 Wanted to do a quick sound check. So Jack says he's going to join by phone. Okay. Pam, I couldn't hear that. Amherst media wanted to do a quick sound check. So if you could just talk a little bit. Oh, really? Okay. How's, how's your Christmas shopping? They are good. They are good. We are good to go, Mr. Marshall. Go ahead. Okay. All right. So welcome to the Amherst planning board meeting of December 15, 2021. My name is Doug Marshall and as the chair of Amherst planning board, I am calling this meeting to order. At 634 p.m. This meeting is being recorded and is available live stream via Amherst media. Minutes are being taken. Pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021. The planning board meeting, including public hearings, will be conducted via remote means using the zoom platform. The zoom meeting link is available on the meeting agenda posted on the town's websites calendar listing for this meeting. Or go to the planning board webpage and click on the most recent agenda, which lists the zoom link at the top of the page. No in-person attendance of the public is permitted. The public can access the meeting in real time via technological means. In the event we are unable to do so, for reasons of economic hardship or despite best efforts, we will post an audio or video recording, transcript, or other comprehensive record of proceedings, as soon as possible after the meeting on the town of Amherst website. Board meetings, I will take board members. I will take a roll call. When I call your name, unmute yourself, answer affirmatively, and then place yourselves back on mute. Maria Chow. President. Jack Gemse. Not yet with us. Tom Long. President. Andrew McDougal. President. I'm Doug Marshall, I'm president. Janet McGowan. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here. Ms. McGowan. I'm here. And Your Hon mouth. President. All right. Pam and Chris, I hope you'll let me know if I don't mention when. When Jack shows up. I think Jack is here, but he's muted. His, his little boxes here. Yep. All right Jack. Are you able to respond. to Jack. Board members, if technical issues arise, we may need to pause temporarily to fix the problem and then continue the meeting. If the discussion needs to pause, it will be noted in the minutes. Please use the raise hand function to ask a question or make a comment. I will see your raised hand and call on you to speak after speaking remember to remute yourselves. The general public comment item is reserved for public comment regarding items that are not on tonight's agenda. Please be aware the board will not respond to comments during general comment period. Public comment could also be heard at other times during the meeting when determined appropriate. Please indicate you wish to make a comment by clicking the raise hand button when public comment is solicited. If you have joined the Zoom meeting using a telephone, please indicate you wish to make a comment by pressing star nine on your phone. When called on, please identify yourself by stating your full name and address and put yourself back into mute when finished speaking. Residents can express their views for up to three minutes or at the discretion of the planning board chair. If a speaker does not comply with these guidelines or exceeds their allotted time, their participation may be disconnected from the meeting. All right. Looks like Jack has arrived here at six thirty eight PM. Jack, can you hear me? Yes, I apologize. My computer's been like a dinosaur for the last three hours. So, okay, well, I apologize. We're back in real time here. Yeah, sorry about that. So, Jack is present. All right. The the typical first item on the agenda is review and approval of minutes. However, we've moved that later in the agenda after the public hearings. As we thought we would have a little bit longer conversation about minutes this April. The second item on the agenda is the public comment period. As I did mention, this is the time for public comments on items that are not part of the agenda. So if you have a comment about one of the topics that it has a public hearing this evening, either of the preliminary subdivision plan hearings or the zoning amendment related to the solar moratorium. This is not the time to make your comment. So we will come. We will solicit public comment for each of those items when we get to that hearing. All right. Does anybody want to make a general public comment about something not on the agenda? I see thirty eight attendees in the participant in the attendees list. At the moment, I don't see any raised hands. Okay. All right. Seeing no raised hands, I will conclude that there are no members of the public who wish to make a comment during public comment period. All right. The time now is six forty and we will begin the third item on the agenda, which is the public hearing for preliminary subdivision plan for S U B twenty twenty two dash zero four or rather dash zero two. And that's for four forty six and four sixty two main street center east LLC. In accordance with the provisions of mass general law chapter forty a this public hearing has been duly advertised and notice thereof has been posted and is being held for the purpose of providing the opportunity for interested citizens to be heard regarding S U B twenty twenty two dash zero two four forty six and four sixty two main street center east LLC. This is a request for a four lot preliminary subdivision plan under mass general law chapter forty one sections eighty one L and eighty one S map fourteen B dash sixty six and fourteen B dash sixty eight was located in the B N zoning district. First of all, are there any board member disclosures? Okay, I don't see any. And I see John Roblesky has joined the panel panelists. I assume, John, you'll make the presentation. You are muted. Yes, there you go. Okay, welcome. Yes, thank you very much. Hope everybody is looking forward to a nice day tomorrow. Enjoy the sixties. So we're asking for a continuance of this public hearing to, I believe, January fifth was the next day coming up. We're still working through some information and so forth and just not ready for the public hearing at this point. So I'm requesting that we continue it to is it January fifth? I assume you're asking Chris that question. Chris, you have your hand up. Yes, January fifth, but I'd also like to make sure that Mr. Roblesky is asking for an extension of the forty five day period in which the planning board has to review his preliminary subdivision plan. Yes, please. I would like to extend the forty five day period also. All right. Are there comments from the board or discussion we'd like to have before voting on this continuation request? I see Chris, I see your hand. Oh, sorry. Nope. That's a legacy. Legacy. Okay. Let's see. I don't see any raised hands from anyone in the public. Is there any public comment on this? Again, I don't see any hands raised at all. All right. So why don't we do a roll call to to continue to January fifth? We probably need a time specific. Chris, January fifth. I think you could choose six thirty five and we need a motion. Yeah, so we need a motion to continue to January fifth, that six thirty five and to extend the forty five day review period for the planning board. I saw move. All right. Janet, do we have a second? Andrew, I see your hand a second. All right. Any further discussion? All right. So let's go through it. I'll start with Jack. Approve. All right, Tom. Approve. Andrew. Approve. All right. I'm going to prove. Janet. Approve. Johanna. Approve. And Maria. All right. So we are now. Completed with that hearing for this evening, we will continue it on January fifth. Moving on to item four on the agenda. A second public hearing. All right. All right. So this is also a preliminary subdivision plan request. The time actually is six forty five exactly when it was advertised to begin. And this is for SUB twenty twenty two dash zero one at eleven dash thirteen East Pleasant Street from Archipelago investments LLC. This hearing has been continued from August twenty fifth twenty twenty one to September twenty ninth to October twentieth and to December first before continuing to this evening. All of those dates being in twenty twenty one. And I understand the applicant has requested to continue again to January fifth twenty twenty two. This is regarding a request approval for a two lot preliminary subdivision plan under mass general chapter forty one sections eighty one L and eighty one S map eleven C dash two seventy five eleven C dash two seventy six eleven C dash two seventy seven eleven C three oh nine and eleven C dash three ten all in the BG zoning district. All right. So. Chris, you want to say anything? Yes, I'd also like to say that he's requested an extension of the forty five day review period in addition to having that continuance. All right. And am I correct that Mr. Wilson is not able to join us this evening? He is not able to join us and his attorney hurt his leg and he's having surgery today, so he's not able to join us either. Mr. Wilson sent his regrets and I sent an email to you all regarding, you know, what you could consider doing about this case. And first, you could consider denying the request to continue. And you could review the plan that was submitted. And I did send you in a packet not too long ago, an email that I had written about things that were missing from the plan, but I neglected to include it in your current packet. But Pam has that letter and so does Doug, that email. So you could deny the request to continue and then you could discuss the plan tonight and talk about, you know, what the pluses and minuses are. And whether it satisfies the requirements of the preliminary subdivision plan or you could grant the request to continue and wait until January 5th. The reason that Mr. Wilson has told me that he wants to continue is that he's waiting to hear about the mixed use building zoning bylaw that's coming before the town council on December 20th. December 20th is a must vote date. The town council cannot postpone that vote any longer based on the town charter. So they will be voting up or down on the mixed use building zoning bylaw on December 20th. So that's why Mr. Wilson would like to have this public hearing continued to January 5th, because by then he'll know what rules he needs to follow for his mixed use building. And he'll know whether he will comply with the bylaw or not. And if he doesn't comply with it, then he can take advantage of a zoning freeze that would become available to him if he goes ahead and files a definitive subdivision plan within seven months of filing the preliminary. Seven months from the filing date of the preliminary would be February 12th. So he would be required to submit a definitive subdivision plan on February 12th. I did speak to Joel Bard, our town attorney from KP law tonight about what the planning board can do with the preliminary subdivision plan. And he agreed with me that whether the planning board approves or denies the plan the that doesn't affect our Capella ghost ability to file the definitive subdivision plan within seven months. So I guess my recommendation to you would be to continue the public hearing to January 5th and hear from Mr. Wilson at that time as to whether he wants to continue with this review or withdraw the application. But of course, you're you're welcome to do whatever you think is proper. But so those are your choices either review the plan tonight and come up with your recommendations or wait till January 5th and review it when Mr. Wilson will be here. Thank you, Chris. So clearly this entire series of continuations were were intended to get him to the point where the town council voted on this mixed use bylaw and that and he understood the implications of that. So part of the reason or part of the lengthy number and free and multiple continuations was that this our process as a town has just taken a long time. Maria, I see your hand. Thanks, son. Yeah, I saw the email Chris that you sent last week. And I didn't respond to it. I figured it was like not just administrative. But I agree that with the option number two, you had sent where we should just continue it to the fifth and wait to see how they need to proceed based on town council's vote. And yeah, just that that makes the most sense to me. I think that's what you basically just said tonight, Chris. So thanks, Andrew. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think it's a reasonable thing to ask of us to wait until that vote on the 20th. I guess, do we have a sense? He actually will show up on the 5th because I know that's something that we debated a couple times is that he's just hasn't even made himself present. It would certainly be nice to get some better assurance that he likes to be here. Chris, I will certainly invite him for the 5th. I expect that he will be here on the 5th. But that's, you know, that's all the reassurance I can give you. All right, Janet, I have a question for Chris. So I was reading the letter that you sent or the email you sent to Kyle Wilson on July 12th of this past summer. And I was wondering if the defects in the preliminary subdivision plan, the information that was missing, if it was there, if that was supplied, or is it still missing? And then from reading the rest of the requirements, it seems like there's other information that should be submitted in the preliminary plan. So I kind of don't want to keep kicking this down the road. And then on January 5th, we say, oh, it's not adequate, you know. Chris. So I think that those things are still missing. Yes. Okay. And Chris, you don't expect him to show up on January 5th with an improved plan? Or, you know, maybe you have no. My expectation would not be that, well, I shouldn't, I have, don't know. He hasn't said one way or the other whether he's planning to provide that added information. So, but I would expect him to show up. Okay. But let's assume that the mixed use, I mean, if the mixed use bylaw fails, he will probably withdraw the subdivision plan application because his owning hasn't changed and he doesn't need the freeze. If the mixed use bylaw passes, he will need the subdivision plan. He will probably show up on January 5th. And you're saying he needs to finalize that plan by February 12th? So what he needs to do is, first of all, it's unclear whether he would comply with the bylaw as it's currently proposed. It's currently proposed at 30% non-residential on the first floor. It's unclear whether he complies with that or not. He would have to have a conversation with Rob Mora and decide Rob Mora would have to you know, make a determination about whether the plan that was approved by the planning board this summer would comply with that or not. So that is, so if Rob Mora made that determination that it does comply, then I would understand that Mr. Wilson would withdraw his application for subdivision. If Rob Mora makes the decision that it doesn't comply or if Town Council decides to increase the amount of non-residential to 50% or whatever, change it somehow so that he wouldn't comply, then he would also want to pursue the preliminary subdivision plan. And my understanding from talking to Joel Bard this evening is that it doesn't matter if the planning board, you know, denies the subdivision plan or approves it or approves it with conditions. He still, Mr. Wilson still has the right and ability to file the definitive subdivision plan by February 12th. All right, so if he, so let's say he shows up January 5th and there's no new plan, would we need him to come back two weeks later on say the 19th to review the final plan or do we have any say on the final plan after January 5th? You would have to, unless Mr. Wilson requested a further continuance, you would have to make a determination on January 5th about the plan that is before you. And I can't tell you whether that plan would match the plan that's before you tonight. I don't know that. Yeah. All right. All right, so any more board discussion of this this evening? I don't see any hands, I don't see any hands among the attendees. Why don't we go ahead with a roll call? Vote on this. So we'll need a motion, someone to move to move to move this to January 5th. 6.35 pm is already taken. When do you want to do this, Chris? How about 6.45? Okay, 6.45 on January 5th. And this the same parallel motion to continue the to extend the planning board's 45 day period for review. Extend the 45 days and continue to January 5th. Yeah, thank you. All right. So, Andrew, you got your hand up first. So move and Jack. Yeah, I'll second that, but I guess I had a bit of a sentiment that it seems like Chris and the planning department has had to do a lot of speaking on behalf of Archipelago on this, which I'm a little disappointed in them. So I just wanted to say that. All right. Well, hopefully you'll have an opportunity to say it in real time to Mr. Wilson before this is over. All right. So we'll start this time with Tom. Approve. And Andrew. Approve. I'm an approve. Janet. Approve. Johanna. Approve. Maria. Approve. And Jack. Approve. All right. Thank you all. All right. So that ends this public hearing for this evening. We'll now go to the fifth item on the agenda this evening. This is also a continuation of a public hearing. The time is 6.59. I guess technically we ought to wait one minute before we start because this was advertised for seven o'clock. We'll see if I can ramble on here long enough to get to seven o'clock. All right. So this is a public hearing regarding a zoning bylaw for article 16 temporary moratorium on the permitting and approval of large scale ground mounted solar photovoltaic installations. This hearing has been continued from December 1st, 2021. To see if the town will vote to add article 16 temporary moratorium on the permitting and approval of any newly proposed large scale ground mounted solar photovoltaic installations with a rated capacity of 250 kilowatts DC or greater to be in effect until May 2023 or the date on which the town adopts amendments to the zoning bylaw concerning large scale ground mounted solar photovoltaic installations, whichever occurs early. During the moratorium period, the town under the direction of the town manager shall undertake a planning process to study, review, analyze and address revisions to the zoning bylaw relative to large scale ground mounted photovoltaic installations. All right. So this is a continuation. Chris, do you want to say anything introductory or I see Pat has come into the panel? Maybe we should start with her. Pat and Lynn are both here. Okay. Pat and Lynn, do you want to introduce this again this evening? Yes. Yes. Thank you very much. I think we all understand the need to develop zoning bylaws that support responsible land use and development where we seem to differ in the last meeting was on the need for a bylaw that addresses solar development and where we struggle. I'm sorry. I'm going to begin again with that last sentence where we seem to differ in the last meeting was on the need for a bylaw that addresses solar development and where we struggled was with whether to support a temporary moratorium on large scale in ground solar installations while a bylaw is created. There are two reasons why we propose Article 12. One, we really like ECAC want time to develop the solar resource assessment called for in the climate action, adaption and resilience plan that will guide municipal, community and private solar development efforts in our town. And two, we really do need time to develop a bylaw that defines meaningful parameters to appropriately regulate ground mounted solar photovoltaic installations. We've shared our initial thoughts with the planning department and have asked their help in creating a bylaw that would appropriately regulate these installations. One by providing standards for the approval, placement, design, construction, operation, effective monitoring, modification and removal. Two by creating clear developer specifics so they understand in advance what is required. Three by providing adequate financial assurance for the construction and eventual decommissioning of such installations and financial assurance that any unanticipated damage which can include serious soil erosion, pollution of wetlands and things like that are repaired by the developer and are not impacting our taxpayers. And also by balancing the need for renewable energy with the need for diverse habitats and greater biodiversity by protecting fertile farmland and by maintaining commercial forestry as a viable agricultural activity while providing many recreational opportunities for town residents. We really do want your support for this moratorium. Lynn? I would rather save time for any public comment. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Pat. And we'll wait to hear from you later, Lynn. All right. I see that we have a large number of attendees in the attendees list and I suspect that many of them want to speak to this topic. Would any of you object if we went straight to public comment and left our deliberation until after we've heard from the public? I'm seeing generally nods to in support of that. So why don't we go ahead and do that? All right. So this is a now I'm speaking to all the attendees. First, I want to know how many of you actually want to speak this evening? And because if all 40 of you want to speak, I think we're going to go to a two-minute limit rather than a three-minute limit. So at the moment I see 12 hands. All right. So why don't we yep. Okay. So let's stick with three minutes and we'll see how that goes. All right. Pam, why don't we start with Martha Hanner? Please state your name and where you live in town and or if you don't live in town at all. Welcome, Martha. I'm Martha Hanner. I live at 18 Elyssum Drive in District 5 in South Amherst. I'm a planetary scientist at UMass and my spare time. And I urge you to support the temporary moratorium on constructing large-scale ground-mounted solar installations in order to allow us time to draft a balanced, sensible solar bylaw for our town. We need to have a broad-based local study that takes into account both CO2 emissions and carbon dioxide sequestration in order to identify the most appropriate locations for large solar arrays. Comprehensive climate models demonstrate that just curving carbon dioxide emissions is not going to be sufficient to rain in global warming. We need to increase the drawdown of carbon dioxide as well and of course things like improving efficiency, et cetera, et cetera, to decrease our use of power overall. As Amazonian forest destruction increases as well as worldwide forest losses from drought and wildfires, our temperate North American forests become increasingly important for climate balance, including those in western Massachusetts. And published research shows that mature forests, that is, forests 50 to 100 years old and their undisturbed soil, actively sequester the most carbon dioxide. And so our town council is on record as supporting the resolution that opposed large-scale woody biomass power plants, since something that takes 100 years to regenerate is not renewable energy in the urgent need we have today. And clear-cutting forests to install solar panels may seem more benign, but calculations indicate that retaining the undisturbed forest is more helpful with restoring climate balance than the emission offset from solar panels, particularly when one considers that the clear-cut area is roughly twice as large as the solar panel area. And the COP26 Global Climate Conference emphasized the need to preserve and restore forested areas. And for Amherst, we need the time to develop a balanced plan for solar siting. We need a study that takes into account not just all the wonderful places where we might put solar panels and how you folks want to zone them, but we also need to consider the other side of the equation. How does Amherst help in pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? Whereas storing in forests, storing in wetlands, farmland, if we put solar panels on farmland, are we meaning we don't have as many local vegetables, and so we're using more transportation than fossil fuels to bring in? That's very complex, and so I hope you'll consider the complexity. Yes, thank you. All right, thank you. All right, Pam, you've got the timer started for the next or set up for the next person. Okay, the next person is, looks like Jane Scanlon, Emick. Please state your name and your address. My name is Jane Scanlon, Amy, and I live in District 5 at 182 Palmview Drive. I'm here, May I begin? Yes. I'm here on behalf of Sunrise Amherst, a hub of the National Little Sunrise Movement, which is a nationwide youth-like climate organization whose goal is to stop climate change while creating good jobs. I'm 16 years old and attend Amherst Regional High School. Recognizing the harmful effects of solar panel installation without sufficient regulation, Sunrise Amherst supports a moratorium on large-scale solar projects. About 2,500 acres of trees in Massachusetts have already been cut down to put up solar panels. Solar is an excellent alternative energy source, but there are costs to deforestation land in order to install large-scale solar farms. We want to present the example of the current solar farm proposal in Shootsbury, which would have Amp Solar, a Canadian solar company, pay WD Coles to cut down 190 acres of Shootsbury forests. This project would damage the forests and habitats in Shootsbury and have impacts on the long-term carbon storage and well-being of the town. Forests increase a healthy living environment while protecting the state land, biodiversity, and natural town habitats such as wetlands and forests. It is possible to initiate a speedy transition to renewable and sustainable energy sources while maintaining biodiversity. We must. Well, the carbon cost of cutting down these trees would at some point be offset by the solar panels installed, or it is still unclear what effects this project could have on ecosystems in Massachusetts forests. But this isn't just an issue in Shootsbury, and of course we realize that this is indeed an Amherst plenty-war meeting. Forests, the land in Massachusetts is being threatened with industrial solar projects posing a danger to Native American cultural land, resource waters, biodiversity, natural processes in town land. While Sunrise Amherst fully supports a transition to solar energy, we recognize that deforestation can have devastating effects for seen and unforeseen on the natural landscape and water flow. Subsequently, and subsequently private properties in public land, we need more information on how exactly Sunrise, excuse me, on how exactly the town wants to transition. You have 15 seconds left. My apologies. And we recognize the town needs to transition as immediately as possible, but not in a way that is reckless. We have already seen the effect of smaller solar projects in and around Amherst and it's clear that the town needs to pause to reconsider the best way to transition into renewable energy. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Ira Addis. Please state your name and where you live. You are still muted. There you go. Yeah, I'm Ira Addis. I live 192 Shootsbury Road in North Amherst. Pretty near what was the proposed solar project on Shootsbury Road that I believe has at least been temporarily withdrawn. I'm not here to try and list the potential reasons for why we need to save forest land or the importance of solar panels. What I'd like to do is leave a question with those of you who will vote on this moratorium. It seems to me that it's pretty obvious that we do not have the rules and regulations at this point that we need or are seeking to appropriately control this kind of technology in this area. That's why we're asking for the moratorium. We're asking for time to do something that Amherst has not already done. I would assume like with most other projects, if you put some time in and you have the appropriate people to advise you, that we will come up with the best possible recommendations given the immediate circumstances. I don't have any doubt that we can do that. I guess what I'm curious about and I would leave you with is why would anybody not vote for this moratorium? I think anyone who opposes the moratorium has an obligation to clearly state what their specific reasons are for opposing it. I can't think of any particular reason other than the one that allows large corporations at this point to exploit rules that haven't yet been set up. If there are other reasons that the people who would oppose this moratorium have, I would like to hear them. I would like to hear them directly from you. So I think it's really not up to at this point the people who want the moratorium to make the case for it. I think the case is obvious. I think it's up for those who would oppose this moratorium to clearly state what their reasons are. And I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Sharon Weisenbaum. Please state your name and your address. Hi, I'm Sharon Weisenbaum. I'm at 86 Henry Street in Amherst. I've been going door to door to talk to Amherst residents about the proposed large-scale solar installations. The most striking insight from doing this is the fact that about nine out of ten of the people I speak to are unaware of this proposal and they're taken aback when I let them know what's happening. Because these proposed arrays are considerably larger and in controversial and environmentally sensitive areas compared to anything that Amherst has done up to date, it's important to take the time to inform residents. In the interest of public awareness, transparency and democratic process, a temporary pause in making these decisions that impact our community so profoundly is very important. I'm also speaking on behalf of Ethan Nadeau, a local freshwater ecologist who runs an ecological consulting firm which has been providing services on issues including wind, solar and hydroelectric. He writes, I believe a moratorium should be established immediately to give Amherst a chance to work to formalize zoning overlay, protection districts and bylaws to protect watershed. In this Amherst and Shootsbury are intimately linked. The importance of these surface water supplies, some of which would be seriously impacted by the Amherst and Shootsbury coals and proposals cannot be underscored enough as they are uphill from Amherst and supply not only the town's drinking water but feed many streams that flow through the community. Reading from the Shootsbury master plan, he quotes, Shootsbury residents value the protection of all drinking water supplies but in particular Amhersts. A water supply protection overlay district could have within its design the regulation of land uses that pose a threat to surface and groundwater quality within these sub watersheds. And then the town of Amherst was thinking along these same lines with a report that stated the town of Amherst intends to work with the town of Shootsbury to implement a more comprehensive bylaw to restrict activities on parcels in zones A, B and C. These zones are precisely where Coles Amps plans to clear cut several hundred acres of forest to install these solar arrays. A sensible course of action is to take time before allowing potentially reputable damage to allow the town to formalize water supply protection overlays and bylaws. I am mostly only interested in seeing the town of Amherst follow through on its longstanding commitment in protecting watershed areas and its drinking water supplies. This general philosophy is described on the town of Amherst website watershed page. Please check it out. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sharon. All right, next we have Jenny McKenna. Once you're in the room, please unmute yourself, state your name, address, and turn off. We're not getting feet. Hi. This is actually Jerry Weiss Jenny's husband because I'm using her computer. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Are you getting feedback? Yes, yes. I wonder why I'm sitting here by myself. Okay. In 2014, the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs offered policy guidance for regulating solar energy systems in Massachusetts. They also created a companion model zoning for that regulation to assist cities and towns in establishing reasonable standards to facilitate development of small, medium, and large scale ground mounted and roof mounted solar energy systems. This is all easily available on the state website. They recommended that any regulatory language developed from that guidance be reviewed by town council prior to adoption. It's my understanding that some 200 municipalities in Massachusetts, using this advice and guidance have adopted some kind of regulatory zoning for that purpose. It seems to me that if the DOER has done this work and so many towns and cities are using that work, it would be a good idea for Amherst to follow suit. And if it's a good idea to create zoning regulations, then it follows that a moratorium is needed to make sure that the solar applications are not put up before those regulations take place. If it's worth doing, it's worth taking time to do it right. And it makes common sense that we don't end up with wrongheaded installations before such regulations are in place. I support strongly support having more solar panels in Amherst, especially on rooftops and parking lots. I support the idea of a moratorium and I support the creation of bylaws in Amherst to regulate those establishments. Thank you so much for your time. Glad to be here. Thank you. Thank you, Jared. You're welcome. All right. Our next public commenter, it looks like it's coming from Eric Bakrok. Please give your name and where you live and unmute yourself. Thank you. Eric Bakrok, 277 Shootsbury Road, Amherst. I'm pleased to be able to speak to the Amherst Planning Board in support of the temporary moratorium on large-scale ground-based solar arrays. The temporary moratorium which is in front of this committee comes at a time when we are starting to absorb the magnitude of the climate mitigation challenges facing us. How do we fit into the solution? What is our responsibility in being part of the solution? A moratorium is a smart move to make now because, number one, we're in a state of legislative flux where land use vis-a-vis industrial solar is being scrutinized. There's legislation proposed by Senator Comerford to amend the so-called Dover Amendment amendment. Other legislation proposed by representatives Olivera and Blaze serves also to revisit regulating solar. Two, in addition to the flux in legislation, the Supreme Judicial Court is considering the scope of the Dover Amendment and how far towns can go in regulating solar. An SJC decision is expected by March 2022. Three, a temporary moratorium will put a pause on any ground-mounted solar arrays until the town creates a solar bylaw until now the special permitting process governed solar development. The project that inspired the moratorium would potentially be the largest by far of any existing project to date. How large is too large for the town? A moratorium gives us time to hear from Amherst residents about what they hold dearly and what we as a community value. Community engagement and public discourse would help establish criteria for a solar bylaw. Four, we can use the time to follow the recommendation of the Energy and Climate Action Committee while commissioning a solar siting suitability study to comprehensive study comprehensively the town's total land resources in relation to its energy needs and role in climate mitigation. Five, without losing any time during a moratorium, we can actually solarize our no-regrets, low-hanging fruit projects such as roofs and parking areas on a Fort River Elementary in Amherst Middle School and the rooftops of Jean Eldren and Anne Whalen houses. These have already been identified as eminently appropriate. We are living through terribly shifting times, times of deep uncertainty and times when decisions are made today that will affect the world inherited by generations of younger people much younger than us. We act and speak for people beyond ourselves. Thanks so much for considering the moratorium. Thank you very much, Eric. All right, our next commenter is Renee Moss. Please unmute yourself, give us your name and your address. Good evening. My name is Renee Moss and I'm at 277 Shootsbury Road. And thank you for listening. I'm speaking tonight to urge the planning board to support a temporary moratorium on large-scale solar development in order to give the town the time to create a bylaw that reasonably regulates the siting of solar installations. I feel that there are many reasons to take this pause and think before we act. At the last planning board meeting several members said that we have a special permitting process in place for this and we have already used this as a means to construct several arrays already. This has worked so why would we want to change anything? It's true that we have constructed several solar arrays but now we are seeing projects come before us that are almost double the size of previous ones and are proposing to clear cut right now close to 50 acres of forests that would be 37.8 football fields of contiguous forests. This is not like the previous ones that have come before us or possible arrays that will be proposed in the future. Solar arrays bring us the renewable energy we need in order to decrease CO2 emissions and forests to remove CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. These are two sides of the coin that can mitigate the climate crisis that is upon us. We need this moratorium to consider Amherst plans to do our fair share of addressing climate issues and come to terms as a town as to what the balance between creating renewable energy and sequestering the carbon that has already been produced in order to do our part to mitigate the climate crisis before us. There are 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts. Of those towns 206 already have bylaws and many of them have taken have had moratoriums to take the time they needed to develop them. Amherst is smart and we need to address our greenhouse gas goals in a smart way with a clear plan and join most of the other towns in Massachusetts. We need to take this pause to do this right because we do not want to regret decisions we make before we have a solar sighting study that looks at the strengths and the risks of various options for solar placement. The planning department has said that they prefer having a solar bylaw with clear guidelines for them and clear guidelines for the solar developers. It seems to me that clarity and transparency is always the best route and of course with all of the bylaws already created throughout the Commonwealth we're not starting from scratch. You have 15 seconds left. I hope the planning board will support the temporary moratorium that will help us get it right as a town. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much Renee. Okay our next commenter shows up as Molly on my screen. Please unmute yourself. Give us your full name and your address. Thank you. My name is Molly Gallagher and I live at 211 Wildflower Drive in Amherst. I am urging you to support the temporary moratorium. I think that more thought needs to be put into a sensible location to develop a transparent and ecologically sustainable model for solar farms that maintains biodiversity and benefits the community rather than for-profit companies. Thank you so much for your consideration. Thank you and thank you for your concise comments. All right next we have Jack Hirsch. Let's see okay there he is and please unmute yourself. Give us your name and your address. Hi my name is Jack Hirsch and I live at Flat Hills Road in District 2 in Amherst. I'll be very short. I really support the moratorium and I urge you to vote for it. I don't feel like solar is appropriately appreciated. It's certainly a very necessary thing to get us off fossil fuels but it's at best a stopgap measure. Solar is going to be like who remembers atrack tapes or CDs or even floppy disks. Solar panels are just a stopgap measure and we need to be very concerned about planning for such a stopgap measure. We don't know what's coming next so cutting down forests and putting solar in places that could last hundreds of years just doesn't make sense. So thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Thank you very much Jack. All right next we have Michael Lepinsky. Please unmute yourself. Give us your name and your address. Hi I'm Michael Lepinsky 167 Shootsbury Road and I'm in a butter to the initial incomplete amp industrial solar proposal for Shootsbury Road. As a matter of fact it's so close to my backyard that I could weave to the bulldozer operators as they tore down the forest. I'm strongly opposed to that particular project and so I bought a sign to show my opposition. The lawn signs from smart solar western mass and basically says we support smart solar installations that do not involve clear cutting forests and destroying ecosystems. Well I had that sign up for a while and I liked it but I just thought it wasn't big enough that I really opposed this project so I wanted a bigger sum but as I drove around town I noticed there weren't any large signs in the yards around town so I thought well maybe there's a bylaw against it. So off I went to study the bylaws. Lo and behold I find five pages of signed regulations in the town of Amherst so I dig through it. I finally find the section that says I'm allowed to have six square feet of sign in opposition to this project. So okay I gave up on the idea of a bigger sign so while I'm there I decided to look up the zoning regulations and what they have to say about solar installations in town. How large can an industrial solar project be in town? 10 acres? 50 acres? 400? No info. How many solar cell modules? 10,000? 25,000? 75,000? Nothing. What's the maximum height for a solar array? A lot of these have eight to six foot fences around them. Could the array be 12 feet tall, 16 feet tall, 20 feet tall? Nada. How close could it be to a butter? That's a big concern of mine. 50 feet away, 150 feet away, 500 feet away? Not a mention of solar. How about the access road? The access road to the Shootsbury Road project is right in people's backyards. How close could that be? 100 feet? 50 feet? 5 feet? 5 inches? Nothing. Large-scale battery storage is a huge concern now in the solar industry. Almost every one of these projects has a huge battery storage system, sometimes multiple units. How many would this site have? 1, 10, 100. Is there a limit? Could there be a site that's just batteries and ammers? My point is this, ammers are safe from signs. We have zero bylaws to protect us from large industrial solar projects that can pop up in any neighborhood and this needs to change. We need solar bylaws in this town and we need a moratorium to give us the time to create ones that are both fair and strong. It's not reasonable to expect a handful of people on the ZBA to know enough about all the issues involved with industrial solar. Individuals involved in these decisions need standards, guidelines, and rules. They need bylaws. Thank you. Thank you. Next we have Jessica Wilkinson. When you please unmute yourself, give us your name and your address. Hi, this is Eric Wilkinson. I am again using my wife's computer at 20 Gray Street in Amherst. I fully support sound and reasonable and solid zoning requirements for solar development, all renewable energy development. However, I do not support a moratorium and I think the reason why is because the message that we are sending, if we do enact a moratorium, to renewable energy developers. The clock you have on this Zoom call for participants to remind us of the time is also a good reminder that the time is running out on us to address climate change. If we tell developers not to come to Amherst, it's just like every town that is potentially hosting a wind farm or transmission line, that their projects are not wanted and renewable energy will have a very difficult time achieving the goals that we need to save our planet. So I don't support the moratorium. I do support good zoning. I think you can walk and chew gum at the same time and I urge the board to do that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Eric. Okay, Pam, will you reset the clock? Thank you. All right, next we have Phil Rich. Please unmute yourself, give us your name and your address. Okay, hi. Phil Rich, 187 students we wrote. You know, I agree with everything that's been said, except Eric, of course. I support and totally support the moratorium for all the reasons said. I am also one of the immediate abutters and so I have an even more invested interest in a moratorium that also considers not just the effect on our entire ecosystem, but on the abutters and Mike Lupinski, I think did a great job of pointing out there's nothing, including protections for the land and residents of the town who are affected by this. So I really want to just go on record as completely supporting the moratorium and providing an opportunity to think this thing through. And as I can't quite remember the name, I think it was Jack up on Flat Hills said, we don't want this to be a short-term solution to a long-term problem that may have better solutions, but the forest will be gone in the meantime. So that's it for me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Phil. All right. Next we have Steve Roof. When you enter the participant panel, please unmute yourself, give us your name and your address. Great. Thank you. Steve Roof. I live at 1680 Southeast Street in South Amherst. I want to say that I am not in favor of the moratorium. I think the moratorium will set back progress on our climate action commitments that we've made in Amherst and also that the state of Massachusetts has made. That's 25% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2025. That's just three years from now and 50% reductions by 2040, which is not that far away. The moratorium, I think the, well, I have faith that the planning board, you guys, the zoning board, the concom can all protect the natural resources that are out there with existing laws and regulations. In order to combat the climate emergency, we need to stop burning fossil fuels, need to stop burning fossil fuels. That's the most important thing. Wind power, wind turbines offshore primarily and solar are the only ways we can replace fossil fuel burning. The forests do contribute. Bill Moomaw is right that the forests are the best way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but the amount that they remove compared to the amount that we put in through burning fossil fuels is small. Forests in the United States remove about 10% of our emissions each year and forests in Massachusetts less. It's closer to 7% according to studies at Harvard Forest. Solar farms, the PV has a far greater benefit, 10 to 100 or 500 times better in terms of a carbon benefit by offsetting or reducing emissions from fossil fuel power plants. I'm happy to share more of those numbers. I hope you guys might explore that with other experts in the field, whether at UMass or Harvard Forests to get a handle on that. Most people just don't understand that. PV has a much, much greater carbon benefit than forests. Forests are great. There's no doubt about it. Lots and lots of ecosystem services provided there. We only need about 5% of Massachusetts land area to meet carbon neutrality, that is to stop burning all fossil fuels, as long as that's coupled with major buildout of wind turbines and putting solar on top of every possible roof, landfill, brownfield, and parking lot. Those are detailed in the Massachusetts 2050 road map that you can find online. Again, we only need 5%. We're not talking about clear cutting all the forests in Massachusetts or even a significant amount. We need forests and we need solar and yes, we can have both. Thank you. Thank you very much, Steve. Next, we have Lenore Brick. Please give us your name, unmute yourself, and where you live. Thank you. Hi, Lenore Brick. I live on Strong Street. I'm not in a butter, except that we're all, we all are because the land's all connected. And I would love to talk just to what Steve was saying, but I wasn't prepared for that because carbon metrics and crunching those numbers are actually only part of the picture that we're learning about right now. What I was going to say. I think we just lost your audio. Actually, we just lost you entirely. Pam, can you bring her back into the participants? All right, Lenore, you're back. We missed you for about 10 seconds. Am I back? Yes, you are. I'm sorry for the interruption. That's okay. I don't know where I was. I'm just going to pick up where I think I was. As good a job as Amherst planning, bylaws have may have done in the past. There's not enough experience to intelligently guide large large scale solar installations in farce, especially where man made technology is interacting with nature's technology. We need more time to do the research to pool our resources and to call on the expertise from different areas that are involved, not just about the needs and benefits of solar and how and best we're decided, but also from scientists like forest ecologists, hydrologists, and many more that are plenty of experts that we have right here in Massachusetts. Installing solar facilities in farce is a relatively new endeavor, and I would argue that solar companies do not yet have the expertise and experience to understand interacting in those environments, which is distinct from installing solar in other places better suited for that use. There's been devastating damage from solar installations in farce, and we can provide you with that evidence such as such as what's happened in Williamsburg and Wareham to the ecosystems, including of adjacent lands, and honestly to trust that non-local solar companies, developers, and landowners, all of whom are primarily doing this for profit and because of the state's subsidies, know the full consequences of their actions is somewhat naive. Even forest agency agencies trained in modern logging were not educated in the evolving evolving science that appreciates that farce or complex social communities connected by underground fungal networks that have stabilized the climate and ensured biodiversity since before humans inhabited the earth. Their ecosystem services are invaluable, irreplaceable, and hard to measure. We need man-made laws like zoning bylaws to help maintain what these natural laws have always done for us, and we especially need them now because of the impacts of the new climate reality we're seeing with erosion. Fifteen seconds left. I think there's a fear of the word moratorium. Mora means to delay. It doesn't mean death, and it's a pause to support making the smartest plans we can make that also have to be in sync, by the way, with what's happening on the state level which is in flux right now. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Lenore. Okay, our next commenter is Nathan or rather Ethan Nado. Forgive me if I got your name wrong. Let's try to get Ethan over into the panel. Okay, Ethan, if you would unmute yourself, give us your name and your address. All right, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Sounds great. My name is Ethan Netto. I live in Leverett. I'm a freshwater ecologist. I had been talking with Sharon earlier and she relayed some of my thoughts and I thought I would take the opportunity to speak also. I wanted to focus specifically on drinking water supply protection and to urge you to collaborate with the town of Shootsbury. Atkins Reservoir is the largest source of drinking water for the town of Amherst. It has two principal tributaries, Nurse Brook and Dean Brook, whose watersheds are mostly within the town of Shootsbury. The town of Amherst owns some of the land along Nurse Brook and Dean Brook in Shootsbury, but large portions of these watersheds are privately owned and not formally protected. There are four proposed solar arrays that fall entirely within the Dean Brook and Nurse Brook watersheds. In the past, the town of Shootsbury has expressed interest in working with the town of Amherst to implement the comprehensive protections for the Atkins Reservoir watershed. The town of Shootsbury in conjunction with the Franklin Regional Council and Governments published a master plan in 2004, which included a recommendation that the town adopt a water supply protection overlay district for all of Atkins Reservoir, Dean Brook and Nurse Brook watersheds. They also developed a draft water supply protection district bylaw based on the master EP regulations regarding activities that are restricted or prohibited within a public water supply watershed. This draft bylaw can be viewed in Appendix D of the town of Amherst, Water Supply Protection Plan, which was produced in 2005. The town of Amherst has been thinking along the same lines. Their 2005 report stated that the town of Amherst intends to work with the town of Shootsbury to implement a more comprehensive bylaw to restrict activities on all parcels in zones A, B, and C of the Atkins water supply protection areas. The proposed solar arrays would have been entirely within what Shootsbury's water supply protection overlay if it had been established and also protected by Shootsbury water supply protection district bylaw if those had been adopted. So I think a sensible course of action is to give the towns of Amherst and Shootsbury the opportunity to formalize water supply protection overlays and bylaws for the Atkins Reservoir water supply area. This will require collaboration between Amherst and Shootsbury. And that's all. Thank you. Thank you, Ethan. All right, Pam. Can we reset the clock? All right. And Dorothy Pam is the next commenter. Please unmute yourself and give us your name and address. This is actually Bob Pam, 229 Amity Street. The idea that there will be large numbers of industrial-scale solar arrays is a reasonably new one and it's likely to continue on over the next decades. So I think it is appropriate for the planning board, the planning department, and the council to set up some rules that will apply because there can be any number of people who will be setting them up offering to provide that service and hoping to make some money. So creating a moratorium at this point makes sense. It is also worth thinking about that the proponent, the landowner who is making this proposal, has some experience in doing this. And it would be worthwhile to ask what kind of criteria he, she, they are using in deciding where, when, how big to do it so that at least if this is a responsible developer that we get some idea from the industry of how they think it could be done and should be done. It would be useful to think about that as we design our own rules. It's also significant that this is probably not the only new thing that we are going to be seeing as global warming continues and climate change occurs and the importance of this becomes more and more clear. I don't know what the next industry will be. I don't know what that's going to look like, but it would be useful for anybody who is thinking of doing this to also offer their criteria, the ones that they are thinking about and they are using in making their proposals. I think that it is appropriate for us to set the rules, but it's also appropriate for us to at least encourage people who are making these proposals to send in their ideas about what is an appropriate level of restriction and rules before they do it so that by the time their proposal matures into a real application before the town that we'll have had a chance to think about it and to decide what do we want to have as restrictions. You have 15 seconds remaining. I am done. Thank you. Thank you very much, Bob. All right. The next commenter is Kathleen Bridgewater. Please unmute yourself. Give us your name and your address. Hi. Good evening. I'm Kathleen Bridgewater and I live on Shootsbury Road. Thanks for conducting this hearing on a temporary moratorium on the idea of having large-scale solar installations in town. I live on Shootsbury Road. I am in a long-time supporter of solar energy going back decades. I recognize the need for increasing electricity that is clean of increasingly sequestering carbon dioxide, protecting our environment, protecting our water supply, and reducing the amount of energy that we require as human beings. To ensure that Amherst can make smart decisions on all proposals submitted for solar energy installations, a temporary moratorium on large-scale permits is essential. This means rejecting rash ideas already suggested of sacrificing 300 acres of land in Amherst before such a study is even done. As many unfortunate towns now realize, it is far preferable to think and plan ahead than to regret errors made in haste. How we can have optimal safe energy production within the town and the region must be examined carefully. Places where minimal regulations have been imposed on industrial plant installers have sometimes experienced appalling damage to natural resources and neighboring properties. The catastrophic Williamsburg-Sturm runoff was avoidable had that town prepared themselves in advance to assert regulations over what turned out to be incompetent developers. I recommend that everyone in Amherst watch the interview with Emily Cohen to see for themselves what happens when a deluge carves gullies, uproots, enormous trees, and deposits foot-deep sludge over the forest floor. That video is available at Smart Solar Western Massachusetts. Without a properly founded solar bylaw, we too risk degradation of our land and water by flood, fire, or chemical pollution. To have necessary foresight, we need first to analyze all aspects of how solar energy can be generated while protecting the environment, public health, town and private water supplies, town finances, and adhering to the Amherst master plan. Without a well-crafted law, free of preconceived notions, we can expect repeated oppositional deliberations with solar developers that make it impossible for the town to do its diligence for the company. You're going to wrap it up? Yes, I will. So we need breathing time, and we need a moratorium and a bylaw to do this job for solar regulation that is done well. Thank you so much for your work. Thank you, Kathleen. And it looks like the last commenter is Laura Green. Please unmute yourself and give us your name and your address where you live. Good evening, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. My name is Laura Green. I do not live in Amherst, although I have dear friends and family in Amherst, and I'm very fond of the town. I fully support the moratorium. The small town in which I live has its power supplied entirely by two wind turbines. One of the wind turbines is cited at the Old Town Dump, and the other is cited at our public high school. I fully support the comments that were made by previous speakers, including the notion that large solar arrays are not the best way to replace fossil fuel powered energy. Thank you very much. Good luck. Thank you, Laura. Okay. So that concludes the public comment on this subject. So, board, it is now just about eight o'clock, and I think maybe this is the good time to take our five minute break for whatever you need to go do for five minutes, and we'll come back. Why don't we come back right at eight o'clock? That should be about six minutes from now. Go ahead and turn off your video and mute your microphone. All right, as people come back, please turn on your video. You can stay muted just so we know that you're back, and we can see that we have enough people to resume. Looks like we're still missing Andrew, but everybody else is back. Andrew, are you there? Well, let's see. I don't know where Andrew is, and I wonder whether we should start some deliberation and hope that he joins us soon. So, board members, I guess I'll open this up. Lynn, I see your hand. Would you like to say something? I would. First of all, I'd like to thank the people who've taken time out of their evening to come and speak tonight and also to the planning board for hearing this. Many people, several of you, have characterized this effort as trying to slow down sustainability. That is just simply not true. While we're here talking about ground mount, we're in the process of planning the net zero school and net zero library, putting solar on our landfill, putting solar on Hickory Ridge. None of those projects are stopped by this. The only thing this is about is solar mount. That's it. It has nothing else to do with any other efforts that continue to go forward in Amherst. Thank you. Thank you, Lynn. Still not seeing Andrew. Okay, board members, here you are, Andrew. Thank you. Okay. Chris, is there anything you would like to say before we get into this? I did see that in the packet, we had a kind of a revised version of the questions. And there were more answers than there were before. In addition, we had an email from is it Steve Judge of the ZBA with his thoughts on the moratorium. And I hope everyone on the board read those. And so I'll open it up now for any comments people would like to make questions. You know, whether you feel you have enough information, if there's other places you'd like to get opinions or testimony or whatever. Jack? Yeah, I did not see or get a chance to read the Steve Judge email. So I'm wondering if Chris or yourself could say what he had to say. Well, it was fairly lengthy. I think the first thing he said was that he did support a moratorium. And he talked about expecting more large solar arrays to come before you know, be proposed in the future. That it was a complicated question because it involves ecological and water conservation considerations in addition to kind of the usual development considerations. You know, the ZBA has had responsibility for most of these decisions in town that they've tried to be consistent and fair. And that he thought it would be useful for them to have a little more guidance for, you know, future proposals. You know, and that we would be well served to learn from what other towns have done and experienced. He also thought that the town might be more protected from legal liability of their decisions if there was a bylaw to support the decision as opposed to the more minimal guidelines that they now operate under. So that was kind of the five main points he made. He had some kind of an outline of the things he would think about in the process of developing a bylaw. So I guess I'll stop there. Chris, is there anything else you would like to say? No, I don't have anything else to say. Thank you. Okay. Jack, did that answer your question? Yeah, I mean, I think it's significant that he said that because I thought, you know, to this point, ZBA has done a good job. Well, we have like six approved, you know, solar fields in the town, four actually constructed, no issues. But for him to say that is something. And you know, it sounds like they would appreciate some support, you know, with a zoning bylaw structure, you know, behind all the decisions that they've had to make. Yeah, I guess, you know, I think he appreciated us asking. I don't know that they would have offered that without us asking. And I'm not aware of him making a request for a bylaw prior to this. Chris, you know, they've reviewed a number of projects. Has that come up before? That has not come up before that ZBA has not asked for a bylaw previously. Okay. Andrew? Thanks, Doug. A lot of sort of thoughts jotting down. None of them are organized. I'm not going to say all of them. I'll maybe do a couple and come back later. I've really been kind of all over the map in my head on this. I really appreciate some of the comments from Eric and Steve just reminding us of the fact that we're trying to get to solar capacity. We're trying to build solar capacity as quickly as possible. And that's an important thing to keep in mind. I know there's at least one person who suggested like who would possibly be against this. Well, I think that there's some folks who are very much solar supporters who have a very reasonable reason to be opposed to this because they want more solar. So I did want to point that out. I know coming up last week, I felt when we got the read out, I felt that we really have some good controls in place to help control the development. But hearing from some of the people who called in, and again, thanks to everybody who did do that, it's really helped me personally, is we still need to know the right things to control. And I think that getting some guidance from the scientific community might help us with that. So that's some of the things that have fluctuated in my head. Also just, I guess I'll go through more of these, would be a question for all of us is like, how long do we think working through a bylaw would reasonably take? And I know that, you know, we've had a history of it taking while, but we've also done a lot of them. So how much time would a moratorium slow us down? If it wasn't clear to people who called in, I think I would suspect that exception. I won't say that. I will say I am absolutely supportive of having a bylaw. You can do both, right? I mean, you can work on the bylaw while still working on improving solar projects. It doesn't mean if like, if you don't support them, if you don't support the moratorium, that doesn't mean you don't want to buy a lot. I think everybody would like one. And we certainly heard that it would provide some really useful guidance. So another point that's important to me, you know, from a very cynical side, which I can be from time to time, is I understand that there's also like a really, there's a concern for, you know, what's happening in all of our backyards, you know, what if the science came back and said, hey, like these solar rays should be like three or four or five stories, right? We can be even more efficient. Like how would we feel about that if we got something that came back that might actually suggest that the best way to meet our solar goals is to produce something that is most disruptive to our, you know, the scenic nature of our community. So anyway, just something for folks to think about. But I really did want to say thanks to the all the attendees who raised their questions and shared your thoughts. It's helped me a lot. Thanks. Thank you, Andrew. And Janet, I see your hand. I have a bunch of questions. So I had, I also had, I had questions about the length of time of 18 months. And also I was surprised that large scale was just, it was an acre of solar array would be large scale. Like I thought it would be much bigger. And so I kind of wondered about the timing question. And if, you know, large scale could be two acres or five acres or something like that. So, you know, smaller projects could continue to go through. It's clear that, you know, a large project of 250 acres in a forest that is in a watershed has been considered for a watershed protection district was being considered as a possible forest reserve in our open space plan and master plan. That's a whole different level of disruption and choice about citing and impacts environmental impacts. I think we'd be far beyond the planning board of the ZBAs abilities to analyze in a permit hearing. And so so that was that's just sort of off the top of my head. I also had questions about, you know, I was recently at Carleton College in my ultimate Frisbee travels of this year. And they just, they basically are heating all their buildings and heating all their water with geothermal. They close their steam plant on May 21 2021. It was part of a five year plan. They had this huge wind turbine off in the field. And so they're obviously well in their way to reducing their carbon dioxide emissions. And they made me wonder what are UMass and, you know, Amherst College doing because they're especially UMass is such a huge institution. And they probably they have a lot of open fields on their thing. So I just wondered, are they in a similar path of going to zero and have specific plans and are they implementing them? So that was another question and a question of a geothermal like when I listened to Steve Roof at the EOA, the committee whose name I can letters I can never remember that nobody was talking about geothermal as a path to, you know, for as it's all electricity. And so I just wondered, is that I think the geothermal is still runs on electricity to run the pumps that, you know, run the fluid down the geothermal well and where the heat transfer takes place. So you need electricity to run the run the geothermal system. And so you need either wind or solar if you're not going to run a fossil fuel. So but it just in terms of instead of a heat pump, you know, or, you know, a system. So and also cooling. So I so there's other questions I had of what are you mass doing what is, you know, we know what Hampshire did with the least amount of money. And what is Amherst College do they have a commitment are they implementing various strategies to get to when we're calculating how does Amherst get there, they're part of the there. Does anybody have the answer to that question or Chris, I have a partial answer which is that I know Amherst College used geothermal when they were doing the renovations of the Lord Jeff, which is now the in at boltwood. I don't know about other installations of geothermal on their property, but I know that they they've been exploring that topic since I think 2014 or so. So that's probably one of their strategies. But do they have like a plan does you mass have a plan to get to zero or 50% or 20, you know, whatever. Well, I mean, I, I, I don't know how public the university has been with this yet. But I do know that they are looking at systems that include systems similar to what Carlton has done. Obviously, you can see that the university has installed a lot of solar array solar panels on parking lots and probably a few on on buildings. So, you know, I think I can say that they're actively thinking about it without getting in trouble with my employer. Um, so I just want to make another long point and actually not a question, but a point, which is it seems like the goal of moratorium is to address two questions. One of them is where where should we put the solar. And so at the energy and environment committee that we have, they were talking about a solar study to analyze the land of Amherst and say, you know, the goal is, you know, to reduce one of the appropriate sites. And the second question is, is first question is where the second question is how and what regulations are need to kind of balance and protect different interests and also, you know, do the best job. And so that's that seems that makes sense to me because, you know, we have a forest area, we have amazing agricultural soils. We have a lot of balancing to do and it seems important to me not to just look at a forest or a farm as just like a solar site, because we could look at the high school athletic fields the same way and just say, Hey, there's an open land, we can throw some solar on there, but we know that athletic fields serve other purposes. And it seems completely, you know, to me that the forest and farmlands offer benefits other than sequestering carbon, although they're very good at that. You know, they produce they produce food, you know, oxygen, wood, incredible habitat. You know, like there's the New England forests have grown back, and they in the spring have a inhalation of carbon dioxide equivalent to the Amazon. And so we're part of that forest and also providing, you know, habitat for, you know, migration and, you know, genetic diversity, water retention, drinking water. So I think we're looking at these resources, not just as like, where can we get the biggest cart, you know, where can put the array and who can produce, you know, take up the most carbon dioxide. We can start looking at every part of Amherst for that. And that's the purpose and think of the study to say where we can get the best bang for a buck, but also trying to balance these interests. And, you know, I think a lot of people are kind of shocked that you would be picking forests. And I want to listen to Steve Ruth's presentation online. The state plan, the smart program was like, wasn't saying, you know, cut down your forest for solar rays, but to protect them. And for all the reasons you can imagine. And so I just, I do think we need to study this and look at it and figure it out, like, where are the best spots, you know, maybe prime farm soils should be protected. But, you know, worse ones shouldn't be ones that we can't bring back should be great spots for solar arrays. We might have solar arrays sitting on some of the best soils in not only Massachusetts, but in the country. And that's an impact. And that's something we've given up. And we do need more local agricultural and food. And so I think that's my pitch for taking some time to collect information. But I do have questions like, do we need 18 months? And could we make large scale little larger so we can have smaller projects go through? Thank you. Jack. Chris, do you want to say anything before Jack goes? I just wanted to mention the fact that Steve Ruth did say at one point in something that I listened to some lecture that he gave that he felt that Amherst's share of solar power for the state of Massachusetts would be around 300 acres. So that might give you a sense of, you know, what the scale would be in Amherst. And the other thing I wanted to say is that I think that it's going to take a year to 18 months if we are planning to do a solar assessment as part of establishing a solar bylaw. So if those two things are going to happen together, first of all, we have to get, we have to hire somebody to do the solar assessment for us, then they have to do it. And if we appropriate money now, we might not have it available until July, which is normal. But you know, of course, Town Council can do different things at different parts of the year. But anyway, my guess is it's going to take at least a year, probably 18 months. And we do need to hire somebody to help us with the solar assessment and think about that 300 acres. Thanks. Okay. And I will mention that I think the assessment that Steve Roof had done was based on our population as a percentage of this total state population, which if you if you think about how that would play out in the more densely populated parts of the state, they wouldn't have area in which to have a raise or or, you know, that are commensurate with their population percentage. So my guess is that there's going to be, frankly, a political will from the eastern part of the state to locate most of the solar arrays in the western part of the state. I mean, I could easily be wrong, but that's just seems like the way it's likely to go. If in fact, solar is really, you know, becomes a prevalent resource. The woman that called at the end who was lived, I guess on the ocean shore and in a town where they had a couple of wind turbines. First of all, you know, we're not in an area with prime winds as far as I can tell. And, you know, I think maybe it was Andrew that said what if solar arrays were a lot taller than they are. I just wonder how this town would deal with having a 300 foot wind turbine that was visible from every point in town. So, you know, there may be no perfect answer here, and we may have to do what we have to do rather than what we want to do. Andrew. Is Jack, I'm sorry. Did you forget about me, Doug? Yeah, I did. Oh, my. So, hey, I have to interject my science background a little bit in this. And, you know, I know you, Hannah has, you know, does a lot, you know, on a, you know, regional or national scale, but there's this been a lot of things. I mean, so many things that we could digress upon. You know, Janet bringing up, you know, geothermal. And I agree with your response, Doug, you know, the geothermal needs other green energy because of the, you know, the logical. I'm a heat flow guy from, from, you know, my graduate studies. So, but, but not a geothermal energy person. But anyway, I guess, you know, I'm, I've heard really good comments on both sides of this issue. I guess I get a little bit alarmed when a moratorium is kind of pushed with regard to one project. And I know nothing about the project that has been discussed in detail, you know, you know, from, from like a third party sense. And I just, I think that's odd because everything this, you know, Amherst has done to this point with regard to their solar developments have been, have been good, have been successful. Maybe Rob Mora can speak on that. But so I'm a little bit disturbed that there's, there's one project I know nothing about that, you know, butters and others are, I mean, they're talking about, and this is what this whole moratorium is about. Whereas we have had a successful run of, you know, permitting of projects, you know, of four that already been built. Looks like what, 0.3 acre, eight acre, 16 acre, 12.4 acre, they've all been built and no issues that I've, that I'm aware of. And then we have to approve that are 26.5 acres and eight acres, but they have not been built at this point in time. And I, you know, I think Steve Roof is very compelling about the whole thing with forest versus, you know, we need, we need solar, we need a couple more, couple more hundred acres of solar and Amherst. And the SMART program was all about, hey, first cut, let's put it on brownfields, landfills, et cetera. But the fact of the matter is, we don't have enough acreage to build on those. They're just not significant. You're talking about like a quarter acre property that might be a brownfield. You can't do solar on that, but that was the state's, you know, you know, foresight that let's, let's put it in, you know, areas that, that will be most beneficial with regard to, you know, you know, renewal of, of compromised, you know, properties. But it's just in, in essence, it just doesn't, there wasn't much to go in that route. So that, you know, now we're looking at, you know, agricultural lands, we're looking at forests. And, but, you know, Steve Roof's argument with regard to the, you know, carbon equation for solar versus forest is, you know, fairly, I mean, how can you argue with that? That's very convincing. So what else, what else do I have? Anyway, again, Steve Judge, you know, you know, making his comments, you know, I took note of those. And, you know, so that's my two cents. Okay, Jack, thank you. Now to Andrew. Thanks. So two other quick comments and then a question would be from some of the feedback we got. I think, I think Lenore may have said a while, I think she spoke last week as well in terms of the, the math equation is that it's more than just a math equation, right? Like if you just take a look at the, what the yield is, that, that won't give you an answer, which might be very compelling to move forward. But, you know, I thought she and others did a good job of mining. So there's, there's a larger ecosystem here that is hard to really put a math value on. Also, I think Jack Hirsch made a point, which I'm not sure if I'm thinking exactly what he's thinking, but this does seem like a sector that is evolving quite rapidly. And if you just sort of look at kind of the miniaturization of certain other technologies, this certainly seems like it's one that's ripe for that. Again, I don't know much about science, but I've, I've thought of this almost as like, you know, those old satellite dishes that people had in their yards, which were like 18 feet tall, and now they're 18 inches. Like, are we on the cusp? Again, I don't know the science well enough. Maybe we're on the cusp of being able to incorporate some of those technologies. The question I had, so Chris, you said 18 months is too long to sort of do the suitability or I'm sorry, 18 months, we would need about 18 months in your estimation is could this be decoupled? Could we have like a, like a short component where we essentially build out the bylaw using all of these other bylaws that have been built out across the state? And then concurrently to that, we do kind of our suitability analysis. Is there a way that we might be able to, you know, cut in on that 18 month a little bit, still make some really meaningful progress, not signal to potential developers that, you know, we're, we're not, you know, we're not open for business. I'm wondering if there's a way we could phase this, such that we could get controls in place. People would have an understanding of what to expect. The answer is really, we don't know where we're going to put this. So, I'd love to take your thoughts. Okay. Thanks, Andrew. Chris? So, based on what I know now, I think that we could decouple it. I feel like we know a lot about solar bylaws from looking around the state and seeing what other cities and towns are doing and Pioneer Valley Planning Commission put out a pretty hefty book of guidelines. I can't remember if I sent you all a link to that or not. But I don't know a lot. And I have heard from Stephanie Ciccarello, who is the staff person for the ECAC, and others that they believe that a solar assessment and a bylaw should go hand in hand. So, I am not the expert on that. My personal opinion is that they could be decoupled. And we could move ahead with the bylaw while the solar assessment is going on. But that's just my personal opinion based on my current knowledge. Okay. Thanks. Thanks, Chris. Janet, you've had a lengthy comment already. Is there anybody else that wants to comment? All right. Well, Johanna, you raised your physical hand. I'll go with you. And my invisible hand, too. Oh, yeah. There it is. And your beige wall. Someday we'll change the color of this room. Doug, I think you skipped over, Tom. You're right. I didn't see it until now. No, mine's invisible like Johanna's. It's okay. Johanna, you can go ahead. Okay. All right. So, sharing thoughts. We know we need to grow solar if we're serious about tackling climate change. As a community, we need to make sure we do our share, right? We have 100% renewable law on the books. We can't just expect to import all that clean energy. We got to do our share, whether that's 300 acres or 500 acres. Most likely, I mean, we've been a leader in the past when it comes to clean energy. I would like us to walk the walk when it comes to solar. So, I'm thinking let's definitely pursue the solar study and figure out what are the areas where we want to make sure we direct solar to and potentially we incentivize that or disincentivize it in other areas. So, let's definitely do that assessment. Let's get a bylaw together. Taking all this good feedback back and all the work that's been done. But I don't think we need to let those two things slow down our progress now. And so, I'm still not convinced that a moratorium is needed. We have section 3.340 that dictates energy facilities. It's worked well for the projects to date. There's no reason why, while we're working on the solar bylaw and doing the study, we can't continue to allow those rules to apply. I just haven't been convinced by the arguments I've heard tonight. And then I do think that as solar adoption continues, the technology is going to keep getting better. I was just looking at a report that came out in October this year and said that the median solar panel installed in 2019 was 37 percent more efficient than the median solar panel installed in 2010. So, basically, if we installed a solar array in 2010 and replaced it with panels now, we'd get 130 percent more power from that area. So it's not totally game changing. It's not micro, but it's getting better. Those are my thoughts. All right. Thank you, Tom. Thanks, Doug. I raised this last week, and I think Andrew tried to raise it again here in this kind of decoupling. And I forget who it was, one of the people who called in mentioned about chewing gum and walking at the same time. This idea that we can be responsible in two ways rather than stopping everything seems to be something that I think we can try to accomplish, whether that's decoupling these things and putting some regulations in place in the short term or whether it is finding the right way to move forward in the meantime. Because, for me, to be honest, we really do have a short timeframe. And the numbers that are coming out of the ECAC are staggering, you know, where we need to be in one year and two years and five years. And if we lose 18 months of that time, that means we're going to more radically have to alter our landscape over a shorter period of time, which is going to be much more dramatic for people. And so I think that, you know, we need a plan, but I think we need to keep moving forward with the opportunities that are there. And I hear a lot of people, you know, talking about the forest and the watershed and this notion of the ecosystem, which I truly believe in and I truly support that. And, you know, I'm a person who spends a lot of time out in the woods and I truly enjoy the woods for what they are. And I also happen to run along the Robert Frost Trail and happen upon this beautiful landscape that's full of photovoltaics. And it's a really beautiful spot along the Robert Frost Trail that I come across all the time. And so those things can be a part of our ecosystem as well, if done correctly. And I think that's where our solar bylaw comes in. But I think in the meantime, we can allow those two things to coexist in our landscape. And like I said, I think there is an urgency here. And the proposal of 18 months to me feels really damaging to the progress that we've made and where we can go forward. And also one comment I also have is I did hear a lot of people talking about the forest and wanting to protect the forest. And while I would have a really hard time approving something that clear cut this much land, but this moratorium is going to stop projects from going in a lot of other places that aren't clear cutting forests. And that aren't having the same, yeah, no, the moratorium stops a lot will stop a lot of projects that aren't just about clear cutting lands will stop all solar projects over one acre. So that to me feels really problematic for the short term. And I think it's going to have a huge negative impact on the perception of Amherst as a progressive or environmentally friendly neighborhood. So those are my thoughts at the moment. Thanks, Tom. Janet, I haven't forgotten you. Maria. Thanks. I'm not going to reiterate all the great points on both sides. But I will say that where I stand is that I've never liked moratoriums. I feel like they're very reactionary rather than being proactive about doing good. They're often seen, in my mind, more as a negative as far as the bigger picture and the bigger, you know, sort of community. But what I do agree with, and I think that this dialogue has really been great for is that we all can agree that we desperately need a bylaw and studies to understand what other towns and cities have already done in this state. So I think that is great that this was brought up because now we know maybe the next Town Council group can bring this as a priority to whoever in Town Hall needs to work on this as far as getting this moving forward. But yeah, I still, none of the arguments that I heard tonight, which I agree with a lot of other playing board members, I really appreciate them coming out and voicing their concerns. But I still feel moratorium is not the way to fix the issue. I think moving forward with actual steps with hiring someone, getting all of the staff on board to push this forward, having Town Council support, I think those are great things that we all should work towards. But I can't really stand behind the moratorium idea. But yeah, great points on both sides. And I think we're all kind of thinking we want the same goals as just how to achieve them. I don't feel like the moratorium is the right way. Okay, thanks, Maria. I'm just going to say make a couple of points from my as my contribution. And then Janet, you can go again. The first thing I've been sort of struggling with is just how this is really different from the downtown moratorium that we considered several months ago. You know, that was many of the arguments made for that moratorium was that we needed to stop everything and plan. And that seems to be the same argument for this moratorium proposal. And I've tried to figure out how is it really different. I guess there is some difference in that there are more ecological and landscape implications to this versus the downtown moratorium. But we do have we seem to have a process that has worked so far. We have a conservation commission that does get involved when watershed resources are involved. They will do that in any case. And if when I look at the typical conditions that the ZBA imposes, they address many of the concerns that residents have expressed. So I am I wasn't in favor of the downtown moratorium. And I don't really see why we need this one. I come down in the same location where several other board members have have come to that. Sure, let's let's expedite and, you know, all hands on deck to do a solar study. Let's start talking about a solar bylaw next next meeting if if if somebody's got something ready to talk about. But I think, you know, to use the metaphor that Steve or whoever used, we probably can walk and chew gum at the same time. And as I I think I asked last at the last meeting, you know, is our process so broken right now that there is a huge risk that the one or two or however many projects might happen over the next 18 months are likely to be an unmitigated ecological disaster. I haven't seen that that is likely to be the case. It seems like we have a responsible ZBA and conservation commission and staff. And so I'm I'm not convinced of the crisis. If you ask me what the crisis is, it's an ecological climate change price crisis. And sitting at sitting out sitting out for 18 months just doesn't feel like the right answer to me. Someone one of the residents talked about how they don't trust large companies just in general. You know, large companies enable the accumulation of capital to do large projects to meet our large needs as a society. So I'm not I'm not swayed, you know, and I unless the town has a way to raise money to do two, four, six hundred acres of solar, we're going to be depending on the private sector. And then finally, it seems like given that that it's taken us almost a year to do a few really minor bylaw changes. I am skeptical that we can do a solar bylaw in, you know, less than 18 months. And because I think we're going to have discussion about where should it be? Or or where do we want to incentivize? And this town is densely enough populated, and there's enough views of beautiful, pristine landscape that we're going to have a lot of arguments about who has to have the solar. And I just think it's going to take a while. So that's where I stand at the moment. Janet, why don't you go ahead? I know you're going to need to leave us soon. Thank you. I had tried to keep it to like three minutes. Yeah, I just actually just had to I was wondering, I did not see the link to the other bylaws, because I think that would be useful for us to look at to see how detailed they are. And, you know, we're an interesting town because we're not urban and we're not suburban and we're not rural. We just have pieces of all those things. So I think, you know, maybe the suburban rural would be probably useful if you have bylaws from those areas to see how, you know, how they deal with the sensitive environmental issues and, you know, neighborhood issues. So one more quest to see other bylaws. I also would like some more information why so many organizations nationally, internationally, statewide do not recommend cutting forests for solar. And so that that came out from the presentation I listened to from the ECAC. So I'd like to see, like, get more information on that because it is that is more focused on forest. I would throw farmlands in there too. And then I have a question for Chris, which is, could the ZBA or PB, the planning board say, you know, if they got a permit application for a large cutting operation or, you know, farmland, do we have the capacity to say, this is not an appropriate area for a solar array because there's too many watershed impacts or too many environmental impacts? Like do we have, under our bylaw, can we reach to sections of our bylaw that would give us the ability to say that or to cut a project down very significantly? And then would we survive the legal challenge? I guess this is the second question. All right. Chris, do you want to say anything to that or you'd need to come back with an answer? I just wanted to say that we do have 53G, which allows us to hire third party experts. So both the Conservation Commission and the ZBA and the planning board have that ability. So if there are questions that relate to specific criteria that either any of those three boards use to make a determination, they can hire with the funds from the developer. They can hire an expert to help them to figure things out. Okay. Thank you. All right. Jack. Yeah. So again, Janet, you know, brought up, you know, forests and agricultural lands. Basically, we have no other available lands other than, you know, some very minor, you know, roofs and parking lots to develop solar. So that's why forests and agricultural lands are under consideration. I mean, that's just, we're not going to get there. We're not going to get to where we need to be unless, you know, we look at all the land. And I think Steve Roof, you know, was pretty definitive in terms of, you know, the impact of, you know, removing a forest area to, you know, install a, you know, a solar development. But essentially what I wanted to say was that, you know, we have been talking about water resources. And I have been a party to, you know, as an expert witness with regard to water resources impacts on a solar array versus, you know, the existing forest there. And those arguments really come down to implementation of a of a sweep with a stormwater pollution prevention plan. And so otherwise, solar really increases groundwater recharge. Solar does not bring any known, you know, contamination other than the brief construction period where you might have, you know, some construction vehicles there, some, you know, that or equipment that has, you know, hydraulic oil. But that's really minor. But forests, in fact, they suck a lot of water out of the ground and evaporate it. And, you know, from, from a groundwater availability situation, you're, you're, you're better off with with the solar field. But again, the, the sweep which controls the erosion and all that, it's very important. But I think maybe Rob Moore can speak to that aspect because that's, that's, that's the real crux of a successful solar development. And, you know, and again, the nightmares that we've heard and what's Williamstown, I forget Williamsburg, okay, but I just, it comes down to oversight and monitoring and a bylaw really wouldn't, you know, affect that aspect of it. That's, that's on the town, that's on, you know, the developer and all that. But maybe Rob can speak to that aspect. I would be interested here, you know, because it seems like we've, we have a good, you know, oversight on a local level construction project. You want, shall we go ahead and ask Rob if he'd like to make any comments? Yes. Well, yeah, first, so I'm not going to, yeah, I'm not an engineer. So I think some of that does fall into engineering for, for good response and advice. But, you know, what I can mention is that I think a lot of those points are accurate. We are, you know, working with this, I work with the ZBA on these permits. And we do focus a lot on the maintenance plan, both during construction and after construction, that's really important. And we are still learning about that and understanding more and more about that. And I think the bylaw will in the future be able to help us more. But I just want to mention that, you know, we haven't had a really difficult project yet. You know, we haven't had a very large land disturbance, tree clearing project. And in fact, the most complicated one may in fact be the Hickory Ridge project that was recently permitted because of all the resource areas, the habitat sensitivity. And the zoning board really, really worked hard at that. I mean, in fact, there's conditions that, you know, require a one-for-one replacement of 192 trees that will be removed for that project. So that's a really small number of tree removal in relation to what we could see with, you know, 10 or plus acres of disturbance for some of these larger projects. So, you know, they're all good points, Jack, and I agree. But I do think that we haven't been faced with the really, really hard questions and issues yet to respond to, which is really why we need this bylaw to help us with that. Okay. Thanks, Rob. Andrew. Thanks, Doug, for letting me talk three terms. This will be quick. I would just say, you know, I hope, and I hope this comes up as we go through the bylaws that, you know, we've talked about the overall success of the projects to date. It's like the success depends on what our measures of success actually are. And I think it's important as we go through this. And again, hopefully this will be informed by our research that we need to have some clear goals that we can solve for, that we can aspire to. And I think it's just going to be very multi-dimensional. And we would want to make sure that we account for that. And I guess the other thing, I'm sure you're looking to wrap up, students, you're like, I agree. I think the 18 months is just too long. I'd love to see that be less. I'd love to see it be decoupled. I'd love to see us chew gum and walk at the same time. But I think that there is a really important need for us to give this immediate attention. I don't know what the new town council is going to have for our priorities. But hopefully this will be right at the top of the list. Thanks. Well, I mean, we also can, to some degree, say it's a priority for us. And, you know, to the extent we have town staff support available, we could ask them to spend time on this as opposed to other things. Good point. I would put it on the top of my list. Thanks. So one question I wanted to ask everyone is, is there information you'd like to have that we don't have yet? We've heard from Steve Judge for the ZBA. Chris has told us that the Conservation Commission really doesn't get involved unless there's a sort of designated water resource involved in a project. We haven't heard directly from ECAC, but it does sound like several of us have listened to the recording of their meeting last week. I think it was. I haven't listened to their meeting from yesterday or from this afternoon yet. You know, what more would we want to have before we took a vote? Andrew. Thanks again. To me, it would back to my last point is, are there some metrics that we should be thinking about that we're not thinking about that will help us understand whether we're actually providing appropriate guidance to meet our goals? Janet. So it would be helpful to me to see other bylaws and then also why this is for the moratorium. Yeah, and it would be helpful to me to understand why so many organizations say not to cut forests for a solar and actually farmland. And I think it's part of the state priorities on the smart program and, you know, internationally. So it seemed, you know, so I thought that was compelling to me. And there's there's a difference between a farm and a field too. But I just I just think that information, you know, if we're going against that advice by international experts, state experts and, you know, solar people, I'd like to know that. Okay. All right. Chris. I just wanted to say that I think that those two things are really relevant to writing a solar bylaw. But I'm not sure that they're crucial to making the decision about whether you want to have a solar moratorium or not. And being able to find that information about who says what about whether forests should be used or whether agricultural land should be used. I mean, I'm sure that there's a lot of research and that would be a kind of big project in my estimation to figure that out. And that would be more appropriate to do during the time that we would be doing our solar assessment and studying and and creating our solar bylaw than necessarily having that information in order to make the decision about whether you think a solar moratorium is good or not. And so that's all I have to say. Okay. Thank you. Dave Roof mentioned the organizations in his presentation. So well, Janet sounds like it might be worth going back and getting those names and having them ready ready for whenever we talk about this topic next. Well, you know, Doug, you said, do we need more information before we decide that? And I'm saying I feel like I would like that information. So that was answering your question. I'm happy to look that up too. I may have time. Okay. So, board, what would you like to do now? Should we continue this hearing to to some point in the future? Should we close the hearing and vote? We've heard that Janet would like to have a little more information. Chris? Two things. One, I just got a text from Jack saying that Steve Roof has his hand up, but also I wanted to mention the fact that the CRC will be holding their public hearing on this topic on January 10th, which is Monday. And so I don't know if they're going to close their public hearing that night or if they're going to continue it, but I just thought I'd mention that so you know kind of how to coordinate what you're doing with what the CRC is doing. And is it true that CRC generally prefers that the Planning Board has voted before they have their hearing? They do prefer that, yes. Yeah. So we really have tonight and then we have January 5th as our only opportunities before that meeting. And Lynn, I guess I can ask you, will the CRC meeting on the 10th consist of the new CRC with the new newly constituted board? The answer is yes, and therefore what they preferred in the last council may not be what they prefer in this council. Okay. Thank you. You had raised your hand. Did you have another reason for that? Okay, just to answer the question. So Chris, thanks for telling me that Steve and it looks like Martha are both among attendees who would like to comment. Why don't we bring Steve into the panelists so that he can comment? And Steve, if you can limit yourself to three minutes again, I think that would be helpful. Yes, just thank you very, very, very briefly speaking as an ECISM member. Now, just tonight before your meeting, the ECISC approved the letter that will be forwarded to you very soon, probably tomorrow, that basically is a summary of the presentation that I gave last month to the ECISC that many of you have seen online. So that's some additional information coming to you very soon. Thank you. Thank you. And Martha Hanner. Hello, Martha. I think you should be able to unmute yourself. We will help you. You can keep your comments in three minutes. Yes, thank you. Yes, I would just like to offer to be able to send a couple of research articles, one by Bill Mooma and a couple of others, about the need for the pro-forestation, for keeping the forest in order to draw down carbon dioxide. I mean, our goal and Amherst ought to be to try to maximize the lowering of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which means considering not just solar, but also then the drawdown and storage in our fields and forests. And Steve, it seems to me that when you were speaking earlier, you were giving us sort of a general number for balance of solar versus forest. I really think that acre per acre, from my understanding of what I've read, that it's about neutral or slightly in favor of the forest drawdown. It's certainly not overwhelmingly that the solar winds in acre per acre. And I think we need to consider both as well as the fact that most of Massachusetts renewable energy eventually is going to come from these deep water wind fields. And so we need to be careful about how much we say is our quote obligation to require from solar. So thank you all for your serious consideration of all this. And that's it. Thanks. All right, thank you. And if you do want to send some information to us, please send it to Chris Brestrup. She does a great job of collecting information that comes in and disseminating it to us. We do get a lot of information from the public. And I know I read all of it, even if I don't always agree with it. Thank you. Thank you. And one more public comment. I see Ivor Brick. Please limit yourself to no more than three minutes. Hi. It's actually Lenore Brick. I was bounced off the meeting over and over again. So I missed a lot of it. I think when we lost my audio, the way that you took me off made it impossible for me to go back. So it's me. Anyway, a couple of things to consider in response to some of the questions brought up by your board. Janet, I can probably get you some information, some more information about why environmental organizations are against solar and forests. I mean, one obvious reason is the forests don't grow back. It's not like you can replace the trees that you removed with trees. It doesn't work like that. A forest is not a tree plantation. It's a social community. It's a web that what happens under the ground and all the microorganisms that contribute to that ecosystem are as important as what's happening above ground. And carbon is stored in the ground and above ground, and it's not just about carbon. And the problem is we don't have the metrics to measure the services. The way that we think about solar and measuring emissions, non-emissions, we don't have that kind of math yet. It's being worked on, but it doesn't exist. And so there has to be a certain amount of respect for nature's technology and what has actually stabilized the climate since before humans have been here. And there's also a regional approach being worked on on the state level that might change the way we think about our town's obligation. It could be that Western Mass's job is to protect its forests and farmlands. It could be that's how we contribute to the region. That it's not that we have to create all the energy right here that we're using. We don't have those answers yet because the state, the region, the country is working on those questions right now because it's complicated because just like a bird goes from one area to the other, so does our ecosystem. It's not like Amherst can operate as an island. And so that's another thing that a moratorium or some pause would help with. I know there's all this fear that we're not going to progress, but if we pause, we can still keep moving with what we need to do. It's not like we're stopping what we need to do. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Lornaur. Okay, so Chris, I see your hand. I just wanted to say that if any planning board members or other people have information that they would like to disseminate, please send it to me and I would be happy to disseminate it. And so, Jen, depending on what research you're able to do, please send it to me and I will send it out to planning board members. Thank you. Yes. Thank you for that reminder, Chris. All right. So I think at this point, I'd like to ask for a motion to either close the hearing or a motion to continue the hearing. Does anybody want to do one or the other? I see a hand from Johanna. I see your both of your hands. I would move to close this hearing and subsequently take a vote. Okay. Chris, is there anything that we need to edit with that motion before we move forward? A motion to close the hearing and move to our vote? I think that is a fine motion. Fine motion. Okay. Excellent. And Janet? Well, I was going to move to continue the hearing to collect some more information. So you would not, so you would probably not second Johanna's? Well, I would second anyone's motion just so we can discuss it, but I'm kind of a prolific seconder. Okay. Thank you. And Jack? Jack, you're muted. Did Janet second? I think she did. I'm not sure what I did. I mean, you were asking what motions. I think she seconded a motion that she's probably going to vote against. Yeah. If she did not second it, I'll second it. Okay. So I can't, I have to wait to move to continue for more information. No, no. I think, I mean, if we vote, if you vote against closing the hearing, the hearing will stay open. That's true. I think I'm okay. Great. It's not clear to me who seconded. All right. Well, why don't we, why don't we give Janet the credit since she's a prolific seconder. Yes, I'll take it. Okay. Any further conversation of the board before we vote? Jack, your hand is back up. I just wanted to say that, you know, this, this concept of a deforestation to meet our solar goals. Steve, we've said we needed like 300 acres. We have somewhere short of 100 acres on the book. 300 acres is less than one half square mile. I don't think that should be associated with, you know, removing our force. I mean, it's just, it's such a small amount. And I just, just from the, from the, from the scale of, of numbers, 300 acres is not a lot. But, you know, we need it. And so these, these, you know, developments are like little chunks of the force, but it's not like miles and miles of clear cutting like New England was 100 years ago. We didn't have any trees, right? So just want to make that point for in terms of scale. Thank you, Jack. Andrew? Thanks, Doug. I'm just wondering, could we within the motion, I guess, is it possible to accommodate Janet's wish by just closing public hearing now, but just delaying our vote until the fifth? And then that way we can still collect information. Is that acceptable? Well, I mean, if we were going to go that route, or are going to go that route, I would recommend we just keep the hearing open. Yeah. You know, we learned our lesson this past summer when we closed some of the bylaw hearings. And, you know, people still wanted to make comments. And we learned from our town council that there really wasn't any need for us to close the hearing as quickly as we did. And in fact, we can still take public comment after the hearing is closed for bylaw measures. So I think, I think, you know, if we want to delay the vote, we probably ought to just continue. That's at least just my opinion. But I see you, Janet, but I thought I saw somebody else for a minute. So, okay, Janet, go ahead. So as you know, I'm not a fan of starting, looking at a zoning bylaw with the public hearing for these very constraints and then to do research and study and collect information. And so I would hope that we just continue for the next meeting to collect the information from ECAC. It's probably not time to ask concom over the holidays for that. But I do think we need more information. I think these are really big issues. And, you know, I'm sure the science is not certain, but we need to look at the best information we can get. So. Okay, thank you. Okay, so we have a motion that's been seconded. And the motion is to close the hearing and proceed to a vote. All right, so let's see. Let's start. Roll call. We'll start, Janet? No. Johanna? Yes. Maria? Yes. And Jack? So the vote is on. Do you want to close the hearing tonight? Okay. Yeah, I'm good with that. Yes. Tom? Hi. Andrew? Nay. And I am a nay. So it looks like it passes four to three, I believe. All right, so we have voted to close the hearing. And the second part of the motion was to go to a vote. So does anybody want to say anything else before we go through the vote? What are we voting on? So this will be a vote on whether we recommend to town council this bylaw to implement a moratorium. So a yes vote is in favor of instituting the 18 months moratorium. And a no vote is against recommending it to town council. Chris? So you need someone to make that motion? Right. So Johanna? I move to not recommend this moratorium to town council. Okay. Do we have a second? Andrew? I was actually going to make a motion that we adjust the moratorium period from 18 months. So just we'll do another back to back like confusing thing here. So I'm not seconding that motion. I would rather see the shorter time period with the ability to extend it so that we can keep things moving. So no to the second, for me at least. Okay. Tom? I second. Okay. So we have the motion and second it. Andrew, are you proposing an amendment to the bylaw? I would like to. I'm just not I'm not sure what the right timing would be for it, but I would like I would rather see a shorter moratorium that could be extended than an 18 month moratorium. And, you know, whether that's like six months, I'd love the idea of decoupling as well. I mean, I think that gets in the point where we're doing some surgery to this to this proposal. So I'm not sure the best way of going forward with that, but in my perfect world, they are decoupled. There is a very short mort, short moratorium, if at all, for us to implement a new article that leverages all this great work that's done across the Commonwealth already. So you don't have a specific amendment you would want to make? I don't have I don't feel like I can get concise enough with the timing for it, but I would love to have a recommendation that does decouple these. Well, I guess I do see multiple hands. Chris? Just wanted to say that I don't think that Andrew's amendment fits with Johanna's motion because her motion is to not recommend. So there's really not an opportunity to amend something that you're not recommending. Okay. And I guess I kind of feel like, you know, if we cut it in half or something, it's so short that there's really no point. You know, it's almost like we might as well just not have the moratorium that because it won't have made much of a difference if it's significantly shorter. Jack? Yeah, I just want to say that I, you know, definitely in favor of a solar bylaw, and they kind of wondered why the town, you know, didn't have one from the get go. But it, you know, it just, it puts more on the ZBA. They have demonstrated to do, you know, a good job. I mean, Rob mentioned, you know, some things that we would want to, you know, spend, you know, special attention to for, you know, particular projects that might be more of a, you know, clear cutting type project. But it's just, but I have to agree with some of the other board members there about a moratorium for this purpose that, you know, definitely yes on moving forward with a bylaw. Okay. Thank you, Jack. Janet? Oh, so is that a legacy hand? Actually, I forgot my thought, but I very quickly remembered it. I wonder if we can just push this discussion to our next meeting, because I can see we can go through a series of amendments and discussions and back and forth and things like that. Is there any harm just waiting for two weeks to people or do we want to just vote now? Well, we decided to close the hearing. We have a motion to vote in a second. Chris, do we have the option of just continuing until, I mean, we voted not to continue the hearing. Well, continuing your discussion is different from continuing the hearing. All right. So we can continue our discussion on January 5th. I think you can, but you would still open the meeting with your motion on the floor. On the table. Yeah. And, and we could, and by that time, we could have received some additional information in the mail or by email. All right. So why don't you take a vote now? Why don't we take a vote to whether to close discussion or not? Does that seem reasonable? And if we vote to, if we are, if we are, if we have a majority who don't want to close the discussion, then we'll continue, then we'll resume it in the next meeting. It's the same as call the question, isn't it? Yeah. That's probably the better. Okay. All right. Thank you, Chris. Does anybody want to call the question at this time? I see no one that wants to call the question and, okay, Andrew. Well, no, I just wanted to clarify isn't calling the question. Is that just saying we're going to vote on the motion that's on the floor? Yeah. Period. Yeah. That's the only way out. I'll call the question. Okay. Thank you. Does anybody want to second that? Jack? Yes. Okay. Second it. All right. Any further discussion? I see none. I see Johanna. I just wanted to quickly clarify that a yes vote here would mean that you agree with not sending the moratorium to town council and a no vote would say no, you do want to send the moratorium to town council. I think a yes vote here means that you are agreeing that the question has been called and you're agreeing that you're going to move forward with the vote at a later time. So you have to vote on the call the question. And then after you've done that, then we can vote on the previous motion that Johanna made. And I see Lynn was the master of this type of thing. Not in your head that that's right. Guest parliamentarian. Yeah. Okay. Thank you all for that guidance. So let's do a roll call on calling the question. And I guess I will go first. I will say no. Janet? I'm going to say no, thinking that this will delay our vote till the next meeting, but I'm not 100%. Yes. Okay. Okay. So I'm saying no. Okay. Johanna, call the question. It's very confusing. No, I, it's funny. I recognize that the period for discussion is over. You know, I, but I'm going to, is it okay if I share a couple of thoughts and then I will cast my vote? Like I hear, I see the appetite from members of the board to get more information and to get this letter from ECAC and to do a little bit more of this research. I think for me personally, you know, at, so yes, I'm going to call the question. All right, Maria. I think I'm a yes. Okay. Jack. Yes. Tom. Yes. And Andrew. No. I'm seeing four yes votes and three no votes. So the question is called and we will go right into the vote on Johanna's motion to not recommend this by-law proposal to town council. So a yes is that we will not recommend it and a no is that we will recommend it. I try to keep that straight and chew gum and walk. Okay. So again, a yes. I'm trying, this is for me. A yes is to not recommend. All right. So starting, starting with Johanna. Yes. Maria. Yes. Jack. Yes. Tom. Hi. Andrew. Nay. Janet. No. And I am a yes. So we have now voted to not recommend this by-law to town council. I believe it's five to two. All right. As far as I know, that's yes. There's nothing else we need to do with this hearing tonight. And we now, it now moves to town council or CRC. Doug, I'm going to leave, but good night everybody and Merry Christmas also and happy holidays. Thank you. Thank you for staying with us, Janet. Thank you. I want to you're going to have a really short night. Yes. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Good night. Goodbye. Okay. That was item five on our agenda. We now move to item six, old business. First item is to remove, review examples of planning board minutes from Amherst in 2007 and eight and selected communities in Western Massachusetts. We're going to talk about what we want from our minutes. And then we're going to have, I believe it's four sets of minutes to approve this evening. But the hope is that this initial discussion will help guide the work of our staff in preparing minutes. And I'm actually, I'm sorry that Janet has had to leave us since she's been such a vocal advocate for very thorough minutes. And I think she's been in the minority. It's now 24 minutes after nine. And I guess I'm wondering, Chris, would you be okay if we postponed this discussion of sample minutes and kind of what we want until Janet can join us? But tonight we would go ahead and review and probably approve the four sets of minutes you have given us. Chris, what do you think of that? Yes, I think that would work very well because I think Janet needs to be part of the discussion when you talk about what, what do you expect for minutes? Okay. All right. So we will pass by the old business item six on the agenda. And we have now item seven, the minutes. So I saw four sets of minutes to be approved. And in one case you, you gave us two sets of minutes for one date. The July 14th minutes had the minutes as I had drafted them, and you had made minor corrections, mostly consisting of correcting my erroneous spelling of Marine Pollock's name. But then Janet had done an extensive set of edits to those minutes. And I saw it. So with those minutes, our first decision is do we like either of them, I guess. Andrew? I was wondering, yeah, if we would just vote on the three that didn't include her comments and she is not here to speak to them. It was very extensive. I sort of, I'm not exactly sure why. Okay. I have no objection to that. Chris, other than the two subdivision applications, do we have any other agenda items on the 5th of January? I think you may have, Amir, McChie, coming back to talk to you about whether he wants Brick or Hardy Plank siding on his building on Southeast Street. But I'm not sure about that. And then you have the two subdivisions. And at this point, maybe Pam is a better person to ask if we have anything else on the January 5th meeting. Pam keeps good track. Thank you, Pam. I think I agree with you, Chris. We have the two subdivision applications and you have Amir. And that's what I have. We can't hear you, Pam. Sorry. I agree with Chris. Okay. All right. So I guess the other question, Chris, I had was those July 14 minutes are among the ones that we had the open meeting request about. Have either of those requestors been expressing any dismay that those have not been completed? No. And I would like to ask, Pam, were the July 14th minutes as drafted posted? Do we know that? Because some of the minutes that were just in draft form have been posted, but I'm not sure about July 14th. I'm not sure either. Because I'm not sure both of these have been posted. The ones, the original ones from Doug, I think are posted. So that may be good enough to satisfy the request, the open meeting law request, if the original ones from Doug were posted as drafts. All right. Then why don't we postpone the conversation about the July 14th minutes? The next set was from September 14th. Chris, do you want to say something about those? Yes. I wanted to thank Andrew for writing these and also to apologize that I put Pam's name at the bottom. So on page six, at the very bottom, it really should be Andrew McDougal who drafted these minutes. And here Andrew. All right. So we could approve those minutes with that edit. Andrew. Yeah. And I wanted to apologize. I wrote these on the train in the morning, and so like, Maria, I got your name wrong. Johanna, I got your name wrong. So I usually try to pay close attention to that. I apologize. I missed it. Were those names incorrect also in the version that was distributed in our packets? No, they were corrected, but you'd see the red ones. You have what do you call it, a track changes version in your packets. So it shows all the spelling issues, but other than spelling, Mr. McDougal did a marvelous job. Okay. Be careful. You don't do too good a job, Andrew. Yeah. You could be our next clerk. Okay. So could I have a motion to approve those minutes with the edits that Chris made and with the one additional edit that Chris just mentioned to replace the name at the end? Okay, Andrew. So moved. Tom. One second. Okay. Any further discussion? Jack. Just was wondering what Andrew's technique was for coming up with these wonderful minutes. You need to be riding a train. Having three and a half hours with nothing else to do and watching this video. I live through this meeting like two and a half times. Uh-huh. Okay. So let's go through and vote on these minutes. These are the September 14th minutes. Maria? Approve. Jack? Approve. Tom? Aye. Andrew? Aye. I'm an aye. Janet's absent and Johanna? Aye. All right. So that's six, zero, one, I guess. One in abstention. Okay. The next minutes are from November 17th. Chris, do you want to say anything about those? I would like to say thank you to Pam for pounding these out in record time. Thank you, Pam. And I'll second that expression. All right. Does somebody want to move these minutes? Tom? So moved. All right. Secondly, Andrew? Second. Okay. Let's go right into it. Maria? Approve. Jack? Approve. Andrew? Aye. I'm an aye. And Johanna? Aye. All right. That's six votes to approve and one absent. And then December one minutes. Any comments on those? Other than those are even more lightning fast than the November 17th minutes. This is great. We might actually be just about caught up at the end of the year. Okay. Anybody want, I'll move these. Let's, I make a motion to accept the December first minutes. Anybody want to second that? Tom? Second. Thanks for changing the color of your hand. Okay. Let's vote on those. Maria? Approve. Jack? Approve. Aye. Andrew? Aye. I'm an aye. And Johanna? Aye. And Tom needs to teach me how to do that. All right. Okay. That's the end of item seven on the agenda. Chris, do we have any new business? We do. I think I put, I sent you all an email, which wasn't correct. Anyway, we have letters that we should have sent last fall when you made your choices about your officers. And these letters are written to the registry of deeds and the land court. And what you need to do now under new business topics not reasonably anticipated is to vote to authorize your officers who are Doug Marshall, Tom Long, and Maria Chow to sign documents having to do with subdivision control law. And this includes ANR plans and preliminary subdivision plans and definitive subdivision plans, anything having to do with subdivision control. You're authorizing your officers to sign those, to sign those documents. So I think you could probably make a joint motion. Well, I guess you don't really need to make a joint motion. You just need to make one motion to agree that you're, that you are authorizing your officers Doug Marshall, Tom Long, and Maria Chow to sign documents having to do with subdivision control law. All right. Does anybody want to make that motion? All right, Johanna. I move to allow our officers to sign documents related to the subdivision control law. Thank you, Andrew. Second. All right. Any discussion? Andrew. Yeah, we still, Chris, this is, we need to come into the office to sign these. You mentioned either today or tomorrow or Thursday or Friday. Is that right? Yes, that would be these documents as well as the decisions that I sent you this afternoon. There were two decisions for Christine Lindstrom, and they're essentially the same as the minutes for November 17th. They were pretty much taken from that. So I would ask you to sign those four documents, the two decisions for Christine Lindstrom and the two letters. And if you could do that Thursday or Friday, that would be great. Okay. You have to take the vote first on the letters. Right. And did Andrew second Johanna's motion? I believe Andrew did. Yes. Okay. All right. And I'm not seeing any more discussion. Let's go on through the vote. Jack. Hi. Tom. Hi. Andrew. Hi. I'm and I, Janet. I'm rather not Janet Johanna. Hi. And Maria. Approve. Yeah. All right. Six, six, zero. All right. Any other new business, Chris? No other new business. All right. All right. Then any form A's, A&R's? Yes, we have two form A's and maybe Tam can bring them up. Can you see them? Yes. So the first one is Emerson College has property at the corner of Route 9, which is also Northampton Road and South Pleasant Street. And the property that is outlined in the yellow is the property on which sits that beautiful yellow building that sits up high on the hill at the corner of this big intersection. And then I think it also includes the former president's mother's house. And it, I believe it also includes their planetarium. I'm not sure if they call it the planetarium, but anyway, it includes a planetarium. So that's how I would describe that property. So what they're doing is they're changing the property lines for that property outlined in yellow, as well as the properties that Pam has outlined in either black or dark green here. And now she'll show you how they're changing those properties. And so this is oriented a different way. Northampton Road is on the right and South Pleasant Street is on the bottom of the drawing. So the yellow house is in the lower right corner of this property. So what they're doing is they're, overall, what they're doing, I'll explain that to you. They are building a new building. And the new building is going to be sort of farther to the left on this drawing. This is kind of a difficult one to explain. You'll be seeing it very soon. Anyway, they're building a new building on one of these lots. They're building a parking lot on another lot. And they want to make the property lines suitable to allow these things to occur. So what they're doing is they have five lots to begin with. And they are adjusting the property lines. So if you look at the lot that's shown as existing lot two, and it's in the upper right hand corner of this image here, that lot right there, they're expanding that lot a little bit by adding a strip to it. And that allows them to expand the existing parking lot that's on that property. Then they're taking, if you go farther to the south or the left, if Pam can move her cursor over, they're taking these little strips of land here. And they're adding a strip, sort of a triangular strip of land to existing lot one. And they are also adding a little strip of land called parcel B to existing lot four. And they're also combining lot four with lot two. So what you're deciding is whether you're going to authorize Doug to sign this plan. And the authorization is that this does not constitute any kind of subdivision. In other words, we're not creating a road here. We don't have parcels off a road, so it's not a subdivision. And that's what A&R stands for, approval not required, subdivision approval not required. So do you agree by consensus that Doug can sign this plan as an approval not required? And do you want a roll call vote or is a sense of the meeting adequate? Sense of the meeting is adequate, but it looks like you might have some questions. Okay, Tom. I was just raising my hand in support. Okay. All right. So maybe, why don't I ask, does anybody object to my signing this as an approval not required? If so, raise your hand. All right. I don't see any hands raised. So I guess this is approved as approval not required. Okay. And then there was a second one. Second one is this one here, which is John Oliver's property down in South Amherst at the corner of, it's roughly at the corner of Country Corners Road and West Street. So John Oliver owns a really a lot of land right there. And what he's doing is he is making an agreement with the state to, I'm not sure if he's selling or donating the land to the state. So he owns these three parcels, the one outlined in yellow and the two that are outlined in turquoise. And then if Pam can show the proposal, the proposal is to essentially the land that's shown with the circle in it is the property that he's going to retain. And that includes sewer easement and another kind of easement, those dotted lines that go across the property. So he's going to retain that property that includes his house. He and his daughter live there. And the other properties that he's making an arrangement with the state about are one labeled parcel B. Well, let's see, what is that label? That's labeled lot one. Lot one will be created by parcel B, parcel A. I can't quite read these designations, maybe Pam can read them better than I can. But anyway, these four lots over here, the one that is sort of more or less rectangular, the smaller rectangular one just below that, the one that is kind of oddly shaped, and then the one to the right, that's a triangle. They're combining all of those and giving or selling those to the state. Department of Conservation and Recreation, DCR. And DCR owns much of the land on the Holyoke Range. So this is a really good thing for DCR to acquire this property. So do you agree that Doug can sign this plan? So these new parcels don't have any street access? That's correct. I think they're labeled not a buildable lot. And why are they not buildable? Because they don't have street access. There is a note here somewhere that says not, there it is, in the box that says lot one at the very bottom, it says not a building lot. So the new lot is going to be called lot one, and that will be the combination of these four lots that I just described to you. So it's not a building lot. It doesn't have a frontage. So does anybody object to my signing this as an A&R? Raise your hand, or if you have any questions. All right, maybe we've hit the hour where everybody's a zombie. Okay, I don't see any hands. I don't see any, hear any questions. So let's just, let's conclude that that is the board is okay with that. All right. Okay. Just for reference, the time is 9.45. Chris, item 10, do we have any ZBA applications? That's Pam is shaking her head, so we do not have any ZBA. Upcoming SDP, SBR, SUB? We have the Wagner Farm, which is building its farmstead. And then we have Amherst College, which is building the new building that I partially described to you along. I think we'll see both of those in January. You may see them on the 19th of January. Okay. And I think that's all we know about for now. All right. Committee liaison reports. Jack, Pioneer Valley? Yeah. So we had a regular commission meeting, which would be a quarterly meeting, and the focus was on East West Rail. And to tell you the truth, they dove into the presentation like everybody knew what was going on. So they kind of lost me. I think they could have done it down a little bit. But anyway, there's a lot of momentum for something happening and how Amherst may or may not be connected to that. I don't know. But I hope at least the bus or some sort of public transit to the terminals on that East West Rail is improved. Because I'm not sure we can take a direct bus through, at least from the PVTA, from Amherst to Springfield. But I think there might be some other bus companies that do that. But anyway, I know that was a big deal for Steve Schreiber, former chair that the North-South Rail went into shifting from Amherst through Northampton. A little bit of a loss for us. And we have an executive committee meeting tomorrow afternoon. But nothing really of note there. I think some annual reports to be approved and expenditures and things like that. So that's all I got. Thank you, Jack. CPAC. Andrew. Thanks, Doug. We had a meeting last Thursday. We wrapped up all of our discussions on the project. We made a recommendations. And our chair has assembled a draft letter to Centetown Council. It's an appropriation of nearly $3 million, $2.879 million for one of six 17 projects, as well as debt service and a budgeted reserve. We were nearly unanimous on all of the votes for all the projects. There was one that was outright rejected, which was a preservation project for the North Cemetery on East Pleasant Street, which would have been replacing the fence. There's some question as to whether the funds would be eligible. We had two deferred proposals. One was from the North Amherst Community Farm. There's also a question about eligibility of what they were asking for. And then the Amherst Regional High School, they had put a request in for some money to really repair their track, which folks may not know, but the high school track is not functioning right now. The school does not host any track tournaments. Those were deferred because the proposal that the town put together or the school put together for the track does not comply with the master plan for sort of athletic fields across the town, which would actually reorient that field. So they may come back in January. If they do, that would be one that we would recommend be put forward as that we would borrow money against that rather than using the CPAC money within the current year. So overall, good experience, got some great projects. I think in January we should hear back from both the high school and the North Amherst Community Farm. And it's possible we might have another project that comes to us as well. We've heard kind of rumblings of that, but no clear information as to when that might occur. We do have general reserve in place that we could hit if needed to. Okay, great. Thanks. Thank you. Tom, design review board. Yeah, so we met on Monday to review our usual collection of signage, three small projects. One was pretty large, but the signs were small. The bank building on the corner downtown, where the co-working space is no longer an organization called Kaya Association, which is educational. They have some pretty standard basic signs that are going in just to replace the existing signs. Nothing new and ostentatious. Mexicalito in the old rails is adding a couple signs to their purview, pretty simple stuff on the brand. And then Insomnia Cookies downtown is also revamping their frontage and doing a new kind of signage package that's more on brand with their, I guess, corporate standards. But it's probably the most in your face of all of them, but still pretty well done. So they were all universally approved and all went through. So that was pretty quick and eventful meeting. So that's about it. Great. Thanks, Tom. Chris, do you have anything for CRC? I do not have anything for CRC. I haven't met with them for a while. They may have met on their own, but I don't think they had any zoning on their agenda. Okay. I have nothing on the report for the chair. Chris or Pam, any report of staff? I have nothing. All right. Chris. Yeah, I suppose I could say it's been a nice year, guys. It's been quite a year. I hope next year is not as intense as this year has been. But it'll be nice to have a couple of weeks off and I'll see you next year. The time is 9.52 and we are adjourned. Thank you very much. Thank you. Happy holidays, everyone. Happy holidays. Bye-bye.