 All right, we're recording. All right. Good evening. This is our regular town council meeting of October 19th. And it will begin with a hearing and then move on to the rest of the meeting. Governor Baker's March 12th. Order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. Allows us to hold this virtual town council meeting. I will call on each counselor by name. Please answer so that we know you can hear us and we can hear you. And then we please make sure you mute your mic. This is also how we will conduct the meeting. Given that we have a quorum of the council present. I am calling the October 19th, 2020 meeting. Of the Amherst town council to order at 632. The meeting includes audio video and is available live on Amherst media. It is also being recorded. There is no chat room. If you have technical difficulties, we will make note of that. And if we have to stop the meeting. Meantime I want to draw particular attention before I take roll. To the fact that tonight for the first time. We have the ability to do closed captioning. If you're watching this on zoom. And that is on the bottom of your bar. And when you go there, if you'll put the, we now have this up. That you join on zoom. As a desktop client or mobile. You can see on the screen. When we begin the notification will be a little CC box down at the bottom. Such as the one you see on the screen. And if you click on that, you can choose which kind of closed captioning you would like to see. This will also be shown on the screen. Of Amherst media as we go forward. So with that, I'm going to call the role of the town council. Shelley Bob. Shelley present. Yes. Alissa Brewer. Present. Happy Angeles. Darcy DeMont. Present. When grease for present Mandy, Joe, Hanneke. Dorothy Pam. Dorothy, could you please unmute and. I was. then I muted myself. Thank you very much. Evan Ross. Present. George Ryan. Present. Kathy Shane will not be with us this evening. Steve Schreiber. Here. Andy Steinberg. Present. Sarah Schwartz. Present. Okay. There are some meetings that are shown on the agenda, but I want to make a correction to two of them. First of all, in terms of council committee meetings, there will be no finance committee meeting tomorrow. The second is the town services and outreach committee, instead of meeting on October 22nd, we'll meet on October 29th, and it will meet at 430 instead of 630. In addition to that, there are two other announcements that we're showing. One is regarding the COVID hotline, and the other is regarding the emergency rental assistance program. Okay. Thank you. We're going to take that down, and we are going to officially begin the public hearing on the master plan. This hearing is in advance of asking the council to adopt the master plan. The adoption of the master plan is in accordance with section 9.8B of the charter. The master plan or any amendments thereto shall be approved by the planning board and then be submitted to the town manager, to the town council, by the town manager, to the town council, which shall hold at least one public hearing zero on. The town council shall adopt the master plan with or without amendments. So we have already held a public forum on the master plan. That was earlier on Tuesday, September 29th. Today, we are doing the actual hearing, and we will have it on our agenda for the first time. And then it will return on our agenda a second time, which will be on November 9th. And at that point, if we are ready, we will vote. We are going to have a brief presentation of the memo that Mr. Backelman has prepared for us. And he will be assisted in this by Christine Brestrum. Paul. Thank you. So under the charter, that's the town manager's responsibility to transmit a request for the master plan to be reviewed by the town council. And of course, this has been ushered through the entire process by our planning director, Chris Brestrum. We also have the chair of the planning board, Jack Jemsak here. So I'm going to turn it right over to Chris, who's already done a primer on it for the council and for the public, but she can give a brief synopsis for those who are new and have not listened to it before. So Chris. Well, I wasn't really prepared to give a presentation tonight. I was under the impression that we had already had the presentation. And I wasn't asked by Lynn to give a presentation. That's true. The presentation is in our packet. And if people have questions about the presentation, they can ask those during the hearing. The presentation, as I mentioned before, was done on Tuesday, September 29th. Is there anything else you'd like to mention in fact about the master plan at this time, Christine? Would you like me to summarize Mr. Backelman's memo to you? That would be great. Thank you. All right. So Mr. Backelman has prepared a memo about the master plan and tried to capture all of the history of it and the ins and outs of it. The planning board was asked by town council to update the master plan sometime during the winter of 2019 and 20. And during the time that the planning board spent assessing the master plan, they found that the master plan was really pretty good the way it is. The strategies and goals and objectives all seem, most of them seem to still make sense. And so rather than trying to update the master plan at this time, the planning board decided to ask town council to consider adopting the master plan. We had been asked to update the master plan using the terms necessary and obvious, but it turned out that some of those necessary and obvious things would have required a lot more work than we originally expected, particularly with regard to demographics and land use. And so the planning board and the planning department decided it was better to wait until after the 2020 census to update any demographic information. And we really need to work with our IT department as well as our planners to update any land use changes that have been made and that's a pretty big effort. It's not just a question of changing the word, select board to town council or town manager. It's really, there's a lot more to it. So the other day we had a presentation about the master plan and we talked about what a master plan is. And a master plan is one definition of it is a dynamic long-term planning document that provides a conceptual layout to guide future growth and development. A master plan is a community whose long-term blueprint for its future. It's a dynamic document and marks the beginning and not the end of the process. And it's not the same as zoning. It contains many, it contains I think 10 different chapters and I can go through those. Land use is one of them, demographics and housing, economic development, natural and cultural resources, open space and recreation, services and facilities, transportation and circulation. And the last one is implementation. And of course the master plan starts off with goals and policies. It also contains key directions for the town such as maintaining Amherst's existing community character and providing housing that meets the needs of all residents and diversifying and expanding the economic base and promoting an ethic of sustainable environmental energy practices in all town activities. The master plan is on the town website and it really began about more than 12, 22 years ago, I guess it was. Now in 1998, when the Comprehensive Planning Commission formed and the Comprehensive Planning Committee worked diligently from that time until about 2006 when they turned the reins over to planning Amherst together. But the Comprehensive Planning Committee was very active during those 12 years that it was really involved. And it published an Amherst visions report which is online. The Conduct and Planning exercises and obtained funding for a build out analysis. It gathered and analyzed data and published a build out analysis in future growth scenarios. It worked with the UMass Planning Studio on Village Center design and planning. And eventually it started the process that we know as planning Amherst together in about 2004, 2005. The current master plan is the first master plan in nearly 40 years. It was based on a lot of public input and that was continuing the work of the CPC which began around 2005, this effort of planning Amherst together. I don't know how much more history you wanna go into but we do have plans that are associated with the master plan are listed in the town managers memo, including the sewer extension master plan. Excuse me, my phone is ringing. The housing production plan, the housing market study, transportation plan, open space and recreation plan, bicycle and pedestrian network plan, community field master plan and the energy and climate action plan which is currently being developed. So the town has implemented a lot of things that are in the master plan and the parts that I'm most familiar with are the land use aspects. The planning board has worked diligently for the last 10 years implementing the master plan by making changes to the zoning bylaw. The select board had developed a charge for a master plan implementation committee in accordance with chapter 10 of the master plan but no members were ever appointed to that committee. And so the planning board has really been sort of ad hoc implementing the master plan and is planning now to make a careful study of exactly how many of the things that are in the master plan have been implemented. I'm gonna be working with Doug Marshall who's a member of the planning board on that endeavor. So the next steps are that the town manager, the planning board and the town staff recommend that town council adopt the master plan as it is written and that the town start the process for the new master plan in about four years around 2025 with the goal of having a new master plan in place by 2030. The Amherst Home Rule Charter requires the adoption of a new master plan by town council every 20 years and 2030 is the target date for the new master plan since it was first adopted in 2010. In order to prepare a new master plan, the town will need to appropriate funding to hire a consultant to conduct research and do public outreach. The consultant would be required to do demographic research based on the 2020 census and also research the changes in our land use patterns. The estimate for preparing a new master plan is probably at least $200,000. That was the amount that was appropriated in the mid 2000s to work on our current master plan. And meanwhile, the town should work on implementing the master plan that we have. And as I said, Doug Marshall and I are making an effort to assess exactly which strategies have been implemented and which ones haven't. So thank you very much and I think that's it. Thank you. Before I call on Jack Jimsick, I wanna go back to town manager Backelman and ask, I understand you did an update which has been posted and could you just explain the update to us? Yes, thank you for pointing that and for noting that. So there are several, there's one new paragraph and a couple of additional phrases that are put on page three of the memo and basically recognizes the role of the comprehensive planning committee in the development of the previous master plan. And I think that was important because especially since we're looking forward this document that you're looking at now will have some longevity and people will look back to this to say where was the council in 2020 as we started this process. And it was important to include this part of the history so that people understood the entire history of the process. So thanks for pointing that out, Lynn. Okay, thank you. And thanks for making that update, we appreciate it. Jack Gemsick who is chair of the planning board. Would you please speak to us about the planning board's recommendation? Yes. So on July 1st, we had a meeting and we realized as Chris explained that an update in the master plan was not going to be a simple task as simple as formatting and adding the nearly dozen plans that have been developed over the last 10 years. It ended up being much more complicated plus we have COVID plus we're trying to do zoning bylaws which again, Chris Brestrup is assisting Rob more on that. Anyway, it wasn't going to work out that we could give it a refresh as town council originally asked. So we did support accepting the master plan or recommend to town council to accept the master plan as written realizing it's not perfect but it is a very good document. I mean, it took a lot to get that together and approved and passed. And it seems like it has everything we need to get us through the next 10 years. So, and I really like Paul and Chris's recommendations there for looking at it in five years and try to hit that 2030. But the planning board, we recommend that the town council approve it as is. Okay. Thank you, Jack. Mandy Johanna Key, would you please report on the conversation with the community resources committee and their recommendation? Yes. So on July 21st, we took the planning board's unanimous recommendation under advisement. We had the chair of planning board at the time into our meeting along with the Christine Brestrup planning department head. And after discussion, we voted unanimously so four zero with one absent. Councilor Schwartz was not at that meeting to recommend the town council adopt the master plan as is. Thank you. We are now, later on, we will have an opportunity for counselors to speak to this discussion because it is on our agenda later on, but we are now open to public comment either and we'll start with an opportunity for residents in favor of having the town council adopt the master plan. Please raise your hand. Okay. I see no hands. Are there any residents who would like to speak in opposition to adoption of the master plan by the town council? Then let me just ask if there's any final comments from Paul or Christine or Jack or Mandy Johanna. I don't have any. First of all, we want to thank the planning board for having looked at this and look forward to their report of how we've done on the master plan, which we understand will be forthcoming. So with that, I'm going to officially close the hearing and we're going to move on to the regular, to the rest of the agenda. Okay. We start the rest of the agenda with general public comment. Residents are welcome to speak up to three minutes at the end. We will not engage in dialogue with you at that time. However, we will make note of your comments and obviously they will be recorded. I will try to make sure that we keep record of all of the comments. And if we could, we'll start with Rachel Hayes. You're going to enter the room and we'd like you to unmute and go ahead and speak to us. Okay, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, thank you. Hi, I'm the Reverend Rachel Hayes, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst. I speak tonight in support of the proposed wage theft bylaws. In my role at the UU, I encounter labor justice issues in three main ways. As a person of faith who believes in honoring equity and human dignity, as the head of staff at my organization, and as someone people call in distress when they can't pay their bills. Everybody needs money for food and rent and medicine and an employer withholding pay from workers because they can get away with it is morally bankrupt. As income inequality continues to rise in this country, we need to build protections for our workers into our community. The issue of wage theft touches every facet of oppression in our culture. The less power a worker has due to oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, national origin, ability or disability or any other oppression, the more likely they will not receive fair pay for their work. We can change that. Amherst can join other cities and towns in passing wage theft protections. All of the provisions in these bylaw changes are already being used in other towns. And these changes support employers who play fair by not allowing bad actors to compete for the same contracts and markets. Changing our culture into one that honors the dignity of all human beings will take some work. But the town can get us a step closer by providing protection against wage theft. Thank you. Thank you very much for your comments, Reverend Hayes. Margaret Sawyer. Hi, thank you all so much for your tireless work on these bylaws. We know you're not considering them yet tonight but we're grateful for everything you've been doing. I'd like to ask, I'm gonna make a few comments and then I wanted to see if it's possible for Jonathan Alvarez to follow me and for me to interpret for him. I don't know if it's possible for us both to be on at the same time or I can follow him too. It is absolutely possible and we'll bring Jonathan into the room so that if you could speak, identify yourself first and go ahead and then Jonathan can unmute and you can translate for him. Okay, great. I'll just finish my comments quickly which are that at the Pioneer Valley Workers Center we really see this as a sign of Amherst's commitment to honoring workers, standing with workers in a time when there are so many challenges facing workers. We were thrilled that you all would still consider the wage theft ordinance during COVID. There's so many other things going on and we are grateful to you for taking this on at this time when we know that workers face so many challenges. So we've seen how this law has been critical in other towns too as a preventive measure, positively reinforcing to employers that in this town with the bylaws we won't allow cheating of employees. It helps to force businesses to follow the law and then face repercussions if they don't. We're also so grateful and consider it so important that you're encouraging the greater diversity in the construction contracts. That's been an important part especially in these times. At the Workers Center we do get complaints of wage theft from Amherst. No one is immune to bosses trying to cut their obligations. We firmly believe that this is a creative and hopefully regenerative time in our country. Obviously we're facing incredible challenges but this is a time for building and I'm thrilled as an Amherst resident and also on behalf of the Workers Center that the town counselors are boldly and affirmatively tackling this issue to make our town better for all people and especially people earning their wages. Thank you. And if you would please ask Jonathan Alvarez to introduce himself and he can begin his statements with your translation. Jonathan, que se presenta y yo te traduzco después de cada frase más o menos, okay? Hola, soy Jonathan Alvarez. Quiero responder un poco sobre mi historia trabajando en Amherst. Hello, my name is Jonathan Alvarez. I'd like to tell you a little bit about my story of working in Amherst. La experiencia que he ha tenido no ha sido muy buena. Me gustaría dárselas a entender muy amplio pero sé que el tiempo es corto. My experience was not very good and I'd love to have the time to tell you the details about it but I know that time is short. Son muchas cosas que pasan detrás de todo lo que se ve. No solamente lo pasé yo, lo pasan muchas gente, latinos, americanos y de toda índole. There's lots of things that happen, quiere decir en un negocio, verdad? Sí. In a business behind that which you see in the front. There's lots of things that happen, not just to me but to other Latinos, to Americans, to everyone. Nosotros sufrimos de muchas cosas. Me gustaría especificarlo pero no puedo. Pero hay mucho robo de salario, hay mucha incertidumbre. We've suffered many things. I'd like to be able to explain it but I feel that I can't. We've suffered wage theft and also disculpe me, Jonathan, no capte la última palabra. Hay mucha incertidumbre como que nos dejan en el abandono. Feeling of uncertainty of being abandoned basically not knowing where to turn. Me gustaría que no estés en el abandono y si es posible luchar y exponer mi historia lo haré. I'd like to see that our voice and our concerns are heard, that we're not left relatively abandoned and if there's an opportunity to more fully turn. I'd like to see that our voice and our concerns are heard, that we're not left relatively abandoned and if there's an opportunity to more fully tell my story I would like to do that. Un punto muy importante que tenemos que recordar todos que detrás de nosotros tenemos una familia por la que luchamos tenemos que poner la comida en la mesa, hay que pagar renta y los servicios públicos. It's one thing that's so important to remember is that behind all of us, behind every worker, there's a family and we're working to provide for them to put food on the table and to be able to pay the rent and take care of the bills. Muchas gracias por escucharme. Si necesitan alguna otra explicación más amplia puedo dárselas pueden contactarme de cualquier manera. Thank you so much for listening to me. If you need a more full explanation or information you may contact me directly. I want to thank Jonathan for your comments and Margaret for your translation and Margaret I would like you to ask Jonathan if he would to provide us a written statement that gives us more fully of things that he would like us to know about his story and perhaps then we have somebody who can translate that as well in our town hall. That's great. Dice que gracias y también si puede proveir sus palabras por escrito si lo haras el favor, ellos pueden traducirlo y quieren saber más de lo que está hablando. Claro que sí, con mucho gusto yo puedo escribir todo. Thank you so much. I'd be glad to do that. I'll write everything down. Thank you. We very much appreciate both of your being here tonight. Max Page is our next audience person. Please come forward, state your name and where you live. Hi, it's Max Page. I live in 84 McClelland Street, same place I grew up in 54 years ago. I teach at UMass Amherst and I am the vice president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which is the 117,000 member union of public school and college and university educators. We're also the largest union in New England. And I just want to say a few words and really kind of sum up with some of the things that have been said so far about this wage theft ordinance. One of the most basic right of every worker is to be paid fairly on time for the work they do. And clearly the reason that we have a statewide law on wage theft and why we are asking for these, this local ordinance on wage theft is that this, that wage theft happens all the time, $700 million that's estimated is stolen from workers. And so this is a chance for Amherst to kind of lead and join a number of other towns and cities in making sure that this does not happen in our towns. And you just heard a powerful statement from Jonathan Alvarez who has seen and experienced this kind of debilitating violation, the theft of their labor and their wages. So just very quickly to sort of summarize, first Amherst is joining other cities and towns. This is, this has happened in Northampton, Boston, Linn, Eastampton, Springfield, Worcester, Cambridge, a lot of other progressive communities are moving on this and we should be certainly joining the many of the elements of our bylaw have been implemented elsewhere. The second thing is that the hope is that actually the point of these bylaws is that they're preventative by when you raise the stakes for violating wage in our laws, these bylaws help discourage such behavior. So the hope is actually simply by having on the books that prevents they're having them to be actually used. And then the third point is simply that these provisions help assure a fair and wage justice playing fields. Employers that act responsibly and that's the vast majority of employers in Amherst will not be undercut by those committing wage theft. And that's the idea to create a level playing field so that the people, the employers who are doing the right thing are not somehow punished for their good behavior. And I just want to end by saying there's some comment that I've heard around towns that perhaps there might be problematic for Amherst to be out front in this that somehow this would expose us somehow I'm not exactly sure why perhaps the lawsuit or something. But the first thing, as I said, there are many other communities that have done this already. We would not be at the very forefront. We would be, you know, following, but also leading the rest of the rest of the state. The goal, of course, is for every city and town to have such an ordinance, but those progressive communities have to start and it behooves towns that are most committed to social racial and economic justice to lead the fight. And I think one of the things that so many of us love about this town is its history of having pushed out in front, whether that's the Vietnam vigils of the 1960s or the first LGBTQ plus literature course at a high school, the greatest of women poets having a town with a foreign policy. I mean, we pride ourselves in having kind of pushed the boundaries. And in this case, let's let's join some of the other progressive communities and lead so that we actually banish wage theft from the entire state. So thank you for listening to me. Thank you for your comments, Professor Page. Yasmin Kerasi, please state your name and where you're from. Hi, thanks. So my name is Jasmine Kerasi and I'm also an Amherst resident at 81 Harlow Drive. And I'm a faculty member at UMass in the sociology department and labor center. And I wanted to talk to you today about why I support the proposed wage theft bylaws and how my research underscores the importance of strong workplace regulations, especially now with the coronavirus. So when COVID hit, my colleague and I launched a research project to understand how COVID was impacting essential workers here in Massachusetts. And so far we've done four surveys, one in April, May, July, and September, and we've talked to over 7,000 workers who are doing in-person essential work in Massachusetts. And I'm going to talk about two things that we found. First, we asked workers a series of questions about their work in home lives during coronavirus, like stress levels at work, access to paid sick leave and health insurance, feeling safe at work, food insecurity, and so forth. So over and over again, in each of our surveys, we saw that workers of color and low wage workers were experiencing the greatest hardships across almost all dimensions here in Massachusetts. And so my takeaway from this is that COVID has been very difficult for everyone, but low wage workers and workers of color have been disproportionately harmed. Okay, so second big finding is we asked workers whether they were afraid of being disciplined or fired if they brought up safety concerns at work. And what we found was very concerning. So on average, about one in three workers reported that yes, that they are worried that they'd be disciplined or fired if they voiced safety concerns. And that's a very large and troubling number of people and really reflects the lack of power that people are feeling during this time of the pandemic. And perhaps not surprisingly, these concerns have been much higher for both low wage workers and workers of color. So for example, here in Massachusetts, 43% of workers earning under $15 an hour were afraid to speak up. And in comparison, only 23% of those making higher wages over $30 an hour were. So to state the obvious, no workers should be afraid to speak up about basic safety concerns. And yet that is what's happening. And so how do these findings matter for wage theft bylaws here in Amherst? So it reasons that workers would be just as fearful to speak up about wage theft as they are about safety, especially with few other employment opportunities during coronavirus. And at the same time with economy hurting during the pandemic, some employers may be more tempted to take shortcuts. And so what our research shows and what I believe as a resident is that wage theft bylaws send a strong message to both employers and to workers that Amherst abides by labor law and will not turn a blind eye to wage theft. So thanks for your time. Thank you, Professor Kerasi. Frank Gomez, please state your name and where you live. Hi, my name is Frank Gomez. I live in Worcester, but I work for the North Atlantic State Regional Council of Carpenters. I would like to talk about the projects on cows road in Amherst, where a group of 12 workers reach out to me to ask for help because for the last six weeks, the work over there, they were not getting paid. So when they started asking for the money, they just got fired without getting paid. Many of these workers struggle with the fact that they didn't have the money to pay for the rent or to buy groceries, but this is not an isolated case. Since they are very familiar with this business model, the many contractors are using the hire a third party labor sub or a labor broker to avoid any responsibility with the workers claiming that they do not work for them. I help them file a complaint with the Attorney General, and I continue to connect with the workers over the long time. It took the Attorney General to investigate. Even though we have all the time sheets and prove that they work at this job, it took 10 months for the Attorney General to finish our investigation. In the end, the workers only receive a portion of what they were owed. This is a project that received several million dollars of state dollars, received a major Amherst tax break, and still workers were cheated and not fully paid. This is why we need to pass the but this bylaws. Thank you. Mr. Gomez, thank you for joining us tonight. Please state your name and where you live. Hi, Dan Wallach, 37 Cosby Avenue, Amherst. Amherst resident for 31 years. I'm also a retired carpenter having worked in local 135, 108 and 336. I feel very strongly about just compensation for a day's work. This ordinance will ensure that only qualified contractors with a verified history will be allowed to bid on town funded projects. As an Amherst taxpayer, I can feel confident that my contributions to the town coffers that will fund upcoming municipal projects, they will be performed by tradesmen and women receiving their deserved wages. I hope this ordinance will not be distorted by partisan politics or be distracted by whether it is an issue of affordability. As this ordinance is about enforcing existing wage laws. Also, I would like to say that this is not a union or nonunion agenda. Amherst should get on board with other cities and towns of the Commonwealth in ensuring economic justice on town construction projects. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Mr. Wallach for joining us this evening. Are there any other people who would like to make public comment? I would like to make public comment period in our meeting tonight. Seeing none, then we are going to move on with our agenda. We are going to the consent agenda which we will put up on the screen. The following items were selected because they were considered to be routine and it was reasonable to expect they would pass with no controversy. I would like to make public comment. I would like to make public comment on the meeting. Ask that it be removed when I finish the list. And that does not require a second. The motion is as follows and I will be looking for a second to move the following items and the printed materials there under and approve those items as a single unit. 6A, adoption of the resolution supporting the east-west area. 7A, approval of the town manager appointees to the following boards and committees. Community development block grant advisory committee, cultural council, design review board. 9B, appointment of Councillor Pat D'Angelo as liaison to the affordable housing trust. Item 11A, approval of minutes, October 6th, 2020, council meeting minutes. Is there anyone who would like anything removed at this time? Is there a second? Thank you. Then I'm going to move to the roll call vote. We're going to start with Alyssa Brewer. Well, that's convenient because I just wanted to make sure that you fixed the motion to say it's October 5th minutes, but other than that, yes. Thank you. It was October 5th. Thank you, Alyssa. Pat D'Angelo. Yes. Thank you. Darcy Dumont. Darcy Dumont. Yes. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Yes. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Thank you. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. This is not absent. Is absent. I'm sorry. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Shalini Balmille. Yes. It passes 12. For none against. No abstentions. One absent. Okay. The next item on the agenda is our presentations. And we're going to start with the report on the zoning bylaw article 14. And for this, Paul Bachman is being joined by Christine Brestrup. And building commissioner Rob Mora. Christine, it's been a busy week. A couple of weeks actually. Thank you for everything you've been doing. And I just want to state that. We are not voting on any changes, but in your packet is not only an explanation of the process, but also a presentation of the calendar for us to move this by the revisions to this bylaw forward. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Paul. Thank you, Lynn. So article 14 is the zoning bylaw that the town council passed at the beginning of the pandemic. We were ahead of the state actually when we adopted, when you adopted it. And that gave some leeway to the, to the building commissioner to make decisions that otherwise would have gone through and sometimes arduous permitting process with town boards. We have Rob Mora, who's our building commissioner and Chris Brestrup, who is our planning director here. To talk about a little bit about how it's been used. What other changes have been made under the governor's order? And what, what recommendations they have from their experience and how they would like to see the article changed for your consideration tonight. So I think Rob, are you, do you want to walk through this? Yes. Good evening, Rob more building commissioner. I just want to mention, whenever I say we or the town or us, I just want to know that there were quite a few departments involved with this to make this all happen. It all came together relatively fast back in June, but planning inspections, fire facilities, public works, the board of licensed commissioners, the town manager's office, town manager, of course, and all of this was done with great support and assistance from the bid and the chamber. So just wanted to mention that June, we started June 5th issuing permits for establishments to either increase or create outdoor dining. We worked with 17 restaurants. Most of those, almost half of those were on private property and the remainder were out in the public way where the town manager created the space on North Pleasant, South Pleasant and Main Street. Of those eight restaurants on private property, some of those have potential for a permanent outdoor dining expansion in those areas. But at this point, these 17 permits were issued on a temporary basis following the governor's order. At that time, they were due to expire November 1st. And as you know, now have been extended to 60 days beyond the end of the state of emergency. So those remain in effect without the need for article 14 None of those 17 restaurants actually needed article 14 to be established at that time. They may, however, at the end of the governor's order when that expires, be able to benefit from article 14. If it is in effect next year to possibly continue either on a temporary or more permanent basis. All of almost all of those, I think only one did not receive a extension of the premises from the board of license commissioners. So almost all of those establishments were committed to serve alcohol in the areas where the outdoor dining has occurred. Moving to actually using article 14 to help establishments, we've had three cases so far. Two of them are pretty straightforward in it. And one of those is a temporary situation. I believe you have the memo that was written to town manager Bachmann that, that explains the, the locations. One was a salon out in North Amherst. They actually set up three tents, personal services for salon services to occur out in the parking lot. There was an outdoor water connection made for hair washing and it was done really nicely. I'm the same site. There was also an outdoor restaurant, outdoor dining created on that private property as well. We've recently used article 14 to open a new smoothie shop right downtown. That was a relatively small project, minor alteration in the outdoor space on the private property for seating. The most involved proposal so far has been one brought to us by Stackers Pub. They currently operated under a special permit, had some outdoor seating at the rear of the building on a patio and their proposal is to expand the patio area, increase some lighting and landscaping and provide a better access through an alleyway to, to and from that outdoor dining. And that's one that just recently got, we got finished up and will probably be starting construction soon. We've had many conversations with prospective restaurant operators. I'm, I know I was aware of one possible retail establishment that might benefit from article 14. But those were the three that have actually occurred so far. We've also had applications that didn't fit into any of those categories that we can say were related to COVID situation. That, that article 14 didn't help and that the governor's order didn't help. And those are, those are temporary proposals that came to us from the Jones library, the emmer survival center, the public schools, private school. And the town of Amherst itself. So that kind of leads me into the new, or expanded possibly, but extended at least article 14. Where, you know, we, we would like to discuss, I think we're going to start with the CRC soon, discussing some of these changes, but really trying to anticipate where could this possibly be used that, you know, we didn't think of the first time that that might likely come up, whether it's a tent in the parking block changes to the parking or overflow parking arrangements, maybe signage. And what comes to mind are the medical establishments, the public schools, the libraries, the nonprofit institutions and the town. Also put in the proposal, you'll see a temporary allowance for farm stands. The thought there is maybe in the spring, there'll be more requests for roadside farm stands from the agricultural community. And we just wanted to be prepared for that. I think one thing we experienced as school began to making their final decisions on how they were going to open up. There was a need for things to happen fast. And most of these that I mentioned, that didn't fit into a category of article 14 of the governor's order, but it did fit into a category of article 14 of the governor's order. Ended up having to go through a process with the planning board. And we were able to move that as long as quickly as possible, but it did. It certainly would be nicer. I think if we were able to accommodate those temporary uses in a updated by law amendment. Thank you. You're muted, Lynn. Thank you for your comment at this point, or Christine, before we move to questions. Yeah, just as Chris has anything you want to add. I just wanted to note that I hope that you saw the updated version of this bylaw that we sent out today, which includes the office park district. Along with the professional research park district. And that was an effort to include the medical offices on university drive as well as on research drive and the valley as well. And that was done by the medical facilities. So they may need to set up, you know, some sort of tent in their parking lot or, or outside to administer tests or vaccines. And that type of thing. And we wanted to be able to allow them to do that. So that's all. Other questions from the council at this time. I apologize that this question isn't directly related to bylaw 14. The zoning bylaw. But this is for Paul. Have you, you know, I went back to the town council policy regarding the control and regulation of public ways. And I read the section we added on zoning bylaw article 14. And it looks like we might need to amend that too. Have you had a chance to look at that? And when might we get those requests? Yeah, depending on the reaction from the council on this change that we're looking at, I would be advancing a memo to that. That's not a bylaw change. It's a policy change by the council. So it could be done pretty quickly. Yes. So that would need to be done. Absolutely. And when that comes forward, that goes to TSO for review. And then back to the council. Alyssa. So thank you. So yes, following up on that, that was mentioned at our last meeting. I'm going to go through the final report. I'm going to go through the final report. And then I'll go through the final report. I'm going to go through the final report that I proposed because we talked about that at the last meeting, the last town council meeting as well as tonight. The other thing I'm a little confused process wise about the fact. I first of all want to make sure it's clear that I am really impressed with the report. Is exactly what we asked for in my opinion. It is what, you know, when people express some nervousness about doing this this way. And we said, come on, let's try it. See how it goes. I'm going to go through the final report. I'm going to go through the final report. I'm going to go through article 14. And I think that's just incredibly helpful moving forward. So I thank you very much for that. And. I don't understand why we've been given except for a verbal sentence from Chris tonight and one sentence from Rob tonight. Any indication of why this needs such an expansion. We were not given that heads up in our minutes. It's reflected that I said, I don't understand why we wouldn't want to lay groundwork right now, especially given that we had already referred this to CRC on October 5th. And they've apparently been, you know, busy with other agenda items. And so haven't even talked about this at all. And I find it really weird that we're going to have a hearing on this on November 4th. So I don't understand why we wouldn't want to lay groundwork right now, especially given that we had already referred this to CRC on October 5th. And they've apparently been, you know, talking about these. So I find it really weird that we're going to have a hearing on this on November 4th. And basically the only thing that anybody knows about it is that it wants to be expanded, not why it wants to be expanded. And I presume that will be reported. For the purpose of the hearing. And then of course, obviously there will be a planning reward include those additional zones and for what purposes. I appreciate what you said about the schools in the library. I appreciate what was also finally said about medical because I had no idea why you would want to expand medical except for the tense issue. And then my final question is associated with, you mentioned retail and passing, but did not mention what that meant. I understood the tense for the schools, the library, the vaccines, the testing, but I don't know what you might have meant with retail or with nonprofits in terms of why they would need this. And I understand you're trying to look forward into the spring, just like with the farmer's stands. But I also want some assurance that this has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of marijuana or cannabis facility of any kind. Melissa, thank you. First of all, the reason this is on the agenda tonight and is not with action is for the very reason you're stated. So it would be very useful, Paul, Christine and Rob, if you would give us a little more background as to these various classifications and why now we want to put them on this bylaw. Okay. So a couple of things here. What you'll notice is that we tried to establish a temporary use definition to be clear that these new expanded uses for the most part are under a temporary situation. And we tried to define that so that was clear. And it really is as simple as this is what maybe possibly could be useful going forward. There isn't really much more to that. I haven't had specific requests from anything other than the library, schools, public and private schools, and the nonprofit institution that I was referring to is the Amherst Survival Center that I had to go through a site plan review process to put up a tent. So that really is it. I've had some requests from the town itself for things like temporary facilities in various locations, trying to anticipate maybe there'd be signage. And when we're talking about the medical uses, it was tense and possibly parking is what I would have had in mind. Maybe there's a need for overflow parking either on the site or an adjacent site that could benefit from this. These uses are very specifically laid out and called out according to our use classification chart. So if it's not there, it's not part of Article 14. Marijuana never did show up, still doesn't show up on this article and has no intention of appearing in any future amendment of Article 14, as far as I'm aware. Retail was there from the beginning, so that's not a change. When I mentioned retails that I am working with a retail establishment that might benefit from Article 14, as already written, and if extended could benefit from it. And I guess the reason for making that comment is that there hasn't been a lot of activity. I don't think we're at the point that we thought we would be where Article 14 is doing a lot yet. It's just starting to have some effectiveness through instances. And there's a lot of talking about new restaurants, but until they decide to actually move ahead, I think this will be a very beneficial amendment when we finally do come to the end of this thing where business owners are starting to move forward again. Happy to let Chris or others add on to that, but it really was trying to anticipate where we could be helpful and not have to go through a longer process. And I think Chris could probably talk about the staff time that's involved to create a site plan review for the Survival Center for the Jones Library for a tent that they want to have up for up to 12 months. Yes, please go ahead. Oh, yes, I would say that it is a lot of work for town staff who, for instance, process a site plan review application for the Jones Library to put up a tent on their front lawn. We have to notify our butters. We have to hold a public hearing. We have to write a decision. We have to make sure the planning board has all the information it needs. And if that kind of thing can be administratively approved by the building commissioner rather than going through a public hearing process, it's really a time saver for the applicant as well as a time saver for town staff. I also wanted to make mention of the fact that it's possible that the bank center might want to set up a tent in its parking lot. Not that I've heard of any such thing, but for the same reason that medical centers might want to do that, namely to offer testing and to offer vaccines when it becomes available so that they don't have to have people come into their buildings. So those are the kinds of things that we're looking at. And I think it would be very beneficial to have this ability for a limited period of time to grant these kinds of permits. So just to clarify, if we had included these or these other classifications in the original bylaw, the survival center would not have had to go before the planning board to put the tent up? The survival center probably would have had to go because they're proposing a shed. Okay. I'm not exactly sure how they got the tent up in the first place, but the shed that they're proposing now had to go before the planning board, even though it's a temporary shed, they're intending to take it away as soon as COVID-19 is no longer an issue. Okay. Shalini, you have your hand up. Yeah, I just want to firstly thank Rob and Christina and the entire staff that has been working so tirelessly. I mean, I can't even imagine how you've taken on this extra work in the midst of COVID. So just on behalf of all of us again, thank you so much. And this means so much to the businesses locally. I know that I don't know if most people know here that so many of the businesses are owned by immigrants. Many of them have their life savings put into starting these businesses. So what you're doing is really, really goes a long way. One of the concerns that were raised when we passed this earlier on was how it's going to affect other neighboring businesses or residents since we're not going through the planning board. And I was wondering if you encountered any such situation where there was a pushback or people were not happy with what's happening. And one other thing I wanted to say was I actually appreciate you are preempting some of these things that may not have showed up like in medical and survival centers or any of these issues. So thank you so much for thinking ahead. Chris, I don't think we've heard any complaints. I haven't heard any complaints. And I think that part of that has to do with a really great outreach effort on the part of Gabrielle Gould of the bid. She's really been working with all of the merchants and particularly in the downtown area and also Claudia Pasemani for the other village centers trying to help them to understand what their rights and responsibilities are with regard to these extended premises. And I think that's really gone a long way. I would agree with that. I just wanted to add that the one case where we are looking at a more permanent use of Article 14 for the patio extension at Stackers Pub, that did go through the design review board. So I just wanted to make sure you were aware of that, that that was the recommendations from the design review board were incorporated as conditions of that permit. Are there any other questions? I just want to mention then that this has already by vote of our meeting last time on October 5th. It's now been referred to the planning board and CRC. They will hold a joint hearing on November 4th at 8.30, 8 o'clock PM on this. And then after CRC is done, it will also come to GOL. The goal is to have it come back to the town council for its first reading on November 9th and its second reading on November 16th. Okay. And we're going to move on to COVID. Paul, our update, it's you and Jim Brown. Yes, thank you. I'm glad, I guess. And Jennifer is here too. I am. There you are. Okay, good. Anyway, slides. So this is our regular update and go to the next slide. So again, we'll follow the same format as we have in the past and go to the next slide. And we want to talk a little bit about the cases and what's been happening over the next, the last few weeks, the last three times actually we presented to you. And this is information as of October 18th. If you can go to the next slide. So what has happened over the last three periods of time? On September 21st, I presented, we had eight cases. On October 5th, when we were here, we had 75 cases. And then today, as of this afternoon, we had 21 cases. And I think Jennifer might want to talk about why this up and down and what has happened and why we are seeing cases come off now a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So September 21st, as you said, we have eight active cases, 149 total. Two weeks later, we started seeing the spike of that cluster and the associated cases. So we actually had additional 92 cases, but 75 cases active. It's dropped down to 21 cases active now. And what that is, is that when people come out of isolation, it is a process where a nurse will speak with them and determine if they're symptomatic, if they're infectious, and then take them off. The big drop here in part was because patients were coming off, but also some of those cases were taken off sort of in sort of a clump. And the reason that was done, I spoke to the UMass Public Health team today about that. They've been working so hard with this cluster that they have been taking care of the patients, but the data entry has been lagging a little bit. But what's been happening is, as I said, they really take great care of their patients. They've identified that their platform doesn't work, their process doesn't work. So they've added four new nurses. We have a total of six nurses now, and they're looking at a new system. They think that maybe that red cap may not be working with them. So over the winter, they're going to try to figure out how to make this a better system. So today we do have, I'm going to update our number, not 21 cases. We have 23 cases. This afternoon, I was working on two new cases that are not associated with UMass students. We have a total of 268 cases. And I think one of the things that we've talked about is that you may see more of this up-and-down motion for our community. If there's another cluster, you will see that in this active case number go up. And then hopefully as those cases age, people will come off. And what we don't want to see is a consistent up, where even as people come off, we get an increase. So it's a very volatile situation. It depends on the spread of the disease. And it's something that we work very hard on. Jen mentioned the additional staff that UMass has added. We have two registered nurses also who are doing contact tracing for the town. And of course, Jen is really good at doing the contact tracing as well. So we can go to the next slide. So the point of this is that we are still considered red as of last Wednesday. The state comes out every Wednesday with a category of what risk level you are. And we are at higher risk, which is the red category. It's the second week in a row that we are in the red category. The town of Sunderland is as well. There was a significant uptick in the number of communities that have gone into the red zone. And so it's something that is concerning the state. In fact, if you looked at the state's numbers, the entire state would be in the red zone. If you looked at it as an entire state. Next slide, please. And this shows the communities and this sort of elongated map on who's red and who's not. And there are a number of cases out in our area. Ours are very concentrated and attached. You see Amherst there with Sunderland above us as connected mainly to the university cases. And we are at 15.7 incidence rate up for 100,000, which is almost twice what the state expects. If I can just jump in there. Yeah, thanks. So this this determination of status map is, you know, as we know, it's the average daily incidence rate per 100,000 over a two week period. So that calculation for that number that was published last week was data from September 27th to October 10th. The data that's coming out for this Wednesday has been collected already. And it's from October 4th to the 17th. So we may be catching the tail end of the U.S. Amherst students off campus that cluster. And our next calculation, the number of average cases is decreasing per day, but hopefully will be in the yellow this Wednesday. Thanks, Jim. Next slide. Again, we want to look at what the three colleges are doing. And there are links to each of the colleges website. They maintain them every day. Hampshire does it every week. And there's a lot of information on each of those websites. And the next slide. So this shows a little bit of what has happened. And I think the bottom chart shows the daily cases and how there was that spike in late September, early October. And then it has been dropping off somewhat over the course of the month as we progress through the month. Jen, you're going to jump in if you have anything. We want to get to our other points. We'll race through these next few slides. So again, the one thing I want to mention here, and I'm not sure if I mentioned it last time, is that what we're seeing a little bit now is our operations are all really solid, still working well. We are seeing some incidents at the Department of Public Works where they've had some absences due to COVID, either someone, their person's child being exposed from a play group, and then they have to quarantine or some other thing like that. So until they are cleared, they have to be, they can't be on a job site. But that's really been the only real noticeable impact on our staffing. As you know, force protection is our number one goal with our staff because it's through our staff we deliver the services to the town. And we were very concerned obviously about our emergency medical services, our police services, our water treatment and wastewater collection systems. Fortunately, and of course the town hall finance offices and the town clerk's office. So thank goodness those they're all maintaining their healthy and that they're healthy. So next slide please. Moving forward, we continue to do, we started up our weekly calling shows a week ago and Jen was on it. Last week we had the town clerk, the active town clerk and our facilities manager on it. We're going to continue with these every weekly, every week and bringing on whoever is topical. We're hoping to have this intended on for Thursday if he's available or we'll pivot and bring someone else on if that's not available. And we'll just move on to the next one. So recent updates. So we all know that the schools reopened on Thursday and it was a very successful reopening for kindergarten and first graders. The students were back and very happy to be back. The staff were back and very happy to be back. They are, they have certain metrics that are set up that they have to follow. And this is a week by week thing. If they're metrics the way they've agreed to with the union dip down, they will be forced to close. So that's a week by week basis. But I think they have a pretty measured approach to how they're doing this. But I was at Crocker Farm School in then Fort River and it was just talking to the teachers who were very, they just said it was good for my soul to be back in the classroom with my kids and it was very heartfelt. So it's good to see that. License fees, the Board of Licensing Commission met last week and voted to reduce the license fees for restaurants on premises for all alcoholic and beer and wine restaurants by 40%. And those renewals will go out on November 1. The university has offered testing for first responders, which includes our core facilities like wastewater and water treatment, people who are responding to emergencies and police and fire as well. So that has been worked out very quickly with the university. And so we're working on a memorandum of understanding, but they've opened up their doors to our staff and they've set them all up with their Google accounts and everything's moving forward. And I think we mentioned last time about our Department of Transportation grant that we received last week. So next slide. So the other thing that we came out with last week was our tips for Halloween. And many people are asking us for tips. And communities are all over the map onto some cities in town say it's not a town function, we're not issuing any guidance. We felt like we weren't giving guidance, we're giving tips, which is a little bit lower level, I guess. But really just to use common sense, encourage people that, you know, not going out is probably the safest procedure. But if you are going to go out, follow certain guidelines, we also provide guidance for people who want it to participate as in your home as at Halloween. And the basic metric I'd like to use is to say if your porch light is on, you're welcoming people who might be coming to your door. If your porch light is out, that's a that's a signal that you're not participating in Halloween this year. And, you know, we basically looked at what other communities we're doing and tried to look at what the CDC and Department of Public Health was recommending and put some just some guidance together for some tips for people to know what what to do. Next slide. So this is where Jen, I wanted to sort of talk a little bit more because we're, we believe that we're going into a more difficult time of the pandemic. And Dr. Ulster-Hahn was on Meet the Press yesterday and talked about these are the darkest six to 12 weeks of the pandemic that he saw, mainly because of people being inside, people having the sort of pandemic fatigue and letting their guards down. And so our concern is that we will start to see some more community spread and that's already being there's a bit of an uptick in the Commonwealth. And Jen, did you want to weigh in on this someone? Yeah, you know, I try to I do keep up to date with journal articles. I'm also listening to podcasts from Harvard Press conferences. So I'm really trying to keep up to date so I can report back to you and make judgment and decisions on what we're hearing. And really, we're hearing things like this is a period of heightened concern that we're going into. So part of that reason is like what Paul was referring to, that we have holidays coming up, family gatherings, people are getting fatigued, feeling we did so well over the summer, we can sort of let our guard down. But really, there's this is the time where we just really cannot be slacking off. I think if we use really strong public health messaging, that the tools that we have, this is what we have, and we need to continue to use them, be vigilant, stay vigilant. And what those tools are, are the things that we know, until we have a therapeutic, maybe we'll have a better therapeutic you know, medicine to treat COVID before vaccine, hopefully we'll have a vaccine, but we don't now. So what we do have is social distancing, reducing density, face masks, being outside, and these other, you know, hygiene measures. So I think going forward, really good communication. And again, public health messaging to really, you know, make sure that people can get together, but do it safely, and not just get together. I mean, there's other obviously forms of, you know, society we need to keep going. So I think we can do it. But again, I just think we need to really be heightened awareness now. So I know there are questions from the council, so we want to leave time for that. Right. Dorothy, you have your hand up. So this builds on something that I was hearing on the television today. We hear the numbers of patients, but we don't have much sense of the illness at this time, as opposed to the early days in the spring. And so of all the people who have tested positive in Amherst, have any of them been hospitalized? Have any of them been in intensive care? I think I feel, I mean, I'm being very good, obviously. I'm doing all the things they're supposed to do. But I feel the need for this to feel a little bit more real, because great sacrifices are being made, such as things like Thanksgiving dinner and family things. So I'd like a stronger sense of what really is happening with COVID in Amherst. Well, you know, we report data on our very small dashboard, the active cases, and then the running total. We have the ability to expand with additional demographics and data. That's something that will need to be decided here or with Paul. One thing that we can do, and I wouldn't be great at doing this, but you know, for Hampshire County and the state, you know, we have data on the number of hospitalizations, surge capacity and deaths. So that's not much of an answer for you, but I understand your concern. It's also for, you know, dealing with the whole what they're calling COVID fatigue. If it's not real, if it's just, oh, I'm positive and then like I felt better, I stayed inside when it was over. It doesn't keep us moving in the right direction. I just feel a need for more information. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I think, you know, we have these great statisticians and epidemiologists, but, you know, let's use our public health messaging. And I think that's an important piece right now. Thank you. May you have your hand up? Yes, thank you. I gave Paul a bit of a heads up of what I was going to ask him tonight, and I know he can't provide the answers tonight, but I'm hoping he'll be able to provide some information about when we can get this information, because I think it's really important for the public to hear. As you said, it was good for the school. Kindergarten first graders went back to school five days a week starting last Thursday. The school had metrics. They followed those metrics, and we can either agree with those metrics or not, but they had them, they put them out there, and they followed them. And it was good for the soul for the kindergarten first graders. And I will say as a parent of a seventh grader, it would have been really good for the soul of that seventh grader to be in school last Thursday. And like I said, we can agree with or not, but we knew what was happening and we know they're being followed, and we can look towards a date where that seventh grader can get back to school if we can keep those metrics where they are. We have not heard a single metric from you about when our public buildings that are non-school related might be open to the public, whether they be libraries, banks, centers, senior centers. So I think it would be very helpful to the public to hear what those metrics are, not just when it's safe. Is it a positivity and testing number? Is it a Hampshire County per 100,000 number? Is it something else? And what is that based on? So I think it's time. We're seven months in. We've had restaurant indoor seating available since June 22. We've had retail browsing inside for bookstores and other things since June 8. We've had DMVs open for the public to go get driver's licenses in person. So governmental offices open for public transactions for a while now. Yet our buildings are still not open and we've had until this UMass sort of cluster very low numbers in Amherst. So I'm hoping you can tell us tonight when we will see those metrics so that we can start talking about whether we agree with them or not and what they're based on and start looking forward to being able to do stuff in person. As I think I said in my email, a new normal, most people have already gone to the new normal. In my life, I'm wearing masks everywhere I go. I'm going indoor to browse bookstores, to shop, to do fitness activities. I know we've got some other counselors, I think that are going to fitness centers wearing masks and doing everything. And we're not hearing in this part of the town or this part of the state about community spread being traced to those particular activities. The community spread is being traced from everything I've heard to gatherings without masks where people stay less vigilant. So if we can stay vigilant, it likely is safe, but I think we need to hear what those metrics are. I appreciate you giving the heads up on that, Manjo. So I have talked with Jen about it and as we know, we have the health director from Northampton as a consultant for us to help us guide through this. And I have to rely on our health experts as to what is the right way to look at this. And when I look at what the decisions we have to make, it's about can I deliver town services successfully to the public? And by delivering town services, it means I have to have town staff that are healthy and available to deliver those services to the public. I had a scare about 10 days ago in town, maybe a little bit longer than that, where I thought someone might have had exposure to COVID. And that would have like because of our staffing, we could, I was feared that we might have to depopulate the building in a significant way. Minimizing the kind of variables that our staff are exposed to, people are already exposed to lots of variables because they have kids in school, they're going into stores and things like that. So I try to do the things that I control. Schools are a little bit different. Anybody who walks on their premises is required to have a mask and they can control their environment. We could do the same thing, but I think that the danger of being a building that's just open to the public is a lot different than having things where you can't control it as well. So we are looking at doing additional things, opening up the town hall for in-person contact for staff through a portal for the town hall. For the senior center, it's really the last place I think we will be looking to open because that is the most vulnerable population and putting that most vulnerable population in danger is not something I'm willing to do. We have provided town services, we have provided elections at 10 locations and we're able to do that successfully. When we have to do a town service in person, police, fire, DPW and elections and things like that, we do that. We have migrated a lot of our permitting online and people have been able to accommodate that. I haven't heard much of a demand from the public to say, I need to come into town hall. I think almost all of the transactions that we have instituted have been able to be done outside. Now, if the weather is changing, that's going to change and we need to accommodate that as well. That's why we're building these new places for people to be to interact with people at town hall. Until we have a vaccine or herd immunity, I don't see us exposing the town hall just to open town hall doesn't make a lot of sense to me unless it's because we, I look at it as providing services. Are we able to provide the services that the public needs in a successful way? If I'm hearing that we're not able to do that, then that would be, we will change that. We'll look at that again. In the fact of the matter, it's working for us for the most part. We haven't had concerns from our employees. Employees are coming to work every day and they feel safe in their environment. Looking at that, a lot of this is conversation with their employees about how do you feel safe coming into the office and what are the provisions, measures we have to put in place to help them feel safe coming to work every day because we need our employees to be able to come to work. We are, we have some people who work remotely, but a lot of most of our folks are working on-site and because we're an in-person type of operation, other communities have really put everybody out into the field and you're working remotely. What metric we would choose, I mean, I did ask, you know, it's like, will we use case count? Will we use positivity rate? I mean, what timeframe would we look at? We could look at all those things. I don't know, I'm not sure which one is the right one to use that would tell us this is a safe day today. So, I mean, we will think about that. I appreciate the sort of level of detail you provided in your question. So, we will definitely look at it and rethink it. It does make us rethink everything. So, I'll come back to you with more. Thank you. I just want to respond very quickly to the you haven't heard from people meeting services. Well, many of those services are being provided other locations. And so, for example, passport applications, passport photos that Town Hall used to do, you can go to the post office or CVS and get some of that. So, that could be why you're not hearing about them needing them here is because people are finding others. That doesn't mean you can't, you're not, it doesn't mean you're not, not, you know, I'm not sure how to say this. It's a failure of service to provide. You're just not hearing about it because someone's finding another location. Others are, I would certainly say kids sports. And the things that the, the newly named recreation department provides are being provided in private. And that doesn't necessarily help those of our residents who cannot pay the private fees for that. But you may not be hearing about those people finding other locations to get them in and, and it being done safely. Let's see, you have your hand up. So, I will try and be brief at the risk of being a sort of point counterpoint situation here since I see I'm the only other one with my hand up because I completely disagree with a huge percentage of what Mandy Joe just said. And I do agree with Paul in this particular instance. I would also point out that whether we agree with the limitations or the metrics that Paul has is really completely irrelevant actually. It's the school committee had that conversation, even though the state basically said it was up to the superintendent, I would argue that we can complain all day about what we think the standards should be to Paul. And I'm sure he will listen to us, but that doesn't mean that we get to make the decision on any of those things. I am, however, completely sympathetic to the idea of some of the things like different uses of the library, right, in terms of being able to use computers. For example, we don't have a place for people to do, drop in computers, totally get that one, totally get the recreational opportunities. We, there's a reason we run a leisure service, which we're changing the name of there's a reason we run those services. There are many in the community who've always told us it's foolish that we run those services that it should all be done privately and we should just offer scholarships. But we as a community decided to do that differently. And so I appreciate that that's now an unmet need because there are a number of people who are not able to access that kind of thing to do. But at the same time, I find it really objectionable to say, well, I'm going to book shopping with a mask on. I'm going to the grocery store. Well, I'm not. And I don't think your relevance is any more important than my relevance on that particular situation. I know there are other communities out there that say, well, if the kids are in school, then we should all be meeting in person. And I come back to something Paul just said, which is, how do I provide the services? And now I appreciate what you said about, Hey, there maybe they're going someplace else for some of those services. But if we can provide services safely without putting our employees at risk, just so that we can say, Hey, you can come into town to pay your property tax bill when there's a literally no reason why you can't pay it some other way, unless you have a very specific situation in which case we'll meet you in the parking lot or meet you in this little safe cubby somewhere in town hall. As long as I'm hearing, as we've been hearing that town staff is doing everything they can to keep town staff safe and to provide the services making the adjustments for the weather, which is going to be trickier. I see every reason for us to say, you know what, let's just assume nothing's open until next July. I think that's entirely reasonable. I think pretending that without a vaccine that if you just go around with the mask, it'll be no problem is ludicrous. And I just cannot support insisting that that's a thing that needs to happen. I know I've been hearing this a lot over the last several months. And I just think it's completely unreasonable. In terms of the metrics, I'm not sure I even agree with the school's metrics. But again, you know, that's not my decision to make. And but my children would not be in school. Your child is desperate to be in school. My children were they that age would absolutely not be exposed to what's happening in school. So I think we need to remember the huge picture of everybody. And in the meantime, Paul's focus on keeping employees safe and not having, you know, because if one employee goes down, even with the protections you've got, there are people other people that are going to be affected. I really appreciate the way he's looking at that. So another report on what's being adjusted for the winter, right, when people can't just meet out in the parking lot. Now, some things have been done. I think we'd all appreciate hearing that. But I am absolutely not wanting to hear that we're planning to open anytime soon. There are plenty of private employers that people are privileged enough to work for that are not insisting that they go back into the workplace at all, much less try and treat it as the new normal. Just to follow up on that, right down the street at UMass, another very public institution, really the message is if you can possibly work at home or not, you know, come to the university, then you should do so. So I think that there are definitely conflicting, you know, there's conflicting information, but that's the message from the other huge public entity. So I have a question about the whole red, red, yellow, green, because it's based on 100,000. Yes, that has to do with a trajectory based on 100,000. Yeah. So we all know that what our census count is around 40,000. So I think that that's, is that what it's based on, the census count? No, the population for Amherst, it's, I can give you the number. Yeah, it's 40,497.88. And that number is from UMass Donahue Institute. You'll have to tell me more about the .88. But but certainly my question is, isn't the whole thing skewed though, because we know that those many people aren't here right now, because of the fact that the universities are in colleges are underpopulated. So, so it's kind of a weird made up thing, right? Because that's not really what our population is at this moment. Yeah, you know, I think there's a lot that goes into calculating these, these epidemiological, you know, these, these calculations, you know, incidence rate is, you know, we're loosely saying it's new cases. But I think, you know, it's new cases in the susceptible population. So I just don't know all the intricacies. And that's why it's fun. And that's not fun. But I get a calculator out and I can probably, you know, predict pretty closely where we're going to be. But we really leave it up to the state to have consistent information week to week. Mandy Jo Hanneke. Yeah, just, just I want to briefly in some sense respond to Councilor Brewer, but also sort of ask the question a different way. When we went into this in March, the whole point of staying at home and doing this was, as you even said, flatten the curve, flatten the curve, flatten the curve. And what I think most of us in the public assumed that to be was to allow for room in hospitals. And it was not a stay at home until the incidence rate is zero. And there are a vaccine and no one will ever get COVID again. And so I guess the question I would have is, if we don't have, if we're not looking at metrics of infections or what is your new standard, an incidence rate of zero, or is there some, some level of risk this town is willing to take, I guess, is, is the something that I think that the residents should, should hear from you. If your risk tolerance for opening these buildings is not until everyone in town has been vaccinated, well, then that's not next July. That is never. And we will never have a public building again. And unless Baker requires us or the governor requires us to have a public meeting in public in person, we'll never do that again, because we're never going to get there. And so I think we, as a town should be able to hear what our leaders standard is for. I guess it is technically a risk tolerance as to, are we waiting for 90% of Amherst to be vaccinated? Are we waiting for vaccines to be available? Are we only waiting for our town staff to be vaccinated? Are we, is it not even a vaccination? Is it as Ms. Brown, our public health director, interim public health director just said, better treatments, you know, what, what is it we are waiting for? And that's something we haven't heard out of the town. Dorothy Pam. I guess the thing is, I feel I'm in a vacuum. I don't know in the town of Amherst, then a young person or child who's been sick. I do not know of any old person who's been sick or died, except for those that were in nursing homes. I read the obituaries. I don't see anyone saying died of COVID. It's not because I think that maybe nobody's sick. I feel like information is being withheld. And I think it's really hard to live this way when we don't know what's going on around us. I'm sorry, Paul. Yes. Information is not being withheld. And I think that kind of conspiratorial story thing is really negative and not reflective of the way we've handled this public health pandemic. So I mean, I think people have different tolerance levels. I think many Joe's right. We see that just nationwide and community-wide, even within Massachusetts, people have different risk tolerances. And I think it's fair to say, what is our risk tolerance? What is that? But I think because anecdotally, you may not know everybody who has it, right? But that's not a good metric for us. We can't work on who I happen to know or who you happen to know. We go to our health experts and say, what's your guidance on this? So just, if I didn't need to jump in and cut you off because I think saying that we were holding information was just not a fair thing. I just feel that what I said got twisted, but I'll let it go. Okay. Shalini? Is this a good time to talk about the emails we received about the concerns about the gathering downtown where people were not wearing masks? Should I talk about that a little bit now? So there were two different times there were gatherings downtown. Several of us have gotten emails about them or saw it ourselves. Paul, you and I have discussed that, so why don't you share with Don or not them? So about eight days ago, there was an anti-vaccine debate or protest on the just outside what was reported was just outside the mask requirement zone on the northeast corner of the town common on the other side of College Street. So if you are in front of, if you walk on that, if you cross College Street, it looks like the green for Amherst College is actually is still townland. It's still the town common. Those individuals were there holding signs against requiring a vaccine. They were not social distancing. Many did not have masks. Some did. The second event was a pro-Trump rally and people who were protesting against the pro-Trump rally. Many of those people were within the mask zone, mask requirement zone. There were some incidents where the police had to respond or vendor vendor or things like that. I think that people were saying, why don't you go and make them wear masks? And at that point, I think the assessment by the police was that it was really you're going to create more of a friction time versus you know, trying to enforce mask wearing. We don't issue tickets for people for not wearing masks. We offer them a mask. We did not put our ambassadors in that situation. These are either. There was a lot of shouting and yelling back and forth, but not a real much of an incident. There weren't actually that many people on the pro-Trump rally, quite honestly, compared to some other things that we've had on the town common. But I know how it, when you drove by and saw it as a direct insult to the town, I know how that felt, but it didn't seem like that's something that we would intervene on. Shalini, you continue to have questions. Can I just, I just wanted to make, highlight some things because I went back and forth with some residents in our district and I just wanted to share that with everyone because I think there is that burning question or the frustration that why can't we enforce the mask for these people, the endangering everyone. And I know that Paul, you just addressed that, that the police felt and had the discernment that if they interfered or intervened or it would have escalated maybe the problem. And I just wanted to put that in perspective for some of the residents by reiterating that even in our district meeting and district five, Darcy and I heard many BIPOC and other people's concerns about being overpoliced related to masking. I know this is not an issue of BIPOC, but I can understand from the police perspective that if we are saying to the police that do not intervene, then we can't have them intervening in some places and not intervening in others. And I think the approach we've taken as a town is of education and hence we have ambassadors. But then I can also understand that if I was an ambassador, I wouldn't want to go into a pro-Trump rally and offer a mask to people. So I just want to put those things out for residents to really think through that why these decisions are being made and there are a lot of complexity of issues. And just like if there were to be more of these things happening in the future, maybe we would have a different we would need to think of an approach of how do we deal with it. But I think if it's just one off rally that people came and they left and there was no, you know, issue that we're, I think we're fine for now. Pat DeAngelis, you have your hand up. A quick question. I probably should know the answer, but did the group protesting masks and also the pro-Trump rally have permits or permission to be where they were? And if not, why not? And if they did, will they be given a permit again? So we don't issue permits for political rallies and political rallies are exempt under the governor's order for gatherings, not for mass gatherings, but for gatherings. And so, yes, when someone asked us, I'd like to have a rally on the comment, we appreciate that they asked us, but we don't permit different political, any political thing, but we tell them, oh, well, if you want to be on the comment, that happens to be when the farmers market is. So they've already reserved it. We try to inform people so they know where to assemble. And this has happened multiple times this year. And we say, could you go on the North comment instead? And so there isn't a permit that's required for political gatherings. Thank you. Are there any other questions at this time with regard to the COVID presentation or these issues? Okay, seeing none, then we are going to take a five minute break. We will reconvene at 8.5, a seven minute break. Please turn your video back on when you return. As you return, please uncover your video so that you show your face, your real face, that I know you're here. Thank you. Another minute. Okay, I just want to make sure that as we come back, everybody is still connected. I will start with Pat DeAngelis. Yes. Darcy Dumont. Darcy, you need to... Yes. Thank you. Lynn Griesmer, yes. Mandy Johanicki. Present. Dorothy Pam. Present. Evan Ross. Yes. George Ryan. I'll come back to George. Steve Schreiber. I'm here. Andy Steinberg. Here. Sarah Schwartz. Here. Melanie Balmille. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Present. I am waiting for George Ryan. All right. We're going to get started. I'm sure George is going to be joining us. So we have three action items, our three items in the action area tonight. However, we're not taking actions on any of them. All of them will reappear again on our November 9th agenda. So let's get started. And we now have the opportunity for council discussion with regard to adoption of the master plan. Are there questions or discussion that the council would like to have at this time? Alyssa. Thank you. I want to thank Paul and his staff for updating the memo that talked about the master plan history. The master plan primer and the original memo did not recognize the vast and extensive role of the many, many people who volunteered to serve on the comprehensive planning committee and recognizing that role and the amount of work that they did and they in fact passed a master plan draft that they'd worked with consultants on over to the planning board. The planning board did not draft the master plan. And so just in terms of that background, the reason I asked about that beyond the fact that we've talked a lot here recently about how do we get people to be engaged? There were between 12 and 28 members on that committee at any given time and it met for many years at least once a month to develop the master plan. And so my point being not only yay, I saw the people who did that, which we do have to recognize, but more importantly moving forward, I appreciate the timeline that they laid out because I thought that was really important that Paul and staff did that to show us, you know, what do we have to do to get ready to do this for 2030? And one of the things we'll need to talk about perhaps not us exact us, but some variation of CRC in the future at least, we'll need to talk about what kind of approach to take because they won't be working with, oh, the most recent plan is kind of the SCOG plan, like the master plan committee was, they will have something more current, but of course it will be decades old at that point. And the question is how much community engagement does Amherst want? Because I can guarantee you that if the amount of engagement we had had was the amount that most communities in Massachusetts use, we wouldn't have a master plan at all right now. So we needed a lot of community engagement, meaning a lot of volunteer committee members at the time. We might be able to do it a little differently this time again, because we're not starting from as far scratch, but to think that it would just happen with planning department staff, the planning board and consultant is naive. That's not how it's going to work if it's going to work effectively. So thinking about a way of meeting in the middle associated with how that can happen in the future. It's really just, you know, I know we're pushing it off a few years, which is great. And I'm the one who said in February, hey, we don't need to correct the minor errors, we can just move forward with doing the things people want us to do in town and make those things happen, even if they aren't perfectly slotted into the master plan. But I want us to be aware that that community engagement didn't happen because a consultant came. It didn't happen because we had good planning staff. It didn't happen because we had a planning board. It happened because we had an entire committee who met for years trying to figure out ways to make that work and made it happen. So please understand how incredibly complex that process is going to be in the future. That means at this point, of course, that we should just go ahead and vote to accept it. And it's going to be great. And then as we've all been talking about making the actual things happen that we want to make happen. Thank you, Alyssa. Are there other comments or questions or statements at this time? Darcy? Yeah, I guess I would just hope that at the point that we make a motion that we include, that we are assuming that whatever we do is going to be, you know, various plans that are in process are going to be integrated into the master plan. So if we could include that in the motion, that would be great that we're going to integrate our Climate Action Plan. We're going to integrate our housing plan. We're going to integrate all the different things that are currently in process so that that is clear that we're not just adopting a decades old plan, as Alyssa said. Thank you. We'll work on that. We'll work on trying to make the emotion, the motion reflect the fact that the master plan is a living document. Are there other comments or questions at this time? Okay, seeing none, then again, it will come back up and this time for a vote on November 9th. We're going to move to wage and tip theft bylaw and the responsible employer public construction contracts and agreements protects bylaw. And Mandy Jo, Hattie Angeles, and Kathy Shane, who is not able to be with us tonight because of personal family issues. And Lisa Clausen will be doing this. They're going to give an overview of why we do this and so forth. And then we'll actually talk about each of the bylaws. So I'm going to turn it over to the three of you and go for it. So I believe Lisa Clausen is going to start, but we're going to need the slides up. Yes. We go. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Lynn. Thank you, counselors, for hearing from me. So my name is Lisa Clausen. I live in Northampton. And I'm an organizer of the Carpenters Union and here in the capacity. I want to, as you can see there, just I'm going to kind of define the problem of what wage theft is and why we have been working with different counselors to propose some ways to address the problem. So first of all, as you can see, wage theft can take many different forms. And when workers are not paid, we're not paid fully or not paid properly according to what they owe, wage theft often goes hand in hand with payroll and insurance fraud. As then payroll taxes are not paid, we're not paid properly or fully. And insurance, particularly workers compensation is often not paid for workers as well. And particularly in the construction industry, we see it a lot where workers are being paid cash wages. And so the payroll taxes are not being paid at all. Work is not covering them. The two biggest industries with problems in the state, according to the Attorney General, and reports that her office puts out are the hospitality industry, construction industry. And if you're interested in learning more about it, the Attorney General issues an annual report each year on Labor Day on the issue. And if you just, you can Google Attorney General Massachusetts Labor Day study and you'll pull it up and get more information on it. So the next slide is I'm good for. So what the proposed bylaws are aimed to do is ensure that when public funds in particular are being used on projects, that extra care is given to ensure that there's no wage theft, or that there are repercussions if there is wage theft. And likewise with business licenses, when they're being renewed, it's looking at if there has been any problem with wage theft and having some recourse if there is. To this end, with both bylaws, we really see them as being preventative. And that by having consequences or repercussions, it helps ensure that employers are taking extra care to make sure that wage theft doesn't happen in their business or on their construction project. And the bylaws really give the town tools to employ to address the problem if there are workers coming forward, and that they are hearing that wage theft has happened on a project or in a business. And I guess I would just end with saying that while the Attorney General's office is the main office in the state that addresses wage theft, and there are other state offices and federal entities, the Attorney General has supported municipalities taking on this issue to help expand the tools and expand the protections for workers and preventative measures against wage theft happening. The amount that gets caught is unfortunately only a small amount to what is likely happening because many workers, if they experience wage theft, don't know where to go to take action or don't feel safe taking action as Jasmine spoke to in her testimony in the survey they had done of workers. And so we do appreciate that the town is taking up looking at putting some more protections in to prevent wage theft from happening when tax dollars are being spent on projects or businesses are getting licenses and Amherst. Thank you. Okay, can we go to the next slide? So I'm going to talk a little bit about what the wage and tip theft bylaw does. And so this is the one that that really is the one of the forces for protecting workers not geared towards just municipalities. So this is the one that promotes knowledge of knowledge for the employees. It allows our Human Rights Commission and our Human Rights Director to educate employees and employees and employers for seminars and workshops and other things. It requires businesses to post wage and tip laws, tell employees about their rights and give employees information in a timely manner regarding their schedules and pay rates and stuff. So it really allows the employees to know what their rights are and know what can and can't happen to them if they complain about their rights being violated. It also promotes compliance with wage and tip laws by using our licensing authority, the town's licensing authority, particularly around alcohol and meal service to ensure compliance. So if a business is found by the AG to be violating state wage and tip laws, the Board of Licensing Commission bind them, could revoke their license, could require a wage bond to keep their license, which is basically a wage bond basically insurance that would assure employees that the employees get paid if their employer violates the laws. It's kind of like that type of insurance. And so it's a way to try, this bylaw is a way to ensure that employees know what they can and can't do, have additional information, know where they can come on a more local level to make a complaint that would then be forwarded to the AG, but they might know someone in town hall that they can make a complaint to. And it allows entities like the unions and the Pioneer Valley Workers Center to be able to refer them to a more local person than the AG's office that could be very intimidating to make these types of complaints and get their issues resolved. And I'm going to pass it over to Pat to talk a little bit more about this. You're muted, Pat. Yes, I just unmuted myself. Thank you, Mandy Jo. I'm not sure where to go with this exactly. In terms of the wage and tip theft bylaw, I've been doing some reading and I'd like to quote a restaurant worker if I might. Carol Dunn, who worked for years as a waitress, was not receiving overtime yet. She was required to come in early to open the restaurant and to stay late to close it. And she says, I was afraid to ask for anything extra. There is a real fear factor in saying something. And when she finally did, with the support of a worker center, ask for her overtime, asked to be paid fairly, she was abruptly removed from the schedule in a restaurant where she had worked for many years. So in terms of wage and tip theft, we really need to understand that this is this is a problem that needs to be addressed directly. And one of the best ways we can do that is by having license withdrawn, having the wage bond, et cetera. And Mandy Jo, did you want me to go on to, you were going to do, I'm not sure where. Summarize the other bylaw. Okay, so we'll move on to the next slide. And I'll focus more on the legal stuff. Yep. So the next one, as this is, this is two bylaws actually, because it got really cumbersome to try and put them all in one. So the second one is what we call the responsible employer bylaw. And it really means that we in the town want our town money going to those employers who are responsible and don't violate state wage and tip laws and pay laws. And so this one has two parts, public construction contracts and agreements for tax relief. And what it does is it promotes the responsible use of taxpayer funds. So it requires when the municipality, when Amherst is contracting for construction services, it wouldn't require certain clauses to go into that contract. So this is like if we, the contract we have for the building of the dog park or Kendrick park, or if we ever get there, a new fire station, and the construction, the general contractor contract would have to have these clauses in it. And it would also, for tax relief agreements, also require clauses into those tax relief agreements. And those, those tax relief agreements are, we had one up in North Amherst in the Mill District, and that is when we say, hey, if you build this, this private building, we'll let you pay less taxes for a certain amount of time to make it more affordable for you to build something, because it's something we want built for this, for the one in the Mill District, it was affordable housing. And that type of agreement would also require these clauses. And those requires, those clauses would require the sponsor for tax relief, but all contractors in a construction contract or on the tax relief project, all subcontractors on those projects to comply with wage an hour loss. It would, it would say that if you don't comply with them, then there are penalties, if you're violating the law, and if you're found to violate the law. And those penalties could be monetary damages for breach of contract, revocation of the tax relief that we granted them, you know, clawing back already paid tax relief potentially. And then it also, those clauses also promote diversity of a workforce through encouraging encouragement language, not require language, but encouragement language about the employment of veterans, women and minorities, and with, without those not meeting them would not come with penalties. And it also promotes the hiring of Amherst residents and then Pioneer Valley residents, instead of residents from say Eastern Massachusetts. And again, there wouldn't be penalties for not meeting them, they would just have to prove that they tried them. And so what this does is promotes equal playing field and make sure our tax dollars are not being used to support businesses and contractors that are not paying their workers. Next slide. Pat, do you want the next slide? No, I'm sorry. Well, actually, go ahead, go to the next slide. And that was a listing of municipalities that have these kinds of contracts and, and ordinances covering tax relief agreements or TIFFs and diversity goals and their provisions. And these are particularly things that we need to look at because they're things that KP law was questioning. We have municipalities like Somerville, Lynn, Northampton, New Bedford, Chelsea, et cetera, et cetera. We have municipalities with diversity goals. Worcester has higher goals than are being proposed in these bylaws. East Amson has the same goals. Springfield requirements are similar or higher than Amherst for residents of color and women. And the Boston requirements, not goals, are in public and private contracts are higher than Amherst for residents of people of color. The, you know, all Massachusetts, UMass Amherst mass gaming commission, public construction work and gaming bids contains goals for women and people of color at the Amherst level. And UMass Amherst and the mass gaming commission enforce these levels aggressively. And to date, there have been no legal challenges. And I think we can go on to the next slide. I think this one's me again. Yeah. So what our goal is sponsors with Kathy and, you know, we're sorry Kathy can't be here tonight, but that we're trying to support our community. We're trying to reduce the unfair competition of a bidder that follows the wage laws losing out on a public contract bid because someone that knows they're not going to follow it can put in a lower bid. We want to increase the knowledge of the rights of workers. You know, we heard in, you know, public comment that there was, there was the UMass professors started with a study where a third of workers reported they're afraid of being disciplined or fired for speaking up on safety and their rights. And we want to, we want to make sure they know they can't be. And that the employers know that if they do, they're going to face problems and they're going to face penalties. You know, so we want to give the town tools to ensure that our residents and our workers, whether they're residents or not, are paid for the work they do. And that taxpayer funds for Amherst taxpayers aren't used in jobs that aren't paying workers for the work they do. Pat? Yeah. I believe that was the end of the slides or do we have one more? Yeah. I think that's the last slide. I think that in terms of wage and tip theft, this bylaw would include licensure authority and fines to enforce labor laws and would focus on service industries, such as restaurants and other hospitality industries that include tips in addition to wages. It would involve our Human Rights Commission and Human Rights Director when and if one is hired again in Amherst. And their goal would be to educate employers and workers, referring workers to state authorities in the event of a potential violation, and providing penalties should the Attorney General find violations and require the posting of rights in all establishments and information on how to report a violation or file a complaint. These bylaws, both the wage and tip theft and the responsible employer would enable Amherst to exercise its purchasing, taxing, and licensing power to ensure that firms doing business in Amherst comply with labor laws. We've met throughout this, we've met with town staff, we've met with the business community as represented by the chamber and by the bid. And we've met with workers across the board in town and around in service industries and in construction. Mr. Alvarez was working on a project in Amherst when wage theft occurred. And I won't speak further to that and I think he can do that on his own. So one of the things that we also had a review by KP law, we had more than one. We had the first one involved them sending us information. And then we had a meeting with Lauren from KP law and GOL. And then Mandy Joe and Kathy and I met with Lauren from KP law privately. And KP law's focus is very specific. And it is a focus that tries to, as Lauren would say, is very, very conservative and very concerned about any possibility of a town being sued for anything. And I think that what she found was that we are not in conflict with any state laws and that, in fact, municipalities have the right to, I'll quote, they have, they really have the right to add to state laws. When I was talking to Bill Newman from the ACLU, one of the things he said is when a law is created, a bylaw or an ordinance, one of the things, if state law already has a law, that law can be more restrictive than what a town creates. And then the town benefits from that restriction. But if the state law is not as strong as it needs to be, a municipality has the responsibility and the ability to add to their bylaws in terms of wage theft. And that, in fact, the state recognizes and doesn't make exclusive the process of establishing the requirements for contract, etc. And I can go into more detail about that if you have more questions. I don't know whether to stop here and address all the issues that, the issues that were brought up through the discussions, or should we open it, Mandy Jo, to questions and comments? Maybe open it up and if the end there are any, you can address them. I just want to say one final thing, which is I want to thank Lisa Clausen from the Carpenters Union, Rose Bookbinder, from Pioneer Valley Workers Center, because they really helped us as sponsors get this to today. And we couldn't have done it without them. I want to say one more thing, because Amherst in many ways around town government has stayed divided. And so we had Pat, myself, and Mandy Jo, who represents one side, and then Kathy and I, who represent another. We worked in harmony, in the sense of really collaborating, really questioning, really challenging each other. And I feel like what we came out with was much better than any one of us or one side could produce. And that's something I'm looking for, is how do we work together? And I don't know. So I want to thank Mandy Jo and I want to thank Kathy for our work. Back at you Pat. So this all actually started when Lisa and her colleagues came to the town and said, we'd like to see if you're interested in this. And as I do with any number of things, I kind of threw it out there. And Pat and Mandy Jo and Kathy picked it up. And a lot of work has gone into this. And by the way, we will at some point hear from both the town services committee and GOL with regard to their review of each of these. But what I'd like to do is see if there are specific questions about the wage and tip theft bylaw at this point. Dorothy. I think I know the answer. I just want to be sure. Thinking back on my youth, as a waitress, I had to come in for one hour before work and one hour after before. And you couldn't check. You had to check in your card in the machine after that hour and before that last hour. So we had to set up. We had to clean and never got paid. That was when our hourly wage was 75 cents with tips you had to sign. Still, it was a good job. Then a little later, I was in Aspen, Colorado cleaning hotel rooms at the Aspen Institute while I was at the Aspen Music Festival. And when a very famous woman asked me if I'd gotten the tip she left me, I said no, what tip? And we had a meeting with Big Rose, Big Ruby it was, who said her brother was a sheriff, had all the girls. And she said, I take those tips and what do you want to do? What do you want to make of it? So the only answer to that is to quit, which I did. So would that, taking of tips and just claiming them, would that having people work and then punch in, those would be covered in this law? Okay, good. Thank you. Absolutely. Andy Steinberg, you have your hand up. Yeah, hi. I appreciate all of the work that has gone into it by the three sponsors and by Lisa and the committee's review of which I'm one of them, which is GOL. In doing that, there are several things that came to my mind that were questions that I had. This isn't a statement in any way that I'm going to both know, but it are questions that I have. And as far as this bylaw is concerned that we're talking about right now, when I read the memo that the committee put together with a number of appendices, including a Q&A and statement from in the letter that was written to the Attorney General from the Attorney General to Lynn, the Q&A has the statement, the Attorney General's office doesn't have enough investigators to adequately stop the problems. And then the letter from the Attorney General to Lynn says we were unable to investigate and take enforcement action at every case. So that raised the question in my mind as to what the staff cost and including consultants that we might hire is going to be to enforce this bylaw and whether there has been any financial impact investigation that is done, including inquiry with other cities and towns that have had the experience of administering this bylaw for a period of time, not to advocates, I want to know whether anybody has talked to any of those towns and said, what has been your cost? I believe Lisa is planning to address that question. Is that okay? Mandy? Yes. Go ahead. Sure. So the issue of the Attorney General not having enough staff for enforcement is a constant budget challenge and it's a budget challenge then for any community working to address the problem. And there is an effort on the state level to give more resources to the Attorney General to be able to work on this issue. But regardless of that, there's still going to be a need on the local level to work on it. But in certain communities where they have more resources, they have put staff into having compliance officers who investigate complaints of wage theft. So Boston has staff that do that, Springfield and Worcester do, knowing that a smaller community like Amherst does not have, we did not anticipate that Amherst would have the resources to work on investigating wage theft. And similarly, North Hampton, East Hampton, other communities have not, Chelsea has not as well, I know it's a bigger community. The way the bylaws are drafted are that it would not be Amherst staff doing investigation, it would be reacting and having some tools if wage theft cases are brought forward. So that is then advocates going out and hearing of wage theft and bringing forward where a case that the state or some federal body has investigated or bringing people to the Human Rights Commission to look into what has happened with that case. It gives tools to Amherst to then address it and to evaluate. Is this a case that makes sense for the town to take action and conclude that there has been an adequate finding of wage theft and to then take action on it or not. But currently right now, without these bylaws, for example, you know, with the Cowles Road project when wage theft came up came forward there, the contractors that cheated workers and still in some cases have not paid workers from that project could just as easily bid on a school construction project and there would be no, they'd be treated no differently from other contractors who have not, who have played by the rules, who have not had a history of cheating their workers. And so this would enable that what this says is that the town would need to take a look at what the recent track record is, have there been problems of wage theft when they're evaluating it, but it would not be a cumbersome process or take the staff having to go out and investigate it themselves. The contractors would have to submit affidavits sharing whether they have signed into whether they have been had a finding on them for wage theft in the last five years or not, and if they have what that finding was. And for business licenses, it's just when they're up for license renewal, they would have to share whether there have been any findings against them for wage theft, what those details are. And so then there, you know, could be a wage bond that they're asked to purchase not to continue their business license. Thank you, Lisa. George Ryan. Thank you, Lynn. One of the, I think, many good things that this particular bylaw does, and that I think Mandy brought out, and Lisa's brought out, I think also in her remarks just now, is the role of knowledge of informing workers of their rights and making sure that they know what their rights are, and that they have multiple pathways then to pursue having that knowledge, they can, and then they know what they can do. And what I noticed in Amherst, what I think about is that, in particularly with the restaurants, we have a veritable United Nations in that community and many languages. And so I'm just wondering practically, you know, Lisa maybe has experience here in other communities, but again, we're a small town. On the other hand, we're a university town. How can we be sure that this knowledge and information, which is so important for the workers, can be communicated to people who speak Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish, whatever, Cambodian. And on the other side are the business owners, who also, many of them, English is not their first language, and American legal system is something that they perhaps do not understand very well. So I guess it's just a practical question going forward, as I hope this will do. How do we actually make sure that this important knowledge gets to the people who need it? I know Spanish will be covered, English will be covered, but can we be sure, and do we have the resources to make sure that people who speak many different languages can get this knowledge? And also, I think for the business community, maybe working with the bid to make sure that particularly for restaurant owners, for whom English is not their first language, that they understand what this bylaw is going to be asking them to do and what their responsibilities are. This is another time where the Attorney General's Office facilitates municipalities and directly addresses language issues. All of the requirements of the laws, all the employer requirements are on a poster that the state gives out. That poster comes in Vietnamese, it comes in Cambodian, it comes in Chinese, Spanish, French, etc. And so those would be required to be posted in each restaurant. Also, in terms, and I hadn't thought of that, but in terms of the bid and the chamber facilitating possibly a meeting with restaurant owners or business owners to introduce these new bylaws to them and to be able to do that with interpreters in required languages or needed languages at that meeting. Mandy Jo, do you want to add anything? Yeah, I was going to mention the Attorney General's Office. The bid, I think when we met with the bid in the chamber, they expressed an interest in actually helping to host informational meetings with employers as well as employees, but mainly employers because they're an employer sort of representative agency. We aren't requiring it in every language worker speaks. We decided that was one thing KP law had flagged and we changed it to English and Spanish, two of the most popular and translations that we have available in town staff and then a language spoken that's by at least one third of the employees in the workplace. So we said a number that we thought was sufficiently high that it's not going to necessarily catch the one offs, but we'll catch those that are speaking a lot of any one language in that particular workplace. George, do you have another? Just quick. The practicality of it is what I'd like us all to keep in mind as we go forward because this is an important thing. It needs to be done, but the knowledge has to get to the people and so I hear exactly what Mandy's saying and one third seems perfectly reasonable, but I just also like the idea again of working with the business community as well as reaching out to the workers. Everybody knows what what the rules are. Are there any specific questions about the responsible employer bylaw? So TSO looked at this June quite a while back and and I'll say this, this is my opinion, not that of TSO. I think that we considered it prematurely because we did it before TSO had a process and so one of the things the one of the reasons TSO exists is to consider how any bylaw will impact the provision of town services and that involves a conversation with the town departments that will administer those services, which we've done with every bylaw since but did not do with this one. One of the things I said as TSO voted on this to recommend was that I was voting on it with the expectation that at some point, prior to it coming to the council, I would get a memo from the town manager about what procurement's position was on this bylaw and how they saw the effects. I heard from Mandy or Pat, I think it was Pat who actually said it, they've talked, they have talked to town staff but we have not received that information including the members of TSO whose job it is to think about how this might impact town staff and so I appreciate that the sponsors have had these conversations but given that procurement is the one who will be carrying this bylaw out, I'm questioning and this is less a question actually I think for Mandy and Pat and more a question for the town manager as to what procurement's thoughts are on this especially on some of the issues in here that were raised where KP law and the sponsors contradict each other or are in opposition to each other because I'm a little uncomfortable moving forward on this without hearing from the town staff that actually has to enact this law. Paul, would you please address this? So town staff have met with the sponsors and you know discussed what tried to understand more than what the bylaw's intent was and what the requirements were and conveyed the sort of feelings of the town staff to the sponsors. We have not reduced that to writing, something we could do but we have not done that. Well if I could just follow up, where that value would be is that if there are places where town staff have concerns it would be useful I think for the full council to know that and again this is especially true I think with some of the areas where KP law expressed concerns, where KP law expressed concerns but the sponsors did not want to change the bylaw in response to those concerns, it would be useful to know where the people who actually have to carry out this bylaw stand on some of those disagreements or divisions between KP law and the sponsors. Paul, that would be a memo that you would have to facilitate with staff and we'll be looking at this again on November 9th and so I'm asking if it would be reasonable to have a memo in advance of the November 9th meeting. Yes absolutely. Thank you. Andy you have, Evan does that satisfy your request? Thank you. Andy, you have your hand up. Yeah just real quickly coming back on the first bylaw we were talking about the way staffed bylaw. There were also the response was talking about some of the penalties that flow into the question of the responsible employer sections of future contracts but there's also a penalty that can be levied if there is proof of failure to comply which I think is the right thing to do but I think that we ought to know what the cost of that aspect of enforcement is too. As far as the responsible employer bylaw I just want to point out to everybody that on the one hand when you look on the memorandum that the three sponsors prepared for us and it says responsible bylaw would and this was written in relation to both ask winning bidders on public contracts to seek to hire a diverse workforce which was mentioned by Mandy but then earlier in the memo where it talks about at the very beginning what the purpose is it says that the purpose is to strengthen Amherst's ability to assure that employers receiving town tax payer funds act and comply with state wage hour laws and to provide Amherst with tools to prevent wage theft and so I find a little bit of confusion that comes because we started with the question wage theft and then we layered in another important goal but a goal that really was not about wage theft it's about hiring practices and it just I think it gets confusing because you put if you're putting a second purpose that's getting layered on top of the first purpose without having had a discussion of it I want to separate these two questions because Andy I want to go back to your first statement because you implied that you're looking for something and I want to make sure we understand what you're well at least I gave a very good explanation from other communities about the ease of which it is to enforce this because there's the ability to not give future contracts and create penalties for future contracts but it's really broader than that because it's also about license holders and it's about and as well and it has to do with penalties for failing for wage theft violations and so when we get into the cost of enforcement and question of staff time committee time consultant time time attorney time in actually loving the fines and enforcing the fines and representing in court if the fines are challenged which there is a right to do whether that has been looked at with the other communities that have similar bylaws assuming that they have similar provisions okay so I'll just ask the sponsors including Lisa in this case whether they would like to address that issue I don't want to go on to the other issue yet I could and less one of the pattern Mandy Joe Lisa come okay so to my understanding and other communities of a similar size or slightly larger it has there has not been much staff time or cost to it and I think it could be a question I think we with the workers center's help could do some follow-up with Northampton as they did essentially all the different components that the Amherst has in their bylaws now the licensure so they have had several businesses that have come up for license renewal and have had a wage theft finding by an agency against them and so they have then asked those businesses to get a wage bond and to secure one which they have to then get their renewal for their license but I think it was to my understanding but we can check and see about getting a memo from the mayor's office from his staff in Northampton on it that it did not require very much staff time it was a part of the business license renewal process already and the onus was then on the business to then put together the wage bond for a year's wages given that they had had a past problem of not paying their workers properly the idea is that that would then cover those wages were they to not pay them in the future and in terms of contracts I can speak to that more clearly what is asked of contractors is that they signed an affidavit that they have not had a recent finding of wage theft and then there's a process that the town could instigate if wage theft is found to happen on that job where the town and city council could then take up looking at was their wage theft where their findings of it do a hearing on it essentially and and then put into place some of the repercussions and penalties for it so on my understanding within Northampton these are just signed by the contractors they're another piece that are a part of what the procurement staff do when they're talking with a contractor's bid who secured the bid you know here's the paperwork you need to fill out as part of you know securing the bid and they have added the wage theft component to it they then file it that there's nothing that is asked of town staff to do they file it but it enables that information to be a part of public record if someone to then were to go and challenge that and say no we do think that this contractor has incorrectly filled out that paperwork and actually has a finding of wage theft and in which case so that hasn't happened in Northampton to my knowledge but it's a process that would enable it to happen if it were needed to in terms of but what it really comes down to is it's the general contractor who knows that this is now a component that they can't hire a contractor that's had a recent finding of wage theft there are hundreds of contractors to choose from and this would enable them to you know they they just would know there are certain contractors they're not going to use because they've had a recent wage theft problem and so in that case that gets to what what several people talked about the leveling of the playing field and making it fair so that companies that do follow the rules that do pay their workers fairly are are being you know evaluated on being used against other contractors that are in a similar place and not contractors that hit low numbers because they cheat their workers. Andy I want to ask you specifically what it is you would like the guy the what you didn't address tonight and Mandy it may have helped me here too there's also the ability to have the police department the Human Rights Commission I think there was one other named Levy of Fine and I think that it's fine was a daily if I recall I'm not 100% certain on that so there's a monetary penalty for that comes before they ever get to recontracting and is that being enforced in other communities and what is the experience and that other communities have had if they have been enforcing such penalties. So there is no penalty in the responsible employer section so so so there's no fine non-criminal disposition or criminal disposition from that point of view in the responsible employer municipal contracts or tax relief agreement portion all of that is based on breach of contract or breach of the agreement so the penalties are written into the contract or the agreement for that bylaw where you saw the the the sort of per day violation type things or per employer employee is in the wage and tip theft bylaw we removed the criminal fine and the criminal action from that bylaw so there's no more criminal disposition there is non-criminal disposition the first violation is a warning and only after the first violation is there a 300 dollar fine or fee per violation it can be enforced your right by the human rights director the police department or the board of license commissioners so if the board if someone's in front of the board for a renewal of a alcohol license and they during that hearing and all and renewal determination determine that they have been violating this bylaw the board could just issue those those non-criminal disposition I don't know whether they're called tickets or violate they're just called violations at that time this the wage and tip theft is not a bylaw that is intended to be I guess what you would call actively enforced I think our town uses enforced upon complaint or something like that I forget how our our our police chief refers to things like that they're not going to be going out into a business specifically looking for failure to post the rights but if someone comes to them and says comes to the human rights director and says hey they don't have the poster up the human rights director could walk over to the business look to see if the poster's there and if it's not issue a warning um yes that'll take some time um a little bit of time from the human rights directors or the police departments um you know time of day but but that that's it's it's more of a enforcement on complaint I don't know if that's answering your question but it has that that penalty in the penalty block doesn't isn't in the contract the municipal contract or the tax relief agreement bylaw those are you'd have to find a breach of contract so that would be you'd be alleging a breach of contract and you'd be into that type of enforcement already Andy for the questions on this issue well I I guess I'm just getting back to the question as to whether other communities with similar provisions have had experience in the costs of enforcement for it or what we've now narrowed down to is which I was trying to get at the fines and if so what the report on that has been if there hasn't been an inquiry then I think we'd probably give exhausted it and should go on I mean we have a study set up and then yeah we we have in a sponsor specifically gone to Northampton and say hey how many of these fines for wage and tip theft have you issued and how much staff time did it take we haven't done that to the other communities that have adopted those that did offer to talk to Northampton and get yeah I will follow up with that okay okay thank you and then Andy you raised the other question which yeah I was more pointing it out and I don't really particularly um want to get into the discussion myself but I wanted to make sure that other counselors are aware that the initial statement on the top of the memo that Kathy Pat and Mandy Cento stated October 14th said says the the purpose of the two bylaws is to strengthen Amherst's ability to assure that employers receiving town taxpayer funds comply with state wage hour laws and to provide Amherst's tools to present wage theft and then two pages later expand that purpose and to something that is really different subject an important subject but a different subject and that's um on hiring practices and if people are uncomfortable with going into really a two purpose bylaw I think that I just wanted to make sure that everybody was aware that it's really gone beyond it goes beyond wage theft and into another subject and I'll leave it at that so um Paul I do want to ask the following question in any other policy statements of the town including bylaws do we have targets if you will or percentages where we state what we should be in terms of hiring or what for contracts or anything like that in terms of minorities women people who live in an area or a geographic area I don't think so okay so this is the only bylaw and the only town policy in which we have some stated guidance and this is again as the sponsors have pointed out it's not punishable it's a guidance okay right um sorry no go ahead yeah I would add that you know we we have residency guidance for all of our boards and committees we require them to be Amherst residents um we require our town manager to be an Amherst resident they don't have to be when they're hired but they have to be within a year or something like that um so we do have residency requirements for various um positions in town I do not know whether our police department I know it's been common in the past for police departments and fire departments to have residency requirements I do not know whether ours does we're getting nos to that so and I was really more after the issue of percentages uh particularly as what the state guidance is at this point and I'm also hearing that we don't have that stated any place else's policy no but we are matching the state guidance in these bylaws and I would just add that um the construction industry has been one that has been one of the least diverse industries um in our country um the military police fire other industries that have traditionally been also not diverse in terms of gender as well as race um historically across the country have made more progress than the construction industry has um and so yes it's uh Andy is correct and that these are two different issues that are together in one bylaw and um we have been as uh from the carpenter's perspective as we advocated for this wage theft is a big problem in our industry and as we've talked to counselors and municipalities to address it we've also taken that opportunity to raise that um there is also a diversity problem in construction and um and we've been urging municipalities to kind of join in on helping fix that problem and we found that where um you know aggressive recruitment to change and address the diversity problem is something that many of us in the industry are working to do but it really helps when there are owners of construction work who are also requiring or setting goals at in this case are contractors to work towards um more diverse um uh workforces all right uh I'm going to go out Alyssa you've been very patient uh please go ahead so for the public believe it or not we've talked about all this stuff at committees a lot and tried to work out all these details it's just that there's just more and more fine tuning and more questions that arise and maybe some that just hadn't been answered before so I'm going to ask some questions that I just asked that be answered for our next meeting right rather than somebody trying to figure them out right now the first is actually a comment based on what you just asked about Lynn in terms of what other policy statements or bylaws might we have that to have targets or percentages I just want to point out that we have a TIF agreement with Atkins that says that we were looking for employees of the greater Franklin County economic target area and Amherst in particular and that was something that KP law complained about in their original memo and I said well that's funny because we already did it once and I know that uh KP law is not likely to say oh yes that was a terrible idea but um I don't know how that you know again the reality is like you said we don't have a policy or bylaw that has targets but we did in fact outline targets in a previous contract so um whether that was a good idea or not it was certainly something we thought we thought was a good idea with whatever town attorney we had at that time to do that um in terms of other parts of this when it talks in the responsible again not expecting an answer tonight when it talks in the responsible employer by law and says defines tax relief and says means any form of tax relief granted by the town under a TIF agreement and as we saw in the KP law and as some of us already knew TIF is a very specific thing under state law or pursuant to any other provision of law regulation authorizing the town to grant tax relief so to be clear which is like incredibly boring and in the weeds but what we did with Beacon North Square is not a TIF it's special legislation that we have in place that we are allowed to use for affordable housing and we used it with them so I just would like someone to verify for our next meeting that that kind of agreement would fall under that second part of the part pursuant to any other provision right as opposed to being a formal TIF under state definition and it just means that we would have to write the contract with them in such a way that this would be enforceable whereas what contract we wrote with them before we obviously believed there was not going to be wage theft or we would not have entered into an agreement with them but from everything we've been hearing over the last many months that's been problematic in terms of enforcing with subcontractors and so we would in future were we to do another affordable housing project with Beacon or anyone else we would be able to write the contract reflective of this new bylaw that would then enable that to be enforced in a different way so that's a good thing but I just want to make sure that that project which is not a TIF TIF but a different kind of TIF actually is covered and it sounds like it will be well okay but it would be good to yeah that's fine it would be good to be clear about that just because when KP law wrote they acted as though we didn't have any tips and we have one special legislation and we have a couple of other actual TIFs yeah no we intend to the bylaw is written in as an intent to cover especially the special legislation right that's why the sponsors added the sentence about what would not be included in this this definition instead of what is included the KP law's recommendation was to say accept and she added a big clause in there and we had big concerns that that clause actually then took out the applicability for the special legislation and all so that's why there's that extra sentence that says this specific section of MDL does not fall under this and that's the the tax sort of write-off type relief that we grant during budget season every year for veterans and and you know elderly the over 65s I think those types of special you know tax relief we're saying this doesn't apply to but it does apply to that so great and then the other I'm sorry the other one I had is in regards to and it was really just again a previous conversation at TSO and then a couple of people both the counselor and one of the presenters have mentioned the human rights commission the human rights commission has a limited role here as is clearly defined in the bylaw it is a very useful role in terms of meeting with the attorney the attorney general in terms of reporting type materials it is not and has never been and I have said over and over again at public meetings yet Lisa mentioned it again tonight that someone who believes they've experienced wage theft should go to the human rights commission that is factually incorrect and it's still in appendix d as being go to the human rights commission that's not correct we the human rights commission is obviously subject to open meeting law and it would be ridiculous for someone to go to the human rights commission and say at a public meeting my wages were not paid by x company at a public meeting I just that needs to be removed from that appendix moving forward I realized that's not part of the bylaw the bylaw is very clear it says human rights director which then leads to my second point that I think needs to be addressed in some fashion prior to our November 9th vote which is that we have not had a human rights director since deb bradway retired from being both human rights director and human resources director we do not have a human rights director with that title so given that the bylaw very clearly talks about the human rights director's role again I don't want to hear explanations tonight but it needs to be clarified in a memo to the town council for next time and to the community how that's going to work that obviously it must be someone designated by the town manager for that sort of work but there's not someone with that job title right now and again really really strongly feel as I'm sure you understood that it's not appropriate to take wage theft complaints to the human rights commission because they can't meet about it privately they'd have to talk about it in public and that's entirely inappropriate okay any comment from anybody at this point all anybody else I would say we'll fix appendix d it was probably at one point it was to the Darcy and we just exactly we just didn't affect it when we handed it off we'll fix it so the only follow-up I think coming out of that is to clarify who is in fact the designated human rights director from all of your three points is that correct Alyssa got it Darcy yeah I just uh have to say that our support for these two bylaws or is it three I'm not sure it's two seems to me to be a no-brainer as Evan said TSO uh took this up really early we took it up on May 4th five months ago um and uh we first heard it we gave suggestions for for amendments uh which the um which which the sponsors worked on and came back with the the proposal uh for the addition of the human rights commission um peace which had previously been a separate committee that was going to be created so they changed that um on our request but the reason that we took it up so early before we even had a review process was because of COVID-19 because of the urgency of the needs of low wage earners during the pandemic and now we see that the pandemic is going to go on and on for at least another year and um and so it's particularly pressing to get this passed um as soon as possible in in my opinion we we really want to support responsible employers um as as the sponsors noted um and contribute to the health and well-being of the workforce um and community we don't want those responsible businesses who abide by wage and our laws to face unfair competition um when others can at wage theft and I really really want to thank the advocates and the counselors who stepped up to sponsor these bylaws because it allows Amherst to really show leadership in supporting our low wage workers during this time and generally going into the future Darcy let me suggest that at this time is there anything that you would like to add to your statement that would actually be your official TSO report on either bylaw um well on the 14th the TSO did vote unanimously and to recommend it to the council before it moved on to GOL um we made a number of suggestions in the first meeting which as I mentioned the the sponsors looked at and they came back with amendments um for the May 18th meeting when we voted um so I don't think we have we uh I think um I don't really think I need to add anything more than that um yeah we uh voted unanimously to recommend thank you and um George I'm actually going to go ahead and ask the same thing now for GOL your um the statements for both bylaws whether I wish to add anything or whether it just to report report GOL's actions okay um good um I wanted to begin by saying that I actually support this bylaw and I plan to vote for it but that's said in anticipation of the fact that GOL is asked to look at the bylaw simply as a matter of clarity consistency and actionability and a key part of that is the legal review so um as you have perhaps some of you painfully had to wake your way through the GOL report there's now two of them that spell out some of the discussion and also some of the areas of of difference between KP law and the sponsors and as the sponsors made very clear this evening they spent an enormous amount of time working with KP law both in the GOL meeting and also later and came to I think a fair amount of agreement but there still remain some areas and so what I tried to highlight in the second report are areas where there still remain some um differences um but uh Pat was perfectly correct that um the KP law did not identify any what's called sharp conflicts between this bylaw and state law what they did point out and it's in my report um and I'm sure you've all read it is that there are areas where this could get sticky um at some point um so I don't have anything really to add to it um it's there for everyone to read um bottom line is that we declared it clear consistent actionable um by vote of four uh in favor and one abstention for both bylaw I'm sorry both by both yes for both bylaws we did each bylaw separately and the vote for each was four in favor none against and one abstention so um we've had a very healthy discussion on this tonight uh there's a couple things that we've asked that there'll be follow-up on and I've made note of those and I'll confer with the sponsors on those uh before our next meeting and are there any final comments otherwise this will come up again on November 9th and we'll have some answers to some of the questions that you've asked I want to thank all three sponsors and Lisa for bringing this to us originally enormous amounts of work have gone into this uh and Kathy will be with us on the ninth and we can get to thank her as well all right so then with that we're going to move on we've done appointments uh we're going to do the committee and liaison reports finance committee is first Andy you skipped CRC oh I did I'm sorry then you skipped me um and in fact there's not much to report there's a report in your packet um you know and I would just ask that you read that uh the the report details particularly one vote that CRC took to recommend that the council forward something to go out um I I will be talking with Lynn about getting that on an agenda at some point um and that relates to issues surrounding town council multiple member body appointments um as Lynn announced earlier uh CRC will hold a joint hearing with the planning board on November 4th at 8 p.m the planning board meeting will start at 6 30 but the hearing that involves article 14 and zoning bylaw will start at 8 p.m and CRC next week we'll have a meeting at 2 p.m and we'll be discussing zoning uh probably article 14 will be on that agenda of there's a possibility that 40 r will be on the agenda but I don't think that will be on it I think it will just be zoning priorities and uh article 14 okay uh Darcy you you have your hand up question yeah I have a I just have a comment about the CRC report is this a time to do to make that comment um I uh I really appreciate that CRC debriefed its planning board interview process um and I agree that a change in our process is one that the council needs to discuss um I don't agree that the issue should be referred to GOL uh because it's one a policy um it um it will end up being one way of doing it or the other um it's not um GOL's own guidance document states can GOL recommend substantive changes that alter the intent or function of a measure no GOL only evaluates proposed measures for clarity consistency and actionability doesn't evaluate policy to what GOL will not recommend any revisions to a proposed measure that change the intent of the measure or its functionality unless GOL determines that the intent or function of the measure conflicts with mass general laws the charter or the adopted town bylaws thus I believe that this discussion that we need this is a discussion we need to have with the full council and that any action start here um then if we come up with proposed language that we can agree on as a policy or as a new rule of procedure or whatever um I personally think it probably should be a new rule of procedure that would then be referred to GOL um and but GOL isn't the body to recommend which policy to adopt I'm just writing down notes sorry um right is there any other comment regarding that Alyssa I agree okay then we will come up with a time to put that on the agenda of the full council before the referral okay and I'll speak with different counselors who have more able to describe the process in full that was used before we go forward with that let me just try to find a time on the agenda for that any further comment on that all right now we can go to finance committee sorry Mandy Jo I didn't mean to slight you Andy the finance committee report is really the report that was provided in added to the packet on Saturday along with several documents and I had asked the documents put in in advance because we were having problems getting the report into final form um for a couple of reasons that I wish I won't go into but um in any event the report was really covering um sort of our discussions about the fourth quarter year end report and uh the process for the coming year and a little bit about the question of the inventory so um I just will leave it as to whether there are any questions that come from either the report or any of those documents and if none then I am finished and Jo you have your hand up yep um just a quick question on the consolidated timeline actually two questions um the consolidated timeline has the council referring the CPA items to FINCOM in it looks like maybe April it's hard to tell um and voting on the CPA stuff in June um but the regular timeline said CPA was going to finish its report in December so I'm hoping that we're not going to sit on a report for four months or five months that we're going to actually do that referral in January and vote in February or March um so maybe it just didn't get shifted when CPA's timeline got shifted maybe this consolidated timeline didn't shift that and it would be really nice the other comment on that is it would be really nice if the consolidated timeline also included uh capital uh the JCPC functions because it does not include JCPC on this timeline at all it says budget but the capital budget it includes it as part of town council um presentation of CIP in April but it doesn't include like a JCPC when it's doing its thing okay thank you for the comments and uh when we have our next meeting which will not be tomorrow as noted but when we have our next meeting I will make sure that we get those reviewed again that was submitted to us by staff and um we talked about it some but did not have a complete review to the level and so your comments are very helpful thank you thank you um GL George uh just note that we're meeting on Wednesday um and that the main item of business will be continuing to discuss the council process for evaluating the town manager's performance and for setting town manager performance goals um Vandy Joe you still have your hand up thank you okay town services Darcy yes I won't repeat what's in the report um except to say that uh TSO unanimously voted to recommend approval of the face technology bylaw proposal um we'll be speaking further to the transportation advisory committee about how we can work together effectively and uh that important appointments for the community safety committee are coming up at our meeting on I believe they're coming up on October 29th although I have not confirmed that with the town manager um the uh and as we mentioned earlier the October 22 meeting is postponed until 4 30 p.m. on October 29th thank you um are there any liaison reports okay we've done the approval of town manager's report Paul highlights yes um so first off elections are happening uh the voting is happening we've had um early voting starting at the banks community center on starting on Saturday uh over the weekend on Saturday and Sunday we had 236 people vote some of the counselors who actually voted as well um we also have a uh the voting ballot if you want to hand if you want to put it uh your ballot if you don't want to go through early voting you can drop it in the drop box that's on the main street side of town hall that's also available um no real um problems over the weekend although there was a line pretty consistently so the people are eager to do the early voting which we're very pleased about um so uh in terms of uh so that's the big thing we're focused on I am we had the first meeting of the interview team for the community safety working group really good meeting for that group and uh so worked on number of the questions that they would like to ask the process that they would like to use during the interviews um we're now securing actual interview times over the course of the next week so we can interview all the applicants and getting this pretty talented group together for big chunks of time as we're going to it's going to take multiple hours of their time to be able to interview everybody who put their name forward so we thank the these these folks for dedicating their time to this um so those are the two things the big things that I wanted to mention if there are other things that you have questions about I'm happy to answer yes um there is a small confusion uh which we may have contributed to um Bob and I went and did early voting on Sunday and we were asked when we're in line by the poll workers if we had taken out a um absentee ballot and we said yes and then they had to call town hall to say put a stop on that when they're going to vote in person so um the people after us when they were asked that question said yes and here they are and so all that they had to do was to give their empty unfilled out ballots to the poll worker so Bob sent out a memo but some people have been getting confused so I believe this is correct and please correct me if I'm wrong if you have filled out your absentee ballot you can take it in person to the drop box but you do not take your filled in ballot to the early voting but it would save the town workers a lot of time if you took your unfilled out absentee ballot with you if you go to vote in person and then they will take it and that way they know you're only voting once because they have to they will be they're going to check on every um absentee ballot that has been sent out to make sure that that each individual only votes in person or by absentee ballot is that absolutely correct yeah so um on the list is a designation if you've requested an early voting ballot if that if there's that EV designation there they need to verify with the town clerk's office that that hasn't been received by the town clerk at this moment in time so if you so that you only get to vote once and so you can either do early voting by by giving you the envelope or doing it at early voting in person so they will verify whether you've done which one you've done if you if you have the ballot that's fine you don't need to have the blank ballot with you if you have a filled in ballot you can't take it to early voting because you put that in the drop box because they can't accept a filled in ballot that's only for in person voting right so but my point was you could save some people some work if you brought your empty ballot with you which i which i had done yeah it might save some time but i think they would still validate that with the clerk's office um you have your hand up just a couple of questions i was wondering if we know thank you for the numbers for in person early voting i was wondering if we know what percentage of all resident all voters have already voted including the absentee and mail in early voting ballots um so that was one question what could you update us on the status of the strategic partnership agreement negotiations with umass is number two emergency rental assistance you talked about in your um memo your report uh do we is it is it allowed for us to know how many families have benefited from that program right now like how many have been awarded um and then just a sort of a housekeeping travel thing west pomeroy lane or road or whatever it's called um where there was a lot of construction going on and the road is torn up it is a moonscape and dangerous to drive on um so when will it get paved i know you might have to have it sit and if it's not going to get paved for a while it needs regraded very badly um so west pomeroy lane has been the site of numerous water mean breaks and you know they've been investigating why you know that that has that that road has blown out several times and it's usually um something wrong with the pipe and we we're they've done a lot of investigation there seems to be like an electrical current or something that's grounded in there so um they've done a lot of different things so they just decided to replace the entire thing and so that's going to take some time and that should resolve that um that challenge i don't know how when they're paving is is going to be done but i can find that out for you um you have to remind me of the other points strategic partnership agreement no progress on that um not a lot of interest at the university level to talk about beyond what they've already committed to with the schools and i don't think this is the opportune time to be asking the university at this moment in time but it's not off of my radar screen at all um and uh remind me of the other two the emergency rental assistance just how many families and then if we have a percentage of how many people have already returned so emergency rental assistance there was a report given to the affordable housing trust on thursday night i didn't write down the numbers i can get that number for you easily um it was it's a um it was less utilized and we had hoped and we discovered some reasons why more people started to fill out the application and finished it so that is an indicator that either the application was too complex or for some reason people got to a point and stopped filling it out so that was something that the affordable housing trust had talked somewhat about in terms of number of people i know that um about half the people have requested um early voting uh but it's meant in terms of how many turned as have turned in today i can find that out they we keep a track we do keep track of that thank you happy interest you have your hand up yeah um two meetings ago i asked about the ambassadors and i know your report reflected today that it is fully staffed now and i'd like to know how many people were hired to be ambassadors uh do you have that number i do 20 okay i know that 20 how many are white uh how many are people of color yeah you asked me that last time pot and i apologize for not getting back too sooner i did i don't have that number yet but i'll have that for you tomorrow morning okay for the full because i think that i remember at the very first meeting when i brought it up you said oh i didn't think of that um and it seems to me that that's something that we need to think about and i need to know the result of of that thank you yeah and i would like to add that in addition to that poll it would be very useful to know other statistics about the ambassadors like where they're where they live are they students or not uh it just be interesting to know i met a group of them at one point i knew at that point one was from holy oak another one was from springfield so just be used enough okay i'll see what you know are there any other questions of the town manager right then uh we're moving on to town council comments um let me just say i now have a spreadsheet of all of the topics that people listed the last time i will be adding the one that came up tonight to that which is the issue of uh how we do planning board appointments and zoning board of appeals but there's one i want to clarify and that is one request was to look at the salaries of town counselors and the reality if you go to the actual charter you will find that it states in section 2.4 of the charter that if you're going to do this you must do it within the first 18 months of your term we have now exceeded the first 18 months of our term and so we can no longer look at whether or not we would raise the salaries of or the compensation for counselors or the next round of counselors the next terms so that one is off the chart that's going to get removed okay here's my chart see another one of my wonderful matrices um uh dorothy you have a question this is a comment a statement of praise thank you to uh paul bachum the town manager and to billford mooring and to scott livingston and to all the people who made it possible we have a i believe permanent um speed blinker on amity street which is attractive and i think it's a little solar powered top i'm not sure affirmative nod from paul and that i hope will really help in um stopping some of the speeding on the street because a lot of the speeding is inadvertent people just don't realize how fast they're going and most people when they see that will slow down so um many people have already expressed happiness and joy because this has been a major concern uh on our street so i just want to give thanks for thanks adieu so thank you hey and dorothy you have your hand up yeah i would just like to say two things one is um uh if mandy joe or some other person is keeping a running list of potential uh changes amendments to the charter that would be really um interesting for all of us to take a look at and see if we want to add anything to it and um also on the issue of salaries um i'm not sure i agree that we should take it off the list of things that we should discuss um because we might want to put it on that list and um it's just unfortunate that the whole black lives matter conversation came up at such a time when it you know exceeded that 18 month limit and you know there just were a number of people who said well we we wouldn't be able to run for town council um if we're not going to be paid a reasonable amount for our work um so it's just a bind that we're in um and we're also in that bind because we have a three year and one month term that we'll ever have that yeah so that that is unfortunate and you know what do we say to people yes you should you should still run for office um and then once you get elected you can raise your salary um who's gonna do that raise your salary in the term you're in according to the charter and in fact that's also how the state legislature works you can only raise your salary for the next round of council right right um so oh so then they're totally screwed because even if they run thinking that they're going to raise their salaries it still won't be until the following term so yeah yeah we we missed the boat this time around um and I I think the charter should allow us to do it why wouldn't we not why would we not be able to do it for the full length of our term not going to have the discussion tonight I'll add it to the list but I'm just saying um yes maybe Joe use your hand yeah I could get into that as a charter commissioner as to why we didn't allow that but I'm not going to because we can't as a council change the charter it's that simple we we can't do it so um the charter says what it says but what I wanted to comment on I am keeping a list but I am keeping my own list of what I've seen that I might want the charter to change I am not keeping a council list or other people's lists so I encourage other counselors if they have their own desires of things they don't like in the charter start your own list because there will be a charter review commission and it will happen in about three years I believe and at that time you as a former or current counselor or whatever it is whatever you are whenever that review commission starts you can send them your list and say hey when I was serving or as I'm serving here's things I found that I didn't like I'm going to do that with my list but my list isn't going to agree with your list potentially and I'm not keeping a council list the council when that commission forms may want to keep their own list or may want to send a list but that's for another time so I encourage every counselor if they find something they don't like about the charter to write it down for themselves so that when there is a charter review commission you can forward it to them that you have your hand yes just a quickie I'm really thinking a lot about the relationship between council committees and the community committees I've been encouraged to think about it by a couple of different counselors and some residents and community committee participants and so I'd like to see that come up on a retreat because I think it's going to be a very intense issue and there may be other issues I think it's time for us to get together in a different way to look at some of the things that are happening so one of the options that I have been considering is pulling you for a retreat retreats on zoom are really difficult but well and the advice I've been given is don't do it for more than about three hours so that beyond that you really becomes kind of useless so I have meetings work we're working on it you know I have it on my list of two address and the then let me just get back to the retreat are there any other comments at this point okay there are no items under the 48 hour rule and so we are going to be going into executive session and we will not be reconvening so we need to take a vote to go into executive session correct I move that we move into executive session to consider the purchase exchange these are value of real property the chair declares that an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the negotiating position of the public body is there a second second the answer list you need to read the whole motion Lynn the whole motion is I move that you missed the town council will not reconvene an open session following executive session excuse me and so it then there's a semicolon and says the town council will not reconvene an open session following the following executive session now Pat is there a second second okay and now we're going to vote and we start with Larissie Dumont yes Grace Merzy yes Hanna key yes ma'am yes Evan Ross yes George Ryan yes Steve Schreiber yes yes Andy Steinberg yes there are Schwartz yes Melanie Balmille yes Alyssa Brewer yes and Pat yes thank you so the public meeting is now going to end and there will be a note on Amherst media for that you have all received an email which is includes the new link for the executive session so you'll go off of this link and go on to a new link okay see you there in about two or three minutes bye