Governor Baker's March 12th order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law allows us to hold this virtual town council meeting. I will call on each counselor by name. Please answer so that we know you can hear us and we can hear you. And then we please make sure you mute your mic. This is also how we will conduct the meeting. Given that we have a quorum of the council present, I am calling the October 19th 2020 meeting of the Amherst town council to order at 632. This meeting includes audio, video and is available live on Amherst media. It is also being recorded. There is no chat room. If you have technical difficulties, we will make note of that. And if we have to stop the meeting, meantime, I want to draw particular attention before I take roll to the fact that tonight for the first time, we have the ability to do closed captioning. If you're watching this on zoom, and that is on the bottom of your bar. And when you go there, if you'll put the, we now have this up, that you join on zoom as a desktop client or mobile. And when we begin, the notification will be a little CC box down at the bottom, such as the one you see on the screen. If you click on that, you can choose which kind of closed captioning you would like to see. This will also be shown on the screen of Amherst media as we go forward. So with that, I'm going to call the role of the town council. Thank you. Shelly Balmone. Shelly present. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Present. Happy Angeles. Present. Darcy DeMonte. Present. Lynn Griezmer. Present. Mandy Jo Hanneke. Present. Dorothy Pam. Dorothy, could you please unmute and. I was on mute. And then I muted myself. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Evan Ross. Present. George Bryan. Present. Kathy Shane will not be with us this evening. Steve Schreiber. Here. Andy Steinberg. Present. Sarah Schwartz. Present. Okay. There are some meetings that are shown on the agenda, but I want to make a correction to two of them. There will be no finance committee meetings tomorrow. The second is the town services and the outreach committee. Instead of, instead of meeting on October 22nd. We'll meet on October 29th. And it will meet at 4 30 instead of 6 30. Okay. In addition to that, there are two other announcements that were showing. and the other is regarding the emergency rental assistance program. Okay. Thank you. We're going to take that down and we just we are going to officially begin the public hearing on the master plan. This hearing is in advance of asking the council to adopt the master plan. The adoption of the master plan is in accordance with section 9.8 B of the charter. The master plan or any amendments there to shall be approved by the planning board and then be submitted to the town manager to the town council by the town manager to the town council which shall hold at least one public hearing year on the town council shall adopt the master plan with or without amendments. So we have already held a public form on the master plan that was earlier on Tuesday September 29th. Today we are doing the actual hearing and we will have it on our agenda for the first time and then it will return our on our agenda a second time which will be on in November on November 9th and at that point if we are ready we will vote. We are going to have a brief presentation of the memo that Mr. Backelman has prepared for us and he will be assisted in this by Christine Brester. Thank you. So under the charter that's the town manager's responsibility to transmit a request for the master plan to be reviewed by the town council and of course this has been ushered through the entire process by our planning director Chris Brestrup. We also have the chair of the planning board Jack Jemsak here. So I'm going to turn it right over to Chris who's already done a primer on it for the council and for the public but she can give a brief synopsis for those who are new and have not listened to it before. So Chris. Well I wasn't really prepared to give a presentation tonight. I was under the impression that we had already had the presentation and I wasn't asked by Lynn to give a presentation. That's true. The presentation is in our packet and if people have questions about the presentation they can ask those during the hearing. The presentation as I mentioned before was done on Tuesday September 29th. Is there anything else you'd like to mention in fact about the master plan at this time Christine? Would you like me to summarize Mr. Backelman's memo to you? That would be great. Thank you. All right. So Mr. Backelman has prepared a memo about the master plan and tried to capture all of the history of it and the ins and outs of it. The planning board was asked by town council to update the master plan sometime during the winter of 2019 and 2020. And during the time that the planning board spent assessing the master plan they found that the master plan was really pretty good the way it is. The strategies and goals and objectives all seem most of them seem to still make sense. And so rather than trying to update the master plan at this time the planning board decided to ask town council to consider adopting the master plan. We had been asked to update the master plan using the terms necessary and obvious but it turned out that some of those necessary and obvious things would have required a lot more work than we originally expected particularly with regard to demographics and land use. And so the planning board and the planning department decided it was better to wait until after the 2020 census to update any demographic information and we really need to work with our IT department as well as our planners to update any land use changes that have been made and that's that's a pretty big effort. It's not just a question of changing the word select board to town council or town manager. It's really there's a lot more to it. So the other day we had a presentation about the master plan and we talked about what a master plan is and a master plan is one definition of it is a dynamic long-term planning document that provides a conceptual layout to guide future growth and development. A master plan is a community's long-term blueprint for its future. It's a dynamic document and marks the beginning and not the end of the process and it's not the same as zoning. It contains many it contains I think 10 different chapters and I can go through those land use is one of them demographics and housing economic development natural and cultural resources open space and recreation services and facilities transportation and circulation and the last one is implementation and of course the master plan starts off with goals and policies. It also contains key directions for the town such as maintaining Amherst's existing community character and providing housing that meets the needs of all residents and diversifying and expanding the economic base and promoting an ethic of sustainable environmental energy practices in all town activities. The master plan is on the town website and it it really began about more than 12 22 years ago I guess it was now in 1998 when the comprehensive planning committee formed and the comprehensive planning committee worked for worked diligently from that time until about 2006 when they turned the reins over to planning Amherst together but the comprehensive planning committee was very active during those 12 years that it was really involved and it published an Amherst visions report which is online the conducted planning exercises and obtained funding for a buildout analysis it gathered and analyzed data and published a buildout analysis in future growth scenarios it worked with the UMass planning studio on Village Center design and planning and eventually it started the process that we know as planning Amherst together in about 2004-2005. The current master plan is the first master plan in nearly 40 years it was based on a lot of public input and that was continuing the work of the CPC which began around 2005 this effort of planning Amherst together. I don't know how much more history you want to go into but we do have plans that are associated to them with the master plan are listed in the town manager's memo including the sewer extension master plan excuse me my phone is ringing the housing production plan the housing market study transportation plan open space and recreation plan bicycle and pedestrian network plan community field master plan and the energy and climate action plan which is currently being developed so the town has implemented a lot of things that are in the master plan and the the parts that I'm most familiar with are the land use aspects the planning board has worked diligently for the last 10 years implementing the master plan by making changes to the zoning by law. The select board had developed a charge for master plan implementation committee in accordance with chapter 10 of the master plan but no members were ever appointed to that committee and so the planning board has really been sort of ad hoc implementing the master plan and is planning now to make a careful study of exactly how many of the things that are in the master plan have been implemented. I'm going to be working with Doug Marshall who's a member of the planning board on that endeavor. So the next steps are that the town manager the planning board and town staff recommend the town council adopt the master plan as it is written and that the town start the process for the new master plan in about four years around 2025 with the goal of having a new master plan in place by 2030. The Amherst home rule charter requires the adoption of a new master plan by town council every 20 years and 2030 is the target date for the new master plan since it was first adopted in 2010. In order to prepare a new master plan the town will need to appropriate funding to hire a consultant to conduct research and do public outreach. The consultant will be required to do demographic research based on the 2020 census and also research the changes in our land use patterns. The estimate for preparing a new master plan is probably at least $200,000. That was the amount that was appropriated in the mid-2000s to work on our current master plan and meanwhile the town should work on implementing the master plan that we have and as I said Doug Marshall and I are making an effort to assess exactly which strategies have been implemented and which ones haven't. So thank you very much and I think that's that's it. Thank you. Before I call on Jack Jimsik I want to go back to town manager Backelman and ask I understand you did an update which has been posted and could you just explain the update to us? Yes thank you for pointing that and for noting that. So there are several there's one new paragraph and a couple additional phrases that are put on page three of the memo and basically recognizes the the role of the comprehensive planning committee and the development of the previous master plan and I think that was important because especially since we're looking forward this document that you're looking at now will have some longevity and people will look back to this to say where was the council in 2020 as we started this process and it was important to include this part of the history so that people understood the entire history of the of the process. So thanks for pointing that out Lynn. Okay thank you and thanks for making that update we appreciate it. Jack Jimsik who is chair of the planning board would you please speak to us about the planning board's recommendation? Yes so on July 1st we had a meeting and we realize as Chris explained that an update to the master plan was not going to be a simple task as simple as you know formatting and adding the the you know nearly dozen plans that have been developed over the last you know 10 years it it ended up being much more complicated plus we have COVID plus we're trying to do zoning you know bylaws which again Chris Brestrup is you know assisting Rob more on that anyway just it it wasn't going to work out that we could give it a refresh as town council originally asked so we did support you know accepting the master plan or recommend to town council to accept the master plan as written realizing it's you know it's not perfect but it is a very good document I mean it's it took a lot to get that together and approved and passed and it it seems like it has everything we need to get us through the next you know 10 years so and I really like Paul and Chris's recommendations there for looking at it in you know in five years and try to hit that 2030 but the planning board we recommend that you that the town council approve it as is okay thank you jack um Mandy Johanna key would you please report on the conversation with the community resources committee and their recommendation yes so on July 21st we took the planning board's unanimous recommendation under advisement we had the chair planning board at the time into our meeting along with the Christine Brestrup planning department head and after discussion we voted unanimously with so four zero with one absent um councilor Swartz was not at that meeting to recommend the town council adopt the master plan as is thank you um we are now later on we will have an opportunity for counselors to speak to this discussion because it is on our agenda later on but we are now open to public comment either and we'll start with an opportunity for residents in favor of adopt of having the town council adopt the master plan please raise your hand okay I see no hands um are there any residents who would like to speak in opposition to adoption of the master plan by the town council then let me just ask if there's any final comments from Paul or Christine or Jack or Mandy job I don't have any first of all we want to thank the planning board for having looked at this and look forward to their report of how we've done on the master plan which we understand will be forthcoming so with that I'm going to officially close the hearing and we're going to move on to the regular to the rest of the agenda okay we start the rest of the agenda with general public comment residents are welcome to speak up to three minutes um at the end we will um not engage in dialogue with you at that time however um we will make note of your comments and obviously they will be recorded um I will try to make sure that we keep record of all of the comments and if we could we'll start with um Rachel Hayes you're going to enter the room and we'd like you to unmute and go ahead and speak to us okay can you hear me yes okay thank you hi I'm the Reverend Rachel Hayes minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst I speak tonight in support of the proposed wage theft bylaws in my role at the UU I encounter labor justice issues in three main ways as a person of faith who believes in honoring equity and human dignity as the head of staff at my organization and as someone people call in distress when they can't pay their bills everybody needs money for food and rent and medicine and an employer withholding pay from workers because they can get away with it is morally bankrupt as income inequality continues to rise in this country we need to build protections for our workers into our community the issue of wage theft touches every facet of oppression in our culture the less power a worker has due to oppressions of race class gender sexuality national origin ability or disability or any other oppression the more likely they will not receive fair pay for their work we can change that Amherst can join other cities and towns in passing wage theft protections all of the provisions in these bylaw changes are already being used in other towns and these changes support employers who play fair by not allowing bad actors to compete for the same contracts and markets changing our culture into one that honors the dignity of all human beings will take some work but the town can get us a step closer by providing protection against wage theft thank you thank you very much for your comments ribbon haze Margaret Sawyer hey thank you all so much for your tireless work on this these bylaws we know you're not considering them yet tonight but we're grateful for everything you've been you've been doing i'd like to ask i'm going to make a few comments and then i wanted to see if it's possible for jonathan alvarez to follow me and for me to interpret for him i don't know if it's possible for us both to be on at the same time or i can follow him too it is absolutely possible and we'll bring jonathan into the room so that if you could speak identify yourself first and go ahead and then jonathan can unmute and you can translate for him okay i'll just finish my comments quickly which are that um at the pioneer valley workers center we really see this as a sign of amherst commitment to honoring workers standing with workers in a time when there's so many challenges facing workers we were thrilled that you all would still consider the wage theft ordinance during covid um there's so many other things going on and we are grateful to you for taking this on at this time when we know that workers face so many challenges um so we've seen how this law has been critical in other towns too as a preventive measure positively reinforcing to employers that in this town with the bylaws we won't allow cheating of employees um it helps to force businesses to follow the law and then face repercussions if they don't we're also so grateful and consider it so important that you're encouraging the greater diversity in the construction contracts um that's been an important part especially in these times um at the workers center we do get complaints of wage theft from amherst no one is immune to bosses trying to cut their obligations um we firmly believe that this is a creative and hopefully regenerative time in our country obviously we're facing incredible challenges but this is a time for building and we're i'm thrilled as an amherst resident and also on behalf of the workers center um that the town counselors are boldly and affirmatively tackling this issue to to make our town better for for all people and especially people earning um earning their wages thank you and if you would please ask jonathan alvarez to introduce himself and he can begin his statements with your translation jonathan que se presenta y yo te trusco después de cara cara frase más o menos okay hola yo no soy jonathan alvarez este quiero responder un poco sobre mi historia trabajando en amherst hello my name is jonathan alvarez i'd like to tell you a little bit about my story of working in amherst my experience was not very good and i'd love to have the time to tell you the details about it but i know that time is is short um there's lots of things that happen um in a business behind that what you see in the front there's lots of things that happen um not just to me but to other latinos to americans to everyone we've suffered we suffer many things um i'd like to be able to explain it but i i feel that i can't um we've suffered wage theft and also a disculpe me jonathan no cap de la última palabra hay mucha insentidumbre como que nos dejan en el abandono um feeling of of um uncertainty of of not of being abandoned basically not knowing where to turn no me gustaría que nos dejen en el abandono y si es posible luchar um y es poner mi historia lo haré i'd like to see that our our voice and our concerns are heard that we're not left relatively abandoned um and if there's an opportunity to more fully tell my story i would like to do that detrás de nosotros tenemos una familia por la que luchamos tenemos que poner la comida en la mesa hay que pagar renta y los servicios públicos it's one thing that's so important to remember is that behind every behind all of us behind every worker there's a family and we're working to provide for them to put food on the table um and and to to be able to pay the rent and take care of the bills um thank you so much for listening to me if you need a more full explanation or information you may contact me directly i want to thank jonathan for your comments and margaret for your translation and margaret i would like you to ask jonathan if he would to provide us a written statement that gives us more fully of things that he would like us to know about his story and perhaps then we have somebody who can translate that as well in our town hall that's great dice que gracias y también si puede prove a year um sus palabras por escrito si lo haras el favor um ellos pueden traducirlo y y quieren saber más de de lo que está hablando claro que si con mucho gusto yo este puedo escribir todo thank you so much i'd be glad to do that i'll write everything down thank you we very much appreciate both of your being here tonight um max page is our next audience person please come forward state your name and where you live hi it's max page i um live in 84 mclell street same place i uh grew up in 54 years ago i teach at umass amherst and i am the vice president of the massachusetts teachers association which is the 117 000 member of public school and college and university educators we're also the largest union in new england and i just want to say a few words and really kind of sum up um but some of the things that have been said so far about this um wage theft ordinance one of the most basic right of every worker is to be paid fairly on time for the work they do and clearly this the reason that we have a statewide um law on wage theft and why we are asking for these this local ordinance on wage theft is that this that wage theft happens all the time 700 million dollars it's estimated is stolen from workers and so um this is a chance for for amherst to to kind of lead um and join another a number of other towns and cities in making sure that this does not happen um in in our towns and you just heard a powerful statement from jonathan alvarez who has seen and experienced this kind of debilitating violation the theft of their labor and their wages so just very quickly to sort of summarize first amherst is joining other cities in towns this is this has happened north hampton boston land east hampton springfield wister cambridge a lot of other progressive communities um are are moving on this and we should be certainly um joining the many of the elements of our bylaw have been implemented elsewhere the second thing is that the hope is that actually the point of these bylaws is that they're preventative by when you raise the stakes for violating wage in our laws these bylaws help discourage such behavior so the hope is actually simply by having on the the books that prevents they're having them to be actually um use and then the third point is simply that um these provisions help assure affair and wage justice playing fields um employers that act responsibly and that's the vast majority of employers in amherst will not be undercut um by those um committing wage theft and that's the idea to create a level playing field and so that the people the employers who are doing the right thing are not somehow punished for their good behavior i just want to end by saying there's some some comment that i've heard around towns that perhaps there might be problematic for amherst to be out front in this that somehow this would expose us somehow i'm not exactly sure why perhaps the lawsuits or something but first thing as i said there are many other communities that have done this already we would not be at the very forefront we would be you know following but also leading the rest of the rest of the state the goal of course is for every city and town to have such an ordinance but those progressive communities have to start and it behooves towns that are most committed to social racial and economic justice to lead the fight and i think one of the things that so many of us love about this town is its history of having pushed out in front whether that's the vietnam vigils of the 1960s or the first lgbtq plus literature course at a high school the greatest of women poets having a town with a foreign policy i mean we pride ourselves in having kind of pushed the boundaries and in this case let's let's join some of the other progressive communities and lead so that we actually banish wage theft from the entire state so thank you for listening to me thank you for your comments professor page jasmine keresi please state your name and where you're from hi thanks so my name is jasmine keresi and i'm also an amherst resident at 81 harlow drive and i'm a faculty member at umass in the sociology department and labor center and i wanted to talk to you today about why i support the proposed wage theft bylaws and how my research underscores the importance of strong workplace regulations especially now with the coronavirus so when covet hit my colleague and i launched a research project to understand how covet was impacting essential workers here in massachusetts and so far we've done four surveys one in april may july and september and we've talked to over 7 000 workers who are doing in-person essential work in massachusetts and i'm going to talk about two things that we found first we asked workers a series of questions about their work in home lives during coronavirus like stress levels at work access to paid sick leave and health insurance feeling safe at work food insecurity and so forth and over and over again in each of our surveys we saw that workers of color and low wage workers were experiencing the greatest hardships across almost all dimensions here in massachusetts and so my takeaway from this is that covet has been very difficult for everyone but low wage workers and workers of color have been disproportionately harmed okay so second big finding is we asked workers whether they were afraid of being disciplined or fired if they brought up safety concerns at work and what we found was very concerning so on average about one in three workers reported that yes that they are worried that they'd be disciplined or fired if they voiced safety concerns and that's a very large and troubling number of people and really reflects the lack of power that people are feeling during this time of the pandemic um and perhaps not surprisingly these concerns have been much higher for both low wage workers and workers of color so for example here in massachusetts 43 percent of workers earning under $15 an hour we're afraid to speak up and in comparison only 23 percent of those making higher wages over $30 an hour were um so to state the obvious no workers should be afraid to speak up about safe basic safety concerns and yet that is what's happening and so how do these findings matter for wage theft bylaws here in amherst so it reasons that workers would be just as fearful to speak up about wage theft as they are about safety especially with few other employment opportunities during coronavirus and at the same time with economy hurting during the pandemic some employers may be more tempted to take shortcuts and so what our research shows and what i believe as a resident is that wage theft bylaws send a strong message to both employers and to workers that amherst divides by labor law and will not turn a blind eye to wage theft uh so thanks for your time professor keresi frank gomez please state your name and where you live hi my name is frank gomez i live in wester but i work for the um north atlantic state regional council carpenters i would like to talk about um about the projects on cow's row in amherst where a group of 12 workers reach out to me to ask for help because for the last six weeks the work over there they were not getting paid so when they started asking for the money they just got fired without getting paid many of these workers struggle with the fact that they didn't have money to pay for the rent or to buy groceries but this is not an isolated case since they are very familiar with this business model that many contractors are using they hire a third-party labor sub or a labor broker to avoid any responsibility with the workers claiming that they do no work for them i help them final complain with the attorney general and i continue to connect with the workers over the long time it took the attorney general to investigate even though we have all the time sheets and prove that they work at this job it took 10 months for the attorney general to finish our investigation in the end the workers only received a portion of what they were owed this is a project that received several million dollars of state taxes dollars receive a major amherst tax break and still workers were cheated and not fully paid this is why we need to pass the buck this by-laws thank you mr. Gomez thank you for joining us tonight Daniel please state your name and where you live uh Dan Wallach 37 Cosby Avenue Amherst uh Amherst resident for 31 years i'm also a retired carpenter having worked in local 135 108 and 336 i feel very strongly about just compensation for a day's work this ordinance will ensure that only qualified contractors with a verified history will be allowed to bid on town funded projects as an Amherst taxpayer i can feel confident that my contributions to the town coffers that will fund upcoming municipal projects they will be performed by tradesmen and women receiving their deserved wages i hope this ordinance will not be distorted by partisan politics or be distracted by whether it is an issue of affordability as this ordinance is about enforcing existing wage laws also i would like to say that this is not a union or non-union agenda Amherst should get on board with other cities and towns of the commonwealth in ensuring economic justice on town construction projects thank you for listening thank you mr. Wallach for joining us this evening are there any other people who would like to make public comment this is the only public comment period in our meeting tonight okay seeing none then we are going to move on with our agenda uh we're going to the consent agenda which we will put up on the screen following items were selected because they were considered to be routine and it was reasonable to expect they would pass with no controversy to remove an item from the consent agenda for discussion later in the meeting ask that it be removed when i finish the list and that does not require a second the motion is as follows and i'll be looking for a second to move the following items and the printed materials they're under and approve those items as a single unit 6a adoption of the resolution supporting the east west passenger rail 9a approval of the town manager appointees to the following boards and committees community development block grant advisory committee cultural council design review board 9b appointment of councillor pat de angeles as liaison to afford to the affordable housing trust um item 11a approval of minutes october 6 2020 town council meeting minutes is there anyone who would like anything removed at this time okay is there a second 10 seconds thank you then i'm going to move to the roll call vote we're going to start with elissa brewer well that's convenient because i just wanted to make sure that you fix the motion to say it's october 5 minutes but other than that yes over fifth thank you very much for it was october 5 thank you elissa uh pat de angeles yes thank you uh darcy demont darcy demont yes thank you uh lindgris mercy yes mandy johannity yes earthy pamm yes thank evin ross yes dirge ryan yes ethyl shane is not absent i'm sorry steve schreiber yes andy steinberg yes sarah schwarz yes shallony ball mill yes it passes 12 four none against no abstentions one absent okay the next item on the agenda is our presentations and we're going to start with the report on the zoning bylaw article 14 and for this paul bachman is being joined by christine breastrip and building commissioner rob morrow christine it's been a busy week a couple weeks actually thank you for everything you've been doing and i just want to state that we are not voting on any changes but in your packet is not only an explanation of the process but also a presentation of the calendar for us to move this by the the revisions this bylaw forward so with that i'm going to turn it over to paul thank you lind so article 14 is the zoning bylaw that the town council passed at the beginning of the pandemic we were ahead of the the state actually when we adopted when you adopted it and that gave some leeway to the to the building commissioner to make decisions that otherwise would have gone through and sometimes arduous permitting process with town boards we have rob morrow who's our building commissioner and chris breastrip who is our planning director here to talk about a little bit about how it's been used what other changes have been made under the governor's order and what what recommendations they have from their experience and how they'd like to see the article changed for your consideration tonight so hi rob are you do you want to walk through this yes good evening rob more building commissioner i just want to mention whenever i say we or the town or us i just want to know that there were quite a few departments involved with this to make this all happen it all came together relatively fast back in june but planning inspections fire facilities public works the board of licensed commissioners the town manager's office town manager of course and all this was done with great support and assistance from the bid and the chamber just wanted to mention that june we started june 5th issuing permits for establishments to either increase or create outdoor dining we worked with 17 restaurants most of those almost half of those were on private property and the remainder were out in the public way where the town manager created the space on north pleasant soft pleasant and main street of those eight restaurants on private property some of those have potential for a permanent outdoor dining expansion you know in those areas but at this point these 17 permits were issued on a temporary basis following the governor's order at that time they were due to expire november 1st and as you know now have been extended to 60 days beyond the end of the state of emergency so those remain in effect without the need for article 14 none of those 17 restaurants actually needed article 14 to be established at that time they may however at the end of the governor's order when that expires be able to benefit from article 14 if it is in effect next year to possibly continue either on a temporary or more permanent basis all of almost all of those i think only one did not receive a extension of the premises from the border license commissioners so almost all of those establishments were permitted to serve alcohol in the areas where the outdoor dining has occurred moving to actually using article 14 to help establishments we've had three cases so far two of them are pretty straightforward and one of those is a temporary situation i believe you have the memo that was written to town manager bakerman that that explains the locations one was a salon out in north amherst they actually set up three tents personal services for salon services to occur out in the parking lot there was an outdoor water connection made for hair washing and it was it was done really nicely and the same site there was also an outdoor restaurant outdoor dining created on that private property as well we've recently used article 14 to open a new smoothie shop right downtown that was a relatively small project minor alteration in the outdoor space on the private property for seating the most involved proposal so far has been one brought to us by stackers bob they they currently operated under a special permit had some outdoor seating at the rear of the building on a patio and their proposal is to expand the the patio area increase some lighting and landscaping and provide a better access through an alleyway to to and from that outdoor dining and that's one that just recently got we got finished up and will probably be starting construction soon we've had many conversations with prospective restaurant operators i'm i know i was aware of one possible retail establishment that might benefit from article 14 but those were the three that have actually occurred so far we've also had applications that didn't fit into any of those categories that we can say were related to covid situation that that article 14 didn't help and that the governor's order didn't help and those are those are temporary proposals that came to us from the jones library the emmerced survival center the public schools private school and the town of emmerced itself so that kind of leads me into the new or it's expanded possibly but extended at least article 14 where you know we we would like to discuss i think we're gonna start with the crc soon discussing some of these changes but really trying to anticipate where could this possibly be used that you know we didn't think of the first time that might likely come up whether it's a tent in the parking lot changes to the parking or overflow parking arrangements maybe signage and what comes to mind are the medical establishments the public schools the libraries the nonprofit institutions and the town also put in the proposal you'll see a temporary allowance for farm stands the thought there is maybe in the spring there'll be more requests for roadside farm stands from the agricultural community and we just want to be prepared for that i think one thing we experienced as school began to making their final decisions on how they were going to open up there was a need for things to happen fast and most of these that i mentioned that didn't fit into a category of article 14 of the governor's order ended up having to go through a process with the planning board and we were able to move that as long as quickly as possible but it it certainly would be nicer i think if we were able to to accommodate those temporary uses in a updated by-law amendment thank you you're muted lin thank you paul do you have any further comment at this point or christine before we move to questions yeah just this chris has anything you want to add i just wanted to note that i hope that you saw the updated version of this by-law that we sent out today which includes the office park district along with the professional research park district and that was an effort to include the medical offices on university drive as well as on research drive and the valley medical facility so they may need to set up you know some sort of tent in their parking lot or outside to administer tests or vaccines and that type of thing and we wanted to be able to allow them to do that so that's all are there questions from the council at this time mandy jowl well i apologize that this question isn't directly related to by-law 14 the zoning by-law but this is for paul have you you know i went back to the town council policy regarding the control and regulation of public ways and i read the section we added on zoning by-law article 14 and it looks like we might need to amend that too have you had a chance to look at that and when might we get those requests yeah depending on the reaction from the council on this change to article 14 i would be advancing a memo to that that's not a by-law change it's a policy changed by the council so it could be done pretty quickly yes so that would need to be done excellent absolutely and when that comes forward that goes to tso for review and then back to the council uh elissa so thank you so yes following up on that that was mentioned at our last meeting and so that needs to be on the tso agenda i suppose because we talked about that at the last meeting at the last town council meeting as well as tonight the other thing i'm a little confused process wise about the fact i first of all want to make sure it's clear that i am really impressed with the report is exactly what we asked for in my opinion um it is what you know when people express some nervousness about doing this this way and we said come on let's try it see how it goes um you were very specific about what worked because of the governor's part what worked because of article 14 and i think that's just incredibly helpful moving forward so i thank you very much for that and i don't understand why we've been given except for a verbal sentence from chris tonight and one sentence from rob tonight any indication of why this needs such an expansion we were not given that heads up in our minutes it's reflected that i said if they were going to be substantive changes we needed to know about them sooner rather than later um yes we saw the words printed on the page which changed this afternoon in terms of adding another zoning district but there's zero justification for why we would do that aside from the two sentences i just referenced so i don't understand why we wouldn't want to lay groundwork right now especially given that we had already referred this to crc on october 5th and they've apparently been you know busy with other agenda items and so haven't even talked about this at all and i find it really weird that we're going to have a hearing on this on november 4th and basically the only thing that anybody knows about it is that it wants to be expanded not why it wants to be expanded and i presume that will be reported for the purpose of the hearing and then of course obviously there will be a planning report report and a crc report after the hearing but i'm just confused about why we would waste this opportunity tonight to have gotten a written document that says why you want to include those additional zones and for what purposes i appreciate we set about the schools in the library i appreciate what was also finally said about medical because i had no idea why you would want to expand medical except for the tense issue and then my final question is associated with you mentioned retail and passing but did not mention what that meant i understood the tense for the schools the library the vaccines the testing but i don't know what you might have meant with retail or with non-profits in terms of why they would need this and i understand you're trying to look forward into the spring just like with the farmer's stands but i also want some assurance that this has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of marijuana or cannabis facility of any kind okay um elissa thank you first of all the reason this is on the agenda tonight and is not with action is for the very reason you're stated so it would be very useful paul christine and rob if you would give us a little more background as to these various classifications and why now we want to put them on this bylaw okay so a couple things here what you'll notice is that we tried to establish a temporary use definition to be clear that these new expanded uses for the most part are under a temporary situation and we tried to define that so that was clear and it really is as simple as this is what maybe possibly could be useful going forward there isn't really much more to that i haven't had specific requests from anything other than the library schools uh public and private schools and the uh you know non-profit uh institution that i was referring to is the amber survival center that i had to go through a site plan review process to put up a 10 so you know that really is it you know i've had some requests from the town itself or things like temporary facilities in various locations trying to anticipate maybe there'd be signage and when we're talking about the medical uses it was tense and possibly parking is what i would have in mind maybe there's a need for overflow parking either on the site or an adjacent site that could benefit from this these uses are very specifically laid out and called out according to our use classification chart so if it's not there it's not part of article 14 marijuana never did show up still doesn't show up on this article has no intention of appearing in any future amendment of article 14 as far as i'm aware retail was there from the beginning so that's not a change when i mentioned retails that i am working with a retail establishment that might benefit from article 14 as already written and if extended could benefit from it and my i guess the reason for making that comment is that there hasn't been a lot of activity i don't think we're at the point that we thought we would be where article 14 is is doing a lot yet it's just starting to have some effectiveness through few instances and there's a lot of talking about new restaurants but until they decide to actually move ahead you know i think this will be a very beneficial amendment when we finally do come to the end of this thing where business owners are starting to to move forward again happy to let chris or others add on to that but it really was trying to anticipate where we could be helpful and not have to go through longer process and i think chris could probably talk about the staff time that's involved to create a site plan review for the survival center for the jones library for a tent that they want to have up for up to 12 months yes please go ahead so i i yes i would say that it it is a lot of work for town staff who um for instance process a site plan review application for the jones library to put up a tent on their front lawn we have to notify a butters we have to hold a public hearing we have to write a decision we have to make sure the planning board has all the information it needs and if that kind of thing can be administratively approved by the building commissioner rather than going through a public hearing process it's really a time saver for the applicant as well as a time saver for town staff i also wanted to make mention of the fact that it's possible that the bank center might want to set up a tent in its parking lot not that i've heard of any such thing but for the same reason that medical centers might want to do that namely to test to offer testing and to offer vaccines when it becomes available so that they don't have to have people come into their building so those are the kinds of things that that we're looking at and i think it would be very beneficial to have this ability for a limited period of time to grant these kinds of permits so just to clarify if we had included these or these other classifications in the original bylaw the survival center would not have had to go before the planning board to put the tent up the survival center probably would have had to go because they're proposing a shed okay i'm not exactly sure how they got the tent up in the first place but the shed that they're proposing now had to go before the planning board even though it's a temporary shed they're intending to to take it away as soon as COVID-19 is no longer an issue okay shalini you have your hand up yeah i just want to firstly thank rob and christine and the entire staff that has been working so tirelessly i mean i can't even imagine how you've taken on this extra work in the midst of COVID so just on behalf of all of us again thank you so much and this means so much to the businesses locally i know that i don't know most people know here that so many of the businesses are owned by immigrants many of them have their life savings put into starting these businesses so what you're doing is really really goes a long way one of the concerns that were raised when we passed this earlier on was how it's going to affect other neighboring businesses or residents since we're not going through the planning board and i was wondering if you encountered any such situation where there was a pushback or people were not happy with what's happening and and one other wanted to say we actually appreciate you are preempting some of these things that may not have showed up like in medical and uh survivals and or any of these issues thank you so much for thinking ahead i don't think we've heard any complaints i haven't heard any complaints and i think that part of that has to do with a really great outreach effort on the part of gabriel gould of the bid she's really been working with all of the merchants and particularly in the downtown area and also claudia pasmani for the other village centers trying to help them to understand what their rights and responsibilities are with regard to these extended premises and i think that's really gone a long way but i would i would agree with that i just wanted to add that the one case uh where we are looking at a more permanent use of article 14 for the patio extension uh at stacker's pub that did go through the design review board so just wanted to make sure you were aware of that that that was um the recommendations from the design of the board were incorporated as conditions of that permit okay are there any other questions i just want to mention then that this has already by vote of our meeting last time on october 5th dramatically now been referred to the planning board and crc they will hold a joint hearing on november 4th at 38 o'clock p.m on this and then after crc is done it will also come to go well the goal is to have it come back to the town council for its first reading on november 9th and its second reading on november 16th okay and we're going to move on to covid all our update it's you and jim brown yes thank you i guess and jenifer is here too i am there you are okay good uh anyway slides um so this is our regular update and go to the next slide so again we'll follow the same format as we have in the past and go to the next slide and we want to talk a little bit about the cases and what's been happening over the next uh the last few weeks the last three times actually we presented to you um and this is this information as of october 18th if you can go to the next slide um so what has happened over the last three um periods of time we on september 21st i presented we had eight cases october 5th when we were here we had 75 cases and then today as of this afternoon um we had 21 cases and i think jenifer might want to talk about like why this up and down and what has happened and why we are seeing cases come off now a little bit yeah yeah so september 21st as you said we have eight active cases 149 total um two weeks later we started seeing the spike of that cluster and the associated cases um so we actually had additional 92 cases but 75 cases active it's dropped down to 21 cases active now and what that is is that when people come out of isolation um it is a process where a nurse will speak with them and determine if they're symptomatic if they're infectious and then take them off the big drop here in part was because patients were coming off but also um some of those cases were taken off um sort of in in sort of a clump and the reason that was done i spoke to the umass public health team today about that they've been working so hard with this cluster um that they have been taking care of the patients but the the data entry has been lagging a little bit but what's been happening is as i said they really take great care of their patients they've identified that their platform doesn't work their process doesn't work so they've added um four new nurses they have a total of six nurses now and they're looking at a new system they think that maybe that red cap may not be working with them so over the winter they're going to try to figure out how to make this a better system so today we do have i'm going to update our number not 21 cases we have 23 cases this afternoon i was working on two new cases that are not associated with UMass students we have a total of 268 cases and i think you know one of the things that we talked about is that you may see more of this up and down motion for our community is if there's another um cluster you will see that in this active case number go up and then hopefully as those cases age we people will come off and what we don't want to see is a consistent up where where even as people come off we get an increase so it's a very volatile situation it depends on the spread of the disease and by something that we work very hard on you know Jen mentioned the um additional staff that UMass has added we have two registered nurses also who are doing contact tracing for the town and of course Jen is really good at doing the contact tracing as well so we can go to the next slide so the the point of this is that we are still considered red as of last Wednesday the state comes out every Wednesday with a category of what what risk level you are and we are at higher risk which is the red category it's the second week in a row that we are in the red category the town of Sunderland is as well there was a significant uptick in the number of communities that have gone into the red red zone and so it's something that is concerning the state in fact if you looked at the state's numbers the entire state would be in the red zone if you looked at it as a as an entire state next slide please uh and this this shows in the communities and this sort of elongated map on who's red and who's not and there are you know a number of cases out in our area ours are very concentrated and attached if you see Amherst there with Sunderland above us as connected mainly to the university cases and we are at 15.7 incidence rate up for 100,000 which is almost twice what the state expects next if i can just jump in there yeah thanks so this this um determination the status map is you know as we know it's the um average daily instant rate per 100,000 over a two-week period so that calculation for that number that was published last week was data from September 27th to October 10th the data that's coming out for this Wednesday is was has been collected already and it's from October 4th to the 17th so we may be catching the tail end of the U.M.S. Amherst students off campus that cluster in our next calculation the number of average cases is decreasing per day but hopefully we'll be in the yellow this Wednesday thanks Jim next slide again we want to look at what the three colleges are doing and there are links to each of the college's website they maintain them every day the Hampshire does it every week and there's a lot of information on each of those websites and the next slide so this shows a little bit of what has happened and i think the bottom chart shows the daily cases and how there was that spike in early October late September early October and then it has been dropping off somewhat over the over the course of the of the month as we progress through the month Jen you're going to jump in if you have anything you want to we want to get to our other points we'll race through these next few slides so again the one thing i want to mention here and i'm not sure if i mentioned it last time is that what we're seeing a little bit now is our operations are all really solid still working well we are seeing some incidents at the department of public works where they've had some absences due to COVID either someone their person's child being exposed from a play group and then they have to quarantine or some other thing like that so until they are cleared they have to be they can't be on a job site but that's really been the only real noticeable impact on our staffing as you know force protection is our number one goal with our staff because it's through our staff we deliver the services to the town and we were very concerned obviously about our emergency medical services our police services our water treatment and wastewater collection systems and fortunately and of course the town hall finance offices and the town clerk's office so thank goodness those they're all maintaining they're they're healthy and that they're they're healthy so next slide please moving forward we continue to do we started up our weekly calling shows a week ago and Jen was on it last week we had the town clerk the acting town clerk and our facilities manager on it we're going to continue with these every weekly every week and bringing on whoever is topical we're hoping to have this tended on for Thursday if he's available and or we'll pivot and bring someone else on if that's not available and we'll just move on to the next one recent updates so we all know the school's reopened on Thursday and it was very successful reopening for kindergarten and first graders the the students were back and very happy to be back the the staff were back and very happy to be back they this they are they have certain metrics that are set up that they have to follow and this is a week by week thing if their metrics the way they've agreed to with the with the union dip down they will be forced to close so that's a that's a week by week basis but I think they have a pretty measured approach to how they're doing this but it was it was I was at Crocker farm school in that in Fort River and it was just talking to the teachers who are very they just said it was good for my soul to be back in the classroom with my kids and it was very heartfelt so it's good to see that licensees the board of license dean commission met last week and voted to reduce the licensees for restaurants on premises for all alcoholic and beer and wine restaurants by 40 and those renewals will go out on November 1st the university has offered testing for first responders which includes our our core facilities like wastewater and water treatment people who are responding to emergencies so and police and fire as well so that has been worked out very quickly with the university and so we're working on a memorandum of understanding but they've opened up their doors to our staff and they've set them all up with their google accounts that everything's moving forward and I think we mentioned last time about our department transportation grant that we received last week so next slide so the other thing that we came out with last last week was our tips for Halloween and many people are asking us for for tips and communities are all over the map on to some town some cities in town say it's not a town function we're not issuing any guidance we felt like we weren't giving guidance we're giving tips which is a little bit lower level I guess but really just to use common sense encourage people that you know not going out is probably the safest procedure but if you are going to go out follow certain guidelines we also provide guidance for people who want it to participate in your home as at Halloween and the basic metric I'd like to use is to say if your porch light is on you're welcoming people who might be coming to your door if your porch light is out that's a that's a signal that you're not participating in Halloween this year and you know we basically looked at what other communities were doing and trying to look at what the CDC and the Department of Public Health was recommending and put some just some guidance together for or some tips for people to know what what to do next slide so this is where Jen I wanted to sort of talk a little bit more because we're we believe that we're going into a more difficult time of the pandemic and Dr. Elsterholm was on Meet the Press yesterday and talked about these are the darkest six to 12 weeks of the pandemic that he saw mainly because of people being inside people having the sort of pandemic fatigue and letting their guards down and and so our concern is that we will start to see some more community spread and that's already being there's a bit of an uptick in the commonwealth and Jen did you want to weigh in on this someone yeah you know I I try to I I do keep up to date with journal articles I'm also listening to podcasts from Harvard Press conferences so I'm really trying to keep up to date so I can report back to you and make judgment and decisions on what we're hearing and really we're hearing things like this is a period of heightened concern that we're going into so part of that reason's like what what Paul was referring to that we have holidays coming up family gatherings people are getting fatigued feeling we did so well over the summer we can sort of let our guard down but really there's this is the time where we just really cannot be slacking off I think if we use really strong public health messaging that the tools that we have this is what we have and we need to continue to use them be vigilant stay vigilant and what those tools are the things that we know until we have a therapeutic maybe we'll have a better therapeutic you know medicine to treat COVID before vaccine hopefully we'll have a vaccine but we don't know so what we do have is social distancing reducing density face masks being outside and these other you know hygiene measures so I think going forward really good communication and again public health messaging to really you know make sure that people can get together but do it safely and not just get together I mean there's other obviously forms of you know society we need to keep going so I think we can do it but again I just think we need to really be heightened awareness now so I know there are questions from the council so we want to leave time for that right Dorothy you have your hand up so this builds on something that I was hearing on the television today we hear the numbers of cases but we don't have much sense of the illness really at this time as opposed to the early days in the spring and so of all of the people who have tested positive in Amherst have any of them been hospitalized have any of them been in intensive care I think I feel I mean I've been very good obviously I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do but I feel the need for this to feel a little bit more real because great sacrifices are being made such as things like Thanksgiving dinner and family things so I'd like a stronger sense of what really is happening with COVID in Amherst well you know we report data on our very small dashboard the active cases and then the the running total we have the ability to expand with additional demographics and data that's something that will need to be decided here or with Paul one thing that we can do and I wouldn't be great at doing this but you know for Hampshire County and the state you know we have data on the number of hospitalizations um surge capacity and deaths um so it's not much of an answer for you but um I understand your concern it's also for you know dealing with the whole what they're calling COVID fatigue if it's not real if it's just oh I'm positive and then I felt better I stayed aside when it was over it it doesn't keep us moving in the right direction I just feel a need for more information yeah I appreciate you saying that I think you know we have these great statisticians and epidemiologists but you know let's use our public health messaging and and I think that's an important piece right now thank you baby jolly of your hand up yes thank you um I gave Paul a bit of a heads up of what I was going to ask him tonight and I know he can't provide the answers tonight but I'm hoping he'll be able to provide some information about when we can get this information because I think it's really important for the public to hear and as you said it was good for the school kindergarten and first graders went back to school five days a week starting last Thursday the school had metrics they followed those metrics and we can either agree with those metrics or not but they had them they put them out there and they followed them and it was good for the soul for the kindergarten and first graders and I will say as a parent of a seventh grader it would have been really good for the soul of that seventh grader to be in school last Thursday and like I said we can agree with or not but we knew what was happening and we know they're being followed and we can look towards a date where that seventh grader can get back to school if we can keep those metrics where they are we have not heard a single metric from you about when our public buildings that are non-school related might be open to the public whether they be libraries, banks, centers, senior centers so I think it would be very helpful to the public to hear what those metrics are not just when it's safe um is it a positivity and testing number is it a Hampshire County per 100,000 number is it something else and what is that based on so I think it's time we're seven months in we've had restaurant indoor seating available since June 22nd we've had retail browsing inside for bookstores and other things since June 8th we've had DMVs open for the public to go get driver's licenses in person so so governmental offices open for public transactions for for a while now um yet our buildings are still not open and we've had until this UMass sort of cluster very low numbers in Amherst so I'm hoping you can tell us tonight when we will see those metrics so that we can start talking about what whether we agree with them or not and what they're based on and start looking forward to being able to um do stuff in person as I think I said in my email a new normal most people have already gone to the new normal um in my life I'm wearing masks everywhere I go I'm going indoor to browse bookstores to shop to do fitness activities I know we've got some other counselors I think that are going to fitness centers wearing masks and doing everything and we're not hearing in this part of the town or this part of the state about community spread being traced to those particular activities the community spread is being traced from everything I've heard to gatherings without masks where people stay less vigilant so if we can stay vigilant it likely is safe but I think we need to hear what those metrics are I appreciate you giving the heads up on that man Joe so you know I have talked with you know Jen about it and you know as we know we have the health director from Northampton on our as a consultant for us to help us guide through this and um you know I have to rely on our health experts as to what is the right way to look at this and you know when I look at what the decisions we have to make it's about can I deliver town services successfully to the public and by delivering town services it means I have to have town staff that are healthy and available to deliver those services to the public I had a scare about 10 days ago in town maybe a little bit longer than that where I thought someone might have had exposure to COVID and that would have like because of our staffing we could I was feared that we might have to depopulate the building in a significant way minimizing the kind of variables that our staff are exposed to people are already exposed to lots of variables because they have kids in school they're they're you know going into stores and things like that so I try to do the things that I control schools are a little bit different they anybody who walks on their premises is required to have a mask and they and you know they can control their environment we could do the same thing but I think that the danger of being a building that's just open to the public is a lot different than having then having things that where you can't control it as well so we are looking at doing additional things you know opening up the town hall for in-person contact for staff through a to a portal for the town hall you know for the senior center it's really the last place I think we will be looking to open because that is the most vulnerable population and putting that most vulnerable population in danger is not something I'm willing to do we have provided town services we have provided elections at 10 locations and we're able to do that successfully when we have to do a town service in person police fire dpw and elections and things like that we do that we have been we've migrated a lot of our permitting online and people have been able to accommodate that I haven't heard much of a demand from the public to say I need to come into town hall you know I think you know almost all of the transactions that we have instituted have been able to be done outside now if the weather changing that's going to change and we need to accommodate that as well so that's why we're building these new places for people to be to interact with people at town hall so until we have you know a vaccine or herd immunity you know you know I don't see us exposing the town hall just to open town hall doesn't make a lot of sense to me unless it's because we I look at it as providing services are we able to provide the services that the public needs in a successful way if I'm hearing that we're not able to do that then that would be we will change that we'll look at that again in the in the fact of the matter it's working for us for the most part you know we haven't had concerns from our employees employees are coming to work every day and they feel safe in their environment so looking at that I you know a lot of this is conversation with their employees about how do you feel safe coming into the office and what are the provisions measures we have to put in place to help them feel safe coming to work every day because we need our employees to be able to come to work we are you know we have some people who work remotely but a lot of most of our folks are working onsite and you know because we're an in-person type of operation um other communities have have really put everybody out into the field and you're working remotely um you know what metric we would choose I mean I did ask you know it's like will we use case count would we use positivity rate I mean what time frame would we look at we could look at all those things I don't know I'm not sure which one is the right one to use that would tell us this is a safe day today so I mean we will think about that I appreciate the sort of level of detail you provided in your your question so we will definitely look at it and rethink it it does make us rethink everything so I'll come back to you with more thank thank you I just want to respond very quickly to the you haven't heard people needing services um well many of those services are being provided other locations and so for example passport applications passport photos that town hall used to do you can go to the post office or CVS and get some of that so that could be why you're not hearing about them needing them here is because people are finding others that doesn't mean you can't you're not it it doesn't mean you're not not from you know I'm not sure how to say this it's a failure of service to provide you're just not hearing about it because someone's finding another location others are I would certainly say kids sports um and the things that the the newly named recreation department provides are being provided in private um and that doesn't necessarily help those of our residents who cannot pay the private fees for that but you may not be hearing about those find people finding other locations to get them in and end up being done safely let's see you have your hand up so I will try and be brief at the risk of being a sort of point counterpoint situation here since I see I'm the only other one with my hand up because I completely disagree with a huge percentage of what Mandy Jo just said and I do agree with Paul in this particular instance I would also point out that whether we agree with the limitations or the metrics that Paul has is really completely irrelevant actually it's the school committee had that conversation even though the state basically said it was up to the superintendent I would argue that we can complain all day about what we think the standard should be to Paul and I'm sure he will listen to us but that doesn't mean that we get to make the decision on any of those things I am however completely sympathetic to the idea of some of the things like different uses of the library right in terms of being able to use computers for example we don't replace for people to do drop-in computers totally get that one totally get the recreational opportunities we there's a reason we run a leisure service which we're changing the name of there's a reason we run those services there are many in the community who've always told us it's foolish that we run those services that it should all be done privately and we should just offer scholarships but we as a community decided to do that differently and so I appreciate that that's now an unmet need because there are a number people who are not able to access that kind of thing to do but at the same time I find it really objectionable to say well I'm going to book shopping with a mask on I'm going to the grocery store well I'm not and I don't think your relevance is any more important than my relevance on that particular situation I know there are other communities out there that say well if the kids are in school then we should all be meeting in person and I come back to something Paul just said which is how do I provide the services and I appreciate what you said about hey there maybe they're going someplace else for some of those services but if we can provide services safely without putting our employees at risk just so that we can say hey you can come into town to pay your property tax bill when there's a literally no reason why you can't pay it some other way unless you have a very specific situation in which case we'll meet you in the parking lot or meet you in this little safe cubby somewhere in town hall as long as I'm hearing as we've been hearing that town staff is doing everything they can to keep town staff safe and to provide the services making the adjustments for the weather which is going to be trickier I see every reason for us to say you know what let's just assume nothing's open until next July I think that's entirely reasonable I think pretending that without a vaccine that if you just go around with the mask it'll be problem is ludicrous and I just cannot support insisting that that's a thing that needs to happen I know I've been hearing this a lot over the last several months and I just think it's completely unreasonable in terms of the metrics I'm not sure I even agree with the school's metrics but again you know that's not my decision to make and but my children would not be in school your child is desperate to be in school my children were they that age would absolutely not be exposed to what's happening in school so I think we need to remember the huge picture of everybody and in the meantime Paul's focus on keeping employees safe and not having you know because of one employee goes down even with the protections you've got there are people other people that are going to be affected I really appreciate the way he's looking at that so another report on what's being adjusted for the winter right when people can't just meet out in the parking lot I know some things have been done I think we'd all appreciate hearing that but I am absolutely not wanting to hear that we're planning to open any time soon there are plenty of private employers that people are privileged enough to work for that are not insisting that they go back into the workplace at all much less try and treat it as the new normal just to follow up on that right down the street at UMass another very public institution really the message is if you can possibly work at home or not you know come to the university then you should do so I think that there are definitely conflicting you know there's conflicting information but that's the message from the other huge public entity so I have a question about the whole red red-yellow-green because it's based on 100,000 yes that has to do with the trajectory based on 100,000 yeah so we all know that what our census count is around 40,000 so I think that that's is that what it's based on this census count or you know the the the population for Amherst it's I can give you the number yeah it's 40,497.88 and that number is from UMass Donahue Institute you'll have to tell me more about the .88 but that poor person but certainly my question is isn't the whole thing skewed though because we know that those many people aren't here right now because of the fact that the universities or and colleges are under populated so so it's kind of a weird made-up thing right because our that's not really what our population is at this moment yeah you know I think there's a lot that goes into calculating these these epidemiological you know these these calculations you know incidence rate is you know we're loosely saying it's new cases but I think you know it's new cases in the susceptible population so I I just don't know all the the intricacies and that's why it's fun and that's not fun but I get a calculator out and I can probably you know predict pretty closely where we're going to be but we really leave it up to the state to have consistent information week to week um mandy joe hannacky yeah just just I want to briefly um in some sense respond to councillor brewer but also sort of ask the question a different what different way when we went into this in March the whole point of staying at home and doing this was as you even said flat in the curve flat in the curve flat in the curve and what I think most of us in the public assumed that to be was to allow for room in hospitals and it was not a stay at home until the incidence rate is zero and there are no vaccine and no one will ever get COVID again and so I guess the question I would have is if we don't have if we're not looking at metrics of infections or what is your new standard an incidence rate of zero or is there some some level of risk this town is willing to take I guess is is the something that I think the the residents should should hear from you if if your risk tolerance for opening these buildings is not until everyone in town has been vaccinated well then that's not next July that is never um and we will never have a public building again and unless baker requires us or the governor requires us to have a public meeting in public in person we'll never do that again because we're never going to get there um and so I think we as a town should be able to hear what our leaders um standard is for I guess it is technically a risk tolerance as to are we waiting for 90 percent of Amherst to be vaccinated are we waiting for vaccines to be available are we only waiting for our town staff to be vaccinated are we is it not even a vaccination is it as um uh miss brown our public health director interim public health director just said better treatments you know what what is it we are waiting for and that's something we haven't heard out of the town uh Dorothy Pam I I guess the thing is I feel I'm in a vacuum I don't know in the town of Amherst than a young person or child who's been sick I do not know of any old person who's been sick or died except for those that were in nursing homes I read the obituaries I don't see anyone saying died of COVID it's not because I think that maybe nobody's sick I feel like information is being withheld and I think it's really hard to live this way when we don't know what's going on around us honey I I'm sorry Paul yes information is not being withheld and I think that kind of conspiratorial thing is really negative and not reflective of the way we've handled this public health pandemic so I mean I think people have different tolerance levels I think many Joe's right we see that just nationwide and community-wide even within Massachusetts people have different risk tolerances and I think it's fair to say what is our risk tolerance what is that so but I think um because anecdotally you may not know everybody who has it right so but that's not a good metric for us we can't we can't work on who I happen to know or who you happen to know we go to our health experts and say what's your guidance on this so just if I didn't need to jump in and cut you off because I think saying that we were was holding information was just not a fair thing I just feel that what I said got twisted but I'll let it go okay Shalini this is a good time to talk about the emails we received about the concerns in the gather about the gathering downtown where people were not wearing masks should I talk about that a little bit now so there were two different times there were gatherings downtown several of us have gotten emails about them or saw it ourselves Paul you and I have discussed that so why don't you share this done or not done so about eight days ago there was an anti-vaccine debate or protest on the just outside what was reported was just outside the mask requirement zone on the north east corner of the town common on the other side of College Street so if you are in front of if you walk on that if you cross College Street it looks like the green for Amherst College is actually is still townland it's still the town common those individuals were there holding signs against requiring a vaccine they were not social distancing many did not have masks some did the second event was a pro-trump rally and people who were protesting against the pro-trump rally many of those people were within the mask zone mask requirement zone there were were some incidents where the police had to respond or fender bender things like that I think that people were saying why don't you go and make them wear masks and at that point I think assessment by the police was that it was really you're gonna create more of a friction time versus you know trying to enforce mask wearing we don't issue tickets for people for not wearing masks we offer them a mask we did not put our ambassadors in that situation either there were there was a lot of shouting and yelling back and forth but not a real much of an incident there there weren't actually that many people on the you know pro-trump rally quite honestly compared to some other things that we've had on the town common so but it I know how it when you drove by and saw it as I did direct insult to the town I know that how that felt but it didn't seem like that's something that we would intervene on. Shalini you continue to have questions. Can I just I just wanted to make highlight some things because I went back and forth with some residents in our district and I just wanted to share that with everyone because I think there is that burning question or the frustration that why can't we enforce the mask for these people to endanger everyone and I know that Paul you just addressed that that the police felt and had that discernment that if they interfered or intervened or it would have escalated maybe the the problem and and I just wanted to put that in perspective for some of the residents by re-trading that even in our district meeting and district five Darcy and I heard many BIPOC and other people's concerns about being overpoliced related to masking I know this is not an issue of BIPOC but I can understand from the police perspective that if we are saying to the police that do not you know intervene then we can't have them intervening in some places and not intervening in others and I think the approach we've taken as a town is of education and hence we have ambassadors but then I can also understand that if I was an ambassador I wouldn't want to go into a pro-trump rally and offer a mask to people so I just want to put those things out for residents to really think through that why these decisions are being made and there are a lot of complexity of issues and um and just like if there were to be more of these things happening in the future maybe we would have a different we would need to think of an approach of how do we deal with it but I think if it's just one-off rally that people came and they left and there was no you know issue that we're I think we're fine for now uh Pat DeAngelis you have your hand up quick question I probably should know the answer but did the group protesting masks and also the pro-trump rally have permits or permission to be where they were and if not why not and if they did will they be given a permit again so we don't issue permits for political rallies and political rallies are exempt under the governor's order for gatherings not for mass gatherings but for gatherings and so yes we when someone asks us would I like to have a rally on the common we appreciate that they ask us but we don't permit different political any political thing but we tell them oh well if you want to be on the common that happens to be that when the farmers market is so they've already reserved that we you know we try to inform people so they know where to assemble and this has happened multiple times this year and and we say could you go on the north common instead and so there isn't a permit that's required for political gatherings thank you there any other questions at this time with regard to the covid presentation or these issues okay seeing none then we're going to take a five minute break we will reconvene at 8.25 a seven minute break please turn your video back on when you return as you return please on show please uncover your video so that you show your face your real face that I know you're here thank you another minute okay I just want to make sure that as we come back everybody is still connected I will start with Pat de Angelis yes Darcy Dumont Darcy any done yes thank you Lynn Griesmer yes Mandy Johannike present Dorothy Pam present Evan Ross yes George Ryan I'll come back to George Steve Schrager I'm here Andy Steinberg here Sarah Schwartz here Melanie Balmille yes Alyssa Brewer present okay I'm waiting for George Ryan we're going to get started I'm sure George is going to be joining us so we have three action items our three items in the action area tonight however we're not taking actions on any of them all of them will reappear again on our November 9th agenda so let's get started and we now have the opportunity for council discussion with regard to adoption of the master plan are there questions or discussion that the council would like to have at this time Alyssa thank you I want to thank Paul and his staff for updating the memo that talked about the master plan history the master plan primer and the original memo did not recognize the vast and extensive role of the many many people who volunteered to serve on the comprehensive planning committee and recognizing that role and the amount of work that they did and they in fact passed a master plan draft that they've worked with consultants on over to the planning board the planning board did not draft the master plan and so just in terms of that background the reason I asked about that beyond the fact that we've talked a lot here recently about how do we get people to be engaged there were between 12 and 28 members on that committee at any given time and it met for many years at least once a month to develop the master plan and so my point being not only yay I saw the people who did that which we do have to recognize but more importantly moving forward I appreciate the timeline that they laid out because I thought that was really important that Paul and staff did that to show us you know what do we have to do to get ready to do this for 2030 and one of the things we'll need to talk about perhaps not us exact us but some variation of CRC in the future at least we'll need to talk about what kind of approach to take because they won't be working with all the most recent plan is kind of the scog plan like the master plan committee was they will have something more current but of course it will be decades old at that point and the question is how much community engagement does Amherst want because I can guarantee you that if the amount of engagement we had had was the amount that most communities in Massachusetts use we wouldn't have a master plan at all right now so we needed a lot of community engagement meaning a lot of volunteer committee members at the time we might be able to do it a little differently this time again because we're not starting from as far scratch but to think that it would just happen with planning department staff the planning board and a consultant is naive that's not how it's going to work if it's going to work effectively so thinking about a way of meeting in the middle associated with how that can happen in the future it's really just you know I know we're pushing it off a few years which is great and I'm the one who said in February hey we don't need to correct the minor errors we can just move forward with doing the things people want us to do in town and and make those things happen even if they aren't perfectly slotted into the master plan but I want us to be aware that that community engagement didn't happen because a consultant came it didn't happen because we had good planning staff it didn't happen because we had a planning board it happened because we had an entire committee who met for years trying to figure out ways to make that work and made it happen so please understand how incredibly complex that process is going to be in the future that means at this point of course that we should just go ahead and vote to accept it and it's going to be great and then as we've all been talking about making the actual things happen that we want to make happen thank you Alyssa are there other comments or questions or statements at this time Darcy? Yeah I guess I would just hope that at the point that we make a motion that we include that we are assuming that whatever we do is going to be you know various plans that are in process are going to be integrated into the master plan so if we could include that in the motion that would be great that that we're going to integrate our climate action plan we're going to integrate our housing plan we're going to integrate all the different things that are currently in process so that that is clear that we're not just adopting a decades old plan as Alyssa said okay thank you we'll work on set we'll work on trying to make the emotion the motion reflect the fact that the master plan is a living document are there other comments or questions at this time okay seeing none then again it will come back up and this time for a vote on November 9th we're going to move to wage and tip theft bylaw and the responsible employer public construction contracts and agreements for tax bylaw and Mandy Joe, Hattie Angeles and Kathy Shane who is not able to be with us tonight because of personal family issues and Lisa Clausen will be doing this they're going to give an overview of why we do this and so forth and then we'll actually talk about each of the bylaws so I'm going to turn it over to the three of you and go for it. So I believe Lisa Clausen is going to start but we're going to need the slides up yes there you go great thank you thank you Lynn thank you counselors for hearing from me so my name is Lisa Clausen I live in Northampton and I'm an organizer with the Carpenters Union and here in the capacity I want to as you can see there I'm just I'm going to kind of define the problem of what wage theft is and why we have been working with different counselors to propose some ways to address the problem so first of all as you can see wage theft can take many different forms and when workers are not paid we're not paid fully or not paid properly according to what they owe wage theft often goes hand in hand with payroll and insurance fraud as then payroll taxes are not paid we're not paid properly or fully and insurance particularly workers compensation is often not paid for workers as well and particularly in the in the construction industry we see it a lot where workers are being paid cash wages and so the payroll taxes are not being paid at all work is not covering them the two biggest industries with problems in the state according to the Attorney General and reports that her office puts out are the hospitality industry and the construction industry and if you're interested in learning more about it the Attorney General issues an annual report each year on Labor Day on the issue and if you just you can Google Attorney General Massachusetts Labor Day study and you'll pull it up and get more information on it so the next slide is I'm good for so what the proposed bail laws are aimed to do is ensure that when public funds in particular are being used on projects that extra care is given to ensure that there's no wage theft or that there are repercussions if there is wage theft and likewise with business licenses when they're being renewed it's looking at if there has been any problem with wage theft and having some some recourse if there is to this end with both bylaws we really see them as being preventative and that by having consequences or repercussions it helps ensure that employers are taking extra care to make sure that wage theft doesn't happen in their business or on their construction project and the bylaws really give the town tools to employ to to address the problem if there are workers coming forward and that they are hearing that wage theft has happened on a project or in a business and I guess I would just end with saying that while the attorney general's office is the main office in the state that goes that addresses wage theft and there are other state offices and federal federal entities um the attorney general has supported municipalities taking on this issue to help expand the tools and expand the protections for workers and preventative measures against wage theft happening um the amount of wage theft that the amount that gets caught is unfortunately only a small amount to what is likely happening because many workers if they experience wage theft don't know where to go to take action or don't feel safe taking action as jasmine spoke to in her testimony in the survey and they had done of workers um and um and so um we do appreciate that the town is taking up looking at putting some more protections in to prevent wage theft from happening when tax dollars are being spent on projects or businesses are getting licenses and amersed thank you okay will we go to the next slide so I'm going to talk a little bit about what the wage and tip theft bylaw does and so this is the one that that really is the one of the forces for protecting workers not geared towards just municipalities so this is the one that promotes knowledge of knowledge for the employees it allows our human rights commission and our human rights director to educate employees and employees and employers for seminars and workshops and other things it requires businesses to post wage and tip laws tell employees about their rights and give employees information in a timely manner regarding their schedules and pay rates and stuff so it really allows the employees to know what their rights are um and know what can and can't happen to them if they complain about their rights being violated it also promotes compliance with wage and tip laws by using our licensing authority the town's licensing authority particularly around alcohol and meal service to ensure compliance so if a business is found by the AG to be violating state wage and tip laws the board of licensing commission by them could revoke their license could require a wage bond to keep their license which is a basically a wage bond basically insurance that would assure employees that employees get paid if their employer violates the laws it's it's kind of like that type of insurance and so it's it's a way to try this bylaws a way to ensure that employees know what they can and can't do have additional information know where they can come on a more local level to make a complaint that would then be forwarded to the AG but but they might know someone in town hall that they can they can make a complaint to and it allows entities like the unions and the pioneer valley worker center to be able to refer them to a more local person than the AG's office that could be very intimidating to make these types of complaints and and get their issues resolved and i'm going to pass it over to pat to talk a little bit more about this you're muted pat besides it's unmuted myself thank you Mandy Joe um i'm not sure where to go with this exactly um in terms of the wage and tip theft bylaw i've been doing some reading uh and i'd like to quote a restaurant worker if i might um carol dunne who worked for years in as a waitress uh was not receiving overtime yet she was required to come in early to open the restaurant and to stay late to close it and she says i was afraid to ask for anything extra um there is a real fear factor in saying something and when she finally did with the support of a worker center uh asked for um her overtime asked to be paid fairly she was abruptly removed from the schedule in a restaurant where she had worked for many years um so in terms of wage and and tip theft we really need to understand that this is a problem this is a problem that needs to be addressed directly and one of the best ways we can do that is by having license um um withdrawn having the wage bond etc and Mandy Joe did you want me to go on to you were going to do i'm not sure where i can summarize the other bylaw okay so we'll move on to the next slide that and i'll focus more on the legal stuff yep so the next one as this is two bylaws actually because it got really cumbersome to try and put them all in one so the second one is what we call the responsible employer bylaw and it really means that we in the town want our town money going to those employers who are responsible and don't violate state wage and tip laws and pay laws and so this one has two parts public construction contracts and agreements for tax relief and what it does is it promotes the responsible use of taxpayer funds so it requires when the municipality when amherst is contracting for construction services it wouldn't require certain clauses to go into that contract so this is like if we the contract we have for the building of the dog park or kendrick park or if we ever get there a new fire station and the the construction the general contractor contract would have to have these clauses in it and it would also for tax relief agreements also require clauses into those tax relief agreements and and those those tax relief agreements are we had one up in north amherst in the mill district and that is when we say hey if you build this this private building we'll let you pay less taxes for a certain amount of time to make it more affordable for you to build something because it's something we want built for this for the one in the mill district it was affordable housing and and that type of agreement would also require these clauses and those requires those clauses would require the sponsor for tax relief but all contractors in a construction contract or on the tax relief project all subcontractors on those projects to comply with wage and hour laws it would it would say that if you don't comply with them then there are penalties if you're violating the law and if you're found to violate the law and and those penalties could be monetary damages for breach of contract revocation of the tax relief that we granted them you know clawing back already paid tax relief potentially and and then it also those clauses also promote diversity of a workforce through encouraging encouragement language not require language but encouragement language about the employment of veterans women and minorities and with without those not meeting them would not come with penalties and it also promotes the hiring of amherst residents and then pioneer valley residents instead of residents from say eastern massachusetts and again there wouldn't be penalties for not meeting them they would just have to prove that they tried them and so what this does is promotes equal playing field and make sure our tax dollars are not being used to support businesses and contractors that are not paying their workers next slide i don't pat do you want the next slide uh no i'm sorry well actually go ahead go to the next slide and that was a listing of municipalities that have these kinds of contracts and and ordinances covering tax relief agreements or tiffs and diversity goals and their provisions and these are particularly things that we need to look at because they're things that kp law was questioning we have municipalities like summerville lynn northampton new bedford chelsea et cetera et cetera we have municipalities with diversity goals mooster has higher goals than are being proposed in these bylaws east ampson has the same goals springfield requirements are similar or or higher than amherst for residents of color of color and women and the boston requirements not goals are public in public and private uh contracts are higher than amherst for residents of people of color the masses you know all massachusetts umass amherst mass gaming commission public construction work and gaming bids contains goals for women and people of color at the amherst level um and in umass amherst and the mass gaming commission enforce these levels uh aggressively and to date there have been no legal challenges um and we i think we can go on to the next slide i think this one's me again yeah yeah so so what what our goal is sponsors with kathy and you know we're sorry kathy can't be here tonight um but um that we're trying to support our community we're trying to reduce the unfair competition of a bidder that follows the wage laws losing out on a public contract bid because someone that knows they're not going to follow it can put in a lower bid um we want to increase the knowledge of the rights of workers you know we heard in you know public comment that there was there was the umass professors started with a study where a third of workers reported they're afraid of being disciplined or fired for speaking up on safety and their rights and we want to we want to make sure they know they can't be um and that the employers know that if they do they're going to face problems and they're going to face penalties um you know so so we're we want to give the town tools to ensure that our residents and our workers whether their residents are not are paid for the work they do um and the taxpayer funds for amherst taxpayers aren't used in jobs that aren't paying workers for the work they do pat yeah um i believe that was the end of the slides or do we have one more yeah that's the last slide i think that in terms of wage and tip theft uh this by-law would include licensure authority and fines to enforce labor laws and would focus on service industries such as restaurants and other hospitality industries that include tips in addition to wages it would involve our human rights commission and um of human rights director when and if one is hired in again in amherst and they their goal would be to educate employers and workers referring workers to state authorities in the event of a potential violation and providing penalties should the attorney general find violations and require the posting of rights in all establishments and information on how to report a violation of or file a complaint um these by-laws both the wage and tip theft and the responsible employer would enable amherst to exercise its purchasing taxing and licensing power to ensure that firms doing business in amherst comply with labor laws um we've met throughout this we've met with town staff we've met with the business community as represented by the chamber and by the bid and we've met with workers um across the board uh in town and around in in service industries and in construction mr alvarez was working on a project in amherst when wage theft occurred um and i won't speak further to that and i think he can do that on his own uh so one of the things that uh we also had a review by kp law we had more than one we had the first one involved them sending us information and then we had a meeting with lauren from kp law and gl and then uh mandy joe and kathy and i met with lauren from kp law into privately and kp law's focus is very specific and it and she it is a focus that tries to is very as lauren would say is very very conservative and very concerned about any possibility of a town uh being sued for anything and i think that um what she found was that we are not in conflict with any state laws and that in fact municipalities have the right to um quote they have they really have the right to um add to state laws when i was talking to bill newman from the aclu one of the things he said is when a law is created a bylaw or an ordinance one of the thing if there if state law already has a law that law can be more restrictive than what a town creates and then the town benefits from that restriction but if the state law is not uh as strong as it needs to be a municipality has the responsibility and the ability to add to um their bylaws in terms of wage theft um and that that in fact the state recognizes um and may it doesn't make exclusive of the process of establishing the requirements for a contract etc um and i can go into more detail about that if you have more questions is there um i don't know whether to stop here and address all the issues that the issues that were brought up through the discussions or should we open it mandi joe to questions and comment maybe open it up and and if the end there are any you can address them i just want to say one final thing um which is i want to thank lisa clausen from the carpenter's unit union rosebook finder um and soyer um from piner valley workers center because they really helped us as sponsors get this to today and we couldn't have done it without them i want to say one more thing because amherst in many ways uh around town government has stayed divided and so we had uh pat myself and mandi joe who represents one side and then kathy and i who represent another we worked in um in harmony in the sense of really collaborating really questioning really challenging each other and i feel like what we came out with um was much better than any one of us or one side could produce and that's something i'm looking for is how do we work together um and i don't know so i want to thank mandi joe and i want to thank kathy for our work back at you pat so um this all actually started when lisa and her colleagues came to the town and said we'd like to see if you're interested in this and um as i do with any number of things i kind of threw it out there and pat and mandi joe and kathy picked it up and a lot of work has gone into this um and by the way we will at some point hear from both the town services committee and gol with regard to their review of each of these but what i'd like to do and see if there are specific questions about the wage and tip theft bylaw at this point dorothy like i think i know the answer i just want to be sure uh thinking back on my youth as a waitress i had to come in for one hour before work and one hour after before and i had you couldn't you had to check in the the um your page your card in the machine after that hour and before that last hour so we had to set up we had to clean and never got paid um that was when our hourly wage was 75 cents with tips you had to sign still it was a good job um then a little later i was uh an aspen colorado cleaning hotel rooms at the aspen institute while i was at the aspen music music festival and when a very famous woman asked me if i'd gotten the tip she left me i said no what tip and we had a meeting with big rose big ruby it was who said her brother was a sheriff had all the girls and she said i take those tips and what do you want to do what do you want to make of it so you know the only answer to that is to quit uh which i did so would that taking of tips and just claiming them would that um having people work and then punch in uh those would be covered in this law okay good thank you absolutely andy steinberg you have your hand up yeah hi um i really i appreciate all of the work that has gone into it uh by the three sponsors melissa and the committee's reviewed of which i'm one of them which is dol in doing that um there were several things that came to my mind that were uh questions that i had uh this isn't a statement in any way that i'm going to both know is but it are questions that i have and as far as this bylaw is concerned that we're talking about right now when i read the memo um that the committee put together with a number of appendices including a q and a and statement from in the letter that was written to the attorney general from the attorney general to lin the q and a has the statement the attorney general's office doesn't have enough investigators to adequately stop the problems and then uh the letter from the attorney general to lin says we were unable to investigate and take enforcement action in every case so that raised the question in my mind as to what the staff cost and um in uh including consultants that we might hire um is going to be to enforce this bylaw and whether there has been any financial impact investigation that is done including inquiry with other cities and towns that have had the experience of administering this bylaw for a period of time to the not to the advocates i want to know from the whether anybody has talked to any of those towns and said what has been your cost i believe is planning to address that question is that okay that mandy yes you can go ahead sure um so some town um the the issue of the attorney general not having enough staff for enforcement is a constant budget challenge and it's a budget challenge then for any community or working to address the problem and there is an effort on the state level to give more resources to the attorney general to be able to work on this issue but regardless of that there's still going to be a need on the local level to um to work on it um but we in in certain communities where they have more resources they have put staff into having compliance officers who investigate complaints of word of wage theft so boston has staff that that do that uh springfield and wuster do knowing that a smaller community like amherst does not have we did not anticipate that amherst would have the resources to to work on investigating wage theft and similarly uh north hampton east hampton other communities have not chelsea has not as well i know it's a bigger community um the way um the the bylaws are drafted are that um it would not be amherst staff doing investigation it would be reacting and having some tools if wage theft cases are brought forward um so that is then you know advocates um going out and hearing of wage theft and bringing forward were a case that the state or some federal body has investigated or bringing people to the human rights commission to look into um what you know what has happened with that case it gives tools to amherst to then address it and to evaluate is this a case that makes sense for the town to take action um uh and conclude that there has been an adequate finding of wage theft um and to then take action on it or or not um but currently right now without these bylaws for example you know with the cows road project when wage theft came up came forward there the contractors that cheated workers and still in some cases have not paid workers from that project could just as easily um bid on a school construction project and um there would be no they'd be treated no differently from other contractors who have not who have played by the rules who have not had a history of cheating their workers and so this would enable that what this says is that the town would need to take a look at what the recent track record is have there been problems of wage theft um when they're evaluating it but it would not be a cumbersome process or take the staff having to go out and investigate it themselves um the the contractors would have to submit um affidavits um sharing whether they have signing to whether they have been had a finding on them for wage theft in the last five years or not and if they have what that finding was um and for business licenses it's just when they're up for license renewal they would have to share whether there have been any findings against them for wage theft what those details are and so then they're you know it could be a wage bond that they're asked to purchase not to to continue their business license thank you lisa uh George Ryan thank you Lynn um one of the I think many good things that um this particular bylaw does and that I think Mandy brought out and Lisa's brought out I think also in her remarks just now is the role of of knowledge of of informing workers of their rights and making sure that they know what their rights are um and that they have multiple pathways then to pursue and having that knowledge they can and then they know what they can do and what I notice in Amherst what I think about is that in particularly with the restaurants we have a veritable united nations of of of in that community and many languages and so I'm I'm just wondering practically um you know and Lisa maybe has experience here and other communities but again we're a small town on the other hand we're a university town how can we be sure that that this knowledge and information which is so important for the workers can be communicated to people you know who speak Vietnamese Chinese Spanish whatever um Cambodian um and on the other side are the business owners um who also many of them um English is not their first language and American legal system is something that they they perhaps do not understand very well so I guess it's just a practical question um going forward as I hope this will will do how do we actually make sure that this important knowledge gets to the people who need it um I know Spanish will be covered English will be covered but um can we be sure and do we have the resources to make sure that that people who speak many different languages um can get this knowledge and also I think for the business community maybe working with the bid to make sure that particularly for restaurant owners who for whom English is not their first language that they understand what this bylaw is going to be asking them to do and what their responsibilities are this is another may I speak you know this is another time where the attorney general's office facilitates um municipalities um and directly addresses language issues all of the um requirements of the laws all the employer requirements are on a poster that the state gives out the poster comes in Vietnamese it comes in Cambodian it comes in Chinese Spanish French etc um and so those would be required to be posted in each restaurant um also in terms and I hadn't thought of that but in terms of the bid and the chamber facilitating possibly um a meeting with restaurant owners or business owners to introduce these new bylaws uh to them and to be able to um do that with interpreters um or required um in required languages or needed languages at that meeting. Mandy Jo you want to add anything? Yeah I was going to mention the attorney general's office the bid I think and when we met with the bid in the chamber they expressed an interest in actually happy helping to host in informational meetings with employers as well as employees but mainly employers because they're an employer sort of um representative agency um we aren't requiring it in every language a worker speaks um we we decided that was one thing KP law had flagged and we changed it to English and Spanish two of the most popular and translations that we have available um in town staff um and then a language spoke a language spoken that's by at least one third of the employees in the workplace so we we set a number that we thought was sufficiently high that it's not going to necessarily catch the one-offs but we'll catch those that are speaking that are speaking a lot of any one language in that particular workplace uh George do you have another just quick um it's the practicality of it um is what I'd like us all to keep in mind as we go forward um because this is an important thing it needs to be done um but the knowledge has to get to the people and so I hear exactly what Mandy's saying and one third seems perfectly reasonable um but I just and I also like the idea again of working with the business community as well as reaching out to the workers everybody knows what what the rules are are there any specific questions about the responsible employer bylaw Evan so TSO looked at this uh June quite a while back and and um I'll say this this is my opinion not that of TSO I think that we considered it prematurely because we did it before TSO had a process and so one of the things uh the one of the reasons TSO exists is to um consider how any bylaw will impact the provision of town services um and that involves a conversation with the town departments that will administer those services which we've done with every bylaw since but did not do with this one um one of the things I said as TSO voted on this to recommend was that I was voting on it with the expectation that at some point prior to it coming to the council I would get a memo from uh the town manager about what procurement position was on this bylaw and how they saw the effects I heard from Mandy or Pat I think it was Pat who actually said that they they've talked they have talked to town staff but we have not received that information including the members of TSO um whose job it is to think about how this might impact town staff and so I'm I appreciate that the sponsors have had these conversations but given that procurement is the one who will be carrying this bylaw out I'm questioning this is less a question actually I think for Mandy and Pat and more a question for the town manager as to um what what procurements thoughts are on this especially on some of the issues in here that were raised uh where KP law and the sponsors um contradict each other or are in opposition to each other um because I'm I'm a little uncomfortable moving forward on this without hearing from the town staff that actually has to enact this law Paul would you please address this so town staff have met with the sponsors and you know discussed what understood tried to understand more than what the bylaws intent was and what the requirements were and conveyed the sort of feelings of the town staff to the sponsors we have not reduced that to writing it's something we could do but we've not done that well if I could just follow up um where that value would be is that if there are places where town staff have concerns it would be useful I think for the full council to know that um and again this is especially true I think with some of the areas where KP law expressed concerns are those concerns shared where KP law expressed concerns but the sponsors um did not want to change the the bylaw in response to those concerns it would be useful to know where the people who actually have to carry out this bylaw stand on some of those disagreements or divisions between KP law and the sponsors Paul that would be a memo that you would have to facilitate with staff and we'll be looking at this again on November 9th and so I'm asking if it would be reasonable to have a memo in advance of the November 9th meeting yes absolutely thank you uh Andy you have uh Evan does that satisfy your request thank you uh Andy you have your hand yeah um just real quickly coming back on the first bylaw we were talking about the way staffed by law uh there were also uh the response uh was talking about some of the uh penalties that flow into the question of the responsible employer sections of future contracts but there's also a penalty that can be um levied if there's uh proof of failure to comply um which I think is the right thing to do but I think that we ought to know what the cost of that aspect of enforcement is too as far as the responsible employer bylaw um I just want to point out to everybody that on the one hand when you look on the memorandum that the three sponsors prepared for us and it says responsible bylaw would and this is was written in relation to both ask winning bidders on public contracts to seek to hire a diverse workforce uh in which is was mentioned by mandy but then earlier in the memo where it talks about at the very beginning what the purpose is it says that the purpose is um to strengthen a responsibility to assure that employers receiving town tax payer funds act and comply with state wage hour laws and to provide amorous with tools to prevent wage theft and so it's I find a little bit of confusion that comes because um we started with the question of wage theft and then we layered in another important goal but a goal really was not about wage theft it's about um hiring practices and the it just I think it's gets confusing because you put if you're putting a second purpose that's getting layered on top of the first purpose without having had a discussion of it I want to separate these two questions because Andy I want to go back to your first statement because you implied that you're looking for something and I want to make sure we understand what you're well Lisa gave a very good explanation from other communities about the ease of which it is to enforce this because um there's the ability to not give future contracts and create penalties for future contracts but it's really broader than that because it's also about license holders and it's about and as well and it has to do with penalties for failing for wage theft violations and so when we get into the cost of enforcement and question of staff time committee time consultant time time attorney time in actually levying the fines and enforcing the fines and representing in court if the fines are challenged which there is a right to do whether that has been looked at with the other communities that have similar bylaws assuming that they have similar provisions okay so I felt and just ask the sponsors including Lisa in this case whether they would like to address that issue I don't want to go on to the other issue yet I could unless one of the pattern Mandy Joe or Lisa gun okay so um to my understanding and other communities of a similar size or slightly larger um it has there has not been um much staff time or cost to it and I think it could be a question I think we with the workers center's help could do some follow-up with Northampton um as they did essentially all the different components that uh that Amherst has in their bylaws now the licensure um so they have had several businesses that have come up for license renewal um and have had a wage theft finding um by an agency against them and so they have then asked those businesses to get a wage bond um and to secure one which they have to then get their renewal for their license but I think it was to my understanding but we can check and see about getting a memo from the mayor's office from his staff in Northampton on it that it did not require very much staff time it was a part of the business license renewal process already and the onus was then on the business to then put together the wage bond for a year's wages given that they had had a past problem of not paying their workers properly the idea is that that would then cover those wages were they to not um pay them in the future um and in terms of um contracts um I can speak to that more clearly what is asked of contractors is that they signed an affidavit that they have not had a recent finding of wage theft um and then there's a process that um the town could instigate if wage theft is found to happen on that job where the town and in city council could then take up looking at um was there wage theft where their findings of it do a hearing on it essentially and um and then put into place some of the repercussions and penalties for it so on my understanding within Northampton these are just signed by the contractors there another piece that are a part of what the procurement staff do when they're talking with a contractor's bid who secured the bid you know here's the paperwork you need to fill out as part of you know securing the bid and they have added the wage theft um component to it they then file it that there's nothing that is asked of town staff to do they file it but it enables that information to be a part of public record if someone to then were to go and challenge that and say no we we do think that this contractor has uh incorrectly filled out that paperwork and actually has a finding of wage theft um and in which case so that hasn't happened um in Northampton to my knowledge but it's a process that would enable it to happen if um if they were needed to in terms of but what it really comes down to is it's the general contractor who knows that this is now a component that they can't hire a contractor that's had a recent finding of wage theft there are hundreds of contractors to choose from and this would enable them to you know they they just would know there are certain contractors they're not going to use um because they've had a recent wage theft problem and so in that case that gets to what what several people talked about the the leveling of the playing field and making it fair so that companies that do follow the rules that do pay their workers fairly are are being you know evaluated on being used against other contractors that are in a similar place and not contractors that hit low numbers because they cheat their workers andy i can ask you specifically what it is you would like to know what you didn't address tonight and mandy it may have helped me here too um there's also the ability to have the police department the um human rights commission i think there was one other named levia fine and i think that it's fine was a daily if i recall i'm not a hundred percent certain on that so there's a monetary penalty for that comes before they ever get to recontracting and is that being enforced in other communities and what is the experience and that other communities have had if they have been enforcing such penalties so um there is no penalty in the responsible employer section so so so there's no fine non-criminal disposition or criminal disposition from that point of view in the responsible employer municipal contracts or tax relief agreement portion all of that is based on breach of contract or breach of the agreement um so the penalties are written into the contract or the agreement for that bylaw where you saw the the the sort of per day violation type things or per employer employee is in the wage and tip theft bylaw we removed the criminal fine and the criminal action from that bylaw so there's no more criminal disposition there is non-criminal disposition the first violation is a warning and only after the first violation is there a 300 dollar fine or fee per violation um it can be enforced you're right by the human rights director of the police department or the board of license commissioners so if the board if someone's in front of the board for a renewal of a alcohol license and they during that hearing and all and renewal determination determine that they have been violating this bylaw the board could just issue those those non-criminal disposition I don't know whether they're called tickets or violate they're just called violations at that time um this the wage and tip theft is not a bylaw that is intended to be I guess what you would call actively enforced I think our town uses enforced upon complai