 Okay, Anna. I'm trying really hard to make sure that we're recording, Lynn. All right. Thank you. Good evening. It is June 26th, 2023, and this is a regular meeting of the town council. The open meeting law has been extended. This allows us to continue holding meetings remotely without a quorum of the council physically present. However, I do want to note that at this point, we, in fact, have a quorum of the council in the room. At the same time, we provide the public with adequate alternative access to the meeting. They can be here in real time, and we have a couple of people in our audience tonight. Welcome. This meeting is accessible in real time via Zoom, by phone, and as a live broadcast on Amherst Media, Channel 9, and through live stream. Given that we have a quorum of the council present, I'm calling the June 26th, 2023, town council meeting to order at 631. I'll call on each councilor to make sure that they can hear and we can hear them, and then please make sure you meet your mic again. We'll start with Shalindy Balmillan, who I believe is absent. Patty Angeles. Present. Anna Devlin-Goth here. Present. Lynn Griezmer is present. Mandy Jo Hanneke. Present. Anika Lopes. Present. Michelle Miller. I'm not present yet, okay? Dorothy Pam. Here. Pam Rooney. Here. Kathy Shane. Here. Andy Steinberg. Present. Jennifer Todd. Present. And Alicia Woffel. Here. And so please keep an eye out for anybody else, and I'm quickly checking the audience on Zoom. Thank you. There's no chat room for this meeting. If you have technical issues, please let Athena and me know to make a comment or ask a question. Counselors, please use the raised hand function and during public comment, the same rules apply. If technically difficulties rise, as a result of utilizing remote participation, we'll decide at the time how to address that, whether we have to suspend the meeting or make note of it in the minutes. There is no change in the order of the agenda as posted at this time. We'll go on to the announcements. I just wanna note that we have listed the rest of the council meetings through the rest of the summer. We are still holding August 7th as an if needed and if we have a quorum. And so we meet on July 17th, August 21st, September 11th, and then actually again on September 18th. Committees continue to meet and their schedule is below. And while we've had a robust number of activities around town for the last several months, things have kind of quieted down for summer, but please enjoy things like the concert, concert on the common and the farmer's market. We're going to move directly to general public comment. There is a special public comment period about ARPA funds. So we're going to do just general public comment for this time. So if you are in the, physically in the audience, please make sure that you have signed in with Athena. If you are in the Zoom where we have 10 attendees at this time and you would like to make general public comment not about the ARPA funds, please raise your hand at this time. Hey, Athena. First, we have Eve vocal. Please come to the microphone. State your name and address before your comment. Eve, name and address and also where you live. Address isn't where I live. No, name and address, I'm sorry. That's fine, sorry, no problem. Hi, my name is Eve Vogel. I live on Harlow Drive off East Pleasant 135. I served for over 10 years on town transportation committees and have driven, walked, biked and ridden the bus in Amherst for 15 years. Often when my past then young son was in tow. Earlier today, I sent the council longer written comments. Others attending this meeting can see my comments as a letter to the Amherst Indy. I am here to urge you to vote no on the draft street lights policy as it is currently written. It aims to address an important goal to reduce unnecessary nighttime light which can affect human health, interfere with wildlife and make it harder to see the night sky. The problem is that if the policy is passed as currently written, it will unintentionally threaten pedestrian and bicycle safety. And it will make it much more difficult for the town to build out a safe pedestrian and bicycle network. Why does this matter? Pedestrians and bicyclists are three to seven times more vulnerable to fatal accidents in the dark than during daylight hours. Children are particularly vulnerable and minority communities experience disproportionate impact. More lighting not only improves safety, it also increases comfort and confidence, increasing the use of walking and bicycling paths. Lighting is important not only during the dark but also during low visibility weather. In my fuller comments, I described three of the fatalities in the last decade that happened at night in Amherst. Many more people have been injured by drivers who did not see them in the dark. I spoke to one of the policy's proponents when she came to attack meeting. I was reassured that the intention of the policy was in no way to interfere with needed lighting for safety. The problem is despite the intention, this draft policy will interfere with safety. The key reasons are the unbalanced language of the draft policy and cost. As an example, think of North Pleasant Street north of the UMass campus where one of the fatalities I wrote about occurred. It has some of the highest crash rates in Amherst. Have you ever walked or biked up that street heading north in the dark or even in the rain? It's hard to see, especially if you're on the east side sidewalk that's covered by trees with the lights on coming from the other side. The best way to meet both safety standards and reduce unnecessary night lighting is to have low and frequent pedestrian scale light posts. But to do that up and down that stretch of North Pleasant, much less add it to the other four doors in Amherst where we want bike and pedestrian primary routes is cost prohibitive. The choice then is to use the utility poles where lights must be mounted high and to have light stretch across and along the street to illuminate both sidewalks and the road in between. The light must also spread between lampposts in order to provide continuous illumination which is essential to bicyclists and important to pedestrians. So please wrap up. Okay. The policy can be fixed. The ideas and the details are good. Two things are needed. Add equally specific safety performance standards and add provisions to the policy that have considerations and processes to balance the trade-offs among safety limiting unwanted light and cost. I've also sent to the council a sample marked up policy that can do this. Thank you very much. Thank you for your comment. There were a couple of people who came in later. If you want to be here for general public comment, not specific to ARPA, please make sure that you've signed up with Athena who is over here. Later on, we'll do specific public comment with related to ARPA. Okay. There are two hands at this point in Zoom. Please bring Emily Boutilia. And I'm going to ask you to state your name and where you live. Hi, my name is Emily Boutilia. I live on 36 Chestnut Street. And should I start talking now? Please, please. Okay. I want to express strong support for the streetlight policy. I think that I would be really proud to live in a town that took a leadership role in this. I've been researching light pollution, light trespass for a few years. And I think that this would make a great impact both locally and in helping the national and international problem. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Was there anybody else in the audience, Athena? Or general public comment? Yes, the next person we have is a resident of Leveret. So we usually keep those to the end, just letting you know. Not for general public comment. Next is Pat Ananabaku. Did you want to make general public comment? No. Vera Cage, did you want to make general public? Please come forward. Hi, my name is Vera Cage. And I live at 12 Longletter Drive in Amherst. I'm here to talk about the Drake. The Drake received $300,000 in ARPA funding, but they couldn't figure out how to put up a ramp to their stage. I'm questioning how it came to this point after a whole year's worth of operation that they are now applying for a variance with the Massachusetts Architectural Access Board. I was very surprised to frequent the Drake one evening. And I questioned the town manager, Paul Balkaman, who sits on the board of the Business Improvement District. And he also has donated to the Drake as well as some of you folks here in the town council. And I just want to figure out how one establishment in town, who's also listed as a nightclub, could not get away with a temporary ramp that could be pulled away. Yet the Drake was allowed that ability. So I'm questioning the integrity of our building commissioner about his thought process on that. And I'm interested in what the Massachusetts Architectural Access Board will do with respect to the Drake's application for a variance to be okay with the law around accessibility. That is my general comment, thank you. Thank you for your comment. We're going to go again to Zoom and please bring in James Lowenthal. Hello. And if you will go ahead and state your name and where you live. Yes, thank you. My name is James Lowenthal and I am a resident of Northampton. Is it appropriate for me to speak now? Is this regarding general public comment or is it regarding our spending? It's regarding the proposed lighting policy. Please go ahead. You have no more than three minutes. Thank you. My name is James Lowenthal. I live in Northampton. I am the president of the Massachusetts chapter of Dark Sky and I am also on the American Astronomical Society's committee for the protection of astronomy and the space environment. And I chair the Light Pollution Committee of that organization. And I also lead efforts to combat light pollution at the international level. The proposed ordinance, the proposed policy for Amherst is consistent with current best practices. It is by no means putting Amherst out on a limb. There are over 50 cities and towns around Massachusetts that already have some kind of protection of the night sky. And Amherst's current policy regarding its lighting is woefully out of date. And you can see the evidence of that by walking around town. We all know that to use a flashlight properly, you point the flashlight at the ground, not in your own face. And yet what Amherst currently has is a lot of public street lights poking everybody right in the face. That's bad lighting. And it's ineffective and worse. It's dangerous. I also am a transportation advocate. I helped found Northampton's Transportation and Parking Commission. I sit on its bicycle and pedestrian committee. I'm very familiar with bike and safety issues. And I can guarantee you that the number one problem at night with visibility is the same effect, the flashlight effect, glare. It's light that pokes you in the eye and limits your visibility. It ruins your visibility when it should be helping. All outdoor light at night should be shielded effectively against glare. And that is one of the major points of the proposed ordinance. We have way more than enough light already. It's not a question of the amount. There is so much light out there. It never gets dark in Amherst anymore. It's at least five times brighter than natural on a typical night in Amherst. There's more than enough light. The problem is it's not going in the right direction. It's not controlled for glare. It's not controlled for color. Whenever you go out tonight and see a bright blue light poking in the eye, that's glare, that's reducing visibility. So I wanna speak in favor of the proposed ordinance. It has some very basic vanilla-flavored aspects that are recommended for best practices, not just here in the valley, not just in Massachusetts, not just around the country, but around the world. And a lot of care and attention has gone into it. It's gone through many iterations. And I hope you'll find that the 10% worsening of light pollution around the world every year is enough cause. And if you're not sure about that, please turn to the current issue of Science Magazine. Thank you very much. Thank you for your comment. Are there any other people in the audience? Athena, okay. And we have nobody else in Zoom. I just wanna mention that at this point, we have 19 people on Zoom and we have 10 people who have joined us in the audience tonight. We are going to go on to the Consent Agenda. The Consent Agenda is a pretty straightforward gang. It's to approve an appointment for the Conservation Commission and two agendas, two sets of minutes. So I'm going to make the motion. And if there's anybody who would like to remove an item, please do so, you do not need a second. To move the following items and the printed motions they're under and approve those items as a single unit. Nine, A1, approval of town manager appointments to the Conservation Commission. 11A, a approval of June 12, 2023, regular meeting minutes. And 11B, a approval of June 12, 2023, town council public forum meeting minutes. Is there any requests for any removals? Is there a second? Second, Devlin Gother. Thank you. Okay, we're going to begin. Shalini Balmil is absent. Pat D'Angeles? Aye. Anna Devlin-Gother? Aye. Lynn Gresemer's an aye. Mandy Johanicki? Aye. Anika Lopes? Aye. Did Michelle Miller join us? No, thank you. Dorothy Pam? Here. Pam Rooney? Yes, yes. Kathy Shane? Yes. Andy Steinberg? Yes. Jennifer Taub? Yes. Alicia Walker? Yes. Can I clarify that Dorothy Pam's vote was- Thank you. A stain or yes or no? It is, my vote is a yes. Thank you. Thank you. And thanks for that clarification, Dorothy. Okay. We have no resolutions and proclamations tonight. So we are going to move on to the next item. And let me just explain how we're going to approach this item. This is the presentation with regard to the American Rescue Plan Act funds that we and other municipalities all across the country have received. This is an initial presentation. There will be a follow up opportunity on Monday, July 17th based on questions that are asked tonight of both the audience and the council. The plan tonight is to have the town manager and the finance director provide a presentation on the status of our ARPA funds, what's been spent, what's not been spent, et cetera, and how we might move forward. I will then turn to the town council to see if you have clarifying questions, not changes, just clarifying, okay? We will then have a specific public comment period with a three minute limit to all people that want to speak. And an invitation to submit written comments at any point in time, which is always open. We'll return then to the council to ask additional questions so that they can ask additional questions or indicate information they would like prior to our July 17th meeting. All counselors will be asked to send questions also to the town manager following tonight's presentation. So with that, I'm going to call on town manager Paul Backelman and finance director Sean McConnell. Great, thank you, Lynn, and thank you for this opportunity to talk about where we are with the funding of the use of funds from the American Rescue Plan Act ARPA, which we'll always be calling it ARPA tonight, which is the common term that we use. It's our opportunity to give you an update on the status of the funds and how they've been utilized and what hasn't been done yet and what we're thinking of for the next round of funding. We always anticipated two rounds of funding, the first one and round two, which is where we're headed towards now. And our goal tonight is to present what were some ideas that we have and a welcome feedback on those ideas. The funds that we've been utilizing have been aligned with the goals of the town council. That was always our first metric and to meet the needs of the town and its residents and businesses. We've also utilized funds to take advantage of strategic opportunities that were aligned with the council's goals, such as purchasing the VFW site for a future home for a homeless shelter with supporting services. We are very grateful for these funds from the federal government. We're very proud of how we've stepped up during how we've allocated these funds and how the entire town has stepped up during the pandemic, during the recovery. We are in excellent shape as a town, primarily because of the hard work put in by our community and by our staff. So while we know that we are in good footing, there are still more challenges that need to be met and we're gonna talk about some of those things. So next slide. So tonight, we're gonna give you a little bit of background and we're gonna talk about the status of where we are and Sean is gonna do that part. Then I'll come back and we'll talk about the round two plan and then ask you for questions. There'll be plenty of time for questions and answers and I do wanna thank Finance Director Sean Mangano and Leah Carver from the Finance Department who've been managing this. While the funds are a blessing, it also takes a lot of work to conceptualize, to build programs, to develop applications and to monitor the spending and make sure all the money is spent appropriately. It's complicated, it's time consuming and I will match our work that we've done against any other community in the state. We do this with the expectation that we will be audited at some point by the federal government. So to that end, we are being very careful about how we make our decisions and the documentation that we require. Sometimes I can seem onerous, but it's really important for us because we are trying to limit the liability of the town so that if we don't wanna be allocating funds that we can't justify. So for background, we received $11.9 million in ARPA funds and just for a reference point, the city of Northampton received twice as much money. So while it's a lot of money to us, there are a lot of communities that have, they are able to do a lot more with ARPA funds. The funds that we have have to be obligated by December 31st, 2024, meaning they have to be either spent or under contract. And that seems a long ways away, but it really isn't given the speed of local government. The first tranche that we talked about was 9.8 million and we purposely held back $2 million with the understanding that at some point, not all $9.8 million would be spent and that would come back into the pool. The funding plan is based on community outreach and working with the town and worth the town council. And everything that is on our website under our ARPA page, so it's very transparent. So now we're back. Next slide. So Sean is now gonna give a sort of update on our different groupings of what we've spent and what we haven't spent. And we've tried to sort of show this in graph form to make it easy and then we summarize it at the end. Thanks, Paul. So yeah, we've grouped the projects by category. And then on each slide, you'll see a pie chart that summarizes the total amount allocated to that category, how much has been obligated and how much is unobligated. For the purposes of this presentation, obligated means that it's either been spent, encumbered meaning it's under contract or a purchase order or it's projected to be spent. We have things, some projects that are payroll based so we can't really encumber them specifically but we're projecting to spend them. And if it's unobligated, it essentially means that we are saying it's not projected to be spent at this point and so it's available to go to round two. So for this first category, which is public health and safety, 2.3 million was allocated in total and about 50% of that is obligated. About 50% we're expecting to go to round two. Public health staffing was used to make our public health nurse, which was a 0.8 position, bring that to full time and to hire a full-time administrative position that both of those things have happened and all those funds are expected to be spent. Public health translation services was to work with a contractor to have a translation capability when people call the public health department. Our public health director has done that and so that capability is available and so far we hear that it's working well. Fire and EMS staffing was to hire four additional firefighter positions that has been done. We don't anticipate spending all of that money because our goal from the beginning has been to incorporate those four positions into our operating budget as soon as we can because those are permanent positions that we anticipate will continue. And so we wanna get them off of grant funds as soon as we can. So some of the money that is unobligated is coming back from this section. Mental health services was again to partner with a contractor to provide some mental health services in town. Much of that need has been taken care of by the DPH grant and by some of the ESSER funds that the schools have received that they have put towards mental health. So that money is planned to go back to round two. Cresc implementation was to support that new department as it kicked off. Again, same thing because of the DPH grant which has covered the majority of the implementation costs for Cresc, much of that funding is going to round two. And then premium pay was payment for some employees who had a particular exposure to COVID-19 during the pandemic. This program has been done for a little bit and so that project's complete. And there's some funds that are coming back from that that we'll go to round two. The next category is Resonant Aid Programs. So all the funds in this category anticipated to be spent. The first project was the Survival Center. There was 150,000 allocated to continue the meal delivery program. They had some other funding sources that were winding down and then this funding would pick up to continue this program for the foreseeable future. The Resonant Emergency Aid Program had a $150,000 allocated as well. This was to support households that were behind on their mortgage or utilities or rent. And this program has been very successful. We've helped approximately 80 households. You can see the demographic breakdown to the right. It was optional whether people identified the race as they applied or households identified the race as they applied. So there's an unidentified category but you can see it's a pretty diverse allocation of grant funds. And this program where actually you'll hear more later on from Paul but we're increasing the funding for this program by 50,000 because the first 150,000 has been used up and there still have been ongoing applications coming in. Homelessness support was allocated to help identify a permanent shelter for the homeless and also for transitional housing. As Paul mentioned earlier, we've secured a site now for a future permanent shelter which will help us seek state and federal funds and accelerate that process and address a long time goal of the council. And then senior center transportation thanks to our senior center director who was able to get a used PBTA van donated to the town, an accessible van donated to the town. These funds have been used primarily for drivers to drive that vehicle and bring seniors to the senior center and to medical appointments. Next is housing. So there was a million dollars allocated for housing also expecting to spend all of that. The majority of this million dollars has been earmarked for the East street school and the Belcher town road site which will create 70 new units over half of which will be affordable and there still will be funding left over hopefully to support another project somewhere in town. Infrastructure, there's a number of projects here. Cyber security, there were funds allocated for our T department to do an assessment and to beef up our cybersecurity posture especially in light of what's been going on in municipalities across the state. There were funds for capital projects management to either hire a temporary staff or a designer to help implement some of our capital projects. We have a number of projects both in ARPA and non-ARPA that we need some additional capacity to help get them started and moving and that's what those funds are for. Enterprise support, this was to fill in lost revenue in the sewer fund in our parking enterprise fund early on during the pandemic when the university closed. Both of those enterprise funds saw the revenues drop suddenly and so this one's been done for a while but that's what that was for. Public Wi-Fi, we received a different grant not ARPA to upgrade the downtown Wi-Fi system. That is almost complete. We hope over the summer that this upgrade will be completed and these funds are being used to supplement that project and then expand Wi-Fi to other locations like parks outside of the downtown area and bring that additional coverage. Likewise, Municipal Fiber, the town is a project to build out a fiber network connecting all the municipal buildings and these funds were used to add additional strands to that network so it's more flexible and can do more in the future, possibly have more extensions of where it can go and if there's any funds left over in this category it will be used to connect additional locations that were not in the original scope. Trails money was used to repair a trails that were heavily used during the pandemic and the downtown public restroom, we've heard a lot about needing a publicly accessible restroom that was not attached to a restaurant. We believe we've identified a location near Kendrick Park and so this is one of those projects that we hope to bring on temporary staff to help us lead this project through the design phase and complete this project. It'll have to go through all the steps of any public facilities so. So all of these funds are expected to be spent. The next category is education and childcare. So there was about 150,000 allocated for preschool and after school. The preschool funds have been used to support three and four year olds with social, emotional and behavioral challenges especially those that may have been caused by the pandemic and by having disruptions in their care and their education. We're partnering with the preschool at Crocker Farm for that project. After school, those funds are being used to provide transportation for students to attend after school care during some of our vacation weeks and also to provide subsidies for students to attend the vacation camps that we have that operate during February and April vacation. The early childhood expansion program, there's 300,000 that was gonna be a grant program for childcare providers to increase the number of slots that they can offer in town. We had high hopes for this program. We were hoping that this would result in a large increase in the number of slots that might be available for Amherst residents. Unfortunately, there was a general lack of interest when the applications were due and so we decided not to move forward with that program and so those funds will go back to round two. And then the sixth grade transition, originally we had allocated a large sum to the regional schools to support bringing the sixth grade, actually the elementary schools, sixth grade, the elementary schools to bring the sixth grade up to the middle school was gonna cover some operational costs and some facility costs but due to that transition being delayed until after the new school is open, those funds have come back and we'll go to round two. Climate impact, there was 510,000 allocated here. The majority of this pot was for the heat pump program to provide financial incentives for particularly low income households to convert their heating systems from a fossil fuel heating system to a heat pump type program. This project is starting to take off. We're finalizing a solicitation for a consultant to administer the program for us and to help provide the education and outreach. So we hope this is a program that will kick off in the second half of this year. Other projects that were included here were two sustainability fellows to work with, Stephanie Chickarello, they're helping with assessment of municipal facilities and some other projects that she's got going on. This funding is being used to create a community dashboard to monitor the different strategies in the climate plan and the town's progress towards completing those strategies. That work has begun. We've contracted with a company who is developing that now. These funds are also being used to support the mobile market and Fort River Community Farms. And lastly, we'll also be used for to complete an inventory of our municipal fleet and the greenhouse gas emissions from our fleet and then come up with a transition plan to move us off of those fossil fuels. So most of these things are underway and we hope to get them complete in the next six months or so. This is the heat pump program will be a longer running program though. Diversity, equity and inclusion. We allocated funds for Amherst Recreation to better serve children in the community that during our listening sessions, we heard there were some gaps in service. They're still in the planning phase for how to deploy those funds. Youth empowerment, there was 500,000 to help with the creation of a center and a program. I think the town manager is gonna be kicking that process off in the near future a group to start moving that project forward. Community engagement was initially for our ambassadors and as our ambassador program has been phased out, it's been supporting community engagement more broadly. And then the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion before it was approved by the town council and funded in the actual budget. We had started the department with one staff member and these funds helped pay for that staff member until the budget included a new appropriation. So all these funds are anticipated to be spent and nothing we'll be going around to from this section. And then the last section is economic development. So there are three projects here. Small business grants had $100,000. $65,000 was for growth and startup grants and the other $35,000 was for technical assistance. Of the growth and startup grants, we've allocated and awarded pretty much all of them at this point, $64,000. You can see the breakdown of those grants. So 95% have been awarded to businesses owned by owner or identified as marginalized, which we defined as a BIPOC, LGBTQ or women owned and 5% to non-marginalized. And then the breakdown between BIPOC and non-BIPOC, 55% to businesses owned by a BIPOC individual and 45% to non-BIPOC. And I think the more impressive thing with the small business grant program is that it's awarded grants to over or to 18 businesses, many of which if you walk downtown, you'll see. The downtown entertainment venue, the Drake. So there are funds allocated there, $300,000. About half of that was for infrastructure improvements and the other half was for programming. The programming piece is still being spent. The infrastructure, the biggest piece there and it's all been spent at this point was for HVAC. Again, this was as we were coming out of the pandemic, we invested in the HVAC system to support a safe air quality situation in that indoor performing arts venue. And then economic empowerment, there was $350,000 allocated here. We had high hopes for this program. It was gonna be used to support entrepreneurship in town, arts and artists and performing artists and to build on some of our partnerships with UMass. We're gonna be able to do some of those things through other means, but the biggest challenge we ran into with this project was finding a staff person to do it, to implement it consistently and we were unable to do that. And so these funds will largely come back and go to round two. So in summary for round one, one of the lenses that we look at these projects to see if they were successful is what type of lasting impact will they have. Some of the programs in round one were for sort of immediate assistance and that's okay. That was one of the intentions for the program was to provide immediate relief but we also wanted to make sure some of the things we did had a lasting impact and achieved goals of the town council. Some of those things include our location for permanent shelter, the formal housing development, the youth empowerment program and a public restroom facility, the downtown performing arts venue and the impact that has on the downtown and supporting other businesses, increased adoption of heat pump technology and then again, our Wi-Fi usable fiber infrastructure which is really the backbone of our communications network as we go forward. We hope there will be additional ones we can add to this list when round one is complete. There's still money there. So there may be some more things to add to this list but in total seven million was expended and cumbers or projected to be spent in round one which leaves 2.8 million to shift to round two in addition to the existing two million that was already there. And I will turn it back to Paul. Great, thanks Sean. So when we look at what we should be trying to accomplish with round two of the funds the first thing we thought about was there has been talk at this federal level about clawbacks if you have, for cities and towns that haven't spent their money that they would claw it back, take it away. So we have a strategy in mind that for rapid action were that to happen but we're hoping that we don't have to do the allocation. We'd rather use it through the ARPA process. The second was to minimize new programs so that when they are instituted they don't create new fiscal cliffs new operational demands on our budget. We want it there to be a clear path beyond ARPA if we're putting something together we want it there to be a clear path to support that program going beyond the extent, the expiration of this program. And then the third thing was to support the goals that the council had already identified or had been identified through studies that the town had done and or have been articulated during the JCPC process or some other study that the town has done. And then the last thing was to reduce the long-term operating costs to the town if we can use things to make us more efficient and be able to recapture the funds that we're not gonna be utilized to support these primary goals. Next slide. So here are some projects that we've already committed ourselves to in round two. First is the need for a consultant for the resident oversight board consultant. This is $100,000 to help us create the resident oversight board that was recommended by the community safety working group. Our DEI director felt very strongly that we needed outside support. This will be the first oversight board that's been created after post. And we really wanna make sure it's done right and effectively and has longstanding a stature. The second was to support an immediate need that had high urgency, which was to support the replacement of pump four under our wastewater system. The council had already allocated funds, but we had needed the additional funds to complete this project. The third is $250,000 to make improvements to recreation areas. As Sean mentioned, recreation areas had intense usage during ARPA or during pandemic and we're really suffering from the usage that was being done. So we were allocating funds to support, just basic improvements to our bathhouses and some other park areas that we really needed to invest in. We also recognized in working with family outreach that there was a significant need for the heavily utilized program to aid residents who are behind on rent or mortgage or utility bills. And so we allocated $50,000 for that. And then we settled on $100,000 to close out the CARES and FEMA funds. So if you recall, we also had CARES and FEMA money that we put as many costs as we could. Then we submit that to the federal government. And then we had a very high success rate, but some of those costs are rejected and we have to then find another source to fund those costs. So those are the things that we've already committed ourselves to. And so some of the things that we are talking about, and this is where we're really welcoming your feedback. As we thought about this, we really wanted to have significant impact going forward. So the first is to install a solar canopy at the high school. This was one of the highest rated priorities in the town-wide solar assessment. It would reduce the operating costs for the high school. It may qualify for tax credits under the IRA program for the state, for the federal government. Clean energy, obviously. And we also think it would be a highly visible, impactful project and a location, again, that was identified in our CADMIS report. This was a request that the students from the high school brought to the council. It's a very expensive project, but we think that this would be a game changer for the town and something that would well be needed. It's not an easy project. We have to repave the parking lot. We have to install everything. We have to work out a lot of agreements with the region to understand exactly what our relationship would be if the town puts money into this. The second is sort of a companion to the teen empowerment center. We have not, on the teen empowerment center, we have not made the progress we had hoped to make. So we are sort of backing up and going to take a new approach because that is something that's an important priority for the town, for the youth empowerment center and moving that forward with more community involvement as we move that forward. Concurrently, we also recognize that we will not have a new senior center given the sort of demands on our capital projects with the DPW Fire library and school in the queue to be built. I don't anticipate we will have funds for a new senior center in the near future. So in the meantime, we need to address the needs of the seniors by upgrading the space at the Banks Community Center. And important to the senior center was a functional kitchen that would be actually be used by any members of the community that we put in the large activity room and to have a exercise room for seniors. Because they have the equipment, they don't have a useful exercise room. It will require reallocating space at the Banks Community Center. We have done some work on that. We need to do more work and also consult with the senior center staff and the council on aging. But this, again, it was a stopgap measure that will meet the needs of seniors for the time being. The third thing is community grants. Now, when we set up the original ARPO program, we did not offer community grants. And these are grants to nonprofit organizations, other groups that might have a mission that the ARPO funds could be allocated to. We want to put some money aside to offer this up to community groups who could apply and be awarded this to achieve the function, the goals of their organization. We've had many groups come to us saying we would like to allocate ARPO funds for this or that. This would be the opportunity and these are all, if you're a nonprofit organization, then this would be something that you'd be able to access. And then the last one is the roads and sidewalks. You hear about roads and sidewalks all the time. You could take all of the ARPO money and put it in the roads and sidewalks if you so chose. But this is something we want to have as being like everything that we don't spend would wind up going into repairing our roads and sidewalks. Next slide. So for tonight, we're eager to hear from you. We're in listening mode. Do you support these projects? Do you think we're on the right track? If not, what track would you like us to go on? Are there any ideas that you have that we haven't thought about? And this is not just to the council. It's primarily to the council because you're our boss, but it's also to the general public and we're eager to hear from you. And then the idea is that during the course of the next few weeks prior to the next council meeting, you will send us your ideas. If you have specific questions, you will formulate those questions and we can come back to you with more detailed answers. And then have another conversation come July 17th. Thank you. Thank you. So as planned, I'm going to turn to the council and just ask, do you have clarifying questions about how the money has been spent? Not so much about future expenditure. I think that's more of the second conversation. Pat. Thank you. I would love to clarify. Use your mic, please. I have it on. Okay, thank you. Let's speak into it. Thank you. Never enough. That's right. I'm interested in the Youth Empowerment Center, $500,000. Now I'm was, I don't, let me see my notes. How can you clarify what has happened with that so far? What's the process for this? Yeah. So we anticipated that we would move that forward primarily with staff. Given our staff turnover and the sort of a lot of new people in new positions, we just didn't make progress on it. And so now I'm where I want to back up and sort of create a community group that has representatives from different boards and committees that will drive this a little more aggressively. And then that will help move this forward on our agenda. I think with a oversight group of some sort that will help this, I think it gives us clarity and where it's going and it gives us more community involvement on what the options are. And then we will hopefully get something forward back to the council quickly. And so that money is there for that. The money is there for $500,000, right? And again, I think that this isn't gonna buy a new Youth Empowerment Center. It will get us something that'll last us until we're in a position to build a brand new center. I understand that, thank you. These are clarifying questions. Dorothy? I'm interested to know why we receive so much less money than Northampton did. Was that because they don't count students the same way or it just seemed like a very interesting question. So I'd love to hear some more about that. Thank you. Let me speak to that Paul. Sure. Yeah, we were very... It's a bone of contention with us to say help. You're very angry about it, Dorothy. So once upon a time, Northampton somehow was categorized as a metropolitan city. Typically you have to have over 50,000 residents to meet that or get that classification. Somehow they still got it without hitting that mark. But because they were classified as a metropolitan city, metropolitan cities split a different bucket of money than everybody else. So they got an allocation from one pool of money that was split up among metropolitan cities and everybody else was called a non-entitlement unit or an NEU, which where we fell, and we split up everything that was left. So that's why they got so much more as they were classified differently than we were and split up a different bucket of funds. Again, this is to Lynn. Will we have a chance to make another... To make a comment on this topic today? Yes, absolutely. After we do public comment, then we're gonna return to the council to talk about our thoughts on different things. So thank you very much. Okay, certainly. Are there any other council clarifying questions? Jennifer. Yeah, so I just... So with the Drake, I am a supporter. I contributed. So I'm just asking that was a priority for the town. But so it wasn't, I guess what I'm asking is the money wasn't given to the bid and then the bid decided to give it to the Drake. That was something that was a priority of the town. I think there's some confusion there. Yeah, I can answer that. Yeah, so the Drake was a separate project from the small business grants. The Drake was viewed as sort of a unique economic opportunity and really to support the arts and culture industry in town. When we looked at Amherst and sort of what drives its economy, that's one of our major sectors and was really impacted by the pandemic. So that was viewed as its own project completely separate from the small business grant program and it didn't go through the bid to them. It went straight from the town to them. Okay, thank you. If you think back to where we were at that moment in time, nobody knew what the future was holding for the town. And one of the things that people identified as a need for a real venue that was open to the public to utilize to generate more activity downtown. Alicia. Thank you. I have a couple of questions. You mentioned briefly about ARPA funding going to support three and four year olds with social emotional challenges. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that and what exactly that means? So one of the things we heard is that the delays and some of the disruptions caused from the pandemic and just inconsistent education from either being remote or in person has caused a variety of challenges for students. And so these funds were to provide some targeted intervention to address those needs. The preschool will give you a better explanation than I will. It was a proposal from the school system. Okay, and I just generally meant like, was it like hiring more staff? Was it like providing different services? It was, my understanding is generally it's been used to hire contractors to work with students. The preschool has limited staffing and so this is to work with some of our contractors that we work with typically to provide some additional intervention services. Okay, thank you. And then my next question was about the subsidies for transportation. And I was hoping you could also elaborate a little bit more on what that means. So there were sort of two separate things and I can get an update from the schools whether they're implementing it for the this coming year. But the transportation was just to provide transportation services to the vacation camps and the afterschool program. Where in the past, they've had limited transportation available for those. So it was to hopefully create more access to those offerings. And then the subsidies was that there was there's a tuition or a cost for those vacation camps and to provide more basically free slots for Amherst residents. Thank you. And do you know, does that also apply to summer? Just cause you mentioned February and April. Yeah, I'll have to get an update that the original plan was just for the vacation camps but I'll have to get an update where they are at currently. Okay, awesome. And I know this question was already asked about the Youth Empowerment Center. So I don't think I need more of an answer right this minute from Mr. Balthowan but I would like to know more about how like how the group is being established how we're deciding who participates in that and what their actual charge would be like what are we hoping to get from that and if there's a timeline. So I'd be interested at another time to hear those things about the Youth Empowerment Center. My other question, sorry, I was writing a whole bunch down when you were presenting. My other question was about measuring lasting impact. How are we measuring what is lasting impact? Like what does that exactly mean? Yeah, no, it's a good question. I don't think, I think lasting impact, I think for us it's sort of if it's gonna continue to support the town or benefit the town years after the project is done. The reason why I sort of pause for a second is that we do all of our projects we do have goals and outcomes quantifiable goals and outcomes which aren't necessarily focused at lasting impact but just that impact in general. So on that link in the PowerPoint, if anybody wants to see any of the goals that we did establish when these projects were first created, you'll see all those listed and that's something that will continue to track and monitor. And if I can address Alicia's first quick. So in terms of what that the next step is for the Youth Empowerment Center, I will expect to have something to you prior to your July 17th meeting with a proposal that what that looks like and get feedback from you at that moment in time. Awesome, thank you. I just have two more questions. My next question was you mentioned Mr. Bachman something towards the end about the next round of funding identifying or using the funds to address identified town needs. And I'm wondering like, do we have like a specific set of town needs that we were trying to address when we were distributing ARPA funds? Like is that an actual thing that we did? In round one or in round two or both? Well, I think now I think you just said something about like, okay. Yeah, so in this round we, when we were looking at what the needs were, we identified things that had to come up through the joint capital planning process through some studies that has done either through the CARP program for sustainability issues, things like that. We looked at things that had already been studied, things that had been talked about by the council through the budget process, things that were in my goals or in the financial goals for the town. So we started, that's we weren't, we're trying not to just make up things as we went along. We were trying to think about what are the things that have been already articulated as needs for the town that might not be able to move forward, but for a sudden infusion of new money. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead. Sorry, and I actually have two, two more. And that also in the distribution of monies for the assistance program. There was like a pie chart and it listed marginalized as an identity. And I'm wondering what that means. For the small business grant program. Yeah. There were two projects going on the left hand. Yeah. So we identified marginalized as women owned, BIPOC owned or LGBTQ owned. There could be other categories in there, but those were the three primary that we identified. Okay. Thank you. That is helpful. And then my last question sort of just came up with the question about the bid monies being a separate contribution through the town as like a recognized initiative of the town separate from business grants. And just wondering why some of the businesses wouldn't also be considered as contributing to the culture and arts sector. So the money for the Drake did not go through the bid. It went directly to the downtown Amherst Foundation, which is the nonprofit entity that's operating the bid. So when we identified a need and there was an initiative to create a downtown music and arts center, we thought it was important to support that effort. And generally, I think the community supported that. I mean, Representative Dom came up with $50,000 to contribute to the project as well. So there's broad support in the community to create a venue that could support this that was owned and operated by a nonprofit entity. And if I could just add to that, just stepping back for a minute. So the process when we first allocated round one, we met with the finance committee, met with the council to talk about process. And some communities did sort of a very open community grant process. Some did more targeted. The feedback that we received from finance committee was to consult more with key stakeholders in town and seek at their thoughts. So our process when we allocated round one was we did listening sessions that were open to everybody. And there was feedback that I can recall specifically that we received at those listening sessions that resulted in programs that have been created. So those were helpful. We used Engage Amherst as our online tool to get feedback and then we consulted with key stakeholders in all of our departments, both staff, but also the community partners that they work with. And those three sources, we had a forum that they all filled out and we compiled all those and that helped create the basis of what we allocated for round one. Thank you. Yes, thank you. I just have one last comment. I ask because, and I have no issues myself with the bid, but my question is then why when we're looking at like expanding culture and helping disproportionately affected communities, which is literally what ARPA funds are for, why we wouldn't be looking at black owned businesses as a like specific target population since we literally have one in our downtown and that one business didn't get any ARPA funding. So that just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And so I think the next question or the other helpful process that it would be helpful to have outlined would be the application process, like what were the requirements or criteria of businesses to apply for ARPA funds because I know that we make those calls. Like the town can say ARPA funds can be used. We create the perimeters. And so what were the perimeters that we created that allowed that to happen? So we can put that all together and share that with everybody in the council. Yeah, and I'll just add a good question. Yeah. And we didn't again, we didn't have goals that specifically were laid out for black owned businesses but we did have goals for BIPOC businesses and marginalized businesses. And even the funding for the Drake had goals for the performers and for the artists that they would bring in that had those parameters on it. So again, we didn't have that specific one but we did have an equity lens that we brought to every project. Okay. Are there other councilor clarifying questions before we move to public comment? We will then come back to the council for additional discussion. All right, some other people have joined us in the room. I'm sure that if you would like to make public comment with regard to ARPA spending that you have signed in with Athena. She is over here. And I just wanna mention we now have about 11 or 12 people in the audience. And if you are in the Zoom link and you would like to make public comment please raise your hand now. We're gonna get an assembly of how many people we have in each. Athena. Pat, on Anubhaku, you're first. Would you please come up to the microphone, state your name and address before you make your comment? We are limiting to three minutes per public comment. Thank you. Good evening. Can people hear me? We can. Okay. Pat Anubhaku from Amherst, president of Black Business Association of Amherst Area. I'm here to speak on behalf of my group. I do have other BBA members here tonight. And listening, first of all, I wanna thank the town council and the town manager for tonight to discuss ARPA funds. At the same time, I am very embarrassed for our town to continue to discriminate against black owned businesses. I am calling for investigation of how Drake came to have $300,000 for a nightclub. And when a black owned business that is nightclub hazel was declined funding. The stakeholders that were being referenced tonight to me were all white-led organizations. BBA has been in operation since 2016. When I hear that Pat Anubhaku made up BBA, look in the room tonight. We've invited our town manager and some elected and appointed officials to come to our meeting that I did not make this up. We were having this conversation tonight because of me, what my research, what I dug up. And that's why we're having this conversation. We have a huge crisis in our town. In listening to our town manager do his presentation, he never mentioned about the harm that was done to BBA members and other black owned businesses, BIPOC businesses who did not receive our funds. We were not invited to the table. And all of a sudden we're being told that Drake is special. What is special about Drake? Except that it's owned by powerful land owners and developers in this town. And if we're students about DEI, we really need to do the work. My group is asking for $150,000 for Hazel for eight months of permitting process delays due to racism. They were forced to put in permanent RAM and Drake was allowed to open without permanent RAM. My group is also requesting $150,000 for upper funds. And that's nothing compared to Drake getting $300,000. I'm calling for investigation, how that came about. Why is Drake a priority in our town? Don't we have other groups that can also provide cultural and arts to our town? Ask any black owned business in our town. If Drake opening has benefited them, their revenue have not increased since Drake has opened. Who is Drake benefiting? We've had some black artists come up to us telling us that they were refused to perform at Drake. So this is just a crack. It's coming. It's going to blow up real big in our town. We better do the right thing and make everybody whole. We have Hispanic group. We have Asian American group, other groups as well. I support non-profit as well to tap into upper funds. We need to do a robust outreach in our community. What we're doing here to me is very measured, is very controlled. We need to have three or four hours and have people just come for listening session. We need to go into the communities and listen to them. What we're doing here is not enough. So we have more than $4 million on the table. Let's do the right thing. People are still hurrying. People are still have a lot of debt. They haven't paid their bills, mortgage. A lot of people hurrying childcare and so on and so forth. Let's use the other $4 million wealth to people who really, really, really need it. When we talk about marginalized, it would be nice to really break it down by race. White women in our town, and I support them getting funding for businesses. They are not marginalized, except if they are group like LGBT or something like that, yes. So if we're talking about business funding allocation, we need to break it down by race. I urge you to do your work, do your research and try to piece out who got what with the business funding. I was able to get that information by myself by working with the finance director. I just have so much to talk about tonight, but three minutes isn't enough. What I'm trying to say is we need, listen, we need public, robust, public engagement to get this right. Thank you. Thank you. Shall I go on to the Zoom? Okay, Allegra, I believe it's Allegra Clark under Allegra Defund. Please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Hi, my name is Allegra Clark. I live in district two. I am calling tonight about the ARPA funds. I had two things. One, I support a more equitable distribution of funds for business owners and taking a more critical look at what has already been distributed. One of the things I noticed when going through some of the numbers that were given was that when you look at the artists that are paid by the Drake, there seemed to be some discrepancies in the amount of payments given to black artists versus artists that were white. So that was something I noticed and I do appreciate that they are trying to bring a diverse group of artists into town, but I think there needs to be equitable payment to those artists and to the existing black businesses in town. My other question, comment was around the childcare subsidies that were taken back off the table because there wasn't an interest and I just wonder how that was proposed. What I have seen during and after the pandemic in my childcare facility and in speaking with friends is that there's been such staff turnover in childcare facilities that we actually have been operating half the number of kids in slots at our place because they don't have staff staying long enough to be operating in ratio because the EEC has ratios of students to staff members and so you would look in a room and say, okay, well, 10 of 20 kids are here but really because there aren't enough staff consistently there, they can't fill those other 10 slots. So I just don't know if staffing was gonna be addressed by that money that was taken back off the table or if it was creating slots that might not necessarily need to be created but somehow need to be supported by staffing. So that was just a question critique comment from my experience in childcare in this pandemic that we've been in. So those are my comments. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Athena. Next, we have Vera Cage. Please come up to the microphone, state your name and address before you make your public comment. Vera Cage, 12 long metadrive, Amherst. So I have a problem and I think other people have problems and I think you all need to have a problem with the fact that our town manager sits on the board of the business improvement district. We should have a problem that our town hall, that city hall, that town hall, not only is Justin's close proximity physically with the business improvement district but practically we're in bed with them. The fact that $300,000 went to the downtown Amherst Foundation which is a project which is the nonprofit arm of the business improvement district tells me that it didn't go $300,000 to put together to be the economic incubator stimulator for this town didn't go to the most qualified entity or human being to administer this project, this endeavor. There was no application process. There was no request for proposals. It went to the person sleeping next to them. That is not objective. The fact that we are so okay with this business as usual concept that our town council president, our town manager regularly meets with the executive director of the business improvement district which is the lobbying group for developers and landowners in this community. The fact that $150,000 of the $300,000 that went to the Drake went to improve the facility of Barry Roberts is beyond my understanding or comprehension he received $150,000 basically to do an upgrade to his building. $150,000 went to help tenants and homeowners who are behind on their rent who are behind on their mortgage. And now we're thinking, oh, there's a need. So we'll kick in another $50,000 in the second round. That's $200,000. That's $100,000 less than what the Drake received. That's the communication. That's the reality. That is the real information that many of our people in this town will know more. When you push people to the wall, what do you expect them to do in this community? Sit back and take it. We will have a real revolution in our hands when we go to every door, every resident in this community and tell them that this is happening in our community. The $150,000 in programming that went to the Drake to put on programming, these are decisions and choices made by the same human beings. That's sickening and that has to stop. The fact that you can't find a driver for the teen empowerment center is a fear because you know people who can drive this. You know people that can make this happen, that can make this a reality three weeks ago. But we in this room choose to ignore the people that we appoint to our advisory committee that we have worked with under the CSWG, the CSSJC, we can throw out a whole bunch of acronyms and alphabets. I'm over my time. I have more to say. I don't know if you will allow me, council president, because I'm also the board president of Amherst media, which also is an entity and nonprofit in this town that could benefit from our profunding that provides real critical resources to this town to document and to archive our history and the progress that we are achieving in this community. We work with college students providing internships. We equip regular immunity members with equipment, with training, with the tools to tell their own story. We're one of the oldest organizations in town. How can you not trust us, but trust people who have put together a concept that hasn't been tested? I'm just gonna leave my comments at that. I just say that we need to stop having the town manager serve on the business improvement district. It is a lobbying group. It is a 501C4. That's why they had to create a 501C3 nonprofit. It's the same people running the same show. Thank you. I'm gonna move on to the Zoom and it's Kathleen Anderson. Please enter the room, state your name and where you live. My name is Kathleen Anderson. I live in district three. I just wanted to remind Sean Mangano that BIPOC means black, indigenous and people of color. In other words, people who own the Hazel's Blue Lagoon are black business owners. They're black people. If this town can have a diversity, equity and inclusion committee, but cannot find a way to use ARPA funds and grant ARPA funds to black businesses in the community, there is something wrong. As Vera has pointed out, there is something wrong. And if this town wants to advocate for a diversity, equity and inclusion program, then it needs to honor the BIPOC people who have businesses and are eligible for ARPA funds. Throughout the history of the United States, white people have created ways for BIPOC people not to benefit from some of the same programs that they themselves benefit from. Let's stop that here. Stop it. I'll stop. Thank you for joining us. Athena. Alma Karshabazz, please come up to the microphone, state your name and address. Alma Karshabazz, 29 Chapel Road in Amherst. I don't recall the specific recommended language about it, but I do serve on a town-appointed committee. And I just want to make clear I don't speak tonight in any capacity related to that committee. I speak only as myself as a resident of the town. So just wanted to express that first off. I am part of the Black Business Association of the Amherst area. I believe that the coming together, the organizing and the expression of a kind of united voice of Black business owners is very important to the long-term viability of those businesses. We can see this back at the turn of the early 1900s when Booker T. Washington organized similar kinds of Negro chambers of commerce and Black help to organize Black business to come together all over the country. And what historians refer to as the Nadir, one of the worst periods in race relations and in high-ranking communities. And in high-water mark of racism against Black people in this country, it was very vital to their development, to their communities, to their survival, to have that kind of organizing. In fact, Booker T. Washington came to Amherst and went to what today we call Hope Community Church as part of helping that church get off the ground and become financially viable. And at the same time, also promoting the Black community in town, Black businesses in town was all part of his coming here to Little Amherst. I think we have to really look at Black businesses as a strategic investment in the viability and long-term development of the particular diverse community in Amherst of people of African descent. When I first came to the town, I remarked that I drove down the street and there was Baku's African restaurant and we immediately turned in to have lunch. And it was very impressive to me because where I was moving from Tulsa, Oklahoma, there was also a restaurant owned and operated by Chef Mundi, a Nigerian chef that had his own business there in Tulsa. And so it was very impressive to me to see that, oh, I'm moving somewhere that has the same kinds of diversity. And when it closed, I was very sad and I began to push for, I found myself going out of town to Chickapee to where Hazel's was located at that time. And as I would go, I was like, well, you know, I'm making this trek from South Amherst over to Chickapee. What if they came here? And as I would talk to Junior Williams and Patrick Chapman, I saw that in terms of where they were in their own business development and their own ideas, the idea of moving to Amherst was very appealing. And so I was directly a part of the encouragement of that. And so to see how they have fared in this town is a source of a really great, great, great pain to me. And I hope something will be done for that particular business, but also that the town will make a strategic investment in supporting black businesses. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. I have one person in Zoom. This is a specific comment to the ARPA funds. Darcy Dumont, please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Hi, this is Darcy Dumont. I live in South Amherst. And I just wanted to support the previous speakers in their expression that they felt that there has been unequal or inequitable distribution of the ARPA funds. And that it makes a whole lot of sense to make sure that some of the funds go specifically for black-owned businesses. And that I really hope that the town council is listening to the distress that's being expressed here tonight. I also wanted to just say that I was pleased to hear that the high school might be getting solar canopies. I'm really excited about that possibility. I, you know, the initial request for that was two or three years ago. And one thing I'd be interested in finding out is if it would include, I know that we're also applying for EV buses. It could conceivably be a really exciting program of creating a microgrid around the school community there which would be also be provided with energy storage by the EV school bus batteries. And I know that was part of the initial application by the high school students. So would be really interested to hear about whether that is being contemplated and also whether it's being contemplated that it be integrated into the community choice aggregation assets. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Athena. Monica Cage, please come up to the microphone, state your name and address and then make your comment, please. Hi, my name is Monica Cage. I was at 12 Long Metal Drive in Amherst and I'll yield my comment to Vera Cage. Vera Cage, 12 Long Metal Drive, Amherst. So I hope that the town council will take action on my advisement that the town manager should step down from his membership with the Business Improvement District because it seems like everything that the bid wants, the bid gets and that doesn't sit comfortably with a lot of us in this town. Not everyone can speak up against wealthy landowners in this town, right? A lot of us want to choose to be in proximity with these wealthy white landowners and developers because maybe they can do more for us. But a lot of us in this community disagree. A lot of us in this community are suffering economically, financially, we heard that our children are suffering in school. We could use more help and more support. And the data is there, the research there, the engagements there is just figuring out what we think is cool and it could be a priority. And on the litmus test shouldn't be how many other powerful people agree with these projects. Because sometimes we need to listen and provide the adequate support for communities who are truly suffering and not give money that are meant to target communities and businesses who are suffering economically, like ARPA is supposed to help people who are struggling. Not for people that are well off. So this is not a game, right? A lot of people, a lot of people in this town, the elites, it's a game. How much can we get? And who cares if people are suffering, if you're behind on your rent, if you're behind on your mortgage, your taxes? Who cares? We're in this elite club and we're gonna run the show. We're gonna get the money and we're gonna spend it on ourselves. You'll get some, you'll get some, you'll get some, you'll get some, don't worry. We will put our people to work and we will gain from the money that's coming down the pipeline, whether it's ARPA or anything else. So this is not a game for many of us. This is life and death, this is our livelihood, this is our pride, this is our joy, this is our life. And when you have signs all over the town that says black lives matter, really? In this town, there shouldn't be one sign up. Because how you all have made decisions, black lives do not matter in this town, thank you. There are no more people on the Zoom, are there others there? Steve Nagy, please come up to the microphone, state your name and address before you make your comment. Good evening, my name is Steve Nagy, 106 T Autohill Road, Leaver, Massachusetts. I was here this evening to learn more about how the ARPA funds were being distributed. And it was very interesting to find that the Drake was received $300,000 and I believe half of that was allocated to building improvements. It seems odd that American Rescue Act funds would be going toward an HVAC system or a landlord that had a vacant building. And now I believe that vacant building has the Drake as a tenant. I'd love to know how much the lease payment is on a monthly basis. And also that they will be housing another new business here in town, the White Lion Brewery. So I will find more information as time goes on, certainly the Form 990 from the organization that is the nonprofit that received the funding will be available as time goes on. And we'll continue to do some research and see exactly where these funds have gone. Thank you. Athena, is there anyone else? Okay, that concludes public comment. We will now return to council to provide feedback or other questions that you might have regarding the expenditures of ARPA funds both past and in the future. Anna. Thank you. Paul, could you please discuss and outline the public engagement process for the distribution of ARPA funds in the first round? What did you do to engage the community? What process was there and what feedback did you hear as part of that process? Thank you. So, I mean, Shine can jump in on this as well. The, you know, we did have a number of meetings with open to the public. We had people able to weigh in on the Engage Amherst website. Yeah, I think I can hop in. It's probably something if I, we put together a full written response. I can, again, we did a listening sessions. We reached out to the stakeholders, we did consult with the council and the finance committee and we had the Engage Amherst process. But in order to give you all the sort of findings or outcomes of those public engagement sessions, it's better if I summarize it. But again, we use the template that we work used with every stakeholder to summarize the feedback that came back from them. So I can pull that all together pretty easily for you. If it's easy to pull together, I'd be interested to see specifically also how many listening sessions did you have and were they well attended, things like that. You don't need to have the answer now, but I would love to know if it's relatively simple to pull together. I have a couple other questions, but I'll let other people go first. We'll add that to the list for the July 17th meeting. Pam, Bruni. Thank you. In the second round, if I'm to reach out to folks in district four to alert them of the opportunities, is there some kind of structure or format that you are seeking this input? You listed, it was listed about one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight different categories, everything from public health to economic development. Are those the same categories that are expected to sort of lump things into for the round number two? It's okay if I respond to that, Paul. So I think we're looking for feedback specifically on the projects that were proposed. Again, if there's support for those projects, if there's not, if you're hearing alternative ideas, we would like that feedback as well. So in addition to ideas within those categories also, what are their thoughts on the six or so projects that were already suggested? Yeah, I mean, really there's four that are being proposed. There's the solar canopy at the high school. In your kitchen, community grants, and roads and sidewalks. That's correct. Yes. Those are the four. And then there's already the commitments that happened, Pat. Just a quick question. Can you define or clarify what's meant by stakeholder? I have an idea, but I'd like to hear a word. Yeah, so again, I can give you a list. I think we've summarized somewhere each of the groups, but for example, public health, I was working with the Board of Health, for example, would be one of the stakeholder groups, the school, the school community and the school district. So sort of every area or every department head has their sort of key stakeholder group that they partner with. But again, in the response to Anna's question, we can list all the stakeholders that were consulted. Okay, so basically it was town departments? It was town departments and their community partners that they work with. Thank you. Yeah. Dorothy. Okay, sorry. Okay. Those who have get more, big business establishments basically run lots of places in small towns as well as big because it's easier. It's efficient. It's so much easier to deal with people who are part of your regular group. And that is the way business has been done and is done in most places in America because it's easy for those who have power. But one of the woman who headed the senior center a while ago, she kept asking, who's not at the table? And for me, I'll tell you, if you will reach out to me on Engage Amherst, you have not reached out to me. That's a new way that some people like, but that's, you know, there are other ways. The problem is that there's this great appearance of impropriety. And I am not saying there is an impropriety. All right. But there is a conflict of interest. And I understand that the desire was to reduce costs. We do not have an official formal economic development officer. And so it seemed reasonable to our workaholic town manager to take on that role. And it was efficient. And I understand that. But I see the wrong that has happened here. I do not want to see us to continue to harden signs. Where we just get more and more alienated. When I came to Amherst, I assumed that I wouldn't have to pick sides. This was a modern up-to-date liberal town. And right now what's happening, it is, that is not what I'm seeing. So what has happened now, because of the backlash of the black owned business, that felt that it did not receive its due. And I've got to say that a lot of very reasonable points have been raised tonight. There is now the Drake is now requesting a variance or the fact that does not have a permanent handicap ramp. And it just has a temporary one that gets stored underneath the stage. But they have been operating for a whole year without it. And they will continue to operate, you know, for another year while that whole process is being solved. And the other business. And I know that the bid did in fact reach out and help. They did not necessarily ignore the other group, but the other group did not get money. And so I think that I have to always be suspicious when things like this, I don't think that people have to intentionally do things in order to hurt somebody else. But, you know, giving the money to one of the biggest landowners in town for his building, okay, and he's very gracious and has lent lots of things still that doesn't look good folks. And we just have to remember the world we live in where so many things that seem normal and okay, we realize now are not normal. They're not okay. I mean, only this year I learned that the GI bill and that and the FHA housing program were not available to most black people. I didn't know that I grew up thinking I was living in a democratic fair country where there were openings for people of different levels and different races. So centuries of racism in this country, I am not saying that the bid or our town manager has been racist, but I am saying that there has been something which certainly has an appearance of impropriety and that it maybe have been well meaning, but it did not work out this way. So I'm really hoping that we don't have to continue to harden our sides, but that we can come together work together and do something to bring and help this new business, this black owned business into successful operation in our town. You know, there's a difference between a business that hires and a business which is owned by blacks. It's not, you know, day and night, but this is a black owned business and it needs, it may have been given help. It needed more help and it did not get any funds. So I'm hoping very much that we can come to some kind of settlement, understanding and stop this creation of this feeling that something wrong has happened. Amherst does not need this. The papers lately in this area of towns just falling apart, blowing themselves up. It is getting to be ridiculous. I don't want our town to join it in more than one way. Thank you very much. I am going to ask that you start using the clock. Thank you, Jennifer. Yes, I was just wondering, I went to add to the questions that were, will come back at July 17th with a response to is what was the process. During COVID, you know, what was the process. By which all the businesses in town, or was there a process? What was the process of notifying businesses that the ARPA funds were available to apply for. So might not have included. So that's my question. And then I guess how so that was the bid was selected. To handle the applications. For the ARPA funds to businesses. Am I correct in understanding that? The bid was selected to administer the grant program. Okay. So what. So my, I guess my questions are, was it to. Administer it to businesses. All in Amherst. Just within the city, not just to downtown businesses. Yep. Okay. There were businesses beyond downtown that received grants. But I'm wondering how that the availability of those funds and. The notification. Yes. Thank you. That'll be part of what we answer for July 17. Exactly. Thank you. Anna. I have another question and then I have a statement after. I'll wait for that one. Did Amherst media apply for ARPA funding? Was that something? And when we think about the health of a community. Which is the purpose of ARPA, ARPA funding in the largest sense. I'm curious if that was an area that was able to, to receive funding. If there was an application in from them and we were able to support them. So there wasn't a category. They did not. The answer is, did they apply? No, they did not. They have subsequently expressed interest in ARPA funds. And that's 1 of the reasons we established the community grant sort of. I think it's a very important section to recognize that there are, there were some organizations, nonprofits that didn't have access previously. Thank you. Alicia. Thank you. I have a few comments. One, I'm actually. Glad that. The monies that was allocated for the moved. Of the sixth grade to the middle school. And I think that's a very important part of that. I think that's a very important part of that. I think that's a very important part of that. I think that's a very important part of that. I didn't get used because I think that that's a strange way to utilize ARPA funding. And considering the current crisis in terms of. Social emotional well-being that exists within our schools right now. I mean, like, you can talk to any staff in the school. In any school. There is a crisis. We are not fully paying our parents. We are not fully paying our parents. We are not paying our parents that they are experiencing from COVID. We are cutting teachers. We are cutting programs. We are not fully paying our paras. And when we have extra monies to combat the impacts of COVID. In our community. We're going to fund the move of the sixth grade. To the middle school. That is strange. So I'm very glad that that did not happen. I'm very glad that we're able to use that money to help our students who need resources. And who are lacking. Fully. Opensated. Caregivers during the day. So I would definitely urge you to think about that. The one of the other. Future initiatives. What's the community grants. And again, while. We're not fully paying our parents. That is. Has been a beneficial program to many. A lot of people have not been able to access that program because of the requirements. So like you need to have an eviction notice. You need to have a notice to quit. You need to have all of these things. You need to have a shut off bill. So you cannot just simply be behind. You also cannot say I cannot pay. Because living in poverty is not that cut and dry. So I think we need to think about the requirements that we're putting on the monies for the people who are. Who are receiving the community grants. Because there is a lot of very strict requirements as to who and how people's can receive that money. And so if we're going to allocate more funding to that program. I beg of you to revisit the requirements. And how people can apply for that. So I think we need to think about the requirements. I beg of you to revisit the requirements. And how people can apply for that funding. Without bucket loads. Of documentation. People should be able to just write simply like COVID impact statements. That should be enough. And then I did want to talk a little bit more. About sorry, I know I'm running out of time about. Money, money. So I'm not talking about. Hazels, not getting money because that is so very troublesome for me. And for all of the reasons that were already mentioned. But one thing that I think people are not also realizing is not only did they not get money, but when we're talking about the ramp issue. They were not allowed to open at all. They were not allowed to function as a business, because of this ramp for many, many months. setbacks. That in itself is a debt that all happened during COVID. Why are we not compensating them for that? If we're allowing other businesses to currently run, operate, generate income and revenue for themselves. Why are we not compensating for them for that amount of time that we did not allow them to open? That is a whole separate issue. But then they also didn't get ARPA funds. It just makes no sense. And so my big hope is that when we're looking back at the monies that was allocated and not spent, let's not just roll it over into the next round where we have a new pot of money. Can we look backwards for a minute and look at all the people who didn't get money during the first round who should have gotten money? Because there's money left over. Can we reopen again the businesses grant and change those requirements as well? Because I think the requirements are too boring. Why would there be a requirement that if you have an outstanding bill, you can't apply for ARPA funding? Isn't that what it's for? This makes no sense. We need to revisit the requirements because this is a systemic issue. This is literally how systemic racism happens because it's not within the people. It's within the systems we set it up to happen like this. We need to look at this. This is a very serious issue. And when we talk about dismantling systemic racism, this is a system right here that we've created that we can readdress if we really are serious about dismantling systemic racism. We change the policies. We change the practice. We change our approach. We listen to the peoples in our communities. We have heard enough people. This is an issue. People are suffering. We need to change our practices and our policies. And we can do that. We still have ARPA money left. I appreciate everything that Councillor Walker just said. I'm also looking back and asking about the transportation to summer programs. Can money be found? I think we got a message from someone in the community reminding us that it's one thing to have a summer program, but if you can't get to it, it does you no good. So I would also ask to reopen any opportunities for folks to apply for the transportation and to summer programs themselves as part of reassessing essentially what wasn't quite covered in round one or has carried over into round two. Thank you. Can I speak to that one real quick, Lynn? Please. One thing I forgot to mention, and I think Councillor Walker mentioned this as well, within the money given to the schools, I don't think there's going to be any capacity to do transportation for summer. But the other bucket that we have talked about that is the recreation money that those given to the recreation department to improve access. So that is a bucket of funds that we have actually discussed transportation in the past and this feedback is helpful. And the recreation funds are from the town, not from the school pot. Correct. Correct. Thank you. Anika. Thank you. So I just had a couple of questions and these can be for the second round. One was that I don't know if it is possible, but would any of the funds be available for either the middle or high school groups with all the trouble they're having? I'm sorry, I didn't hear that, Anika. So both the middle school and the high school rooms are leaking. So I didn't know if any of this would be able to be of help there. Okay. And then I like what I heard about the senior center and I wasn't sure if some of those upgrades included railings or emergency poles for the bathrooms. And then, you know, of course, the roads and sidewalks. I hope that folks will be happy about that, whatever is available. But I did also want to speak in regards to the bid, the Drake and the BBAA. One I just wanted to note out there that there is more than one black business in town. And, you know, there were us in downtown area, you don't want to leave people out. And in terms of the businesses who that did receive the black businesses that did receive funding, I'm happy to see we have at least one that I know here. I want to give a shout out to Caraford Cakery, so excited that you're opening in July, so ready for you. And I know many of us are already familiar. And I just wanted to add and ask really that with these community grants could, and with the next discussion, can we have a thorough, clear explanation of qualifications for the ARPA funds and what had, what had to be done, what were held to federally? Because as we all know, during the pandemic, there were so many who have lost their businesses and where it is not easy for anyone, certainly for black, the indigenous, for other people of color, for women, for LGBTQ, no matter what anyone tells you out there, it is incredibly difficult. I'm someone who experienced that firsthand and still does. I mean, this happened after 9-11. What also was a fall through is we have to also understand that with the revolution that you're referring to, that also comes with the opening of books. So we want to make sure that all of our businesses that we're actually setting people up for success or sustainable long-term success. And I would just also like to add, I think I'm over my time here close to it that, you know, for our younger entrepreneurs or new entrepreneurs, please do not wait for anyone to tell you to get a proposal or a plan. Be ready. Be ready. Do not wait. Disasters can happen anytime, but please have yourself educated because no one comes to you. It would be nice. And we may able to be able to create some of that bubble here in Amherst, but in the real world, you have to do the work. And especially being a black business, you need to make sure your eyes are dotted and your teeth are crossed double time. So I hope that there will be a strong educational component. And I would also like to thank Gabrielle Gould especially and the bid for your work for being out there every day during the pandemic. Thank you. So my understanding was that when the prior council looked at the long-ranging plan for staffing, they chose to fund the the DEI department and I was not on that council. Personally, I agree with that decision, knowing that it meant we wouldn't be having an economic development director for a while. I looked up the articles of organizations for other business improvement districts across the state as well as the official guiding documents from mass development. And they all include the practice of having a town representative, either a mayor or a mayor's appointee or a town manager on their board. So I get, for me, I'm not, that doesn't feel like a bad idea given the nature of, and the relationship of business and municipalities. We are at a 3% or 4% vacancy rate downtown and we don't have an economic development director. Those two things don't just happen, right? Those are not a coincidence. That is a result of serious intervention and work from the bid and the chamber and from our local businesses to sustain. And that's pretty incredible. I mean, I look at surrounding towns after COVID and we're doing very well. And I recognize that there's a lot we can still do better and a lot of systems that we need to disrupt. So we've heard a lot from the administrator of these grants through the bid prior to tonight on why specific businesses did or did not receive funding. And I do want to separate out the ramp issue because I feel like we've got 60 some odd pages of a report from our DEI director on that. But I want to focus in on the requirements. So Paul, I guess this is my question that I'm not expecting right now, Paul and Sean. And I think Anika just asked something very similar. So I apologize if it's repetitive. You, and it's building on Alicia's comment too. You said that you were expecting an audit, a federal audit at some point on ARPA funds. And I'm curious what you anticipate being required in that audit because I, if it's, if the case was that the administrator of these grants was able to just willy nilly make up requirements, then that is many questions about that and how those were selected. However, I am assuming that with federal funding as with state funding as with town funding, we see a lot of requirements that you have to report back on. And so I'd like to know what those requirements might be in terms of the questions I see that I see the yellow light, I'm paying attention. So in terms of the questions that you had asked in your presentation, I am really excited about the possible round two projects, specifically the community grants and the solar canopy. And I am really excited to see that you're looking at JCPC as a source for ideas, especially the resident capital requests I asked that you consider those as well. We see small asks come from our community and often they're challenging to meet. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Good timing now. Anika, I'm sorry, Andy. So follow up on what Anna said. I just been thinking about this for a while. We have to face a reality in Amherst and the reality is that we have a tremendous amount of land that we can't tax and that's either because it's conservation land or a lot of it is owned by nonprofit colleges and other institutions and the University of Massachusetts, which all contribute to the demand for town services or a substantial amount of them contribute to the demand for town services, but we're not getting any revenue for it. And as a consequence, Amherst has one of the highest residential tax rates of communities in Massachusetts. And anything that we can do with our funds or any other grant opportunities that will allow us to do anything that will change the balance so that there's a little bit more money coming from nonresidential taxpayers and can increase the amount that is coming from business taxpayers is going to in the end have a long term effect. And during the pandemic, some of those consequences and funding disparity as far as revenue funding disparity actually was worsened, which is one of the reasons that Congress asked ARPA was to allow that balance to be addressed and to recognize the effect of on the business sector, which is in Amherst, when you start looking over at Northampton and driving around Northampton or some of our other communities, Hadley, we see a tremendous difference in the balance of tax revenue that's available from commercial versus taxpayer that's available from residential. So as we're looking for criteria to measure round two expenditures, looking at whether those expenditures will contribute to the goal of trying to help recognize the burden on taxpayers that are residential taxpayers. I think it's something I would recommend for consideration. Thank you. Are there any other councilor comments at this time? Alicia? Thank you. I just wanted to add that I think we do a lot of consideration and I know this is part of our job as counselors and town manager and the finance director, but thinking about our town's economic development and what benefits our town, but we're really, really missing out on community members. Like I don't think we take into consideration the businesses and the things that don't directly benefit us. We're talking about what can increase the revenues that come to us so that we have more money for our budgets and like that is great and we need to help the people in our community. It doesn't always have to be a direct benefit to our revenue because expanding the culture downtown, expanding what's available for people, making it more inclusive, making it more open, making there more diversity, more possibilities, more things happening also inadvertently benefits our town and our revenues. People will want to come here. People will feel more comfortable here. And there was a comment made earlier just thinking about the differences in communities when you say our community and our priorities. I think just like recognizing and understanding that there is a real difference in priorities between different racially identifying communities. Like that is just a real thing and it doesn't need to be a bad thing. It's just real. And so when we're addressing our priorities, whose priorities are we addressing and whose priorities are we completely ignoring and missing out on. And I think we need to find a way better way of balancing because the scale is very heavily tipped in favor of financially well off and non-BIPOC peoples. It's very, very much tipped in favor of those populations in those communities and what they like to do and what they want to see in our town. But like a lot of people are really also very much excited to have Black food in our community. Like that is also very exciting. That is also an economic driving force for our community. Like I think we just need to look at these things in the same way instead of so differently. I just see like a huge divide in how we're talking about and thinking of like all of the really good things we're saying about the Drake. You can say those same exact things about hazels. Like I just I just don't understand this huge divide. We need to accommodate our whole entire community. We need to pour funds into our whole entire community and some of our community is suffering more. We need to address those things. Are there any other councilor comments? We're going to conclude this section of the meeting. We're going to take a 10-minute break. We will be back at 8.45. Thank you. Please make sure you unmute or mute. I'm sorry, mute yourself. Thank you. A little bit of an issue by the nature. It was some of your ancestors that led to the creation of the Hope community. And they were meeting for church children here in Town Hall until they got the new building that they used. In 1904, when I see the Washington Post, 1904 he helped to raise money. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, folks, it's time to start getting ready to reconvene. When you return, please turn on your video. Hi, Dorothy. Thanks for hanging in. All right, we are going to continue. I am making a couple adjustments to the agenda. At this point, I am postponing the streetlight policy until the 17th of July. I am keeping the others, although if we start to get into major discussion about items four through seven, I may postpone some of those as well. At this point, we are going to go to Councillor Compensation. I am going to begin Councillor Compensation by reading the motion, looking for a second, and then asking the Finance Committee Chair, Andy Steinberg to report, and we will proceed from there. In accordance with Charter Section 2.4 to adopt an increase to Town Council compensation in the amount of $2,500 for a total compensation of $7,500 for Town Council members, an increase of $2,000 for the Council President for a total of $9,500. That does not read the way it is supposed to. Effective January 2nd, 2024, and to request the Town Manager submit a supplemental budget appropriation to meet said increase in accordance with Charter Section 5.6. Is there a second? Second. Thank you. Andy, would you like to speak to the Town Finance Committee's discussion? I think I am going to be very brief because the report was an attempt to be complete. It was a divided discussion, but we really ended up focusing on the item that is the subject of the motion that was just made and seconded, which is the amount of increase in compensation. Other aspects were not recommended for immediate action for by agreement actually with pretty much everybody who is involved in the process, not moving forward with questions about health insurance, which had another number of complications, including the fact that if we did it for one elected board, we would have to do it for all elected boards. That was a legal requirement that created an economic barrier and practicality barrier. And the question of compensation for family care, we felt very strongly that that something that we felt was an important component of the plan that was put forward by the Town Manager even before the process was part of the budget. It has that in the budget. We would like to see that go forward as quickly as possible. And because it once July 1st comes, the funds are available. Our suggestion, which is not part of the motion because we didn't think it needed to be a part of the motion is that there be quarterly reports on how those funds are being expended and used. And we did recognize that there was one problem that exists that there's no real resolution to which is that the money can only be spent by reimbursement that they can't be in the advance on it because of how the law works. So those are the major points. I think that there was one thing that was emitted from the report. And I will hope that Kathy Shane will pick up on this if she wishes. But I'm going to just report it quickly. And that is that we did research several other communities that were not on the list that the cosponsors have put forward as far as providing what the compensation to counselors is. And the East Long Meadow is fairly much in line with us. But we found that Greenfield is $2,000 a year. And so that that was information that only came to us actually at the very end. And I wish that it had been a little bit more clear to the committee earlier, but I'll let Kathy pick up on that if she wishes. So that's basically the report we as I said, did make the recommendation and did have a vigorous discussion that we tried to report on very fairly on both people who are arguing for a larger amount and people who are arguing for the amount that was ultimately voted. So other than that, we'll just respond to questions. Are there questions from the council? Mandy? So my question deals with the supplemental budget appropriation part of this motion. And it's really the part I'm struggling with more than other parts. Last year's budget that is in operation right now for a couple more days, the school committee had asked us for more funds and we said, find the funds within the budget. We think it's possible. This year they passed a budget that was above what we got. I don't think we ever received a formal request for it, but I think we again basically said find the funds within the budget. But this part of the motion seems to say give us more money outside of our 2% or 2.5%, 3% that we gave this year so that we can find the funds to pay ourselves. And that doesn't sit well with me. So I guess my question to the manager or to the finance committee and then to the manager is to the finance committee, why aren't we just asking the manager to find the funds within the budget we first, we already passed. And to the manager, do you have any idea where you would find the funds if we passed a motion that said submit a supplemental budget? Paul, let's start with you. And then, yeah. What I would suggest is that the council, if it chooses to increase the compensation for the counselors, then ask the manager for a suggestion, recommendations for funding it versus saying come with a new appropriation or determining what that decision, how to fund it would come back. So we may come back to you with different options in terms of how this would be funded. One might be an appropriation. One might be existing sources. One might be a timing. When does it go into effect? So I would think you would ask the manager instead of it does I worry about the precedent it sets in terms of the council saying please introduce a new appropriation for this in particular. But I think the timing of the when the council wants it to take effect versus when our budget year is sort of like out of sync. And that's the challenge we have. But I think the suggestion would be we want to increase appropriation. We want to increase the compensation which is within the town, which in the council's responsibility. And then to the manager say, you know, how what is your recommendation to bring back something that tells us how we can do this? That's what my suggestion would be. Mandy, Joe, with that suggestion, do you have an amendment you'd like to make to the motion? Eventually, but I have to come up with the wording. Thank you. Okay. I'm going to go on to Pam Rooney. Since I don't have the all the documents in the very thorough finance report in front of me, can I be reminded please if this vote would be for town council plus school board plus library trustees? Is that all part of the package? This vote is only for the town council. The thing that was discussed at the finance committee is that we also would like the finance committee to provide to the council a letter that would be signed that will go to the charter review commission that might suggest that they come up with a way to form some kind of committee of non-elected officials to look at this in a way similar to Northampton. And at that point, or possibly even before to look at both school committee, at this point, Jones library does not receive any compensation. And the charter actually we spent a lot of time on the charter. Andy, you might want to add to what I've just said. Yeah. To both comments, I mean, I can be interested in what Mandy proposes because we're really, we're going back to the charter and she was in the charter commission, so she might help us to understand what the charter commission was intending for the process here, but the section that is particularly directed towards the council, which is separate from the section for other boards committees, which is why the school committee and library are in a different status, says that within the first 18 months of a council being seated that the council can propose an increase or decrease actually goes for either way to be effective for the next council term. And then it also uses the words subject to appropriation. Well, the town manager when developing a budget, which he started that work on that in January and February, had no reason to know that we would be thinking about an increase in compensation, so that there was no possible no expectation reasonably to build it into the budget that starts on July 1. And the only way to get it into to do anything for that next fiscal year that is FY 24 is to do an amendment to the budget. And the only process for the different amendment to the budget is what has been suggested there. The council can't amend the budget. The budget amendment has to come on a recommendation from the town manager. So when you put all of those sections of the charter together, this is the only way that it could happen now with the for the for this council to act for the next council term is to do what is proposed. So that's why we took the choice that we did as far as processes concerned. And which then gets back to the school committee and library trustees are under a very different section. And it's why when we did the report, we pointed out the fact that all the charter sections are very explicitly set forth in a separate document within the council within the committee packet that is available on a click from the finance committee report because the amendment does not have to be made by July 2nd. It could be made at any time for the school committee because it's an amendment to an existing compensation. And so there's a separate process for that. The library trustees would have to wait until the next budget. Mandy, Joe, you have your hand up. Is that because you have a suggested? I do, but I can wait. Okay. Dorothy. Town counselors are democratically elected in order to represent the whole body of the town. And if we are to stop being a group of the quote unquote elite who know better and want to make decisions for other people, we have to make it possible for a broader cross section of people to afford to do this job, which everyone knows is a very time consuming job. And the council is deeply enriched by the presence of one mother of school age kids on the council. There's a reason there aren't others. And it has a lot of it has to do with compensation. I feel that I've been played a game of bait and switch. We were, we brought this up at the very beginning. This was Darcy brought up the question of counselor compensation last counselor. And we were told, Oh, it's too late to do it. Okay. I've been bringing this up again and again and again. If we need a commission to study rates, then we should have had that commission from the very beginning of this council. So I feel totally that I've been played with being told, Oh, we'll do it. We'll do it. Well, then we get to the point and it's too late to have a commission and we can't do it without a commission. I think it's very simple to do the original proposal that was brought in, which is $10,000 a year for elected town counselors. I don't see anything challenging or difficult about that. And it will make it possible, particularly since we have the reimbursements of requirement, which is, you know, one of those things that are part of a town budgeting things that are out of our control that you have to lay the money out first. Having been a very mother of three kids without much money, I know how difficult that would be. So and $10,000 and a lot of money, but it is a lot different than five. I just feel that we have these conversations. And I don't feel they go anywhere because very few people seem to understand there are a lot of things at stake. And one of them is democracy. So I would say, let us support the $10,000 a year salary for counselors for the next incoming council. Thank you. Dorothy, if you want to change the amount, you need to forward it as a amendment to the motion. I'm going to go on to Kathy, but that's how we have to deal with this at this point. Kathy. Thank you. I just have a couple of quick comments. It's in the context of us just going through a very difficult period with trying to settle contracts and not finding extra money than that the schools asked for that we split the difference and went instead of to $10,000, we went halfway there. And it's a very real perception of who do we represent that we shouldn't be taking care of ourselves alone. We should be financially accountable. The going to the full amount is the equivalent of, and Andy wrote this of me, he did a good job writing up our discussion, but we're talking it's a firefighter. It's a school teacher. It's not in its significant amount. And it's because we're 13 counselors. So when we look at some of these other towns, they have eight, they have nine. And when you look at the whole table, Andy just wanted me to reemphasize what he already said. I need to pause the meeting a minute. I have lost my screen. Okay. Okay. I got it. It's at my clock. Are you okay? I'm rebooting. Maybe we did. Lynn, you're still, can we continue? I'm sorry. Okay. Thank you. I'm sorry. I just needed to make a point that I'm not up there. But we will continue. So at this point, Kathy, did you have anything else you wanted to add? No, I was just going to say that, you know, that we were, we were very conscious of the context that we're in. And we thought this is the beginning step. It's not the end. So it's not that we would hold the whole process to a study. I think we all would like to have some more annual increases, something in line with what the union contracts are coming in with. And then the other point, Andy said it in reference, we were given a table that showed what towns in the surrounding area that have counselors in. And if you add a couple more towns that weren't in that table, it's not that we're at the very bottom, you know. So there are towns that are above us, but we're not at the very bottom. That's not to say that any numbers particularly correct. But I think given the extremely tight budget and the very tough negotiations, plus when the schools asked for $85,000 more, we said no, that I could not bring myself to go into the higher amount. I think this is a reasonable first step. So I just want to make that comment on how we came up with the going to the increase of $2,500 rather than going all the way up to 10, which would, I know we shouldn't do it by percentage, but the other would have been doubling our salaries, our stipends. We all agree they're stipends, not salaries. And I'll stop. Thank you. Anna, would you please take over the meeting while my Zoom updates? Yep, Alicia, you are next. Go ahead. Thank you. I just wanted to say a couple things. I'm sure you all have read what was in the packet, but just because it wasn't explicitly stated, even though Andy did do a good job by giving a summary of our conversation, that the original motion was proposed for an additional $10,000 increase for each, I mean an additional $5,000 increase for each counselor to be a total of $10,000 in compensation annually for counselors. And I also just wanted to remind you all that this initiative that was brought forward by myself and counselor Michelle was with the intention of increasing diversity on our next council. And so when I ran for to be a counselor, one of my goals was to recognize and address barriers to participation. And this is and will continue to be one of the biggest barriers for people of different socio and economic statuses for different like life makeups, different household compositions for different races and ethnicity ethnicities for people with different experiences. And so I think it's very, very important to continue looking at it in that light as an initiative to increase diversity and participation. And not just simply as an increase to our salary. Another important thing to consider is that we're not, this is not an ask to increase our own your own salary, this is for the next council, it will not go into effect until January with the next council. So again, the real goal is to allow people with different perspective, different experiences and different things to offer to this council to be able to successfully participate as a counselor. And so I think it's very important to continue to look at that initiative in this way. I am on the finance committee, this was my proposal and I did not support the recommendation that came forward from the finance committee for that exact reason, a $2,000 increases not enough, that is $160 a month. When I talked about just my cost of getting childcare during these meetings, it eats up my entire stipend. So even if we're talking about reimbursement, that means I first need to pay my entire stipend for the childcare to then get it back. It's not enough. People with different experiences, different perspectives which will greatly benefit our town and the outcomes in our town cannot participate on our council because they are not adequately compensated for the amount of time that it takes to be an effective counselor. Anybody can sit up here and just sit up here and make decisions blindly, but we also want, I think people who run for council want to be effective. They want to have time to read the materials. They want to have time to talk to constituents. They want to have time to do a good job. And so I think it's very important to consider what we would have to spend, what commitments we would have to make to make it more equitable and more inclusive and to eliminate this very important barrier which is a socioeconomic barrier. Thank you. Thank you. All right. I'm going to call on myself next and got my note. Okay. So the average babysitting cost in Massachusetts ranges depending on which source you use somewhere between 1670 and 2250. Nationally, it's $20.57 an hour for one child. So far, we've been here for a minimum of about $50 worth of time tonight, just to contextualize this. I don't know the average that you all spend on council work, but I do know that this job will take as much as you are willing to give to it and even more than what you are willing to give to it at times. I'm grateful that we have a pilot program in fiscal year 24. I think that is a very admirable move for family care. But if I were to take this very conservative estimate and say, you know, you're taking a week where you are really going to hold your boundaries, you're really, you're just going to go to a meeting, to your two meetings, right? Not even three, just two. So we're talking a minimum of six hours a week. That ends up being over $110 a week or over $6,000 a year. It's reasonable to say that that money that we're putting aside for this pilot in the next year could be used up by just a parent of one child who needs that support, as Alicia said, as a reimbursement. I think that we all wish for a council with multiple parents on it to best represent our town. And I know that we currently have three counselors who are parents of school age kids, which is great. I'm incredibly grateful for their presence and their input here. But that $6,000 doesn't even include costs for meals, lost wages, if hours are reduced to make council work fit in or more. We don't know our life, everyone's life circumstances. If we want to make holding this office an option for a broader group, we need to we need to consider which avenues must be opened up. I support this motion, but I wanted it to be higher. I said that at finance and I want it to be higher now. Because the reality is that a 40 hour a week job plus hours on council doesn't leave a lot left for other things like sleep, relationships with friends and family, taking care of ourselves, maybe having a hobby that's not council. I don't know. Increasing this stipend would allow people to do things like request partial leaves or cut down hours at work. It would allow people to support their families through babysitting, right? Or other family care. It would make this process slightly more reasonable for a broader part of our community, which I believe I have heard every single person talk about wanting to do at one point or another. This is one way we can do that. Thank you. I'm done calling Lynn back to you. Yeah. Mandy Jo. So I drafted a motion. I'll make it. I trust Paul will tell me whether it gets to what he explained or not. So as I move to amend the motion by deleting the phrase, a supplemental budget appropriation to meet said increase in accordance with Charter Section 5.6 and replacing it with the phrase options to the town council by October 1, 2023 for appropriating funding for said compensation. Athena, you should have it in your email. Okay. For the purposes of discussion, I'm going to second the amendment. Paul, do you see any problems with that? No, I think that covers it. Okay. The motion's been made. It's on the floor. There's an amendment to that motion. If you want to speak to the motion, the amendment to the motion, that is where we are now. If there are later amendments to the whole motion, we need to go do this piece first. May I speak to it myself? Yeah. Thank you. So I think Athena will work on getting it up hopefully. So I make this because I'm concerned about requiring that the manager find extra money somewhere, not within the budget we already passed. And this gives him the option of finding it within the budget we already passed. We passed a bottom line budget, which means if he wants to just move money around, we don't actually have to pass a new budget. At least that's my understanding. And so this gives him the option, which makes it a lot more comfortable for me to vote for it, frankly, because of what Kathy was just saying about the school committee and the school budgets and all that I'm very uncomfortable saying, find it outside of the budget we already passed. So I'd really like to see his options, which is why I made this motion. So Athena, could you go to the top of where you are and actually redline into it? Meantime, we're speaking to the amendment to the original motion, not anything else. The amendment to the original motion. Dorothy? Just to be clear, what Mandy Joe was saying is to change where the town manager finds the money. Is that right? She's giving the town manager more flexibility to come back to the council and say, hey, I found the money. We don't need to amend the budget. We don't need a supplemental. He may have to come back and say that, but he hasn't locked over to determine what the options are. But my point out by then is we also have usually have certified free cash, but there's, but that does not include, and if he finds enough money to increase the stipend. No, all this does is amend the existing motion, which is the 7500 and the 9000 for the president. Yeah. All right. Well, that seems quite reasonable. Thank you. Okay. So is there any other comments regarding the amendment to the motion? Then I'm bringing that to vote and we'll start with Pat D'Angelis. Okay. Yes. Anna Devlin-Gothier. I. Lynn Griezmer is an I. Mandy Johanna. I. Annika Lopes. I. Michelle Miller is absent. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Pam Rooney. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Jennifer Taub. Yes. Alicia Walker. Yes. Shalini Balmilne is absent. It's unanimous 11 in favor to people absent. Now we go back to the original motion. The original motion is in accordance with Charter section 2.4 to adopt an increase to town council compensation in the amount of 2,500 for a total annual compensation of 7,500 for town council members and an increase of 2,000 for the town council president for a total of compensation, annual compensation of 9,500 effective January 2nd, 2024 and to request the town manager submit options to the town council by October 1, 2023 for appropriating funds for said compensation. Alicia. I would like to move to make an amendment to the amount for the compensation. Please. Do I need to step forward? Something can I just, I would like to amend the 2,500 to 5,000, the 7,500 to 10,000 and the 9,500 to 12,000. Okay. I second that. Okay. The motion has been made. Can I ask for clarification? Yes. So what's this 2,000 getting amended to Alicia for the council president? I left it as the additional 2,000. So that would stay 9,500 then. Because Lynn gets 7,500 right now and that 2,000 goes up to 9,500. So you're trying to get the president up to 12? Yes. Yes. So I think that would be 7,000 for the council president then. No, 5,000. 5,000. No, 4,500. Okay. So it's a total compensation of. 4,500 for that 2,000 would be 4,500. No. Wait, I'm. No, let me, let me try this. It was wrong. Okay. Alicia. Let me try this. Okay. You want to change the 1st 2,500 to 5,000. For a total compensation of 10,000. Yes. For account town council members and an increase of 2,000 for the council president for a total compensation of 12,000. No, no, because that that motion is based on your current 7,500 compensation. That was what was wrong with the first motion. Yeah, go ahead. I don't think there's anything wrong with the first motion. First motion. First motion Lynn gave you a 2,000 increase rather than a 2,500 increase. So it worked perfectly. Right. But when it says for a total annual compensation of. But the total, the increase for the council president would be 4,500 for total annual compensation of 12,000. Right. Right. No. Right. Okay. I hear I see what you're doing. The 2,000 needs to be xed out. Yeah, I don't. Okay. I just think of it differently. But anyway, that is the motion. It's been made in seconded. Now the discussion focuses on only this part of the amendment. The change. Yes. Exit full screen. Yes, they did. Dorothy did. Is it okay if I speak to it just very quickly? Please go right ahead. Yeah, because I said most of my comments as to why my reasoning is for this, but I also just wanted to state that I think any increase would be beneficial. But I don't think a $2,000 increase is substantial enough to make the impact that I was looking to make with this motion. And I know I heard Kathy say something about to the full amount, but in my opinion, even 10,000 isn't necessarily the full amount. Like Northampton did the study. If everybody read their study, they ended up increasing their 16,000. And so who is to say that we wouldn't hire a committee or a commission to look at this and they would increase an additional amount. This is just the number that Michelle and I came to settle on as a number that we thought was substantial enough, but not too high in terms of still trying to be fiscally responsible because understanding the constraints of our current budget. But suggesting an increase that is not substantial enough still does not achieve its intended goal. So while it might look performatively well like we tried, it doesn't actually have the impact that it's intended to have. And so that's why I'm requesting this amendment. Are there any other comments at this time, Andy? Yeah, in this time I'm speaking on my own. This is not on behalf of the committee. I am uncomfortable with an increase of this amount that's being suggested for the reasons that are referred to in that section of the report. However, because I think that there are a couple of things that we need to recognize. One is, as has been mentioned already, the effect on the morale of other public officials who are in negotiations now and the question of putting councilor Stuypence in a different class. The second thing is that I really am concerned about our very generous taxpayers who just voted themselves a huge tax increase in order to build an elementary school. And I feel really uncomfortable then turning around and doing something that is this large for ourselves. And maybe the last thing that I'll say and just since I want to be brief on this is that for all that Northampton did and their increases, I don't find that it relevant because I made this reference in earlier comments on a different subject this evening. But when you go over Northampton and you drive up and down King Street and you drive up and down Pleasant Street, you see a lot of commercial activity and commercial growth that we don't have and probably won't have car dealer rows here and it's not coming here, for example. So I just don't think that we can ever be comparing ourselves to Northampton because they are such a different classification economically. And we ultimately have to look at the fact that we're a very high property tax community because it falls so heavily on a very single segment of homeowners. And it just makes me very uncomfortable to ask for this kind of an increase for the council. Dorothy, I believe you're next. Okay, I'm trying to open my okay, you can see me. Okay, given given our financial realities, we really can't afford to increase the stipend at all. I totally agree. I understand we are greatly taxed. We certainly got a big increase. But we spent most of this evening once again talking about democracy in the town of Amherst and the people who are good suffering from our high taxes perhaps would like to have a more representative council. We would be speaking to many of the issues that are of concern to them. And Alicia made it clear that this increase that she is seeking is not really going to be just compensation for the amount of work the counselor does but it is a symbolic statement that she thinks will be sufficient to encourage a broader group of people to run for town council. I think that would be very, very important. And there's always reasons why I mean, I am as upset as Kathy is about the school budget and the lack of funding for certain positions and actually the rates of funding for certain things. But we have to deal with the problem of are we speaking for the whole town. And right now, I don't think we are. So this is an act that will be real and symbolic that should result in a more representative diverse crop of town counselors to deal with the problems that face a wider array of people in the town. So I really strongly think that we should say yes on this one. Thank you. Alicia, I'm going to go to Kathy and then come back to you. I'll just I just want to underscore what I said earlier. I actually very much disagree with going all the way to $10,000 and it is a $2,500 increase. It's not a $2,000. And I think if you talk to a lot of people in town, they're worried that we're not financially accountable as a council in terms of adding new departments that we've added. There's not widespread support and some of what we've been doing is in the name of social equity of thinking about doing things differently. But we've really been stretching the limits with decisions we've made. And people are watching that. And I think we need to be accountable for this year to say we've just asked a lot, including water and sewer rates. And we too need to be parsimonious with ourselves. And $2,500 is a substantial increase. Yes, it's not $5,000. So I will not be voting for this the same way I was not voting for it in the Finance Committee. Mandy Jo. Andy asked earlier what the Charter Commission was thinking. So as for when we have to vote this, it was because the Charter Commission did not believe that the council members should vote their own salaries. And so what Alicia, I think was Alicia said earlier about this is not an increase for us. We have an election coming up. We made it so early so that people would be able to weigh in on whether they thought what we did was right, which is why we had put it six months before the end of the term and three months before the election or so. And so that people could decide if the compensation was something they could deal with with running instead of doing it after people did not have those options again. How did we get to $5,000 and $7,500? The original intent of those numbers was to try and ensure when we had no idea exactly how long council time would take that anyone who needed to pay for child care or elder care would have enough money from this compensation to do so. From what Anna said and from what Alicia has said, and given we all know how many meetings we're now attending and how long they are, it appears that that is not that the Charter Commission did not set the compensation high enough. It is up for people to decide what that is. But that's how the if people are wondering that's where the Charter Commission was thinking and setting these numbers. A number that would ensure that someone who ran for council and served on council did not actually lose money by serving on council because of the expenses they needed to incur to serve on council. Pat. I'm like Kathy, I cannot support this increase. And I keep thinking about my work as a member of the mobile market in Amherst and policy council people who had. Sorry, Pat, but I can't hear you on Zoom. I'm sorry. There was no compensation for a few people in the mobile market. There became jobs and that was part of our plan. So I cannot raise the salary as high as you're requesting. But what I want to challenge us to do as a council, because we do need other voices, I want us to really go out and reach out to people who live in the boulders, the people who are using the survival center and find ways to get them involved in town government, whether it's on committees or on council. And another way of doing that is we all our meetings are translated. We still don't do that. And there are plenty of people in this town who do not speak English well enough to participate, yet when they're able to speak in their own language, the what you learn and what they challenge us to create is phenomenal. So I think that while I can't support your request, Alicia, for this amount of money, I do want us, I want to challenge us to really move forward outward to the community, because it's a lot broader than even you're talking about it in terms of income and everything else. But what the community does have is a real willingness to commit to hard work. And we pretend that isn't true because we don't offer them the ability to be here. So that sounds like a contradiction, but I think you get my idea. Alicia, you have your hand up. Yes, thank you. I just wanted to offer a couple of more comments. Sorry. I think, again, these conversations are always really difficult for me. So I'm breathing. Alicia, you need to speak to your thank you. You can hear me. Now I can. Yes. Okay, great. Sorry. I was just trying to take a deep breath anyhow. So I just I can't understand when someone is saying that they're uncomfortable giving somebody else equitable compensation. I mean, we're talking about equitable compensation for a position as critical as being a town counselor who has the ability to have influence on every single major discussion that happens in this entire town. I don't look at this for me personally as a different like a different flask or I'm not sure the exact comparison that Andy used for the school committee coming to asking us for more money, putting this in a different flask and looking at a different light one because I voted yes to that anyhow. So I was in favor of giving them what they were asking for and two, because when people are saying we're financially or fiscally irresponsible, it's because we approved monies to demolish a gas station for aesthetic reasons that if we didn't vote for that, we could have used that money to fund both of those initiatives. So when we're thinking about what decisions we make as a council, we always have decisions and our decisions always have impacts and outcomes in the community. We wouldn't even need to go do outreach in the boulders if we could increase the compensation so that somebody who lived there could be on the council. I have used the survival center for my entire life. When I was younger and we didn't have food, my mother brought us to the survival center for dinner. I still go to the survival center to get groceries for my family because as a single mother of three, I cannot afford to always put food on my table. If you want to hear from people who use the survival center, hello, I am here and I am telling you that you need to provide more if you want people like me to be able to be on the council. It is not going to happen with a $2,000 increase. Like I said, that is $160 extra dollars a month, which can do absolutely nothing. That is not an impact. That is not a dent. That is not how we get people in the communities who we do not hear from. Yes, translation, all of those things are important and I very much appreciate all of your comments, Pat. I do hear you and I don't want you to think that this is directly at you, but it is very hard because we always are constantly saying we want to hear more from these people and when these people come and talk to us, we don't listen to them. How do we want to hear more? How are we going to hear more if we don't compensate people? How? If we want people who live in the boldest, we want people who use the survival center, we want people who don't have, who aren't financially stable all of the time, we want to hear what would help them, we have to pay them, how else are we going to free up their time to hear from them? That is literally the entire point of what I am trying to do here. Thank you. Are there any other Councillor comments at this time? There is an amendment on the floor. The amendment is shown on the screen. It increases the $2,500 to $5,000. It increases the total compensation for Councillors to $10,000. It increases the President's compensation so that it would be a total of $12,000, $2,000 more than all Councillors. Are there any other comments? If not, we will move to a vote on the amendment. I am going to start with Anna Devlin-Goth here. Lynn Griezmer is a nay. Mandy Johannike? Aye. Annika Lopes? Aye. Dorothy Pam? Yes. Pam Rooney? Yes. Kathy Shane? No. Andy Steinberg? No. Jennifer Todd? Yes. Alicia Walker? Yes. Pat DeAngeles? The ayes have it with one, two, three, four, five, six, seven votes. Did I get that right? And seven in favour, four opposed and two absent. The motion passes with and we will move on to the next item. We have to do the total motion. So the motion now is in accordance with Charter Section 2.4 to adopt an increase to Town Council compensation in the amount of $5,000 for annual compensation of $10,000 for Town Council members and an increase of $4,500 for the Council President for a total annual compensation of $12,000. Effective January 2, 2024 and to request the Town Manager submit options to the Town Council by October 1, 2023 for appropriating funding for said compensation. That motion is now the motion that's on the table. Okay. All right. We'll begin in this case with Lynn Griezmer and I'm a nay. Mindy Johannake. Hi. We're voting on the full motion as it appears on the screen where everything in red is also now in black. Yes. Pam, the previous vote was to was to change it with what's shown in red and now the vote is to vote to approve or not approve the entire motion not just to make change it. No. The earlier motion, the previous motion was the amendment. It's like the same thing, but you have to vote the whole motion. Okay. All right. So, Mindy Johannake, hold on. I need to find it on a place. We're to Anika. Hold on. I was an aye. Mindy Johannake is an aye. Anika? Aye. Dorothy Pam? Yes. Pam Rooney? Yes. Kathy Shane? No. Indy Steinberg? No. Jennifer Tobbe? Yes. Alicia Walker? Yes. Pat DeAngelo? No. Anna Devlin-Gothier? Aye. Seven in favor for opposed to absent. We're going to move on to proposed specialized opt-in energy code. Anna, you are the sponsor of this. And I would love to introduce a very, very special guest. This is Jesse Salmon. He is a member of the Energy and Climate Action Committee. I'd also like to extend my deep gratitude to the ECAC. I see several of their members on this call. They are the ones who initially outreached about this idea and have been doing a lot of the work to prep it for y'all. So I just want to extend some gratitude to one of our fabulous committees. I'm going to just give a quick overview and then really turn it over to Jesse. And he's going to lead you through this because as we know, building codes are notoriously simple and easy to understand. So I sent you a memo. It was in your packet. And I just want to touch on some high points of it. What we are asking for is for the town of Amherst to opt-in to a higher level of specialized stretch code than we currently have opted into with the existing stretch code. Some people have heard this referred to as a stretchier code. It's actually it's funny because it's actually less stretchy is the point. We stretch further. I'm going to stop saying the word stretch. So basically the specialized opt-in code ensures that new buildings in Amherst are going to be more resilient in the face of climate change. So when we think about we're seeing heat waves, I mean, it was 85 degrees today and it's not even July, deep freezes, other major changes to the world in which we live in. How it does this is that it requires more efficient measures in new buildings and significant retrofits. This code builds on the existing stretch code and brings in increasingly strict standards for energy efficiency, such as higher levels of insulation, high performance windows and doors, increased air tightness. The opt-in code recognizes that not all buildings can be built or renovated to net zero standards and so it offers several pathways to full electrification, including mixed fuel, provided that the building is able to be fully electrified in the future. So for larger buildings over 4,000 square feet, the requirement is that they either produce zero emissions or be fully electrified. We adopted the energy stretch code over 10 years ago in 2012. That code updated in 2023 and that's when the specialized energy code was introduced. Adoption of the opt-in code, which is optional, sends a strong message that our community isn't going to wait until those energy efficiency measures outlined in the opt-in code become required, which is very clearly the direction that this is going. We are being proactive, we are being progressive in requiring them now if we choose to go with the opt-in code. Ultimately, it's clear that we will need these changes in the not so distant future. When I was talking about this with Jesse, I was like, so like 10 or 15 years and he was like, no, like three to five max, right? Like we're talking that these are happening with increasing speed. Requiring them now allows builders to avoid costly retrofits or owners to avoid costly retrofits down the road. I included some FAQs from DOER, Mass Department of Energy Resources, as well as a really great chart from the folks in Watertown Mass, who are one of the communities that has opted into this code. I hope that you'll join me in supporting moving forward with the specialized opt-in stretch code, and I would love to turn it over to Jesse for a presentation. And Athena, if you don't mind driving, that would be phenomenal. Thank you. Please go ahead, Jesse. Thank you. Thank you all. I know it's been a long night. Appreciate the time. This was probably 40, 50 minutes tops. You didn't talk to me before then. It's a word of brief. I'm here on behalf of the ECAC to recommend the adoption of the specialized code next slide. Doing well. So here's kind of a quick update of what's there. The base codes off the table you already voted out of that. The, I think what's important about this slide is that the stretch code updates on its own, and we'll update again on July 1st, 2024. July 1st, 2024 is probably the soonest you could have the specialized code in place, and they will be very, almost the same thing by then. So really, in some ways, this is a political move to say, yes, we support this. It will not have a dramatic effect on the code. Next slide. This is a big list here. And I think this is always evolving and changing as I read this today. I think the takeaway I would say is DOER did a study, all buildings types that see the improved codes have a lower life cycle cost. Some building types even have a lower initial cost. I think you can read this on your own time. Next slide. It was also in our backup. Thank you. We appreciate that. Yeah. This is sort of the technical language of how buildings are rated. It's hers rating. If you're curious, you want to learn more, ask me at the end. If you're not curious, don't. But I think it's going to get better in a year. I think, and it's just got better in January for residential buildings. It's going to get better in July for commercial buildings. Questions? Next slide. I think what's important about the commercial buildings is what they're part of what's exciting to me about this code. And this is part of the stretch code anyway, but is they're making electrification of renewables possible by they're changing the way buildings are judged, not just make it a little bit better than what's there, rather reducing the total amount of energy demand and peak demand situations. I heard that Williamsburg had a blackout yesterday because of too much air conditioning. Yesterday wasn't even that hot. So this is about resiliency and really dovetailing with the rest of the state's climate readiness plans. Next slide. This is an exciting one for me because this is actually a building type that we see a lot of in this town, particularly as new construction. And it's a really good match for a low energy building, which is a multifamily homes and even a mixed use multifamily. And it's a great match for the passive house standard, which means these are a really durable, really resilient, low utility bills, great indoor air quality. It's a good match for housing. Next slide. Questions, comments. Okay. Yes. Jesse, could you speak a little bit about the, you and the ECAC team spoke to town staff about this. This was not just an, I mean, it was an ECAC, was the electric motor. But what, can you speak to the support that you received from town staff as well? Yes. I think what towns they've given, we've met with them twice and them is the, thank you. The inspection services, Rob Mora and Dave Roscavitz really trying to go fast. I don't know if people want to go home. All right. Oh, believe me, you're not between us and going home. There's so much else. We spoke with the inspection services and they, and we kind of had a really good back and forth about pros and cons. How does this affect builders? How does developers, homeowners, et cetera? It doesn't have a big impact on inspection services in that to meet this code, it's, it is and has been under the stretch code is outsourced to a hers radar or a building energy specialist. So it's not additional work for the town. And they did express some specific concerns about technology being available. For example, if electrical meter sockets, things that have long lead times, will have a direct dramatic negative impact on construction projects. And given the timeline that we're talking about, which is getting approval before the end of this year and having it enacted by July 1st, 2024. We don't, we all agree. We didn't think that was a problem. So they are in support of this as we've been talking about. Thank you. And Lynn, if I may just one more part of technically, I think I'm still in the presentation part. What we're asking for today is a referral to CRC, as well as a review for clarity, consistency and actionability by GOL. This goes to CRC as it primarily has to do with buildings. And we, I believe that this was the most appropriate path for this in terms of where it should be referred to. So we're asking for referral today. It will be discussed thoroughly and then come back to the council. But Jesse, yeah, anything. And I would add to that that the ECAC is available to support that conversation and committee, as well as DOER, Department of Energy Resources. They routinely speak to towns about what this means. They answer questions. They've done a ton of studies on cost impacts, on climate impacts, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you. They are the current experts in this code. Thank you. Thanks, Jesse. So I'm going to go into council questions. And before we put a motion, but I'm going to put a motion on the floor pretty soon. Kathy? My main question is, well, it's a two part question. Whether we really need to do this or not as a town because of, and it's mainly because we were just recently briefed about the elementary, the we is the elementary school building committee on Teddy. And I won't even begin to try to tell you what Teddy actually is. But the, it wasn't enough that we were a low energy building and that we were a net zero energy building. We are going to have to incur some additional costs for the envelope of the building, including the windows and some insulation. And that's a statewide standard. So if that's coming in and it's going to affect private buildings as well as public buildings, does Amherst need to go further than the state code is all already going? And it took quite some doing and modeling before our modelers could even conceive that any school could meet the new standards. And then as a result of working with the OR, they redid the model and they redid the specs on two ends. So they both agreed that it was possible to build a school that had windows. Let's talk about that, let light into it without and because we weren't building a cave. So I'm just questioning whether we need to take this extra step as opposed to the state is already taking a very big step. And I don't really need an answer for it right now because it was a complicated enough explanation about what Teddy was versus energy use intensity. We already built an extremely tight building, which is what our geothermal rebate is going to be, not rebate, it's advance. So it's not clear to me that we need to take another step, given the big step the state is already taking. That is my question and comment. And since it's so technical, I'm not sure that this needs just to go to CRC to get those answered or not. But I'm worried about spending a lot of time on this. If the answer is the state code is already going really far, we don't need to go further. Thanks. May I respond briefly and ask Jesse if he has a response? I'm sorry, what? May I respond briefly and then ask Jesse if he has anything to add? Please. So I mean, I think yes, right? Like there's a reason why this is called an opt-in code. It's because that there are things that we have the option to opt into. I think it's important to note our current net zero bylaw counts for town buildings and we want to be broader. I think that if the state code were enough, and even with the updates which happened this year, if they were enough, then this specialized opt-in code wouldn't exist. So I think the opt-in code allows us to be out ahead of the curve. And when we're talking about climate change and climate action, I think more of us need to be out ahead of the curve. That curve is way too slow behind. Jesse, do you have anything to add? I mean, I don't know the answer to Kathy's question. I think it's a good question. The Teddy thermal energy demand intensity, I believe, would be is that maybe the most complicated and difficult leap that's happening anyway. That happens in a couple of weeks for all building permitted in this town. So the bump up into the specialized code is actually far less demanding than just the natural stretch code updates. So I don't know if it actually makes it that much harder. I think my read of it is it makes it better, not harder. Dorothy. Okay, I'll do that again. I like this proposal because maybe even 50 years ago, and I was an elected official at that time, LaGuardia Community College came to, you know, is a public school to get extra money to build handicapped accessible restrooms. And I said, but they just built it last year. Why would they not have done it when they built it? The answer was it wasn't required then. So this is saying you don't have to do all of this. There's opt-in, but it's showing the way forward so that people can avoid the stupid waste of public money of having to do something when you're told you have to do it when you could have done it because it was a good thing to do it. And then later on, you're going to be told you have to do it. And I think Anna is right. The field is moving very, very fast. At the moment, I'm feeling very lucky to be here in Western Massachusetts and not fearing wildfires. We don't know whether summer will bring, but the climate change is very big, very real, and very sudden and is making it impossible to live in huge areas of the country. So I think we have to try to work with people to help them be ready to be forward thinking, to move ahead and to be ready to keep making those changes. It is complex, I do admit. So I do support this. Thank you. Pat, there's a lot that I support here. I'm a member of CRC and I'm a member of GOL. GOL would have to get it. I want to know why ECAC and the sponsor aren't making the changes that have to happen in our stretch code and then bringing it to GOL. Why do you want CRC to do the work that I think your committee should be doing? So we can't change any of the codes. No one here can. We can't even propose to change the codes. That's well way outside of any of our jurisdiction. And maybe we didn't. I don't know that this is not a big... This doesn't involve designing standards or customizing any standards to this town. It's a binary yes or no. You either do it or you don't. There's no argument on the language. Yes, you cannot change it. Yeah, you're not allowed. You cannot change it. So I think that's appealing in that part of why we actually do feel comfortable making the ask that you spend time on it is because you can't get bogged down in the language of it. You could either like it or you don't. And I'm not, I mean, heard what I think. But yeah, I think it's simpler than that possible. Should the council choose to send this strictly to GOL for actionability? I would not say no to that because that would get it done faster. We thought it would be appropriate to send it to committee as all of our other bylaws do go through 10 to my understanding as they go through committee. Hang on, I have to sneeze. Thank you. However, we did feel it was appropriate to send this to CRC, even though what Jesse said I want to be very clear on, we do not have legal leeway to edit anything about this code. It is a up or down. But it seemed worth it to have more of an opportunity versus strictly add a council meeting for a committee to dig in and discuss it. But I appreciate your sentiment and I don't disagree with you. If we could pass it tonight, I'd say, yeah, let's do it. Andy. Perfect timing for what I was going to say because I appreciate what Pat raised. I have sort of been the voice for this council in asking us every time we do a referral to committees for some new proposal that we've not dealt with that's going to require time of committees, both the original committee that it's assigned to and to take a step back and to think about what the capacity is of this council to handle it and what is the capacity of our staff to provide the support that's necessary for the committees and the council to make a wise decision that they're being asked to make. And I think that this is just another example of a proposal that I just urge all of my fellow counselors to think about very carefully because it's again making a big ask of CRC, making an ask of GOL. It has a very what may be unrealistic timeline requirement and given the fact that we're getting into the summer months where it's going to be harder to get committees together to meet. I have real concerns about taking this council in its last six months of work and creating yet another new requirement and to at least make sure that we just don't support it because we think G it sounds great but we also think about what is our capacity to do it. Mandy Joe. Can I respond to that? Yeah. I take exception to the phrase G it sounds great. Eight very hardworking people who care about this issue deeply spent a lot of time preparing this. I know I rushed through my presentation but we are professionals in this field and we made that decision that it's important to do. It may or may not be the right thing. You might not do it. I think that's belittling it a little bit. The other thing I will say is we will continue to support the process to make it as easy as possible for the council to do this work. We'll continue to do the research. We'll continue to network with the OER so on. Offer up that support as well so that it is less of a burden to this group. Mandy Joe. Thank you. I'm chair of CRC and I sit on GOL. So I have some practical questions that may result in me when the motion is made asking for more than 45 days. I was reading the DOER guidance on this and the paragraph on page four at the very top of the page stuck out at me because it says in order to be adopted the regulations must be considered at an appropriate municipal public hearing subject to the municipality's existing public notice provisions. So I'm curious whether that is after adoption or before adoption because we wouldn't so I would need to know whether CRC or GOLs hold in a public hearing and if we have to hold a public hearing we need more time because of the notice requirements for publishing in two weeks and all of that. And so basically what I will say is if this is referred to CRC I would be going to Paul immediately and saying, hey, Paul, can we get a legal opinion on what the change to the bylaw needs? The bylaw right now that adopted the stretch code is literally like two sentences. And so I foresee that we might only have to change the reference from stretch to specialized. But I'd need the right CMRs. I'd need the right thing. So I would be going to the legal to say, do we need to hold that public hearing? Is it us or is it the council? And what is the language that we need? And then we'd be following that. I don't know whether that needs to be at CRC or whether that's like come to CRC if there's a public hearing. But CRC regularly holds public hearings and GOL doesn't. And if the hearing is on the actual regulations it actually makes more sense to send it, I think to CRC then to just GOL if you're literally going to get builders in talking about the specifics of the regulations at a public hearing. Mandy, I appreciate you speed checking me with my secret desire to just pass it today. No, I think that that's valid and I agree in terms of the timing for for public noticing and all of that. Really the the the purpose here is, to and to kind of address Andy's point too, to do our jobs, right? And I think that our job is to put this through committee. Our job is to properly notice it. Our job is to pass laws that we believe are important for the future of our town. And so that is that is that's the goal here, right? Is that this is this is about the future. I mean, it goes beyond our town because climate change doesn't really respect municipal boundaries. But yeah, Mandy, to get kind of down to the nuts and bolts of it, I think that we can be flexible and that provided that we do need that public notice and that public hearing. The way that Jesse explained it, and I'm going to say it and then you're going to correct me, I'm sure. So the way that Jesse explained it is we have either July or January in terms of July's or January's to adopt, right? And then to implement. So we're not going to hit July. I'm not crazy. But I'd really love to get it done before January because at that point, who knows who's going to be sitting at this? What's this called? Dias, Dias. This is the oblong round lima bean table. So so I think that that's as long as we can really get it done. And I think expediency is important because I also think that prioritizing not necessarily bumping this up in CRC's agenda. I'm not asking for that. But showing that this is a priority and showing that the council is attentive to it also sends a message, right? This is a very practical, absolutely a practical code in all of that and how we approach it and how we deal with it is a political action as well. It covers both bases. And so I think that as for us, prioritizing it in terms of saying, yes, we are going to get this done. I'm committed to that. ECAC is really supportive and committed to that as well. So long, long story short. Yes, absolutely. We'll make it work. Jesse, did I get anything wrong? Oh, that's that's stuff. I don't understand how any of that works. I'm, I'm going to use my privilege as a counselor to speak to this. And I really am going to ask that you all consider what we have to accomplish between now and the end of December. And whether or not this truly can fit in the calendar, not just for CRC. I totally appreciate ECAC's stepping to the plate. Our staff and the council deliberation. And I, I have serious reservations knowing what else is out there that you all have already put on the docket. And so I'm questioning where our staff is on this. I'm questioning every time we say a committee is going to do the work, then we run into issues of, do you really have the time? So I'm just questioning it because I can go through all of the outstanding things and it'll scare the Jesus out of you that we have on our plate to get done between now and December. And as you said on it, this is not the kind of thing that you want to then say, gee, pass this off to the next council. So that's my reservation. It's, hey, I was on the first council. The first thing we did was create ECAC and adopt our goals. So it's not, but it was very near the, nearly the first thing. So I just really have to ask the question whether we have the bandwidth in our council, in our staff, and in our meeting time. Gosh, I hope we do because respectfully, we don't really have a lot of other options. I think that our committee chairs know exactly what's on their plates. And I think that if our committee chairs can handle this, that's great. But I also think that this is not a measure that's going to take significant deliberation because we can't change it. So there is deliberation that can happen and the public hearing that will happen. But ultimately, I believe that, and I can check with our committee chairs on this. I also believe that we're negating the fact that ECAC did a significant amount of due diligence in speaking to town staff about this. This was, that was one of the first things I asked Vasu and Jesse was, did you talk to town staff and what do they think? Because that is always a consideration. And I also respectfully, first council didn't pass this, wasn't brought forward. Would have been great. So let's get it done now. Let's not kick it down to the road to the next council. Indy Jo. If it is referred to CRC, CRC will get it done. I can't guarantee about our nuisance that we've had referred to us, but we've got exactly basically two referrals right now we're working on because we just made a recommendation on one. Tonight has all of the appointments that CRC has been working through. CRC after now has outstanding rental registration, which is nearly done. In terms of where we're getting to, I'm hoping to by the, in the next two meetings to be able to get something to this council on that. And then we have nuisance. This can easily fit into that schedule. But the fees, no, the fees, that's part of rental registration. We can do it. My belief is we can do it. My committee might not believe me. So I believe CRC has the time to get it done. But what I wanted to say really was one of the first major things the very first council did was adopt climate action goals of net neutrality by 2050. A decrease of 25% by 2025. I believe that is two years from now and a decrease of 50% by 2030. Jesse'll correct me if I'm 2035 something like that. Jesse'll correct me. He knows it more than me. Every building that is built new that uses fossil fuels that cannot easily be converted to not using fossil fuels from this day forward prevents us from getting to net zero net carbon neutrality by 2050 because that building will still exist in 2050. That is literally 27 years from now. My own home is older than that right now. And in adding mini splits on an oil based system, my family found out how hard it is to fully figure out how to get rid of and not use that oil at all. So any delay in saying or any way to say our stretch code is good enough because it will eventually get us there when we could adopt a super stretch code, stretchy stretch code, specialized code, whatever you want to call it that will mandate those buildings be done and to this standard quicker is one more way we as a town council can help our manager fulfill his manager goals that we adopted and told him to do and how we as a town council can stand up and say we're serious about those climate action goals we adopted because anytime we say build a building that uses natural gas or any other fossil fuel or we'll just renovate it and keep that in there instead of converting is another tick against us meeting those goals. Pam? I think that's a good thing but I am worried about the level of research and ramifications of what does this actually require homeowners and amateurs to do? Are we are we are we push I mean and whether this is a good or bad thing I'm not I'm not saying that but there's I feel like all of these things that we tackle there is a huge learning curve for most people most of us and my concern is are we driving people to be required to have solar on their roofs is that something that? No okay thank you that allays a little I mean it's not possible for everybody to do it so I don't know I don't want future homeowners to say I can't afford to build an Amherst because it's too expensive we have enough housing we have enough housing issues as it is all you have your hand up? I do so I think Pam was actually hitting on something I was going to say which is the ramifications and I think that the council will want to be doing its due diligence and as it moves forward one of those ramifications is what is the cost to anybody pulling a building permit there's other concerns like in Jesse Reffer we're installed already says supply chain issue can you comply with the the new stretch code if the if the parts aren't there and available the other concern we have and you know talking to the building commissioner is how do we train our staff to be able to implement it there are no classes out here there's no training that's being offered by the state in this area I mean that's all stuff that has to be developed and delivered we don't have the capacity to send our staff to Boston to get trained so we have a lot of building inspectors who would need to get up to speed on it it's complicated so we want to take into account the implementation and I would hope the council would invite in the building commissioner to understand what are the challenges of implementing it as well as the you know it's a simple binary yes no vote on it but I think there's some things that go along with it and I think it's so I don't want to undersell how complicated it is for but the council will want to do this due diligence because they're going to hear from their constituents when they come to get a building permit and they're told you need to do this in order to get a building permit to do whatever it is we're going to do this at some point because the state's going to go there and we're going it's just a matter of when we do it so it's not a matter if it's a matter of when so I just think the council will want to do use its you know its public hearing process and stuff to understand it so I think if you get started on it you know if Manny Jo usually delivers on what she says she's going to deliver on it's a it's a it's something that can be done this calendar year but I don't think we should be overly optimistic about voting on it tonight because I think there is some conversation that has to happen I was mostly joking but yes thank you Pam you still have your hand up right the motion that is on our sheet is to refer the memorandum regarding specialized opt-in energy code to community resources committee to develop amendments to general bylaw 3.48 stretch energy code consistent with the memo and to the governance organization and legislation committee to review set amendments for clarity consistency and actionability with report back to the town council within 45 days of transmission from the community resources committee can we just make it 90 days period and ignore the rest of the end of that sentence within 90 days and the sentence there all right that's the motion is there a second second Devon got there all right any other comments Manny Jo are we voting yes I Anika Lopes I Dorothy Pam yes Pam Rooney yes Kathy Shane I'm gonna abstain because I don't understand the ramifications this enough I so putting everyone through the work to bring this back to them I'm gonna have questions so I have to abstain Andy I hate abstaining but I'm gonna also have to abstain because I really don't understand this we rushed to this particular motion it's on the floor so fast okay Pat DeAngels I on a Devon got here I you skipped to tell and Walker I'm sorry it's because it's in the next sheet Jennifer Todd yes Alicia Walker yes and how did you vote Lynn I'm sorry and how did you vote Lynn I'm getting there I have to flip the damn sheet excuse me I'm gonna vote I with serious reservations so it passes 1234567 nine in favor two abstentions two absent thank you so much Jesse Jesse thank you all for your time for those that abstained I'm gonna work very hard to make it more clear and for those with reservations I'm gonna work very hard to make it easier so have a great night everyone thank you Jesse and thank you to the rest of the ECAC team for working so hard on this all right we are coming we are back to the proposed rescission and replacement of bylaw 3.4 snow and ice this was brought before the group before and there has been a one change made I'm going to call on Pat DeAngels to discuss that change thank you at our last meeting we decided to keep the 24-hour period for snow and ice removal with enforcement being a warning for the first non-clearance of a sidewalk by an owner and fine after that for the same owner it was also decided to keep the same day 24-hour period for waste container removal and it was the discussion of section B which about overhanging vegetation where there was a language change and that is for the purposes of this bylaw vegetative overgrowth extending into the sidewalk zone or overhanging the sidewalk 10 feet or less above the sidewalk shall be considered an obstruction and from what I understand Pam Rooney and Jennifer Todd went riding around on bikes to get this bigger I have an amendment to make I would like to lower that height to eight feet not ten feet hold on one second um Pat anything else okay so the um motion that will be put on the motion I'm putting on the floor is the following it in accordance with charter section 2.10a to rescind bylaw 3.40 and replace it with bylaw 3.40 obstruction of public waste and snow and ice removal as shown on page 14 of the motion sheet is there a second second okay uh discussion Pam you have your hand up yes I I did communicate with the chair of GLL and and had initially suggested 10 feet because it added some additional height to what would normally be within the reach of a of a cyclist but after walking several uh several side streets and realizing that vegetation at eight feet is still above a cyclist head you know they don't have to stand up on their on their pedals and try to hit the limbs overhanging their their their sidewalk it isn't that critical and there are some wonderful intimate spaces that are created with an eight foot ranch and um so I would I would like to change that to eight feet please and then I had one other correction in the last paragraph um in the third line it says well it starts out by saying in addition to the remedies provided above the town manager may blah blah blah clause clause clause recover from the owner the expense therefore so we need to delete the words again and may recover it's just a leftover wording so let me just make sure I understand the motion first of all was the motion seconded yes okay thank you uh so your your amendment is as follows and I'm looking for the second okay it's under b one to change 10 feet to eight feet yes b three three i'm sorry b three 10 feet to eight feet yes okay and then in d to remove after the comma and may just after the word by law after the word by law remove and may you can't remove the and just just may okay um okay there the amendment's been made is there a second I so I'm not even sure the may I know there's two maze there um Mandy I don't think there was a second yet was there a second on that moment well I'm just clarifying whether we need that amendment at all Jennifer why second the first part I'll but I'll second it but I would defer to Mandy to okay so the motion the amendment's now been made and seconded now we're back to I guess so sorry my question on the second though removal of the may is if we remove that may I think before you can recover you'd have to again give due notice right because of how the sentence is written the town manager may after due notice and an opportunity for the owner of the real property to be heard all of that is included then in the clause for recover from the owner of the expenses therefore saying the may should stay in yes you're saying the may should stay in that's my thinking but I just want clarification from other people who read it as to whether I'm thinking properly or not okay as the person who made the motion do you accept that we're leaving the may in do you accept the fact that we're leaving the may in got it um I understand believe me Jennifer do you accept leaving the may in since you seconded it yes okay so at this point the amendment is to change 10 feet to 8 feet are there any further conversations about that all right then Kathy Kathy just just a very quick I'm in a different time zone and I'm going to need to leave so I just wanted everyone to know that when my camera goes dark it's because I'm not there anymore so I won't be voting on this I'm okay bye okay thank you Kathy all right we are voting on the amendment we're voting on the amendment only at this point I'm starting with Anika hi hi um Michelle is absent Dorothy Pam yes Pam Rooney hi Kathy Shane is now absent Andy Steinberg hi Jennifer Tobbe yes Alicia Walker yes Shalini Balmille is absent Pat D'Angelo's hi Anna Devlin-Gothi hi Reese Merz and I'm Andy Jochanike hi unanimous with three absent um now we're going to go to the original emotion except for the fact that we have changed it from 10 feet to 8 feet and this is just one of those housekeeping weird things okay yes okay go ahead so this is the second time this evening that we've had the same situation I do thought I thought I recalled in town meeting if an amendment was made and passed that then that article was accepted if it didn't pass you went back to the original article and voted on that so why are we having to do these twice I'm going to look to my parliamentarians so the vote first you vote to amend the original motion so here's the original motion is in accordance with charter sections such and such now you've made a suggestion to change the bylaw from 10 feet to 8 feet and the body gets to decide if they want to make that change before they make the change to the bylaw so first the council decides that they'd like to change 8 to 10 or 10 to 8 and then they adopt all the changes to the bylaw so in other words we only voted on changing the 10 to 8 now we have to vote on the full bylaw okay all right so now we're going to the full bylaw and I'm starting with Dorothy Pam yes can you hear me yes Pam Rooney yeah yes Andy Steinberg hi Jennifer Tobbe yes Leisha Walker yes Kathy Angelis hi Anna Devon Gauke hi Lynn Grease-Merson I'm Anna Johannake hi Anika Lopes hi okay and that is unanimous with three absence there are three other items on the agenda tonight they are the proposed flag policy the proposed changes to town council policy regarding control and regulation of the public ways and proposed rescission of bylaw 3.35 parades and public meetings these were all reviewed by GOL this is not a night we were going to vote on them it was a night you would basically ask any questions or anything else so I'm going to quickly ask Pat anything you want to say about proposed flag policy I'd like to say something about all of them together thank you please go right ahead okay I'm going to be briefly talking about the proposed Amherst flag policy proposed changes to the town council policy regarding the control and regulation of the public way and the repeal and rescission of bylaw 3.35 parades and public meetings and the reason I'm doing that is that since the supreme series of supreme judicial court decisions regarding first amendment and issues of government speech and free speech or public speech the town manager and the DEI director created and proposed a flag policy in addition to that members of GOL and town staff began to review policies regarding the banners and flags flown in the business improvement district downtown and also to look at bylaw 3.35 parades and public meetings we determined that the limits of government speech required our policies to have clear and consistent regulations in place to avoid the perception of bias and decision-making the proposed flag policy and changes to the town policy regarding the control and regulation of the public way were reviewed by KP law whose advice and revisions guided our decisions after extensive discussion which focused on reservations on the common use of the public ways flying flags and banners the following three motions were made one to recommend the town council adopt the amendments to the town policy regarding the control and regulation of the public ways to recommend the town council rescind bylaw 3.35 parades and public meetings whose substance has been integrated into the policy regarding control and regulation and also to recommend the town council adopt the flag raising policy as shown in the document memo to the town council flag raising policy dated 426 we also have a clean copy of the flag policy in the packet so i'm going to open it up to questions and i'm going to hurt all members of GLL to participate in answering those questions okay are there questions about the flag policy are there questions about the proposed changes to the town council policy regarding control and regulation of the public ways yes Pam Rooney could someone explain the delegation of authority to town manager versus town council and why why it was split out in that manner i'm going to look at either pattern maybe joe i was going to ask do you have a specific which delegation there's a lot of delegating in there i mean i i can give my interpretation which is basically whenever it's short term we say town town manager do it when it's a longer term or more permanent then we want it to come to the council that's it and do you want to i'm on GLL so i can answer that question yeah so yeah so i'm not i'm not hearing the people in the town room sorry about that jennifer um so for banners and the flag policy paul and um and his staff proposed a flag policy that dealt with i think it was supposed to pamela and pamela um through kp law proposed a flag policy that dealt only with the flag polls on the common um but when we started getting into it there's banners that go across north pleasant and there's the banners the decorative flags or banners in town and so we tried to add that into the policy and what we looked for there um was were there sections of those banners and and that that even though we were declaring everything government speech which is the important thing to do um were there things that we could agree on were government speech that the town council would always allow and so that was delegated off to the town manager and those were things like um if you read it the us flag the massachusetts flag our town flag um the school flags um um and then basically everything else and then were there other ones and so that's where we looked at the greeting we do a lot of like holiday greeting banners and welcome back and congratulations on graduating banners and and so that we put in there as a separate one but that while government speech were the go l thought was sort of more ministerial that we as a council didn't need to see but could still declare government speech and everything else we ran into problems with declaring it government speech but giving the authority to the manager so that means we're actually going to see a lot more stuff um including most of what goes across pleasant street because we couldn't as go l figure out how to um make it government speech but also delegate it in a way that didn't put the manager in a weird situation or potentially put us in a weird situation in terms of the flag policy from what in terms of the flag policy move up pat more i believe it says in the flag policy is this loud enough that the town manager will be organizing regulations and process so he's very involved in this but the decision um about what is government speech and what gets put up there is definitely belongs to the council is that okay pam does that help thank you are there any questions about the proposed rescission of bylaws 3.3 bylaw 3.35 parades and public meetings can i say something about that in case for our questions yes one when we got um the review from kp law we were looking specifically asking kp law about that by law and that goes back to bylaw review and the only thing that we can regulate around free speech issues the first amendment issues we can time place and manner of such activities in this instance public meetings and parades and if we are not consistent um and that's true also of the flag policy that's where we're going to really get into trouble so this is to make things as consistent as possible and we don't need that bylaw anymore because it's it literally has been integrated now into right are there any questions from the council these will come about back for a vote um i probably will put them on consent for the vote um on the on the 17 okay if someone has a question they can pull it off consent absolutely absolutely all right we're going to move on to town council appointments because of the nature of the discussion at the um crc for regarding planning board we made these into three separate motions i'm going to begin in accordance with charter section 2.9c to appoint fred hartwell to the planning board for a term beginning july 1 2023 expiring june 30th 2026 is there a second second rooney okay is there any question or comment may i make a report please so crc had discussion i'm going to report on all three of these at once so i don't have to do this multiple times as as chair um crc had did the interviews the reports in the in the packet um with a little bit of an explanation and and in the end after discussion crc voted to unanimously recommend fred hartwell and jessie meager um to uh three year appointments and had a two in favor and three opposed to recommend um yohana newman to reappointment for a three-year term okay so the initial motion's been made and seconded uh it's regarding fred hartwell are there any questions seeing none i'm going to move to the vote i believe we're at dorthy pam yes amrooni thank you uh i am shana sapson andy steinberg hi jennifer tob yes alisha walker yes pat de angeles i anna devlin gothier i lin greece mersen i mandy johannike i anika loaves hi and there's absent and darthie pam yes that is can we be 11 no must be 10 in favor and three absent we're moving to the next one in accordance with charter section 2.9c to appoint jessie meager to the planning board for a term beginning july 1 2023 and expiring june 30th 2026 is there a second second rooney thank you are there any questions or comments mandy joh i'm making my comments not as chair just so it's clear um i can no longer support um jessie meager for appointment to the planning board and i want to be clear it's not that he does not support the bylaw amendments that pat and i has proposed um he signed that that paper the the letter that we received and it's his act of signing not his lack of support that concerns me at the time he signed it the hearing was still ongoing at the planning board and if it is not ongoing anymore but he signed a document to the planning board where he might have sat on the hearing board itself um the document he signed had obvious factual errors that anyone reading the actual proposal and having a minimal amount of zoning understanding would recognize as incorrect immediately this is and that it deals with the claim in the letter that the proposal would quote eliminate a butter notifications for duplexes triplexes townhouses and converted dwellings which is nearly 100 percent wrong and anyone who reads the proposal would know immediately that it was nearly 100 percent wrong and so i find mr meager's signing of a document without doing due diligence to a board he wished to sit on as something that i can no longer support because of his lack of due diligence and clear lack of willingness to actually read the proposal before signing it or at least get a modicum of understanding of what it is before um putting forward an opinion to oppose it so it is not his opposition in and of itself and i just want to be clear about that it is his lack of due diligence to signing um before signing it that presents a problem for me okay are there any other comments at this time on them can i ask a clarifying question please i apologize if you said this um in terms of the timing of this this is not something that we would have the opportunity to ask this person about any clarifying questions correct like we can't the interviews are closed right and they had closed prior to this petition okay okay are there any other questions or comments then i'm going to move to a vote and i believe it's andy no jennifer tov yes alisha walker yes pat de angeles uh i am i am concerned with this lack of due diligence but i am going to go forward with vote for my anna devlin gothner i when greasemors no with reservations and i mandy joe hannity no anika loeks yes with the reservations i uh pam dorthy pam yes pam rooney yes it is one two three four five six eight in favor two opposed three absent next one in accordance with charter section two point nine c to appoint yohana newman to the planning board for a term beginning july 1 2023 and expiring june 30th 2026 is there a second second de angeles okay are there comments or questions i would like to make a short statement please i did not support miss newman in the meeting i voted against recommending her i have some reasons in terms of what i felt like were um misunderstandings or distortions of positions particularly around the solar moratorium and i wouldn't have brought up the solar moratorium but miss newman brought it up in her statement of interest and in her responses but the more i thought about it the more i felt like if i could accept jesse meager then i needed to be able to accept yohana who has worked thoughtfully frequently on the on the committee and who who has made a real commitment to the work so i would like to see people support her other yes andy yeah i also want to speak in favor of yohana i was really very upset by the recommendation of the committee because i we have a member of the planning board who's worked diligently as exceptional understanding of energy and the whole subject of environmental regulation and solar that she brings a level of expertise that is equal equally important to mr. hardwell's expertise that he was bringing from working in construction and and as an electrician so it seemed like a real double standard and furthermore i was really concerned about picking out a statement from the soi and making what i think was a very unfair and incorrect assumption of what was meant by that statement with that and it just didn't strike me that a same standard has been applied in other situations to other applicants to just go to end it's really a question that we need people who are looking at a balance as we just talked about with another candidate who are going to look at the whole range of what it is that we need in order to have diversified housing that will bring housing opportunities to lower income people that might otherwise be able to afford housing under current rules and can balance that against the other needs that we have in town zoning has been frequently something that has come a barrier and this is not just an amorous situation this is nationally this is the way age zoning works has been a barrier to people in poverty being able to have housing opportunities and i hope that we continue to welcome planning board members who have a very wide-ranging understanding of those complex issues Dorothy okay first of all i think we have to separate a person's talents and abilities and their performance on a committee i enjoy reading um Joanna Neumann's um Newman's articles in the paper uh and i have absolutely no doubt of her expertise however um i believe i've attended more um planning board meetings than um most other town counselors and i thought that she had stopped being on the committee she was absent so many times and um often she would be there but would offer no comments no construction no no no questions even uh so compared to the other planning board members it was clear that this was not a first priority so i i do not in any way um derogate her positions her training her knowledge her abilities but if you want to be on a board and particularly a board as crucial as the planning board you have to really participate and do the work and um you have to do the site inspections you have to attend the meetings you have to read the documents you have to question the documents and that's uh where um i saw a problem so i think it does make sense to have um i know that that leaves a vacancy but people who are on the planning board it's it's a job well i say it's as hard as being a town counselor i'm not going to say quite that but it's a hard job it's a very very important job and you have to have somebody that has wants to do the job and has the time to do the job and is willing to do the job and that is what's most of concern to me not the questions of of opinions thank you hammer uni uh Dorothy Dorothy attended probably more planning board meetings than i did um so but i'm number two um i i value yohana for her expertise in energy i would love to see her on ecac where her knowledge and expertise could be immediately put into use um i i have to echo i have to echo everything that Dorothy said um i don't think any of us want to disparage candidates or make it so onerous they can't participate but i needed to i needed to respond to um what andy said i don't think anyone took things out of the statement of interest that weren't then contradicted by statements that were made in response to some of the questions and i think that's where um it was some of the responses and uh were more divisive than i would have liked to have seen um and i and i agree whole heartedly that someone who sits on that planning in that planning position needs to be an active member um someone who analyzes everything considers all ramifications and um oftentimes miss newman would listen to a presentation from the developer and then just say i support it i think we could vote right now um and and that's not the way i think planning should be um managed um with we're not i don't want to repeat what's been said um and i also feel i don't like to um you know publicly um in you know question how somebody has performed on a board that makes me uncomfortable but since we're voting um i have also been zooming into planning board meetings for three years and i i find you know one of my concerns is that is the uncritically questioning many of the applications that come before the planning board for approval and you know like with these this sweeping package of zoning um proposed zoning revisions no matter what your position is for against for some you know whatever your position is on those revisions they were an extremely they are an extremely complex set of zoning revisions that required a lot of consideration and when the sponsors presented them for the first time at the planning board meeting on february 1st all the members of the planning board meeting were were talking about how what kind of a deep dive were they going to take to really wrap their you know minds around and understand the full magnitude and implication and impact of all these different changes some members said well maybe we should look at you know different zoning districts and you know how the change in duplexes will affect zoning district or should we look at just duplexes and triplexes you know divide those up and see you know how they apply town-wide there was a lot of discussion about how to even begin to think about these this proposal and at the end of the meeting when miss newman spoke she said you know that she would not like to see it sliced up she thought it should be you know accepted and um she even said it was a comprehensive nudge not a leap and i thought you know just hearing this proposal it was like there was 40 slides on the powerpoint and just to say let's accept it that seemed not giving it and that's an example of kind of the consideration it was due and then you know she frequently describes you know neighborhoods in my district as transitional neighborhoods which feels a little demeaning and um so yeah i i just i could not vote um in good conscience for her to for a second term you know that for that is my main consideration is how the the deep analysis and thought about much of what comes before the board and then her characterization of i think neighborhoods in my district is transitional neighborhoods and then people averse to change who have different opinions um i would like to see more open-mindedness um i'm members of such an important body as the planning board i'm going to support everything that pat and andy said but i want to add something else about what critical review of proposals means and what participation in a meeting means just because someone doesn't speak very often at a meeting doesn't mean they haven't read the materials it doesn't mean that they haven't critically thought about those materials and it doesn't mean they've gone through in their head haven't gone through in their head what the ramifications are it might just mean they've done all of that and believe they don't have any questions left because they've thought it all through or it might mean every other planning board member or member of that committee has asked there are questions and they don't need to i sat on the charter commission for 18 months and there was at least one charter commission member that rarely spoke at the meeting but when he did you knew he had read everything he had thought of it he had done both sides of every argument and he knew what he was talking about and he was fully participating he didn't need to speak to be able to make that decision and so to say just because someone speaks doesn't mean they're thinking critically about an issue i think takes someone's participation assumes something about a person's participation that is not necessarily accurate um that's all i have to say hannah i i planned to enthusiastically support yohana's appointment especially because of her expertise those with climate action knowledge are needed on all of our committees not just ecac if we are limiting our climate experts to ecac gosh are we screwed right i was actually really disappointed and i have an email drafted to mandy that there wasn't a question in the interview about climate climate and planning climate action and planning need to go together that's alarming to me so heads up and emails coming honestly i wish some of us would take a page from yohana's book and consider what we are saying about a human being and how they process information in this meeting right now i would like to gently and it's close to 11 so i recognize them being a little less gentle but i think all of us need to check how we are speaking publicly about our neighbors and do it with kindness and empathy being loud or talkative and being unprepared are two very different things i have been part of many meetings where i have been extremely prepared but i haven't felt the need to add my input to make them go longer there have lots of ways to engage and ask questions there have been plenty of times where each member of this council separately has said a lot and times where they have said little i agree we should explain our positions but to say someone is not doing their job because they do not share their full process and only their final decision is alarming and shocking to me pat thank you i want to go back to the first meeting in february that you brought up jennifer i don't i i totally trust you about what yohana said but i also went through the whole process with her and she wasn't in the same place at the end that she was in the beginning and that's what we're supposed to do we're supposed to listen observe etc i didn't get the support from her that i would like for what we've been proposing she did propose that there were some elements that were worth voting on separately but that was not the will of the planning board and and so i feel like your example falls really short because what i've seen in her in this instance of where again where i didn't get my way but in this instance where she processed things changed things and had different input so i'm going to support her dorthy okay this is a public body this is a public discussion no one is going to be a good town counselor because they have a great interior process unless they share that process with other council members the public has a right to know i have attended so many meetings of the planning board and that moment never came when all of a sudden you got the benefit of it she looked bored she did not seriously i am not talking about her as a person i'm talking purely about performance on a crucial board in the town and that performance wasn't there so if you want to play it this way you can and i understand defending a friend is good and i in no way say anything bad about her ability she's a great writer she's got great ideas and wonderfully but did she engage with the material did she did she listen to did was there any sense that she was even listening to the other members of the planning board no there wasn't so you know at some point you can't just be called a musician because you're thinking great musical thoughts you have to produce some music and it doesn't have to be all the time but it has to be some time and i didn't see it so i think it was a reasonable vote that was taken and um you know i do i know that's a really good point about wanting to have people with climate knowledge on all committees i totally agree with you but you would want them to share that knowledge what good are they doing on the committee if they have this special knowledge and they don't share it and there was no sharing going on so um i think that this is a reasonable decision that the planning board is not the town body for Joanna but does she have great talents and abilities yes but i think another body would be better thank you andy after i'm at Dorothy i'm sorry that i look at this group itself i wonder sometimes whether people are looking forward here and how do you judge that when you look at people but the other the thing that i was really uh had raised my hand was uh Jennifer raised brought up that term the transitional neighborhood and i think that that was probably the thing that really triggered me off to begin with because i'm not sure um there's so many ways that that can be interpreted for meaning and i kind of just felt that it was uh not it was not reasonable to make an assumption about what that meant for somebody who has served on planning board has developed the expertise as the presumption that we built into our rules that presumes reappointment and that i think that um obviously a presumption is a presumption but not a final decision but i think that we created that for a reason and uh for for that variety of reasons i really felt like um this was uh one that um there was not reasons put forward that don't have us go with the presumption that we had built in the rule i think that's where we have it Anika um yes just just to be brief i think you know not everyone is here to perform and i i would i think it would serve us well to stop um describing the inner workings of people we don't know as as if we do um and i understand the language of transitional might be um offensive and you know if that's how it felt to jennifer than it was but i think that there's also a bit of we can't be hypocrites because it's you know um and into any point that could be taken a different way um as can saying slums and ghettos can be but these are you know freely um they're tossed around as well and describing amherst neighborhood so i just i think that we need to be careful and just make sure that we are um showing those grace it's it's not easy to be involved with these committees or at all so thank you that's it jennifer yeah um so pad i guess i would just say that you know maybe you felt the this planning board member may have changed a little you know may have asked for some changes over time as the planning board continued to hold its deliberations over you know a few months but my sense is she would have just accepted it lock stock and barrel at that first meeting based on what she said i went back and listened to the meeting based on what she said she said that she hoped it but i'm not going to repeat that i said it before um so i guess i would just ask in terms of some grace because i think she will be um you know probably voted on to the board that a little more grace towards the neighborhoods in my district because over a period of years i have heard my district referred to as we're averse to change even though we have all the changes that were in those zoning um proposed revisions that we are a neighbor we are a neighborhood where people live we're not an investment opportunity um so i would ask you know this member for some grace when she's looking at some of the neighborhoods uh closer to town thank you i'm going to call the question question's been called move to immediate vote on whether to call the question and then we're going on um this is jennifer what the point of order or clarification did you actually make a motion to call the question i moved to call then i will second it thank you thanks and so now the now we on whether we're ending debate thank you uh but we have to vote on whether to end debate yeah okay all right jennifer voting to end debate yes alisha yes pat i on the deftly golfer i lin greece miss i mandy johannike i anika lobes i pam rooney i mean dorthy pam yes pam rooney yes andy steinberg i okay we're going to move to the question we start with alisha walker so we're voting whether or not to vote we ohana newman on to the planning board for a term beginning july 1 of this year and expiring june 30th 2026 yes pat angeles hi on a deftly golfer i lin greece miss and i mandy johannike i anika lobes i pam rooney dorthy pam no pam rooney no andy steinberg hi jennifer tov no okay that is seven in favor three opposed three absent we're going to move on to the zoning board um so in accordance with charter section 2.9 c to appoint everald henry and philip white as members to the zoning board of appeals for terms effective july 1 2023 and expiring june 30th 2026 is there a second second are there any comments or questions do you want a quick report oh thank you yes i'm sorry and i had your i had your name on this piece of paper but not here pam please give us a quick report you wrote a nice report by the way thank you thank you i copied mandy's text long in the short there were five candidates that submitted statements of interest we have two full-time members positions open we have four associate member positions open and we initially went into the interviews with the suggestion that we would at least try to appoint the full-time members and if we were able and if we had qualified members of candidates that we would also fill associate members as as possible we ended up making the recommendation that you see on the on the motion with a lot of discussion thank you anything else would you like to make any other comment i just wanted to add one thing yeah that doesn't relate to that discussion the third motion on the motion she does not necessary tonight regarding the extension of term where dylan maxfield because that hearing has closed so we don't need to make that motion i just wanted to put that out there for everyone so they knew why we were skipping it okay all right so are we ready to move to a vote yes i think we're back up to pat de angeles hi anna deblin got here i win grease morson i mandy joe hannity hi anika loeks hi dorthy pam yes pam rooney yes andy steinberg hi jennifer tov yes lisha walker yes it's unanimous with three absin the next motion is in accordance with charter section 2.9a 2.9c to appoint hilda greener bomb green bomb david sloveter and sarah marshall as associate member to the zoning board of appeals for terms effective july 1 2023 and expiring june 30th 2024 is there a second second is there any question or comment was do you have any further report okay my my hand is not long enough manny joe so i just wanted to make the statement um that i will be voting as a group for these despite my concerns about um david sloveter's signatures on that same petition for the same reasons but since he does not sit on the planning board and it has that slight difference that um for that reason i will still vote to appoint all three okay um are there any other questions or comments yes pam i would also like to state that i strongly supported promoting david sloveter and sarah marshall to the full-time positions because they have spent the past at least six months to a year serving as associate members and that was one of the strongest criteria that our zba chair offered to the committee i voted to go the route that we are for unanimity okay um jennifer um i would say you know echoing pam i also um stated during the meeting that i thought um the two associate members david sloveter and sarah marshall who had served as associates for a year um had served in good standing and i supported their moving on as full-time members um and i think that's kind of off in the route and then i supported the three other uh candidates to be associate members and i just wanted to note that um i don't know if you all had a chance to read the letter that or email that came into the council from steve judge the chair of the uh zoning board of appeals who you know he has said expressed that you know he thinks that from what he read um of the statement of interest that they were all strong candidates but he really appreciated would appreciate having the two associate members advanced to full-time members so that they could hit the ground running so i just you know thought we should acknowledge that we had received that letter and um you know that i really shared um you know that point that i i share that position but um you know after the contentiousness i guess um when we were um from our june 12th meeting for the crc which was three days before for the planning board um i did ultimately go for unanimity but um you know i'm not totally comfortable with my i with that decision but that's where pat yes i just want to say that my first choices since we seem to be sharing those was philip white and sarah marshal um i chose philip because he has a background uh in architecture not architecture but zoning and land use and design uh that he uh involved with in economic development strategy how planning impacts that he and so i was quite interested in him um and i felt strongly about sarah what i i don't i didn't guess i didn't feel like things were contentious but i i did feel like he had come to a collaboration um that that so no i was surprised by the reaction because it even said i think i even said or somebody else said um let's let's collaborate on this let maybe that's not the word um but to compromise um to to reach a compromise like you were and so i don't understand the decision i think all of us should because we made it however you want to now jennifer no i was referring to the june 12th meeting being a little contentious not the june 15th yeah thank you for that clarification i appreciate it all right the motion but fear of contention shouldn't make one make decisions i know i don't really like contention okay the motion's been made and seconded is there any other people who feel they have to comment dorthy um the chair of the committee wants more members full-time associate whatever because the work of the zoning committee zba is is quite arduous and i don't believe that the chair had any objections or criticisms of the functioning of um slovener and marshal so i just think it would be a good idea to um do what was originally done to have them be full-time members and the others coming on as associates because there's there's a lot of positions a lot of work that has to be done by the zba and um when you listen to the zba meetings they're very well behaved people talk share opinions they're not contentious um but they're full i mean ideas are discussed um so i i would you know sometimes i guess i'm saying kind of maybe remove some politics and let a committee that works have its full strength thank you joe i echo what other members of our committee have said is that i believe this is a we've already voted philip and everald on to as full members but but that the recommendation coming out of crc in some sense was a compromise recommendation that tried to get us to a unanimous recommendation i think we sometimes always strive for that we don't always get there and given the number of applicants we had we were able to get there and i think it might not make everyone happy um including some of us that proposed the compromise solution there each of us might have had a different set of people we would have liked to see for three-year terms but we got to a compromise solution it was unanimous um i do want to say one thing as to one of the reasons i was concerned um with um appointing the two current associate members that applied for appointment or reappointment to the zba and and sought three-year terms or one-year terms but every all five people who applied preferred a three-year term we asked them that um was that if we had done that all five members of the zba would have been from district four and one of the criteria that the zba chair has actually put forth um as important to the zba is geographic diversity in town um and so it just did concern me that all five members full members that had the first right to sit on every zba panel um would be from the exact same district which also happens to be the very smallest district in our town um so that was something that went into my consideration of potentially seeking a compromise vote and recommendation jennifer not to be labor but um i the there's many criteria i mean one is experience and one is geographic diversity but you can be in the same council district i just want to be clear and have geographic diversity um the new district four so the two council the two members that would be advanced the two current associate members if they advance they right now live in different council districts they will be in the future in the new district four but they're in different parts of town just like um the new district five goes from amherst woods to downtown so i don't think just going forward we should say you can't be in the same council district because you can be in the same council district and live in very different neighborhoods i just want to add that unless there's any other comment i'd like to move to a vote without having to call the question thank you um i think we're at alana devlin gothier alana devlin gothier votes yes brice lin greece mersen i mandy drohanicki i anika loaves i dorothy pamm yes pamm rooney i andy steinberg hi jennifer tob yes alisha walker yes pat de angeles hi it's unanimous with three absent we were done with the votes for the evening at each of you have submitted various reports but just let me ask mandy joe crc i believe you've heard enough from crc tonight okay elementary school building committee cat he's already gone alisha do you have anything you'd like to add um we haven't had another meeting yet i know that on july 10th we're going to have a site visit and visit look at the site together with the with the design team so that's what i'm looking forward to i'm not sure if one of the other subcommittees had another meeting paul i'm not sure if you know both subcommittees are meeting the same day okay yes so that we don't have any updates but thank you paul is there anything else no okay uh finance uh finance committee andy no report uh gol pat you've heard enough from me john's library anika okay i'm going to refer to paul for just just a question i'm not sure if i'm blurring from another report or i don't know that we've met that our the last meeting was after our last council meeting or before do you remember you've met since then we have because we did the conservation commission appointments okay that's right so uh yes we we did hear about um the the architects are coming in um they were concerned with their estimate but they're coming in on an under budget yeah i got it i think that he it was both it was both i got it but we did me um um and uh no no no i got it i i understood that he was saying t s ova meant the jlbc i could read that there was another allotment that came in that i'm sure everyone has heard about from uh the representative mendy dom and senator joker referred so um that's that's about it for the jones library okay now t s okay so so t s o is also i think we can uh you know skip through street lights um we're going to be talking about that next meeting um hopefully with prepared amendments if there are any in advance and i will refer uh defer to paul for an update on the holler policy sorry so yeah so we call the waste holler policy we're supposed to send the rfi out this week by the end of june so that's the goal and mr moring said that's his mission before he goes on vacation to get it out so okay thank you for that are there any liaison reports moving right along for a minute we any town town manager anything else paul no no okay president's report you got one and it's got a ton of testimony in it because that was basically last week mandy joe also testified at the rank choice voting hearing thank you mandy joe yes question um future agenda items that's what my hands for future agenda items yes um i gotta get all the way down the charter review committee charge what's up with that is is it coming to the council at some point or thank you it's uh i'm writing myself a note thank you i think we should be looking at that no later than july if not august okay anything else what i have on for the for july 17 besides all the various things that we discussed night uh one is paul is going to come forward with some ideas about how we might look at systematically at issues like traffic calming and public ways um we are hopefully going to be looking at either from gl either the bylaws from the first council or the rules of procedure we're doing one in july one in august uh hopefully we'll have something on the reproductive care by law yes if ready yeah okay and we don't know when we'll get to duplexes but it could be as early as the 17th and that's it is there any other questions or comments future agenda items seeing no hands the meeting adjourned it is 11 24 i just ruined my record but you were doing so well before this no