It's October 3rd, 2022, based on a July 16th, 2022 act of the legislature. They have suspended certain provisions of the open meeting law. This allows us to continue holding meetings remotely without a form of the council physically present in the room. However, I do want to note that audience is now allowed to be in the room. This meeting is accessible in real time via Zoom, by phone and on Amherst media. Given that we have a quorum of the council president I'm calling the October 3rd 2022 town council meeting to order at 632. I'll call upon each counselor by name at that time you should unmute and say present and then remember to mute again. Shawnee Balmille. Shawnee. President. Pat DeAngelis. Present. Anna Devin, Gothier. Present. Lynn Griesmer is present. Mandy Johannicky. Present. Anika Loops. Present. Michelle Miller is not here yet. I'll come back. Dorothy Pam. Here. Pam Maroney. Shane is not here yet. Andy Steinberg. Present. Jennifer Todd. Present. And Alicia Walker will be here, but she will be a few minutes late. We're going to go to the announcements and keep an eye off Michelle. Can you hear us? Michelle Miller, can you hear us? Yes, I can hear you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We're going to go to the announcements. They're on your board. I want to just add or highlight a few. The one I want to highlight initially is the public dialogue on rental permitting bylaw, and that will be at the beginning of our meeting two weeks from now on the 17th at 530. I also want to highlight the fact that the community resources committee is holding a meeting on Monday, April 24th at seven. And the finance committee, in addition to the meeting that's listed here is going to have a committee of the whole on October 18th at three. At that time, there'll be a more in-depth discussion of the major capital finance model and the options. We have two districts meetings coming up. District two is meeting on October 12th at 630 via zoom and district four is meeting October 23rd from one to three at the Amherst History Museum. I'd like to ask Nika, because she has expressed interest in making a statement about Native American Heritage Month. Nika. Thank you. So I will say that I had missed the confirmation, but I will ask and state that we do acknowledge where we are, where we stand. I will not offer a land acknowledgement, but instead invite us all to do our own research as to who was here, learn about them, pronounce the names correctly and go from this space on on because we can really go to all corners of this island. I would also ask that we hold space with those that these upcoming days are not a celebration. And acknowledge that, you know, we do where our beloved town is named after one of the first persons to participate in biological warfare. With that, I ask that we all be curious that, you know, we make sure that we are aware of the difference between appreciation and appropriation when we deal with Native American communities and make sure that we're reaching out to those who are on the ground who are actually working with their communities and building, you know, workforce building collaborative relationships that are really important to all of us understanding each other and moving forward with peace. Thank you. I just want to confirm Kathy Shane is joined can you hear us Kathy. Yes, I can I apologize for joining late. We're just getting started. All right. There's no hearing tonight we're going to go on to general public comment. If you are in the audience and you would like to make general public comment please raise your hand. Are there any other people who would like to make general public comment. Okay. Welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at the end based upon the number of people who wish to speak. The council will not engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter raised during general public comment. At this point there are two hands. I'm going to call in Keith Nesbitt and ask him to enter the room, state his name where you live, and then proceed. Can everyone hear me. We can Keith, thank you. Hi, Keith Nesbitt 490 Middle Street. I am the current president of Amherst about a chance. And on October the 15th, we are holding our 50th fall foliage run and cider walk. Just wanted to take this moment to make the council aware of that date and that event. Those who have attended in the past know that it is a beautiful course that is designed to run through Amherst colleges campus. And some of the wooded areas of our town with events on the common that day that include a lot of family freely activities. I just wanted to make sure that those who may not be aware are aware of the date and invite everyone to attend and participate as a runner or a Walker, or just come out and have some fun with family and friends on the common on Saturday, October 15. Keith, thank you for sharing that with us. There was another hand up. But I don't see it now. Are there any other public comment at this time. Okay. See not we're going to move on to the consent agenda. And the following items were selected because they were considered to be routine. And it was reasonable to expect. They would pass with no controversy to remove an item from the consent agenda for discussion later in the meeting, ask that it be removed. That does not require a second. So I'm going to make the motion, then look to see who wants to remove what, and then we'll proceed to move the following items and the printed motions they're under and approve those items as a single unit. 8 to a referral of creation of capital stabilization fund the finance committee. 8b referral of proposed amendments to zoning bylaw article 51112 and classification table, proposed revisions to adjust sunsetting of article 14 temporary zoning community resources committee, governance organization and legislation committee and planning board. Adoption proposed amendments to general bylaw 3.39 street numbering of houses. Adoption of 2023 town calendar meeting town council meeting calendar. E authorization for town council president to submit the following correspondence on behalf of the town council I can want to point out that you can remove one, two or all of them. UMass Amherst Chancellor search committee letters to legislators regarding MVLC funding for johns library response to community safety, safety and social justice committee letter. 11 a to C is approval of the following town council meeting minutes, September 19 2022 special town council meeting minutes, primer on the master plan. September 19 2022 special town council meeting minutes public forum on the master plan and September 19 2022 regular town council meeting. I'm going to call first on Andy Steinberg. I request to remove HC adoption proposed amendments to general bylaw 3.39 street numbering of houses. Okay. Kathy Shane. I would like to remove the letter responding to community safety and social justice committee. Okay. Dorothy Pam. The same item that Kathy mentioned. Okay. Lisa. The Chancellor search committee letter. UMass Chancellor search letter. Okay. And I'm aware that Alicia would like the letter to legislators regarding the MVLC funding for johns library removed she will be joining us later. Are there any other comments at this time you do. Nobody needs to comment on why they're moving anything. They just need to ask that it be removed. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.  Thank you. Okay. I'm looking for a second to the motion. That motion now does not include HC. Adoption of proposed amendment to general bylaw 3.39 street numbering houses and eight E all three letters. Is there a second. Second really. Thank you. And. I'll start with. Pat de Angelis. Hi. Anna Devlin got here. Hi. Lynn grease prison. I'm Andy Joe Hanneke. Hi. Anika Lopes. Hi. Michelle Miller. Hi. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Pam Rooney. Hi. Kathy Shane. Yes. Indy Steinberg. Hi. Jennifer. Hi. And Alicia Walker has. Not joined us yet. Okay. Thank you. So it is 12 in favor and no. I'm sorry. Shalini. Yes. It's 12 in favor. No opposed. And one. No abstentions and one absent. Okay. So given that we have. We can take the consent agenda down. And. We have no. Proclamations. And so we're going to move immediately to presentations and discussions. And so I'm going to call on Paul. And Sean McGonnell. This is a night of serious education for all counselors. And the beginning of some significant fiscal decision making. And so I'm going to call on Paul. And Sean McGonnell. And Sean McGonnell. And Sean McGonnell. And so many of them are automatic. In fact, some people have asked why aren't all of these things on for the vote. And that is because. We actually have an automatic referral for most things that go to the finance committee. But the one item that does not, we did have a vote. You just voted that on the consent agenda. So with that, Paul. Thank you, Lynn. So every fall. We have a lot of questions for the town council after we have free cash certified. And we look to move money into stabilization fund, things like that. And that's what we're doing tonight. These are things as Lynn said, we're not asking you for to act on these other than to refer them to the finance committee, but we did want to take the opportunity to be able to explain them to you. Today we send you a written memo that sort of summarized everything, but you don't have to have read that in order to understand what we're asking you to do tonight. So I'm going to go through the recommendations that Sean will lead us through of course. So, Sean. Yeah. So which one would you like to start with? I've got three ready to go. Do you want to start on the budget process. And your budget process. Okay. Let me pull that one up. And share my screen. Athena, can you enable a screen sharing? All right. Can you see it on the screen now? Yes, we can. So this first one is on the budget process and I have a short presentation to go through it because I feel like a lot of this is going to be a discussion and back and forth. So our budget process is, you can kind of break it down into four phases. The first phase that we are about to enter, we have just entered as the engagement and direction setting phase that leads us into developing the budget. And that's our next phase. Once we have developed a budget, we're going to start with the initial phase. So we're going to be presented to you all and we move into sort of the review and approval portion. And then there's an implementation phase. So there's really sort of four distinct. Sort of. Phases to the budget process and the good news is we're at the very beginning of the initial phase. So this initial phase is engagement and direction setting. And this is where we get all the feedback and the input that will lead into the budget that will ultimately be presented to us. So one of the first things we do is the resident capital request. We have this, I have this in October. I'm not sure if it'll be October this year might be a little bit later, but this is one tool we use to engage with the public where anybody in the community can submit a capital request that will go to the town manager and go to the joint capital planning committee for review and for consideration. We are working to refine this process this year. There's it's worked. We've funded a number of projects through this mechanism, but we also have gotten some feedback that there are some improvements we could make. And so I've worked with Kathy Shane and, and on a Devlin got the air to make some improvements to it that we hope to roll out this year. The next couple of things that happen in this phase is the financial indicators presentation. This is the big presentation that's scheduled I think for November 7th right now, where we'll share a number of different criteria that we, we measure benchmarks that we measure for our budget and how we compare year over year and how we compare to our neighbors. Things like expenses per capita revenue per capita, economic development. I think there's 20 or 20 slides, something like that. So there's a number of variables that we, that we present. And then after that presentation, we share an initial forecast of revenues and expenses for the following year. And that really kicks off the, the budget guideline discussion and the rest of the, the early phases of the budget process. And then at that, I think it's at the same meeting. Lynn, I think it's also the seventh. I know there's back and forth between the seventh and the 21st, but. Support is going to be the 21st. It is going to be the 21st. Okay. So shortly after the financial financial indicators, we'll have the public forum. This is an opportunity for the community to come and provide input and feedback into the budget. What they like, what they don't like, what they want to see in the next budget, the next budget that's being proposed. And then we'll have the public forum. So this forum is really held early before there's really any work done on the budget so that it can be considered when the council creates its budget guidelines. And when they establish goals for the manager. So this forum is really one of the key dates in terms of engagement is, we'll be on November 21st this year. So the information from the public forum, the financial indicator sort of naturally leads into the development of the budget guidelines, which is the same thing that we're doing in the budget. So we're doing that initially by the finance committee. And that, those are. Set the parameters for how we develop the budget. You know, we get a lot of our. Cues for what we should make sure is addressing the budget. If there's, I think an example this last year was. The latter truck was specifically mentioned in the budget guidelines and so that we knew that was a high priority. So we take, we take the budget guidelines very seriously. And the same thing with the town manager's goals, which are usually more specific. And we want to make sure that the budget supports those goals or supports making progress towards those goals. So all that engagement sort of is synthesized into the budget guidelines and the town manager's goals, which are the two key documents that we use when we develop the budget to make sure the budget reflects them. Any questions on the engagement direction setting or lend, you want me just to finish this, this first portion? I don't see any hands. Okay. So all that is done. And then we move into budget development, which is roughly from January through April. And this is a lot of the internal workings. And I'll just kind of give a few highlights of the things that we do with staff here at town hall. So we develop our initial projections. And most years we will get a state aid. Projection in January. I think this year will be later because of the change in governor. But that's usually a key date that we look, look to to get an indication of where state aid is headed. And then we will get our early projections on health insurance, which is a key indicator in our budget process. All of that sort of folds into this refined projection that we do in January. We also draft a preliminary capital improvement program. And we review with departments any fee changes that they are considering making for the following year. In February, the joint capital planning committee will begin to meet. That's a committee comprised of town counselors, members of JOVE and library trustees that review the preliminary capital improvement program and we'll make recommendations to the town manager for potential changes or things they'd like to see improved. And that same committee will also review the resident capital request that come in. And then we will have a number of meetings with departments to review their budgets at a much sort of more nitty gritty level, their staffing levels, what happened last year, to get into the details. In March, the Joint Capital Planning Committee will wrap up its work and make a recommendation. Any additions or reductions that are being considered for the budget proposal will be sort of finalized at that point and we'll draft by the end of the month sort of a rough version of the budget proposal. And then in April, we will incorporate any of those recommendations from the Joint Capital Planning Committee into the capital improvement program. There's always a number of recommendations that make a lot of sense that we fold into that plan that ultimately goes to the council. We'll incorporate any votes by the school committees or the library trustees. Those votes happen in March. Usually those numbers that are approved are consistent with the budget guidelines, but not always. And then we will review and finalize the budget proposal that will be given to the council on May 1st. That leads us into the review and approval phase. For those of you on finance committee, you know we spend about 30 to 40 hours reviewing the budget at public meetings during the month of May, meeting with every single department, going through their service levels, their history, asking questions, getting answers, looking at their goals and objectives. And so all those meetings are very productive. The region budget for the regional schools is typically approved in May because of the relationship with the other towns. Since the other towns have their town meetings, the town council will typically approve the regional budget in May as well. And then we will start using some of our engagement tools, like Engage Amherst, and we've done some Ask Me Anythings to engage the public and share information on the budget. And then in June, there will be a public hearing on the budget, which again, at this point in June, it's sort of reactions to the budget proposal, not as much input into what's gonna be in the budget. It's really reacting to what has been proposed. And there will be a public forum on the capital improvement program, and then the council will review all of it and vote. And then once you vote, that leads us into the budget implementation phase, which is mostly closing out the previous fiscal year and starting the new fiscal year. So how to participate in the budget process. So there's a number of ways, probably one of the best ways is just direct outreach to town counselors, school committee members, library trustees, the town manager, depending on what the budget issue is and what portion of the budget it rests and who has supervision for that area. The public forum is sort of the key point if you have input into the budget that you want to see reflected. Again, it's ultimately up to the council to determine if feedback is appropriate to put it into budget guidelines or into goals, but that public forum is early enough for that to happen. The public hearing is great for reactions to the budget proposal. Engage Amherst is a good two-way communication tool that we really encourage people to use. It's really user-friendly and it's a great way to log questions. All the finance committee meetings in the month of May are really anytime, but in particular the meetings in May, there's public comment at every one of those budget specific meetings. And then same thing with joint capital planning committee, there's a number of meetings there that have public comment and then public comment really at any town council meeting. So I think the last thing, this is important for, I think we all sort of know, but just to sort of state that Amherst, our revenues, we don't see huge increases in our revenues year to year. Our revenues are primarily property tax driven because we don't have a lot of commercial activity in town or other economic activity in town. So our property tax revenues are capped by proposition two and a half, which Michelle Miller sent out some nice videos for anybody to watch it. Those are really helpful sort of overviews of how the different components of proposition two and a half work. And so our base levy limit can only go up to 1.5%. The good news is that's in addition to any new growth that we have during the year and we have had quite a bit of new growth over the past five to 10 years, which has been really important for our budget. And that's one of the reasons why we really stress the importance of economic activity and development. We've all seen the new buildings that have gone up around town. If we didn't have those, there's no way we would have the budget that we currently have and be able to fund the programs that we currently have unless we were to do something like a tax override to make up the difference. The other things that go up are state aid. It's usually pretty modest. We had a slightly or larger than the typical increase for FY23 that you'll hear about in a minute or in a couple of presentations, but typically state aides pretty reliable but pretty moderate in terms of increases that we get year to year. And then changes in local receipts. These are things like motor vehicle excise taxes, permits, fees, penalties. These go up, they go down. They're what we call elastic revenues. There may be years where they're really good. And then they kind of snap back after a period of economic sort of boom, they might come back down. So we're particularly careful when we budget local receipt revenues because we wanna make sure we don't increase the budget to a level where then it's gonna come back down and we have to decrease the budget. We don't wanna have that sort of yo-yo effect. So on the revenue side, those are sort of the major ways that revenues go up. On the expense side, we have to account for salary increases in any particular year, rising health insurance costs, liability insurance costs. We just got a liability insurance quo and that's an area that's going way up because of the cost of construction going up, the natural disasters we're seeing. That's a huge driver in our budget right now. Rising pension costs, which we'll have for at least the next 10 or 12 years where our pension system, the assessment that we have is gonna continue to go up. And then the thing that we've seen more recently, which again, we'll talk about in a couple of presentations is inflation, which fuel and utilities are really being impacted hard. So whatever new money we have, these are things that sort of are the first things we have to make sure we pay for because we don't really have much of a choice. So the end result is just that there's really limited available resources each year for any new initiatives, which is why we stress the importance of sort of prioritization and setting direction to help guide the budget process. And that's it. Happy to take questions. Andy. I just wanna point one thing out and then Sean can follow up on it as these terms necessary, but a lot of what was described in process comes not just from creation on a local level entirely or by the council, but by state law and the charter. So that this process is heavily regulated by things that are set forth in state law and the charter. If that comes up, I encourage Sean to point it out. If not, it's an irrelevant point. No, I think that's right. I think one, just a couple of things I'll add, I'll say Amherst is used at least by some as a model for its budget process. I think there are some things that are sort of prescribed, there's a lot of things we do that not every community does. Our Joint Capital Planning Committee is an example. Our budget coordinating group, that's in our charter now, but that's an example holding the public forum early before the budget really starts to be developed as another example. And then I think sort of one of the best examples is the financial indicators presentation, having this sort of baseline understanding, meeting early in the process to make sure everybody's on the same page. Again, that's not something that's required, it's something that Amherst has done for longer, longer than I've been around, so. Okay, Michelle. Thank you, thank you for the presentation. So yesterday, the AHRA began its boots on the ground work and just bear with me for a second, I am getting to this, but what was really clear as we went out into the community and knocked on doors and particularly going to the apartment complexes is that there are lots of residents that really don't know what's going on in the community. And though we're offering all of these ways like the community forums, the various listening sessions that I know that you've hosted last year, the Engage Amherst page, we're still, I think, somehow missing reaching these folks, particularly in the apartment complexes. So I'm just wondering if we might be able to brainstorm some ways to get out during the engagement periods of this process into the community more and even if it's partnering with management companies of the apartment complexes and trying to get the word out about the forum and ways that people can engage. I don't have the answers, but I just wanna pose the question. And I think it's a really important, this is such an important part of the town government, this budget process. And I would really like for us to find ways that we can reach more people, so thanks. Shalini. Yeah, I was going to also emphasize the period of October to December engagement time and Michelle already spoke to the residence aspect. And I think partnering with the local agencies like maybe the family outreach or survival center. And that was one way we had gotten more participation when we were doing the rental registration initially. So that's one idea. And the other thing is of course as town counselors in our district letter, newsletters, we can definitely have. And maybe if there's a way that Sean, this was such a great, really simplified. I don't know if maybe this is my fourth year, so I'm getting it better, but it seemed like a very simplified explanation of the process. So I think I might share this or some parts of it so that residents can understand. The other part that I wanted to ask was about the committees themselves, like the town committees, like the ECAC or CSSJC, the TAC, the disabilities committees, are we inviting them to share because they are also on the grounds looking at where funding is needed. So are we systematically reaching out to them to also participate in this process? That was one question. Yeah, a quick response. I think we can, if we haven't, we can be more explicit about inviting them to the public forum. I think the other thing about those committees is if we have a staff liaison, a lot of times we get feedback through our staff liaison. So through the ECAC, we get a lot of feedback through Stephanie Ciccarello, through the disability advisory committee. I know we've gotten guidance through planning in terms of our capital improvement program. We incorporated feedback from them this most recent year. So for some of the committees that have staff liaisons, we get feedback that way as well. And the last question was about the Engage website. When will that be up for us to start inviting feedback on that? Yeah, so we could, you know, it may make sense to start that when we do the financial indicators presentation around that same day. We could open it up, post those materials, and then turn on the Q&A feature and the comment feature. Thank you. I noticed that, Paul, you have your hand up. So let's go to you and then come back to Pat and Anika. Thank you, Lynn. So I just want to respond to Michelle and to Shalini. Yes, we can reach out if there are ways that you can suggest to us or connect us with communities that you're already working with. That's the best way to do it. If you, sometimes if you put out a call for, you know, we're doing a budget forum someplace, people don't want to show up. But if they feel like there's somebody that they trust who's saying you should come to this, that's really helpful to us. So we're open to that. And as Sean said, usually on that, the November 7 financial indicators is when we launch the opening of the Engage Amherst, we do the Ask Me Anything page electronically and open up a lot of different avenues during November and December. Yeah, and every committee has a staff liaison and they're aware of all these processes. So, yeah. Pat, you might want to go to Anika. Somebody's leaving a message on my phone and I don't want it to shatter in. So I'll follow Anika. Thank you. Thank you, Anika. Yeah, so I know that this has been brought up since for a while and before my time, which is the implementation of the interpretation services or software, which would also be helpful in reaching broader community, in my opinion, and also ways to be able to engage with the middle and both that sometimes are left out between either the audience that does come to council meetings and follow us or apartment complexes, survival center, if family outreach, it seems to just go from one, from council audience and those that are following local government again to just jump to survival center and apartment complexes. And I think there's great partnership there, especially in combination with the community officers that have been on the ground in those complexes for some time, but also to be able to just focus on the vast amount of residents who, whether we find different areas that might interest people or just broader ways to communicate with that missing middle, so to speak. Okay. Patty, are you ready? Yes, thank you. I'm echoing Shauna and Anika, so I'm not gonna speak very long. The one thing that they haven't said is something about us reaching out, going out to some of the complexes. And we did that when we were creating the mobile market and it was extremely effective. I know that involves staff time, but I think it would really be possible if there were a location where we could have a meeting that was easy for people to walk to and so we can get input from the people who live in the boulders, et cetera, et cetera. Thank you. Thanks, Anna. Thank you. Our staff liaisons are phenomenal and their roles are much more expansive than their committee work. I'd like to emphasize the opportunity to work with the committees themselves as specifically an engagement opportunity and echo what I believe Michelle and Shalini mentioned as well. This isn't just about ensuring input on a specific topic, this is about engaging as many folks as possible. And while our committees would have input on a specific topic, that speaking with them is an opportunity to reach that audience and also demonstrate care and commitment to the committee work that's happening. So I would like to not necessarily lose that regardless of the fact that our staff liaisons are phenomenal and do a good job. I don't wanna totally pipeline that as much as I think has been done, it'd be great to open it up a little bit more. And even if it's about inviting committees to attend one of the info sessions or something along those lines, I think specific targeted outreach to committees would be a really, really beneficial component of this process. Thank you. I do wanna note that there are various members of various committees in our audience tonight. We have 18 people in the audience and there's also a few staff who are staffed as committees. So we're reaching some people directly and we never know who's on Amherst media. Jennifer Taub. Yeah, just quickly kind of echoing Pat. There's also, counselors are very busy but I guess maybe as time permit, there's no substitution for kind of just pounding the pavement and going door to door. I mean, I know sometimes like Amnity Place in my district, I don't know as many people there as I like to. So sometimes I just go knock on doors or leave some leaflets, I don't know. But sometimes, and I guess as Michelle said that you were doing earlier this week. I mean, sometimes just when we can to go out and maybe having a list of like what part of our district we might be able to walk and spread it out over whatever time, but sometimes I don't know if that's the old fashioned way of doing outreach in the community, talking on people's doors. Okay. Are there other comments on this part of the presentation? Just trying to see whether there'll be shows. Okay, with that then let's go on to the capital projects model or presentation, thank you. Sean? Okay. And let me just start by saying this is the presentation where we will go into more depth on at the finance committee, which will be the committee of the whole and that is on October 18th at three o'clock. Yeah, so for tonight we have some brief project updates and we'll discuss the modeling a little bit but as President Griezmer said, we're not gonna dive into the models themselves tonight. So on the elementary school side, same sort of not to exceed budget for the project, $100 million right now, hoping it comes in less than that, but we'll get more information at our next independent cost estimate, which is around January of 2023 when we'll have those numbers. At that same time, we expect to have a better estimate of our reimbursement rate for the project. Currently we think it's gonna be between 30 and 40%. The biggest thing that's pushed our reimbursement rate down or not maybe not the biggest thing but one of the biggest things. Sean, I'm going to interrupt you for just a moment. Alicia's in the audience. Would you bring her in? And then I'll make sure she can hear us and we can hear her. Alicia, can you hear us? Yeah, yeah, how are they doing? Great, thanks for joining us. Please go ahead, Sean. Okay, so what I was just saying about the reimbursement rate is that one of the major drivers why the reimbursement rate feels so low is that construction costs, inflation, the construction costs and market have gone way up while the MSBA has maintained the limit that they will reimburse for construction costs. And so as the costs go up and their limit stays pretty flat, the gap of what they'll reimburse is widening. And there is some efforts on this front to advocate for an increase to what their construction cap. Another update is that there's been a CPA proposal submitted by some community members for portions of the project. The CPA committee will be reviewing proposals in November. There is a new timeline, I think was in the packet tonight, developed in conjunction with our designers and our project manager based on the MSBA board meeting schedule that was released a few weeks ago. The next council action as it relates to the elementary school project is anticipated to be, I think it's February 6th, 2023, right, Lynn, at this point. And that would be a vote on the debt exclusion and also potentially a vote on the debt authorization at that same meeting with a town-wide vote to be held on May 2nd. And we are exploring a number of alternative financing funding options for the whole project, but really where we're seeing some glimmers of hope is the greener elements of the project. We had a good meeting with Eversource last week to talk about some of the rebates they have for the green energy we're building into this project, like the ground-source heat pumps and the solar panels, there's some incentives or some rebates that we could help get the overall cost down. There's also portions of the Inflation Reduction Act that, well, it's still early and we're still monitoring how it will play out. It seems like there's potential to get some offsets to the cost there as well. So we're gonna try to find as much as we can to reduce the overall cost of the project to the town. On the Jones Library Front, the current estimate is between $43.2 million and $49.6 million for a range. This includes budget reductions that have already been approved by the Building Committee. Our next cost estimates for this project will be at the end of design development and at 75% of construction documents, and that's around October of 2023. And our next council action for this project is gonna happen sometime between October 2023 and January of 2024, and that would be to approve any required increase in the debt authorization. And you can see a breakdown here of the funding sources based on whether it's the low estimate or the high estimate. For public work, site exploration is still underway and our DPW superintendent is working with Wesson and Sampson, who's the designer for the project to update their work based on sort of our fiscal realities and what we can allocate to the project, but also the fiscal realities of the construction industry and what costs are doing out there. And for the fire station, the current DPW site is still the preferred location, so there's some limits to what we can do with that project until we know the timeline for public works, which is still being developed. So we're gonna shift to the modeling. So because of the rising construction costs, the high increases to interest rates, we've sort of taken a little bit of a step back and we sort of recalibrated what are the things that are most important about the plan and to address all four projects and what can we use to evaluate different models. We've done this a little bit from the beginning, but we wanted to take a fresh look and this is what we'll do with the finance committee. Tomorrow is look at a number of different options and use this framework to evaluate them against each other. So I'm gonna quickly go through the things that we've determined to be sort of key or very important for considering each model. And then again, anyone's welcome to watch the meeting tomorrow. So the first one, I think everyone's aware of is urgency. There's, this has been from the beginning, one of the key factors is how quickly can we do all four projects. One thing that has changed, I will say, from two years ago to now is that the timeframe for what's quick has definitely gotten longer. When costs were lower and interest rates were low, we had models that were much quicker than they are now. So just to kind of set expectations and in light of the new fiscal realities, what is quick is longer than what was quick maybe two years ago. The second is impact on bond rating. The time has a very strong bond rating. No matter what we do, when we take on debt for two or three of these projects, it's gonna impact the bond rating, but there are some models that impact it more than others. And so what we wanna do is look at the different models and how it impacts these different factors that influence our bond rating. Those factors are budgetary flexibility, which is essentially how much reserves do we have. Liquidity is how quickly can we access those reserves? Are they tied up or are they fairly liquid or we could use them to make payments if needed? And then debt service and total outstanding debt. So debt service is the annual cost to finance the projects and then total outstanding would be the life of the project, how much debt is outstanding and for how long. The next is overall cost. So this would be looking up the total payments the town would make for a project, principal and interest. There are definitely some models that are less expensive than other models, but it may make sense in a particular circumstance to go with a more expensive option if it's stretched out over more years and it allows the town to accomplish other goals in a particular year, which leads us to the next one which is funding for other capital needs. We've heard from the council and from others that it's really important that we continue to maintain our other assets, not just focus on these four building projects, but we need to continue to invest in the buildings that are not gonna be replaced. So that would be the fourth one. And then the final two, so usage of reserves. So here we're talking about how much we're using but we're also talking about how we're using reserves. Are we using reserves in one particular year or two particular years and then it's done? Are we using it every year for 10 years well into the future? And there's definitely a predictability issue if we're going with a model that says we need to use reserves 10 years from now. And then the last one is flexibility. We can build different levels of conservatism into different models so that if costs come in higher, interest rates rise, if economic conditions worsen, there's some ability to stick with that plan because we have some buffer built in. But there's also models where we can put in less. And so looking at where those areas of flexibility are in each model is one thing we'll evaluate. And that's it. Before I go on to questions, I just wanna confirm with Andy, the chair of the finance committee. It is in fact October 18th of three that we're going to be taking up the models in a committee of the whole. Is that correct, Andy? That is correct. And I was just looking at the agenda for tomorrow to make sure that of the same question, but yes. Okay. We wanted to make sure we scheduled that far out enough in advance so that counselors who want to be there can be if you are able to. And if you aren't, there'll be a taping of it just as we did when we did the session, well, all sessions, but we did the session back in July. With that, Kathy, let's go to questions. I've got a couple of comments and then a question. First, the comment is, Sean, thank you for doing this. It was excellent. And I just, I want to underscore he was highlight a couple of things he said. One was the potential for some green money for the schools, the ever source incentive that is linked with ground source heat pumps if we build an efficient building is actually a $1.6 million outlay directly to us. So it's not a, it's not, it's a big amount of money. And what's in the federal bill is for both PV, photovoltaic and for potentially for ground source is allowing public entities who don't pay taxes to get a tax credit, a direct payment of a tax credit. So it's, we just don't know when those are coming in in terms of regs. So Sean, my comment question is, there is a really important amendment on the voter before the voters in November called the fair share amendment. And if that went through, we have a resolution in support of that. It, the money raised by that extra 4% for people for income above a million dollars would come directly to schools and to roads. So one of our issues in your modeling has always been that 3.2 million for everything else. You said vehicles and buildings, but it's got our roads in it too. And I think roads, when I knock on doors, aside from personal things, everyone shares a concern about roads. It's on everyone's. So I think all of us need to be doing what we can to let the residents of Amherst know that this is a direct benefit to them. I smoked to a small shopkeeper the other day who didn't even know it was on the ballot. And roads were immediately on his list. So my question on it is, if it passes, we'll, I'm assuming we could go back once you know what the terms of it in and relook at some of this and whether it's a, we have to apply for the money, but it creates a flow. And I don't know on education what the flow would look like, but on roads and other that may help us on the capital side. So you're just staying tuned to that. That's it. Those are my interactive comments. Yeah. No, those are, that's a great point. I haven't seen any projections or I don't know if there's anything available about what it would look like. Paul, I don't know if you've heard of anything through the MA. On the school fronts, my optimism is a little bit tempered because I know how the chapter 70 formula works. And if all that money just goes to the chapter 70 formula, it may not be as big a boost to Amherst specifically as it may be to some other communities. Not to say, you know, you shouldn't vote how you vote, but I would just, until I see what it would mean in terms of numbers, I would caution on the school front, on the roads front, if they follow the same allocation method they use for chapter 90, then we might see some bigger contributions there. But if we see a projection or if I hear anything, we'll certainly factor that into the planning process.  So it's not a, again, it's not a, and that's the whole state, but we get some, we presumably would get some piece of that. So I just think we've got these unknowns that are quite helpful to us in the otherwise extremely tight modeling that you're looking at, yeah. Okay, Mandy Jo. Yes, thank you. I was dismayed to see an election date already chosen for the council when the council in theory is the one that gets to set that election date. So I was not happy to see that someone sort of already put a date out there without the council even discussing that. So in some sense, I'd like to know how that happened before it even came to the council for a discussion as to when we'd want a special election for a debt exclusion override. In conjunction with that, two weeks ago, Kathy, as our school building committee rep, said that there were two votes, that we could, two dates for the MSBA that we could be aiming for for MSBA votes in early March and late April. And the new schedule came through with the late April one, which does really hamper when we potentially choose to go out for the debt exclusion override. So why are we not aiming for the early March date for the MSBA? Public works and fire, we still don't have a DPW site. And so is it about time maybe that we find another fire site because the fire station's about ready to fall down? It can't wait for another five, 10 years for us to find a DPW site. I've been on the council four years now. The entire time I was on the Charter Commission two years before that, a lot of the time I was on town meeting. Fire sites been set, but kept saying, well, we need a DPW site, but we don't have one. And we're nearly a decade or more later. It seems a shame to make the fire department wait while we struggle to find the DPW site. So I'd like to know whether there are other options or whether even looked at other options for the fire site in order to be able to move that one ahead of DPW. And then I would like to know what options have been considered for splitting DPW among multiple sites that the town currently owns like the transfer station, Ruxton sewer treatment plant. Those are just three that came to mind immediately, such that maybe we can actually move DPW forward sooner because we split how much land we need or what has been considered to modify our zoning because my understanding is that part of the problem for DPW site is our zoning lock coverage maximums. And so have we actually considered in town asking the town council to modify those lock coverage maximums to free up more locations to build DPW sites. Mandy Jo, let me just pause for a moment and say the issue of the timing is in your calendar is in your packet tonight with the expectation of a discussion. We can have that discussion now or we can do it when we talk about future agenda items, whichever way or the school update, whichever way we want. So with that, let me just go then back to your other questions because I think it would be useful for Paul to weigh in on issues of DPW and firesite. Lynn, Lynn, could I just answer her question of why we didn't choose March versus April? It's a longer conversation. So let's just stick with the sites and then come back to the timing. Okay. So on the sites for, we have had them sequenced the way you explained with DP with knowing that the best location for the fire station was at DPW. I would argue that the DPW building is in much worse condition than the fire building is significantly so. That being said, we will, we're at the council president to put us on the agenda for the 17th to discuss DPW options with the council and executive session because we have a property transfer property option that we would like to review with the council and we can explore more of that then and at that meeting, I think we'll get some feedback from the council as to which direction you'd like to go. Mandy, Joe, anything else you want to ask on that? I mean, it sounds like I'm not going to get any answers until executive session. Is that correct? Yeah, because we have to lay out what the, we have a real property option that we'd like to review with the council and executive session. Now, the question is, should we pause this and go to the school discussion or come to that later? I'm open to that one way or the other. You're the president. I didn't know it was on the discussion for agenda, future agenda items. That makes, that's kind of confusing to me because it came up in these presentations. It actually came up two weeks ago and took me off guard. So that was part of what happened. But I guess my question was basically, why did a date get published and put out there before the council has even discussed it? It's proposed. That's not what it said in any of those presentations. Okay, fine. All right, Paul, do you want to stop and discuss the school thing? The school dates? Yeah, I think. And we might just go ahead and pull up Athena, the schedule of, that shows the two different schedules. Pam. So are we tabling the conversation to thank Sean, or not Sean? No, we're going to go to the school question that Mandy Joe has raised and then we'll go back to the rest of the conversation. Okay, because there were several hands up that presumably were on the previous presentation. Right. So this isn't it. Paul, do you want to go on this one and Kathy? I think Kathy had raised her hand previously on this one. Kathy. So Mandy's question, what's driving dates, whatever we then decide, was that the MSBA March 1st meeting or March 2nd meeting, they surprised the designer and the OPM by saying, they always in the past have had the materials for that do six weeks before instead they said, if you want to make that meeting, everything has to be in by December 28th, which is instead of the anticipation was in January. And that would have left very little time to get good cost estimates and do community, some community engagement on where we are with the building. And so the schedule on, if you look at the where, the yellow and the red and the purple are, forget where the green is. The work that was going to be done doesn't really push off the later dates, but that extra month of going for the April meeting rather than the March meeting gives time to get really good revised cost estimates with a design where we're working through right now with the building exterior interior, some of the site costs. So we get a much more solid cost estimate. So it lets us have two more weeks or three more weeks, which they always thought they were going to have until MSBA did December 28th. And MSBA didn't have a really good reason for that since their staff isn't there during that time period, why the materials had to come in then. But we, so that scrunched the timeline, Mandy, that it really would have been extremely difficult to get everything done at the level we need to get it done on. So that pushed us into the April meeting. And as Lynn said, it cost hers by surprise, but it caught everyone by surprise because they don't publish 2023 with the due dates until very late in the year. So that news about everything had to be in by December 28th was major news as opposed to on the April one, everything has to be in by the beginning of March. And we have plenty of time to do a good job with you all knowing what this building might look like well before we're submitting. So that's the basic moving. And then when we as the council do our votes or when the town does, that's up to us to decide. It's just the timing needs to continue to allow our designers assuming it passes time to design the thing, go out to bid and stay on the school opening in 2026. So we want to keep that timeline if we can. So that's that early May date, Mandy, which is as soon after MSBA meets as possible. But clearly that's a decision we can make as a council on that timing. If I can chime in on this. So one of the I think one of the driving forces on this and the way Kathy explained it is correct is we believe that there's a staffing issue at MSBA and they're trying to elongate the processes to push things down the road in terms of because they're going through a lot of staff turnover and they're trying to recruit people to review all these projects that are in the queue. So we felt that it was important to go to the later MSBA date because the council would rightly expect to know what the MSBA decision would be and what their percentage would be before you were willing to vote on a project and also decide to put it on the ballot. You can choose to put it on the ballot if we're going to go for a debt exclusion override at any time. You don't have to wait for the MSBA in some ways. But I think that to the public, they're going to have as much information as possible. So pushing it out further seemed to make sense and it didn't impact the end date of the project at all, according to our designers. So originally the plan and can go back to this plan was that we would come to or the everything would come to the council in December with the idea that they would the council would vote by December 21st or 19th, I think is our date, and that it would go on the ballot at the end of March, March 28th. Now the proposal that's in is, I'm sorry, it doesn't say draft, my apologies, but the proposal that's in your packet has it moving out to the council beginning to discuss this in January. And then voting February 6th and then it goes on the ballot for a date of May 2nd. And during this discussion, I wanted to make very sure, and I have, that the higher ed institutions are still in classes. They're not even in exams, they're in classes. Amherst, UMass Amherst is in class until the middle of May, Amherst College is in class until May 9th. Obviously the schools are still in session because what we don't want to do is run into that issue where faculty and staff and students are starting to leave campus. So we can discuss the timeline further now or in future agenda items, but that's, I sat in this meeting whenever we were here two weeks ago, I guess, and all of a sudden I'm hearing that something has just happened and I'm going really, then we need to find out what happened. So questions? So I appreciate the explanation. I still, it shocked me when I pulled up that updated timeline and there was no proposed draft anything. It had a big green highlight that said this is the date and the council hadn't ever discussed when it wants it, whether it wants it before or after the formal MSBA vote. We've been told we could choose either and any of that. And now there's a date out there. And I feel like we can't even choose another date because that's the date that is on documents that doesn't even say draft. That was my big concern. I'd love to discuss more. I'm not sure this is the right time. I think a separate meeting agenda item that has things like when do we want to put it is appropriate. That's probably not this meeting because I think all the counselors have to think about it. But like I said, I was, I was flabbergasted when I saw an actual date out there instead of, you know, we're aiming for the end of March, early April, or early April, late April, early May. And even in your future agenda items, two weeks ago, it had all of the other ideas, you know, proposed future agenda items backed into December, moving on to March. And I'd have to go look at the actual documents. But I believe they were put in under future agenda items. So that we can have further discussion later on about this. But that's, that's what happened between last meeting and this meeting was MSBA. We learned that MSBA had changed their schedule. Cathy, did you have a further comment on that? Just, just I wanted to say one more thing. As Paul said, Mandy, we could go before the MSBA vote, but there's this hope springs eternal is one way I would think of at it when they meet on March, that date, they could increase the cap on a cost per square foot. If it does, it changes how much money we get. And so that's a maybe we don't think they're going to, but we are trying to say there are a lot of towns and cities in the same situation. So we'll have a good sense by the second week in January of what or share would be if they don't change the cap. We won't know whether they said they, it's not on their agenda right now, but there is that chance. So just that's the, there's that one piece of uncertainty. I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about it, but going well before the meeting, we wouldn't want to miss the opportunity because they never go backwards. So if they did increase the cap, they don't go backwards and give it to you. So that was just the other little bit of a slim chance, but maybe a chance. I'm also hearing Mandy Joe suggest that she feels the council needs to discuss all of the options as to when we go out. Do we go out before? Do we go out with this? Do we wait even longer? So that's part of the discussion. Yep. Am I? Yes. Okay. Going back to our previous conversation, we can take this down.  This is, we're now on the capital projects. I would say that I was not happy with the previous discussion because it's not the clarity that I have often heard from Sean. And it kind of, he was much too neutral. It sounds like, well, we can have everything if we do it this way or that way. And there was no real sense of limited resources and what the impacts could be.  And we had things like the balloon mortgages and all kinds of models were thrown at us. And it's like, oh, these are all okay, but they weren't. They weren't all okay. Some are good and some are not good. So I'm hoping that when we're presented this, because it made a person like me, I'm just a regular person when it comes to these things, feel like this is all like magic. And would make me feel not capable of making an informed decision. I'm hoping that we really get the information we need as to what it means to us, the town, if we reduce the reserves, if we spread it out longer, if we pay a higher interest rate, all of those things really matter for the future of the town. And I think we have to be aware of limitations. That's my thoughts. Okay, Pat. Quick, one, thank you for your work, Sean. I think that everything that Dorothy is asking for will be coming forward. As you presented, it was clear that we would get more and more detail. So thank you for your work. The other thing I want to bring up quickly, and it probably mostly needs to be reserved for executive session, but Hickory Ridge, we own and is a really good spot for a fire station without negatively impacting conservation area or even possibly some affordable housing there. We've had multiple conversations with the fire chief about that site. It is an excellent site and we own it. So it seems to me we need to maybe give up the idea of moving the DPW, but work on the building. I am concerned with the ongoing expenses of just maintaining even in a shabby poor state, both the firehouse and the DPW. And so I really would like us to be able to move forward on that. Thank you. Anna? Oh, God. Hang on. Too many things open. Like I lost my note thing. This is why I need a notebook. Okay. Not like the notes app, notebook. All right. So I think I wanted to echo. I can't remember who I'm echoing, but thinking about when we think about DPW and fire. Oh, Paul, it was Paul. The state of the DPW building and the need relative to their both high needs. I think that's been very clear. And I think that we can't let go of one, honestly. So I also I wanted to thank Sean for doing his job really, really well, which is to provide us with models that show us how to move forward while trying to accomplish all the things we want to accomplish. That is some magician math that I do not have enough knowledge, skill or degrees to do. And so this is why Sean is here. And I'm so grateful to you for staying neutral and providing these models. These are things that the council has been talking about and prioritizing as capital needs. And so we have asked you to create models where we can do all of this. And you did that. And I am very grateful for that as well. I think you've been very realistic and pragmatic and it makes sense to be providing an overview now and then to be getting down into those details in the future. So I wanted to make sure that was very clear. Thank you. This is a ton of work. I'm also very excited about some of the other things that you've brought to us today, but we'll get to those later and I will be excited later as well. Thank you. Are there any other questions on the capital presentation at this point? Okay. Then let's go on to the FY23 appropriations and transfer. This is an automatic referral to the finance committee. And again, I'm calling on Sean. All right. This is the last one, I think. So we have a number of actions that we're proposing. We do this every year. The past couple of years, there's been a little bit more than typical, but we feel there's really strong reasons for why we're proposing these. So quick overview. We are proposing three supplemental appropriations, one for the operating budget, one for roads and sidewalks, one for the reaching track and field project. We're proposing the creation of a capital stabilization fund and then we're proposing a couple of transfers that are somewhat contingent upon the vote on the capital stabilization fund to transfer into other stabilization funds and I'll clarify that in a second. So the first one is for operating budgets. So we are... Sean. Yes. I'm going to pause for a minute and ask for you to go back a little further in history. And that is that all of a sudden we're talking about supplementals. Where did the money come from? That's a good question. So every year, we have to certify our free cash and free cash is, as you know, we typically keep it around 5%. At the end of the year, we close out our books. Any excess revenues go into free cash. Any savings on our expense budget go into free cash. And there's a number of other adjustments that are in a complicated formula that Sonia puts together that comes to a number. And so if we have a year that is where we have sort of a strong budgetary performance where we bring in more than we expected and we don't spend as much, our free cash increases. And our policies say that we will keep 5% in free cash. And then anything above and beyond that we will transfer to our General Civilization Fund or we potentially could appropriate for sort of a one-time use type of thing. So that's on some of these free cash transfers and these supplemental appropriations. The source that we're proposing for those are from free cash. And it's the free cash balance that was just certified about a week ago. And the first one, the supplemental appropriation for operating budgets, that is a recurring request for recurring appropriation or increase in our operating budgets which is a recurring expense. So the source for that is state aid coming in higher and I'll speak to that more in a second. Does that answer what you were looking for, Lynn? Yeah, it's always in the street of people where money all of a sudden appears from. Yeah, again, this is a once a year when we close out the previous year's budget where we do these sort of one-time transfers. And the detail will, if time permits, we're planning on doing the fourth quarter budget report on October 18th potentially as well. And that's the fourth quarter of FY 22 where Sonya will go into detail about just what I just said, what revenues came in better, what expenses, where did we see savings on the expense side and you'll get a much better idea in your head about where those savings came from. So back to the first one that we're proposing which is a supplemental appropriation for the operating budget. So we're proposing a half percent increase which is about 351,938. This increase would be for the town, the schools and the library. The reasons why we're proposing this, there's really three main ones. One, we have a number of ongoing expenses that across the schools and the town, maybe the library, but I don't know as much about the details of their budget right now, but we have a number of recurring expenses that are being funded by federal grants and we've talked about trying to transition away from those federal grants. And one way we can do that is to get our operating budget up. So for the town specifically, we're talking about the fire and EMTs that we hired last year. We added four right now, they're being funded by ARPA and increase in our operating budget, that limit up will help us phase them into the operating budget. For the elementary schools, it's that arts position. You may remember when we talked about the budget in the spring, there was a lot of discussion around revisiting it in the fall, depending on how state aid came in and this is us revisiting it. And then the last one for the regional schools and talking with the superintendent and their business manager, they're funding a number of mental health activities that they would like to be ongoing. They're being funded by federal funds right now. They're ESSER funds and increasing the operating budget would allow them to continue some of those as well. The second reason why is inflation. Inflation is, we talked about this, the timing of the budget. We would in fact, there are a lot of inflation into the operating budget. We did more on the capital side and we have seen rising fuel costs and utility costs. I was just on a meeting late last week about the price of electricity and I think we've all probably seen the newspapers or heard about that, but electricity costs are really expected to go through the roof this winter and that's something that will impact all of our department budgets. And then the last one is our operating budgets, during the height of the pandemic, we held them flat the really bad year where there was a lot of uncertainty. We held operating budgets flat and costs continued to go up, salaries still went up, health insurance still went up, but we didn't increase our operating budgets at all that year. And that was very unusual. And we never made up that flat year. The next year we did a 2% or so increase and then a 2.5 the next year, but we never made up for that last year of increases while our costs continued to rise. And so doing this half percent is sort of a first step at trying to get that back, that year of zero percent increases to operating budgets, which is one of the reasons why we stressed it so much in the budget proposal this year that we're hearing a lot from department heads about the struggles they're having with their operating budgets. So how would we propose to fund this when we propose the FY23 budget? We based it on the governor's projection of state aid for municipalities. The legislature had a much higher projection and that was ultimately what was approved. And it was approved rather late in the budget process. So it came, it was approved after the town approved the FY, or the town council approved the FY23 budget. So that increase in state aid, and I think in the packet tonight there's a memo and in the back of that memo there's a projection. So you can see the increase in state aid and how it would support the increase in the operating budgets. So that's number one. Number two, like last year, we're proposing a million dollar allocation to roads and sidewalks. This, there's the reasons why I think most everyone knows these, but it's been identified as a high priority by the council and manager. There's a large backlog of repairs needed. And this area two has been hit hard by inflation where we just can't do as much as we used to be able to do. I'd like to be able to say this million dollars will go really, really far, but I think it's going to help us just get back to what we wanted to do, maybe a little bit more. But again, roads and sidewalks are driven by oil prices and things like that. And then so this is one that would be funded by the amount of free cash that we have above that 5% that we keep. And you'll see a, you'll see a grid at the end that kind of summarizes all this. The next one is $900,000 for the region track and field project. So the regional schools put together a financial plan for how the contributions from the four member towns would work to fund the track and field project. This is the larger project that would take care of the field as well as the track, not just the track. And the council has already approved sort of the first two legs of that funding plan. You approve the debt authorization in May. And then over the summer, you approve the CPA request. And so this would be the third and final leg to fund the town share that was outlined by the regional schools. If this is approved, the next steps would be in the hands of the region to work with the other member towns to raise their shares. And for whoever's going to be leading the fundraising process to work on fundraising. And this two would be from, oh, sorry, this two would be from free cash. And this will be discussed when we do the fourth quarter report for FY 22. One of the reasons why our free cash came in higher this year, so that we have some to transfer, is that it included 400,000 of returned assessments from the regional schools. When a regional school district has so much of its own money and reserves, it has to give some back to its member towns. And so they exceeded a certain amount a couple of years ago or so. And so they returned some of the assessment to us, which wasn't expected. So in some ways, about $400,000 of this transfer request is really regional school money that was given back to us that we would put towards this project. Creation of a capital stabilization fund. So several years ago, the town considered a capital stabilization fund. At that time, our reserves were a lot lower. We feel strongly that send this fund out would be a really helpful planning tool, not only for myself and the town manager, but we think it would be really helpful to the community to kind of see what we've set aside specifically for capital. Some people do this in their own personal finance. They'll have a Randy Day fund. They might have a home repair fund or so. This would be like the home repair fund. This would be how much are we sent aside specifically for the four building projects. And if this fund is approved, we would recommend a policy that would state any reserves in excess of 15% of and Andy caught me on this while he was reviewing the PowerPoint in excess of the operating budget. But specifically when we say the operating budget, we mean the operating revenues that support the budget. Any amount of reserves in excess of 15% of that figure would go to the capital stabilization fund to build that fund up. And we're proposing that after the decisions are made on the other orders we're proposing here tonight. Why are we doing this? The town is, as we discussed, is undertaking a significant challenge to replace all four buildings as quickly as possible. And this fund would aid in the planning process. It would also distinguish for the community, what reserves do we have for sort of economic fluctuations in revenue and downturns? And what do we have specifically to support these projects? And as I said, the funding for this would just be any amount in excess of that 15%. The next one is a transfer and appropriate to the Reparation Stabilization Fund and if approved, the Capital Stabilization Fund. So the first, there's two actions within this order. The first one is to appropriate 134,330 from free cash to the Reparation Stabilization Fund. This is the amount that's equal to what was collected in cannabis tax in FY 22. Staying with this one, this was the plan that the council agreed to to basically set aside annual amounts that are equivalent to the cannabis tax revenue received and make those contributions to the Reparation Stabilization Fund until the balance hits 2 million. So this would be the FY, the contribution basically for FY 22, what was left over from FY 22. And all that would be done if the town was determined to be in good financial standing, which I think we are at this point. The second order here would be to transfer 1,678,120 from free cash to the newly created Capital Stabilization Fund. And this is that amount that's in excess of 5%, which is what we like to keep in free cash. This is the amount that's in excess of 5% of free cash when taken into account all the other orders. And I can show you a sort of a breakdown of that later. And so, yeah, so that contribution will go right into the Capital Stabilization Fund. So that's really just moving, this order here is really just moving money from free cash into the two stabilization funds. And then the last one is to transfer and appropriate 7,815,456 from our General Stabilization Fund to the Capital Stabilization Fund. So again, if our policy would be to keep 15% in reserves, that would equate to 5% in free cash, which is our policy to keep 5% in free cash. And then that would mean we'd keep roughly 10% in our General Stabilization Fund to add those two to get to 15%. And so what this would do is transfer the amount we currently have in General Stabilization above that 10% to the Capital Stabilization Fund. Apologize for the complexity. I know it's a lot of percentages and different stabilization funds. And so again, this would be to build up that Capital Stabilization Fund in anticipation of the four building projects. I think this slide will make it a little clearer. So this is the summary. So you've got the different actions that are being proposed, the order numbers that are in your packet, pending Sonia's review, she's on vacation. So if I mess something up, she'll let us all know. You've got the amounts that are being proposed. So they all have amounts, except for the creation of the Capital Stabilization Fund. You have the funding source. So the funding source for the first one is state aid, as I explained. The next few would be free cash. And then the last one is again, the amount above and beyond having 15% reserves, which would come from the General Stabilization Fund. And this town, school operating budget one, it's recurring in the sense that the state aid is being built into the base and that base will continue going into the future. It won't be a sort of give it to the school budget and then take it away. The other ones would be one time, except for the reparations, which is it's sort of recurring as we will consider it every year. It'll be a decision every year, but it'll be recurring that we'll consider it. And that's it. A lot of information. So we tried to package it all together for, try to get it all, a lot of it's related. So we try to package it into one conversation, but I understand it's a lot of percentages and numbers. Could you put the chart back up? Mm-hmm. You just showed us. When the Capital Stabilization Fund, the second from the bottom, wouldn't we be doing that on a recurring basis based on free cash? It would be an annual decision every year. If we had the free cash to transfer, then yes, but at this point, I'm not presuming that we would have free cash to transfer every year. Okay. That's my only question this time. Anna. Still typing. All right. First off, I am so thrilled to see a proposed Capital Stabilization Fund. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is something, you know, I'm just, this is necessary for the bill that Mandy Jo and I introduced because we said that a lot of the money would go into a Capital Stabilization Fund. So we were hoping that one would show up. So that was great. We weren't hoping we knew it was coming down the pike or we'd heard rumors or we would introduce it. I really do want to strongly emphasize my support for this.  And I'm curious, you know, if you have ideas of what might be supported by that fund in the future, for example, you know, inflation has hit things like roads and sidewalks and like vehicles and like all of these other elements that come before JCPC. And so that fall under that idea of capital and obviously a Capital Improvement Stabilization Fund is slightly different from that. And so I'm curious what you see is the really, really long-term objectives of that fund. And then I also just wanted to commend you for the track metaphors in the slide about the track. So thank you for that. Although Mandy did point out, relays typically have four legs, so you can add one more, one more in there. Thanks. It's okay if I quickly respond, Lynn. Sure. I think, you know, I think our vision for the Capital Stabilization Fund is primary objective would be the short term to help support the four building projects, but that it would continue to have a purpose after that, just to support. We know there's other capital needs that are sort of right behind those four building projects that we've heard about. And so we think this, you know, it's a good idea to have this regardless of the four building project plan that it's nice to have a place to put money for the capital repairs that we know will be coming. So thank you. Pam. Thanks. And thanks, Sean. This is a very complete presentation. Even if it's a little general, it's a really good starting point for a lot of us. Question on, for instance, the track that was mentioned. So if $900,000 goes into this project, is that $900,000 that would come off of the intended borrow that we were originally looking at? Second question, the operating budget, you had the half percent that was going sort of across the board to all of the operating budgets for the schools, the municipal budget and library services. I recall a fairly active conversation last fall when we talked about the $50,000 that was requested by the school board for teacher, art teachers. And the message was pretty clear that we thought that there was enough money in their fund, in fact, to handle that. So it's interesting that we're now seeing that just $50,000, but we're actually seeing $125,000 in this. I really appreciate the fact that between you and the finance committee that the town has operated very conservatively and had this kind of free cash residual. So I really appreciate that work. And I would ask that the finance committee in discussing this gives some consideration to these questions. Kathy. So I want to echo Anna that I like the capital stabilization fund concept a lot. So I have a question that I think might help those who are also listening, Sean, how much is in the stabilization fund, not capital, at 15 percent? Because I don't want to give the impression that we're taking all the money and put it into capital fund. You've left a 15 percent. Do you often have that number? So if we move this 7.8 out, what's left in? Because that money could be used for capital. It can be used for and then do a long list of other things that can be used for. But we're not taking all the money away.  And so I thought that would be useful. And then press number one and then two to build on lens in the future. If we have dipped into that 15 percent and there's free cash, this most of it would go into the general stabilization fund, as I understand it. It's only when we're generating free cash that's high enough that stabilization hits it. So it will be it will be it's basically hard to predict where this is in year two, three and four. I can understand that. But I just want to know how much how much do we have right now is my question. So we're not when we take 7.8 away. What is what are we taking it away from? Yeah, so great questions. So one thing I'll give you those answers in one second. So one thing just to be aware of is we track year over year, how much we add to free cash and how the budget does. I would say that the last this year and the year before, not what I would say are typically years. We've had larger increases to free cash than general. And the number one reason for that is COVID. We've been much more conservative in our budgeting. You got to remember the FY 22 budget was developed in the spring of 2021 and the fall of 2020, which different time than where we are now in terms of what we're seeing out in our downtown, which is definitely rebounded. And so that's the major reason why the last couple of years we've had these sort of bigger than normal free cash transfers. Now we've hoped to be able to keep building a capital stabilization fund, but I don't anticipate it'll be to the same amount that we have been these last couple of years. So to answer your question, if we were to keep 15%, that would be a total about 13.5 million. And again, that would be a split between free cash and general stabilization, but it'd be about 13.5. And that would still allow us to transfer about, what is it, the 1.6 or 1.7 plus. That would allow us to transfer about nine and a half to the capital stabilization fund. So we keep the 13, sorry, go ahead. Right now, if I add the 7.8 in, so we've got over 20 million in the stabilization fund with, yeah, okay, thank you. Yeah, to start this year, we were at about 25%. I think when the last number we saw, we were at about 25% in the general stabilization fund. So this would be transferral. But again, as we described, the reason why we're there is because we've built it up for these projects. This would allow us to pull it out of there and put it in a place that's clearly marked for capital. Mandy Jo. Thank you. I also really like the idea of a capital stabilization fund. One of the benefits is when we were looking at just a stabilization fund and then looking at the models, you went through just a couple minutes ago. As a counselor, it was always hard to guess, well, how much can we use from the stabilization fund? Where is that line? What is that? How much does it put us at risk? And so if we're just looking at one fund that already has the money in it and we know we could, in theory, draw it down to zero, that helps us evaluate those models so much easier than it did when they were combined with our savings account for rainy days. A couple of questions. I asked this at the BCG meeting, but the region appropriation order, we had talked at BCG about it not necessarily being part of their budget for this year, that it would be more of a potentially go-to-the-track project or some other thing, and then the overall number, that 85,000, be included in what we base the increase on next year, but because the region budget is so difficult, we can't change their full budget. So I see it in the draft order that it would be a supplemental to them, and so I'd like to know more about what the draft order actually means in terms of where it goes and how it goes and what other votes we might need, or whether it should not even be included in that, and it should be included in a separate financial order completely for some other reason. The track. I like that we'll have funded pretty much our entire share, but I'm curious about, I hope, I don't know whether you guys know an update on how the rest of the towns are doing and how the fundraising is doing, because those were a large part of getting to the project we really wanted, and I'm worried that that might not happen, mainly because at least for the fundraising, I haven't seen any movement by the boosters for seeking money. I've been at athletic events where they've asked for contributions to the boosters, and they haven't mentioned the track project at all, and then do we know whether that budget is still about the same, or are we going to be, has that also ended with an increase somehow because of all the other inflations we've seen? It's okay if I respond to that, Lynn. Please. Yeah, so no great point about the region. We can't increase our assessment officially to them this year without all the other towns revoting their assessments and voting higher assessments, which is not likely to happen. So there's really two options that to your point, Manny Jo, this order might change a little bit. The two options we have are the first one that you described, which is we could potentially just put it towards the track and field for this year. We would build it into their base for next year, but for this one year, the increase would just go towards the track project, which we know they're still looking for funding. The other option potentially would be to donate it to the region. They've reached out to their attorney how that would work, and they've also talked to Mark Abrams, who's a regional school district guru around the state. And so one option would be to donate it to them, not officially give it to them as an assessment, but almost like a gift. So those are the two options that would be available for this year's funds for the region, again, but with the mindset that we would build it into their base for the following fiscal year. I have not heard any updates about the other towns. I don't believe any have made any additional commitments to funding. I know they're talking about it, but I haven't heard that any have approved any additional funding beyond what one or two of them did for CPA originally. And then I do not have an update on if the price, the cost has changed, but I can check in with Doug Slatter from the regional schools about that. Are there other questions again? Remember, this is just the opening discussion. Are there other questions about this piece of the financial presentation? Is that really covers three and four in your agenda? Okay. Before we take a break, I just want to see if there are other questions in general about finance and other requests in general about finance, given the fact that at the very beginning of the meeting, Sean laid out kind of what's to come. And we had some good discussions about further outreach. Then we also particularly, he particularly went on to the capital projects and there's going to be a more in-depth discussion with actual model scenarios from what I understand on the 18th. And then this one, which is what was being referred to the finance committee, all of this is referred to the finance committee. So, Michelle. Yeah, I had a couple of general comments and observations about process, but I was hoping to bring them forward in finance tomorrow. Is that, is that a good approach or will there be an opportunity in finance to talk about process? Andy. Yes, I assume that that is a major part of the discussion tomorrow. Okay, great. Okay, thank you. Is there anything specific you wanted to mention, however, tonight? Well, I need to get my thoughts together, but one of the things that comes to mind is with the turning over of a council, a portion of the process happens prior to that, and then the new council on boards in January. And then the rest of the portion of the process happens. And just from my personal experience, I just, I had some observations that I was going to share in finance about that and maybe ways to manage that. That's the first only thing that's coming to mind right now. But as long as I know there's going to be a place in time for that tomorrow, that's great. It's a very astute observation, however, that I think particularly six counselors are sitting here going, I came into this story halfway through. So that's, we, we fully sympathize with you. We came into the story even in a more interesting moment. Let's change processes all together. Because now we're a city known as the town of. Dorothy. You may not have meant this when you said any other requests. This is probably not the right time. But I know that I've heard from a lot of people that they would like to add money to the town budget for tree maintenance. We at present don't have any steady source of that funds. People are very interested in preserving trees. And to do that in a consistent manner. We need to have a maintenance, more money in a maintenance budget for trees. Andy. Yeah, actually commenting on just the last two comments. One is that what Michelle was raising is a difficult problem. What happened in the last round is the select board had to start with the process and hand it over to the council so that the first council was dealing with what select board had started. And because the guidelines really came out of the select board. So except for this brewer and I, there was no carryover between the two. And that was hard on love another counselors and which gets back to the point that I raised very much at the beginning. But to a large extent, we are a victim of the charter which is in itself a victim of state law because this charter was developed to be consistent with what the state requires. And we can talk about it tomorrow, but it just in general, it is important to recognize that we have to have a process that coincides with what the state provides is to how and when budgets are developed for cities. And why it was done the way it was is an interesting question. Because every city must face the same problem that they're holding elections in November and doing inaugurations at the beginning of January. And there's mandates of when the budget has to be developed and how much time it takes. And that's the one of the things that I was referring to there. And as far as the comment that came from Dorothy about trees, I mean, it's really helpful to know what people think is important. And so I really welcome that. We are stuck with something that you pointed out, Michelle, and that is two and a half and the limitations because our budgeting doesn't start with our needs. Our budgeting starts with what we have available. And what we know is the cost of continuing programs that are existing. So that is just the fact that we've always had to deal with as long as I've been involved with that, which is four years from now. Are there any other comments or questions? Sean, thank you. I think that we asked for a budget overview. We've seen operating. We've seen capital. And we've seen what happens at the end of a budget year when you have a balance left. So this is the beginning of the budget season. And you put a lot of thought into this. And we really want to thank you for putting it out there the way you have. And we know there's much, much more to come. Yeah, no, thank you. We'll be discussing it tomorrow at three o'clock or three thirty three, three o'clock, three o'clock tomorrow. Thank you. Okay. We're going to take a 10 minute break and then come back. We'll be back at eight thirty. Wow.  As you return, please turn your video back on so that I can tell if you're here. I figured you all needed a very generous break because that was mind boggling numbers. And we'll do that. And we're going to do that. Okay. As you return, please turn your video back on just to start moving on. Item eight C was removed from consent. And Andy, you were the one that removed that. So let's it's a second reading. Would you like to speak to your question or whatever or the whatever? The reason you would like this removed, I'm sorry. You shouldn't. Okay, let me explain. It came up very quickly this time and it looked like a very simple change to something called street numbering. And then when I started looking at it a lot more and thinking about it, I realized that this is a fairly significant request that we are making of all of the homeowners and all of the property owners, business property owners in the town. And the question then came as to whether this was the best way to solve a problem. I think that the problem is important and I really appreciate the GL identified it because as was indicated in their cover memo, it's really important that the FIRE EMS staff and other first responders be able to find a place when they are sent out by dispatch as quickly and as easily as possible. And I think that in general, it's always important that people be able to find what they're looking for. And I was sort of reflecting back as I said to Michelle when I was emailing back and forth with her about this a little bit since she's chair of TOL. When I campaigned, if I went looking for a particular house on a voter list, sometimes it was easier than other times. And the difficulties that I have were several. One is for homes. It really depends upon the particular neighborhood and even the particular house. Some houses have numbers on them. A lot of houses don't. Some houses are built so that you can't tell where would be the best place to go looking for a number to begin with. Some people don't use the front doors as their main entrance. And so they put numbers around in various insides. So the real important question then comes to that all that provision, which is having the number be, if it's not visible from the front of the house, that it be on the entry of the, where the public way. And that also depends very much upon what the property is. If the mailbox, for example, is right in front of the driveway, or in the driveway is going to a single house, it's pretty easy. If there's a long driveway shared by a number of different homes, and there's five numbers down at the bottom of the hill, or whatever the entry may be, and there's multiple houses, then is it easy to make sure which house is which as the emergency responders looking. So there are just a whole lot of questions plus the whole question of how commercial properties are identified and how dispatch identifies commercial properties. Do they identify by a street address or the actual business name, because a lot of times things are identified by the business name and are known by the business name. So I think that there were a lot of questions. And when I was asking whether GLL had considered all of those things and had received specific advice from from the like the dispatch fire EMS, the bid, the Chamber of Commerce for the business sense of it, the answer was no, was there any effort to reach out to people who are just general residents to let them know what we're thinking about and how they would identify. It seems that there hadn't been any work on it. It was just something that was created by the committee and I appreciated their effort in doing it, but I'm not sure that I feel that it was a well researched and something that had been floated to the community with community input that is going to have a fairly significant impact on the community. And that's the reason I wanted to bring that up and bring the whole thing up today because I would urge that we not vote on it tonight, but that we vote to refer it back to committee. I'm going to ask if that's a motion. I will make that a motion. Okay, so your motion is to refer this back to GLL. Correct. Okay, is there a second for that motion? I'm going to second it for the purposes of discussion, just to put it there. Okay, Mandy Jo, you and Michelle and Pat, we're all on GLL, so which one wants to go first? I'm happy to let the chair go first if she'd like to go first. All right, Michelle, you get fingered on this one. Thank you. Well, first, I just, I really appreciate the thought that Andy put into this. I really, really do. And I think, you know, the bylaw we previously had was one sentence, I think. So I think there's at least some agreement that maybe getting a more robust bylaw that takes into consideration some of these matters that Andy brought up. We attempted to do that. We did consult with the fire chief who was supportive of the language that we propose. But I think that the points that Andy is making are good. And I'm not sure, and you know, this is for the town council as a whole, I guess to consider, but that GLLs, I mean, so is there another committee, given what you're saying in terms of what I'm hearing Andy, the level of outreach that you would like to have happen on this particular bylaw, be, you know, the business community. I also heard you mention reaching out to residents. We would normally do that through some sort of public hearing, which I is just beyond what I had ever imagined on a bylaw like this. However, if, for example, TSO would be able to consider these things, I'm not sure that GLL necessarily would be the right committee. And I don't know what other committee members on GLL feel about that. But given the concerns that you're raising, it seems like another committee may be the better committee to look at it. I'm not turning away work. I'm just putting it out there. So that's all I got. Mandy, Joe.  Back when the bylaw review committee reviewed all of the bylaws for the changeover of government, this one came to the council as a, we're not going to change it, but we think it needs looked at further because it's very vague. And do you, should we require it not just for residential buildings? There were two things we were asked to look for. What does by figures mean in terms of how to indicate a house number? And should it include not just residential buildings? Should it include more than residential buildings? And so that's why we're here tonight. We believed it should include not just residential buildings, which is what the current bylaw does include. So in terms of to respond to Andy's concern about homeowner issues, well, they already have to post somewhere visible to the street. So now you might have to add it to the house. But if you're not, you know, in that shared driveway, a house number on a house is really important to figure out if you take Lynn's house, which house has the number when there's five at the bottom of the street? And, you know, or a supplemental dwelling unit or something to have them on the house, it doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have, it could be on a door, it doesn't have to be drilled into brick or anything. And in terms of expanding it to residential, from residential to all building owners, not all commercial buildings have a big sign out front identifying them as Dunkin Donuts. Many commercial buildings are just a big office block that doesn't always put a number on front. And then you sit there driving down the street hoping you've got the right building. And so what we tried to do was clarify to expand it to everyone to make it more easy to find building numbers. But to clarify that figures really does mean numbers, not words written out to describe those numbers. Because we felt universally it's much easier to read the Arabic numerals 413, for example, than to read 413 in script, say. You know, that makes it less accessible. So that's really the goal behind all of this. And then if you'll notice there is non-criminal disposition added, there was no enforcement mechanism in the current bylaw. So it was there, but there was no way to enforce it because there was no enforcement mechanism or violation mechanism. So, you know, the goal is not to find people. You'll notice that it's a very small fine. The goal is to get them to put their numbers on if it becomes a problem, which is why the first violation is basically a correction notice. Please add your numbers. So that's sort of a little bit of the history and why we've proposed it this way. Dorothy, question, comment. I would like to suggest that we consider what they do in Norfolk, Connecticut, where I live for a number of years. It wasn't up to the individual homeowners. They had their numbers however they wanted them. But the fire department EMS had a particular style of, I think it was a blue thing. They, and they put the numbers on them and they placed them where they needed them, because the idea was that if you have an emergency, they need to find your house and then you define it quickly. And that gets rid of the question of who's doing what and where because they would do it. Now, this obviously takes the time of some town workers. So you could say, this is something that would be implemented over a period of time. And they would do the ones, the areas that they felt were most in need of clarity. Because right now, if they can't, I'm sure they would take, lose up very important time trying to find houses the way we have our Hickley Hickley numbering system. So that's my suggestion. Thank you. Just to clarify, Mandy, Joe, nobody had house numbers on their houses until we moved there and made them do it, including at the entrance to the driveway where we released them all. Paul. Yeah, I just want to bring to the council's attention that the salt council, which is a seniors in law enforcement together, has a program to provide numbers to anybody who would like them. And they charge $7. And it's done by volunteers from the salt council who will take the put the number on a, you know, four inch tall numbers onto a stake and put it in front of a metal stake, metal numbers, reflective numbers, and they can put that in front of your house. Anybody can go to the police department's website and look up the salt council. And they are always willing to do that. And $7 is what they charge. Pam. I had exactly that times three. And, and every time those wonderful post posted signs on my front lawn walked away in the middle of the night. So it's a really, really great numeral and it's really visible, but they do walk. So so the motion on the floor is to refer this back to GOL. And yet we heard from one person in GOL that perhaps this isn't a GOL issue. And so I want to also you know, mention other options. And that is can the town develop, I want to say guidelines because regulations may be what I really mean. Can the town develop guidelines and do some kind of joint program with the group that helps people do this so that it, these numbers are in fact quite visible. I mean, you know, if you're using your GPS on your phone, and all of a sudden it says the address is there and you're going really, I didn't know that. So is there some other solution we can suggest besides developing a very complicated bylaw that starts saying things like, you know, if your house is 25 feet from the street, then you should have a street marker and those kinds of things. Because I could just see, you know, that being the kind of thing GOL would wrestle with, well, or some committee, Michelle. Well, just as you were talking, Lynn, I was thinking if it does go back to GOL, one thing we could do is explore what other communities do with respect to this, there may be some model out there that works really well, like you're describing. And so that's something I think we could look at. And I just differentiate that from what Andy's talking about, which is really about getting public input and engagement, at least how I heard it, from the business community and from residents. So I just, I'm not sure that piece of this would be a GOL matter. Andy? Yeah, I don't think that it needs to be made too complicated, but it would be really helpful to know from dispatch what kind of information they receive and how things can be identified, which is really a question for the first responder departments that then provide the response after dispatch is to what information that they have that is helpful and when it is not helpful. As I understand the question that was asked to Chief Nelson was, do you like this? And he said, yeah, and he was probably saying, gee, it's better than what I have now. But it wasn't really an investigation of what is the best proposal, the best proposal came from the committee itself. So I just didn't feel it had gone far enough. I'm not sure that it needs too much else. I think that we've probably done enough discussion that we should have done during first reading that the community may become aware of this. And we might hear from people anyway who have strong feelings and people who don't have strong feelings. Well, and we should just do it, is really in the best interest of the first responders. I was concerned about, Nandy touched on this, is putting it on having to mount it into brick or some other surface that is difficult to mount it into. Even doors aren't made of wood anymore. And so, you know, how things get fixed done, not even sure that I'm the expert. But I think we talked to the hardware store to find out that answer. And so I just felt like it was worth making sure that there was more community awareness about this, and that there was some effort to give some thought to what is the best way to do something that's really important, which is to make sure that houses get identified for first responders and for the community at large. Michelle. I see Anika's hand too. But I just quick response that I do actually, I did wonder about that. I did wonder how it would, how the information, if the bylaws approved will be rolled out to residents and building owners. And that would be, I would imagine a town staff matter. So we didn't really address that so much. So that's a good point. Anika. I was wondering if it would be possible to maybe list on the town website, if it is something that we're seeking input on to differentiate between that and it being an issue of safety. I know myself, I had to go ahead and put like the larger numbers out that for various reasons and personal reasons I wasn't, I wasn't in love with the idea of doing, but I do understand that it is, not only just helping people know where they're going, but especially in the event of an emergency. I guess the question would be, would it be sufficient to have those questions or at least have a mention of it on the town website that encourages people, if they feel one way or another about it, they can reach out to, to see if there even is broader interest. Shalini. Yeah, I want to, I appreciate Andy bringing up this discussion and the safety aspect of it because I think if you position it that way, many more residents are likely to look at it because I'm now looking at our house and I'm like, sometimes it doesn't show up on GPS and now if we had an issue with the police and fire find us and so I'm already thinking about it. So I think it's a discussion worth letting the residents know about, not just in the rollout, but I think up front, I mean the rollout definitely, but also before that and I had a related question then because as we are, we are working in TSO on the outreach plan, community engagement plan and one of the questions then is if a committee like in this case, GOL is proposing a bylaw change, should they be doing the outreach or is that supposed to go to TSO and I think from the TSO side, we would feel that the outreach has to be with like CRC is doing the rental registration and they're doing the outreach and so GOL is proposing then and that's kind of the way we are designing the template, offering it to the town council to look at it some future day, but that would be the idea, but I think that will be a clarification that would be helpful to TSO also as we design the outreach plan is the relevant committee responsible for doing the outreach. So Michelle. Sorry if I could just respond briefly to that, I do think that GOL is a little bit different in the sense that any, the bylaws can have a spectrum, they can impact a spectrum of matters in the town and so if we were to take on the engagement piece for every one of the possible matters that could come across in a bylaw revision situation, I think we would be way outside of our workloads, so it almost feels like what you're saying Shalini is and you guys are working on this, there's going to be a need or there is a need or we're consistently talking about the need for more outreach to happen for any sort of changes and measures that are brought forward. So how do we address that in as a system, you know, to have a process for that as opposed to, I can't imagine GOL really being able to do and have the capacity and the systems in place to do the outreach for any number of bylaws that may be revised, you know, as a referral to us. Jennifer. Just seconding what Michelle just said. Yeah. All right. So the option, there's several options here, one is there is a motion on the floor, the motion on the floor is to refer it back to GOL. At that point GOL could do any number of things including come back and say gee, I think this also needs to be considered by another committee. Another option is that we go ahead and we vote on this, which means that it goes into effect. And then we look to the town manager and say, how do you want to inform people of this new requirement? And is there a plan for outreach and implementation through the town? I'm just throwing out options at this point because the one thing I want to recognize is that the bylaw that we had in place prior to this was woefully poor. Okay. So sometimes we want to, it's better to at least put in place a slightly better bylaw while we maybe work on other options. So that's just something to think about. The motion on the floor, however, is to refer back to GOL. The motion's been made and seconded. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none, then we're going to vote on the motion to refer back to GOL. And I'm going to start with Anna Devlin-Gothier. No. Lynn Griesper is a no. Mandy Jo Hanneke. No. Anika Lopes. No. Michelle Miller. No. Dorothy Pam. Abstain. Pam Rooney. No. Kathy Shane. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Jennifer Taub. No. Leisha Walker. No. Shalini Balmilne. Yes. Patty Angelis. No. Okay. There are three yeses, 12 noes, one abstention. I'm sorry, three yeses, nine noes, one abstention and no absence. So the motion fails. Andy, you have your hand up? Yes. I'm going to be voting no on the next motion. I don't expect that I'll necessarily be in the majority when I vote no. But I really am concerned that we are passing something that is going to be the final decision. It's going to require that people put large numbers on houses that don't have and go through the responsibility to do that and to place the entrance to the public way, which may or may not identify their homes. And for many people, they have identification of the public way that does identify their homes and the necessity of putting the numbers on the house is pretty close to zero. I just don't find that it's a well thought out proposal that is going to solve the problem we're seeking to solve. And for that reason, I'm going to vote no. Kathy. I'm going to echo Andy's and I wish I'd read it closer to see whether there's some simple edit I could do. But if I go up and down our street, many of the houses can't be seen from the road, but they have a very prominent number at their driveway. And so we're asking that house to also put a number on the house. Historic older houses, my constituents will say, why did you do this? Why didn't you just say you have to have a three inch high thing saying where your house is or on your house? So we have a and on on the building and outside. So I'm just saying there are driveways that go up a hill. So it's asking people to go to an effort where you may not need the extra effort. So I will vote no on it as it's currently written. Okay, Mandy Joe. I'm going to make the motion and move to amend general bylaw 3.39 street numbering of houses by inserting the language shown in bold red font and removing the language shown in red strike through font as follows. Do I need to read the whole thing? Yes. Okay. We're getting rid of the word houses and adding buildings to the title and then adding penalties for violations of the street number of buildings bylaw, non criminal disposition for first violation, warning and correction notice enforcement by building commissioner inspection services fire department, non criminal disposition for second and subsequent violations $25 enforcement by building commissioner inspection services fire department. The leading the sentence homeowners shall indicate the street number of the house by figures at two and one half inches high and so located is to be easily seen from the street and adding the phrase or clause or multiple sentences. Building owners shall post the numeric street number of the building on the building and if necessary to be easily seen from the public way at an additional location easily visible from the public way using figures at least three inches tall. For clarity purposes, 413 a is the appropriate posting not 413 a. Okay. Would you please put the motion up on top on on the screen and Mandy Joe, I want to make sure that for all of us. Yeah, we need to see. There you go. What of this motion that's on the you did you change anything. No, okay. So this is the motion that is on your motion sheet. Is there a second. Second Miller. Okay, many Joe. Michelle, I just wanted to briefly respond to Kathy Kathy you know where I live. And I just wanted to give you an example of at the bottom of the long driveway. You know, I could have posted my house number which I do on a tree. But I have an accessory dwelling unit. Okay, so even if both 374 a and 374 b were posted at the end of the driveway. If somebody needed to reach either my children in 374 a or somebody in the accessory dwelling in 374 b unless they were properly identified on both of the houses when they came down the driveway they wouldn't know which house it was. So that's just one example of where it could be detrimental if it's not placed both at the end of the driveway and on the particular building that it's matched to him. I think I'd like to make a friendly amendment to change the word. It's in the second line of the main text. The building initial post the numeric street number of the building on the building or if necessary to be easily seen from the public way at an additional location easily visible from the public way. It's you know in many cases it really is sort of an either or and maybe both is a little overkill. Is there a second for that? Second. I'm going to speak against that and the reason I am is because when you go up my driveway there's four houses and how do you know which one is mine and the way you know it is because we have postings on trees we have postings on the house and we have a posting at the beginning of the driveway. So you're covered so you're covered. I'm covered but I don't I if you have more than one house as Michelle was just mentioning not putting a number on the house or on something right near the house doesn't help the fire in the lease and EMS. That's why I'm I've said my piece. Are there any other comments or questions? Shall any? Yeah I just wanted to share my position why I will be supporting this and normally I like I'm all about the community outreach and understanding the impact that this might have on residents and businesses and however keeping the safety factor in mind that I think the fact that this should be in place as soon as possible in case there is an incident and so I'm keeping that in mind and which is why I am in favor of getting this passed and making it all the houses safe and easily accessible. However I would like the town manager to then have a way to let everyone know that and I think the fact that there is no immediate fee fine there's you know there's a letting people know so I think it feels like it's being taught through so it's not going to have and have a really negative consequence so I think we're pretty good just let's do this and let and maybe to again coordinate a little bit through our district newsletters and all of that let people know that hey for your safety please do this. So thank you. Andy. I think that we're getting into minutiae of trying to write something on the floor which is never a good use of time and which is why I was preparing to get it referred back to a committee I was not trying to necessarily require all of those things but in any event what I think is really what we're trying to get to is we want every owner of a building whether it be a home or commercial to have visible from the public way and in additional locations sufficient signage so that people can easily find the building or residence involved and it's really varies a lot by property for the various reasons that are brought up to today but I was I think that's what we're after doing and I'm not sure that is the way it's written now that it necessarily achieves that and is putting requirements on people to do things that may not serve that purpose. Alicia. Thank you and yeah I think I at first didn't really understand what Andy was asking but also a couple of things have come to my mind during this conversation um and that is that like it really does differ and is specific to property and so like wow your house and Michelle's house might need those markings like there are some houses that might not need two markings because it would be very clear from the one by the street in the public way that it was identifying their house because of the proximity to the street or the proximity to the house or what have it because all properties are so different and requiring those people to do that may not be like a significant like roadblock however I'm wondering about like the time frame in between different penalties because if it were a financial issue and they don't have the money or maybe it's a timing issue and they don't have the time to be able to add the markings right away and they've already gotten a first warning and now there's a fine on top of the already whatever difficulties they're having like is there a time frame in between when someone can receive the first warning and the second warning like are we giving them more time to get it done if there's a specific reason or is there a way to make it so that this is specific to individual houses and not just one that covers all people that might not actually need it is there any comment regarding Alicia's statement Mandy Jo um normally and I can't totally speak for inspection services or anything but normally when they issue correction orders they put time frames on them and so the first warning the warning and correction notice would likely come with a time frame to do so you know there are reflective stickers that go on mailboxes that can go on houses that cost like 80 cents per number you know I think we're making this much more complicated than it actually is in terms of fretting about how much it costs to put a three inch reflective sticker on a mailbox or on a house somewhere um they are very sticky I've tried to get them off my mailbox when they've faded and they're extremely hard to get off your mailbox they'll stick on wood on a house you know it's not an expensive proposition and it adds to the safety and Chief Nelson has said he likes the changes we've made so I'm going to vote against the amendment too the suggested or yeah that was a friendly amendment it's been it's been taken back uh Dorothy Pam I want to remind people that the purpose is safety and the ease of finding the number by uh first responders and I think that that is best done by them deciding exactly the size the color the reflectivity and the placement so they don't have to figure out look is that on the tree is it on this isn't that when you want to get there fast you want us to do it and it works in other towns and I think that's a good way to go thank you okay there's a motion on the floor the motion's been made and seconded the motion is the one that is at appears on your motion sheet Alicia you still have your hand up yes um I just wanted to talk really quickly again sorry I'm I'm not even necessarily going to vote against this um because I do see the benefits and the safety but I also think that like when we are talking about finances and other people finances it's really important to be cautious because not everyone is in the same position and something that might be very simple and sustainable for you might not be the same for somebody else and people are living on very tight budgets but even a five dollar expense to throw off all of their monthly budget um and the other important thing is like timing like I have a super busy schedule so something I have to plan for something that's going to take like I have to be home or I have to be able to go to a store I have to call somebody to schedule something that I have to actually schedule that in my calendar to be able to do it because I don't have a lot of free time so I was just trying to be mindful of different situations and different circumstances for other people and maybe putting in something around like we recommend or suggest giving people like 30 days between the one morning to the next morning like might be something to protect other vulnerable people okay Kathy uh well what just occurred to me I can do about my next door neighbor and several others who will be furious with this is I'm going to buy those cheap stick-ons that Mandy just talked about and I'm going to revisit people that I haven't seen for a while and give them them because one of one of them has literally said he will do everything he can to move out of Amherst because of all the rules that every time he turns around there's another rule and if I just bring him his sticker I can not have him be angry once again um so I'm just saying that he has a very clear marking on the street and his house is very visible but he does not have a number on his house I just will I'm going to bring him this number and I have a few others I can bring their numbers to it will be a good community outreach exercise for me. Shalini and then Anika and then I think we need to bring this to a close okay so two things I'm hearing is about the timing and like the timing the time that's given to people to correct the issue and that needs to be lenient and spacious and understanding now is that a decision we need to make the town council or the staff or so that's just for me I'm not sure what the answer to that is and who's making that decision does it need to be made and put into the bylaw itself and the other thing that I heard that I think is worth uh figuring out is what should we hear from the fire chief or the police or whoever where it should be placed so everyone puts the signs on at the same place so those are two things that I want to know. Paul did you have any comment with regard to timeline? So typically you know as I think Mandy Jo mentioned when there's an enforcement order they give them an adequate amount of time to comply with the order and I think in this situation they would give them plenty of time I don't know what the time frame would be but you know it could be a couple weeks to comply with the request. Okay in my mind we pass by laws and the town figures out how to implement them okay and whether that's through education and outreach and then over time you know fines or whatever but I for us to get into that means we've done we've gone into administration and that's not our job. Anika? I just wanted to quickly clarify Kathy I think that it's great that and and very generous that you will buy stickers and give them out I think that is wonderful but you know to Alicia's point not everyone can do that whether it is a time or cost so my question just to clarify through Paul was the the program that you were talking about are those numbers available for free and is that a free service? No the Salt Council charges seven dollars and then they come and put the they put it basically a stake in the ground that has your number on it like a flag that it's weren't just tall I believe it is and I just want to know that this bylaw there's already a bylaw requiring people to have numbers on their houses so this is not a new bylaw it's just changing where the location is and that would apply to all property owners not just homeowners to comply. Okay and it's also conceivable that the town would develop some guidelines you know for example if there are four houses on this then you need to do this or you we recommend you do that I would like to just bring this to a vote at this point if everybody's okay no more questions. Was the amendment withdrawn? Yes the amendment was withdrawn thank you. All right we're going to begin the vote with I guess we're up to Griezmer so I'm voting yes Mandy Jo. Hi. Anika. Hi. Michelle. Hi. Dorothy Pam. No. Pam Rooney. Hi. Kathy Shane. No. Andy Steinberg. No. Jennifer Tob. Hi. Alicia Walker. I'm going to vote yes but I also just wanted to say this is a very good example of small things that we do know. Thank you. Shall we vote no. Yes. Pat DeAngelis. No. Anna Devlin-Goth here. Hi. I'm going to ask the clerk for the vote. I have nine to four. Nine in favor four opposed no abstentions and nobody absent. Okay we did approve the town calendar I want to thank Mandy Jo for her scrutiny of that calendar and that's why you ended up with two different amendments today. We are going to move on however to the correspondence and we're going to go through each of them and then we're going to have a motion to pass or authorize me to sign all of them. So we're going to start with the university the one regarding the chancellor search and let me just mention this came about because I believe all of us received an invitation to the search committee. They had a 30 30 minute period of time where some of them were in present and you know if you showed up you could talk well Anna and I showed up as did Molly Keegan and so I had prepared some statements but it seemed to me like it was a good idea to put some of those statements in writing so that it could be shared more broadly with the rest of the search committee and that's my attempt and so forth. I'm certainly open to additional changes so let's just go through and see if there are some. Mandy Jo? Yeah I have a lot of questions and then some things I didn't like about it. The first one was it was very confusing to figure out who this is actually from and on behalf of. The from line says you and Anna the second paragraph implies that it's you and your personal capacity Lynn. There is never a signature that says it's on behalf of the council but there's a lot of we and if it wasn't on behalf of the council we wouldn't be voting on this letter so I think that needs completely clarified throughout and that was one of the reasons I was pulling it off was I just it wasn't clear. Yeah so that was the first major comment. The second one is about the new addition at the very end of the first page. I think we have to be very careful as to the way we refer to rentals that are dwelling units that are rented to students. The phrase student rental has a negative connotation. I would change that to rentals to students which is a little less negative but the whole added sentence the steady growth of UMass's student population feeds that demand so increasingly more neighborhood find themselves serving as proving grounds for young renters transitioning into adulthood a position few neighbors relish that does not sit well with me at all. It almost seems derogatory to the adulthood level of young college students or young people in general even if they're not in college and so I don't want to see that sentence in this letter at all. The third full paragraph on page two has that weird sentence we are at home and our home that's just a weird sentence I don't even know what you're going with but then there's the many faculty and staff live in our town yet earlier you said that many can't live in our town because it's too expensive a little contradictory there um utilization of road sidewalks bike lanes first responders is not limited to those who live in our town all of the employees and students and graduate students and everyone who works or attends school at these campuses use our roads sidewalks and bike lanes so it's not just those that are living in town same with the public safety issues and then I thought we could be a little more stronger on our nee