 All right. Welcome everybody. If we can wait just a minute or two. That would be great for people to show up. Have. Well, you're waiting for Chris too. I know Laura is unable to make the meeting today. And just so you know, the meeting is recording. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I just often need to set up my desktop here to be ready to start facilitating. Okay, great. So should we wait for Chris? Do you think Stephanie? Um, Maybe just give her one more minute. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And let me just. Mentioned that. Jack, are you. It's your term for taking minutes. Are you okay with that? I thought maybe it was my turn. I think it's. Sorry. I made myself a really organized calendar. And I have Martha down for minutes today. I was going to get to the, at the end of the meeting, Jack, you're on deck for next time. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. All right. Okay. But Martha, yes, you're on. You're on time. I'm on time. I'm on minute duty today. And we'll get to the minutes in a moment in a moment for it to review and to vote on her today, but we'll wait just a moment. Thank Dan for his minutes. Last time and that we'll be reviewing and voting on momentarily. Let's see. So other than, are we missing anybody? Except Lauren. Laura. I think we have some public. I think we have some public. Great. Okay. And. See if we have any public. Yeah, we do have some public. So I think you have everyone now, Dwayne. Okay. Okay, great. Okay. Well, welcome everybody and thanks. Thanks again for being part of this working group and, and this meeting today. We have the, the agenda that Stephanie provided. We'll have. Following up from, from last week on the. Mapping capabilities. For the town that we were presented. Last time Chris is going to give us a little bit of an overview of, of land use and mapping in Amherst. I had a good conversation with Martha yesterday. And she's going to give us a little bit of an overview of that. And she's going to start to, she'll be providing some background on the, at the state level on the decarbonization roadmap. And she has a presentation to walk us through that, which appreciate. And, and then we want to dig into the. To the work plan and timeline. And appreciate input that Janet provided. And then we'll have a little bit of an overview of the agenda. Hopefully if we can to sort of merge those two. So we have one document. And work plan to work from. And then we'll definitely want to save more time than we did last time. On scheduling our next meeting. And the, an agenda items. And then we'll have time for public comment as well. At the end of the, of the, of this, of the meeting. So, do you have a question or comment? Chris, we can't hear you. Okay. Your microphone. It sounds like it's not working. Hold on. Yeah, you don't, you're not muted, but. You're not muted. So I just took my headset off. Now my microphone is probably working. Yes. Now we can hear you. I guess I will lead it that way. And hopefully my colleagues in the office won't be disturbed. There must be something wrong with my headset. Sorry about that. Great. Okay. So with that, let's get on with the agenda, which is first to review and update and vote on the minutes from our last meeting on July 29th. Again, thank you. To Dan for taking those minutes. I thought they were very thorough. And. I wanted to get cause the question came up when I was talking to some other people, just Stephanie, in terms of what your expectations are for, for the minutes, I thought Dan's were definitely thorough. But other people were sort of asking also in terms of how, how, how little guidelines maybe with regard to. How detailed. And the scope of the minutes that are expected sort of from, from our note takers. So minutes are not meant to be transcripts. They're meant to capture the essence of the conversation. If there are significant points made. But it's not. It shouldn't necessarily be. Speculative information. It should just be a general summary and anything that is voted on absolutely needs to be. Recorded the vote needs to be recorded. Whether someone abstained. So we need that. That needs to be detailed in terms of who abstained. But other than that, it's really just, they should be more of a summary. It's a little, it's a, it's one of those things where. Every person does them differently. So I would just say, you know, I typically just try to work with whatever someone sends me. I don't. I'm not going to spend so much time on them that I'm going to summarize everything. If someone submits really detailed information, I typically try to sift through and just sort of get rid of some of the more superfluous confront comments that don't really. Contribute anything to the understanding of what the conversation was about. So I would say, you know, do your best. I'll try to whittle them down as best I can, but there's not going to be a standard format that everybody does. It just, I've never. In all the years that I've worked with committees, I've never had a committee that had one set of minutes that looked the same for every meeting. It's. It just varies on who the person is who's taking the minutes. So Stephanie, that you're saying that you do review. The minutes that the recorder submits then. Yes, I do. And I'll add. You edit them. I edit them just to make sure if there's information that's missing. Sometimes people will make a comment to me, please fill in this information and I go back to the recording. I almost always go back to the recording and go through the recording and try to pick out the information that might be missing. Or if something isn't accurately. I try to catch if something isn't accurately. If I remember it differently than what it looks like was written. I might double check. But you know, we can only spend so much time on them as well. So we try to do our best to capture what might be missed. Okay. And the recording is, is. Provided online, right? So that's correct. If anybody needs to or wants to. Go, go into the, into the further detail. But in my mind, the minute should at least. Inform folks of what was discussed and if there's more detail, they want to find out specifically what was said. In the, in detail, they can go to the recording. All right, great. So with that in mind. Let's take a moment to entertain any. Well, let me first, I should probably for the recording say that. This is the meeting. Of the solar bylaw working group. For August. 11th, 2022. And for the record. So. Let's turn our attention to the minutes, the draft minutes from our last meeting, seven 29. And hopefully people have had a chance to review them. And I'm open to any comment or thoughts or suggested amendments to those minutes before we entertain a vote. Jack has his hand raised. Oh, good. Okay. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yep. Just a section four. It says I was a former commissioner. I'm still the commissioner. For the town. They're probably alternate. Great. Yeah, I think that's, that's important. Okay, great. So with that amendment, anything, any other comments? If not, would anybody like to put forward a motion to accept the minutes as amended. By that one striking of the word forum. Former. I moved to accept the minutes as amended. Who was the second on that? Robert. Great. Robert, thank you. And then. Okay. So please unmute yourself. So that I can hear your voice vote. Corcoran. Except. Brooks. Yes. Breger. Yes. Hannah. Yes. Jim sec. McGowan. Okay. It's approved. Great. Thank you for that all. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Agenda again. Okay. Great. So next item on the agenda. Are any staff updates? Why don't we start with Stephanie and then, and then Chris. Sure. So an update on the solar assessment. I'll give it now just to get it out of the way. We haven't had any responses quite yet because we did have a request for an extension by two firms. We've extended the proposal submission date by two weeks. But we had two firms. Definitely interested in one that is actually conducting the statewide assessment. Sent in an inquiry about that proposal and I'm. I've got my fingers crossed that they submit a proposal. That would be fantastic if we could get them so, but we have to get the, you know, we haven't. We haven't heard any more than that, but there are at least three that have expressed interest. And just for clarification, when you say two weeks extended, when would that push the, the response date to. I believe it's the 29th. Okay. So, so still in August. Yeah, great. Still in August. Yeah. All right, good. Yep. I'm sorry. I didn't see who's hand was raised first. So I'll go with Martha. Yes. Okay. I don't know then whether this is the time, whether you're going to do. Discuss the solar assessment later. But if this is the time I would like to raise a couple of questions. Is this. The time, you know, after reading over the RFP, I do have a couple of questions and. Puzzlements here about it. You know, for. Namely, what is the role of our committee in relation to the consultant? I mean, I see in here wording about, you know, consulting with sound staff consulting with the ECAC, but there's no mention of our committee until the very end when we get to hear the report. And. You know, it seems to me that. You know, we, we need to, to work with them. We shouldn't just be working, you know, separately in parallel and have no contact till the end. I think I don't think that's very effective. And, and also I have some concerns about the. Wording here that there's no mention. Of our towns master plan. Or our towns. Clean energy plan. I think that this spring I actually signed up and took a zoning workshop in preparation for this committee. And what was stressed there was the importance that zoning regulations had to use their, their municipalities master plan as a guideline. You know, this is something that's vetted and approved by the council and so on. And we also have our, we also have a public park report to, and so I wondered why those weren't specifically. Mentioned as, as guidelines. So those are my questions. I'll, how about I answer the second question. First doing, and then do you want to respond to the first question? Sure. So as far as the resource materials, we don't necessarily always identify the resource materials within the RFP, but we don't always identify the resource materials within the resource materials. And those will be given to the consultant as resource documents. So that's just, I mean, those will be them. And they will in fact be the main resource documents that documents that they will be provided to work from. So we just don't. You know, there's enough information that we have to sort of call through to get the RFP together. It's not. It's not. Yeah. It's not imperative that that be included in the language. And so I think that that would be a good question. I mean, I think that that would be as then when the scope of work is written for the consultant, you know, after they're hired and your. Town staffs preparing the contract and so on. It would seem to me that if you're going to put in things about. At all consulting and being informed by the. Town and the ACAC and so on that that those documents. And perhaps also the, that is guidelines to follow and inform the work? Sure, we can put them in the document. I mean, I think there's no question that those will have to be guiding documents, but we can put that in the contract at the time when that gets developed. There is a scope of work that's already been developed as part of the RFP, but I think once the consultant comes on board and we finalize the language for the contract, we can certainly include those things. That's no reason why we can't. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure all of us in our own professional experience have worked with writing of work plans for contractors or for grant proposals and so on. And so it seems to me that it's important to get things down in writing because that really does influence what results you're going to get is how you phrase things. So I wonder if our committee here could have an opportunity simply to give the town staff our inputs or recommendations as to items that should be included in that final contract. Obviously the town staff, you folks are the ones that write it, but since it involves our committee's work, whether we could make recommendations at all. We would probably work through the chair as we did in drafting this RFP. So if you all had, I would say that the best pathway would be to get your comments to Duane and Duane would be reviewing the draft basically on behalf of the committee. So I would say if you have specific comments, get them to Duane. And when we draft the contract, we would allow Duane to review. Typically staff works with the town manager because the contract is really with the town and the town manager. So it's not necessarily common for committees to be weighing in on contracts like that. But in this case, because of the work that you're doing personally, I feel like I'm certainly willing to at least work with the chair on making sure that this contract is reflective of the desire of the committee and reflective of the work you're doing. So if you want to provide those to Duane, I think that would work. Great. And maybe I can just comment on the first part of your question with regard to the engagement opportunities for this working group to interact and engage with the chosen contractor. And I think there is, as I see it, there's sort of two opportunities. One, as you mentioned before, towards the end, some review and input given to the outcomes of the analysis. But at the front end, I think as I see the charge of our charge as well, and I think it is also in our work plan document that we'll be getting at later in our meeting here, is that while the consultant will be within their scope of work, facilitating and engaging in the community engagement aspect of this solar assessment, we do have an opportunity and a role to provide some input into what that form of engagement and content and questioning that we as a working group want to suggest to the consultant to learn from the community in which our community that they're engaged with. And so I see it as our, in our scope, and it's actually in our work plan, at least the draft that I had, and we'll get to that later, a period of time where we, and we'll probably tee this up for maybe not the next, but the next meeting is to start putting together some input and recommendations that we have with regard to the community engagement that the consultants will be facilitating sometime in their scope of work. I think it's important to recognize that the consultant is contracted with the town and as Stephanie mentioned, is responsible to meet the contract terms to the town. We are here as a volunteer committee, also working and providing input to the town. And so there's a mechanism here, but we are not the managers of the consultant and we can provide input, but that's really done as part of the scope of work that has been laid out. Okay, I think... Jack has his hand up, sorry. Janet, somebody, yeah, Janet, you had your hand up before, so sorry. Yeah, and then Jack, yeah. Thank you. I was struck by the lack of, like there's no mention of our group. And it seems to me that in the scope of work that the consultant would wanna meet with us and talk to us about what we'd like to see in the solar assessment and look at, and just to acknowledge that we're going to be looking at the assessment and then applying it and deciding priorities and a map and things like that. So it'd be good for the consultant to understand what our work is. And we're sort of bleeding into a later agenda item. So I was struck by the absence of mention of our group and I thought it'd be good in the scope of work to give a heads up that our work is to do a priority map and figure out like what we recommend as priority locations for solar development. And our work also is to do community outreach. So we should just work on that together. And I don't see our role as advising the consultant on how to do community outreach. I see our role as working together with it. Or we do a separate path because that's what the town council asked us to do. That doesn't make sense. So I think the scope of work should reflect how the consultant is going to work with us and that he will or she. And then also what we're trying to do. So it also looks to me like the consultant's work is informing some questions and issues that ECAC has about meeting targets and things like that. And so I had questions about like, what does ECAC want from this solar assessment? Are they looking to make a separate recommendation? Are they looking at specific targets? I know that's not the work of our committee. We're not supposed to be saying, here's how you get a target A or B or C. But I was wondering if ECAC was looking at that. They wanted that kind of information. So scope of work, what's ECAC looking for and hoping to do? Or are they hoping to do something with it? I don't know. I can respond as sort of the representative from ECAC. Though I must admit I was not able to meet our ECAC meeting yesterday. So if anything did come up, Stephanie can add to that. But as we see it, this technical assessment consultant is just that it's a technical analysis. It's not opining on the issues or the perspectives. It's mapping out, providing information that's gonna be useful to the town, useful to ECAC, useful to our working group with regard to more of the technical potential of solar in various different forms in the town. And that will be critically informative to both ECAC and our zoning bylaw working group with regard to both of our missions for ECAC. As you know, with ECAC recommendations, the town has adopted carbon neutral goals by certain dates and that part of that part of the planning there is to what extent can Amherst host its own energy production. It doesn't suggest that we need, the town needs to get all of its energy from hosting its own solar or renewable energy generally. But it'll be helpful to know what that technical potential is both on the built environment and on the unbuilt environment. And the idea with the scenarios that were put forward in the scope of work is to give our committees a sense of scope and scale that we are talking about. Again, the technical consultant in my mind is not offering a prescription of what we should do, but what is technically possible or not possible. And so the scope of work really has them to, they have the technical expertise and the contracted time to pull together this mapping of our potential resources. And then through these scenarios, look at if the ECAC or our committee, about more so the town itself was to suggest any amount of solar they think would be appropriate to host in the town, what could that possibly look like in terms of where it could go, how much land, how much could fit on our built environment, how much might be reasonable to think about on the unbuilt environment, as well as some differentiation about what that might mean in terms of cost and so forth associated with that solar development. So I really feel like the technical assessment is just that it's a technical report and analysis of what the potentials are of solar in various forms around the town. And it's really there to inform our committees as well as the town staff and the town council and the town manager to be able to scope this whole concept out in terms of how we should move forward with solar planning for the town. So I would still ask that the scope of work, bring our committees work a little bit more to the forefront. So we're not kind of just showing up at the end that it'd be great for us to meet with the consultant. But sort of following up on what Jack had asked or said at the last meeting, I wonder if it seems like that technical report could be done, I'm not saying think quickly, but first and then that report could come to us, eCAC and then be part that, so we could look at that and then start the community information process because everyone's gonna know what can go where and how much and so it seems like if the assessment can come to us and the town and eCAC and staff, that would be part one and the next part is the community engagement process which I really do think it'd be great for us to work with them on that. Because we live in the town, we have all sorts of different people we can plug into and resources, but I was like sort of Jack's question is how quickly can we get that assessment done which is technical and based on the mapping and town bylaws and is this chapter, is this APR land and stuff like that, can we get that in a month or two or two months and then take a moment, look at that and then start a community process saying here's the information and there's prices to pay for different scenarios or positive goals that places we can reach. So that's, I'm wondering if Jack's idea could be let's do the assessment quickly and then do the community process as a group together. Let's hear from Jack first and then we can see if we can address his thoughts as well. Yeah, I don't really have any thoughts. I just understand that we are seeing this RFP for the first time and all that. I thought that we kind of went over a lot of this last time as something went into quite detail about how consultants are usually interfacing with the professionals in our town hall there, Chris Restridge's group and things like that and we've never really interacted with on the planning board consultants directly and I just felt like we went over a lot of this last meeting and I just wondering how efficient we're being with some of this but again, I agree Janet that seems to be, it doesn't seem like we're gonna make much progress until we get to solar. It would be more ideal to get it sooner than later. But anyway, I just, I'm not interested in interviewing consultants or anything like that. I think the product and like Dwayne said, we can dig in afterward and use it as a tool as we push our, the bylaw and associated planning document or planning that with us. Great, thank you. Yeah, Stephanie. So I'm sorry, cause I do feel like I'm repeating myself again, but the managers of the consultant are the town staff and the town manager and the consultant will have the opportunity to meet with both the solar bylaw working group and the ECAC and it's expressly in the timeline that Dwayne has put together that this consultant will come meet with you. I believe at two points as Dwayne stated at the beginning and at the end, the beginning will probably be to be able to talk about that community engagement piece. And towards the end will be when they sort of have a draft to review and input on before everything is finalized. You're not the only, yes, it's important for the work that you're doing, but there's also other departments in town that this will impact. There's also other committees that we'll wanna weigh in. So there's gonna be a very broad process of an opportunity for other groups and other folks to weigh in. But ECAC and solar bylaw working group are specifically going to have the opportunity to meet with the consultant, which other committees won't necessarily to do other than the broader public engagement process. How we often work with getting other departments to weigh in is either staff will schedule a meeting with all of the department heads, which is what we did with the climate action plan, or we will reach out to all of the department heads, send them any documentation, draft documentation or initial engagement output that we feel they need to weigh in on. For instance, we will wanna reach out to the DEI director, Pamela, to get her input on the community engagement process. And we will then take that information and convey that to the consultant. So there's a broader, there's a much broader process beyond just what this committee's doing, I guess is what I'm trying to say. So you will have opportunity. They are going to meet with you. They are expressly going to meet with you and the ECAC at least once, if not twice during their process, but it can't be more than that because they do have the bigger work that they're doing with the community engagement as well and funds are limited. I mean, we don't have the ability to have you work directly with them throughout the whole process because we don't have the funds for that. So they'll be working through a lot of what your input might be. They might meet with you initially and then additional feedback might come through staff. So we will give you drafts. We will give you information. We will ask you for your feedback and then it will come through staff and go to the staff will work with the contractor to incorporate your feedback. I hope that clarifies this. Yeah, I think, I mean, I presume during that timeframe we'll probably have an agenda item on each of our meetings to get an update again on the work in progress and provide any feedback to Stephanie and Chris that can then be related to the consultant. Okay, anything else on that is a staff update, extended staff update and solar assessment update, Stephanie? No, I think that's fine. Okay, Chris, how about if we first, any staff updates first and then we'll move into your more prepared remarks or whatever on the land use. Yeah, so I just have two updates and one is that now that Nate Malloy is back from vacation he's back working on the scope for the consultant who's gonna help us with drafting of the solar bylaw. So he hasn't put it out yet, but it will come out soon. So that's one thing. And the other thing is that based on our conversation last time we met we talked about trying to get input from KP law which is our town council, SEL. And we have made contact with an attorney at KP law and Dwayne and Stephanie and I will be having a conversation with him on Friday about some of the questions that we have that we would like him to address when he does come and present to you. And we're imagining that the presentation would be sometime in September or October where he comes in, you know, tries to give us guidance on what can and can't be included in a solar bylaw. Okay. Great, yeah, thank you. And I thought the conversation last week or last meeting and who was a lawyer I think provided that sort of update on some of the legal issues was very helpful to hear that which can then help us develop a set of questioning, questions for the KP law council. Great, thank you, Chris. Any comments on that before we move on to the next agenda item? Great, thank you. So next is Chris again to give us say an overview of land use and mapping in Amherst and appreciate really you taking the time on this, Chris. Thank you. Okay, so I'm going to, I'm very nervous right now because I've never, only once have I successfully shared my screen. So I'm gonna try to share my screen and if I fail miserably then Stephanie will step in but I believe I have the document open. So I'm going to hit the screen and then I'm going to find my document which is was open. Now where is it? Chris Pamela, when you need our Chris. Chris, check your banner at the top. Check your banner. There we go. Yes, banner. Am I still here? Yes. And just, and then hit share at the bottom right. I see, yeah. And then, all right. Now can I minimize this? Then I hit share. There you go. Seems to be working. Are you seeing what I... No, we're seeing your desktop. Yeah, we're seeing your whole screen which is maybe, maybe okay. More than you want to see. More than we want. So you might want to stop share. Stop share. There you go. All right, let's try that again. Okay, so I have this document open. There it is. So I click on the document and then share. And then there should be in the bottom right. There's the share button. Here it is. Okay. And then I go here and now you can see it. Yes. Perfect, yeah. Oh, good. Okay. All right, I'm going to be going home and bragging to my family that I did this today. Okay. My family won't be very impressed. They won't be. No. All right, this is a map that is part of the master plan. And I'm going to introduce myself to people who are out there in the audience. I'm Chris Brestrup, the planning director. And I want to give you an overview on land use in Amherst. And this is the best map that I could find that really kind of puts it all in one place. The map is entitled physical form and character. And it was prepared in 2007 as part of the work on the master plan. It shows in general how land use is done or how it exists in Amherst. And there are a few small errors here and there and some changes that haven't been made to reflect new land uses. But basically it shows generally speaking how we use land in Amherst. To let you know, the map is available on the town website. If you go to the planning board page and then over on the left-hand side, there's an opportunity to click on... I can't hear Chris. Yeah, I think she got frozen. And I, Stephanie, maybe as well. So maybe it's a town hall thing. I did want people to know also while we wait for Chris, this was also in our packet, this map. And so I suspect that means it's also in the folder of our working groups so people can access it there as well. Oops. Okay. Okay. Am I back again? Yes. Okay. Sorry about that. But we lost your shared screen. Lost my screen. Chris, would you like me to just open it? Sure. And then you're gonna have to help me when I point out places. So. Okay. Or when, well, I'll do my best. All right. I could try this again. Try again and see. I'm not sure why we lost. Were you disconnected, Stephanie, too? Yes. I was knocked out. So. Isn't that strange? So I clicked on the map and I minimized it. And I'm here in, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to go with Stephanie. Stephanie, you're my ticket. Okay. Bear with me one moment. I had a brief success. Okay. There's the map. I tried to move it. So that wasn't a good idea, was it? So anyway, these orange circles, faint orange circles, they represent the downtown. And let's see, Stephanie was just pointing to North Amherst. So there is the downtown and village centers. So there's the downtown that Stephanie's pointing to. And other village centers include just to the east of that is the East Amherst Village Center. So Stephanie, you can put your cursor around an orange circle to the east to the south is Pomeray Village Center at Pomeray Lane. Can you get down to that step? And the South Amherst Common, where the Munson Library is located and the church. And then Atkins Corner over, yes, there's Atkins Corner Village Center. It really primarily consists of Atkins Market. And then in the north part of Amherst, if Stephanie could scroll up, there are two village centers. One is the North Amherst Village Center that's at the intersection of Pine Street, Meadow Street and North Pleasant Street. And then a little village center over to the east is Cushman Village Center. And that centers around some housing there and the railroad track and the Cushman store. So these areas already have a significant amount of development. And the master plan states that we should direct future development into already developed areas and preserve our outlying areas for farming, forests and recreation as much as possible. On this map, the olive green areas represent existing protected spaces in town. And a lot of it is open space. These areas could be farms, forests or recreation lands. Many of the farms are protected by what we call APRs, which are agricultural protection restrictions. So these APRs represent areas where the landowner has agreed not to develop the land in perpetuity and has made an agreement with the state and the town to refrain from developing. And in return, the landowner receives a one-time payment and puts his land into an APR. So those are areas that can't be built on in the future except for farm buildings and things like that. Some of these olive green areas are owned by the town, such as the area around Puffer's Pond. I wonder if Stephanie could scroll down and find that Puffer's Pond sort of to the east of North Amherst. There, you just switched by it. It's towards the top of the page. Yeah, there it is, Puffer's Pond. So we own areas around Puffer's Pond that are in conservation. We also have the Mill River Conservation Area and the Cherry Hill Golf Course, which is a big piece of land up there in North Amherst. So those are preserved as either conservation or recreation lands. Then as you notice on this map, we have cross-hatched areas. And those are considered to be chapter lands. And what that means is that they're temporarily protected. They're lands for which the landowner has made an agreement with the town not to develop the land in exchange for reduced real estate taxes for a period of time. And those chapter lands are considered in three categories. The period of time is about five years usually. So he puts his land into chapter 61, which is forest land. Chapter 61A, which is agriculture, or chapter 61B, which is recreation. And then gets a reduction in taxes for a period of five years. If the landowner wants to take his land out of chapter, he needs to pay the back taxes to the town. And at the time that the landowner requests to take the land out of chapter, the town then has a right of first refusal to purchase the parcel. And if the town feels that it's a worthwhile purchase, then the town has the land assessed or, excuse me, appraised. And then usually there's a purchase and sale agreement. The owner might have a purchase and sale agreement with a potential buyer. And that number is used as the purchase price for the property. So then the town would have to find the money to purchase the property if they decide to do that. So these lands need to be acquired at fair market value, which is essentially what I just said. The areas shown in gray, and there are large areas shown in gray, are the institutional properties. And these are UMass, which is right there in the center of the screen. It's a really pretty big array of land. Then we have Amherst College, which is closer to downtown. And they also own quite a bit of land. And some of the chapter land that is south of the gray area also has a cross hatching on it. So those are lands that Amherst College owns, but they also have a chapter designation on them, some of those lands. Let's see what else. And then we have, of course, Hampshire College down in South Amherst, and they own a whole lot of property down in South Amherst. These are generally speaking in the educational zoning district. And so the town has limited ability to control what goes on in those properties. The properties shown in red, and if Stephanie would scroll back up so we could see the downtown area again, the areas shown in red are mostly areas where a significant amount of commercial development has already occurred. There's downtown Amherst, there's the area along University Drive where the big Y shopping plaza is. There's the farmer's supply along the rail trail in the center of town. It's just to the east of downtown. See East Amherst Village Center is also there where Kelly's Restaurant and Spirit House is. There's area down in South Amherst, Atkins Farms Market, and in North Amherst, the North Square at the mill district. So that's South Amherst and then North Square at the mill district is where there was recently a housing development that was built up there. So those are areas that we consider really the heavily developed areas in town. There are also lesser developed areas and they're shown in pink on this map. And they represent lands that are available for business or commercial uses but may not be as heavily developed as the red areas. And some of these places include the area along Route nine, which is between Route nine and the rail trail. That's where Greenleaves is located. And there's also a mixed use building that's being built there now. You've probably noticed it. Barry Roberts is building a building and it's going to have eye physicians of Northampton there eventually, but it's a mixed use building and it's got dwelling units in it. There's also a bit of land near Fort River School, which is in the eastern part of Amherst. And that area includes Watson Farms, affordable housing development and Amherst Glass is also there and the Amherst Jewish Community Center is there. So those are places that are somewhat developed but not heavily developed. There's another area along Belcher Town Road that is a pink area as you go towards Pelham. That's right. There we have Valley Medical, the Stavros Building, Dr. Kdadkinson's Building on Research Drive. And there are some parcels of land in that area that are available for development. There's a pink area around Pomeray Village Center and that's at the intersection of 116 and Pomeray Lane rather over towards the western part of town. That's right, that's where it is. And this is a place where the roundabout is going to be built. There's already a fair amount of development there including Mission Cantina and other businesses that we often go to. And then in North Amherst along Sunderland Road, there's a pink area up north of where North Square is. And along Sunderland Road, there's quite a bit of land that's available for development. It's zoned PRP or Professional Research Park. So north of the Village Center is what I'm talking about. So those are kind of areas where we've earmarked for future development. The white areas and many of the white areas are also densely built on. That's where most of the housing, single family housing in Amherst exists. So we have Echo Hill which is over on the east which is my favorite place because I live there. It's on the eastern border of town. If Stephanie can, yeah, that's right. That's right in there is Echo Hill. We also have Pelham Road, Jank Street and that area. So that's relatively heavily developed for housing. We also have Orchard Valley on the east or west side of town. It's down near Pomerai Village. So if Stephanie would scroll up a bit, Pomerai Village is just right there, that pink area but to the southwest of that is Orchard Valley which is a heavily developed housing area. And we have Amherst Hills which is in the process of being developed in Amherst Woods. We have an area around the high school. So there are a lot of areas in town that are already heavily developed for single family homes. Other areas shown in white include areas that could be developed but many of them have wetlands or lack of town sewer and water. So it's a challenge for developers to develop them. So in conclusion, I guess the point that I wanted to get across here is that there's not a lot of developable land left in Amherst. Many of the farms and forests are already preserved and the institutions own a significant amount of the land which they may or may not choose to develop. So this map shows existing land uses and constraints on land uses in town and those will limit our ability to find suitable places in town for large ground-mounted solar arrays. And so now with the permission of the chair I'd be happy to answer your questions. Permission certainly, Grant would you like to next? Yeah, Janet. I wanted to make one comment first of all which is that we don't have officially designated village centers. And so these are sort of like what we think is village centers and I really have never been able to understand why Cushman Village with one store is a build center and there's like a, I think there's a preschool there and then also on South Common near me which is a church next to the Munson. And so surrounded by houses and protected land. So those two have never made sense to me and I do totally support sending dense development towards the existing village centers that actually already have commercial stuff. So I just wanted to sort of say that that designation I would love us to do as a town officially but we just never have to do but I do have questions for Chris and then a request to look at like I don't know if we have a map I have a map that's a little bit different showing kind of like the Lawrence swamp area and the Fort River like give us a sense of more of the natural resources in the air but I wanna push that aside. I have two questions for you. When we were looking at the protected open space which is the olive green options do those prevent any solar development because they're through some state program or is it a mix? And then the second question I have is will the consultant be looking at educational lands and like the ever source right away? Cause I think there's a ton of open space on all the campuses that could be for solar so I hope that doesn't get taken away from the consultant. So those are two questions. What are the olive green off the map for solar because of state requirements or is it a mix? May I answer that? Yes, please. So I understand that these properties that have restrictions on them APRs and conservation restrictions they each have their own set of restrictions but in general, they are not open to development. I would be very surprised if they would be available for solar development. I think I've asked that question of people in the office here and they've said definitely not with APRs and then the conservation restrictions Stephanie may be able to answer that more fully because she works in the conservation department but my understanding is anything that has a restriction on it really wouldn't be available. The lands that have chapter designations certainly could be available for development for solar and as far as will the consultant look at the ED zoning district. I don't know if that's something that Stephanie had in mind when she wrote the scope of work for this consultant so that would be something to ask Stephanie. So we didn't have any, we basically wanted them to look at where is solar possible in town. So those parcels that do have APRs or conservation restrictions are absolutely off limits. I don't think we had the, we didn't have the conversation about the educational. And again, this is something that has to be refined when we get a consultant on board and to see what the town feels is the best approach. We can't presume that the colleges may have already had their own assessments actually. So we might actually ask the consultant to reach out to the colleges and the university and ask if they would share what they have identified for solar development. So they may not because I, in fact, I know that they've had assessments done on their own. So I don't know if that's something that they've been able to do. In fact, I know that they've had assessments done on their own. And then Doug Marshall had suggested the ever source right of way, which I've been walking my dog on, which is all cleared land and right next to transmission lines, but not with the actual ability to just put a wire into it. And I just, it seems like a huge swath that has to be kept open. And so I would love to have the consultant look at that too. So if we can, you know, again, because there's utility, I don't know that, yeah, Dwayne probably has more experience with that from working in other communities. Well, actually the question from other communities has come up. Why don't we put it in electric transmission, particularly rights of way? So just at the clean energy extension, we did dig into that a bit. And because it seemed like no brainer to some extent, that being said, there are issues with regard to rules and regulations of the utility company, but furthermore, and this comes from some research from other parts of the world as well in Europe as I think, and elsewhere, there are some real issues associated with interface between the transmission lines and any solar, the workings of the solar, technically being that close to the, I guess it's EMF coming from the transmission lines, that close, there's guidelines with regard to how far back solar arrays, this is not a guideline from the state or from the federal government, but just from researchers of how far back it needs to be to not interface with the electric activities of the solar cells and it's remarkably fairly far, so it really limits that amount of space that would be available. That being said, to have the consultants opine on that, I think it's something that we could consider if it could fit into the scope of work in the budget. One thing I will say is that just from my background experience as the former wetlands administrator, I know that the reason why it's so open is because it's meant to be to provide 24-7 access to those transmission lines should there be an outage or other event that they need to access them, so having solar panels directly underneath to me would prove to be an obstruction to access, which is probably why they're not cited right on directly underneath. Okay, okay, great. And there are all kinds of exemptions in state laws to allow them for that because it's a public benefit. Thank you. Great, I thought, Chris, thank you very much for that. I would agree with, and I think it is a different question than what we're asking Chris to do here, but certainly something the consultant will be looking at is the issue of, okay, as I think we recognize from this map, there's a lot of land in Amherst that can't be used for solar, which is great. We treasure that open land and the conservation restrictions we have. And then if we, in addition, overlay wetlands, and so forth, that's gonna further, I mean, some of that will be on the already conserved areas, but it'll take away even more of the white areas, I presume. And so maybe the consultant will have a pretty easy time of this, but it's gonna leave, these are, so I think that's sort of a takeaway from the presentation, but I think it will come later with regard to overlaying other environmental layers like wetlands and habitat of rare species and so forth. Jack? Yeah, I just wanted to confirm with regard to solar underneath the high tension wires that there's, are there any solar fields that you're aware of, like in the Northeast that are situated in that sense? Because it sounds, it does sound great, like it was mentioned, but I think, has to meet the straight face tests for us to really even pursue it. And you're looking at a big landowner and utility and ever source and national grid and things like that. But are you aware of any solar fields underneath high tension wires in that, in the conceptual manner that we were talking about? Me personally, no. And in fact, I think I would know if there was, at least in the Northeast, because we had a student sort of dig into this as a literature review and I'm confident he would have found that. So, and I asked the student to look at it because it's a little bit different than it was maybe five or 10 years ago. Now we're talking about this real constraint of solar and land use. So, you know, the utilities don't want it just because they don't want to deal with it, then it's time to reassess that. Because, you know, if we don't put it there, it means that somewhere in the world, if not in the Commonwealth, something else needs to be cleared away and cut down to put up that array or that capacity. So, but I think there are real technical issues that really limit that opportunity. I do wonder whether the state's going through a technical assessment as well as Stephanie mentioned. And I'm wondering if that's on their radar as well. I'm not sure. It may be just a clear no. I mean, to me, it just raises safety issues is my, you know, that to me is the primary barrier, I would think, because that's high voltage. So, yeah, absolutely. There's definitely safety issues and the need for the utility company to get there, get the points along those lines in a moment. So similar issues occur when you're talking about solar along highways and median strips. Well, that also looks like good opportunities. There's good reason why those medium strips are have unobstructed grassy areas, because it's a safety issue and a safety desire. Okay, any additional questions for Chris? Great, this is really helpful. And I was going to mention, I think when Chris was frozen, I did mention that this map, as well as some other information was in our packet. And so in addition to maybe digging it out of the planning department, I think that it's also in our packet. And for that reason, Stephanie will be in our folder on the four hours of working group as well. It's in your, it's already in your meeting packet and it's in the resource folder. Yeah, okay. So that might be an easier place to find it than Chris's place to find it in the planning department. All right, great. Okay, good. We're about halfway through, which looks good. And so why don't we turn to Martha for the next agenda item, which is basically providing an overview of the state, Massachusetts decarbonization, road map. And Martha did put a presentation together and did you want me to share that, Martha? Well, let me see if I do any luck better than Chris at doing this here. Okay, let's see. I have it teed up just in case. Okay, so let's see. And let's try to stick to about half an hour on this 20 minutes and half an hour. About half an hour, so let's see. Slight show. Slight show. And then at the top? Yes, yes. Unfortunately, what's happened right now is the little bar that says, oh, there we go. Okay, play from start. There we go. Okay, let's see how it works. All right. So I just want to give them a high level overview of the 2050 decarbonization road map and then discuss the clean energy and climate plan for the near term that just came out two years ago and the updates and the goals in that. So as you know, Governor Baker committed Massachusetts to a target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. And what that means is at a minimum an 85% reduction compared to 1990, being used as the base level here. And net zero means that emissions equal subtractions so that if there's residual emissions has to be balanced by the amount of carbon sequestration that is the amount of CO2 that's actually removed from the atmosphere each year. So that's the definition of net zero. Mm-hmm. So there are several basic documents. There were several technical reports that were written in 2020 to support the Massachusetts decarbonization roadmap. And so as I identified with the red dot, the one that's called energy pathways to deep decarbonization is really the technical report that analyzes and asks the question, is this goal feasible? And does various analytic studies with various scenarios and so on. So that's what I really have read and wanted to focus on here. So first let's have a look at what is the annual greenhouse gas emissions. And so this is a plot then from 2005 up through 2017. And as you can see, the biggest contribution to greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts by far and away is transportation. All the fossil fuel being used to run our cars, buses and so on. And next after that comes buildings. That is many buildings, maybe the majority still use oil heat or other fossil fuel heating and other fossil fuel for other uses, water, heat or whatever. Then the electricity, the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, as you can see, has been declining now for years. And that's due mainly to the closure of coal-fired plants, oil-fired plants, to some extent then converted to natural gas and then renewable electricity generation is slowly but surely increasing. But it's important to note that that yellow line that's decreasing steadily is not a decrease in use of electricity. It's only a decrease in the emissions that come out. And actually the use of electricity is rising and will rise substantially as time goes on. And then the non-energy and industrial are sort of the miscellaneous things, the methane leaks, the municipal waste incinerators, the, you know, they don't mention it but making cement or other industrial uses and so on. So then just to review the numbers again, this transportation is by far and away the highest almost half, then buildings and then the electricity generation. So these are the areas then. And so these analytic report then looks at each one of those sectors to say, well, you know, what are the goals? What are the strategies to do something about? And so the first, the basic thing is to increase energy efficiency. And that comes out of every study being done by any organization. Our League of Women Voters did that a decade ago. The more you can increase energy efficiency, say particularly then in buildings and so on, the better you're going to be. And then the next important, very important aspect is to electrify the end-use technologies. And that means electrifying vehicles, bus fleets and so on and electrifying home heating and so on. And then you come to further decarbonizing the electricity generation is where solar panels come in. And then fourth and also important then is carbon capture. What we said about net zero means balancing emissions and subtractions. So here then in a little chart, we have that what the technical report and roadmap are called the pillars of decarbonization. So the goals would be then, whoops, excuse me, hi. Good. The goals would be that first of all, say take automobiles should be electrified. And so Massachusetts already is stating that after 2035, only electric vehicles will be sold in Massachusetts. Now the pace of how that progresses depends of course on a lot of things. It depends on people, how fast do you really want to spend money to buy a fancy new electric vehicle. Also their technology, maybe pretty soon all the electric cars will have solar panels on the roofs and hopefully also improved batteries. The batteries currently are quite heavy, hopefully maybe better technology, lighter weight, more efficient and so on. Then the energy efficiency and then also electrification of buildings is certainly significant. And this is discussed in our town's climate action plan and so on, that energy efficiency and so on means retrofitting existing buildings and the codes, the green codes for new buildings. We see that here in Amherst with a discussion of the new elementary school and how it's going to be done. And then decarbonizing the energy supply that's wind energy, solar panels, hydro, et cetera. And finally, the fourth pillar then is sequestration and how we do that and how we can balance. So, well, let's see, there. So then this technical report considered eight different pathways to analyze. And this was a process that actually was begun in California and several states are now doing that to sort of analyze, take different scenarios of what would happen if you made different sets of assumptions and can you still get there and what would it cost? And so I was impressed with the details of the analysis but also they cautioned that these are not forecasts. There's a certain set of assumptions. There was really no effort to try to project what new technology might do in any concrete way. So the all options, the basic benchmark concludes that yes, it's feasible and not horrendously expensive that you can get there from here. Then if you limit offshore wind, which we'll see is really a big thing, then they really are stressed to provide enough clean power. And they suggest that maybe in fact one would have to consider then also having nuclear power generation. And similarly, if you limited efficiency, if you didn't really work hard to get your buildings efficient and improve the efficiency of storage batteries and transmission, it wouldn't be difficult. Okay, so the next set here. And again, as you see, they went through various other scenarios. I'd like to mention the final one called distributed energy resources breakthrough. And that is considering more small distributed units and what we call behind the meter. That is things that are really locally generated for buildings and so on. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. So this was the basic technical aspects then they're kind of buttressed and supported the basic 2050 decarbonization roadmap. Martha, I'm sorry, I didn't understand the distributed energy resources. I don't know. I'll get that to that in a couple of slides. Okay, just so, yeah. Okay, and so New England has a regional grid. We're all tied in together also with bordering parts of New York state and Canada. And each one of these areas has come up with a mission targets for reduction. Some of the problems are that New England has a high population density. And so that is challenging. We have large winter heating loads, which of course gives a big peak to the draw on energy that you need at a time when say solar panels are not producing so much. We have a large offshore wind potential. The area south of Cape Cod, continental shelf is considered a world-class wind field. And certainly Massachusetts is emphasizing that. The governor of the legislature see that as a huge win for our economy and jobs and so on, that they conclude we have moderate solar resource quality and we have significant tie in with the hydroelectric system, mainly the one up in Canada, hydro Quebec. And that this is seen as a real kind of buffer and sort of a steady backup against the sort of the variable fluxes in both wind energy and solar energy. And also then they looked at that there's no real regional possibilities for what you'd call geological sequestration. That is pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and somehow storing it in geological formations that really sequestration depends on our natural open lands. And so their model results then in terms of the electricity generation is that the offshore wind is the most important. And they give them a minimum estimate for offshore wind. They're using the past tense because it refers to their models but obviously it's talking about the future. And then in the cases where the wind dies down or there's big delays, then really the hydro from Quebec is used to make up the difference. And then the solar photovoltaics, they project would make up 25 to 30% of the electricity generation and limited by the cost of storing and shifting in the times, the day, night times and so on. They also emphasize that rooftop solar can be quite significant. And although both rooftop and ground mounted are definitely needed, the more that could be done with the solar rooftop, the less land use that would be required for ground mounted solar. And the final estimate was that the share of final energy delivered in 2050 would be 68%, which is a factor of three and a half times our levels of today. Okay, so now the behind the meter, the distributed energy here. And they emphasize that energy production and storage systems such as photovoltaics that can directly supply homes and buildings with electricity before passing through the meter and onto the grid are significant and are an interesting development with what they see as a lot of potential. And that's what they meant by their direct, distributed energy resources breakthrough was upgrading the technology that was particularly safe for storage systems. It has an advantage that you're generating the power at your point of use. If many buildings, if not most, could be powered themselves by solar panels and then have storage systems with that, that could be a real plus. It also then would sort of decrease to some extent the loads necessary for the transmission grid. However, they mean that such behind the meter systems would still mainly be connected to the grid so that energy could flow both ways. It's not, they're not talking about off grid and so on. And then when they did their best estimates, they found that if you could really strongly encourage rooftop installation and the built environment, you can significantly reduced land requirements, but you still need both in order to reach the net zero goals. So challenges then in just the general overview would be places to site renewables, both wind and solar due to high population density and the expense of land parcels we've seen from Chris that there's not huge amounts of obvious availability here in Amherst. And then there's problems with citing upgraded electrical transmission lines for the same reasons. And as some of you may be aware, there's real problem from Massachusetts with contracts with the hydro Quebec because transmission lines have to come across Northern New England and both New Hampshire and Maine have sort of challenged the ability of having above ground transmission lines marched through their state to get to us. And also then there's the problems that wind, solar, hydro, the generation is not located near the end users, except for the distributed small scale systems, which again is problems you need really to upgrade the whole transmission system. And we have the potential for extreme weather events, both in terms of high winds, hurricanes and floods that can destroy equipment, but also then extreme heat spells in the summer and extreme cold spells in the winter that really shift the peak loads. And there's a problem with the renewables of balancing the times of peak loads versus the times of peak production. So that was just kind of a high level overview then of the sort of the analyses that went into the basic 2050 roadmap. And so now I'll turn and talk about the latest updates here, the clean energy and climate plan for the near term, which was just published in late June. And so this document sets specific goals for 2025 and 2030 and describes strategies to reach the goals for each sector. And in contrast to the original decarbonization roadmap, there's a lot more emphasis on carbon sequestration and preserving natural and working lands. I think that sort of the recognition that getting to zero emissions in 2050, 100% zero emissions is probably not going to happen. And so if you're at, you know, 85%, 80%, whatever, you really need to balance it with the carbon sequestration. And of course, climate research has recent years has shown that it's not going to be enough just to cut our emissions that we really have to increase the amount of CO2 drawdown. So looking again then at these emissions, we saw that transportation was the high one that hadn't decreased very much, whoops, whoops, here we go. And then the buildings and the electricity at the moment, the amount of emissions has gone way down, but we have to recognize that electricity use is going to go way up. So now I'm showing you in a different form here, this is sort of the same thought, but this is really the crux of the whole thing. So I want to spend some time on this particular plot. So here is the plot of the greenhouse gas emissions starting from 1990, which is our reference year, all the way out to 2030, which is the end goal for the latest report. And again, you see the sectors that transportation is the largest sector and then comes buildings. And then electricity certainly from 1990 to about 2010 was significantly high. And it was starting really in the 2010 that the coal-fired plants and so on and the highest polluting plants have been decreasing all the way down. And then the report is very proud to say that we reached our 2020 goals, which is that first little diamond there for 2020. But if you look closely, you really see why and you note the transportation and you see the abrupt drop in the transportation emissions in 2019 to 2020. And I think we can all conclude why that might be that it might have something to do with a certain COVID virus that was really decreasing transportation. And so maybe the true line would be a little more gradual there. But you can also see then if you look ahead to 2025 and 2030, you have to decrease the emissions from transportation and buildings. It's not enough just to say, oh, we're going to totally eliminate the emissions from the electricity sector. You really have to concentrate on the whole thing. And again, recognize that then the electricity draw will be going up. So then just to summarize their goals, the 25% reduction, they say it was met. And for 2025, 33% reduction from 1990 and by 2030, which is not so far away, the goal is to have the greenhouse gas emissions 50% lower than 1990. So transportation, as they state in the report, the way they see to get there is you have to reduce the growth of vehicle miles about mainly in private vehicles by improving public transportation. And so you need to add bus service and convert to all electric fleets of buses and so on. Just read in the paper today about Boston's MTA and the Governor Baker's new funding to help improve that system. Then the transition to electric vehicles that's for particularly for passenger cars and then buses and any other kind of vehicle fleets and so on. And this is going to take time. It's not something that everybody's going to rush out and buy their electrical vehicle next year. As you can imagine, it's going to be over a decade, two decades before we really get there, that's my view. And then along with that, the state is committing to improving the infrastructure for electric vehicle charging so that there's many more stations in there. And so you see there's the goals for 2025 and 30. And so then buildings really have to focus on improving energy efficiency. I mean, that's the mass safe kinds of things, but specifically then electrifying the heating systems. And that means primarily then heat pumps. They're not talking about geothermal yet because I'd say because that technology is still under development. In a few years, we may be able to really talk seriously about that. But this is the most important thing to do for the short term really. That's where you get the biggest benefits is to electrify buildings and reduce their emissions. And part of what the state is doing then is enhancing the building codes for new buildings. We see evidence of that then in Amherst. And then the state is going to be increasing the financial incentives for people to install heat pumps, try to make it more attractive for that. So there's the goals minus 28% and minus 47%. So it's ambitious goals. And it's what I think it's going to take is really a lot of proactive emphasis on doing this. So then electricity generation. So over the years as the other sectors electrify, electricity demand is going to increase significantly, which means that the transmission and distribution systems need significant upgrades and increased capacity. And Massachusetts has concluded that wind energy is going to be the dominant renewable. And the numbers I've heard it's that estimate of about 40% of our energy supply for electricity will come from the wind energy. Mainly the offshore wind south of Cape Cod. And there are already two contracts that are signed and in place and work is starting. As I understand it, there's a third contract under negotiation and more coming so that our state government is taking this very seriously both the legislature and the governor, they see it as really significant for jobs and Massachusetts economy. And so that I think is one strong reason why they are emphasizing the wind energy. Plus, if you can do it offshore, you don't need the challenges of getting land to do it. Also then regarding solar, there is the new emphasis on rooftop solar. And that really is to help offset the widespread use of land for solar panels. There has to be a balance. But again, I think they want to put some priorities and some financial incentives on doing solar for rooftops and the built environment. And then the land conspiration and has the new urgency. And so I've included then just a couple of verbatim statements from the document rather than trying to summarize. And so here's their statement then on the solar that the two challenges are the interconnection of distributed energy resources and the impacts on natural and working lands. And again, the statement on the solar deployment that in order to balance it with the protection of natural and working lands, the DOER will work closely with environmental protection agencies and stakeholders to balance the incentives to provide it to solar and storage so that they do not unintentionally harm valuable natural working lands and forests. And DOER will encourage deploying solar and storage projects on built landscapes. And so they estimate that there could be two million systems installed on rooftops, lawns, fields, et cetera. So that is sort of the future over the next 10 years, I would say. And then again, a statement from the document about protecting our natural and working lands here. And their calculations have now been done to analyze how much our natural lands in Massachusetts currently store. So they've given a number here, six gigatons of carbon, which they say is equivalent to the past 25 years of greenhouse gas emissions in the Commonwealth. So this is not insignificant, which is why they are now stressing the importance of preserving the natural land. So let's look at here at the map of Massachusetts here. And so settled areas are in red. So that's about 25% of Massachusetts land area. And you see, obviously it's concentrated in East Massachusetts, except that there we have Springfield and Holyoke and sort of the Pioneer Valley. And then forest land is almost three million acres or 57%. And it's concentrated, of course, in the western half of the state. And there's wetlands and water that are about 10%. And then the crops and grassland is about 7%. And that surprised me. And because we think of Massachusetts, at least I do based on living here, of having extensive farmland and local produce and so on, local dairy industry. And yet it's very little and most of it is concentrated right around us. And so I think when we are considering zoning and what we may write about agricultural land, I think we might wanna give certain thought and focus to what is best for our local agriculture, yes. So then just to summarize that, forests are more than half of all our land area. And the quarter is the settled part. And then we have a little bit of agriculture and so wetlands and water. So again, here is a statement then from the document that the importance of forest, both for carbon sequestration and then also for the other benefits that forests can produce. So I won't read the whole thing. And so one of the statements then in this document is the Commonwealth is committing to the goal of increasing permanent conservation of undeveloped land and water, including wetlands. It's now I think 25% or 26% and they want to increase it to 28% by 2025 and 30% by 2030. So that is a specific commitment that they want to make looking at our natural lands. And then this is just an interesting plot. The ownership of permanently protected open land, the state owns of somewhat less than half and municipalities own about a quarter. And then there's the private areas, the description that Chris was talking about and land trusts and so on. So the state is wanting to step up and increase the permanent protection of lands that are under their domain. And then there's a bunch of additional goals that I'm not going to go into, but the plan does itemize various things, including planting urban trees by the thousands. And then overall, they have analyzed that natural lands do have some emissions as well as sequestration. And the goal is to reduce that to 25% lower than natural lands, yes. And so just before closing, I do want to mention that both the 2050 roadmap and the 2022 updates here do have a sections on environmental justice policies. I think relevant to our cases here that awareness of environmental justice in citing decisions, any citing of large-scale industrial facilities needs to take into account where these are being placed relative to where people live in environmental justice areas. And then also there's the recognition of the high upfront costs, particularly say for homeowners or renters of installing heat pumps or solar and so on. And I know that the recent state legislation that's been passed regarding the climate plan actually has some wording that's going to make it possible for the benefits say of solar, say on the rooftop of a building to be shared among the renters and so on special legislation. And so this is something that needs to be really a focus for environmental justice is how to ensure that all parts of our community are involved in the benefits from improved efficiency and electrification, so on. So I'll just conclude sort of this is some sort of my takeaways and that for the short term, energy efficiency is really the most cost-effective step. And that means focusing really on building retrofits and new buildings and heat pumps and so on and that state financial incentives will be available for this. And we hope our community would be able to take advantage of it. And as I see it, the demand for electricity is going to rise gradually as cars get electrified as buildings get retrofitted and so on. It's not something instantaneous, but slowly but surely all the way to 2050, electricity demand will be slowly rising. And when the energy is going to be the largest source of renewable energy, and which means that if we are starting to do an accounting in Amherst of where our renewable energy sources come from, I suppose that we can count our share that comes from Eversource that's their share of the offshore wind. And then the stress on maximizing rooftop solar and the built environment in order to minimize the natural and working lands that are impacted and consider their importance for sequestration, the two sides of the equation. So that's it. If I can stop sharing and do questions. All right, great. Thank you, Martha for that. That was really helpful, I think for all of us as background on the transition generally and specifically on solar issues that were raised and land use issues that were raised at the state level. That was really helpful. Thank you. I think two things that I recall that you didn't cover explicitly was that, that, well, first the electricity, as you say, electricity, while we've reduced our greenhouse gas emissions from electricity, our use of electricity has risen and is expected under at least the baseline scenarios is expected to about double between now and 2050, which is, it would be actually a good thing. Yes, yes. Because that's through the electrification of our transportation and our buildings, but just to put in perspective, the scale of new electricity generation that we need for the Commonwealth to, and while we transition to the renewables. The other thing I'd mention is that the, while we have, as Martha, you mentioned, the four components of this transition from the electricity generation side is offshore wind, which we have world-class resources, large-scale solar, I mean, sorry, large-scale hydro from, particularly from Northern Canada, solar distributed around and battery or other energy storage. What's important to recognize is that while there can be some scenarios where there's a little bit more, a little bit less of each of those, and to the extent that we have less offshore wind, it probably means more solar, in addition to potentially nuclear, but what's important also to recognize is that all four of those things, all four of those technologies are complementary in ways to each other, so it's important that we don't put all of our eggs in one basket, if you will, because generally from a broad perspective, offshore wind is generally more prevalent in the wintertime, more so than solar, solar more during the heat waves when the wind's not flowing as much, and then the hydro is really a really helpful resource if we can get that down, because as Martha mentioned, is a balancing mechanism. It's almost like energy storage. It can be ramped up, up and down quickly with the solar and wind, even though they're intermittent, they're very predictable. When you implement them on a large geographic scale, ISO New England has all sorts of methodologies and algorithms to very well predict the solar generation around the state, not necessarily each individual plant, but in total and likewise with the wind, offshore wind, they can predict those things very carefully. With weather forecasts and information technology and smart learning and so forth, and that the hydro then becomes very important as a buffering, as Martha mentioned, and a ramping as those predictions suggest when it's gonna die down or every evening the sun goes down, the hydro can ramp up to keep our energy system balanced, and also to recognize that in New England, Massachusetts and the US and many other parts of the world, we are highly reliant and expect and will accept nothing other than a highly reliable, resilient electricity infrastructure. So that's the challenge in front of the policymakers in ISO New England, but that's why it's really important in this roadmap that all of these technologies are moved forward together and in ways that complement each other. It was ironic, yeah, you know, Tuesday when I was working on this, as I told you, Dwayne, and suddenly our power went off in the neighborhood. Exactly. And sometimes that's not too bad. So, okay. Yes, yes, yes. So anyway, I will put this into a PDF and give it to Stephanie to add to our... Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, thank you. And thank you again, Martha, for putting this together as well as presenting it to us. So let me open up for any questions or thoughts, comments, takeaways from what Martha presented. Great. Yeah, Janet. I just wanted to briefly say thank you for that presentation because that was a tremendous amount of information. I know that's like hundreds of pages of reports. I cut to the chase and I just read the most recent document which was like a mere 160 pages. So I'm struck by a lot of things. And one of them is like, there was really no discussion of geothermal. Especially since buildings use a huge amount of energy and we know that UMass and Amherst College are looking at geothermal. And I kept on thinking, I mean, Massachusetts has a lot of large institutions like that. And so it was, I thought that it was funny, it wasn't there because I do think that technology is getting better but I also think it's here. And then I also thought, I always understood that UMass was looking at wind, hydro and then solar as kind of the supplement. But you could tell like as you were reading that report like the main referendum where people did not want to transmission lines. And so you just, I began to think this is a very shifting landscape all the time. The economies are gonna change, the politics are gonna change. And it just seemed like what Dwayne was saying and what Martha says, it's like it's a balanced portfolio and you don't know, it's like you're relying on several different sources because you don't know what the winner is or the economics of it. And the other thing I also didn't see much was talk about hydrogen for storage. And I began to wonder if hydro Quebec is gonna have a hydrogen plant because they have tons of energy, they just can't get it to the customers. And I know that is being looked at by car manufacturers and truck manufacturers and all that stuff. So I just kind of, but I also realized this is such a complicated thing. And this is a snapshot, this is the plan right now. And it struck me as a very moderate kind of, a really sensible plan to look at all that. And I was actually personally super encouraged as a lifelong environmentalist that all the times that I have written checks to save land or forests, it's true that New England has the largest, inhalation of carbon dioxide in the spring comparable to the Amazon because it's been reforesting. And so, and that wetlands sequester carbon, fresh water, wetlands hugely and that we're not protecting them enough. And so part of me felt like, I was kind of reading this like, oh, what should I switch to after my propane tank? Where's the winner? And it's, and I'm always looking at the incentives and I'm hoping some girl comes into my home and gives me answers. But I thought it was a great report and I appreciate your summary of it. I just, it's super complicated, but it seems within reach. Yeah, thank you. I mean, it had to be always simplified. And the reports did discuss a little bit the conversion to hydrogen. I just chose to ignore it as being more toward the future. I think they admitted that new technology hopefully will come along or just trying to do the analysis and say, yes, it's feasible even with our current technology, but hopefully batteries will get a lot more efficient and helpful. And I note that even locally, the companies that are advertising solar for your home are now saying, and a battery storage, which is interesting. Yeah, and I think all large scale solar 500, I think it is KW and higher in Massachusetts now need to have battery storage. Yes, that's required by the late cause. For the smart program. Yes, yes, because you're trying to shift the peak from noon away to when everybody turns on their stoves in the evening or whatever. Yeah, great. And to some extent, I think it's an interesting, particularly on the transportation side, but just generally for energy storage, hydrogen I think is a big opportunity and something to keep in the weeks for sure and very exciting and has some advantages, especially for longer haul vehicles, I believe, but I think from an analytical perspective, it may not matter too much in this decarbonization roadmap because you're still need to generate the electricity to store the hydrogen, to make the hydrogen. So whether it goes into a battery or goes into a hydrogen production may not be that critical in terms of the roadmap ahead. And these may get into other areas that different parts of the state government are working on. Great, any other, we're a little bit short on time and I'm gonna have to adjust the agenda momentarily, but any other questions or thoughts on this topic? Great, thank you. Jeff has a cigarette. Yeah, Jeff, sorry. I keep your sunflowers in your hands look the same. So hard to tell. So that Martha's presentation was seemed it was kind of global in nature. Here we are in our little committee working on our little town here, trying to figure out how we can do our fair share. And so I'm wondering, what is the fair share that Amherst has obligated to do? I mean, because not all towns can, provide say based on their land area a contribution toward things, I guess, but we have our own, what are they? Goals that set forth by the town council that we also wanna be zero energy. So there's that. So I guess that's the driver, but. Yeah, I was just looking at the kind of the global picture and the hoping then for our future conversations, the kind of the global or Massachusetts wide picture will help inform then, but what direction we should go locally. But it seems like the local goals of the town council kind of overrides a lot of this stuff in the state. You know, that was done back before the latest studies have come out. So. Yeah, I think the question of what's our fair share is an important one that I think we should take a look at in this, in some subsequent conversations. And it can be, you know, fairness is defined various, can be looked at various different ways of its land area or population or energy use ourselves. And all of those things are different ways to sort of consider this fairness issue, which I think, and you know, the ECAC committee has been looking at this as well. And I think we can get into that a little bit later, but let's move on with the agenda, but first to Stephanie and then to Janet. Just real quick for a point of clarity and accuracy. The state's goals were set before the council set their goals as well. These reports are updates, but the council didn't set their goal until I think it was 2020. So yeah, or 2019. So the state goals were set in terms of the long term. Yeah, the decarbonization roadmap was published in December of 2020. And the analytic reports then would the. Right, but the goal, but the goal, the climate. So the Global Warming Solutions Act was the original guideline and guidance for the state. Everything came after that. So what I'm saying is that set the goal in the Global Warming Solutions Act and the town council's goals referenced that bigger long-term goal set by the state. And then the other, correct, yes. Yes, but how you get there from here, I think is being sort of continually upgraded, studied in the state plans and what's going on at UMass. Absolutely. I just want to state though that I just wanted to clarify though that you said our goal came after theirs, but that wasn't accurate. That's all I wanted to clarify, but you're right that they are updating how we get there. Yeah, but what the state has more recently done is set intermediate goals of 2025, 2030. And they're gonna have to, they're by legislation now, they're gonna have to set goals, I think for every five years, maybe five years ahead of time or so. Okay, quickly, Janet, and then Dan, please. I'm just a little confused about fair share of what, because it seems to me, I would think that the council's goal of zero energy is how do we get to that? And so that could be solar, it could be buying into wind power, it could be buying green power from another community, can be buying it from New York state apparently. And so I don't like fair share of what, I don't get that. That's the discussion that we might have. I agree that it doesn't, the goals that the town has established does not suggest that we need to be self-sufficient in terms of producing that ourselves. But to the extent, but it gets into the equity issue, if we're not producing our own, then we're putting the burden on some other jurisdictions to produce for us. But that may be fair, because if it's offshore, it's not in anybody's backyard, quite frankly. Okay, Dan, and then let's move to close this out. Yeah, so first off, I have a hard stop at two, so sorry, I'm gonna have to leave a little bit before we wrap up. But does this document account for the carbon emissions associated with producing the green infrastructure that they're saying is gonna be developed? I think the analysis of the eight pathways does some of that, but I really don't know how much. Okay, yeah, and then the other question would be, is that something that the town accounts for and our goals? Yeah, I mean, that I think is, I think the issues are so complex that our town has to be really careful to consider all the complexities. And as you say, what goes into all the construction or this and that? Yeah, let me, it's a good question, Dan. And I think there's several ways to answer that, but maybe we can cogitate on that and bring that up at a subsequent time. I particularly with your leaving, I'm gonna punt on the review of the work plan and timeline for the next meeting. We'll start off with that on the agenda next time. But let's also then quickly turn to scheduling our next meeting. And I say that particularly because if we wanna go back to Friday every two weeks, that does not work for me, which would land us on the 26th. I'm actually on vacation the week of the 22nd. And I'm wondering whether we might then set our next meeting. If we wanna get back on Friday, it would be three weeks if people don't think that's too long. But otherwise we could try to stick with the Thursday timeframe though, I do have a bit of an issue at about one o'clock on next September 1st, but September 2nd, our noon, sorry, our noon to two time block noon to 2 p.m. works well with me, but I'm just one. So how does that work for other folks? And Stephanie, did you have a thought on that? No, I just, I was gonna encourage you to give the actual date, which you just did. Yes, yeah. Dan. I'm not available on September 1st or 2nd. Good day. Do you have others? Yeah, anybody else? You need a quorum. I'm available on the 1st and maybe not the 2nd. I could do it earlier in the week. What's, is there a problem Stephanie with that of like changing up the time all the time? Or, I mean, I do want to eventually made when the fall semester starts for those of us who are academics to try to find a time that we can just mark on our calendars going forward. But... The only requirement is that it works for the committee members. And you have a quorum and that it's posted 48 hours prior to the meeting. And if you announce the date here, that's even better. Okay. I mean, we do, we have to still post it, but it's helpful that you're announcing it during this meeting. So if you can agree to a time now, that's best. How does Wednesday at noon work? Wednesday, the 31st of August. I could do that. Yeah. Works for me. Let's do that. That also reduces our interval. I'm sorry. Can you repeat the time again? Wednesday, 31st of August. So we'll meet next on Wednesday, August 31st at noon to 2 o'clock, 2 p.m. And I think that'll also work out with you in terms of posting on Monday. Yes. That should be fine. Monday morning. I posted before. Chris, is that gonna affect the planning board meeting that night, your schedule? Can make it less fun day. I don't think we'll have a planning board meeting that night unless something comes up. Oh, good. Okay. Okay, great. Let's settle on Wednesday, the 31st at noon and for our two-hour meeting. Okay, so with that, I know we've reached the two o'clock hour, but let me ask if there, if Stephanie, if you're okay, asking if there's any public comment from the public that we have. Sure. Participating today. And sorry again to the attendees that we went past the two o'clock mark. So if anyone from the public is interested in making a comment, please electronically digitally raise your hand and I'll unmute you. And also a reminder while we're waiting for that, for Jack, as I mentioned at the very beginning, many of you are on chat for the meeting minutes on August 31st, yeah. I don't see anyone raising their hand. So I don't believe there's any public comment. Thanks. Great. We'll appreciate that. Appreciate the public listening and listening in and being part of this. So with that, let me, do I have a motion? I need a motion to adjourn, I think. Is there a motion to adjourn the meeting? Do I need a motion to adjourn? You can just make, ask for a motion and someone can say so moved and someone second and then you're good. Okay. So moved. I'm so moved. Yes. And do we have a second? Do we have a second? I'll second. I'll second. Thank you. It doesn't sound like we need a voice vote. So we are good to go and thank you again to Chris and to Martha for the presentations today and for everybody for participating and have a good rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye. All right.