for us. Thank you very much. Then welcome everyone to the November 5th select board meeting and before we get to public comment I just want to mention two things one thanks to everyone for the good wishes for my father for when I was not here last time he had been in a bad accident he's getting much better and the community support has been just wonderful and so on behalf of him and my whole family I thank you very much. Thank you to Ms. Stein for running the meeting so well in my absence and to everyone else for taking up the slack during that meeting. The first thing before we get to public comment tonight is Mr. Musanti has a special a special thing to to tell us about and introduce us to. Yes thank you and we have a special presentation tonight related to some good deeds and heroism on the part of young people in our community on a recent ambulance call and I want to call Chief Nelson and staff and to the microphone and proceed. Thank you. Good evening I think you can take that right off of the stand if you'd like to. We'll fix it if you do. We have the Fitzgerald family with us tonight Mark his wife Krista and their sons Sam and Joe I got right they're twins and we wanted to recognize Sam Sam and Joe for some extraordinary actions that they took at a time when their when their dad had a medical emergency and I'm going to let the Captain Ingram kind of fill fill us in on what happened. Thank you. Thank you. So in October there was an ambulance call to the Fitzgerald residence and Mr. Fitzgerald had a medical emergency and the two sons eight years old got on 911 without hesitating and while one was on the phone talking to the dispatcher the other was watching out the window and communicating back and forth watching for the police and ambulance to show up. Shortly after about two hours after the call I got many emails and phone calls about the actions that these two young individuals did and they were all very proud of them and so I actually went and listened to the tape and couldn't believe that they did an outstanding job sometimes better than adults do. I can vouch for that.  So we all as a community should be very proud of them. Thank you. Congratulations to Sam and Joe. Good job. That's a wonderful lesson in public safety and the importance of 911 and the Fitzgerald boys have been taught very well. Thank you. Mr. Rossanti anything else you'd like to add. No you just hit the nail on the head and you know I was fortunate to attend a recent safe graduation another group of fourth graders and Amherst and the surrounding towns. Firefighter Ingram and staff are involved with that along with folks in the Amherst schools and there's I forget what the number was but there's been a couple thousand students have gone through that program in the last 17 years and this is exactly the kind of prevention and common sense steps to help our public safety people do their job. So thank you very much. Thank you. Well prepared. All right. So now we will move on to public comment. Folks here for public comment Mr. Keenan please come forward. Introduce yourself at the mic. Good evening. David Keenan. Thank you for hearing me tonight. I wrote a letter and I want to just leave this with you. This is a complicated issue. I'm certainly not going to be able to do it in a couple of minutes. You only have a few minutes for public commentary but I welcome being able to talk about this issue. However the board sees it most productive. I would welcome talking either with Mr. Mazzani or with the board or in a public commentary or something. So I think the flavor of the letter is pretty concise and I'd like to leave it with you and hope you get some consideration and talk about this matter. I know it's complicated. I know there's a lot of issues but I think it's important. It's something that's left over from my tendency is select board member and as you all know you know sometimes you get these issues that just don't go away. So I feel as though it's something I have to continue on with. So I'll leave it with the board. OK. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you very much. Anyone else here for the public comment section of the meeting. OK. We got a couple minutes then before our first time to Adam. So we will go to our untimed items. Let's see. Let's talk about scheduling January through June 2013 select board meeting dates. So you'll recall that I mentioned a couple months ago that when it got to be November and we were going to be looking ahead to scheduling our 2013 select board meeting dates that I would suggest I would throw out there for consideration that we make the dramatic earth shaking move of going from Monday nights to Tuesday nights because there are so many Monday holidays that seemed like it would be a helpful thing to do that we would be able to schedule our meeting such that it was always like the first and third or the second and fourth Tuesday of the month instead of having to deal with all the holidays. And so among the benefits to doing that in addition to the scheduling regularity was I thought it would be nice to to the degree that we have to spend a lot of time on Sundays preparing for meetings. I thought that would kind of give us our weekend back. Also it had some benefits in the office. So then the other day I was putting together the projected Tuesday dates and I found that it actually wasn't any easier at all. There are plenty of Tuesday holidays also who knew but even though the year starts on New Year's which is a Tuesday holiday. We have various Jewish holidays that happen on Tuesdays. We have elections that happen on Tuesdays. And when I thought more about it I realized that there are only a couple of months at all that we are looking for a regular schedule because the fact is we have a bunch of irregular scheduling built into our schedule. We meet as often as necessary during town meeting. We meet every available week in the month before both of the town meetings and we meet just as little as humanly possible during the summer. So the whole first and third second and fourth thing basically fell apart. And once I found all of that I basically changed my recommendation from high to extremely lukewarm. Now I'm not sure it's worth the big shake up at all but I have provided in your packets calendar pages with both proposed Monday and Tuesday dates. So I wanted to just put all of that information out there for your consideration and see what you'd like to do with it. Ms. Brewer. I know at one point way way back in the dark ages when not everything was televised certainly one of the things that we would have been concerned about was being on the same night as what is typically school committee nights. But it's my understanding that school committee both at the region and Amherst level is now able to be televised in their own space as opposed to needing to be in the space as they were at one point. And so aside from the fact that we can't go to their meetings and they can't come to ours which is something we don't typically do anyway because we meet associated with four towns meetings or BCG or JCPC. I guess I'm not seeing a problem but I certainly know that at one point that would have made a big difference but I'm not aware that it's an issue anymore. We did check with other folks who use this room and there was no particular conflict on Tuesday night as far as that went. Ms. Stein. Excuse me. The problem with Tuesdays during town meeting times we'd be doing Monday Wednesday anyway. So we'd be switching back and forth. So if there are no strong reasons Tuesdays I think I just didn't stick with Monday. Thoughts on the side of the desks. My thought is entirely personal in that Monday night is the only night I generally have free except for. Okay. There's no strong sense of moving towards Tuesday then. Okay. So then never mind. Just forget I ever brought that up. So then there are the Monday nights. So just looking at them as proposed they are January 7th as well as you'll note that January 16th is ended there. That's our budget meeting with the town manager. We have been doing that lately on a Friday but we can do it on a Wednesday this year. The actual date as per the Town Government Act because it falls during the week as opposed to on the weekend. The 29th or 28th rather of January. A couple meetings in February couple meetings in March. I don't think there's anything really too dramatic about any of these. I did the best I could considering the schedule and the various other things that were going on then. So does anybody have any questions about the dates as proposed now ignoring the Tuesday just like the blue Monday dates. So maybe if someone liked to make the motion naming the Monday dates but I would say for May you could just say as necessary for town meeting during May because I didn't actually double check that we had reserved the auditorium specifically for each of those dates. I move that the select board approve the schedule for select board meetings January through June 2013 as presented for Mondays being the primary day. Second adequate. It's been moved in second and further discussion. Mr. Aiden. I just point out that there's a lot of second and fourths going on which I appreciate. But even that just wasn't regular. Well that's not perfect. It's still pretty close. All right further discussion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. That was unanimous. All right. A couple other minutes here. You might as well do some taxi licenses and liquor licenses as we can get through those. We have a revised motion sheet on our desk so everyone should have that with red type. OK. I move that the select board approve a new taxi slash so for no. I move that the select board approve new taxi slash so for licenses for Edward Matthews of East Hampton, Massachusetts and Enrique Correa de Vega of Amherst on behalf of Zikwi Taxi. Second. For the discussion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. That's unanimous. I move that the select board approve two new taxi slash so for licenses one for Joshua Yvonne of Chica P. Mass and one for Lawrence O'Connor of North Hampton Mass on behalf of Aaron's Transportation. Second. For the discussion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. That's unanimous. I move that the select board approve a new taxi slash so for license. Nope. It's two of them. So approve crossed out the a new taxi slash so for licenses for Ellen Dickinson of West Hatfield and Carol Jean Lake of Montague on behalf of Celebrity Cab. Second. For the discussion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. That's unanimous. I repeat the names for celebrity. Are you one of them? Celebrity. OK. It's Ellen Dickinson of West Hatfield and Carol Jean Lake. LAIT of Montague on behalf of Celebrity Cab. OK. OK. This is the owner of Celebrity Cab. These are really his drivers. OK. All right. Those are all set then we're good. All right. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. That's unanimous. Do you have time? Now we'll leave the liquor licenses for later. OK. OK. So speaking of taxis our 645 item is taxi business issues. The first bullet on here the taxi business application for Christian coach taxi. That is not ready for our consideration tonight so we are going to skip over that. And instead we're going to go to the second bullet which is approve new taxi regulations effective January 1st. This is something that we have been talking about for a while now. Staff including how manager staff from the select board office and the chief of police have and inspections folks have been meeting first together to talk about what some weaknesses were in our regulations then holding meetings with the different taxi companies to get their feedback on the proposed changes. We have in our packets and folks can be following along at home with stuff on the web proposed new regulations actually revised from what was in our packets. So that was also on your desk tonight. And there's extra red type on the newest version that is also on the website. There's also an explanation kind of section by section of what each of the changes is about. And there's also a document that it summarizes the feedback received from the taxi companies during this process. So Mr. you said anything else you'd like to say about the about the materials and how we got here. I was just going to very quickly go through the handful of changes from the draft regulations that I reviewed with you in some detail at your last meeting that are on your table tonight. So first in section three we've added language in the very first paragraph for vehicles making clear that operate sounds self evident but it's now explicit in the regs that vehicles shall have a taxi registration numbered license plate. And we added language making clear that that does not constitute authority to operate a livery service. And there's a citation of the appropriate mass registry of motor vehicles regulations related to livery service requirements. That was suggested by a couple of board members and did come up in our discussion with taxi company owners. Secondly on section later in section three at the top of page three we did retain language related to the appropriate dress and appearance of taxi drivers but we made that gender neutral by eliminating the male centric language from that paragraph. On section four fairs we just made clear that the requirement for installation of meters is effective January 1 2013. And again based upon some discussion with taxi company owners at our feedback meetings we did amend the proposed discount for senior citizens to be a minimum of 10 percent. We originally had a shall be 25 percent was the first draft. So that was in response to some feedback gives taxi companies the discretion to offer a greater discount but sets a lower minimum threshold. And then on section six violations. I think we did some further tightening up of the language about that the if a vehicle is in violation of not the driver but a vehicle is in violation of the regulations or inspection regulations and there are safety issues in the discretion of the chief that vehicle can be removed from service for 30 days. It's also language in there about a second offense happening you know if the situation is not remedied that can there can be a suspension of the company's licensed operator and Amherst for up to 120 days and that there's some discretion about the length of that amount and we built right into that a public hearing by the licensing board which is the select board would be scheduled as soon as practicable for due process given that would be a much more severe step we want to board needs to weigh in on on length of that and have an opportunity for the license holder to be heard before that penalty is enforced in full. So those are the key changes from last time and chief Livingstone is also here tonight and we're happy to answer any additional questions you may have. Thank you so just so people recall this is an effort that was undertaken because there was a sense that first of all the taxi industry in Amherst had grown beyond our regulatory and enforcement abilities and so this effort was in order to try and tighten up some weaknesses in our regulations in order to ensure that to ensure to the best of the town's ability that the licensed taxi services in town are safe for customers this is all about trying to to find a way to make sure that the the taxi cab companies are in compliance and there were a lot of weaknesses with the under the previous regulations the key change in all of this is changing to a metering service and the reason to change from meeting services first of all it it makes the fair situation very clear to the passengers which was one passenger concern and also it makes for a much more concerted investment in the taxi vehicle so that is the vehicle that has the the meters mounted in it it obviously needs to be well maintained as that is the the the cab with the meter it makes it much more unlikely to be switched out for to two vehicles that haven't been reported to the town or to license plate changes or all kinds of strange things were being reported as as happening out there so this is a way to say all right this is this is fairest for the passengers it's fairest for the companies it creates a level playing field and it is easier for all of us to regulate so that is really the key change we announced this last year during late fall right about this time when we were looking at the license renewals for all of our businesses for the following year we said get ready because when we renew licenses at the end of 2012 we're going to be looking at requiring metering of the cabs all of the cab companies were notified about that change at that time so they've had 12 months to get ready for that so do select board members first of all have any questions or comments about the revised regulations as we have them no okay anyone from the public like to comment on the taxi regulations okay that was easy on miss borough I actually was wondering if during this discussion there happened to have been any feedback associated with the and I know we have a section in here about fees and how those can be changed at a public meeting and that you know it's not a huge burden to change them but I wondered if there'd been any feedback since I assume it's been some little time now that we've had $25 for an individual and $100 for a business license and if there was any thought as to considering changing those anytime soon since these are going into effect soon and whether or not we feel like those are adequately capturing our costs associated with administering we have had some discussion at the staff level a specific recommendation we haven't included in this package as of now it's it's something you know we'll take a look at I mean this is a significant change in policies after 18 years with some upfront costs incurred by the license holders to comply so that influenced our our thoughts about the fee schedule at least as at least for now so at this point you're it's not likely that you'd be bringing anything forward to us in the next say three to six months about a change in fees just associated with the rest of your budget process because of the fact that we're doing this at this point we haven't finished that but I think it's unlikely okay but we'll certainly look at it you know for future years but we didn't think 2013 made sense given all the other changes that are occurring sure other questions or comments about the taxi all right miss Stein would you like to make the motion I move that the select board approved the rules in order regulating the use and operation of taxi businesses in the town of Amherst dated November 5th 2012 as presented second discussion all in favor say hi hi that is unanimous thank you very much we have new taxi regulations as of January 2013 fantastic and thanks to all the companies for being part of the process for giving their feedback and and trying to help us improve that that whole regulatory situation for their and and everyone's benefit okay we have a couple more minutes before we get to our seven o'clock item so let's go back to those wine in my wine and malt licenses okay I move that the select board approve a special wine and malt license for a reception to be held at UMass Amherst at the fine arts center and it's mocha moca on November 14th 2012 from 5 to 7 p.m. Merida Schmidt campus center director second for the discussion all in favor say hi hi and I move that the select board approve a special wine and malt license for an anniversary celebration to be held at the Eric Carl Museum on November 10th 2012 from 6 to 9 p.m. Christine Ellison owner slash manager second for the discussion all in favor say hi hi I do the committee appointment since we're right there I moved that the select board confirm the town managers appointment of Maureen O'Leary Amherst MA to the board of health for a term to expire June 30th 2015 second for the discussion all in favor say hi hi hi that is unanimous okay three more minutes um maybe we can be quick with the question about considering select board meeting schedule for fall town meeting so we changed the town meeting to uh seven o'clock but then we never did talk about when we want our meetings to start um we have been meeting at 6 30 we have 50 minutes we had 50 minutes when town meeting was starting at 7 30 um we could meet at 6 we could meet at 6 15 split the difference we could continue to meet at 6 30 and that would give us 20 minutes what are people's sentiment about that Ms. Brewer well I'll just jump right in and say I'd rather keep meeting at 6 30 even though I realize it's not giving us a lot of time I don't want us to have to do a lot of stuff unfortunately we may have to this time around um associated with fall town meeting but going earlier than 6 30 is hard which does not mean to say I didn't want to try the town meeting at 7 but um we do have a little more wiggle room if we of course don't get quorum anytime near 7 o'clock but I'm I just am not sure I'm going likely to be there and again I think they should be short meetings anyway and we already don't have public comment during so okay we are set up a little bit strangely this time for you to take positions at that time would we be interested in splitting the difference for this first town meeting try for 6 15 we certainly try we could try uh Mr. Hayden clearly um some things trump others um and in my sense that um really we we've often fill up the hour with work but if we can't all be there we definitely have to to go a little bit later so I don't know 6 15 works 6 o'clock works for me but 6 15 6 30 I'll talk fast talk less oh less okay um so does 6 15 seem like a reasonable compromise to start and we'll all do our best to be there and no meeting will start before there are three of us that's for sure okay so 6 15 so that's good so I can inform the office and act mrs media etc about that very good thank you okay so now it is time to address the warrant articles again we are voting in a signing select board positions on town meeting warrant articles we have a whole bunch of zoning articles in front of us tonight and as well as the ones from being put forth by the planning board as well as the ones being put forth by petitioners and one non-zoning petition article um we don't have materials for any of the petition articles in our packets and I'm not sure if the those materials aren't available yet or whatever I know that at the last meeting the select board didn't feel that you had enough materials to to have taken positions on the articles at that time so um I hope that you've gotten to read all of those and we can take positions on those after we get through all of these articles um we have because of the very weird town meeting schedule this time um it starts very late and the reason it starts late is because of the weird things that are happening this week and next week typically town meeting starts the first Monday of November but because tomorrow is the presidential election having town meeting be on both sides of the presidential election was just too much for town clerk's office and requested we not do that and then next week is veterans day because next week is veterans day the select board is also not meeting so we've got this strange schedule of town meeting starting very late um and on top of these weird um other constrictions or not other because they're related constrictions to the meeting schedule one of the issues here is that that means that the planning board is not done with all of its public hearings on all of these articles so they are going to be finishing there's ugly finishing up on Wednesday night and that's primarily the petition articles um we don't have another meeting after they do that before we meet at the middle school so because as we just discussed we have a lot less time even in the old days to talk about things at the middle school the only way to proceed with this with this on our end was to have the presentations now with the option to defer a position on them if we so desire so uh so that's why we're doing them now in the slightly uh a suboptimal order but that's the situation Ms. Brewer just just to clarify I mean in terms of the segue there I'm a little concerned that the planning board schedule has nothing to do with all of these other things I mean in terms of when they were able to form a quorum be able to come up with their positions etc etc really has nothing to do with whether or not we were ready to meet about these things so there's not really a relationship I might not have been clear so um typically we have the planning board's recommendation on things that are related to zoning so we they're the only reason I reference the planning board schedule which I did not reference completely is that they have hence not taken their positions on the petition articles yet so they don't have any recommendation to offer us we can either make our recommendation without that or if we feel that we want it to go through the uh planning board public hearing process before we've taken our position then we would defer that okay so I'm not being clear why is when the planning board hearings have already taken place and their positions already been done that I guess is my question because we run into this different years different times obviously everybody's got stuff going on but it's not like we don't know we have planning board articles we don't know we have to have hearings we don't know we have to do reports so the fact that we're having town meeting later has basically nothing to do if anything planning board should be done sooner in the process I don't want to speak for planning board but um there they will be done where they need to be by town meeting they're just not meshing with our schedule that well so that's that's not their problem that's our problem okay um so anyway that's where we are so we will just go in order and see how this goes um so article 12 is zoning article single family dwellings and we have some folks from planning board planning department here to talk to us about these and um uh so folks know all this information is also on the select boards web packet so welcome please introduce yourself I'm Rob crowner I'm representing the planning board and um so so this is the this is the big show here this these these articles um 12 13 and 14 are addressing um the problems that that we've all been experiencing with turnover of of traditional single family or two family homes to rentals primarily to unrelated rentals so so there's a wide range of of responses and and reactions to to that situation this is just one part of it it's not going to it's not going to solve the problem but we hope that it that it does a little bit at least and so these articles um that 12 addresses single family homes 13 addresses two family homes and 14 addresses converted dwellings they're meant to be taken together because together they they present a different way of regulating uh those these kinds of of structures um but they they're divided because they're they're they are actually three separate use categories and they they can stand alone if necessary so the so um the the basic approach is to define or to divide the use category for single family homes and for two family homes into two youth categories one of which is owner occupied and would be um permitted under this under the existing conditions same same way that we do now the other the new use category in both cases would be a non-owner occupied and those would be uh permitted as a special permit you require a special permit if you wanted to use it for that use and secondly um they these articles are meant to clarify the difference between a duplex and a converted dwelling so it's very confusing right now um a lot of what is happening is is you have a a single family home and it is being turned into a structure that that houses two family units or two households is that a converted dwelling or is that a duplex what is it so we're together these these articles are attempting to define what the difference is and so that we can be clear about how we're regulating them so first of all article 12 um again it's it's uh taking a single use category and dividing it into two um the first use category would be uh owner occupied single family dwelling and by owner occupied we mean um the actual owner lives there or they are renting it to a family um or other uh other group of related people so it's so it's uh what we think of as a traditional family owned and and um lived in dwelling the next use category would be non-owner occupied single family dwelling and in that case um it would be a place where the owner does not live there and they are renting it to up to four unrelated people so we're we're proposing that in addition to a special permit for that use that various other conditions are are required including um appropriate management for this for the use secondly that that article would add a a definition of a single detached dwelling unit where one does not exist right now um I should mention the planning board split evenly on this article there's um we all recognize that it's a very difficult situation um what is the appropriate response uh a number of members of the planning board thought that regulating single family home in such a way that you might have to acquire might have to get a special permit in order to rent it to somebody that's something that we take for granted right now it's it's traditional property rights some members of the planning board thought that was going too far um other members of the planning board thought that it was important to establish some sort of of oversight some sort of review some sort of permit review for this kind of use um so and I think you know I think there's sympathy among all members of the planning board for for both positions it's a it's a matter of of what is you know what does the town want so although we split on it we we did agree that that it was an issue that a town meeting expects to see expects to make a decision on and so we we're we're bringing it forward so the town meeting can make a decision what does it want to do should I go on and cover all of them they are sort of related or we can stop that makes the most sense sure why don't you do them all and then we'll go back and ask questions us so uh uh duplex uh article 13 this one does uh two primary things one is it it helps define what a duplex is in the in the uh standards and conditions that that that accompany the use category so what a duplex is is a single structure that has the appearance of a single structure a footprint of of a single family home that actually contains two dwelling units and there's language in there that that describes how how the permitting body will will interpret that that statement and um it provides some flexibility for the permitting body to to vary from a strict interpretation of of of that so that it um it fits into the neighborhood it uh um you know it's it's not it's not it's not a very strict it's not a perfectly strict definition but but it the intent is that if you're applying for a perm for duplex it should look like one house with two with two units uh secondly um it would divide the use the current single use category of duplex into two use categories one of which is owner occupied again that would be regulated the same way it is now and the second one would be non owner occupied duplex and that would be by a special permit um again the the the non owner occupied use would assume that uh owner does not live in either side of the duplex and that both sides are rented to uh up to four unrelated people in each one and again a definition is added where one does not exist for two family detached dwelling unit article 14 is converted dwellings in this case um we're not making any changes to the use chart in all cases a converted dwelling where is loud would be by actually no um in all residential districts it would it would require a special permit so what is a converted dwelling a converted dwelling we're saying is one that um is substantially the same as as the existing dwelling it can contain up to 20 of new um structure or uh demolished and reconstructed uh structure um but we we added a provision that that um could go up to 40 percent if uh two or more um other criteria are met including um handicapped accessibility um and uh 40 b um inventory other important goals so so what we're what we're looking for is is a structure that is is substantially the same um the reason the reason for the converted dwelling category to begin with is is a it's a leftover or it's a originated in post war zoning where they were trying to protect um old houses large houses actually what we're faced with in in our historic districts historic neighborhoods um they wanted to protect them um in in substantially as they were um existing but they wanted to be able to allow more dense use of them so that so that's where we're trying to extend that um make it make it uh clear that converted dwelling is different from a duplex duplex would be have substantially new construction more than 20 percent or in some cases more than 40 percent of new construction if it's not that if you're just taking a house and and putting a dividing wall in it or adding a little bit more it's actually a converted dwelling and and you're going to be regulated as under a special permit in most cases um there's a couple other items um added or changed in the standards and conditions for converted dwellings of note um number nine um there's uh currently there's a confusion about in cases of of a small detached structure um the current language allows uh conversion of a structure um of at least 500 square feet with an exterior footprint of at least five or square feet it's a little confusing right now what that actually means what we would like it to mean and what we have decided to change it to mean is 350 feet of habitable space we want the space to be the measurement the habitable space to be the measure rather than the footprint and we're we're lowering it because uh habitable space typically has a it would be a smaller measurement than a footprint footprint would include uh steps or a porch or so on um but and we think that 350 square feet is is a minimum amount necessary for a dwelling um i don't think there's any other major change to the standards and conditions there's some language change um and and again we are adding to the definition of converted dwelling um in the in the in chapter 12 the zoning bylaw to make it more clear okay thank you so uh the agenda erroneously says residential zoning definitions you guys did that last time right that's right okay yeah i apologize i meant to take that off um okay so 12 13 and 14 thank you very much for um the explanation and thank you to the planning board for putting all this effort into different ways to try and address what is clearly the uh a critical issue facing all of Amherst neighborhoods right now um so um to try and organize how we talk about this um i'll say that i think that the duplex and converted dwelling ones are uh pretty straightforward and among the most important things that that that those are doing i think is clarifying as is made clear in the uh in the planning board reports which are very good about the the permit shopping situation that was going on there um because there is some ambiguity otherwise this is something a duplex or a converted dwelling um the duplex article was brought to town meeting and failed a couple of years ago can you tell us generally what the difference is between this one and that one um there's actually not much difference um it's it's substantially the same um there the language about requiring um appropriate uh professional appropriate management is added um i think the problem last time was that it was it was confusing what the intention was um now that it's in the context of of of addressing the rental problems that we're having hopefully it'll be more clear to people okay so select word as i recall supported the duplex article the last time and do we have any questions about it this time it was a good idea then it was a good idea now okay anything in relation to the converted dwellings versus the duplexes which is um a lot of clarification going on there really important stuff miss burr i just wondered if you could characterize a little bit associated with density one of the favorite words of the people as you know because you were one of them working on the master plan um looking at page three of article 14's report it talks about how in some districts you would be there there was a point at which you could convert to six units but now and i totally appreciate wanting to make it simple by having them all before could you characterize like where that is and why we would want to go ahead and do that to reduce from six to four where that is i'm not sure what you mean but well and i'm sure mr tucker can tell us off the top of his head exactly what areas of town we're talking about just to give people a sense of what we're talking about without the without the maps up in front of us okay so so yeah so yeah right that's i should have mentioned that so one of the one of the changes in standard conditions for converted dwellings is that is reducing the number of possible units that can that can result in the rg and rn districts from six to four that would match the other residential districts um which are already four or it's actually rg and rvc right so so rg and rvc are are are the what we consider the the most dense or potentially the most dense residential districts rg is is the area around the downtown on on all all sides um basically going from the Lincoln avenue area down to um yeah yeah down down to east village over just over to the high school area um and rvc is is are the residential buffer around many of the village centers um i don't know if all the village centers have rvc zones or how big they are but it's it's basically a a second ring of of the village centers so so you're right so normally we would we would want those to be dense um and in fact the zoning subcommittee um did not make the recommendation to to change that from six to four but the planning board in the public hearing um we heard that people want to be as careful as possible um and and not um allow too much density um inadvertently i guess um so so it's it's it's a it's a gesture to to um people who are concerned about conversions adding too much density too fast so um it's a it's a compromise position on mr tucker and then mr waltz the uh for many years um the density involved with conversions in the various ways that is was expressed in the zoning bylaw from mid early 20th century up until i believe the 1980s uh the maximum uh density as a result of conversion was four units everywhere anywhere and it was only uh in the late 1980s that in those districts immediately around the mixed use centers it went to six units i can tell you just from a vague sense of it that we are nowhere near all buildings capable of being converted being up to four units and in many however in many cases we have any number of larger older homes that have many more units than uh four or six or eight or or ten so it depends on uh the history of development but in terms of approaching uh the question of the rapid spate spate of conversions that we have been seeing i think that was part of the reason for determining that we needed to slow this down and actually take a look at uh these different uh zoning districts for instance when we you've probably heard me say this before the general residence district that mr crowner described includes nine ten twelve different districts which developed at different points in history have completely different characters densities spatial arrangements and so forth and the notion of there being any one requirement dimensional or density or whatever for all of those districts is a tad silly so what we need to do over time in the future years is to analyze all of those districts and propose zoning that is specific to them rather than having a blanket requirement in this case we're responding to a near term i suppose you could call it emergency of a kind i expect it will change again in the future and be based more closely on what's actually there okay so at this point the the recommendation is to go to four as the maximum for conversions mr wall that answered my question thank you all right other questions or comments from select board um about the duplex or the converted dwellings part okay so then there's the single family dwellings this one is more complicated this is a much more dramatic change for the community um slack board mr wall first of all again excuse me like to commit mr crowner for his typically precise and sober explanation and they have to be fair and show both sides of this uh and i know it's a very difficult issue we all feel really very strongly about it because of the social consequences and in addition uh it's tempting to reach for the first tool at hand which is noise the right tools a lot of mixed feelings myself about the attempt to use zoning uh i noted in passing we failed the town meeting failed to pass to do that with modification by law which would have addressed some of these problems i've got a rental of this type across from the street from me and if anything as well we're better run now as a rental with four people in it so it's a mixed case but just briefly then could you characterize the alternative steps because the one position says it could be done by much other than zoning could you outline just briefly what steps those might be how complicated and so forth all right so yeah so so actually possibly a better way of handling a single family home um rented to foreign related people is is by a strong rental permitting system and so i anticipate that that um when the town um does develop that system and bring it forward that that um maybe maybe that zoning is is not zoning that strictly is not necessary anymore however we don't have that yet um we hope that we'll get it in six months but who knows what will happen to me um so what is currently the case is that a home that is lived in by its owner right next door to you could turn over to a rental property with four or however many people living in it without anyone knowing at all so so this is an attempt to um make sure that somebody is is is providing some oversight on that putting some conditions on it whatever so um whether this is the right tool in the long run i don't know but it's it's it's um it's a tool that we're proposing as a at least interim step but the the key other alternative would be the uh rental permitting and within half a year it could be in place is that a yeah um another you know potential alternative would be a different permitting standard um site plan review or something but that's not what was being proposed any questions or comments miss burr since this opportunity when you're before the select board is obviously yet another audience just like with your planning board hearings perhaps you could um characterize how it is that when when something that that this directly affects people in in a way that perhaps people don't think of because of they think about other things as affecting the investors themselves whereas if someone didn't follow the rules here and we have this zoning in place what would happen what would the enforcement look like it's not the same as when we have a rental registration by law and that will all lay out what can happen if things aren't done appropriately in a situation like this if someone just goes ahead and converts the house this goes into place we go ahead and say oh yeah this is a great idea and then someone does convert the house next to me without going through the steps then what happens to the people who are living there and to the property owner how does that process work briefly without you know hours of time here but um well um as is the case now um if if there is a zoning violation um the zoning enforcement officer will will take whatever steps he thinks is is appropriate including fines um but he's not going around to every house all the time he's going to respond to a complaint or or um or a a police call or or something so there's going to be a reason for for um taking a look at at the house and and and trying to determine what what is going on and so what what would happen in the case that you talk about is it becomes a zoning violation and becomes um a a final offense um so i i don't i don't know i don't know what would happen to the people who live there um i don't know i don't know how all those details then play out and you know just we had the situation with the one house that kind of became the example of the foreign related persons person we had doubt before we could really see what might have happened under those circumstances so perhaps the town manager would be would be better able to address that i mean obviously we'd call we'd say there's a problem here he would he would go there he would say yep yep there's problem here these people didn't do what they were supposed to do um but of course that's not really the tenants fault so to speak so then what happens this museum to your mr tucker yeah i'd ask mr tucker to walk through that in more detail you can um there is a process for enforcement laid out in the zoning bylaw itself section 11.4 page 102 for those of you have the current version those of you with old versions are on your own um but the process is laid out in in detail that the building commissioner as a zoning enforcement officer must follow in terms of notifying the person that they're in violation and the actions that follow on that within that framework they have a great deal of of discretion and need it we don't necessarily always want to go right to whacking somebody with with fines because you can then result with that that can result in challenges appeals to the zoning board of appeals court action and all of that can take a great deal longer to resolve than the building commissioner saying if you don't do this i might have to do the following um but in any case it's laid out the process is laid out here there is an appeal process if the person disagrees with the order that's been given and that goes to the zoning board of appeals if that appeal process doesn't work it goes to the courts the question we do have the ability to impose a non-criminal uh disposition ticketing as well they just get a ticket and then the issue becomes are they going to pay it and how are we going to force them to pay it and so forth Mr. Hayden um i want to sort of explore just a slightly different avenue i understand the the the ideas and the intent of the rule and i appreciate that um i'm wondering though um as i understand it um the there are a number of other rules which are not zoning rules regarding tenants and um people allowing to to have to have tenancy the question i have is that it let's let's imagine that um for um upstanding teachers have found a place finally where they can live near where they work and it's because somebody has chosen to surreptitiously change their home from a class one to a class two dwelling and they they sign a legitimate lease it's a contract and now uh robert shows up and says i'm sorry you've got to leave because um it's not allowed by zoning how does housing court deal with that i can't speak for housing court but what i can say is that in that instance the instance you cite there would be in the first case it would have been unlikely that there would have been a complaint and it would have come to our attention there are all kinds of scoff law behaviors going on every day in amherst that nobody ever knows about because everybody behaves so well that it's not an issue the purpose of the law nine times out of ten is to deal with the problems that come about not with sort of standard normal human behavior the issue in i think in in that case would be between the tenants and their landlord it was the landlord who broke the law by creating us a an underground rental so to speak and their their issue would be with them and not with and in fact the enforcement officers issue would be with the the property owner of the landlord and not with the tenants uh there would be the problem that if we got as far as a cease and desist order saying that this use must stop then they have to find other places to live that is part of what the concern was on the part of uh some of the planning board members who who said let's wait until we have a rental regulation system in place that you didn't want to get into a situation where housing had been created um illegally and in the middle of a semester for instance whether it's whether it's teachers or students or whomever administrators suddenly lose their housing because no no people forgot to follow or didn't weren't aware of the rules with a rental regulation system you won't be able to escape awareness of it is the intent um Stein did you have a question about this okay also presumably one of the um one of the results or the effects of of the building commissioner discovering a zoning violation is that he would require the owner to apply for a special permit so okay um so uh i i appreciate all of the intent behind this article and the the town is trying very hard in a number of different ways to address this ongoing and very real problem um to me this article feels like kind of the step of last resort and considering how much effort we're putting into for example the rental regulation situation and and how near term that is now um i feel like it's much too soon to do the step of last resort i think that we should see how the rental regulation situation plays out first and then um and then if that didn't work you'd maybe go to a step like this personally i i am concerned that this is this is something that affects every single one of us who is a property owner in amherst this is not just your neighbor and what they might do to your house this is what would happen to you as you're trying to sell your house if you have taken an entire section of the the marketplace who might want to buy your house and that sale is now going to be contingent on whether or not they can get a special permit to rent your no longer your house out when they buy it that that strikes me as just an incredibly radical change it's one that i can understand the community sort of thinking about and saying yes there are pros and cons to that but our problem is so bad we think that that's the right way to go but um but i think that it's premature to be considering a decision like that when we haven't gone the rental permitting route yet so um so i'm not going to be able to support this article miss stein i hate to be an opposition but i am going to support this because i think we have seen such erosion of the housing stock um being converted with no regulation and it takes a while to get a perfect and i wouldn't want this to um be pushed aside while we wait for the perfect i i think i'm guessing that one of the things that will come with the rental um regulations is that all the properties will be registered and that sort of thing but this seems to me like a perfectly reasonable piece of zoning on its own um and so i i would be happy to support it because when i look at the data that are supplied i think the rapid increase um in uh conversion and so on has been extraordinary and there have been so many complaints as a result that i'd like to have a stock gap measure while we work for the perfect so the thoughts on article 12 miss raiden and mr wall as i was um going over this um i felt a little bit and and and and i think you you phrased it very well but i felt felt a little bit like the cart was getting before the horse um it would be interesting i think valuable um for um uh this article to have referenced and sort of taken as its legal underpinning let us say that the further rules and regulations about registration everything else that's just not here it can't be um and uh it would be useful and i think um would actually um uh make the the the zoning more robust um um and more enforceable more just a better stronger piece of zoning um that could be enforced that could be understood by even somebody as displaced as a housing court uh for example no in a similar vein just sort of thinking out loud as we go along here and again i appreciate the concern that i'll bring to the issue and the subtlety with which you're approaching it um i realize that these three articles also fit together pretty well what but speaking in terms of urgency and so forth what would be the harm in postponing article 12 until springtown meeting or at such time as after the regulations are in place i mean what is the urgency that makes one want to bring this forward now as opposed to waiting as muscle keeps said um the fact that that houses are being bought up and and turned into rentals of students so actually let me let me um um there's one thing that i didn't say and that's um there's a preamble to articles 12 13 or 14 this was um language that suggested by town council and what it what it does is is it um establishes or it or it uh asserts that in fact there's a difference between a home that is lived in by an owner and and a home that is lived in by or that is rented to unrelated people and so it's establishing a difference and and therefore um it makes sense to to regulate them differently and so that's that's what the point of that is um and and so if you think of it if you think of it as your home and and i can do whatever i want with my home that's that i understand and how you would take one position if you think of it as this is one use and this is another use you might you might be willing to regulate them differently thank you this birth two things one is i'm i'm assuming where it's accepted that this would not prevent parents from purchasing a house for their student and they then have other students there it it i'm not entirely clear that you're going to be able to show that it's not that that's not a class one single family dwelling if the actual you know 19 year old has the house in their name which we know there are cases of that and they live there with their four buddies from the lacrosse team it's a little unclear to me how that fits in although i know that isn't the main category of use that people are concerned about they're more concerned about companies from out of town coming in switching things over mr tucker the current existing definition of owner occupant in the zoning bylaw um talks about uh one or more natural persons who in their individual capacity is distinct from any representative capacity own a whole or undivided interest in fee simple of a certain real property and at least one of whom occupies the dwelling unit as their principal residents so it has to be they have to own a whole and undivided interest in the property it's not they're sort of named or they have two percent or whatever it is it's not mommy and daddy own it and they're letting their child or their adult child live there uh it has to be someone who owns the property living there and it has to be their principal residence which you may recall from looking at article 15 we've made a whole set of definitions about what constitutes principal residents uh and have left it up to the zoning enforcement officer and or the permitting board to determine that on a case by case basis um it's not it's possible the scenario you describe as possible it's it's not wouldn't be easy it's unlikely to begin with it becomes more difficult under these regulations because of 15 yes uh miss dine and then this brochure well i was just going to say that the difference is a difference in permitting between class one and class two it's just that the this for class two it would be a little bit more rigorous permitting because it would be a special permit it's not precluding use by up to um for unrelated individuals it's just taking a much a little more stringent look at it so i i don't see this as being um particularly arduous for an owner miss buren then mr hean my other question was in regards to um the waiting and what happens if we wait the um new rental registration regulations i wonder if if someone could speak with some authority as to if everything comes together the way we would like in terms of developing those because i know we have a lot of people working on that right now and they go forward before springtown meeting when would they actually take effect in terms of the term coming school year and you know how how would the timing work out because i'm sure that's a concern that people have so what's our thought as to how that's currently going to play out mr tucker in terms of the effectiveness of a zoning a regulation that it is effective two times it's effective as of the date of the first publication of the legal ad for the public hearing and it's effective as of the date of the vote it doesn't become real until the date of the vote and then it's confirmed later on by the attorney general's passage of uh approval of the zoning amendment general bylaw it's the same thing except there's nothing about the legal ads or anything it's on the date of the vote in terms of when it becomes effective and then it is blessed by the attorney general later on in terms of people's ability to actually enforce it where we are creating what we're proposing to do in the spring as i understand it is to create a set of rental regulations to create an accompany structure of people to enforce those regulations and that all becomes real on july 1st when the budget and everything else associated with that goes into effect and then you have to hire people and and so forth so we're probably talking about uh early fall fall of uh 2013 but when this actually starts to be enforced the issue going back to the question of the zoning and exposure um remember that under zoning when you change the zoning regulations previously legally existing uses are grandfathered and you can't make them not go away and you can't make them come in and get a permit unless they're changing something in a significant way such that the use itself is is being changed so any new conversions that happened between this fall town meeting and the spring town meeting would be become automatically grandfathered even if we brought um article 12 to the spring town meeting um and the longer that goes the more of them become legally grandfathered so that's that's the exposure that's being discussed uh where was i was selected to a question and a comment um from the way this is set up um the question i would have is how common is this type of zoning in the state my suspicion is that um this is pioneering um and in which case um you know i think we need to understand that there will be some testing it's likely there'll be some testing of it so that's that's the question and i missed the line in there that said it's the first so the the comment that i would make is that um um i'm not clear that we have enough staff to look after all of this in place right now when it comes time to enforce and and make all of this go mr zeddy yeah and you know the how it's enforced and by who is an ongoing discussion and the scope and breadth of uh the inspection component in particular will largely impact what the recommended staffing levels are and part of this work group that i've been talking about we'll look at structures to bring that about and how they're paid for and by who so select board are we looking for additional information before we make our recommendation on this or are we ready to make our recommendation miss time i just would like to add one other thing i i think the people at home may not be aware but from 2009 to 2010 um they went from eight uh owner occupied to non owner occupied change up to from 2010 to 2011 there was a change of three additional and now we're up to seven additional over 13 so it's really going up almost exponentially and that's why i feel the urgency of getting something into place and not waiting i guess i have some concern that we've been in a particularly challenging real estate market over the last couple years since the economic crash um etc and i'm concerned about drawing conclusions making regulation zoning changes that are based on such a peculiar real estate market at this moment when this is going to have major repercussions the the real estate market is going to do all kinds of different things in relation to the student population that you mass etc over the years and the idea of of putting such an anchor on a potential home sale if you're needing to leave the area because you know your partner got a job in some other part of the country or um you know you're you're moving to a different kind of living situation or whatever the idea that you would have a potential the the idea of turning your house into a rental was going to hinge on a special permit which can be refused just seems like an additional real complication that is applying to everyone i think it's a i think it's a it's using a a hammer when you want really something much more surgical than that i could have made a good analogy there but the words didn't come to me quick enough but anyway it's it's about using a much bigger tool than um then is appropriate to get at the specific problem and considering the rental regulation situation that we're um we're actively working to have for spring it just it's just the wrong combination of factors for me mr and i'm sorry i've asked to speak so many times i'm just which i'm not usually sorry about but i am i'm really torn on this particular issue because i i very much normally consider myself to be a fairly large property rights person and if i do need to sell my house then i would like the option of you know if i can't get a decent price that if i have to send it to sell it to an investor well you know that's life um on the other hand there's a lot obviously going on here and one of the if we're trying to send a signal this is one heck of a really clear signal to outside investors that's right now that's fairly immediate in terms of if we if we do this in the fall and then obviously attorney general takes a little time to do it but it would because things are so cyclical here associated with the student rentals i think it would now is a time to really make a dent in choices that of investments people would make over the next six to eight months so it's um it i'm not quite sure i'm ready to decide to vote but um am i positioned right now or maybe i'll change it later but normally i'm not big on a hammer when maybe we need a finer tuning thing but i think what people are desperately looking for right now is that hammer and i'm not sure that this is so bad when it comes right down to it so mr. waltz again i'm sympathetic and torn uh i really understand the motive behind this and i'm tempted to vote for it but i also think about my neighbors across the street who needed to rent their house and it suited their needs and it's been good for the neighborhood so i don't want to be precipitous i guess my feeling is that you know all things being equal when we are this divided about something we might be better and come up with a stronger position if we had more time to think about it and hear more evidence for our next meeting okay so our next meeting we've already decided is going to be about 35 minutes long but sure okay it's the information in between not so much the deliberation yeah for sure let's read and and one one thing that i'm going to try to get a handle on is the effect that this will have on the property values especially in some neighborhoods i mean this this this might i could see how it might and i may discover that i'm totally off base sort of decrease the value to a point where um i'll 90 percent of our tax base might be smaller um i mean really the what's going on is that there's a there's a market tension between people who want to move into neighborhoods and people who just want to place to put students because it's a valuable thing to do and the balance is tipping as you suggest because of a rather unique situation that we're in um and decreasing the value of those houses to a point where anybody could live in it with us with their family would work okay miss burr can i suggest that we um not take a position on 12 but we could go ahead and take our positions on 13 and 14 sure are folks good with that yes okay then miss stein would you like to make the motion on 13 sure i move that the select board recommend november 19 2012 special town meeting article 13 zoning bylaw two family dwellings second for the discussion simple enough okay all in favor say hi hi hi that's unanimous okay i moved at the select board recommend november 19 2012 special town meeting article 14 zoning bylaw converted dwellings second for the discussion all in favor say hi hi it's unanimous all right we're skipping 15 so now we're at the petition article so if i know you guys haven't um considered these yet but to the degree that you want to stick around and comment on how they may or may not mesh with the other things that you guys are doing and we'll be considering that could be great mr. talker i just know very quickly that the planning board did have a hearing on article 18 and i think the recommendation on that thank you it's um 16 17 and 19 that they got you okay mr. hidden i just wanted to uh mention to our friends who may watch television only on monday night that there's been a ton of work going on on wednesday nights um and the planning board around these articles for which i'm very appreciative thank you okay so we have the petitioners who are looking to speak to these for uh we'll start with article 16 and anybody who's tuning in late i erroneously put article 15 on this list today this uh that was dealt with at the last meeting so article 16 miss adams and two just to clarify we do not have paperwork on 16 and 17 right we're about to okay all right well but not from the planning board because they haven't had their hair right at least there's some background material yes good evening my name is morianne adams and i'm from precinct 10 and um i suppose the theme for the evening is that the perfect is the enemy of the good because i think that theme may come up again with our petition articles and i'd like to say that although my name is quite visible on all of these articles and i'm pleased to see it there uh that uh i was the person who turned in the paperwork and i'm working with a group uh a coalition of amherst neighborhoods that has become quite active in the recent few years as we've become coalesced and become concerned about exactly the urgency of conversions of overcrowded rentals of nuisance houses becoming an anchor or a magnet for very large parties for students who are looking for a place to drink as well as under uh basement bars so there are a number of things that uh because of enforcement difficulties or one issue or another we felt uh were urgent and that they urgently affected not only our neighborhood by precinct 10 i mean of course the neighborhood between the campus and town but it's clear that this is now an issue that has extended across town i believe there may be only one neighborhood at the moment that is exempt from this difficulty so i just want to give a bit of overview and then i'm going to turn the microphone over to various members who will speak to various specific petition articles but let me just say as an overview uh that are concerned with these uh with these articles and there are three zoning articles and one town bylaw the nuisance house bylaw article so three of them are zoning one of them is a town bylaw and our goal is to stabilize and restore sustainable family oriented neighborhoods characterized by a mix of residents where families with elders children working adults and students can live in harmony it's very important to know that we not be construed as anti-student many of us have worked our entire professional lives at the university or in community colleges or in other educational venues we value the students who live in our neighborhoods we're concerned about the tilting of the neighborhoods so that they are no longer hospitable or affordable by families with small children and we're trying to maintain a balance in the neighborhood and avoid the kind of student ghettos that we have seen in other college towns when both town and gown have not paid attention to the urgency of these problems these three the three zoning articles work to reconcile two seemingly opposed concepts in the master plan itself on the one hand increased density within amour central residential neighborhoods and on the other hand preserving the integrity and character of these residential neighborhoods that's really the problem that we're trying and asking you to help us address so the zoning articles that we are proposing are designed to allow increased density but without sacrificing the attractive qualities of these neighborhoods and we'll speak about the specific issues of each of these articles separately Denise Barberette will say something about article 16 you'll notice I apologize since I hadn't realized you didn't have materials I simply pulled out of the computer something that I had handy and they're not in the exact order of 16 17 18 and 19 so if you want to put little article numbers next to them you'll find and now I'm speaking to the select board not to the television audience you'll find them going as 17 16 18 and 19 okay and so Denise Barberette will say a word about 16 I'll come back to the microphone for 17 then so Connor will say something about 18 and Melissa Perot and John Fox will say something about 19 let me also add that there are about eight of us from the coalition in the room and we would be pleased if the select board had questions that various of us might take an opportunity briefly to make comments so that no one person of us unduly represents a coalition that is trying to work together I also want to note before I give up the mic to Denise Barberette that we have been regular attendees on those Wednesday night meetings we've not been as busy as the zoning subcommittee at committee I'm planning board but we've been pretty busy working with them we've sought their help we've worked with the planning department we still have a way to go we really are some of us amateurs with this but we decided that we needed to move quickly and learn as we went so that you will see that set that article 16 maps in some ways onto 13 and we're thinking about and working with the zoning subcommittee and the planning board to figure out the coordinate exact coordination of these you realize of course we had to get these in on September 19th I believe that was our due date and that was a date before the zoning subcommittee or the planning board had fully developed all of the articles that we are in some ways matching similarly our article 17 will be mapping onto 14 whereas 18 and 19 are standalone articles thank you thank you I'm Denise Barberette North Whitney Street town meeting member from precinct 9 and I'm going to be talking about article 16 which is a two-family dwelling and I guess I see it as an alternate article two article 13 so what article 16 proposes is actually very simple and very straightforward it states that if you start out with a single family home and you renovate expand or put an addition on to it so that the end result is a two-family home also known as a duplex you must do so under a special permit before the zoning board of appeals rather than by site plan review under the planning board right now article 16 further takes advantage of already extant and applicable language in the zoning bylaw by treating such renovations expansions or additions either as conversions which is section 3.3241 in the zoning bylaw or as supplemental apartments which are accessory uses and those are now governed under section 5.011 in the zoning bylaw in case the audience members would like to follow along the coalition of Amherst neighborhoods has proposed this amendment to the zoning bylaw because of growing concern over the unintended consequences of another amendment that came from the fall meeting actually the fall special town meeting of 2008 at that time the permitting of duplexes in rg which is general residents neighborhoods and also rvc which is village center residences changed from special permit to site plan review the special permit would have been under the zoning board of appeals and site plan review then fell under the purview of the planning board this was one of the first zoning changes that we saw as a result from master plan and basically what it aimed to do was to increase density in the central neighborhoods in town in a modest way by accounting by accommodating two families in essentially what was a structure that looked like a one family and provided a footprint of a one family home by accommodating more families in our central residential districts it would enhance and it would also protect our traditional family neighborhoods to the dismay of many residents this has not been the actual result what we've begun to see are single family homes that have been purchased and either renovated and divided to accommodate not four but now eight individuals usually students in one example would be 156 sunset avenue which actually did go before the zba special permit because it was a non conforming property or we're also seeing large two-story structures that are being added to existing single family homes an example of this is 79 taylor street which i believe went before the planning board in 2001 probably sometime in the spring of 2001 both of these properties are now used as student rentals as far as i know i do not know whether or not they have been disruptive to their neighborhoods though i do know there was at least one police report of 79 taylor's uh one one police response uh that i read about in the police report to 79 taylor street um but i don't know if there have been other reports on either of these properties i'm just using them as examples and they shouldn't necessarily be seen as negative examples um but i do know that what this use of property brings an increased number of cars more traffic and more activity at more hours of both the day and the night than one would see from more traditional families which one can construe as individuals or couples with or without children this is why the coalition of amherst neighborhoods would like to see the permitting of such two family homes return to the special permit process so that can be the zoning board of appeals that will decide whether or not such such a use is appropriate in either the general residence district or the village center residence district rather than leaving open at least what i see personally as a very large loophole first allowing an owner occupied duplex under site plan review and then should that owner decide well i'm tired of doing this let's sell it or circumstances might happen where the owner has to move and can no longer be the principal use that as his principal residence and then has to rent it out it seems to me that this is a very easy way to bypass the special permit process so rather than have that process bypassed we would like to see the zba decide even before the duplex is created whether or not this is actually an appropriate use in this particular neighborhood what it will do is it will give greater protection to the neighborhood and it will also bring duplexes more in line with the permitting requirements for vote for both the conversion of dwellings and also the addition of supplemental apartments neither of these has a has as great an impact as a duplex would in terms of the amount of space that it occupies the visual impact and in general in the number of individuals that can accommodate supplemental apartments we tend to think of his mother-in-law apartments i don't think there are a lot of mother-in-laws or perhaps father-in-laws who invite the same amount of police response as we have seen in some of these converted duplexes and yet they are still required to go through the special permit process so by when you add essentially space that is going to accommodate more residents and more activity in an area it seems like it makes more sense to put all this under the permitting process of the special permit in the zoning board of appeals and we hope that this is going to be an easy a simple a fair and a straightforward way to help maintain the integrity and the quality of life in our residential neighborhoods thank you questions or comments from select so i think we're working under the assumption that we're going to not take positions on these and get the kind of digestion by the planning board on them to to give their full attention to how well these mesh or don't mesh conflict or whatever with or overlap with the things that are proposed so okay so so not related to the planning board part of it other questions about the specifics of this as presented miss barbara knowing what you know now what you folks all know from the article that was put forth by the planning board are you seeing any conflict here you're saying you you said that this is an alternative to that one are you saying you wouldn't support the article 13 because it conflicts with this one why i don't think it necessarily conflicts but i think it's a lot more it's a lot simpler it's a lot more straightforward and i do have difficulties with dividing things into class one in class two i think it's it's a very fluid movement between when something when something ceases to become owner occupied and when it goes to a rental property and i also think as you pointed out that there are going to be problems when people want to sell their properties you may have a duplex that's owner occupied but you have to move for whatever reason you want to sell it the only person who is available to purchase it is somebody who is going to use it as a rental property and the big question that i have that has not been answered yet although i'm not sure to actually ask the question is what happens when someone goes to purchase that property before the purchase and sales agreement is signed will the individual have to go to the zoning board of appeals and say hey here's a duplex i would like to buy it but i need to get a special permit and i'm going to use it for a student rental and what happens to the zba looks at the person's record as a property owner and says no we don't think this is going to work we're not going to give you the special permit or what if any individual realizes oh now i have to go to before the zoning board of appeals i've heard it's a really onerous process all right i'm just going to skip this i'm not going to buy this property so i have serious questions about what this is going to do to people's ability to actually purchase property and to benefit from the purchase of said property i'm sorry are you saying you think that the article you're proposing is going to make that too complicated no that's what the planning board article does by dividing things into class one where you only need site plan review and class two where you need special permit ours says from the outset we want to determine whether or not a two family is appropriate in this particular area and therefore it doesn't matter if it's owner this is when it is a renovation an expansion or an addition if you are taking a single family and you're making it into a two family as opposed to building an entirely new duplex we want to we want the zba to weigh in on whether or not this is actually an appropriate use in a particular neighborhood so it gets rid of the distinction between owner occupied and rental property it just says if it's a duplex that is created by changing a single family home into a two family we want the zba to weigh in on it we don't want to say if a then this will go this way if b then this will go the other way okay thank you other questions or comments from select board mr wall that was very helpful actually could you explain a little more about appropriateness because obviously you could have a owner occupied house with six or eight people in a duplex with two and physically the buildings could look the same so how would how would that be determined do you think how do you how do you see appropriateness being calculable in these cases appropriateness of the use yeah again given the fact you could have fewer people in two duplexes than a single large family house well basically what we're talking about our student rentals i think that that's the very large elephant in the room and since many since what we're seeing at this point is basically single family homes being bought and renovated or expanded to be used for student rentals that's really what we're looking at if somebody's going to be quiet that's great we have no problem with that we don't want them to be loud and invite the police to come but we do know that often with student rentals we do have that type of problem we do have that disruption to the neighborhood some property managers managers are better than others what we really want to do is not have this be a problem to begin with so if the people living there if it's six to eight people and they're perfectly quiet i don't think anybody has an issue with that i don't think there would be any issues if that's the way people were but we can't regulate who rents the building no we can't so that's why the zba needs to look and say okay what's the character of the neighborhood this is what is proposed it's going to be a rental property it could accommodate up to eight tenants is this appropriate for this particular neighborhood it will be the zba who has the final say on that and that that's also why the property owner's reputation or business profile comes into it i'm assuming that that's what the zba can take into account but i don't know never having been on the zba i can't speak to that the questions or comments from sloughburg okay so bearing in mind that between now and our next meeting we'll get a planning board report about this and some kind of opinion so if you have any other questions that you need to be answered we're not going to be deliberating hugely about this is our expectation at the next meeting we're going to be more or less maybe summarizing our new information and then voting okay no more questions thank you very much next is uh article 17 morian adams precinct 10 uh let me also add that if there are uh questions that come after my presentation that others may be more qualified to address uh i'd be glad to uh turn the mic over to them so i'm speaking about uh article 17 and i want to and this is the first one that is noted on the uh pages that i handed out to you uh this revised language aims to allow for modest increases in density without sacrificing the life for all residents this article mandates that for any properties to be converted uh into two or more dwelling units one of the units shall be and shall remain owner occupied this provides the stability associated with owner occupied properties oversight of tenant behavior by the property owner him or herself and in the event of disruptive behavior by tenants assures that neighbors know whom they should contact to address these problems and i just want to add editorially that we are serious about this as something that is needed now we have great confidence in the working group and the process toward a permitting system but that is still down the line and we have the urgencies of neighborhood disruptions um on the long weekends from thursday to sunday and sometimes during the week so that this i also need to remind you and i think that not the i think the entire select board has not had the opportunity to hear the recent study by town meeting member and university of massachusetts professor ralph caustrum about nuisance house rentals in the fearing lincoln and sunset southern perimeter of campus this study documents and this is a limited area but it's a very solid empirical study of that area that all of the chronic nuisance houses in the district are not owner occupied while none of the non-owner occupied student rentals in that house are nuisance houses we even found in one case of an owner occupied house that when the owner was away for several years there were nuisance calls when the owner came back there weren't i'm not talking about causal relationships but i think we know there's a strong association and i think we can speculate why you also know that a nuisance house is described in the general bylaws of the town is a house with a record of nuisance calls of neighborhood calls and there we don't mean calls to help me because i fell off a ladder or because i have a personal emergency these are calls made by neighbors designated to specific addresses because of nuisance that is going on in that address and nuisance by definition then becomes more than one or two such calls and we talk about this again in our article 19 so it follows that on the immediate perimeter of campus non-owner occupied converted to or more unit rentals are magnets for chronic nuisance behavior now let me also say as i noted earlier that we turned the that we crafted and turned these articles in on september 19th while the discussions with the zoning subcommittee and the planning board are ongoing we are certainly flexible in coming up what is with what is the most effective useful language when we get to the floor of town meeting we understand that we cannot make changes in these because of the you know 150 or more signatures that we had to these this particular language but as we work with the zoning subcommittee and the planning board we may be uh suggesting amendments on the floor of town meeting i know that that doesn't help you with your deliberations here but i think you need to understand the situation in which we are making these petition articles thank you questions or comments from select board about article 17 i have a question um section 12 which talks about an enforcement action that is very unusual and not standard in the zoning bylaw how that is expressed did you get any sense of whether that was going to be enforceable in this way did you get any advice from anyone about whether this would we're in the process of getting feedback about let me say that there are two items here i should note that 10 we discovered after we had turned it in and had some further deliberations that 10 is redundant in that there is landscaping language elsewhere and was pointed out to us that it doesn't make sense to be redundant in one article and not another so that might certainly be one that we may remove uh just a bit of the short answer is that we are still in discussion about whether we are going to go forward with 12 whether shall should be may how exactly we want to deal with it you will understand that we have been frustrated with the difficulties of enforcing zoning we do know that uh zoning violations we do know that the permit uh that we're looking to as the perfect down the line may have very strong enforcement language because once you have a permit you can also remove a permit whereas the zoning enforcement is more complicated but i think that it may be that 12 expresses the frustration of the coalition about the difficulties of enforcement and the sometimes the slowness of response and how exactly we will handle 12 is still under discussion okay mr i think this is an excellent example of why we normally depend so heavily on the planning board's reports on these items because this is something that as you say is something very different than is in the rest of the zoning bylaw as in making it happen in a certain way so that without better legal guidance on what that means that is awkward other questions or comments mr hean yeah just a technical question what permit i don't see where i was i was looking ahead to the permit bylaw that we are anticipating in the future at the moment there's nothing to remove for wayward landlords and if i may just i hope not in defensive mode but note that we were taking the unusual step of forming a citizen coalition so that we could interact with those who have more legal knowledge than we do but that we could take certain initiatives that might not be possible to take otherwise so um other questions or comments from select one um one question i'm sorry um for the section one so that the big change is that you're saying that it absolutely has to be owner occupied so that's what we're saying for conversions i mean we know that we're talking about conversions here which is you know kind of a white elephant being subdivided or possibly added to by about about 20 percent but we're looking at large houses in the neighborhood and we're saying that when they are converted into into duplexes or triplexes we are saying that they should be owner occupied and we're saying that for someone who wants to do that with their own home in order to get greater income from the second or third unit the person would be by definition the owner occupying the home so we did not see that that was a particular liability for the owner and we did see it as a major deterrent to the out-of-town LLCs buying these houses for for commercial purposes i'm wondering if there's any potential unintended consequences from an affordable housing standpoint we're always talking about trying to increase the ability of you know um workforce housing and and lower income level housing in Amherst so if that you know we focus on the students a lot because students are a very big pressure on our housing stock for sure but i'm just wondering if that has been thought through to its potential for i suspect that that could come up on wednesday when we have a very thorough hearing with the zoning subcommittee in the planning board and let me add that since we cannot designate categories of student of of of either owners or occupants uh it it may be that it's possible with the permitting language down the line to have transiency kind of annual turnovers as some kind of a rental category because again without wanting to name students as a category it is true that where we have nuisance houses it's because they are out of control commercial rentals that are also serving as a magnet for large numbers of other people looking for parties so we don't see this in the case of older mature more mature working people this one i appreciate that too because i think it stands to reason on the on the grounds of impressionic impressionistic evidence in common sense that owner occupied is beneficial in certain ways if i'm renting i don't want to be animal house it's fairly obvious but i guess my question would be then to pick up a miso keeps point if the issue is more behavior then why not regulate through enforcement nuisance houses are illegal why why approach the problem from this direction as opposed to better enforcement of behavior of actual people who live in houses well we have we have been as you as i've noted and we'll come back to this on 19 we've been frustrated about the speed or reliability of enforcement and i don't know that that's just a staff difficulty kind of lack of staff i suspect that there are difficulties with zoning bylaws themselves that are difficult to enforce and that can lead to a great deal of litigation by LLC owners who are well represented on the legal side so i think that what we're what was in our minds or at least i speaking for myself what was in my mind was not to make it so easy to create the conditions that lead to the behavior our focus is not so much on student behavior our focus is more on the conditions of overcrowding non supervision non regulation that lead to these situations and we're trying to change the facts on the ground that make it so easy to have these kind of houses but you're conflating several issues it was overcrowding the numbers of the issue you're talking about behaviors so those aren't the same thing and i guess if i were worried about enforcement i would have figured that out before i tried to rezone the town um i'm just not sure this is the best way to go about it okay we as i said we were working from data that suggested that this was a very strong predictor of behavior even though it might not be causally related okay other questions or comments from select board so the only other information that we'll get between now and our next meeting is going to be again some interpretation and extra information from planning board okay all right thank you very much continue previous structures fence and o'connor um summer street and precinct one town meeting member and uh as this is even a more difficult situation in terms of you trying to interact with us because we have a planning board has rejected and we have abandoned the the article that's on the warrant in favor of an effort to limit the scope of what was originally proposed which was quite broad and so and this occurs in the context of of two situations one one was that an entire streetscape in north amherst was proposed for demolition to be replaced by a multi-story apartment buildings that in all likelihood would have primarily housed students and and so that threat um and the uh and the efforts to demolish uh outbuildings and so forth to accommodate additional housing units um provoke this although I think there's there's always in the background as as some of us are aware the the possibility that we might be subject in town to the same types of situations that occurred elsewhere where houses on large lots are purchased and then the existing structures are knocked down and replaced by McMansions or you know things that are in terms of the streetscape and neighborhood and so far are are really out of scale and and so forth so the um the proposal that that we had you know because we left the planning board hearing on this article um having said to the planning board which that one we weren't we were not going to go forward with the the article as as it was in the warrant because we realized it was too restricted even as we gather signatures people brought up what about this so we've tried to make and and one property owner in north amherst made a very um uh cogent uh expressed a very cogent concern about um uh her property which was not in the residential district but is in a commercial district and would have not and and building you know apartments multifamily housing on that thing would not have been inappropriate for the district or for the neighborhood because it would not have resulted in the destruction of of a streetscape it would have probably improved the existing streetscape on a nearby street that is somewhat in uh you know disorder um and so I can say that we have um in the in the text and I can give you so that each of you have so we've um our limitations are that we're going to propose to restrict this to residential zoning districts um and that um we are um and that and this is in response to both comments from the planning board and comments that uh some of us who circulate petition heard we're going to provide a a means by which a housing unit or or a structure in a residential zoning district which is um you could think of it for example of uh like Lincoln Avenue there with there might be like a small uh Cape Cod house that is sort of actually in its placement out of character with the existing neighborhood it might have been there before the houses but it doesn't have any particular historic significance or whatever as as might be determined by the historical commission and that would be ripe for replacement by a more significant residential structure um and we we've so we've tried to provide for that um for that exception and but we've also tried to create an exception where if the the select board in accordance with the appropriate chapter of the massachusetts general laws has appointed a local historic district committee um that while that committee is in operation um and we might want to get absolutely more focused language uh we think that in all likelihood we should maintain the status quo while the committee deliberates on what uh what area should be included in the local historic district and um investigates as part of its charge um the historical character of of of structures that might be uh not yet in a national register historic district but would be appropriate to include in a local historic district so we've we've tried to protect the local historic district committee deliberations while um opening up the opportunity for uh for replacement of existing housing by you know by more significant structures um in cases where the the structure whether it's a residential or non-residential structure it and it there's also a question of whether we want to say structure or dwelling unit a residential structure um in essence we this is the kind of discussion we're going to have at five o'clock not at seven o'clock on friday with the zoning subcommittee um because there are instances where I think it would be um as a in the preservation mode where we would want to in the town want to encourage um the reuse of of outbuildings and so forth perhaps as um uh garages and storage areas uh which some of us who live near some of these rental single family and duplex rentals realize that there's there's often the lack of adequate storage on site and so we want to encourage them and also to sort of maintain the existing historic character even though the the structure itself might be being changed from what it used to be to some to some other use including the residential use so that's the that's the purpose and I have a technical question for you um because the original article is so broad maybe by definition narrowing it down is still within the scope of the article but have you run it by the moderator we haven't yet that's one of the things we want to do before wednesday and um and we we do we have a version of this from mr. Tucker um I don't think the planning board has had a chance to see our proposal um so we're going to we're going to hopefully run both versions by the moderator and see which of the components he feels would be appropriate and then we're going to discuss which ones we would like to advocate for and um and we'll hear from the planning board and which ones they're comfortable for but I think we've we we've addressed um most of the concerns that were expressed by the planning board and and as were expressed to us um as petitioners um so is the planning board going to reconsider this they've public hearing to this already right right but we're going to go to the zoning subcommittee with the because we want the planning board to know and consider what language we are going to move on the floor of town meeting right we don't want to have them walk in on you know some night in december and uh and never have had a chance to either see or um or consider this language even though we may have run it by the moderators so they I'm sure they appreciate that as do we um so do you know if they plan to do that in advance of town meeting um I I think they would but because this article is late enough on the warrant we it may be considered at a again I their schedule uh on on uh on wednesday is going to be pretty tight uh so that there is a possibility that would be considered at a later meeting but I would hope that uh you could get a report from them on the language we're going to we're going to move so that we can all at least be talking about the same thing okay so you're saying this this language here is under consideration but you're not sure if that's what you're going to be yeah we I mean all the details and some of it is we want to make sure the words all say what we want to mean we want to consider the proposed wording Mr. Tucker has has us has responded and has produced in response to this and so um it's you know I this is one of the um this is a circumstance where I think uh unfortunately you're you're um it's very difficult for you to act given that the planning board is has not had a chance to see this so then considering the the state of flux this particular article is in a dislike board members have questions or comments for Mr. O'Connor that will help us when we have more information Mr. Wall I'm sorry I'm reading this off the top of my head which is also bruised and has 12 stitches and oh my god sorry um I'm alternately confused and intrigued I think because I understand what Mr. O'Connor is trying to do and certainly tear downs are really serious problem affecting neighborhood character around the country not just here in fact much elsewhere this isn't a chance to try to do something before the problem occurs right and to have something in place I mean I guess a few things I would say but we have caution uh and Mr. Tucker knows this has probably told you you know the historic preservation regulations have to do with the parents not used so they're separate things and that the fact of structure is found significant does not prevent its demolition in either a normal situation or a local historic district you know it's sort of a it's a it's a touch wire but it's not a it's not a it's not an absolute barrier and that's why we didn't we didn't want to replicate article 13 of the bylaw which talks about demolition right and provides for a year set off what we're taught what we're concerned about is to is to essentially guide the replacement in such a way right that maybe demolition would be um uh it would give uh the the town a way to get people to think twice about demolition even after the year was up if if they knew that what they could put in in replacement uh would be limited and so I think that that's you know that's why we didn't want to address the demolition issue because that's already addressed significantly elsewhere in the bylaw I guess that's the other thing that kind of blends the demolition delay bylaw and the local historic district bylaw I think what you're trying to capture is something from the local historic district bylaw because for example uh you cite the case of 290 Lincoln Avenue which was found not significant and a demolition permit was permit a demolition permit was granted and I gather maybe carried out soon under a local historic district bylaw you actually could prevent demolition of a building if it impacted the viewscape yeah so I think that's what and so that's that's one of the reasons yeah to try to to preserve the status quo why while a local historic district committee is considering uh making considering what recommendations it might make to town meeting yeah regarding both the scope of the local historic district and the nature of the protection that they might want to recommend yeah because that's sort of the obvious one with the law in place but it takes time to establish yeah and then I guess the other consideration again with Mr. Tucker and Mr. Molloy can deal with is how one tries to blend things like this the other thing you might do is look at alternate models there are some things like types of neighborhood regulations which might not have the same power but might be more effective than this in existing in various communities large and small and again we don't know if we if the planning board is going to have time to consider this on Wednesday but we we we are going to stay in dialogue with the zoning subcommittee and then hopefully again the planning board so that when you get their recommendation we'll know what our language is going to be you'll have their recommendation on the language that's going to be moved the moderator will have seen it and then you can consider your recommendation based on what's actually going to be presented to town meeting instead of something that's at this point somewhat in flux okay thank you very much thank you very much and could if I could make just a comment about affordability and so forth I just wanted to point out to the board that one of the as a tenant and somebody who's been involved in affordable housing for a very long time one of the things about the previous article about the owner occupant requiring owner occupancy for conversions that I thought was beneficial is that it would limit the market to it would sort of skew the market in favor of families and it would create a situation where families might not only have an advantage in purchasing homes but and being able to finance the home through an additional unit but that increase in density would be would which I think the you and the planning board really are concerned about would be much more likely to be accepted by the neighborhood if that increased density was in the context of essentially adult supervision and I think that if so I think in this case behavior control and affordability sort of go hand in hand increase density behavior control and affordability are all advanced by having by having owner occupancy rather than commercial activity okay thank you very much all right article 19 I'm Melissa Perot from Summer Street precinct one we have a very good nuisance bylaw existing it was approved by the annual town meeting in the spring of 2008 since then the Amherst police department sometimes assisted by UMass police have been diligent in addressing the issue of disturbances predominantly by students living in unsupervised housing in our residential neighborhoods these have escalated over the years despite numerous additional approaches to the problem to the town by the town and university but the issue continues to grow with larger gatherings in hundreds and with increasing violence requiring a greater police presence the Amherst police force has been increased to cope with the number of arrests that now occur regularly in residential neighborhoods on weekends and some town residents have had to hire their own security guard in order to gain some order in their surroundings it is this situation that has brought our attention to the existing nuisance bylaw and we're proposing some amendments to help implement that bylaw and so the purpose is to extend the liability which is focused now on tenants and property owners to rental housing management companies and organizations for which we have given a definition it's evident that while finding students might deter those few from repeat offenses it does not deter the overall student population owner-occupied and well-managed populace do not generally become a nuisance and I quote again Ralph Karlstrom's compelling PowerPoint presentation this is the only real change that we've asked to make to this nuisance house bylaw number two and three are really to ensure that what is said there actually happens so we want to ensure that management companies and property owners are notified of violations as proposed in the 2008 bylaw by designating a town official responsible for sending out those letters which and providing with that the date time and nature of the violations and the names of those arrested who are living at the property so that the property owners and rental management companies can make appropriate adjustments to their enforcement of their leases the manager's office was proposed in the amendment but following conversations with the police chief and the town manager they agreed to assign the responsibility to the police department and we will make that amendment from the floor along with the addition that the date time and nature of the violations and the names of those arrested who are living at the property also be included in the letter because we've had some comment from from landlords that that was not necessarily there and it made it impossible them to follow up and the third third point is to create and disseminate the property owners and management companies schedule of response costs developed by the select board as required in the original bylaw and to apply said costs on the first and sub subsequent violations by changing may to shall in sections four five six and seven of the existing bylaw and that's all we would like to do thank you very much did you want to ask questions if you'd like to add more to the presentation please go ahead john fox of bearing street precinct 10 first of all i would like to make it just a general comment to commend the planning board the planning director for really trying to listening to the concerns we have and while we don't agree upon everything we really see a welcoming of our ideas and openness and it's a been a much more collaborative and encouraging process so we're very grateful for that and glad to see it let me make it a statement which i think kind of captures all of these warrants and the issues that you've been talking about with the planning board i think the great question for you to decide is how urgent these concerns are what is the trajectory of the changes in the neighborhoods and how dangerous are these changes to the very character of the neighborhoods so if you believe that well as you suggested miss o'keith that maybe we're in special times we don't really know what will happen in the future well that's true we aren't going to know i remember a stockbroker explaining some to some investors that she only knew tomorrow's news she could make us all a lot of money and so we don't know tomorrow's news but we do know a good deal and what we do know is that bernard vernaki has said that the federal reserve is going to keep these interest rates at virtually zero the mortgage interest rates are going to remain very low for a long time and that people with substantial money from outside of amherst not interested in the welfare of these residential family neighborhoods are going to buy up every single house they can get their hands on they can offer more than the asking price they come in with the cash and they're prepared to do it and it's happening at a speed i would suggest and argue for all of you to consider that doesn't allow for simply the orderly transfer over to a permitting system when you think about a permitting system which i think could have real teeth and i'm encouraged to believe that it will have real teeth but that permitting system is dealing with i think i'm correct mr tucker is it 3500 units rental units 3400 something like that a huge number of rental units so you think about a permitting system that may go into effect if adopted by the spring town meeting maybe in the fall of the year from now and then you just begin a process so project what this neighborhood is the the rg neighborhood would look like a year from now two years from now look at ralph carlstrom's data on how fast this is occurring i would suggest you that a real brush fire is occurring and that the fire is growing and growing that the danger is as they say in the law clear and present and so as you consider all of these all of these particular bylaws that you realize we don't really have time on our side time is not on our side and the changes are transformative we are i think at a tipping point in our neighborhood we're still a family neighborhood we still have lots of children and we think we're a great place to live a great place for faculty and administrative people from the university to live but it's becoming increasingly demanding on people who are living there particularly a lot of older people who live alone or or or don't have young people family people to help them out to live where their party is going on which keeps them up till two and three in the morning which are so disruptive so in general i hope you will yourselves look at the projection of how these transformations are going to occur in the next few years and how urgent it is to take on the recommendations for further bylaws and along those lines i i'm going to give this to mr tucker i i just discovered tonight uh before we came over a norman oklahoma bylaw i think it's a bylaw it doesn't say bylaw i think it's a bylaw but norman oklahoma is where the university of oklahoma is um and the question that you've asked tonight often is should we have a hammer or should we do something more delicate well by god they have a sledgehammer they have something called a nuisance party and let me just read a little bit to you and i'll give it to mr tucker and you can all obviously see it it says no person owner occupant tenant or other person in possession control or having responsibility for individually or jointly with others of any premises shall sponsor conduct host allow or permit a social gathering or party on the premises which is or becomes a public nuisance and it says a social gathering shall be deemed to constitute a public nuisance when by reason of the conduct uh it results in three or more particular violations and they are the obvious ones it goes on for you i can only show you a whole page of them but includes things like noises prohibited uh drinking intoxicating beverages possession of alcohol beverages furnishing alcohol beverages disturbing the peace unlawful assembly littering so you just find three of these and you are in violation it then goes on to list the and and it's long here it the response costs that can be charged and it says response costs are the costs associated with responses by law enforcement fire and other emergency responses providers to a gathering including but not limited to salaries and benefits of the few enforcement code enforcement of the of law enforcement code enforcement fire or other emergency responses salary and benefits mr fox i have to interrupt you um thank you very much for this and i appreciate you passing it on to mr tucker but it's very late now and and what we consider in the future is uh is will be exciting uh for then but if i can just conclude then what what this goes on to say is that these can be both civil and criminal penalties so we're not asking in this nuisance for anything like what is being uh what is the law in norman oklahoma it's much softer but we think it's absolutely the minimum requirement to hold the property manager responsible for the conduct of the tenants thank you very much thank you we're not asking for anything more than has already been approved in the existing nuisance bylaw except to extend it to the management companies and just to be clear um the management companies are already all notified about any police uh uh situation at the properties it's the managers as well as the property owners get those notifications so mr musanti yeah i would just add that uh um this is one of many subjects that i have met with uh representatives of of this group including most of you here and i pledged in our meeting last week that we would build upon the discussions that have already taken place uh with myself and you directly with our police chief to see what might be possible in a motion at this town meeting that would we could all recommend in in support but there are there are some open issues um that need to be worked out but you know we think there's some possibilities to work it out satisfactorily okay questions or comments from ms burr i have several um let me preface it with it and i think the town manager just segued nicely on that obviously this is not a zoning issue and so it's not the planning board who's going to be giving us recommendations and so are we going to be getting something from you as the town manager is it we're expecting something from the board of health separately or are you just kind of combining all those things and you'll get us a report on this particular i'll uh i'll get you a recommendation that has input from all of those parties including the neighborhood group the petitioners great and then i wanted to point out that i want to make sure i'm clear on the way the language is laid out in terms of adding in boldface and deleting underlined i would actually argue that there are some substantial differences in the changes that are underlined um in terms of removing language for example on page 18 it refers to a significant segment of a neighborhood being removed which i assume means if that annoys one person next door means that would be okay and also on page 20 two points within letter a one is clearly trying to protect you know initially was trying to protect property owners by saying if the town didn't get their act together and send the letters in the right amount of time then they really couldn't be blamed um and so it appears to be taking that out and then even perhaps what strikes me is odd but i'm looking for an explanation on is that the owner of the property would not be responsible for any violation and penalties if they're actively trying to evict i would think that would be something we'd be trying to encourage so i'm not sure why we would continue to penalize people if they were actively trying to event so do we have any and those are all examples that are part of our ongoing ongoing discussion other questions or comments from selectly um okay so let me just see one thing i was going to comment on um one thing i was interested in in the bold print was the uh about having the date time nature of the violations the names of those arrested who are living at the property um i wouldn't want to do anything that would make it harder for the police to issue the violation so this is something one of the reasons that we created nuisance house and um that we created various and improved different town bylaws was to make them ticketable offenses as opposed to arrestable offenses because it's easier to issue a ticket arresting can be hard um if the if the police are in any way dissuaded from issuing the ticket because they've got to get a bunch of information together which somebody might then claim afterwards oh sorry that information wasn't valid so that ticket isn't valid i i would be concerned about that as an unintended consequence so um as mr missy nanti talks with the police chief and others about that um the idea of really getting the names of the folks who are living at the property and making sure that matches up with whatever goes to the property managers or whatever i think i think that that could be um that could weaken rather than strengthen this and i'm and i know that that's not your intent um that was my only comment on the specifics of this awaiting further recommendation any other questions or comments okay and we're done with those um i apologize for asking the planning folks to stay mr crowner and mr tucker because we didn't end up asking you any questions about the petition articles but we do anxiously wait your for the recommendations and information that come out of your wednesday hearing um so select board members i recommend watching that on television if you might be available or showing up for it so that um showing up would be a good way to get any other specific questions answered that are raised mr i'm sorry i have an additional question based on this piece of information we were given tonight on article 19 um what you were just referring to an item to where it talks about date time and nature of the violations names of those arrested where is that in the warrant because that's being added on the floor of town meeting was the intention okay all right all right thank you that's what i was unclear on okay so this time um there are two pieces of paper that we had to share and could i ask that they be copied and sent to us by email tomorrow right scanned well and maybe they'll be in our online packet yeah they'll end up in the online packet but we can we can email them but they'll be added yeah that's fine thank you everyone for coming in and providing so much good information okay so um all right let's deal with multi-year solar then we'll deal with the last bullet so mr pooler solar has a great future in amherst and we uh put together a couple of articles in the draft warrant to promote solar's future um but we thought that two um two articles uh were overdoing it you go back to one of your analogies that maybe was like using a canon to ring a doorbell um so uh we can after the board voted on october 15th to approve one of those articles we were discussing uh the remaining article on a staff level and we consulted with town council and concluded that really uh there were a few fundamental things we were trying to get done with these articles uh they're listed at the bottom of the memo that i gave you but there's really three things uh to allow the town manager to enter into contracts for the town to act as a host customer for solar projects and that means every single solar project has to have a host customer somebody has to be the intermediary with the local utility it doesn't mean you have to actually buy the power but you have to they have to be a host customer and for amherst to act as a host customer the advantage to us is that there are proposals out there one of which was in the paper the other day for a project up in north amherst on some of the coals property where the developer would actually pay the town to be the host customer for that the second thing that we're trying to do is allow the manager to sign long term solar power purchase agreements whether those solar arrays are in the town of amherst or outside of the town of amherst when you voted on October 15th what we were talking about was uh that article that portion of this new article that would allow the town manager to buy solar power from other projects um the idea is that with our original plan for the solar project at the landfill we were looking at 4.75 megawatts of power and as we're looking at how to configure that and as we're looking to how to deal with some of the neighbors and address some of their concerns it is probably going to make sense to shrink that footprint some but we still need the full amount of power and then the third thing in both of these instances is to engage in and participate in the net metering programs that the state has set up so that um we actually get paid by the utility for any solar power we buy so um the long and the short of it in this article is taking those concepts putting them all into one article and so tonight what we would ask is that um you would support this revised article six which would replace the the vote that you took on the 15th and just have one article to move solar forward and be happy to answer any questions so is everybody clear on that there were two articles on pun further review it was clear that one article actually uh one article with the concepts combined dealt very well and broadly with the town's interests and solar both to be hosts potentially for um for private projects uh and to enter into agreements with to purchase power either from within or outside of Amherst what it all boils down to so this is one blanket authority to the town manager to do all those things none of which in any way um impacts the the zba process is another permitting process is that any kind of solar that were to happen in Amherst would have to go through it's just the it's just the ability for the town to be a partner in the electricity should it ever be permitted to be um created and part of the theory here is just like the town manager doesn't have to come to us before every agreement he gets into with purchasing you know electricity or or other utilities from anybody else why would we put solar in some different category so we might as well give him blanket approval assuming uh that the town's desire to be solar customers and hosts continues this trade i understand um what it means to enter into a power purchase agreement and um how net metering works and and sort of the responsibilities and obligations that come along with those i'm not so clear on host customer does that mean that we have to forward the bills or or what how does that what is that uh to be the host cut under the uh state net metering rules um there are two kinds of projects there are municipal projects and private projects um and for example at the the project that's being proposed for north amherst that would if the town serves as a host customer it qualifies as a municipal project um it has the advent two advantages one is that it um gets you into the queue for municipal projects as opposed to private projects and that um there's more um there's more room if you're in the municipal queue than the private queue um so it's more likely that you're actually going to be able to net meter the project the the other is that um the net metering rates are higher for municipal projects so the agreement which means that the ultimate price paid by the customer is less for the renewable energy um the agreement that we have worked out with these developers in draft form at this point would say that we would ask this host customers but it would be their responsibility to resell the the electricity to somebody else in other words they'd have to find customers other municipal customers to actually buy the electricity so the town won't be on the hook um either financially or administratively to deal with the power so the reason this is before us tonight is because the two uh what had been two draft articles were merged into one as the warrant got finalized we voted on the previous version of this article that left out the other half they'd since been merged so in order to have our vote be valid we wanted to present the fact that the the new article is um slightly uh reconfigured and to see if we still want to vote to support it do we we do okay this time would you like to make the motion sorry i did i move that the select board recommend november 19th 2012 special town meeting article six multi-year solar agreements second is that enough of a description oh i'm sorry you didn't ask for comments uh it just moves any is that enough of a description for the agenda it is uh for the motion article six what's article six name of the article that's what the article is called so that's adequate uh for the discussion oh mystery one shouldn't judge a book by its cover i guess all in favor say hi hi that's unanimous i believe mr hayden was speaking to that before were are you still like to speak to it okay all right um before we get on mr perkins has been here very patiently all evening and i really appreciate that i just want to make sure that these folks in the back are you waiting for anything specific that we may or may not do or you're just observing good okay because every so often folks end up sitting okay good some every so often folks end up sitting through the whole meeting and saying but but but i was your taxi license and you didn't approve me or something like that so all right so then that brings us to uh we'll deal with the olympia drive one right now so um we have mr's oh my come up to explain to us this is something that you folks dealt with at the last meeting you approved the uh the layout as proposed by this life board and now we have the article four town meeting which you had a general description of but we now have a new motion up mr oh thank you dave zomac director of conservation and development and i'm j