 other person, but we'll make sure we catch her. Thank you, Athena. Yeah. Hey, Gabriel Ting. Welcome, Chief Ting. Yeah, hello. Hi, everyone. I want to let you know that we're not going to need, unless you're interested in rental registration and rental permitting, which you're more than welcome to stay for, we're not going to get to NUSAN's house for at least an hour, if not more like an hour and a half. But so feel free to hang out if you want, or rejoin us somewhere between 5.30 and six ish. OK, I'll come back. See you in a bit. Thank you. Thank you. OK, so we are going to start. We're missing one committee member, but we're going to get started. So I'm seeing a presence of a quorum. I am calling this regular meeting of the Community Resources Committee of the Town Council to order on October 19, 2023 at 4.30 PM pursuant to Chapter 20 of the Acts of 2021, extended by Chapters 22 and 107 of the Acts of 2022, and extended by Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2023. This meeting will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so via Zoom or telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means. This meeting is being video and audio recorded. At this time, I'm going to take a roll call, essentially, to indicate who is present so that we can also ensure that people can be heard here and be heard. So I will start and note that Shalini Balmilne is not expected to join us today. So Pat. Present. Mandy is present. Pam. I'm here. And Jennifer. I'm here. We are also joined by town manager Backelman and our building commissioner Rob Mora. So welcome to Paul. We don't normally have Paul here. And welcome to Rob too. We're used to having Rob. We're going to get right into, oh, I think I didn't state the time. It's 4.32 right now, in case I didn't state the time. We don't have any public hearings. We are going to start with our action items. We're going to take the action items in the order they are on the agenda. The goal is to get through our permitting fee structure and everything we need to do with that. Within the hour, by about 5.30, do a little bit of time on the town manager goals and then move to the nuisance house no later than 6.00 PM today, but slightly earlier if we get through things earlier. We'll do general public comment, probably after permitting, rental permitting. So we might take that one out of order. We do not have minutes today. So we are going to postpone the minutes to the next meeting. It looked like Pam, you had a question before I actually started. Well, I'm sorry, you were rambling off what was something in different order. And I missed what you said about it being in a different order. Oh, I think we'll probably take general public comment between the rental permit discussion and the town manager goal discussion for CRC if CRC wants to do that, is when I'll probably do public comment. So someone remind me if I forget that because I sometimes do when I say that. With that, we're going to go right to then the rental permit discussion. And so last week we got our last meeting, we discussed the finance committee's memo to us and got through most of the documents, the bylaw, the regulations. And we did not get through the comments as it related to the permit, the inspected, the structure, the fee structure, or the fees themselves. And we just didn't have time. We talked a little bit about the structure. I had put fees into the structure just so we could see what they were. As I said last time, they were based on some of the options in the Excel spreadsheet, but they were never discussed here. So they're not like proposals necessarily. I just wanted people to see what it would look like in a document if we finally did that. We as a committee need to decide whether we're going to send actual fees over or portions of fees over as proposals to the finance committee to consider or whether we're just going to send back a structure that responds to their comments. To update you on other things. So that's where we're going to spend our time today is on the fees and the structure. To update you on the rest, I'm not going to put Paul on the spot, but I have no update on the letter that we have received. And so my plan is to continue with our work until we receive that update and continue with what we were doing and wait until we receive an update on when and how and where that letter can be discussed appropriately as a council or as a committee. Pam, you were raising- That was essentially my question. And I had it going through the letter from the attorney. I had some feedback on a number of the positions that were taken by the group and wanted to kind of get a sense of where best appropriate, Paul, I'm looking at you, to actually discuss our thoughts about what was presented to us. Paul? So it's a letter we have placed out on notice to our insurance company, although there was no litigation mentioned, but not actual. But we always do advance notice for that. I do not have comments back on from the town attorney. So I think we continue to work on this proposal, the proposed by-law, and then once you get there, we can share whatever the final form that you move it from, say, perhaps today to the town attorney. Thank you, Paul. My follow-up to that is that in my reading of that letter, I'm actually thinking that many of the points that are trying to be made refer mostly to the nuisance by-law, which isn't actually the rental permit by-law. And that the nuisance property conversation is probably where the bulk of the concerns lie in the association. Thank you for those, Pam. I don't wanna get into a full-throated discussion of this because we need to get some thoughts and opinions back from the town attorney before we do that, but thank you for those initial thoughts and things. So with that, would the committee, does the committee, here, let me, I'm just gonna do this. What we got to last time is, and I cleared, cleaned this up a little bit in terms of where we got last time was that we are, where's the deletion here? The consensus on this one was to ask KP law, and so we can forward that onto KP law when we get to a final document as to whether finance, to update you, Paul, you might have been there, but finance had a question as to whether what is now currently in red and outlined was legal. And so what, in response to that, what CRC recommends is that we ask KP law whether it is before we get to recommending whether to delete that as a subset of permit fees or not. So it would be remaining in there. So that's one of the ones we talked about from finance. The initial permit fee, we decided to add it, the request of finance. And we kept the difference in inspection fees too. And then we deleted the no-show fee, I think was the one that was on there, right? There's one we deleted last week that is now showing as deleted by consensus that wasn't related to finance. And so where we are right now is basically, I think where the committee is, is a new recommended structure, but now there's no, you see that there's numbers here, but there are no actual numbers attached to it. This was just for illustrative purposes here. And all. So I can open up the Excel spreadsheet and we can look at some options and see if we can get to something where we could send numbers over to finance and say, hey, these are what we recommend if finance wants to recommend fully funding the program through fees or if finance recommends using some other revenue for funding portions of the program, right? That's sort of where we got stuck the last time, but we're looking at that. So let me see if I can share this so that we can actually look at numbers and see. Okay, so I know it's small and you'll see the numbers I put in were based on option one. So I just moved them over once we make a decision. So there's inspection fee options, there's application fee options and then there's the estimated total revenue. So this is a new sort of slide or tab I did. Rob, as we know, Rob Moore has estimated approximately $500,000 a year, 550, I think. In terms of cost of the proposed program, the proposed bylaw. And so this here, his estimated cost was 440,000, I guess, is where this number is. And so this talks about which option you choose what it would raise and what potentially under those options the necessary budget support would be to give people an idea of under those fees, how close are we to a revenue-neutral fee structure versus requiring some operating support from somewhere? And so I added that to help people sort of add the numbers together. Application fee option one is in green because that is the option that this committee in its last report to the town council back in September or August thought recommended. So that's why application fee option one is in green. We had actually recommended that one as a fee option we thought was. Mandy Jo. Yep, Pam. Excuse me. Is this in our packet? It should be. And what is it called? If it's in our packet. It's titled three A fee structure samples 2020 309 28 proposed in response to finance. It's going to be a PDF in your packet. Although in SharePoint it's uploaded as well. And it's the third tab. So it's probably the third page. Yeah, it is in there. We just might not have gone down to the page. Yeah. Each tab is a separate page. So shall we start with the options or do we want to talk about revenue, neutrality and all and what we would recommend or anything to the finance Jennifer? So I guess I thought that we were going to present the program to finance and maybe a fee structure but that they finance would fill in the amounts. I don't really feel that that's in our purview to do that. So they seemed to struggle with the amount question too, which is why I'm bringing it back to us as to whether we want to potentially recommend amounts to them to discuss because they looked at this spreadsheet and got very confused and weren't sure what they were being asked to do. It seems to me they're being asked. We're saying they can say this is how much the program cost, if we're going to be revenue neutral, this is what we would have to fee and inspections would have to be. So it doesn't seem like that would be so complicated for them. I mean, I guess I'm missing something, but. They were, from my observations, they didn't know, they struggled with that question and what they were being asked to do. So they sent their questions back to us and we can decide as a committee whether we want to send them some options with this and do our best and say, hey, pick one or whether we want to recommend any. It's up to this committee. I just, this whole new, this entire tab is new in hopes of sort of laying some of those out more and we can talk about what options we might give. Pam and then Rob. Thanks. My question actually may be directed to Rob. We have gotten over time improved data on the actual number of units that are rented in town. And I don't know if we have anything since July as a better update for all that since it is kind of the basis for moving forward on this. I would love, love a really accurate here the number of rental units in town. One of the, a segue to that is that one of the, one of the suggestions made by a constituent and also somebody listening in on this program was that we talk at least briefly about using the number of bedrooms or basing a fee on the number of bedrooms. The question to Rob is aside from getting accurate numbers of units that are rentals, is there any possibility of getting the number of bedrooms as part of that? Rob? So the first question, the most accurate data is what you already have the July of 23. That's the 1,258 units that we're using for these examples. So that's going to be the most accurate count because we haven't done inspections of these properties. The bedroom count that we have is all based on the applicants, you know, information that they're putting into the application process. I have too many examples of where that's not accurate. So I wouldn't rely on that for the first round and probably look at that option, you know, for a future way of establishing a fee schedule but not at this time. Thank you. The other thing I wanted to mention about this tab was one of the things finance had asked us is how to maintain a fee that for owner occupied rentals that is no more expensive over the five years than the current fees they pay. So that's what this last sort of set of boxes is to show with the options that are option one, application fee option one that we had sort of endorsed two months ago and say inspection fee option one, what the total cost of the current fees would be over a certain number of years and what the total costs per five years on, you know, over five years, the average fee over five years and the average fee and all just to see what those differences are. And same with the other options to try and since they had asked for that comparison of trying to keep, and this was a per unit but that's not where it would. It would be current fees over five years. So it would be this column here or and then in the current fees over five years that have no inspections and the total fees over five years. So we would be comparing these two columns down to see what the proposed fee structure and fees in this tabs would cost versus what our current fees over five years cost total to get that comparison finance was asking for. I hope I under explained that sort of. So basically what finance wanted to know is right now the owner occupied unit, an owner occupied dwelling that has one rental unit in it pays $500 over five years. What is the current proposal for them to pay over five years if they get one inspection or if they get two inspections and is it equal to less than or more than what they are currently paying over five years? So does this column, that $500 what the proposed fee structure is under these sort of options in tabs one and two, what would they pay and how does it compare to what they pay now? But over five years because we're moving to sort of that five year inspection sort of thing. So finance wanted to sort of ensure that this number here in this cut loop, this number for at least owner occupied was no more expensive. The owner occupied in column F was no more inspection in expensive than the number in column G. They wanted those comparisons. So that's the other thing this does. So the question for our committee is what do we wanna do and what do we wanna send back regarding fees to finance? And we can look at any of the four tabs that are here. Paul. So when you, so under the bylaw you are responsible the council's responsible for setting the fees. That's how you've chosen to, you say we wanna set the original fees and then you give to the license commission. When you're setting fees, you look at a number of things. One is clarity to the payer of the user fees. Big piece of it for us is gonna be ease of administration. So the more detailed and complex you do every sort of layer you put in like owner occupied, not owner occupied, number of bedrooms, all those things add complications to the administration. So for most fees, when you're trying to set up a fee structure you try to keep it as simple as possible. So I would recommend that you reduce the number of variables that you can implement in this. Thank you, Paul. Thoughts from the committee on which document you want me to have on the screen. Which one helps you the most is the question too, Paul. Oh, I'm sorry, it goes down automatically now. Yeah, I know. Jennifer. So I guess, we want to not have it be overly burdensome for the staff, but when we first passed the bylaw back in 2013, it was basically one fee for every kind of structure. And that was felt rightfully so not to be fair that if you were renting one unit or 20 you were paying the same fee. So we have to have some variability to make it equitable. And that's where a lot of people have been asking about what column H is, which is the per unit sort of cost of the fee to see if it can be a little more equitable. So that's what I was trying to get with column H or at least calculate it so people could understand where it was. Pam. I wouldn't mind a short conversation about I'll just say the carrying capacity of this program. Right now maybe somebody can remind me but I think I remember that we have a building commissioner in the department, we had a senior but we now have again a senior inspector. We have an administrator person. What is the, I'll just say, what is the current cost of operating today's administration of nuisance and noise and building inspections, actually building inspections or that are complaint driven, not the ones that are new construction sign off on the CFO. What does it take to run the department today? Part of me wants to, certainly as a taxpayer, I would like to not add a burden to my tax to expand a particular program, but I want to acknowledge that we in fact today carry a certain amount of cost. What are we expecting to then add to this to make it a little more robust? Do we have the Delta? Rob? So right now we have one lead building inspector. So in the estimate that I gave earlier on, that's approximately $105,000 cost for the salary and benefit package for a full-time employee at that level. We don't have any other staff dedicated to the complaint program. So we share administrative, couple of administrative positions and I would estimate that each of those equal positions are about 25% of their time is spent during the renewal period or during periods of a little bit more busy work associated with the program, but they don't support the day-to-day work of the lead inspector. So that position had a $90,000 figure in my estimate. So I would suggest half of that. So if you're looking for just a ballpark number, it's $150,000 would be the current cost of the program. That one point I thought I saw that the cost the cost of the program was, I can't remember exactly how it was stated. So I just changed the numbers here, but it wasn't for an increased capacity. So if we were to, for instance, when Paul thankfully negotiated a strategic agreement with UMass, we had asked if UMass could provide two inspector positions. We came away, it looks like with about one. That would be a contribution to this effort because we are adding inspections. It seems to me that we, for that reason, can keep the fees fairly reasonable. So Pam, have I interpreted that comment correctly as indicating that the necessary operating budget support or the aimed operating budget support is approximately that $100,000, that that's what you would recommend the finance committee adopt in a fee structure potentially or that we would send over that we would request that the strategic partnership agreement housing funds be used to support this program in addition to fees. I'm seeing some nods from Jennifer and Pam. And that means that Rob's estimated 474 would become a goal of about 374 in fees. Jennifer. Yeah, so if I'm understanding this correctly, right now we have one and a half people, that's how we get to the 150,000? Yes, yes. And we're saying that we need two or two and a half. I mean, two additional or two altogether? The 475 includes three additional, two inspectors and one four or two, I'm sorry, two and a half additional, I suppose from the one and a half that we were talking about. And that's what we need to implement the program we're recommending. That's right. Okay. So I think if I would agree that if we need that 100,000 that's part of the strategic partnership agreement or some part of it, this would be inappropriate. I mean, this is how we, if it's for safe and healthy neighborhoods, this gets us, this is a key part of it. Pat and then Paul. Yeah, I'm just, I wanted to ask, what's the likelihood of us getting this $100,000 from UMass in the strategic partnership that's definitely tied to this program? Or is that just another type? No, we have it. We have it. Or this program? Well, we have 100,000 for safe and healthy. Yeah. Yeah, we have 100,000, but is it earmarked? Specifically for inspections. Paul. Yeah, so it's not earmarked for anything. It's in the strategic partnership agreement, but they give us some money. We decide how to spend it. And I think this is what you're, what this committee is saying is that it's an appropriate use of this money to support the rental registration program, which I think is what UMass's hope is as well. I think you should count on having that $100,000 as an outside non-tax payer subsidy of this program. Thank you. I needed to know. So that would mean we would be looking for numbers on this line here if we wanted to suggest some numbers to finance, which we don't have to do, that number to be approximately $100,000. Because it would mean the revenues coming in from both application fees and inspection fees are approximately $100,000 less than the estimated program costs that Rob had given. Do we want to potentially suggest some or change some of these application fee and inspection fee options to hand over to finance to give them as many choices as possible since they seem to struggle with that? Or do we wanna just say play with your own spreadsheet? Rob. You can tell me if you're not interested in this, but I had given an example possible fee schedule to the finance committee back in one of their first meetings. And my thought was to just take, start from our current fee schedule. So we're collecting $290,000 in permit fees right now. And everybody has been paying the $250 other than the reduced costs for the owner-occupied properties. And I had then suggested a $50 increment based on the increased number of units per property, which didn't generate that much more permit fee, but caused a resulted in a higher fee for the larger properties. That came out to about, that raised the fees from about 290 to 330, I believe, somewhere around there. And that's, something like that is a really simple way to establish a fee schedule. It's something our program can handle. And then from that point with Paul's confirming that the $100,000 from the strategic partnership is available, $150 inspection fee would bridge that gap. So it seems like we could look at reasonable inspection fees and starting from our current fee schedule and even further reducing the owner-occupied properties down to even $50 would still work just fine for that. So I just, I guess following Paul's comment is less complicated, it'll be better for all of us, including the applicants. Pat. That sounds reasonable to me right now. One question I have having gone through zoning where trying to make zoning changes around owner-occupancy, how, and there, how do we know that these properties are owner-occupied? Or because that seemed to be one of the concerns and the unintended consequences was you can sell a building and then it's no longer owner-occupied. How is that kept track of? Or is it at all important to keep track of? Rob? Yes, it's important and it's been difficult to keep track of, but where we are now and what we've done over the past year is probably the best position we've been in regards to that. We did a very detailed comparison and it really came down to mailing address versus property address that we're talking about. And what we do is we check the 100 in, I think it was 140, but that 100 in something properties that have claimed to be owner-occupied through the application process. And we confirm that by making sure that the mailing addresses match up and there's no other reason to think that the owner doesn't occupy the property. To be honest, there's been a couple that somebody's moving around or might have another home somewhere else and rents it out while they're away that we've had to work through but it's a very, very small number. And I think we're able to keep that 150 or 140 really well monitored. We also then month to month watch the transfers. So we'll compare that list with the owner-occupied list to make sure if any property changes ownership we're then again confirming we follow up with a letter to the owner of the property to just confirm that it continues to the owner-occupied. So I think we can manage that now. And again, this kind of goes back to having the additional staff will make it a whole lot easier. We have one person and part of some administrative staff that helps to do that. But we're working on making sure that's more consistently monitored. Thank you. So Rob, I just wanna confirm a couple of things that you just said. And I just put some of those numbers into option two since option two was the one that sort of the floating one option one we had as a committee looked at before. And you would say, and this says renewal but am I understanding you correctly that you would recommend not a different fee for an initial permit as a renewal permit like we were thinking of going to you'd recommend just one fee no matter whether you're renewing or it's your initial one and that it would be $100 for owner-occupied parcels with up to six units and 250 for all other parcels with and you said for each unit above one unit 50 extra dollars is that what your initial schedule was and would you then have a maximum fee? Yes, so in my example, I went up $50 and then at the 10 or plus unit property it maxed out at $700 and that was the max. Okay. Because my thought there, it gets to a certain point where a registration fee does get a little excessive even for the larger properties but I understand that we wanna have wanna charge more of those properties. And I thought the difference between 250 and 700 did that. And thought there was really no reason to reduce the fee for the properties other than the owner-occupied properties if you wanted to further reduce that I think that would be fine. Okay, so I would have to fix column F here because that one obviously takes $10,000 for whoever our 200 unit one is into that 527,000. I can't do that now, I can do that later but then for inspection we were exploring, let me go to the other one. No, having inspection fees that were different for the first inspection, so that initial inspection because you said that might take a little bit more time a renewal fee. So a different initial and renewal for the usual inspection but then also complaint fees and reinspection fees. And are you then recommending that we eliminate all of those differences and just have one inspection fee no matter whether it's for the program itself or in response to a complaint or in response to a complaint where say a violation was written up and you're coming out a second time. You'd recommend charging the same thing for all four of those types of inspections. Is that what I heard? Why not, right? I mean, everyone's having so much trouble with putting numbers into these schedules. I mean, why make it that complicated? If an inspection costs $150, let it cost $150 for whatever purpose where they're inspecting. The reality is we're probably not gonna charge it other than for the scheduled inspection, the five year inspection. It'll probably be very unique circumstances where we'll be charging it for other reasons but it'd be an inspection fee on our schedule. Thank you, Pam. Yeah, just looking at the math, if we have someone earning 105,000 max with all the benefits, et cetera, that's about $50 an hour. So if a person is going to do an inspection, whether it's the first or second time, it's definitely gonna take more than an hour by the time they've been there, written it up, confirmed documentation and done any follow-up, I personally don't feel that $100 is certainly not too much to ask. And that's kind of the base minimum for an inspection feels like it needs to be at least $100. Now, maybe there are some economies of scale if you're in a building that has, say, eight units and they all share a heating system. So you don't have to look at individual heating and individual ventilation systems, et cetera. Again, taking Paul's advice, trying to keep it simplistic rather than complicated, I would definitely be able to support at least 100 or a basic inspection fee. And if people feel that's low, then chime in. I think that is low. I think it should be at least 150, but I wanna hear from Rob more than myself. Yeah, I had suggested 150, I thought that was reasonable for all the reasons Pam just mentioned that we gotta figure there's gonna be some follow-up, some phone calls, it's not, not all of them are gonna be resolved with just the hour-long inspection. So there'd definitely be an average that has to get worked out there. And just another comment that you made about the mechanical spaces and things like that, if it's an apartment building, no matter what the inspection is of the dwelling unit, whether or not it has its own mechanical systems or it's shared, the common areas in a larger apartment complex or a larger apartment building, that's inspected differently. That's not this program. All those buildings have a periodic inspection from the building and fire inspectors that happened. And that's looking at the hallways and the stairwells and the egresses, the mechanical rooms, the sprinkler rooms, all of those things. And that will be part of this inspection. This inspection will rely on that being done. So this is truly looking at the dwelling unit and some buildings have their own systems and some of them have the shared systems. Nice to hear. Does this reflect a little bit of what the finance committee was trying to deal with that when there is an, they were looking at how to reduce the cost of the program and with less frequent inspections of say larger properties. But what I just heard from Rob is that let's take, let's take Puffton Village for an example. There are a number of head examined or inspected facilities there, units. I think Rob, what you were talking about though is not just what typically gets inspected by HUD, going into the personal dwelling spaces. Is that a correct assumption? So the HUD inspections are of the dwelling units. That's so that's comparable to what we're talking about in this program, not the larger systems of the building or common areas that aren't associated with the dwelling unit. They've got a checklist and they go through the individual dwelling unit for their inspection. Rob, Paul. So I really like the direction you're going. I think simplifying it, aligning it with how we've done it in the past, it'll be simpler for the property owners to understand. I think actually the discussion at the finance committee revealed sort of confusion about how the complexity of it and introducing some new features that they weren't really grasping right away. The other thing I would say is that, these are fees that will be reviewed by the Board of License Commissioners. So we don't have to, I think we should be looking at this as let's see how this works, let's see how it plays out on the ground. We don't know exactly how this is gonna work out in the inspections world. We have a pretty good handle on it, I think, but we will be able to review this annually to see if it's matching up with the way we've projected it. So I think we don't have to perseverate over like getting things down to the penny. I think just getting it within challenge distance would be good enough. Thank you, Paul. So what I did while people were discussing was fix the application fee option two for the guardrail of $700 max as best I could very quickly. So this J and K column now represents what Rob was just talking about from what I can guess. So it's option two down here, which is where I've been moving stuff. So 100 and 250 and 50 with, you'll see that this total number of rental units changed. I'll make better changes, but that's the total number above the one that would be there. I think I have to, it might actually be high. Let me, now that I think about it, let me see F2. Oh yeah, no, one too many. So now it's better. So it'll make more sense now. I think Rob was like, that's a little high from what I can't even have one too many cells in there. So that would be that. And then what I did here just for quick able to do it was I changed all of these to 150. This might not given how it was set be totally accurate at this point, but then right here in J and K is where those numbers add up to approximately 451, which would then have operating budget support or as we discussed, use of SPA funds at approximately 22,000 as an estimate, as Paul said, everything here is just a guesstimate at this point because we don't know. So thoughts of the committee on that as a potential option to send over, it would mean that on the other sheet, I've been toggling between on the screen share, the schedule, we would change that schedule to just inspection fee. And I can pull that up if people want to see that one too. Yeah, let's look at that, please. So that would mean we'd be looking at possibly not even going to KP law on item two here because that's in addition to what we currently split out. So we'd have to talk about that. We'd be deleting number one and two A and just have, you know, we'd clean it up. So it would just be one of these ones. It would not be both of them. And inspection fees, it would literally just say inspection fee colon 150. So I can do those track changes if people would like to see what that would look like. What it would be is. I thought it was 150. It's 100 right now, actually. But not 250, but 150. No, the owner occupied is currently 100, I believe. And the RL other parcels, Rob had recommended and all other parcels stay the same at the 250 we currently do. So that's what we would send over if we went with Rob's plan. Now we could play with some of these first. Wait a second, I just want to slow down half a second. A is based on option one, right? No, they're both based on option two now. Okay. Sorry. Still working on fixing everything. All right, I'm sorry. No, that's still working on fixing everything. And we could potentially change some of those numbers and see what that looks like in the spreadsheet if we wanted. Jennifer. Yes, I just wanted to clarify for myself. So the 150 inspection fee is what you pay once every five years. Well, that and any potential other inspection you have. But so I just want some clarification. Just Rob said chances are they wouldn't really be charging other inspection fees. So that's if there's a complaint made, I mean, what if you could just clarify that a little. They could charge it for a complaint or for a reinspection after a violation is found if they chose to. But Rob is saying that chances are they wouldn't just because it wouldn't really take that much of their time. No, I think what I was saying is generally just the way we operate, we would reinspect, if we went and did an inspection, things didn't pass, we would reinspect not charged for the second visit. We wouldn't be careless with that fee. But if we went back three times or if we went back twice over a couple of months and there's a pattern there, then we would use it. And that would be nice to have. We don't currently have the ability to do that in any of our fees schedules except under the health laws. And we do that only in the really bad situation. So I think it's good to have it there as an option, but I wouldn't count on it as a source of revenue. Okay, thank you. So we can remove that from the, if people would like to see, we could remove that from the estimated fees revenue so that you could see what the difference is then and what the total is right now, those complaint inspections are estimated in the other spreadsheet that I was showing, if people would like to see it without those in there, given that Rob might not, they might not be a general one, we can show it with just the renewal inspection fees estimated. I think that's a good idea because we want to be clear about what is happening. So, so what it means on this chart is that I've changed in option two, the followup inspections and the complaint inspection just to zero because that's the easiest way to follow everything through to the calculations. What it did was it reduced this number by about $45,000. And so here you'll see that 22,000 went up to about 67,000 which is still within the 100,000 number we'd be looking for. What is the committee's thoughts on potentially sending this over, potentially even cleaned up with just those options on there? I think you should simplify it for finance as much as possible, which is kind of sad to say. So what I could do, I've been modifying this one, I could delete basically everything in gray here so that it's just got the box here. I could delete option one completely, leave option two and just be option, right? Just modify it. Same with the inspections to leave to option two. What I could do is add notes in here that says zeroed out on Rob's comment that they may not charge but it would still be 150 or something like that or I could give them different numbers based on it there or not in other calculations but leave it in at 150 and just calculate it two different ways. And we could send that over to finance with a cleaned up version of this to remove the extraneous stuff essentially and label everything a little better than it's labeled now. Paul? Yeah, I don't think you wanna take away that the ability to charge that fee if you need to I think it's fine to zero it out to be conservative in your budgeting but if there's a recalcitrant landlord that require I mean, I think it's sort of you don't want it to be the residents sort of penalizing the landlord by calling for complaints all the time nor do you want it to be you do need something for the recalcitrant landlord. So I think what I would do is I zeroed it out so that we could see this column better so I could create two columns with complaint and reinspection fees charged and without those without them billed I wouldn't say charged billed the charge would be the same so that they could just see the sort of the range then it would be a range of potential options. I could fix that too. Yeah. It would be basic services and then based on the number of general complaints that require a follow-up that would be the other column of potential and what would create the range. Yes. So I can relabel that appropriately and create that range too. So is this, I'm going to stop this one and go back to this one because this is sort of what is response to some of their other things which is is this, I'd change what's in yellow and I'd unhighlight the green is this what we would like to send over at this point to finance. Paul. Just a question for Rob. The administrative fee appeal fee is that tied to something or is that going to be set? Is that tied to some other fee that we have? Yes. Let me show you what it is. It is the same thing the ZBA charges for their appeals from a decision of the building commissioner. So it's not directly tied to it but it was chosen because it would agree with the fee the town charges for appeals of the decision of the building commissioner. So is your intent just to leave it as a set number or do you want to tie it if one changes the other one change? Just leave it as is. I think our plan was to leave it as is and let the Board of License Commissioners set it themselves once they start handling the appeals. Makes sense. Committee thoughts? Let's clean it up and send it to finance. Do we want to formally vote on all three documents as sort of, I don't even know what the vote would be. Well, we did change them so we could vote to recommend the council adopt the three current, let me change the title of this one. Clarification, the 250 renewal or just a permit fee is per parcel, correct? It is not per unit. Yes, these are per parcel and for all other parcels it has a $50 per unit addition over the first unit up to a maximum of $700 per parcel which is 10, I think according to Rob, 10 units. Jennifer. So what you're saying is if you have a duplex you're paying any units rented separately you're paying $300 and it's not owner occupied. That was Rob's recommendation, yes, yep. So you're paying $500. No, if they're on the same parcel you're paying $250 plus 50. So I think we did the other documents last week and addressed finance's concerns so but we did not take a formal vote. So I think right now I will just so we have a formal vote let me get the titles. I retitled this one because it had big changes. So it's a motion to recommend the council adopt general bylaw 3.5 residential rental property as presented at CRC regulations for general bylaw 3.5 residential rental property as presented at CRC on and what's that one? Rental registration fee schedule as modified at CRC on October 19th, 2023 and forward those recommendations to finance. Is there a second? Second, the Angelus or whoever I don't care. I don't care who seconds it either. Oh, Pat's second. Pat's taken. Any further discussion? Seeing none, we will take a vote. We'll start with Pat. Aye. Yandy is an aye, Pam. Yeah. Jennifer. Yes. That is unanimous with one absent. I will write that at least the forward report to finance tonight since their meeting is tomorrow. And Paul, I will make sure you are included on that with all of these new documents tonight so that you can do you indicated in the meeting that you will forward onto the attorney the document. Thank you. Thank you for coming tonight, Pam. Where will we be able to see the corrected documents that we have to wait until two weeks from now and get it in the packet? I will, let me do this. I will send to the finance chair and Paul with a CC to this committee. Thank you. And you might want to CC Athena to get it into the finance committee packet as well. Yep. And that's another place you could find them, Pam. It should be in their packet tomorrow. Okay, so I will do all that. With that, we're going to move on to public comment. Public comment on matters within the jurisdiction of CRC will be accepted at this time. Residents are welcome to express their views up to three minutes. CRC does not generally engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter raised during public comment. If you'd like to make public comment, please raise your hand at this time. Is Rob already gone? Yeah. He's gone so quickly. When he says he's leaving at a certain time, he does. He leaves so quickly. Yeah, that's true. Good for him. 15 minutes ago. Yeah, he did tell me that, yeah. Okay, we have one hand raised. Renata Shepard, please unmute yourself. State your name where you live and make your comment. Hi, Renata Shepard, Justice Drive in Amherst. This was really upsetting to hear. So you now want to charge more to simplify. Who would that help? The $115 inspection every five years seems somewhat reasonable. I wouldn't think it would be that much, but it's not horrendous. However, keeping a yearly permit fee of $250 for non-owner-occupied property is ridiculous. This whole time, this whole year, two years, discussing this, all this talk of trying to make fees fair, this all went out the window. $700 is nothing for a large property, but $250 is a hardship for me. And for many other small landlords that have one property or maybe they are renting a place for two years or whatever. We are not that stupid not to understand three or four different permit fees based on property size. And again, other towns charge $15, $25, $50 for this annual fee. Please lower this $250 fee for one to five unit properties. Thank you. Thank you for your comment, Renata. I see no other hands. With that, we will close general public comment at this time. We are set to move on to the follow up to the joint CRC AMAH team meeting town manager goals for a couple of, you know, 15, 20 minutes. And then after that, thank you Gabe for your patience. After that, we will move on to nuisance proper nuisance house. Thank you chief team for your patience. I had asked people to look at one of the things and I'll just preface this again. One of the things when we had the joint meeting that CRC was going to look into was to potentially recommend some manager goals to the full council. And I guess then to GL who does the initial draft for manager goals based on our discussion. And so it is manager goal time. And so I had sent the CRC charge and the manager goals related to our charge out to individuals, to the committee so that you have them in one email. And so does anyone have any thoughts on any potential recommendations related to those that we might as a committee be able to make to the council slash GL as GL does that. I think it would be easiest if we go through the three goals related to our charge in order to see so that we're not jumping all over the place. The first one was climate action. So thoughts on that in terms of anything specific or not specific, if we are going to make any recommendations as a committee, it is something we as a committee would have to vote on just to be clear on that. Pam. I have a different topic, not climate action. Okay. Anything for climate action? So I will... I did, I just fell my note, sorry. Number three in the existing priorities says the third objective is take necessary steps toward and support the town in developing waste hauling bylaw. And I would like to make that more active and more current by changing it to something as contract or initiate and contract a competitive waste hauler system, et cetera, et cetera, that starts before the beginning of fiscal year FY25. Jennifer. I'm sorry, I should ask this at the beginning. This is not in the packet, is it? So neither document I put specifically in the packet because I only pulled excerpts out of two different documents. One is the GOL, not the GOL, the CRC charge which is on our website as what we are charged to deal with. And the other one is the manager goals which are on the manager's website. Okay, sir. And I had just pulled excerpts of them and emailed them to the committee. Really? Let me see. Okay. I wanna get the... When did you email them? I didn't see that I'm sorry. Last week, as part of my reminder about this meeting and that the packet was posted. If we're not ready to talk about it, that's okay. We can move on to the next item on the agenda. I apologize, I am not ready but I can't speak for anybody else. I do a few notes. I'm happy to share them now and we can come back and talk about them again. Yeah, why don't you share them? I just pulled up the email. Okay. When's it dated, Jennifer? It's dated Friday the 13th, last Friday. I don't know when GLL is taking this up. Pam, share your thoughts. I will share mine. I received some shot thoughts from Shalini with we share them very quickly. We can then move on but then I can create a document with the thoughts. That was it for climate. Okay. Economic vitality? Yep. Okay. Thinking about economic vitality, I would like to add something to the effect of reviewing all policies with an eye to improving conditions that support an increased year-round population in town. We've heard lots about, we need more family friendly stuff. We need more people who want to live here. So I just think reviewing all policies with an eye to improving conditions that support an increased year-round population. Okay. Anything else on that one or housing affordability? That's an affordability, yes. I would like to add to housing affordability of an objective of maintaining up-to-date data. Yep. On affordable units, for sure. And that came out of the AMHT meeting. Yep. And rental units. We need really accurate information to be better planning. Thank you. So I'm gonna just run through some of mine. You know, there were some, I think there's some just basic updates to climate action that can be done potentially with the solar assessment deletion because I think that's been completed. You know, just basic updates we tend to do every year. And so that was sort of my thing with the climate action one was sort of do the basic updates. But ECAC had recommended adding a reestablish the e-bike network. And so I think that might be a good one to potentially add in, along with the typical updates that need done to reflect what has been done over the past year and what hasn't been. On economic vitality, I was wondering if the first one, which is the closely with local institutions needs to be a little more specific about what we want them him to work on in there instead of just a general promote diverse neighborhoods, affordable housing, new growth in downtown and village centers, and the reduction of barriers to operating a business. Is there anything specific we want him to focus on with it within that or something? So just, again, I don't have any real specifics here. And number three in economic vitality together with the council facilitate the review and revision to increase and support economic development. I think we need to get more specific of what we want reviewed or what we want done with that review instead of facilitate it. What should we be focusing on? What should he be focusing on with that review? Again, I don't have a proposal for what but I think it would be helpful to potentially the council if we came in with a specific request under number three to add in instead of just facilitate the review. And with housing affordability, similar to what I just said with economic vitality in numbers three and four, increase the diversity of housing stock available to all residents and explore strategies to stabilize the year-round population in town. That's so broad that we're not, I think we should help provide some specifics to that. Like we did in climate action of with carp, what are the five things we hope he does next year? And so again, I don't have the specifics here but I thought we should discuss whether we want to be more specific on them and which strategies we would want explored or which strategies or the need to actually propose something or propose a way instead of explore strategies to stabilize the year-round population, propose strategies to the council to adapt for stabilizing or something like that. So using an essentially stronger language. I'm gonna, before I recognize you Jennifer, I'm gonna go through what Shalini sent me. She sent me four requests the funding of an economic development director who has experience with promoting innovative housing solutions to meet our diverse and affordable housing needs. So that was number one. Number two was hire a design consultant for form-based zoning. Number three was facilitate the review of the gateway project. And number four was hire a staff member to support the climate action goals specifically to apply for grants that can benefit making our residential buildings more energy efficient. So those were Shalini's requests as it relates to these projects. We're gonna be writing at some point. Yes, I'm going to, I'm typing down what you said Pam and what I said and I think Jennifer is gonna add. And then I'm gonna create a merged document with it I think is what I'll do sort of. And we'll discuss it at our next meeting. And then we will put it on the next meeting. Yeah, Jennifer. No, I was just gonna say I totally agree that we need to get a little more specific because otherwise, yeah, you can just say you, you know that you looked into it over the year and then you accomplished the goal because that's all we said was to consider. So do you want actually our responses to things now? Or after you- Let's not do that now. Let's get- Yeah, I'd rather not either. I'd rather think about it. Yeah. I just figured if we put them out there then I can easily put the document together without violating open meeting law and then we can move on to chief Ting and nuisance house. Are we good for now on this one? Yes. Yes. Okay. So we're going to now move on to nuisance house. The proposed new name is nuisance property. I want to welcome chief Ting. I want to thank Athena. I know Athena's already gone from this meeting too. Everyone, you know, but I thank you chief Ting for coming. Thanks for having me. Thank you to Athena for being a liaison and recognizing we should be talking to chief Ting and giving him the stuff and then telling me, hey, Mandy, you're sitting down on the job here. You can't ignore chief Ting. So I want to thank Athena for making sure we weren't forgetting an important part of the nuisance house bylaw and enforcement of what we're doing and getting that conversation in there. I'm going to take a little bit of time just to update chief Ting on where we are and sort of summarize for those in our audience where we are on this too, which is back last year now, the council referred the nuisance property, nuisance house bylaw to CRC to look at a couple of specific different things. And I can't even tell you what they were right now because when CRC first then looked at those things and we read the nuisance house bylaw, our collective view was that the whole thing needed re-looked at because it wasn't really working for the town. And then we sat on that view for months. This is why it's been a year because we were doing rental property. And so we are back to trying to figure out a way to rewrite the nuisance house for the bylaw, hence the new name nuisance property in a way that would better function and address the nuisances that we as counselors in particular have been hearing about our present in neighborhoods and there are having some struggles to address. So we have been floating back and forth different options on what to do, different conversations of what is a nuisance and what constitutes a nuisance property and different conversations on how we would want to regulate that and also enforce any potential violation. So what you've seen is our latest version which hasn't been discussed in a while but we recognized also had some issues with it in terms of ability to enforce. I think was our biggest, we've been struggling with that. And so I also sent you on what is also in the packet for our committees conversation is Boston's nuisance property bylaw. And I will say when I read it, I thought it might address some of the concerns and issues we as a committee have been having and trying to draft something that accomplished from just a flat out read point of view what we were trying to. So I would like to look at that but we can look at that after we definitely hear from Chief Ting on his thoughts and everything and we can ask Chief Ting as much as we want right now about it all and hear from Chief Ting about the police department's work with the nuisance property, nuisance house bylaw. I'll go to Pam first. Yeah, I just wanted to help frame it a little bit. The intent here was that we talk about, we talk about some nuisance in tears. So it's kind of tears of violation and at what point do various entities get notified of what's going on. And so you might have a couple of violations, some issues occurring and things can get resolved. Those that continue to have violations, there is a requirement then to reach out to the property owner and manager to at least notify and ask for amendment to the bad activity or addressing the issue. And then finally there would be the potential with further violation within the same timeframe that there would be potential for denying a permit. And one of the things that we heard across the board is there is no enforcement, there is no way to disallow somebody who's doing a really bad job of managing a property to feel any pain and to make any change in the way they manage a property. So this is an effort to sort of categorize what's happening. Thank you. Jennifer? Yeah, and I guess it's kind of echoing what Pam said, but there's a frustration among residents who live, you know, near problem properties, nuisance properties that nothing changes year after year, after year. And, you know, I know, because I hear from a lot of residents and I'll say, well, this is, you know, you do X, Y and Z and they just look at me and they go, yeah, we've been doing that for years, nothing happens. So it's, yeah, so I feel I would just like to be able to ensure residents that our bylaws are enforced and we, the, you know, whether it's because it's new tenants every year, so then they're starting all over, but there are certain properties, no matter who the tenants are, they seem to be problems year after year after year and the tenants have basically given lost hope that the town will ever do anything. If I could just respond, I'm sorry. No, I was actually just gonna ask you, Chief Ting, your thoughts on the nuisance house and on just enforcement of that and noise and all these other bylaws that we might be writing and any ways you would think we could improve some of them? Well, to be honest with you, I could probably talk about this subject all night long. You know, it's quite extensive, you know, over the years in terms of, there's different layers in terms of what we're talking about here. So something that Jennifer Todd was just talking about, you know, it kind of depends on the locations. There's some locations you're absolutely right where every single year it's a recurring problem, regardless of, you know, it's a new tendency or not. I'll give an example. So Phillip Street is notorious for noise complaints and disturbances and issues. And a lot of that has to do with the same type of tenants that are recurring. So there's a lot of underground fraternities that constantly rent out the same properties over and over again. So you're gonna see the same type of issues. Now, if you were to take a look at a rental property outside of that area, you know, it kind of depends. It's dependent on what type of tenant you get. So every single, let's say two to four years you're gonna have turnover, you're gonna have new tenants. So from a police department's perspective, you know, we try to incorporate as much outreach with our students as possible, just going back historically a little bit. We used to take the stance of trying to arrest our way out of it. And we kind of learned that that punishment per se wasn't really working because, you know, it was actually counterproductive because a lot of the students, that's primarily where the source of the noise is coming from, you know, they felt as if it was a fight, a dog fight. So there was a lack of respect there. So what we're trying to incorporate now is a lot more outreach and to try and make these students feel like they are a part of the community because for a good portion of the time that they're here, they are a part of our community. So we do want them to be a part of our solution. So with that being said, in terms of the nuisance bylaw, we do utilize that as a tool, but usually we utilize that for the most egregious situations. It is a $300 town bylaw violation. And we do utilize that. It does help us. But in most cases for noise complaints, the recidivism rate isn't that great. Usually when we charge somebody, whether by means of a town bylaw citation, a summons or arrest, usually they don't reoffend. So that's a good thing. So we don't utilize the nuisance house as much. And I certainly have data to support that and I could review that down the line. But in terms of the revision of it, so from our point of view, we like tools. Any tool that can help us to try and mitigate situations is we welcome it. However, it's, I guess the question is, how do we utilize that tool? And basically how do we meet it out? And we try to use that in a meaningful way and reasonably. So certainly we don't wanna use it as a tool to try and punish anybody, but we wanna try and utilize it as a tool to try and educate and to transform the culture, which is an uphill battle, as you know, with this being a college town with a flagship university, it does make it a little bit difficult. But our constant partnerships with the university and the university police department, we have seen a lot of changes and that certainly reflects in some of our statistics. Can I see some hands up? Yeah, Jennifer. I think Pat was first. No, I wasn't, but one of you. As everybody on this committee knows, I have some trouble with the emphasis on students. And I deeply appreciate the problems they bring, I do. And also what you're talking about in terms of engaging them in the community and things like that, which I think is the way to go. My concern is there's a level, possibly an unintentional level of discrimination because I'm a property owner. And we've talked about people violating nuisance property because they're leaving furniture on their lawn. I can do that, or I've dropped, well, I can. In East Pleasant Street, there are junked cards near a house that aren't students. So how much actual, are we really only focused on students? Or how do you address, Jennifer, I'm not asking you, I'm asking a cheap thing. I know we don't agree. And I respect your position. I really, really do. So don't go over. No, I'm agreeing with you, it's not just students. Yeah, but what I'm saying is, how much interactions do you have with home owners around similar issues with things left on the lawn or garbage left out or things because it just, there is a level of, I think, a level of discrimination. And it doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist of the issues that students can bring, but other residents bring them too. And we don't really, we're not ever really talking about, so I'm sorry, I'm shut up now. So to try and answer that question, it's, we kind of deal with, when I'm talking about permanent residents and for example, we'll take that as an example, if they leave a couch on the front yard, it's a little bit different, simply because of the rental registration. The rental registration provides certain specifics that gives us tools as well as inspection services. So for example, if you own a home and you have a driveway, you can keep as many cars as you want on there. But if the property is a rental, now you're subject to a parking plan, which only allows X amount of vehicles. So if there's a violation, then basically we can step in and it really wouldn't be us, that would probably be Rob Morrow's office that would be handling something along that nature. But he has that tool, the rental registration to be able to enforce that. Whereas if it was just a regular citizen's house and it wasn't a rental, we don't really have those means. We would have to incorporate other agencies such as the fire department, if it was a fire hazard, and again, inspection services, so relative to those type of things. So we would coordinate with other agencies to try and mitigate that. So I hope that answers your question, that kind of changes, depending on if it's a rental or not, it kind of changes the scope and how we can handle it. Right. Jennifer. Yeah, I might just be really that terrible neighbor, but I have absolutely called when owners, occupants have, like, left a, you know, I had a neighbor years ago, I just called John Thompson, guess a mattress was left out for more than a week and it was raining and they just, you know, it said free and it was like, no. After a week and it had been rained on and I didn't think it was safe for anybody, it was probably moldy to take the mattress, but I would absolutely call for violations. I don't really care who's living there. But what I was gonna say in terms of my concern with these problem properties is not going after the occupants really, but if you have a house that is a problem year after year, I'm concerned that the owner, they are permitted to get that rental permit year after year and at what point have they forfeited the right to be renting the property because they're not ensuring that their, that property is not a problem year after year. So it's not, my concern is much less with the occupants than these perennial problem properties. I think the response, you know, that there's no penalty that seems to ever accrue to the property owner because we have never, you know, denied anyone a permit or suspended a permit. So that's my question. I think that, I think each situation needs to be looked at, looked at individually on a case by case basis. I think it'd be, it'd be difficult to put out like a blanket limit. So for example, if you have three violations then right away, there's such and such consequence for it. I truly think that investigation needs to be looked into in terms of who the landlord is, what their reputation is, what their history is. The reason why I say that is because, you know, a lot of times, like I said, you know, with certain properties there's a high turnover for new residents and new residents, especially with college kids need to be reeducated every single time. You know, it's their first time away from home and they're gonna take that gamble because they don't know what the risks are and throw a party and they have no regard in many times for their neighbors until they are well educated for that. And whether that's outreach or whether that's some kind of enforcement, usually they change their behavior after that. And it makes it difficult to hold a landlord in many instances accountable because the landlord only has so much authority over those tenants. You know, those tenants are adults, you know, landlords can't even walk onto the property or go into their homes without prior notice. So it makes it kind of difficult. And if you take a look at, you know, one of the means that a landlord has is eviction. And if you were to take, I'm kind of going into a realm that's kind of off topic, but in terms of the eviction process, it takes a really long time for that to go through and this state is really tenant friendly. So that process alone isn't an easy solve for a landlord even to handle. In a lot of landlords, I'm sure don't even want to go through that process because they're going to lose money in the end. So that's a whole nother conversation. But essentially I do agree with you that we do need to look at some of these landlords because there are a lot of absentee landlords as well. There's plenty of properties in town where the landlords don't even live in the state or anywhere near in the area. So again, for my opinion, it's, I think we need to take a look at each property on a case by case basis to answer your question. Thank you. Jennifer, you can follow up. Just one last question though. So do we, in terms of the police department, that's behavior like the furniture, a house that just looks really terrible, that's building inspection. Correct. Right, okay. So I won't. Right. So I guess the question I have is, you know, when we first looked at the nuisance house by law, as I've been telling residents, it's not working for Amherst, at least from our counselor point of view, because when we read it, it seemed to only deal with gatherings and underage drinking, which was not dealing with some of the other issues we're hearing from residents of things like, Chief Ting, you identified one, lots of cars on a lawn outside of official parking areas, right? Yeah, indoor furniture stored outside, junked vehicles stored in the front yard, visible from the public way, things like that. And so we saw the rewrite of the nuisance house by law into a nuisance property by law as a potential tool, as you said, to add in and bring in some of these other things that over the course of time can really create that sort of nuisance in a neighborhood. So the question I would have for you is, you know, you've seen sort of a random draft and you've seen Boston's and you know what our current one is, are we sort of going in the right direction for things that would help the police department, you can't comment on building commission department, you know, our inspection services department, but the police department deal with some of these nuisances that the police department has been seeing and been responding to in neighborhoods, whether it be for, and I know some of these are not rentals, right? I know I've received as counselors complaints about idling trucks overnight and things like that, like, are we going in the right direction? What would you recommend we potentially add or delete or, you know, in reading, say, Boston's, did you think it was something that would be useful to you or should we stick more with what we currently have and just add a couple of things? You know, to be honest with you, I kind of like having, like I said, I like having more tools, you know, it doesn't mean we need to use it, but if we have it available to us, so if a circumstance occurs that we have a solution for within this, then I like that and I appreciate it. It's just a matter of, it's a little convoluted because it depends on who issues what. So we kind of work on, with the police department, we work on criminal matters. And so if there's a violation of too many cars, for example, that's not a criminal matter. So that would be something for inspections to handle. And I understand that if we were to have an all-encompassing nuisance violation that either inspections or the police department can use, I certainly welcome that. So for me, the more the merrier, I think, you know, like I said, it gives us more tools. And for you town counselors, I understand it's, you guys have quite a job on your hands because prior to this new government, there was nobody to go to, you know, so now you guys have somebody to represent your particular district. So you're going to hear those voices and those complaints much more intimately than it used to be. So I welcome it to answer your question. Thank you. Pam. Thanks. Yeah, I just wanted to verify what I think I heard. And that was that in a case like this, if we have a more comprehensive nuisance bylaw that we are going to be able to track obviously charges by either police department and or inspections that there's a way to, to see the records of both departments. It's not like there are two little silos that never speak to each other. And we would never really truly know, you know, how many total violations there were. So I'm just confirming that it's possible. So we track all of our nuisance violations that we issue. So yes, for nuisance house violation, it's usually tacked on as a secondary offense because normally we go to a noise complaint. For example, we'll find underage drinkers or if the, the party is so egregious that we feel like, you know, a nuisance house violation is probably more applicable and appropriate than we tack that on. So a noise complaint violation, for example, is a $300 fine nuisance house is $300. So when we're issuing a $600 fine, we're hoping that that's going to solve the problem for especially a college student who probably doesn't have an extra $600 to spare. So we, we, when we utilize our nuisance violations, it's again, on a case by case basis, you know, it's usually, it's usually for those who don't get it, you know, and so we'll kind of add that on to try and help them understand the problems that they're creating. I have a follow up to that. So that means, you know, as we've been wrestling with how to write the violation section and the enforcement section, something like, I think Boston's is, you can't write the nuisance house, the nuisance property violation until four say noise complaints violation tickets have been written. So in that sense, that would lessen the number of tools you have. And so you would almost then recommend that whatever we write be allowed to be issued on the first sort of violation at the discretion, but maybe then ramp stuff up for some of those other types of things where we were talking about meeting with town staff and complaint, you know, there were plans and stuff like that, but that you, you wouldn't want to see sort of the Boston, a sole Boston approach that only kicks in after so many calls have been made or so many tickets have been written. Right, I guess to answer your question, the way that we have the nuisance house violation right up currently, basically the portion that we enforce, I like it a lot because it does give us a lot of discretion. It gives us a lot more latitude. So it doesn't have to be a repeated offense. You know, if it's like I said, a lot of times it's so egregious that we will apply that right away. So I would prefer that portion of the nuisance house bylaw to remain the same. I would like to add on to it because I do know that a lot of our town counselors they're constituents complain about other things such as littering such as, you know, again, garbage and just basic upkeep of the property which is not being met. This I think will give us a tool, at least the town, not necessarily us will give the town something, a tool to be able to try and mitigate that. So I guess that's how I see it. I like our nuisance portion from the police department but I'd like to add on to that. Thank you. Jennifer. Yeah, so I recently learned from the town manager that if the police are called out to a residence for like a noise disturbance that the property owner actually isn't notified that I guess Bill Laramy will usually try and come out later to talk to the residence which is great. But if I were a property owner I think I'd want to at least be notified. I don't know how. That's not entirely true. So we can make notifications, you know especially most of the larger apartment complexes. So basically Bill Laramy will have a list of all the landlords. And we have landlord meetings probably twice a year. And usually these landlords they wanna be on that list because they wanna be notified about noise complaints and issues that they're having with their property. So with this list and there's probably about I would say at least 60 different landlords stemming from even the large ones Puffton Village, Townhouse Apartments and all the different rental agencies. So if there are noise complaints that apply to their properties, Bill Laramy does send a notice out to them to let them know exactly what happened. But there are some, there's a lot of smaller landlords that don't participate but we welcome them to, if they want the information we're more than happy to give it to them. So that's, so we do notify them. We just don't notify all of them. Now, would it be helpful to have it in the bylaw that they would be notified? You know, anyone that you have an address for? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, absolutely. And we'd be more than willing to do that. In fact, you know, not only Bill Laramy but also our patrol staff on all of our noise complaints, we have follow-ups. So we go back to the caller just to see if there's any further issues. And we do follow-up with the people who are complained about to talk to them. Which is great. Thank you. It is, it's great. You might've asked, got us all of our questions. Yeah, Pam. I'm just going to sort of sum up what I think I heard and that is the portions of the current nuisance house which has primarily focused on parties and noise is still an important element that needs to be in a broader document, the broader document offering the inclusion of the other array of nuisances that we hear about. So I think, and then I'm going to talk about Boston for a second, I believe if I remember Boston also has sort of a tiered approach that never actually said that you could lose your permit but it must be because I'm sure I didn't read that properly because I would think they would want that as well. So Boston would do the permit as we've, I've advocated we do. They have this nuisance property bylaw and if you have a current whatever that third tier is in Boston or the second tier in Boston, their rental property bylaw references the nuisance property bylaw and says if you're under X part of the nuisance house bylaw classified as that, then you can't get a permit. So that's how we've sort of done it right now for ours but we removed that because we're in the middle of, you know, fixing the nuisance house and redoing that one. So, but that's always that that's somewhat referenced a little bit about allowing some of that and we would clear up that referencing in the rental bylaw itself once the nuisance house would be passed, it would just be another amendment to the rental bylaw to to re-reference the correct one and whatever system we decided on whatever level that would be. So that's how Boston does it. So I just wanna say that, you know, I've recognized that there's many different perceptions there's different attitudes towards or the sensitivity towards noise and parties and whatnot. You know, you have some people in town who say, well, you know, it's a college town. So, you know, it's to be expected. And then there's other attitudes where it's like, well, you know, they live in this town, we live in this community together. And just because they're college students doesn't give them the right to be able to just basically not think about their neighbors. So I understand the dynamics of all that. And so that's kind of why I formulate the opinion that, you know, I'd like to have more tools to use. It doesn't mean that we have to go out there heavy-handed and just start, you know, throwing fines left and right. You know, we try to do everything in a reasonable way in a reasonable manner and to make sure that we're trying to gain compliance in essence. You know, again, I don't want to pick a fight with the students. I think that's a losing battle. I wanted to try and get them on our side to help us, which in essence helps them. So that's kind of my goal. Thank you, Pat. Yeah, I really commend that attitude. And I also, you know, in terms of several neighborhoods I use Grantwood, just as an example, they've had some horrendous times with students and parking and all kinds of stuff, and still sometimes do. But I feel like the department's response through Bill Laramie and meetings and other people as well, you've been at some of those meetings, you've really come out and it has begun to change the neighborhood. It has begun to create relationships between permanent and non-permanent residents that I think are important. So I want to commend the department for that. I appreciate that, Pat. I mean, we take it very seriously, you know, especially I grew up in this town. So, you know, I'm very intimate with all of those neighborhoods and I've seen how those neighborhoods have changed. You know, as a kid, I used to hang out, Grant would drive all the time and have a lot of friends there. But, you know, as the families have grown older and whatnot and they've moved away, unfortunately a lot of those houses have turned over to become rentals and whatnot. So that becomes a new challenge for each neighborhood. So it's, for me, it becomes a little personal as well. So we take that very seriously. So thank you. So I have a slightly more practical question, which is what other violations or references to violations, would you want to see that maybe you have thought of, oh, this would be a nice way to be able to write a nuisance house ticket, but you haven't been able to because it's not referenced in there. Are there things that you wish were in the nuisance house included in that or, you know, or your officers are that aren't there now so that it's not as, you know, like that you're saying, oh, we wish we could write one, but it doesn't technically fall under nuisance house. So we can't write that second one, even though we think that would be a good tool to use. Is there anything that comes to mind like that? Sure. So I have two things. Number one is littering. We already have a town bylaw for that, but it'd be nice if it was all encompassed with a nuisance house. And number two is public urination. That's something that we deal with constantly, you know, especially if, you know, if you go to any house party, you're going to see college kids publicly urinating all over the place. And we don't really have a means to mitigate that, other than charging them with disorderly conduct and disorderly conduct is a criminal charge. Is that a little bit too much? I guess that depends on who's perception that is. You know, it'd be nice to have a happy medium, a $300 fine for public urination is pretty hefty. And I like that. We'll make Jennifer very happy because she's witnessed that and it would make me happy as well. Right. And we don't have, you know, like I said, we don't have a means for that. So I think that would be wonderful. Yes. I don't think they should be criminally charged. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Because that's not their, their intent. But a $300 fine, I think is more than appropriate. And we'll probably teach them a lesson. Thank you, Pam. Just, just for my own education is that I think, I think you just hit on it, but I just want to make sure I understand if, if the Amherst police gives someone a citation, is that, is that automatically because it's a police officer, is that automatically a criminal citation? No, it's not. No. So that's just a civil fine. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Anything else for Chief Ting while we have Chief Ting here, specifically for Chief Ting here? Well, if not, I'm always available too. So you can always contact me if you have any questions offline. I'm always available. As I said, I appreciate that because I have and you do. Yeah. I appreciate it. And I appreciate Athena for, for tagging me and saying, come on, Mandy, you need to talk to Chief Ting. You talk to Chief Ting. So I, and I appreciate that you're here. You're, you're welcome to stay. We have about 10 more minutes left in our meeting. I want to get to it. We're going to continue on Newson's house because, because, because this is where it is. We have to find a way to get to a new draft. And that's, that's the other thing I'd like to, to talk about. I think this latest draft, we kind of were stuck with the enforcement part. But given this conversation, given a Boston option that would obviously be tailored to what we've conversed. And given where we are with our current draft, what are people's thoughts on how the next draft should look or where we should go in the next draft of it? And I can pull up our current draft if that would help people. I wouldn't mind offering to take another stab at it. I think I've ended up doing a bit of the work on this one. But it would be, it would be very helpful actually to just start with a clean copy instead of track changes all the time, which is really hard to read for everybody. Yeah. So this one, I think the biggest, you know, we've gotten into what do we include in public nuisance violations, but from this draft, I think the biggest concern and where we were stuck and wrestling with were sections D for the person's liable, which Chief Ting kind of follow the current bylaw but use different wordings, but sort of follow it in terms of sort of thinking about first, second, third offense. It's just not really worded that way. It's got some other wording, follow that. And then the enforcement and corrective action plan that we were trying to add in there are sort of, mainly this corrective action plan was where we were struggling with. I would certainly welcome Ham taking another stab at it, potentially not even with track changes, just doing a new, you know, sending us something clean, right? I'm gonna put Boston's up for a second. So the interesting thing with Boston's was how it defined a problem property of, and this is where I think Chief Ting, you would say it's a little bit too strict because you wouldn't be able to use it on sort of a first offense because you have to be a problem property before you can be cited under their bylaw. The thing I liked about this one personally was it got us to that sort of corrective action plan a little bit better with some more clarity than our current draft does in my mind, which is where we were struggling with, well, how do we do and what do we do, right? With the enforcement and remediation, you know, that management plan and all of that and inspections and things. It's got us there where we've been struggling to define some of that and what does that mean? But it was to me a little cleaner, but I get what Chief Ting is saying is right now you can write that citation on a first offense that this one you can't write until you've met at least one of those three criteria. And not even necessarily a combination of those three criteria. So I'm not even sure that three calls to a property in 12 months for criminal offenses plus one complaint for noise would do it. I think you'd have to meet four, you know, like each one of them separately, which might be a little bit too challenging. That's a lot. Pam. Yeah, I'm a little confused what's trying to be accomplished here. We have a number of issues that each could receive, you know, a citation. We have violations. We have, you know, call it 10 different things that could be a violation. So it's not as though we're calling anything a problem property or a nuisance property right off the bat. It's just violations occur as a citation. The way we were trying to craft our bylaw is that with the third violation of out of that whole list there is then a designation of something being a problem and the owner and the manager are notified. And a remediation plan is requested. So it's not, I don't think it's that different than Boston. Right, I think the difference with Boston was that upon, the nuisance bylaw doesn't even start being applicable until you've had, say, four sustained noise violation citations written. Right. And this one, and our current nuisance house, you can write that, so you can't in Boston write a citation for a nuisance house and go through the problem property thing at all until you've had, say, four noise complaints that have been ticketed. And we, right now our writing is, you know, it's a violation to create a public nuisance and then we define public nuces as these activities, various activities, and then we say, on the third violation, you're a problem, on the third violation of this bylaw, so once you've hit three writings of this bylaw, then you get those corrective action plans, whereas on Boston it's the first writing of the bylaw violation, that you have that equivalent of a corrective action plan, but you can't write a violation until you've had four, say, noise complaints at all. So it's just a different starting point, I think, and what I've heard from Chief Ting, I still wanna call you Captain Ting sometimes. That's fine too. Chief Ting is that the police department likes the ability to write the nuisance house immediately on top of, say, the noise complaint, not only after four noise complaints. Right. I think it'd be going backwards if we had to have a limit. Yeah. And so in that sense, Boston might not be from that point of view, what to follow. Right. So a question, then if you're writing a nuisance house citation, that seems that you're getting to that endpoint quicker than you would under this rewrite. And if we call, if there's a nuisance, maybe we keep nuisance house designation or just nuisance house as a violation. And it's one of 10 things that you could be cited for. It's when it gets to become a problem property and then a nuisance property, the semantics are, it's all semantics there. Yeah. That's an option. I'll go to you, Jennifer, just in a second. That maybe we keep the nuisance property or nuisance house or whatever as this one and then create a more thing, something like Boston. But I'm not sure I like that. Or we could, one thing we don't use a lot that maybe this one would benefit from is right here we have criminal and non-criminal and it just says 300 fine. In other bylaws, we've said first offense, X fine, second offense, X fine, third offense, X fine. Maybe it would be clearer as we write this up that the fine is $300 penalty, second offense, problem property designation, third offense, nuisance property designation or something like that so that it makes it a little, I don't know whether that would clarify some of the stuff we're trying to do if we put it up into the data block. Clarifies and simplifies. Yeah, it might include some of that up instead of trying to write it in down below. Jennifer. Yeah, no, I think that's good because what might be different here than in Boston is, you know, if you think of it over the most part you're having or a number of these properties you're having new tenants every year but to the neighbors that are there continuously I guess if it always, this way, yes, it gets a little quicker otherwise they always feel like they're starting over but from their point of view, it's just continuous noise. They're not really, so I think yes, if we have to wait till four, I guess what I'm trying to say is every year you're gonna have a new and then for the residents it's never gonna get to a point where you can really address it. So I agree with you that it. So it could be that section C sort of gets moved into the data block up at the top without maybe the year designations and it just says third violation designation as problem property, fourth violation designation as nuisance property or maybe we move it to second and third, whatever but moving section C completely up and eliminating section C and then look at D with how we did it in the current bylaw and then this corrective action plan might be able to be simplified a little bit to only one or maybe we skip problem and nuisance and we just have one designation instead of two that third offense designation as nuisance property skip the problem property and then the corrective action plan comes into play. Just thinking out loud here, Pam. A comment on that. The only difference between problem property and nuisance property, the way we're trying to write it is that there is a further engagement of the owner and manager in the nuisance level and there that I think it was included that there would be financial liability as well for the owner and manager at the nuisance property level. That's really the only difference between nuisance and problem property. Yeah, and the financial liability is in both it's section D and both. The bigger difference was when you got up to nuisance that's when we were going to throw the nuisance property designation not the problem property designation was gonna be thrown into the permit by law. But yeah, maybe we just tried to maybe three levels is too much. Maybe it's two levels, essentially some citation and then you're a nuisance property after multiple citations, which might clean this up and make it easier to work through our issues. Yeah, I keep bouncing back to what Rob said and also Chief Ting said, simple is better. How do we simplify it and having it what we need, but simple, yeah, cause I mean, we are creating these three and four page bylaws that maybe aren't quite necessary. Now we can do the same thing in fewer words. We can edit ourselves. Do you have enough Pam? Yep. Yeah, thank you very much. One last question because I know we're over time but we've got Chief Ting here. Is this open and gross lewdness charge the one that's for public urination? Or is there no public urination one or do we need to add something else for the public urination? So I wouldn't use that, the open gross lewdness and the serious behavior because that's not really the spirit of it. That's for somebody who's potentially has some mental health issues that they're not just trying to relieve themselves. So I don't think that's applicable. And that's a pretty serious criminal charge that I don't think would be solved by a $300 violation. You know, that's something that the courts need to visit. So you would get rid of that. And then so we might stick it under this section be activities that may not violate a specific law, the indoor furniture on the front lawn, public urination, something else. Like we could just list it there. Right. Is the zoning bylaw change or a general bylaw? No, as this one here for the public urination. So delete C up here, but add public urination as a number two after indoor furniture on the front lawn. I put public for urination above. Put it above, but in that section, in that section. So do we eliminate the open growth, lewdness altogether? I think it is applied. It is used from time to time. But chief, it's a very different. I would get rid of that because I don't think we would ever issue a tag bylaw citation for that. That would either be a summons or an arrest, you know, open gross lewdness. That means somebody is flashing or, you know, it's egregious. Thank you. I think we've given Pam enough work. I'll have it to you by January. I would love to get this one off our plate. Oh, that would be lovely. For two readings in December. That's a tough act because this is our last October meeting. We only have two meetings before that. So I know it's a tough act. We might have to, I'm going to be writing the transition memo soon. Okay, so quick question because we are talking about penalties because we know there are folks in the community who are concerned about this and liability of owners and managers rather than just tenants. Is this going to get wrapped into the conversation with KP law and what, you know, so basically whatever we do with this, it's still under review. I have no idea. I would say for now, at least on the why of the who's responsible part, maybe go back to our current nuisance house by law and take that language. I think our current language in there is nearly identical to that, but you might want to check that for what has been operating for a while in terms of first offense, second offense, third offense to pull it from there. It depends on what we would do to modify the, it might depend on what we would do when this one gets done, what recommendations the committee would recommend to modify the rental permitting by law to take this new one into account in terms of a nuisance house designation, say our nuisance property designation. But until we've finished with this one, that was CRC's conclusion was while this one's currently being modified, we can't really bring it into the property, rental property one specifically on that too specifically because we're still in the middle of revising this one, but that when this one is finished revising, then we can go back and look at how to relate the two to each other, if that makes sense. With that, thank you, Chief Ting. I don't have announcements. Next agenda is these things, although maybe not rental permitting. We'll be back to the other two. Is there anything not anticipated, 48 hours? No. Excellent. We are adjourned at 6.38 p.m. Thank you. Thank you, Chief Ting. Thanks. Thank you for including me. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Good night. Good night. Thank you.