 We're calling the meeting to order at 6.30. And council members, if you have not placed your bet on when we will adjourn tonight, please find the sheet as it's passed along. We'd like to welcome our younger members in the audience. We also welcome anybody else as well, but particularly Larry Parnas' journalism class from UMass. And we, this is a different group than your predecessor students observed in the past. That group was only five members. We're now 13 and a different form of government. So thank you for joining us. And when you get bored, please feel free to leave. So we are under a very tight time schedule for the first part of our meeting. We're under tight time schedule for the whole meeting because we promised that Sean and Magano would be out of here at 7.30. And so let me just start by saying, we have a number of announcements, which I'm actually going to wait until later to do because there are so many of them and they are around our listening sessions and our four town meetings and our upcoming budget forum. And so forth. So without any further ado, we are going to continue our education tonight about major capital projects. And in order to do that, I'm gonna go ahead and call on Mr. Bachmann and Sonia and Sean. You're sitting here, Sean. Thank you. I'm here with Sean Magano who is the finance director for the school committee but for the school department but also our capital projects manager and Sonia Aldridge who is our interim finance director and also the comptroller. So last couple of meetings, you had presentation from the school department and from our DPW and fire department and library director about the four major projects that we have been talking about for a number of years that the town is grappling with. And you got to see an overview of the need, the status of the projects and where we think we're going forward of these. Tonight, we want to lay some groundwork in terms of how are we going to pay for these projects? And this is specifically why Sean is here tonight to talk about how can we pay for them. At the end of this, this is the beginning of a long conversation that it's going to revolve around this body because we have to come up with a plan to pay and to build and pay for these projects. The four projects being the DPW headquarters, the fire department headquarters, a new school and the library. These are the four things that have been identified in the past. And we have to do these projects at the same time meeting our ongoing capital needs. And for an example is continue to work on paving our roads and taking care of our transit infrastructure. This conversation isn't a one night thing or isn't a several night thing. It's going to take months. I'm sure as we help you understand what the parameters are, you're going to help us understand what information you need to make an informed decision. You're going to want to go out into the community and engage with your constituents under here what they have to say. You're going to have bring that back and say what about this? What about that? That's the process that we're going to be going through. And again, this is a not a several week project. We're thinking this will take a long time to take several months for us to do to go through this with our goal being in the fall that we will be settling on as a community a plan that we feel is acceptable to the community at large, but also a plan that is doable and that is affordable. So tonight, and one of those pieces of that process is to have an interactive tool on the website that people can play with on their own and that they can put in their own scenarios and come up with things. So we want it to be a process that fully engages the public, helps to get you to a place where you each individually feel comfortable articulating where you stand on a plan of action. And then that we as a community can move forward. We talk about it as being, we have to have one plan for the town and that's what we're moving towards. We're really fortunate that Sean has agreed to take on this really important task. As I've talked to you previously, he has great respect within the community. He's already up to speed on what the needs are and I appreciate the superintendent and the school committee agreeing to let us use some of his talents in this process. Let me just turn it over to you. Thank you. Thank you. So tonight we're gonna look at the workbook, the model that we're gonna use to project the costs of the projects and that might potentially be something that's interactive on the town website that the community can use as well. And then we're gonna go through a little presentation just on sort of where we're at with the process. Sorry if I talk mostly this way, it's sort of the way the microphone's facing. But where we are at with the process, what we know, what we're still working on and next steps. So this is the workbook. Presenting Excel spreadsheets is never fun and flashy so if I move things around too much and it makes you dizzy, let me know. But basically this workbook is to help estimate the project costs, estimate the future debt associated with any of the projects at different borrowing assumptions and different terms. Estimate the funds available for other capital needs so after we do all the building projects theoretically in the future, how much is actually left over to do all the ongoing capital work that the town still needs. Estimate the impact of debt exclusions and run various scenarios related to timing, different costs and different configurations. All of those play a big impact to what we can afford. So this first sheet is really focused on estimating the project costs. There's a variety of different projects at the top and I'll go through each one so you'll understand once I go through them. So the first piece is sort of the base estimating tool. So we're set row five there where it says base cost estimate. That's the number we have from some report and you'll see in the next when we get to the PowerPoint what the source of that information is. But we've got an architectural report on pretty much all of these projects except for the 600 student school that was proposed by the superintendent a few weeks ago. And so that's our base. We have the library, the DPW, the fire station. We've included column F, new school for 465 students and then we've also included a Renault version just so you have the scale. And then if you keep going over it's kind of cut off but we've got the new 600 student school and we've got the new 600 student school. Then after that we have the initial year of construction and that's important for calculating the cost escalation because as we've seen from the first school building project to the second school building study that we did cost escalation really makes a big impact on the total cost. So that initial year of construction is whatever that estimate is above it what year was that assuming construction. Then we have years of escalation which I'll talk about in a second. More escalation factors and then a preliminary cost estimate which will include the cost escalation and then a net zero premium. So some of these projects, the estimates didn't include net zero in particular the DPW and the fire station. The school projects already had net zero built in to their original estimates and the library I'm told is sort of excluded from that bylaw. So it's really the DPW and the fire station that will have to estimate some sort of premium. One important thing is just at the beginning these are all draft numbers right now. So nothing is real at this point. We're just, this is the tool when we flush out these numbers and get more solid on these numbers we'll come back with official figures. So up at the top you'll see draft numbers not updated. This is just to go over the tool. Sean I just wanna edit one thing. While the library is excluded in fact their estimates do include significant energy saving efforts. Yep and feel free to ask questions as we go through the spreadsheet cause it'll be hard to go back and forth. And then one thing that the finance committee recommended was what would be the cost of the half percent for ARP. So I put a line in below just to estimate that as well. For the school projects it is included because they're ongoing so they were able to include that in their cost. So the grouping below that's sort of in the dark red orange color. So those are different variables that will affect the cost above that you can play around with. I know. Sorry. I'm interested in finding out whether potential renovations to Crocker Farm to make it available to 600 students. Where is that in this cost? So it's not there yet but we'll talk about that when we get to the presentation. That's one of the things we're still working on developing. Right, thank you. So the variables, sorry go ahead. Is there any way to make this little? Yes. Thank you. Hi. Should we? Whatever you want to do. So the chart below are the variables that you can play around with here. So the first is what do we want to use for cost escalation? So right now I just have four percent plugged in. We might change that to four and a half. Yeah, it's right here. This column here. So again, I reached out to an architect that we're working with who said four, 4.5, maybe even as high as 5% is realistic going forward. Below that the net zero premium. I have 10% plugged in right now. That's just a number I've heard thrown around before but that number we need to get more support for. And then projected construction year. So we know some of these projects probably aren't gonna be constructed in the year that the architect originally thought they were. So this is where you would say what year do we think they're gonna be built in? And then that will adjust the cost escalation above. So I'll just use the library as an example. We say that's 20, 25. Well then that builds in two years of cost escalation and there's the factor and so that's what it would do to the cost. So you can do that with all the projects and play around with the different years and scenarios that way. So that's sort of for the base projects and so again for library, DPW fire station and the two school replacement option. We've got architect reports on those so we've got pretty good data. The 600 student school, we have to somehow extrapolate the information we have to estimate what that cost would be because there hasn't been a deep study by an architect of that option. So what I did was sort of play around with four different models and still thinking of do we go with one of these models or take an average of the four but they all sort of are in the same range. So the first option looks at similar size MSBA projects for students over here. 630 for the school, 645 for the school and what the square footage of those buildings were. And then it takes the cost per square foot from the Fort River feasibility study by the TSKP architects and multiplies it by that square foot cost. So on this first option comes out to that total cost for 600 students. The second option, so it does, it just takes the square foot per students from the TKSP. So if you look at how many square feet they're projecting for 465 students, it takes that proportion and multiplies it by 600 students to get a total square footage. So it actually comes out to almost the same square feet as in this first version. It comes out to about 110,000 square feet. And then same thing, you take the square foot cost from their report and you get almost the same number because it's basically the same calculation. The third option was looking at the marginal cost increase from TSKP's report. So they had a 315 student school. They also had a 465 student school. So we looked at what was that difference, what was that increase in cost per student between that difference? And then we took that same rate and multiplied it by the difference to get to 600 students. And so under that version came out to about 70 million. And then the last one was, there was this a good comp that the MSB had data on for Nelson Elementary School. It was a project where they also spent a lot of money on trying to make it very energy efficient. And it was about 600 students as well. So we looked at that comp. When it was built, we escalated it to the same year as the current, the project we're looking at. And it came out to about 73.6 million. So they're all sort of in the same ballpark between 70 and 80 million. So we'll probably end up somewhere in that range. And we did the same thing for, just a thing for, sorry, that's it, we'll keep going. So that's the cost estimating tool. The next slide is sort of, yeah, go ahead. So I think what's really important about this, especially for the press is that these are numbers that we are putting on a spreadsheet to estimate costs. And anybody can go in there and change those numbers according to new information or anything like that. These are not the costs of the new buildings. This is a tool that we want the public to be able to engage in and for the counselors and everybody to participate in. So I don't want it to be taken away that, oh, new school costs X number of dollars. That's not the point of this. This is to show the tool. Yeah, and I think our work is, we're not gonna put out one option. We're gonna put out multiple scenarios. And then those scenarios will also have versions that you can sort of play with based on each one. So this is sort of the main chart that looks at, all right, given the cost of the projects, what year do we wanna do them? And how do we wanna pay for them? Do we wanna pay for them by borrowing and using our existing capital money to do it? Or do we wanna exclude the debt and sort of take it off the books and have it paid separately? And so it's set up so that you can do, you can do a couple of different things. You can do the fire station, the DPW in the library, and then it's got two spots for schools. So you could do the two school option or you could change one of these to the 600 student school and just do one 600 student school as opposed to the two of them and just make the other one zero. You put the year to begin, how many years you wanna borrow for, so up here in column B, row four, put the year you're gonna begin the project, how many years you wanna borrow, what the cost is right now, it's just a kind of made up number. If there is any grant, so right now it's at zero, but if we had a grant, so for the schools we'd have the MSBA for theoretically at least one of them, you put that grant percentage in right here and then it reduces the cost that the town would actually have to pay for. Sean, could you enlarge that and then just go over a little? Slower. Slower, thank you. You gave me a really hard time that I thought about. I know. So again, so each of the projects are up here, so we'll just look at the first one. So the first one is a new Wildwood. You can put in what year you want the project to begin and you can go 2030, 2023, you could do whatever you want. You put in the borrowing years, which most likely is gonna be 30 for most of these projects, but you could change it if you wanted to. The cost of the project, so from that first sheet, whatever you estimated for a total cost, that would come into this cell right here. Then you have, we'll go to this next, the reimbursement rate, so if there is a grant for that project, you would put it in this column right there, what percentage is the grant? So for the schools and for the library, there's potential grant funds out there that will reduce the town cost. And then this right above it would be the net cost to the town after you subtract out the grant funds, which is what the borrowing or the debt exclusion would be based on. And then this, if you choose to exclude the debt, so there's little boxes next to each of these projects. If you uncheck it, it means that you wanna see what it looks like to exclude the debt. If you keep it checked, then it's just part of our general borrowing. So right now this is unchecked. So what that means is it's saying this is how much would be basically added to the average tax bill to exclude this much debt for the year. It's not very much because it's a million dollars, but if it was a full-sized project, it would be much more. And if you didn't wanna do this, if you wanted to just pay for it or the general borrowing, you would just check this box. And you probably can't see it much. Let me change this number to be a little more noticeable. So if you uncheck this, if you keep your eye on this graph over here, so when you uncheck it, it takes it out because that graph over to the right is showing the annual debt payments from the town's capital funds, not from a debt exclusion, but from what we have set aside for paying debt from capital. If you check it, then it goes back over. And I'll tell you what this chart means in a second. Any questions on sort of these cells and what they do? Dorothy. If you chose not to do a debt exclusion on the school, can you explain that a little bit more slowly? If you chose not to do a debt exclusion. So if you chose not to do a debt exclusion, the debt payments for the schools would just be paid out of the town's funds that they set aside for capital, essentially. So the town sets aside a portion of the tax levy every year, it's 9% this year, it's projected to be 9.5% next year. And so that portion of the tax levy has to pay for all the debt associated with capital, and it also has to pay for the ongoing capital needs. So if you're not gonna borrow for a capital project, you're just gonna pay for it with cash, it also comes out of that portion of the tax levy. So it's a finite amount, it's about five or six million dollars, basically, and that amount of money has to cover all the debt payments associated with capital and all the ongoing capital needs. So if you don't exclude this debt, that amount of money has to cover this project as well. So why don't I explain this chart because that'll help round that out. So what this chart shows, these lines show what that amount of money that I was just talking about is. So the portion of the tax levy that's dedicated for capital is these two different lines. So one is looking at 10% and one is looking at, I think, 9%. So we're at 9% now, the goal is to get to 10%. So it just shows the difference if we can get to 10% how much more money is available to pay for capital. So this is sort of our upper ceiling. If we're gonna try to fund all these projects staying within that portion of the tax levy that nine or 10%, we have to stay under this line. If we go over this line, we have to find another way to pay for it. So it's either gonna have to come from the operating budget or from some other source of funds. And then these bars underneath show the debt. So the first set of bars here, this dark green, this is all the existing debt the town has. It's running out, which is good. We've all heard that the town is in pretty good position with its debt. And so you can see it's winding down, projected to go away completely in 2026. But this is the existing debt that's already coming out of that portion of the tax levy. Then there's a placeholder for new debt. So there's some specific projects that are sort of on the radar that have been factored in going forward. And there's also a placeholder for regional school district debt that the town has to share the assessment from the regional school district. So that's factored in. So you see this yellow piece going on in perpetuity because of that. And then the rest of the bars are related to those specific projects on the left. So the dark blue would be the debt payments from Wildwood. The red would be the debt payments from the fire station. This green is if there was a Fort River project. The gray would be DPW and not on here yet because it's not checked as the library. And again, these are not numbers to like gasp out because they're not real numbers out. It's not a real scenario, but just so you can see sort of how it works. So in this, you know, if this scenario happened and we did all these projects that specific way, we would go over that amount. So we have to do some work to get it under that line. Does that make sense? What this chart is showing? Are there questions? Yes. How about this? Yes, Kathy. I think the answer is yes, but my question is you've got a base assumption of what we're going to be spending on everything else, you know, as you look through these lines. So if you said on roads, for example, that we want to spend $800,000 a year each of this, it reduces the amount that is left for the big projects. Is that a correct way of, you know, you could do it interactively to show us this line comes down. Yeah, so that's the one thing that we're still thinking about how to show. So right now in this chart, there's no amount in there for ongoing capital needs. So really, you don't want to be up against that line. You want to be a healthy amount underneath that line so that there's money left for the ongoing capital needs. This chart below, which I put together quickly, I'm gonna make it a little smaller. So this shows how much is available for other capital projects. So aside from those four big building projects, this is how much would be left over to do all the other ongoing capital needs for the town. So before the building projects go into effect, we'd have this much money available. Once it goes into effect, as you saw above, it goes above that tax-loving line, so it actually puts us into a negative area. But essentially it shows that there's nothing available for other capital projects. Literally means nothing, like no repairs on a building. So when we put together scenarios, we're gonna factor that in of what we think would be a reasonable estimate of what do we have to have set aside for roads, for school buses, for police cars, fire trucks, things like that. So again, that's not factored in yet, but that's gonna be part of, it's in the PowerPoint we'll talk about in a second, and it's gonna be crucial that we keep that in mind. So the other part I spoke about a little bit, which is really important is, so this debt exclusion impact per household average and the high. So if we exclude the wildwood debt, so it takes it out of the right because it's no longer coming from the chart, because it's no longer coming out of that allocation of the tax levy for capital. It's come out of a new source of revenue from taxpayers. And this shows what the impact is on the taxpayer. So on the average household, which I think is 300 and it's on this next slide, what is it, it's 354,000 right now. So on the average household of 354,000, the average impact of the debt exclusion for 30 years would be 128 and the high would be 181, which would be in the first year and it would go down slowly over the course of the 30 years. But at that, excuse me, but at that point, we still haven't gotten ourselves under the line. Right, we're still not under the line. So again, that's why I mentioned, so playing around with the years is gonna be really important because we're gonna have to sort of space these projects out as best we can. Understanding that there's a need to do all of them. And also the cost is a big piece. We're gonna have to try to get the cost down as best we can on all the projects and grant funds. I think all those things are coming to play when you have this magnitude of new construction that we're looking at or renovation. So this is the main slide that we thought we would somehow make available to the public to play around with because most of the information that you would need other than maybe some instructions is available. We'd clean it up a little bit and protect some stuff, but basically allow people to change these inputs and see what it does to the chart on the right. I have a question about the, for example, under the purple one in the library where you have it costing, for example, 35,000. And then in the box to the right, you have 22,000, 22,450,000. What is that number again? So this would be, and again, I don't know if this number I haven't checked out a little bit, but that would be if we had a grant that reimbursed roughly 36%, what would the talents cost be? I see. So those are two pieces. So the library is a little different because there's a grant they're looking at, but there's also some private fundraising. So we'll have to look at how we label that. With the schools, it's a little more straightforward. It's really whatever the MSBA reimbursement rate is, which is another variable we have to nail down. But that's what those would be. It would be what portion is being paid by a grant or another source of funds. Dorothy. Again, this is a basic question. You have down Wildwood School and Fort River School, but the plan that we have before us is for one school. So how do I relate that chart to this? It's a good question. So we could do a couple of things. Either we could add another box, basically, down below that was a 600 student new school. And if you go with that option, you would just make those two zero. That's probably what we'll end up doing to make it the simplest. This is a model in progress. It's in progress. Other questions at this point? Okay. So now that you all memorized this and can explain everything easily, we want to do a presentation on, and this is a presentation that we have done with the finance committee. And a lot of the material you're getting, we will always preview with the finance committee in advance to get their feedback and then present it to you for additional feedback. So. All right, so I just wanted to sort of recap what information we have available right now and what information we're still in the process of gathering. So as I said before, all the projects, basically, we have a semi-recent report from an architect that's estimated the project cost, which is really helpful. So the library, we have a report from Fennesey Consulting, who used somebody else as the architect, but they were the consulting group. We have a report from Kessel Booze for the fire station. The DPW, we have a report from Western Sampson and for Port River TSKP Studio. Again, of these three, the only one that sort of specifically included the net-zero by-law as it was passed was the Fort River project. The library may, I'm not sure the timing of that one was, but Fort River, we know that's built in. This is a little bit new from what the finance committee has seen, so it's updated a little bit. We also now, we've worked, connected with the town's financial advisor from Unibank to get what we should use as a projected interest rate going forward. And it's what we were assuming anyway, but he confirmed that 5% is a good number to use sort of in the future as a borrowing rate. And then cost escalation, as I mentioned, I spoke with an architect that we're working with at the region who said between four, four and a half percent and could be as high as 5%. And it's, I confirmed it by looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and looking at cost escalation for new school constructions the last couple of years, and it's been about four and a half percent. So there's a lot of information that we still need. So again, net-zero costs for the DPW and the fire station. We need the costs of the new 600 students school, which we're estimating, but the piece that you haven't seen an estimate for yet is the cost to build an addition at Crocker Farm, or the cost to renovate the middle school to take sixth grade. So the cost to renovate the middle school to take sixth grade, we'll have a firm number, well quasi firm number from an architect relatively soon. That's one of the things that JCJ's looking at for the region, looking at different scenarios. And that's one of the scenarios that they're gonna give us information on. The other one, we don't have anybody looking at that right now. So we'll have to be creative in how we estimate that cost. We don't know exactly what the grade configuration would look like under that scenario. So again, we'll have to be sort of conservative when we estimate that. And then there's also been requests from various people about sort of the operating cost impact of this. So what would be the cost of operating a new 600 student school? You have one fewer building. Would there be savings from having one fewer building? Would there be a financial impact if we were at the sixth grade? Was it the middle school? Would there have to be some sort of agreement with the regional school committee to house students there? Impact on bus transportation, you have fewer buildings. So maybe the bus is gonna be more efficient, but maybe if we drive more miles. So all that stuff we have to look at still. Other stuff, so the debt exclusion. So we'll have some scenarios, but ultimately what projects will have their debt excluded and how much of the excluded swing space costs. So the schools could potentially have swing space costs, but I think we also heard from the library that they might need temporary space while their project's going on. On the positive side, if we do have new school buildings, I think there's quite a bit on the capital plan that could potentially be pulled off. So the town has a 10 year capital plan that has, I know for the schools, has a roof for Fort River and new windows for one of the buildings. Some of those things can be pulled off the capital plan if a new school building's gonna be constructed in the near future. And I assume that's true with all the projects that are going on. Impact on capital and operating funds from increased debt level. So we talked about this a little bit already. If the debt levels rise significantly from the new building projects, that means there's gonna be less money left over for other capital projects. And depending on what the needs are, that could also sort of eat into the operating budget because if we really need to do another capital project but there's no more capital money left, really the only other place it could come from is the operating side. And then a really big one that I've reached out the architect's TSKP about is MSBA reimbursement rate. So we've got the reimbursement rate from the original school building project from a few years ago, but that was before net zero. And I don't know how much if any of the net zero sort of premium that was added on to this new building will be reimbursable by the MSBA. So we've asked them to sort of analyze the estimates they've put together and give us what they think the effective reimbursement rate would be. So there's two reimbursement rates. There's sort of like your stated rate, which will be a high number. And then there's the effective rate, which will be a much lower number. And it's because the MSBA doesn't reimburse for everything. And so they'll give you the stated rate, but then when you apply that to what's actually eligible, it'll be lower. So we're asking them to help us with that number. So to try to make this simple, what we're planning on doing is proposing four scenarios for you all, at least initially. And each of these scenarios could have different wrinkles. So the first option that we're planning to look at is basically a new fire station, DBW, library, Fort River and Wildwood. So that's sort of a baseline. What if we just replace both schools as they are now? What would that look like? Within this option, you could have one of the schools dead excluded, one school is not dead excluded. They could both be MSBA projects. It would affect the timing. So there's definitely different wrinkles within each option, but that's sort of the general option would be looking at those, that configuration. Option two would be the same as option one, but instead of new schools, it would be add-renos for Fort River and Wildwood. So it would be a little less expensive. Option three would be, the first three buildings would still be new. And then we'd look at a new 600 students school with an addition at Crocker Farm. And then the last one's the same thing except for, instead of the addition at Crocker Farm, it would be the sixth grade moves to the middle school. Questions on these four options? Yeah, the issue option two, my understanding of the messages at school building authority is that they would only pay for part of an addition. They would not pay for renovation of a, at this point, of those buildings. Is that correct? I would have to check with the Fort River feasibility group and Dr. Morris. I haven't heard that specifically, but there might be something that. Okay. I think it's more of an MSBA issue than it is the building committee. Okay. It directly impacts your statement that those might be less expensive. Right. Because the amount of state money we might be able to get for those is, I understand it would be drastically reduced. Yeah, that's a good point. My statement was mainly the total cost, but you're right, the net cost to the town if that's the case, then the net cost of the town might be lower or it might be higher. When you set this up, if I go through the first three things, fire station, DPW and library, will it be set up in a way that I could put a different number in than the initial number? You know, in other words, this is a new and proposed suppose it was. To try and price out the different options. Yeah, we'll try to set it up to be as flexible as possible. Okay. I have some questions over here. Mandy Jo. Oh, I'm sorry. Shalini. Does the renovation of Fort River and Wellwood accommodate the open classroom problem? I believe it addresses the open classroom issue. I mean, Dr. Morris would have to speak to that a little bit more, because I haven't been directly connected with the Fort River Feasibility Study, but I believe, so the ad reno here is based on the Fort River Feasibility Group looked at, I think six different options, A, B, C, D and E, and a code update. And so these specific options would be looking at the complete new construction and then they had different levels of addition and renovation. And so I was looking at one of the smaller addition options. So we have a small addition and be primarily renovation. Andy. One additional cost factor for options one and two is that it would seem unlikely that MSBA would allow SOIs into the process for two different schools in the same town at the same point. And therefore, not only do we have the educational problems of whatever the second school is, but the cost factors with the additional construction costs for the second school that's built just because of the time and the need to do capital work to maintain that school during the interim period. And I was wondering how that kind of thought process gets factored in. Yeah, I know it's a good point. So none of these options make any assumptions around timing of these projects. So again, that's why I said there's a lot of wrinkles within each of these options. So option one, for example, there is a way to do the two schools with MSBA funds, I think, it would just, they'd have to be spaced out quite a bit more than what I think a lot of people would like. But so that would be different scenarios. So we can show one where we have a MSBA project for Fort River, for example, and we do a de-exclusion for Wildwood so that they can both be done in a closer timeline. But you could also play around with the model and say, well, what if we did Fort River now and Wildwood in the future? And we assume that MSBA funds for both of them. Again, we've talked about that at the school committee level, it's just that there's a much larger gap of time between the buildings. And that's difficult to have two schools out of the exact same have similar issues being addressed that far apart. But that's a good point that I should clarify again, none of these options make assumptions around timing. That would be, again, some of the things that we have to play around with to make the costs work, quite frankly, so it's affordable. And just to provide the information that you're requesting. Are there other questions? Okay, would you like to go back a slide? Couple more. All right, why don't we finish the slides and then we'll go back. So, that's probably what helped with the last question. With those scenarios, just other considerations. So again, the order and timing of the projects, all those options, we would have to play around with the order and timing, whether the fire station goes first or last or whatever. Some of the timing is driven by when the school is getting to MSBA and when the library funding comes around, so there's lots of considerations and things that aren't known right now about the timing of when the projects will be done. So we have to make some assumptions around that. Space availability, in particular, with the fire station DPW, that sort of domino effect, and as I said, acceptance of MSBA and other grant programs. So next steps, so on the town side, we're gonna gather the information, there's much of it as we can, and we're gonna provide some cost estimates for the different options. Again, it's gonna be very high level cost estimates because we're so far removed from these projects and architects aren't looking at these specific models. And then sort of on the finance committee town council side, meeting with you again in the future and just continuing to adapt these models based on your feedback as we go forward. Now I'm done. Okay, Mindy Jo. I have two questions, one of which might have some sub-questions to it. The first one is related to our reserves. I didn't see in the workbook you were using any impact of potentially using reserves in there, has there been a thought of using them and if so, how much of the reserves and how can we factor that into the tool to place? So this tool does allow, so if you look at like this little yellow lines you see up here, they're hard to see, but it does allow for if we were to put a steady contribution into the stabilization fund, theoretically a capital stabilization fund, it does allow for taking some of that out. So for the years that we do go over the line, if it wasn't a lot, we could potentially start set aside money now to fund some of those years in the future where we know we're gonna go over the amount set aside for capital. So what this shows is based on the model here, this model I think assumes contributions of about 500,000 into capital stabilization each year leading up to it and then it applies it in some sort of order, it applies it going forward. So basically if we do set aside 500,000, we could afford up to this level going forward, but as you can see the bars still go above that in this sort of made up model. But it does allow for that, we can play around with, and it probably does make a lot of sense to try to use some of our reserves and set aside money as best we can to pay for some of these projects. My next question is, this is working with numbers we're being given. I'm curious given our credit rating, what's like the maximum we can borrow at all? Is there a maximum there? Is there a max, I mean I know there's a maximum for how much we have within a capital budget, but is there a maximum even with that overrides of what the creditors would allow us to borrow? And then the related question to that is, that's a maximum for total, but as it is, these are numbers given to us, do we have any say in, hey this project really can't go over this number and you have to figure out a way to get under that number no matter what they're handing to us? Let's start with the first question. Is that more of a Sonya question? I can answer the debt limit. Inside the debt limit we have about $100 million of debt capacity to borrow, whether we can afford to pay back $100 million is another question. Okay. Is there any other comment on the debt issue? Okay and then your second question was? It was just about project costs, how much do we as a council have in terms of setting a number for each of the projects versus the projects coming to us with a number? Well ultimately I think anything that's borrowed you'll have to authorize the debt. So you'll definitely have to say when it comes to that. I just wanted to see whether what Mandy was asking is suppose we said we think we can have for DPW 20 million, what can you do for 20 million? So we wouldn't want to pick a number out of the air but say, okay this is where you came in, but what if the most, is that? Yeah, so I think that we're anticipating that that there's gonna be both the cost, the payment and the cost containment. We have to look at both of those angles when we look at this. A lot of times when architects design, they design to what you say you want and sometimes your want exceeds what you can afford. So now we have to pull back what we want to recognize maybe we can't afford everything we want. So maybe we can phase it in or prepare for what we want eventually but we can phase it in or we just don't get what everything we want. So I think that that's part of this conversation as well. It's not just how we pay for whatever it costs. It's also you have to look at the expense side as well. We're prepared to do that. Let me give you just an example because of my experience with DPW and FIRE. Right now the feasibility study for the FIRE station includes a community room, which would also be used as a training room, which would be a nice asset to have in South Amherst. But maybe we can't afford that. And that's an example of one of the questions that has to get raised. Are there other questions of Sean before I open it for public comment? Sean, can you bear with us for just a minute, another minute or two? Do we have anybody in the audience who would like to make public comment on this particular issue? We will do a general public comment after Sean leaves. Okay, are there questions? Andy. I was just wondering if it would be helpful if I don't know if any of my fellow counselors should need a little bit of help with something because you talked about a debt capacity, Sonia. And then we've used the term debt exclusion and I'm not sure that those terms are fully understood. And well, I think I do understand them. I was wondering if it would be helpful to do that for other people. Well, I'm not a treasurer, but I'll try. Debt capacity. We can borrow up to 5% of our EQV for debt. And that's debt capacity is about 119 million. And with our outstanding debt, it's about 100 million that we can borrow. So that was a rounding figure. The EQV is property values, right? Yes. Explain the EQV. I get that all the time, so now I'm gonna do it to you. Thank you. So y'all lost my train of thought. No, thanks. So that's all inside the debt limit. Outside the debt limit is over and above that capacity. I think it's all gonna come down to how much we can afford to borrow inside and outside, how much taxpayers can afford. So under proposition two and a half, we can only increase our taxes by two and a half percent globally through the town. It doesn't mean each individual tax bill is goes up two and a half percent. It means we can raise whatever we're raising this year plus two and a half percent. And so, and that's to pay for everything. Plus we can have new growth, which are new buildings that come online, new whatever it is that can increase our money coming in. So this is all about money coming in. If the taxpayers agree, if you first agreed to put a question on the ballot and then the taxpayers agree, they are what they are saying is that we'll pay our two and a half percent increase plus we're willing to pay more because we think this project is really in particular is very important to us. And they're willing to pay more for the life of that debt only. There are two types of debt, there's a debt exclusion and then there's the override. The debt exclusion just pays off the debt. So if the DPW, the voters say, we wanna exclude that debt, we would increase our taxes by $200. I'm making up numbers here. $200 a year for the next 30 years to pay off that. And we agree to do that over and above what we can do under proposition two and a half. Contrast that with a general operating override, which says the voters say, wow, we can't really get everything we want within the limits of proposition two and a half. So we're going to increase our, the money we're paying for taxes every year forever by $200 or whatever it is. And that's an operating override and that stays forever. It builds up our base of money coming in from the taxpayers. Typically this, while our neighboring community has done an operating override in the past, this town I don't think has ever done an operating override. It hasn't done for a while. Andy would know, obviously. But it is not irrational to ask the voters for debt exclusions. And the logic on that is that when you're limited to two and a half and if inflation is higher than that, it's the argument can be made to the taxpayers to say, we'll live within the limits of proposition two and a half. But when we need something above that, we're going to come to you, ask for your permission to tax higher than that. So that's the logic on that. Mandy Jo. So if our borrowing limit, whether or not we override to pay back that borrowing is about 100 million, I think if you go back to the previous workbook there, the projected costs are well over that. Is that right? I don't know all the numbers in my head. It sounds right, if I can find the mouse. It is, it's about 160. So we don't plan, I mean, you're right, that's going to be a concern. We aren't going to borrow all this at once. So, but it's something we're going to have to monitor. Is there a way to put that sort of maximum of a 100 million or whatever the maximum borrowing is, some line somewhere on that, on the chart? That's a good idea. One other thing, I wondered if on the chart, which is the next page, there is a way to take the yellow line, or maybe it's an additional piece that really reflects much more an average of what we need to be paying each year for general maintenance of roads, et cetera. I mean, I'm very concerned that we could become building rich and have roads, and I don't think we want that. So it's trying to look at the whole capital. Yeah, we'll try to build that into this chart, so that's all in one piece. Yeah. Other questions at this time? Yes, Darcy? I just wondered if this chart, this tool is available to us now to look at anywhere. It's not quite ready. I think pretty soon. I think we want to get some of the base variables solid first, and once we do that, we'll work on trying to make it available to you. So I would say within a couple of weeks, hopefully that it's in that place. Other questions? Okay, and no audience comment at this point on this? Thank you. You're going to get out of here nine minutes early. I actually am going to just, Margaret, go back to the beginning of the agenda. I wanted to make sure we had plenty of time for Sean, and so we kind of did things in a slightly different order. I do want to mention the announcements that we have a very intense two week period coming up. It includes six listening sessions with the schools. Not only will there be school committee members of those, but there will be counselors at least two at every one of those. And in many instances, several more. Counselors are there to listen, to hear what the public has to say. And we hope that you that are in the audience and also listening at home will also come out for those facilitated listening sessions that are being conducted by the schools and by their external facilitator. We also have a four towns meeting. Andy Steinberg has been working very diligently over the last several months with the other three towns to come up with the formula for the regional schools. And this is the point at which we will be looking at that. And you'll see Sean again, because that's part of his job. And Andy may have some more to say about that later. And then also we want to make sure that people are aware we are doing a public forum on the town budget. That will be on Thursday, March 7th at 630 at the Amherst Regional Middle School. So there's plenty of room. And we hope that again people will join us. That will be called as a regular council meeting or as a special council meeting, excuse me. But again, the real goal is and the requirement is that it's a time to hear from the public. So half of that time will be spent in public comment. So I'd like to go to general public comment. If there's an item that is not later on in the agenda, for example, the public ways issues for the farmers market, et cetera. This is the time for general public comment. Is there anybody that's wishes to speak in about an issue not on the agenda later on? If not, then we'll continue right on. We have no hearings and we're going on to action item six. And let me just mention this is again, in part, our responsibilities to act. But for this council, it is also an opportunity to learn. We are the keeper of the public way. That means throats and the parking lots, et cetera, et cetera. And in that responsibility, we need to provide for special requests to the town that people and different groups make for the use of the public way. And we have three of those before us tonight. I will just give you a heads up right now that when it comes to the Amherst Half Marathon and 5K Road Race, I will be recusing myself because it benefits the Amherst Survival Center, which I'm still on the board. And Mandy Jo will be taking over as chair as president for that time. And then at the end of this conversation, we will be looking at a memorandum from the town manager that we would then ask, I would ask that we refer to the governance organization and legislation committee, because it really is suggesting some ways in which Mr. Bachman believes that we might want to consider looking at requests for public way in the future. But this is the first time we've dealt with public way, except for our experienced previous select board members. And our first one is the Amherst Farmers Market. And I believe we have someone who would like to speak to that. Please come forward to identify yourself. First of all, I'd like to thank you for having us here to speak. My name is David Mahowski, and I'm speaking for the Farmers Market. And I believe this is our 48th year that we're up in front of some governing body asking for the space again. So thank you very much. Wow. I'm happy to answer questions, but we're, again, probably in summation, it's best to say that the Amherst Farmers Market, if you're not familiar with it, is going into its 48th year, and we're one of the oldest, largest, and longest standing farmers markets in the state. And I think we have really nice representation for both the town of Amherst and communities as far as Brookfield and New Braintree, Pittsfield, where vendors are coming in to display their wares. It's been a very successful market and we're growing. And I guess one thing I would like to say that's kind of a new addition for this year and for the next three years, actually, is we have a new partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield getting involved with their healthy incentive, healthy dietary, healthy plan, healthy lifestyle, sort of entity that they're partnering up with us. They've given us a very nice grant that's going to be allowing us to have some new capabilities to reach out to different and new members of the community, hopefully. We hope that our experience is kind of going out in concentric circles and we're gonna be able to spend more time and more energies and more efforts to do so. With or without that, we have had historically on average on a good market day between 3,000, 3600, 4,200 are the numbers that I got back from Don Marion, who was at Extension Services at UMass in terms of foot traffic. So we draw in quite a hub of activity on Saturdays and we historically have run April through November, latter part of April through November, up to the weekend before Thanksgiving. So it's on average 30, 31 weeks and we have used the Spring Street parking lot and part of Boltwood Avenue in front of the Lord Jeff as our L-shaped farmer's market for the community and we're asking for that, I guess, for year number 48 to continue the tradition going. Yes, are there questions, Alyssa? Just to move this along a little for the town council's benefit, normally at this point we would ask, are there any changes from previous years? That's the, because we have been doing it for a very long time and some years there are tweaks and other years, it's just the same thing. Okay, are there any changes? This year we're tweak-free. We're just gonna keep up the momentum, hopefully, and have a little growth. We've had a very good run and it's been, I would have to say successful, partly due to the town support. We've had a very nice atmosphere element in governance and providing what we can for the town and it's very good for the local growers, so. Great. No tweaks are in place. Great. Andy? Yeah, being the other former select board member who's here. An issue that we had raised for a number of years on the board well before I became a member 2014 and I took up the issue when I was elected on behalf of our local farmers is that there was a concern that there wasn't sufficient outreach and sufficient opportunity for our local growers and local food producers to participate in the market on an equal basis with other farmers and while we have great respect and appreciation for farmers who have come for many years to support the supply side of the market, we also as a community that believes very much in our agricultural history wanna support our local farmers. So I was wondering if you have any observations about recent efforts that have been made on outreach to Amherst farmers and producers about their ability to participate in efforts to get them involved on a equal basis with other vendors at the market. Luckily, a recent tweak, if you will, adding the Boltwood Avenue extension for the market, which I believe happened four or five years ago, has enabled us to not have to turn anybody away. So if somebody's a local grower and if they're coming to us and they fulfill the bylaws of the market, we have space for them now. So we're full, but we have elbow room and I have people coming at me to get involved. It's been successful enough that there's this momentum of people that are coming and approaching the market. And again, as long as they fulfill the requirements that they are a local grower, they are a local producer that they're not buying and selling or not a wholesale, wholesaler. We can welcome them with open arms. We have the space to do so, which is really nice. So I guess I'll just, I'm probably gonna leave it with the Agricultural Commission in town over the next period to see if they have any concerns. I don't think that it's gonna affect how I support the market this year. But I, the one comment that I heard from some growers is that if they're, why I use the term equal opportunity for placement and participation is that that is a factor in how well apparently people are doing in the market. But anyway, thank you. Mandy Jo. So this question might be more of a town manager's question. But as I was reading the application, I noticed there was no listing for a fee being charged for some of these uses. And I recognize there's about 50 parking spots that are going to be taken up by the farmer's market. And we have been dealing with parking issues in this town and 3,000 patrons coming in is fantastic, but we're losing 50 spots for some of them to park. So I guess my question is, do we as the town charge anything for 31 weeks of use and blocking off of the Spring Street lot for five hours? And which is why I say it might be more for a town manager response. And if we don't, could I ask why we might not charge even a minimal fee? It's actually about 40 spots total and not quite 50 to 40. Mr. Bachmann. So we don't charge a fee. And the town has never charged a fee for it. If the council would like to entertain that, that's something up to you, you're the controller of the public way. Could I, we do charge a fee for pavilion rental at the parks, right? Yes. I would like to make one other note on this. On the application in the letter, they had asked for five spaces on South Pleasant Street. Previously, the select board had granted two spaces. So what's before you and in the motion is for two spaces on South Pleasant Street. Those are the ones all the way to the left to comply with what the select board voted last year. And I've talked with Mr. Michalski and he's fine with that as well. And the only other thing I want to point out is if you see on the map, there are these two blue dots on the right, which have lines that go to the Lord Jeff. And we have a companion motion on your motion sheet that gives them permission to use those because we are taking their normal drop-off area away from them during the course of the farmer's market. So we provide those two parking spaces to the Lord Jeff for exclusive use during the time the farmer's market is open. Dorothy. I want to comment that the Amherst, is this thing on right here? That the Amherst Farmer's Market is a very vital part of the town and that my daughter and son-in-law found it very useful in growing their business, the kitchen garden farm. And they don't do farmer's markets now, but it was, I think, an essential part of the increasing, I think, agricultural presence of the area to have this great market. The question of who you let in and how many, the committee that runs the market does have to balance that with having a varied market so that people have a chance to make some money when they bring all their food there. So you can't have too many of the same thing at the same time. So it's a very complex process, I just wanted to say. Yes. Yes, Pat. Thank you. I'm wondering, I'm going back to the Blue Cross Blue Shield grant. I know other farmer's markets give more dollar value to food stamps and things. So are those some of the things? Could you tell me what you're thinking about providing for people with that grant? Actually, it's a huge increase for what we can do with those that are disadvantaged or using SNAP or EBT. If you're familiar with the HIP program, the Healthy Incentive Program, which is a supplemental benefit for those that are getting SNAP benefits, it has varied over the years with the monies that they've had for our cash influx. And the first three years they had the HIP program, they used up all of the monies allocated, I think, in a year and two months, something like that. It went away very quickly. What we're planning to do with the Blue Cross Blue Shield money is 80% of it's going to go towards a direct cash influx. Using it for those people that have SNAP benefits already, we're going to allow them access to 80% of the monies on a monthly allocation to use it for shopping at the market. So it's going to be a quite a nice addition for the local community. And again, with that, it's going to partner into the reaching out that we're going to be doing for various elements of the community to try to get more access to the market. And we're fortunate enough that granted parking might be an issue, as you'd mentioned, at times. But we're right on a bus line, right in the 33, the 35, the 31, you know, there are extensive numbers of buses that basically drop people off right at one end of the market. So it's not too difficult to actually get to the market and literally fall into it. So accessibility is pretty fortuitous for us. Of course, Pat, go ahead. Thank you. I'm wondering whether or not farmers who are selling at the market at the end of the day or are there donations made to any of the food programs in town or the food bank or not bred alone or anything like that? I can't speak for the vendors and what they do at the end of the market. Most of the market vendors do multiple markets. So at the end of closing day on Saturday, they're on to a Monday market Tuesday, et cetera. I'm pretty sure some of them do, you know, they repurpose stuff where it goes back for compost. It's not wasted, but it varies depending on the vendor. Alyssa. Mr. Steinberg can speak to this more specifically if somebody else has a question about it. But I want to emphasize with it, based on a comment earlier about not having too much of the same thing and the need to balance. That is true. And they also accept all Amherst producers even if they want to sell exactly the same thing that the booth next to themselves because we insisted on that throughout the process that was worked on some years ago because Amherst producers were being told that their work was duplicative and therefore there was no room for them. And we said, we're not charging you for the use of these spaces. You will include Amherst producers. And it was nicer than that, but that was basically the bottom line. And it all worked out and everybody's happy. And so that's really good. It is in fact true as we go through these other items that traditionally for events on the common, we do not charge for parking. So big brothers, big sisters, craft fair, taste of Amherst, et cetera, we do not say we don't charge for some things and we certainly do charge for things like when people use spaces because they're doing an office clean out or an office move, but for the big events that draw people downtown, our tradition has been we do not charge for the booking of those spaces even though obviously it takes a lot of spaces out of commission. Okay. Mr. Steinberg? Oh, sorry, I'm sorry, Andy. I wanna add one more comment about local farmers because Pat and I represent a district that has several farms, district two and various other counselors represent other districts. And we hear from them that the farmers market has basically negated some of the popularity or use if you will, of farm stands. And so as we look at this and we look with agriculture, the committee on agriculture, I just think that needs to be brought into consideration and how some of those farm stands might be made to feel more welcome to come to farmers market. I think historically, I've seen a lot of the vendors that have been at the market go out and open their farm stands. So in a sense, the farm stands have been a bit of a draw away from the market. It hasn't gone the other way where they start to stand and then commend. They start at the market. They grow big and then move out. A recent one was Jeremy Plotkin, who has his simple gifts. He's at the market for 18 years and essentially got, I think it's fair to say, he got bigger than what the market could provide. Jeremy's a wonderful guy, welcome back too. We have a spot for him if he wants to sell at the farm stand and come to the market. I don't know if it's financially viable for him to do both, but space is there waiting for him if he'd like to do so, which I've expressly told him actually. Yes, Sarah. So I just wanted to say, because it was brought up and made a statement by someone on the council that everyone is happy with the way things are with the market right now. And I would just like to say, I think the select board did an amazing job in bringing in, making sure that all Amherst farmers were welcome in, that that wasn't always the way that it was. So I really like to say that was fabulous. But I just like to say that there are different ways to maybe not make someone feel welcome or maybe to change things, to make everyone feel welcome and to make it equal playing field. So I think that like Andy said, like maybe with AgCom, maybe if there, I know that there are some issues that farmers have, just I know you've always usually come and talk to them. So that might be something you guys could tweak during the year. You may not be aware of this, but I'm actually part of that on the agricultural commission. So there is a conduit between what's going on with the commission. Yeah, I was acknowledging that. I was also on AgCom and I know that you guys do. Any other comments, questions? Any other comment from the audience on this, please. Please come forward, identify yourself and use the mic. Thank you. Oh, God. That's okay. My name's Amy Whittington. I work at the farmer's market also and we'll be doing community engagement with the grant money. So to address your concern about what the vendors do with their produce, part of what our plan is, is to engage people who deal with food insecurity in the area. So the Western Mass Food Bank, the Survival Center, they have a food pantry at St. John's and one at the Banks Center. So I wanna really work on kind of fostering relationships with the community, because food insecurity is a huge issue. That's all. Yes. Oh, I said first Baptist, sorry. Right. Other comments? Meanie Jo. Can I just ask a question about the boltwood? We haven't heard from the in on boltwood and I know you've been doing this for 48 years. That expansion and road closures a little bit younger than that. Do we know how they feel about losing their spots in front of them and then this reserve of two? Well, first of all, I haven't been doing this for 48 years. I should just clarify that, but I should give just a little bit of my own history. I've been doing it since 1986, 86 to 2002. Then I did that thing of having children and had to break away from the market. And they asked me back in 2017. So I'm in a sense relearning and trying to rebuild and give the market a little bit of a new atmosphere and new face. And I think we've had a nice uptake in the last two or three years. Just the vendors are happier. I think the customers are happier. And that's my goal is to kind of have this nice synergy. As far as I know, the people at the Lord Jeff are also happy. We've had, I'm visiting with them every week. They're working in concert with us to have the parking lot clear, have their customers park out and back. They have been, every interaction I've had, they've been inordinately supportive of what goes on at the market. And the customers, the clientele, that are at the Lord Jeff when they come out on Saturday morning, not having realized that there was a farmer's market, they're kind of fall into this thing that they describe as what a wonderful thing to wake up to. So I've not had any negative banter interaction, feedback, snippets of conversation that I've heard that's been anything but the plots, frankly. I think they appreciate the draw. I think it benefits the ended bolt with the new naming of what it's going to be, that it puts a nice clientele and a nice opportunity for their clientele right in front of them on Saturdays. And they give us tea and coffee every Saturday and we're very happy about that. So I think it's a nice synergy, frankly. It's been, I've not heard a thing, not heard a thing. Any other comments, questions? All right, then we have two motions before us that relate to this. I realized I should make a statement before the second motion. Okay, all right. So the first motion is to approve the closure of the section of Spring Street beginning at the intersection of South Pleasant heading east to the intersection with Boltwood Avenue and that section of Boltwood Avenue beginning at the intersection of Spring Street running south to the access way to Potter Hall and further to approve the reservation of the two first two-metered spaces on the east side of South Pleasant Street originating at Spring Street moving south towards College Street to accommodate the Amherst Farmers Market each Saturday beginning April 20th, 2019 through November 16, 2019 from 7 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. And that is with David Machowski, Market Manager. Second. Okay. Is there any further question? The dates? I'm sorry, the dates? Again. And then they'd be going to next April 2nd, April 20th, 2019 through November 16, 2019. Oh, you're right, it would be. Okay. All right. Any other questions or clarifications? Call the question. All those in favor? Raise your hands. Opposed? Okay. Abstain. Okay. Second motion. Yes. I just want to state for ethics purposes that my husband is an employee of Amherst College and since this motion kind of relates to that I wanted to put that out there, I do not think that it is an actual conflict for ethics reasons. So I will not be recusing myself. Okay. Second motion is to approve the reservation of the first two meters parking spaces on the east side of Boltwood Avenue, immediately south of the Porter Access driveway. Exclusively for guests of the Inn on Boltwood each Saturday between April 20th, 2019 to November 16, 2019 from 7 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. Second. Further conversation? Questions? All those in favor? Opposed? Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I look forward to coming to the market this summer again. April 20th and we're hoping there's a little less rainfall this year. Yes. That would be nice. Would you like a break? We're actually going to take a break while we switch, while I leave the room. We are going to reconvene at this time and let the record show that I am officially turning the gavel over to Mandy Johannick as vice president. Thank you, Lynn. I have a permanently on mic. Ooh. So the next item on the agenda is the, again under the request for use of public ways, the Amherst Half Marathon and 5K Road Races. I believe it might be Matt Anderson that is here from the Hartford Marathon Foundation to speak to this request. Good evening. Thank you. My name is actually Charlie Scanlon. I'm the operations manager for Hartford Marathon. Matt has two young children, so he's a little bit occupied, but thank you for having us again. So as you mentioned, we are requesting use again of the public ways for the Amherst Half Marathon team relay and this year, 5K. In the past, the event has taken place both Saturday and Sunday of the weekend that we've held it with the 5K taking place on Saturday and then the Half Marathon taking place on Sunday. However, due to a few different reasons, we are deciding to combine everything into one day. So that would just be Sunday, November 10th, 2019. The Half Marathon and team relay will be held in the exact same format with timing and all of the same roadways being used. The 5K would then be added to Sunday and would start 10 minutes after the Half Marathon at 8.10 that morning. And we have submitted a course to Chief Livingstone who softly approved or at least gave kind of his blessing as far as he thinks things would work easily and would not have a negative impact on traffic that morning. So we would be happy to show you that map as well, but essentially it would start in the same place, travel down Massachusetts Ave and then make a hard left onto East Pleasant Street until it hit Eastman Lane, making a left on Eastman Lane back onto North Pleasant Street and then finishing at Hague Small where the Half Marathon also finishes. Otherwise, the event will be held in the exact same format, working with local municipalities as far as safety is needed. We are proud to say that we've had no major medical issues with people that have participated in the race the last two years and we are glad to say that again. So otherwise, we work with the Survival Center as Councilwoman suggested and we've made both monetary donations as well as done sneaker drives and food drives knowing that they have kind of many needs to serve people in the community. So again, we thank you for having us in the community as we're all the way from Connecticut and we know that's an outside body, but we're glad to be here and we hope to be back in November. Thank you. You addressed this I believe in the presentation and you changes from last year's application. Yes. You addressed all of them? Yes. Okay. Counselor comments, questions? Anything? What won't come as a surprise? I have a few. If no one else does. One of them goes to the money again so it's probably more of the town managers. There's police detail that's involved with this. So does the Hartford Marathon pay at least those, it costs for the police detail? Yeah, any kind of police details or ambulance details they compensate fully for? They arrange for and compensate directly for those things. And then the donation was something that we had requested early on as part of their proposal and they chose the survival center as their designated recipient for the funds. My next question relates to road closures with the 5K that's nearly all three major North-South routes through UMass. Are they all closed at the same time or is it like serial closing as the runners go through? So yep, so it's rolling closures. So never at one time will all three of those roads be shut to vehicle traffic and often time working with police and other authorities. We often say that roads are not closed to vehicle traffic. We just have police officers out there monitoring to make sure that runners can pass safely. So if you had lived on East Pleasant and you were trying to pull out of your driveway, very much welcome to do that and continue as you would travel. But if someone was running in front of your driveway, we would just ask that you wait till they pass and then proceed safely down the road to make sure that you didn't hit anyone or put anyone in danger. But yeah, so all rolling closures and again, leaving open to vehicle traffic when safe as much as possible. Okay, Pat. I just wanna say that last year's race, it was quite easy. I did have to wait a little bit every once in a while but also got directed on as a car. So I think that's well handled. Thank you, thanks. Any other questions? I have one other one that relates to the station road bridge, the marathon, half marathon and relay goes over the station road bridge. Is the temporary bridge, what? How's, it's more for the town manager, how's this going to work given all of it? So they were aware of it last year when the temporary bridge, when there was no temporary bridge, they were able to go across the bridge because it allows pedestrian traffic. And we anticipate that there will be a temporary bridge in place by November. So that should be not an issue for them. One other thing that often comes up is going through the center of town and because of church and things like that. And typically they start at 8 a.m. and they're, I've been down there and they're through the center of town by 810, 815. The last people are through by 815. So it's a very, it's a glut of people going through very quickly. It has not impacted the churches at all. Any other? Andy. Yeah, the only thing I would add is that in the first year, the only problem of court in my observation and reported to me by former Captain Gunderson of the police department was a little bit of a problem around the Cushman Common. She suggested some modifications of how they direct traffic around the area for the second year and then I asked her and she said it had worked very well the second year without change. So her reported to me in the first two years, I can't ask her again because she won't be involved for the third year, but that it seemed that she was satisfied. Any other comments, questions from the council? Is there any public comment on this matter? I am seeing none, which brings us to the motion time. The motion is to approve the proposal by the Hartford Marathon Foundation to partially close roads on November 10th, 2019 from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. for the southbound lane on North Pleasant Street, East Pleasant Street and North Pleasant Street. Further closure of South Pleasant Street from Mass, Massachusetts Avenue to Snell Street for approximately 40 minutes, 8 a.m. to 8 40 and to close East Pleasant Street from Triangle Street to Eastman Lane, Eastman Lane in its entirety and North Pleasant Street from Eastman Lane to Mass, Massachusetts Avenue to accommodate the 5K road race, all subject to final approval by the chief of police. Is there a motion? I need someone to move. Excellent, Pat's move, I just read it. Pat has moved and Evan has seconded. Is this all of it or is this for just the 5K that I just read? Okay, it doesn't talk about Pine Street or East Pleasant, another East Pleasant Street. Okay, just wanted to make sure it was the whole thing. Okay, any discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor? All those against? It is unanimous with Lynn having recused herself, so 12-0. Thank you so much. I think Lynn heard that, so we're going to welcome Lynn back to begin chairing, presiding over the meeting again. I highly recommend that you go back and see the Amherst media people and the whole setup back there. It's very interesting, thank you for the work back there. Our next one is the Amherst Garden Club and do we have a representative here? I guess not. For any of you that have stood in line, waited for the bell at eight o'clock in the morning with your wagon or whatever and your accompanying people have spotted which trees they want. This is the plant sale. You can tell I've obviously been to it. So, Mr. Bachmann, do you want to speak to this one particularly? Yes, so this is for the setup of the plant sale. Once they're finished with the setup, then they will release those parking spaces because those are important parking spaces as well. And again, an event that has happened annually on the Common, but it's helpful for the vendors for them to unload. They don't think they'll use all of the parking spaces because they want to use just the number that they absolutely need, but they requested the entire South side of Spring Street lot in case they need them. Are there specific questions about this? Yes, Bindi Jo. This is, it looked like it was for Friday morning only as plants get loaded in in preparation for the sale on Saturday. I was trying to figure out the timing because they mentioned a tent set up on Thursday. They don't need anything for that. That's a tent on the Common itself. And again, we have not been charging for the use of these spots. Correct. Is there any further questions? Yes, Bindi Jo. Sorry, can I ask about the charge to the town manager? It sounded like sometimes we charge, if someone needs like a spot for a moving van, do we charge them for that? Or is there essentially no charge at all for any reservation of parking spots in this town? There are, we do charge for reserving metered spaces for certain events. Some events traditionally have not had to pay because they are either by nonprofit organizations or fundraisers or something that has been going on in the Common for a long time. If a new person comes in and needs four parking spaces for whatever it is, we charge them on a per diem basis for the parking space. Further questions? All right, then the motion in this case is to approve the reservation of 18 metered spaces, metered parking spaces on the south side of the Spring Street parking lot for the garden club of Amherst's annual plant sale set up on Friday, March 17th, 2019 from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Susan Sheldon is chair. Is there a second? Second. Okay, in this case it's Dorothy. Okay. Just to clarify, it's May 17th, 2019. Whatever I said was wrong. I'm moving from a really early closing tonight. Is there any other questions about the motion? Move the question, all those in favor? Opposed? Can I get comments? Yes, I just want to say that the plant sale is a wonderful tradition at Amherst and it is a place where you can, it's really by wonderful things at a very modest cost that have been grown and nurtured by local gardeners and I think it makes the town a rich place to have these events taking place on the green. Great. Okay, moving on. We are now to the public way memorandum from the town manager and Mr. Bachmann. Thank you. So in your packet is a beginning, it's a memo to begin a conversation, I think the council would probably like to have. Under the charter, as you know, the council is responsible for the public ways and public ways means all of the roads and streets in the town, but also for the town common. The town common is part of the public way. Not all parks are, so Kendrick Park is not part of the public way, but the North Common, the South Common in front of the Inn on Bultwood. The South Common in South Amherst, the East Street Common, those are all public ways and under the jurisdiction of the council. So in the past, we've had a number of requests that have come in to utilize the public ways. Some of them are last minute, many of them are annual like you've seen already and some of them are in between. So what my request to the council is a question is how would you like us to handle them? Would you like them to all come to your meeting? Would you like them to be processed through one of your committees first in advance? Would you like to delegate some of that authority to either the town manager's office or to another board? And so I've tried to put together a material for your consideration. I'm not looking for any kind of response tonight, but it would be helpful for our office as these things come in to know how the council would like to address them. And in addition to what you've seen tonight, we often will get a company who wants to come in and they need to put a dumpster in front of their building as they're doing construction. So we say, well, okay, if that's, if it's complies with the fire chief and police chief and they sign off on it, well, we might say, yes, this is a good spot. Put it for two days and we charge them whatever we would have gathered from the meter for those two days. So it's typically that type of thing that's a low-scale thing, not a huge impact. But then there are larger issues that come to that are under your jurisdiction. So if someone asks for a change of parking on a public way, they either want to institute parking or they want to take away parking. That's usually a bigger issue that involves a neighborhood that you would probably want to retain and have a public hearing on and engage in that conversation. So what I'm requesting is I figure out how we can have that conversation and have the council try to figure out how it would like each of these types of things to be addressed and look at them in categories and then give us direction on how you'd like to address them. So I'd like to divide this into, first of all, are there some questions clarifying at this point about the memorandum? Yes, Alyssa. Yes, I have several comments on the memorandum based on my history of working on the public way. And one is that I appreciate the town manager's description of things like Kendrick Park, Sweetser Park, parks are under the town manager's jurisdiction. The common is actually considered part of the roadway, strangely enough, so it's the public way. And it used to be under the select board's jurisdiction is now under the town council's jurisdiction. But that's a funny thing because many years before I, or Mr. Steinberg or any other recent select board members served, that got delegated to the town manager's office. So we have traditionally, since 2007 at least, since before 2007, we talked about as the keepers of the public way, which the council now is, the parking for the farmers for things around the common, but not for the actual use of the common. So for the taste of amherst, for example, you know there's always parking blocked off. So we would have that motion as keepers of the public way, but we as keepers of the public way, despite the fact that the common is the public way, we're not making the decisions on whether or not the taste was going to be on the common. So looking at all this again is a perfectly reasonable idea. It seems like it also made sense to go ahead and delegate that because that was a DPW function, town manager function, police department, fire department, sanitary. I mean, it's all different kinds of town departments. But technically it got delegated a long time ago and I would argue that we should make a proactive decision as a town council, as keepers of the public way, that we are continuing to delegate that part of it. This is a whole nother level of delegation that's being asked for, that we have not previously delegated. And again, much of that may make a ton of sense, but so there's several levels to this. One is, are we gonna leave delegated something that was delegated long before any of us were doing this? And two, are we going to delegate some additional things? Associated with those delegations, one of the things that I'm concerned about is that, and I think it was just a matter of trying to lay out all the possible options here, is it talks about requests for short term, requests for short term and then permanent. There's like nothing here about what's long term versus permanent. And so that would need to be teased out. Also, I cannot fathom a situation that was 14 days. So I have no idea why 14 days is in here as it means nothing to someone who was a keeper of the public way. Let me put it that way to you. And so there are sometimes four days of parking associated with the taste, or one day of parking associated with the farmer's market every single week. There's never been two weeks of parking associated with an event. So that's just, that's not an arbiter that we've used. So it may be that the town manager and research with other places now knows a 14 day thing, but I'm unaware of the select board ever doing a 14 day thing. And so don't be too wedded to some of the words, I guess is what I'm saying as you're trying to sort this out if this ends up getting sent over. And finally, I guess I have obviously a bunch of questions about this, but I would hope that if this does get put over to governance, although I think an argument could be made that it's a rules issue at this temporary moment, but maybe we just leave a section in the rules that says where this goes because honestly we've not done policy yet really as this body exists, that whatever group is looking at this more before it comes back to the council includes talking to somebody who was an elected official who was dealing with the public way. And I don't think governance has anybody like that on it right now. And so just to do that reach out. I also don't have any reason to believe that downtown parking working group will continue to function in the way that it has in the past. And so depending on them to be at least the ones associated with downtown and they've never made recommendations associated with downtown use of the public way in the short term. And so these are just pieces of context that I offer you that you may not be aware of associated with what's written here, but I do think it's great to kind of take a look at the whole thing and figure out what to piece out so that everybody understands who does what. Okay, thank you. Yes, Dorothy. I have a brief question about, does this include food trucks? We have food truck regulations that were looked at, but it could, yeah, it's a public way. So of course it would be under you. Okay. Alyssa? So luckily we don't have any, but one food truck right now that actually functions. The complication with this, this was a huge issue for us when we were trying to make this work as keepers of the public way because there are both questions about not blocking the sidewalk or the kind of food cart that's actually lunch truck technically that's on the street versus the kind that's on the sidewalk and how many can you fit and what spots and there are very specific spots in town where they are allowed. But the licensing of those used to belong to the select board as well as the public way. Now the licensing of those belongs to the licensing board. So now there's two separate bodies that would be associated with that. So that's another little added quirk to all of this as to how that would work. Luckily you're not struggling right now with 25 of them trying to come in, but it is in fact, it's the licensed commissioners that decide whether or not they can be someplace and they would obviously, they use, that was all the same group of people deciding where they could be. Now you have a separation of powers between two different groups to try and figure that out. So it would be all well and good for them to give them a license, but then if this group said, but there's no place you can put the cart, that wouldn't be very helpful. Other comments, questions? Yes, Mindy Jo. I'm focused on money tonight. So who, is it us as keepers of the public way that could set potential rates and policies for what would be charged? Or does that happen somewhere else? And is there like a common say rate sheet right now for who gets charged and who doesn't get charged and what they get charged or what they don't and all of that. So we charge except for these sort of traditional things that have come before the town previously. And I think the fee is $10 a day, which is, it depends whatever the meter generates, but it's low, I think the going rate is $10 a day for reserving a parking space. Who sets that? Is that supposed to be us? I guess the question. Yeah, if it's a public way, it's up to you. Additional questions on this. So the recommendation on the motion is that this be referred, excuse me, to the government organization and legislation committee before we place that in motion is their discussion. Yes, Kathy. I guess I wonder which committee it should be referred to because I think what we're talking to is, as I understood what Alyssa was saying is, some of this is embedding policies we had before and some of it is new policies around treatment of public way. And one idea we had in the charge you're gonna see next week on the committee on economic development would be to refer public way policies to that committee because it's talking about the way how town resources and community is being, and it would be, I think I'm making the distinction on a policy change that has some implications to it as opposed to just refinement of code. So I'm questioning whether GOL is the right committee. We don't have this other committee yet, but we had tentatively drafted a charge that would include the public way in that committee. Yes, Evan. So I understand what you're saying. I think that what we're considering right now is my understanding is who should this go to to decide who request would go to. So regardless of whether it goes to GOL or something else, GOL could come back and say all future reservations of public way should go to community and economic development, but we're not quite at that stage yet. But I do wanna sort of return to what Alyssa said, which is is this a GOL conversation or is this a rules conversation? And I'm not sure what the answers to that. So I'd be interested to hear maybe some of my fellow GOL members or some of the rules committee members speak to that. I am getting to a point where I'm getting a little concerned for my colleagues on the rules committee that we are dumping almost every conversation on you. I feel like we've had, I mean, we just had a conversation in OCA the other day that ended with this has to go to the rules or was that GO? I don't even know, they're all running together. But I do, I don't want to, rules committee has a big task ahead of them and I don't wanna put more than they need. Dorothy. Well, I had been planning to speak up and say that the new committee that we've been working on does in fact include public ways in it. But after Alyssa spoke, I thought, I would like to have a long conversation with our ad hoc committee and Alyssa because it sounds like there are so many aspects to the things that have been brought up that are in your memo that involve town departments and that just go all over the place. I think it's gonna be, I think we wanna roll in it, but I don't think, I mean, from my point of view, not the whole ball of wax. I mean, it's very complex. So I think it takes a lot of conversation which is probably why you sent us the memo. It is the reason and it's also the reason that in setting the agenda tonight, we decided since we had three requests that we're ready to be acted on, that we give you a sample of what it was like and with that in mind, say, okay, let's put this in some committee that will then come back with a recommendation as to how the more significant ones would be handled and the ones that are not as significant, much more routine might be handled and don't even have to come to the council. So it's an issue of really wanting a committee and in this case, I differentiate rules of procedure from governance organization and legislation because rules of procedure goes out of business in less than six months now and is really looking at the rules and procedure of the council. This is really an issue of as a legislative body, what do we wanna do? And so that's why I felt that this was the right place to refer it. I also think rules of procedure has a ton of stuff to get done. Mandy Jo, you're on both. I was actually gonna say nearly what you just said, Lynn, the rules of procedure committee is tasked with proposing, quote, proposing to the council for adoption, rules regulating the procedures of the town council, that's from its charge. It has exactly six months from December 3rd to get that task done, which is June 3rd. That's three months away. So it has a lot on its task to do that. While I see an argument for figuring out whether to delegate public way items or not delegate as a potential rule regulating the procedures of town council, it's not what I've necessarily thought of the rules committee doing. I've thought of the rules committee of really dealing with what are our subcommittees going to be? What are our rules during debate going to be and things like that? And I don't see this public way discussion falling into that. I don't know whether governance is the right committee. It seems like it is, given if you're not going to put it at rules, and I don't think rules, I think rules is a worse committee than governance to put it at, I guess, for that reason. The other committees we have don't really fit it either. So I think a default to this governance which has a legislation component, and given that we are the keepers of the public way under the charter, we might determine that this needs to be a bylaw. If we ask for delegation and not just a motion, it might need to be part of a bylaw at some point. And if that's the case, then it falls more into the legislation portion of governance. And I know governance was not charged with doing substantive issues. But there really isn't a committee at this point charged with creating substantive issues that this council wants to look at. So I know it's an imperfect fit, but it to me seems more logical than rules at this time. All right. It, at some point, recognizing that there is still this other committee out there, and we actually are going to be talking about that on our agenda next one week from tonight. But the issue here is really how to divide it up, if you will, how to legislate it differently. It doesn't mean that eventually the committee that is yet to be named is, won't have a role. It just means this would define what that committee's role might be. Alyssa. So the way I see this flowing is that, and I think maybe Dorothy touched on this, is that eventually once it's determined by whatever fashion, which things we actually retain control over, then those things sound like they will in fact fit very well under this new committee. So once you know whether or not you're doing, you're doing things like the Garden Club, then you'll know that that's yours, and that will be your thing. In order to figure out which those things are, I think it's really important to remember that rules of course is not going away because then the rules are just done, and we never have to think about them again. Rules exist because it's required by the charter. Governance, organization, and legislation is just a made up thing that we decided to do. Rules will be all the work that rules is doing, and that does or does not get done by the beginning of June, is now, because we have governance, is gonna get thrown over to governance. So there's a continuum there. So we're serving as that rules is serving as that group right now, but governance, a year, we had this conversation previously, a year from now, a lot of things would get sent to governance because rules wouldn't exist. So there would be no place to send it other than to governance. I was feeling quite pretty confident about sending it over to governance until I was reminded that they've not been charged with substantive issues, and this is a substantive issue. So that's where it gets complicated. So again, were this to come up a year from now, we might be in a different place. So I'm not sure there is a perfect solution and a less bad and a less good solution, but it may make sense given that this is rather of a piece all of its own, and it's a fairly complex issue, but it's also not so intertwined with some other things yet. Maybe it would make sense to go ahead and send it to governance because they don't have quite the workload that rules does at this moment in time, and maybe that would be in a more efficient way of them having more time to deal with this while rules is doing the rules things. Okay, is there any further comment on this? All right, I'm gonna try a motion, and the motion is to refer the public ways memorandum from the town manager to the government organization and legislation committee. Do I have a second? George Ryan, any further conversation? All those in favor? Okay, oppose? Motion passes 12 to one. Moving on, the appointment of non-resident, non-voting residents to the finance committee, and let me just preface this by saying the following. As you recall, we adopted the charge for the finance committee, which included four non-voting residents. We are clearly into the financial season and the active participation of residents on the committee would be welcome. The finance committee is a standing committee of the council and council members of standing committees are appointed by the council president. However, as stated in the charter section 5.5B, council rules shall address the appointment of such members, and that is particularly out of the section related to the finance committee. So therefore, the recommendation here is to refer this to the rules of procedure committee to determine how non-voting residents would be appointed to the finance committee. Question? I'm sorry, Karen. It's more of a comment. Are there people waiting in the wings for these appointments? We have had applicants for the finance committee. I have seen none of those applications, but I understand we have a significant number. Okay, so I think, Alyssa, is our next meeting May 5th, am I getting the right, you know, I'm just thinking that if you wanna move it quickly, I think that's, am I, do I have the right date for the next one? So I'm just thinking that it should be at the top of our agenda so we can report it back. Well, I leave that to the chair of the committee. Are there other comments? I'm sorry, Mindy Jo. This is one of the things us charter commissioners didn't really notice is a odd little quirk of the charter. But I'm concerned with holding off on these appointments until not only can the rules committee come up with a procedure, but bring that then procedure back to this council to then go through that procedure to make a vote when the town manager's budget is due May 1, and that is two months away. And in theory, we might not then have resident appointments close to then, and we've got a lot of other stuff going on. So I'm concerned about that. That's not to say I don't think rules should look at this and come up with a procedure. I'm not sure it's wise to wait for that to happen before allowing the president to make the appointments for say the next six months until the end of this fiscal year. I guess it's about three months so that we've got some appointments that maybe end June 30 under the charter two, six, or whatever, two, three, whatever it is that says the council president appoints all members of council committees. She has at this point in theory the right to do that for the finance committee. Maybe we could go ahead and have that done until the end of this fiscal year so that rules committee has the time to come up with a procedure, but that our finance committee is not operating without those members for most of this budget cycle. I'm sorry, Evan, yes, excuse me. So just to add on to what Mandy Jo said, because the process she laid out sounded lengthy, but I actually think it would be lengthier because in less, so I do think we need council rules to decide, so I do think that rules committee does need to come up with a process. However, appointments go through the appointments committee. And so in less rules committee came back and said, we're just gonna give this to the town council president. Our rules are town council presidents do this. If rules committee came back and said, perhaps anything other than town council president does this, my assumption is rules will deliberate, come up with a recommendation, bring it to the council, which will likely then say, okay, now it's the purview of OCA, and then it will go to a process that OCA is currently working on now. My guess would be that process would mean that no residents would be appointed to the finance committee this budget cycle, and we would have residents appointed after June for the next budget cycle. And so I think, I am stating an opinion, so I can't say that. But I'm not saying it's only an opinion on what to vote on the potential motion, but recognizing that waiting on this means that we will likely have a budget, the budget process going on right now will not include residents, because I just don't imagine it going through rules to the council to OCA in time for us to actually appoint resident members if the budget has to be passed by the end of June. Andy. So I guess I'm gonna speak at it from the side of the finance committee, both from my, more from my experience on the prior finance committee that existed here in this community, but a little bit for this finance committee. I think I've said before to some people, maybe to the entire group, that it took me even with a fair amount of experience in accounting issues and budgeting issues with nonprofits because of the type of special legal records and requirements that are involved with municipal financing, which is a whole different set of rules, a year to really understand and fully participate in the committee. And it was a process that was helped because there were people on the committee who had been doing it for a while and we all helped each other out as new members came on. The, where we are right now, I think is as a committee as we have a really good committee, I'm really pleased to be working with the group that is our current finance committee, but we're a little bit in the learning mode and that's what our next meeting is gonna be about. So one thing for you to consider during this discussion is that you would be bringing people on right at the beginning of the budget process and as we're going through this learning process and have partly got there, and unless there are people being appointed who are on the prior finance committee, they're gonna be behind and it may make it more difficult for them, more discouraging for them and more difficult for the other members of this finance committee as they're trying to get up to speed to get done what needs to happen in order to help present the material and review the material for the budget season that's going forward. And the second piece with the same preface, so I don't have to go through it all again, is that bringing somebody in for just one this year and they're not being continuing members isn't really an effective use of their time or anyone else's time. I really would encourage that we bring people on who are really gonna be committed to working with for a period of time so that they can become fully educated and participating members of the committee and be there through multiple cycles so that it can actually gain some utility after doing what I think is intended. Sarah. So as chair of OCA, I would like to say I do think that these resident appointments are definitely town council appointments. So that's something like absolutely if we wanna start now and hand it to rules and say take a look at that, we could do that. Andy beat me to the punch on what he just said because I know when I first was on finance committee, Andy told me it's okay, we got your back, it'll take a little while, it's a steep learning curve and it definitely is and my feeling both as chair of OCA and also as someone who's served on finance committee is that I think that I think it would be detrimental to like Andy said, just give this to someone like if you I believe in you totally and completely but then you are bringing people on for a certain amount of time, they don't have time to catch up and that can be really, that can feel really awful when you don't completely understand and then to know that most, you know, there's a chance that after you've struggled through this a whole bunch you're gonna be gone. So I would rather, I myself think that there's some merit in perhaps not putting them on until. Two line one. Until July one. Alyssa. It will not surprise anyone who worked on the charter commission that there are some quirks in the charter that I think weren't quite what people intended and strangely enough this particular item as our president stated says the council will develop rules for this. It doesn't say that for planning borders, EBA appointments and I don't know why it says that but it does and given that it does it seems that the conversation at rules might potentially and yes, it is going to be added to the agenda. The rules conversation might in fact be very brief except for the idea that has arisen which was the idea of the president potentially appointing that conversation never arose with the ZBA or planning board as being something the president would do because it's not a town council committee but these are also not town counselors that are on a town council committee. So the conversation may be brief or long but it does need to take place at rules because it says in the charter it's going to be a rule and that's where we do rules right now. But it shouldn't necessarily drag out for a long period of time. It can probably be handled at one meeting which is in fact next week and of course things continue to come up every single time we meet so that we're not doing the other work we were doing but this is one of the things that needs to be done. I wish we had all known sooner that it needed to be done this way but that's the fault of not having a transition document that would laid out for us in a chart form when we needed to do various things. So we're behind well it's not a surprise we are where we are and given the feedback that we've heard and what we've seen happen with finance committees in the past I don't think we're hurting the budget process to not have these folks in place and certainly not to step them in in a short period of time. What I'm really looking forward to when we do appoint them eventually is that they're going to be super at helping with outreach and doing things like getting people to the annual budget forum getting people engaged in different district meetings talking about the budget, et cetera but none of that can happen in time for the budget forum next week. So given where we are at this point we have advertised the town manager had previously advertised for finance committee members that work town council appointments we've put out another call for that last week and we fully expect that OCA which I happen to also be serving on will be doing a process to appoint that unless rules has a different opinion on how to do that because again rules didn't have that option of having an opinion on things like ZVA or planning board. So the process that we would bring back would just be limited to at this point unless we come up with yet another option would be, oh rules thinks the president should just do it or rules thinks it should be like all the other council appointments like ZVA, planning board, participatory budgeting and ranked choice voting that would be the extent of the process that was presented to town council. Like those two sentences unless some other new thing comes up. So this is not like a big presentation you need to deal with. Other comments? Shalini. This seems to be an assumption that the residents who are all new and don't have experience I think it would be highly beneficial if we do have residents who have been involved in the finance committee because right now we only have Andy who I believe who has experience if he did have residents who had experience with the finance committee work before I think it would be beneficial to all of us. Pat. Building on what Shalini is saying is it feels to me like we could or you could appoint former members of the finance committee who are residents to work through until the end of the budget period and then knowing that we then what may be appointing other people but I think we're losing experience that may be really important. Kathy. I was just gonna try to build on I think the point with Andy was making I think short term appointments are not helpful if you're bringing it into a functioning committee and we might short term experience but you're still bringing them in if this isn't quite the same way finance has worked before. So we might wanna consider whether some of these appointments might be two year appointments rather than one year appointments. I mean I think we could decide for the residents that some commitment that they come on they learn and they stay. So I'm not saying that necessarily but it's something that is even though we're doing just one year for the council members we might wanna make the residents more continuous. It's a reason for having it be considered and rules and coming back with how might you wanna do it cause we could set a different term on this group of people. So that's a tricky one because I do not like to have a committee appointment predisposed by whether or not somebody was on a previous committee. So that piece of what you're saying or various people have said concerns me so that in other words the only people eligible would be people that served on previous finance committees. That's not the way we advertised and it doesn't seem like the way in which we should screen. So given all of this I feel like we need to refer this to the rules of procedure committee and it may very well mean that we do not have new resident non-voting members to finance until July one. It's an unfortunate gap that the council just in our transition I mean that you just get to these things as fast as you can. But I don't know that we have it's because when rules comes back to us you also need to be able to say this will be the term of people, et cetera, et cetera. So are there other questions, comments, yeah. I just wanna point out that I believe the term was set in the charge for the finance committee. So I believe the term says one year in that charge. Okay, so people would be appointed for a year in the finance committee, okay. I mean, yeah, right, right, yeah. What was the previous terms of finance committee members, Andy? Prior, it was three year terms. Yeah, gave you the learning curve that allowed you to understand the budget and be able to contribute to it. Dorsey. Looks like I was trying to figure out the dates of when these different things could happen and if it went to the rules committee on March 5th and if we could, as Alyssa said, decided on that day then it would be back here on March 18th and then we would send it to outreach communications. They would hear it on the 25th of March and then it could possibly be back here the first meeting in April in the town council. Back here with what? With a, well, with recommended appointments. That means you'd have to do the interviews and everything by that time. I don't see that happening. That could be. Sarah. I just want to say that we're still working very quickly and hard on our process but we won't have a process that quickly and I am loathe to do something that we haven't really made solid just to do it quickly. Alyssa. If I could just add, when she says work quickly and hard the obviously five of us will agree with that but it's also because we have been meeting every week. We've had six meetings. We have 15 meetings coming up that we have scheduled already. It isn't that we didn't think of a great process, we just aren't allowed to do it legally and that means that we're different than every other municipality in the Commonwealth who just does whatever they want and nobody notices but since we asked the question, we've been told no and so we are trying to figure out a process that meets all kinds of reasons which we can talk about at great length at another time but it isn't that we don't have plans. We have lots of plans. Unfortunately they have been thwarted thus far and so we are working on this very quickly but whether or not we could in fact be ready for April is it's possible and it's also not something I think we're ready to commit to. Other comments from, I'm going to use the privilege of the president and recognize a comment from the audience. I'm not supposed to. I'm Barbara Pearson from 11 Page Street. I just think that these are non-voting members, right? And one of their goals is to get interest into the process and to help it propagate throughout the community. And if I understand that we have several people who have applied, why does it hurt to, I mean it looks like this is an opportunity for input from community. It doesn't mean you have to take it. It doesn't mean you have, you know and since it's a short term, the process is over at July or whatever but I would urge the council to try and come up with a way to have these people be on some kind of special advisory committee that's pre-legislative or whatever, you know, predates the rules. Just seems like you've asked them if they want to be on the finance committee. They've said yes and they say, oh, sorry. Okay, thank you. So if there were some way of just incorporating their feedback, their input without being obliged, they're not, they haven't been through the training. Anyway, thank you very much. Thank you. Let me just not respond per se but say a couple things regarding budget and the budget season. We do have our forum on the seventh and that's clearly a time for in fact, pretty much exclusively public comment. In addition to that, the finance committee, Andy I think is beginning to think that not only we'll be meeting at least once a week, we might start meeting twice a week at some point and we expect there to be a lot of public comment at that point, because we're gonna be hearing. In fact, we are looking at the calendar and we have asked people, counselors, to indicate to Angela Mills whether or not you want to start coming to some of the finance committee meetings because we may call them as committees of the whole so that you have the opportunity to hear more about the budget in the detail that the finance committee is going to be hearing about it. I don't know that we have a perfect solution here and I think timing is not, and the charter in this case has left us with this kind of hanging situation. So further comments, otherwise I'm gonna call the question. This is addressed to Andy. We know that these residential members would not have a vote. You also know that the finance committee has a huge job to do in a short period of time. You addressed how the members would feel, the new members would feel, how frustrating it would be for them. I'm asking you as chair, do you think that bringing people on at this point for a short period would hold up the business of the finance committee or were you just thinking that they would find it very hard? It's really hard for me to answer that question. It depends upon the individuals chosen because some people who are quick learners or willing to put in a lot of work and show some patience and not be sort of diverting the process to their needs, then it would work early, it would work fine. But it really depends upon who's appointed and how the, we don't really have an appointment review process in place yet so that we can't get the right kind of questions that we would ask into that process, but we could. So I really don't have a good answer other than that. Shalini. So is it possible to create special circumstances where we choose based on experience just for this transition period? No? Is that short term appointment? I mean, is that really fair? I'm going to call the question because I think that we need to send this to rules and have them wrestle with us in a more detailed way. So the motion is to refer appointment of non-voting residents to finance committee, to the finance committee, to the rules of procedure ad hoc committee. Is there a second? Mandy Jo, further conversation? All those in favor? Okay, that one's unanimous. Okay. The next one is council liaisons to committees. Part of this is kind of continuing to try to move things along. A lot of several counselors have been asking about liaisons to committees. And the charter does speak to this, but it's really left to the council. The previous select board did have liaisons to committees. In fact, they even described that in a manual that I was just recently made aware of. And the manual states something like the following. Select board members serve as liaisons to a variety of boards and committees and attend as many meetings of those other bodies as is practical for them to do so. Liaisons are not members of those committees and should not be doing the committee's work or unduly influencing that work. While the liaison role is relatively open-ended, the key point is for the, in this case, select board member to provide relevant information the committee might not otherwise have, such as details in this case about town meeting deadlines, reminders about open meeting law, budget process, et cetera. And similarly bring back key information regarding aspects of the committee's work of which the select board should be aware. So again, this is something that council members have asked and I would like to have the council discuss this and then suggest a referral to the rules of procedure ad hoc committee. The floor is open for discussion. Alyssa. So I mean, this is also being added to the list of topics for rules for next time and it's, if it had not been something that various councilors had brought to the president's attention, it would have ended up in the rules eventually but would not be getting attention next week. But because people have been asking about it, I said certainly we will add that to our list of topics. It is an entirely appropriate thing for rules to be covering just as the select board appointed committee handbook currently governs the behavior of many multiple member bodies in town. The liaison work that is addressed in there on page 14 which I thought we were gonna have a copy of in our packet but we'll get you one for our report. And that was worked on very carefully and rules needs to look at it again as to the role of the liaison because we have had members in the past of bodies who wanted to be liaisons who believed they were the sixth or seventh member of a committee and that is absolutely as our president read out, not what the intention was. And so if that's the intention of this council then that would need to be codified in a different way than it has been done in the past. Are there other comments? I'm sorry, Mindy Jo. I think I would just say we should really think closely as to maybe which committees we potentially want liaisons to when we're looking at our standing committees and our workload as counselors. This goes back to what Alyssa was saying in terms of what is the role of a liaison. I think we should also consider do we need or want them for all or only a small portion of the 70 some committees this town has? Is it something like that? 60 or 70, because that would be a lot of non-voting liaison roles for each council member or should we consider maybe a select few of those committees to have liaisons for? This is one of the reasons it needs to go to the roles of procedure. Yes, Pat. I have just a general question to the council. What is the, what would be negative about a liaison being able to vote on a committee? I mean, it's school committee, it's clear. It's very different. It's an elected body. So of course, you would only be a liaison doing the two activities. But I'm curious to hear what people have to say about that. Mandigio. The charter in section 290 says non-voting liaisons. The town council may select from its membership non-voting liaisons to multiple member bodies, the school committee and or the library trustees. So the charter restricts us to non-voting liaisons. I certainly don't speak for the charter commission but I do have to say having chaired a committee in which there was a liaison, he sits to my left. It was very beneficial but at no time did I ever feel that Andy was there other than to provide us with information we might otherwise not have had about timelines. And at no time did he ever say, and this is how the select board has voted or this is what we would like. In other words, he didn't speak in terms of representing the body, which is the big danger of having counselors as voting members of committees. Is there scene is then speaking on behalf of the body? And I guess, brief comment. I liked the sentence that said, would not do the work of the committee. And if you don't do the work of the committee, you shouldn't vote. I think we are gonna have plenty of work. Any further discussion on this? Okay, then I'm gonna move the following to refer council liaisons to committees to the rules and procedure ad hoc committee. Is there a second? Councillor Schwartz. Any further comment? All those in favor? That's unanimous. So, the other day, we're sitting in the office, we're setting the agenda and the issue of the annual town audit comes up and I go, oh yeah. That's great. We do get one of those, don't we? And of course, we pulled out the charter and of course, at some point, we need to address the audit. So, this evening, before you is a proposal to create an audit committee. In this case, trying to keep things a little simpler, to have that audit committee be a member of three people from the town council. And it would just, the goal is really two. It's one is to review the audit with the auditors. The second one is perhaps not this year. In fact, personally, I would recommend not this year. Review whether or not we wanna continue with the same auditors over time. That's a much larger discussion that should be kept to this committee. But the charge before you is to create an audit committee of three people. And while it's not immediately pressing, however, the audit is almost completed for the town. In fact, it may be completed by now or will by the beginning of March, as I recall. And it is very important as an elected body for us to assume our responsibilities of reviewing that audit and its recommendations. So, the reason you have the charge before you is to create such a committee and then we would go forward with such appointments. Yes, Dorothy. I would nominate Kathy for that committee. We're not even, we haven't created that committee. If such a committee existed. Thank you. Okay. Yes, Andy. Yeah, just for your information, in the prior audit committee that had existed, the committee consisted of members of the select board, member of the finance committee, a representative appointed by the school committee, representative from the library trustees since library and schools were also a part of the audit and then one citizen member who was appointed to serve in addition. So there was more than just, you know, as to necessarily a select board committee was actually, if you take to the majority, it was not even the majority between the select board and the finance committee. And so I just wanted to point that out for your information and point out that there were two documents that we received along with the proposed draft charge. And one of them recommended that the committee be of the governing body and the other made the recommendation that it be a broader committee. And so the guidance that we were receiving from those to the government finance officers association and the Department of Revenue's Division of Local Services are contrary to each other on the point. Wow. Thank you. Comment, question. Do you have, yes, Amanda Jo. Sorry, as this is suggested to be referred to the GOL committee, as chair of the GOL committee, could we have some guidances to, we've been struggling with how much we can change a charge based on the GOL's charge to review only for technicalities. So as chair, I'm reaching out to this council to discuss not that I'm seeing many changes to this and I'm gonna say that right now, but what I'd like to hear from the council sort of their vision of what the referral would be for for this charge, whether it is truly for a formatting issue or whether it's for things like membership that could be considered more of a substantive issue and all. I personally think it is around membership and I think it could be argued either way. In other words, a membership more like the previous audit committee where it represented because the audit is comprehensive. It includes the library, includes the schools and includes the town. So it's not as if, and even though we pass a budget for all of that, nevertheless, we do heavily rely on the schools and the library for the knowledge of their budget. Yes. Can I make a motion? Please. Okay. I move that we have an audit committee which will include a member of the town council, a member of the finance committee, a representative from the school committee, representative from the library trustees and a citizen representative. So that is an amendment to the charge. Okay. A member of the town council of any member and particularly a member from the town council finance committee, a representative from the school committee, a representative from the library trustees and a resident citizen representative. Is there a second? I'll second it, but then I have a question. Okay. My question is the original motion on the table was to refer this charge to a committee and now we have a motion to amend the charge. So I guess I'm a bit confused. I may have done it out of order, but it seemed to me that there are too many things we're being referred to a committee and I believe that your point that this was getting into substance was a very valid point. So that I thought it was better and perhaps I should have waited till we got through that first motion that we in fact formed a committee. We set the members here and then referred it to the committee for whatever formatting and final touches and consistency was needed. As clarifying, was that four people that Dorothy listed? Five. So there's a town council person and then a town council person from finance. Correct. Okay. Didn't know whether there was one town council person or two. Two town council and the total number of five. I mean, it just seemed that this was something that had been devised. I looked at it, it seemed like a reasonable solution. And I think we have to start moving forward a little bit faster. Okay. So we have a motion before us to, we actually never put the other motion in. Okay. We have never put the other one in motion yet. So we're looking at a charge. We have a motion to amend the charge that's before us. So then the amendment would make, would change the membership of the body to be a town councilor, a town councilor from the finance committee, somebody from the library trustees, a person from the school committee and a resident. And I'm assuming that the other bodies, meaning the school committee and the library would appoint their own person. Correct. And the resident would be appointed by? Outreach. They don't make appointments, town council makes appointments. Okay. So in other words, it would not be made by the town manager. Yes. So does, would we be changing whether this is a standing committee of the council then? We would. So it would now be a committee of the town that then brings in that the town manager does the appointments technically? And thus we begin the confusion. Yes, Alyssa. So when GOL has time to finish the charge situation, we will stop calling things standing. That's what the problem is here. We're calling this standing. What we need to know is what was the intention? Was it intended to be a standing committee of the town council, which in other worlds, everyone calls subcommittees, but for whatever reason we don't. Or was it meant to be like the energy committee where the town manager is doing it? And so if that's true, then I think the standing just refers to the fact that it's not something that's a working group that's doing one task and then disbanded. It's an ongoing thing. It doesn't have to be that way. It has been in the past sometimes just like, oh, who wants to do it? Okay, good. And then it was time to do it. And then they didn't do anything until the next time they needed to do it. So it doesn't really technically have to be a standing committee unless Mr. Steinberg thinks that would be a big improvement over what we used to do. But I think that's where we're getting confused is that our committee, that word standing is just causing us problems. And the way the charge is presented to you before their amendment was proposed is as a standing committee of the council. Mr. Bachmann. So I drafted this charge and there's no requirement for there to be a committee under the charter. It just says that the council shall, the council shall cause for there to be an audit and that you shall receive the audit. In the past, as Mr. Steinberg explained, there was all these other members on it, but since it's the council's responsibility for the audit, that's why I'd originally had it one way and then switched it to the main only counselors because it is your responsibility ultimately. And so in terms of using the word standing, that was done purposely because it is a standing committee of the council. And if you wanna change the composition of the council, then you might look at the form of the charge and change that as well. So there's no requirement for there to be a committee. You don't have to create one, but I think that it's wise to create one because you want to have some group of people who are going to engage with the auditor to review the work of the executive side of the government. So town manager should not be appointing people to this committee. Town manager should not be sitting on the committee. It really should be something of the council. Right. Right. And I mean, let me just add because I've not only served on audit committees but chaired audit committees. Sometimes audit committees are completely divorced from finance committees by recommendation of auditing. And other times they are actually part of finance committees. And I've served in both capacities. So just to further confuse things. Mandy Jo. I wanna do it. Dress, Alyssa's point of the charge. The GOL committee has come up with a preliminary draft charge. That line will eventually read either standing or ad hoc or something, dash committee of the town or committee of the council to make it clear. We would take care of that at a referral to GOL if this charge comes to GOL as a technical matter. That draft charge template is set to be voted on this Wednesday morning. And once it is, it will fully be distributed to the entire town council. And it has already been distributed to the clerk and the town manager and the committee that was dealing with the economic development draft charge so they could work with it, pending changes. And then to comment on the committee of the council, I think it could remain a committee of the council. I was just questioning whether it was intended that way. If it is then the charter provides for the president appointing all the members. You might be able to say upon recommendation by the school committee or something of the school committee members or things like that. But the formal appointment would fall through the town council president per the charter. There's a motion on the floor to change the membership of the committee. I'm gonna call the, there's no further discussion. I'm gonna call a question on that motion and then we'll go back to the original motion or the original idea. So call the question on the motion to make the committee have a membership of one member from the town council, one member from the finance committee who is a town councilor, one member from the library trustees, one member from the school board, or school committee, school board committee and one resident. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Oh, oh, it was a vote and second, right? So now I'm asking all those in, right, all those in favor, raise your hand, opposed, abstain. Do you need more time? Okay, go back. All those in favor, opposed, abstain. Steve Dorsey, okay. Andy, Kathy. All right, so we're back to the original motion which is to refer this to the rules of procedure committee. Right, no, I'm gonna make sure I got that right. No, the following, no, excuse me, I totally forget what I just said. Here is the motion and I'm making now as a motion to refer the audit committee charge to the governance organization and legislation committee. Is there a second? Sarah, further conversation. All those in favor, opposed, abstain. Two, Dorsey and Kathy. Okay, we are, that was the timer. We are now moving on to appointments. There are none and committee reports and I just, Sarah, I'll start with you. I know you've submitted a written report, thank you. Yeah, so Dorsey is gonna be giving our report tonight. Okay, Dorsey. Yes, this will be short. We just submitted a memo about our meeting that Sarah and I had with the town manager and two of the community participation officers. And the reason for the memo was just to give guidance to counselors about just giving them information about the community participation officers and their availability to assist us with our district meetings and other information about their availability, et cetera. So I'm not gonna go through all of that because you can just read it in the packet. But it was just sort of a service to the counselors to give them more information about setting up your meetings. Okay, questions at this time of that committee. Andy, do you have an oral report from finance? Yes, I will be brief. When the finance committee last met, our major time was spent hearing Mr. Mangano's presentation and because we were aware that it would be presented again tonight to the full council, we decided that a written report was really not going to be particularly helpful because we thought that Mr. Mangano would speak for himself. The committee is meeting tomorrow and I think that it's at two o'clock in this room. And the major portion of the work will be to really delve into the question of the committee's goals and work plan for the remainder of this year and to explore questions on budget information materials that would be helpful for the committee to complete its work. So we will be back to you with a written report, probably at the next meeting, explaining what our proposed process is and how it will fit into the council schedule as a whole. And as an example of that, I will explain something that goes into Saturday's meeting, the four towns meeting. The charter does provide that if there is good legal reason to do so, this isn't the exact word that we can, as a council, take up a portion of budget at a different time. And we will be discussing whether to take up the regional schools at a time that coincides with the other three towns having their annual town meetings in which they will adopt the budget, in part because the rules, the state law that governs regional schools provides that once it has been adopted by three towns, then the fourth town is bound to it so we would be committed forever more to the budgets adopted by the other three towns if we don't take that action ourselves to participate in the process at the same time that the other towns are doing so. So that will be part of the discussion that we will be having tomorrow and incorporating into our report at the next meeting. And we will also probably continue the discussion that Mr. Angano started tonight and continue to be working on that so that we can make sure that the information that we as a council need for making our decision on April 1st is available to us. Thank you. Questions? Mandy Jo? Governance Organization Legislation Committee. So we're still working on the template, as I said. We hope to have something finalized this week. We are also working on guidelines for how the governance committee will review items for clarity, consistency and actionability that we're working on creating a document for that. We've discussed the guidelines and we'll be discussing the document that we can then pass out and circulate to people, not just the council, but others so that they know, have some idea of what our review will be like. As the report said, the GOL committee took a vote and voted to not recommend referring the resident advisory committee charge back to this council that it took a vote to say that charge does not belong in front of the council so it is not going to be referred back out to the council from our committee. It was sent straight back to the town manager for him to format his charge under the temporary preliminary charge template for establishing of the council, of the commission and the reasoning is in that memo. So that's it right now. Questions? Yes, Kathy. Yeah, in reading the report, it looks like you're considering going to every one of the committees that exists beyond the council committee and asking them to reformat there. Will that come to us as a recommendation? Because I've gone and looked at them and I realized that they're all over the place in terms of the way they write it, but I find all of them clear and it would be a lot of work to format them into a specific and they might end up rewriting. So I'm just wondering is that gonna, you're gonna look at that and then is it gonna come as a recommendation to us? So the committee is discussing whether to make a recommendation to the council that the council request that town committees relook at their charges and reformat them themselves into the template so that it's not falling on staff or on the council committees to do all of that reformatting. We were charged with coming up with a template and so we will be discussing how we want council, how we want town committees and council committees to get their charges into that template and so yes, if whatever that, however that discussion resolves itself or wherever that discussion leads, the implication at this point is that it would be a referral back to this body to make, that it would be a recommendation from the GOL to this body to then this body act on whether that is something that we want committees to do or not. And is this all committees, all 90 of them or just the standing committees and the ones that we've done? We haven't actually had the discussion yet so I can't speak as to how broad or not that recommendation may or may not be. Thank you. Any further questions? Yes, Darcy. I would just like to add to what Kathy said that it's a concern to me that committees would be asked to do this reformatting. That's number one. Just because I feel like we are doing a lot of work and I feel there's a definite weariness factor at about this time and not only would all of the committees be required to do this additional work but then all of it would come back to us and this would take up our council time to be just looking at whether or not we approve a template from all of these different committees. It seems like, I guess I feel like we need to be thinking about what types of things are truly necessary for us to do and try to eliminate as much as possible the make work and the types of things that aren't necessarily going to help in fulfilling our mandate as a council. The other thing I was concerned about is the fact that the resident advisory committee charge was sent to the town manager. That seems, that feels to me like a substantive decision on the part of that committee and something that should have come to the council as a recommendation rather than the committee making a substantive decision like that on its own because it seems like a big decision to me, a substantive decision. Are there further comments, Alyssa? So assuming this is just being given in the spirit of not going to your GOL meetings, so have fun there and these are the things we're just telling you because you'll hear them when you come back otherwise is associated with the RAC. I totally get that that is the town manager's charge and if he chooses to use our format or not or whatever he chooses to do is fine because the charter makes it clear that's his committee and that's not subject to confirmation. At the same time, OCA is very concerned about what the role of the resident advisory commission is because it makes a big difference as to what we feel like the process is for appointments and so if that committee is actually evaluating applicants which is what it says in the charter that's a whole different situation than if they're just doing outreach and so it's true that we don't control what the charge says but if the committee that's going to be bringing appointments back to the town council doesn't know who else has been involved in the appointment process then we're not giving you adequate information because we don't have adequate information to work from. So if they didn't exist, that would be one kind of process but assuming they exist, whatever role they play if it actually follows what it says in the charter which I don't believe it can based on open meeting law but if it did or if it doesn't we at outreach communications and appointments need to know what it is in order to explain how we brought you appointments to act on because that's part of the process. So I get that Geo is like, hey, it's not our charge, it's his charge but we need to figure out some way of making that connection back to the appointments process so that we have that situation. And then separately, completely separately on charges I don't think we have a thing to say to the 40 odd committees that are multiple member bodies about what their charges should look like. I think that this, in terms of that we have no say on what their charge documents look like and so I think it would be a great idea if governance said, we think this looks good. We like this new thing. We feel like we've addressed a bunch of stuff because we wrestled with all these issues when we were trying to figure out what to call things and so we think this looks like a pretty good format. Would you like to use it? What do you think of it? Because actually they've all been doing work of committees. We haven't been, they have been and many of them haven't looked at their charge in five years or longer and so I don't want them to rewrite unless they want to. So I guess I'd look at it as more of a, hey, we came up with this cool thing that we think was pretty great. You might want to use it too but and even maybe get some feedback from them how it might or might not work for them but I don't really feel like it's appropriate for us to be telling bodies we don't even appoint how they should be running their charge documents. Hopefully we just learned from the best of those what we think looks good in our charge documents. Further comments? Doris, Dorothy, here, here. Are there any further comments? I feel like first of all, the format for charges has not been brought forward so we're not in any position to have a further conversation about that. However, the committee has referred back to the town manager, the resident advisory committee but there does seem to be some ongoing question as to its role and its relationship to the Outreach Communications and Appointments Committee. So I'd be interested in hearing councillor's thoughts on that and Mr. Buckleman's. Sarah. So as Alyssa stated, I think as far as for outreach and communications and appointments, I just think if the town manager has an idea, you know this is his committee. If he has an idea of how he thinks the role is and it would help us to then know what our role is. Thank you, so I have had that conversation with certain councillors. In terms of the resident's advisory committee, there isn't a lot of direction in the charter. It's basically a one sentence thing and the way I envision it is that it's not the public participation, the committee participation officer's role that they're augmenting. It's really designed in my mind the way I read it to assist the town manager in making appointments or referencing appointments. Consider that you may have a new town manager who doesn't know the community as well and would want to talk to other people about making appointments. There's an important responsibility for the town manager to make appointments. So the resident's advisory committee would be and able to advise, it's an advisory committee on what those, who would serve well on which committees. It's because it's sometimes it's a chess game as you know or not chess game, but you're a puzzle trying to figure out who serves well on which committee and who works well together, that type of thing. And that this is someone, a group of people who would be useful to have that conversation with. And I think that that's, you know, I'm happy to come to an OCA meeting anytime if I'm invited and engage in this type of conversation. Some people perceive the resident's advisory committee as an outreach arm, I don't. I see that as being the job of, I mean the counselors are doing a tremendous amount of outreach. I think that the, you know, the community participation officers are doing a tremendous amount of outreach. And I see this as more as a consultation and a vetting process for the appointments and having that conversation with the town manager about are your appointments aligned with the requirements of the charter, the charter list, a couple of different things that town managers supposed to take into account when making appointments. And so it's sort of as a testing mechanism for the town manager before those get relayed to the council for confirmation. Pat. One of the things I've been concerned about is diversity in appointments to all committees. And so it feels important to me that we are aware of who applies, what happens. You know, our people of color, I'm not saying this is true, but are people of color being rejected even if they have extra speed expertise or now there's too many mothers out front people so we can't have more. You know, what are the assumptions and how do we know the assumptions of the residents who are gonna be advising you? And I have a personal experience with someone I'm close to being rejected from a committee, not in your tenure, but at the time she was working for the Institute of Community Economics and which did a lot of land trust work. She was being wanting, they wanted to bring her on to planning. And at the discussion of her application, one committee member said, oh, she sounds like she has an agenda and so she was never interviewed or anything else. And the only reason she knows that is because the guy who asked her to be on the committee was there and related. So I'm not saying that's what you're doing or any committee is doing right now, but it's a concern and an ongoing concern because Amherst doesn't always live up to his professed values. I'm going to suggest that the Outreach Communications and Appointments Committee take the town manager up on his offer to have this conversation and that if other counselors are interested, they obviously can go to observe and behave accordingly. Okay, all right? Yes, Alyssa. And to further entice you to consider looking at our meetings, let's understand that we have at this point as much as we've been working especially hard on process that you heard already that I was frustrated by because we're not going to get to do what we want associated with Planning Board and ZBA. But in terms of all our confirmation of town manager appointments, we have zero information at this point as to how that's going to work. We have zero information on what we'll be able to tell you associated with demographics, on what we'll be able to tell you about the possible pool, on why individual people were chosen, which is one of the reasons we wondered what the role of the RAC was actually going to be since the words in the charter say, evaluation and selection of candidates. That is different than here's some advice of some organization to talk to about possible candidates. It says evaluation and selection. So it is very much a work in progress. And so thoughts that you have can be shared with us individually or come to our meeting because I know you all don't have enough meetings to go to. But we're just actually not ready yet because we don't have enough information to know yet. Okay. I'm going to suggest we move on. Dorothy, Steve or one of the other four co-chairs? Of the Community and Economic Development Committee charge. Ad hoc. I'm sorry, I missed rules of procedure. Alyssa? Surprisingly, we're adding liaisons and finance committee resident appointments to our meeting next week. Anything else? Okay. Dorothy, you're speaking for the committee tonight. I'm giving a very brief report. We met twice. We came to agreement on a revised charge which you will get in a few days. And one of the major things that we did do was to suggest a changed name of the committee because of something that we're envisioning in the future. We are changing it, recommending the change from committee and economic development to the Community Resources Committee because we strongly feel although economic development is very much an important part of the purview of this committee that there needs to be a multi-member town committee on economic development, which would include non-counselors. So, and there was some research done by committee members of what's done in other towns and this committee name is used, I believe, in Northampton for the same committee. So, that's really the committee, except that we wanted to strongly say the report, that we wanted to have a town-wide economic development committee formed and that the new Community and Resources Committee, we hope to get in action soon. And that's actually scheduled for the March 4th meeting for that charge. The Bylaw Review Committee has no report at this time. I'm sorry, questions. You'll have to just excuse me. I'm kind of like a little foggy tonight. So, I'm trying to envision this. This committee, the ad hoc committee is just putting forth a charge for the council committee, but it will be accompanied by a recommendation that someone, but not this committee, also draft a charge for a new committee of the town that will be an economic development committee. Is that what I'm hearing? So, we can expect that there'll be yet another committee, another ad hoc committee formed to form another committee in the near future. Yes, but it would not be formed by this committee. Bandit, Joe. So, my question was on a similar but slightly different line, although Evan brings up a different point, which is would such a drafting fall under GOL or not? This is one of the things that GOL is struggling with in some of its conversations as to what our charge actually is. So, it'd be good to hear from the council about things like that. But my next question was, is this charge, since we were given other charges to review, including one tonight, does this charge come to GOL before it comes back to the council? And if so, will we have it in time for this Wednesday's meeting at 10.30 so that maybe it could be acted on by the, on the fourth? Hi. Ask Cathy. Cathy. When it's submitted to the council, we put it in the format that you gave us. You know, we followed it exactly even with a footnote filled out on it. So, I think we changed it enough from the last charge that people saw. It would be good for people to first look at the content and then refer to say, do you like, because we were asked both what's the scope and what exactly will it do were the two big questions. So, the rest of it could then go. I just think you're gonna wanna look at what we wrote up as a group and say, you kinda like it or something else. You're meeting on Wednesday morning? Yes. Evan. We also have a scheduled meeting for Wednesday, March 6th. So, we could discuss this charge on March 4th, take a vote on March 4th to refer it and GOL can just go ahead and put it on our agenda for March 6th. All right. GOL has a entire year long schedule of meetings now that was actually, I believe, attached to the report that is in our packet. Okay. So, we will proceed with discussing particularly the substance of the charge and any other issues around the charge on our next meeting and then if it needs to be referred to GOL, it will be but it may not need to be. Yes, Alyssa. Just to follow up on how that was kind of a two-part issue is so the charge for the actual committee that we've been discussing various iterations of, that's coming back to the council on Monday and then may very well be referred and could already be added to the list of topics for GOL for the 6th but their other recommendation that's going to be accompanying that would that then be a secondary referral? And so, are we getting a two-part thing on Monday or are we only getting a and someday we should be doing this other thing or are we actually getting a two-part thing on Monday? And the reason I ask that is because if we're getting a two-part thing, I just cannot emphasize strongly enough to please find out why the TCRC failed and why we don't use the EDIC before you just come up with a brand new charge for an economic development committee. Okay. You're not getting the second committee recommendation. It was just that in terms of the name we thought about that this committee would probably come into being relatively soon and it would be very confusing for townspeople to have an economic development committee and a community economic development committee. So that's why we did the name change. If you need to have me read the items that we proposed it cover, I could do that or you could wait to get it in your packet. We'll wait until next week. Okay. All right. Anything else on that ad hoc committee? All right, bylaw review. There's no report at this time, Pat. We could tell you quickly we've had our first meeting and we reviewed the work of the previous committee and what their guidelines were. We set up a meeting schedule and we're ready to begin work this Friday, I believe. Great. And your chair is Bob Ritchie? Not been decided yet. Yeah, we're gonna be collaborative. Yeah, it hasn't been decided yet. And Pat, I don't want you to see this as a correction but when we say meeting schedule, it's not like GOL's meeting schedule. We were able to find two times to me, like out of forever because this is starting to get tough. This is starting to get tough in terms of all the commitments we all have. Thank you. So I'm impressed that you came up with a year-long schedule. Okay. Any further conversation on that? Thank you. We have approval of minutes. I moved to approve the February 6th, 2019 Station Road Bridge funding public forum. Is there a second? Second. Yeah, we got a second. George got it in his hand. George is the second in this case. Are there questions, corrections? You've seen these, we've given you an opportunity to edit them in the past. Anything else? Questions, corrections, changes? Seeing none, call the question. All those in favor are approving the minutes for February 6th, 2019, first Station Road Bridge funding public forum. That is all those in favor? Okay. There's 12 and then one abstain, which is Ms. Brewer. I'll move to approve the minutes of the February 6th, 2019, Station Road Bridge funding approval and orientation to town departments. Is there a second? Second, Pat. Comments, corrections, changes? All those in favor? And that is all but Steve and you're abstaining and Alyssa abstaining. Okay. And the minutes of February 11th, 2019, I move to approve them. Is there a second? Second. Mandy Jo, changes? Yes. One thing I didn't catch, I was rereading them this afternoon. Page two, public comment. The third public commenter, Mr. Hockman, 51 Arnold Road, if I could pose an amendment to add Pelham because that address is in Pelham. That is correct. And I think it's important to know. And he did make that point when he introduced himself. So. Okay. Consider that a friendly amendment. Is there any other changes, corrections? Okay. All those in favor? Opposed? Huh? You weren't here? Oh, abstain. Okay. To Darcy and Alyssa abstained. Any, okay. Town managers report, Paul, highlights. Thank you. You have my report. And I wanna start off by actually thanking the council for the amount of time and effort you've been putting into taking on this important task. I think you've sort of already referenced the amount of efforts that you're... How hard it's starting to get to schedule things. But we have more coming up. So tonight you had your SharePoint training. Next week we are inviting you or the Musanti Center is inviting you for a tour of the Musanti Center. You would meet at the Musanti Center, which is across the street in the lower level of the bangs at 530. Totally volunteer if you'd like to take that tour or not. And then next up is once the weather changes, we would request the opportunity to give you tours of facilities for the town. I think that it's really important. Our staff would be very excited to give you the tours, but we don't wanna do that until we're beyond the bad weather. All right, my next cup of joe, this is not on here, but will be on Friday the 15th, I think, looking to go to Atkins with Fire Chief Nelson. Continuing to monitor the events at Hampshire College and recognizing that whatever happens there will have an impact on the town and being engaged and as best we can as a community in the decisions that they make on their campus. Board of License Commissioners had their second meeting today and they seem to be working. It's a very engaged group. They've put a lot of time in as they are educating themselves and taking action, approving licenses and things like that. I want to mention the community participation officers. So this continues to be a work in progress. They are meeting at least twice a week, communicating with each other, thinking about how they can be involved, wanting to get more feedback from the council and exactly how they can best serve you. We've had discussion today about the district meetings, what their capacity is for engaging in that and what role you want them to play in terms of how much organization, whether you need people in attendance or not that type of thing. So we want to have that as a conversation in terms of how you would like to engage staff and we've had this conversation a bit. It's an important conversation because you're all, at least 10 of you, are responsible for having district meetings at least twice a year and we want to make sure that we kind of standardize what the expectations from staff is and there are lots of different ways to do that. So I think we're looking forward to having that kind of conversation probably with the OCA committee when the time comes that they're ready to have that conversation. But in the meantime, as best we can for the district meetings, we'll support those. And we've had some conversations about different ways to engage staff in your district meetings or in other venues that might be something other than your district meetings, open to whatever thoughts you have on that. They have been working on the website. Focus has been on the town council website itself to try to bring that into an acceptable form so that people who are interested in town council activities, which I think is generating a lot of interest in the town can find the information they need as easily as possible. So to that end, we've created a separate calendar just for town council events and for your individual office hours and meetings and people will be able to subscribe to that. And if they wanna just say, they just wanna follow what's happening with the council and not have to do anything else with the rest of the town boards, they can do that. Trying to get your committee structure online to be uniform so that all the committee's spaces look the same. Margaret, as you heard tonight, if you're here for the SharePoint training is working very hard with Sean, with others about getting our processes in place and figuring out how SharePoint fits into our public, our need to put material on the website and making sure our internal processes are in shape and who's gonna do all the work. And so we're working through it pretty successfully, I think, but it takes time. And so if you can be patient with us and have suggestions for us, we're very open to those suggestions and trying to get this into a well-oiled machine, which is what all of our goals are. And the only other thing that I wanted to mention, I think, was this Saturday you will have your four towns meeting at the high school, typically it's at the middle school, but it will be at the high school in the cafeteria. And so that is scheduled from nine to 1030. We will post that as a council meeting, but on top of that, it is the weekend that is known for having parties. And so that's where we typically work for, we would typically stage at the middle school. So if you go to middle school, you'll see a lot of police cruisers and that's where everybody comes, they get their instructions and things like that. So that's why the meeting had to be moved to the high school. So in terms of you'll see a heavy presence of police officers from various communities standing on street corners, just having a heavy presence, being there, helping people do what they wanna do, but be responsible about it and making sure all residents are being safe. A lot of planning has gone into that. So hopefully that will go off well. The big determinant in how what happens on that day is typically the weather and the weather looks to be not so good, which is great news. That concludes my report. All right, thanks for the weather report. Town council comments. I really have nothing else to add at this point unless people have questions. Yes, yes. I recently got a call from one of the members of the Housing Authority Committee and they were concerned to get the East Street proposal when it was coming up on the agenda. And I realized I had no idea and I contacted Lynn and I got the information. But one of the things I was realizing is while I can't set the agenda, it would be really helpful to know what's in the pipeline. And that doesn't put onus on you to schedule it my way or something, but I really would like to know what's there. Thank you, and I totally agree with that. And I contacted Paul at that point to understand the status of the application and that will either be on the agenda on the fourth or the 18th, probably the 18th, that's what Paul's saying. Another item under future agenda items, this comes out of a email exchange that I had with Kathy and that is we'd like to ask Doug Slaughter to come at some point and talk about transportation. Now if he'd like to talk about the Board of License Commissioners, he's more than welcome to, perhaps he'd like to give us some reflections of its first moments, yes. So I did speak to him today and he's prepared at your convenience to be here. Okay, okay, yes. One of our alert viewers when Guilford Moren was giving his presentation notified a number of us that while Guilford talked about the way that construction services are procured as being designed, that build, Massachusetts has enabled another way which is construction manager at risk, which in some ways is a possibly a better way if you're dealing with complicated building types such as a high performance buildings. So it doesn't affect the work of the council directly at least at this point and it's sometime off in the future, but it should be noted that there is another way of procuring construction services chapter 149A if you're keeping the score at home, which is construction manager at risk and it means procuring the services of the contractor through a qualification based selection process, same way the architect is selected. Okay, yes, Alyssa. So to briefly follow up on that, is that the one that gets the writeups about how it actually didn't end up saving anybody money that they thought it was going to save them because that could be one point associated with that that came up with some school projects, but it is worth knowing that there are multiple ways of doing it and I thought he touched on that, but thank you. The other thing completely unrelated is from the town managers report associated with the North Amherst Library and just in terms of managing our constituents' expectations, it says there are three options. This will be in a future capital plan. It doesn't say which of the three options will be in a future capital plan and it doesn't really indicate if it'll be this year or 10 years from now. So I'm just wondering if that's something we can, if we wanna manage because JCPC will talk about it and then it'll come here, but it's just something that obviously District One, where I happen to live, is talking about a lot and they're planning to have a meeting focused on it soon and so it's an interesting situation we find ourselves in. If it's not really something that's for the town council to talk about yet, because it'll be a capital planning process, but to understand again, so we can manage expectations because saying a three-option thing will be in a future capital plan is maybe, I don't want people to assume too much. Andy, do you wanna speak to the issue since you're also chairing JCPC? Yes, and I guess I'll do a disclosure really quickly because as was done previously, my wife is an employee of the library system and works at the Northamers Library. However, I don't believe that creates a conflict for the question of looking at the capital plan. The joint capital planning committee has been developing 10-year plans. I think that it is our inclination to continue to develop 10-year plans, which is longer than specified in the charter, but the charter sucks, but really in terms of the minimum. So I think that we will have to talk about where that place is in, but it gets back into the presentation that you previously heard from Mr. Mangano, and so I think that the JCPC will be taking that up. I just don't know how quickly we will be able to do that because we have to work through the other processes that are in place and see where they fit in before we can start talking about placing another significant project, and the same will be true for people who are asking about Senior Center and some other proposals that have been out there for a long time, also. Yes, Dorsey. I have just one more listed agenda item, and I'm just referencing Tim Holcomb's email from yesterday. This might be something we could, I can't talk. This might be something we could put on as a very quick resolution on one of our meetings to support the legislation that would change the state seal that's been, oh, thank you, supported by our two state legislators, and might be something we could do at the beginning of a meeting during the resolutions and proclamations. It was an email that we got yesterday with a recommended resolution in it. It's possible that not everybody got that. To clarify, I think five counselors received that, the three at large and the two district five counselors. Okay, all right. Could you please forward it to me? Sure. Thank you. Are there any other items? I do know that we have one other resolution coming up next week and it's regarding the Tibetan resolution, right? And Alyssa and I attended the event on Saturday, what day was that, Saturday? Saturday, and it was just lovely, and they really honored Jim McGovern, who has played a large role in the filing of legislation regarding Tibet, and trying to restrain China, frankly. So are there any other comments or questions from counselors? Any other items not reasonably anticipated? None are my part. No executive session, do I hear a motion? Yes. Wait a minute, what time is he listed for? Hold on, hold on. Steve. Steve, 9.58, you already missed yours. Steve, okay, what is it, Steve, that you think we skipped over? We didn't, okay, you're sure? Okay, please let me know by the way, if there is a change in your plans to attend any of the school events because you will be recognized and introduced by the facilitators at the beginning of the event. And also, please carefully read the somewhat lengthy email I sent earlier, since we spent a lot of time getting both opinions from Paul and Margaret on our attendance at these meetings and our kind of do's and don'ts. And also, I spent some time with Anastasia Ordinez making sure I understood what the flow of the program would look like. And we're, they're really looking forward to our participation. So do I hear a motion to adjourn? Is there a second? Sarah, all those in favor? Let the record, oh, opposed. Okay, let me say that the person who won tonight's lottery is, well, it's a toss up between Evan and Dorothy. Evan, it's closer to 10-15, you get it this time. I think I said 11 something. Did you? Oh, you're right, yeah. Oh, it's definitely Evan.