintain fields. So it's a real collaboration. So our newest department head is Kiko Malin, who's in day seven. And she's gonna tell you what she knows after seven days. Thanks so much, Paul. And thank you all for being here. I really appreciate you organizing this because it's been very beneficial for me, also to learn all this stuff. So I'm really happy to be here. Yes, Paul provided me with the slide template and I just added a few things, but it really doesn't reflect my vision or knowledge so much of public health here because I'm brand new, but I just wanted to start by giving you some of the basics. So our public health department really has broad responsibility for ensuring the health and wellbeing of all Amherst residents. And we embrace core public health functions, the things that are in the middle column there, communicable disease surveillance and containment. So monitoring and tracking of infectious disease like tuberculosis, it also includes tracking of vector-borne illness, mosquito-borne illness, tracking and containment, learning the public about that to avoid West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne illnesses. We do a lot of collaboration in public health. We really recognize that health is not just, health is more than healthcare. And while we do a lot of work with healthcare facilities like the Masanti Health Center located in our own building to help make sure that people have access to health and dental services, we're also collaborating with people to do vaccine clinics. We'll be holding a couple of flu and COVID vaccine clinics in the fall. But as I said, it's not just health-related things, it's also working with multi-sector partners to think about a broader vision of community health, collaborating with housing, with food access organizations, with recreation department, to think about how we work collaboratively to ensure community health for all residents in our community. In addition, we really do focus on uninsured and underinsured populations, historically marginalized groups is really important focus for us as the health department. This is my vision coming through. And we work closely with the Board of Health, provide staff support to the Board of Health that is responsible for developing policy and regulation. We do a lot of community health education on various things through our website, but I'd like to see us do a little bit more community-engaged community health education. And we're starting to do some harm reduction activities as well, sharps collection and disposal and Narcan training and distribution. So more on that. So I'm just really looking forward to getting deeper into the work, understanding more about the needs of the community and being able to develop a vision and a plan that really centers equity and takes into account anti-racist approaches so that we can ensure that we're looking after and promoting the health of all the people in Amherst. So thank you again for being here. I'm really just thrilled to be on board. Now that was brave to come in, look at slides that you hadn't really worked on before and but to share her vision, I think Kiko's vision is something that we align with in the community. So I'm really excited for her to put her imprint on our health department. Now we're gonna talk about finances. Now, most people here had an opportunity to talk with Sean Mangano before he resigned. And so we had lots of opportunities to talk with Sean. So we're not gonna get into a lot of detail on this which we might otherwise would have, but we do want to give you a framework for the department. Who's, are you all gonna come up one at a time or what? Okay, they travel as a group typically, a trio, yes. So yes. Good evening, everybody. Thanks for being here. Again, I'm Kim Yew. I'm the principal assessor here in Amherst. So in our office, we have myself, one other person that's full-time and a shared position with the collector treasurer's office. And very quickly, what do we do? We value real estate and personal property and just a very quick, what are those two things? So real estate is land and any improvements on the land. Buildings, sheds, pools, fences, all that sort of thing. And personal property is anything basically inside of those buildings that you might be able to shake out if you were able to lift it off its foundation. So that's very quickly what the assessors do. So again, I'm Holly Drake. I'm the comptroller for the town of Amherst. I have a staff of four other people that work in my office, a senior accountant, a payroll and benefits coordinator, a AP clerk that pays all the town's bills and a procurement officer who makes sure that we are meeting all of our state requirements on procurement. We also manage the ARPA grants manager position out of the finance department out of my office as well. We don't have a lot of flashy slides and fun stuff like some of these other departments do. We mostly, I was thinking about something just tonight I'm like, Kim sort of like creates all the bills. Jen collects all the money and then we get to spend it and balance the checkbook, it's so much fun. And then the vast majority of the budgeting process goes through previously the finance director, but now it will be a collaboration between Jen and myself with a special thanks to Athena O'Keefe who is going to assist us in a lot of the planning of that. My name is Jen LaFountain. I'm the Treasurer Collector and like Gabe, I went through the Amherst school systems and I'm also a graduate of UMass, Eisenberg. Very proud of that. In my department, there is four people including a split position that we share with the assessor's office. Our office is the central service area. So we are the first people that you see when you enter the first floor of the town hall. Like Holly said, our primary function is billing and collection of all taxes and bills for the town. On the treasury side, we invest money, manage debt, help other departments with the help of the town manager and our financial advisor to get good rates for borrowing money to pay for all these big projects that are coming up. So we're gonna go to the next slide. There's four revenue sources for the town of Amherst. It consists of property taxes, which is capped by proposition two and a half and makes up the biggest piece of the pie. As you will see on the next slide, state aid is the second largest and then local fees, fines and taxes and other reserves. So this slide illustrates town-wide revenues and expenditures. Property taxes make up over 68% of the town revenues state aid approximately 20% and local receipts are next and include multiple fees and charges, such as motor vehicle tax, the largest in this category, meals tax, licenses, permits, fines, interest in late fees and many other departmental revenues. The second pie chart shows the different categories for expenditures. Education is nearly 50% of the general fund expenses, which includes the regional school district assessment and the elementary school's operating budget. The total number for revenues and expenditures must match before a budget can be approved. So this slide illustrates the, just the general government portion of the previous slide. So this is that 29% of the piece of the prior pie. So the vast majority or the biggest piece of that pie on the left side is public safety and then it comes to general government is the portion of the town budget that is us, that is finance, that is accounting, that is the assessor's office, the town clerk's office, the IT department, the facilities and just those things that you need to run a government in general. Like I said, we're not that flashy. We don't get to build stuff and make projects and that kind of stuff. And then the slide on the right is, again, just breaking down those pieces into different categories. Again, you see the personnel services is the largest by far piece of the pie and then employee benefits. Those are more or less some fixed costs of the town. They are governed by collective bargaining agreements, our operating budgets are for the general government section of the budget are really very tiny. And then next slide. So this is our prior finance director who recently left us revamped our entire budget book when he came on, it was one of his first projects. And this is a new thing that he had created and you will notice this in the inside cover of the budget book that we present each year. That budget book is almost 300 pages long. It is generated completely here in house by the finance staff. And this is just an illustration of the numbers, the goals and the highlights and a little bit about the budget calendar. And I'm just gonna do, I know that Sean talked to you previously, I don't know exactly what he said, but I'm gonna do a tiny little recap of the budget. So budget projections and personnel calculations will kick off or should have already kicked off in September and October, where we're starting those really early projections. And then the first big step is the financial indicators report, which will be happening on November 13th. And that's when we really kick off our FY 25 budget process with a 10 year look back and sort of a comparison to other communities, our financial indicators is something that the town is really very proud of. And then the hard decisions have to start after that. We'll sit down with all the department heads. We do two rounds of meetings, a more informal meeting will happen in probably the December to January timeframe. And then by February, March, we're having final budget hearings going over goals and objectives and revenues and expenditures in every department, meetings with town management that shape that budget and get it to where we need to be. And the governor's budget comes out in early March. And then we have to make sure that everything is balanced and ready for presentation and a nice big document by May 1st, and then it will go to all of you folks and you will have to approve a budget before June 30th. So on July 1st, the first day of the new fiscal year, we can start spending money. So good luck. Yeah, so there are two pieces of our budget in the big pieces, the school and the other pieces, the town. But under both of them is a capital improvement budget, which is a separate process entirely. There's also community development block grant, community preservation act. So there's multiple different budgets contained within our budget process. One of the things that starts early and we do the financial indicators where we share a lot of information. And then it's up to the council to set financial guidelines for us. And that gives me the instructions on where the priority should be for as we build our budget. And that's when we start working with department heads. They bring their priorities to the table as well. And we have that conversation. Next slide. So one of the things, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this, but this is worth, we really try to follow the government finance officers association planning guide. We really try to align our goals, the town council's goals, which is policy making with our budget and with our operations. So that there's strong alignment with them. Not a lot of communities do that, but we really feel that we're moving in that direction more and more. So I'm not gonna read each one of these slides. We'll send this to the slide deck to you in the next one as well. So just to make sure that our financial plan is connected with the budget. And so the budget is our planning document. That's really important. Okay, so we're gonna, this is our last set of slides. We're talking about running for council and our town clerk. So at that, who you've all talked with many times, I'm sure. We'll give you some rules to live by. All right. Well, good evening everybody. It's nice to see you all again. So I know I saw you once at the window taking out papers. Thanks for being here. So I actually prepared something completely off topic, which I wanted to read, but I'll talk about this first. So some guidelines for running when you're campaigning. This is a state law that you cannot campaign within 150 feet of a polling place on election day, okay? And if you want to know where that 150 foot line is, you can go inside and ask to speak to the warden. They will be happy to let you know where that boundary is. Signs, there've been a lot of questions lately about signs, and I think we've pretty much covered it in an email from the town manager, but basically signs are only allowed on private property and they must be removed three days after the election. So by 11, 10, okay? And then the campaign finance requirements. There's a $1,000 annual limit for an individual to contribute to your campaign. Next slide. Okay. You all got this in your packet of materials when you took out your nomination papers. So you should have this, but eight day preceding the election, your campaign, your M102 forms are gonna be due. So that's October 30th. It explains basically who's required to file. I'm not gonna go through all the details here because you already have it. And then you're gonna file a second report for your end of year expenses, which will encompass all of the prior year's expenditures on January 20th, 2024, okay? And I don't think there's another slide, but I just wanna talk a little about my office. We are a three-person office and you know some of what we do already, but before I go into all that we do, I just wanted to state that basically the municipal clerk is the oldest of public servants in local government along with the tax collector agent, okay? The profession traces back before biblical times, the early keepers of archives were often called remembrancers and before writing came into use, their memory served as the public record. The title clerk developed from Latin clericists. During the Middle Ages, when scholarship and writing were limited to the clergy, the clerk came to mean a scholar, especially one who could read, write and thus serve as notary, secretary, accountant and recorder. When early colonists came to America, they set up forms of local government to which they have been accustomed and the office of the clerk was one of the first to be established. And over the years, the municipal clerk has become the hub of government, the direct link between the inhabitants of their community and their government. The clerk is the historian of the community for the entire recorded history of the town and its people is in his or her care. And I just wanna share one quick little quote before I tell you just a few things that we do. Professor William Bennett Monroe was a political scientist and he wrote the following text in one of his first books on municipal administration in 1934. He captures the essence of the office perfectly, I think. And he said, "'No other office in municipal service "'has so many contracts. "'It serves the mayor, the city council, "'the city manager and all administrative departments "'without exception. "'All of them call upon it almost daily "'for some service or information. "'Its work is not spectacular, "'but it demands versatility, alertness, "'accuracy and no end of patience. "'The public does not realize how many loose ends "'of city administration this office pulls together.'" So when people say, what do you do? I say, what don't we do? So basically, here are a few things that we are responsible for besides running election is maintaining the voter database, keeping all permanent records for the town, including vital records, processing licenses and permits, administering oaths of office, preparing and processing the annual street list and the jury list, receiving marriage intentions, updating the general bylaws, disseminating the conflict of interest law and posting of meetings. We serve as notary publics, justices of the peace and burial agents. And in summary, if there's anything that you need, chances are we'll be able to offer this service or at least know who to contact. So the variety of tasks is never ending, but always fulfilling. So thank you. Thank you, Sue. Chris, you hadn't said anything. Do you wanna say something? Are you just here to, everybody else has a left viewer here to answer questions, if need be. I'm really here to answer questions. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Okay. So we have a few minutes for questions. Do people have questions they wanna ask, or then we'll also have some time for people if they have just one on one. First of all, just really thank you very much. You've already had a full day and now you're here and we really appreciate it. And I kind of wish that every townsperson could see, if not be here, that would be impossible, but at least see you all and hear the work you do. I served in the council for three years and I became deeply impressed by just the quality of work, the professionalism and also the patience that all of you exhibited. And I know there's some new faces here and also some old faces. But anyway, thank you. My question is for Guilford. I've been walking the streets lately and I can explain the roads a little bit and what the work we're doing on it. Paul set aside money and people are seeing world work. I can talk about sidewalks and people are seeing work done and they like that and they're impressed. But Guilford, the one thing I just, I fall silent when people ask about potholes. So could you give me some sort of short answer? Is it a matter of the environment? Just New England is just a place where there's just nothing we can do. Is it just a lack of, we still don't have enough bodies and enough money, but that's one thing I hear a lot about and I just don't know what to say. So do you have any advice or maybe you don't want to talk about it either? We're very proud of our pothole crop this year. I think it's a very good crop of potholes. We work very hard. So we, it is New England. So you do have the freeze thaw. So as we go through this climate change and we have these warming spells, more warming spells in the summer or in the winter, you're going to have more potholes and that's kind of what we're seeing. We do need to put more maintenance onto the roads. That's more money, more time, more people to kind of close up the cracks so that when we have these freeze thaws, we don't get as many potholes. But as the climate changes and gets warmer and we still get freezing until we can become Florida or North Carolina, we will have this cycle that continuously goes and it's just a constant battle. And if you want your roads to be totally clear of snow and ice after the storm stops, you're going to have more potholes because when you use more chemicals to keep the snow off and you keep the snow off, you create more water. More water gets into the cracks and at night freeze and pop the road again. So if you're willing to give up your clean roads after a snowstorm, we can have a few less potholes but it's the environment, it's the climate, it's what happens and we just have to, yeah, it's what happens. Now, Vince O'Connor, district one candidate and this is for the assessor. Could you use, I have an example, I wonder if we could use it to explain the different methodology you use for assessing properties. And the question is, what would be more beneficial to the town and less onerous for your office to deal with? A $30 million lottery winner's mansion, a $30 million commercial building like Thorne's supermarket or a $30 million apartment building, which my understanding is you have to use a different methodology for some of those properties than others and I think it would be helpful for people to understand what the methodologies are and how they result in, they give different results than how you assess a single family home. Sure, so each one of those would have its own difficulties. I wouldn't say that either example there would have more so than the other. So the reason being when we do our residential properties, excluding apartments, we look at sales of all of these types of properties, we look at the average to see for example, if this mansion is maybe a contemporary home, we're gonna look at all contemporary homes and see what's going on. This one maybe was just built or maybe just sold for $30 million and we're gonna say what happened here? Maybe we can't actually use that sale in our study for the rest of the contemporary homes because it just, we can't bring up the other contemporary homes to match that one. Maybe it was that they had the money to spend on it so that's why they did it. Looking at the apartment complexes, how many other apartment complexes were built or sold for $30 million? What about this particular complex made it sell or build for $30 million? Specifically with the apartments, we're gonna look at what their rents are, what their income, what their expenses on that building. The reason that we don't do that with single families, two families, three families, condos is because we have many, many, many more sales of those particular types of property. Whereas with our large apartment complexes, they only sell every so often so it just doesn't make sense to use the sales. Something that we actually did look at specifically with those two types of properties, what if we used an income and expense method for single family homes, what would that look like? And in some cases, we found that the values of single family homes would be significantly lower than where they are right now using the sales analysis. And then in other cases, there might be a few that are significantly higher. So the Department of Revenue would go, what are you doing? You need to pick a method that's gonna fit everybody. So just briefly to touch on those two types of properties that's sort of why we do what we do. With the commercial properties and industrial properties, we do use the income and expense methodology with those properties because as you would know, I mean, the commercial properties have the income if they're a rental, we ask, what are you receiving monthly on your storefront? For example, do they pay the utilities as well? Is what's included in your rent? Same thing with, again, with the apartment complexes. So, and the reason that we use that methodology with the commercial and industrial properties is again, because there just aren't as many sales as there are with the residential properties. So I think not to get too deep into that, but does that answer? So that's a terrific explanation. So there's two ways of valuing property. One is by comparing other sales of similar properties and we do that for most houses around. And then if we don't have a lot of sales, then we do the income and expense analysis. And then the property owners have to give information to you and you make it a judgment based on the value based on if it were a business. Yes. And there is another method, which is the cost method. Right now, especially the way that the cost of everything is, the price is going up and down all over the place. Most of us assessors will stay far away from that. But that is an option if we have a very strange situation of a new build, something that's totally nothing like anything else in the community or surrounding communities. So that is an option too. So time for one more, is there anybody? You learn something new whenever you come to these meetings. So thank you all of you for the great job you do. I have two questions. One is, what do you attribute the increase in fire to? And my other question is to our interim chief of police. Would you please describe our evidence room? There we go. We believe that the increase in fire is more so because we have had an increase in population here. And so folks are burning more dinners, fall, falling down. We have more car acts since here in town. We've never been in a town where folks just can't drive. But anyway, that type of thing. Plus, we're in terms of our educational programs. We encourage folks to call. And people will call for, they're just not sure. Most folks might say, well, geez, why would you call because your smoke is multi-tector is beeping to change the battery. But some folks just aren't sure and they want to be sure and be safe. So we encourage folks to call. So there are going to be times where we go out and it's a simple thing, but we would prefer folks to call as opposed to not call. So that's generally why there has been an increase in our fire rescue calls. Highline. So to answer your question in regards to, yeah, so in regards to our property and evidence room, you know, it's kind of unique. So to answer your question, you know, I grew up in town here. So I know that there's plenty of residents here when they think about the town of Amherst. They say nothing goes on around here. There really isn't a whole lot of crime, not a whole lot of activity. And that's the way we like it. So when we hear those kind of comments, we certainly appreciate it. I feel like we're doing our job. But if you were to view our property and evidence room, it's a room about the size of this room. And it's a very interesting room because it kind of shows you it's a snapshot of all the different types of things and activities that happen within the town. So our property and evidence room stores just about anything. It's almost like a flea market. And there's a story behind every piece of property and evidence. And Lynn has seen it before and I welcome anybody here to stop by. We'll be more than happy to give you a tour and it's pretty fascinating to see what type of things are in there. And there's literally from A to Z. And a lot of things will show you the volume of what goes on in this town. Thank you, Gabe. And I just want to thank, and so, you know, we will be, after the election, we'll be organizing more information sessions, tours of facilities, things like that. So I thank everybody. They've, many people have been here since seven or eight this morning. It's a long day. You'll be back here at seven or eight tomorrow morning. So I just want to thank my colleagues for putting in the time, it's very, very useful. Thank you all for being here as well.