Just a few housekeeping things, please feel free to share if you find this content helpful. We will be recorded so if you miss part of it, you can always watch it later and be sure and ask your questions. I'll be keeping a little bit of an eye on the feed. So if you have questions, we'll try to answer some of those live as well and as always, totally excited to have you here. If you want more information about myself or any of the information I write about, you can find that on my website, which is jillcarnahan.com and you can find retail products at drjilhealth.com. So I want to introduce my guest today. I'm so excited to be talking to him, colleague and friend Dr. Conan Shaw and Dr. Conan Shaw is a certified functional nurse and practitioner and board certified clinical nutritionist with over 20 years of experience and I'm going to read the rest of his blog, but I want to tell you something personal. I remember we first talked a couple years ago and it was really really neat for me to talk to him on the level the kinds of complexities and patients that he sees and realize he is as bright, as smart, as incredibly brilliant at these complexities as anyone I've ever talked to. And I think I told him that at that time just being like, wow, you really know your stuff. And he's so humble, he won't tell you that so I get to tell you. But he is a really really smart guy and you're going to hear that in these conversations because the stuff we're going to talk about today, Lyme disease, mold related illness, mCAS, trauma, etc. These are complex things and there's not a lot of doctors on that level that really understand how they all meld together. So I always get excited on our conversations because we go deep and we kind of almost can bypass some of the superficial things and go right into the deep complexities. So he works with individuals who to help them achieve their health goals, I know he gets to the root cause of illness and he uses this integrative medical approach, specializes in treating the why behind the broad spectrum of health issues. He looks at deficiencies in flow metabolism, gastrointestinal issues, mood-related concerns, cancer, chronic fatigue, complex autoimmune disease, and as we talked about Lyme and mold related issues. And what I find so interesting, Dr. Shaw, is we talked about this right before we started to go live. You know, Lyme and mold, we didn't choose them because we probably wouldn't have chosen them. They're too complex and hard to treat, but they chose us. So I would love to hear, yeah, a little bit about your story. Like, first of all, how did you get into functional medicine and then how did you get to be where you're at in Lyme country and treating these complex patients? Thanks for, I appreciate you having me here as well. It's fun to chat live. I think like a lot of functional medicine doctors, I stumbled into functional medicine by having an experience that was a little bit challenging. And I learned about functional medicine through a personal experience to make that somewhat long story, rather short in pre-med. I had it. And before we know and stay in ability. Hey, there we are. Can you hear me? Where did you lose me in my story? Yeah, I think we got a little frozen. No problem. I was going to stay live or restart. No big deal. So we'll just restart. I just heard the very beginning, like maybe sentence, and then we lost you. Okay. So I had in undergraduate school had a DPT MMR shot. Did you catch that part? Yeah. And then I had a very, very traumatic time with that. And my first introduction to mastile activation syndrome actually had acute, acute hives, terrible reaction with hives. And I was medicated for that for about six months. And I was not actually skipped my claritin was the new drug at the time. And I skipped. I missed a day and then I hospitalized with hives head to toe. And my sister was in chiropractic college, sent me to a nutritionist who had studied under Jeff Bland, which was interesting. And he changed my diet and gave me some liver and colon support in seven days. I was asymptomatic without, without medications. So that immediately was tossed into the mindset of what, so I called and asked, asked him what was going on. And he said, well, was claritin treating your symptom or treating the root of the problem? And I was like, oh, my gosh, here we go. Right. So that started my journey in the functional medicine early on. And then it was, you know, 20 some years later, the Lyme, Lyme caught up with me in a, in a vicious, vicious way. And so I learned rather personally and very quickly about the trials and tribulations of biotoxin for illness. Wow. So yeah, so you had to deal with some of that yourself. I understand that journey very well, because it's all the same with mold and Lyme myself too. And when it comes, you know, it's again, the complexity of mold related biotoxin and Lyme, and there's a lot of similarities in many of the people we see have both. But the complexity there, I don't think there's anything else that we do that's more complex. Would you agree? It's so deep in the, the potentials of the, you know, when people are suffering from the immune system doing what it's designed to do, it's an incredibly complex puzzle to unwind, no doubt. So I totally agree. I would love to know, like, so say a patient first comes in, and you're doing the interview, obviously you start with good questions and stuff. But what's your kind of initial approach? And then if you do find they have these layers, where would you go? What would you treat first? How would you do that? Wow. So when a patient comes in, you know, a difference between the, I guess you and I are always chasing self regulatory mechanisms, right? So allostasis or the body's ability under stress to reset itself to normal. And when someone can't reset to normal, there's either an infection or a toxin hormone dysregulation or immune confusion or a combination of those four things together. So once you try to differentiate, is it an infection or a toxin? You ask a number of questions or exposed to chemicals? Do you have them albums? Right? You know, you start looking at some genetics. Do you live in Western Pennsylvania and do you run in the woods? Right? I mean, but see the ideas, then you start some line of testing to kind of confirm I am somewhat of a diagnostician, but I almost feel patients who are really suffering on that spiritual level that there's so many layers almost, it's almost intuitive that you know, you're getting into something kind of deep, right? So then I try to differentiate between the type of biotoxin that it is, are they moldy or limey, right? Which is like, which came first, which is more, you know, yeah, totally agree with you there. And then if you get into the biotoxin space, or I know when I get into the biotoxin meaning toxicants are manmade chemicals and biotoxins are are toxins from living things, right? Like a mono or a lime or a mold, any of these kind of stealthy viruses and bacterial infections. I attempt to, I attempt to figure out what's the most dominant pressing issue that's suppressing the immune system, right? And usually, the consideration of emotional trauma comes into that as well, which I know that you dive into with your patients. But so the first is assessing if it's lime or they just align patient. So in my Butler County, Pennsylvania, we're the top percentage of lime diagnosis the last two years in a row in the country.  You just kind of start thinking, oh, maybe this is a limey thing and you start testing. But is it a lime patient? Or is it a lime and patient? And usually, and I love my lime patients who are just mine. Yeah, that's easy, right? Relative. It's so easy. There's no cytomethylviruses, no mono, right? There's no trauma. There's no physical trauma, right? There's probably see some that come in with their bullseye rash, which we don't always see like in my part of the country, Colorado, they've been bit by like the ticks from tick-borne relapse, hermici and myelomati and some of the ones that do not even cause a rash. And so I actually rarely see an acute rash because I'm in a non-endemic state. So you probably actually see some acute cases, which those are easy, right? So there's tier one, tier one is this new, you can go to IgM and IgG testing and kind of feel that out as well, where a lot of people don't have the rash, right? Yeah, yeah. I think it's about 30% actually due. Is that the statistic you've heard? So maybe 70% don't or something or a lot less. I've read so many different opinions on that and I guess no one can really qualify and quantify, but very few people have the real life, not just the spin, I don't know secretions that it's seen in this, Jen. We're missing you just a little bit there. I might need you to repeat what you said there, if you froze, see if we can get that. Hopefully we can get Dr. Conan right back on here. Looks like we're having a little technical difficulties, but I will just speak until he pops back on here. I think one of the things he was saying is that with tick-borne infections and Lyme disease, there is a transmission that isn't always so common as what we typically talk about with the bite. So you were saying something really important.  So go ahead. I can hear you now. And you were saying, I think you just started about, we were talking about the rashes and how they're not that common. And then I heard little bits about transmission. Go ahead and just repeat that. Oh, okay. So deer tick is obviously what most people expect, but it's been identified in spiders, mosquitoes and national secretions and semen and contaminated food as well. And so it's not quite as I had a bite.  That patient is the slam-dump diagnosis. The doxycycline kills 90% of the spirochetes and the bacteria in the blood streamer spirochetes kills 90% of those. And amoxicillin kills 80% of those. And those patients are rather easy because there's a bit of a cleanup from the antibiotics. You just do a little bit of support, but usually, and most physicians agree that that patient is a candidate for antibiotic therapies and usually is well responsive. Unless you have that postline syndrome kind of genetic predisposition, you tolerate antibiotics rather well and you're over it. Yeah. Yeah, I've seen actually again in Colorado, it's very unique because I don't see all the classical. So what I see is a lot of people are horse trainers, horse riders with horses a lot because the horse are transmissible vectors, dogs, which we all have dogs in Colorado. So dog owners and dogs that go hiking and camping. So not that they're always transmitted by animals, but especially in Colorado, I've seen a half a dozen or more patients that are specifically working with horses all the time. The second thing I see is the tick-borne relapsing fever because it's more endemic in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Texas. It's more in the Western States. It's very unusual and that these ticks will come from a log cabin, your body heat at night. So you might go camping in the woods and take a little secluded cabin that you've rented and these ticks are there along with the mice as a vector and they'll come out at night, bite you in your bed or sleeping bag because they fill the heat and they'll go back and within 15 minutes they can transmit that. You never have a rash. You never know you were bitten. And so it's this thing that you never knew that you ever had. And I've seen some of those be the most difficult cases because any typical Western blot for Lyme, except hygienics, which does specific tick-borne relapsing fever, titers will miss it. No one's testing for tick-borne relapsing fever and they're certainly not testing for 11 strains like hygienics. And I have no ties with hygienics. I just know that they are the lab that does tick-borne relapsing fever well. Other labs do the regular ones well. But back to Colorado and then I've seen lots of spider bites, all kinds of different spiders that carry different things, babesia, bartonella, even some of the Lyme type illnesses, ehrlichia, anaplasma, etc. So I see definitely like you, very unique. It's not the classical woods and Pennsylvania and the Rhode Island and Connecticut type of patients. So let's talk about when you say the tick, the Lyme patient, what would be the symptoms that would clue you in? What would be kind of the things that would make you think about that as a diagnosis? Just to piggyback on what you were saying before about the mysterious bite that no one knows they got the rash for. The other side about Lyme with these stealthy infections is, from what I understand, Lyme has 23 different ways to outsmart the immune response, to sheath itself from 8 years back. And so people say, oh, I had a tick bite three or four years ago and their symptoms of Lyme actually don't show up until this has had the opportunity to build numbers and have an army. And often that happens after some kind of drama shows up and say, oh, three or four years ago I had this. But after the loss of a love and all of a sudden they show up with Lyme symptoms and you think you're never getting an IGM on those patients and sometimes you get IGTs and in your case you're not getting the test that shows positive. So then the question is the symptoms that I usually will see. First, I've seen 10 doctors, patients will speak this to me. I've seen eight or 10 different doctors and no one can tell me what I usually will see. And so the diagnosis of exclusion is a big one. Amplified Muscular Pain Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, these kind of things without causative effect or with no medical diagnostic capability to actually determine there's a disorder would say, hey, you've got these symptoms. That is a very good place to look for Lyme, classic symptoms, transient joint pain, of course. People say, oh, my knee hurts for a week and my shoulder hurts for a week and there's no rhyme or reason, random pains like that. But neurologic symptoms are very strange. I had an alpha-gal syndrome patient. She came in and she was all of a sudden allergic to red meat, alpha-gal syndrome being from the Lone Star tick. People have to develop a meat allergy at meat. So you get very random symptoms. What's the term for food?  It's almost like an EOE and eosinophilic esophagitis response where all of a sudden people are having panic and anxiety after they eat. Just very strange symptoms. And of course, their physicians are saying, here's some Prozac. Yeah, it makes sense. And one thing that clues me in on is the data really shows there's very, very few in the differential of migratory neuropathies or migratory joint pain. So if you have joint pain that won Tuesdays on your elbow and Fridays on your knee and then migrates around, there are very, very few things besides Lyme disease that cause the migratory arthritis. If you just have an RA or rheumatoid arthritis and it's always your fingers when you wake up at the morning for 10 years, that's pretty classical. And a lot of the rheumatological diseases stay with one area of the body and just progressively get worse. But if you're having those migratory strange pains for unusual, where you have numbness or tingling one day in the hand, other day in the feet, brain fog and brain dysfunction are super common with Lyme and mold. So that's an incredibly common thing with the brain and nervous system. Like you said, anxiety, sleep disorders, depression, all super common. And then so I think a pain and fatigue as the number one and number two, unexplained pain, unexplained fatigue. Would you agree? Is there anything else that's like a big key that you're like, oh yeah, that's very likely in that realm? Of course, mysterious things. No, that's really big. And actually goes back to the beginning of Lyme disease awareness, right? 1970 in Lyme, Connecticut, a rather large epidemic of children being diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. And two people who said there's no way this is happening. They went to Yale, right? And they had a number of researchers from Yale come and do some information or do some studies. And they found they isolated in children with the bullseye rash, right? The first spirochete isolated from the skin, from the blood and from the spinal fluid, right? So started out as a rheumatologic condition that way. And of course, that's an immune response, right? Doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is what's so tricky about this is you're, you're treating a healthy immune system doing what innately it was designed to do, right? Exactly. So let's talk just a little bit about that. So if our listeners aren't super aware of basically what Dr. Shaw is talking about is when we have some trigger to the immune system. And in autoimmunity, there's always a genetic predisposition towards this overreaction of the immune system. And then there's some environmental trigger, and then there's always a gut immune barrier dysfunction. So with that environmental trigger, it could be heavy metals, it could be environmental toxicants, but many, many times it's an infection. So you could get a mono and Epstein bar, and then it triggers this chronic viral issue. You could get reactivation of varicella, which is chickenpox and gets shingles. Or you could get bit by a spider or tick or arachnoid or mosquito and get an infectious disease that's in this realm. Now the classical Lyme is just one tick, one strain, that kind of thing. Well, there's a lot of those in that, in that Lyme Borrelia, but there's so many more that we're talking about here. And that's why it's not always a bullseye rash. It's not always a simple tick. It can be these other things because they carry, it's like nature's dirty needles I've heard. And I love that analogy because they're full of infections and studies show the average patient who has Lyme disease has two, three, four other infections. They can be Bartonella, which really affects the nervous system. It often causes anxiety, neuropathies, seizures, very severe issues, sometimes pan and pandas with the auto-immune encephalopathy of the children. And then Babesia, which is a malaria type illness, it affects the blood. These affects the blood cells. And so that will cause night sweats and air hunger and anxiety and insomnia, disequilibrium, those kinds of things. And then there's Anaplasma, ehrlichia. And don't you see just a slew of these all together in patients? And those are the co-infections, right? And those sit beside the patients who also have mold in their home. Yeah, let's talk about mold. How does that fit into this? And how do you, how do you figure out like which comes first? What's your order of operations if you have someone with suspicion of both? Yeah, I mean, so to determine whether moldy or Lyme, right, there's all the different diagnostic tests that we run through the gamut of blood work. And of course, urine profiles that can tell us if they're spilling mold toxins or not. I guess the idea whenever you're managing a Lyme, I almost feel like we coexist with Lyme rather comfortably. Like I just have a vibe, almost like mono. You had mono. You might have been down for a couple of days. You weren't aware that it was mono. It just hangs out in their dormant. And then whenever your immune system takes a hit, this has an opportunity. It's like, oh, the coast is clear, right? It comes back out and it does this thing. So I spend a good bit of time educating the patients about what's actually happening. I think part of it's people coming for treatment. And the other part is people are really coming for an education because you have to know your enemy, right? But understanding what is more likely to suppress the immune system for the number of mold and Lyme patients. I'll say, hey, go to your house, do a rather thorough inspection. You can get air testing done and see if there's mold scores there. It's strange. We'll treat a number of patients for mold first and then consider maybe, I can put it on their treatment plan. Maybe we'll do Lyme second. When their immune system comes back online, they're asymptomatic. And I say, why even go after the Lyme? I just don't even think it's, if your immune system is robust, I think you just get past it personally, right? And some patients... This is why I love talking to you because you're one of the few people we totally agree on that. I've often told people, you know, mold, again, they're walking along. I say this all the time to patients. I think there's tens of thousands of people walking around with Lyme disease. They don't know they have it. They don't have any symptoms. They don't need to be treated. It's no big deal because in a real healthy environment, our immune systems are designed to take invaders to have old infections to keep them at bay.  We get trauma. We get lack of sleep. We get stresses in the job. We get in a moldy house and something takes us over the edge. So then all of a sudden, I would say it's like a limbo bar that dropped and then these old, you know, infections pop up like Dr. Conan said and basically take over, start to cause symptoms. So usually when someone's presenting to our office, as you mentioned, I'm asking them about the house, about the environment, about the stresses, about the trauma because usually, I'd say about 50% of the time, something triggered immune deficiency, immune issues where they're not robust enough to take care of the infection. And when you get that back online, that really takes care of things. And even the mold affects detox. So I've seen people who look like they have massive heavy metals and toxicities. And when you get that detox system back online, because mold tends to trash the glutathione status and really, really break that system down. So when you get that back online, sometimes they don't even need as much detox as you would think either. Right. Yeah. It's absolutely true. And I think you and I will call it the total toxic burden, right? I mean, you know, I actually try to make a list of the bad guys and say, okay, well, we're dealing with Lyme obviously, right? And so let's see what else is in there. And that's why I'm not a really big protocol guy. A lot of people will call the office and say, Hey, what protocol do you use for Lyme? And I said, there's really no protocol for Lyme. There's a strategy for Lyme, right? Strategies gets your immune system smarter, stronger and faster than the bacteria, pull the bacteria out of where they're hiding, right? Because I believe that there's 23 ways that the Lyme can hide from the immune system that I'm aware of. And so, you know, you really need to get your immune system back in the proper space to be able to manage that. But there's no protocol for that specifically. There's a few underlying tones that kind of continue to resurface with people. But how many patients are very similar to my story? I went to eight years ago, I went to MedExpress, very, very ill, which is not like me. And I don't usually get sick. When I get sick, I'm not worried about it. When I got extremely ill, I said, I'm gonna still get a medical opinion, make sure I'm okay. And the doctor has said, that's just a virus, just go rest. And I did, it was three years later after I had a loss, an emotional loss, that all of a sudden there was transient joint pain and there was neuropathy and there was panic and there was depression and there was all of these things. Wow. Never would have tracked it to that tick by three or four years before, right? And so, the question that I've asked and I know you and I've talked about in the past is, if emotional trauma can suppress immune system, why is it addressing emotional trauma, part of a core treatment plan for chronic Lyme patients, right? Yeah. Yeah, I love that you bring that up. And I love that we're talking about that publicly because whether it's acute death, a loss of a loved one, surgical procedure, or just, I mean, even this pandemic has happened to many people, if they've lost a job or it can be, you know, job loss or divorce or child in trouble or not doing well in school or even death of a family member or friend, all of these things are very traumatic and those do suppress immunity. We know things like increased sugar intake, loss or trauma, all of these things massively affect the immune system. Even isolation, which people have heard me say this here before, but that was one thing in the pandemic I was struggling with because they were not taking into account the massive effect on immunity that social isolation actually has. And I really think that we were missing the boat. Not that we did everything wrong, but that we didn't take that into account as part of the equation because childhood trauma and isolation and loneliness, they are maybe some of the biggest players in immune dysfunction. And why are we not having that discussion? It's so powerful. And that's, you know, that's a pretty easy line of questioning to ask people, give me a number from here to 10. Where's your stress level? I mean, let me ask you this, how many of your Lyme and mold-borne biotoxin patients you're working with, do you have on some form of adrenal support at the same time? Yeah, probably 90%. Right. So, that underlying component of stress, over stress, it breaks the bank. It's one of the things in the total toxic burden, and I think the spirit, excuse me, the spirit of the mind and the body being connected, that's part of the dialogue and really communicating with people and saying, hey, let's focus on positive mental attitude and doing things that bring you good feelings and whether it's counseling or yoga or meditation or prayer, whatever it is, I get part of the treatment plan, right, because it's, you know, pulling people out of that. It's not just a bacteria. It's more than that. I agree. And again, you and I have dealt with both Lyme and mold personally and some of these things. But one interesting thing that we've talked about too that I think people would bear hearing is we've both done NLP and we've done somatic work and we've done some of the deep work. I will tell you, Dr. Shaw, I'm happy to say this publicly, some of the transformative NLP somatic based trauma therapy, thought field therapy and EMDR, brain spotting, I've done all these things. And I realized with my mold related illness and recovery, some of those treatments and things that dealt with old past traumas that were stuck in my body and system were really affecting my immune system and my ability to fight infections and my ability to show up in a healthy way. And it was, I would say that was equally important to any herbs or protocols or detox that I did. So if you're stuck and you have Lyme or mold related illness and you have not even thought about dealing with old trauma, I highly recommend. There's all kinds of things. Like I mentioned, I'll just repeat them. But DNRS is an online program that Annie Hopper and Dr. Gupta both do that's very effective. You can do it on your own. Both Dr. Shaw and I have done neurolinguistic programming or NLP and some of that somatic work and highly effective, wouldn't you agree, with some of those triggers and things. And then I've done in the past other types of somatic based trauma therapy. What that is is just there's cognitive behavioral therapy where you sit and talk to someone and you talk about your thought processes and you talk about why you think that way. But if you're analytical, like Dr. Shaw and I, we don't need more analytical stuff. That's where we get stuck. We get stuck in our heads. It doesn't do any good for those of us who are analytical because we've already written down, we've journaled, we've made the plan, we've thought about it, we've tried to figure it out, we can't get past it. What we're talking about is in the cellular tissues of the body where trauma is stored subconsciously, how do you get there and get to that level and start to feel and actually feel like you don't talk about it.  And then what does that lead to and where's the memories and you deal with those things. So I won't go into all the detail. I just want to be sure and say that if you're stuck, that's a great place to start when you agree. Yeah. And I love that you're, I love that yours kind of validating of the therapy as you are because not to sound page three YouTube about it, right. You get down six or seven pages in YouTube and you see some guy and he's like, if you want to heal Lyme disease, take my Lyme vitamin. Yeah. Right.  And you're like, what? Because clinically speaking, this is all validated. Yes. Neurocytia immunology, right? The spirit affecting the mind affecting physiology and either you heal faster. If you bring peace to your spirit, or you fight a little bit harder, right?  If you say, Hey, there were some trauma in my childhood, someone helped you to release that trauma. Cause it's just all back. It's all a bag of mucky buck, right? It's all bad. I love it. And I always like to clarify trauma because a lot of you listening, you're like, Oh my gosh, I had a great childhood. I had great parents. I said that. I know to just Shaw said that.   But when you don't have the resources at five or seven or 10, they are a big deal. Because at that time you didn't have the resources that you do now as an adult and your little child is still struggling to deal with that thing because they didn't have the ability or the resources to understand at that moment. So these are not, I mean, yes, I acknowledge some people have been through horrendous trauma. That's a whole another ball game. And I have such compassion for those people. And probably some of you listening would be like, Yeah, that's me. And I'm so sorry if that's you. But some of these things seem like they're insignificant. And even if you've had a great family, great childhood, they are important to address and deal with. Let's get practical because people always love not that we're going to make recommendations for treatment, but what are some of the like really broad spectrum just like nutrients that we would say for like detox. And then what approach do you go with herbs? Typically first you do medication like you recommend medications first from a physician or how do you do the protocol with say someone comes in with Lyman mold, and clearly they're in a moldy house, they have Lyme disease. What are basic nutrients that you would give them? I love that. So like you, I would start food first, right? And I would always say, if you don't lock the inflammation in your body down with your diet, it's going to be a bit of a struggle. So that makes me somewhat unpopular with certain people who won't come to see me because they know that I'm this like diet warrior. I don't suggest that people go on the keto diet, although the keto is the lowest inflammation kind of diet that's going on, I guess. But I definitely have people go towards an anti inflammatory diet to start just to lay down the ability for the body to be in this space where it can heal, right? And then we start going into the nutrients and we always have some usually there's a, okay, I'm sorry, let me back up. If it's mold obviously is you're especially you get people out of the mold, right? So you make that that's clear. And then you say, let's start opening up the detox detox pathways. I'm a big fan of genetic testing, right? The single nucleotide polymorphism testing and kind of learning where people's weaknesses are on the genetic level, because it gives me like a little cheat sheet of where they're weakest that kind of helps me support them. But glutathione is usually a nice place to open up detox pathways, primary detox is liver, of course, secondary is colon, they're both extremely important for the body's ability to remove toxin. Remember that sometimes toxins clear the liver, but when the gut is unbalanced, you resolve the toxins, right? So that's post-epatic and terrapid absorption of toxicity. That happens with estrogens as well. And so I'm always liver gut first, right? I always kind of go into that phase. So the diet is there. Hydration is usually 50% of the patient's body weight analysis. We tie trade up to that slowly. We don't try to just like force water, but half the time when I'm seeing the patient, I've got my pom poms out and I'm cheering for them to stick with their diet, right? Because I really, really want them to heal. And then, you know, as you would kind of go into anesthetal cysteine and psylliumrin and milk thistle and choline and then acetyl and those things just to support general detox pathways, that's a start, right? If it's a mold patient, I know you would have a whole protocol of binders, right, or different things that you would use. So am I answering the question the way you would answer it? Yeah, I just want like basic nutrients. So glutathione, NAC and nostril, I totally agree on all that. PC, real powerful for cell membrane. So that's healing there. And really a limer mold, those are kind of core. I think with limes sometimes resveratrol and sulforaphane can be effective, just helping those pathways. There's a recent study, I think it was out of John Hopkins that did herbal treatments for Lyme and vitro. It's one of the more recent ones. And it was interesting because many of them didn't do a whole lot in vitro, but the two that outperformed everything was cryptolepis and resveratrol, so Japanese knotweed. So because of that study, I've actually tended to go a little away from some of the old formulas I used to use. And I use Japanese knotweed and cryptolepis. And I find Japanese knotweed has some anti-inflammatory activity. It's really powerful, but it's also very gentle. People don't tend to have Perk's reactions as much. Cryptolepis is a powerhouse. You better be careful with that one, because it really has some spectrum, I think activity against babesia and Lyme. And do you use those herbs, any herbs in specific that you like? I definitely do. And a couple of fun facts on resveratrol, because people always talk about their wine and they're drinking their wine. And I did a Facebook post on this about two months ago, you need to drink 18 bottles of wine to get what you get in one capsule of 3.75 milliliters of resveratrol. So don't fool yourself with the wine. But the idea there is, is in Western Pennsylvania, where Lyme is, is epidemic, right? Japanese knotweed is overgrowing. And they always talk about how nature has, how nature has a cure. It's very, very powerful. But I use Japanese knotweed across the board with Lyme patients. I don't usually enter in that with multiple patients, but with Lyme, I do use. There's usually an essential fat. I eat awesome things in for collagen support, because Lyme is kind of like the bacteria that gobbles up collagen, right? And it causes very cascade. So I'm educating patients on that. And there's usually an essential fat. Perfect, yeah. Carcumin would be a good source. Just general support for inflammation for some patients is beneficial. Helps them feel well. Yeah, exactly. Most of them do have pretty significant inflammation and pain. So yeah, I love curcumin. Now I do find there's a small percentage, I just say, and I'd love to know your snip, a few of your snips maybe that you see commonly. So we'll talk about that in a second, but it just made me think just a couple of unique things. Curcumin with people with histamine issues can be an issue. It's not common, but there are small percentage that don't tolerate it. So a lot of these things like bone broth, you think amazing. Everybody should be on bone broth, but not those with histamine issues. Curcumin, anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, it has so many studies. Love it. But if you have a massive histamine issue, you may not tolerate it. So these are just little pearls. And then bas-wellia is an alternative. If you can't do curcumin, I love bas-wellia, frankincense is another name for that. And then corsetin, love corsetin. It's anti, it's massive stabilizing anti-histamine. But if you have COMT++, corsetin can be inhibitory. And what that can do is cause buildup of neurotransmitters that are excitatory, causing anxiety or estrogens. So I just personally, I have the COMT++, of course, all of those of us who are driven in Taipei. I think we have that, Jean. Do you have that one too? I'm a single step of COMT. Okay, cool. Cool, cool. What I was going to say though, I noticed just personally, when I took too much corsetin, I would get breast tenderness, which is that estrogen dominance. So I always know if I overdo the corsetin, I'll get the breast tenderness. And that's a sign for me that I have to back up so that my estrogens can metabolize normally. So you mentioned genetics. Is the genetic test something that must be gotten through a physician? Is it something patients could do and what labs do you like for that? Oh, that's a great question. So some people find it to be a little bit controversial. 23 and me, right? So for under $200, I get 17 of the relevant clinical SNPs in the methylation pathway. There's a question. Ancestry.com would also do that. Some people don't like these gene reporting sites because there's a question about sharing data and maybe the government would know what you're predisposed to or something. So I think for the amount of money you spend for those SNPs, I mean, thousands and thousands of dollars. So for under $200 to get a 23 and me and get the raw data downloaded, we actually don't use any information from 23 and me. I use Ben Lynch's company. I use strategy data through that.  About three weeks, you get a bunch of information. We take that information in about two minutes and turn it into a strategy report. The strategy report, I can kind of give you the vibe. That's what you're looking at. You get your positive. Is that visible for you? Yeah, we can totally see that. Yeah. And so the new people would want to see this and say, well, because they can do that on their own, all of that. Now, of course, you might need a physician to help you interpret, but I love this because you're exactly, I totally agree 23 and me, there is controversy. It's the easiest, cheapest way. I did a new Amsterdam Genoma complete gene analysis, $3,000. And it was cool.  However, that's way out of the field for most people to afford. And I just wanted to know what the company was. I don't usually recommend that. So we can do this for $200. And then there's also genetic genie, which is very much smaller, but it's free. So if someone is really strapped or whatever, they can get a very basic report that's decent with a few of the, like MTHFR and CUMT and NOS and SOD with that. And then I love the strategy as well. Bob Miller has a program that I don't use, but a lot of docs use that and it's excellent as well. And so there's quite a few out there. But I love that you're talking genetics, because for me as well, it's kind of this foundation that I don't always go through, that would take maybe a two hour visit to go through just the genes. But what I do is I reference it like you do, so that if I'm giving them Corsitin and they have COM2 mutations, then I'm just aware that I don't want to overdo that pathway or methylation, I make sure that I give them the right form of bees, which we're normally doing anyway. Right. Does say someone has a double heterozygous or two of C677T of the MTHFR, which is one of the more popular methylation genes, would that change your treatment with limer mold? Would you do anything slightly differently if they had methylation issues? It would. I would give some methyl donors in that. So when you have either compound heterozygous, one of each the 1298C and one of the C677T or your double or your homozygous for the C677T, you're 60% to 70% less effective in methylation. So we're talking about moving things in your body and your cells. That's methylation really is what moving things around. And it's of the five detoxification pathways, one of the more powerful ones. When you have that double SNP, you know those aren't always turned on. So I always remind people, this is not your destiny, but it's where your weakest link is. Well, you know limer mold or a really nasty relapse of mono or any of these co-infections would turn these on. So I can kind of go into those genetic SNPs and say, yeah, this is turned on. And so I'm going to do more support for that methylation pathway if it's slowed down. So I would give a TMG or a B-tain, right? Or I would give the right kind of methylated B-vitamin for the individual. But also remembering that that's at the top of the chain. I love going downstream and having the other SNPs because if you've got a double GSTP SNP, remember, lime disease as a bacteria is giving an endotoxin, that endotoxin, not being able to be detoxified properly. So if I've got a double GSTP SNP with an MTHFR, this person can't get the stuff out of their body. Right? Remember, you are what you eat, breathe, touch, taste, smell, but most importantly, what you can't eliminate. That will change my treatment plan immediately. How am I going to get this patient just eliminated with toxin? Because there's your Herxheimer. I know we didn't talk about Herxing, but the reaction to killing bacteria and winning the war sometimes makes people feel worse, right? So while you're getting better, what you're sick from is not detoxifying fast enough. So those methylation SNPs just give me that edge and that knowledge and that insight to say, hey, maybe I can help them feel better while they're beating this monster back. Yeah, I love that you bring that up because patients who are listening, who have had this, they understand this very well. And I always describe it as this. It's mobilizing toxins and eliminating toxins. And we can mobilize pretty easily. Those are actually, I think that's the easiest thing to do in the world. And if we mobilize too fast and we're not eliminating properly, then we get stuck and we get this accumulation. So for example, and I kind of in my head, just from experience, and I'd love to hear your opinion on these things, I categorize things into safe. You can't really overdo the mobilization. Like for example, epsom salt baths, unless you have an allergy to sulfate or something like that. Usually people tolerate that and they can do them every day without getting sick. Usually, let's see, other things that dry brushing also super safe, hydration super safe. Most of the homeopathic drainage remedies super safe. So those kinds of things are generally you can mobilize and excrete pretty equally. But what I find is things like antibiotics or anti lime herbal treatments, or the detox stuff with mold, if we push glutathione or NAC or these two fast with binders even, those things can push too hard. And sauna and for sauna amazing, but I feel like people can push that too hard too. So in my mind, I'm always trying to weigh these options and saying, are we mobilizing too much? And many doctors are like, oh, you're going to have a Herxhem reaction. You're going to be in bed for five days. I'm like, wait a second, don't like that at all, because a Herx is actually this complete, you know, inability to excrete. So it's a bad state. You don't want to keep people there. You don't want people to be there if you can avoid it. And I don't know about you, but sometimes it's inevitable. But I'm always trying to at least eliminate or decrease the amount of suffering that's potentially there because that means we're pushing too hard. You're nice like that. I don't want you to get too sick. I often will have a Herx protocol for people.   So Perfect. Yeah, I have a whole sheet of this too. It's like, because a lot of it's bowel elimination. Like you said, it's enterohibatic recirculation. If you're not eliminating through the stool, you're screwed. Not really, but that's one of the things I learned in Switzerland. Three things from there that we don't typically do. You probably do this better than I as an allopathic MD, but we were never trained. And this is colonics, hydrotherapy, colon hydrotherapy. Weekly in a really significant case can be powerful. It helps with that elimination. I don't routinely recommend that, but in Switzerland during the detox, everybody got a weekly colonic. And that actually was a big aid, coffee enemas, another really big thing that can be done daily in the severe cases that can really amp up the glutathound production by about 600%. So that can really save people if they're stuck in this detox thing. And then bitters. I'm a huge fan of bitters, and we don't hear a lot about that. Do you use bitters much in clinical practice? I really don't. I don't, but I know that most of the getting your gallbladder clearing, it's definitely beneficial in and out. Yeah, and none of it really tolerates it. What I find is the bitters, if the gallbladder is excreting bile, bile causes sterilization of the small bowel. So you get a lot less of the small bacterial overgrowth, small intestinal fungal overgrowth, parasitic infections. And then the bile is where the toxins are stored. So if you're pushing that out, you tend to get a better detox as well. Yeah. Cool. Well, any last words of wisdom as far as just things that patients might not know that if they knew that this would be an easier course, any last bits of information that would be helpful? Yeah. I mean, I think the more you remind yourself or educate yourself on a process, I like to go big picture a lot of times instead of a lot of the molecular things that we're talking about. I really like to be reminded you've got like a trillion good guys, and there's like a million or a billion bad guys, and you're going to win, right? And it's about numbers. And you got to kill enough bacteria to the point where the other army starts to retreat, right? And you're going to get there. And the only way to fail at that is to quit, right? Or to stop looking for answers.  Let's do some other testing. Let's take a break. Some people weave. I'm just reminding people it's Lyme is a strategy, and it's constantly changing. My Lyme protocols with my patients are changing every month. Diet can change, right? And so the idea is the big picture.  It's not about that. It's the problem is that after some of these individuals have been suffering for 10 to 15 years, and then they come in and you diagnose them with Lyme, and they're relieved to have an answer. But then here's the eight to nine month battle that you've got to fight, and you might get a little worse, and you matriculate towards having good days. Half of what I do with Lyme patients is cheerleading. It's just reminding them it's going to be okay. It's okay not to be okay. It's okay to have bad days, hang in there and kind of keep believing in where you're headed. Because, you know, a lot of it is trusting and healing and trusting in the human and the native intelligence to do what it's designed to do. And that's our job. Our job is to interpret that, right? The blood work and the patient's response to what we're doing. It's tricky. But, you know, the best last tip I can say is don't give up because I went from sleeping 30 minutes a night, three weeks straight and going neuropsychiatric. And basically, being at the point of not knowing if I was going to be alive to completely functional with no symptoms, it took a lot of climb out. But once I got a diagnosis of Lyme, I could climb out. And just I had to dig in and do it. Yeah, because I love that because people who are suffering, if you're listening and you've had this and you've dealt with it for years, there is hope. And both Dr. Shaw and I have personal experience. And we're standing here saying, you know, we have full functioning practices. We're busy. We have lives I can go hike and ski in the winter and do what I love to do. And I used to be, I'll tell you a real quick glass story here 10 years ago when I was moving to Colorado to start my practice, I was in the midst of unknown, unbeknownst to me, mole exposure and active Lyme disease, didn't know it. But I had such severe back pain. I have a real high pain tolerance, but I remember like passing out cold because of the pain one day. And then that flight home back to Illinois where I was transitioning to move, I literally needed a wheelchair in the airport. And I'm not that type of person to even ask for help. But if my pain was so bad, I could not even walk onto the plane. I've never been so, that was 10 years ago. So the truth is, and now I hike and I ski and I don't have pain. And it's funny, Dr. Shaw, my orthopedic doctor looked at my MRI of my spine. He said, Jill, you have severe degeneration L4, L5, L5, S1. Like they were saying, you need surgery or you need PRP or some sort of stem cells, you need treatment. This is really, really, I mean, it's bad on the MRI. Guess what? I have no pain. I can do anything I want. I mean, I know how to properly lift to protect myself, but I don't have symptoms. There's nothing I feel like I can't do except maybe a 200 pound deadlift, you know, but realistically, I don't have limitations and yet I have what looks like a severe issue from the Lyme and from those inflammation.  That's just not true. So seek out someone like Dr. Shaw or myself to help you. And I'll be sure and link to his page. Where can people find you for more information, Dr. Shaw? If you link to my Facebook page, I usually put information up two or three times a week on there at website, www.drcshaw.com. So I put some blogs on there. I'm not as prolifical writer as Dr. Jill is. You write quite frequently. So I have information up there for people in the book. They can certainly go Facebook or to my website. Good. We'll be sure and link up with that. And you're still taking new patients, right? So if you are out on the East Coast, actually anywhere, do you do zoom in a virtual now as well? So pretty much anywhere in the, so if you have a complex issue and you need someone, Dr. Shaw is accepting patients. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It was so fun as always talking to you and have a great afternoon. Thanks so much, Dr. You're welcome. Take care.


A quorum is not present of the town council, but I am still going to call the meeting of the town council to order at 10.30 a.m. It is not technically a meeting because we do not have a quorum, but no formal business and votes will be taken other than who will preside. But we're not, we're still going to hold our meeting. It just won't be formal. So we still don't have it, a quorum, even with Kathy here. The first thing we need to do, I am presiding in the absence of our president, Lynn Greesimer. I am the vice president of the town council. It is October 16th. I am not able to stay for the meeting. So under rule 3.1 of the town council rules of procedure, I am going to call for nominations to elect a president pro tem for this meeting because I will be leaving and we need someone to run the meeting. Do I hear any nominations for a president pro tem? I nominate Andy. Do I hear a second to that nomination? Do I hear any other nominations of a president pro tem? Andy, are you willing to accept that nomination? I will then call for a vote on the president pro tem to run the rest of this meeting on October 16th on electing Andy Steinberg as president pro tem for the October 16th, 2019. Non-meeting meeting of the town council. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. It is unanimous of those that are here. Andy did raise his hand. So I am now formally passing the meeting over to Andy and taking my leave. I think that our course of business is to hear from our principal assessor, Mr. Burgess. And so I will turn the meeting over to him to make his presentation. Well, thank you. Before I start, I'd just like to introduce my board of assessors with me, Mr. Morse, who is our chairperson. Mr. Hardreeze is a member, Mr. Heinz, who is behind me, is the third member of the board. They have been with me by three years in total for you. They've done this a couple of times. The purpose of the meeting is actually just to give you a little bit of an understanding of what we are going to ask you to do on Monday night, which is basically agree with us for the tax rate, being a single factor, and no other exemptions being raised. Please remember, anything I say today on Monday night is a recommendation. You are the only folks that are gonna make the decision. So you can change this at any time. That's a lovely slide, but I think we'll go to the next one. This basically just tells you the options we have. We're gonna vote on whether we have a single rate or a split rate on Monday for between commercial and residential. And then the other exemptions are open space, this kind, small commercial exemption and residential exemption. I'm only gonna touch briefly as we go through this on the open space and the small commercial because we don't have any. So we'll deal with that as we come to it. The next slide, the total assessed values are determined. You, we must have this public hearing. This is the law, every year we have to have it. I will provide you, sorry, someone will provide you the information to the council to make classification decisions. The town manager and I are not required to make a recommendation, but we may. The next slide is basically just the excerpts of the law that allows you to do this.  On the next slide, we show the Classification Act given to being in 1978. And we have four classes of property, residential, commercial, industrial, and personal. The guidelines for that are set by the Department of Revenue and not by us. By the way, as I go through this, if you want, I'll answer questions, or we can just do questions at the end, whichever is easiest. Next slide, please. There we have the definitions of the different types of property. And basically, residential property. And the only thing I'm gonna tell you different, not different, but explain in the residential property that apartment complexes and multiple units are residential property. Massachusetts assesses based on use. And that is a residential use for the apartment complex. Everything else is fairly self-explanatory, except for the commercial, which we'll throw in the chapter nouns, which is chapter 61A, 61, and 61B. And those get special treatment because of their requirements. And next slide. This is gonna show you what are. So, it says commercial and then it lists forest land, farmland, and recreational. Did you say those were exceptions or those were included? Those are included in the commercial because they're generally for commercial use, foresting or farming, which they consider is recreation. I'm not quite sure how it's commercial, but they just put it there. Of course, we do have golf courses, so that'll be part of that. This slide shows the breakdown for the town of the amount of property. And our total property valuation is just over 2.5 billion. Of that, 2.29 billion is the residential. 194 million is the commercial. 87 million is personal property. The 4.7 million is industrial. Industrial land, it's a very small sliver. We couldn't get colors quite the contrast. But we have 6,219 residential properties. 490 commercial, 29 industrial, and 108, sorry, did I say commercial? Commercial, industrial, and then personal property. Next slide, please. This graph that designed to show you the breakdown of the tax classification distribution between commercial, industrial, personal, and residential. As you can see, residential has remained relatively steady at 80% for the last 10 years. And we have about 20% of the other three classes, which comes into play when we decide to talk about the tax rate coming along. Next slide. This is really what the hearing is about, and whether we're gonna have a split rate tax rate or a single tax rate.  You're gonna see talking about selecting a factor. The factor of one means that all the property classes will be assessed equally, or sorry, we'll have the same tax rate. Factor of less than one means that we would raise the residential taxes, yeah. And factor of greater than one would mean we're raising the commercial taxes more and splitting them. Other way around, yeah, I knew that was the start of saying it. That's what we're here for. Yeah, correct me. So that's what we're looking at. On the next page, the factor of one will result in an estimated tax rate for FY 2020 of 2136. Please remember when we talk on Monday night, this is an estimated tax rate, and it has changed since I started doing this document. We've, it's a moving target until we finish with the Department of Revenue. We're projecting now a tax rate of $21.32, not 2136. So this is an example for you. For comparison, this is Amherst Neighbors' Rank for tax rates for 2019, and the commercial tax rates for 2018. As you can see, several of them, Mahoglio Westfield, Chickapee, West Springfield, the very large commercial tax rates. Next page, please. This shows you an example of what the residential tax rate would do if we make the complete change to 150%. The average single-family home on Amherst this year will be 374,000 valuation, and a tax rate of 2136 will generate $8,004 on taxes. If we adopted the split rate, the tax rate would drop to $20.00 and two cents for $1,500, and that's for $7,502 for a decrease of $502. Commercial valuations, the average is 524. At the 2136, it's 11,209. At the next tax rate at 150%, it's 3203. It's an increase of $5,599. Yes, go ahead. Yes. And for the industrial, our industrial average is 164,000. Now, that's very low, but most of our industrial is land. And at 2136, it's 3,513. And at the 3203, it's 5277. Or an increase of $1,764. So you can see splitting the tax rate between commercial and residential would be quite significant, and increase the commercial properties. Next slide. This is just a breakdown of communities that have a single versus split tax rate. And as you can see, the FY18, that's what the user year used. And there were 236 that had a single tax rate. There were 110 that split the tax rate, and then there were additional five, because five tax rates were either adopted to residential or commercial exemption. And basically, that is the end for that. And I and the Board of Assessors and the Manager all recommend a single tax rate. These are the other exemptions that are allowed. And this is the one that I believe we're gonna talk a little bit more about than the others, is the residential exemption. Oh, sorry. Next one. No, it does not. Sorry, you were right. The residential exemption allows for a shift of the tax burden within the residential class from the lower valued properties to the higher valued ones, and those owned by non-revenue residents. However, this also shifts the burden of rental properties. Residential exemption is a statewide exemption. We can use up to 35% of the average assessed valuation of a residential property to calculate this. This is a fixed amount of money, not 35% of each property that gets the exemption. And this automatically raises the tax rate within the residential class only. It does not impact the commercial, industrial, or personal classes of property. Next slide. Take a minute on that. So you're saying this is in power right now. Right now we have a residential, if it's owner occupied. No, we have no exemptions and the town of Amherst for owner occupied or commercial or anything like that. Something that you could do, but we don't do. Well, haven't done. It gives an advantage. I mean, it's hard to read it while we're going on, but if it's an owner occupied property, you would pay a lower tax rate. For the majority of people, but at a break even point, even the single family owner occupied property will pay more. You don't get it? Okay. This does not help an owner occupied house, you're saying? It helps the majority of the owner occupied property. But when you get up to somewhere about $450,000, anyone with evaluation over that, even if they get the exemption, will pay more because the tax rate has increased. Right, but this would help houses under that point. Okay. But it would penalize apartment complexes and things like that. I have a couple of questions on this. When I went and I read MGLC 59 section 5C, it said it's the owner occupied, but it's only the property that you use for your principal residence. So when you, so my first question is when you, I realize you're doing a rough estimate of what these are, but if some of the properties you said people might own two or three houses, but it would just be the home that they lived in and had as their principal residence that would get this exemption, is that correct? You're talking about two or three houses on the one lot? Yes, or they own two or three houses. So it's... If they own two or three houses on separate lots, they've only get the one exemption. If they own multiple houses on one lot, they would just get the one exemption for the property in total. Okay. It's a little bit complicated because we took, most people talk about residential properties. We talk with parcels and every exemption impacts the particular parcel, not the individual house that's on it. So just on following that up when you've done the calculation, the reason that rate is going up as I understand it is because you're still trying to get as much total revenue out of the tax assessment. So you're giving some a break, but does the apartment dwelling, does its rate go up more? So can you split the rate? Actual rate within the residential class was the question. No, what would happen is you would change the rate within the residential class. If you look at some... Right, I was trying to follow the math later, but I just, so if a large apartment complex, say one is pleasant, has multiple, they don't get the exemption. They won't get the exemption. But the rate becomes the same rate for them and the homeowner and just the homeowner gets the exemption so you can't split the rate within the residential class. Okay. Okay. And do any towns do this was my last question on... There are several towns do this. I think there's about 11 in total across the country. State. And I think there's about 11. Yeah. And most of those are communities that have also got a split tax rate because if you split the tax rate and some of them go up to 75% on commercial, if you do that, even with the higher tax rate within the residential class or property, everyone pays less taxes than the residential class because of the way it works. And the majority of those properties have more than 30% commercial industrial and personal property. At the maximum, we have 20%. So that's something to remember as we go along. The rate, could I just go a little bit further because there is more here? Sure. Okay. So if we go to the next page, this is briefly, I'm gonna touch on the small commercial exemption that is for property so the valuation of less than a million dollars that someone owns and has 10 or people, no more than 10 people working for them. We simply don't have any because most of our properties are rental properties. You've got an owner and then you've got business people occupying them so they wouldn't qualify. And then we have the open space exemption which we didn't touch on here because we do not have any open space class property and that is a board of the assessor's decision at this level for classifying the properties. If you look at the next page, this is a breakdown of how we have the parcels in the town of Amherst for the residential only and the mixed use because they have some residential parts to them. And as you can see, there's 6,277 and this just gives you a breakdown of the percentages of each class of property and whether they are likely owner occupied or not. On the next page, this is a single family home frequency. It basically shows you what levels we have properties at and obviously in between the $200,000 and $300,000 is the largest property class. And believe it or not, we do have residential property values at less than almost $1.4 million a single family. So we have over a million dollars, we have five of them all together. We didn't know that when I started here, trust me. If we go to the next page, this is a proven, before I go any further, I'm gonna tell you, I didn't do all this by myself. I had a lot of help, particularly from Athena and then Mr. Hardgrave came up with a lot of the information that we had coming along. So I'm not that good with computers as she is. So the residential frozen cons, majority of owner occupied properties would benefit and this would likely help first-time home owners. Non-occupied properties would pay increased taxes as a con. Owners of these properties may increase the monthly rent. The benefit is not income based, so anyone can get it. It shifts the burden to a higher priced home owners. Now I will say this, this will put in quite a considerable burden on the assessor's office at the first year we do it because even though we're estimating and we do have some reasonable information, we haven't updated it in quite a while so we would need to do that. If we did not do that, that would cause the last one, which is an increase, we would have to put more money into the overlay reserve because people have the right to apply for an exemption. If we didn't give it to them and they think they should have got it, they have 30 days to apply after the tax bill goes out. So it's for the sake of argument, if we had a hundred of those, you're probably looking at another $25,000, $30,000 in the overnight. So we would have to increase that. Now we have to overexplain the overlay if you do not know what it is. I can tell you what the overlay is if you don't know what that is. Okay. The overlay reserve is an amount of money that the assessor's request each year and that's figured into the tax rate. At the moment it's a little over $500,000 a year and that money is to allow us to pay for exemptions for the personal people who qualify and debatements that people may get during the year. We have a conservative overlay amount at the moment but obviously we need to cover it. So if anything was likely to change, we would have to put more money into it to see what's happening. Any money that's not spent it will eventually return back to the budget. Next page please. Okay. Here's the fun part. To arrive at the figures in my estimates, I used 10% exemption, 15% exemption and 20% exemption. As you can see at 10%, any property that qualified for the exemption would receive 36,500. At 15, it's 54,000 plus and at 20% it's 73,000 plus. We have about, well, 62,83 residential units. I changed that around a bit. Of these, approximately 4,316 would qualify for the exemptions and 1,967 would not. If we use that amount above, the tax rates, I used last year's tax rate of 2,180. If we use 10%, that tax rate would go to 2,356. If we use 15, it would go to 2,454. And if we use 20, it would go to 2,562. And before anyone says anything about the $25, yes, because of exemptions, we can exceed the $25 limit. This is a little bit fast for me. This is if you're giving a homeowner exemption for an owner occupied house. Correct. This is the changes that would happen. It would lower the taxes on the cheaper houses. Is that correct? Of the 4,387, 4,316, anybody below evaluation of $487,000 that qualifies for the exemption would pay less. No, it could be pennies less. With the 15%, that number changes to 3,795. And with the 20%, it's after the $4,000. If you had a 20% exemption of a house below $450,000, how much money would they save? How much money would they save? Yeah. And last year's, if they qualified, the $1,500. That's money. Yes. But the other thing is once you get on going up of the ways, over 4,400, that's at the bottom end. But with the tax rate, once you get into $4,487,000, they will not save any money. And anybody above that will not save any money. And the chances are that people in the last quarter of that 4,000 would only save a few dollars or a few pennies. But on your chart, you had that majority of houses were below $450,000. Yes, but they don't qualify for the exemption? Well, it looks to me that people who have houses that are valued lower might be people who would really like to save on their taxes. So you're not convincing me, it's not a good idea is all I'm saying. I'm not gonna try and convince anybody of anything. I'm gonna put the facts before you. But the other side of that sort is all of the income housing and the apartment complexes are gonna pay at the higher tax rate. When the time comes, most of these apartment complexes are gonna have a tax writer. In other words, if the taxes go up, your rent goes up and your lower earning persons will be in those apartment complexes and they will pay more taxes. So that's, I understand what you're saying with a single family, but there's a wider board as well. Now if we go to the next page, this illustrates the 20% residential exemption, assuming a 2019 tax rate. Properties under 100,000 and under, with that exemption would save $691.28. And if you go all the way down and follow that second column all the way down, this is the changes in the taxes. So the apartment complexes, a $10 million apartment complex is gonna pay an additional $36,329.28. And the non-owner occupied one would pay $38,200. If you look at the $400,000 range, I'm talking with the last two columns here. If you look at the $400,000, that person would save $342 and then at $500,000 they'd actually pay more at $39. So that's for the breakeven point this for everybody. And if we go to the last page, or not the last page, we have never adopted a residential exemption. This is only an explanation. Many communities have split tax rate which affects the impact of the residential exemption. We're particularly asked about Cambridge when we talk with Mr. Angelis. Cambridge had a single rate last year, their tax rate would have been $8.37 per thousand. But they shifted under the commercial rate by 64%. So the commercial rate went to $13.71 and giving a residential rate of $5.84. If the residential had only been granted, it would have been $6.86. So even with the tax rate at $6.86, that is lower than the original $8.37 because of the split tax rate. And even with the exemption and because of the split rate, all residential played less. Cambridge has a 65% commercial base as opposed to Amherst's 10% base or so. Even with the split rate in Amherst, the exemption would cost higher taxes for some of the residential class. And the residential exemption in some of the communities along the coast was simply put in place to impact the non-residents year round property owners because as they came into town, they paid raised the values of the properties and they were only there part time. So the residents decided that they should pay more taxes, which I think seems fair. So the recommendation of the manager, the assessor and the board of assessors would be a single tax rate and no commercial or small residential exemption. The last page shows you a breakdown of this year's valuations. And as you can see, 90% of it is residential. Any at 0.78% of the residential? So that's where we are. If you have any questions, we're happy to take them. Not a question, but a thank you for answering my prior question and focusing me on the impact of rental tenants. I have a question in the beginning you talked about personal property and you said roughly 188 parcels. What is personal property? And on this last one, it's total valuation is 87 million. You said it's mainly utilities, but... Well, the value is mainly utilities. We've only got five or six utilities. Qualified for utilities. We'll have Bertrick Gas, the Western Mass Electric Company, and then we're going to the telephone company. It's not really utility, but it's valued by the state and our biggest player, one of our biggest taxpayers.  And they make up roughly $75 million of the valuation of the 87 million. The rest of them are all small businesses, such as the mom and pops across the street. And they pay on their inventory and the machinery and equipment. There's all their kinder tops and things like that. So all those are paid for. Okay, so they pay on the equipment inventory inside as well as the property? Well, they don't pay the property tax, the property owner pays the property tax. Because they're renting. They will be paying some of it in some way. In a solar field, would that be personal property? Would that be industrial? What would that be? Personal. Personal. Now we had, those are under pilots, which are payments on lieu of taxes. But because of the way the Department of Revenue has told us we have to do it. A normal pilot is outside the tax rate. These pilots are inside the tax rate. So we have to calculate a value for them every year and put them inside the tax rate. And I believe we're about $7 million, you know, all together for the four we have at the moment, with more coming. And then my last question is the two big institutions that aren't taxed in town, Amherst College and UMass. Do you ever do an assessment of the value of what their land plus buildings are? That's question number one. And the related question is to the extent there are commercial activities on those properties that are not specifically teaching. Have we ever looked at, could we be taxing that part of the enterprise separately? And I've just seen a few communities, Princeton had a challenge on this, for example, in the town of Princeton. Have we ever looked at that? Have we, the first is, have we assessed the value? And secondly, have we said, some of what you're doing looks pretty commercial. It's not just teaching. Yes, we've assessed the value. Not UMass, because we haven't got all their buildings online, but we have for Amherst College, and one thing I like, Hampshire College, and we do that simply to have it. In all honesty, from the point of view of an assessor, those are special use buildings. So I really, I'm just putting a construction cost on them more than anything else. They don't really have a market value. And yes, we have looked at the commercials and the exempt properties, and we do have a few properties that are taxed to Amherst College, and we have some banks taxed at UMass. We have the tax the leaser, no, the leasing, not the leaser, in those cases. So UMass is not taxed, but the bank is taxed. For ATMs and things like that. If, and I'm doing this as a hypothetical, and we'll bring it up, because I know it's not the topic we're doing now, but if you said they were operating a food service as a commercial that it wasn't just purely UMass, could you come in and look at the whole thing and say this is unrelated business and should be taxed? Yes, we could. Okay. Well, I want to say that I think that this might be a good year to do a owner-occupied house exemption because we are talking about our major projects, our capital projects, and we're discussing the property, a possibility of a tax override and which taxes will go up on houses. So I think maybe we should think about that. As I said, that's up to the council, but as I also said, our information isn't exactly up to date when the owner-occupied are not. I would ask or suggest that if you were gonna do it, you would consider it for next year and give us the chance to get all the information in place. So I have made more sense to me, but again, we can do it. Can we do it? Yes, we can do it. You have the time. But you need to come up to the microphone just because they're recording it for... I think Dave did an excellent job over viewings. Oh. I think Dave did a great job giving you the background of all this process. A couple of quick comments. One is this is tax policy and this is the council's decision to decide who benefits, who pays and Dave went over what exceptions or what options you have and you have to decide that. I had 100% support what David says. Get all the facts together. So if you wanna do this, get all the facts together next year so you're prepared next fall and also Amherst is very much, they like to be involved in processes. So you'd wanna involve the town in this process. The other more technical point of view is when David's talking about parcels, those are parcels, taxpayer parcels. So you might have one apartment with 300 units and that's just one parcel. So you need to understand the effect when you go through this. The other data we'd wanna get more facts about would be, it looks like the majority of the housing units in Amherst are rental right now. Again, this is without research, but it looks like that and it looks like a majority of those rentals are occupied by students. So again, that's information you'd wanna understand better. Just understand what's gonna happen when you start having apartments pay more. Is it affecting students? Is it affecting elderly? Is it affecting affordable? What's happening there? So again, if you wanna do that, I'd put something in place next year to have the information available for you. Yeah, I think that in my one hesitation about taking over as Chair Patent today was because I was a member of the Select Board. I'm the one who's actually dealt with this issue in prior years and some of the switch roles for a second. When the Select Board looked at this each year, it's not something that we just automatically did because it was recommended, but there were a couple of things that were ultimately important considerations. One is the uniqueness of our community and the distribution of residential to commercial. We really are tipped very hard, which makes it hard to have a split tax rate, so that was one part of it. As far as the exemption was concerned, ultimately each year when we did talk about it, factors that we were looking at was, do we know enough about the properties that would be affected at the high end because some of them are owned by people who have owned for generations and are living on fixed income? And so that you really take a great risk of affecting people who are on fixed income and ultimately then you come into the disruption factor. And when, if you make this change, it could have a huge disruption piece and whether that's a desirable thing to happen is something that now the council's the board that's gonna have to make that consideration. And I think there was one additional piece which you alluded to, which is that yes, number of renters are students. Students are a part of our community, but number of the renters are really low income and people who are living on very restricted income. And if you start looking around at some of the apartment complexes, they're not all students. Colonial Village is an example that I would throw out for consideration. And we have to realize that anything that would shift taxation to the rental properties, we have to be aware of who the tenants are and what the effect might be on the rents. And those are not easy considerations to make. But those are the kinds of things that we probably were struggling with each year. In the spirit of the strong recommendation of get our facts before we make any decisions, the point Annie was just making, I went back to your graph on the distribution of property values and homeowners. It looks to me if I said just picking one properties of $700,000 or more, we might end up with there 150 of those or whatever the number is. So it's not 2,000. Could we be doing an inventory both of how many are homeowners, as you said, versus rentals, but of those that have a high assessed value that look like they're homeowner, would we be able to do an interview, get some assessments so your house rich but income poor, or is there no way of getting that kind of information? Well, we could get the information, but you can't do anything about the assessment because the assessment's gonna be based on the market value. Right, and I'm just saying purely that we would say, we've got a couple hundred of these or a hundred of these that are the, you've lived in your house forever and the property is worth a lot but you're living on Social Security income, your income is low. So we think we're hitting a high income person but I understand you can't target this. This is not targeted at all. We are allowed to ask for income information, but it's only asked, we can't compel. We could definitely take a look and see what would happen. Looking around seems to be additional questions from council. In New York City, there are tax exemptions based on income for senior citizens. And I know from a previous meeting with you that we do not have that in Amherst but there's a policy where some people can work it off which I think meets the needs of some people but not of others. Well actually, there are several state exemptions that we have and Amherst has always voted for the highest one. We have an exemption for a blind person. We have exemptions for persons over seven years of age but within income qualifications, so we can do those. We have an exemption for a surviving spouse and as long as they don't remarry, that's in place. We also have several veterans exemptions, different classes and Amherst over the years, this is one of the things you will be asked for on a yearly basis as a town council to vote on, has adopted the optional exemption that allows us to raise those by 100% over a period of time. Amherst has adopted the optional exemption that allows us to increase those state exemptions by 100% over a period of time as the tax is raised on the property. So we have put a lot in place over the years and Amherst has always been very receptive to everything we've put forward. Okay, first of all, we need to just reflect for the minutes that it's 11.15, we now have a quorum of the council present. So we ask, no, we don't. That's right. Okay, we're still up. And I guess the other is because when Mindy left, I was elected under the council rules. So we've gone through, we had previously received in the packet the same slides that we have been looking at and asking questions about today. We're trying to isolate the help of Mr. Burgess, the decisions that the council will make when it has to have the tax classification hearing so that we can understand what each of the factors are. I think that the other point just to let you know is that the recommendation was that if we are going to consider any significant shift in policy, that we not do it in the first year, but that we ask for the information to be developed so that council fully understands the consequences of the decisions that it's gonna consider. And that's the most inter-residential exemption question. So I think inside, so go ahead. No, I'm just agreeing with you. So are there other questions? Just wanna echo Pat's thank you. I actually found these tables very clear and very useful to be seeing how the interaction with the rate happens because it wasn't obvious to me until you did the work of showing this. And I liked the last column which shows the actual tax change on it. So you don't just look at the rate, but you see minus your exemption. You're still, a lot of people are still paying more. So I thought that was very useful. Thank you. So the council will feel that there's additional information that is going to be helpful because we do have the tax classification public hearing scheduled for October 21st. And... Would you move your mic closer, please? The, just to remind you of the tax classification hearing is scheduled for 6.30 p.m. on October 21st. We wanna make sure that we have, at least from this group, is sufficient understanding of the issues that we will be considering. I think that the other factor in which gets back to Mr. Burgess's recommendation about fully developing an understanding amongst ourselves of what the ramifications of a change of policy would be. So we probably, as a council might wanna consider what steps we would wanna do to inform the public about what we're considering and the possible consequences because of the, if we institute a major change based upon prior experience, we don't get a lot of public that comes to the public hearing. But if there's a lot of notice that, hey, your taxes might change significantly, that could change a whole lot. And so I would also encourage the council when it gets to it to think about the kind of advanced public notice it wants to have because one question that came up was what do we know about the individual circumstances and the effect on individuals? And having advanced notice out to the public will inform people and they will come and tell us if it's going to affect them significantly. And that's something the council might wanna hear. Yes, Kathy, and then I'll start. The one suggestion I might have for the hearing is to have in your back pocket if you don't have it already. The chart you have which shows residential rates versus commercial, you can eyeball back and forth and you can see the communities that don't split them. But your point about those that have gone higher, so Cambridge, for example, have a huge commercial property base, it might be used to have that as a background if someone asks about it, so they're able, so I was going through, Greenfield doesn't do it, Northampton doesn't do it, and I was just doing by, this is the same number in both charts, but the charts not easily set up for that, but just be ready to have that, not just the Cambridge, because it looks like Agawam, a few others do a split rate and I'm assuming that what you said is often true for these others that they've got a decent enough a commercial base to be able to do that split rate. For the split rate, that's correct. The idea of Cambridge was to show what would happen with the split rate and the residential exemption. Agawam and all the rest of those communities out here, we do not have residential exemptions in any of those communities, so that's why Cambridge was signaled out. Okay, and so that's the only one that actually has the residential exemption also of that chart, yeah, okay. Dorothy. I was speaking up for an opinion that has been voiced here many times by Sarah Schwartz, which is that many people that she knows say that if the taxes increase, they'll be forced to move, and so I assume those are homeowners, so I do think it's something that we have to think about seriously. Yeah, we hear that quite a bit. It's one of the things we have no control over, and I'd just like to say to Mr. Steinberg, I'm not sure if it was before you were on the select board or just after you came on the select board, but we did do a major study of the residential exemption at one stage about 15 years ago, and it was quite a turnout from the apartment owners who weren't in use. That's the people you're going to hear from are the apartment complex owners when this comes out. As you look at that chart in the apartment complex owner of $10 million is going to pay an extra $38,000 a year, and that's a lot of money, but that's who you'll hear from. Anything else? Evan? Yeah, one thing I almost forgot about. So the tax rate is decreasing 2% from last year? Yes, the tax rate is decreasing 2%, but in turn the residential values are going up by 6%. So when the values go up, the tax rate goes down, so that's what happened. We are on a five year cycle at the moment, and if we had it left at this year, our valuations would have been roughly 90% of market value instead of 95%, and right or wrong, I didn't want to leave that for the next assessor coming in, I'd rather push it up and get it back to where it should be and give them three years to work with it instead of coming on and having to make an adjustment next year. Yeah, I think that might be a comment that I see you're about to raise something too. I think most people don't understand the 2.5% increase applies to the amount of total taxation that we can make to the community so that as property rates is the assessment's increase because property is more valuable in the community, that means that the rate goes down. It's just, but there's another factor that we as a council ultimately have to be aware of because we're in a regional school district and not how property values are changing within each of those four communities is not the same, and that's part of the tension that goes into the regional assessment discussion, which is a separate process, but then comes back related to what we're talking about here. Mr. Spachman, so anything else? Because I don't think that going back to the agenda for today's meeting that there's anything else unless there's public questions, but public is really the Board of Assessors and I really appreciate all of your being here and on behalf of the councilors, I just want to thank you for being here and for all of the work that you do to make this tax system work and work fairly and then to be prepared to handle the appeals process should that come about, which the greater disruption we throw into the system, the burden's gonna fall back on you and so I wanna recognize that and I would appreciate your service for the community being on that board. Anything else from my councilors, members? If not, then I think we can declare ourselves adjourned.


I'm seeing now more and more a lot of the, which you just said, the intern-based contracting professionals. It seems like a lot of the people that were, I guess, the ones grandfathered in are retiring. Did you see that same trend? Yes, quite a bit actually. There was a very, very heavy amount of the baby boomer generation who are actually retiring, and they're really leaving a pretty big hole to fill, which is good for, which is great for the people of my generation because we're getting promoted faster and things like that. But it could be tougher for the next wave of people coming into federal acquisition. Yeah, I see that because I mean every, and again, I started doing this back in 2007. And so everyone at that time that I dealt with, they had been a contracting official for 20-some odd years. And now, you know, fast forward 2019, almost every office that I work with now in the federal government has interns. Almost every office, like 90 plus percent, they all have interns working in there. And there's a lot of transition. And then the older people, like you said, the baby boomer generation, I guess they all just retired at the same time. Yeah, that's what it feels like on my end as well, and what I've seen in the workforce. Wow. Now, you called it, you said the acronym, DAU. What did you call it? How did you say it? Yeah, DAU. But no, you said it, you said it like to get like dowy or you said it. Oh, do we, the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act. That essentially was the basis of why DAU exists. Do we, that's how you say it. Okay. Okay. And do we, that's the certification? Yes. Okay. That is the, the certification courses that we, that we teach essentially. Okay. So I teach Khan 90, Khan 170 and Khan 280. Those are about a mixture of level one and level two certification courses for contracting. So let's, let's talk about, we'll get back to that. But first, how did you get involved with Defense Acquisition University? How did you, how did you go from, what did you do before that prior to this position? Sure. So right around the, the 2008 timeframe, I was a, I was actually a teacher at a middle school and high school and at a private school living in South Florida. And I also recently finished my master's in business administration. So because it was 2008 and housing crisis and all that stuff and the economy was just in, you know, terrible downturn, I was fortunate enough to, to get a government job. So I really started all the way from the bottom and got a job at Wright and Penerson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where I was doing like flight simulator contracts. And I was doing a source selection for a pretty big $450 million deal. But so I was essentially doing the, the performing level of the contract administration type stuff. So I did a few different rotations and offices by a lot of different things all the way from toilet paper to major weapon systems and F-35s and things like that. And then USAjobs.gov, I, I saw a job for an instructor position at DAU. And I was really interested in that. And I, I applied for it when I did an interview and I was able to get that position. Well, that actually makes sense coming from a teacher background that you went to back to what you liked or what you enjoy the most. Yeah. I didn't find out until afterwards that they give additional points for already having some instructed, some teacher experience or things like that. Oh, so that worked out in your favor? Yeah. Okay. Okay.  And then they started requiring it for everyone in the 2000s. Now, is it mainly for contracting officers and contract specialists support people or who else can all participate or sign up for courses with Defense Acquisition? Joe, we have many different certifications in, in Duia. We have, like what I teach, I teach the concourses, which are entirely contracting because all of my background is contracting. But we also have everything from program management to engineering to life cycle logistics. And every different type of, every different member of the acquisition team can come to DAU to get training. But we also do allow contractors to, we do allow contractors to come to Defense Acquisition University. But because of the need for federal government employees to come first, the contractors are really lower down on the, on the list. So it's difficult for a contractor to come into a DAU class. I've actually never had a contractor in one of my classes, but I've heard that it can happen. And I know other instructors who have had a couple. Okay. So it's not prohibited. It's just the, the need is so great right now for the, for the Department of Defense that we, you know, that comes first. That's the priority. Exactly. Right. Exactly. Okay. Okay. Now I know that you also, they also have online learning and online modules. Yes. We actually have quite a few. There's a lot of stuff on the dau.no website, which if you're interested in something, you can just go to that website and go get educated. And there's so much stuff for people to just learn and take continuous learning modules and receive continuous learning points to be able to kind of self-help without an instructor present. Okay. So then we probably have a better chance of doing something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now you said it's not that expensive, but we're talking about the track of someone wanting to actually become a contracting professional, right, to become like certified so they can do this for a living. But if we, if we want to take random courses, anyone could sign up at any time for the online classes. Exactly. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's fair. Do you have in mind anything specifically like, is there a say curriculum for how to navigate the small business program? So they have like a separate curriculum for that? So there are certain positions at dau that that focus specifically on small business. Okay. And I know ours at at the capital northeast region, ours just recently retired, and I'm not sure if they have hired a person yet for that need at the at the DC region. Okay. Okay. And the reason why I ask is I was just wondering if there are a lot of times what, and again, from my experiences of working with smaller companies, they want a structured curriculum. So if I recommend to them just to go online and take random classes, they're going to the next logical questions could be, right? Is there a track, right? Is there an actual course or a track that I can follow? And that way we take in a series of classes to lead us to somewhere. Yeah. And that's another problem that I've heard from industry is that they don't really have a capability to educate their, their staff the same way that that the federal workforce does. Right. So I have heard of the need where, you know, contractor force the development of some type of contractor equivalent program for for Dawea certification. Yeah. And that's interesting because think, and I agree 100% by the way, because think about this way. Dawea and I, and I'm, and I have your catalog of courses, right?  But imagine if that the buyer has all of this information, but the contract that's offering the services has none of that information at their disposal. Yeah. Right. So if the buyer needs this type of certification, this type of education, in order to buy the products or services, the acquisition, it would, it would make sense to me, right, that the contract should have at least of a minimum understanding of providing that level of service to the government as well. Right. So then that way we're both exactly, we're both talking the same language. It's like one person speaking one language and the other person speaking a foreign language. Yeah. And from my experience, what I've seen happen is the private sector will kind of hire, you know, seek a federal employee that they find and have a good relationship with to kind of work with them and represent their, their business and make sure that they can, they can sell things in accordance with the Federal Acquisition Regulations and the Defense Regulation Supplement as well.