te councillor brewer yes councillor de angeles yes councillor dumond councillor greesmer yes councillor hannacky yes councillor pamm yes councillor ross yes councillor ryan yes councillor shane yes councillor schreiber yes councillor steinberg yes councillor swartz yes councillor ball mill yes it votes unanimous okay and then finally to schedule an additional meeting i moved to schedule an additional meeting of the Town Council to be held at 6.30 p.m. on Monday, April 29th 2019. Is there a second? Second. Ryan is a second. All those in favor? It's unanimous. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. There it was 12 for it and one abstention. All right. Paul or Andy, we're going to oh no actually I want to use the opportunity of already being on the issues of the finance committee to just ask Andy briefly to report on the four towns meeting of this last Saturday. Well four towns meeting this last Saturday really dealt almost in its entirety with the question of the assessment method and at the point where we went into the meeting, the committee of four people one from each town that had worked on the issue and considered and eliminated dozens of different methodologies had come down to two and both of them were considered at the meeting and the decision on which to recommend was the unanimous decision. All four towns were ultimately in support of it. The understanding is that we would try and do the method that was talked about for two years and that it would then be subject to review and essentially it is to move towards the direction of a methodology that is 50% based upon what is known as the minimum contribution that's required for each town and with the balance but not just on the regional on 50% but on a five-year average of the region of that minimum contribution and then the rest based upon the current regional agreement method which is a five-year rolling average of enrollment. One of the things that was very attractive about this process that would come out of this is that because everything is being based upon averages over a longer period of time that go backwards four years that there's a much higher degree of predictability going into the process as to what the proportion expected from each town will be going forward and that predictability was ultimately the attractive factor of that method that swayed both the small committee and the larger discussion that happened on Saturday. Okay. Any questions or comments? All right. Then we're going to move on to the calendar of the town budget and Paul, I believe you're going to speak to that. There's really no action required for the council at this point so that's why that motion on your motion sheet is eliminated. Right. Did you want to speak to the calendar itself at all? Oh, that's the finance committee's calendar that's in your packet. I think those outlined a little bit in the memo from the finance committee. Okay. And then that establishes a fairly aggressive schedule for the finance committee during May once they get the budget. They will be meeting twice a week. I think there'll be discussion. The president has talked about having discussion with other members of the council as to whether they want to be present for some of those discussions because those will be pretty intense discussions. Once the finance committee makes its recommendation to the full council, you will have 30 days basically to vote on the budget during the month of June. So I think working on that schedule that is good for the finance committee to come up with its plan of action to get to the recommendation to the council, which is what is in front of you tonight. Okay. And did you have any further comments? I think the only things that I would note about this is when you look at the finance committee budget and it talks about FY19 budget review, the purpose of those reviews is to use the current budget and how it is structured and what it proposes is a way of familiarizing the finance committee as to how the budget will be structured that they're looking, that we're all looking at quite frankly. The critical pieces of course are the ones that talk about FY20 budget because they are about actions that we're actually going to be taking. The finance committee that existed previously as a body of town meeting would regularly through the course of February and early March meet with all department directors and department heads in order to hear from them about the proposed budget and to be able to ask questions that relate the budget back to the operations of the department, which is ultimately what budgets are about. And the finance committee will be doing that on the very aggressive schedule that was just described by the town manager. And of course that was the point that if other members of the council wish to attend, we certainly would consider that as a reasonable action. I think that the president will need to speak to that later because the requirement would be that there has to be some mechanism of knowing how many people actually are going to be there and whether it needs to be posted as a meeting of the council in addition to a meeting of the committee. And then based upon the information that we'll receive can take the action that's required to us in the charter in making a recommendation to the council as a whole and then the council will have the period in June to take the action that is specified again in the charter. So let me just mention that specifically May 7th, 9th, 14th and 16th is when we as a finance committee will be hearing from the various town departments. It is not our intention to bring them back to the general town council when we look at the budget unless necessary. I will be asking Angela Mills to be polling people to determine whether you plan to attend any of the additional dates so that we know whether or not we need to call a committee of the whole, meaning a committee of the council. And so please be responsible responding to Angela when I send that email out. I also want to mention that as you've seen in all of this, we start this Thursday with a public forum on the budget. That's where people talk about what they'd like to see in the budget and the town manager talks about the budget. It is a regular, it is a special council meeting so we will call it and then later on on the 21st you notice in this calendar we have a public hearing on the budget and then finally we hope to adopt the budget before the end of June. In fact, we legally have to or we'll be sitting here till 2 in the morning. Anything else? Alyssa? Associated with the comment you made about posting a meeting of the whole, I can't possibly stress enough just go ahead and post those meetings as town council means. They're not regular meetings. They're not part of our regular schedule. They don't require public comment because we're compelling them as regular meetings. That way you just don't have to pull and if a quorum doesn't show up, it doesn't show up and the minutes can just be the minutes of the finance committee. So it's just one more thing to answer. Thank you. I also, that by the way allows you as a member of the council but not a member of the finance committee to be just as interactive with the presentations. Andy? Yeah, the other thing that I just wanted to remind you of because in case you aren't yet familiar with all the minutiae about the charter provisions on the budget is that the public forum is to be called by the president. The hearings are to be a requirement of the finance committee and so you see the dates of the hearings on the schedule and because we just voted to separately consider the regional school budget, there's actually a requirement that we have a second hearing regarding the regional school budget and we are cognizant of the fact that the school committee itself is also required to have a hearing on the budget but the charter mandates that we take that action and that's why it's listed. And Andy, the one on April 2nd is called by the finance committee as well, correct? That's correct. The one on April 2nd is required by the charter to be called by the finance committee and the one on May 21st which is regarding the other portions of the budget is under the same set of requirements from the charter. Okay. Yes, Evan? Just looking for, I feel like all I'm doing tonight is looking for clarification. All of this that's outlined here is completely separate from the capital improvement plan for which there's also a required public forum. Would we expect that we'll see something similar from JCPC to this? Yes. Okay. And yes, we do have to have that before the end of June as well. Okay. We're running as fast as we can. Are there any other questions on the budget? If not, I'm going to move on. Committee reports, let me just say we'll have a committee report from GOL, Governance Organization and Legislation. We've already heard finance. We have a committee report from Outreach Communications and Appointments and rules of procedure. I have asked the person who is presently convening the bylaw review committee and I've not received any report from them so we'll skip that. And on the energy and climate action ad hoc committee, we'll defer that till March 18th. So GOL, Mandy Jo. So there's no written report this week. We are meeting on Wednesday. Last week we also met. So I'll go through briefly what we did last week. There will be a full report written for it because there are some actions we're asking of the council. We adopted a template for the committee charges. We adopted a guidelines document for how we will review bylaws, measures, charges, things like that for clarity, consistency and actionability. We decided to undertake a review of town committees for structure. I'm still not good at describing this as I look at Pat, to see if there's any overlapping committees. If there's a way, if there's a need to consolidate any to recommend dissolution of any to create any. So we'll be taking a look at an economic development committee, things like that. There is no timeline for that review at this point. But I thought I'd let you guys know we're going to undertake that. And then we will have some requests to the town council at a meeting that I know next week, next meeting is very busy. So I'll work with our president to figure out when they'll show up on the agenda to recommend that we ask the town council to request that all town committees that were created at least five years ago review their charges. And if they seek changes that they reformat their charges into the new template we just adopted and then submit those revised charges to the town council to adopt or reject after review of the governance committee. So that will come with a bigger description of that at a future meeting when we have a report in writing. And at this week's meeting we will be discussing the audit committee charge that was referred to us at last town council meeting. The community resources committee charge that was referred to us tonight and the public ways recommendation memo that was referred to us at the last town council meeting. And if time allows that organization and structure of town committees and a continued discussion by the committee of the GOL committee charge. Questions. Alyssa. I still don't understand why it's that committee's purview to have anything to do with any town committees that currently exist. I understand the point of having people review their charges regularly although I will give the caveat that I'm fairly confident that not every committee that has a charge actually knows where their charge came from because the charge doesn't say on the charge and some of them are based on town meeting action and some are not. So hopefully they'll all have staff to help them with that. But that seems reasonable to me because that'll help the public to have a more consistent structure. But for GOL to be undertaking a review of town committees that have existed that exist under mass general law to see if there's overlap recommend is up to salute. I'm not seeing that as part of the charge at all. So I'm concerned. I don't know why that has anything to do with town council. Why would we check the conservation commission's charge to see if it overlaps with a future economic development committee. What does that have to do with us. Other comment. I just was pulling up the charge and it's not part of the charge either. I mean so I'm not sure why it's being done but I also isn't something I think we asked to have done. At least I don't remember asking to have it done. Okay. Other comments. Shalini. Shalini. Did I hear the governance committee is working on the economic development committee. No. Did I hear that wrong. Mandy Jo. So my what I said was in undertaking a review of town committee charges that would potentially include looking at proposing an actual creation with a charge for an economic development committee. It could potentially include that. Other questions. Comments. Yes. Alyssa. So do I just keep saying that at every meeting or do we have a conversation about what the charge means because I don't want to fight. I just don't understand and I don't want to just keep bringing it up randomly and having it continue unless are we changing the charge. Do we all agree. Do we not care. I mean I just I don't understand. So the question it's been raised is whether or not the GOL committee governance organization legislation committee has within its purview based on its charge the ability to look at all town committees and look at their charges and ask for consistency. Is that that part I'm willing to concede. OK. The whole speech about how whether or not these committees should even exist because they have overlapping charges and they might be they might not need to exist. That that whole part. No. That's the part I object to. OK. George. I think we saw it as a kind of housekeeping task and eventually we come back to the council for review and discussion. But if we don't do it mean you could argue that that we don't care. Doesn't matter. Just let it be. But if we do care and we do want to have someone systematically go through the existing committees and make sure that things are so to speak in order would seem to fall naturally to us. But perhaps the charge doesn't allow it. Fine. We certainly have enough to do. We don't need any more work to work. But the question arises then. Well who does do it. If you care to have it done. OK. That was my question to you. They don't do it. Who is doing it. Who you know who is. So the question is do we care to have it done. And if we do who's doing it. Dorothy. My question is slightly different. I could see a good argument for doing what she described. However I think it could be put off until we've done other things that are more pressing. OK. Other comment. Evan. So just to add some clarifications. I this is not something that G.O.L. is undertaking like in the next few months. This is part of what G.O.L. has been doing is figuring out who we are and and and what our role is and the different roles that we can play to serve the council. This was an idea that we generated as part of that discussion as perhaps a long term goal of G.O.L. Certainly not something that you'll see on an agenda in the very near future. I think that part of this has to do with how we might interpret the charge. And I think that the charges. There's many ways you could read this whether or not when we're talking about governance and organization. We are talking about strictly the governance and organization of the council or whether we are thinking about that broadly. That's I think something that we could debate and how we read the charge. I think I could make an argument to interpret that first bullet of our charge either way. But I think one of the things that we realized is we have a lot of committees in this town and we have a lot of vacancies. And the question is do we still need all of those committees. And as one of our committee members said perhaps we need to Marie Kondo our committees. And and so then the question becomes right. Who does that. And and it if any committee it seems to fall within the purview of G.O.L. If the council has a whole disagrees that's the council. Steve. So any counselor can propose a project or a policy change or a bylaw. Any citizen can you know following a process can also propose additions, eliminations of committees. I hope that we don't ad hoc committee everything. So I think that this is a really important project. The cleaning up and the strengthening of the committees of this town. Totally understand that some committees in order to be a town. You must have a planning board. You must have a conservation commission. You must have a zoning board of appeals. You must have this. You must have other ones are dictated by the charter. Other ones were dictated by town meeting. I think we have enough institutional knowledge to wade through that. I think this project needs to be done. The G.O.L. is of the one committee at Mont is the one where this suggestion has come up. So if it requires a change to the charge of the G.O.L. Let's go for it. But I don't think that we should squash ideas that need to happen because it's not explicitly anticipated in any of our charges. Okay. I'm going to suggest the following. That we not continue this conversation until such time as we have the charge of the committee before us. And if the committee would like to if the G.O.L. would like to propose a change or an amendment or some modification of its charge, it does so at that time. And I welcome that at any point in time. Okay. Because we don't even have the charge in front of us at this time. Okay. And I by the way think that that is probably something each of the standing committees may have to do from time to time. Okay. Is there any other so we're going to move on to outreach communications and appointments? So we don't we don't actually have anything written that we submitted to you. I will tell you that we have met every Monday for I think seven weeks. And the biggest thing that we've worked on so far is a procedure for appointments. Mostly the decision tree which big word we've been using a lot has been for town council appointments. And this sounds like it might be an easy thing to do just says that we do it. But I can tell you it's extremely complex. We cannot use the same process for appointments that select board did for many reasons, one of which is that we're a legislative branch and not an executive branch amongst other things. We are wrestling with a process that would all would protect the privacy of people who are asking to be on committees and volunteer position as well as making sure that whatever process we use is as transparent as it can be so that members of the public feel like they know how we are deciding on the people that we are nominating and then why we're nominating them. This has taken seven weeks of intense conversation of many decision trees and also a lot of legal advice. We have gone through many iterations of decision trees and this particular one also is not just for town council appointments but it will also link back in to there are certain things that we need it's put forth in a charter that we'll need to confirm. So don't worry we got it all under control. We had a meeting today in which I'm fairly certain that we have narrowed down all of the questions that we need to ask for possible decision trees, legal questions that would it's the last step we think that need to be answered so that by the time that we meet we're taking one Monday off we will meet on March 18th we should be able to say vote and say this is our process and we can stand behind it philosophically we can stand behind it it's it's so lawful it's crazy like we have asked the attorney generals we've asked the you know we've asked our town attorney so we should be able to do that for you at our meeting today we also talked about the fact that we have had so much discussion around appointments that the outreach part of our program sort of had fallen away we want to make sure that we just keep running full tilt on that so we actually created a subcommittee of our subcommittee and we have we formed it we have members we will be meeting Monday the 18th right after our OCA meeting so we really take outreach very seriously we take outreach and how we coordinate it with the community participation officers and the resident advisory committee so we're definitely right on that we're also going to be talking a little bit more about the CAF forms and we're also looking into possibly some ways in order to have somebody else take our minutes one of the things that we was brought up to us today is maybe it could be a senior tax credit sort of thing and so we're on that as well so you know the senior tax credits that they do that perhaps that might be something that would be a possibility that taking minutes could be I don't know that I haven't even asked that so don't it was just it was just a workshop idea so anybody out there who's who's saying what yeah we haven't even asked yet but I um we're we're working really hard and we hope that we'll have a lot of concrete things for you by our March 18th meeting okay any other questions on that okay let me just elaborate on that be Evan I just wanted to piggyback on what Sarah said to stress the amount of work we've done to make sure that everything we do complies with open meeting law of our two and a half hour meeting today a full hour and a half of that was spent on speakerphone with town attorney just making sure that we're checking all of our boxes so you can be confident that we are making sure we're coming forth with as solid a process as possible legally okay any further comment from the committee questions um rules of procedure ad hoc we meet tomorrow we'll do the step you referred to us plus all other stuff it'll be great the only thing I ask of this committee is if there are things that perhaps should be instead referred to GL that you let us know okay I would just follow up on that by saying GL is going to get all the leftovers so what we don't get done is going to be their problem so but I don't see us carving anything off at this point but there may be sections we say to be discussed in the future okay given the fact that your committee has a deadline of June 3rd um all right anything else on committees we have no minutes to approve we've done proclamations town managers report Paul some highlights yes um first you already mentioned the events on March 2nd which went off very well from our perspective there were six arrests but that's a relatively average weekend for us a number of transports per usual but again want to thank publicly the our mutual aid partners terrific planning by the police department fire department UMass police department and the university so a very good day and as we were we on that day we run two emergency operation centers one at the university one at our police station and as we closed our emergency operation center at around 5 30 we received a notice of sudden loss of pressure in our water system and that and this is something that you all heard I hope you all received a phone call or a text or both or email something if you're if you didn't you should be signed up for our emergency notification system so this happened on Saturday night uh this uh usually when something like this happens it means there's a fire or a water main break because you see a loss of pressure it means our water tank is is dropping the the amount of water that's in it um the on-call water people where it came into town they didn't see any water main break or there was we knew there wasn't a fire um they brought additional supervisors in and then they identified the problem the problem is being at well number three we have five wells if you recall from your orientation with the department of public works that we have five wells plus two surface treatment uh two surface water areas um so one of the wells was pumping so all the indicators were saying everything's working normally except that we're losing water and no one could figure figured out just looking at the equipment because all the pumps were pumping regularly but what was happening is that one of the wells was pumping water not into the system but out of the system and it had an overflow valve that popped open and that created a problem I'm using my language this is not what the engineers would say um um so they quickly shut down that well um and it was isolated from the system this greatly reduced the loss of water from the system we turned we brought a couple more water operators in we turned on our fifth well and that started operating and we continued to ask people to conserve um water so that was all done with about it within about an hour and by 8 30 uh we were notifying people around 6 30 by 8 30 uh we felt we had it under control but the water had already gone out of the system so it took time to recover fortunately it was a Sunday there's it's a typically a low water use day and um and that has been built up and it's back to normal now the pump that had broken has been fixed so everything's back to normal and so but again thanks to dpw amy rezecky and gilford mooring and all the water treat all the water guys um who came in to help identify the problem and fix it thanks to our communications team uh dave zomek julie feterman briana sunrid who were out trying to maintain good communication we did a lot of outreach to the university and the two colleges because of our myelastics when I first started here we had an experience with drought that was that we had to work really hard to make sure the communication worked well so everybody did a terrific terrific job and that day was over um so a few other things um we've had some snow emergencies as you've seen we had one last night and I want to make sure people understand we get calls about saying how am I supposed to know if there's a snow emergency you know I know you have these blue lights but if I'm not out of bed how am I supposed to know um and so you can sign up for emergency notifications through email or text you can always go to our website we send it out to the press and to all the media so it will scroll on the screen um there is the flashing lights and we put it in multiple places on our website so but the basic rule rule would be if it's going to snow expect that you're going to have to move your car and just assume that if it snows you're going to have to move your car and that's the message we want the public to hear because we don't like towing cars we don't like ticketing cars but they're in the way of the DPW plows we have to do that otherwise it leaves a giant mess and creates hazards for public safety vehicles and for the general public um just a few other things we'll be doing a cup of joe thing on March 15th from 7 30 to 9 in the morning at Atkins um in uh South Amherst and my guest that day will be Chief Tim Nelson our CPOs have been hard at work continuing to work one uh attended a very successful meeting on Sunday that George and Dorothy put on and um was very happy to have been there and we're trying they're anxious to have a conversation with um the OCA committee to help develop a really good model for um district meetings so we can support the district meetings in a in a um sustainable sustainable way um and we want our staff to be able to attend the district meetings um but we want to do it in a manageable way and uh George had actually suggested some ideas on how we could do that successfully so I think there's a real opportunity here to gauge um how we handle staff attendance at your district meetings um and think it through so that uh anytime you say oh I'd like this at my district meeting we have to multiply that by five districts times twice a year and we want to help but it would be helpful for the council to say here's what we expect the standards to be um what I tell people is that my time is elastic so anytime you invite me to anything if I can do it I'd absolutely will be there our department heads have a fair amount of elasticity in their time too they they have higher expectations our line staff I'm very protective of their weekends because um if you say oh it's only an hour it's actually four hours and it sort of hangs over them for the weekend and I I don't like asking them to do that unless we have to um if it's important we will always do that but we just like to set the expectations for our staff and make sure that it's an alignment with what is serving your constituents which I knew you wanted to provide really good services to your constituents which I think you've been doing in a really well good way um um many of you may not know about a Kanekasaki sister city program so that delegation from Japan will be coming uh at the end of March March 24th there's typically a reception it's just a welcome ceremony it's not even reception I can't even call it that in this room when they come in and they bring their suitcases in there's a few um the council president will be on vacation so we'll ask the vice president of the council to say a few words um of welcome to them there's some people from the schools who will speak and then they speak and then they get off to their hosts uh to their hosts homes um and so they're only here until Sunday and Andy is much more familiar with with the group he's been doing it for a number of years and actually has traveled to Japan so he may want to add more to that um our HR director I think you've all met Evelyn Rivera Riffenberg started today and she's come in and is meeting with all department heads and lots of staff in my report I mentioned uh the town of Leverett seeking to have an extension of their water of the town of Amherst water line into the town of Leverett this is an issue that's been going on for over a decade where some of homes I have roughly about a half a dozen homes in Leverett had their wells contaminated uh purportedly from the landfill in Leverett so they're looking at different ways to fix the problem they've been buying these homes bottled water for a long time and so they're looking at different options one of the options is to extend our water line on East Leverett Road into Leverett uh that would if they if that were to come to fruition if that's that's for that to be considered the council would need to approve it both because you are the water and sewer commissioners and you're the keeper of the public way and you have to approve inter municipal agreements so you've got three shots at this and you can say even they would need to have yes yes yes for this to happen they're not sure I talked with um one of the representatives like board members from Leverett on Sunday they're still not sure what direction they're going in in they're hoping to get some resolution in the town of Leverett at their annual meeting this May but again just not they're looking at different options in terms of potentially taking the houses or whatever other options are exploring what our posture has been is that we've been working with them with out incurring costs to the town of Amherst but providing them any technical advice or engineering advice that we can offer them they've engaged in engineering firm to start to investigate how much it would cost them and what what the barriers are to extending our water line you might say well wait a minute do we have enough water to give them from DPW 20 views six houses is kind of minuscule compared to a lot of other things are proposed in town so it and if we can with the agreement we can limit it to the number of houses who would make connections station road bridge we've received comments back from the state department of transportation they had some minor things that they've identified they had a couple more substantive things we have a meeting tomorrow I'm not but there is a meeting tomorrow with our engineers to review all the changes that they have requested and that project we're going to keep moving it forward and hope that we still have our schedule I will know more after tomorrow's meeting as to whether we can stay on schedule or not and that is my report great thank you questions made a joke I have one about station road and one about gruff park which you didn't mention I'll start with station road so it my understanding is the bid documents have not gone out then so we still think we can meet the April 17th deadline um it seems implausible to me but I'm I'm not an engineer right so they're exploring other means of securing the bridge and that might tighten up the schedule a little bit so and gruff park yay is what one thing I want to say is I'm thrilled to see that bids came in and they're within the budget and I'm curious what the plan for mill lane is when gruff park has a brand new what playground in splash park with mill lane currently right now as bad of a moonscape as I've ever seen it in the last five months that it's practically undriveable and will swallow your car and to put a new playground and water park in there and keep a road an access road undriveable for two large developments that live on the other side of that road what's our plan for making that accessible without ruining cars so we will be bringing um or up sending to you a pavement plan uh for the end with relatively short period of time and um um I don't know where mill lane is on that typically what we have been doing with our our pavement money which is we know we have a lot of needs and um not enough money to meet all those needs and that mill lane is not one of those that gets the highest priority because we try to fix the roads that are already um in bad shape so it's a horrible shape yes but it's unpaved and people know it's unpaved Kathy um I just Paul knows I I send him this question among others so as we have road plans um there is a hierarchy of what we think we're doing when and where um is there a point at which uh people would be able to see it um and then the other question related to that in this past year or the current year where you made a big effort to put more money into roads uh did that come with if we spend nine hundred thousand dollars we get this far over the course of a year so you have a kind of a standard that we'll get this many miles done or you know so you can look backwards and say did we do it and you can look forward and say what are we thinking of doing sure um yes and it's not an exact science as you can imagine because when you go out to bid and it's competitive world you you may get fewer than you anticipate what this what the plan does is estimates how much how many roads we can pave puts that on a calendar and and sort of over five years and we can start to look at that and um but it moves like any plan it's a budget it's a forecast but it's not like you're locked in place there might be a road that blows up during the winter and we have to reprioritize that but at least people can see where am I generally over that five-year plan and that's a um by road by by location are there other questions yes mark Darcy I don't have a question just to comment um I know this wasn't in your report but I um attended the municipal vulnerability preparedness workshop today and I'm going tomorrow and just wanted to say that it seemed like incredibly well run effective it was very exciting to see all the different town staff and um sustainability uh people that were from the different institutions like UMass and Amherst college and some of them I was meeting for the first time today um but just wanted to commend you for um that fantastic uh process that's going forward I'll say thank you but just because I had nothing to do with it it was all Stephanie Ciccarello was really the owner of that and made that happen thank you yes Sarah so I wanted to say as someone who's been a resident of Meadow Street for 30 years I just want to say kudos to everyone who planned fabulous things for UMass students to attend that they were excited about I will tell you that usually we sit on the front porch and watch the parade this is happy happy students and the quietest on Meadow Street that I've seen in 30 years so amazing um the other thing I wanted to say is um chair of OKA is that um we have had the privilege to work with town staff quite a bit in these past seven weeks and I'm so impressed by them and I'm so appreciative of everything they've done to support us so most definitely we will I will invite the community participation officers to come down just give them some ideas for meetings um and we really look forward to having them with us thank you and in terms of Meadow Street one of the things that the police reported was that the biggest challenge they had on in North Amherst was the police officers was boredom because there wasn't anything going on and at one point um yeah so that was I want to echo yeah I mean it was so quiet it was kind of creepy okay yes Alyssa I wanted to say something about RAC based on a conversation I had the town manager earlier this evening since we got to meet the RAC members which was great thank you for bringing them in I'm glad two of the three could make the time and hopefully we'll get to meet Ms. Dennis soon is that just from an OKA point of view one of the things we wanted to be able to eventually explain to you when we brought forward candidates to be appointed to various things that we wanted to be able to explain where the RAC fit into the process and it's my understanding and please correct me if I'm wrong but it has been determined that the RAC will not be seeing individual applications from applicants and so they will not be serving in that way to evaluate and select they will not be looking at names of people and they will be subject to open meeting law so they will have posted meetings where they can where they talk about things that they said they were going to talk about tonight so just so that you're remembering that so that when we bring you that whole long process of what we used that's where they're fitting into it as we understand it right now Paul yes so the presumption is that the residents advisory committee is a public body is subject to the open meeting law again I've had individual conversations with the three but they have not met as a committee yet and so one of the conversations to have with them is how they can best help with the process and part of that might be individually being involved in interviewing people because that's something that is available it could be consulting with me and also holding me accountable to standards that the charter has put in about diversity and qualifications and so they can hold on to those and review those as well so there's a as I said earlier I think it's a work in progress I think we're really privileged to have really quality people on the both you met the board of licensed commissioners at four of the five and they're all really very talented people but more than that a lot have not been involved in town government before which is unusual typically for a lot of our our volunteers and it's kind of exciting because they have a lot of energy they're coming in they're excited by the new form of government and want to be involved and so again the residents advisory committee I'm anxious to have the conversation with the three of them as a group and see how how they perceive the their role as well okay for the questions comments okay we are moving on town council comments and we have two items that we have sent that I sent out to you one was the draft goals of the council and the other was with the draft value statement I along with the draft goals in your packet tonight there was also a direct transcript of the the butcher paper the the notes that we took during the our retreat and then my first and I do mean first and very draft attempt to try to turn those goals into some kind of plan if you will statement of goals and then plan I did receive comments but only from three counselors and so I really don't know that we have a lot that we can do with that sitting here tonight besides the fact that we would be wordsmithing and that doesn't seem very useful on the value statement shall any I'm going to leave you to talk about that at this time so thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to share this document I'm kind of excited about it and it's something we've all been working on it's the values that we discussed at three different at these two different points of time one was our first workshop with Stan Rosenberg and where we shared some do's and don'ts that we want to see happen in our town council and the second was the retreat and then I also looked at the document the charter commissions values what what did they value and so I kind of looked at these three documents and then I looked at several other towns of the value statements that they have and put together combined all of this and the purpose of doing this is really to create a shared vision of what's most important to us as a town and as a town council and so it sets the guidelines for how we run our meetings and how we interact with each other and kind of set the tone for the culture in town as well so that's kind of the main purpose of creating a document like this and so a couple of reasons why in addition that I think they're it's important to have a document like this is you know when we're running a meetings or making decisions that we all have a shared set of values and they're not competing or inconsistent with each other for example you know if we have fiscal responsibility as a value as a town council but fiscal responsibility can mean different things to different people so just having a common a collective vision of what that looks like and so just so that's one reason the other is it would set the tone for our meetings and district meetings as well like we talked about balance being for example one of the things that has come up you know as we're respecting the boundaries of the town staff but I think the same applies to all of us you know so I put I stuck in that value and it was sort of mentioned in the retreat the idea of balance but I think it's important for us to be sustainable in the long run and to make good decisions that if it's not important we should not meet on weekends for example you know so things like this could then create the boundaries or where we feel we're at crossroads then we you know that this document can provide us guidance that are we indeed true to the values that we put together so we could the different ways we can use it and all of this is open to of course discussion and so I invite everyone to share there I mean I don't know how we want to proceed with this but I think what would be helpful is to see what values or what guidelines would help all of us feel safe would help help us feel productive in our meetings and so we can then include those and also think of how we're running our district meetings because I think the same guidelines would also be helpful in in running our meetings I think that's about it so here are here are the options one is we could sit here and we could discuss the goals we could also discuss the value statement another option is we in fact do create an ad hoc committee to work on these and bring them back and those are really the two options as I see it this could be part of the rules committee because we are already writing the rules and I was actually sort of in charge of making sure that I mean sort of having sort of an open introductory statement in the rules document that these are the values which are guiding us in how we're that would be for the values part of it yeah my only hesitation is how much more can the rules committee take on and meet their deadline Alyssa we were already doing this section so if you hadn't brought it forward now we would have been doing it in time for June 3rd this was one of our sections though the one thing I do want to mention associated with that though is that if people have input obviously I think the best thing to do is for them to write directly to Shalini and then we will we will take that into account because we have not had a chance to discuss this topic yet at rules and of course we keep adding things to our agenda as you indicated I will say just in terms of for example I'm hesitant to say this because obviously it's the public meeting but under integrity it says avoidance of big money politics that just clangs really hard to me against all the other things we're saying and so maybe what we're talking about for example is a perception that we're influenced by big money politics for example and the whole balance thing obviously I much prefer imbalance and so clearly I don't agree with any of those statements but everything else I really like and so I'm hoping that rule I what I'm perceiving is that rules would not bring this back to you necessarily immediately although we could just as we've brought some other trial sorts of things to do if we can make significant progress on this say on Wednesday after we do the other two priorities we have to do that you referred to us but we had always intended this was going to be kind of the preface to our rules document okay so the the idea then in this case is this would just people first of all would provide Shalini individually not in group any feedback on the town values and guidelines and that would then be incorporated into the rules of procedure committee is there any further discussion about that piece that does not require a motion okay all right on the goals I personally feel that I need some additional assistance on this I would I could continue to do that by having you comment to me individually or I could do that by having a very small working group otherwise known as an ad hoc committee and the reason I this is important is because these need to be meshed then with the goals set by the select board and put together as it relates to the evaluation of the annual review of the town manager all of which has to take place and be completed by the month of August so yes just a question what what will be the final product here and where will it reside I mean what is the interesting I'm taking a play a page out of the select book in the past like board in the past so they would establish goals Andy and Alyssa and forth of the select board and then those would be incorporated into the town manager's goals now interestingly the town manager has performed his duties for essentially five months under the select board but seven months under us but the question is based on what goals and at some point you know you have to evaluate someone against something so it would be a public document and it and then the other piece that I find important about goals it's a measure of us it's our statement to the community this is what we plan to accomplish this year and whether we accomplish it or not so I see two purposes and I see it as a very public statement Alyssa if I could just clarify a little bit about the select board's practice so the select board was part of the executive the select board did not have its own separate goals the select board had goals for the town manager to accomplish because he was the one who could implement the things that we wanted to have done he is working under the select board goals we can't just change him to the town council goals next week because he's been working under those goals all this time but we need to be thinking this through so that I mean right now the evaluation document would be based on the goals that were established for him in the fall but you want to have the next document ready and if you do want separate since you're talking about now about two separate branches you do want to have two separate sets of goals then obviously as you say they need to mesh that's all that that's critically important but there was not there were not two separate sets of goals in the past they were purely goals for the town manager and those goals were put on a chart which you can read at your leisure on the old select board page as to how we evaluated those goals thank you yes george what i'm hearing correctly i think from you is that um if we just sent you comments some of us have done that some of us haven't that still kind of leaves the burden on you you it's what i'm hearing is you might like some help with this so an ad committee would be very useful to you personally and working through this is am i hearing that correctly or yes you are okay that's then i would think that would be a good way to go okay and to do that formally would be to form an ad hoc committee so you're making a motion to form an ad hoc committee to assist you in the in the formation of these goals and is there a second sarah further discussion how many members maximum five unless you want to have committees of the whole okay any further conversation on that all those in favor of the motion thank you it's unanimous now i want to see who the people who would like to work with me on this raise your hands sarah evan okay i got more than i need unless it's a committee of six six it can be it can be a committee of six one because i'm i'm one of them okay so it's sarah okay sarah kathy george and pat and myself okay thank you i appreciate that that does not mean that we don't welcome the comments from all the rest of you we do want them okay please provide those to me directly and individually any further conversations on either of those i asked that group to stay so we can see if we can find a time to meet in the very near future future agenda items we are trying our very best to get as much information out to you today you did see the very aggressive calendar for both the regional school budget and the regular budget so that that gives you a sense of what's coming up but in addition to that on march 18th we will be hearing from the schools from the elementary schools on the msba application um to for the statement of interest and we will also be looking at the east street school affordable housing project we will probably then on april first do both of those again and the reason being is that the first is when we will take the vote for the msba it is unclear whether we'll be ready to take the vote on the east street school affordable housing but since it involves the transfer of land we need to have it come before us twice before we vote on it okay and then i want to ask for additional items and i'm going to start by adding one for which i'm going to ask councillor brewer elissa to be part of helping us be educated on the issue of marijuana and how it relates to the town of amherst yeah june maybe may are there other issues yes kathy okay and and i wasn't sure when we would want to do this but at the very beginning we talked about this reforming committees what are we doing and then there was an issue of liaisons with others we talked about that last week we've referred the issue of liaisons to the topics for tomorrow for tomorrow night okay okay and then that would be come back then that would come back with a recommendation and then we'll deal with liaisons okay and then the second one is this um discussion we had tonight about bus routes and transportation i just what i'd like to know and maybe it'll come up in um finance is where and how bus routes paying money decisions get made so i understood we're going to get more information back but i think we were we were being presented with something that if we don't act soon the opportunity to act won't be there and i just don't quite understand what the implications are so maybe we can bring do that first in finance if it's a money issue so just not quite grappling how we do it since we don't really have a transportation subcommittee or a you know a and tac doesn't deal with i ask they don't usually deal with bus routes you know they you know so the transportation advisory so just trying to figure out where right so um first of all mr slaughter duck slaughter has agreed to look into the proposal that um bob cousin brought forward rob cousin and i will take it up with the town manager and with paul with dog to determine how we bring that back it does also have a question that then blends into our budget which we can discuss how that happens in finance committee yep any further question in that paul okay other issues before the council that you would like to have come before the council yes dorsi one issue that i think has come up recently and i think that we at least i overlooked as we were approving different of our charges for committees of the council was just the issue of whether or not the the new committees have the ability to to decide matters on their own decide policy as opposed to coming back to the council with recommendations for action for action items so i would really appreciate kind of revisiting uh some of the committee committee charges just to um to see if they have that ability um especially the gol committee and we talked about it today in okah also um and so uh that just is really important to me i feel like there are issues that um uh i would like to be involved in the decision making on i think my constituents have you know they elected me to have a voice in some of these major uh policy decisions that we're making now um and i would like to see a lot of those decisions made on the council level as opposed to in the committees of the town council i think it's you know great that that those committees are able to do all the work to to to be able to present a recommendation to the council but i think all of us should be able to be involved in the decision making and a lot of these issues so i would kind of like to see that as an agenda item so it's really looking at our understanding committees their role their charges their role and their at what point they bring what forward to the council right fine i'm i'm totally hearing that yes sarah so i i totally understand that and i i do agree with that on the whole i guess one thing that oga was struggling with is you know when you when maybe we could look at what information the town council as a whole would like to see when a committee brings their decision in front of all of us just in the fact that so that um we're answering pertinent questions and that of course if the town council says i think this is terrible you've got to go back at least they we can we can have a format of a very answering very succinct questions so that we're not then going back and debating something that the that the particular committees have already gone through so let me just state one very clear thing all standing committees only bring forward recommendations to the council they don't bring forward decisions it's the council's prerogative to vote and decide so i happen to be at the meeting where this came up earlier today and it was around the issue that this group has spent enormous amount of effort on which is the issue of how to go about selecting people to be recommended for committees and i it's leading to a body of practice that this committee will be putting into place but i personally feel it's important for the council to understand what that practice looks like because at times there may be other bodies or other collections of the council that will have to follow similar practice so but we can discuss that as this whole agenda item i do ask each of the standing committees of which there are only at this point three to look at your charges and see if there's any other tweaking on your charges yes right i think i hear what darcy's saying and so one of the things i was going to say is a lot of at least in terms of the two committees i serve on oca and gl we're still sort of figuring out our footing and and how we operate and to some extent who we are and so perhaps this is a bigger discussion that the council should have in july after because the budget's going to consume us for the next two months right but also that will have given us six months as committees to sort of get our bearings figure out who we are and then we can sort of have a discussion of the council of are these committees operating the way we intended them to when we created them in december um do the committees feel like they have what they need to operate and maybe that's the time for committees to bring forth um proposals it seems like it'd be good to have it as like a holistic discussion of the council of all right is we set the structure up it's been seven months how is it going um but also recognizing that the next few months are very busy and committees are still figuring out themselves and so we should have we need to let them mature first before we kind of reevaluate there may be some things that we want to bring up earlier than that but dorsi i would just say that um i feel like right now is the time when we're making these major decisions um in all the different committees and we're making the the big policy hopefully recommendations about how we're going to work as a council um so i i actually would disagree with evan on that because i think that time is of the essence we we need to be looking at what we're doing right now because this is when all the big decisions are being made they'll all be made by july a lot of them i hear that and we'll take it under consideration when we look is when to put this on the agenda it may be a two-stage conversation one that says are there some tweaking now and another one down the road that says what else do we need to do somebody's decided the lights go out okay that's a hint is there any other any other issues additional agenda items etc i noticed we didn't take a poll tonight all right there are no other topics are there any other councilor comments at this time i just wanted to say that i you know i was going to make a comment about transparency and problems with it but i i've been very pleased to find out that um the different committees are going to be meeting in this room and um the president informed me or the oca committee today that there's going to be some kind of provision for automatic videotaping in here so that's a stride forward for working on still working the kinks out but getting there yes by the way there are other groups that like to meet here but we have priority okay or so i'm told um any other questions or comments from the councilor i don't have any topics that were not anticipated i'm sure there's many but i'm not going to bring them up no executive session yes today i attended the hearing in this room of the fort river school committee and i was the only council member and i was one of two people who weren't part of the committee it was interesting and i did learn something because for me when i see a picture and i don't always understand what they're saying they explained it and i learned a lot this is for the fort river um feasibility feasibility thank you that yes there were children in attendance yes so there were more than two there were more than two it's just that they weren't a voting age okay all right are there any other comments observations do i hear a motion to adjourn second pat all those in favor thank you


Well, first of all, thank you for starting so late and for the interest of time, I suppose we'll just go straight to the metro. Anyway, my name is Darvin and what I really want to discuss tonight is alternative structures of doing ICOs. And because we've seen many ICOs recently and many of us is getting concerned with it. Sorry, there's still a thing on the slides. So, just a bit about what we do. We're from Radow. Basically, what we're trying to do is we create digital assets or tokens that is backed by real estate. So, imagine if we can have a property, say, apartment A, you need 0101, and then we can have a token with a certain code that represents that property. And then by doing that, we're creating a programmable real estate. So, that is essentially what we're trying to do. This is traditional structures that we usually have when we're buying property. Now, this presents a problem with the mass market because in order to enter to a traditional real estate opportunity, you need a lot of financial commitment. That's usually the biggest problem. And usually right now, what we do to solve the problem is a lot of us comes together and buy the property together and record the traditional ownership in a traditional way. But the problem with this is that we kind of need to trust all the participants in this group. So, we experience that ourselves back then and we have been trying to look for a better way. So, by using the blockchain and tokenize it, this is actually the model that we're trying to achieve. So, if we can represent a particular real estate to a particular tokens or assets, we can then have a lot more people come together to buy the properties. So, this is the basic building block of what we are trying to do. We can now do an ICOs that actually has an actual real estate backing that tokens. And this is important for us. We wanted to achieve a certain level of publicity or public records because it deals with real estate. So, we're using and we're building on Ethereum blockchain for this purpose, which also means all the tokens, the property tokens that we create will be a standard of ERC20 if you're familiar. So, it is actually usable and transferable easily across Ethereum ecosystem. So, this is the model that we're building right now. In an ideal case, what we want to have is that there is a straight line. There is a straight line between the properties and the token holders. So, in the ideal case, we want to be able to say on the legal title that the owner of a certain real estate is a certain token holders. That's the ideal case. Unfortunately, as we know, our legal structures have not caught up yet to that stage. So, we want and we need to follow the existing structures. And right now, the established structures is trust. So, this is the model that we're working on right now. Basically, the property legally will be held under trust. And then we will act as the middleman in a way to issue this token to the users. And again, these tokens will be on Ethereum standard where users can transact easily. Left-hand side, this is the model that, again, we're building right now. It really simplifies matters because a single real estate now has half a single type of token representing it. But in the future, it's just a step forward to actually do multiple assets representing a single token. So, essentially, if you're familiar with read, this is basically a read on the blockchain. Now, when we mentioned about tokenization, many of us usually came to the first conclusions of the use case, which is property crowdfunding and investment. Of course, that is a valid use case and that's what we're building towards for now. But we would rather see it as a building block for a lot more other applications. So as soon as we tokenize a property and we can have a tokens that represent this property, these tokens then can be used in all other applications in Ethereum-based applications. One example, of course, the property crowdfunding, which is pretty straightforward, another applications, and the second one, property tokens card. When I show these to developers, this is usually what distracts them. Now, imagine if you're familiar with Ethereum, of course, they have an address and then they have a private key to access their address. Now, imagine this is a valid Ethereum address and then they have the private key hidden in a scratchable area, this part here. So imagine if this address, you know, we deposit property tokens and then we can create property tokens card, which basically opens up a new channel for property developers to sell their property. So instead of gifting, say, a Amazon gift card, we can actually now literally give properties away. So that's one example of how tokens can be used. The third one, smart contract based wheel writing, this is another use case that actually being brought up to us through our partners. So especially with the recent high-profile case regarding wheels, imagine if we can now write a wheel on the smart contract that will execute no matter what upon someone passing, we can now code in money as in cash in terms of Ether, for example. But if I have an asset, a real estate, I can't actually program it to the smart contract now. So if we are able to tokenize a property, we can then create a smart contract, wheel smart contract, that actually program my property. So upon someone passing, the smart contract will execute no matter what and the property ownership will be distributed programmatically through their tokens. So that's another area that we can build on. But I want to highlight on the fifth one, Crowdvilla, which is an example application, a real application on an ICO structure that not just banking on the ability to raise funds, but really try to create a structure that decentralizes the traditional company structure. Another use case that actually I want to highlight, this is a tennis card, just like Julian shared earlier. So this is also another use case that was highlighted to us in Singapore with the older individuals, they're usually asset rich but cash poor. So we were trying to solve this problem like reverse mortgage and lease buy back and all that. So far it didn't really work. Now imagine if you can actually tokenize their assets, properties, attach it to the application like this one and then actually spending your property bit by bit technically, it opens up new ways to actually create, solve their problem to solve the older individual problem. So this is a structure that I want to highlight. It's based on an idea that is already validated, shared holiday homes, nothing spectacular there. But what we want to highlight is the structures of how a new business startup can be formed. So the way we say it serves actually all these industries come together and of course the key of this business creations is democratization of capital. We don't have centralized model companies anymore. Rather we separate all the functions out and this is an overview of how we can achieve this. Like in the middle here, it's pretty straightforward. So subscribers transfer either and then the fund will give tokens so far so good. But imagine if this funds now is going to be used to purchase real assets that will be backing that tokens. So from the subscribers point of view they don't lose any value in a sense. The properties will then help by a trustee and we have a local managers to manage the property. So all these functions now is decentralized. We don't have a single company that is doing all these things. For legal reasons we can put in a fund manager there and then categorize it as a security. Fund manager will manage the funds with subscribers and send instructions to do whatever they need on the property. Now this is let's call this real estate crowd villa token, RZCV token. Now this is where it gets interesting. Now imagine they have the RZCV token. It is a new structure where imagine annually RZCV will produce let's call it red token real estate dollars. And then the real estate dollars will be used to actually stay in the property. So instead of pricing the properties now in fiat currency we can use this internal currency of red tokens. So if we see it from another point of view it's like the RZCV token it's backed by the assets in the portfolio. But the red token is backed by the utility or the time value of the property. So we can always put the dollar value on the red tokens. Now this is the model that we're proposing. We can base an idea for because in this model now when we generate the red tokens we immediately distribute it out to all the stakeholders. If we do it this way there is no distributions of income anymore. There is no profit distributions because it is being done on the token level. And this eliminates obviously a lot of issues when you're designing your ICO tokens. And usually the biggest issues is distributions of profits. If we do it this way the subscribers will immediately have access to the red tokens to utilize the properties. And if they don't have enough immediately all the holders of red tokens can create a market for the users to buy and stay in the properties. So again this is just reiterating. Suppose user A have RZCV token, RZCV token will create RZC token. User A can now then use the RZC token to stay at the property or if he doesn't want to use it he can put it up for sale. User B can buy it from the open market with great value to the red tokens and user B can stay to the properties. Pretty straightforward. And this is basically what is backing the RZCV token. So the portfolios combine with the ether that the fund structure will hold and the RZCV token that structure will hold. And then they probably have a fiat currency account on that too. So basically that's a fund failure. And if we divide it with token supply we have the face value. So if we do an ICO this way the participants of the RZCV token will hold RZCV tokens. They actually have something tangible to value their tokens for. Okay well it's pretty short I hope. If you have any questions I'll be happy to answer it. The legal part is put the fund manager as just mentioned security. Because in the end at legal wise you have to have put someone as the owner of the property. So I'm not sure that how it's going to work. Or you just create something like ground funding RBMB. Right. So obviously I didn't explain it enough. But the whole idea is that we have existing structures that everybody agrees that is working now which is REIT. So we can modify the REIT form right now and actually attach the tokens to it. But then rather than just distributing profit from REITs we can now use tokens or the blockchain to create an asset to utilize the REITs. So it is a hybrid, a new model that we're trying to propose. This is not perfect. Probably it won't apply to many of the use cases. But if you have an asset, an actual asset and plan to twice use this is probably one way you can look into it. So basically create a utilization token of the assets that you have. I hope that answers your questions. Yeah sorry. Yeah so the question is whether we need to create a new token that we tokenize. So at this stage for simplest reason we are tokenizing every property individually. So yes when we tokenize three properties for example we will have three tokens. Every token will represent one property and this is how we achieve the modularity to be programmable. Sorry can you repeat the question? So these are two models right? Where we are right now is really tokenizing one property to one token. But as my earlier slide show we can actually group an asset together and tokenize it. But we can also do it like the REIT way which is we raise the fund first and then give instructions say to the fund manager to buy properties in certain areas for examples. So we can actually reverse that path. At the end of the day the tokens that is released on the second model will still be backed by the portfolios that we have. Because all these assets will be held under the trust. And then we create a direct relationship between the tokens and the assets. I think that's the key part. There's no relationship. So that's the beautiful thing. What we're doing is we're creating the platform tokenization platform. But in the actual business model all the parties are separate. For example the local manager their interest is really just to manage the property. They don't try to make a huge profit for their shareholders. So likewise all the participants the trust company the fund manager they have their own role and there is no centralized company in the way. Yes. So for the right right but the relationship is loose. We not a single party has an interest to make the whole thing successful. I mean to put it bluntly they have a role that they need to fulfill. And as long as they fulfill that role they have basically they do their business right. In the event of liquidation does the token holder has the right over the property. Yes. So that is what we're trying to solve. So in this model because we can create a direct relationship we've been token and the properties. If the property is liquidated we can actually distribute it back to the token holders. So the answer is yes. Yeah. So your blockchain base reads right. Does your token give out dividends? In our model in the crowdfiller model we don't have dividends anymore because the dividends it's created in the form of rate tokens really. Okay. This is what I want to create. So in the traditional fund structure what we have is a fund that will operate and invest and tries to make money. And then they will minus their expenses right. And at the end of the day if there is any extra they will distribute it as dividends. That's the current model. But in this blockchain model the token itself will create a token utilization token for the property immediately. And the subscribers can actually monetize immediately. So it removes the needs of profit distributions. So when is your ICO? We don't have it yet. We're not announcing that yet. I think what we really want to show is an alternative of doing a safer ICOs in general. Okay. Thank you so much. Oh sorry. Right. So I may ask the first organizations that we reached out to where we started like one and a half years ago. And obviously we don't have you know the legal structures that support all these things. But to answer your questions STEM duties is applied for every paper based transactions. So when we first purchase the properties and put the properties on the trust we will pay the STEM duty. But after that the tokens part is actually separate from the STEM duties. But again this is only for Singapore. And every jurisdiction has its own uniqueness in terms of property regulations. So we're solving them one by one. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you Dervin. All right. For those of you who.


Welcome to News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV for Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. It's day four of Oracle Open World, one of the world's largest tech conferences for business decision makers, IT management, and line of business end users, which will come to a close at the Moscone Center tomorrow. Joining us now from San Francisco to summarize some of the conference highlights is Wikibon chief analyst Dave Vellante. Welcome to the show Dave. Hi Kristen. So Dave, update us on yesterday's keynotes. We want to hear all about the morning keynotes especially. Well as we talked about yesterday in our morning call Kristen, Joe Tucci was up and as expected Joe Tucci was very respectful. He's presenting to an audience on Oracle's home court and basically he did exactly what we thought he would do. He gave the audience a heavy dose of cloud meets big data, talked about EMC and VMware's virtualization strategy, their cloud strategy. He also talked a lot about flash. He in a way kind of geeked out for a while with the audience, which was kind of fun to watch and was very avuncular and I've called Joe Tucci the godfather of the IT industry and he presented himself as a great ambassador. So that was very strong and then Jeremy Burton, EMC's CMO and now head of products came out and took a couple of jabs at Oracle, very tongue-in-cheek, lightweight. At one point he said choice and flexibility. We want to give you choice and flexibility, something that you haven't heard much about at Oracle Open World, which was kind of funny. We had Jeremy on the cube later on in the afternoon and asked him about that and kind of had fun with it. But in general I thought that what EMC did was they put forth their strategy and juxtaposed their approach relative to Oracle and really I think did a good job appealing to the Oracle crowd. I heard you mentioned flash. What were some of the other big show themes yesterday? Well you know Oracle first and foremost is a software company. The irony is that Sunday night in Larry Ellison's keynote he was talking about big iron and hardware and it was also interesting yesterday to note that EMC was up there largely talking about software, big data and automated tiering software and the like. So when you walk the show floor it's very much a software show. The big integrators there, the big partners of Oracle like Accenture and others are really pushing Fusion apps. It's a big business for them to integrate Fusion apps to get them up and running. That really is a major focus of what's going on at Oracle Open World. At the same time since Oracle's acquisition of Sun they have become this new type of player. So you do see and hear a lot about things like flash storage. Flash accelerates database performance. It's a crowd of database administrators largely and they want to see faster performance. So you heard a lot about flash in the sense of affecting the performance of the database. We also heard about kind of a boring topic we talked about on the cube which was protecting the data. Remember people running Oracle applications are running their most mission critical data in the Oracle database and so protecting that data and backing up in a proper way is critical. Oracle announced a new database 12C. You're hearing a lot about that. Oracle is pushing very hard. Of course the C stands for cloud and that's the other big theme that you heard. Of course we all remember a couple years ago Larry Ellison at the Churchill Club ranting about how cloud is water vapor and it's just a bunch of servers and storage and memories inside of a data center off and online. It's something that Oracle claims they've been doing for a long long time. So you're hearing a lot about cloud. It's interesting to know when you walk the show floor Amazon Web Services has a booth there. So they're clearly a competitor that wants to get a piece of that Oracle customer pie. Now Oracle founder Larry Ellison what did he have to say in his keynote what were some of the major topics. Well Larry was a classic Larry on point somewhat more measured than I think he's been in the past but did a very good job of laying out Oracle strategy and as I said Oracle is a software company first. He focused a lot on fusion apps. One of the things he talked about of course remember last year he told us that it took six years to develop that fusion portfolio the middleware and the fusion apps. So he spent a fair amount of time conveying to the audience the benefits of fusion apps. I thought the most interesting part of his keynote was again his cloud discussion. He talked about the consumption by their customers of fusion apps and he kept emphasizing in classic Larry way we have a lot of customers and so in a style that he's used before he went through and gave examples of companies like Overstock and Hitachi data systems and many many many many others pointing out that they have a lot of customers for their fusion apps but not only the fusion apps for the online version in the Oracle public cloud which Oracle announced last year and he made the he gave the audience some some data so that two-thirds of the sales of fusion apps are online in the Oracle public cloud. Now what many people might not know is he's probably talking a large part of that is Tulio and and right now two companies that Oracle acquired. Now as I said it took six years for Oracle to develop that whole fusion strategy. It's all written in Java and and those two companies write their software in Java and so I guess that's how Larry's including them in that whole mix and I think it's a legitimate thing to include them but the point is that he's trying to emphasize and demonstrate to the world that Oracle has a public cloud strategy that has a SaaS strategy to really try to combat salesforce.com. The other thing we talked about is that he said just because we're in the cloud doesn't mean we have to ignore industry standards so that we can go proprietary. So in classic Ellison fashion he took the biggest criticisms of Oracle i.e. that they're closed and that they're proprietary and he turned them into a benefit saying that all of our software is written in Java industry standard software that interconnects and can share data across applications. So in essence he was making the counterpoint that Jeremy Burton made. He actually used the word choice and so we give you the choice because we use open standards. So again very strong presentation by Ellison. The last thing I'll tell you is he gave a demo, a long long demo which was their attempt to show that they're in the big data space and the bottom line of the demo was big data needs big iron which is kind of ironic. I think a lot of people might disagree with that. I think in general big data and big iron don't necessarily go together but it's clear that Oracle's strategy is to bring big exadata and exolytics expensive iron to the big data space. Dave you've been there since the conference began on Sunday so I really want to hear your overall assessment of Oracle Open World. Well nothing joked that Oracle Open World is called Oracle Close World. Why do we do that?  Oracle lets its partners in and the partners give some keynotes but it's really always comes back to Oracle. It's very well orchestrated and I think the bottom line Kristen is that this is a big show and there's a lot of customers here and everybody has to appeal to those customers and so they've got to dance to that Oracle drumbeat and they do and so I think overall the show is not as exciting as some of the other shows. It's kind of constraining in a way but it's big business and there's a lot of business being done at this event. We've talked a lot about Oracle's new strategy. Do we believe that this is really game-changing or is it just sort of a marketing ploy? I think it is game-changing. I think Oracle's acquisition of Sun really changed the computer industry's landscape. As John Curry about many times, Larry Ellison wants to be the Steve Jobs of the enterprise bringing hardware and software together and that's what they've done. Their whole strategy is to engineer hardware and software together. When Oracle bought Sun most pundits predicted that Oracle would spin out the hardware business that it wouldn't want to be in the hardware business. Well in that sense Oracle did change the game with things like Exadata and that whole push toward bringing hardware and software together. It changed the dynamics of the industry. It changed their partnership relationships and it really changed in many cases the value proposition that companies are putting forward to their customers so I do think it's game-changing. Who do we see as Oracle's biggest competitors now? Well the IT industry, Kristen, has become an oligopoly where you have five or six of the largest companies that kind of control the chess board and of course those companies including Oracle are companies like IBM, certainly Microsoft, Cisco, Intel. I would put VMware and EMC in there as well because they've got so much momentum. So I think in terms of Oracle's biggest competitors you still have to put IBM up there and the reason I do that is because IBM and Oracle uniquely sell to the Fortune 1000 more effectively than any other corporations. That's where they make a lot of their money and a lot of their margins. At the same time I would put VMware and EMC in there because they have such industry momentum. VMware is trying to become the cloud platform of the enterprise and Oracle is using its database to try to be the platform of the enterprise and now with its new cloud strategy the cloud platform of the enterprise. And of course Microsoft while still relevant I think is the competitor that Oracle knows well. I do think there is an emerging set of competitors particularly in the big data space that approach the world very differently than Oracle. So collectively I think the open-source movement is also a big competitor and I think Oracle can do again what we've talked about on theCUBE a lot is they will wait until the industry trend crosses the chasm and then they'll jump in and grab that company and acquire that company. So really I think it's IBM, I think it's VMware and I think it's the open-source movement and the big data movement that are the big three competitors and then of course there are you know many many others around the periphery. Well Dave thanks so much for your input and we'll be talking with you again soon. All right thanks for having me on Kristen. For more breaking analysis and the latest in tech innovation keep up to date with news desk on SiliconANGLE TV number one in tech event coverage.