 we go from here. So I'll just call on people to introduce them. So I'm Paul Backelman, Town Manager. I'll go to Mike. Sure, I'm Mike Morris, Superintendent of Schools. And why don't I call in the next person then at the end of your introduction you get to call in whoever you like. I like that. So why don't I go to Steve? To me? Yeah. I'm Steve Schreiber, I'm the Counselor from District 4. And my other job is I'm the Professor and Chair of Architecture at UMass. And I'll call on Kathy Sheing. Thank you Steve. I'm also a Counselor. I'm a Counselor from District 1 and I'm on the Finance Committee. So we picked two counselors. One had to come from the Finance Committee. Who do you choose, Kathy? I'll pick Sean. This is fun. I am Sean Mingano, the Director of Finance for the Towns. And I served on this type of committee last time around for Wildwood. I will call on Ben. Hello, I'm Ben. And I'm here as the Representative of the School Committee. And I'm also the Assistant Facilities Director for ARPS. With that, I'll call on Rupert Warwick-Lark. Hi, I'm Rupert. I'm the Facilities Director for the Schools. Who do you gonna call on Rupert? I'm gonna call on Allison. Hi, I'm Allison Estes. I'm the Assistant Principal at Wildwood Elementary School. And I will call on Phoebe. Hi, I'm Phoebe Mariam. I don't have a school job. I'm a parent. I live here in Amherst. And I'm, you know, happy to be here and excited to join you guys. Diane. Good morning. I'm Diane Chamberlain, Principal at Fort River School. Jonathan. Good morning. I'm Jonathan Salvon. I'm a parent of two children at Fort River. And I served on the Fort River Study Committee. And I will pick on Anthony. Anthony Delaney, Procurement Officer. And I think last. I think that's it. The one person who isn't here is Wayne Chambl, but hopefully he'll join in. We are recording. Good. And Anthony, can I make you co-host, right? Just in case anything happens. There's somebody else who is at the controls. And we do have some audience members. So the first thing we'd like, I'd like to do is see if there's any public comment. Usually we reserve public comment no more than three minutes. So let's reset, receive some, if anybody has any public comment, please raise your hand. I'll bring you in. And say none. Hopefully we have one. Or no. Yes. Irene, would you like to raise your hand? Please unmute yourself and you have three minutes. Yes. My name is Irene Lujovne. I served with Jonathan and Anthony for reverse disability stability. I would urge you, I see that you're recording. I would urge you to make these recordings public so that everybody has access to the meetings. Thank you for your comment. I'll let you manage that. Anthony, if you can. So I'm just wondering how many people have been able to get sworn in. I know that it's been tough with the kind of clerk's office. Sometimes they've dissuaded people because they're just swamped with the election. So but I know that a number of people who has, who has not been, if you've been sworn in, yes. Okay. And who's, you know, Kathy, I know hasn't. Allison has not. And Ben has not. So we have some who have not been sworn in. So what I would suggest then, one of our topics is to elect a chair and vice chair, and maybe we hold that to the next meeting when everybody has had opportunity to be sworn in. And we can make that call at the next meeting. And so the next thing we're going to do is just give an overview of the MSBA process. And Mike is going to walk through that a little bit. Yeah, I'm just going to share my screen if that's okay with you, Paul and Anthony, to show some of, let me make sure I have the right screen up. Hold on one second. How I should be able to do it. Can folks see that? Especially the graphic in the middle. So this is from the MSBA website. And this describes the process that they they work with districts. So to start with MSBA is sort of a quasi-public agency. They are funded from tax dollars. In the most recent Student Opportunity Act that passed last year, they were going to have an additional $250 million, I believe, in funding. Candidly, we all don't know exactly where the Student Opportunity Act funding sits given the current status of the world and funding in Massachusetts. But in general, they're funded from tax dollars as per statute. There's a very competitive process that we many districts submit statements of interest because there's many districts in Massachusetts who need an upgrade of their facilities. I want to thank Rupert, in particular, Ben and others who worked on our statement of interest last year. We were fortunate to be accepted into the process. Most districts that apply are not accepted into the process. Also want to thank the school committee and the town council for voting to allow our application to go in because I'll be honest, not every community supports the application because they know that the majority of the funding comes from the town, not from the MSBA. The project actually goes through. So we're fortunate, I feel like, to get in from our application. We're also fortunate to have elected officials who see the needs in our elementary school buildings and who voted to support this process moving through. So I'll go through this graphic from the MSBA website a little bit. Let me see if I can zoom in a little bit more. Hopefully that a little easier to read on people's screens. So the things that are in blue are done by districts. So that'd be us. The things that are in the greenish olive color are construction professionals. And so we are currently in the eligibility period. So at this point, we are in charge of all the work that is occurring. So one of the things about the eligibility period is forming a building committee. We're here. The district has communication with the MSBA on enrollment and enrollment projections. As that process continues, you know, Paul's been involved, someone else from the town as well looking at future population growth in the community. As that process kind of continues, we'll be sharing that. There's not really much to share at this point, but we'll be sharing that back with the building committee. So you're aware of those discussions, those conversations and where MSBA is. You know, at the end of the eligibility period, the town council needs to vote to appropriate funds to get the project started. And MSBA will have to vote that we they approve us to move on from the eligibility period into what's what's called feasibility. The reason those votes have to take place is as a financial element. Once we start forming the project team, that's adding on owner project managers and architects that are hired through a competitive process that we'll get into probably meeting or two from now. The owner project manager in particular, we would run that process ourselves. And so because there's a financial element, there needs to be votes of the district and the town are ready to move forward with that process. So once we have our owner project manager, who really helps us manage the project and our architects who helped design it, and they come with a bunch of consultants along with them, we start on a feasibility study. feasibility study is what it sounds like, you're looking at multiple options, trying to understand, you know, what should we study? What, what, you know, we'll have the enrollment. At that point, we'll work dynamically with architects and owner project managers about site information, design information, you know, Amherst being a green community, how we want to approach the net zero by law, all those things go into a feasibility study. The end of the feasibility study is a major report that's presented and voted by the committee, and then then brought to the MSPA, then looks at multiple options to study. At that point, the committee will have to have lots of discussion and community outreach should be part of all of these work to identify a specific scheme or design that it wants to pursue in more detail. feasibility study is still where there's boxes on a page, right, that are that are more or less interchangeable. That's maybe overstating it, but it's been explained to me that by architects. At schematic design, you're getting much more specific on what this building actually looks like, how exactly it sits in the land, we have a lot more tests of the land of, you know, it's getting down to a more narrow slice, both of, you know, what we're planning to do, as well as what the design looks like, still not at the construction design document level, like they're not designs that you could give to an architect, say, or to a construction company and say go. But it's a lot more specific than the feasibility study. I'm going to stop here because I've been talking a lot and see if there's questions in the first half. There's a reason why this visual is designed with the top half and a bottom half of the process, which I'll get into a second, but I thought, you know, I would pause here and see if there's questions from the committee on what I've shared today. And if people who know more than me like Rupert Ben, Jonathan about construction and others, Steve, if there's anything I'm saying that you would disagree with now's a great time. I'm very open to divergent opinions on things. So if there's something as those of you know me well, I don't always have the right language for this stuff. My wife can tell you in great detail my inability to solve simple problems in our home. But if there are any questions people have, I want to pause and see if we have it. After you had a question. Yeah, Mike, it's not a question so much about what you just described, but just some sense of timing on the project team. How long to that point to the feasibility studies and the schematic design that first that middle row? It's great question. So what I can tell you is what's typical, not necessarily what will happen here. The form of the project team, that's a bit process. So legally, that's going to take longer than people think it'll take. Because it has to be posted in, I don't know, I don't have the right words, but it has to be publicly posted. We have to solicit bids. There'll be likely a subcommittee of this group that will look at those and shortlist people to interview. There's an interview process, a public process, or allows for some nature of that of public input. At the end of that, there's a selection, there's contract negotiations, and then we do that same thing for the designer for the architect. So those processes are not week long processes. They generally take, you know, I would say six to eight weeks from start to finish in terms of putting it out, getting bids, getting proposals, excuse me, interviewing, shortlisting, finalist contract negotiation. I think all in all, when you look at eligibility period to end of the year, what I've seen most frequently is about two years. As a rough estimate, you know, some districts are able and towns are able to go quicker. Many are able to need more time. You know, and again, people in the field can definitely correct me if that feels like an incorrect estimate. But that's what I've seen in terms of some other districts, how long they've taken. I don't know if Rupert Ben, Steve, Jonathan, if you have anything that you'd want to add to that, my rough timeline of how long that would take. You know, input, I'm assuming dangerous to take that as consent, but I think for now I will. You know, but, you know, all of these things, you know, there's I feel great urgency. Many of you have heard me say that many times over the last five, six years, and rushing a process and ending with a result that doesn't have broad community buy in. And our our ability to make changes throughout is really critical. So it's always balancing the urgency with making sure you get it right. That's how I sort of frame it. Does that help answer it, Kathy? Yes, thank you. Other questions anyone who has. So what I'm not being as explicit about is that there's multiple stop points. Kathy's question was a great prompt for this that we have to vote as a body. But actually MSBA has to vote for to advance us to the next phase. So even at the designer, who hires a designer? OPM, the owner, project manager is all done by this committee. There are three representatives of this committee who drive to Boston. We'll see what world we're in in the future, but it might be virtual. And the interviews for the designer occur with three representatives of the building committee. And then the rest of the voters are representatives or MSBA either employees or board members. Lead board member, but definitely employees. So even that process is not not purely our own and the stop points of the end of feasibility studying the end of schematic design involve approval of presentations and approvals from the MSBA. So that's something else that takes some time. The board meets roughly every other month. So some of it you lose time just because of when you get on the calendar. So there's other points that take more time that aren't just because of our own doing or time we need, but we need to get approval from MSBA and we need to get on their either a subcommittee calendar or their full bullet board calendar depending on the submission. Then we get to funding the project. So typically the way it would work is the MSBA agrees to fund their share of the project. You know, in general for our district like last time, it's in the neighborhood of half of the cost. So that's a lot of money. And they're going to take their time evaluating every single part of the project before they put their stamp and their commitment for funding. And the same thing will happen locally. However, you know, that'll be a local decision that's made from the community to vote it, whether that's an override or not an override will be up to the town to just the town elected officials to decide. But at one hand or another, it's going to be both of the community, their elected officials or elected officials plus the general populace to fund the project. At that point, if it's funded both at the commitments made at the MSBA level and at the community level, the architects get into detailed design, which is creating design documents that construction firms can actually utilize. The construction process, again, generally takes in the neighborhood of a year and a half to three years, depending, you know, how complex the construction process is. And completing the project is also a critical piece that there's there's evaluation at the tail end and commissioning and all that work that's less public but still matters. So on all building committees, you know, take, you know, can take upwards of six years because they may continue to meet after the kids are in the and adults are in the building because there is there are work, there is work that's occurring even after that timeframe, particularly in our project, which will likely have an intensive focus on energy efficiency. You can design all you want and then you want to test it and evaluate how it's going after the building's actually being used because, you know, we'll notice a change in energy efficiency from a shiny building or shiny renovated building that no one's in versus the actual use by human beings on a regular basis will affect the efficiency there. So that's sort of, you know, again, the nuts and bolts of the process. You know, I would encourage people, the website is massschoolbuildings.org. It's a really helpful resource. You could look at other projects that are in, you know, in design that have been approved, that are completed. There's a treasure trove of resources around that. It'll go into each module, which describe all of these rectangles in much more detail than I did today. So, you know, at this point it's a quieter period. Eligibility part we will need again to identify a cost to the feasibility study that will need to be voted at the town level. We have enrollment work that's occurring and this this this building committee needs to, you know, start meeting not as frequently as we will once we get into the project. Those are really the key points of the eligibility, but once we hire an owner project manager and a designer everything starts accelerating very very quickly. So just to foreshadow that for the committee, it may be the first couple meetings feel a little bit like this one. We're having some general high-level conversations, but the reason we're doing that is once we're, once we start going, I know from last time and from other districts, it feels like we're going pretty quick. So I wanted to just foreshadow that for everyone on the group as well as for the public who may have an interest in knowing about the pacing and it's not linear that I can assure you on the process. So I think with that unless there's further questions I'll hand it back to Paul. But, you know, please feel free, you know, and Paul and I are sort of co-chairing at the point at this moment until we get everybody sworn in and we can take a vote. If there are questions in between, you know, my email address is morrisammitarps.org, please feel free to email me anytime if you want to have a conversation, which is generally my preference these days. You know, please let me know. I'm happy to share, you know, from my experience. I won't speak for the committee. That's not my role, but but if there are specific questions I can help with, please do access me. I'm happy to do whatever orientation anyone would need as we kind of slowly enter this process. Great. Thanks, Mike. Are there questions for Mike on this so far? Great. Thanks, Mike. Also, I recognize Dwayne has joined us. Welcome. So we introduced ourselves, Dwayne. Do you want to take a minute or introduce yourself? Yes, everybody can hear me. Good morning. Hello, everybody. I'm Dwayne Chambl. I'm the out-of-school time coordinator for the district and I am happy to be here and I do apologize everybody for being late. I don't know why my eyes was seeing PM and not AM. So thank you for email. I'm like, oh my god, Paul. So I apologize. Good morning, everybody. That's good. Thanks for making the effort to get in. Also, you know, we didn't, I just want to, I didn't, I should have done this earlier, but I want to thank you all for stepping forward and taking the time. Appreciate meeting at this hour. I, this committee can decide if it wants to continue meeting at this hour or not. But it's, you know, this has been a long wait to get to this point. We're on a long journey and, you know, Mike just talked about what the journey looks like and it's, you know, we all want to get to the ribbon cutting, but that's a long wait away, many years away. But this journey, you know, this is a really important task for the town. It's something that's, the town has needed for a very, very long time and it's so exciting to get started. And this is, and you're the tangible evidence that we're moving forward. So thanks for that. That's going to take a lot of work, you know, big commitment, a lot of education of ourselves. Some people have been through it, others have not. And, and I think, you know, one of the key things is that there are no dumb questions and always ask the questions that you feel like you need your jobs. Our jobs are to represent the public in this process. The MSBA has a very strict process that they follow because they're putting in the bulk a large portion of the money in this project. And they want certain types of skill sets on the committee and we are fulfilling those, you know, procurement, architect, finance, members of the public, things like that. So I think we have a really broad-based, very strong committee, so I'm really proud of this group. So as we move forward, again, we all will have our roles, but we'll be having an owner's project manager who's really going to help us manage through this process where it's not going to all be on us. We are going to need to have someone who's done this a lot of times move forward with us. So I guess there's just some logistical things on terms of when we would like to meet, what time of day works. You know, Mike and I talked a little bit about this and we think that our next meeting could be in about a month. That'll take us it'll take us that time before we have another, you know, ready to go with the next phase of things. So maybe like either right before Thanksgiving or right after Thanksgiving. And I'm looking for people's interest. If you, we had advertised that these meetings would be a 730 in the morning to accommodate people's schedules, whether that actually works or not. And now that we're doing it, if you can raise your hands and say that was a bad idea. People want to chime in and see what they think. Just, people should. I like it. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Steve. I'm sorry, please. Oh, I'm sorry. I like it. Yeah, just sure that the 730 came from two places in my conversation with Paul and some of this was based on our experience at the last time. So we have a number of school staff members involved and, you know, if meetings were to occur during the workday, it complicates a lot of things for staff when we want their input. I think the second thing was for a lot of working families. Last time it was hard to do it in the kind of late afternoon or evening. There's no perfect time, but, you know, pulling some people from who are in the last group, just informally, it seemed like if we could do these meetings frequently, efficiently, in a time limit of way that worked well. There are a number of other communities we've heard from architects we've worked with who do like this, you know, before people head off to work. You know, many of us on the school side and many of you on the family side have child care responsibilities in the evening or work responsibilities in the evening and I'll be candid you get to a certain point of night, I'll be at tonight and sometimes the efficiency of how we're doing doesn't improve with as the sun goes down. So we're thinking maybe if the sun goes up might work better for us. We'll see. But that was the thinking that's not to suggest that I'm not open or we're not open to divergent opinions, but it wasn't just, you know, throw times on the stairs and see which one, you know, makes it to the top stair. It was done really thinking about some of the challenges that people experienced the last time and people routinely experience with late afternoon or early evening meetings. So that was sort of the thinking. It could be wrong headed thinking but it was at least, it tried to take into account feedback we were hearing. Phoebe, does it work okay for you? It actually does. It's probably the best time of the day between work and three kids and everything else. So yeah. And Allison and Diane, fits your schedules? Okay. Okay. So while we, is there, you know, let's stay with us at 7 30 a.m., let's look at a, you know, I think that we're best off looking at, you know, I think we might, next meeting, one of our agenda items will be to elect a chair and vice chair. Another one will come up with a meeting schedule. So next, next time we meet, we'll want to, you know, be talking about frequency of meetings and how, you know, there's going to be every month for three months and then bi-weekly after that or something like that. Mike and I can sort of sketch out what that might look like based on other people's experiences. You know, and so maybe we just look at calendars and see when we can meet again. Mike, your guidance on how soon we should meet is would be welcome. Yeah. So I mean, I think like you said before, either before Thanksgiving, maybe the week before or the week after, makes a lot of sense. At that point, hopefully we're, you know, a little further along with hearing from MSBA, from an enrollment perspective, we can share that back with the committee at that point. Probably the town council will have to schedule their process for voting, you know, and appropriating funds, you know, which MSBA will guide us in that they're really a wonderful partner in my experience. I'm not sure how much need there is to meet in between, you know, those two, you know, we're trying to be respectful of everyone's time. We know, you know, just normally this is a very stressful time for everyone in the room, you know, with everything that's going on. So we want to meet when we have some substance to meet about, not meet for the sake of meeting. I don't think people would be thrilled to have 730 meetings where we talk for 20 minutes and say, yeah, no updates to give, you know, I'm not sure how satisfying that will be to the groups. So that is sort of, you know, I think that timeframe works pretty well. I don't know which morning of the week, you know, and that maybe that'd be good to get some feedback on. But that's sort of where, how I see it anyway. I'll throw a date out there. What about Wednesday, December 2nd, since we're already here on Wednesday? That's the week after Thanksgiving. It's fine on my calendar, Paul. I'm just, you all know how much work we need to get done. Does that push us, I guess your other choices, Wednesday the 25th or the 18th of November, does that push us off at all by waiting until December? I look to Mike for that. Yeah, I think I tend to agree probably with Kathy. I mean, I'd rather probably meet in that time before Thanksgiving. I think if there's really no updates, we can always bail and say, hey, we're going to move it to December. But at least if we get it on the calendar and there are updates and more substance, then we're not, you know, I'd rather schedule it and cancel it than not schedule it and go too long if that makes sense. So you all look at the 18th? Yeah, that's what I was thinking about. Okay. How's that look to everybody else? Fine with me. See, no negative none. So we'll look at November 18th at 7.30 p.m., a.m., going a.m. I said p.m. Good. What are their agenda items would we put on there? Again, Mike or Sean or somebody's been through this before. Yeah, hopefully at that point we'll have a little vote, as you noted, for, you know, chair and vice chair. That's just a plug for everyone to make sure that they get sworn in by that date. I think maybe we'll have some information on enrollment projections from MSBA at that point in time. Mike, too early to draft a request for services? I think it is. I think the thing that we'll have to talk about at that meeting is trying to come up with an estimate of cost of the feasibility study so that we can go back and forth with MSBA on that and then the town council, because the town council will have to, the way our MSBA works is the towns or municipalities vote in the full dollar amount to let's say the feasibility cost. I'm just going to make it up because it's ridiculous and no one can claim later that I was predicting. So it was $100 to do the feasibility, right? Then the town has to appropriate the $100 and then the MSBA reimburses whatever the percentage is back. I think I'd probably work on that as a committee before we get the scope of services for the next steps because the scope of service is going to need whatever that dollar amount is. Does that make sense, Sean? Yeah. And you've been through this before. So I'll lean on you. This is fun for me doing that again. I'll lean on you for some thinking about potentially and I'm happy to help. Looking at COMPs and what's in the market right now in terms of cost of feasibility studies. But I do think that's something that we should talk about and I do think actually it makes sense to do that in November to give the town council enough time to hear that recommendation and be able to act on it. Yeah, I just had a question on coming up with that estimate, Mike, and conversations you're going to have with MSBA. We did a wildwood study and then we did the preliminary design and look at Fort River figuring out to what extent some of that work will be considered by MSBA have already having done parts of it or do we have to redo some of that? So it's a question, not a statement on it, on a if we knew that some of it would count, then it might affect the rough estimate of how much this round would cost us. Yeah, so I'll make a statement in response actually, but that's it's a right question to ask. You know, we have had some preliminary conversations about that MSBA will not fund for the wildwood site to work to be redone for work that was already completed that they contributed to. The upside of that is we may not to do it need to do as much work at the wildwood site because work was done. I think there's some savings there. I'm not an expert on this, but I think much if you look at how we spend much of the money, it's not as much on some of the technical aspects. I'm going to look at Jonathan and others, but a lot of the money is on design. So I think that you probably net some savings there, but the majority of the funds of the feasibility study aren't paying for sort of landscape architects to do the work that was already done or testing of soil that's already done. I'm not saying there's not cost. I'm not saying it doesn't cost real dollars, but I think much of the funds is going to kind of design the meetings, the feedback from this group that probably does need to be done independent of work that was already done. But Jonathan, I don't hate to call on you, but you know, you do this all the time. So I don't know if you have any thoughts about, you know, what we might yield in savings, not as a dollar amount, but just in general versus things that we'd want to have an architect at OPM be working with us on. I would agree with what you've said so far that things like borings and site investigation should be very, from both prior studies, should be very reusable. And that Mike's right that this study will mostly be about asking the designers to do additional design. I think MSBA is going to require that work, even though both have been looked at in a design way, they're going to require that part to be redone because really it's a different process. It's a more global process that's going to look probably at both sites in a way that's different than the prior two times. Does that sound right to you, Mike? It does. Yeah, that's spot on. Thanks for giving me the language. You know, again, this isn't my forte. Is there anything else we have on the agenda for the next meeting? Sean, did you have ideas? Well, I can connect with Mike and we can look at the estimates and see if there's or at least do the preliminary research into what that might be. And I know MSBA is usually pretty good at also kind of giving us some direction about what they're seeing for feasibility studies and the costs. So we can work on that for next time and see if that's ready to go. Is there anything else on our we want to have on our agenda next next time anybody wants to bring up? I don't see anything. So is there anything else anybody wants to bring up today? This is awesome. I mean, this was intended. Oh, Diane. Well, I'm just curious. I know that we have to appoint a chair. So I just wonder if we should pull informally, pull folks and see if anybody's actually interested in that role. Well, yeah, so we don't want to vote today because not everybody is able to vote because they haven't been sworn in. But I guess it's if there are people who are interested, you know, you could express your interest either now or, you know, or or prior to the meeting or at the meeting next time. I think it would make sense to review the responsibilities of the chair so everybody's aware. OK. We must have them together like that. Basically, yeah. So that's good. That's a good thing to do also. Good suggestion. OK. Anything else anybody wants to talk about today? And everybody can make it on the 18th at 730. That's clear. That's good. OK. So with that, I think we can adjourn the meeting at 8.11 a.m. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.