 Good evening and welcome back to Byline here at Amherst Media, co-sponsored by the Amherst League of Women Voters. This is our public affairs show to give you a chance to get to know the legislators representing you on the town council and our newly elected representatives to Beacon Hill. And tonight our guests are the two district counselors from District 5, the district in which I live. And we want to welcome you, Shalini Belmin Milne. I'm sorry I got it very easily the first time, but... It's perfect. It's perfect. Okay, thank you. And Darcy Dumont. Welcome both of you for this 30 minute or so show in which I'm going to throw some questions at you and give you as much time as possible so that the people watching at home and online can get to know who you are. So let's start with you, 13 of the last 17 years as I remember you've been living in Amherst and you became a United States citizen three years ago. Congratulations. Thank you. And you decided to run for town council. I did. Why? So there are many reasons for that. In brief I feel when I started voting I got more involved in the local politics and issues that were very important to all of us. And along the way it struck me that when the new council was being formed that I have certain skill sets that would be useful especially as we're transitioning into a new form of government and I just felt like I could contribute and make a difference. Very good. And those three years when you were out of town in that period what were you doing then? Right. So I was a tenure track faculty at the University of Utah in the business school there. So it's teaching marketing and doing research. Great. And you're now affiliated with the Eisenberg school? That's right. And you have a practice in mindfulness here in town and we're going to come back to that in just a minute. But let's ask Darcy. So Darcy an activist, a teacher for roughly 20 years, a lawyer for at least 10 years or so specializing in mental health related law. What brought you to the election? Well, for the last six years I've been volunteering in town on climate and sustainability related issues on the state level and to some extent on a town level. And after we voted to form a new form of government and we were preparing for an election I looked at the list of people who were running and I felt like it wasn't representing a broad enough swath of the community and I thought that I would be able to contribute my sustainability background to the list of people that were running. So I signed up on the very last day at noon. Very last day at noon. So your background in sustainability and climate change, you were active both in the community but also at the state level and at the state level you were working on statewide legislation along with a lot of other people and you had some involvement in some resolutions and things here in town during your pre-election service. Can you tell us briefly about that? Yes. Again, working with Climate Action Now and Mothers Out Front, I worked to help present the zero energy bylaw and the 100% renewable energy resolution and our fossil fuel divestment resolution. And I also have been working with the multi-town task force on community choice energy for the last year to try to figure out whether it's feasible for the town to adopt community choice energy, a more progressive model that is more focused on reducing greenhouse gases than other community choice energy models. Very good. So because you are elected at the district level, the people in your district probably know you much better than the folks in the rest of the town, so that's part of the point of this show is to help people come to know more about you. Let's go back to mindfulness here, Shalini. Could you talk a little bit about mindfulness and what that is and how does that influence or serve you as a member of the council and how do you think it might help the council and its work? Sure. Generally speaking, asking about what mindfulness is like asking what is life or defined love. So I will do my best. In its simplest form, mindfulness is having the ability to see things clearly without letting our biases and our emotions hijack our thinking. That's a very good, concise definition. Yes. And... Could continue. And as you can see, it has many implications. It has so many benefits. So that's one of the reasons it's now being studied, researched in education and politics and business, the military. In the town council specifically, I mean, there are again so many benefits, but one that immediately comes to mind is perspective taking. So I can be really attached to an issue and it's like so important. And I really want everyone to buy into that issue, for example. And in mindfulness, my training would require that while I present that passionately and at the same time, I also listen, have the ability to truly, genuinely be curious of other people's perspectives. So that means my district people, the town people, how are they going to be affected by this? Involving their voices, perspectives. Looking at research, what are the best practices in this? So I may think, based on my experience, this works. I believe everyone should be practicing mindfulness, but I have to see what is the culture? What are people saying? What is the research? What are the best practices? You know, so we don't reinvent the wheel. So what is some research behind it? And then the third piece of it is then again stepping back and now looking at the bigger picture of what is the additional information I have and how can I work with that. So that I think is going to be is very, very important. Should I go on with another one? Okay. Let me play that back. Active listening, integrating other people's thoughts into your own thinking as a conversation or a debate is going on and then allowing those ideas and thoughts and different opinions to meaningfully influence your final decision and vote. That suggests that sometimes you might change your mind right there at the table. Yes. And that can be seen as a negative, oh, she's going back and forth. She doesn't have a mind of her own and I think that's the flexibility which I hope people can understand is that yes, as we gain more information we might be willing to budge and I think that's a good thing that shows flexibility and not. So through how you behave and act, since people will understand that you are influence driven if you will by mindfulness, they're seeing you practice mindfulness and maybe it will affect their behavior sometimes as well. Absolutely. So the way anger and other emotions are contagious, if you're angry at me my immediate reaction is going to be to define myself and that did happen actually in the campaign where someone really challenged me on an issue which I felt was not fair and I remember the first time I actually started defending myself and then later on, again, that's part of the practice is to go back to that situation and contemplate and I realize where was my curiosity there and I felt into my default mode of defending my position versus engaging the person, okay, tell me more, you know, how is this affecting you and what's going on? What people really want from their elected officials is to know that they're really listening to them. They may not in the end agree with them, but they're being heard, you're listening to me and it may or may not, it's going to be considered in my final decision whether in the end I vote the way you want or not, but people would understand that that's the perspective you come to the table with. Yes, and then part of closing the loop would be to go back and explain, okay, I heard you and I see but this is the reasoning why I decided to go in the other direction. Very good. Marcy, you have a lot of diverse experience that you bring to the table as a former teacher, lawyer, activist. How do you see yourself at the table contributing constructively to the work of the council given your background that you're bringing to the table? There are only 13 of you. It's a small group with a big responsibility. How do you see your background and your experience contributing to the work of the body? It is true that I've done a lot of different things career-wise and one thing I didn't mention was that I've also spent time being a grant writer, so all of them contribute. I spent 20 years teaching part of it as an elementary school teacher and part of it as an art teacher and in Holyoke and I worked in three different buildings with many different superintendents and principals and so I have the experience of different type of building situations. Moving from building to building, I have experienced grade reconfiguration and have opinions about that, so that's relevant to our current school project, our current school proposal. I also was a substitute during the year that I moved here. I substituted all around the area and so I've actually taught in the open classrooms at Fort River and Wildwood, so I understand the issues around the open classroom. I also substituted in Pelham Elementary School, so I have a picture of Pelham as far as regionalization with Pelham Elementary School. So I think I have a good understanding in general about class size and issues that would come up around the schools. As far as my grant writing, I have had a lot of experience writing grants to the state, Massachusetts Cultural Council and the local cultural councils and foundations, so I have somewhat of an idea about how to get money for projects, how to get money, which is an issue that we may run into and of course my legal background comes in extremely handy because of all the work we do, wordsmithing in the ad hoc rules committee, which I'm a member of, and in general just understanding the charter and all the work of the council. So I think that the variety of experience that I have is invaluable, it makes me an interesting member of the council. You can come at things from a lot of different directions, it sounds like. That is absolutely true. And are you a visual artist? I am, yes. And so from your point of view as a practicing artist, does that bring to the table as a member of the council? Well I think that I highly value the arts. I would be a supporter of projects of the arts commission. I would like to see more public art in Amherst and I hope that we can get funding to promote that. So I can almost picture you sitting at the table in various debates and one minute you've got the lawyers hat on and the next subject you might have your education hat on and then on another subject you might have your arts hat on, not just around arts policy questions but just the way an artist might think differently about a problem or looking at a situation because I find a lot of artists are very, very creative. They think outside the box. They see things in different ways sometimes and have ways of communicating that effectively to other people in ways that they may not otherwise have noticed. I think that that's true and as I was trying to formulate what I was going to say today and thinking about how can I explain these different careers and what the thread is, I think a lot of it is that I have looked for careers in which do allow creative problem solving. So all of the different things that I have done have involved sort of being able to think outside the box and being able to come up with some creative ideas. So let's shift topics now. Let's talk about committees. You're helping to stand up a new government. There's a lot of organizational work that has to happen and it starts with being able to have reasonable rules and procedures for operating the council and I understand both of you are serving on that ad hoc committee. So could you give us just an idea or two of things that you're thinking about as you're working on forming these potential rules and procedures? Sure. So I think the rules and procedures committee, the purpose is to codify all the relationships, how we're going to do our business amongst the town councilors, the town council to the town manager and the committee. So what I think many of us are doing is looking at other town councils and trying to find a way to operationalize our values. So that's the piece that I'm really interested in is like what are the values that are important to us as a town? For example, engagement or citizen engagement, transparency, inclusion, accessibility. These are the values and how do we write our rules to make sure that those values are actually reflected in how we're going to do our business. Could you, Darcy, give us an example of one thing that you're focusing on as a member of that committee because I want to make sure in the ten minutes we have left that we get to talk about a couple of other things. My particular assignment on the committee is to look at public comment, how different towns have dealt with the issue of public comment and even dialogue because there are some towns like Portsmouth, New Hampshire that in every other meeting include the possibility of a back and forth between the public and the council. We are just looking at it to see if it is feasible and also the issue of where public comment should fit into the council. We've been hearing that people would like to have it at the beginning of the council meeting and also perhaps after each action item an opportunity to discuss after the council discussed and give the public the possibility of discussing. We did that around the issue of the climate committee. We had a discussion session where the councilor discussed and then the public discussed. So it seemed to work out very well. So we're just trying the different things out and listening to the public about what they want to. So let's shift to finance. You're sitting on the finance committee. That's one of the most important things that the town council will do every year is to create a budget. Give us some thoughts about your thoughts about serving on that committee and what you're going to approach that job. So the finance committee is pretty much doing the same role as it was doing with the town meeting and so we are going to be the experts and try to become the experts who we're a resource to the town council on all financial matters which includes reviewing the budgets, the capital expenditures, infrastructure and unforeseen capital expenses. As an example, our first two finance meetings were addressing the unexpected breakdown of a bridge in district five actually and so that was an interesting thing for me personally because I am representing now the whole town and the responsibility of making sound fiscal decisions but I'm also a representative of the district five residents and so it was looking at that from the perspective of how is this affecting the residents, listening to them, how is it affecting the businesses, the environment. For example, I calculated based on numbers provided by Superintendent Morme, Superintendent of DPW that there are 1,100 cars and based on that over two years we would be traveling two million extra miles and if the bridge was delayed by three years we'd be traveling three million extra miles so thinking of that aspect and the cost and the environment. So there are all these different factors that we are considering along with where is this money going to come from, does it affect other projects and so then making decisions, looking at it holistically and the other piece that I think I'm interested in participating and looking at is we focus so much on the expenses and I'd like to also look at the income side and look at what are some opportunities that we're not really utilizing in our town to increase our revenues for example because that was a big concern of people, the rising property taxes and so I think. Very good and you mentioned the environment there which takes us to another committee that the two of you are involved in Darcy, you and Evan have been promoting and others have joined in on the council, the idea of a climate and energy committee or an energy and climate committee and you are one of the authors of that. Could you talk to us a little bit about what your vision is for what that committee should be doing and what you're hoping it will create over time for our community? A sustainability type committee has been in the works for more than a year now, the town manager suggested it to the select board a year ago and so it's been in discussion and now we have put forward a committee that was just created on Monday which the purpose of this committee is somewhat narrowly focused on climate mitigation meaning preventing the worst effects of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilience which means protecting from future impacts, protecting town residents from the climate change that's coming in the next 10 to 20 years. So it will be starting out proposing goals along the lines of maybe the state goals or the goals proposed by the new 100% renewable state legislation to guide the town in implementing different programs and policies in order to reduce greenhouse gases and to provide resilience. So we're really excited about it. It was an initiative that was highly endorsed by the new president as a means to have our first act be an act of unity and one that's very positive that the whole council can get behind and so I'm very excited about it. I'm excited about the people that it's going to bring together that we have a wealth of expertise in town in the colleges and the university has many departments related to sustainability and the two colleges, the Hitchcock Center. We have a wealth of expertise in our town. So as we are recording this show which is probably about a month ago, you are, that's fine, that's no problem. So the stage that we're in at this point is fine tuning the charge and the vision for the committee and Shalini you're on that committee as well with Darcy and a few other counselors. This is a, not a town council committee if I understand correctly. And they're going to be community members who will be able to apply to be on the committee as well as a couple of counselors. What's your vision? Do you want to add to what Darcy said with regard to your vision for what this committee's charge should be? I think I would add the perspective after again having spoken to several experts who have been working on climate change at the national level even with United Nations looking at some of the best practices like what are some other organizations doing like in United Nations and whatever the consistent theme I've read is if you really want long term change we have to look at it from a whole systems thinking perspective and look at how it's going to impact the different communities of residents especially the underrepresented residents. How are these policies going to affect them or the businesses or education schools and so because it's affecting these different stakeholders it's important to have some way of including them and having their voice part of this discussion and that would also ensure that we have the buy in of the different communities. So it's really about getting everyone on board with this with this deep sense of real understanding that you know when I'm solving this problem I'm also looking at how does this affect you and to make sure. So it sounds like this is going to build on the work of the past where a number of major policy decisions were made by the community and are in the process of being implemented but now you're looking at the next round of policy questions and issues and how you involve the whole community in that conversation sounds extremely important. Also taking enough time to get it right there's a certain sense of urgency because of the effects of climate change that said we are in the process of standing up a government and that's going to take a lot of focus and work of the council but on this other theme there's also a sense of urgency because of the nature of the problems but figuring out how to put together a robust plan and how to phase that in to the work of the council and to the work of the government is going to be a big part of the challenge I would assume because there are a lot of things going on all at the same time. So I think we've about run out of time so I want to thank you both Shalini and Darcy from District 5 for joining us tonight and thank you all for listening, watching and if you need to see the show again it'll be rebroadcast on Monday evening at about 6 p.m. I think it is and we will also have it available to you online. So thanks for joining us and I hope we'll see you again.