Seeing as we have a quorum of the Town Council present on January 27, 2020, I am calling the meeting to order at 6.30 p.m. A couple quick announcements. Several of the Councillors and the staff were able to attend the annual Mass Municipal Association this past Friday and Saturday. On the February 1st we have two events you might be interested in. The first is the Fortowns meeting which is the regional schools and it is at 9 o'clock a.m. and the Amherst Regional Middle School Library. Later in the day at 1 o'clock we will do the flag raising for Black History Month on the steps of and on the common North Common and the steps of Town Hall. On February 10th we will have a hearing regarding a Verizon request to install conduit locations on Spring Street. This is based on us being the Peackeepers of the public way and on that same evening we will also have a public way request to install a ramp at the Amherst Visitor Information Center at 35 South Pleasant Street. This is for those people particularly interested in 132 North Hampton Road. Valley CDC has submitted their project eligibility letter for 132 North Hampton Road. However, I want to be very clear, the State has not sent an acknowledgement and is not until the State sends an acknowledgement that the 30-day comment period begins. We will have broad notification of that 30-day comment period and after that we will summarize all of the comments and send them off to the State. And finally, we do have a change in the order of the agenda tonight. It's up on the screen. We're basically going to go through one through five as we normally would including general public comment. We would then go on to a presentation and discussion of the proposed downtown investments. And at 7.45 we will move to action items B and C, general bylaws and then authorizing a discussion of authorization for a public hearing regarding Lincoln Avenue. We will then return to item B, I'm sorry, 6A. And at that point Doug Slaughter will be able to join us and that is regarding his report to us as chair of the license commission and also amendments to the open container law.  Okay, so with that in mind, there are no there's no hearing tonight. We will proceed to general public comment and let me just say the following. It's on matters other than those that are under the agenda listed as having public comment. That includes items 6B and 8A. Public comment on those agenda items will be taken up at the relevant time during the agenda. Residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes unless we have so many people I have to restrict it. Counselors are not expected to comment or will they comment on matter raised during the issues of general public comment. May I see a hand of those people who would like to speak during general public comment. Let's start back on the far back, far back general public comment. Okay, I'm sorry. Vince, please come forward. Please state your name and where you live. Vince O'Connor, Summer Street, Amherst. So we are on the basis the cusp of some momentous change in the United States which may drastically alter the traditional role of local and police, local and state police departments as enforcers of the codes of political and social order demanded by the 1 to 10 percent of the 90 to 99 percent. Economic inequality is under attack front and center. Cannabis and perhaps other drugs are headed for decriminalization if not legalization as was done so successfully by Portugal which diverted its drug related enforcement criminal justice and incarceration expenditures into treatment and reduced its addict population by one half. There is the Black Lives Matter movement. Gambling has become the province of state, local and tribal governments rather than of the mob and so forth. I don't think any of us expect to read of a stonewall type situation. So therefore the the present city council may thus become the municipality's first legislative body to confront the requirement to develop a radically different policing posture for Amherst. It is your good fortune that no terrible incident has occurred which might distort clear thinking about this goal. To avoid such a tragic and destructive event the city must begin the transformation of its policing policies while it has the time and space to do so. I would have preferred to bring this proposal to a smaller number of city counselors on a public safety committee which many cities have where I could also address other related issues. The city council is not seen fit to establish such a committee so here I am. My proposal is quite simple and direct backed up by the article before you the neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping. From the October 2014 volume 15 issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 pages, two and a half pages and footnotes. In evaluating future candidates for the police department you ought to to make use of the most up-to-date brain research techniques to disqualify candidates who might be more likely than others to employ deep-seated biases unconsciously in policing and the use of deadly force without good cause. How to how to tease out these deep-seated biases please read the article. There are good reasons to employ such research techniques because as the article points out not only does brain testing expose deep-seated candidate biases it can also reveal which candidates are making a conscious effort to combat their biases. We need you to ramp up. Yeah finally um as you consider this article and my suggestion please consider that Massachusetts already has a form of stand your ground which applies only to police officers. To be black or Latino the resident of a wrong address police raid or fail to obey an order from a police officer because you are mentally ill do not understand English.  The City Council can prevent such a tragedy from happening in Amherst if it begins now to implement science-based police officer selection. Thank you for your comments. Excuse me I what you need to be called upon. Thank you. Are there other public comments? I did see a hand in the back earlier. Okay. Are there other public comments? Please come forward. You have three minutes maximum. State your name and address. Amy Zuckerman 117 Brittany Manager Drive. I'm here to invite everyone on the Town Council. Town managers and others in the room to come tour my building as Ed Smith did this afternoon. He's both a health inspector building inspector in terms of a former firefighter. I raised the issue of fire prevention very serious matter for lodgings particularly complexes. I walk with Ed now that he says this is not his territory but we did analyze the issue of fire prevention or training that does not exist in the boldest which has at least 500 residents if not more. I wish there's maybe two maintenance people at any given time or three. There are no diagrams on any floor that show you the layout of the floors to where the where the exits. Most of the people in my building are not don't speak English or well.  They panic how are these people going to get out? There's no training. I've talked to the fire department many times. I'm not sure if they had to be invited in by the management at the boulders but they have not. Jeff Olmstead network these are great people but they got to come in. I said let's create a training program. Let's put a manual together. Let's have some diagrams. There are 500 or more people and those in that place there's no fire escape. There's a difference between having meeting code for the fire marshal and surviving a fire. Big difference.  Thank god people didn't die. It's amazing. I've seen 35 people die on one night in a fire in Worcester when I photo edited the cassette. What are we going to do? How about meeting me and take a tour and see why will you not get out of that place if a fire engulfs the hallway? You won't unless you want to jump from the second third building story. We could fix it. There's not one lodging in this town that is required to have fire ladders just put them over the window climb out not required.  Thank you for your comment. Are there any other people with public comment at this time? Okay then we're going to proceed we have two resolutions our proclamations this evening. The first one is a resolution in support of house 2810 an act to promote green infrastructure and reduced carbon emissions. It's in your packet and the governance organization and legislation committee has reviewed it. Mr. Ryan? Yes we the committee met on January 8th and voted unanimously to declare the proclamation on house built to a 10 to be clear consistent and actionable. Okay and this is sponsored by chris riddle and sponsored as necessary by a counselor and that is pat de Angelis. Is there any other comment pat? I have a sign here that says mic because I never remember to use my mic so if all of you would make m's whenever you go see me speak. Anyway this is very important legislation that's coming forward to do carbon pricing and it does have guidelines so that people of low income who may be most impacted would have recourse and things like that. So this came before the council a month ago several weeks ago and it needs to be passed as quickly as possible and I'm hoping it will be unanimous. Thank you. Are there any counselor comments at this time? Then could I have a motion? The motion that I need is to adopt the resolution in support of house 2810 enact to promote green infrastructure and reduce carbon emissions as presented. So moved. Second. I second it. Okay Darcy uses second. Any further discussion? All those in favor raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain. So it's three thirteen zero zero. The second proclamation is regarding Black History Month and I understand that Pituah Mukimba is in the room. Is that correct? Maybe she wasn't able to get here by now. The co-sponsor on this is the Human Rights Commission and Pat DeAngelis as the counselor. Is there any report from GOL? Again GOL met on January 8th and voted four zero with one absent to declare the Black History Month proclamation to be clear consistent and actionable. Okay the motion that I need is to proclaim February 2020 Black History Month and adopt the Black History Month proclamation as amended by replacing the word noon with the word one o'clock p.m. Is there a subject of motion? Pat? So moved. Second. Dorothy? I second. Okay. Any further discussion? All those in favor raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain. Thirteen zero zero. Okay we will now move on to our first presentation and I'm calling on Mr. Backelman and I think you are going to introduce the rest of the team. Is that correct? Yes ma'am. Along with Mr. Zomac. Thank you for having us. This is going to be a little bit of a carousel. We have a number of people who are will be presenting and we're trying a new format for presenting so let's see if that works. There we are. So tonight we want to talk about downtown Amherst. It's the heart of our community, the place we come to meet. It's like here tonight in Town Hall to engage with others. It's our Civic Center with the Town Hall, Jones Library, Public Safety, Buildings, and Senior Center. It's our commercial center with our extensive array of retail offices and businesses. It's the home to many of our religious institutions. Where we go for entertainment and movies, an extensive array of restaurants with cuisine from across the globe, and our transportation nexus where many of the roads and many of the bus lines all either wind up here or go through here. So and increasingly it's becoming the the residential home of hundreds of people who live here on year round. Something we hope will develop into a true vibrant residential community in the years ahead. It's the place where residents come to come on Saturdays to shop at the farmer's market, grab supplies at Hastings, enjoy the wonderful chaos of the town fair, or meet a friend for a quiet cup of tea or coffee or a fun night at a bar. It's also a destination for visitors, both those who are looking at colleges and tourists visiting our many cultural attractions. It's a dynamic place with the opportunity to do much more. But our downtown needs attention. We have done some, but we need to do more. Tonight is a first look for the town council, an opportunity for us to place some projects, ideas really, before the council for your consideration. We're not asking you for to decide anything tonight. It's the opportunity for us to preview what we will be presenting in the next few months and for the public to see what's coming up so they can engage with you as well. We call this destination Amherst and we want to provide a roadmap for investments both public and private in our downtown that will cultivate and enhance and celebrate the cultural richness of our community and make all those amenities more accessible to all who live in and visit the town. Tonight we'll identify the things we're already doing, note the projects that are in the pipeline, and present to the town council as a first look some exciting new opportunities that will be presented to you in the coming months. These include a new performing arts shell on the town common, a total rehabilitation of the tired and worn out North Common, including reclaiming one of the most important parcels of town from being dedicated solely to parking, and an impressive idea to construct a parking structure that will address many of the needs identified by the public and business community at no cost to the town. I have one more thing. These projects are all connected and that's one reason you see us using this new Prezi format so that you can see that we're moving around. Some people get sick by it because it's like it's movement but bear with us. So I'm going to speak for a few minutes on Kendrick Park. I know that the council is very familiar with Kendrick. We recently came before you with the exciting news that the town was successful in getting a $400,000 park grant. That is the largest grant that is awarded through the park grant program and we're very excited to bring that to you. As you know that this proposal to bring a new playground to Kendrick Park builds on a master plan that was done and participated in by dozens and dozens of citizens, residents and staff and committee members back in 2011. It calls for a playground and new walkways at Kendrick Park and again it's a combination of park grant funding and CPA funding and we're very grateful to the council for supporting the CPA funds that you have authorized. So without going into great detail this is a conceptual design. I want to make that very clear. I know you know it and hopefully the folks behind me do and those folks on TV. This was a conceptual design that we put forth as you have to do for the park grant program. It is not the design for the park. We are now engaging our community in coming up with designs for the playground and walkways. On either side of the conceptual design you'll see kind of a range of different playground structures, some more traditional, some you might see in a playground like we're doing down at Groff Park and then on the other side what we call more of a naturalized playground. We had a meeting on January 9th that was well attended, about a two hour meeting led by the planning department with LSSE commission support and participation and right now we're gathering all of this community input to put into a design that will be developed with the planning department and DPW and through the LSSE commission. Next steps are that as I said we'll be developing that plan. We'll hold some community feedback meetings in the spring. We're under a very aggressive timeline for this grant and that is really determined by the park grant folks in Boston. We need to finish the design this spring probably around June 1st and we need to put it out to bid in early summer for a beginning construction in the fall of 2020 and completing the park by June 30th of 2021. So that's a very exciting project to activate the north part of our downtown. So next I'm going to invite Gabrielle Gold who's the Executive Director of the Business Improvement District and Jeff Kravitz who is our Economic Development Director and as you well know this is Jeff's probably last presentation to the town council and we're very fortunate that he's here tonight and thank you for being here Jeff. I'm going to say a couple words to embarrass him because we will have another event later this week for town staff and say goodbye to Jeff but Jeff as you all have worked with him know that he brings the highest caliber of work to the town. He's dedicated himself to the mission of economic development and the town has done a tremendous amount of work. He's going off to do some really good things. He'll be a colleague in the town of Sunderland as the town administrator there. He's smart and most importantly he's really fun to work with. He's going to leave a big hole in the mezzanine for us. Hello Gabrielle Gold, the Executive Director of the Downtown Amherst Bid. Good evening. The bid is here tonight to start the conversation for the Performing Arts Show. We have created a standalone 501c3 foundation. The Downtown Amherst Foundation was created to raise the funds to build and help program a public art and performance space on the south common. While we have not put any designs out to bid for costs the foundation intends to launch a capital campaign with the goal of raising one million dollars. This will cover the design and building of the structure, secure a maintenance and endowment fund, as well as a fund for programming for the first two years. I think I got this. All right. The south common is where we see the structure having the greatest impact. The bid sees the location being where our temporary stage resided last summer. This location agrees with the Olmsted's with Olmsted's original drawings of Amherst's green spaces from 1874. Based on the brief history of the town common that we are happy to share as well as our summer concert series we feel this is where the benefit will be greatest to the Downtown, the businesses, and the economic development of our area. We have spoken with many businesses on the common including the Inn on Boltwood and each one has welcomed the idea and has asked when. Actually for over a hundred years the desire for performance space on the common has been noted and as recently as 1991 a narrow loss of 72 in favor and 76 opposed at town meeting precluded this opportunity for the generous offer from the Rotarians to donate and build this stage. There is a palpable and outspoken desire for our downtown landlords, business owners, and community that Amherst needs more and that the arts and culture are a great way to increase traffic of both our community and tourism to our downtown. Amherst needs to be a destination not a drive-by. Acoustically we have spoken to several sound and stage engineers the proposed location based on sorry everybody based on the natural topography is ideal something we feel as imperative is that the common be reactivated a performing art shell that is visible coming into town from all directions instead of hidden away as part of that reactivation seeing life and art happening in the heart of a downtown can only have a great impact on invigorating our community. It is our understanding that usage of the common is in downtown Amherst continues to decline and has dropped over 50 percent in recent years. We need to bring the heart of our community back online. We are working with the architects who won the contest through a public voting charrette hosted by the bid. The contest was a great entry to design but had very little structure as to what was needed in terms of acoustic size performance ability a la dance theater music art lighting weather engineering for northeast climate and more. It did however bring us a winning team to work with on design of what could be Naomi Darling and Ray Mann are very excited to create a design with the bid to present to the design review board planning board and council when the time is right. We will also be working with an acoustic engineer out of Boston who has worked on many performance spaces and an engineer to ensure that the shell is sound in terms of weather and building code. The design will focus on functionality with the inherent knowledge that this would be often a piece of sculpture or art on our common and therefore needs to be attractive and pleasing to the eye. We are planning on meeting with town offices regularly to ensure that our design is compliant. The use of the stage will be hugely multifaceted. We envision local talents utilizing this the high school performing arts bringing programming such as theater band performances poetry slams and open mic nights little kid programming as simple as mommy and me yoga or music classes local dance and music recitals local non-profit and organizations who host events will be able to utilize this space as well as be able as allow us the ability to bring in talent. Some of our goals and ideas range from Shakespeare and co traveling dance troops like Pilabalus modern dance company and all types of music from classical to jazz to rock and roll. Summer viewing of films festivals and art shows as well the main programming would be in the summer with shoulder season looking at but not limited to parent weekends graduations and events from both our own public regional high schools and our university and colleges. In short how do we encourage the campuses and visiting parents to come into downtown and enjoy Amherst. The bid and the downtown Amherst foundation look forward to working with the council and we see great opportunity in working together. We introduce this to the council tonight with a desire to present a more in-depth presentation in late february or early march and then move forward with design. Once design is approved by the powers that be we intend to get bids on building costs and begin our fundraising endeavors. These are very broad strokes and we know that there's a lot to discuss. I look forward to speaking more about this and to working with the council and the town on this and many great initiatives to ensure that Amherst thrives. This council holds the key to bringing more art and culture to downtown. We are ready to do the legwork and create a space for all to enjoy. The energy and vision with new leadership across the board is sitting in this room. Thank you. So very quickly building on the Gabrielle's presentation on the main part of the common. We're going to move toward the north common and I think as Gabrielle said we look forward in the coming months to presenting a more in-depth proposal to you but right now what I'd like to do is cover some of the main aspects of our proposal which came before the select board actually back in the fall of 2008 and the select board graciously reviewed our proposal and decided that they would really work with staff work with the town manager to to put a pause button a little bit on our plans and here we are a year later coming back to you and hoping to reinvigorate this project and review it with you in the months ahead. So this is really a 10-year plan for improvements to the north common. The effort was led by the historical and LSSE commissions with staff support. We were able to hire a well respected architectural firm out of Boston, Weston and Samson. They worked with us to come up with a number of proposals for the north common. Well over a hundred people were involved in the effort. We held multiple meetings right here in this room and throughout town and gathered input on a range of topics from accessibility to the parking situation in the main street lot, trees, access, lighting and the list goes on and on. At that time we were able to secure a partial funding package from town meeting and that's really where we hit the pause button and fast forward to today. So here's a look very quickly at our town common from the air. It is an area of town that I think most of us would not be terribly proud of. It has severe erosion issues. Many of the trees are dying or later in their lives and suffering from disease and other ailments. We have worked closely with Alan Snow, our tree warden, to assess all of the trees on the north common. So the tree warden as well as the public shade tree committee have been involved in our efforts and we've looked at everything from electrical service, trees, access, the topography of the area prevents very unique challenges. If any of you have been out there in the rainstorm and seen the water movement and soil movement from the northwest corner to the southeast corner there are some days I think you could put a kayak out there and maybe have a good run of it. So we did all of this assessment looking at infrastructure and we came up with a number of plans that were vetted right here in this room as I said and let me just move quickly to what we collectively called the preferred plan and this was the plan that was presented to the select board as I said I believe it was in December of 2018 and what it did was it provided people with a plan that really looked at some fundamental things like dealing with the erosion on the site and the challenging topography. It created a plan that allowed people to move from one side of the common to the other. It increased the width of sidewalks particularly on the Hastings side if you will of the common and it came up with compromises to creating better parking around the common on boltwood. It did present some food for thought on direction of traffic on boltwood but again these were all concepts that were put out there. One of the central features of this plan is really celebrating the town hall and you can see in the upper right hand corner of the the north common this area that would double as both a parking area most of the time but also an area that we could better present large gatherings. Think Mary Mabel, think extended farmers market, think any other gatherings that the town might want to do or nonprofits might want to have on our north common. It also presented spaces for just informal gathering throughout the throughout the common and let me go through a couple of those. So these were some of the concepts that we came up with in our in our various public meetings again with a focus on activating the space, creating areas for sitting, for picnicking, many people throughout the process referenced Pulaski Park in Northampton and the incredible job that Northampton did to transform that space and I think if any of you have been there you know what that can be eight or nine months of the year. We're looking for something like that in in the heart of our downtown. This was a final image that was created by Weston in Samson really giving a sense of what kind of a meeting space, a lingering space, how we could activate the central part of the common while still retaining a great tree canopy as well as spaces just private spaces for quiet reflection for having a picnic or reading a book and I think the preferred plan accomplished all of that. So next steps really we hope to work with you to review the design that was presented back in the fall of 2018 to gather more community input to really blow the dust off this plan a little bit and then ultimately present all of those plans to you in a more formal way when we have a little bit more time but all of this would be part of this package for downtown improvements. Thank you. Good evening. Thank you Paul for the kind words. I'm now going to make you regret them. I brought a visual aid and it's a parking structure because I don't have a lot of pretty pictures and I'm not nearly as charming as the next speaker. So it probably will not have a car lift or anything like that but parking is actually it's a really serious issue it's not nearly as much fun as parks or playgrounds or performing arts shells but I think it's vitally important to our downtown. At peak times parking is near at capacity. The recent study showed that I think it's 7 p.m. on Saturday nights it's at 86 percent capacity which really feels like it's at 100 capacity. The future demand study also showed that over the next few years parking demand is going to likely increase by up to 12 percent. And the basic idea behind this proposal is that it's going to increase parking spots available to the public without an investment of private dollars and the the ideal location I think that staff has looked at and downtown property owners and stakeholders is sort of the lot behind Miss Saigon between Pleasant Street and North Prospect Street. So I think that you know one of the strategies in the report itself was to look at a public-private partnership. This is a public parking lot right now owned by the town it has 70 spaces. You know there's been some preliminary work done looking at the size of the lot and what could potentially be built and the topography of it and you know there's a because of the hill and the structure I think that there's a floor that can go in into the hill and be unseen and then potentially stories above it. Point out just the rendering up there is not anything about this. I think that's a Smith College lot that that's in Northampton but it's just an idea of parking structures don't have to be monolithic things that are eyesores that can be done nicely. So going back we think that potentially there could be up to around 200 spots total. Right now there are less than 700 metered public spots in downtown so we're talking about a fairly significant increase around 15 percent parking spots. And again at this point I think that what we're talking about is just exploring the opportunity and saying this is a piece of town owned property we think it's underutilized. We don't think that public funds should necessarily be used in order to create a parking structure there but can we put out an RFP for a public private partnership and see if the private sector thinks that it's worthwhile to do something and I think that in such an arrangement the town would have a lot of control over what the RFP looks like and could determine things like height and what it looks like how many spots public availability things like that and then see if there are interested parties who would come back and say yes we think we can make money and we think it could help the town and it could be a real win-win. You know one of the things I've heard since day one and I think as people who have campaigned and been counselors for over a year you've heard as well is that parking is a challenge in Amherst. So next steps the parcel is currently zoned in a way that does not allow parking structures so we would have to look at you know either creating an individual overlay zone or something else that that would allow a parking structure there and then obviously a public procurement process draft the RFP tell the industry what we want and then allow them to respond and come back to us with a potential solution and I can pass this around I brought some cars if people want to play while we finish up I did not bring one for everyone so I'm sorry. So I just want to mention some things this is just sort of an add-on to note that we are doing things downtown we have been doing things downtown for a number of years and we will continue to do things for downtown so while I think your attention should rightly be on the projects that we just discussed I do want to note that you know we received a significant multi-million dollar mass works grant where we were able to build help build the roundabout make the put the utilities underground and install crosswalks and new lighting we had we got a cdbg grant we use some of our cdbg money to do the walkway where next to the Unitarian Church the amity street with the crosswalk and the parking lot has been done the main street from basically town hall down to the Emily Dickinson house with new crosswalks sidewalks road repairs that that's been done what's coming up is we received a grant to replace the pleasant walkway which is the Starbucks walkway that has the deterioration and that along with some crosswalks downtown will be done with grant funding the you will see a request coming before the council to have a privately funded handicap access on in the public way for the visitor information center and we'll be working on other improvements to sewer lighting crosswalks and sidewalks downtown all that is to emphasize that we aren't looking just at public funds to make these changes that the town has been looking for and has secured significant grants to make improvements downtown we have we are looking through the garage a public private partnership where we utilize an asset that the town has i.e. the land and secure funding and the investment by the private sector to build a parking structure that will address the parking need but also more importantly address the perception of the need for parking downtown which is what has been identified over and over and I think many of us feel it that I'm not sure I'm going to find a place to park so I don't want to go downtown and the and then the private commitment by the business improvement district which started a non-profit to raise a million dollars to put a structure on the on the common is a significant step forward and they are set and ready to go but and then for the north common the jewel of the town downtown you know activating that space which is where we all walk through a different times and we we have the reading of the human rights week there is the weekly vigil that takes place there it's used all the time and it's an embarrassment quite honestly to to what we have there it should be the shining gem of our entire town but we it it just looks shabby and we use the most important parcel to dedicate it to cars and I think it's time to rethink how we do how we think about that that change with the addition of a parking garage should help a lee lay some of the fears that people have about removing parking downtown so it's there's a lot here it's it's ambitious I'm not asking you to say yes or no to any of these we understand that you're going to want time we also know that the public one of the reasons for doing this tonight is so that the public can start to hear about these ideas start to pay attention to them start to weigh in so that public has some time to digest what this all means what they how this what this means for the future of the downtown and I appreciate that the president has allowed time for the public who are here who would like to weigh in so um so that that's pretty much all I have to say and we are here to answer your questions oh did we get it maybe I didn't do everything so here's here's where we are Kendrick Park already approved downtown improvements will be doing that during the summer in the fall here's our schedule rough schedule hasn't been confirmed by the president yet but conceptually here's where we think we can be in terms of when we when the when we will be ready to present is the performing art shell in the February March time frame the north common and parking structure in the April May time frame so that's the time frame we would like this to come back to the council for you to go through your process I know it'll have to go through a committee structure and you'll have a lot of discussions and decisions to make on these things but we're we feel that we're ready to start acting and this is the year to make it happen so that concludes our report. Thanks to all of you who have made your presentations we have both an opportunity for council discussion and comments and questions and then we also have an opportunity with this agenda item for public comment so let's begin with the council Kathy. Thank you very much as you know we didn't get a chance to see this or at least I don't think we got a chance to see this before it came but what we did have at least a list of what might be on it what I I think my overarching question is I'd like to see it as a package with some price tags on it because we're also facing as you know some very tough decisions as we move ahead and one time I saw the North Commons I may be lagged on this but we had about a million dollars but the design was calling for two million dollar projects so I don't know whether something can be brought in at a million dollars you know within a budget you know trying to think of how this works together and so I I don't know how you're thinking of getting sets of questions so the garage we built many years ago boltwood was built so it could have upper stories put on it and it was very expensive with the underground so I I just think a series of questions on a the location of it the total cost and if a private entity was running it what kinds of parking fees might we be expecting is what Northampton's been really successful of starting on the higher side and but running it themselves and pulling down on the debt till now it gets less and less expensive so just thinking of what that model so for me it's much easier to think of things together the way you've presented them one by one so I'm hoping we're going to have that opportunity together um and and I would include the playground up in Kendrick Park too I mean what what else are we thinking of Kendrick Park um because we could activate we heard some very interesting ideas from other towns recently in Boston that were very low priced so thinking of what we can do within our budget limits short term versus long term those are all excellent questions and when we get to the time to talk about them you know the price instructor for the garage all those things are not worked out it's something we want to have the the conversation with the council about okay additional comments from the council Shalini so I feel very energized by the proposal here in terms of not just a single project but bringing these this collection of projects that can activate and re-energize our downtown and I specifically want to speak to one idea picked up at the MMA the municipal conference that we were at which was about diversity inclusion and it invited us to look at all our fact all the issues through the lens of diversity inclusion and just like we were starting to do for climate change and one of the things that comes up for me for having a performance shell right in the heart of downtown is that it makes it accessible it makes art and culture accessible to so many more people who can't afford to go to Broadway or fancy places and it also invites people who are artists new artists who can maybe pay you know expensive fees to rent locations they could find a space to showcase their art and therefore have an opportunity so I think this is really a remarkable idea I'm excited additional comments Alyssa a couple of things not entirely related one is I'm a little chagrined to hear the concept that most of us are not proud of the North Common of course we're not proud of it but it's not like any elected officials ever told town staff ignore it this isn't about what happened in select board in 2018 this is decades of not managing the mulch decades of watching the trees get older decades of watching the different enclosures that the kids love to play on around the trees deteriorating and so those were not active decisions on any elected officials apart to say just ignore that we'll let that go so one of the things we really need to hear about and this has been a theme I think of this town council so far as we're moving forward and I know at least one of the projects mentions a maintenance fund for the band shell we're bad at that we have a lot of really good people with really good intentions who don't have enough time to do everything and that fell apart because choices were made not by elected officials to not keep that up so we're going to really I think want to hear a lot about how that's going to be different moving forward every time we build something new because we really want to keep these things up so that we all can be proud of them and then on a separate note in terms of managing our expectations as to what we can expect to see I do understand that we were told the general topics for tonight as Kathy mentioned we had no idea if we were going to be receiving detailed proposals or a really beautiful somewhat uneasy making but very beautiful slide presentation or if we were going to get two page proposals on each of the reports we knew nothing until we walked in the door tonight so I appreciate what it turned out to be that we didn't need to try and absorb the information I'll also point out that all the town council part-time elected officials turned in all our reports before we went to MMA so everybody had a chance to look at those before they left so let's please continue with our focus on getting materials ahead of time for the next set of things that we get so for February we have stuff well in advance of that Monday meeting so we have more time to ask you questions before we get here etc because I think this was great as a wonderful introduction for everybody but we we had no idea what to expect coming in what level of introduction was going to be and so if we can just get that managed better like you can say oh you're only going to get this much information and then we'll know how to budget our time and so we can tell the public because we had people asking us what's the proposal going to be we're like I don't know if there's going to be one or if it's just going to be a really great intro so that helps us help the public additional comments yes Steve so I want to thank you for calling the North Common Project the North Common Project and not the North Common Main Street Parking Lot Project because it's really the North Common with parking on it that in my opinion should never have been put on it so I'm also glad to see part of the package a multi-story parking garage very close proximity which will address a lot of the concerns that people have expressed about the parking on our North Common so that's I think those two points and then my third point is exciting to see the two is the other common called the South Common or Regular Common or South Common Middle Common the South it's exciting to see the two and so in some ways the performing art space on the Regular Common South Common might mean that the North Common might have to be less ambitious because that one of the plans I saw also had a ban shell on the North Common or had a not a ban shell but a performing space on it so some of the big ideas for the North Common can be taken up by the South Common and maybe that will help with budget and other issues okay Sarah so again I do think a lot of these things are absolutely beautiful um I think for someone who does go downtown a lot and whose kids like to go downtown a lot and often it's so um I feel like the hardest part to get to Amherst especially on the weekends is this North Area if you want to go just even pick something up at like Buena Huesano I know that my family cannot find a place to park and so what ends up happening is is that one person runs to go get it and the other person has to go you know we're talking about like maybe on boltwood like that behind part being one way there's no way because you have to make a circle in order to come pick somebody up again that extends all of the downtown going past the one boltwood and it's that's the hard place to park and if you've got young children or you've got your mom there who's in a wheelchair trying to get to that Common and park or even get to that side of town which is very busy there just isn't anything and I know maybe it's only a few parking spaces that will lose but do people have such a hard time getting anywhere in there it's it does really hit on people that we it sort of seems like we're being told two different things one is we need complete streets we want to be you know a walking community and at the same time you know then we're building the the parking garage and I just from a common sense point of view I look forward to somebody like just showing me Sarah like this is a way traffic is going to flow or don't worry about that part in front of Town Hall because there's going to be parking somewhere close by there thank you additional comments yes Dorothy I'm excited to buy some of the ideas but I am agreeing with Sarah that parking is a major major problem and certainly for handicapped accessible we have merchants complaining that people can't find a place to park we have Amherst Cinema saying that people come from out of town and can't find a place to park and I do agree that we do want to get rid of some of those parking places in front of Town Hall but my my vision is restoring historic green as much I think that it's going to take a lot of money I mean if I listen from what I've heard about restoring an athletic field to restore an eroded area with grass and trees that are young and living and to put benches benches and I love the idea of the passive places to meet, walk, sit, read I think that's really appropriate but and I am a devotee of the performing arts and like to do them myself but I would prefer to see the band shell or not band shell the performing art space on Kendrick Park I went to the meetings and there seems to be space for that to happen that is an active park there will be bushes and trees and rocks and places that are nature and when I was there we were all putting our dots on the plans that used boulders and logs and looked not metal the whole way but keeping the greens the north and the south green as simple and quiet as possible so that we and then thinking about more parking also I read a letter today from grace church there was it's I had never thought about the fact of what you need to have in front of a church in terms of herces that you have to have a certain kind of parking that you have to have quiet that you may have your programs that would be going on the same time as other concerts there was a great concern I just wish we hadn't lost the spring street parking lot so if somebody has an idea of how to create a small parking lot downtown that would be great I'm I do think that the parking lot that you're describing is going to be very welcome I just wanted to shift the entertainment a little bit uptown to Kendrick Park and to work at keeping a very quiet and green piece of nature and we do remember of course that many big activities come in and put up temporary structures on the parks and we always go to them but I'm glad when they're going to additional comments Pat I really admire the transformation bid has done around the band stand which it was originally and moved it to a performing arts a permanent performing arts stage I think it will add to the life of the town and continue counter to what Dorothy is saying continue the engagement of citizens and performances in festivals and taste of Amherst and the things like that I too am concerned because I must have been at a select board meeting when the North Common Plan was presented and I remember very much the Episcopal Church talking about the direction that they needed for herces etc so I'm glad Dorothy brought that up I think that the new parking possibility of really creating a public-private partnership will do a lot to alleviate and and we're talking I think they we're going to lose 11 to parking spots with the North Common Change and if we were able to keep as many of the spaces as possible handicapped accessible that are there it would be important Bandy Joe so I like the comprehensive plan in a way but I do have some concerns particularly about the shell so I'm going to focus on that one it is proposed to be on the town common which is a public way that is under our control and with a proposal to be built by a private entity so potentially a public private partnership but without any at this point and I I'm saying this so that hopefully we can get more specifics later on on who owns it in the end and who the intended controlling entity on granting the reservation rights is and because right now that would be us under our public ways policy depending on how often it would fall to you as manager too but but things like that because if it is looked at as the bid built it so the bid gets priority I've got concerns about that you know and so getting more information about what the operations of that would look like before any vote on design or anything comes to the council I think for me is going to be vitally important and and I would personally like more information about I know the Kendrick Park plan in that plan from the 2010s or earlier had a potential shell and band space included in it and so you know I'm kind of with Dorothy and all about what's the plan there if that was the plan there are we aiming for both ends what are we aiming for comprehensively is the common the best spot in town our bid director said that when the businesses around the common are pulled they say yes but what about the businesses up by Kendrick Park I'm sure they would rather have it at Kendrick Park so I'm looking for more information as to what the best location for a shell is not well Olmsted you know planned it that way so that's what we have to do well that's been 100 plus years so maybe given the development of our downtown that might not be the most logical spot so I would be looking for more information on that route too as we move forward on this additional comments Evan so I want to echo much of what was said about appreciating the comprehensive nature of this connecting the dots between a number of different projects and especially pairing them especially since one project would involve removing parking and another would involve adding a significant amount of parking so my my two comments one has to do with the parking facility so that's something that I would like a little bit more information on how we move forward with that from a zoning perspective there was a conversation if it has to be rezoned versus an overlay I know you're already intending to bring us that information but getting that information in advance and knowing what the options are so instead of just saying we want to do an overlay it'd be nice to know if we don't do that you could also rezone it or perhaps there's you know other options too so understanding what our options are to move that forward because I think it's really exciting of a project and I think as we're approaching these major capital investments the idea that we could get something a big infrastructure project done as part of a public-private partnership is exciting and perhaps a model for how we can do some of the other major investments that we have in front of us that we haven't even considered using public-private partnership model for the second thing would be the new with common project I think there's been a lot of work done on this which is great I align I think a little bit more with where Steve is and then I'd like to see there be no parking on that common I think that it's always been an embarrassment to me that we have paved over sections of our historic common and that public space I am always troubled by how much public space we reserve for the temporary storage of private vehicles accessible to some and so I would like to see us reclaim some of that public space for the community and see if there are options perhaps on on boltwood to increase parking we were just all in Boston and I noticed the how common it was for diagonal parking on streets if that's something that's an option to perhaps maintain the number of spaces but take them completely off of the common and so viewing this not just as the common but also as boltwood and options there thank you additional comments from the council George just briefly one of the least for me personally the most moving things that that I've done and we'll be doing again soon celebrate black history month is the reading of proclamations and the gathering of citizens and it works fine we stand on the steps of town hall police keep traffic for running people over but it seems that we might consider this space in the north common as a place for that to take place a gathering place for those kinds of events so that's something I'd like us to keep in mind the performance part perhaps in the south common but and the quiet space in the north is fine but I'd like to think that we could somehow in the planning create a space where when we do these kinds of proclamations and people gather there would be a designated space where we don't have to be worried worry about being run over or things like that additional comments from the council shall any I'm sorry Darcy you have not spoken yet I just have a few comments one is I would like to see how this whole plan that's together with our other capital requests you know ideally I'd love to see a spreadsheet of all of our potential capital requests and how much each costs and so that we could rank them so that we could prioritize them against each other I'd also like to know how sustainability generally and climate action will be integrated into whatever it is that we're proposing here because we're going to be having a climate action plan completed sometime in the next few months and hopefully everything is going to be integrated into that and lastly I'd kind of like since this is clearly it's going to you know if some of these things were done they'd benefit the town they'd benefit the residents but they would especially benefit the downtown businesses it would be nice to include in a package like this you know something the businesses together could offer such as a plan to compost all of the restaurant's food waste in a program where it would go to be used in local farms or something like that or using compostable containers or you know something that the local business community could offer in exchange for time counsel not in exchange but to sweeten the pot so yes those are my comments additional comments shallowness I agree with my councillor co-councillor whatever colleague however you say that it's trying to be all formal but anyway I agree you need more information about the ownership and so forth of the performance shall regarding the reservations I think we as a council need to have a conversation about do we want to be the ones who are making reservations like artists emailing us and or coming here and it seems like that's going to be too cumbersome and time-consuming for us as a council to be doing the reservations so I would be very happy to pass that on to the bid or whoever is willing to do that however as a council we could come up with criteria that we can provide to them that guides them and what sort of programming and so forth but that's something I think that as a council we need to have a discussion on and then provide the guidelines to to the bid okay additional comments I'd like to make one or two first of all I really want to appreciate express my appreciation to both the town manager your staff and the business community for coming forward together I think that sets a tone that allows us to look at this from the very beginning as a partnership and it is not to be seen as something minor this is the beginning of a very very important discussion for us when the town council met in its retreat back about almost a year ago now we actually identified downtown as one of our three top priorities and it continues to be a priority that many counselors have extraordinary interest in some people themselves have businesses downtown and clearly all of us have spent a whole lot more time downtown since we've been elected to office and we get to see it in its many many different forms so while I'm not going to get into whether or not the parking fee should be here we do have to look at this in light of our many many demands on our capital and on our land and but at the same time I really hope that we can find a way to weave forward as we often have been doing and come to an acceptable solution that will enhance our downtown so that it brings both businesses and our residents down here so with that let's go to public comment who would like to speak let's start over here and please come forward we are going to limit you to three minutes unless it gets to be a lot and please state your name and where you live David Mazer 27 Woodlott Road in Amherst I'm also a property owner uptown at 37 39 South Pleasant Street I know there's a lot of talk about the North Common building Guillaume is right across from the North Common the Main Street parking lot is just about the most heavily used parking lot in Amherst it's in line of sight of many many businesses that rely on that parking lot I have gone around I've talked to 24 businesses they are all appalled at the idea that the town would even consider removing those parking spaces because parking is their number one concern not all parking is exchangeable if you're going to go get to the barbershop you're not necessarily going to park way behind CVS you can't look at these things as just interchangeable a lot of the businesses Russell's liquors or a lot of the restaurants they rely on people being able to just park come in go to Glaze Donut go to Russell's liquor that's how people use that parking lot our building the building next to our building and the building next to that have not a single private parking space there's two restaurants one of which just expanded and doubled in size if you go all the way down Main Street it's lined with restaurants these are very high traffic businesses and they as we know lunch times on weekends that lot is full you know this this holiday season I was shopping at Amherst books and I actually just by coincidence was at the register at the same time as one of the town councillors and I mentioned you know the idea like you know I hope we're not going to be losing any parking and I am for beautifying the North Common I mean that's a worthy goal what somehow has gotten involved here is the idea that you know removing parking that is needed in our central business district so I'm standing there with with this town's councillor and I turn to the people at Amherst books and I say are you guys in favor of removing some of these parking spaces they're like shocked now I've gone around and talked to their reaction was take it away we need more parking more parking where people can just come right in the door if you talk to Glaze they will tell you a lot of their customers are older they're not going to walk from far away if they do not see a space they drive on so you know this parking to go to Black sheep to go to Lone Wolf to go to Amherst barbers it is critical to them if you're going to have a farmers market on the Spring Street lot and you're going to take away half the spaces where people park to go shopping at that you're just adding to the pressure so I asked you to consider that the beautification is a worthy project but I think it needs to be confined to its current footprint and then you can think about ways maybe you can beautify a little bit to that space it may not be the most beautiful but is essential for our downtown businesses thank you thank you for your comment either I'm going to ask that at this point we continue on the theme of the parking Sharon this is on Sharon Povinelli 45 oh no uh 493 Montague road um at first I'd like to say I have the most respect for my fellow downtown business owners um it's hard out there I'd just like to throw that out we all have our own unique set of challenges and complexities um but I we obviously intersect around people and parking and how that translates into a lasting business and a vibrant downtown having said that as in a butter to the north common I would like to voice my support for the decrease and or relocation of the Main Street lot this is the epicenter of the downtown and should be allowed to be imagined as a safe space that attracts families visitors and students to enjoy the downtown and showcase what we as a community have to offer let's hide the parking and promote the parks thank you okay additional comment Carol please hello I'm Carol Johnson I'm the executive director of the Amherst Cinema and I'm here to make a couple of points um one is and we already have a very vibrant artistic community in our midst and that is with with uh some humility the Amherst Cinema we screen over 275 programs a year that's 5,000 different screenings in more than 25 languages and we attract people from all over I'm going to pass around the map which has red dots that represent our members we have over 6,700 members who come from all over Massachusetts thank you um parking is the number one concern of the Amherst Cinema and of our patrons so my main request for to you is as you're thinking about what to propose going forward please keep the vision that we've got something already that we should value and it depends upon parking and it one parking space taken away actually affects maybe three programs a day because people come for two or three hours and if that parking space is removed then it's um that parking space times three that's not available to people um just one final point and that is we attract about 110,000 people a year to Amherst Cinema that's 2,000 people a week that's uh it's a lot of people who come downtown and spend their dollars and want to park so as you're thinking about what to do going forward please think about the long term and what what we already have and how we can preserve what we do have thank you for your comments additional comments on parking let's go way back here um Leslie Eric I my my parents live in Amherst I no longer but we have a business a family business at 37 South Pleasant Street is the mic on or yeah okay okay um I I have a couple comments one is that the to remove parking spaces from the parking lot in the center of town seems like an outlandish idea if you have not already put more parking spaces in so so I would hope that if if you decide to go forward with these plans that you would absolutely add before you subtract because to take parking spaces away is extremely frustrating um we pay for um the downtown parking permits for our employees and uh I guess there's no limit on the downtown parking permits for people who live and work in the center of town because even though we pay for those uh every year uh our employees uh including me we end up having to park at meter spaces anyway because there aren't enough spaces so like to remove more of those in the center of town seems foolish um and also there already is a parking garage behind Judy's um and I remember when it was built and I remember that the intention was to have it be multi-storied and I wonder if anybody knows why that didn't happen um please don't go there okay well that's just like a half finished idea that like now didn't work out and I just feel like there might be other half finished ideas that aren't gonna work out and are gonna you know like maybe don't take stuff away until you have like a real clear plan and and something else there to replace the things that you're trying to take away and also um are they gonna cut down the nice big old beautiful trees on the north common in order to reclaim that green space because by I would strongly object to cutting those trees down those are those are sort of like the nicest part of that area and you know if you're going to build something new I mean can you guarantee that it's going to be maintained since the things that are there now are not being maintained what would be the difference you know who's going to be in charge of maintaining new structures new buildings new ban shells um is there no is it the the parking garage that already was started that's not something that can ever be uh expanded we're not going to comment at this time okay that's because that's our rule with public comment okay okay well just you know I would hope that you would add before you begin subtracting thank you thank you for your comment the gentleman back here please state your name and your address it's uh Jeremy Austin and 75 northeast street um I just wanted to comment on the parking I am all in favor of I have a business at 31 South Pleasant Street right on the common um and uh have looked at the north common for quite a long time and it's uh it's decrepit state but anyway uh I think we're getting to an argument where uh you know might have you might have had in north Hampton 30 years ago you know of course we you know uh how are we going to survive with you know a parking lot and everybody using a parking lot well everybody uses the parking lot there it's it's a place where you can always find parking and it frees up more of the street parking um if we are to put uh parking in the cbs lot the natural spot in town it's actually very close uh to the theater I would add hundreds of spots and the 15 or so spots that will be lost on the north common would be inconsequential which is a decent walk from there to the cinema and it's not appreciably further behind the Jones Library straight shot uh the other thing about it is that if we were having this argument and there was no parking there it would be absolutely absurd there's no way we could ever get it passed where somebody said let's dig up a part of the common but put 15 spots on it I mean I why are we having the conversation that just would not happen so let's reverse the past and and do the right thing and put grass there and make it a beautiful place and I will take all day long a beautiful town center with lots of programming on the common and I'll take the 25 people who want to come through this town and are excited to be in this town to the one person who's bitter about not finding a parking place when they drive through thank you for your comment Vince please come forward that's all connor summer street um yeah so we did a parking garage x number of years ago net gain of 30 to 40 spaces for six million dollars hopefully uh a new garage will do a little better on the per space thing um the shell on the on the middle common this is south common is really an emmer's college um if you really want to make it functional you're going to have to end parking enforcement at six o'clock if you're going to have programs at night um and with regard to the the parking permit situation the council can find out for itself I could make a public records request but my my belief is that the last time I looked there were somewhere between two and a half to three times as many permits that were granted as there are permit spaces and of course the situation with creating five-story buildings with no parking spaces as is about to happen on spring street like literally not a single parking space not even an hp space on on the property or a zip car space um is it may work during the the the weekdays but on the weekends when those um when those spaces are open to everybody and people park their cars you are inviting you have invited a serious problem the only good thing about those buildings is they're basically luxury apartments that are occupied by most people if you can drive by during the summer and during the winter term for seven months of the year so you may luck out but my concern when i'm listening to all this and seeing all these proposals is that i ran for school committee starting twice starting more than 10 years ago who's and my first priority was to deal with uh renovating our schools and if i'm a citizen who's paying really enormous taxes and i live in an apartment so my taxes aren't that enormous or my share of the rent that goes to taxes aren't that enormous but if i'm listening to and looking at all this discussion and i have kids in schools and i'm wondering when the town says well you can't build a new school to have an override or until we get state funding and yet all our nineties projects are out of the capital budget now there is money available we could have renovated the school or rebuilt or replaced at least one of our elementary schools and we haven't done it and quite frankly i think that that's going to be a problem for these proposals to fund things when we're also doing all of this thank you for your comment are there any other public comments regarding the presentation yes i'm sorry could you just ask people remind people to please sign in thank you make sure that you have signed in back there be if particularly or up here particularly if you have been a public speaker um please come forward claudia posman executive director of the amherst area chamber and also resident 47 emily lane so as representative of the of the chamber i submit the following remarks um our 2020 vision was unveiled this week and it included activation of downtown supporting the survival of businesses downtown creating experiences and playing a larger role in our creative and culture economy all contributing and supporting to this destination amherst that was described in detail firstly the performing art shell proposal made by the bid offers a private option to have a public space made available and it comes at a time when our small businesses downtown and similarly across the country are facing their toughest challenges the diversion to online shopping coupled with the loss of handing down business from generation to get to generation we start we need to get creative and this is not news to anyone but this is an opportunity to reimagine our downtown we know that our rising generation responds to experiences created we need to be innovative while holding true to an old tradition of gathering in our common space for all in addition the creative the creative culture economy represents 2.3 billion impact dollar impact on our state according to the mass cultural council culture embraces everyone as shallony pointed out it enriches community drives growth and opportunity and empowers a new creative generation and based on all the diverse groups mentioned in Gabrielle's comments it would be open for all and there are even studies who suggest that those who experience arts and culture steadily are healthier and live longer so imagine a tanglewood style concert to student performances from jazz to poetry film to concerts and like she says mommy to be to local to local school venues this is the only way we can activate our downtown or together in combination with these efforts to to create destination amourst the parking garage proposal made by the bid offers again a private public option made available at a time we were at peak crisis with a number of capital improvements needing to be made and it could alleviate some of that pressure though the nelson night nigard parking studies demonstrate that we are nearly at capacity we hear from our downtown business owners when are you going to fix downtown parking and i've heard from individuals from across the region when are you going to address downtown parking so i can come back downtown and i've heard it from residents alike who work elsewhere and don't come downtown to eat so this is this is lost revenue and a partial answer to the why of empty storefronts both the amour cinema and jones library may have plans for expansion the proposed site of the parking garage would directly support any vision for that for both of these two amourst cultural beacons alone in addition there's an increase of new development already we saw the 12 increase that jeff mentioned so more reasons to support a parking garage proposed by the downtown bid okay i'm just going to close up and just in closing with the parking garage option and a performing art shell a north common rehab is in perfect alignment with these upgrades and again as a compelling fit to the total project and and in completing the vision for amourst as a destination we have maturing and aging trees little space to truly gather and welcome over 500 000 guests who come to our museums alone so it may seem a hard balance when looking at each proposal but looking at the big picture these are wins for downtown amourst businesses and will serve as a true economic driver for the future thank you for your time thank you for your comments tony tony merullus to break court 01002 i'm a member of the bid board and i just wanted to make four quick points as you think about these projects first parking and the activation or the loss of parking on the north common one thing to note the busiest restaurant night of the year happens to be mary maple year in and year out that is the time that we take parking away from the north common we activate that that space it is not to say necessarily that you know the proposal in front of you takes away some of the parking space but activating that streetscape has actually been very beneficial to the town additionally i'm thinking about the ban shell on the common activation of the common and regular programming on the common does not necessarily preclude additional programming in kendrick park or in suites of park as you might know suites of park twice a year has the amourst community band that plays there kendrick park has been the site of at least one concert and other art events and with a playground there that would be active as well so as we think about our green space in town we're blessed to have four spaces that can be used and when they're used and used vitally it brings me to my fourth point so i'm going to skip my third one for sec the quick trips into while quick trips into town are difficult one of the thing that the one of the things that the business community has always struggled with is stickiness we lose people very quickly people come to their destination and they go one of the things that's made places like north hampton successful over the years is that ability to lounge and to be in town for a while to do some window shopping we will encourage that by activating our spaces so it's just one thing to think about as we look at all of these these plans and how they work well together and then finally to councillor hanneke's question about the structures on the common and who owns them there is precedent and i just wanted to point this out it's not to say that this would be how the comp the ban shell would work but there is precedent for other structures on the town common that were owned by other entities so when i was executive director of the chamber we owned the electricity on the common we gave that to the town because we we didn't have the money to upgrade what the town did do under i'm going to give kilford mooring a big shout out there because he did a great job with that but we own that we own that electricity we rented out that electricity for a nominal fee just so that we pay the bills on it on a regular basis i mean i think that you know whoever does run that that ban shell will need to have some revenue only to for the maintenance of and that that's one thing the the other piece to remember is that there was that additional info shack that was on the common for many many years and and it served as our visitor information center if you will before it was taken down because it was in disrepair but there so you know some of your thoughts about having a fund to maintain that will be certainly important but there is precedent for structures to be owned and to work cooperatively with the town thank you yeah thank you for your comments are there any other comment at this time please come forward my name is bob lowery i live at 1739 south east street and i have a business next to the north end of the common and um my experience uh well it's it's a restaurant bueno isano which was mentioned thank you and i and i appreciate your chiming in there um and uh however in unintuitive this may seem i think that um i agree with the idea that uh activating the space um quote unquote would probably bring additional business um to our restaurant um my my perception it's only that but is that the parking is is difficult at um peak times uh only i drive in and out of town every day park um not as much in the evening i have to say but uh my perception uh at least in the daytime and uh most of the time is that we're really talking about friday nights thursday nights maybe you know saturdays um in the evenings when everybody wants to be out for dinner or something like that and i and i uh i just think that's interesting is that we i cannot i can find a space anytime except for peak times um and the you know congress does stuff with bills and you put stuff in there and you get what you want maybe um i i like the idea that uh that was you know brought up that if if we were able to add a significant place for parking i think that would alleviate some of the pressure in the surrounding areas um and that if that could be um if that could be put into place uh maybe not you know or at least uh in the budget and going to happen then i think that uh this idea of um eliminating a few spaces downtown right where we are would be much more palatable um and more well received and i think that perceived parking is uh um just as much an issue as actual parking and i think if there were an additional large space um that went together with this other proposal to activate the common area i i would i would like to see that so thank you thank you for your comment so anybody else who would like to speak to the issue of the proposed set of plans that we have been introduced to tonight um then i'm going to turn back to the council but quickly say we have yet i have yet and with you i will work on this to figure out how to couple and decouple this so that we look at the issues we need to look at and then also look at the whole and i'll spend some time with the town manager on that and also welcome the council's comments on how they would like us to consider that um this package and yet the individual pieces of it are there any other comments from the council at this time elissa two quick things toward the future presentations whenever they come up because you'll be getting lots of individual questions from people etc so i believe there was a mention and so that can just be followed up on when we were discussing the ban shell that there's currently less usage of the common than in the past and if that's true then what is it that we're missing is there are fewer kid events because there are fewer kids in town are there fewer events than there used to be with bans but now bans want electricity i mean if if we're going to make a statement like that i'd like to know what that represents and if it's made purely on reservations etc and then the other thing is that just a whole like uh question about parking which is that yes someday i'm sure we'll be talking about the six o'clock or eight o'clock enforcement again but i would like us to reevaluate what it is that makes it special that when people want to go to downtown town hall during the day or they want to go to the common for a free event on a Saturday or the farmers market they have to pay to park but after six o'clock hey if you want to patronize the business it's free i have no understanding of why the u.s thinks this is a sensible way to manage things there are businesses that are only open until five p.m you have to pay to park to go see them there is no such thing as free parking for them so i would just hope that when we have those kinds of conversations we're thinking about what kinds of businesses we're trying to reinforce some have their own parking lots like Hastings others do not and to try maybe that's a regional thing within our little town but to be thinking about what is it that makes it great to charge people to park during the day but not at night okay are there any other comments from counselors at this time Dorothy well i would just suggest a common sense thing that we try to do an immediate zoning change and get rid of this idea that we don't that people can build apartments and don't need to provide parking for their tenants because we have a bus system i mean that has helped exacerbate the parking system in town and i you know i just think it's a common sense thing since we're talking about common sense thank you any other comments at this time shall we Lynn i'm not clear what what what are the next steps for with respect to this are we waiting for more information and then i mean i think it would be helpful for everyone involved to know you know yeah what are the next steps i think that the best thing that i can answer at this time is to come back with you with a way to lay that out because there are different pieces that we have to bring forward for example rezoning of the lot behind CVS and that's a separate issue so that's part of the couple and decouple and put it into some kind of timeline i don't have a magic answer for you okay just to add to that conversation i mean i don't expect an answer on this um thinking about the council's role for the performing arts venue is to authorize the use of the public way um i think in my mind there's a question of which comes first because i think to some extent there might be some reticence on the council to authorize the use of a public way for say a performing arts venue that is not fully funded or that we haven't seen a design for the other side of it is i know that if i was being asked to donate money to a performing arts venue and i was told that it would all be dependent on a council that i may or may not know authorizing use of the property i may be hesitant to vote and so i think there needs to be some conversation that if we're relying on private fundraising for any of these um that in the same way that we sort of pre-authorize the town manager to act um on the community choice aggregation stuff so that we could have good faith with our partners we may want to consider something similar in that um so that we can we show up front we're ready to do this if you can raise the money and as opposed to waiting to doing at the back end okay all right steve yeah so i see the proposed parking concentration the same way i see the water tanks up on the high parts of amherst that the reasons that the water tanks are there is to provide municipal water in certain parts of amherst so that development can happen more sensibly so that's how i see the proposal for the multi-story garage behind cbs is so that we can have other sensible development frankly without parking um more walkable communities so that's why i am in generally in support of this sort of back you know back lot i mean it's front lot if you live on north pleasant that's to be discussed but um back lot at least to whichever pleasant whichever pleasant that is so it's a municipal resource it's a concentration of a resource to enable the nearby entities to not provide parking okay are there additional comments from counselors at this time seeing none that i'm going to suggest we take a break even though i had not intended to do that late 30 and when we come back we will take up action item seven b and maybe even c before we move on to the board of license commissions please make the break no more than about five minutes if possible thank you um as some of you may know that on january 6th we had a little connection problem for the second half of the meeting and amherst media worked very hard and did restore the tape but it took a little while so we're trying to make sure we're still connected all right jeff why don't you come forward since we're going to do bylaws and this is our opportunity to you know say whatever else we might want to say to you i did not bring props for this if you did it would have been reams of paper at this point and lawn mowers plastic bags etc waiting for two people but okay so as i mentioned let's get through the bylaw stuff and then we'll spend just a little bit of time um saying whatever we might like to say to jeff about his future but um meantime uh i i just love dangling it out there you know um we've had a number of conversations about the general bylaws and the approach we're proposing to use tonight in fact we're planning to use tonight is instead of sitting here and debating each of the bylaws that people have asked for changes to is to in fact refer it to go well and this would allow us to meet our timeline of replace and repeal or repeal and replace and also meet our timeline of dissolving the bylaw review committee we need to do this because just leaving town um there you go okay um so in the process there are a couple of motions in fact there are four motions specifically about the bylaws and then i also just want to um our four or five motions i think actually six motions thank you uh but i also want to point out that there are other items that were already being referred and that this those are already automatically referred this is we need to have a motion on those two that's okay got it all right so let's just begin with the first motion is to repeal and replace the general bylaws with the document recommended general bylaws of the town of amherst dated 1206 19 is there a motion so moved is there a second conversation discussion questions dorthy it wasn't you okay dharsi i'm sorry how how would this motion affect the the later motions that are um referring different sections to the gol committee so what this first motion allows us to do is to take the recommendations as made by the committee accept those so that we have in place an ongoing set of general bylaws with the changes that they recommended okay and at the same time refer to gol the four particular areas of the bylaws that that counselors have asked that there be changes on and in addition the additional pieces that have been asked already to be automatically referred so all it what it does is it gives us a set of general bylaws that have been in fact revised but still leaves open for future revision in the near future possibly why don't we do it with the exception of those sections because you need the bylaw if there is a bylaw in there you need it in there otherwise you would remove the bylaw and completely and i don't think you want to do that so in other words you would remove the plastic bylaw completely i don't think you want to do that i also have my hand up just i want to clarify lin um in terms of i've got a couple on others but it seems to me one could leave the existing wording as is in the new revised um rather than leave it blank and remove it all together i mean that is an option i mean it might not be an option that we want to consider you know that we're gonna that that some wording was cleaned up and it reads cleaner and we are but there's a placeholder so i as i understood Darcy had given us a rewrite for the the single use plastics as an amendment to the revisions that have been made so it's just not clear to me that we have to literally delete it and be silent on it as opposed to keep the unrevised version of it mean did you while we don't have to the motion language could get very complicated very quickly because the new bylaws have a different numbering system than the old bylaws and they did not track over accurately so to make a motion to replace all but certain ones and then keep other ones from that and then add in a new number it would get very complicated that doesn't mean it's not possible but it would probably take us lots of minutes tonight to figure out how to actually word that um but the from my point of view the benefit of this and i have i have one of the the requested changes that is being affected by this in fact it's going into effect if we do this and i want it to be repealed so i'm it is actually almost opposite what you guys are talking about with some of yours um is that we as counselors if we do it this way we have some counselors that have identified certain things that we're not happy with in a huge rewrite of it and are saying let's do the huge rewrite but let's use our committee process that we have in place to really delve deeply into those portions of that rewrite that we still have concerns about without holding up the adoption of pretty much everything um and to and that to me makes logical sense so you know i you know mine was the noise bylaw where i don't like the fact that the bylaw review committee added in new restrictions to noise bylaws and new places you can violate it um this this plan tonight would adopt that new restriction before the council has really had a good discussion on whether that's wise or not and would move that initial first discussion into a committee which kind of follows what any other bylaw revision that we do from now on that's how it would happen um going to a committee having that discussion coming back with a recommendation with appropriate wording in my motions and all of that and so this is kind of trying to follow that process Darcy it seems to me that it wouldn't take us that long to um um come up with a recommendation from the gel on the four different um sections that are that have requests for changes and i don't really understand why we would need to um replace the bylaw pending that it makes you know it's similar to our issue around uh updating the master plan are you know are we going to vote to adopt the master plan even though we know it has many many issues that need to be updated well we we are not going to do that um we're we're waiting for the update so i just don't understand why we wouldn't do that here why we wouldn't just wait for a month or six weeks or whatever to replace the bylaw pending just updating making whatever changes that we're going to make as a result of these motions these other motions with regard to elissa issues so two things one is in regards to that i guess i just repeat what mandy joe said which is that this is the cleaner way to do it i understand the words you're saying about the master plan but if you accept a new bylaw and then you send the sections off to gol you want done then they fix them as quickly as they can and get them back to us and in the meantime you have a clean bylaw instead of this old messy bylaw along those lines though i believe i heard in your introduction and maybe i didn't hear it correctly you said something about automatic referral nothing in this isn't maybe so we're missing a motion from last time we talked about this on today's motion sheet we had a motion that said motion didn't mention that we were going to have all these other things of course but the motion said to refer the document bylaws identified for future consideration to gol that doesn't seem to have made today's motion it's the third motion on the list that includes adding the condo and cooperative blah blah blah the one with the bullet points it's it combined motions instead of oh was that motion then intended to cover all these things because we seem to have some separate motions and some combined emotions so i'm very confused by that evan so i certainly have some comments on some of the other motions and some questions about what gols purposes in this but i think before we branch off into that it makes sense for us to deal with the motion that's on the table and then talk about these motions separately i don't think we ever put the motion on the table we did okay who was the second okay all right could we have the motion sheet up here so that we can see them thank you okay so the motion on the table is to repeal and replace the general bylaws with the document recommended general bylaws of the town of amherst dated 12-06-19 further comment kathy okay i i just want to um respond to the notion that this is cleaner um if these if i weren't wearing a federal legislator hat and someone gave me major changes into multiple sections of the medicare law and said don't worry i've taken some language out and i've added some language in just accept all the changes now and we can come back and look at each of those later i would be really worried um so i i don't think i think it's easier for the reasons mandy said because the previous language had a different wording you know it had a different style so um i think um my sense and i actually am going to agree with the one on noise i would just take the sentence out so i think we're trying to avoid a long discussion now which i appreciate that but we flagged four things so is there some certainty that each of those four things will be reported back sooner rather than later because in one case we're eliminating a bylaw altogether and another we're adding words we've taken words out of one and we've taken words out of another so if the concerns are shared by other counselors i just would want rapid action rather than leave a bylaw in place in the town that's missing some things that we might want or added some things we might not want because normally you'd be voting on each of the bylaws i mean that's how they were all enacted law by law by law that's it's a set of laws so i i just don't you know how do we have assurance that this happens when we pass the other motions we can put dates certain on them voting on this motion first suppose the other motions don't pass okay we can hold this motion in advance and go on to the others that's what i'm not liking it's on the table with somebody like withdraw the motion i'm just saying that okay it's uh i i got it kathy okay would you withdraw the motion so it wasn't my motion to withdraw i only seconded it but if we don't do the repeal and replace first then the motions that follow don't actually make sense because they are referring then to the current bylaws not the revised one so it really has to go repeal and replace first thank you i i kept thinking to myself there's got to be a reason we have to do this one first is there any further discussion darsie i just would like to ask the question what's the urgency why do we need to do this we have a charter requirement that within one year of appointing the bylaw review committee which was at the end of january 2019 that we adopt the revised bylaws we are at the end of january 2020 i'd like to talk about another urgency there are many councilors working on potential bylaw revisions to bylaws being proposed but also additions to bylaws with whole new groups of bylaws to propose and without a rescindent replace in place now those all that work is on hold because you're not going to put them into an old set of bylaws that then needs to modify this whole document and so there's been councilors waiting for this rescindent replace to happen so that they can propose new bylaws to be enacted by this council and for discussion and so if we do not do that and we hold it off till all these potential issues are discussed at and figured out by gol and brought back and that's decision that's another two three months of our three year term that's already one year plus two months gone that we cannot really actually deal with legislative matters that councilors want to bring to this council is there any further discussion then i'm going to call the question all those in favor of the motion to repeal and replace the general bylaws with the document recommended general bylaws of the town of amber stated 12 dash 06 dash 19 please raise your hand and say aye opposed abstain so it's three zero i'm sorry 11 0 2 okay and the motion passes the second motion is to dissolve the bylaw review committee because now that we have taking their recommendations they are finished with their job is there a motion george i move to dissolve the bylaw review committee is there a second second okay is there any further discussion all those in faith i'm going to call the question all those in favor of dissolving the bylaw review committee please raise your hand and say aye opposed abstain first of all that motion passed 13 0 0 and i do want to take the opportunity to publicly thank bob ritchie and also bernie kubiak who not only served us for this year but for a about nine or ten months prior to that and then in addition to that the three counselors who worked on this and they are pat evan and alissa the whole time that the committee was operating and to jeff for being an enormous clerk of the works yes ten hardgraves who is on the original bylaw thank you and k moran who is also and k moran is also yes she left town she couldn't stand it anymore and now jeff is leaving town she's enjoying portland though no just working elsewhere not leaving town okay so now in keeping with the confidence that other counselors have placed in us let's quickly move through the rest of these and let me know if there are amendments because you want to put dates certain on or maybe you want to split a motion okay so the first one is to add condominium and cooperative conversion a general bylaw recommended for deletion to the document bylaws identified for future consideration last edited 12-05-19 and proposed general bylaw 3.34 regulation of signs to the document bylaw identification for for future consideration last edited 12-05-19 and to refer the document to the town council governance organization and legislation committee to report a recommended timeline for development developing a work plan to the town council on march 9th 2020 is there a motion is there a second second is there a discussion um yes george gl meets twice before that so i guess we can meet this request um could somebody just enlighten me as to why and i'm sure there's a very good and simple reason why there is a date certain this march 9th elissa since i wrote that yes i can tell you because it we don't we want people to know that we are going to be developing a plan of what to work on so march 9th your plan could be aside from if there's a separate conversation about the condominium part but in regards to the sign bylaw and the other items that were all that already are on that list the idea was we knew you couldn't do it and this was when we thought we might do it at the last meeting we knew you probably couldn't get it done in february and the way that 30 days and 45 days and the usual periods that we tried to you know compare use our usual precedence and it came out to march for the next meeting and that idea being then that that's the plan at that point that's not you have them all written although some people might have specific ones they weren't written by then but there that's the plan of okay that means sign we're going to do this in time period we're going to do the others in this time period it's as we've done with many other town council reports it's your report out on your plan not that you've necessarily accomplished everything unless you get a motion tonight that tells you a thing has to be done by then okay any further questions on this garcy so this list of um uh bylaws identified for future consideration is different from other bylaws that we're going to be considering yes these were the ones that were forwarded by the committee it was in our original packet when we first started looking at this but we've added to it we've added the additional ones that we are referring directly but this was a list provided that recommended that we refer these to gol okay and they're going to be treated separately from other things that are being right because the other things were added as a separate item okay i'm sorry ever so i just i think elissa clarified it but i want to just make sure i know what i'm voting on so this is to report a recommended timeline for developing a work plan for the council so you kept saying you're reporting your plan on march 9th but this sounds like it's reporting a timeline to develop a plan so we would say we so the report could literally be on march 9th our timeline is to have a plan to you by june 6th and that would comply because it's a timeline for developing a work plan i'm what what's the product that we're looking for from this elissa my standpoint it was maximum flexibility because i thought there might be ones that the council said but we really need you to work on this one first and we would give that direction to gol and therefore they would come up with we're going to work on sign we're going to work on condos in february and march but we're not going to be able to start looking at the signed by-law until sometime in june so our timeline for that looks about like this so it both tried to address specific ones and then didn't lose sight of any of them but some of them probably going to get pushed kind of far out thank you any further questions okay then i'm going to call the question the motion is up there and in this case it specifically deals with the by-law is identified for future consideration late last edited 12-0519 are there any other questions if not call the question all those in favor please raise your hand and say aye opposed abstain 13-0-0 okay now we're going to move on to the ones that are specific to ones that individual counselors have added during our discussion the first one is to refer section in fact kathy i'm just going to ask you to read it i'll read it maybe i i'll add a word or two of explanation it's so section 3.4 is the responsible employer for public construction projects that's what it is in the current by-law and so this is referring it to gol to make a recommendation whether the wording that has been deleted from the existing bylaw in three instances should be lab added back to avoid the risk of weakening the bylaw specifically should the following be added back the requirement that bidders quote agree in writing that they shall comply to the reference labor laws number two the requirement that contractors slash subcontract shall quote certify under oath and in writing on a weekly basis that they're in compliance with such obligations end quote and the third is a penalty of liquid dated damages payable to the town amount of five percent of the dollar value of the contract end quote that was one of the possible actions if someone was out of compliance the reason i let's start with the motion please okay so the motions on the floor and has been seconded now kathy speak to the motion okay the um when i went back and compared the revision to the existing these were words that were taken out that i think could potentially weaken it because there are a couple different points where the contractors had to attest in writing that they were going to comply and it gave you leverage to see and and we have one additional penalty so i asked a couple people um whether there'd been any discussion on did this weaken our ability to control or hold people accountable was there a discussion and this came from legal counsel this didn't come directly out of the committee so my hope is that go well would look closely at this because these words are not in the massachusetts general law the ones i've referenced most of the others it was simplified to say take a look at the law and this is what they're supposed to do so these are wording that i'm seeing many towns put in their responsible employer this do it in writing so that you know that they they've acknowledged that they have these obligations so i'd like the consideration of at least for the time being if that should be put back in in the whatever places they best fit and i don't know about the penalty but it we had we had four possible penalties under the current file and we're down to three for not being in compliance so there wasn't any rationale given on why delete the fourth that there's a good one fine but that's why i think this should be referred okay are there any questions at this time remember we're not getting into a debate about this it's merely a referral Evan so i guess i'm curious uh as a member of gol and a now former member of the viola review committee with the expectation of gols for this and the reason i ask that is because so the in if my memory is correct and i am gonna ask alissa or pat or jeff to correct me if my memory is incorrect was that the revision to the responsible employer for public construction project bylaw came from our town attorney we sent them and they sent back fairly detailed edits and that's how we have what we have here if went to gol i don't think that i i don't believe that anyone on gol has the personal content knowledge to be able to evaluate this statement and so to me gol would just say oh well we don't really know we have to get town attorney opinion but this came from town attorney and so i'm curious what the expectation that gol will do is given that we probably don't have the ability to really assess these questions without legal counsel who is the one who recommended these changes jeff do you have anything to say to this particular issue i would just agree with evan that these recommendations came from the town attorney and with detailed revisions to this and several other bylaws and so yes i think that you know the bylaw review committee was under the auspices of the of the town attorney so we felt that that was important to incorporate so what i'm hearing from kathy just let me clarify this is that in comparing our bylaw to other towns she feels that these pieces have been taken out of our bylaw but exist in other towns and do not appear in mass general law and i think kathy what you're looking for is why would we eliminate these or should we not and it may it may require gol to go back and have an additional conversation and come back with with town attorney and understand why they would have taken them out right and my recollection was the general answer was that the state law was sufficient to cover the town in case there was issues with the public contract but i think that if the council feels that they need more of an explanation or whether or not adding this back in would present any legal problems and that's you know more of a policy consideration versus a legal consideration i think that that's a legitimate question pat yes as a member of the bylaw review committee and also a counselor working on wage theft bylaw i initially accepted that explanation that we didn't need it but after consultation with lisa clausen from the carpenters union and rosebook binder from pioneer valley workers center and reviewing bylaws from summerville cambridge brookland several several towns this language was there and what lisa clausen said is what we needed there because it gives strength um to even if it is listed in the mass general law and i've come to the agreement with that position and i would like to see this come back okay so we're again we're not going to get into the debate i think what the petitioner in this case is kathy is asking for is greater understanding or perhaps the restoration of these if they feel it's strengthened and those kinds of debates exact or exactly what will happen in g ol is there any further discussion okay all those in favor of the motion yes raise your hand and say i i i opposed abstain 13-0-0 moving on to the next one um darsie why don't you read this one uh to refer section 3.28 of the general bylaw of the single-use plastic bag prohibition and the document titled single-use plastic bag bylaw d3 etc to the governance organization and legislation committee to make a recommendation on changes to the bylaw with a report back to the town council on blank date let's put march ninth in there all right um is there a second second any further discussion yes darsie i just wanted to mention that i that the document titled single-use plastic bag bylaw d3 is an amended version of the of the of the bylaw it's different from the one that was it in the packet in the last meeting and i actually in response to what jeff had said about some of the language being out of date i took that out and and now the purpose is just one sentence and that one sentence is sort of the crux of why i'm asking to keep the definitions definitions in because the purpose really underlines that the primary purpose of the bylaw is to reduce the negative effects of single-use plastic bags on the environment reduce contamination of plastic bags and residential recycling strains and most importantly to encourage consumers to bring reusable bags while shopping eliminating the environmental impacts of any single-use bags so that really puts that one sentence in the purpose and gives a different context to the definition this is being referred with all of those documents to go out okay by having it in here it's referred okay is there any further discussion all those in favor raise your hand and say aye opposed abstain 13-0-0 okay the next one uh mandi joe to refer to the governance organization and legislation committee section 3.2 for unlawful noise of the general bylaws to make a recommendation on whether to remove lawnmowers leafblowers snowblowers and other similar mechanical devices to the items included as quote loud disturbing injurious or unnecessary noise and quote with a report back to the town council on march 9th 2020 second second okay here's this motion has been made in a second is there further discussion seeing none all those in favor raise your hand and say aye aye opposed abstain okay thank you now jeff thanks for all your great work we know you're only i'm sorry do we have one more which one is one oh wait a minute it's not an rc okay so jeff we know you're only going to town away and we know you're going to still live in amherst or at least we think you are for now thank you for all your work with the town over the last four years thank you we wish you well in your future um growth opportunity because it certainly is that one and um we look forward to hearing about your success thank you very much it's been a pleasure and an honor to work with you thank you that was against our bylaws but that's okay i mean our rules are procedure but it's okay if we want to break them we will the audience can't but we can clap all right uh mr slaughter dr slaughter assistant coach slaughter finance director slaughter good evening hi so now we're going back to um six a and asked of specifically if there are any highlights he would make like to make first i realized so yeah we're because i shoveled the agenda so that we could put you i had actually put c seven c before you oh do you need to do seven c first well there's another person in the audience waiting and he's been here since the beginning do you mind i'm sorry that's all right thank you okay we're gonna do seven c and let me just frame seven c as oh boy um the issue of linkin avenue has been before the council in the past in fact five years ago at which point there were numerous doctor documents produced by the town and by the council i mean by this select board at the time and uh there were um various recommended changes made at that time however it's five years later and the residents of the linkin avenue have come forward again i think it's a different group probably and they have placed a petition before the town uh that deals with further changes regarding parking and the public way and the only thing tonight is to um this was originally on an agenda as if we were going to go ahead with the hearing and there was some objection to that and so before i schedule a hearing um i was looking to the council regarding that issue um and so there is a motion which is to schedule a public hearing regarding changes to the public way on linkin avenue on a date to be determined by the council president and i just before we go on to discuss it is there a second okay now discussion elissa so as i said at the previous meeting the problem here is that what one does is one puts in a public hearing notice for a particular plan one does not put in a public hearing notice for do something different on linkin so once we decide what the plan is that we put up for a public hearing then we publish the notice for the public hearing and then we have the public hearing normally that works in as you saw with the materials provided from 15 is that staff and as staff has indicated in this case staff has been working on putting together different parts of the puzzle and would be presenting something to us and we would then unlike the time in 2015 we would decide if that was what we were putting or if we wanted to add something to it or maybe make the area larger maybe make the area smaller um giving ourselves flexibility obviously because it's always a pain to schedule public hearings but we don't know what we're scheduling the public hearing for yet okay so mr balkerman is the staff prepared to come forward with a plan recommended plan yes okay and that's what i'm trying to get across once we see that plan that's when we decide if we're going to have a public hearing at all okay Evan so i want to second that and i plan to vote against this motion and the reason for that is when i opened up my packet to see what we are authorizing a public hearing about i found some old plans from 2015 i found a letter written to the council with no attribution no date i don't know who it came from it quoted or it didn't quote but it cited staff opinion in the letter but i didn't have anything from staff and i can't possibly imagine voting to authorize a public hearing unless i have in front of me a proposal of what that is that's updated with maps and input from staff so that i know whether or not i feel like this is something we should move forward on but to schedule public hearing on the plan that apparently exists that we haven't seen i'm not going to vote for that so the idea would be that at our next meeting we would receive the plan so if i may so the genesis of this is came from the neighbors neighbors came and said we would like to make a change and they've talked with the staff and i if you recall back in december we presented the idea to the council and the council didn't have a process in place and said we should think this through and that's where we are today um so the the proposal is from the neighbors and you know the staff would have its own recommendation on this so it depends which one you want to have advertised the one that the neighbors asked the council to consider or the one that you that the staff is going to be recommending evan so perhaps it would be useful to get a presentation of both and then the council could have a discussion about which one we want to move forward with and authorize a public hearing for mandate job so i i was going to say something similar but um mine went to a committee you know we got some notice today that there are public hearings for public ways coming because staff has a plan and the president has said yes we're going to put that on as a public hearing as required on the agenda because the president has the agenda setting authority and so i think where we've gotten stuck is when the proposal comes from the residents who says it's ready for the public hearing the council as a whole or the president and i i think i tend to just still go towards the president does but when you've got competing potential potentially competing plans and it sounds like there may be or at least staff may have a recommendation different from what the residents desire i i don't know though because i haven't seen it um my thoughts are maybe that needs to head to a committee for a recommendation from a committee on if a public hearing is held this is what the committee recommends the plan the hearing be held on or something i again i don't know but yeah and this is well it may not be new just people who were on the select board it's new to the council poll so you could treat this like a town meeting warrant article where there's a request to change the parking on link and av that would include something like this and you make it broad enough in your public hearing notice that it could encompass a any decision that the council would want to make and you can narrow that down or do whatever you want with it so that's one way to meet the public hearing notice requirement in terms of moving forward steve i guess i see this more like or more like a public planning board public hearing where the only people that can request a public hearing and basically the are the major parties are the owners of the land so the town is the owner of the land it should be the town's proposal that we're considering and at a public hearing for planning board butters and others can present alternate plans but they it's not the alternate plans that we should be considering it should be the owner of the lands proposals that we're considering so to me this is analogous to me proposing a project for my neighbor's land and asking for there to be a public hearing on that okay additional comment george i guess i'm still struggling with this um we have a proposal it seems from the town and um we want to see that before we decide whether we want a public hearing on that proposal is that correct i think the idea was that we would see both what the town is recommending and also what the neighbors are asking before we decide whether we want to set a date for a public hearing that correct is one of the one of the options on the table and i'm having trouble with that because it seems that that is the whole purpose of a public hearing is to have these plans presented for us to consider and i agree that we need to see these before the public hearing but to wait until we have all these materials to decide whether we want to have a public hearing or not i have trouble understanding that um according to the bylaw public hearing is required for these sorts of requests so um eventually there has to be a public hearing of some kind and my understanding was that um if you've got a proposal that's ready to be presented um it's presented at the public hearing and then we listen and then we decide we can do anything we want with it we could just ignore it we could send it to a committee we could we could you know fix it on the spot or we could accept it as it is or whatever but it seems the first and most important step is to actually have the public hearing to have the town and perhaps the the residents make their case and then we decide what we want to do next but now it sounds like we're going to wait until all these materials are assembled and sent to us and then we'll meet again in two weeks and decide whether they want to hold a public hearing or not i don't get it the other option is the one that paul proposed which is you basically have a broader public hearing and all parties present their proposals elissa if you go too broad then people don't know why they should show up they don't know what the specifics are are you going to say lincoln from any possible change to any type of parking restriction running from route not from college street all the way to umass and therefore everyone in town should literally come to the hearing because that may very well feel like that affects them based on their commute that's why you normally have something a bit more specific than that in terms of why you do this i didn't make us wait since december george i'm sitting here waiting i don't know why we didn't get this specific proposal long before now but now's when now's we're hearing still that it's available to us but we haven't had it presented to us yet the reason why is if you look back at the minutes from 2015 of what happened at select board you will find that we found staff's plan which they put together to be insufficient and we would not have called that hearing had they given us that plan ahead of time before we had a chance to actually schedule the hearing this is based purely on experience the plan your i believe you're indicating that because staff came up with the plan it must be a viable plan the select board did not believe that it was a viable plan therefore we had no need to call that public hearing we would have asked for a different public hearing based on the information we had so rather than getting to the hearing for the first time seeing the plan at the hearing and saying man i don't know why we're doing this this isn't the plan i was was thinking we were going to be doing i want us to say yep that's absolutely the plan we want to look at this is the area we'll make it kind of broad and kind of specific at the same time and this is when it'll be garcy Dorothy well i think i would like to us to see the town plan before we have a public hearing i would like us to have a public hearing in which the town plan and the plan from the residents are presented and we can discuss it i'd also like to say that the plan that we're saying the plan of the residents it really is beyond that it's really people who use people who live on Lincoln Avenue and people who drive on Lincoln Avenue and i do believe that the plan that has been put together by the people who live on Lincoln Avenue has very distinct limits it would be from amity street to um uh fearing no block beyond fearing what what's yeah mess up but it's but it's all it is it is written out um the there are many people who've been waiting a long time for this i i'm very pleased and interested to hear what elissa is saying because it's useful it's really useful to hear that we have to really know what we're doing when we go into it and not to be surprised um also that everybody should have a chance to see that plan first but i'd like to do it proceed in a quick matter so i leave that to you lin to find out how we can okay get the materials and have a hearing quickly sarah so i think to make it easier if you're gonna say we're having a hearing about if you put if we're voting on emotions as we're hearing we're having a hearing about changes to link and af like when i'm reading all this information tonight i was like what what are the exact changes how are we as a legislative body supposed to walk into a meeting absolutely that's been advertised as changes to Lincoln Avenue not coming from anybody because town council hasn't talked about it i haven't seen the residents proposal and wow i'm really shocked sitting here to find out and i'm not placing blame i'm just saying like as we work on process it then it kind of shocked me to say oh well the town has a plan i didn't even know it i think probably a lot of us didn't and we hadn't seen it so i'm not pointing any fingers but i i just think that as we're doing things a certain process is important you can't hold a hearing on we're gonna sit down about link and af and not know what it is and how can the legislative body that's supposed to make some kind of decision walk into a meeting without having the town's proposal and we get it at the same time as everyone else i and i'm not i'm not trying i'm not being blaming i'm just trying to i think that maybe and no george is just looking to people who are immersed in this right i think you're like what are you talking about because we all know but some of us don't because we haven't been given it that's that's all i'm saying and it's no blame or anything i'm just saying i think we need that information and how can you hold the hearing without saying what it's about andy so uh there's one other aspect of it and that is that we have orders of transportation advisory committee fit into this and because we did get a memo from tac and um when we have a planning board hearing and suppose that the planning board comes to us with a revision on accessory dwellings i'm just pulling out of the air by the time it gets to a hearing the planning board is said to us through their report and recommendation this is the change that i would like to make an accessory dwellings and then a hearing is held about the very specific proposals and if there are people who have an interest in the neighbors or other residents people who would be affected by it in some manner they come in and are able to react to the specific proposal and that makes for a logical hearing to take place so i guess that what i would like to see is a proposal that has some vetting with possibly tac and leave that process needing to be fleshed out because it also could go back to a council committee and then when we have a specific proposal we bring that proposal to the council say to the council do you want to have a hearing on it since this isn't the planning board this is council would be having the hearing let us make the decision and then we notice the public at large in a very broad sense what it is that is being proposed and if people who live or drive on Lincoln Avenue find it adequate they will tell us and if they find it inadequate and would like something else they will tell us that too and that will give us a chance to have a meaningful hearing in which we can take the information gathered and use it other other comments Dorothy Sarah what you're seeing is is continued growing pains this has come before CRC the people from Lincoln Avenue have come and spoken at a council meeting they have met small group designated people have met with the president and with the town manager but and they've gone to tac all right the problem is that we didn't seem to know what was the procedure okay so that's what we're talking about right now so we may we may create and come up with a procedure because we haven't had one but this has been people have been working on this meeting with the police chief meeting with different department heads for a long time but you're right we can't go we should not go into a hearing not knowing exactly what that plan from the residents is and without knowing the plan that he said the town has which I haven't seen Kathy okay I'm I'm I'm gonna be in agreement that we don't have a plan in front of us but we did on 1216 and we have it in our attachments it's not proposed in the format of a plan but they the residents came to us with a specific proposal so what I'm not sure of what in what it's just been described we've been sending them around to various places and I don't understand why one of those committees including our see it just didn't take hold and say okay here's the kernel of an idea they wanted no parking on either side between eight and five p.m. that was the proposal very specific um why didn't we say here's a piece of one what's the town saying and come to us with an amalgam that said here are three ways of addressing the Lincoln it seems to me it's similar to not completely like when we were kicking percent for art around everyone saying the bylaw is not quite right and it went to finance and it went to CRC but we had to put a small group together just a few people so maybe we could do that here just come up with what what are the options with a little bit of discussion on it so we don't keep moving the ball to another court that's thank you Darcy I just have a question in the December 16th letter from the group they said that almost every house has signed a petition supporting this request did we see the petition and was it sort of in the form of pre petition under the charter um it was not in the form under petition under the charter it was a written statement with signatures and yes you did so we're we're just treating it as um that at our own discretion we can provide a public hearing on this issue I'm sorry oh okay we can get existed but we didn't see it officially as a council all right I thought you did no okay in other words you saw the letter but you didn't see the petition okay at the total the the it was added again in our current packet at 7c as an item so that document was that we saw in the middle of D