This evening we have one counselor attending via remote participation Counselor Hanna key has petitioned and received permission To participate in that manner giving physical attendance would be unreasonably difficult This is permissible under nine four zero CMR 29.10 five Let the record reflect that board committee members Counselor Mandy Joe Hanna key is attending remotely via speaker phone for the meeting of February 11th 2019 Because it would be unreasonably difficult, which is permissible Mandy Joe. Can you hear me? Yes Was very clear Let could let the record reflect that member Counselor Mandy Joe Hanna keys attendance based speakerphone can be heard by all present at the meeting and some of those even further away It's pretty loud All votes taken during a meeting with a remote participant shall be by roll call vote therefore at as all votes at all votes the town count clerk will ask for the individual votes if Technical difficulties arise a result of utilizing remote participation. I will suspend discussion while reasonable efforts are made to correct the problem If remote participation is disconnected that fact in time of disconnection Will be recorded in the meeting minutes I've asked each count the I've asked Mandy Joe in advance to provide with any agenda items that she would like to reasonably speak to and Counsel Ross will indicate that the council are participating remotely wishes to speak in this case Thank you Remote counselors are to speak by stating their name You will be Acknowledged, but they won't speak until called upon usual time limits apply So seeing that we have a quorum. I call the meeting of the town council to order at 632 Welcome all This meeting is being broadcast live and being recorded by Amherst media copies of the agenda are projected on the wall in The meeting room and we're posted in advance of the meeting if you are interested in speaking during the meeting Please sign the sheet at the side of the room over at this table. I have a couple announcements First of all on February 13th 2019 Amherst will mark its 260th anniversary on That date an act for erecting the second precinct in the town of Hadley in the county of Hampshire Into a district by the name of Amherst was passed by the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Second tonight. We begin our education on major capital projects, although we have had a preview on the schools At the town council meeting on Monday, February 25th The council will discuss various funding scenarios for major capital projects And we hope that you both listening at home and in the audience will join us for this educational period in our time There will be school listening sessions where both town councillors and Amherst school committee members will be present and Those sessions have been publicized. They will not be official district meetings that we as we originally had intended Just scheduling would not allow that But they will be two meetings on February 27th to on February 28th and one on March 6th The school building application to the mass Massachusetts school building authority will come before the town council for discussion on Monday, March 18th and For a vote on Monday, April 1st One other date to put on your calendar. We will hold a public forum as required by the Charter on the budget at that time. We will be meeting on Thursday, March 7th at the middle school And as in as with all public forums half of the time is devoted to public comment speaking of public comment Public comment and The agenda have been rearranged. So the council wishes to thank you for your patience as we've organized and as counselors We want to communicate that we have heard you Many counselors and the public have asked that we move public comment earlier in the evening In addition to that the rules of procedure ad hoc committee has proposed a trial rearrangement of an agenda This is our second trial and includes movement of public comment earlier as well as rearranging agenda items in Setting the agenda. I have taken into careful consideration the following The report forwarded by that committee My strong desire to personally move public comment earlier My serious reservations about having what could be five or more public comment periods on one agenda and Request by some counselors to end meetings much earlier than midnight Finally public comment To the town council meeting at town council meetings is only one way To we and we invite you to communicate with us. However, there are others you can email us at town council at amherst ma gov You could send us individual emails with our last name and then our first initial at the same address You can come visit us during office hours, which we're organizing some counselors have done better job of that than others and You can come to district meetings, which will have at least two a year. In fact, maybe even more and Whenever my husband lets me go grocery shopping and doesn't expect me to return for several hours, you can talk to me there. I Had to just enter that it's been a family joke for years So with no hearings, we're moving on to public comment general public comment on matters other than those under agenda items 5a 5b and 6 or frankly others We will have public comment after those items 5a 5b and 6 Public comments on those will be taken at the relevant time after the council has had their initial discussion Residents are welcome to express their views for up to one to three minutes I'll decide on how long when I see how many people wish to speak and The council will not engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter raised during general public comment So These floors open for general public comment. May I see it the hands of those who would wish to speak I Say two hands Let's start with the gentleman in the front Mr. Kuzner you have to push the button Thank you and good evening Rob Kuzner and It's nice to join you here in Quorum and to the absent member who's joining us remotely I wish you were here because I signed my letter with a pen that you'd recognize the color on it's a nice purple flair pen Anyway, I don't know if the letter that I put together about an hour ago was distributed if it is then I'm happy to just let you read it and keep my comments very brief This is an opportunity for town council to show what I think proponents of the system of government Had promised namely the nimbleness of local government. We're now Seven months into Fiscal year maybe eight months depending on how you count fiscal year 2019 last spring we were aware that the governor's budget for public transportation Funding to the non MBTA regional transit authorities the largest of which is the PBTA that serves us Here in Western, you know the Pioneer Valley Was going to cut the transit support by about eight million dollars Happily some of that was restored by the legislature during the summer but not enough it was restored in a way that was So we say non strings attached for those funds to reappear in the budgets of the transit providers like UMass transit So we're in a situation where Last spring our legislature at the time overwhelmingly approved a supplemental Appropriation that would help alleviate some of the service cuts that we've just experienced in this past month and that we're going to Experience in a much bigger way starting in May once the summer break for the colleges begins and those cuts affect some types of public transit services that are Happening every day of the week during the daytime just as the Sun is setting on every summer evening The two main core bus routes are going to stop running till the next morning and the service cuts are even worse on weekends and in general PBTA services lighter in the summer Given our interest in reducing Our impact on climate change and other environmental consequences of driving private vehicles I hope we'll renew our commitment one that this town and our Five college Neighbors have committed to for nearly five decades now our commitment to supporting public transportation locally, I hope that This council will consider two actions and done in tandem I think they'll allow us a to restore those transit cuts and B send a message to the future that we really care about transit namrs And I'll light them in in items one and two below one is to follow the lead of five colleges five colleges incorporated They've committed to increase their contribution to the PBTA system by $50,000 a year for each of the next five years. It's a long-term commitment Which is something that PBTA likes to see when it agrees to create or restore transit services they want to have something that's in place for a long time and Following up on that if the town can commit in a resolution it can't be formally done in the budget that far in advance but I think a resolution showing a good-faith commitment would go a long way to the showing that we care about transit and PBTA would respond to that but then I ask you to Encourage the manager our PBTA representative and us Citizens who care about transit and rely on transit to work with PBTA to make use of the supplemental budget that the town Appropriated to restore these transit services During this summer and that could be done in the FY 19 budget. So thank you for the time Sorry that I haven't sent this to you by email yet But now I know the email address I'd forgotten it and it'll come to you probably as soon as I get back to work Thank you Thank you for your comments the gentleman in the back, please come forward and state your name and Restrict your comments to three minutes. I'm Bill. I am a resident of the Ann Whelan 260 years ago this town was perhaps charming 25 years ago. It was certainly charming It is now moving inextricably toward what might be termed The desolation of modernity and it is my impression that every square centimeter of the town will be five-story High-rises apartment high-rises. I was in Boulder attempting to clean it up many years ago and the same phenomenon occurred it's no longer a Inhabitable environment and I would like to propose again that the five-story construction be limited to the other side of town the the Kendrick Park side as opposed to the sweeter Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Were there any other public comments at this time? Okay, see none. We're going to move on with our agenda We have a variety of public Capital public projects. They're going to be discussed tonight I mentioned before that we have already had a discussion with the schools about the possibility of a new school building and Then we're tonight. I'm going to turn it over to mr. Backelman and ask that he introduce this piece of the agenda. Thank you Thank you. So I'm going to put this in context a little bit Town of Amherst has not built a new building in 30 years We have pent up demand for significant capital investment. I think you have seen our buildings and have Internalized the need for new buildings. We've we've seemed to have taken Built buildings and little bunches like 30 years ago. We built the police station I just one second Mandy Joe. Are you still connected? Yes, sorry about that. Okay. Thank you. So 30 years ago. We haven't built a new building in this town in 30 years We built the police station 45 years ago. We built a number of our three elementary schools plus the north fire station 70 years ago. We built the banks community center 90 years ago roughly The Jones library in the Munson building Then 120 years ago. We built the town hall the fire station and the DPW the town hall was renovated in 1998 so what we wanted to show you tonight is With the new council coming in it's an opportunity for the town to begin addressing these significant capital Needs, but the first thing we have to do is say are they really needs and why are they needs and to tell you what has happened Since these needs have come to the to fruition. So tonight the intent is for us for the library director the fire chief and the DPW superintendent to lay out what the problem is with the buildings where we are in the process for replacement and and entertain any questions that you may have on the conceptual needs Not really talking about the funds because that as the president said is coming up at the next meeting and will be discussed at the finance Committee committee meeting as well. So So that's that's the lay the ground work for the tonight And So the concept that we have been working on is something that I've been calling One-town-one plan we need to address take on all these capital projects plus the things that we have that the council has identified like investment in roads and other smaller investments maintenance that we have to do in terms of roofs and things like that and come to a Consensus as the superintendent had talked about about how we can afford what we can do and What is our plan over the next several decades because it's not a five-year plan or ten-year plan? It's a decades-long plan So this is our first for a and just trying to share information There are a lot of slides our presenters know that they're going to especially the DPW Empire They have lots of slides to show you they're going to go fast. So don't worry when you see the number on there and The other thing that we were that the DPW superintendent will do is sort of lay out What's it take to build a public construction project? So you can see the steps that have to be required there have to be followed in a order for us to build a new new building So first I will ask the library director Sharon Sherry to come up and do her presentation Hi everybody, thank you so much For this opportunity. I wanted to start by introducing the library trustees that are in the room tonight Austin Sarah the president of our trustees is back there Tamsen Ely Chris Hoffman Here we go Founded in 1921 the Jones library quickly became one of the iconic institutions in Amherst Samuel line at Jones bequest enabled a town of 5,500 to build a library that was regionally celebrated in its day Because it exemplified the central role the library should play in a town with the Amherst unique values and interests More than just a place a cozy place to read a book the Jones library welcomed all its citizens to the town's cultural heart Fast forward to today's project It's been in the works for over seven years and the specific design proposal is the result of almost three years Worth of planning by about 20 members of the community along with several architectural professionals and dozens of open meetings So I thought we'd put this project through a sore strategic planning analysis Talk about talking about its strengths opportunities aspirations and results So starting with our strengths. What does our building do? Well Amherst is special It takes great pride in its unique character It's the land of the book in the plow and Amherst town library is also special We are already more heavily patronized than any other library in the state except Springfield and 19 other Boston area libraries We serve over 250,000 visitors and circulate almost 500,000 items every year in addition The 1921 founders had a radical vision that the library can play a central role in supporting the character of a town Thus the Jones was designed and built to look like a house It originally included a 250-seat theater for performances concerts lectures and movies and an art gallery To offer area artists and crafts people a public space in which to exhibit their work and encourage appreciation and understanding of art The Jones has gone through several transformations in its time But two of them were quite substantive in that they drastically changed the look and feel of the original 1928 building The first large-scale renovation was in the late 1960s Planning began and money was secured in 1966 and the work was done in 67 and 68 This renovation removed the auditorium seating area The stage became a mezzanine with additional shelving and a floor was added above the auditorium seating area That became the Burgess fine arts room in the basement the stage coach was removed along with coal bin To make space for more shelving Studios for painting ceramics and weaving replaced a catalogue room and a youth activity room Planning for the second major renovation began in 1988. It was an important expansion renovation project the trustees received an mblc construction grant in 1991 and The and the work was finished in 1993 This renovation which undid some of the 1960s work added 12,000 square feet to the building it removed the stage and the Burgess room Restoring the height of the current fiction room. It removed the art studios Updated heating and cooling systems updated lighting improved handicapped Accessibility created the woodbury meeting room space and the back entrance It also created the atrium added space for the ESL program and created the dedicated space for special collections Opportunities what circumstances can we leverage for success? The last renovation of the Jones that I just talked about followed a plan intended to serve the library for 20 years and Now in 2019 all of the building systems have come to the end of their life cycles And it's time for the Jones physical plant needs to be addressed. We need to become substantially greener Improve overall energy efficiency and replace the atrium. That's too hot in the summer too cold in the winter and leaky year round We can no longer fulfill our historic mission We offer a terrific set of activities and programs which makes us a community building hub But the present facility does not allow us to serve large portions of the population including those who are mobility impaired Children and families the current spaces that are allocated towards to children's needs Whether for activities or simply reading aloud or inadequate to the demand Almost 7,000 children attend activities annually and parents often have to leave because all the reading spaces in The building are already taken Teenagers there is no dedicated space for teens in our in our building either to work on Collaborative school projects or to gather when the school buildings are closed We should be eager to attract them to their own space in the library instead of to this The streets or de facto to the unsupervised stacks of the basement of the current building Those learning English 25% of those in Amherst schools come from families whose first language is not English We need to provide welcoming quarters for English language learners through our recognized ESL program That meets the needs of this growing Amherst demographic and those needing access to computers 33% of Amherst residents live below the poverty level and the Jones computer terminals are regularly over subscribed Reflecting the dramatic change in the ways knowledge and culture is being shared and transmitted Library computers are an especially important lifeline for the growing population of the town that cannot afford a computer at home There are also safety issues that we have to address in this building due to a severe sack of staff sight lines The basement elevators stairwells the cozy rooms and the garden are notorious locations for unwanted activity and our security cameras are reactive rather than proactive once the crime occurs the damage has already been done and Then there's the fact that the Massachusetts Board of Library commissioners calls the Jones library the most dysfunctional public library in the state of Massachusetts We need to preserve the significant elements of the distinctive look and feel of the original 1928 building while replacing the 1993 edition with spaces that are much more user-friendly for both patrons and staff And I'll take you on a visual tour so speaking of the building overall None of the original 1928 building is ADA compliant and much of the 1993 edition including the stacks are no longer up to code The steep pitch of our roof dumps snow onto the heads of patrons The six staircases are confusing and unsafe due to lack of staff sight lines All our building systems need to be replaced the cobbled together technology is old and inefficient The chiller compressor is operating at half capacity due to costly repairs that are needed The pneumatic thermostats are very difficult difficult to calibrate if they work at all The building is not wired properly for a 21st century library The overall layout of the building is extremely confusing as well as many other maintenance issues Which need to be addressed such as stained and faded carpeting and peeling paint and plaster Speaking more specifically about the different rooms in the building the children's room is not big enough to handle the demand There's not enough patron seating there the non-fiction stacks are too high the two close together The collection is housed on two different floors and that creates a hardship for parents of multiple children The room is outdated the cramped children's librarians office is in is located in what should be a gorgeous reading nook And this that space contains the only bathroom on the main floor The Jones adult circulation desk is the worst circulation desk. I've ever seen it is too small for staff Staff spunk functions, and it's not good for customer service. It has three service points So patrons are never sure whether or not they're standing in the right line And the backs of staff are always facing the patrons The interlibrary loan room is neither heated nor cooled And it's just not big enough to handle our interlibrary loan delivery of up to 20 bins a day The atrium roof it's poorly designed and it has leaked badly since it was installed Many attempts throughout the years have to make it watertight have just failed So we have to keep buckets near the adult circulation desk desk to collect the rainwater and The reference department there's not enough computers and this is important because the majority of research materials nowadays are accessed online The non-fiction stacks in the basement. I consider it's a warehouse for books The space is not inviting and it's unsafe to be there because there's no staff presence There isn't enough space for ESL services to meet the demand and it's very difficult to find Then there's the special collections department, which is severely on undersized The materials which do not fit in that archive are not being stored in climate control spaces The exhibit room is only open when special collections is open and you have to be buzzed in There's no no door on the climate controlled storage area Which is like leaving your doors and windows open at home while you have the air conditioning going There's not enough room to collect and store additional items and because this department's location is so far away It's very difficult to find your way back out of the building and then there's our telecommunications room Which is really quite scary. There's a there's little space for expansion in the room And we have data wiring running through the pipes in our boiler room So how do we fix all these problems? We again became involved in the Massachusetts Board of Library commissioners construction grant program Beginning with the creation of a building program. It's a detailed inventory ours is six pages long of all the functions in the library including the number of books computers chairs and tables for each room I do want to reiterate that the only reason our project is here before you now is because of the availability of this grant The MBLC's program only comes around once every 10 plus years And this is why we have been limiting our JCPC requests over the past few years Because we knew this would be the most cost-effective way to preserve and enhance the library So we hired fine gold Alexander architects out of Boston They are historic preservation experts and we gave them our program to analyze Also, remember that the Massachusetts legislature has allocated substantial funds specifically for library projects such as ours similar funding will not be available again until 2025 or later and as I said previously our project is considered a high priority by the Massachusetts Board of Library commissioners Because they fully understand our buildings deficiencies and know that the Jones plays an important role in Western Massachusetts We are very much a regional library through this grant program. The MBLC is returning your tax dollars to Amherst The architects work was guided by several principles They found that they could not solve our problems within the existing 48,000 square foot footprint The facts show that we must expand to 65,000 square feet The MBLC publicly stated it will not fund a smaller project if the town wants to go smaller The town will have to pay for it on its own The most efficient way to add square footage to the Jones is by building off the rear of the building Rather than by adding up and adding an additional floor Within the past few weeks our architects have researched again the possibility of going up in order to preserve more of the rear garden But due to three primary concerns It has been decided that building up an additional floor is not an option and the first problem is shown on this slide Massing so building up another level as is shown on the picture on your right It will negatively impact the original structure visually and most likely have trouble getting Massachusetts Historic Commission approval Secondly the costs it would be more expensive to build up and thirdly staffing issues We would need more staff if there were another floor going up Thus it was decided that building out to the rear is best as is shown on the picture on the left And to be clear This is the design and the footprint that we submitted in our grant application The footprint is not getting bigger than what was approved already approved by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners and Regarding the rear garden we have preserved 70% of that space and the final designs will be a result of a community planning process No landscaping plans have been proposed Instead the trustees have appointed a gardens advisory committee which will help oversee the project The landscaping is already included in the project's budget and the plan is for the existing plants to be moved or replaced in accordance with the community's plan and On to aspirations. What do we want to achieve in the future? We are looking for a building that can be used by everybody in town Teens people with mobility issues the financially disadvantaged and non English speakers a Building which better needs the needs of traditional book borrower or borrowers and encourages user independence With more visible and efficient circulation services and a building which attracts the interest of the next generation of library patrons is safe and Has clear signage so patrons feel comfortable navigating the building Preserves our history including the refurbishment of the wood floors and the fireplaces and the beautiful wood paneling and Safeguards our future by being green Offers plenty of collaborative and silent spaces and has windows and comfortable seating on every floor overlooking the gardens And what are the tangible outcomes? We'll see that demonstrate we've received we have achieved our goals The architects tried to find a good combination of preserving the look and feel of the original building and Designing a new addition that is open and adaptable The designs shown here are very much still a work in progress and that's why they're so small here The MVLC is requiring that we move the large meeting room from the first floor To a different spot so Thus, there's going to be a ripple effect throughout all of the designs But in the end what we're looking for is a front entrance that's handicapped accessible All of the children's services will be on one floor so families have easy access Low shelving in the children's room so the kids can reach their books on their own Children's activities room on the same floor as the collections a story time nook The young adult room which will be bright and welcoming and encased in glass walls So they can be noisy, but we can still see them It will be filled with technology and their collection of materials Restrooms on all the floors the circulation desk will have very clear points of service There will be a book return that doesn't overflow So the police department won't get phone calls anymore and plenty of computers as well as group study rooms The large woodbury room will almost double in size It will have windows and can be used for meetings and events even when the library is closed The entire special collections collection will be stored in a truly climate-controlled space and the exhibits will be open to everyone during all Library hours. We are also making room for the town's refurbished civil war tablets regarding aesthetics The trustees are firmly committed to maintaining the homey feel of the Jones library It's up to the architects to combine the wonderful historic feel of the Jones Along with the updated technological services that we need to provide to our patrons Regarding the interior appearance the MBLC does not care about aesthetics It's up to each individual community to decide on the look and feel of their public library So that's why design development. We haven't been through it yet That doesn't happen until after the grant is received and the town has approved its share of project costs Regarding the exterior appearance the entire facade of the 1928 building will be kept as it is except for some protection from of the front door from ice and snow and The appearance of the new addition is not yet determined. There's going to be a balancing act with the budget primarily between historic preservation and Lead certification and you'll be hearing more about the budget for the project. The total cost is thirty five point six million With thirteen point seven coming from the MBLC six million coming from private donations and historic tax credits and Fifteen point nine coming from the town And what if the project isn't approved? Well passing on this grant is not going to prevent Expenditures because of our deferred maintenance needs we can easily spend millions and get nothing for it So for a moment, let's say we've solved all our collection space problems We've weeded our collections to the fullest patrons are using the ILL system more heavily And we have properly climate controlled or store our special collections materials We are now housing our entire mystery and science fiction collection in the basement of another town-owned building Let's say we've now made enough room at the Jones for a teen room and ramps have been added so that staff with mobility issues Can get to the staff bathrooms one could say that most of our problems have been solved Except they won't be millions of dollars will still need to be spent replacing all of the buildings outdated systems All of our systems have come to the end of their lifespan and need to be redesigned and replaced We are in the same boat on a smaller scale as the schools if the town votes down the grant the trustees will have to go through the JCPC process over several years probably in order to fix many expensive problems our Immediate needs are labeled phase number one on the left side of this slide The fire alarm sprinkler and burglar alarms need to be replaced The atrium has to be entirely removed Redesign and rebuilt no matter what it cannot be repaired The HVAC system needs to be entirely removed redesigned and rebuilt it cannot be repaired The slate roof has to be repaired most of the windows all the carpeting needs to be replaced The front elevator needs to be replaced to make it accessible and the entire interior needs to be repainted Also several of these individual projects will trigger a domino effect for example if we replace the glass atrium We'll also need to replace the HVAC system to avoid heat created ice dams So as you can see phase number one is a no-fills list According to the 19 the the 2017 cost estimate it's going to cost a million a minimum of ten point seven million dollars to do the work in phase one and That ten point seven million dollar figure does not include the phase to work listed on the right side of the slide We do not have a cost estimate for the phase to work because we would have had to hire an architect To get that cost estimate and architects are expensive And after going through the JCP sir JCPC process the resulting structure will still lack Sufficient space and will still not be entirely up to code because without a substantial redesign Several areas will still not be handicapped accessible But it will have cost the town almost the same amount of money as if it had taken advantage of the grant also dealing only with the library's deferred maintenance Accessibility and code requirements will create some of the same hardships as going through an entire expansion renovation project Because we'll still need to relocate temporarily while the work is being done But the result will not be the 21st century learning center that Amherst needs We believe it would be a mistake to spend ten million dollars on repairs when before us lies such an incredible Opportunity for so much more the trustees oppose Propose that the town accept the state grant our goal is to spend 16 million after private fundraising of town money So that Amherst can have the library it needs a library which will last long after you and I are gone The beauty of this grant is that we'll get all our systems replaced and we'll have everything else our patrons want Including safety security common-sense flow bathrooms on all levels lots of natural light green technology and historic preservation I'm gonna end here with the Estimated timeline that you've seen before we're expecting an FY 21 grant announcement an FY 22 town council approval FY 23 construction would begin and construction would end in FY 25 Thank you. Are there specific questions to share it this time from the council Kathy Thank you for their presentation and also what has clearly been a lot of work from a lot of people I want to start out a bit where a Town manager Paul Baccham in introduced in terms of thinking the whole town that we need one plan that fits the whole town and Given our restricted very restricted budgets If we line up all the big Projects, I think we're gonna have to focus on needs Really with a laser beam and not go to once so we might have an ideal situation if we had a lot of money to hone down so I want to ask a little bit more about the Fixing the Jones side of it which I understand you couldn't just go for a grant you have to do the expansion You know so you expand the proposed project increases the total size by about 35% and Demolishes the new wing that was added so it's a major construction project as well as a renovation I went on your website, so I think the renovation Estimates for from Western builders did I get the right to download so you know it had a you could either phase it in Or you could do it all at once And as you had pointed out it didn't do certain kinds of things in their estimate It their costs were a little bit lower on the website than what you showed here about a million lower So I'm not sure about the difference, but say it's in the 10 or 11 range So I think if I'm looking at the numbers right that if we got a grant The townshare would anywhere be for anywhere from around six million to more even with the grant than it would be in Repairing and renovating and when I say or more you need to raise another six million dollars, so I'm What happens if you don't raise the money and we're in the middle of the building project is sort of like that's where 16 million is where you think you're going to be so I have a how much of the Urgent need could be met by the repair and renovation in a phase way the JCPC route rather than an entire building project So I That's that's what I was talking about with the The phase one that's the Ten million dollar estimates, so that's just for those items. Those are the immediate needs And and could could we as a town be living with a functioning library for several years with that type of expenditure? Oh, well, certainly Any you know The town can live with whatever library it is going to you know Put into it So yeah, I mean we're living in it now even without anything being done to it Are there other questions? Yes, Dorothy Excuse me. Oh Yeah, I'm gonna tell you that my husband Bob Pam who is a trustee of the library can't be here tonight because he's babysitting We couldn't be in two places that he couldn't be in two places at once, but he does wish you were here So I do agree with you that the town's public library is something that expresses in a way the soul of the town and I Hearing the details of the atrium in my mind I had kept hoping that that could be repaired or we could keep the sense of the large gracious space and Maybe remove some of the stacks and have something that some people refer to as a the town's living room But you're saying that that from the very beginning. It was not did not work that it leaked Is there any plan for some kind of space in the library that would be? one for people to come and to sit and to reflect and to be able to perhaps talk to somebody but in a quiet way a Public space of an informal type Yeah, I think what we have been working on with the architects is exactly a nice mixture of total Having some totally quiet spaces and having some more noisy spaces and having those spaces in between So yeah, that's the opportunity. That's before us So what was the date of the addition the addition? the most the most recent one it ended in 93 so technically, that's the newest Billing so the finished after the Police station, but it's an interesting study in the tale of two buildings, right? So the Jones edition you know by all accounts is Well, no, I'm sorry by a lot of accounts is you know, it feels worn out for many reasons and the You know the police station not that I've been in there that often, you know You know simply feels You know it feels more solid, but I think it's an interesting case study and value engineering. So we had the the original architect is for the the owner of the firm has passed away, but one of his Helpers came to UMass last year and talked about she talked about Kind of the original scheme for the 1993 edition and really what happened in the value engineering process So at you know, I wasn't around at the time But as far as I understand it in order to meet a budget a lot of things were cut And I think it's those cuts that then made the current Jones as a whole Really not functioned to the highest degree possible So I mentioned that in part because it's a lesson going forward But also in part because people a lot so many people ask the question Why are we tearing down something or why is there a proposal to tear down something? That's only I Can't do the math 26 26 years years old Evan I feel like you said this but I may have forgotten it the ten point seven million is your mic on it is I can I can hold it closer That ten point seven million is that's just that deferred maintenance list. Does that include? Is there an ability to deal with? Some of the concerns over space for English language learners or teens within that ten point seven million or is that strictly those? Yeah, the ten point seven million is just the items in that list. It doesn't it doesn't add space anywhere It's just fixing things So When we asked the question is this something that we could live with That would mean we would still be facing the problems of not having sufficient space to serve our underserved communities English Language learners teens low-income people correct. Thank you. Yes. Thank you Are there comments or questions Kathy? I just want to follow up on that. Have you You did a nice walk-through with me of all the different rooms in the library As there was there a step at which you said suppose we reconfigure the use of our current space to build on Evans Yeah before we got involved this space for teens and move something else over here Move things around. Yeah, so that was a part of a part of my spiel Let's say that we've taken care of all our space issues by you know weeding heavily and and you know Offsite storage and and all of that stuff. You've still got to spend well over ten million dollars to fix the building problems Any other questions? Yes, Pat the off The off-site storage is that fee Our fees required with that that we would be paying for appropriate storage Yeah, I mean depending on Where it went? I Yeah, so I Yes Assuming assuming I'd have to rent space somewhere I mean that would in essence be creating a third branch and I'd have to pay for Heating electricity and all of that. Thank you. Yes, Dorothy I was in the library Recently and I was in the lower level and I discovered by talking to some people that that's where the teens go and It's I if I were teen would actually like the space, but it's completely unsupervised And it's not really safe So I do think you need a new teen space I do have a question and that is would you have to vacate the library under either circumstance? Total renovation because you're adding an addition or the just the repairs So I'm just a librarian, but yeah, if we do a complete renovation the plan is to be located in an interim space For the duration so that it can be done quickly and safely As far as the you know, for example if you if we have to rip out the atrium I would think we would have to close the library because it's right smack dab in them in the middle of the space and You know to get to the bathrooms and things like that. So Yeah, we'd have to be located somewhere else no matter what is the cost of relocation and remove and moving back in this estimate It's in the grant budget estimate. Yes. Thank you very much Shelly So in the slide with the opportunities, do you have a sense? So I'm sure you do which Services are currently being utilized the most and which ones would You know be facilitated better With the new space The children's services are definitely utilized the most I believe Yeah, and I I want to say what we're proposing is doubling or tripling the size of the children's department and so that families can really come and have all their needs taken care of and Yeah Can I just follow up? Yes, then so many the other areas that that we are attributing to the new building would those really be needed if I would say yes.  So what are the services that will be most used so we may create space for teenagers But are they coming or what can we do perhaps do to make sure? Oh, so the teenagers are definitely coming so You know when I started working here the headline in the newspaper was always there's a teen problem at the Jones and That's a shame the teen the word teen should never be put next to problem The fact that these teenagers are coming to the library is the coolest thing in the whole wide world and so the trustees and I we We hired a young adult librarian so we actually we have an actual position now and if you do things with these kids They will be successful library users and they will will grow up knowing that being in a library is good and and and they're not being given dirty looks and And they can eat and they can make noise because these are not they're not children And they're not adults. They're their brains are not fully formed yet We want them to be teenagers and they deserve their own spaces and they are our patrons Are there other questions? At this time, I failed to mention we are going to take public comment at the end of all of the capital projects I'm hate to do that to you, but otherwise we would have public comment at six different times tonight, so I Do want to ask one other question you This is actually a point of information The library is not Quote owned by the town. It's certainly part of the town Therefore, it is not subject to the zero energy bylaw. However, I heard you mention lead certification which some people debate whether that's the way to go or not but And but I gather that is also in your plan. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you very much Good evening Gooford you do need to be close enough to the microphone so we can hear Did you know these toys in the back and you can like do a karaoke thing here if you wanted to and have a really good time with this I actually do this better when I stand up and I apologize if that makes people uncomfortable. I do like it a little better so I was asked To go over some of the classroom work that many of the town staff members have to go through to learn how to do these projects and to Be certified to do these projects The inspector general's office controls procurement in the state and they've come up with a program called the MCPP program, which is the Massachusetts certified public procurement officer program There's about four of us in the town I think there's now five of us in the town who are certified in this and there's one in the school It's kind of a thing that's catching on and a lot of people being certified because it keeps us from breaking the rules Which was actually really popular about the time when they were building a lot of additions at UMass and Boston, you want to look it up You look up the ward commission and a lot of what I talk about has come out of the ward commission findings and Go way back to when they were building and giving contracts to buddies and giving gifts to buddies and Friends and family and people were doing all this stuff. So that's why we have these rules They are they do seem quite onerous at times But they are what they are and this is what we go So this is basically an overview of how we Lay out a project if you're building a building building projects is in the middle Building projects are here in the middle if we're a local government or state government. We follow the same rules If the designer fee is over 30,000 or if the project's gonna be over 300,000 we have to do a special way of hiring a designer It's called the designer selection process and if we're over ten thousand dollars We have to follow MGL 149, which is a lot of other cool stuff This slide actually shows public works. I really wasn't wish it wasn't there for you because I don't want you to get Confused, but these are the rules that control public works type structures and projects Public works are considered a horizontal construction. You're building things horizontally Buildings are vertical and if I switch into that frame of reference, that's what I'm talking about buildings go vertical Public works projects are horizontal We use a process here in the town called design plan design bid it and construct it So it's planning design construction bid design construct the same things as a word you'll hear a lot We design it then we go out to bid it and then we construct it. There are other ways to do it They're much more difficult as many many me more requirements on the town if we do it that way This is a straightforward way of doing it. If you have a simple project if you have a very intricate Unknown project you would do it one of the other ways of doing it. This is your basic way of doing the projects some definitions owner You are the owners The town is the owner as the representative of the town That's that's you as the people of the town that belongs to you as well the owners You define what you want to do you decide what you're gonna do you define who's going to Pay for it. You define how you're gonna do it and make sure we follow the rules That's what the owner's responsibilities are You can have a construction manager This is also known as the clerk of the works to people who have been around a little while longer Construction manager is not required But you can have one and that person helps the owner make their project and make their project go forward You may be required to have a owner's project manager So if your building is more than 1.5 million dollars, you have to have an owner's project manager If you have an owner's project manager, you have to do designer selection based on the qualifications of the firm not based on price You have to ask for the best qualified Choose the best qualified then negotiate the price And if you don't like the price and don't like that as that goes long Then you go to the second qualified But you have to have a reason why you didn't go with the first qualified and the first reason cannot be they were just too high That's not allowed You can also assign a staff member to do this in the school projects We've had a consultant doing this and the library project We had a consultant and the fire and DPW project and in the library project in North Amherst We've had a staff member do it because we still been fleshing these projects out moving forward You can change to a contracted person at any time in the process You just have to be careful about making sure you you do it in synchronization and you don't mess things up a little bit If they these projects is over 50 million dollars. We're required to have an owner's representative, which is basically a Clerk of the works you have to have a clerk will work with his projects many more than 50 million dollars. I Think we might be getting close now to that number on a couple of projects The designer the designer is the person we hire to design the project lay the project out did the project and help us construct the project Because it's over the threshold that we talked about earlier. We have to do a qualification based selection of the designer You cannot just do it based on bids and price You have to ask for their qualifications. You have to examine their qualifications Then you have to decide this is going to be the person we want to choose and then you negotiate the price some parts of this process you can do in steps and you can set the prices and Then they can say that you want to do it or not That's only easily in the first part of the process. You can set that price And then the second part you usually have to go with more of the industry standard What that price should be based on the building you've now come up with Contractor if we do this in a simple format This is the person who builds the building and it could be the person who builds the building with all his friends His subcontractors We will have to have subcontractors in this process Because we will have work that's over the threshold for requiring filed sub bids and to have a definitive sub bidding project sub bidding process sorry So bidding this is is difficult because we have to design it then we have to bid Subs and then we bid Contractors take those and they can bid use those subs and then they bid the project. That's kind of how it goes You can design that you can bid this Contractor you want to but then you still have to do filed sub bids and some of that on the Subproper as well. So it's usually subs Then it's the general contract with bid it So it's a it's a bigger process. It's not like People that works projects. We're easier vertical or Horizontal yeah, if you think about it when you go up it's more difficult and when you're going on the ground It's easy. It's smooth. You can go downhill or okay, sorry This is the overall This is the overall picture for you owner You have your construction manager, which actually you could have you could have three people over there in your construction manager You can have your construction manager you choose you can have your required OPM and if the project is over 50 million dollars, you can have another construction manager That's a lot of overhead over there on that side, but you may be required to have some of it You have your designer you have your designer who has his specialty people as we in Amherst He's definitely going to probably have a Environmental specialty person there who's in green buildings and all that type is making sure we meet the green the zero Zero zero by law. Sorry about that. You're definitely going to have the person library.  Nelson will talk about that a little later They had we had a special person who came on board who was his his specialty was designing fire things Storage for oba scuba gear the laundry machines for washing gear So they don't contaminate the whole building all that stuff He was an expert at doing that and then you had the architect who knew how to design the building and put it all together So your team will be made up of subs in the designer and subs in the journal side And And then this is just a so a slide that brings back together what? Qualification based selection of a designer is and this is kind of how you do it You basically are required by those two laws and it's competition based on qualification not price Now if you go to a class and you take one of these classes that the state offers this whole slide shows about an hour and a half, right I Really convinced it down Actually, this is probably all I took out of the whole class anyhow for that hour and a half So that's that one do you want questions or no Sure questions specifically on this Yes, Dorothy Dorothy. Well, I guess I'm quite surprised to hear about this method of bidding I think New York City. It's it's Competitive bidding and price has a lot to do with it So who set up this process and who requires it is this by choice?  It's Matt. It's a Massachusetts law that we have to do designer selection for our designers It's if you want if you won't look it up. I'll leave it up there You can go to MGL chapter 7c go to section 44 and 58. That's actually the section that requires it and talks about it The selection for the OPM is the other one Kathy Does that apply just to the designer side not to the contractor side? That does not apply to the designer side when we get into the contractor side depending on the price We may have to have a certified contractor who it has to be told to us the contractor is certified to bid these items And then we can only choose from those contractors We can't just choose from a local contractor because he's local, but he's not certified he can't bid Yes, show me. So if you had designers who had some the same Qualifications would would you then be able to choose based on price? No, you have to to choose based on Qualifications first you cannot look at the price to talk like a tiebreaker You have to figure out some way to break the tie without looking at a price You can say who has the best Friday lunches You can ask Yeah, that's that's how do you define qualifications? I guess is well You'll define qualifications when you start looking for your prop designer So if you're doing a fire station do they have they done fire stations? How many fire stations have you done in the last five years? How many so if you get six contract six designers, they've all done five contractors in the last five years Then you'll go you need other qualifications. So there's how many of you done how many of you done on time? What have been the comments from your the people you've worked for it had been good comments I didn't give a bad comments. You'll actually check those references. So those are all go into the selection process Check the web Yes, Steve. So I'm pretty sure that qualification based election is a characteristic of all 50 states for choosing Architects professionals basically architects engineers Yes, I'm only certified in this state. Okay, that's I'm actually stating that as a fact Okay, but the other thing I want to mention is that You mentioned the Ward Commission. So the word commission. I was in architecture school The word commission was in the early 80s. I had to do with scandals mostly at UMass Boston Boston a little bit of UMass air moist and This entire this seems very cumbersome, but the fact is there really has not been a construction scandal in Massachusetts since the Ward Commission, so we actually whether there is a price to pay for this but the price is scandal-free for However, I've turned my mouth tonight Having been being very familiar with the mass UMass Boston situation. Basically, it was a whole entire campus built on top of a two-story parking garage which is no longer able to be used and the price of trying to Make that campus stop sinking is enormous Yes, and just to note that ward was the president of Amherst College and that he chaired that commission Okay, Andy Yes, when you talk about qualifications that we would be we design the qualifications We specify what they are and can we include familiarity with zero and that energy construction as part of the qualification Yes, you can you can actually write in there that you want people who have specific experience and qualifications in that field Other questions on this part of it Moving on So I was also this is another there's another hour and a half to go through class And I promise you I made it much shorter, too So when you're procuring the design contracts Just they have to be licensed registered license and registered people in Massachusetts You cannot have a company from New York come in and do it unless they have a license to work in Massachusetts So that's one of the biggest qualifiers you have is that these people are Qualified and licensed work in the state These are the phases and what the designers mostly do you have the planning phase or feasibility phase From the feasibility phase you'll get schematic design documents and usually those two phases go together And then you have design development and construction documents usually those two go together There'll be a brief pause usually but they're kind of clumped together to make the project go well Then they'll do construction which is they'll do the bidding process Help us with the bidding help us put the bids out make sure all the bidding goes well And then they'll do contract and construction contract administration for the building building cycle There's also the end of this which doesn't get talked about much is once you finish the construction you have commissioning and you have Takeover and close out of the project, which is actually a big part It's lumped into the construction and contract administration But it's something to think about because as you the more detailed and the more Interesting things you have in your buildings net zero energy type stuff The more you want to make sure that your commissioning aspect of your building is very thorough You don't want someone to say they're just slap solar panels on a bunch of things and they're all work fine You want to make sure it actually does work fine So there's a lot of those things that in the end of the project needs to be thought about as well Just it's not talked about much here. So I just want to bring it up So then plant planting stage He's usually confirms what you need and all these things and it's kind of what do you need to make these requirements? You'll see you saw it in the library dot the library. They do a Big charts of what they have you'll see in the DPW in the fire We actually talked about what we need what we do how much space you need for that What's normal space requirement for that to have that and it's all charted together and puts into a big chart? So Basically the study does talk about that puts all that together It's then he does come up and there are places where the say we'll say well, you just need to redo your building You just need to do this. You don't need a new building I can tell you in the fire and police the fire in DPW stays. It was You need to do something besides redo your buildings That was the final outcome of the studies your buildings aren't suitable for what you use them for right? So out of this stage you do get schematic designs and preliminary specifications and that Really big really big cost number which scares the bejesus out of everybody Because it's so far It's so preliminary and so far in the future the building that they put a lot of a Lot of condition on it and a lot of contingency into it so much contingency that you say cut that back cut that back It really will scare you the number, but this is the preliminary side and remember it's preliminary The next phase you'll go into plans and specifications We will actually do detailed plans and specifications for your project and you get to review those and add input into it and then again these are your deliverables which are just your plans and specifications for bidding at this point You're ready to go to bid you'll have your final plans your final specifications and your 100% cost estimate You'll also know what people you need to have filed sub bids from and what professions you don't need file sub bids from And then you go through the bidding process You bid your ward you set it up you start going you oversee the contract and you build this building And then again I left this this slide in here because in this one it shows you that if the designer fees over $30,000 Are for constructions more than $300,000 you have to use the designer selection law, which is MGL 7c44 and 58 That's required by the state and I believe that's That's just another one too. I'm sorry Questions like quick questions on this one I'm glad you mentioned particularly commissioning the building Because when we were working on the zero energy bylaw revision the issue of commissioning all of the Things that are associated with getting the zero energy is a significant piece there questions There will be a quiz So I'm going to take a break now and the fire chief is going to come up here and talk to you about their fire station studying Actually, Guilford was the project manager for the feasibility study for the fire station So I guess what I'm what I'm going to do is just sort of sort of give you give you an idea of where we are in in the long long Process for a news Head to head My my buddy here is the as I said is kind of kind of the tech tech guy He can't kind of level level level led us through through this. I kind of like to say that, you know You want that you want to write the end of the story story story first where where where where we're going to end This is kind of what this is about But we're going to take the show on the road So this is I'm actually going to go go to talk about this gentleman name Bob Nitro came in and it's this is as it says it's a need need need need assessment This is one. This is two pages of probably a hundred page dog document Where he goes through all the needs that you would have have four or five for fire fire fire fire station Every nook and cranny, every type of thing that we do. I mean, for instance here, you have administrative registration walls, mainly the miscellaneous space.  And he broke it down by square feet. And it was pretty intensive. Took us a good week or so just to kind of go through it all. And then he produced a document with risk roll. So this is what he, we, came up with. And this is what really a mob of modern or enough to date fire firefighters, the station to serve our area should look like. As you can see, we've got several spaces for the ad, ad admin, a place for the public, and fire firefighters. And then you have the, I guess, what you call the operational side of the house. There's another rendering that shows it on the proposed site. But this gives us really enough room to do what we need to do. Again, Gilbert mentioned that both of our buildings aren't adequate for what we're asked to do. It's just size, layout, that type of thing. It's just an adequate. And this is what a model of modern fire, fire, fire, house, fire stations should look like. Site analysis. Part of the project was to find an adequate site. And really, Amherst, the way the town is laid out sort of presents a challenge because the town is long and skinny. And if you're going to get anywhere in town in a reasonable amount of time, you really need to be either somewhere along Route 11616 or along Route 9, somewhere there. And because it's so long, it just makes sense to be south of the town. And this show shows a response time. It's called a heat map. And it just shows a response time. It's the different parts of the town. The other piece of this is the level that's off to the side. It's kind of tough to see. But that's how they came up with the site. And again, the town presents challenges with roads, streets, overpasses that type of thing. So again, it's either you're along Route 9 or you're along Route 11616. So it didn't really hamstring, string it, but it narrowed down where we might put a new station. And this will give you an idea of the raving or raving scale. It's tough to see. But there were a number of properties that Bob looked at. And each show was really, really great. It came up with a total score based on at least 10 criteria to the interior here. So the W site came in at the top site. The site that made the most sense based on this criteria to the interior. So I've got a vested interest in him getting a nice new place so I can steal his land. But again, a lot of work went into it. It's a pretty comprehensive study to find out just where we didn't need to place a new station. So if you can imagine, this is the DBW site. Now, this is the rendering of how it would be laid out. This one, this one. That one there. There we go. So what we would have is our fire engine's here. Ambulance is down here. The truck would go out this way. Ambulance would come out and around here. So it just makes sense in terms of efficiency. And the firefighter area would be back here. And the support for the sections would be here. You'd have storage for gear equipment, medical supplies. You'd have a place to dig it down, to contaminate gear, to contaminate people if that were in need. And our gear source. One of the things is the standard now is that all our turnout gear is not supposed to be anywhere near the living spaces out in here. So you have a very strong sense of separation between the work area here and the living space. You want to do the top. Remember, they're preliminary. Yeah, preliminary. So again, based on what we've priced out here and based on at the time, they actually didn't have a site. So there's no site figures figured in this number either. They just chose generic site cost and they came up with this as a generic price of what we would be talking about right now. There was no discussion about how to arrange anything. It's all arranged one floor. You can arrange it two floors if you wanted to. There was some discussion about how to arrange some of the bays, but this is still in the preliminary phase. It's based on the analysis of what the department needs to conduct its mission and then how much space that equipment and those things need inside the building. Yeah, as he said, there were some plots that they looked at where it would make sense to go up because you don't have enough space. The W site presents the best spot for us just in terms of the footprint of the building. But it also offers us an area for us to the train. There's space there that we don't have now. We have to go out and use rubber rucks to train at times. We can't really train on our own ground and do specific things to what are working in the in-tails. So where we are now, as you can see, we're in the design phase now. And the next two steps would take it probably for 14 months. It would start at 8 to 14 months. And then it's the construction piece. But that's our next big step for us. We actually did not complete the schematic design phase. OK, we're done with that. But you can't go on to the next phase unless you know what site you're building on. Is that correct? We've chosen a site. Gee, I wonder who that is. Sorry. I've got the mic on now. Yes, we have finished schematic design. We can go on. We have a site that's been recommended that the Public Works Department is the best site. We've been talking about how to shrink the Public Works Department so that we can move these two projects along simultaneously. If they're approved, we could build them at the same time. We would shrink back on our site and let the building begin on the fire station while we begin building on our facility. Questions? Kathy? I don't know whether this would ask for speculation, but you've gotten to this point without actually fitting out the project, correct? I mean, so this is the best guess. So the price we're looking at, would that be likely to be higher, lower, or you don't know? That price is what the designer, we went through the designer selection process. The pre-planning section is where we actually selected our designer. We actually did a designer selection. So the designer we selected, which is Castle and Booze, this is their best estimate if we were to build that project, which the price would be. And that's based on the numbers, which we finished in 2018. So those numbers are relatively, they're not very old. They are actually very fresh. That's where I'm looking for, fresh numbers. There was an entire bidding process with specifications for the designer. And the DPW Fire Station Advisory Committee did that selection process. I want to just real quick, just talk. One of the things the town of Antwerp talked about was need.  We have a series of photos that were done of the entire building. I'd ask anyone to call and stop in, and we'll give you a tour. The building was put up in 1929. It's been around a little while. It's a nice built building. It just doesn't work. When we did the study in 2006, this was even before your time here, Chief Nelson. Well, the first one was done long before all of the four were here. 1947 was the first study. But even as recently as 2006, the recommendation basically was for Central Fire Station. It was cheaper to demolish it and build a new substation or station there than it was to try to renovate it. If you read the 1947 study, you read the 2003 study. You read the 2006 study. In fact, even the staffing study that was done a couple of years ago, you can take the header's off, and they all read the thing. That building is too small to fit the needs of the fire department, and it just doesn't work. Any other questions at this time? Yes, Steve. Yeah, so I was just curious about zoning, because I didn't see zoning as one of the columns. I see neighborhood impact. But I assume that either be site plan review or a special permit. Yes, there is some permitting that has to go into it. But the one thing about the DPW site is that it's already a municipal site. So it's actually already owned by the town. It falls under those rules, which are a little different. So they didn't actually try to compare apples to apples. And if you read the report, it says they noted that you do have permitting process you have to go through. Yes, Evan. I have a comment from Mandy Jo. OK. OK. I appreciate the cost estimates, but I want to get back to I think what Kathy was saying. When I do a square foot cost on this estimate that I know is really preliminary, it seems really high, somewhere in the $600 to $840 range, depending on which square footage you decide. So I'm curious, is that a normal square foot cost for a fire station? Is that high? Is that low? Do you know where the designers got that? And how do we gauge that? So the number is actually on the right side in the comments section, $596.60, so there's a square footage cost. When you start talking about this building, it is higher than a normal building if you're just building an office building because of the actual things you have to build into it to make it into the fire station. The chief talked a little bit about separating the gear, the turnout gear from the living spaces. There's actually three buildings here, and there's actually an airlock between the two sections.  All the air in that system goes through purifiers and is sucked out and controlled in that one section. Negative pressure? Yes, negative pressure, which pulls it in, makes sure everything comes into it. And any of the vapors, any of the chemicals that the fire fighters were exposed to that's off-gassing from their suits, which is off-gassing from them, is collected and then processed out. So that's actually a cost that's a little above and beyond a normal building. This would be like building one of the labs at UMass where you're trying to make sure that you have positive pressure in there and you're controlling the chemicals they're working in. One of the things that they pointed out a lot and I always wondered about myself, but firefighters have a history of having a lot of nasty diseases and it comes from going to a fire.  So that's why there's this one special section and that actually is probably the biggest cost increaser in this building is having that section. You have a special laundry, you have special storage areas and you have a special decontamination area kind of all together in this area. And that is a national stance, that is standard, really. And it's actually promulgated by the end of the NFDA, right down, down, right down, down the road. The third piece is the admins as second here. So as Gilford said, three separate buildings, three separate functions. Hence, I believe that that's where that increase in cost comes. But you really can't escape that if, as he said, this is not an office building. And it's used 24-7, 365, so. Isn't there also a special decontamination coming off of ambulances? Yes, yes. And when, you know what? Actually, I'm glad you brought that up. Because we do the EMS as well, we have a separate area where we'll take care of those type of biobug biohazards and that type of thing. Dispose, dispose, dispose, you know that. You have to keep all our drugs and equipment separate and not exposed to any type of contaminants. So you've got almost three and a half buildings put in one. And again, it's, you know, this is not a strip mall. It's a fire station and it's highly specialized. That's just, and that's just the world we live in now. Any other questions? Yes, Pat. Since the 1947 study is almost as old as I am, I want to thank you. I want to thank you and the current firefighters and fighters before you for keeping us safe. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Okay, let's move on to. You're up to. I guess we have one other presentation on fire. This is the tour. No, we're going on to DPW. Yeah, like the tour of the station, that's 65 slides. That's a lot of, and it's all on our website or stop in a visit. We are also going to arrange an actual visit to various facilities when the weather is better and we aren't expecting snow. So, moving on. Yeah, great. So the next talk we're going to, a presentation we're going to have is on the DPW. DPW proposal is finished in 2016. So we're already three years old in this. So it's some of the numbers, there is some dated material here as far as the numbers go. Brief history, we're kind of like the bank center. We're one of the few town buildings that functions now, not in the capacity it was built for. The bank center was built as a school and then converted. We were built as a trolley barn and converted. I left out the slide that was inside the trolley barn. I apologize that, but that's actually in the counselor's packet when you see the pictures of inside the building. The four gentlemen who are working on trolley motors. That was, that's what we, this building was used for for quite a while before we took it over. Just that's the history of what we've been doing. So we did the same thing. We took what we do, vehicle maintenance, traffic lights, electrical, administration, highway, parks and rec, water, the parts of the sewer which are in the main building. And we went through and we kind of listed them all out and then listed out our equipment, listed out our people and listed out what we needed to do for each and the spaces we needed for each of those functions. And we came up with schematic drawings like this and a table as well. We came up with some preliminary layouts, how we would lay stuff out in a barn. And then we came up with some needs. These are the square foot needs. The original's needs are on the middle, reduced are on the right. We said, well, that's a lot of space. Can I reduce it? That's what happened. We reduced down 5,000. I think it's, no, we reduced down just a little bit. 4,000, 6,000 square feet is what we reduced down to. So, and then that's basically how we set ourselves up. Administration, staff support.  But it is lockers for your gear. So you come to work, you can change clothes and put on your work clothes. At the end of work, you can take your clothes off, shower and go home clean. One of the funniest things is when I did a sewer call in Northampton, I came home and it was really late at night. I came home, my wife met me at the door and said, you're going in the garage. And I actually, she said, your bathrobe's in the garage and there's a towel in the garage.  We had that same problem. We do have chemicals. We are exposed to biohazards when we do some work. So we do need to clean up. But it's not to the detail that the fire department has. So there's showers, there's cleaning areas and so forth. So that's the staff support. Highway, the big trucks, tree and grounds. We want to move the, our proposal is to move the barn at the high school to the new facility and consolidate. We want to do that for two reasons. One's management reason, just to have everybody together and to have consolidation in the same services for the staff and be able to communicate better. The second one is that we want to redevelop community field. And here we have this little industrial site sitting in the middle of community field. It wasn't supposed to get that big. We weren't supposed to have that much equipment there, but it has gotten bigger and bigger as time has gone on and it detracts from if you're going there for recreation or going there to the high school, it's like whose construction company is that over there? So we want to move that out and we brought that to the main building. The water department, their administrative offices function out of our office. That's the distribution crew, and that's the meter crew and a couple other crews that work in the water, they work out of the air. Maintenance, we do all the vehicle maintenance for our building, for our vehicles. We also do some inspections for the entire town. We do all vehicle inspections for the entire town. And then we do, we talked about when we do this building, maybe consolidating and bringing in some of the scattered maintenance that's around town. The schools do some maintenance. The police do some maintenance. The fire do some maintenance. We thought of bringing that stuff in and consolidating it. We don't have really room for that now because our base or maintenance base are too small. And if you look at the pictures in the big presentation, you'll see they're much too small. And then we just need to store our equipment. Storing the equipment takes up the biggest space. Storing our equipment is also the place where we can actually stage how we build this building. We kind of need the stuff at the top. We need some of the vehicle storage immediately and then we can stage and add on as we need to and as funds become available for the additional vehicle storage. We have some vehicles that have to be inside or else they freeze and they're not useful. The Vactor, the big truck with the elephants not on the front. The kindergarteners from the common school call it the elephant truck, elephant truck. That has to be inside because there's water inside of it. There's a couple other vehicles that have things like that inside that can't freeze, they have to be inside. So you can, this is one of the few buildings. Actually it's the only building where you can talk about staging how you do it. When we started this process, we had nine sites. Actually there was a 10th one, it went really fast and was taken off the table. We did all, analyzed all these sites and came up with a chart, rated them all. The top three, I took that slide out, sorry. Top three when we did the study Fort River which we've been taken off the table. The town wants to do something else there if they don't do a school there. School is number one, something else besides DPW is number two. Something else besides something else is number three. About number one million down the list is DPW site. So Fort River is never gonna be a DPW site. So people keep saying that we're never gonna go there. It's just not gonna happen. Second site was off of Old Farm Road which is number four on the list. That's now Conservation Land. The third site is for sale still but I believe there's a purchase and sale agreement going on that's number seven, Ball Lane. Those were the top three sites. We're still looking for a site. We have a couple more which weren't in the original study. We looked at all, when we did site evaluations we looked at all these items. We looked at one of the biggest things we looked at was permitting and effects on our neighbors. So that was a big piece in that one.  We're not, unlike the fire department who gets a call and leaves, if we come in to work a snowstorm, someone's there all the time during the snowstorm and we make a lot of noise and it's a bit of a disturbance at times. This is just a rough, if you take all the blocks and you just block them in, the very rough schematic of what the layout might look like for the building. That's how we came up with the minimum site size we need. Then the thing to remember is that the big piece in the middle is the one that can be kind of staged. Then for prices, we came up with a, actually I might take the big price off, $375 square feet of, $375 of square foot. So we came up with, and then these at the time were sites we would compare ourselves to. These were DPWs that Weston and Samson were working on at the time. Born and Norwood were very similar to those. Medford was a little different. They don't do as much water work, I think, as we do. Where we are in the process right now, we finished up in March of 2018, which actually we finished up more in 2016. Should've changed that at 16. We're waiting to go to the next phase. We just need to move forward with that. We are looking at a couple of sites and the site, for us, our site has not really been determined yet. So we are kind of still waiting for that. We're still working on that piece. And that's it for this one, if you have any questions. Questions, yes, Pat. The big price, you said you left it off? I don't know why I left that off. Approximate. It's approximately $35 million, if you want. OK. This is my million day. I will talk in millions, not a... Additional questions. Yes, Shalini. I'm just curious if the DPW building could be on the same site as the fire station. We could, if the site is big enough. We can't be on the existing site we're proposing for the fire station because of the river behind us. The Fort River is behind us and there's this 200-foot magical line which is there to protect the resource area of the river. If we take that 200-foot line on the DPW site, the DPW already encroaches onto that line. You can't add anything beyond towards the river. So the site is almost exclusively filled with the fire station and we don't fit unless you could figure out more land in that area. Do you need about, what, eight acres for the... We need eight. For DPW. Eight is why it's another study. If you read the study, it says eight and then if you really want to have nice buffers you might want to go with 10 acres. And fire requires how many acres? About three? It's if you take out the training part. Yeah. I think it was one and a half and then the rest is three, I believe, yes. Okay. Kathy? It's in the study. Yeah. I'm looking at the cost chart that was in our pack. What is that number? And there's, you know, you said around 35 but you have a line called soft costs that adds, you know, so we've got the three different sites and I'm consolidated so there's a bottom line that's quite a bit higher than 35. If you do soft costs, I have a question of soft costs. And my second, in looking at the pictures, the place where the vehicles would be inside is that are those, could those be simple? I'm going to use the wrong terms, but simple metal with a cement floor that just keeps them out of the elements. And would that be less expensive than the visual of the other place that looked quite elegant like it was an indoor building with beautiful bays of some existing world? But think of it as a great picnic you'd have in that big one. We showed you the picnic we have in the other building. It's kind of tight. If we had it, no. So the answer to that question, soft costs are things, or furnishings. Furniture, those type of things that go inside the building. Do you put carpet in? Do you put tile in? Those are things that really haven't been decided. So those are things that are also possible that you could put in basics and then upgrade as you go along. We could take our old furniture we have now and use that furniture. We're like the ultimate take it or leave furniture group. The guys, it's not going to be appreciated with the DPW. It'd be nice if we move into a new building and have new, but there are things that could be, we could adjust the cost and we could work on to make them more compatible. Just like in the fire department, you have three sections of the fire department and the DPW, you really need three sections. We need an office section and a staff section which is climatized so that it's comfortable to work in. Work in, take a shower in, do those type of things. Not all at the same time, but in your right place. You need a section to keep vehicles above freezing. So the vehicles I talked about that can't freeze, the sewer back, a couple other trucks that can't freeze. You need a section of vehicle storage which we keep above freezing. So that's above 50 or around 50, not above 50, around 50.  So yes, you can start out with covered storage which has no heat in it. It's just how the wind, it's how the snow, it's how the rain. And then work from there later on to add heating to it or add what you want to it to it. So yes, that's how we talk about staging. That's where you get the staging. One of the other things that came up during these various studies and that is you reduce the life of a vehicle when it's left outside by at least three years, if you're lucky. Other questions on this. I'm going to actually suggest we take a break before we do the street scan, five minutes. And then we're going to actually look at the horizontal issues of the town, right? Yeah, okay. So as we were looking at the capital projects, there are many people who have suggested that our infrastructure is like a fifth project. And so we asked Mr. Bachmann to have Guilford, Mr. Moring to come back and talk about our streets and our infrastructure side box. So the council has seen this slide before. So a little different, but not that much different. So street scan is what we use to prioritize and scan and manage the roads in town. It has a vehicle which drives, okay, I kind of just cut this a little shorter. So it has a vehicle that drives around. There's LiDAR, there's scanners. There's actually the little motion detectors which you have in your cell phones which can tell vibrations. So you can tell how bumpy the road is, all the stuff comes up with a lot of numbers and tells you the condition of our roads. Again, we showed this last time. This is the breakdown of our road conditions. We're trying to, we want to be at 70, PCI is 70 or higher. 100 is great, just like in school. Zero are no cookies as we call it in school, no cookies. You have to take the class over again. It's not what we want to be at. So we're average is about 63 and the scan was done two years ago now. So we've actually had a lot of deterioration since then. But this is the kind of breakdown of our roads. As we talk about roads, the thing to remember is is a road is a lot like a living being because it's affected by the elements as much as we have people that are affected by the elements. So when the weather's rough, roads get worse eating. If it gets really, really cold and stays cold all winter, that's far better for the road than heating and cooling and heating and cooling just like us. We don't like it when we get really too hot and get really too cold. We like it to stay one temperature, usually about 70 and everything is good, right? So the roads are the same way. This is a breakdown of our segments of roads and how they fall into the categories. Again, to the far right is 85 to 100, which is like excellent, very good roads. 70 to 85 is good roads and then you start deteriorating as you come down. So we actually have four segments when we did this scan, which were zeroes or less than zero. Our weighted survey of the whole town was 63 when we did this two years ago. 28% of our roads have structural damage. We estimated that we needed $16 million just to repave the roads. And then if we put it in contingency and police cost and some other costs that we use, there's another, you just add another $10 million to cover those costs. So that's kind of our backlog for roads. If we actually were to budget, this was based on two years ago. If we actually were to budget these numbers here, we'd be able to bring our PCI, PCI is on the left side. We'd be able to bring our PCI up to 70 if we used $2.5 million a year to pave our roads after four years. Now we're a little behind this now because this is two years ago. And yes, we've had some deterioration, a lot of deterioration. We've had a lot of freezing and thawing. And we're not helping our winter maintenance and our winter techniques for keeping the cars moving in the winter are not helping our roads by having a lot of salt on the roads, keeping the water flowing, keeping water moving around and not just freezing and staying frozen. We're actually helping to accelerate, I think, that freeze-thaw cycle, which we've been noticing over the last few years since we've been using all salt. So we're not really helping with our weather conditions. So we're a little behind. This is just a, if things have stayed perfect, this is just where we are. So we're at $27 million is when we first did the study. We're probably a little more right now. I don't know the exact number. And then as we move along, hopefully we'll catch up. But that's the fifth project is, that's the fifth project is we were talking about the infrastructure for the roads. And that's kind of what it is. We actually do, so we have $800,000 to get from chapter 90. Chapter 90 is $800 and some thousand dollars a year. The town has been putting an extra amount of money in. We put in almost a million dollars. We put 953,000 last year to help us with this. And then we do a lot of roads, water and sewer projects in the roads. And when the water and sewer department cuts the road to make a repair, the water and sewer department pays to fix the road. So Amherst Woods is being resurfaced now. And most of that's coming from sewer funds because we were doing sewer work in that whole section and tearing the roads up for sewer work. We're gonna go, we have a couple more roads. We're doing water work by the next year and they'll get resurfaced with water running. So it's not really fair to make the road people pay for when we're doing the water and sewer work. So sometimes we spend around $3 million, but it's not a consistent $3 million. And sometimes the $3 million is not in the right spot. If we're doing a road or sewer project that's in a road that's in decent condition, we may end up cutting that road a lot sooner than we want to just to deal with a water and sewer issue. So that's kind of how we handle it. The last slide I want to show you on this is actually separate. Yes, Paul. Well, Guilford was looking for that. I do want to emphasize that last year, and you'll see this again this year, the town has moved off a lot of the capital requests from departments so that we carve out as much money as possible for road repairs. Typically, historically the town has done about $300,000 in Guilford Mansion. We were nearly, we almost got to a million dollars this year for road repairs and we're moving in that same direction for the budget you will receive on May 1st. So we're trying to get there. It just means there's just a lot of balancing act and we'll be reviewing this with JCPC. Okay. Thank you. Guilford. So I was asked if there's a list. That's the famous where everybody calls up and says my street has a pothole. Can you fix it? And we say, yes, it's on the list. Well, there actually is a list for big road projects. This is our, this is our list. We kind of keep running for big projects. So at the top was the annual, annual paving for last year which we haven't finished. We'll finish it up in the spring. West Bay Road sidewalks, that's a project, a large project that's going on in the spring. It got moved off. We have to put together our 2019 paving list for this year which we don't really have a final number on what we're spending so we haven't put together the final list of roads we're doing. East Tadley Road multi-use path is being funded by Community Development Block Grant Money, CDBG. That's the sidewalk, the big sidewalk we're doing on East Tadley Road. Mill Street Bridge, that's a state project. The blue ones are funded by the state DOT. That project is going on. Northampton Road resurfacing is underway in the planning phases. It's scheduled for about 2021 in the state list and they're gonna actually pay for that. Northampton Road, route nine from University Drive all the way up to South Pleasant Street. There's some widening going on. There's some sidewalks going on. There's some shoulder work going on. Northampton Road resurfacing. We're working on that project. Wait, wait, Belchtown Road resurfacing. We're working on that project as a tip project. We proposed that to the state and the state's approved it and it's going through the planning and design process. That's from Southeast Street all the way to Belchartown. Road widening, sidewalks, some shoulder work. The state, hopefully, will pay for that as well. These are just rough budgetary numbers in those three. North Pleasant Street and Pine Street Intersection and the Sunderland Road, Montague Road Intersection. Those are the two that are in yellow here. They had been broken apart. Now we're kind of motioning them back together to do the analysis of the intersection concepts we have. So that's going on right now and we're supposed to have a report from them by the end of the month on what the best concepts and how the intersections work together. And then once that's done, we can start moving that project forward and trying to decide what we want to do next in that project. But that's the North Amherst Intersection motion together, both pieces. Station Road Bridge is in there. The one in red, which Kate reads very well, is a parking lot. That's the Main Street parking lot in front of Town Hall, which is on hold, I understand. We did a lot of preliminary work on that, so it's on our list. The North Pleasant Street parking lot, which is a lot previously known as CVS parking lot, which we call North Pleasant Street parking lot now. The two property owners there, we're talking about resurfacing the lot and we would help do our piece as well and resurface the entire lot. That's kind of being a concept being floated around. That's as far as that's gone, it's just a concept. North Pleasant Street, the pet upgrades on North Pleasant Street is a project from the roundabout at Eastman Lane going all the way to Pine Street. And that's to upgrade the sidewalks, maybe change the sidewalks from two five foot sidewalks to one six, eight, 10 foot sidewalk, and then maybe one five foot sidewalk on the other side. The West Street and Pomeroy Intersection was a project which was put together many years ago and it's kind of sitting on the shelf, it's already put together, it just needs to be dusted off and we can change the intersection at Pomeroy and West Street. East Pleasant Street upgrades, I should say pedestrian upgrades, sorry about that. That's for doing sidewalks on East Pleasant Street from where they end now to Pine Street again. And we need to do the survey before we can start the work on that. North Pleasant Street through UMass, that's a project the university wants to do with the town and we're gonna kind of change a little bit how that's set up. So we have basically, well it's gonna have some type of bike lane, travel lane, and the UMass big sidewalks, the UMass big sidewalks. There's a water line that runs through there that we're gonna work on as well. Route nine in University Drive Intersection, that's a state project, the state's been working on this. As I said once before in a meeting there's three intersections that came up on the really bad intersection list from the state several years ago. This is the third one, there was Pine in North Pleasant and there was Meadow in 116. This is the third one, nine in University Drive. The state's working on that. South Amherst Common, that's come back up that's something people want us to look at that makes some changes to the South Amherst Common and do some design improvements there. And then Mill Lane, we've been requested to look at Mill Lane because Groff Park is in there and we're making changes to Groff Park and how to connect Groff Park back to West Street and then to the new sidewalks we're doing on East Hadley Road. That was kind of, that's what that project is. It might grow, people would like us to pave Mill Lane and that whole project might grow a little bit. So as street stuff goes, none of these are included in the $27 and $16 million number. But if we did these, some of that number would get smaller but it's not included in that figure number. When we do things with the state, doing things with the state costs us more. It costs $50,000 or actually $45,000 for me to have a surveyor come in and survey North Pleasant Street from Pine Street back to the campus. It's gonna cost me $160,000 to survey from Southeast Street to the town line for the project on Belchtown Road project. It's about twice the length of the survey but it's not twice the cost. So doing things with the state, because you wanna get free state money, there ain't no such thing from the state as free. You're paying and you're gonna probably pay more than you would normally pay to get that free state money. Just, it's one of my concepts in life. Just remember that, there's no free money. So that's overall road projects. So I guess I'm ready for questions. Okay, questions. Yes, Shalini. I was curious about the criteria you used and I've been talking about that for a while. Like how do you prioritize? How do we prioritize which projects get done first? That's a good question because this is just the leftover list from before we had the TAC and before the TAC got started talking about it. The two projects the TAC started talking about and started to prioritize and started to add on to this list. If you look at the far right corner there's something that says TAC priority for 2019. They chose the North Pleasant Street pet upgrades and they chose the East Pleasant Street pet upgrades as their number one priority that they'd like to see money allocated towards. So how these projects start is there's usually requests and in the past it was usually from the town manager's office and from us talking to this road really needs something done to it and that put it on the list. Are the state came forward with the project and that got it on the list and that's how it went forward. Now we're gonna see that the TAC will have more of an input of taking the requests they get from residents and flushing out something and saying we should spend some money on this and we're gonna put it on our list as a recommendation that goes into the capital plan and then the capital plan goes through its process and we see if money comes out. I'm sorry, is that? Additional questions? Yes, Lisa. Thank you for the hundreds of pages of slides that we had uploaded but we don't have this one unfortunately and so when we do get that one I wonder if you could flush it out I realize that requires additional time but with the words you just gave us in terms of point A to point B because I'm sorry but I don't think we're all gonna remember which section of each road that would be so I wonder if you have either a longer version of this you could send to us that has another field that says from here to here and from here to here because this is really useful to be able to refer to. No, I'll lie that on. It's all kind of burned into our brain so we just know. Sorry. Yes, Kathy. I also I can't see this so I'm glad that this has sent it to us but I think you said that what you have up here is not part of the road backlog that we've got and so the dollar numbers you were showing on the 800,000 plus another so one and a half million a year ish. That doesn't include these calls or does that budget that the town's been allocating doesn't include sidewalks or intersection fixes? Anything that's an improvement beyond just repaving the road it's not included in that 16 or $27 million number right. I'll just call it $27 million number of road repairs. Any sidewalk improvement any intersection improvement that's not included in that number. So you won't be able to take these numbers to the right if you add those numbers up as cost estimates they're a lot more than they don't match up. So these numbers aren't included in that at all. And then they're also not coming out or if they're not budgeted in the budget projections you showed us that doesn't have these in them either. Those aren't in those either at all. That's why there's two separate things. So these are the bigger projects which have more improvements. This is like paving a road, repairing a road on steroids. You're usually getting new sidewalks and usually getting some type of changes to the intersections you're usually getting some type of enhancement beyond just paving the road. The other list is just paving the road. Yes Dorothy. I realized that adding these is very expensive but I applaud you doing it because I think that it will affect the lives of an awful lot of people in the town and the whole quality of life. So I hope we can figure out some way to include it without going broke. Other comments or questions at this time? Shalini? Just a clarification. When you say roads, does it include bike paths as well? What include bike paths? These 16 million because sidewalks is not included but bike paths which are part of the road, is that included? If you're talking about the bike accommodation on the roadway, it's included in the bike accommodation if it exists already. So like East Pleasant Street is wide enough to have bike lanes on it now. So that's included in the 16, 27 million dollars. But Pine Street, I'm not Pine Street, Henry Street does not have bike lanes on it. So bike lanes on Henry Street are not included in that 16 to 27 million dollars. Additional questions. I'd like to open it for public comment and ask it for a show of hands of those people who would like to comment. Okay, we are going to limit you to three minutes. Please come up and state your name and the area that you'd like to comment on. And let's start over here. You have to press the button in the center, yes. Where it says push. I'm Alex Lefebvre. I'm a trustee with the Jones Library. So I'll be speaking on behalf of the library project. I don't have any prepared comments but I heard some really good questions from the council so I just wanted to take a second to give you my thoughts. One of the questions was about could we reorganize the existing space that we have? And I think that's an excellent cost effective question. So I think it's important that people know that the MBLC does the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners does provide a resource to the library which the library did take advantage of prior to applying for the grant to bring somebody in to look at our existing space to see if we could reorganize it to take better advantage of the space for our community needs. And the conclusion that the MBLC came to was that we could not in fact use our existing space. So the second question that was asked was can we do with our existing library? If we make the changes that the library director talked about in phase one and perhaps phase two and we paved for it through JCPC process can we live with that as a community? And I think the answer to that is a difficult one because libraries serve the function of being the great equalizer, right? They are the social justice tool of a town. And unfortunately our existing library without the expansion, the people in our community who are being left behind are our populations that are most in need. So for example, right now children's programming which is our most popular programming. We turn families away from our programming because we don't have enough space to accommodate all of the people who are interested in that programming. Our English as a second language programs are some of our most popular programs. We have a long waiting list. If anyone wants to be a tutor, I'm gonna put a plug in because we always need more people. But those programs, what winds up happening is the ESL programs wind up taking the public meeting spaces because we don't have enough space to accommodate people in the library. So our meeting spaces which are taken advantage of almost every single day wind up not being available to as many people who might want to take advantage of public meeting spaces which I think are important to have access to free meeting spaces in a library and we lose that. Our teen spaces, you know, you have two issues. One, we want to bring teens into the library. We want to teach them about libraries and we don't have a space that does that right now. Putting them in a basement, they may think it's cool but I don't think it's a good way to teach them to be a good citizen. But more importantly, our teen collection is very, very small. Youth adult books have doubled in terms of sales in the last 10 years. The largest group, 70% of people who purchase are 18 to 64 year old. So they're not even teens and we don't have the space to accommodate that kind of growth. So we have somebody to direct the programs but not to accommodate the growth. So I could, I'm sure your, my computers, I could go on, right? If you go into the library on any certain day, you will see a large number of low income, homeless, home insecure people who their only access to the internet, their only access to computers is at the library. We offer programs for college education, for continuing education, for music, for art. There are unlimited resources available to people for free at the library and we don't have enough computer terminals to meet those needs. So what becomes a difficult question is do we as a community feel the library is our social justice support for our community? And if the answer is yes, then I would say our existing building doesn't meet that. Thanks. Thank you. There was another comment back there. Actually, okay. Yes, ma'am. You have to push the button and the green light goes on. Yeah, it's, oh, okay. It is working. All right. I'm Nancy Baer. I'm a member of the District One Neighborhood Association and North Amherst. In the interest of bringing the, this is just a little over one minute. In the interest of bringing the concerns of North Amherst District One residents to the council, I make these points, which are taken from a letter to town counselors from Met Gage. Many of us feel North Amherst infrastructure issues are overdue for attention. We cannot walk over the Mill River Bridge after five years of the bridge being out. Our library does not have a restroom and is not accessible to people with disabilities. The traffic light at the Meadow and Pine Street and Route 63 Montague Road intersection is an ancient signal, which keeps traffic backed up for 15 to 20 minutes every day at rush hour. Many families on East Pleasant Street walk on this well-traveled road without sidewalks. Two excellent steps in addressing these challenges would be a smart traffic light, allowing left turns at the Meadow, Pine Street, Route 63 Montague Road intersection, a $50,000 for a sidewalk survey of East Pleasant Street, the first step in building sidewalks. And I was encouraged to hear that these two items are on the list. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you very much. There was another comment back here, sir. Hello, Chris Hochman. I'm having trouble understanding the distribution on here. I was looking at the numbers 19 and 21 and concluded that that's 40%, but the graphic shows me far in excess of 50% of that area shown. So I'm led to believe that that large area, the majority of the chart shows me that roads are 85 or better for the pavement condition index, but I believe is somewhat misleading if we go down to the next part, the breakdown of by mileage and number segments. We'll see that in actuality, those two categories that are graphically depicted up there looking like 50% or more are really 6.15 miles, which are 11.1 miles of 101 miles of roads, which is 10%. That's not 50-something percent like the slide led me to believe, but if I go back to the slide, I'm wondering if perhaps the, those are just segments of the sampling that were done and so that actually the segments vary in size on the street scan. They can be 150 feet. They can be 2,000 feet, the segments. So maybe the number of actual samplings really would lead to that conclusion, but I think that's a, that graphic is not a good one to assess and say, oh, lots of green, we're great. When in fact, it's only 10% of them are in that color category really, if you go by miles and that's what us drivers are concerned about. Miles, not segments of statistical samples. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Other comments from in here. Yes. Yep, that's on. My name is Julian Heinz and I wanted to first say thank you to Mr. Nelson and for all his work and his department's work in town for keeping us safe and I next like to thank Mr. Mourin for the work that he's probably gonna have to do tomorrow. And then my second comment is that I would like to make sure that we have some way of preserving the fire station downtown that I understand it is sort of falling out of its time of usability. Yet at the same time, I think that it's an important historic figure in our town and it's a very pretty architectural building and is visually appealing. So whether we build a fire station in South Amherst or not, I think it's important to preserve that area and not have demolition there. I'd be very disappointed if we demolished it or made large changes to the front of it but I have heard the ideas of an art studio which I thought was pretty interesting. It could also be turned into things like a coffee shop or like I know Belcher Town has a historic fire museum which I think might be a cool thing there. All right, thank you. Thank you for your comments. Are there any other comments at this time? Okay, then with the council's agreement, we're gonna move on to the next agenda item. Thank you. The next item on the agenda is a discussion item. It's regarding a proposed fourth standing committee of the council and it is labeled at this time the Community and Economic Development Committee. We are not taking a motion at this time although there could be a decision to do a motion but I am actually going to call on both Steve and Dorothy to head this discussion. Well, we are very pleased to introduce the new proposed Town Council Standing Committee of Community and Economic Development. And I noticed that in the material in preference to the charter, not in the charter but the description beforehand, it discussed some things which were not clarified in the charter and it mentioned that the election of council members would promote democracy by representing what the voters want, providing the central focus and now lacking on what we want the town to look like. And the hope was that we would now have a public and comprehensive conversation about issues regarding zoning and the master plan and to quote the text, instead of important planning and zoning decisions being made piecemeal and out of sight. So economic development and vitality are goals that we all share but economic development is closely related to the attractiveness of the town and its quality of life. We want to grow yet to keep the unique qualities of Amherst as a New England college town and to be a town that reflects its intellectual, progressive nature as well as his historical and cultural roots. So the description of the committee, okay, I will read the committee. I have to hold this button down every moment. To advise the council on matters which impact sustainable planning, land use, zoning, agriculture, open space and recreation, infrastructure, housing, design review, transportation, neighborhood stabilization or revitalization, historic preservation, art and culture and economic development in order to build on Amherst's special character and to improve the quality of life. In furtherance of these objectives, the committee shall analyze, research and review recommendations for changes in the zoning bylaw and other land use laws and collaborate with the planning board on master plan updates. The committee shall also consider relevant issues and conduct research on the relationship between the town and the educational institutions and other partners within the town to develop policies and programs that will enhance economic development. So that was well said. So we, this issue's been discussed at full council meetings but then also at our retreat. So we had a great discussion at the retreat and Dorothy and I did our best to weigh through or go through what was sometimes conflicting opinions of the counselors and come up with a document that we think that we hope that the full council can take action on at our next meeting. Are there comments or questions? Andy? So I guess that my question is in the very first line and what sustainable planning is, what, how that's defined, but before answering it, I wanna also just point out that those of us who are thinking about financial structure of the town and the financial health of the town I think that my view of sustainable is something that is financially, it creates a town that isn't itself financially sustainable which means that we have to make sure that we're looking at planning as something that's stimulating tax growth and that's why I was curious as to what sustainable planning was and how it relates to the continued development of taxable property that can give us some relief without burdening current taxpayers. Shallownay? I'd like to add to what Andy said in terms of sustainability. I am curious to hear the definition of that but the way I think of sustainability would be to include equity, environment and economy. They kind of work together for us to have a sustainable community that can be enjoyed by all residents so it has to include the equity piece, it has to include the environment and the economy that Andy pointed out. Cathy? I'll stay on the same point. I think each of us are interpreting this in our own ways but I've been really struck by planning to date in Amherst and this is not dissimilar to what I see in New York City that you can't assume just if you expand and get new taxable property that you get a net positive impact on the town budget because we may incur high public costs for that private development. So what I've seen some places do and I recently looked at Dartmouth's handover for an example, they make any new development do a public impact statement. Is it gonna need a new road? Is it gonna need a sidewalk? Is it gonna have to re so up in North Amherst where we have to reprogram everything because we're already too crowded and that developer has to pay a substantial share of that so it doesn't be public investment in private. So you're looking at New York and it never gets ahead of the game by putting a new piece of real estate in because it's done tax breaks, it hasn't done the extra things and we don't do that kind of accounting that says we get something here but we paid something there. So if the word can sustainable can be that way of thinking that it's not just the character and quality of life but if we're looking for a net yield you better think in advance rather than after the fact. Additional comments, yes, Steve. So I wasn't sure if these were rhetorical questions or but in the interest of trying to summarize our discussion we debated whether or not to include the word sustainable because in many ways in a community like Amherst it seems unnecessary because this committee will only be as good as the, you know basically the members that are on it and the council that it reports to plus all the other boards and we assume that sustainability, the triad that you've mentioned is pretty much in the DNA of the community. So I think that we wanted, we did keep it in there as sort of a reminder and absolutely there are 13 different definitions of what that is we all have. But so we've gotten to the first line but so that was our thing. So we did, I know there was a, someone had come up with the idea that sustainability should be in the name of the committee and we debated that between the both of us and we decided not to in this version but we're only two out of 13 so if there's some comments on that we're all ears. Dorsey. That was me. Yeah, I think it would make sense to have it in the title since it is covering all those different areas that would be in the master plan and since our current master plan, you know, starts right out with words to the effect that sustainability is our overarching value. So I think it would be good to have that there and I think it would be great to have a separate sentence sort of indicating what Shalini just said about the three ways in which we are seeking sustainability in all these different areas. Evan. Coming from Andy Joe. Okay, Andy Joe. Okay, thank you.  I am concerned moving down to the third and fourth line, the design review and historic preservation portions, how that would intersect with the design review board and I think there's one that does historic preservation to a committee that does that. We've seen it on demolition delays and how their regulatory function would intersect with this committee's charge to advise on matters related to design review. So that's something I'm unclear about. Also one clear about the overarching advise on matters is that general matters, is it things that other committees bring to the council? Is it bylaws, is specifically bylaws or only bylaws and things like that. The appointing authority I believe would need to be the president of the town council since it would be a committee of the council. And then just as chair of the governance committee, as the governance committee is seeking a uniform for a committee charge, a uniform structure, I'd just recommend maybe before any action is done on this a referral to that so that we could put it in that uniform structure. Thanks. Yes, Dorsey. I really like what Kathy said. That's in my mind, that's in this description but it may be that there needs to be some way of making it clearer because what we're trying to do in this committee is to connect the dots to bring the pieces together to put things in context, not to do things just separately. And new things that come in, new buildings that may, for example, there may be sidewalk problems, there may be a need for new parking. There are things that might come with it that we would want the project but we have to make sure that the whole thing is looked at. Okay. Additional comments? Yes, Pat. A small comment. My colleague Steve said that in the DNA of Amherst, we talk, we have equity and we concern for the environment and the economy. And I would say those are aspirational goals that we have not reached those goals as a community and we need to look at ourselves quite clearly because if you can't see it, you can't change it. Okay, additional comments? Evan. Just a question for the authors about what exactly is meant by neighborhood stabilization or revitalization? So an example would be the pressures on the university area, neighborhoods. I think that that concern comes up mostly in Amherst in terms of, you know, in that particular context. It also comes into the context of some of the apartment complexes. Those would be, those are a couple of examples that we discussed. Did you have a following question, Evan? Comment? So that's the concerns. So could you just maybe give me an idea of how you envision this committee would address those concerns and what it means to stabilize a neighborhood? Dr. Erstein. I'll make a few thoughts. Well, of course, that means active code enforcement, citizen engagement. It means in terms of older existing communities, listening to the residents, seeing if there is something that is needed that would make it a better place to live. Just not taking neighborhoods for granted, making sure that part of a strong town has strong neighborhoods and that we would try to do the things that would bring that about. George. My concern with this remains that economic development is gonna get lost in this long list. And I'm wondering what the two authors feel about that, whether one thought was that there might be a subcommittee or some kind of smaller body that would focus on this issue. But when I look at this, I become concerned that economic development is gonna get lost in the mix. I believe that we had a discussion that there was talk of creating another town, town committee, not a town council committee, but a town committee on economic development because we looked and we said that really wasn't being covered that well. So there would be strong work and support that would be feeding into this committee or we could support their work. Alyssa. So while I don't disagree with the things that are written here and I appreciate the comments others have had, I still don't understand what you're actually gonna do when you sit down and meet for the first time because I'm feeling like I understand it if a proposal comes here. And so we start talking about things based on public comment, based on meetings that we've had, et cetera. And we say, you know, this isn't really ready for town council to talk about any further. So let's refer it over to this committee. But it sounds instead like, for example, if this, once this committee exists, that some of the members of this committee might decide we need more code enforcement and then do what. I'm just a little confused about what the process would be like. Steve. So great question. And so I think part of it is the theory, part of the reason for this committee is the theory that anything that's proposed that requires town council action should go to a committee first. So this would be the committee that would, if you think of a typical town meeting, what was heard at town meeting? Much of that had to do with some of the issues that are here, like zoning by-law changes, the public art by-law.  So one way to look at this would be that this is simply the first, this is the town council's group that screens proposals that come from either other committees or from, through citizen petition. Now it's possible once the group sort of gets its grounding. So the answer, really the answer to your question is I have no idea after that. But once the group gets its grounding, there's nothing, I mean I could see it becoming more of also an activist where it itself generates, like wouldn't it be great if there was blank? You know, maybe something that doesn't, isn't appropriately coming out of one of the other many committees in Amherst. But I think that our primary, a primary goal of this is to support the committee structure that already exists in Amherst and be the first or be a liaison between those committees and the full council. Dorothy? Well, one example of something that could come before this committee would be what the young man mentioned, the talk about making the firehouse once it is vacated into a public art structure. And I think it was at least two years ago I was invited to a very large committee of people that I didn't know. Or I heard about it and I went, that's probably more likely. That was on that issue. So there's people in the town who've been working on this for a while. When we talk about economic development, we went to panels at the MMA, the Massachusetts Municipal Association on vibrant downtowns. And one of the common threads that was in all of them was that there was restoration of historical buildings and there was some public arts activity. And they pointed out that the public art might not make any money, but it made money for the things around it, the restaurants and whatever. And that's a kind of a fun way of doing economic development. So that was one item. Another item that would be at least looked at and considered by this committee is the one that we are working on and it's gonna come back to us. And that's the town green. In other words, there's professional people who do a tremendous amount of work in this town who are doing things. But at some point, we wanted to say, let's look at the whole picture and try to put it together. Pat. I was in favor of this committee when it was first proposed. It had a much smaller definition and I'm feeling like this is kind of burgeoning everywhere without necessarily needing to. I don't think I wanna see this committee review every other committee's actions or thoughts, but I am concerned about sustainable planning, land use, zoning, working on the master plan, economic community and economic development because unless we develop our community, we're gonna lose out on the equity-hugey-muggy thing, but we're also going to lose economic, chances at economic development because the more you support the community, the more you support small business, the more vitality financially it can come. And I'm feeling like this is getting scattered. It's a committee I wanna work on, but I'm feeling like we need to refine it and know that I'm rambling and I apologize. But I remember in the initial conversation, someone made the comment that this would slow down other committees and the comment was made that might be a good thing because of the idea that the two of you have of looking at things holistically. Shelley. I'm seeing the role of this committee also in terms of the master plan and kind of setting the priorities. Like reviewing the master plan and so that we're all on board with what are our priorities as a town. And I think once that's established through that, the other strategic vision is established after that. Of course. Oh, Kathy, I'm sorry. I guess I wanna respond to the sense that is it too large, is it not focused enough if this is the only extra committee we've got? So it's one of our fourth. It's the only one that could actually be actively proposing polic