 Then I'm going to call the finance committee meeting to order for January 7, 2020. Wish everybody a happy new year. It is 2.40 p.m. We have four council members of the committee here. Shawnee is out of the country and unavailable. And we have two of the non-voting resident members present, and Mary Lutom and was unable to attend today. It looks like a long agenda, but we're actually going to focus principally on three items, and I want to get to those. Some of the other items I put onto the agenda, not that they're either not going to take much time or they were just in case type of things if it came up for discussion. So the three things that I think we really need to talk about is the affordable housing priorities policy, the financial implications of the proposed percent for our by-law, and the major, excuse me, council orders that are being recommended to us by Sonya. And I... Are we meeting again? Yes. Are we meeting again before the February 1st for Townsby? We are. We should be meeting on the 28th, okay. On the 28th, I believe, yes. So we have a moment to talk about it, we will, but those are the ones that I have identified as being most critical because I think that people are anxious. Now the other thing that I just wanted to let you know is that as far as the affordable housing policy, I did talk to Chris Prestrup, the planning director, and Chris is going to come into the meeting for a few minutes. She is a really busy afternoon, but I asked her if she could come by because there is that section that was left blank in the draft that I sent to you at the bottom of page two that requires a little bit more of an explanation from her about the experience of town staff and the amount of town staff time that it requires to support the projects that have been built in the past and what she might be thinking about as far as the proposed policy. And so I indicated I appreciated her time schedule this afternoon and that she was willing to come by, but I may, regardless of what we're at, take a pause and turn into the housing policy when she comes in in order to not have her wait. And I see in the audience we have John Hornick here from Affordable Housing Trust. And so with that said, Sonia, you sent us three proposed financial orders. And one of them is something that's really new that we haven't seen in a town meeting context before. And two of them are fairly similar to things that would routinely have come before town meeting in the prior form of government. And if people, does everybody have copies of the proposed orders that they got electronically? So do you want to quickly just tell us what each of them is and why you're recommending them to us? OK. I just briefly wanted to bring up all of the council orders that are coming up. And those are three of them. Those are housekeeping ones. The first one is Medicare D being transferred to the OPEB. We're no longer self-insured. We received our last Medicare D reimbursement. And we're ready now to transfer that from FreeCash. It closes out to FreeCash because they consider it general fund revenue. So you would have to vote from FreeCash for it to go into the OPEB. And we have $382,002 that needs to be transferred over to the OPEB from FreeCash. And then there's the transfer of FreeCash to stabilization per the financial policies that we have in place now. Anything over 5%, we have been moving over into stabilization. I can tell you that our FreeCash was certified at $6,741,684. And that's 8.1% of the revenue budget. 5% would be $4,178, leaving $2,563, and some change that needs to be transferred over into the stabilization fund. The third is within the Municipal Modernization Act that was passed in 2016. I don't remember the date. But there's new language that goes into all of our bond authorizations now, which allows us to use any premiums earned on bond issuance. We could use that money to pay the debt down. So we wouldn't have to borrow the full amount of the authorization. It would just be the net of the two. However, some of the debt that we have on there have not been permanently bonded yet, and it was prior to the Municipal Modernization Act. So that language is just letting us follow those same rules for any bonds that were authorized prior to the Muni Mod Act. So let's take them in order and just see if there are any questions about them. The Medicare Part D, what that is about is that because we're a healthcare, we were a healthcare provider when we were running our own trust fund. That for people who were eligible for Medicare D, we were recipients of a reimbursement for some of the costs. Why we get the reimbursements, got the reimbursements. I never quite totally understood, nor did I feel we had to. But the real problem was that when they came into the town, it seemed most appropriate that it should somehow get back to the benefit of the retirees who were the ones who were most likely to be Medicare recipients. And that playing it into the OPEP trust was the logical thing to do. So it has been town policy for a number of years now to make that transfer into the Medicare, from the Medicare Part D reimbursements into OPEP. And this would be the last year we do it, because since last year, it was the last year of having our own healthcare trust. Correct. So that's basically it. And so I guess if anybody have any questions or comments to offer on this one. I have just a brief one. How much is in this OPEP trust fund at this time? I think I remember that you're trying to build it up in order to do some payments for later on, but just how was it going? Don't quote me, but I think it was 6.9 million at the end of the fiscal year. But we have another 500,000 that went in there at the beginning. So I don't have the balance right now, but I can follow up on that with you. We will when we deal with the audit have an extensive discussion about OPEP probably. Right. And I'll probably have the updated figure when we actually do this council order. Kathy and then Lynn. Okay. I'm pretty sure the money we're getting is because of the afford when part D was passed, there was a concern that employers would drop their supplemental. And so it was basically an incentive to keep it and we'll keep getting it as an entity. So my question is in our new insurance arrangement, does it go to MIAA with a designated account and just lower our premium payments? I believe it's all part of the premium calculation that they dare, yes. Okay. So they'll net out this reimbursement from what we're paying. And so it's been running about this much a year. Is that what we're looking at? No. This is actually, this is actually 2016, 17 and 18 and the reason they were smaller amounts, the region and the Pellum portions, I've already gone to the region and the Pellum, but they were smaller amounts and we just let them accumulate until we got the final reimbursement. So we would only do this once. So this won't ever happen again. It's just going to automatically go to the. Never say never, but no, it should. Yeah, no. So in the future it's going through the insurance carrier and getting net out. Okay. So I had said, and Chris came, we would pause, but is there anything else? Lynn, did you have something on Medicare? Kathy asked the question I needed the answer to. Thanks. Anything else that people want to ask about Medicare? Because I'm going to put the other two orders and come back to them in a minute. In our last meeting, we had a brief discussion again about the housing policy and at the end of the discussion, I offered to write a draft of what could be a report to the council so that it would frame the discussion for our meeting, which is today's meeting. And in doing that, one of the issues that I had identified, which is evident in the draft was the question about staff time, because in order to implement the policy, it would require staff time. Most of it would come out of employees on this floor. And I engaged Chris and Dave Malloy in conversation about that. And Chris is very generous to come by and spend a few minutes with us. So I don't know if we want to have, start by seeing if there are any quick questions that people have about what I drafted, or if we want to just go ahead and let Chris speak to the one issue. I suggest that we use Chris's time wisely and go to that issue. And then if we need to come back. Okay. And I did send Chris the draft. I don't know if she had time to look at it. So if you did, Nip, comments, you're welcome to offer them to, but that was not a major question. So what had you thought about the point of the amount of time and what would be needed from our staff in order to implement the policy that is being suggested? So I didn't really quantify things, but I wanted to sort of talk to you in general about what we do on the second floor and how it relates to affordable housing. Andy Steinberg asked me to think about how the housing policy would have an impact on staff time on the second floor. So I wanted to say that the planning department staff and I are very supportive of affordable housing. We spend a lot of time on it. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make it happen, how to create more affordable housing, how to include affordable housing in projects that are going ahead. We write grant applications. We have the CDBG program. There's CPAC. We often apply for funds from CPAC to build affordable units and also to renovate and repair them. And we would all like to see more affordable units created in town. So I don't want you to have any doubts about that at all. It's very difficult to quantify the amount of time that we spend dealing with affordable housing issues on the second floor. There are really two types of affordable housing. One is town initiated projects and we have several of those in town. And then there are developer initiated projects that may include affordable housing and often they do if they are required to have a special permit. So in the first case where there are town initiated projects, the town spends a tremendous amount of time on those projects, both in the planning stages and also seeing them through. And I'll give you a couple of examples. In the case of a developer initiated project, we go through the normal permitting process. And then at the back end or at the end of the project, we have to make sure that the developer is following through on his promises to provide affordable housing and then to rent them to the people who are actually eligible to live in them. So in terms of some examples, we have Olympia Oaks and many of you will remember Olympia Oaks. That was a project that we worked on, I'm going to say at least 10, maybe 12 years ago. And it was a town initiated project. It was town owned property. There are 42 affordable units. So the whole development is affordable. Town staff in the people of Nate Malloy, who's still here, and Roy Rosenblatt, who has since retired, I would estimate that they spent about half of their time for several months, perhaps even years. And Nate just informed me that this project took about four years from start to finish working on this project. It was a very great accomplishment. And it took a lot of town staff time. There were negotiations with UMass about the roadway. UMass owned the roadway and we had to acquire the ability to use that roadway and also to build the roadway itself. So Nate was actually instrumental in putting that bid out, well, negotiating with UMass to begin with for the use of the roadway, then putting the bid out to build the roadway. Then he was out there on, you know, a couple of times a week monitoring that it got built properly. This was a little bit of an unusual project. We put out an RFP for developer to develop the housing. The town did a lot of the upfront work paid for tree removal on the town owned land. I think did some of the upfront site preparation. So Nate was out there monitoring the tree removal and site preparation along with others. We worked with the developer on the plan of the project. They hired Cune Riddle to do the architectural plans and the site work. Cune Riddle did a great job, but we had to be involved in making sure that the plans were what we were expecting. We worked with the developer to obtain the permits. And that was a very lengthy project. And then when it was all done, we had to make sure that the developer did haphousing. It's used to this type of thing, but make sure that they did rent to the people that they said they would rent to. So again, that was about four years' worth of work on the part of the planning department. Rolling Green is an existing development in Amherst. It's got about 200 units. Not all of the 200 units are affordable units, but all of them are counted on the state housing inventory. It's a little bit of a quirk of the state law. Anyway, there are about 40 units that are actually affordable there. So that was owned by a developer or a landowner, I guess, that was about to sell it or turn it over into all market rate units. So the town, people on the second floor are working with the town manager, worked very hard to find a buyer for that property that would maintain those affordable units. We eventually found Beacon communities and then the town staff on the second floor worked with the select board and the town manager to come up with money to help Beacon to maintain the affordability on that property. So that took a lot of a lot of time. I'm going to take a drink of water if you don't mind. Excuse me. Presidential apartments was another one was an existing apartment development and the owner of the property wanted to add 54 units of new housing. And because it was a special permit that was required for the use, they were required to include six affordable units. And this is a property owner who's owned a lot of property in Amherst for a long time, but he had never dealt with affordable affordable units and the requirements related to affordable units. So he got a little bit, I would say, mixed up, if you want to use the phrase and didn't exactly know how to follow the rules properly. So people on the second floor had to step in the inspection services department eventually levy to find against him for renting the affordable units to market rate tenants and the planning staff had to help him understand what the regulations were and how to follow them. And eventually we did have those six affordable units actually occupied by people who were eligible. So that that was kind of an unusual situation. Just a couple more. 70 University Drive, which is a developer driven project down on University Drive built by Barry Roberts. I think many people agree that it's a very fine, fine looking, handsome project that has four affordable units, but we had to be very assertive in making sure that the developer and his attorney understood the regulations for renting out those units and make sure that they did that properly. On and on Aspen Heights, North Square, East Street School is a good example. The Housing Trust made it clear that they wanted to develop East Street School into affordable housing. So the planning department staff established a way of having the feasibility study done to see if that property was actually suitable for affordable housing and worked with the Housing Trust to develop a plan. Again, Cune Riddle did the plan to develop about 30 to 34 affordable units there. But that was a lot of work on the part of the planning department staff. We coordinated the RFP process and if that project goes through, planning department staff will be involved every step of the way, including probably a comprehensive permit to have that approved by the zoning board of appeals. We do a lot of work with CPAC to get money to renovate and repair affordable units that are already in place that would be owned by Amherst Housing Authority. So we seek grant funds from CPAC and then we need to put those jobs out to bid, monitor the jobs while they're happening, and then make sure they close out properly. 132 Northampton Road is one that you know that we've spent a lot of time on. That's an effort by the Valley CDC to build 28 units of supportive housing for people who are low income. So we've already spent quite a bit of time on that and if that project goes ahead, it will be a comprehensive permit with the zoning board of appeals. We'll be providing information to the public at meetings and attending meetings, preparing a decision and then making sure that the units are rented as they are proposed to be rented. So I just wanted to give you a little window into the kind of work that the people on the second floor do with regard to affordable housing and to say that it's an ambitious project to provide 50 units of affordable housing a year for the next five years. I think there was a period of time that we actually documented and you may have a sheet that was provided by Nate Malloy. We submitted this with an application recently, but we had 483 housing units that were built over the course of about five years that we actually documented, but that was a tremendous effort to do that. So if we're talking about 250 units over five years, that's a pretty big number. One thing Nate pointed out to me today was not all of those projects are going to be town driven. In other words, if a project is town driven, it tends to be all affordable units. So many of these projects will probably be developer driven. So that means they're going to be big projects. If you think that, you know, you're going to get 20 to 25 percent of a project as affordable. Well, you can see that the Beacon Project is pretty big. In order to get 26 units out of that project, they had to build a development that's 130 units. So that is something that we on the second floor have to manage the permitting process for that. And then we have to manage the inspections process as well. So those are just some thoughts. And I think, again, I want to be very supportive of affordable housing, but I want to say that if a lot of effort is going to be put into affordable housing by staff, then there are probably a couple of different ways of dealing with it. And one is for the staff to get direction about what priorities are, because we on the second floor spend a lot of time on other things as well, like the Kendrick Park playground and, you know, married other things. So if housing, affordable housing becomes the priority, that would need to be kind of made clear to us. And the other method of dealing with it would be to give us some more staff to help us. So that's really a summary of what I have to say. So when we do projects like this, particularly, for instance, when we do use CPA money, am I correct that we actually can charge some administrative costs to the CPA money? Or is that option available? Actually, Sonya is the one who can probably respond to that. It depends on your definition of administrative costs. Are you talking about staff person working on that? The answer is no. If you're talking about surveys, do diligence money? Yes, that can come from CPA. Okay. The reason I'm asking that is because, you know, part of what I think we would say is some of this is just what we do, okay? On the other hand, if we're going to take on a major initiative that is beyond what quote we normally do, then as a town, we have to look at the staff and how we will afford that, which is exactly the point you're making, because it either means we're going to do that and not do something else, which knowing some of the other things that are on the plate isn't possible. And or we have to look at whether or not we as a town can add additional money into our budget. Again, I know what this budget projection looks like, even though I haven't received it for FY21. As you look out even to 22, we're already looking at some problems. So my real question is how do we as a town make a decision? This is what we do because this is what we do, or this is what we've decided to do and therefore somehow or another we are going to need to recoup the additional cost of that through either fees or some way in which we can recoup the additional planning and quote administrative costs. It's not just all administrative, it's planning, it's you know shepherding a project through, so I really appreciate the point you're making and when I look at it in the context of our total budget and the other things that I do know are on the plate for the planning department and many I don't know. I really question how much of this can we take home? I agree. I wanted to make sure that I was interpreting what you said and also telling you I hear that. You've seen the draft memo and one of the things we talked about is the definition of what we're counting and to the extent we just developed a unit, so Beacon would be an example that some of those are two and three bedroom units versus single person only units, we count each, this is, I'll frame it as a question, we count each of them as one unit, correct? That's correct, yeah. So whether it's a house that can house a family of five or a studio apartment that's got one person. So if we think of return on our own investment, if we have to put money and our developers come in, if we talk about the overall mix, some of the habitat houses, I'm not sure even go into the inventory, so we've also had small units developed that may be more affordable than other units, but they aren't categorized as affordable units because they're not at these AMI, they're not going to the state unit, so I've been interested, I'm trying to get it, of all the housing that's been developed in Amherst over five years, how much of it is expensive housing, moderate cost housing, lower cost housing, and I don't have any sense of that, so 250 seem to me by big number because I'm not even sure until recently we had that much development going on of units, but that got me thinking how do we count a unit? The days of all those small suburbs being developed for co-housing, we had a bunch of them and then we didn't get a lot more of those. So prior to 2013 I think we didn't have a lot of development going on in town, we had the recession, I think things started to happen in 2010 when Boltwood Place was built and that didn't include any affordable housing, but after that there really wasn't much built between 2008 and 2013, and then all of a sudden we did see an uptick, 78 units in 2013, 221 units permitted in 2014, and then in subsequent years it sort of went up and down. It is true that one bedroom unit or a studio unit is counted as a unit just like a four bedroom unit is. In projects such as the Beacon Project in North Square there is a requirement by the state that whatever are built as affordable units match in terms of size, percentage wise, the market rate units. So if there are two, three bedroom units in the market rate then there has to be, or I shouldn't use two, but some number of three bedroom units in market rate there has to be an equivalent percentage in affordable. So there is that equation. Did you have other? You answered. It's just trying to puzzle through when we have invested either town money or developers put some new things in trying to think of, you know, clearly the direct as well as indirect costs very widely depending on whether we get a big state grant to do something and we are able to leverage it or whether we put a lot in it. And I was looking for are there ways to get affordable units to find somewhere around a hundred percent of AMI or a little higher or lower done that don't involve as much town resources directly, dollars and people. So this is some of the in-law units allowing people to build a supplemental apartment next to the house. I know we've been doing those things too, but we wouldn't be counting them, correct? Yeah. Those are not counted. Anything above 80 percent AMI is not counted on the SHI. It doesn't mean that we don't need those units or want those units, but they're not counted. I think we have 11.3 percent affordable units as of today, something like that. Dorothy? I have a couple of questions. I'm going to do them backwards. How much of your time is spent on maintaining existing housing? Oh, that's probably a small amount of time. As I was mentioning, we have the CPAC money that we apply for, and then when we get the grant from CPAC, usually Nate puts out an RFP to get a contractor to do whatever work is required, and then he would monitor it as it goes along. So that's probably a relatively small amount of money. And then time, excuse me. How much time, if we had an effective inclusionary zoning bylaw, which at the moment we have one which is not triggered very often, but if we had one, we would have had a lot of new affordable units in the last year or so, but how much time does that take supervising the, that they actually do have affordable units that meet certain standards and that they rent them to the right people? May I answer? That takes less time because the developer is in charge and developers are becoming more familiar with the requirements for affordable housing. I think each time they go through the process, they become more and more experienced. So for instance, Barry Roberts, if he were to develop another project that required affordable housing, he's already been through the process before. I think he's used the Amherst Housing Authority as his consultant to do the lottery and make sure that all the units are rented properly. So it becomes easier as time goes along. It was difficult in the beginning when we had the presidential situation because that was our first time of having these affordable units attached to a developer-driven project and it was the developer and owner's first time. So I think that becomes less of an issue. The issue is really where the town is initiating a project such as Olympia Oaks, which took that long time. And I describe that East Street School, which is a very worthwhile project, but that kind of a project is going to take a lot of time. So town-initiated projects take much more time than developer-driven projects. And here's a question that shows my ignorance. When you talk about permitting, is that for developer- initiated projects or town- initiated projects, or do you permitting for all housing that's being built? You have to do permitting for all housing that's being built. So the Olympia Oaks project went through, I believe they went through the comprehensive permit process with the zoning board of appeals, which is a very lengthy it did, as a matter of fact, because I remember that whole process. But yes, so all these projects go through a permitting process, either with the planning board or the zoning board of appeals. The comprehensive permits tend to be much more complicated and there are certain rigid rules that you have to follow with regard to timing. So they're a little more challenging and require more staff time. This is not completely on the topic for here, but it's just a curiosity of mine. So when we did Olympia Oaks, which I think is just a marvelous project, Wayfinders is the housing manager. Were they the housing partner from the beginning? They were. They were half before. They were half before, and now they've changed their name to Wayfinders. So when we do a project like that, this is a perfect example, where the town has really invested, it was our property, we've now found Wayfinders, Wayfinders found us through whatever process. What happens if Wayfinders goes away? I'm not expecting them to, by the way. I'm just, and I'm certainly not hoping they will, but what happens? How are we as a town protected, and how are those units protected? The units are deed restricted, so there are documents in the registry of deeds that say those units need to be rented to people who are eligible to rent them. I don't know, I haven't read the paperwork that went through with that project and exactly what the requirements are and what subsequent owners of that property would be required to do, but I assume there are cautions or there are statements put in place in those documents to maintain the affordability over time. I wouldn't be concerned about that. That would pass to a new owner. Yes, and those would be papers that would be, well, it could be that it's in the ZBA permit that says these units are affordable in perpetuity or as far as the state law allows, but I'm sure that there are other documents that restrict this as well. If you wanted to know more about that, I could look it up, but I'm quite sure that it's how, you know, protected. Probably not relevant here, but it does seem to me that, as we increase our investment, you know, I don't think the town wants to become the owner of affordable housing. That's not the business we're in. We're in the business of stimulating it, but not owning it. So I'm just curious. That's all. Yes, Dorothy, and then. Got one more. When I was at Olympia Oaks, I thought that somebody from Wayfinder said to me that people, when they come into the apartments, must meet the affordability standards. But if their income rises while they're in the apartments, they can stay there. And I know this was something that was a big issue in New York City with, you know, some of our Mitchell-Lamas. And, you know, I can see arguments pro and con both sides, but I was curious to know if that was correct. I'm not sure what the mechanism is, but again, I could find out if you're interested. Yep. Just looking to see if you have any questions. Yeah, the one thing that I had just went to, Dorothy had raised a couple of minutes ago a question about renovations. And you had mentioned some of the work that had been done with CPAC and CDBG money for renovations and housing authority. Is the bulk of the work really done for managing the renovation projects done by the housing authority itself? To some degree it is, but there's a lot of coordination with particularly Nate Maloy on this floor who is very involved with any project that goes through CPAC and gets funding and then is part of a renovation of the housing authority property. He's going out to the site to make sure that things are done properly. He's attending construction meetings, pre-construction meetings, making sure the project closes out properly. I just wanted to follow up Lynn's and probably also Andy's. I think what I'm hearing is that once it's in place and there's an agreement and it's been certified, you all play a role if there's a change in owners, a change in managers making sure it's still in compliance with the original permitting. Is there an alert process on that? Do you wait? For example, oh, you see it's changing. You go in and take a look. Or do you wait for someone to say, you know, they're no longer those six units seem to have disappeared or they're taking students in when they were supposed. So is it someone sounds unalarm or are you, I don't want to use the police wording, but you're the overseers of continuation. I'd have to ask Nate exactly how that mechanism works. OK, because it seems to me that's a staff resource on the other end. I mean, we, you know, Lynn's example if a trusted, you know, Valley CDC, we think is a good developer. But suppose they go away in the same place which had all of these things. You'd want to make sure the paperwork just didn't exchange hands, but actually was enforced the terms. Yeah, which could make the units or the development harder to sell. That's part of my concern that the town would end up owning it because it really isn't a buyer for that kind of a property. I don't know. Let somebody has some experience with it having actually happened in another community. I don't know how we don't answer to that. Wayfinders and beacon are pretty stable organizations. Yes, Sharon. Do you have any experience or like relative to other towns, how much time the Planning Department here spends on affordable housing relative to other communities, you know, similar size, structure, et cetera? It's hard to say because other communities call their person something different. They might call them a housing administrator or an affordable housing administrator or something that or community development planner, something different from what we call ourselves. So all the planners on our floor do multiple things. They do grant writing. They attend meetings. They make sure that the boards and committees have the proper paperwork. They work on affordable housing. But some communities have someone or a group of people who are specifically targeted to working on affordable housing issues. So it's kind of hard to make that comparison. Christians, I think that what I ended up when I was trying to work through the draft, you hopefully had a chance to see what I put in there. But I tried to encapsulate the pieces of the policy that seemed to have financial implications and put that into that first section. And the first one was from the introduction itself, which says we can't just wait patiently for developers to come forward with ideas that fit our vision for the time. We have to articulate that vision and then act proactively to see it implemented. And of course, that could be by trying to find developers who but I think it more typically reads, to me, taking even more active role, as was described with a couple of the projects like Olympia Oaks. Because we don't really get in the business of looking for a developer just to develop a project. Developers come to us. Yes. Depends on the developer. Some developers come to town and say, you know, what do you want us to build? What properties are available? They're kind of open. And to a developer like that, we might say, well, it would be nice to have, you know, units that include both market rate and affordable. And can you make that happen? Other developers come to us with a specific idea of what they want to do and a specific place where they want to do it. And so they progress in their own way. So it depends on what a developer comes to town with, what kind of ideas they come to town with. And sometimes developers who have done projects in Amherst before keep in touch with us and periodically call us up and ask us, well, what's going on? What kind of, you know, what do you need? What kind of housing do you need? And we might respond, well, yeah, we need more rental housing and we want more rental housing that includes affordable housing. And so, you know, we get into a dialogue with them. So it really depends on the developer and what their intentions are. Thank you. Just as Sharon asked about comparative data across towns. But I wonder if it's not that we have very much of this going on in Amherst, unfortunately. But when we developed the Amherst Cinema on that whole complex and that was redone as commercial and a new entertainment and everything else center in town, is that comparatively less of us draw on staff time or those kinds of projects? Less staff intensive? Yeah. Yes, they're less staff intensive. That was a project where the landowner was clear about what he wanted to do and the Amherst Cinema and various other entities who eventually went in there were pretty clear and got together as a team and presented a package to us. And there wasn't any affordable housing associated with it. It really went through the zoning board of appeals in a very smooth and deliberate manner. So it was much simpler than some of these bigger projects that include housing. Yeah, I have a question about kind of the future. Under our current zoning laws and regulations, what are the total number of new units we could create in Amherst? Do you have any idea? I don't. There was a development study done a number of years ago, and I would have to dig that up. It was probably done when Nils Lacour was on the planning staff. So I could find that out, but that would be pretty wildly outdated. Yeah, it just would be helpful to kind of have some idea. And they could be single family or they could be multifamily. But it would obviously be different depending on one. But I mean, given that, the affordability is only a certain percentage, that would put kind of a ceiling on what we could do with new units, new construction. Yeah. I think what you're raising is, it may in fact suggest that, at some point, we should look at how to update that in Dory, if you will, because I know I'm not the only counselor who has raised the issue of housing for middle income. And particularly how it relates to the town of Amherst in terms of not increasing the haves and the have nots, and not losing all of our school-aged children, and the other kinds of issues that go with housing, that we as larger thinking about the entire town and housing may have some other interests beyond just affordable. I'm not saying we don't have interest in affordable, but that middle group, if you will, our middle income housing, our workforce housing, or whatever you want to call it, there's not federal dollars out there for that. There's not state dollars out there for that. And yet that's what towns and cities are losing. And if you layer on that 60% of the land can't be developed because it belongs to the university, it's conservation, I think your question is how much is even available? Yeah. Yeah, Sharon. I think we're all kind of going to the conclusion of the draft that Andy put forward, which is I think it is a larger conversation not just about affordable housing, but the whole picture. And I think it's a complicated picture also, as Andy pointed out. And I think that the ultimate conclusion is we're all interested in affordable housing and middle income housing. And I think before a decision is made on just 80% to 20% of AMI and all that, we really do need a lot more data on this in a more broader scope. Yeah, I'd just say a couple of things. Yes. There's not that much land available. I think that's what Kathy said. There's not much land available that isn't wet or rocky or have some other issue related to it. There are properties available in North Amherst, but they don't have sewer or water. So that would have to be provided. So there are a lot of limitations on the properties that are left. In addition, we've made a decision as a town to support our master plan, or at least we had made that decision. Now we're going to come back around to make that decision again, I hope. But the master plan really encourages us to develop in the downtown and the village centers and not to develop the outlying areas. So we really have to think carefully about that. How much more development do we want out there in the hinterlands? And Matt, it's an important townwide decision that we have to make. And then the other question of course is a master plan talks about infill is being the strategy and center of town and village centers. But then there's the question of how much the community really wants to support infill and what is the capacity and the number of units that you could create doing that. And infill is possible in the RG district, which is close to the center of town, which would probably be supported by the master plan. But again, people who live in the RG district aren't necessarily enthusiastic about that. So that's a conversation I think we need to have at some point, but we really haven't had it yet. And it wasn't confronted in the master plan. Well, I appreciate it. Because I'm keeping an eye on the time for us as a committee and knowing what else we have two other major topics we want to talk about. And we have a lot of work to do on this. I do think that we need to honor our promise to Chris and not keep her longer than she can stay with us. And I think that unless there's a burning question, I really appreciate your being here. It's been very helpful. You're welcome. And would you like my notes? Yes. Give them to Mr. Steinberg? Make sure we get them. OK. Thank you. So staying with the affordable housing policy, because we are there, what we had come to at the end of the last meeting was that I would do a draft on this. And Kathy would do a draft on the next topic we're going to talk about, which is percent fraud. And it would allow us to form a basis of a conversation. But when doing a draft like that, everything in the draft is a draft. There's nothing in the we've specifically agreed to as a committee. It's just a way of forming a conversation. So I do want to get committee reaction to the draft itself. And I have no ego investment in whatsoever. So any criticisms or suggestions that come from the committee I'd like to have, then at that point, I also would welcome comment from our one member of the public, who also is the chair of the committee, so that he could be injected into the conversation if he wishes at a time when we're still heavily involved in the conversation before we reach conclusions. So I guess the first question I have is to back to the committee, whether they're questions that you have about what I've drafted or major points that you would like to see enhanced, eliminated, or whatever. Bob. And he added one question on page two. You note that Emerson, under the previous Emerson experience first paragraph, that we have 1,083 subsidized units, which is 11.3% of our stock, I guess. And the question is, you know the statewide average is 9.7, but where is the 11.3 in relation to other municipalities? Do you have a sense? Yeah, I do. And there is, and I can look forward and send it out after the meeting, a link to this statewide, the Commonwealth tracks it. And that number is from the Commonwealth's tracking. And so it gives you the ability to look at each community. And you know, the towns are all over the board on this. Some of the small towns, it's incredibly low percentage. We are higher than North Hampton, but not by a lot. We are lower than some other communities that you'd expect to have a high number. Some of the cities, like Springfield and Holyoke, have much higher percentages. So it's really an all over the board question. And I think it's best to just get you that link, which is easy to find. Kip. I have not gone through this carefully yet. But one of the things I think that you've done, which is terrific, is bring a lot of the information that's been provided us into one place. We got from Nate Malloy, you just mentioned you're looking outside to find out where the 11.3, the 1,000. For me, if this goes up to the council, I would like to put, this is probably the academic side of me, footnotes or links so people can go back and see there is a document, things like 22 units and $10 million that we spent. Because these are big, impressive numbers. And even if we refer to a chart that's been prepared by planning, and it would create a history for all of us to go back and also a document. So I'm offering help on this. I don't expect that you have to do it all. So I could insert this. Because I find getting this kind of information very difficult if someone doesn't give me where to look. And I find it useful. So the kinds of things we just talked about today with Chris, building it up a little bit more that there's not that much land left that can be developed at all. That the count of units, we count a studio unit the same as a two bedroom unit. So you're not necessarily saying at a minimum if we had this many units, 1,000 people. But it might have been 2,000 or 3,000 people depending on them. So I think just a few more sentences here and there that let people know what we've been able to find out because we have kept asking questions. So I liked the way you'd framed it a lot. And what Sharon said about this is part of a larger picture of what kind of housing. We don't really have an inventory of how much super high priced houses do we have. It said most of the housing in Amherst is expensive because land is expensive. If the land is expensive and construction new is going to be expensive. So I just think trying to provide that context as we go along because we have that information would make this stronger. And therefore extremely useful for the other people on council and the public. Some of that's probably in the housing study. And I'm used to going back and saying, tell me where you got it. And I'll just drop it in. So I'm not asking for a lot of making the document thicker. We can make them as end notes so people can go back and say, where do you even find this information? Yeah, I mean the one that Bob was talking about, that's easy because I came from a link. The one that I was going to absolutely attach and even mention that it is attached in the draft is the September 2017 report. Because that shows what has been built in most recently and the amount of public money that was invested. So that was absolutely going to be there. And of course the one that was, I didn't go into the ones that are under development. But if not opened, I stayed with the past tense because I had the draw line somewhere. The cost numbers that are evident in page three at the top, what I did was I took the 2017 thing and I created my own spreadsheet on it. I did not attach the spreadsheet because once you do that, it becomes a public document and it's not good enough to serve that purpose. But I felt comfortable with it to use the numbers so that's where that came from. So you extrapolated into 2018 numbers? Yes, I said that I think that I added 3% per year, which is a fairly low number. But I gave it a, from the year that there was the most recent year that public funding was required to today's date and added 3% per year. Will you cite the original? I agree with you about showing extrapolations and stuff. It's always controversial. But will you at least provide the original source? The original source is the document that Malloy provided except for the North Square. OK. And so the numbers come from that. They're not industry numbers. So the spreadsheet starts there and then the adding 3% is an arithmetic thing. So it's not complex. So I guess, Andy, I just need to raise an issue. And I think we do need to make sure John has an opportunity. But I think about how we're going to bring this conversation to the Council. Besides the fact that I'm probably going to set aside a full Council meeting for it. And maybe that's what we have to do because housing itself is complex. Two different committees have looked at this and spent a great deal of time on it. And it opens up larger issues that the Council has demonstrated some interest in beyond just affordable housing. So if you have any thoughts as a committee about this piece and how we bring it to the Council, I am very interested in that. Do you have an idea as to when you want this back? Because yesterday. You wanted it back yesterday. The more time we have, the more time that the committee has an opportunity to look at this and come back and then have a new round of discussion based on forming around the draft more than the, I think, our last discussions led to this draft. But now I'm trying to get us focused on the financial elements of it, feeling that CRC was handling the other side. And I may need to meet with at least the chairs of each of those and have that discussion about how we bring this forward. Other comments? I talked about just dropping in some citations. I think there are a couple things that we've talked about that aren't here yet. And it's probably just a header and then a few sentences. But Lynn has multiple meetings and we're certainly hearing it when we're out talking to people saying one issue of housing is what's defined as affordable here. And another is working families and workforce housing. And the stock in Amherst is in general quite expensive. And just dropping something about housing affordability and with a few sentences that this whole thing about affordable housing needs to be in the context of the larger housing. And I raised, I don't even know where I want to go with this. But if I live a half mile east or west of Amherst in Pelham, Leverett, Granby, you know, name whatever a border, I'm not very far away from the center of town, not much further than I am in north. You might up in our school system. So when, if ever, do we think of the region? And when do we think of just of our seven square miles? So I would just raise it in there's not that much land. Housing is expensive in Amherst in general, because there's not much land you can even build on and building. And then in this context, we have this. So I dropped a few more things so that when we come to the full council, we're having a housing discussion, not just this. Exactly. Mike. I think that the question that comes up, and I'm sensitive to this because we've had discussions within the council about what are the committees and what are the roles of each committee. And housing policy in and of itself is not an assignment to the finance committee. The financial consequences for the town of proposed policies is more of what we're about. And so to the extent that we had a lot of discussion that really initially started on housing policy, and I did essentially not include it except for a sentence or two, was because I was trying to be sensitive to the council's feeling that they wanted to hear from us on the financial aspect. And I hear that, and I respect that. But what this raises for me is the need for the council to be willing to confront and make the tough choices about where we're putting our resources. And that's why I don't, even though, and so for me, from the finance committee perspective, it's the cost of that. So the rest of it, yes, you're right, it's a council full of councilwide discussion. Some of it's been at CRC, but it's going to all come back to the council. And I can just imagine already the very broad discussion this is going to raise about housing policy and Amherst and our role as government in shaping that policy. So I'm going to conclude with the last point that Ciro Dorthy has to say. And then C.F. John has anything that he would like to bring into the discussion and appreciate your patience. I do want to not lose the recommendation section because calling something recommendation is a pretty strong statement to come from a committee. And what I essentially have done is to say, we have provided a financial analysis as best is available of what was proposed by the Affordable Housing Trust. And we think this needs to get back to the council now. And we would recommend that the council continue this discussion through another committee than this one to address the broader issues, which I think is what really you've been referring to, Lynn. Dorthy, you had something. Well, I think that when we do get it to the town council, we'll get into bigger questions about housing policy. Because some things that have been most concerning to me are not addressed here at all. There's an assumption that the master plan says that all new development has to be downtown on the bus route infill. There's also the meetings we've been having on smart housing in Forty R, which seemed to have to be downtown in the center of town. And there are a lot of problems with that. And my biggest concern is I'm interested in family housing. And I understand that we're against suburban sprawl. That's why I like the East Street housing project. And I hope that that can go forward. I'm also thinking we had a big plot of land that Amherst College offered for the DPW, which we decided would not work. But who says that that plot of land, which we could get what, 99 years for a dollar or something, couldn't become used for family housing? And I'm interested in cluster housing. I'm interested in ownership. This is all rental. And I think that we need to have housing that is owned. And I like the model of one of the development I lived in for a number of years, where it was one and two and three family houses, which had rental units in them. But they were owner-occupied. And it was a very diverse community, diverse incomes. I was just there again for the last 10 days between Christmas and New Year's. And it's solid. It's holding. And it's a wonderful place to be. We're not talking about that. The only ownership we've done is like one house at a time with habitat or something. But I think a town has to have a strong ownership base. And I think we have to really focus on families. We need to keep young families or to lure young families back to Amherst, or the town will not be a strong town. All of these rental units so easily can become just dormitories. If families don't want to live there, and there's no also housing for seniors who want to downsize, I don't see that being discussed at all. So I'd like mixed housing that meets more needs. And I don't think it needs all to be in the center of downtown. Yeah, I don't know that we want to go into this discussion at length, because I think that is what we're suggesting that the council needs to now take ownership on. And the one thing that I would point out is that if you go back to the list that we got from the planning department that's dated December 17, and you look at those list of projects, whether they be small habitat housing developments with two to four units or something as big as Olympia Oaks, those are family occupied affordable housing. And that is what the Affordable Housing Trust was encouraging that there be more emphasis on whether we can, what the financial cost is, and whether we can bear the financial cost is something that's really what we're struggling with because that's what we were asked to comment on. But that's why I was trying to now narrow the conversation back in the draft was in the time to do that. So John, why don't you come on up and sit, since Amherst Media is recording this, please use the microphone and make sure it's lit. John Hornick, chair of the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. I have a few points to make. First, I think, unless I missed it, that the financial analysis does not include the financial benefits to the town of developing affordable housing. There's the money for the actual development that comes in, which by and large is not town money. Obviously, there may be CPA or CDBG money, but the lion share of money for any size affordable housing development comes through the Department of Housing and Community Development for the Commonwealth. And so development of affordable housing is a form of economic development for the town. The property is also taxable, so there is continuing revenue that comes to the town. So this isn't just simply putting up some housing for individuals or families, seniors who are at the lower end of the economic scale actually not so low when you look at the numbers. It's something that has benefit to the town. Not quite as much benefit, honestly, as market rate housing, but it's not nothing. And so I really think it's important to acknowledge that. I think also that the tenor of the report, as it's currently drafted, particularly the conclusion, runs the risk of giving the message if it were to be adopted by the entire town council that we in Amherst do not believe that the development of additional affordable housing should be a town priority. Nowhere does it say that the development of additional affordable housing should be a town priority. Now, and I think that's an important message, and it's a message that should go to town boards and committees that are involved. It's a message that should go to the town manager and town staff who have been involved in the development of affordable housing. The way, as again, the tenor of the draft now reads as if we're backing away from this, there are too many problems. We don't know what we should do. I think that when town council adopts a final resolution, it should say that we support affordable housing. And we direct town boards and committees, we direct the town manager and town staff to move ahead with new affordable housing. It has to be of good quality. It has to involve efficient use of resources. We recognize there are problems, but that's why we have you all working to overcome those problems. So our goal is to see more affordable housing and, you know, in the words of Jean Luc Precard, make it so. I think that's what I want to hear from town council, and I think that's what we should be hearing. And honestly, that's not in the document as it's currently drafted. So those are my two comments. Can respond to questions as well. Go ahead, and then I can say my comments. So if we were able to revise the zoning law to make a really strict across the board exclusionary zoning requirement of 10% of units or space for affordable housing, would that be strong enough for you? I think that revising the inclusionary zoning bylaw is a great idea. I don't think any one solution in and of itself is going to lead to the level of develop affordable housing that I think we want to see. So it's not that I disagree, that's a bad idea. It's a great idea. It's something we definitely should do. It's like, as with many problems, they're complex and they aren't subject to a single solution. Yeah, I mean, I'd be interested in the comments. I appreciate what you had to say, and I'm trying to be defensive. I really am not being defensive in what I say, because I attempted to do a little bit of what you say both at the beginning and the end. And to say that at the beginning, the committee is made up of counselors and residents who are concerned about affordable housing and ends with appreciation for the housing trust starting this. But I ended up focusing and I think was creating the tenor. I don't know how to deal with it, but my colleagues will help, I'm sure, is that in the end when I had gone through it and outlined what I thought were five critical policies or six critical policy proposals that came out of the proposal to sort of drive it because they're the numerical pieces, the 250-unit goal and some of the things that surround it, and then tried to cost it out, that did change the tenor. I was conscious of that as I was writing it, but I wasn't quite sure how to deal with it because I thought that we were being asked by the council to look at the financial implications of the proposed policy. The proposed policy was built around the goal, and it wasn't clear that the goal was aspiration or the goal was a hard goal, even if it's aspirational, you still want to know what the cost is to get there. So that was the problem that I was having and the tone came out bad. I certainly appreciate your comment on it, and I appreciate any comments that I might suggest, as I might get from my fellow committee members, because we're not voting on this today, but if it became what we voted on, then they have to be comfortable that it's what they want to be saying, it's not just what I wrote as draft. Do we feel that being for affordable housing is equivalent to supporting this report? I think that Andy's costing out of things was to show if we did all the various things in the report, we might have some bad consequences and might not be able to afford it. That's not necessarily the same as saying we're against affordable housing. Yeah, sort of reminds me of work that this committee was doing early on and continues to do about the capital projects, because we sort of recognize that the five capital projects is a goal, but whether it's a feasible goal depends upon two things. One was how much we invest in each of those major capital projects, and the second is how much time we spread it out. The more you raise the cost of the buildings and compress the time, the less affordable it becomes, and sort of felt like looking at goals and looking at a time spread for the goals, when we say 250 units in five to 10-year period, sort of led in the same dilemma. So I want to get to the other you said, so I don't want to keep too long. I just, John, one of the feedbacks I've had, particularly up in District 1, is when people hear the term affordable housing, they are not thinking about the inventory you're thinking about. They're thinking about can they afford their house and their rent, and a lot of them are above, narrowly above, the income lines that count for the inventory, and so there's a concern about affordability more generally. And I think if we can write that in a way that doesn't diminish the housing for the low end of the wage bracket, but a solidly lower middle income person can't afford a house here and can't afford the rent, and the market rate rents of the new units are pretty stunning if you say $3,300 for a three-bedroom unit. Well, that's more than a lot of people make all year net income. So it's in the context of that, I think finance needs to be saying, you know, what is it we're trying to do? What kind of mix? So it's the question Dorothy's been raising. So, Andy, I think it's maybe some tweaks in tone, but it is this larger context on where several people have said they don't want workers living in town anymore. We're going to be some low income people and some high income people and nobody left in between. I mean, those are, you know, if you do anything more to me I'm moving out of town. I'm already on a payment plan for my mortgage or for my taxes. So I just think we need to be careful when we go up because when people hear the word affordable housing, to them it's affordability. It's not just this definition. So we can make that clearer here, but your proposal was focused on 250 units defined in a particular way. And I think just putting it in a larger context doesn't say one doesn't want some of those units. But we have to be thinking about the larger people who live here who are feeling they need to move out of town or can't. So I think it's, we can come back to it, Andy. I think it's some tweaking and lead sentences or something that doesn't say, you know, therefore, don't worry about it or don't do it. Yeah. And John, I do appreciate the point that you raised about not saying anything about benefits of bringing your money into the town and taxation. There is Mary Lewis here. I'd probably be hearing this because the other finance committee with her before, there are financial consequences of building any housing. And so the benefits in taxation are cost-providing services. And we didn't get into the cost of providing services. Educating the kids who live in the housing, providing police, other public safety, we'll assume that that's paid for through an enterprise fund. But the streets, certainly, maintaining the streets around, there are expense sides. And I didn't get into that issue either. So I think that there are both. So it is a point that needs to be considered as to whether we want to include some state in the long-term science. John. Actually, there was a study done by Eric Nakajima for the Donahue Institute, which one or two of you may have heard of some years ago that compared the costs and benefits, economic costs and benefits to towns of market rate versus affordable housing. And Eric provided that to me. And I'd be glad to share it with you all. Yeah, actually, I was aware of that study. I think I have read it at one time in my life. I did think about it as I was driving over and was thinking that I wasn't going to put a lid on the spot by raising that topic. I only worked there for 31 years. I know. But if anyone's interested in it, we should try and find a copy and get it to get it around. I think I have. I don't know how. I've not asked Eric in recent years because in at least 10 years, if not more. Yeah, it's probably about a decade old. So I don't know how the numbers stack up now against current expectations. No, the numbers aren't going to be exactly what you would think they would be right now. But at least it provides a framework for thinking about those issues, which I think is very useful. Yeah, no, I agree. Anything else the committee wants to talk about right now? So what we need to, obviously, we're not voting on anything at this point. Maybe I should see who wants to work with me on tweaking as we into the next version and see if we can address some of the points that have been raised today and keep this conversation going so that we can get something to the council before our terms expire. Are we allowed to have three people work on it? Gets to be a problem because I think we can't. Why don't we send our comments to one person and then? Yeah, why don't we start there as some suggestions to me and I'll see what I can do. And particularly since Andy's been sending it as a Word document, people could track, change, drop in comments, do anything, and then send it up to Andy. It becomes easier on an add something here, whatever. Yeah. So if you do that, send it to me only. And if you have a copy of the Donnie Institute thing, I could find it myself. But if you know you have it, then send it along and I'll send it out to the rest of the committee. And thank you. So let's quickly get back to what we started talking about with the proposed financial orders. One was about OPEB, one was about free cash, and it's just a standard application of town policy, town policy being that our goal is to have reserves that are between 5% and 15% of operating revenue. But at this point, we're actually a little bit higher than the 15% and that's because we knew we were coming in. We did that deliberately knowing we were coming into major capital projects. But we've also taken the recommendation or the policy of transferring above 5% into the stabilization fund. It's all our money in the end, but the stabilization fund is something that we have better control of and has slightly better investment value. Anything else you want to add to that? Free cash closes out at June 30th, and it has to be recertified where the stabilization fund is always available for funding source. So we can always vote in stabilization fund now has a different rule than it originally applied. It takes a majority vote of the governing body, whether it be a town meeting or a council, to put money into the stabilization fund to take it out. And so I think we would just be making those points. And then the third question was to go back to old projects and place previously funded projects that had been bonded to account for them differently so that we can reduce the amount of indebtedness. Right. In the past, when you went out to bond and if you had a premium on the sale of a bond, you could use that premium to pay for expenses related to the borrowing. But the rest of it, they considered gentle fund money and it would close out to free cash. And that would be the end of it. With the Immunity Mod, it allows you now to use the premium to pay down the debt so that you're actually borrowing less. So and basically what we're saying here is we have a couple of authorizations, I think one of them was the Amherst, the second phase of the sewer project that was voted on before the Immunity Mod came into effect. So this language allows us to do to use that practice of netting out the premium on that bond, on that borrowing once we go out for a permanent bond. It's basically what it's doing. So are there any questions from any member of the committee about any of the three proposed orders? And... So those are the three that I have council orders drafted up. We don't have numbers on them yet. I haven't given them to Athena yet or anything like that. So I'm not asking you to recommend them here today. It's basically the three that are the most firm. There are other ones that are coming up that I wanted to just bring up briefly that I don't have appropriation orders drawn up for yet. And that is... We have a couple of borrowing authorizations that we need to do pretty soon. One is for the School of Visibility Study. It was part of the capital plan. We had it at $400,000. There was no authorization or anything. We didn't know what it was going to be. We just based that on what we had in the last feasibility study for that. It's going to be more than that. It's probably going to be closer to $800,000. I'm trying to get a firm number before I drop the question. I'm not clear. And we just have to work this out. Right. In which fiscal year we have to come up with that. So the question's going to be this is the feasibility study for the MSBA. Right. The question may be that we go ahead with $400,000 now that we've already set aside when we did the plan and then we do the balance. We haven't set aside any money for that. This is just a borrowing authorization that was part of the capital plan, but there was no action taken on it. Right. So we can make it for the amount that we need to make it now and not have to do two separate authorizations. Got it. Another one of those borrowing authorizations that weren't voted on was the INET loop, which is $589, was the number that we had in the capital plan. That's moving. We're about ready to go out to bid on that. So we're going to need to do that authorization in order to have an appropriation to sign a contract. Do we have to do hearings on both of those? Well, that was my question on these because these were part of the original budget. It was part of the original capital plan and we had forums for all of that. And I didn't know because we didn't actually do a council order at the time. Does that mean we have to do those hearings again? That was the question I was trying to get to in my email to Andy. Yeah. I mean, my sense is no, but I think that I would probably want to ask my fellow counselor, Mandy Hanicky, whether she agrees with me on it because she's very methodical in thinking through these issues, too. We did. It was included in the budget. It was presented to the public. It was part of what the council voted on when it approved the manager's proposed budget. So I think that we have gone through the steps that are required by the charter on this one. And it is different from Kendrick Park, which was not included in the prior action. The thing is, I think at this point, there is another one that I will mention that we'll have to go into a public forum. So you might as well lump them all together and just have a public forum for them all. But I was trying not to have to go through all that. But there's the feasibility study. There's the I-Net loop. And then a repurposing of funds. We council approved money for the Station Road Bridge. And we saved a lot of money on that project. So we have a balance left in that account. And Guilford is asking us to come to the council and to repurpose that, to purchase the equipment needed to fix the North Amherst intersection. So that's going to be coming to you. But again, that's a repurposing of already money. So that wouldn't have to go to a public forum, right? I believe that's... Isn't that an automatic referral to the finance committee? That's what we do. That's what we do with the bus with the schools. It came in 1990. I think it... So we should set that up sometime with him. Right. So that's coming. And as soon as I have more solid numbers on that, I'll put together in order for that. The other thing that you're probably going to need to have a public forum on is a grant match for the transfer station truck. We just got the grant from the DEP, part of the Volkswagen settlement. And we have to come up with a town match and it's from the transportation fund. So Guilford's asking that we take out between $37,000 and $40,000. I'm trying to tie that number down. From retained earnings, free cash out of the solid waste fund to be that grant match. I guess part of my... I'm going to go back to the other as to whether or not we need maybe just do them all even if they're not needed. But since the amount for the MSBA would be bigger than what we originally appropriated seems to me that we might need that. And then two that were in the financial plan but anything with them yet are the two schematic designs. And they're still sitting there. Right. They're still the fire and the DPW which is set at 250 which we know will probably end up being more. Absolutely. That was just a number early on that was on there. Same with the MSBA. There was no appropriation. That was a town meeting number from about five years ago. Yeah. It's a little old. Right. Okay. So let's turn back to the three orders that we have in front of us and if we do we feel comfortable making a recommendation of those three orders so that they can get before the council as early as the next meeting on January 27th. I do. I wasn't really expecting you to recommend them today. There's no council order numbers on those. Athena hasn't had those. They're still in draft form. I mean they're pretty much what they're going to be. They just need numbers. And I, Paul was thinking of grouping all these together so I don't, I'm fine if you recommend it now. I'm okay with that. I'm just throwing out what? Can I just ask on the things we're not looking at? So the repurposing of money for station bridge to the to the traffic signal. Could that be, we're not going to meet again before the next council meeting, correct? We meet just after it. So I'm just wondering whether we want to, what you said Paul is doing all the orders together. That would be incredibly good news to a lot of people to even know that exists. So I don't know how quickly we can move to having that on a piece of paper. And that was going to be bundled with these three orders we're seeing that there were several others. I just don't know what the timing is, Andy, is what I'm asking. I think that one is these three, at least you have a draft that needs an order number and if they're going to be substantially as written. Well, there's not a huge rush on those three. I've been working on those for a while and I've just been holding off until you weren't so busy to do these. So if you want, I can try to pull the other one together for the next meeting and then you can, I'll try to pull most of them together for the next meeting. So we won't do it. So we want to ask for a vote today and we won't take that to the next council meeting. I'm not looking for agenda items for the 27th. You'll be looking for the agenda items for any meeting in the future. Exactly, you got that one. Okay, so the last thing we wanted to make sure that we got to and I'll just say that the meeting schedule that Athena found errors in the prior version of the written meeting schedule which were It's Kathy's unable to read a calendar. Which were not at the beginning of the six-month period but towards the end of the six-month period. And so we do need to issue a new calendar. It is not affecting for the coming months. It's later in the it's more towards May and June as I recall. So we'll get an additional piece on that. So that takes care of item number six. Four towns meeting. We'll talk about it the next meeting. Lynn, did you have anything that you wanted to talk about regarding major capital projects now or It can be brief. We're waiting for the report on the fees of listening and I was expecting it actually as early as yesterday. The other thing is that we're working on clarifying the roles of various committees and the Council with regard to the major capital projects. But in truth, ultimately the responsibility lies with the Council. So the committee that we'll be making recommendations to the Council on the financial which is really what the bulk of a large part of it is anyway will fall here. So we will be getting back to it as a committee even though I think that the one thing to make clear is the key decisions like do we take this project out for an override and what is the date ultimately will be our Council decisions. Percent for art you had provided a draft and there were some changes we know about it already when it's been a few minutes on it. One thing I want to correct my memory was completely wrong that we did not actually vote on it. What I remembered is everyone said I'm for it, I really like it. And Andy said, are you sure we voted on it? So I watched the videotape which is a real asset. And Dorothy says, are we going to vote on it? And Andy said, next time. So ignore my unanimous votes. We went around the room. So anyone should send me comments. Sonya has on anything written here it's very much a draft. Sonya has provided a spreadsheet that takes the $50,000 and the $100,000 on a $10 million and a $20 million project and shows you what it would be each year adding interest costs. So it's in the $1,000 or $2,000 a year range depending on whether you're a 20 year or a 30 year. We can also do it in my table I had done it if we went out for an override what does that look like per household. So I just, Sharon you particularly had asked that we show the implications of this. So there are two different ways we can show it and she's done it in a very, your spreadsheet was very clear Sonya you know on the longer we go out the more the interest rates so it's a little bit higher each year but they're very small numbers and when you divide by household we're at a dollar a household or 40 cents you know if it was an override. So I think it's a great suggestion to put it in and I did a quick table not quite sure of the best way to show these kind of implications so I'm looking for any kind of feedback and Sonya's already generated a spreadsheet and any other comments. Yes. In reading about the Hadley overrides that failed it seems to me that people don't really care if it's only a dollar more. I think they've turned them down on principle because they were, they'd already done some big stuff and it was on this item, that item and that item and I think the feeling was and I just suggest my own guessing okay that the town should take care of things. So I think that the percent for art plan is good because it lumps the cost to something big and it doesn't come to ask people oh give me some money for this give me some money for that because that's the only thing that made sense because it wasn't really going to add that much to their taxes so it was the idea of constantly being had something being added and added and they just put their foot down. So I think you've done a good job on this and I hope we can go forward. Dorothy I was just pointing out that there are two different ways of thinking about it. If it's not in an override and you spend, if the project is $100,000 project so I'm just looking at Tonya's numbers if you spread it out over 30 years it's $3,000 a year and $3,300 once you do interest if you spread it out 20 it's five that's an alternative way of showing that you're spreading an expensive project out and we can do one or the other or both in here in terms of saying drawing out what is 0.5% of something and I did it with just for simplicity I did it on a $10,000,000 and $20,000,000 base we could do $10,000,000 and $40,000 you know I mean I think most people if you show them $10,000 and $20,000 you can probably figure out how to get to $40,000 but I don't know. So I'm looking for any kind of guidance on that table and that what does this mean in terms of money and the rest was very much what we talked about the major changes that spread this out over time it only gets triggered with a higher threshold and if we're in a situation project by project we can decide not to do it we have that option and I will only put in the votes when we actually vote I will fix that So my suggestion had been that we want to make the point if because I think we all support this and the point is going to be clear that it's not going to be that costly a thing it's really a fairly minor expense in comparison to the sum total and if it is a project that is funded by the town within the budget without going for a debt exclusion override it gets repaid through the portion a portion of the amount that is largely allocated to capital and so it has a slight in the word slight is very important diminishing factor on the amount that's available to do other things whether it is buying a new electric school bus or repair a road but when you're talking about thousands of dollars a few thousand dollars it's not going to buy much of a school bus and it's not going to buy much of road repair and but I think that it is worth providing that number and then say and if it is a debt exclusion override then it is not funded from the budget it is going to be funded from additional taxation and would you present it there so I would present both okay so I'll just add a paragraph to say one way and then the other way and make it simple so I think that at this point if you have comments additional comments or suggestions on percent fraud send them along to Kathy if it's about the housing send them along to me we'll try and see what we can do before our next meeting at the end of the month I think it's the 28th and Andy do you want to take a vote on whether we support this so if Lynn wants to put it on the agenda for the council or do you want to wait till the revised report comes back has CRC dealt with it CRC hasn't even started Taiwan start till tomorrow they're talking about it tomorrow yeah I don't see it on the agenda for the 27th then okay because the other piece is that after we look at the bylaw and they not the reports but the bylaw itself bylaws in essence have to also go back then to GOL for final review but that should happen after the council has their discussion okay I just don't see it on the 27th so we could either vote now or not I mean I can just in rewriting this I can highlight that we haven't voted the committee voted and then I'll put a blank and wait for us too so the next draft you'll see we'll remove the fact that we voted because we didn't so let me just ask is anybody present today think that they will not be but eligible on the 28th because we might then have our additional two members and can postpone the vote until we have them present back for the first day of classes which okay so any other business that I don't have anything that I feel we need to do is there anything else that people want to raise that's can be unanticipated business she'd like to bring forward Bob yeah I I saw on the paper that the recyclable contracts are changing and going up in price do we have any sense of what how that's going to affect Amherst there is a piece in the time managers report I believe for the meeting that was yesterday which I will send to you and it is a question that we probably need to talk about as far as the viability of the enterprise fund I am in link to that I'd be interested to know whether anyone in town is looking at now my understanding is we're now down to one trash collector when we used to have two because USA bought Amherst trucking so now my my bucket will change in its name yet again on our streets since we had another one so do we know at one at what point we look at if we have a monopoly offering us a service does that is that doing anything out to our rates I know the town decided to contract this out for good reasons on and we don't have an enterprise fund for trash pickup but Andy you know I just don't know whether it's an issue that might come up in the next six months or the next 12 months because usually you wait a little bit until the fact that you're the only show in town so it's something I'd just like to keep on the radar screen because it goes with the recyclable since we pay it directly through the through trash I'm not sure that that ends up being our issue that we can deal with certainly not a finance committee issue because the contracting policy is really under the Board of Health's jurisdiction I believe I guess my point was we could decide we wanted to have an enterprise fund for trash pickup and that people would have to pay into that and you can still hire a private I think we didn't do that for all sorts of other reasons when we went didn't have any municipal service and if they don't do anything in the next 12 or 24 months it probably doesn't matter you know it's we just keep going the way we've been going it seems to me that we need to bring the whole thing into one bigger question and take it back to the town manager then the only other one I wanted to put on a future agenda for us to have a discussion here I think it would be useful to have comparisons of pilot payments by private colleges wealthy private colleges and public universities toward their town how much do different pay so that we could in a public way talk about what kind of payments we get from the two more that have assets in town and I realize that doesn't necessarily do anything other than potentially raise why does Smith College spend give Northampton more than Amherst College gives to us it just brings it into the public domain because they don't you know and what is the equivalent so I know University of Vermont pays so I would do a couple public colleges you know something equivalent to UMass and a few equivalent to Amherst that are known names and I don't know whether we as finance can ask for a study like that be done or should I go to the economics department at UMass and see whether a couple professors and their students want to do a study like that the most recent one I could find from was from like 2012 so I didn't and it did Wisconsin it did I wanted to do more you know in our state Wellesley Smith Williams so people go oh I know what those are so Andy I don't know whether that would come from our committee whether I just suggested to the town manager whether I go talk to some economists with their students and say would this be a fun project to do where we don't have to take staff time to do it I'm sorry but I think I'm just quickly looking whether this whole issue was mentioned in the draft for the town manager's goals and if it is and I think I've seen so many versions of this I'm my head spinning but if it is then I would suggest that we have a conversation with the town manager as to how he wants to proceed and if we can find a group of people or a student who wants to take this on as a project I was very successful using having a student do a piece of work that was unsolicited by the council and it turned out to be an outstanding piece of work and I went through one of the professors at in public policy at UMass so and there was no cost okay so we've had the issues two issues having to do with trash recycle pickup in the effect of a monopoly and the question about pilot payments are things that we want to add to our to-do list and move along with as we can anything else that people want to raise today otherwise you can take a agreement to adjourn or a motion to adjourn I so move all right any anyone in a pop is second I okay so all in favor I yeah okay so we afford to zero we have a motion to adjourn