 And I'm going to welcome everybody to our Amherst Community Chat for Thursday, February 25th. Today, we are excited to have Library Director Sharon Shari, or some of you might know her as Sharon Sherry, the Director of Libraries. We have Trustee Alex LeFave on board as well, and the Capital Campaign Chair Kent Ferber, all on board to discuss the Jones Library Building Project today. As usual, myself, Brianna Sunred here, and your other host, Town Manager Paul Bachman. Before we ask our special guest to introduce themselves and get started into the conversation on the Library Project, I will invite Town Manager Paul Bachman to give any general updates that he has. Brianna, yeah, so the good news, exciting news for us is that we've been designated along with the City of Northampton as a regional vaccination site. That means that we will have doses of the vaccine coming to the town along with the City of Northampton. We will be running our vaccine clinics out of the Bangs Community Center. We don't know how many doses we're going to get. We're hoping to get between the two of us about 5,000 a week, but how many the state actually sends to us is another question. The challenge for this is going to be that when we become a regional site, it means it's open to the entire state. That's the deal we made. And so people from anywhere can sign up at the exact same time. So it's not reserved for members of the community. Previously, we were charged with serving Eastern Hampshire County. This will be a statewide site and that will, you know, there's intense competition for a vaccine right now because they just open it up to everybody 65 plus and that's many million people, some of the large number like that. And we're getting like 125,000 doses of the vaccine a week. So clearly not enough shortage of supply. We will open our website for registration on Monday at 11am. We hope to know by Sunday night how many doses we're getting so that we are only scheduling people who the number of slots that we have doses for we don't want to open up slots and then have to tell people the doses didn't come in. So that's, that's really our big news. I mean, the other thing is the numbers that you mass are, they've changed their operating posture. They've gone down a little bit. You know, the warm weather is bringing a lot of people outside, which is kind of exciting, but you know, COVID is still with us and we're fighting back. Great. Thanks for that update Paul. So I just want to, before I invite our special guest to introduce themselves I just want to remind those who are joining us live to please feel free to use the Q&A function or to raise your hand in zoom in order to ask your question throughout today's session. So without further ado, I'm going to go and invite our special guest to introduce I'll start with who's in my top left and that is Kent Ferber. Thank you very much. I'm Kent Ferber, and I've been a resident of Amherst for 45 years, and I was a trustee of the library at one point in the 90s. But lately I joined the feasibility committee that helped design this project and then have been working hard to educate the town about it, and then to raise the money. That's the separate fundraising component of the project. Excellent. Thank you. So I'm going to move on to Alex. Hey, thanks. I'm Alex Lefebvre. I'm a trustee. I'm also on the buildings and facilities committee sustainability committee and design feasibility committees around the project. My family moved to Amherst in 2001 when my son was 18 months old. He is a cracker kid and arms kid and ARHS kid and now at home quarantine to kid, but we've been in the area for a long time. And I became a library trustee. So how long it's been now like five or six years? Mostly because for me, social justice is a really big issue for me and I was doing a lot of work in the elementary schools and survival center, and as a language partner at the library. And when there was an opening on the board of trustees it seems like a really good synergy of a place that all of these communities that are important to me come together. And so that's the work that I do is always from that lens. Great. Thank you, Alex. And thanks for being here today. And so last but not least, Sharon, if you could introduce yourself to those there's probably not many who don't know you but if you could introduce yourself that would be great. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Sharon Sherry. I'm the director of the Jones library. I've been directing the Jones for nine and a half years now. And born and raised in Western Mass went to my undergraduate is that is from is in PolySci from UMass Amherst, and I've been directing, gosh, public libraries for almost 30 years now. And it's an honor to be with you all. Thank you. So we have some questions that have already been submitted but I also want to invite again remind people in the room I just saw a couple new people enter raise your hand via zoom star nine from a phone or the q amp a function directly. You can pop your questions in there and I'll read them to our group. So the first question that might be a great stage setter for the rest of the conversation is what is the status of the library project now. What are some of the next steps and kind of what's the timeline looking like for this project. I'm going to let Kent answer that question. The Mass Board of Library Commissioners has awarded a grant to the library to help pay for a significant part of this. And that has been waiting for its funding. It now looks like we're online for this spring. And so the trustees after working on this project for 10 years have asked the council to commit to deciding whether it wants to go forward with this project by providing the town's portion of the financing and the trustees have asked the town to make that decision in April. So last Monday, the library made a major presentation for an hour which you can watch on Vimeo. That has almost everything you'd want to know about the project. And there are two public forums scheduled for the next Wednesday at 630 and then next Saturday the sixth at two. And there are obviously lots of opportunities for people to write and ask questions, make their voices known to the council a good many people have. But those will be the next steps. If the council turns the project down, the library will have to go back to the drawing board and figure out what options they have. And that will be with some direction from the council about how much they have to spend a couple of repair options so called have been developed, but they're not nearly as polished or finished as the proposal for the project. They definitely need a lot of work before going forward. If the town approves the project, then the MVLC will, as soon as a contract is signed with at the state will provide the first 20% of the 1328 million they've awarded, which will allow the library to begin in earnest with the drafting of construction documents, finally settling on a design for what we have to date is just what's called schematics, and they need to be finalized so that a bid can be a request for bids can be put out, and then a contract award. That will take probably a year or so, and then construction in the meantime then if the project goes forward. The library has to be has to begin getting ready to move out for the time that construction will take place. And there's a lot of work thereafter. In the meantime, also there is a fundraising component of the financing of this. And once we know we have a project for sure which we haven't had until this point and which in fact has impeded our fundraising rather substantially there's a number of professional granting sources and applications and banks and historic tax credits and the state cultural facilities fund that are just not going to accept an application when there's so much uncertainty about whether there's going to be a project so once that happens, and uncertainty is removed we will go into high fundraising gear, and I can talk about that a little bit more later. Thanks for for setting the stage for us we've got a couple of questions in from the room that I'm going to ask now to our guests and feel free whoever's the best of you to speak to. The first is what is the square footage of the latest design and what was cut from the initial design submitted to the MVLC in 2016 and MVLC for acronym busting sake is the Massachusetts Board of Library commissioners. Yeah, so right now, I actually do have that figure in front of me right now the designs are at 61,296 square feet. And basically what has happened was, it got, it has been shrinking the architects have been working on that due to concerns for, you know, a smaller footprint. But also, as we get into design development, further efficiencies will be happening. So, so that square footage is kind of like a moving target, if that makes sense. So nothing specific has been cut. It's more about the architects doing what they do and, and gaining those efficiencies. And I can, I can add on to that as well so part of that was because the sustainability committee gave direction to the architects to make the most efficient library possible. Certain things relative to heating cooling and so there are spaces that actually could be condensed because once we know how by paying the architects more money and telling them what we wanted out of building efficiency. And they gave them more clarity about what the systems would look like, which then allowed them to shrink certain spaces because instead of having an unknown space for heating cooling etc. You now know what you need. So nothing has been cut out of the program from the nblc it's just fine tuning and working toward efficiencies that we've been able to gain through the through giving the architects more information. I'm sorry, I'm, you know, I'm not muted. Let me emphasize that the program we would, since the application, the library has definitely indicated to the to the nblc that it will fulfill the program that what the activities that the library wants needs to conduct in there will be maintained. Those have not been cut. It's just been able to translate that into a building is a moving target. All right, great. Thank you. So a couple more questions came rolling in. How much of the community campaign fundraising is in hand at this point, not counting pledges or spent funds. Well, the answer to that is pretty simple, not very much, because nobody is, we don't want people to give us cash that we would have to return if the project returned now. So we have received a request of $273,000 that of which about 120 has been spent, but it's been spent almost all with a very little exception on either the expenses of a campaign that are built into the budget, or the expenses of the project for example, the cost of coming up with the sustainability changes had to be paid for and those came out of that request. But other than that, the rest of it is pledges. Great. Anything, anything you guys wanted to add Alex just to be clear, the amount of those pledges are now a million $50,000. And so people are saying, okay, if you go forward with this program, we are behind you. And in fact, the number is 36,000 more than we reported to the town council last Monday. Speaking of the presentation that was made on Monday this next question references a figure or a statement that that was made during that so how many of the, I'll make sure I get this number right 227,000 visitors mentioned during the presentation were to the Jones library building in person, how many went beyond the front desk. And this person says a quick calculation gives over 60 people for 10 hours a day for 365 days a year. Yeah, so I didn't get all the added calculations but the 227 figures the number of people that come into the Jones building. There's even more people that go into the, you know, the branch, the branch attendance is is not included in that 227,000 figure. But once people come into the building we're not tracking them I we don't, you know, we have no way of knowing where they are in the building. I'm just clarifying. And I would add to that figure and I don't have it off the top of my head but I mean, you know, our meeting rooms, when we're open our meeting rooms are booked here around our attendance in our programs are fully booked here around so I think you definitely have people who come in to use the computers because they don't have computer access or internet at home, but then you also have people who are coming to attend the meeting. Language learners who are coming in to attend tutoring you've got so I mean it's, yeah, we just know the numbers that walk through our door and use our programming services and facilities but unless they're attending a specific program where we're tracking may get the closest thing you can look at would be our circulation as well which is another number which we are the, what number are we in terms of circulation Sharon. Let's say 450 just at the Jones. I mean in terms of how much we circulate compared to other libraries. We are the 20th busiest public library in the state of Massachusetts it's a it's a really important. That's an important statistic to really understand because when you first walk into the Jones library, you just, you just see this really sweet home right and and you think well, you know you're walking by your neighbors and. Okay, so this is Amherst this is our cozy little Amherst but but when you look at library services across the entire state of Massachusetts, we are right up there 20 out of 350 to 53 different public libraries throughout the state. That's an impressive and impressive statistic. And to piggyback on sorry Kent to piggyback on what Alex was just saying. So, so all of our programs that are going on virtually, you know that's a separate figure. But also, where else was I going with this lost lost my train of thought go for it can. I think we should be clear that the usage of the library while it's closed is completely different from when it's open. And when it's open the library is required by the state to accumulate the most incredible collection of data of usage that you can imagine I can tell you for example that our computers are used 29,000 times in a year. The meeting rooms are used 1000 times a year 16,000 hours of ESL tutoring and meetings go on during the year. I mean it's just an incredible number that's all publicly available on the MVLC website I'm not making it up and they keep track of this every year. So for all you data lovers out there, check out their website and check out Joan stats a lot of that information was new for me so that was really interesting as a, as a patron of the library that's really, really cool I did not realize that. I have a question next and maybe this is something Paul is going to chime in on but this is about, where does the town contribution to this financing fit in the overall picture, especially when taking in consideration with the three other major capital building projects that we're facing. So yeah so we have four major capital projects, DPW library, schools and fire and one of the challenges, since I started here was how do we get all these things happening at the same time. This week or last week we presented a plan that mainly developed by our finance director Sean mangano that shows how we can do all four projects within a budget. And with one debt exclusion so that means we will be doing these things without tax increases, other than the normal tax increases, except for the school, the school which we can't do any of the other three buildings if we don't do a debt exclusion for the school. And the town has already approved previously on the previous school project approved a debt exclusion for that so we sense that there is a acceptability of that debt debt exclusion for the school. So this plan shows this project able to move forward with the contribution from the town with a significant fundraising effort by the by the library trustees which Kent is leading up and it's already shown some significant success there. And with a big grant from the board of library trustees is dependent on a large grant from the Massachusetts school building authority. So taking advantage of those two grants, the debt exclusion and the making room in our capital budget in our budget in our operating budget to make sure we can fund the debt service on all four of these projects. And the last piece of it is, for years we have been building up our reserves, we've been very disciplined about our spending. Sharon can tell you how many times she's come into ask for more funds and we're saying we've been very disciplined about our, what we're approving, because we were trying to purposely build up our savings account, and that savings account will be used to shave off the peaks, so that we don't have to do additional debt exclusions. It's a strong plan. It's a it's a conservative plan. It's, it doesn't take risks because it's something that we feel like we could continue to service all of our operating budgets, and we reserve funds for our normal capital budgets to vehicles. The normal things that we buy ambulance is a lot of stuff that we normally buy in the course of our operations so I think it's something we're doing workshops. Sean Mcgano did one last night he's going to do another one on March 6, where we have a tool that people can participate in and they can put in different numbers and say well what if we did it this way or that way. And let you see the sort of calculations about it. So, I think we're I think we're on a good, we have a good path for it. And that tool that Paul mentioned is online on our website on our capital planning page you can access it there also from our engage amherst.org we have a project page dedicated to finance the financial elements of these projects. The tool is also linked there. We do have a question that Kate just came in was a second independent cost estimate obtain. And where would one find the detail of the 2020 updated estimate from fantasy. Yeah, oh, that's a great question. So both cost estimates are on the Jones libraries website. If you can find the building project page, you will see the 2016 cost estimate and you'll see the 2020 cost estimate. Can I can I add to that also. So I think there's two important things to understand about the cost estimate so the cost estimate is a construction cost estimate. But the actual project cost estimate is something that's generated by the owner project manager, which is Collier's so the total cost of the project, which was in the nblc grant, and then the total updated cost that we have now that we presented to town when they asked for the application are created from the owner's project manual man that can't stay out here is project manager. So, there is a fantasy for cost for both but to have the totality, you have to understand that's an opn generated number not simply a cost of construction number. And can I also add that both of those, if you, if you look at those, those both of those estimates and then you put it in the context of the larger estimate that was sent to the nblc you will find contingencies in both people who are worried about cost overrun can relax quite a bit because there's generous contingencies in there. Okay, thank you we've got a couple more questions here. One is, when is the town council going to meet to vote on this project is there a set date or an anticipated date. Maybe Paul has that one. Yeah, so the goal of the council is to vote in April. So that's not that far away. Yes, six, four to six weeks away. That's why there's a lot of time to for the trustees and the council quite these are council sponsored listening sessions and discussion sessions that they've scheduled for March 3 and March 6. People always want to know the broader context which is how we doing it. I'm interested in this but I want to know how it fits in with my overall budget so that's why we did the four capital thing so people have all the information they need to weigh in. So what you do is communicate to their counselors they the council is the group that has to actually cast a vote and that's where the decision will meet in there. They've teed this up for April. And if you're not sure who your counselor is your district is you can you can go to Amherst MA dot gov slash town council, all the direct emails to all of the counselors are there, and should you want to reach out to your respective counselor. We've got five we're coming up on our half hour I know it goes really quick. I'm going to give a last call to live attendees in the room feel free to pop your questions into Q&A or raise your hand. I do have another question here. That relates to the town council's vote. If the town does not approve the project. What are the, what are, what are the options and what will they cost. Can we speak to a little bit of that scenario. You know, so, so Ken, I'm sorry, Paul. I'll start and then you can take it so you know just like with any, any capital project that the library has or any town department. The, the trustees would go back and say, okay, what are our biggest needs and we would attend a lot of meetings and, and we would end up going through the JCPC process so that's, that would be our next step if town council votes it down. Yeah, it's an up or down vote if the town, if the town council authorizes us to borrow the money, we will do that. If they say no, we don't want to borrow the money, then this project as to conceived does not move forward. It's just pretty simple. But we should be clear that we have some idea that the alternatives aren't that great. I mean, we got a very specific and you can fit another 15 page estimate you can find it online that will cost 14 to $16 million just to repair the hvc system the elevator, the skylight and some tuck pointing and interior painting. And that's about the amount that is called for by the participation of the town in this project. So the alternatives aren't particularly good, and they have to be faced up to. There's no way that everybody agrees that this building is unsatisfactory. I mean, you know, it doesn't represent the town of Amherst, it's not usable. And just to do basic repairs, we now have a pretty good quote is about 14 to $16 million. And that's a good point because all of our buildings are in that same boat. You know the same with the DP the DPW roof is falling in if we're going to have to put a new roof on it that you know fire stations inadequate. The schools are in the same boat. So if we don't borrow the money to move forward on these projects, we're going to be spending money on other things on those existing buildings. And we should understand that this is this is totally predictable because we've gone 30 years without addressing these particular needs. I mean the last as far as I know the last major capital construction project was the police station. We have a couple more questions that rolled in so I'm going to try to get these asked before our time is up. This is a follow up to a previously asked question. So with what firm performed the second independent construction cost estimate other than fantasy and where would one find that document. Okay, so maybe there's a little confusion so as part of the MVLC grant process the opm generated a project budget. There was a cost construction there was a construction cost estimate done by fantasy. The committee went back and said, and paid FAA additional funds to then take the existing plan that we had, and to make it a more sustainable design, then the architects, redid their plan and then again worked with fantasy to go back and look at the construction costs based on the newer sustainable design so there's no, there's no other. You've got Western builders who did the repair estimate that Cune riddle then reevaluated brought up to 2020 with accessibility and brought it up to current construction costs. And then you have fantasy and find gold Alexander, which are the renovation and expansion projects. So those are going to be the only construction estimates are going to be Western builders and fantasy, and then total project costs are coming from Cune riddle for the repair, and from the opm for the renovation and expansion. And as Sharon said they're, they're all on the website. The person who asked that question if they have more follow ups. I'm sure that you could email in and we could get more details connected to that. Another question here is what happens if the town does not approve an override for the schools. So what an override for the schools means is that the the money for that debt that we borrow is done is put on the tax bill over and above what your normal tax bill is. And if the if the voters say we don't want to take on that added tax burden, then that has to be folded within the existing budget of the town. So the council would take that into consideration as to whether they should move forward with the school or not whether that we can carve out the that pretty significant kind of borrowing in our existing budget. Great. Thank you. I think we need to do a schoolhouse rock episode on on debt exclusion overrides coming up in all these chats. All right, so we are at the end of our time I do want to give a moment or two for our special guests to leave the attendees and later viewers with any calls to action anything that you want people to do or be aware of in the coming weeks. You know, one of the things that Kent has said, it has to do with with with the amount of money that that the capital campaign committee and the trustees have brought in so we have this $14 million grant. We have this $1 million CPA grant we have over a million dollars in pledges. So that's a substantial amount of money that would be turned away if this project is squashed. So I kind of want people to think about the magnitude of that. Excellent. Thank you Sharon Alex or Kent anything that you want to just encourage people I there is this process has been going on for 10 years. I came into the process as a trustee sort of halfway through and I'm very familiar with how much there is to catch up with. But the presentation that we gave to town council that was presented by the person who does the historic tax credits the architects who came up with the design. And I think for people who did the individual parts of these pieces there's a nice one hour presentation and I think if somebody has an hour and really wants to understand the project. I think it's a it's an hour. Really well spent to look at that presentation. Well done. Excellent. Okay, and I just want to say following what after Alex said I believe. Yeah, that recording from Monday's meeting it should be up there very soon so you'd be able to catch that on our YouTube channel. All right. The website, the project section of the Jones library website is a Niagara Falls of information recordings of the chats we've had all of the anything you want to know about this project is there. Some weekend activities for everybody who really wants to dive in. All right, well we are up on our time again if there were questions or follow us please feel free to, you can easily email them to info at Amherst and made up of and I can get them into the right hands of who would be able to answer that. This will be up on our YouTube channel in case you want to share with friends or refer back to it. So thank you everybody for joining us and thank you again to our special guests for taking some time today. Thank you.