Good evening. This is a special meeting of the Town Council, the school committee, the library trustees, and the non-voting members of the finance committee. Sometimes referred to in the charter as the budget coordinating group of which there are representatives from all three groups. This is a meeting that will be held based on Governor Baker's March 12th order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, which allows us to hold this virtual meeting. I will call each counselor by name. At that time, please let me know that you can hear me and I can hear you. And then make sure you mute your mic again. So let's begin with. Shalini Balmill not here yet. Okay. Alyssa Brewer. Present. Pat DeAngelis. Present. Darcy DeMont. Here. Lynn Griezmer is here. Mindy Johannicki. Present. Dorothy Pam. Present. Ross. Present. George Ryan. Present. Kathy Shane. Present. Steve Schreiber. Andy Steinberg. Present. And Sarah Schwartz has informed me she will not be here. So somebody keep an eye out for Steve and Shalini. And given that we have a quorum of the town council, I'm calling this October 9th, excuse me, this November 9th meeting to order at 534. I'm now going to turn this over to Alyssa McDonald to call the school committee to order. Thank you. Seeing the presence of a quorum of the Amherst school committee, I'm going to call to order our meeting. And I will start also with a roll call attendance. Mr. President. Mr. Harington. Harington. Present. Ms. Lord. Lord. Present. Ms. Spitzer. Spitzer. Present. And McDonald. Present. Thank you. Austin Sorette. Please do the same for the Jones Library trustees. Happy to thanks, Lynn. So I'm going to ask the trustees to identify that they are present, Bob Pam. Here. Alex LeFave. Present. Chris Hoffman. Thank you. And Lee Edwards. Present. Austin Sarad is present. Tampson Ealy is not able to be here tonight, so we have a quorum and I'm calling this meeting of the Library Board of Trustees to order. And Andy Steinberg for the Finance Committee, non-voting members. Yes, just for the record, this has been posted as a meeting of the Finance Committee, but since we've had the Council members of the Finance Committee already indicate that they are present at the meeting, I will not call on them, but Bernie Kubiak. Present. And Bob Hagner. Here. Sharon Povinelli. Present. So I call the meeting of the Finance Committee to order at 537. Thank you. This meeting includes audio video and is available live on Amherst Media. It is also being recorded. There is no chat room. If you have technical issues, please let Athena know immediately and we will see what we can do about it. This meeting marks the beginning of the discussions about the FY22 budget. While there is no public comment during this special meeting, we encourage public comment on November 19th at 6.30pm when we will hold the public forum on the budget according to Charter Section 5.3. With that, I'm turning it over to Paul Bachmann and the Finance Team. Thank you, Lynn. So tonight is the beginning of our budget process. The development of the presentation we're making tonight is a real team effort. Can we start showing the slides? Let's do that. Yeah, I'll pull it up right now. I want to recognize our team, which includes Sean Mangano, our Finance Director, Sonia Aldridge, the Comptroller, Holly Bowser, the Assistant Comptroller, General Founding, our Collector, and Sherry Boucher, our Treasurer. I also want to recognize that in the room tonight are Mike Morris, Superintendent of Schools, Doug Slaughter, the Finance Director, and Sharon Sherry, the Director of the Library. And so it's a real team effort by everyone. I mean, this is the presentation as the Finance Team for the Town, and it's being shared here with everybody, all the elected officials, and the appointed officials. It's a lot of information we have for you tonight. We don't expect you to digest everything. As you can see on the slide, there's 39 slides. We have about 45 minutes, so we're going to be talking fast. There will be available for follow-up questions and clarifications. If you have things, just feel free to email any of us. If you feel like, wow, there's too much information. It can be intimidating, but don't feel swayed from asking your questions. I think the sort of key thing here is that we want you to walk away, is that you should have confidence in the town's working officials, the appointed officials, that you're in strong, capable hands. So you go to the next slide. So what we're going to talk about tonight is the 10-year, we always show a 10-year trend of data, and that's really, you don't really necessarily care what happened 10 years ago, but you would like to see what has happened over the last 10 years, and that sort of gives you some evidence, some information on where we're going. We focus our attention on the current situation, where we are, the current year, FY21, and then what we're looking at for FY22, which is what the budget is that we're going to be working on coming forward. We want to look at the big picture for the town. That's the role of the elected officials to look at the really big picture, like, where are we going as a community? That's why the people elect you all. We'll look at revenues and expenditure projections, which is for next year, and we want to reveal to you or reveal, show what be transparent about what our working assumptions are, and then we want to talk about the budget calendar so everybody knows where they can plug in. So tonight, we want to recognize that we have some major challenges, and this is an unusual year. We're meeting in Zoom instead of in person like we have in prior years. There are definite economic impacts of COVID-19, both on state aid, on our local receipts, and in our enterprise funds. We have set aside some capital investments that we've done in the past, but they haven't disappeared. They're still there, and our taxpayers, many of whom have experienced job loss or job reductions, are under pressure. I do want to take a minute to recognize how much we've gotten done in this fiscal year. The town council working with your finance officials have adopted and implemented an FY21 budget. That was an accomplishment in this year. I think we want to just look back and say, yeah, that was a good thing. The way we approached it turned out to be very accurate, so we're really pleased about that. We do have an agreement with UMass to support K-12 education. We are continuing our focus on growing reserves and reducing debt, and we have stabilized our health insurance, which is the vestige of several years of transition in our health insurance. That's a really good thing. I think that we feel like we've handled one of the big unknowns that has driven the increases in our municipal budgets over the last few decades. Again, I think we work from a very strong financial base. We have good fiscal management, and we look forward. This meeting that we do here doesn't happen in most other cities and towns. People tend to be more siloed. We aren't, and this is an unusual system that we have in place. I think it really shows the health of our communication among the elected officials in the town. We have strong financial systems. When we are audited or when we have our bond rating, they come back with glowing remarks due to the people who work in our finance officers at the schools and at the town levels. We have strong working relationships. Sharon from the library, Mike Morris, and I are talking constantly and sharing information. There's a free flow of information and sharing what the challenges are that we are experiencing. When we have an issue, we get together and we start talking about what the challenges are. We like to talk about the slow steady growth. For everybody in this room, I just want to recognize that many people here have been doing basically two jobs. You're doing your operations jobs and you're doing the COVID management jobs. Kudos to our town staff. I always feel it's important to say that. The next thing, we're going to start with our financial trend monitoring. We're going to be presenting this as a team. People will just step in and introduce themselves and move forward. Sean, you're up next. Hello, everyone. Sean Mangano, the finance director. This first chart just sets the baseline, understanding where our major revenue sources are. It looks at four major sources, property taxes, local receipts, state aid, and other. It's comparing a 10-year span, FY12 to FY21. Usually, this doesn't change very much, but FY21 was an unusual year. The big change is that our property tax percentage supporting the budget went from about 66, 67% up to 70%. That's because we took a big reduction in local receipts. If people remember the FY21 budget process, that's the area where we saw the biggest reduction in revenues. That pushed a greater reliance onto the property tax. We do anticipate that this will be temporary and that as we work our way past the pandemic, we'll see that property tax percentage come back down and local receipts go back up. The next slide is sort of the same thing, but instead of where our money comes from, where does it go? It's broken down into the major categories, schools, both the region and the elementary schools, town spending, the library, capital. Miscellaneous is explained to the right. The biggest thing in there is the pension, and then unappropriated uses are explained down below. Again, the biggest thing that's changed here over the 10-year span is you'll see that miscellaneous category has grown quite a bit. That's primarily because of pensions. The pension is in that section of the pie chart, and that has grown at a pretty large rate every single year for many years now. In terms of FY21, another thing that's changed pre-significantly is the capital spending. You'll see it 4%. That was about 6% in FY20. So on the spending side for the FY21 budget, we reduced capital spending by about half, and so you see that reflected here that the portion of our spending that goes to capital went down quite a bit. I'm going to turn it over to Jen, but real quick, I'll just do a quick introductory to these little boxes in the lower corners. Actually, that might be all over the slide, but there's these Amherst trend boxes for those of you that are new that they basically give management's perspective as to what way the trend is going. There's no exact science to it, but essentially it's a favorable trend, sort of an iffy trend, unfavorable, and sometimes we'll check that on a certain box if we don't know where the trend is going. So again, it's not exact science, but it's to give you a little bit more understanding of whether we think it's a good thing, a bad thing, not really anything to know. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jen. Hi, I'm Jen LaFountain. Can you hear me okay? Okay. Property tax revenue is the primary source of both operating and capital spending. This includes new growth that's been averaging 650,000 annually over the last 10 years. Annual increases are limited by proposition two and a half unless the town passes an operating override, which we did in FY 11. With the blue line being actual dollars and the red line being constant dollars, this analysis shows that the only significant increases in constant dollars from year to year occurred when the community passed an override. This is adjusted for inflation. Now the next slide shows uncollected property taxes at 10-year history. FY 20 was slightly higher due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The town adopted an extended due date for the fourth quarter property taxes, pushing the due date from May 1 to June 30 without any penalty. This also pushed our demand bills into July into the next fiscal year. The percentage of uncollected taxes at the end of July was back under 2%, which is more in line with what we expect to see. Overall, this slide shows our collection rates to be very favorable to the bond rating agencies as we have remained well below the 5% or above warning indicator. Thank you, Jen. So it's back to me for a few charts on state aid. So this chart compares state aid actual dollars versus inflation adjusted dollars or constant dollars over the last 10 years. The actual dollars, it looks pretty positive. However, again, when you adjust for inflation, we're really staying about flat when it comes to the spending power that we have. So that's why we've given it sort of a marginal trend. And we're still not quite where we were back in 2007-2008. We were up at about $17 million for state aid in terms of actual dollars. So we're still kind of fighting our way out of the hole that we put ourselves in that we found ourselves in after the recession of 2009. This next comparison is looking at state aid as a percentage of total operating revenues. So we put it as unfavorable. It could be neutral, but it's essentially a relatively steady decline, very small percentages, but definitely a downward trend, which is consistent with what we see with state aid that we're getting very small increases in state aid as we see larger increases in our expenses. Pension health insurance, those expenses go up much greater each year than what we're seeing in increases in state aid. So this we did mark as unfavorable. We also marked it as uncertain. And that's the sort of a theme that started last year. And unfortunately, we'll probably carry over to this year, is there's just a lot of uncertainty around where state aid is going. We've been told we'll be level funded for FY 21, but that doesn't mean that there couldn't be some sort of mid-year cuts. And we don't know exactly what FY 22 will look like in terms of state aid. So uncertainty around state aid will persist for a little while. In this comparison, the red bar is sort of the money that comes into the town, the revenues that come in. The green bars are the assessments that we pay through the state charter tuition, PBTA. And sort of the most important part of this is the purple line, which is sort of the net of those two. And that's supposed to reflect how much state aid we have after we pay all of our state assessments. How much do we have left over to pay for other things in town? And so that stayed relatively level the last few years. So we've put that as marginal. And again, we've marked it as uncertain. It's sort of a good thing that's leveled off because we have seen some increases in charter tuition over the years. And so the fact that we're leveling off is a good thing. And that we're not seeing any decreases there. However, ultimately, we would like to see that continue to grow in the future. And then the last one for right now is a pretty important one. It's around economic growth. So these sort of like the chart before that was looking at state aid, this is what we define as economic growth revenues as a percentage of operating revenues. And so those are motor vehicle excise tax, our new growth portion of our property tax, and our licenses and our building permit fees. These are things that are looked at as sort of generating economic development or economic growth in town. And so we've seen that increase over the last 10 years to a high of about 5.7, 5.6%. It flattened out and then it did drop off in FY20. And as I mentioned before, these are part of the local receipts or some of this is part of our local receipt part of our revenue budget that we cut pretty significantly. It dropped off a lot for FY20. So this is an unfavorable trend. It's uncertain. We are optimistic that when the pandemic passes and the university and colleges return to normal, we'll see some of these things snap back pretty quickly. But we did reduce it pretty significantly for FY21. Okay, so the next one is me. This chart compares our major general fund revenue sources by showing each adjusted for inflation, which are the dashed lines as well as in actual dollars. The red and blue lines at the top are our property taxes, which is our biggest source of revenue. It does increase annually, but only by the allowable limitations of proposition two and a half. This graph again shows that while property taxes have increased, they're not keeping up with inflation. That line is flatter. In the middle is state aid, the green and the orange lines are second biggest revenue source. Although this was very slowly increasing, it is keeping better pace with inflation. And we are still below our peak level in 2008. When adjusted for inflation, state aid per capita is almost exactly the same as it was 10 years ago at the beginning of this chart. The last revenues shown here are local receipts, the purple and the brown lines. Local receipts have again remained relatively flat and they are keeping pace, better pace with inflation. But they again are still below our peak, which was in 2009 for local receipts. And when adjusted for inflation, again, the per capita is actually lower than it was 10 years ago. So the operating expenditures on the other side per capita, again, although actual expenditures per capita are going up when they are adjusted for inflation, they remain relatively flat. When adjusted for inflation, the per capita expenditures in 2019 are only higher than they were in 2011 by about 5%. The next slide will show our expenditures per capita are fairly low. And we've been able to manage this through effective financial policies, conservative budgeting, and good management. So this shows that Amherst is below all of our peer communities, and we are well below the state average according to the DOR numbers. Our spending per capita is at just about half of the statewide average. This chart shows comparables to peer communities. We began comparing Amherst to communities with similar demographics that were picked out years ago. And since most of these communities were out east, several years back we added some local communities to our comparison. And that's what this next chart shows. It shows that compared to our local communities, again, you can see we are still well below many of our similar communities. Calculating the data per capita and comparing ourselves to other communities makes it easier to interpret the data in these presentations. And I'll just note, for everyone, the color coding here relates to the bond rating of the individual community. It's noted later in the presentation, but blue is double A, purple is triple A, tan is single A. And the statewide averages are the red ones, those are. So the next chart here is about our municipal staffing levels. And this chart is for the town's general fund only. This does not include enterprise funds or schools. Information on the school staffing levels can be found on their websites. The chart only shows the past 10 years, and it shows we've added approximately 15 FTEs or full-time equivalents. In this case, though, it's important to mention and look back at a slightly bigger picture. Back in 2007, we peaked with almost 213 FTEs between the years of 2007 and 2010 during our last recession. We lost 21.46 FTEs, which was a 10% reduction in our workforce. Although we are slowly growing our workforce, we are very careful and thoughtful about when and where we will add new positions. And I just wanted to note that the increase of approximately two positions between FY 19 and FY 20 was the addition of the clerk of the council position, and then the effects of shifting positions from our health claims trust fund back to the general fund. And this chart shows salary and benefits as a percentage of budgets and wages. The red bar shows in 2013 our total salaries and benefits began to slowly rise again, and that's consistent with the chart on the prior slide, which shows our increases in staffing levels. As expected, when staffing levels increase, so do our benefits. Benefits include things like colas, our cost of living adjustments, step increases, retirement costs, and insurance, unemployment insurance, life insurance, health insurance, etc. The blue line shows salary and benefits as a percentage of the total overall budget, and it has fluctuated a bit over the years, but it has remained relatively flat for a long period of time. This was due to several years of no health insurance increases. This is still at almost the same exact percentage of the total budget that it was 10 years ago. The green line shows the percentage of benefits to just the salary and wages portion of the budget, and this has again remained fairly level with small fluctuations. The change from self-insured to a fully insured group plan with Maya for our health insurance has allowed this to drop by about 1.5% from last year. We hope this will continue to have a positive impact on our benefits costs. And once again, I get to do this one. The health claims trust done has been mostly inactive during FY20. We do continue to see a small increase in this balance from 19 to 20 as revenues continue to trickle in and old claims are being settled and some credits being issued back to the town. We expect this will last, this will be the last time you'll see this one, and that the balances should be closed out and monies return to our employees and the town and the other entities that had contributed to this fund. Okay, so we remain, we still remain a AA plus community last updated in 2014. This is our annual debt expense as a percent of our operating net revenue. These are our annual principal and interest payments on existing debt. This chart shows we've been consistently low. The 2013 increase is due to refunding, which inflated that year. However, it's lowered in subsequent years. Because of our debt expense, because our debt expense is low currently at 2.9% we have greater flexibility to issue new debt. And debt surface is part of our capital budget. So this slide shows us compared to other communities throughout Massachusetts above and compares us to neighboring communities below for debt service as a percentage of the operating budget. Our credit rating is strong due to a low percentage of debt relative to the general fund revenue and also to good fiscal management. Outstanding debt, Amherst's long-term debt load has remained relatively low and has actually decreased in recent years as shown in this slide. And this slide shows a comparison again to other communities in Massachusetts above and a comparison to our neighboring communities below showing what our outstanding debt is as a percentage of assessed value for FY19. Again, we maintain a strong AA plus credit reading as a result of this low percentage of debt relative to our general fund revenue. And I'll just note quickly for the new members, when we put these charts together that compares us to our neighbors, we always have to do one year back because the information is we pull it from the department of revenue. And so the data lags with how it gets reported there. So this is FY19. And for all these comparisons, FY19. That's me. I thought everybody forgot about me. No, no, we would not forget about you, Sonia. No, of course you wouldn't. So this is a new slide. This is showing our unfunded liabilities, the amount that we have funded so far on the percentages that we funded so far on it. This is our retirement and our OPEB, other post-employment benefits that we have. And it shows two years separate. Our pension liability is funded right now at 62.4%. And we expect to have that fully funded in 2033. Our OPEB is currently funded at 10.4%, 10.8%. And we're working on redoing our funding plan for OPEB. And we hope to, in 2033, our plan is to use our pension funding towards OPEB, which will help us get this, get it funded quickly. And I'll just note real quick that this was a revaluation year for OPEB. We have to have an actuary come and do an analysis every two years and then do sort of an update in the off-year. And so we are pretty much done with that for 2020. We'll have that information to report out pretty soon. It's almost finalized. But we were able to get the number for this chart ahead of time. Yeah. And thanks, Sean, because I wanted to mention that this fluctuates every time we do a new actuary. Different numbers come into play. Just to let everyone know that. This is the story of our reserves. And I made Sean give this one to me because for once, I want to give good news to the committees. She gave me state aid when she took reserves. I did. So our reserves reached 21.5% effective July 1 of 2020, which is fiscal year 21. Couple of things we need to note here, though, is this is due to returning 1.7 million net back to the fund balance. And also, our FY21 budget was reduced significantly over $2 million. So that plays into the 21.5%. Our current financial policies say that we want our reserves between 5% and 15%. I think we should look at that shortly and maybe switch that to 15% to 25%. And that's the green line and the red line that you see here. We reached our 15% back in 2017. However, we intentionally kept our reserves increasing in preparation for all the large capital projects that are coming. Our intent was to use the extra reserve to offset some of the spikes in debt service as the debt came on. And this is a comparison between local communities and other communities that have the same graphics that Amherst has, to say anything more about that. And this, again, is another new slide. And Sean put this in because he wanted to give everybody a sense of where we're at at the first quarter with some of our revenues. This shows this is comparing actuals to actuals. Actuals in fiscal year 20 in the first quarter and 21 in the first quarter. And we're pretty close on a lot of these. This doesn't show the budget, but we're right in line with budget. And note that UMass occupancy fees are not going to be any more than this. They've shut down the hotel for the rest of the year. So that's as far as it will go. We also included transportation fund, even though it's not part of the general fund in here, just to show that this transportation fund is struggling to meet even what we projected after we adjusted. So we just wanted to note that. And it's here in the general fund because if it's a general fund that might be needed, some of the reserves might be needed to offset the transportation fund. Or we need to make some changes in the expenditure side. And for those who don't know, the transportation fund is funded by parking revenues. And so parking revenues obviously dipped when the university left and the pandemic and some of the closures and things of that nature. And it hasn't really spounced back a little bit, but not anywhere near where it was. And this shows water consumption. And it's showing that our consumption for water, I have notes here, I should probably read them, that our water consumption is catching up. We've adjusted, we reduced our consumption projections quite a bit as the trend was going down for the last couple of years. And then we reduced them again for COVID. So we're in line. Yeah. And there's a little bit of a lag here too. So this doesn't look as bad as we might have anticipated, but we still want to see October and November because some of the meters are billed quarterly and some of them are billed monthly. And so there is a lag that's somewhat reflected in these numbers that we might not see sort of the full impact of having less people in town for another month or two. So, but we're mainly just to show that we're watching this very closely and we'll continue to update you on these numbers. We didn't include sewer because sewer is a percentage of water consumption. So that's anything that's in line with what's happening in the waterfront. Back to Mr. Bachmann. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Sonja. Holly and Jen. Great job. So these are sort of almost like summary slides, but we have more information to give you. Jen talked about our strong bond rating. What does that really mean? Bond rating influences how much we pay to borrow money. And some of the things that they look at is how much money you have in the bank, in essence. How much do you owe and how good are you in terms of your financial management? Those are the three sort of metrics that they really focus on. They give you the metrics that they will evaluate you on and we're confident that when it's time for us to go back into the bond market, we will be very good. Again, be evaluated in a very positive way. I mean, a lot of how we get evaluated on the bond market is also tied to the overall strength of the state economy and the region's economy. What we can control is very limited compared to what the economy is doing in a general sense. And so the bond rating agencies look at a nationwide and actually an international view of risk that they're evaluating, and then they place us somewhere on the matrix in terms of how risky is it to invest in the town of Amherst. We are doing everything we can to say we're doing really good when they come look at us. And then in terms of our reserves, Sonja talked about the strengths of our reserves, which is very purposeful. The town of the select board and the town council and the finance committee have been pointing in this direction and we've been following it successfully. Again, this is anticipation. We recognize that there are major capital investments coming up, and this gives us the flexibility to manage those capital investments. So some of the things that I don't want to be repetitive here. Again, strong collaboration. Again, I talked a little bit about this night is an unusual thing. We've been able to adapt our resources pretty successfully during COVID. Last year, we had level operating budgets. We reduced capital spending, and we reduced our OPEC contributions. Those were the things, those were the tools we used to have a budget this year that was going to be able to meet the revenue sources coming in. What do we have facing us coming forward? We still don't know what's going to happen with COVID-19. There are public health and public safety challenges. We have been and we just don't know what we have a sense of what the university and the colleges are doing for the spring semester. But as I've said, the decision we made today, we might look back in February and say, wow, how did you ever make that decision? We make the decision today on what's going to happen in February and January and February with the university and the sense that this is the best information we have that we're moving forward on. I think we're going to be looking for providing additional support for our residents. As COVID continues to blister through our community, people are going to have health needs, housing needs, food needs, and all kinds of other support needs, transportation, things like that. We need to have resources available to go to that. Looking to support our local business community, we've given some flexibility on permitting and on licensing, and we're hoping that it's going to be a hard winter. We're thinking of new things to do to keep the businesses active during the winter, and so we can come out in the spring as robustly as possible. A lot of the investment you saw us make on the street with heat lamps and changing, putting dining in the streets, we will take that back at a certain point once it's not warm. And then for the winter, when the snow is on the ground, we will not be offering that, but we want to be ready to go in the spring when it comes back to help our businesses, especially our restaurants move forward. We anticipate there'll be a decline in local revenues, which Sean identified and that's been budgeted for. The biggest concern we have is the ends of care funding. The funds that came through the state from the federal government was crucial for us to get to where we are. Those funds end, and we can't spend another dime after the end of this calendar year, and that's a big challenge for us. We have the revenues, the revenues were adequate, but the timing needs to give us, we would like the federal government to give us an extension of the time to spend the funds. The schools are looking at all kinds of things on their plate, and the challenges that the school department faces are enormous in terms of whether it's going to in-person instruction or not, and then providing remote services to residents as many people don't want to leave their homes. They want to be able to interact with their town government remotely, so we're working on all of those items. Paul, and I'll just give a quick update that tomorrow finance committee, one of the items, I believe, is we're going to do an update on the CARES Act. I know there's been some requests for the CARES Act funds, some of the things we've been spending it on, and just an overall update on those expenditures, and so that's ready to go for tomorrow. Good. Thanks. So next is FY22 assumptions, so what are we thinking for next year's budget? So on the revenue side, right now we're working off of a two and a half percent increase to the property tax levy. On the new growth front, so what are the new things coming online in town that will add to our property tax base? We're projecting $500,000. That's a little bit higher than FY21. We projected $450,000 for FY21, but it is pretty well below our normal level. We usually look at about $600,000, $650,000, so we're still being conservative in what we're projecting on new growth. State aid, unrestricted government aid, but just state aid in general, we're projecting as level funded, and the strategy we use for FY21 of considering reserves, if there are any reductions to state aid, worked pretty well. It's easy to say because there were no reductions to state aid, but we are considering using that strategy again for FY22, at least until we get more information, and then we can decide if that'll work. Local receipts, we're projecting modest growth after we had a very large reduction in FY21. We're hoping the reduction we made in FY21 was the worst of it when it comes to local receipts, and that we'll start to climb our way out of that reduction. We're not counting on any federal stimulus, although we are still asking for it. We're not going to count on it at this point. No override for operating expenses, and those large capital projects, we're going to be full steam ahead working to incorporate those into our plans and make those a reality as fast as we can. However fast they happen, we don't anticipate that they will have any impact on the FY22 budget. Even if they're approved as fast as possible, the timing of the debt, they probably won't impact FY22. On the expenditure side, we're going with a conservative estimate of 5% for health insurance. We're pretty optimistic it'll come in under that, but with health insurance, you never know, but our experience is doing pretty well, and we know for retirees, we know at least half the year for FY22, because it's a calendar year thing, we know our rates for half of FY22 for retirees, and it was about a 0% increase. On the collective bargaining side, the schools have six CBAs to be negotiated, so there's a little uncertainty there around the increases that may result from that. On the town side, there is a firefighter CBA to be negotiated, and then we all have all the non-union employees. And then for retirement assessments, which for us is the Hampshire County Retirement System, we always include a 7% increase, and that's been pretty steady. And then for capital, one of the major components of this years of our working assumption at this point is we're turning to a higher investment in capital. We reduce capital significantly for FY21 down to 5% of the levy, and we didn't actually fund any specific projects other than roads. We deferred them because of all the uncertainty. And so going back to 8%, we can start to get through that backlog that we pushed off a year and get back on track with capital. And we're going to need to do that as we look to these four major building projects. We're going to need to get our levy for capital back up so that we can plan for those large building projects. So in terms of operating budgets, right now for the town, the elementary school, the region, the library, we're assuming level funding. We're being conservative. We really don't want to put a number out there, have to come back and say that it got worse. So and because there is so many things that still haven't been determined yet, we're starting with 0%. And there's a few things over the next couple months around new growth, tuition, state aid. There's some things that once we get more information, it might allow us to come back and revise this. But we want to start planning with level funding, and hopefully things will get better from here. Capital, as I mentioned, 8% of the levy, retirement, 7% increase, and OPEB level funded. Personally, that's another area where if things come in better, I would like to see us restore some of what we reduced because we do need to, as you'll see when the actuary report is out there, we have quite a large liability and we want to keep our contribution towards that liability moving in the right direction. And Paul, it's back to you. Thank you. So I think we're running short on time. So I'm just going to, you know, the library schools in town, we can all articulate our needs. But the one thing that this slide tells you is that we all have facility needs, which is capital. We all have concerns about COVID-19 expenses. Those are things that are in common throughout, through all three organizations. We each have some kind of unknown that's part of it. So, you know, these are major challenges that we're all going to face. And that's why I think it's important for us to be all on the same page now. So this is a big picture thing. We talked a little bit about, you know, economic uncertainty. And economic uncertainty is the first bullet, but all those other bullets are subservient to economic uncertainty. If we had a growing economy, those other things would be less of a concern. And economic uncertainty actually drives the thing that we're most worried about other than the state aid is the economic revenues that come to the town. You know, the state, when we look at state aid, they have, the state has budget challenges too. They're struggling. They don't have an FY21 budget yet. They are struggling with their revenues falling off the cliff. So until we know more what they're doing and they're trying to balance their budgets just like we are. You know, the tax base, we're hoping that there'll be steady growth in it. And, you know, we have just a lot of needs in the town that keep, continue to be identified as we move forward services that people want and that we actually need to produce. When we look at what our tools are to hit this, you know, again, managing our resources carefully, you know, prudent use of our reserves when we need to seek additional sources of funds. And, you know, looking at debt exclusions, just as part of a larger strategy. And the only way I think debt exclusions pass is if people say, yes, you've managed my money well. I'm willing to look at your request now. So again, big picture, new initiatives. You know, again, we've been very strict about adding bodies to the payroll. That's the thing that costs the most for at least on the town side. So we are the only, you know, we're very strict about if we need a body added. Federal funds are the key to us. The stimulus money is really important in terms of getting us through this. As Sean mentioned, we believe that we are in a very strong position economically unlike other towns. You know, we have a university in two colleges, there's concrete in the ground, those organizations have to fill up those bedrooms. And we think that that is a major driving force for the development of town. If those, you know, if the university of the colleges are able to come back in the spring as they're starting to project and that we get more normal in the end of the fall, I think we are local businesses will be able to stop, step back. Not all of them will survive. But if those don't, who don't survive, there'll be other businesses that come in. And there might be some re-jiggering and realigning of the retail market downtown. We find that municipal budgets offer enlightening indicators. They come a little bit later, but then they last for a longer period of time. You know, we're noticing there are fewer housing starts going on. I think the COVID, there's a headline today, COVID-19 crushes construction starts. We have two developments that have not moved forward since COVID hit. That in general, this around the country, it's about an 18% reduction in September. And then we worry about our enterprise funds, which is water and sewer and transportation and solid waste. Those revenants are also dropping, but our costs aren't. And so there's more and more pressure on those. All right. So I'm going to do a really brief overview of the revenues. We're almost done. We've got I think two or three more slides. So this top section, this is all revenues on this slide spreadsheet. This is our projection FY 20 actual FY 21 budget and our working projections for FY 22. So the FY 22 column is changing. The top section is property taxes. And so that's where you'll see the new growth number that I mentioned earlier, 500,000 on the two and a half percent increase. And so you can see the overall increase in revenue from property taxes down below that is local receipts. And you'll see if you look from FY 20 to FY 21, that's where we took the big hit in terms of our, our budget in general reduction, local receipts. But we are projecting to start coming back for FY 22. You'll see a 12% increase, which seems like a lot, but following a 40% reduction, it's sort of modest. A few areas in there. I'll just note you'll see departmental revenue going up 66% over 200,000. That's because for FY 21, for a lot of our recreation programs and revenues, we basically assumed no revenue there because there was so much uncertainty at the time. We weren't sure how they were going to do their programming. Well, it turns out, Jerry Hill had one of its better years that's had a long time because people just wanted to golf the outside. And that's one of the few things you could kind of socially distance and do. And so we are returning to projecting some revenues for for recreation programs. You'll see licenses and licenses and permits we have starting to grow. But again, for most of these, you'll look at what we've had for FY 20. We're not projecting them getting all the way back to where they were pre-pandemic. And then one other one I'll note in local receipt, you'll see a pretty large reduction in the pilot area. That's because we had a 40-year pilot agreement that ended in FY 21. And that property has now moved over to new growth. And it's part of our regular tax rolls. So it actually was a net increase, but it's in the new growth numbers up above. So it's a reduction to our existing pilot revenues. State aid is the next section. I mentioned that's level funded. We do think it'll be leveled for FY 21, but there's a lot of moving pieces there that for now until we get more information, we're keeping it level. And then other financing sources, there's a couple areas there. So ambulance revenues, some of the billing revenues we get from ambulance calls dipped a little bit. If you were people in town, people weren't wanting to call the ambulance as much just from fear of the pandemic. And so that did dip a little bit and we're projecting that coming back partially. The CPA is the next one. That's really just an offset number. It nets out with something below. And then enterprise funds, we're level funding that, enterprise fund reimbursements. It's actually an overall reduction from where it was budgeted for FY 20 because we saw that there was some stress on the enterprise fund. So it is still lower than normal levels. And as the enterprise funds rebound in the future, that's an area that could improve. The next slide are all expenses. So you'll see at the top are the operating budgets. I don't think I mentioned this before, but we said level funding for the operating budgets for the elementary schools, that turns out to be a 0.27% decrease or 64,000. The way that works is again, it's a retroactive looking backwards adjustment where you take the you adjust year over year for the net change in charter tuition and the net change in choice tuition. So for FY 21, you may remember that helped the schools. It actually increased what they got more than everybody else. And unfortunately for FY 22, it's the reverse. And a lot of that is due to charter reimbursements going down for the schools. It's not necessarily that their charter enrollment went up. It's that the reimbursements we get from the state actually dropped pretty by quite a bit. The next area is capital. And so again, that's where we're getting back up to around 8% of the levy. One noteworthy item there is if you look at our current debts, you'll see for FY 22, we're having a pretty big reduction in our current debt. It's going down about 460,000. That's because we're paying off an existing obligation for roads. And that's a really good thing because now that can be put back into the pot for capital projects and used for current capital. So that's a positive thing. Pensions we talked about, OPEB we talked about, and state aid assessments, we're also keeping level until we get more information. The one general thing I'll just note because I know at least one member has brought up a couple of times and is interested in it, PVTA and the impact of the pandemic on the PVTA. So we haven't gotten our letter yet for this year. So we haven't been able to plug in actuals to kind of inform what we project for FY 22. But I did have a conversation with their finance director. And it looks like we will not have a significant impact for FY 22 or negative significant impact for FY 22. It's possible it might be sort of neutral or benefit us a little bit. But I just want you to know that for now we've level funded PVTA in here and we'll adjust it once we get that letter. And then the last slide is the calendar. And I'll just note that tonight is the financial indicators report. And it's a BCG meeting. Important to note the deadline for resident capital requests is Friday. And there's a link on the website to submit those resident capital requests. If anybody needs, you know, wants me to forward on that link, feel free to email me. And then as mentioned earlier in the presentation on the 19th is the public forum. And that's really the opportunity for anybody to come out and give their thoughts on the direction of the budget moving forward. And then sometime hopefully in November, December, this is sort of an unusual year. There will be budget guidelines issued and adopted that will really inform the budget development going forward. And I think I will move on beyond that. And that's it. Would you please take the screen down? Thank you. We have, I have pushed back the beginning of our council meeting by 15 minutes. So if there are questions, but I just wanted to say a couple things. We all entered this discussion with different years of experience in different levels of knowledge. And again, this is just the beginning of a conversation. It is not the final conversation, but just the beginning. The finance committee actually will begin its discussion tomorrow at two o'clock. That's a public meeting posted on the town website. So with that, are there questions from any of the boards or committees? Peter Demling, I see your hand up please unmute and briefly state your comments. Thanks. Sean, could you just clarify for the public the difference between what level funding is versus level services? So you propose level funding. So just the difference between those two things? Yeah. So level funding means the exact the same amount of money that you received the prior year. So if you received the million dollars, the prior year to support your budget level funding would be you get a million dollars to support this year. That often means a reduction in services because our services grow each year generally because of health insurance, pensions, a number of other things. Level services is what amount of money does it take to provide the level of services you had this year next year? So you have to account for increases in wages, increases in health insurance. And so often we strive for level services, although we don't always get there. We strive for level services when we can. Thank you. Dorothy Pam, you have your hand up? Yes, I want to make the question. So Town Manager Backelman, to my understanding, you have been very creative in using your existing staff, retraining, repositioning, putting them in charge of other jobs. And I'm assuming that there's been a minimal loss of staff or furloughing this year. And just wondering if that can continue into the next year? I hope so. We don't want to be laying off staff. I think that's a negative thing for everyone involved, obviously. And we have have tremendous new needs. As you noted that redeploying people into working on Zoom, we're redeploying people to working with child care facilities. We've had people at Puffer's Pond this summer. The bulk of the town's employees are doing, their jobs haven't changed. We still need public works. We still need fire. We still need police. And we still need the finance office to be processing things. So by and large, the bulk of the employees are still required to do the jobs that they've always done. Kathy, just a reminder, Finance Committee has tomorrow, but you have your hand up now. Okay. I'm just going to do it for the public record here, Lynn. The budget that we're looking at next year, as you pointed out, we lose here, we potentially lose carers' money at the end of the year, even if we, unless we can carry it over. My recollection is it was drawn on substantially for operating budgets. So the flat budgets that people could live under in the year we're under were partly possible because of CARES. Is that true? Can I weigh it on up? So for the most part, CARES is really for things that we're not budgeted. There are only a few exceptions where we were able to repurpose people. If people were repurposed from their existing position for something substantially different, then we could use CARES money to pay for them. But any costs that were budgeted this year, we are not able to use CARES money for. So it really has been focused on the additional expenses that have arisen from COVID-19. So, you know, PPE, cleaning, everything we've had to do around cleaning and HVAC work, all those things are additional things that really were created by the pandemic. And have those all been done to an extent that we don't need to do them again a year from now? We hope. So in terms of like PPE and things like that, you're only allowed to buy so much of a stockpile. So we can't stockpile for multiple years. There are some things we've been able to do that we hope will provide long-term benefits. A lot of the HVAC work, we've been hearing about air quality and air ventilation for a long time. We've been able to do some things there that will have long-lasting effects. So there are some long-term benefits from the way we've spent the CARES money. Thank you.  Alyssa Brewer. Yes, I do. Thank you. Flipping screens does that all the time. Thank you. And I know that the Finance Committee is going to be talking about this. And one thing I want to just ask that the Finance Committee guidelines, finance guidelines that Sean mentioned that we do every year, do pay some attention to the concept of collective bargaining at the school's level. I know we only have the one collective bargaining agreement in the town that's up for the firefighters. This was illustrated on the slide, plus, of course, non-union employees, but just given everything this year, given CARES funding and not given layoffs and furloughs that we have avoided thus far, but then looking at all those collective bargaining agreements, which shall we say a rather fraught school situation this year. And we're talking about region not increasing at all and elementary actually going down. I don't know how that magically works. And so I would just like us to make sure that the financial guidelines do pay some attention to that to help bring the community along in terms of although we aren't all doing the collective bargaining that they understand the kinds of challenges that's going to present.  Thank you. And thanks to the town of finance staff for a tremendous amount of work and a really fabulous presentation. I think this question is for Sean. I'm attracted as I always am to the pride that we take in things like low debt service. I wonder if there's a way of thinking about debt service that doesn't just take pride in the fact that there's not much of it, but that would help us understand what the optimal kind of level of debt service would be in relationship to the budget. So if I, for example, think that the roads in Amherst are in terrible shape or that the schools and the library and public facilities are in terrible shape, I might think that we haven't been taking on enough debt to maintain those facilities and at a better level. But I just wonder, is there another way to think about debt service? I mean, obviously we don't want any more than we need. But is there another way to think about debt service other than that? It's great that it's low. Like if there's some optimal percentage of a budget or something else like that. Yeah. So I don't have a great answer for you, but I'll just say two things. I think when I look at the debt service number, I'm excited about it because it means that we're in a position to do some of these things we've been talking about with building projects. You know, if we had a high debt number, it would be much more difficult. But because it is low, we have a lot of flexibility around capital. And the other thing I'll just mention is, you know, we can think about that a little bit more. We are reviewing our financial policies and looking at those and seeing if they're still, you know, if they need updates or if there's new sections we want to put in. And one section that definitely makes sense to look at is sort of our debt management approach and do we want to look at, you know, what our existing levels are, when it makes sense to take on debt. You know, when interest rates are high, you obviously don't want to have a very high debt percentage. But when interest rates are low like they are now, it's not so bad a thing. So it's the right question, but I don't have a, you know, a perfect answer for you. And I just, my, I'm really happy to hear what you were saying because I just worried that the town not get into what I would describe as an elevator approach to debt and debt service that we keep it low and then we need to, you know, go up because we have all these capital needs. So that's really helpful. Thank you so much. Okay. Darcy, you have your hand up. Sorry. Two things. One is, will these, this slides be available to us and to the public? Yes. So it's on the website now. I think it's in the packet, but it's also on our website under the budget and the FY22 budget tab. And we'll try to make it a little easier to get to, but it is posted online right now. Okay. Great. Yeah. I couldn't find it in the packet. So that's why I'm asking. And secondly, I just, I guess I would just say that I hope that the finance committee guidelines are going to be kind of like a new look considering that we're, you know, there's a lot of discussion about how we're all moving toward a new normal and the possibility shifting things around and shifting priorities in the area of operating budgets are just looking, you know, assuming that we're going to be, you know, looking at policing in a different way, we're going to be having a new climate action plan. You know, there's going to be a lot of new, new priorities that are going to be coming up over the next year. And part of it is because of COVID, you know, just having this opportunity to look at things in a new way. So I'm just throwing that out there that I would like us to be open to a new way of looking at our finance guidelines. Thank you. Mandy, Joe, I'm going to take yours as the last question and then we'll move to adjourn this part of the meeting. Thank you. I hesitate to bring this up because, as Alyssa said, it kind of piggybacks on Alyssa's question or comment, which is the schools are in a front situation right now that are very difficult and there's a lot of pressure on the schools for a lot of reasons for all sorts of things. But we've seen a substantial decrease in enrollment in the schools. And I'm curious how that is factored into this forecast, whether it is factored into the forecast. You know, we've got children not in buildings. And so I assume that means there's going to be a lower amount of budget use because of lower utility costs than all because of the buildings not being open. But I guess my comment is similar to Darcy's also, should we be looking at budgets in a new way, given that we've got lower enrollment in schools, we've got different uses in town for things like the recreation department, many different uses at the library right now. And how are we going to, I think we need to figure out how we can project that into a budget next year, depending, assuming we're not going to be back to normal. And all of that. And I don't know how you do that. And how things like that affected I am very concerned that the decrease in enrollment, whether or not it affects our projecting of budgets at the schools will affect the local receipts, the cherry sheet numbers we get state aid from that because of that substantial decrease in enrollment. And I don't know how to take that into account. But I think we need to be considering that. Dr. Morris, superintendent of schools has offered to answer the question. Mike, are you there? I'm looking for Mike Morris and to make sure he's here and unmute and he's he's saying that he can't get into answer. I guess he's having technical difficulties. I don't know if Dr. Slaughter if you're able to respond about the chapter 70. Thank you, Allison. I'll be brief. You know, certainly it's a concern of ours relative to, you know, as as was mentioned, you know, when enrollments change, that is a significant factor in how the chapter 78 formula for schools is is is figured. But I think, you know, a lot of districts are experiencing a drop in enrollment this year in particular. So that's something that we've reached out, our legislators have reached out to to those folks in the legislature that are working on on the on the budget for fiscal 22. And so they're aware that there are a lot of districts that might take a huge change in in chapter 70 based on enrollment alone. There's a lot of folks choosing to do things, either homeschooling or or, you know, opting for non public school options that have changed enrollments pretty significantly across the state. So I think that a lot of other districts are like us in that regard. I think the difficulty for us is we have to plan for multiple contingencies. You know, we may have a bunch of students come back next year, but the chapter 70 formula is going to be based on enrollment as of this October. But we have to consider whether we will or will not be in the same model that we are in now, or will be changing to. So there's a lot of variables there. We're going to keep a close eye on all of them and try to be as as careful as we can in the short term and be thoughtful in our planning for the for the future relative to that. So but it's definitely going to create a circumstance where we have to be fairly creative in how we think about our budgets and how we structure our work. There are some things we can't avoid. There are things that we are, you know, both morally but legally obligated to do. And so that's also a factor that that drives us in our budgets. There are certain things and actions you have to take relative to kids needs. And we'll put that person foremost in our thinking, but that will require us to be diligent in how we, you know, investigate and restructure our finances to meet those challenges. Thank you. Can I just add? Sorry. Alison. So the school committees are meeting tomorrow evening and Dr. Morris will in the school committees will be discussing exactly this topic further tomorrow evening. And he's also reminded me that our survey to families that have left the district went out today. So we'll be getting more information about who, you know, how many of those that reduction is actually temporary versus long term. So Mike, you have your hand up again. Are you able to connect? Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. Sorry. I don't know why, but zoom wasn't my friend a couple of minutes ago, but I think I worked it out. I heard most of what Doug and Alison said, I don't have much to add, but I think the thing worth noting threefold and maybe it's just summarizing their statements. One is that our local legislators have been in touch, uh, including with the education, the chair of the education house education, uh, committee. It's, um, well, it's, we're feeling it here. It's an acute issue in many, many communities in Massachusetts. We are not alone. And I did get some communication that the state, uh, the education commission is aware of these challenges and is trying to figure out how to resolve them in the FY 22 budget, knowing that enrollments are wildly different in many, many, I would say the majority of communities. There's been some media reporting because my professional organization did a survey of districts on that. Um, the second piece, uh, and I appreciate, um, our local reps are being on it. The second is that as, as, uh, chair McDonald just said, we're surveyed families. We're trying to understand best, um, families who have left the district where they are, why they left and whether they plan to be back for fall. And I think third is, as, um, as, as Hanuki noted, I think it's really important for us to be planning on multiple contingencies on enrollments as we look forward, particularly as we're starting off the building project that includes an enrollment projection. So that's a whole nother can. So it's good. This is the last question I think, uh, chair Griezmer, but, um, you know, um, I think that question hit the nail on the head and it's something we're actively working on, uh, as we plan, begin the FY 22 planning process, which is already in motion for the schools. Thank you, Mike and Doug and Allison for that. Um, so let me just tell you how this next five minutes are going to proceed. All of the town counselors are going to stay on this zoom as well as the town staff. Anybody who wants to continue to be on zoom, but is not part of the town council meeting as a regular member can do that. And we will exit you to the attendees or the audience. You can also pick up by watching it on Amherst media if you will. Good. But at this point, I'd like to ask, um, the school committee, Allison, uh, you just need to adjourn your committee. We don't require a vote unless you really feel you need to. Um, I will follow the norms of our hosting, um, body here. Um, so, uh, I will now, um, adjourn, uh, this meeting of the Amherst school committee at 6 45 p.m. Okay, Austin Serrette, uh, library board of trustees meeting is adjourned. Thank you. Uh, Andy Steinberg finance. Finance committee is adjourned. Okay. And the towns, the special town meeting, special meeting of the town council is also adjourned and we will move immediately to our regular town council meeting. We're going to take a few a minute or so to bring some people in and other people leave. I also want to take this opportunity while we're doing that to thank Paul, Sean, Sonia and all of the rest of the finance staff for your outstanding work in putting together this presentation. It certainly is even more thorough than we've ever seen in the past and gives us a good sound basis by which we can start to think about the coming fiscal year. So thank you very much for that. Okay. Um, we are now continuing with the regular town council meeting. We are doing this again under Governor Baker's March 12th order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. I'm going to call on each counselor and make sure that they can hear us and we can hear them. Um, and then we are going to proceed very rapidly to a presentation provided by UMass. Shalini Balmille. President. Alyssa Brewer. President. Pat DeAngeles. Pat DeAngeles. Let's assume she will reconnect. Darcy DuMont. Here. Lynn Griezmer is here. Amanda Johanicki. President. Dorothy Pam. Evan Ross. President. George Ryan. President. Kathy Shane. Here. Steve Schreiber. I'm here. Andy Steinberg. President. Okay. I'm going to go back to Pat DeAngeles. And Dorothy Pam. Okay, I see Dorothy. Can you hear us, Dorothy? Yeah. Thank you. All right. Let me just start by saying welcome. I'm officially calling the meeting to order of the regular meeting of the Amherstown Council to order at 6.48. We are going to show you the announcements, and I just want to mention while you are looking at the announcements, the town council extends our most sincere and heartfelt thanks to all of the many people who worked during the presidential election period to ensure that our voting was accessible, safe, and met the highest standards of integrity. Thank you. I want to mention also that we are not going to do closed caption tonight. We're still working out some more bugs, but we'll be back to it. And meantime, we are then going to go on to a presentation by the University of Massachusetts. And for the purpose of that, and before I start that, I also want to thank you, Mass, for your significant effort in keeping our community as safe as you can. It's not an easy job. And providing regular testing to the town's first responders and inspection staff. I want to remind the audience that this session is being recorded as part of our regular meeting and can be revisited at any time. So with that, I'm going to introduce John Kennedy, Vice Chancellor for University Relations. And he's brought with him the A team of a total of eight people. And I'll let him take care of all those introductions as we go forward. John. Thank you, Chairman Griezner. Thanks very much for giving us the opportunity to share our spring planning in our COVID mitigation efforts. I'm John Kennedy, Vice Chancellor for University Relations. We're going to have a cast of folks here to share various aspects of the plan. I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview. The invitation to come and share the plan has grown out of our weekly town gown COVID working group meetings that we've held since July. And they've been a great opportunity for us to collaborate with the town and share information and to figure out ways to tackle some of the challenges that we share. And those actually grew out of the weekly meetings that Tony Morulis and Nancy Buffon, our town gown specialist at the University, have with Paul and Dave Zomek every week. And then, of course, we have a weekly on-call meeting on Monday. So there's a lot of opportunities for the University and the town to communicate and to share information and to figure out ways to problem solve together. If we could throw up, I think Athena had slides to share, if we could throw up the first slide. John, do you actually have those slides? Thank you. Oh, great. Thank you. So we can move on to the next slide. And, okay, we'll start here. So I'm going to be joined by Brandy Hepner-Lebanck, who's our Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life, Evelyn Ashley, our Dean of Students, and Becker, our Public Health Director, Nancy Buffon, our Associate Vice Chancellor for University Relations, Jeff Hescock, Executive Director of Environmental Health and Safety and Emergency Management, Sally Lodowski, Associate Dean of Students, Off-Campus Student Life and Community Engagement, and Tony Morales, our Executive Director of External Relations and University Events. Each of them are going to give more detail on various aspects of the plan as we go forward. If we could go to the next slide, please. Next slide. So the plan we're going to share with you is born out of some of the lessons that we've learned throughout the fall and some of the successes that we've had in the work that we've done to mitigate COVID on campus with a limited population that we've had. We've got a massive asymptomatic testing operation on campus. It's the fourth largest in the state, behind only Boston, Cambridge, and Worcester, an extensive contact tracing operation that really is built on trust, built on trust with students and others who may be tested and may be tested positive to share and be forthcoming about the context that they've had. You know, that work has kept our positivity rates among our community extremely low or well below the state of cumulative rate, well below the positivity rates at comparable institutions. And later on, you'll be hearing more about that testing success and operation that we're going to build upon for the spring. We've got extensive quarantine and isolation protocols, strict policies on social distancing, and face coverings, limitations on guests and residence halls, limitations on travel off campus or on campus students, and a public health messaging campaign that you'll hear about as well that attempts to educate and bring folks along to do the right thing from a public health perspective. The planning process on campus was developed with a series of campus working groups, everything from teaching and learning to residence life, both on campus and off, public health and safety facilities and financial implications, research and libraries, athletics, communications, and then finally the town gone working group was a great forum for us to talk about some of these issues as well. The next slide please. So, you know, we're committed to the health and safety of everybody in the community, not just on our campus, but more broadly because we're part of this community. Most of us live either in Amherst or in the surrounding area. Our kids are in the schools and, you know, we're engaged in the community as are our students. So, we're trying to develop a plan for the spring that is from a public health and safety perspective the best way to go and also helps us fulfill our mission to educate our students and to conduct the work that we need to do on the university. So, we focused on student cohorts for whom living on campus is closely linked to academic success and when we looked at these cohorts we said, okay, how many could we bring back in facilities where we had, for instance, you know, what might be the ideal ratio of plumbing facilities to number of students? What's the ideal ratio of living space to number of students? And we worked our way to these following cohorts that you see up on the screen. First year students, transfer students, international students, all students who face-to-face is a critically important part of the educational experience for them. Students in mandatory face-to-face classes, students dependent on UMass for housing and dining as well as students requiring specific academic accommodations and student-athletes is a very rigorous protocol for student-athletes that's been very successful as well. Some of the key elements of this, let me put this, what you end up with when you put these cohorts together and you look at all the planning we have come up with, you end up with an invitation about 60% of our on-campus population invited back and that translates roughly to 8,700 students. So, we have I think 1,069 students on for the fall. We're going to increase that by about 7,700 students, at least invite that many back. We don't have any indication that this is going to affect the off-campus population and we've been reaching out to students and sort of testing the waters there. We're going to require off-campus students to provide a local address. For the fall plan, we weren't able to do that because the plan shifted after students had already signed up for their classes and so the opportunity we had to implement that requirement had sort of passed. The timing of the announcement for the spring plan is going to allow us to require that address as part of the SPIR process when students sign up for classes. This is from the reelection campaign set up. Pardon me? I'm sorry, I heard a voice. We're going to require on-campus and off-campus students to be tested twice a week. This is a change from the fall, so the requirement for twice week testing will be for on-campus and off-campus students. You can go to the next slide. Before I get to the next piece of the presentation, which will be delivered by Brandy Hepburn Bank, we are committed to the health, public safety of the community while fulfilling our mission and we really think that this plan will in fact achieve both of those objectives for us. But ongoing, we're also committed to continue to work with the town, work with the town gown COVID working group to address any challenges that we have together and to approach this spring plan in partnership with the town. With Adam at a hand, the program over to Brandy Hepburn Bank, who's our Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs and Campus Life. Thank you, John. I appreciate it. Good evening, everyone. You can go ahead and advance the slide. And I'm going to share a place a little bit more in depth with a lot of what John just discussed. And first of all, I want to talk a little bit about a change in our approach, which is going to be about shifting the UMass community agreement to a university-wide policy. So we really did witness a high level of acceptance, adherence to the community agreement. We really were impressed with how the vast majority of our students embrace those public health initiatives. And so at this point, and since we have the time to get this accomplished, it makes sense to codify this. And that gives us the ability to manage it a bit differently. And so our aim is to really look at a pandemic policy that will include public health behaviors, these testing requirements that John just talked about and local address requirements. So that's essentially how we plan to implement some of those things. Lack of compliance with that will result in interventions, behavioral and conduct both. And so again, we will have the ability of the policy to just be able to step in more quickly versus kind of being the agreement and the directive. It will now become a university-wide policy. And then to talk a little bit about increasing the residential community, what I want to do is kind of share a little bit more about how we plan to do that very safely and how we have strategically tried to arrive at a reasonable de-densification or redensification. And so John kind of alluded to this, but we did. We started with the number of plumbing fixtures on each floor, each corridor in a suite or apartment on campus. And then we determined for every one of those we could assign up to four students. But then once we had kind of that occupancy number, we also then looked at the layout of students and tried to create the right occupancy for each room on the floor corridor and suite apartment so that students had appropriate separation and there would be less of an opportunity for the cross, crossing of students in their paths. So in the spring, we also are making a shift where our floors will be primarily single-sex designation, which is a difference from how we typically operate. That will eliminate travel to other floors or corridors for use of bathrooms. And we know that there is a demand for known roommates to be together, sometimes family members, sometimes close family friends, that sort of thing. So we have factored in about 20% double occupancy as an option, but most rooms, the vast majority will be single designated here in the spring. And the students will use an online room selection that they will be able to select their own room so we won't force anyone to live with a roommate that they don't want to. We also plan to do what we're calling kind of some social or some social contact management. So we want to promote social bubbles or teams that will give students a safe social outlet. And what we want to do is we're not going to require that of students because we know that a lot of students coming here haven't engaged here before. So what we want to do is get them here and get them to see the benefits of finding their social group to be a part of and to be able to select a group that they're comfortable with. But then that way, they'll be able to interact with that group and have that engagement and hopefully bring down the resistance to go out and do other things. And so we think that that and that has been a highly successful approach on many other campuses that we've learned from again, taking a lot of cues from other campuses. We'll also do limited but highly managed on-campus events and campus recreation. So there will be less of it because we have to kind of distance those things and the approach and putting it all together will take a different bandwidth from staff. But ultimately, we will have those on-campus events and campus recreation opportunities for students. I also think it's important to mention that students' mental health and their well-being has been really top of mind. We just recently got back some feedback from students about how their semester has gone thus far. 46 percent of our undergraduate students indicated that they are feeling isolated or lonely over half of the days or most days. 60 percent are reporting nervousness, anxiety, or on edge over half of the days or most of their days. And 44 percent are feeling depressed or hopeless over half the days or most days. So again, all of this indicates a need to bring students together in a safe way but to enhance that engagement, which would be important to their mental health and well-being. And then the last thing I just want to reinforce, honestly, what John also said, which is we will continue to lead with education and use data-informed, effective public health strategies. But we're going to continue to partner with our students because they've really been big influencers in all of this and they've been very helpful. And we'll continue to partner and work with the town of Amherst. I think really proud of the work. And I've said this before, I'm fairly new to the institution and I really am impressed with the way in which the university and the town work together to address the issues, to communicate constantly about what the trends we're seeing and how to be responsive best and I'll address those together. So looking forward to those continued partnerships. And now I think I will hand things over to Jeff Hescock and Ann Becker. Thanks, Brandy. You want to switch over to the next slide, please? And then the next slide. So good evening, everyone. My name is Jeff Hescock, Executive Director of Environmental Health and Safety and Emergency Management. And I'll co-present with Ann Becker. The one thing I first and foremost want to say is we have a great working partnership with the town of Amherst from Amherst Fire Department, Emergency Management, Police Department, and the Public Health Department. You know what I mean? And that strength of collaboration has been tremendous from pre-COVID to now how we're working with COVID. And it's these daily calls and daily phone calls that Ann can talk to with the Public Health Director there and Amherst that makes that partnership extremely strong. As John mentioned, you know, we are one of the largest asymptomatic testing centers here in the state conducting more than 120,000, over 130,000 now since we put together this presentation. That's about average of 12,500 weekly. And the vast majority of those students are ones that are living in the town of Amherst in our local areas. So as part of that, the students have been coming in regularly since the start of the semester. The operation could not be possible if it wasn't with the great support from our students. Every day it takes about 60 students to support our operations there at the Public Health Promotion Center down at the Mullen Center. And that has really served as our central coordinating spot for our public health response here during the fall semester. I'm doing COVID tests, having a flu vaccine clinic there. It has really served as, like I'm saying, as somebody comes in and gets one test, then they're getting their shot and they're on their way. And again, 50-plus students from the School of Public Health that focus on our contact tracing element, which Ann will speak to, and then the 300-plus students from the College of Nursing from doing registration to doing the observed testing. Again, 80% of our staff every day is from our students in our own backyard that are coming together to help support this. If you go to the next slide, please. So here's just a quick overview, just a little picture as part of it. But for everybody who's been in the Mullen Center before, we have really transformed that concourse into our testing operations on the concourse. And then the upstairs location in the Massachusetts, we've really commandeered kind of all the office spaces there. So we are one team every day working together because if it's testing, contact tracing and isolation and quarantine, it's three legs of the stool, and each leg needs to be working collaboratively together. And that's what happens every day in that one location. If you could just go to the next slide, please. So the next thing is testing transparency. From day one, one of the big aspects that we do is we're doing the testing, but we want to share our results with the public. Similar to what the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is doing with their daily reports, what they do, we do a similar fashion by developing this testing dashboard. From looking at our cumulative tests to our cumulative positive cases to the rate to our new positive cases to the seven-day cumulative positivity rate, you can see from a transparent perspective of kind of where we are as a Commonwealth, excuse me, where we are as the Commonwealth's flagship campus at UMass Amherst and what we're able to do. We also provide as part of that a detailed case analysis that UMass students on campus, so the faculty that live off campus, staff that live off campus, and that's that sec on the right side of the slide to be able to give more information. The other thing which we're including on the dashboard, as you can see is the total number of tests each day. If you wanted to look at, they're told the number of positive cases and then our testing turnaround time. Contact tracing and isolation and quarantine are so key, but how quickly we can get the test results to be able to get these individuals to reach out to them. And you'll hear from Anne of how quickly we are reaching out to them. We have a turnaround time of 24 hours of getting those test results. You can see that on that page, which is extremely beneficial from a public health perspective. Like I was saying, as soon as we get those test results in, our contact tracing team works seven days a week, as well as our isolation and quarantine team, to reach out to those folks and get the appropriate people into isolation or into quarantine. If you could go to the next slide, please. So as part of this, I was saying, as we've conducted over 126,000 tests, just shy of 100,000 of those tests are our students living in the Amherst area. Approximately a little bit more than 8,000 of those have been undergraduate students have been tested. So we have seen tremendous support from our off-campus students that have been coming in. And you'll see this in the next slide when I compare ourselves to other universities. Next slide, please. So one of the next things we always do is we always benchmarks ourselves against other universities that are out there, right? We look at our big flagship campuses, similar to us, across the country to gather any lessons learned to see what we're doing now or what we can do from the spring. As you can see on this slide, UMass Damhurst has the lowest positivity rate amongst these universities, but that's not the most important thing that's there. If you can look at the number of tests that we've done, if we compare ourselves to some of the states, UConn, Penn State, Maryland, Rutgers, they brought back many more people on campus and are not testing to the level of the off-campus students that we are. I can't understate that enough or overstate that enough. We are testing our off-campus students more than any of these universities are and they brought back more students on campus. In addition, if you look at Ohio State or Indiana University, they brought back more people on their campus as well and their primary focus has been the students that have lived on campus and only a few that live off campus. From our public health measures and strategy that we've put in place now and what we're complaining to do on the spring is for the entire UMass Amherst community, not just the campus, and our numbers demonstrate that as we're continuing to try to do what's in the best public interest of not only our campus but the Amherst community to protect the citizens around. The other thing I mentioned as we continue to evaluate the commonwealths, there's been a little bit of an uptick in the commonwealth in terms of positive cases over the last couple weeks. We've also seen, if you looked at our dashboard recently, we've seen an uptick in cases that includes both students that live off campus as well as staff members as well. And one of the things that is very interesting that the commonwealth produces now in their weekly or daily reports is the positivity rate with higher education tests and then without higher education tests. So if you're looking at the commonwealths update from today, the positivity rate is 2.35%. And that takes into account both higher education tests and then all other tests. In their report now, they also eliminate if higher education was not doing tests. And the positivity rate would be over 4%, 4.02%. So the likes of us and other universities doing the amount of testing that we're doing is not only protecting and helping our UMass, our campus, but our campus community. And like I said before, is we're proud to work closely with the town and all that we're doing and nothing more than to pass it over to Ann now because she is really the one that is collaborating extensively with the town of Amherst each day as we do our contact tracing and isolation and quarantine. Ann, I'll pass it over to you. Thank you. Hi everybody. My name is Ann Becker. I'm the public health director and I'm also faculty in the College of Nursing, working with our students here at the Public Health Promotion Center. And I also work with the contact tracers and we have a team that works seven days a week on campus. We're in the Mullins five days a week and then we have remote contact tracing and case management every Saturday and Sunday. So we really just don't take a break from this. We want to support our students all the time and we're responding to any positive tests that may come our way either through the Mullins asymptomatic testing program or also we're testing students on campus who may have symptoms or are contacts at university health services as well. And we're testing faculty and staff as well. And so whenever we get a positive test we get to work incredibly quickly. Our median response time from the time that we get notice of a positive test to when we've contacted these cases and done our case investigation is 2.1 hours. It's generally much faster than what the the state average is and we're able to do that for multiple reasons. We get very quick lab results even before the the state system would do that and so we get direct notification from our laboratory on campus and or from the Broad Institute who does our asymptomatic testing. And so that allows us a really rapid response that makes it as ideal a situation in a bad situation really but it's as as good as it can get in a bad setting. So we support students on who live and reside on campus and those who are also residents in Amherst or Pellum or Sunderland or Hadley or wherever they may be. We are supporting all of our students wherever they take up their residents and we work with them closely. We work I've been the working in public health on the University for over 18 years and I have worked closely in that time with the town of Amherst Health Department throughout all of those years and so we have a lot of depth in terms of our relationship and that's really been incredibly helpful in in being able to respond and to work and to address issues that because there's always you know students or maybe they have family members or it's faculty who live in town and we're constantly communicating with each other on on and coordinating our response and the best way to approach any kind of case that we come across. So next slide please I almost tried to advance it myself. So we conduct when we get a positive case we conduct a really thorough case investigation. We have registered nurses who do this who work with us as well as public health students graduate and undergraduate and faculty who help support this program. So a case investigation really involves finding out everything we can. We look forward we look backward where the exposure was and how we can be proactive in reaching out to contacts who might have been involved in the initial exposure and who may have been exposed as a result of this positive case. We learn about their living situation if they're on campus or if they're off campus. We ask about their ability to be safe and have food and and all the needed health and medical and mental health support that we can try to provide and we have an amazing team of isolation coordinator quarantine coordinators and public health students who do daily wellness calls and anything that is of concern we bump it up into professional staff nurses and to the health staff at university health services to follow up on anything that may be concerning. It is not easy to be 18 or 20 years old and to be asked to spend two weeks alone in a room. There's nothing easy about that and if we don't take it lightly we we really want to make sure that students are successful to protect the community but also for their for them you know it's very very hard to be like I said that age and and to be asked to not leave your room for two weeks. And so what the students we found incredible support they understand even if so many of them and I feel so thankful that so far most have done really well have had mild illnesses or been asymptomatic so from their point of view it's even harder for them to grasp how to stay in a room for two weeks but they do it they do it because we have peer support and education and we build relationships with them to help them be successful. We work with the dean of students office and with the the counseling center whatever they may need we try to provide it for them plus four great meals a day from our dining commons when they stay on our campus facilities and so with all this and we give them written instructions verbal instructions and we reinforce it with all this we really do our best to make this as best a possible scenario in a bad situation and our students I just you know have been so amazed how understanding they are when they get that when they get that call and they do it for us and it's been it's been challenging for them so thank you. I think next person is public health messaging so I'll take it from there thank you Ann yeah I'm Nancy Buffon associate vice chancellor of the university relations and I think you know Brandy and Ann have both touched on this actually everybody has so far just to how important our students are to this entire endeavor and that was especially true with the public health messaging campaign we knew that we needed their feedback and their input to make sure that the overall message and how we were talking to students was the right direction and the feedback that we got from our initial efforts was really that the students did not want to be told what to do they didn't want an order from the administration they wanted to be seen and they feel like they are a part of the solution and so that's really what drove how we approach the public health messaging campaign so if we can go to the next side we leaned into a campaign that was all about education and compliance and we came up with these two taglines that we use one of them whenever it's appropriate so it's either it's hard but it helps or it's weird but it works and so we went to where students are and so looking on campus we were focused on the residence halls dining commons classrooms off campus we worked with local landlords and property managers to get posters into the apartment complexes we use the outreach welcome bags that Tony and Sally will touch on in a little bit we even had a banner on the town common for a couple of weeks when we go to the next slide so I'm just going to show you a really small slice of what we've done with the campaign these are the messages to the students who are living off campus and it was really about it's okay to stay home if you're you know keep your gathering small if you're having any gatherings and if we can go to the next slide we focused on wearing masks and you can see that we actually just updated the mask messaging late last week to reflect the governor's latest orders so that that's really how you know the messages that we were focusing to our students who are living off campus so this was all through posters and flyers and and other printed materials signage across the campus and like I said off campus we also utilize social media if we can go to the next slide thank you so again this is a really small slice of of what we have done across all of our platforms I didn't include LinkedIn but we utilize that as well we've posted videos we've done Instagram stories I'm trying to really talk to the students everywhere that they are and that that was a really critical part of this campaign if we can go to the next slide so this is some of our social media metrics as of the end of October I'm sorry I didn't put a date on here but really having quite a reach 233,000 views on social media over 10,000 engagements that's people liking it commenting so really people were reacting very positively to what we put out we can go to the next slide we also looked at how is behavior perhaps changing due to some of the messaging and so we look at all of the work as a whole so the work that Jeff and Anne are doing and all of their students that are working in the public health promotion center the work coming out of student affairs and campus life all of it together we've really seen along with the messaging strong compliance around testing and contact tracing we've also looked at what student behavior is like off campus and so this is as of last week noise complaints are down for those police reports that indicate the size of the gathering when police do need to respond we're seeing on average that there's around nine students who are who are at a gathering and the largest parties have really been around 30 people which is really quite a difference from in the past same thing with our ambulance transports those numbers are significantly down so as we look now to what the winter break in the spring semester we're already gearing up for messaging as we will have more students on campus thinking about new ways that we can utilize it's weird but it's work and it works and it's hard but it helps so at that I think I'll pause there and I will let Tony and Sally talk about the outreach efforts that have been going on since August great and I'll start us off and then I'll be co-presenting with Tony Maroulas my colleague in university relations and to start out with you know I think that I'd say that my background I was an associate director at university health services when H1N1 went down so I have experience there and I also have two degrees in public health so as an associate dean working in the off campus venue this is right up my alley thinking about prevention intervention communication and working together with this team in terms of the intersection of our students and the community so I'll tell you a little bit about some of the outreach and education that we've been doing if we can get to the next slide thank you um so I'd start out by saying not much of this is new it is work that we have done on an ongoing basis looking at quality of life issues and students living in the local community what we have done is take everything that we do and turn the volume up on it um so we have a number of student groups that are doing outreach and education that being team positive presence they're a group of undergraduates who do a lot of the outreach the positivity messages the direct communication over social media and we added a new group this this fall called the peer health ambassador network so we invited other students who are doing peer education around health initiatives to come together to take that work further and that's been tremendously successful I get the opportunity not many of my student affairs colleagues do but I get the opportunity to send broadcast emails to all students living off campus that includes graduate and undergraduates and in those emails I will highlight local public health updates resources timely tips a lot of it focuses on living off campus in the time of COVID this is new for all of us those of us that are adults it's created some adjustments but imagine a student coming to live off campus for the first time and going to the grocery store not realizing from eight to nine is the senior citizen hour right like why can't I go in so all those sorts of things um that have to be an adjustment for them and that so we educate on that my emails are timely they're poignant and they pull together a lot of information and I'm really happy that I have really good open rates so students are reading them um so that's been super critical we send those to all the landlords as well as the greek house directors and the on-call group so we copy folks so that they can see what is being sent and then they can cut and paste and copy the message to their audiences as well we do um every Monday at one o'clock we have what we call the on-call meeting and so that that is our first responders the um dean of student staff uh greek affairs university relations um we talk about what the what happened over the weekend what are some trends what are we planning for that's where police reports are shared um where follow-up conversations are planned and who will do that follow-up that has been that group has been meeting for years and continues to meet on a regular basis we met throughout the summer so that we could plan and be mindful we'll also share all the outreach that's happening there as well um every wednesday at the mall and center team positive presence in the pure health ambassador network has been having a presence um talking with students sharing the messages the health communications any updates so for example this week we know that last week the um governor came out with new mandates for the size of social gatherings a mass mandate throughout the state as well as um the curfew hours we want to make sure that all of our students are aware of that the university sent a broadcast email to the entire university community thanks jeff for that um but we'll be down there this week three days a week interacting with students reminding them of that and also asking them what they're thankful for as as we think about the Thanksgiving break coming up and preparing for that we meet uh by week biweekly with the greek house directors we do have 11 chapter houses um zone chapter houses in the town of amherst not all of them are occupied but we meet with them every two weeks to talk about how things are going to update them on the university plans they've been tremendously helpful to us um during during this time in helping to bring recommendations and to help minimize problems there we also do tenant neighbor landlord zoom an in-person problem solving meetings um those are usually based on a concern that is raised whether through the covid concern line or through a complaint through a neighbor or sometimes there are students saying our neighbors hate us we've tried to talk to them and they won't talk to us we need some help so um those have been really proactive and have been beneficial and uh we also do knock and talks which i'll talk about those next what you'll see on the slide are just some of the examples of the materials we put in welcome bags we gave welcome bags starting in august to all of the apartment complexes in amherst and sunderland um for distribution to tenants and we gave them out door to door so those were critical part of our knock and talk uh efforts so those are some of the materials that are that are in there uh next slide please so what is a knock and talk um a knock and talk is actually i think the language is stolen from the police department uh bill larry officer larry uses it a lot and the idea is that you knock on the door and then you talk to people um so we like it we like rhyming things um really our knock and talks are based on a culture of compliance we're all in this together and compliance helps helps all of us we emphasize appropriate behavior in a pandemic this is new for everybody every single one of us is making adjustments in our behavior and we're having to continually make adjustments now we're moving indoors it's colder we're in indoor spaces more so those are the sorts of messages that we communicate with students uh big focus has been information on safe gatherings having 10 people or fewer the physical distancing masks um staying within your pod or your social bubble helping them navigate those conversations with housemates um what about guests what if people want to have guests what's the cleaning going to be like are you going to wear masks when you're in the house together those sorts of conversations they need help with um our walk and talks are educational in nature um when the university started really strongly encouraging students to come in for off-campus come in for testing twice a week we were out there saying have you been in there yet did you know where you go do you know how to do it um and now every door we go to they're like yep we're getting tested yep we got it thank you um so reinforcing those messages um our team is diverse and has a lot of different partners involved so i'm going to turn it over to tony who's going to tell you a little bit about what the team looks like all right next slide please um okay thank you um and so i'm tony morales executive director of external relations and university events and um just gonna let you two quick slides for me um our knock-and-talk team is diverse and i think it's kind of like you know our time gown relations have always been really robust and oftentimes you know we're it's a very strong relationship that we have but i think our knock-and-talk team is where we really really shine and um so our group is a mix of police inspection services university relations student affairs um now which new this year are covid ambassadors um the team positive presence and of course the the newest member of it all winston the amherst police comfort dog i was out last week so there is no picture of me and winston alone nancy has taken that out which is a shame because it's great but i do want to throw out one big thing out of all of these names up here um and john thompson will call us the a well-functioning team and i really think we are but this year i think particular notice has to go out to cat newman who is both uh with umass off-campus student life um and uh also the the town of amherst's covid um ambassador and and she has just been amazing uh in in keeping us together really strategizing and coordinating a lot of what we do so between her and and bill laramy i think we want to give a big big shout out um if we can go to the next slide please so we've uh been all over 10 which is not unusual um but this year as sally said we've really turned the volume up and so we have been everywhere where there are um student where there's student housing throughout the community um here is uh you know just a sample of what we've done this is pretty comprehensive i think we might be missing just a few spots as many of you on the town council of no four of you joined us during uh our halloween outreach um along with uh representative dom and uh our covid ambassadors we were able to go to over 300 houses in town i think we had something like 200 student interactions 119 interactions with community members because we weren't discriminating between the houses we were going to meet everyone uh and it was really a wonderful wonderful day uh that that everyone got to see but you know in kind of just i think uh in a microcosm uh you know one of the things that we have seen throughout all of these knocking talks particularly this year um has been there's receptivity by our students when we see them um that that both to our public health messaging we're always surprised in fact um just how on top of it they are um you know we're asking them them about testing and um they're doing even more than what we're asking for um often so uh it's you know a really great experience and i'm glad a lot of you were able to share it with us and so with that i'll pass it along i think it's evelyn's turn next good evening everyone my name is evelyn ashley and i am the dino students um next slide please so um as we discussed the community agreement was not a policy but an agreement that was connected um to the student code of conduct in that we the code of conduct is established to make sure students understand what it means to live in community and how to be responsible um as they are part of our community and so going forward that will be codified which will make it easier for the office of student conduct and community standards to um track violations of that particular policy next slide please so when it comes to the enforcement of the code of student conduct when a possible violation is reported to the office of student conduct and community standards staff in that in that office follow up with students to make sure they understand um what policy may have been violated and um if it is appropriate they are given sanctions that will help them to understand how to make sure that they are not um making the same violation again um many of the violations related to the community agreement fall into the disruptive behavior category category and i can talk a little bit about um how many we've had this semester a little bit later on um our goal is always to educate students in a manner that allows them to reflect on their behavior um what we have seen is that most students who really do want to get it right and so when we are having when staff is having conversations students are asking questions about you know what what is it that i did wrong how did i misinterpret this so that they don't have um the same violation in the future next slide please so some of the violations of the code of student conduct are um reckless behavior harassment the disruptive behavior that's our noise um disturbances or disorderly conduct and then also our underage alcohol misconduct um when um to so those are the examples of violations the next slide please so when we talk about sanctions under our uh code of student conduct those are listed we have two types of sanctions that are assigned we always assign a status uh to our students so that they understand where they stand with the university and then we also assign educational options for students to complete so that might be having a student complete a module related to their behavior so the good be or good being a good neighbor module um is one that has been assigned to our students along with there's an alcohol violation assigning um an educational um sanction that speaks to that particular behavior is also what might be assigned um i know folks are interested in numbers so that's what i will share in relation to i want to make sure that folks understand that this is um behavior as a whole so our violations related to um the community agreement have not necessarily been pulled out of the numbers that i'm going to share so i want to make sure that that's very clear from august 1st to october 30th we've had 124 referrals to um the office of student conduct and community standards involving 290 students 76 of those incidents involved off-campus students and 48 of those incidents involve students who live on campus the most common violations are the disruptive behavior um like i said the noise disturbances um 67 of the referrals that we've had have come from the amherst police department so we are definitely working very closely with the police when the students are referred to our office to make sure that we are following up with them that they know that we are taking their behavior seriously and that they we want them to be here we want them to behave appropriately and then we're trying to make sure that they have the tools and the information to do just just what it is that we expect of them next slide and with that that's that's really that's it so thank you everyone that that concludes the formal part of the presentation we're going to take some questions but you know to be clear there's even more we could have gone into on the academic side of the house on the covid medication measures that are taking place uh physically on campus it's extensive um but again um uh you know with the the invitation to these cohorts of students is just that an invitation we don't know how many will take us up on the invitation so we don't have hard and fast numbers for what the spring will look like um just for a point of reference for the fall we had about 2300 off-campus students enrolled in essential face-to-face classes and about 600 on-campus students we're in the process of the course enrollment period right now which concludes towards the end of November and then we'll have a much better sense of what the spring looks like in in the face of numbers and just the final thing I would say before we go to questions is you know we're adaptable we're going to modify what we're doing based on what you know the public health situation is both locally and statewide and nationally um uh and so you know we'll see how things evolve but this is the plan as it stands now so with that um you know if we still have time I know we've taken a fair amount of your time we're happy to take questions oh I'd like people from the council if you have questions please raise your hand Mindy Johannake you have your hand up yes thank you um first I want to thank uh everyone at UMass that came tonight to for the presentation and I want to thank you for testing both on-campus and off-campus students and making that a requirement next semester I really do think that's that's an essential part of keeping our town and the students healthy and safe um I believe the UMass agreement for this past semester was that if you lived on campus you couldn't leave campus and so my question relates to that whether that if I'm correct with that that whether that will remain the same for those that are on campus because bringing students back to campus even with that testing obviously helps you guys but it doesn't necessarily help our town's businesses that are um struggling to survive right now if the students can't leave campus so we know Amherst College had that rule and then they set up ways for students on campus to be able to accept deliveries from uh town businesses and they actually also did things where town businesses will come in to cater events and so I'm wondering what the university is doing to allow students who live on campus to patronize local businesses especially if that agreement remains the same and the policy remains the same that they can actually leave campus so I could just start with that I mean we don't we don't have I think the intention or even the capability of restricting students from moving on and off campus we want to encourage students to remain on campus unless they have very specific reasons to leave campus but of course a lot of our students have jobs a lot of our students are engaged in you know in engagement and other activities in the community so that's a that's a you know difficult thing for us but from our perspective to the extent to which we can students can be contained in in their social pods is going to ensure their their sort of safety and well-being for everybody brandy do you want to add anything there no I think you I think you did a good job we are part of the reason why we're going to enhance some of the engagement opportunities is so students have more to do on campus as well so again we're going to be encouraging them to stay close but but certainly we we don't we don't can't guarantee though they will you know go into the communities so there was a second part of that question which was really around engaging with Amherst businesses and particularly food businesses and I wondered if you wanted to comment on that well you know the students who are going to be living on campus are going to have meal plans and that's pretty standard for on-campus students so I don't know honestly what what sort of history we have with on-campus students you know engaging with students with businesses from a food perspective I assume off-campus students will frequent town businesses Tony my colleague might have some more perspective on that yeah thanks John I do actually I I know that you know all of this is weather dependent and unfortunately with restrictions and you know with with safety protocols put into place indoor dining is you know going to be difficult during the winter but certainly when students did come back when the semester was in full bloom and in the outdoor dining in downtown was put into place it's my understanding that through Gabrielle at the bid and Claudia at the chamber that you know businesses were did see you know the student the student traffic so you know I mean I can point out you know the the first weekend and I don't have those numbers in front of me and I apologize because this was something that was at the top of my mind before just a couple of weeks ago but the percentages were actually rather heartening for those you know for those early weeks in the semester again I think you know our students have long been consumers of our downtown businesses and all the businesses within the area I think they appreciate the the local economy and our participants in there um so uh so you know I think they're that that they are back and you know participating in the local economy is a good thing.  Yes thank you I have a comment on that yeah we appreciate that things are as bad as they are in downtown Amherst except they're great right because we're doing great things but they are as difficult as they are with no restriction on students going downtown so bear that in mind right and so um there hasn't been a restriction like there has been for Amherst college so thank you very much for clarifying that for that question um we did submit some questions ahead of time which I realized you may not have seen prior to your presentation and so I'm hoping Lynn will share those with you again later and we can get some answers but one in particular that concerns me and you won't be surprised to hear this based on previous governor's orders and the level of detail that we're in them you guys recently sent out an email that said based on the governor's restriction that says that private residences gatherings must stand by and dispersed by 9 30 yes absolutely indoor gatherings are 10 or fewer outdoor 25 we recommend that all social gatherings should be in groups of 10 or fewer and all in attendance should wear face coverings and maintain physical distance when possible that's not actually what the governor's order says the governor's order actually says if you can't maintain six feet apart inside you can't have 10 people so I'm not clear why that's not being explained to people it says a gathering shall violate this provision when no matter the number of participants present conditions or activities are such that it is not reasonably possible for our participants to maintain this degree of separation unless it's a fraternity or sorority only four students are living together so that means that leaves six people that need to be six feet apart and preferably with face coverings but definitely six feet apart so I'm not sure why that's not being explained and so I appreciate all the amazing work you're doing going out and talking to people but it feels like once again part of the governor's order is being soft-pedaled as a recommendation when in fact it's a fact and so maybe you could elaborate a bit on that Jeff do you want to touch on that yeah so I think as part of what there's no you know our intent was to distribute what the governor's message was as part of copying from quite honestly the press announcement that received and then Sally and Tony and their team as they've been saying is kind of breaking it down even further for the off-campus students so it was an all it was an all broadcast email right so we wanted to make sure all faculty staff and students got the information and then kind of targeted messages came down to the students in their gatherings because it was like the 25 we don't want the 25 off camp you know what I mean we've always said 10 or fewer and that's due to the party smart registration so as part of it you know it's that broadcast email like I was saying and then the targeted messages to the group so it wasn't there's no intent to just other than just sharing the information and and then the student affairs in the ur team working closely with the off-campus students yeah and I would just say we want to be clear we have no intention of soft peddling any of the orders of the governor in fact you know some of our recommendations and requirements have been more stringent so if we you know maybe we need some more and smithing on that so thanks for pointing that out we'll look at it and if we can clarify it more down the road we will thank you just to clarify the questions we're sent and received if there's additional questions that need to be answered after tonight I'm sure that the university will be glad to do that shall any you have your hand up yeah I was wondering if you looked into research that shows that people are motivated to take precautions when it's benefiting others and I believe there's some recent studies that have been done to show especially in the pandemic that people were more willing to take action when you tell them that this is how it's going to affect other people like for example the kids in our school and I know that little kids with the mid flyers or posters and they were in the common and said you know students please be careful because it affects us and so messaging like that I mean to me was very powerful but then I went to look up and there is research to show that messaging that in that way would be more powerful and I was wondering if you considered incorporating that in some of your messaging which is very cool by the way well that's part of part of the theme of the hard but it helps campaign that it might be challenging for you to undertake this but it does help people tell me did you want to touch on that yeah I think that's a big part of our knock and talk discussion when we need when we're seeing students is about keeping the community safe telling them that we've done a good job so far and we want to keep doing a good job and you know our students have been responding to it you know I think the it's born out in the numbers you know Nancy brought up before that the average party side has had has been nine and this is prior to this new spiking cases and the governor's new order you know we have advised that students stay under 10 they've listened to that and they have listened to it because we have talked about a message of care and compassion for the community so I think you know it's there and everything we do and this is something that has gone through with the COVID ambassador as well one more thing if I can because our cracker jack cat Newman just sent me a text to remind me about some of the other business stuff that we're doing in our welcome bags the bit in chamber you know worked with us to create a little magnet with a QR code so we have been collaborating with the bit in chamber to get the messages out about local businesses and I'm sorry I forgot about that before because I've been on furlough for a week so I just kind of forgotten a lot of things so um yes Darcy you have your hand up yeah I just wanted to to comment that I find that your efforts have just been phenomenal and uh the testing and especially uh completing contact tracing in two hours is unbelievably wonderful I mean I just really appreciate the effort that has been put out and um the fact that as an institution you've adapted to this pandemic and and really risen to the occasion I I really appreciate it thank you very much are there any other comments or questions from the town council at this time so let me just summarize by saying thank you for an enormously special presentation in answering questions that even go beyond the ones we often hear again this will be available we can actually segment it and have it be available just as the UMass presentation and put it on our website that way and also provide it to you a great deal of work has gone into the but much more importantly a great deal of work has gone into UMass getting to where we are today and they have met weekly with myself with Paul the police chief the fire chief and other people from town as needed public health and so forth sometimes those meetings have not always been pleasant and sometimes there's been some tough conversations but UMass has really risen to the occasion and we want to thank you for joining us in helping to keep Amherst as safe as possible during this time thank you very much thank you very much for having us we can move on to um public comment and if those of you that would like to stay would who have been part of this want to stay we can move you over to the audience side as well or you can join us on Amherst media okay and I want to point out that I guess on Amherst media live streaming you can actually see the names of the other people who are in attendance this is a new feature did I get that right Athena and Paul yep we're working on it while we have a shared screen up you should be able to see the list of attendees okay great um so uh I'm looking at public comment please raise your hand we have significant public comment and we are already running late so I'm going to ask you if at all possible to keep your public comment to two minutes and um I'm going to start um with Greg Briggs Greg Briggs please please enter the room state state your name where you live and share your comments you need to unmute Greg Greg can we can't hear you I want to just point out that if you are uh in the conference the zoom conference then you need to raise your hand obviously if you're calling by phone you press nine on s-tar nine on your telephone you can take the screen down now Sean thank you okay Greg can you hear us we're having trouble with that so let me move to the SELDA or TAGA please state your name and where you live SELDA please proceed can you hear me yes okay good evening I applaud the work of the Pioneer Valley Worker Center on behalf of immigrant and migrant workers and essential industries and urge you to please support the wage and tip theft bylaw and the responsible employer public construction contracts and agreements for tax relief bylaw the majority of Amherst residents are unaware of the precarious living conditions of many of our local essential workers in April several of us volunteers along with Cooley Dickinson hospital shared with the town manager and other elected officials the crisis conditions faced by these residents in the pandemic these emergency needs included loss of income food access housing rental bills piling up transportation barriers health care issues childcare parents of young children still working we did not childcare technology connectivity issues and language barriers compounding these largely unanswered needs COVID-19 afflicted some of these local essential workers and their families in August and they did not have access to COVID testing and to transportation and again we reached out to the town and to elected officials while some progress was made much more remains to be done to support these workers who make our economy run and whose children are US citizens yet largely marginalized from town life professor Tom Jurovich from the labor studies and sociology departments at UMass has documented the need for the bylaws before you tonight I quote professor Jurovich quote Amherst needs to pass a wage left ordinance because what happened in Amherst last year should never have happened it should never happen again nine undocumented and during workers worked in Amherst 10 hours a day six days a week for five weeks in a row collectively they were owed 50,173 for their labor but they did not receive one penny in wages these were not workers in the agricultural fields of the valley or in one of the local restaurants where wage theft routinely takes place these were construction workers hanging drywall at the north square apartments the marquee project in north Amherst built by the socially conscious beacon properties with over 2.5 million dollars in tax breaks provided by the town of Amherst workers had to wait for 10 months to receive less than 50 percent of their wages beacon communities was never held responsible for this illegal and immoral activity it shouldn't take that publicity to shame a developer to do the right thing it should be part of the bylaws that govern what happens in our community which is why we need to support the proposed anti-wage theft ordinance in Amherst we must ensure that no workers toiling in our community will ever again have to face what the workers at north square had to experience end quote many on this council support most local development projects any such development should include a percentage of local hires and higher people of color as detailed in the second bylaw being proposed if for profit companies are benefiting from tax credits and now from reduced regulations for your recent decisions the least you can require from them is not to steal from workers to hire local workers and to help support a backbone of this economy thank you good evening cedric de leon p