 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise Vs and generous donations from viewers like you. Hi everyone! Welcome to the Amherst Weekly Report. I'm Claire Healy and we've got some really important stories to cover today. First, Town Manager Paul Bachelman received his assessment from the Town Council on Monday. This was released in a public memo available on the Town website, which was discussed in the meeting. The Town Manager was reviewed on 10 goals, divided into policy goals and management goals. In the released memo, Bachelman received strong positive feedback from the Town Council in many areas, with a few noted areas of improvement. An area that needed improvement was in climate action, specifically in the need to, quote, explore internal systems to track energy savings based upon investments. Another area they said needed improvement was in sustainable transportation, saying that there has to be more work to, quote, identify short and longer term actions to make it easier and safer to walk, bike or travel around Amherst. They also highlighted a need to explore an economic development committee and to implement the three actions proposed by the Downtown Parking Work Group. In the meeting, they noted specifically his work and achievements made in spite of the pandemic and his attention to community needs in this challenging time period. Next, I'm going to talk a little bit about two major concerns regarding students returning to the Valley and the current situation with both. For residents, one consistent concern has been that the COVID pandemic will worsen in the Amherst area when students return. Two weeks ago, we saw UMass, Smith and Mount Holyoke dramatically change their reopening plans due to fears that bringing back students would worsen the situation or lead to an outbreak. To clarify what that will look like as students prepare to begin classes next week, here are some details about what universities are expecting. UMass Amherst is now anticipating 1,069 students back on campus for the fall semester. Smith College hasn't released a number but said only an extremely small amount of students who, quote, demonstrate a complete inability to meet academic and learning outcomes in their home environments and whose legal residence at Smith College can apply to stay on campus. Mount Holyoke also doesn't have a specific number released, but they stated that all students who are currently living on campus with Mount Holyoke as their permanent residence or who can't travel home can stay on campus. Students who are unable to continue academic coursework in their home environments are also eligible to apply for on-campus housing at Mount Holyoke. Both Amherst College and Hampshire College expect to welcome the same number of students that they would normally. For many college students making the decision to come back or not, one major concern is about their tuition costs and whether or not it will remain the same for online services. Smith College announced that the changes they will make include increasing financial aid to help offset the impacts of the pandemic and rolling back their planned tuition increase. UMass Amherst has said that students choosing not to live on campus could see a reduction of cost of attendance, but they could also see a reduction in need-based aid. They said that this is a result of need-based aid reflecting the projected cost of attendance. Mount Holyoke also said that they will not charge students for room, board, or the student activity fee, but that moving online could lead to a similar reduction of prior need-based aid. However, they did say that in general more aid will be available to students. Next, as noted in an earlier Amherst Weekly report, graduate students living off campus in North Village have been relocated to different housing while the apartment complex is demolished. This is part of a plan from the university to build a new living complex on the same site in the upcoming couple of years. One former resident, Nabil Ayres, wrote an op-ed to the Gazette about growing up in North Village and how through the reconstruction of the area Amherst will lose an international diverse and close-knit community. We spoke with Ayres and here's what he told us about his experience living there. I kind of felt like one big community. I think there are a couple hundred units, but we all kind of roamed around free and in and out of each other's houses and yards and everyone knew one another. I'm the biracial child of a single mother and I was in no way unique or weird or outsider in Amherst. It was such a common thing. In fact, there was no one thing that everyone was. It's such a crazy mixture of cultures and races and religions and parental setups and everything. It was really just fascinating how mixed it truly was. After Amherst and before Amherst, we lived in New York City, which was similar, not the same but similar. So I think the first ten years of my life and especially Amherst really taught me that that's not weird as long as you don't think it's weird. Everyone got along great and we rarely talked about race and we taught each other phrases and other languages and ate different foods and all of that to me was just normal. After that piece published, I mean I've had so many emails from people from really so many different generations, people who lived there in the 70s but also in the 80s and 90s who just emailed to say, I had the same experience and it was really cool to read this. And that really made me feel great that it wasn't just me and it wasn't just the time that I was there. I remember as a kid, always hearing that it was supposed to be temporary. North Village was built I think in 1971 and it was meant to exist for ten years. The buildings themselves were pretty flimsy and that was sort of the fun about it. You could hear your neighbors' conversations and everything but part of it went to the community aspect. But it wasn't meant to be that long term and it made it almost 50 years. So as much as people want to criticize the university, I think they should also be credited for doing that and to know so many thousands of people have this amazing experience. But it would be great if they would keep doing it. It definitely worked and it could work easily somewhere else if they put in the energy and the money. Following up on another story from a previous Amherst Weekly report, negotiations between the RA-PM Union at UMass Amherst and the university have taken a different turn following UMass's reversal of their reopening plan. The university announced with its reopening plan that it was going to fire around 95% of RA's and PM's, around 450 students without any financial compensation. According to the RA-PM Union, they offered work to 34 RA's and 2 PM's and fired the remaining employees. For students, this meant losing both their job and housing days before they were set to move in. The RA-PM Union says that this violates agreements made in a contract signed the day before changes in the reopening plan were announced and that they will be seeking legal action. As of now, they have secured housing for free with the university for any of their members who need it. The union has also staged an encampment on the chancellor's law this past week and they reported that following their demonstration, they received $1,000 from community members in mutual aid funds. This money will be distributed to RA's and PM's who have lost their employment. We spoke again with the RA-PM Union to get an update on their negotiations with the university and here's what they told us. Our priority was to get as much safety as we could for our members. Through really deep organizing with our members to pressure UMass on a variety of fronts, we managed to reach an agreement that provided every RA-PM with one reusable mask per day in a seven-day week, so seven masks. The university assured us that buildings would have HVAC ventilation, which is huge as far as preventing an airborne pandemic goes. We reached an agreement where we didn't win hazard pay, but we did win a $450 cost of living adjustment in form of dining dollars for every RA-PM to help us afford meals, basically. We also won increased health and safety protocols that really said that if RA's and PM's are feeling like they're in a situation or they're asked by a supervisor to be in a situation where COVID could spread through large indoor gatherings, for example, or there's a party and an RA-PM doesn't feel that they would be safe engaging with that, we would be allowed to not engage with that. We had to get to this point of signing this memorandum of agreement with all the things that James just detailed. And then the following day after we concluded that period of bargaining, the following day was when the reversal or the changes in UMass's reopening plan were widely announced. The first news that we got was that only 23 of our members would retain their jobs and would be hired. And later since then that number based on the adjustments of who a number of students living on campus, that number has been raised to 36, but it's still, you know, the immense amount and overwhelming majority of our members without work after most were going to be starting, whether it was peer mentors working remotely or all the other folks who are going to be working, they were going to be moving in the following Monday. The plan and he's our members three days to prepare for not moving in when they thought they were going to move in. So we just want our goal is to have the university show its workers respect. There's a lot of unease, a lot of worry among our unit and a lot of just concerns of people figuring out if they can stay in school this semester, because they have limited funds from losing their job. And so much confusion about so much confusion and like unclear information about whether they will have housing, whether they won't. Are they eligible and just like a lot of questions and a lot of just a sense of also of like no longer trusting this institution. Finally, for residents and community members around Amherst, the Amherst mobile market has provided affordable food throughout the pandemic and beyond. This past weekend, the mobile market held a celebration de salud or celebration of health in Amherst center that included a session in the Mexican tradition of Danza Azteca pre hispanica. We spoke with Sarah bankert, one of the organizers of the mobile market about her involvement in the mobile market and the market's impact in the community. And here's what she told us. I've been involved with the market is actually in the last couple of years supporting a process that was initiated by healthy Hampshire to really look at the food access needs of residents in Amherst. And to begin to work with the community around identifying some solutions. And so I and my colleague Caitlin marquee work together on envisioning that process. And then worked with the community over the last two years to actually look at data and identify solutions. And then eventually fundraise to implement one of the solutions that we had come up with which was it like a mobile farmers market that would be affordable and accessible to people and go to people's go directly to where they live so that it would be reducing the transportation barriers which so many people experience, we come at things from a public health perspective so it's really about this idea that, you know, if you have healthy food available close to your home, you're more likely to make that choice it's an easier choice to make. I think it's really about getting healthy food to people and then in particular there's this Amherst mobile market has really been about community building and allowing really creating space for the community that is or would be served by this mobile market to be involved in every aspect in every stage of the decision making process and in this case, they're actually operating the mobile market. I would best describe it as a pop up farmers market. And so, typically there are a couple of pop up tents, and then a couple of tables with what is to me a wide variety of very, very high quality vegetables and there's just like a sense of, yeah, a sense of community I would say and just a sense of happiness and joy that people are working together and coming together to really like solve an issue in their community and in a way that they feel really works for them. That's all for this week. Thank you for tuning into the Amherst weekly report. Enjoy your weekend and we look forward to discussing the news with you again at the same time next week.