 Okay, I will call this meeting to order at 4.34pm on this August 30th as acting chair today, 2023. We will start by identifying a minute taker for the meeting. Which I believe the heir to that throne is none other than Laura Drucker. If they're available. Go so fast I know. Yes, I will do it. Thank you. I appreciate and apologize. Review speaking of minutes. We have minutes from the last meeting. If anybody wants to read them or just vote to approve them. I think we typically read them ahead of the meeting. So we don't necessarily need to take time, but. Should I put them on the screen or anything? I can put them up for you if is there anybody who needs them posted to review. They're in the online meeting packet as well. Someone wants to move. I'll move to accept the minutes. Second. Okay. And I'll need your voice vote in no particular order. Selman. Yes. Roof. Yes. D. Yes. Drucker. Stain. Frager. Oh, I'm doing it. I didn't hear you. It's your audio. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you now. Yeah. I said yes. Okay. Great. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure. All right. Thanks. Everybody there approved. All right. Who seconded that? Sorry. I did. Thanks. Public comments. We have three. Members of the public here. If anyone wants to raise their hands. Stephanie can. Make you local. Otherwise. Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having eyes on this. And we have. A hand up. Okay. Christine, you can go ahead and unmute yourself. Everybody hear me. Yes. Great. Yeah, I'm Christine. I am. A parent in the public. Schools and also on the transportation advisory committee. And Stella reached out to the transportation advisory committee. And they said, you know, I just wanted to make sure that you all are discussing today. And was just looking for. A little bit of. Information regarding what the. Our committee has been up to in that realm. So I thought I would attend and give you the quick update. So. Safer to school is actually a federal program. It's administered through the mass department of transportation. And it provides a series of resources. And the goal is to create walkable and bikeable communities for kids starting with the schools. And provides a series of resources for municipalities across the state of Massachusetts to be able to do that. Lots of kind of grassroots actions. Provides education and professional development for, for teachers to be able to do pedestrian. And so it provides a series of resources for kids and projects. And then even provides. Support up to $1.5 million. For infrastructure and intersection. Upgrades. Within two miles of the school. So it doesn't even need to be on school grounds. So. I was like, okay, I'm going to go to school. I'm going to walk to Wildwood and now she walks to arms. And so this stuff just kind of appeals to me. So when I heard about safe routes, I was like, sure, I'll do that. And have worked for the past year to try to engage the school district in safe routes to school. With some success, but unfortunately we have a big power vacuum system. So, um, I think we just decided, let's just get something happening with parents, regardless. Um, and, uh, and, uh, sort of show active participation in the safe routes program that then might, um, Provide, uh, the backdrop against which we could then go ask for some money, um, to pay for infrastructure and, um, Intersection upgrades at the new Fort river elementary school site. So that's what we're doing. Um, we have 22 families signed up so far for October 4th, which is international walk. Bike and roll to school day. Um, and we are, you know, just working with the principals at each school to have bike trains and, um, walking school buses arrive to school that morning. We'll have a little bit of a reception. Um, Paul Bachman will be joining in over near the Fort river school because that's where he lives. Um, and, uh, you know, so far I would say that that's going well. Um, at the back, back to school event yesterday, we, um, recruited a bunch of additional families. We passed out free bike lights that we got from mass bike. Um, because of the new law that requires cyclists to have a headlight and a tail light on their bicycle from dusk on. Um, and so it's been pretty fun. Um, I'd say the weakness has been just a sort of the power vacuum at the school, um, for the past four or five months. Um, in order to be able to apply for these grants, it's a sort of a joint application process that comes from both the district and the municipality. Um, but on the plus side, you know, we're going to be getting an interim superintendent soonish, I think. Um, it seems like the school committee meeting is coming up to be able to do that. Um, but then, you know, Guilford mooring has kind of stepped in to take the lead. Um, he's the head of the DPW. He, um, I think just our, our had Paul Bachman ink a contract with, um, CDM Smith, which is a consultancy to, um, do an analysis of the two problem intersections at the Fort River site. Um, the route nine southeast street intersection and the northeast main street intersection. So, um, I don't think that that's going to be done until December, meaning we'll miss the deadline for grant application at safe routes to school this year. Um, but potentially we could be queued up for, um, for next year, you know, assuming the DPW chooses one of the options that the engineering firm brings back and we're able to create a plan and a budget around that. Um, the other downside, of course, is that Guilford right now is, um, you know, back of the envelope saying that the upgrades are going to cost between four and five million and we're only going to get 1.5 if we get it. Um, it's a competitive program through safe routes. So there needs to be some other scheming done to try to figure out other ways to bring funding resources in. Um, and then there's, of course, a bunch of other upgrades we hear from folks on Echo Hill all the time that they would never want to, you know, ride with their kid on their bike down that sidewalk between Echo Hill and Fort River on route nine because it's so scary. Um, so there are other things involved as well. I think the best thing that we think we can be doing is just starting the active participation, starting to get more and more families engaged in walking and biking. And, um, so far we're, we're feeling like that's going well. So that is the quick briefing from the transportation advisory committee. Christine, could you tell us for the October 4th event if you said there's people signing up where, how would someone sign up for that? Yeah, that's a good question. We don't really have anything formal. Um, last year we had the district, um, we had the district of Washington where we were promoted several times. And so we'll just email out to the families and Deb Westmoreland kind of created an online forum and, um, people would just fill out their information there and she would then just give that to me periodically. Um, that hasn't happened yet. So right now people are just emailing me and saying, yes, I would like to participate and here's the school that I'm affiliated with. school right now, except for the high school in Pelham Elementary, each school has, you know, some parents who've agreed to lead the charge for the individual event at their school, so I just get those parents hooked into those, those leaders. But Jesse, I'm happy to sign you up right now if you've got a school in mind that you'd like to be a part of. I, um, sure, you can sign me up, I'm not sure. Oh, come on, you can do it. My kid's up. Yeah, sign me up. The middle school and the high school, please. Oh, nice. Yeah, so the high school, we're kind of trying to do things through the students. It's just a little bit of a different vibe, obviously. So we do have one student who's a part of the environmental club and is going to be asking the environmental club to engage in like a, they do like safe routes to school hosts of video contest each year for high schoolers. And you can win, I don't know, like a $500 gift card or something. So we'll see how that goes. But I'm happy to sign you up for the arms event, Jesse. Um, do you let me just tell you my email and if you just want to shoot me an email, then I'll have your contact info. My email is CLL800 at aol.com. But you're in luck. I'm one of the leaders of the arms event. So you're on my radar screen. Thank you. Absolutely. All right. I think we have another person with a hand up. If it makes sense. And then Christina, you're going to stick around for Kathy's conversation as well. I hope. I just, yeah, I hope so too. I'll see how long I can, I can stick. Okay. Well, thank you for the update in the interim. All right, Eve. Go ahead, Eve, you can unmute. Hey there. So most of you all know me. So I'm here as a former member of the TAC and of its previous committees for well over 10 years. I've also been running occasional column in the Indy called transportation mode shift. And basically I'm just here because Stella invited us and alerted us. And even though I'm not on the TAC anymore, I still go to the most of the TAC meetings. And I'm pretty active in transportation policy in town. So mostly I just want to say I'm thrilled you guys are engaging with transportation. As you all probably know, transportation is the number one cause of carbon emissions in the state of Massachusetts at this time. You also probably also know that Amherst actually has the potential to be a very bike walking transit friendly town far more than it is. And you may know that if we really want to get people out of their private cars, the most important way to do that is make them feel comfortable and safe, which is really an infrastructural choice as well as just kind of teaching people habits. Which is why I'm thrilled to know that you all are engaging in this Fort River idea. I think there's really a high potential to have it kind of be a model for the town of how to do things right and really make walking biking and transit central to what's happening and how that school was thought of. I personally had a child who I had walk from Wildwood to UMass starting in the second grade after school. And people kind of freaked out. Like it almost never happens anymore. It's perfectly safe if there's actually that crossing guard at East Plus and who stays more than 10 minutes. But it's just not done. And so I think there's what Christine is trying to do and what has been done on these walk to school days is great. I think what Kathy is going to be talking about today and you all are working on with the Fort River ideas is an opportunity to sort of make it more fundamental at one place in town where children are going to be living their lives for how many years, seven years. So anyway, just really support what you're doing and thank you. Awesome. Thank you, Eve, very much. All right. We are going to go on to agenda item number three, which is updates. The first being solar. Dwayne, do you have any updates? It's fine if you don't. That's good because I don't accept my self proclamation or to make sure everybody is aware of our UMass clean energy extension solar, western mass solar forum, which I did, which we did do an email blast earlier this week, inviting folks to that. And you were all on that list. So hope you received that. Welcome you to join us. It's in collaboration with a number of partners, including a number of western mass legislative legislators. Mindy Dom and Joe Comerford have been planning this with us for for half a year now. It starts next week for Tuesdays in September, starting at noon each one with different themes and topics on each one. The idea is to not necessarily resolve all the issues, but elevate the conversation and have people well informed and understanding of the various perspectives and issues around the issues associated with solar, solar siting, solar equity, solar benefits and so forth. And so welcome everybody to that. If anybody does have great outreach abilities to particularly western mass folks through social media, we also have some social media things that you can push out. I don't know. I'm not an expert on that, but a tweet and a Facebook thing, a post that can get amplified, I guess. So if anybody has that interest and ability, I'm happy to share those links with you as well. On the solar, on the solar bylaw working group, we have, we do formally now have an extension from Paul Backelman, not for long, but till the beginning of October, maybe October 8th, I think, but I'm guessing on October 6, October 6. And so we have basically the month of September to wrap things up. And we're going to be working on that in earnest each Friday, or not every other Friday, still we may start meeting a little bit more frequently, but we'll determine that we have our next meeting on Friday. And just big appreciation to Stephanie and to Christine Bestrup as well on the staff side for working on that with us. All right. Nice. And I'll just, I just want to point out that the event that Dwayne's talking about is free and virtual, which makes it, I think, you know, for those in the audience who may listen to this later, I think that's helpful. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely free for the public and virtual. Great to join us live, but the each session will be recorded and available as well. Yeah, I just had a question, two questions. The Solar Bailar Working Group meeting Friday this week, is that starting at 11.30? Yeah, normal time, 11.30 to 11.30, yep. Okay. And then I had a separate question that was in the back of my mind to ask you, Dwayne, and that's about the Massachusetts statewide, the technical potential study that was released earlier this summer. Do you know if the data are available, like the GIS data are available from the study or from one of the DOER offices? You mean beyond obviously the what you can do online? Yeah, the data under, yeah, that's a good question. I have not heard anything on that or inquired on that. So I don't know that. Yeah, I was inspired to try to do some analyses for the town of Amherst based on their data, and that's not really possible to do with their interactive website as well as to do some searching through their different sites and their assessments for different sites. Yeah, it'd be a good question for them. I mean, it seemed to, you know, especially for town planners and town committee members like ourselves to be able to hone in on a town or a region to do some of that. So that would be a useful inquiry to them. I presume to, you know, to DOER I think would be a great place. All right to them. And do you have any sense how that report has been received across the Massachusetts over the course of the summer? I haven't heard too much about it, quite frankly. In our solar forum, the commissioner, DOER is going to speak to it a bit on the first day, on the first Tuesday. So perhaps get a sense from her. You know, it's interesting because the study was commissioned in the previous administration, and now the current administration is broadcasting it and using it. We did ask the commissioner, you know, to talk about the study, the outcomes of the study, but also, you know, to the extent that she can and is comfortable, what do they take from the study with regard to developing their policy framework moving forward? I don't know, you know, if that's not developed enough yet, she probably won't be able to say too much about that, but at least we prompted her with that. Yeah. I found that it was, you know, very encouraging that they were able to find so much technical solar potential. But I don't, I didn't think they really made a clear distinction between technical and feasible or economically feasible in that report. And I also was sort of disappointed that they didn't address what are the limitations to reaching that technical feasibility. And that's something that maybe we can talk about locally and Amherst later in the agenda, the solar outreach. I'm looking forward to hearing what Laura, what ideas Laura has. So how do we overcome those those stumbling blocks or bottlenecks or restrictions that prevent us from achieving that technical potential? Yeah, perfect. And that was sort of some of my not concerns, but sort of observations of like, okay, we had the technical potential to do a fair amount to meet our needs on the built environment. But it's technical potential and one thing that we'll be discussing in the solar form is like, what are the different challenges and market conditions in the different sectors that make, you know, it could be technically possible to put it on lots of roofs and commercial buildings and parking lots, but what's reasonable to assume or what are the challenges now with regard to building up those markets quickly, sort of key at this point, you know, and and so I'm hoping to hear some insights on that. Well, good. I'm glad that'll be a topic in the Tuesday forums next month in September. Great. And great. If we can sort of think about how Amherst can be a leader in trying to accelerate that built environment, that'd be great. Yeah, okay. Great. Thank you. Fantastic. All right, updates. That was update A. Update B was scheduled to be heat pumps with Lori Goldner, who's not available, but I'm going to steal that slot and ask if anyone has had a chance to look at the specialized code Q question list that was sent out earlier in August. What this is just a little reminder is that we're working with the C R C to develop kind of the questions that come with it. Does it make sense for the town to adopt this specialized code, but try to pre proactively explore the potential more specific questions like how much is going to cost with how will it change how it will affect me, you know, all the different things. And so we sent out the initial list of this group and a, you know, quick show in hands. Does anyone had a chance to look at that? Yes, Stella. Does anyone have any feedback they want to give now or also are welcome to just put it in email form? I think I could, we, we postponed the meeting to have all the answers ready by the CRC till September 21st. So we'll need some time to compile it also maybe a week from today for any further comment. But Stella, do you have anything? It was very, it seems very good. It seems very like comprehensive. It answered questions. I didn't know I should be asking. Right. I think the idea, you know, I think the, you know, again, the idea is a comprehensive document that anyone could look at that's user friendly, that sort of helps do just what Stella said, answer questions they might not have known. And not necessarily biased in one way or another. It's just, this is, these are the facts. What I have found is most of the anxiety or pushback against the code has been based on things that aren't actually true or a sort of a misunderstanding of, of how it all works. And so that I think hopefully this document will clear a lot of that up. I don't think we need input. I just want to make sure folks understand that they are welcome and invited and it would benefit from all your input. But I, Anna and I, I think can button this thing up pretty nicely and have it ready for the CRC with Stephanie's help as well. Jesse, did you say, I see the memo, was there another link to like a document where you're answering the questions, or are you just referring to the memo? Just the memo, we have not started answering them yet. So feedback that would be helpful. Again, I'm not saying anyone has to do this, but sometimes there's a certain understanding or expertise or an insight that this group has that can really get to the heart of the matter. If you have an answer to one of those questions, or you want to pose a question and give an answer, we will incorporate that your, your thoughts into it. Yeah, or you might say this, I could, you should phrase this question differently because it would be, you know, any, any input is really welcome to be honest. And you can send that feedback to Jesse and copy me, but please don't send it to the entire group. So I'll say, I'm going to give a, maybe a week from today, which would be Wednesday, September six, if any sort of email feedback by then would be great. And that will allow us a couple of weeks. We need, you know, we need to have it all done and out to the folks. It's not me. I think the meeting is on the 21st, but we need to have it basically ready about two weeks before that. So no pressure, but love to hear what anyone thinks that they're thinking. All right. Anything else on that topic for anyone? So Jesse, Kathy is here. So I'm going to promote her to a panelist. All right. Great. I have been promoted. Great. Congratulations on your promotion. Stella, would it make sense for you to introduce this segment? Yeah, maybe it is the sound because my daughter is watching like videos in the background, which is enabling me to be here. Can you hear that? Or is it not audible? Okay, great. I apologize. It is a little distracting to me. So I apologize if this is a little bit of a disorganized introduction, but basically I had reached out to Kathy because after a chain of conversations between me, I had talked with TAC as you've heard about ECAC and TAC collaborating on thinking about how to incorporate active transit and climate goals in their plan and the carp into the new Fort River plans. And then it seems like a good first step in that is establishing what's going on currently. Like how is that already being incorporated into the plan? Is it currently being incorporated into the plan? And I forget who suggested that I reach out to Kathy to see about that. I forget who that was. It might have been Stephanie. But I reached out to Kathy and I think Kathy should probably introduce herself because I still don't have a perfect grasp of how the planning process is working for Fort River. But my hope is that she can speak a little bit to where current thinking and planning efforts are at vis-à-vis active transit access to Fort River and what current obstacles and barriers there are, which we already heard a little bit of from Chris and TAC has also put some thought into. And yeah. So would you like me to pick up on that? That would be wonderful if you could if you could fill in your own introduction. So I spoke before you earlier this year about the energy provisions for the Net Zero School. I am chair of the school building project which means that I've been a participant all the way through and the issues about traffic flow pedestrian flow, buses flows, cars flows in and out of the school and surrounding were early on a focus of discussion, particularly the off-campus flow. And that was we had a lot of information provided to us by a traffic study and I'm not going to present any of that. But part of that was to inform the choice of Wildwood or Fort River as a location and what was made clear to us is that traffic is an issue at both sites, but particularly at Fort River because of the two intersections. They're heavily trapped intersections. So what I prepared a set of slides and I see Chris Lindstrom's in the audience here and some of them are you may have seen or you can get the whole set from TAC and Christine, but it's what are we looking at in terms of the issue. So when when the people reached out to me I said I don't have solutions but I do have some observations so I can make my observations and if that works I'll just pull up the slides yet to just sort of because I think pictures and words help rather than just me talking. Does that work? And am I allowed to share my screen? Yes you're a panelist you can go ahead. So let me see okay this is me. Are you seeing the slide chat? Yes that's right. Okay so let me just go to slideshow. Okay so what I want to do is a disclaimer at the very beginning. I'm mainly going to be talking about observations of my own and through the process we've gone through rather than what should we do? So that's what this that's what I think I was asked to do and I definitely think this should be an initiative that we we pull together a group to the town we need to do something about this because the activity has stopped on thinking what happens when you leave the school. So right now this is a picture of the flow for the new school the old school is sort of sitting up here the new school the on-campus plan is the buses will come in and out along a loop here and this is a wide enough and long enough loop that no bus needs to queue out on this road so they can come in and they can be waiting for kids at the end of the day and they can drop off kids and there's a there's this school that's going to consolidate all the special needs programs so there are vans coming in also and there's a special loading area a drop-off area for the vans the cars this is different than the current flow right now there are two entrances and exits and there's not a cars one place buses the other all right so this is a change cars will come in on this north and and they can flow around I'm not going to do what the flow looks like around the parking lot whoops let me stay on this around the parking lot and again this this is a longer flow and there are going to be canopies over here and we just added some extra temporary short-term parking spaces so that parents who bring a special needs child in that needs extra time can and have the time to be there with their kid and they're going to be safe crosswalks across from the parking area the car area over to here and it's not showing all the crosswalks and bike places but the on-campus part there's a lot of where can the kids walk where the crosswalks and the crossing guards right now come out at the beginning and the end of the day with a it's a pretty efficient labor intensive but just for a short amount of time with a stop sign you know to let cars out to let help kids get across so we're using people to help make this safer so what what I want to just keep in your mind is what you can't quite see here on this is right up here is one of the intersections busy intersections and just down here is another one and it actually has this slip lane if you drive down this road behind the bank you can avoid the intersection and come cars can come up in here and there have been accidents here because these cars don't always stop so if you think of walking you've got to cross cross here you've got to cross across here you've got to cross up here you have to cross here there's a lot of places that if you're walking or biking so this is a screenshot of that I took from google maps where it shows you the vegetation as well but this is current and I just wanted to show this to impress on you the here's a very busy intersection and here's a very big intersection and you can see how close the this northern entrance exit we're able to move it a bit we meaning the designers not Kathy but the school we can move it a bit further south but not a lot further south and then this but it doesn't leave much space to come in and out went to avoid this intersection down on this one a very busy intersection particularly at the beginning of the day this is a route into UMass from people coming from the belter town part of the world and they can avoid this traffic light if they want to by going behind the bank and coming up here one of the people on the building committee said she had a near fatal car crash here with her kids when the car coming this way didn't stop as she was turning into the school so it's dangerous um right now there is no plan to do anything outside of this except maybe improve the signage you can't see Fort River school here it's hard to see the signs you don't get a lot of warning school ahead and that's where we we had some discussion on a improving this intersection improving this intersection potentially closing this street awful together so you can't go this way if you want to go north here you have to go to the light and take a right hand turn that we could we can do and that sits at in DPW I think they can just do it with of course some notification to the abutters who won't be thrilled um there is a parking lot at the bank so the other issue that came up but we were looking at this is southeast this street along where the school is is two lanes one lane in one direction one lane in the other which means you can't turn into a turning lane here you have to turn into traffic so there was some discussion of making a slip lane coming out that you could take some of this property there's enough um there's enough public way to potentially make a way for course to get in particularly if they're going north it doesn't help them up what they want to do is go here and go that way but you could and this east common it's a historic common there was some discussion of could we put a sidewalk along there could the road be wider could we do something along this stretch um it ends before that little common ends before you get to that intersection so some of these should I just put um question marks we do have a new grant the planning department got a grant and I you just have to get the details from Chris Brestrup for some improvements down in this area because there's some new developments coming in and it's some improvements on sidewalks and cross-struct walks but I'm not sure what that is and I don't I don't know the specifics but I know Chris said no we haven't done anything in terms of applying for grants specifically there are grants that have labels like grants for schools who are near busy intersections I mean it's a real fit for this um this I'll just send you this whole chart set later Stacy uh uh Stephanie um to post because I'm just going to flip through it these are all from a team Tracy Saffron Chris Listrom and Heather Sheldon they sent me a presentation that they did based on observations in 2022 around Fort River and so these are just words to say some of what I've just said these are very busy high traffic um in terms of thousands of cars flying through here so it's really good that the troughs and guards go out and stop it um they there's very poor signage you can't see you're coming to a school there are sidewalks but you're having to um cross multiple uh areas to get to the school if you're walking or if you're on bike um and what they did was very nice on each of the major places on what did you see there um the you can turn right let turn right on red at one of the intersections and not the others and this makes it dangerous for any kid that's crossing thinking that they have a pedestrian signal so some of these are things we can fix the sidewalks are in pretty poor condition all along this approach path repeating some of this there are sidewalks here brightly painted as of 2022 the intersections are pretty well marked so it's a slightly better intersection but it's very busy people have said they will just keep going north because they can't turn left when you're leaving the school so there's um there has been a backup acuing of cars not being able to leave at the end of the day one observation i should make overall is leading up to covid but then with covid fewer kids are riding on our buses the buses arrive not full and parents are driving their children so this is true whether it's at the wildwood school or the fort river school so encouraging people to be on the bus would be a big plus for some of what's happening in terms of the the cars coming into the school these are pictures just to give you a sense of what does it mean that the sidewalks not great and what are intersections look like and these are all again from this earlier presentation i didn't go out to take them um then uh yeah this shows this this slip lane um so that you can avoid this intersection over here by going through here um and and lots of cars do that particularly in the morning and just a little bit it is really close to the entrance where the buses are coming will be coming in so if that could be shut off and cars would have to go this way you improve the safety of what's going on and you remove one driveway that if a child was walking that they would have to cross um this is kind of showing you again the complexity of this with new developments coming in um when when i was on a different set of issues on approving some affordable housing developments a point was made if more families are living in this uh village center we need to do something about walking and biking safely it's not safe even if you don't say the school is there um so that's a indication of a stop sign you don't actually can't see the Fort River school signs very well the actual entrance to the school and you don't see warnings the school is coming soon at these other places the signage is awful um there's a a speed sign and some of this i think some of the signage for the school is included in the school project i'm improving it because this was observed by pretty much everybody so okay this is the end and i'm just going to open it up um what we have talked about in the committee but there's no action yet specified and this is particularly Rupert um who is on our committee but is the in charge of facilities in charge of worrying about buses has regularly gone to the town and said okay what are we going to do about outside the school what are we going to do about it and right now we haven't had a focus there aren't grant other grant applications into my knowledge some of these questions about is would a roundabout be better at either one of those intersections um that roundabouts are a favor of the DPW um how can we approve improve all these sidewalks and crosswalks what about speed limits what about changing the light structure and and and flashers these have all been sitting on a that's the town responsibility the school project doesn't have money to do any of this external um but it clearly um there is grant money out there um and so in my opinion we should be figuring out what we want to apply for and what we want to do and that's the end i'm going to stop my sharing thank you so much that was that was amazing i i said i would give you observations rather than recommendations on what to do it's an observation of where the problem areas are and i know i know tracy couldn't be here and i see that chris is in the audience i think i think there are a lot of people who can give you insights to you know broader who actually experience it but i think a key person to be meeting or persons to bring into the meeting are the planning department and chris restra they've been quite successful in apply applying for grants um and sometimes they're applying with with or without the support of DPW but with the knowledge of DPW um and uh they're pretty short they've been short staffed but i don't so i think this is slipped from the top of the radar screen list but i think it needs to go back up the school is due to open in 2026 um you know the construction will be happening up until that point so there is some time to start paying attention or if we're going to change any of the signage of the um that slip blame by the bank is the one i'd like to just go ahead and close it off because it's dangerous now if any some of that could happen before you certainly wouldn't want to be doing any major anything when the school is opening it's going to be disruptive enough so you'd like to do it before if we could and that that is what i have to someone said to me why are you talking to ekac about this now they asked me so here i am so it's all the time is all yours at this point hey just a quick question um is the would part of this thinking include mitigating the impacts of construction traffic as well during the the course of the build and and i maybe question slash suggestion of maybe there's a solution that can facilitate construction and because that's that'll that's obviously got a huge impact so one of the benefits of choosing the Fort River site for this building is it so big so we um the a lot of the the staging of how they're building it the first thing they're going to be doing is the geothermal wells and doing some soil preparation they're planning on raising bringing fill in and raising the height to deal with water and drainage issues so that will be the first but they can there's enough space to bring the construction vehicles and staging onto the campus and not have them go in and out all day long so yes that is one of the issues in while it would have been a major problem with the one driveway on where would they how would they get there and where would they sit um we probably would have had to figure out something with the middle school so so that at least is potentially addressable but i think the more we could fix some of the intersection issues and the in and out um the the overall issue here is this is heavy heavy traffic this is a commuter pathway so it's not like we can tell cars will you please try to find another way to get to UMass if you're coming from the belcher by town part of the world you know go take a left don't go up this way um so but i that's a partial answer so some of it is that that some of the big construction and the materials they can be bring it brought on site and it can be happened without going back and forth other than cars um you know the the workers cars yeah laura and then laura and then christine also has a hand up that i know something needs to happen to let laura go and then i'll unmute chris christine tathy how do is there any precedent on how these types of situations have been addressed in the past even just the simple this intersection is not good we need to update it like how does that process work because i think where i'm getting stuck is like it sounds like this isn't nobody's they would have you you're right laura the first would be we have to say the intersections are problem and here's what we want to do about it so you'd have to reach at least some consensus of possible design changes and then who does that like who does so like well who doesn't problem people can think about it it sits in two two key entities at the town staff level the planning staff at dpw so when that turnaround uh there's a roundabout that's happening at palmore lane one of the planning staffers saw there was an opportunity and they wrote up the grant in a convincing way and secured that money and that one actually had we want to do one of two things you know it wasn't of given it would be a rounded out but they wanted to put in some sidewalks and a different kind of light so it was either going to be signalized with sidewalks or and so the state they secured that grant with enough convincing arguments that it was necessary um we failed up here i up here i live in north amherst past the north amherst library and cherry hill golf course so any of you who have had the pleasure of that intersection where it's it's kind of a nightmare the town has failed four times to get a massworks grant for that intersection um three times i might be exaggerating and i think we're gonna we will try for it again there is a special category called safe routes to school grants for near for intersections near schools that i know chris breaststroke was on a phone call with me where the state a zoom call where the state was saying look at all these cool little pieces of money that we put for you um and so you have to say oh i think we fit that one or if we fit this one but we'd have to agree at the town level um what we might want to do there to then propose it with a cost estimate you know so things different things cost differently if it was just to put some sidewalks in repave do some that but you probably need to do it in a package because otherwise the question would be why can't you just do it with your existing road and sidewalk money but if we did it because the new school is coming in and new developments are coming and therefore we need the following so that's what the package would look like but those are the two key parties they someone needs to take a lead one of the two and there needs to be agreement at least on the pieces of it okay just one quick follow up to that so does the agreement need to happen before the grant can be applied for or I think you know so I'll use the recent history of these one the success and one a failure but the successful one didn't say specifically but it laid out two possibilities and they both priced out at about the same amount of money um so they found a category and it fit so they didn't have and then the town went through a process with everyone who lives well town-wide but particularly anyone who lives anywhere near that intersection businesses on what you would be preferring and then we made a choice so that's one where the choice came after the money um in the North Amherst situation there was something similar there were lots of charrettes with it could be like this and like that and they went ahead and applied um there wasn't agreement among I just you don't want to know the full details of this and there wasn't full agreement on what um but I had to do deep digging to find out what we'd applied for and it was a surprise to some people that that's what we applied for because they thought we were applying for another concept but that's one where we had to price out rerouting a road um and doing some things that were pretty expensive um so so I think in this situation if it's signalized keep the signalized intersections the same widen the road to allow a slip lane put sidewalks in or put around about but change the road plus sidewalks so you could have those not full decision and that's where then the town uh the people in town would get to weigh in on which choice um and we did that pretty fast with the Pomora lane it wasn't like it took years it was get a lot of input on it and then go for it because the grant had a timeline on it but so I hope that answers you know it it's you know it kind of is uh is there total disagreement is there at least either one of these options would be would would ease the problem um we can't we can't just say um change the route into Amherst so that one isn't on our and on our radar screen thanks all right let's stay chris and then Stella chris you can go ahead and unmute hi can you guys hear me yes okay great hi kathy thanks um that was uh um nice I guess a good refreshable even though daunting at the same time um but I did um I was uh on a call with gilford today and just so that you know um I think yesterday paul bachelman inked a contract with um cdm smith an engineering firm um contracted by dpw to do an analysis of the two intersections um and the anticipation is for that analysis to be done midwinter december january um and um safe routes is definitely on his radar screen um I've also had a conversation with the western mass coordinator and um gilford about that so I think it's also maybe even something that you can do given your stature is to convene um christine and gilford together to you know look at a potentially five million dollar budget for those two intersection what are the grant possibilities and the pots of money and who can apply for what because um you know I think that dpw also you know I can't speak for gilford but often he mentions under staffing and you know the difficulties of sort of sifting and sorting through this stuff so um I you know through your process you've compiled a bunch of this knowledge and you can bring together the different folks who should be talking but um at least there is an analysis that will be coming from dpw in the next several months that's fabulous news because uh it is news to me but it's I'm I'm glad that finally is moving because it wasn't um earlier on in this year um and it's it's uh the the school folks have been saying one are you going to do it one are you going to do it each time there is a fair amount of information there was a traffic flow study so I will write away I know gilford has it but I don't want cdm smith to redo things that we did not that long ago there was a traffic and what they did is the flow of cars you know time of day flow of cars um in all directions when around the school time through through those intersections in particular they basically just gave them f's as intersections go um but but he he has that information and those of you know who gilford he has a strong preference for roundabouts so uh I would say very strong um so it wasn't people didn't say it can't work there it was just let's talk about what could work there um that's really good news and I will follow up thank you absolutely thank you yeah um thank you so much again I I was wondering in light of in light of the fact that I mean I think everybody here has has shared goals and um not a ton of time what would be kind of most helpful from this committee and I was kind of wondering if for example like a memo from this committee to the planning department with maybe some language that could be cut and pasted into grants uh would be helpful if that would be not helpful um I'm thinking here like language specific to climate like in support of um in support of taking action on these intersections and and on some of the sidewalk things if that's something that would be useful to just save them some writing time or not you know I think I think coordinated efforts and information are always useful of value um you know so providing as you just said some potential wording of someone is writing this up and what I don't know is how best to get that into whom to where where the recipient of this has to be willing to say um you're adding value that they don't already have um you know so when when the town applies for the big grants there's usually multiple eyes that go on it in terms of usually someone is writing it but people Dave's oh my gets involved various people get involved just um potentially wordsmithing it um so uh one of I think they have the the key pieces of information is new school and two to three new housing developments all coming into this village so the need for need for thinking about these issues is um is a community wide challenge it's not just when the school is in session it's also in the summer and in and the breaks um so that's what I don't know I mean I think you know Tracy and others on TAC can tell you the extent to which their input they have felt has moved the needle in terms of the content of the grant but I'm I'm definitely going to stay on top of this because this has been on our radar stream from day one so finding out that something is moving is terrific news um uh Stephanie you have a comment and Dwayne then even sure um just very quickly because I know this has come up about that the two departments are DPW and planning but I do want to note that people are aware that the planning staff has been short staffed by half for an extended period of time they do have someone in zoning but you know um and he's doing great but they're still backlogged from quite a ways and the good news is we are I think moving towards getting an additional planner and I think when that happens it will certainly enable the ability for the town to be applying for some of these grant you know this grant funding and I think there's a lot of expertise um and Stella you know your offer is greatly greatly appreciated I think though um I think it would be best to sort of not go ahead and just sort of do that work because I don't want people to unnecessarily be spending their time working on something that may or may not be needed I think you know I think if they need additional um input on a sort of climate lens they would probably reach out to me who would either pin something or reach out to you all so I you know I think there's a process and a pathway for that but just wanted to sort of say that I think there will be additional planners coming on that will hopefully be able to help with this effort you know I mentioned that in passing Stephanie but I totally agree I mean we've just been short staff you know at the point we were thinking in the council can we put some temporary money and just just hire a grant writer and then hire someone temporarily to write the kind of grant we want you know so has some because if there's a backlog of a need to write grants you don't get them if you don't and I know you face that with your within sustainability there's just only so much to give instead the current scath can do great yeah this has been really helpful Kathy thank you it's an intersection or an area that I know very well living in Echo Hill and observed a lot of what you had said but to understand it sort of from a traffic perspective it's really helpful and what's going on with specifically with regard to the school and the construction I guess my question is you know most of what you presented and it seems like is being looked at is how to make this traffic flow better for cars and buses and better signage and all that's critically important I guess I'm and I'm not an expert in transportation particularly sort of bicycles and pedestrian and I'm wondering you know are there are there considerations that we should be ecac should be thinking about and maybe and Christine with this safer school I forget exactly the name of it are there sort of best practices with regard to how to make this friendly for kids on bikes and and kid pedestrians are there are there technical options out there that we should be putting forward dedicated bike lane and certain proximity to the school maybe open only during beginning and end of school a bridge over these intersections for pedestrians and a bicycle yeah I hear what you're saying and I think that is that would be a good focus you know one of the issues this is an elementary school these are young kids yeah I know that I bike to school when I was a kid but it didn't look like this you know my and I had a sidewalk all the way to school you know not because no one walked on our sidewalks so we just rode our bikes on the sidewalk you know and when we got to one busy intersection there was an under there was an under tunnel we just went under it was under the train tracks actually you know so it was I thought we were riding forever but we were apparently riding a mile and a quarter when you were in fourth grade it felt like you were really but my parents didn't think twice about sending us off on our bikes the observation has been not a lot of kids walk to Fort River that doesn't mean there aren't there aren't kids who live within a distance that they could walk or there wouldn't be more kids so trying to think of how to make it safer to get there walking or riding a bike is a really good one there is a there's a back there is a path that goes off the back of the school to kind of swamp lands but there is a path but then we own some community gardens the town does there's not a bridge to them and so it's been on the list for a while from Dave Zomek to link it over so the kids at the school could actually go over and look at the community gardens but make it easy and that's where this new housing complex is coming in so it's not a bridge over a road as much as a bridge over a brook you know it's but trying to walk around out there to see what you think you know a protected bice lane that wasn't off the road I'm not sure how protected it would be but if it was one of these the sidewalk got wider and there was a clear place for bikes then that would be protected and so some of what I identified is that green it's a historic green could anything be built on that or is this one of these thou shall not touch it it's pretty small you know could you know there are other opportunities there to just make it wide enough for walkers and bikers and then think of where they're coming from yeah um I think Eve is next then Chris then well hey there so Dwayne you had a perfect question to segue into what I wanted to say which is to me your role more than anything else is going to be to say that at every step of this process the folks who are thinking about this need to think about how to increase the share of people both students and parents who are walking and biking and and do think about parents and not just kids because um there are a lot of low income housing complexes up Belcher Town Road and up Amherst Road where people don't have carps so you want them to be able to walk or bike or take the bus and feel safe doing it to their kids school so they're not having to pay for an Uber or just not go so think about both kids and parents and just yeah it seems really clear to me that the role of somebody who's concerned about climate change and energy your role is going to be you don't have to come up with the traffic answers you know what I mean but you can come up with the emphasis and the questions so even these two studies that are being done on these two intersections um having worked with Guilford from the TAC and other transportation committees all these years you know Guilford often thinks about how do we get traffic moving efficiently and he tends to think about current numbers of pedestrians um and and it seems like part of what your role can really be to say is say even in these two studies think about how do we actually increase um how many pedestrians and how many cyclists we have you know there's other kinds of micro mobility as well scooters it could be you know wheelchair aids maybe there's elderly people around the corner who are going to want to be you know using their walkers um in these areas how do you make all of these modes of transportation more possible and the choice that people are going to pick rather than their private cars all the time and and frankly that's going to improve the traffic there um just one other brief little comment on um you know I guess it's an example is um yeah Guilford often does love um roundabouts I'm often much more um what's it called agnostic I really think whether a roundabout is good really depends on the specific situation um and in this case the thing I would be concerned about and this is just one example of the kind of thing that would be considered um in a in a different kind of well depending on how you frame the intersection studies but if you have a roundabout you don't have an automatic time where there's a period of time when there's no traffic turning right or no traffic going and those moments are often really crucial times for people to cross streets especially in mid block crossings um so you know think about um kids crossing that what is that street anyway whatever is that east street there um if they're crossing that street if there's a roundabout it might be really great most of the time um you know not but maybe not right at the beginning and the end of school when you're going to have kids crossing streets and if cars are just flowing and flowing and flowing and flowing it's going to be much harder to find a safe space so I don't know that that's the answer but it provides an example of why insisting that that question be asked at every step is really going to matter great comment um Laura go ahead like Chris put her hand um yeah just my comment when I raised my hand was to Kathy's mention of potentially hiring a grant writer or something to that effect just to note that there's a significant amount of funding available from the inflation reduction act to support a whole host of things related to clean energy that I think is so not related specifically to transportation but just saying that there's a whole I think the number of grants and paperwork and things we will need to apply for to be able to leverage all of these fundings that are available is going to increase significantly and so if there's a just flagging that I think there's a need there um and maybe it's a bundled need of some sort um the point that I wanted to raise after Eve's comment is the challenge that ECAC has as well as TAC is that we're advisory committees and there's absolutely no requirement to incorporate us into any of this stuff so I'm just also flagging that for Kathy because I think that's a big problem with all of this work right is that um you know Stephanie's carrying um the workload of many many many many people and you know trying to get into these conversations and there's no checks or balances for ECAC to be involved in these conversations either necessarily so just flagging that as one of the potential challenges and ensuring to Eve's good point that mode shifting away from private cars be considered in any decisions we're making about transportation now and into the future. Yeah that's that's super important and I'm as the moderator all answered might I'm going to cut in line and say as we look at some of these projects and this millions of dollars I would ask the question because I don't know the answer is like are the solutions of humans with signs and flags and engagement are those solutions good and positive and do they work well and could the millions of dollars of asphalt be used for something else potentially um no one needs to necessarily answer that but keep that in mind um all right I think it's Jeremy and then Christine back in our Jeremy you can go ahead and unmute yeah hi uh Jeremy Anderson can you hear me okay yes um yeah thank you so much for this and I had the pleasure of meeting Kathy and talking to Stella a little bit about safety zones one thing that's that's really kind of struck me I live in North Amherst and just biking on northeast street sorry you've got to interrupt with Leslie I'll find it for you okay uh biking on on northeast street to me is terrifying and I'm an adult and I've been biking my whole life I similarly I used to bike to school and it was a pleasure uh Eric who my older son who's now in first grade he asked to bike to Fort River uh at the end of the school year and I was just like I know I'm so sorry but I just you know it breaks my heart but I don't feel safe uh biking on northeast street because cars go so fast and I feel like across the town there's so much speeding there's so many people going excessively fast and if there's stuff that we can do to set a lower speed limit for the entire town or establish some of these safety zones that would lower the speed limits for parks for playgrounds for for you know for the whole you know just make our town just calmer that might make it more bike friendly and it might help some of these plans going forward that's great Jeremy thank you um I also remember biking as a kid and I don't remember even seeing a bike helmet until I got to college um Chris go ahead hi um uh so one idea I had was to um well first of all Jeremy Anderson my email is cll800 at aol.com and you should email me so you can participate in our walk bike bike roll to school day on October 4th which is a special day where you should bike with your son but um one idea would be a joint letter from the two committees um that is raising I think two points one um and I could never drill down on the data on this but each school actually has a walk zone and each school administrator knows the number of kids who live within it and the comparison is so when we were out doing those counts last spring that Kathy has incorporated into her presentation and looking at each school and counting the number of cyclists and um walkers the number of walkers and cyclists was nowhere near um the number of kids who actually are within the walk zone um and so if we could um and I'm just thinking I've got to go back to it's hard to get anything from the school district right now but try to get those numbers again because I think that's where we could really drill down on what an increase in walkers and cyclists would look like if we could even map what where those walkers are and figure out which neighborhoods they are concentrated in and what are the things that we need to do to remove barriers for those walkers um I think that would be actually extremely helpful because otherwise it just feels a little bit like throwing spaghetti at the wall and you know this person happens to live up in Amherst near Shootsbury yet they like to bike every day to school with their kid and that's totally different than somebody who lives in University Village on North Pleasant and would never dream of biking through UMass to go to Wildwood so if we could um figure out how those circles are drawn and maybe try to coordinate with the district to drill down on the walk zones that could potentially yield increases and the second way to yield increases is to do a set of those things that aren't super that don't require four or five million dollars Kathy your whole presentation was filled with them like brighten up the you know redo the crosswalks get rid of the vegetation um you know I some of this stuff is um it's just not maybe even we have a couple of cleanup days but I think if we got our heads together around some of that um I don't want to call it lower hanging fruit but I think you guys know what I'm talking about there's a set of things that we could probably do now um just on the margins improve the walking and biking experience for folks um and so you know maybe again Kathy not to put more on you but convening us or convening the I don't know I have to think about it a little bit more but it seems like between the two committees um there's some work that can be done there to start the increasing now um and we don't necessarily have to wait for these big grants to get applied for Kathy do you want to respond directly to that and then uh yeah I just you know I just um I'm I think it's great that you're having this conversation because I think the school building committee itself will not be having much of this there is a lot of interest of people the staff within the schools um looking forward to pieces they um I didn't get the information before I got here but we did get a mass works grant from for the intersection that's going to be doing some improvement with sidewalks around the Route 9 southeast street going down to Stanley Street um they have some money so they've started to work on that and their plans for a larger project I'm just reading from an email I got uh 10 minutes ago uh that show a larger project that try thinking of travel lanes and bike lanes um so there is there is work that has been put toward this I didn't want to say that nothing has been done but the the one other thing Christine you just raised we did ask for it I'll just have to figure out if I can find it when we were looking at Wildwood and Fort River as the two locations we asked of the existing student population how many lived within a mile lived within three miles whether or not they walked we have that information so you don't have to ask the school for it again I have it um and they did have their best guess of walking you know it was a fraction of the potential and they just did it by uh addresses um and some of them our buses will pick up those kids they don't they don't say you know you live too close and we just won't get you um but the buses arrived pretty empty um so I just um I I can find that information so there is some work that that before we lost planning staff they got this mass work grant to begin to do some work but not right around the school it's going toward this new development so I just I didn't want to leave the impression that nothing is being done and the great news is that Paul is starting to look at this I do think human watching people go out the crossing guards they make a huge difference just all the cars stop I said this is only if it's it's the custodians who take part of their day and they knew all the kids they were just helping them cross the street helping cars and I thought that's a good human way to have a connection with the people who work in your school I thought it was a it was a low cost way um that made people connections I liked it yeah I love that and and I love Chris's vision of the sort of school spilling out to that whole stretch of street and being and sort of inhabiting that space as as being very clearly the street of the school um would it make sense for Eve to be our last comment for this conversation and to thank everyone after that it's timing wise Stephanie am I right about that all right Eve thanks I just wanted to thank all of you um and offer one little lobbying pitch to the extent you um can use your advisory capacity to add to the tax voice the pedestrian bicycle plan never had its map finished and because of that it really just can't move forward and guiding what happens in this town and it would be lovely to have someone besides the tax say that that's important to get finished um and to build on it yeah that's huge that's and that falls very much under our review of things to advise on the increase in pedestrians and bikes is a decrease in automobiles and carbon and that is well within our sort of scope of advising um Stella do you have any closing remarks on this I thank you guys so much no I thought that was wonderful thank you so much to everybody it is it is daunting as Chris says but it's great to have so many voices in the room thank you I'll sign off you're welcome if you want me to send I can send this chart set to you Stephanie if people want to go back and I just I did put the credit all those most of the words and the pictures of exception for a couple will all came from the work of Stephanie and people before um I just excerpted them with permission but so goodbye and thank you all right we're going to move on to back to topic for discussion um ECAC meeting time so Jesse I can speak to that Laurie had actually suggested that I think at the last meeting she had mentioned maybe starting the meetings at five but I think maintaining a 630 end time I would actually suggest that you don't shorten the meeting if you start at five I would suggest you go to seven because you can always end the meetings earlier but you want to at least maintain that two-hour block because I'm thinking about the times that you have things like speakers or an educational series you want to make sure you allow the time for a full hour of committee work and then an hour presentation time so I I think you all can discuss whether you think it warrants um changing the time that's certainly up to you all I wonder if that's a discussion we might want to have when the complete group is here um in fact I would suggest that and then five of us think about our position on that since this is maybe at least for me it's the first time I'm hearing about it is it anyone object to that no I agree especially since Laurie said it was based on a class she's teaching so I think it's pretty important that she be here great all right um it is six o'clock um I want to just sort of look at the agenda for a second here I think when we have left and do any triage that we need to we've got the solar outreach um that Laura's going to talk about um energy efficiency for renters rental disclosure by law those of them and then our regular and then staff updates and ECAC updates um I think we can get that all in give everything it's a couple minutes Laura do you do you think is it how long do you need for that um I don't have much of an update um I have been doing a little bit of digging around um I think Dwayne from the minutes last time Dwayne mentioned this as well some of this stuff is still up in the air so I think we need to figure out who um when the right time to have this meeting is and whether we want to do a pre-meeting with just some folks who might be more in the weeds on some of this to talk about um you know when to so sort of back up for a second right the idea is that we now have through the inflation reduction act this ability to access non-tax paying entities have a ability to access significantly more credits than they have in the past and it's not just about solar it's about heat pumps it's about geothermal it's about a whole host of things and so what we want to do eventually is get help get this information out to all those non-tax paying entities who maybe in the past have looked into solar and realized it was never it wasn't going to be too expensive um and there's a whole host of them non-profit institutions um the schools like new private schools um the churches and other other groups like that of course it also applies to the town and to the colleges in town um and I imagine the colleges in town already know this and are figuring out how to leverage it so potentially there's an opportunity there to learn from what they're doing um but I also so so potentially before we do a larger information section where we try to bring in as many people from all these organizations maybe we need a smaller session with just a handful of people that are a little bit more in the know to start to figure out when it would make sense to do a larger a larger session um there is good guidance out there already like the blue-green alliance has a guidance on how to use some of these tax credits um the other question that flows to mind is like how do we do um is there a way to do bridge funding to help some of these organizations because they're not going to get the they have to do the project before they get the money back um so all to say we have this excel sheet there's not many partner groups on there but maybe we I mean there are a handful of partner groups on there um and we've got a handful of like ideas for the non-tax paying entities but maybe we need to start with a smaller meeting with maybe even just some of the college folks or I don't know Stephanie if anybody in your side of the shop has been talking about this or thinking about this at all so we started I mean we certainly became aware but unfortunately um losing Sean was a huge hit I mean I I can't even talk about it so I feel like um our capacity right now because we've got two people who are already in two other departments that are kind of covering until we hire somebody else so I kind of feel like we're at a bit of a despacite for um a bit until we get somebody to fill that position because that person's going to be the key person that we really want to have at the table for the discussions um and if Sean would I mean it would have been great if we had Sean still but we don't so I'll stop I am gonna talk with um someone from the library project this week about this because I do think it has implications for that project um so but beyond that I haven't had much information so I think we should keep it on the agenda and if folks have ideas or um you know and maybe we can start I can also start to ask around to some of the college folks to see if they've started to figure out how to how they're factoring I think the main question I have is like how do you factor this into the planning for a project um when the project's already been how do you factor this into the planning for the project and would it allow you to um you know consider heat pumps or other things that maybe you hadn't considered before um so all right so that'll be ongoing um number seven discussion improving energy efficiency for renters uh who's who owns that topic Steve here I am yes um I summarized a little bit last meeting um about some of the efforts that we had undertaken and where they had led to which was unfortunately sort of nowhere at least as far as getting energy efficiency um improvements incorporated into the rental registration bylaw that the town is considering now so that was a little bit disappointing um I think what what I would like to do I guess is be to regroup and look back at the options that are available and perhaps if we can form forget what we used to call it the subcommittee or a team of two of us or three of us maybe even bring in community members again review those options that are available for potentially improving energy efficiency and then combine that with any new information that might be coming from the empower grant that um is active and see if they've been able to do some surveys of renters um and then chart a plan forward so maybe at this point we think about who on the ECAC would be interested in taking this on as a task I certainly am and um and then we could potentially get to work basically re researching the options and looking at those that might be the most profitable to pursue that Benin that's a hand up thank you um so just a reminder that if two of you are specifically tasked with doing this then it becomes a subcommittee that needs to be posted with regular meetings so not that it should stop you I'm just sort of telling you that that becomes an official subcommittee so one of you could say you want to do it and you could reach out to another person uh or another person could offer to give you information from the committee but um as long as they're not officially kind of appointed in that role then you wouldn't maybe be subject to the to the um officially having to post subcommittee meetings so there's just that piece I did want to say that I just today finally received all of the materials from the renter outreach survey outreach effort from the mass um CEC and power grant so I mean we'd been working along I didn't have a lot to report because it was mainly just they were conducting the surveys and getting the information so I have all of that information now um but thinking that I may need to uh reach out to maybe you Dwayne about seeing if you have any students who are looking for a project because I um it's a it's a lot of surveys I think they got something like 250 to 300 surveys completed um so all of that information needs to be compiled and then put into some report format so I could really use some assistance I I don't think I'll really have the time to do that kind of work right now what what time frame are you thinking of so we have we have plenty of time in terms of the grant funding so I can follow up with you outside of this meeting on that to see if you have a student you might be looking for a project for I mean would the would the data be available to work on this fall semester yes it's ready now okay got you so I can I mean I literally physically have all of the materials here and I think might even be able to offer um a space if they wanted to come in um to work with all of the all of the data so we can we can talk about it offline okay thanks that that's great Stephanie that you've gotten some of those results that's uh it's been a while but we really need to look through those and see what kind of ideas and recommendations have come from that survey yeah and I would say I don't know that there's again this was led by uh residents and renters and so we identified community captains they were the ones in charge I had very little to do with this they came up with with the questions I think it'll give you some idea I don't know how much it will give you and I haven't looked at them myself uh as of yet but I think it's just you know the one thing I will say that I heard from uh at least some of the captains during the process was that most people are concerned about their rents being raised I think that's kind of the the number one concern is if we do this we'll landlords raise our rents so everyone's sort of on board with the idea but no one wants to end up having to foot the bill as part of their rent so um just just that that's a concern that's all so I think that's the kind of feedback you'll get I don't know that there's going to be a lot of new ideas generated so well the the last time we did this did you remember Stephanie it was me and um um Chris Riddle and as a community member and who is the ECAC member um Andra Andra right right and Felicia Mednick was also on it as and so do we do those the were our meetings officially posted in public meetings when we met at the time I don't think they were because it was an RMI effort and no one was officially assigned to do it okay um and I think it was just participating in the RMI effort so you weren't necessarily I think Andra was identified as the liaison the official liaison but then you became the official liaison at one point so um but I but I think you're doing something different now and I think that would very much um fall into the category of like a subcommittee if you were to sort of identify a few of you and a group of people all right well I guess I would suggest at this point would be for to encourage ECAC members to really think about if they want to help with this and if so to what level and um maybe we come back to this at the next meeting Jesse and Stephanie and and see if there's a willingness and ability to put some time and energy into this this particular strategy I think it's a good one there's plenty of guidance from RMI from ACEE the American something something energy efficiency there's examples all around in in Massachusetts in different states for how this has been done so we don't have to totally reinvent the wheel I think we can adopt but it will take time to find different programs evaluate them and then figure out how we would go about getting them implemented in Amherst you know whether they are voluntary programs where we're you know looking for building owners that are happily willing to work with PACE or other incentives or whether we tried to do something that might be a little bit bigger lift but to have something that's a bit more of a requirement like energy disclosure of rental properties or even required inspections or ratings of buildings so there's kind of the whole gamut there of exciting options that we could pursue exciting huh Laura and maybe when we get to new ECAC members one of them will have some interests and expertise in this area too maybe we can find some to recruit also I was just checking the minutes the other thing we might want to talk about at least briefly or plan to talk about next time will be the block party Amherst block party and how ECAC is going to present at that our minutes from last meeting sort of left that open as to what we might want to focus on and we might need to spend a little time before September to 21 with figuring that out so I'll end that or stop talking about rental efficiency for now great and I will just say I'm going to plant a quick seed on the block party which is that what if we all had a big pin that said I'm on the town's climate committee ask me about what's going on and then we all showed up to the block party then we're not setting up a table we're not shutting down a table we're not making a schedule we don't have a doodle poll we just have a sweet pin that says ask me about the town's energy and climate action committee and we all commit to show up for as much of that event as we can so think about that and then next on the list I think it's staff updates is that right it is if you're merging the seven and eight which I think you are I think Steve's presentation was so I think that was yes yes definitely okay sorry just giving me one second I made some notes here let's see so so actually the first thing I had on my agenda was the block party Angela Mills did reach out to me or I followed up with her saying that you all wanted a table my question was do you want to share a table do you want your own table there are six foot tables and eight foot tables I just need to know for Angela's sake what you want to do if you say you're going to share a table either it would be good to know what organization you want to share with but I think all the towns committees and departments that are going to be there are going to be together so for instance I think in the past you had sunrise share part of the table I don't know that you would necessarily do that this time I think the idea is that all the town committees and departments are kind of together in front of the fire station so I just need to know what you want definitely do you know if mass save is going to have a presence at the block party I do not know because that what one of my ideas was that we could continue to promote the existing services that mass save provides to homeowners to renters and to property owners it would be redundant if they were there also promoting that but if they're not then that could be a thing that we have some of their information to pass out it could it could be one of several things we're prepared to share with visitors at the block party right so it's usually another organization like mass CEC or somebody else that tends to promote the mass save programming so I don't and I don't know because I'm not organizing this event so I don't know who they have signed up but I can maybe yeah it could be still the company yeah and I was going to say or it could be the utility company because at the sustainability festival ever source actually often promoted the mass save programming okay so um I don't know who they have doing that is that something you could find out if there's somebody going to be a group can ask um I'd say don't put a huge amount of time into researching it but if you could ask Angela or somebody and somebody says yes or no I would be in favor of having a table and the buttons that Jesse described and we have maybe three or four different things that we could promote and we talked about possibilities there's the the green the valley green energy program if that's ready for prime time I don't know um we could talk about be prepared to talk about pace although there's probably not a big audience for that at the black party I think if the bike to school stays the fourth that could be a thing yeah that could be a huge audience for that at the black party yeah so I think we can give us give us a table along with the rest of the town I mean by the fire station that that's a great location it's busy it's happening and they provide a table for us that sounds sweet yeah so again I mean is tac gonna be present I don't know I can find out I can look I mean maybe you want to share the table with tac to promote this program um I would say as far as valley green energy we're not you know the application hasn't been submitted yet because we're waiting on one of the towns to get some information for the application um which they haven't they've been um slow to get that information that's needed so when that comes in which I think is going to be soon however but I don't think we'll be ready in time to be promoting anything specifically on that date so I wouldn't necessarily focus on that the heat pump program um it's been taken a really long time because of getting the RFP together um Sean was kind of working with me on that he left but um because I went on vacation I think just before vacation I had some quick correspondence with him that I have to look back to but I may be at a point where I might be able to release the RFP so I have to work with the procurement officer again I just don't know the timing of that and I don't know how much I'll be able to say because even if we can put out the RFP likely we're just gonna be looking for potential consultants to work with us and I won't have much information really provided at that point so not much to say about the heat pump program but I think you know this bike to school program seems something very very specific and tangible so maybe that's the thing you want to really kind of focus on for this event and sort of help get the word out about that the other thing I want to go ahead well so the other thing and I've been saying this for quite a while and I think this is really kind of a basic thing is just like people need to save energy like we keep we're talking about the technology all the time and all this incredible technology that we have and what we're trying to promote but like we're losing I feel and I'm not just saying we as an ECAC but I just feel like even in the bigger context of the climate we're sort of losing some of that basic like people need to unplug people need to walk more people like those are the some of the concepts that are so basic it's like the simple straightforward stuff that we need to be talking more about and I I really would love to see more of us stop using so much energy unplug limit your time on your phone on your computer shut off your TV like those are things I think where we're needing to really get people to sort of we need to go a bit old school I guess so I I just feel like those are some really good conversations to have and that's a good venue to do that and those don't require a whole lot of materials and stuff education it's like let's talk about what you do during your day maybe we could have people pledge like have a pledge for the event like I'll use less energy I'll be on my computer you know less x number hours a week or my phone less x number hours a week or something like that I don't know I'm just throwing some ideas out there and I think the only other really quick thing that I have is I had a visit from an advocate activist Janet Rothrock who is from Concord and she has been really actively engaged in the opposition to the Hanscom Air Force Base expansion specifically due to how it will really have an impact on the state's goals for carbon emissions and so she gave me a flyer I will share that with you I'm not necessarily promoting I'm just sharing information so I just and I gave her some names of some activists within this community that would be probably interested in getting more information or getting on board but I will copy that flyer and send that all to you as a committee and I'll post it in the meeting packet too for the general public in case people are interested and that's pretty much the stuff that I have for today and just quickly before you go Laura do you do you need an answer today on on the table and can we just say yes we want a table and put us with someone cool um you said Laura so I think you meant me um yeah I mean she got her hand up I just oh I just wanted before she speaks I just want to ask you Stephanie you do need that answer today I need it as soon as possible no I think we can make I think we can make that call there's five of us we want a table okay and six foot fine I don't think you need an eight foot table so do they make a seven foot just kidding Jesse sorry so yes on six foot table all right I will let her know all right well yeah I was just gonna say and have you heading this completely that I will not be in town for the black party because it's climate week in New York City so I will not be able to help but um I like the idea of like maybe having like just a couple like lists of like want to learn more about this put your email here wanted like sort of like collecting people's names so that then we can follow back up with them because I feel like you don't retain a lot of information at the black party but maybe if we could get some people to sign up like we're doing the bike to school thing like you have any interest give us your name and we'll reach out back out to you and like tech can take that on or um like the direct pay thing like this is a place where we could collect like do you work for a nonprofit or that might be able to benefit from funding to support solar and electrification if so give us your email right um so like we could just have some some papers signed up for that so that was my idea I like that idea that's good I think that networking is part of a big part of we've had some great moments of networking let's keep that going I love that um all right I see EC AC member updates and you have two minutes I'll be really quick but since it's a transit heavy meeting already I'll just like throw it out there which is I um these headphones are feel strange to me but anyways uh I had this really frustrating situation well it wasn't a frustrating situation it was like I was doing like tree work with uh an electric electric hatchback and a trailer so not like a heavy duty vehicle uh and I realized there's like nowhere to charge even a light duty commercial vehicle so I just wanted to like flag that because basically none of the level two chargers or like even the faster chargers that are scattered about are set up for any type of like vehicle with trailer like lengthy vehicle um and I think that's going to become an issue hopefully really quickly because like if they're not set up for like light duty commercial vehicles and they're definitely not set up for you know heavier duty commercial vehicles um I don't know I just found that interesting I was like suddenly oh I have this like trailer on my car and I like can't charge it anywhere so that was interesting specifically the like cords aren't long enough and the like parkings places aren't oriented correctly interesting that's a cool or not cool observation um Stephanie I have a question request slash no pressure no rush on it but I would love to see whatever is available I'm sure this is on your list the work that the fellows did this summer yeah I yeah I will send it out as soon as it's available I do have Miguel's but I want to send them together so um Caitlyn just had some work she wanted to do to finalize hers so when they are both complete they will go out to the town manager to the ECAC you'll you'll all go so and they'll be posted where we are oh and I should say work is happening on the dashboard um kind of taken our time a little bit with that because I do want to get some of this information loaded uploaded on it as well but we are making some progress um may take a little while longer but it is coming along so that will those reports will be part of it what I wanted to see was like a page that had like all of the reports in one place the solar studies the climate action plan the MVP report the fellows work you know so all of that will hopefully be in like one one stop on the dashboard maybe I'll close with another transpiration related comment the hordes masses come back tomorrow first day of moving be a great day not to drive for everyone a lot of co-benefits of not driving this tomorrow through the weekend as far as avoiding traffic and whatnot so good luck with that and I think I can adjourn the meeting there is no public I just I just wanted to announce I guess that is a blue supermoon is going to be rising in about 45 minutes and the sun is setting in about the same time so and it's cleared up so I think my family we're going to go up the mount pollocks and see if we can watch them come up and rise opposite so keep your eye out for the blue supermoon the newspaper says it's a celestial rarity bigger than usual add very quickly for items for the next agenda I want to raise the feasibility study for networked geothermal so I will take my ability as no-taker to add that in is there any other agenda items that we want to put on did you get the others from earlier um sort of I'll put down what I have in I'll just double check it yeah okay we could heat pumps never got discussed today so that could get kicked down okay thank you thanks everybody have a great week thanks all yesy yep thanks all great thank you everybody