Seeing that there's a quorum in attendance, I'm calling the February 25th meeting of the Town Service and Outreach Committee to order at 5.02. Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law allows us to hold this virtual meeting of the Town Service and Outreach Committee. I'm going to call on each committee member by name to confirm that you can hear me and we can hear you. I'm Alyssa Brewer. Present. Let's begin my present, Evan Roth. Present. Ryan. Present. And Andy Steinberg. Present. And why don't I just double check we can hear all of our presenters. Mandy Jo. Present. Pat. Present. Ben. He said present, but you can't hear it for some reason. I had an audio problem when I started Ben and I had to adjust the volume for some reason. That was a first. And while we're waiting for him, Paul. Here. And Christine. Present. OK, can you hear me now? Yes. Good. OK. Headset does the trick sometimes. Those assisting the meeting will be monitoring committee member connections. And if necessary, we'll pause the meeting until we're reconnected. We request that everyone be patient with the process. This meeting will be posted on the town of Amherst YouTube channel. So now we are looking to see if we have any public comments. And I'm assuming, Susan, you are a member of the public. Are you? I believe I am. Were you planning on giving public comment? I was not. OK. All right. And I see, Myra, you're in the public. Please raise your hand if you would like to give public comment. Does not look like Myra wants to give public comment at this time. OK, we're going to move on to action items. And we have an election that we did not have at the last meeting. So Evan Ross is going to preside over the election. All right. So we'll run through this. So I'll be presiding over the election of the chair pursuant to town council rules procedure 10.5. I'll run this quickly. But like we do in the council, I'll ask for nominations. Nominations will be limited to a name and not an explanation. I will ask all nominated whether they accept the nomination. Once we've had all nominations, I'll ask the nominees if they want to speak. And then we'll open it for discussion before going to a vote. And so at this point, I will open the floor to nominations for chair of the town services and outreach committee. I see George Ryan. I nominate Darcy Dumont. Darcy, do you accept? I do. Are there any other nominations? OK, seeing none, Darcy, did you want to make a statement or speak to your nomination? I did not prepare a statement, but I will give you the option. I will say that I have actually enjoyed doing it much to my surprise. So I'm fine with continuing. That's the extent of my statement. Is there any discussion? OK, then I will call the roll. And you will say the name of the person whom you'd like to vote to elect chair of the TSO. Alyssa Brewer. Darcy Dumont. Darcy Dumont. Darcy Dumont. Evan Ross is Darcy Dumont. George Ryan. Darcy Dumont. And Andrew Steinberg. Darcy Dumont. And so that is five votes for Darcy, unanimous support. And so I will hand the meeting over to our continuing chair, Darcy Dumont. OK, thank you. So I will take nominations for vice chair. George. Can't give my raised hand function to work. I nominate Evan Ross for vice chair. OK, Evan, do you accept? I'm just why do I do that next? Do you accept, Evan? I can accept, yes. Are there other nominations? OK, so Evan, would you like to make a statement? I've been vice chair of TSO from the beginning. I have had to do something once when Darcy wasn't able to attend a meeting. And so I had to chair. Other than that, it has been a workload of nothing. And so I am happy to continue in this role and doing very little in that role, because Darcy has been able to do all of the work. That may change, but who knows? OK, thank you. So any discussion? Well, I just think Evan is someone who really does very little, very well. So I think he's an excellent candidate. I just want to make that point. He does very little, but he does it very well. OK, so we will take the roll call. And I'll start with a yes. Or Evan Ross. And then who's next? Evan. Evan Ross. George. Evan Ross. Andy. Evan Ross. Alyssa. Evan Ross. OK, we now have a chair and a vice chair. And moving on, we don't have any time manager appointments today. Do you, I haven't checked with the town manager. Paul, do you foresee that we'll have some at the next meeting? We're hoping to, yes. It's a matter of getting the interview scheduled up. OK, so we will move on to the surveillance technology presentation. The two co-sponsors, Mandy, Joe Hanneke and Pat D'Angeles, are back with their amended version of the bylaw after having received comments from staff. And you're free to screen share, which I'm assuming. Go ahead, Mandy. Oh, I can put it up now, but I didn't have anything planned other than the comment section in this document is an attempt to indicate the comments we received from town staff and how our response was or point to the part of the bylaw that addresses those issues. The biggest change we made, we added a couple of definitions or a couple of exceptions into the surveillance, into what is not surveillance technology to address some town staff concerns. But the biggest change we made is to, well, there's two changes. The first one is existing surveillance technology. We went to a pocket approval instead of a pocket veto, if that makes sense. The bylaw would require, if the bylaw is adopted, that the town council approve continuing use of any surveillance technology that the town currently uses. And that had been listed as a, if the town council doesn't act within a certain amount of time, the town would have to stop using that technology. And we changed that to, if the town council doesn't act, the town can continue to use that technology. So it places the burden on the council instead of on the town. And then the other change, which is the biggest one, is everyone was concerned about creating another committee. Regarding the community, it was titled the Community Advisory Committee on Surveillance. And its main purpose was to create and publish a community equity impact assessment and policy guidance. And so we did some research. We talked to the Human Rights Commission. We talked amongst ourselves. And we decided that we didn't want to create a new committee, even if it was just a standing committee. The Human Rights Commission did not want to be a part of it. They already had too much on their plate right now. They felt as it is. And so they didn't want to add to it. And so we decided as council, if the councillors believed that this impact was necessary, that this impact assessment was necessary, that the councillors should do it themselves within a committee of the town council. So it has been moved to the quote, the appropriate town council committee. We did not name a committee. As we've seen in the last three years, committee names change regularly. And so we felt it to keep it as generic as possible to just designate it as an appropriate town council committee that the town council will have to designate at an appropriate time. Those are the biggest changes. I can put it up if people want to. Pat can talk about the flowchart that was in the packet that we created to help people visualize what would actually happen if this was adopted. Do councillors want to pull up the bylaw itself and go through the different changes? Or do you want to just take questions in case people have them assuming we've been able to read through? I don't see any hands. Well, it sounds like the councillors. Andy? So I'm going to limit my participation because I was not a member of the committee when you began consideration. And it's hard to jump into something of this complexity. I did, however, look at the current draft. And so I had a couple of questions for the sponsors. And that is whether this is modeled after an existing bylaw in another community or other communities that was because it was with its level of complexity, I couldn't imagine having tried to draft this without using a model. And the second then is whether there has been any report on the effect on both positive, whether it achieved the goals, whether there were actual problems that it helped address and whether there was any problems that developed from the compliance side. If you want to address those questions? So I can do the first one. I don't know whether either of us can truly do the second one. We modeled it after an ACLU model. There's a bunch of models out there from the ACLU from various ACLU divisions, National and also some state divisions. And so a basic text was modeled, taken from that, and then modified to us. We also looked at Cambridge. It's been a while. Let me look to see which municipalities. Cambridge and Northampton. Northampton had, I think, a facial recognition one. But Cambridge has a full surveillance one. And so that's another one that we, and theirs was modeled after an ACLU by-law too. So those were the two, a general ACLU one that puts out model by-laws and then Cambridge specifically for Massachusetts. I have not specifically talked to Cambridge to see if there's been an effect or anything. So I can't answer that one per se. Cambridge's by-law has been on the books for a while, I believe, though. Yeah, and I don't know of any report on whether the goals were achieved or whether there were problems either. You know how long ago the first surveillance technology by-law was enacted in any municipality in Massachusetts? They're all very recent, right? So in 2019, Cambridge added the face recognition prohibition to its surveillance technology by-law. I do not, I'd have to look at their actual by-laws and pull them up, which I don't have easy access to or quick access to right now to determine when the initial surveillance technology by-law was enacted. But 2019 is when they added face surveillance ban prohibition to it. I might be able to find the original enactment date if you give me enough time. I don't think it's... I guess my question to the committee is whether due diligence would suggest that we should make such an inquiry before making a recommendation to the council. George. I don't have anything to say to that at the moment I had a different question. So we should continue, I think, with Andy's point. My point is something else. Well, do others, do we have other comments with regard to Andy's question or any further answers from the sponsors? I agree with Andy. I think that's part of due diligence. I don't want to recommend something to the town council saying, yes, I know another community has done this, but I don't know how it worked out for them. That doesn't feel like a good recommendation to me. We do need to realize that we may find out that they're new enough so that there's not good data yet. So I was just able to find it. Cambridge enacted their initial surveillance technology by-law December 10th of 2018. So there is barely two years old. Any more on that issue? George. I mean, I guess I hear the point that it's only two years old, but it's two years of experience we don't have. And so I guess I would really like to hear what their experience has been so far. It's just some kind of inquiry. Since there is somebody out there who's actually done this and it's all very new, it would help me be more confident in making recommendation. But I hear you, Darcy, it's possible they'll just come back and say, oh, we don't have enough data yet. It's all new. But I guess I would agree with Alyssa and with Andy that I would like to hear what their experience has been to date. We may be able to get some of that information through the ACLU. Sounds good. Alyssa? It's fine with me if you want to reach out to the ACLU, but I also believe that as sponsors, you should hear from Cambridge directly from somewhere and they're preferably more than one someone, meaning it could be whatever is escaping me right now, what their form of government really looks like. But an administrative type and an elected type, just to hear that, oh, there was only this one concern and it was addressed in this way. I mean, because again, we're talking about after the fact. So people certainly had concerns at the beginning and I don't need you to delve into all that. But with any new by-law that we create, if there's experience somewhere else, just hearing that nope, absolutely nothing's come up in two years is valuable. A thing came up, but their form of government is different enough than ours that it really doesn't apply to us is also a piece of data. But as sponsors, just like when we heard about the wild animal by-law, we need to hear how it's worked out in other communities, not because it's surveillance technology, just because it's a new by-law and it's such a new concept. But hopefully in two years, as George and Darcy have indicated, they won't necessarily have had anything happen, but that in and of itself is a piece of data. Thank you. George, is your hand still up? Yes, it is. If you're ready to move on, I do have a question about section B1C, is the question raised by the police department. And I've read the comment, it's still not clear to me that this addresses their concern, but maybe it does the thought being that if they're given information and they're supposed to act on it, but it may have been used, surveillance was part of what was used to get that information, what are they supposed to do? And obviously an investigation is a timely thing. And so the process we have would probably mean, basically they can't use it. So I just need to get clear as to what the answer is or if there is, we have a clear answer, maybe as to go to attorney. But B1C, does it make sense to pull it up so we can see it because I'm not looking at it right now. So this is a section that requires town council review and approval. And the police had a comment for that and a question from the police memo. And just from what is written here, I don't see the, it's being answered, but maybe it is and I'm just missing it. Could either of the sponsors address that? So I'm hesitant to address it in any legal way because I believe it probably needs addressed from the town attorney. The question from the police was very vague in that it's unclear whether they're asking whether if they had a search warrant to obtain that information, whether they'd still have to go through this or not, or if they could just walk over to CVS and say, hey, can we get your surveillance? And would they be able to do that? So I think it's really a question that is hard for sponsors to answer because we're not the legal attorneys. So this goes for GOL review. And at that point it goes to the attorneys. So the attorneys do get the way in and I will be very curious to hear what, I'm assuming it doesn't take them six years to get back to us. I'll be very curious to hear what they have to say about this. It does seem that we reach out to KP law, not just in GOL. So I think that waiting until this goes to GOL when you've targeted a potential problem seems a way inefficient. No problem. But are we asking them just to look at this section or are we asking them to look at the whole law? GOL would ask them to look at the entire bylaw. This would I assume be a specific question about this particular section. Any other discussion about that issue? Yeah, I actually had also. Yeah, sorry. I wasn't sure if you could see hands or not. No, I can't. I just didn't know if you were. Wanted to speak about this issue. Yeah, so I had also sort of called this one out because I was a little bit confused by it. And so, and I guess a little bit concerned. So, you know, I think let's say the example that CVS has a video camera, right? That the police wanna access to help solve a break in or something. My reading of this, and maybe I'm misreading this is that in order for them to access that information, they would likely need to seek counsel approval. And I guess if that interpretation is correct, my concerns about that is that how this is set up is they would first need to submit a surveillance use policy, which would need to be submitted 14 days before a public hearing or before posting of a public hearing or 14 days before the public hearing. And then we have to have the public hearing and then there might be counsel debate. So you're talking about a minimum of 14 days, but probably more because they take maybe a couple of days to write the policy. So I'm wondering if I'm interpreting this correctly, if this would mean that if there was something that happened and the police wanted to access some surveillance technology from a private company that could aid an investigation, if this prohibits them from being able to access that information for at least 15, 16 likely days and whether or not that could actually inhibit an investigation. Well, maybe I'm just misreading this, but that was sort of my confusion and concern. Any response from sponsors? It seems like this is an issue as George said that makes sense to be looked at by KP law. Though they might have the same question Evan has for the sponsors, which is what exactly is this supposed to be addressing? And the answer may be it's addressing any use of these kinds of surveillance materials by any entity, whether it's a police agency or whether it's CVS or whatever. So I guess we could benefit from clarity from the sponsors because I'm pretty sure KP law is gonna come back and ask them, what exactly does this apply to? And on the face of it, it seems to apply to everything. So Pat, you can go. Well, if you were gonna respond, I just was wondering if Paul could say anything about what the process is now that the police use if they want to check a CVS security tape, just out of curiosity. Okay, Darcy. Yes. I don't see into that. I can certainly find out. And I think these are really good questions. I'm thinking more of missing child or something like that where you'd want to, there's an active, you need urgency to it. And I think these are really good questions for this. I think that was the concern that the police had. And there's a legal question and maybe there's an emergency provision or something. I think I could inquire into the police department to find out what are their more detailed concerns for the sponsors to help guide the sponsors decision. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for that, Paul. What I was gonna say is, my intention on this policy is to make sure, or in section C, I would say, is to ensure that whether it be the police department or the fire department or some other department says, well, it wasn't that they don't sort of avoid if this bylaw passes the applicability of this bylaw by sort of contracting out to other entities, the surveillance and saying, well, it's not the town doing the surveillance, so it's okay. That's what one of my purposes of this is to ensure that when the town wants to surveil people that they have to get approval by the town council, essentially. So it's not to, at least my own purpose was not to prohibit the police departments or other departments from using other people's surveillance technology in the course of investigations. And I know from our Pat and I's experience with the face recognition technology bill at the state house that they wrote in certain provisions regarding active investigations and all, I don't have in my mind exactly how they worded things like that, but it might be something that could be added somewhere into this bylaw through, by referencing what the state did on their recently passed face recognition sort of prohibition to see what we could add into it here. There might have been with KP Law's review of the one we proposed for face recognition, KP Law might have added something similar into that. It's been a little bit since I looked. So we could potentially look at those two sources to see if we already have potential language to sort of add that exception in about investigations and search warrants and stuff like that or emergency, things like that. Thank you, Andy Joe. Alyssa. I'm sorry, I thought Andy was first. Hey, Andy. So I guess there are a couple of things. One is as a part of due diligence, that's one of the questions we could ask in Cambridge and any other communities we find inquire about. But the other thing is Andy just said in a way, if the purpose of the provision is to make sure that the no-town department goes around the policy by entering into a contract with some other entity to conduct surveillance on behalf of that town department, doesn't other provisions in A and B already address that? Sponsors, we don't have to answer that right now. Alyssa? Yeah, I mean, just building off of that. I think it's just that we need some more clarity. So we all understand exactly. I mean, I think I understand what's been presented to us in terms of what was the goal. And as Mandy Joe and Andy both just said, we're not wanting the town to say, oh, well, we have this policy, but we'll just work with CVS and we now get all of CVS's stuff whenever we want to. Or whenever CVS says we can have it or whatever, but at the same time with the emergencies that we've talked about. So I guess I had originally thought that this was looking at, once the bylaw passed, the police sitting down and saying, so let me think, what would we be wanting to use and sort of setting up pre-approved, setting up policies before any investigation needs to take place, just based on their experiences? Well, in our past experience, we need CVS. So let's write a poll. See about how we would use CVS's stuff. But yeah, I get why it's confusing. And I get the point about not contracting out to avoid the policy, but at the same time, I think it's quite obvious that we need to not be in a situation where, as Paul mentioned, the idea of a missing child that we say, oh, well, I guess we can't ask anybody to look at their surveillance technology for that. So clarity about at what point this goes into effect, in terms of this idea of the surveillance policy submission, are we trying to get them to set up a bunch of policies ahead of time so we know what they're planning to do with CVS and other people who have with, and then has written in the exception, except of course in an emergency, I think we just need some more clarity around that. And it sounds like we're moving toward getting that soon. Thank you, Alyssa. Thank you, Alyssa. Any comments from sponsors? Okay, is there any discussion about any of the other sections in the bylaw? Evan. So this isn't a question, this is sort of a comment. You know, having read through this, different iterations of this bylaw, now of course I read through the current version twice, which was much easier to read now, but that's probably just because I have already read through it a few times before. But my biggest concern at this point is that it will place an additional burden on the council and on town staff and on the town manager. And I'm having a little bit of trouble justifying that, knowing how much work is already on the plate of town staff and counselors. So looking at things like requiring a public hearing, which of course requires notification, looking at the once a year public forum, looking at the, in actually, let me, this might actually turn into a question. The annual surveillance report. So would that be for every surveillance technology that is acquired prior to and after the enactment of this bylaw would require its own policy, surveillance use policy, and then every surveillance policy has an annual report that needs to be published or is it one annual report about all of the surveillance? I wasn't quite sure on that. Andy, Joe or Pat? No, go ahead, Mandy. I was gonna say, I've envisioned one report covering all the technology. I know Pat and I talked and we thought a lot of this would just be updating of things year after year too. You know, the surveillance technology in theory would be used similarly every year and all. So, but Pat, you can go on too. No, that's basically what I would have said. So that's fine. Yeah, because when I originally read F1, it said for each surveillance technology approved, the town manager shall submit an annual surveillance report. So I read that as for every technology, there needs to be a report, an annual report. So there would be one report for each technology, not one annual report. So that does change my thinking a little bit because that obviously is a much different workload. And then the, what was it? Community equity and impact assessment and policy guidance sounds like it would likely be TSO's job to put that together, which made me a little nervous only because as a member of TSO I went, I don't even know where I would start with that. But of course we could figure that out later. So, and then there was the annual public forum on this. And so, it feels like a lot of what we've been doing as a council is just adding responsibilities, adding responsibilities onto ourselves and also onto town staff and the town manager. And of course we're not hiring more town staff. And so that is where some of my concern lay at this time. And I think that there needs to be a question of how much work will it actually translate to? And then is that additional workload worthwhile given the potential risk? And that's where I'm having a little bit of trouble understanding because I can't perfectly envision what the workload is because if you do a plain reading of the bylaw it sounds actually like quite a bit of work for everyone. But then as you said, a lot of it might just be updating, right? It also seems to me, Evan, that once a news policy has been created for technology that the town is interested in acquiring, that one is going to be more complicated or consuming than any of them after that because it really in many ways would be plugging in information. I think disparate impacts and things like that would be different for different technologies. So I love the fact that TSO would have to figure out how to do that. And so I just wanted to express that that is something that I haven't made a decision either way, but that's just something that I'm wrestling with is the additional workload versus the potential risk. And then the very last thing I'll say, because it's the last thing I have in my notes at least, is there was one area that said that... Sorry, I should have written these things down better. Oh yeah, standard of approval in D, there's no alternative with lesser economic costs. And I guess I was curious, there was also in the thing you wanted to talk about how much money it costs to buy some of these things. And I guess I was... It seems like the intent of this by-law is really to be focused on civil liberties and also disparate impacts, especially to marginalized groups. And so I was sort of confused by the inclusion of how much does this cost? Is there a way to do this cheaper? Is there a better economical option? And feeling a little bit like, does that... Is there a lesser economic cost? Seems like it shouldn't really be a concern relative to those other things. So I was just sort of curious to hear your thoughts on the inclusion of the financial aspects of this and how those get paired with some of these other aspects. Any response from sponsors on that, on D standard of approval? Was the intent in financial costs, other costs? To me, I feel like we're talking about silver, the costs of civil liberties. But I also think that it's true that there are economic impacts too that the town might want to say no to. And I honestly didn't think about it in this way until Evan, thank you. So I don't know, maybe Mandy Jo, you can be a little more articulate here, but it does seem to me that the emphasis is on civil liberties, but what are economic... How do you weigh economic costs with the cost of civil liberties? I mean, that's a real question. And I think that as we look at any work we do, what are the impacts, the economic impacts, the impact on social issues, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know. So I have to do a little more thinking about this. Mandy? I'm the same with Pat. On a basic level, I have thought about things like, the economic cost, Lester's an interesting word and I hadn't really thought about that. It's probably there because we pulled this from a model bylaw. But I think we do want to consider things like the sort of a cost benefit analysis. Does this technology cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or will it require replacement every two years at tens of thousands of dollars? And if that's the case, what's the impact on the civil liberties of utilizing that versus some other potential, not necessarily technology, but way of doing something that might have a lesser impact on civil rights or liberties or stuff. So I don't, while the bylaws really focused on civil rights and liberties, I don't think you can leave the economics of acquiring the technology out of the equation completely. It's one of the many things you would be looking at when thinking about, is this technology worth approving or acquiring or continuing with based on what its benefit is, but what its costs are, because there's benefits to technology. There's benefits, if we're thinking about police, policing technology, there's benefits in terms of knowing on those car dash cams, being able to see the interaction at a traffic stop or something. There's a definite benefit to that, but there's costs. One of which are economics, but some of which are also civil rights and liberties. And so you can't, I don't think you can take them separately. And so that's why I believe it's in there, but I'm with Pat, we'd have to think a little bit more about maybe the specific wording of these. Alyssa, thank you, Mandy Jo. So I know this has been in the works for quite a while. And so taking, but taking a step back for a moment, since we aren't actually hearing how great this kind of bylaws actually been effective in protecting the civil liberties that are of course a very great importance to all of us for the resonance of any community in Massachusetts. Could you remind me, and again, because this has been unfolding over such a long period of time, if you considered just having the town council ask the town manager under the appropriate charter provision to just provide the information that's asked for in this report now for this year and see what we get in response to that and then have that discussion that could then inform our bylaw because we don't have this information now. We're asking for future information we think we want based on a model bylaw, based on the values and goals that we hold, but we already have data that just hasn't been put together in this kind of report fashion for what we're already doing. And it would seem to me, given as we're getting tied up in some of these knots, that we have the ability as a town council to ask the town manager to have a report like this, like this annual report that instead of being multiple annual reports as one annual report to be generated now. I mean, I don't mean in a week, but this year and then seeing what we got out of that seems to me like it would be really informative toward a bylaw. Again, just because we're in the position of, I love having Amherst right out front, but it's not happening a lot in Massachusetts and we're not really hearing how when you do this, it's just so amazing at protecting the community. So I'm saying, why not collect the data we already have and look at that and say, is this something we want to be doing on a regular basis rather than creating this big bylaw that has that as just part of it. Thank you, Alyssa. Paul, do you have any response to that? If that's what the council wants, we can certainly put a report like that together. Thank you. Andy. Yeah, I'll be brief because I know we want to get onto the planning department staff that are patiently waiting. And again, recognizing my newness to this because I'm a new member of the committee. I keep wondering as we talk about the civil liberties question, which I do think is important to agree wholeheartedly, is to what are, whether we actually are responding to complaints or are we just anticipating something and wanting to make sure that we don't ever have to deal with complaints because we also recognize that there are people who have been concerned that they would like to see more technology like body cameras for police officers or other technology that would help protect them from whatever alleged abuses that they might have experienced or anticipate. So it's really, you know, as you talk about the civil liberties arguments, I can hear arguments on both sides of this. And I don't want to get into a long discussion and hold up our planning staff, but those are things that I think about as I started delving into this. Any other comments on any of the sections? It looks to me like we have a number of different questions and issues that the sponsors are now going to take up and look at for us. And hopefully the town manager can gather data also on what we're already doing with surveillance technology. If we want to, if you need more specifics about that, Paul, we can probably, Alyssa, maybe you can give more specifics about what you think the town manager should provide, Alyssa. So I just want to mention, I am sympathetic obviously to the fact that a whole bunch of people are here for another issue that we're not talking about yet, but that is the joy of agenda grouping. And sometimes people are told to come at different times of the meeting and sometimes things don't go as fast as we'd like. So I don't feel like we should rush the first agenda item because we're concerned about appropriate planning for when people should be here or not. We're doing the best we can. I would like to see, at least it's not running till 11 o'clock at representative town meeting, right? I would like to see the co-sponsors think about the consideration of a report that includes the information that they're looking for for the annual report as something to do this year, not saying that they have to stop working on this, but the more I think about it, the more it's odd to me that we're not actually looking for that information now. And I don't know why it would be so much better to wait for it until after we did the bylaw. So if that information is important, then it feels like it should be important now as in the current year as opposed to now as in this week. And so I wasn't just saying that as like some kind of rhetorical flourish. It was something that I would really hope that the co-sponsors would think about. And I'm not saying that my support of this or the support of the TSO obviously since there are five members hinges on that, but I think it's definitely worth considering while they're thinking about the other things they're doing because I think it would be very easy to make the case to town council that as we're developing this bylaw, we realize, hey, we could be collecting this information right now, which would give us a baseline and how does everybody feel about that? And they might say, oh, we're too busy to do that or oh, we'll pass that bylaw next year or whatever, but it seems like it would be worthy of a town council discussion. So not just saying it as a throwaway, but as an actual piece of content. So Alyssa, are you saying, are you suggesting that we should collect the data that would be the equivalent of an annual report under this bylaw as written to just have baseline data to go forward with? What I'm saying is if this bylaw, if it's important, if it's important that this bylaw include that information, that that information has to be provided on an annual basis, then I don't know why it's unimportant to have that information right now before we make the next set of budget decisions before we actually even necessarily pass this bylaw. So what I'm saying is no, I wouldn't direct Paul to do this, I wouldn't direct the co-sponsors to do it. What I'm asking them to consider doing is to bring it to the town council as just like which we have basically not really done yet under the charter said, we want a set of information. Normally that just kind of comes out informally when we're discussing a particular proposal. Oh yeah, sure, staff will get that more information for you. This is kind of a more separate issue. And so I'm saying I think it would be reasonable for the co-sponsors to seriously consider bringing that to the town council now while this is continuing to perk through in terms of them getting the information from Cambridge, et cetera, because I would think the town council would say, yes, we want that information, not TSO, US, Paul to give you that information. It would be the town council's request for information from a department. Okay, so do we, it looks like, I have a number of different issues that the sponsors are going to look into before they come back to us. Do we need to go through all of them now? I have them listed here. I have a list too. Yeah, and I do too. Okay, so I think that the town council I think that Paul obviously would need to be involved in the town collecting data that would be the equivalent of an annual report. So I guess the sponsors will talk to Paul about that. I want to be clear about that. The charter requires that request to come through the council. So I don't want, you know, so what Alyssa was asking was for us as sponsors, at least my understanding is for us as sponsors to consider going to the council and saying, hey, council under the charter, will you request from Paul this information to help inform this bylaw? And so that's on my list of things as sponsors to talk about with my co-sponsor on whether to make that request to the council. So is that something that TSO should recommend to the council, George? That's a good question. I just want a clarity and it's gotten a gotten clarity now as to, but it is a question now who actually makes the request. What Manage is describing is that we're leaving it up to the sponsors to proceed since it's their bylaw, but they can't come back to us in a couple of weeks if they haven't done these things. Or we as TSO go to the council and say, you need to do this. I don't really care in a sense, but it has to be done. I think Alyssa's correct. One way or the other, the council needs to reach out to Paul officially and asking to provide this information. At the same time, the sponsors need to do some a little bit of historical research and they may also want to look at the issue I raised earlier about B1C and there may be a couple of other things on their list, but are we satisfied as a body that the sponsors will go ahead and bring this to the council on their own? Or do we as a committee simply want to take that on and say, we'll do that. We'll go to the council at the next meeting through our chair and officially ask the council to do this. We could do that and then leave the rest up to the sponsors. Yeah, that would be one possibility we could just in our next report make a recommendation that the council ask Paul to provide the equivalent of an annual report as set out in the draft surveillance technology bylaw in order to get more baseline data for us to decide about whether to recommend it. Evan? Yeah, I understand the rationale for asking that to some extent, as Darcy just said, it's more data for us to inform our decision, but I would say that while I understand Alyssa's motivation, I don't feel the same motivation or that same need. I think it would be interesting to have. I don't think I need that to make my decision and I have some hesitation to put the sponsors and the town manager through that process just for us to have a little bit more information because I'm not quite sure that I'm gonna learn all that much more to influence my eventual decision on this. And I know Alyssa's gonna disagree with me and tell me why I'm wrong, but that is sort of where I'm at right now. And so my preference is for it not to be a recommendation of the TSO, but a request of the sponsors that they can act on or not. And it's sort of their decision about whether they want to bring that type of information forward, which may help or hurt the chances of their bylaw passing, but I personally don't feel like it needs to be a recommendation of the TSO. And if we do take a vote to recommend, I'm not quite sure how I would vote on that. I'd be fine leaving it up to the sponsors to determine how to proceed from here. Alyssa? So this is where it gets complicated when you try and figure things out as you're having an actual deliberation, right? Not everybody's limited to two minutes and only speak twice. But I guess where the place I'm at and the place having an ad are significantly different in that I indicated earlier that my approval would not necessarily hinge on this information. And it doesn't exactly, but if the, I didn't wanna put the sponsors on the spot and say, you have to do this and you have to do it for the next meeting of the town council, but I also didn't want them to think it was unimportant. And so I guess what I'm trying to say is if they're uncomfortable doing it, the two of them under the specific provision of the charter that Mandy Jo can probably rattle off the top of her head, if they'd rather, if they felt it was more helpful to come from the TSO, then I would press for that even if I wouldn't necessarily get Evan's vote for it. But I'm a little concerned that I'm hearing that it might not be very useful information in which case it shouldn't be in the bylaw in the first place. It should be useful information to the town council as it makes future decisions under the course of the bylaw and budget decisions and values decisions. If it's unimportant or not very important, then I don't see why it would be in the bylaw in the first place. So I'm confused by that. I don't think annual reports are supposed to be an exercise just to be gotten through. I think they're supposed to have actual value. If it's not gonna have value, we don't need it to make any kinds of decisions then why have the report at all? Thank you, Alyssa, George. This is a complex bylaw and it has many moving parts and it's new. It's not something that's been done a lot in the rest of our Commonwealth. So leaving it up to the sponsors, I guess I would say to them if they just decided it wasn't worth their effort or they didn't think they'd get very interesting information that would be troubling to me. So I would ask them and expect that they would do this. It's due diligence. And so I guess it's just my message to the sponsors. Please don't just slough it off. I think it should be done. I don't think we were intending to slough it off. I think that's a fantasy. So unless someone wants to make a motion, it seems like we are asking the sponsors to go to the council to ask for a motion to ask Paul to come up with the data that would be the equivalent of an annual report under this bylaw. Does that make sense to you, sponsors? Yeah. Okay. George, still have a hand. Oh, there we go. Okay, so we have a number of different items that the sponsors are going to report back to us on and they're going to go to the council and ask about getting this data. They're going to find out about Cambridge's experience and I'm not going to list all the other things, but they have them on a list and they're going to get back to us about them. So I think that ends this portion of the meeting. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mandy, Joe and Pat. So we're going to move on to time manager updates and council questions about the time manager report and to start with, we're going to get an update about the seasonal shelter issue, which if Dave never came, did he? At least I don't see him here. Athena said that he thought he was going to show up, but maybe Paul, you would be able to give us an update and I know that Kevin's here to speak somewhat to the need for the facility. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think David I know was traveling today for personal reasons. And so at the January 25th meeting, the council put forth an action added a goal to the town manager. We are working on that through our staff level and I don't have a more detailed update to you for that, but I take that on as the responsibility that you voted for me. So we'll be working on that. Okay, thank you. Kevin, would you like to share something about the group that is formed and what you see as the needs? Oh yeah, thank you for this opportunity and no problem with waiting. This is the first time in 10 years we've been able to get to this level of talking to this many councilor. So we're grateful. We'll wait till midnight if we have to or longer. Anyway, it's been a successful season. There's been great cooperation between the Craig's Doors and town government, including the Amherst Police Department. I was just running over to the CVS to wave at them. Anyway, we've only had one, touch wood, we've only had one positive case of COVID-19, which we got through and with a little bit of quarantine and we've had some tremendous success with the Department of Housing and Community Development. They've been financing the use of motels this season, which has been a very big help. And so we have 22 guests at the University of Amherst and we have about the same number over at the Econolodge, which we just opened on the 15th of February. And in order to, that came online Monday morning, really, about noon time, and so we depopulated the congregate site at the Unitarian Meeting House temporarily and they're going to reopen that tomorrow morning. So we'll have another 14 bed capacity there. I anticipate that'll get filled pretty quickly. But this issue, and we appreciate the fact that we've been able to meet with town counselors about this for the last few months, the issue is that Craig's doors itself is homeless and that there's no permanent place. We operated for 11 years, well, the shelter operated for 11 years at First Baptist Church and that's no longer available. The site is still available for our resource center, but the church itself is not something that we would be able to use for a shelter site. The Unitarian Universalist Meeting House is going to be limited in size and when the congregation reopens, probably sometime in the fall, it really won't be an adequate space, won't be possible to use that space. So we're looking for a home, that the homeless agency is homeless and we're looking for a home. And so, again, we're grateful that there's this kind of interest in meeting of town counselors because we do need to find a place and preferably a place that the town already owns that we could move in and renovate or retrofit as necessary. We did submit that document to you and George, Ryan in advance of this meeting just to let people know the types of stuff, things that we need, adequate space for 30 to 35 people, adequate kitchen facility, adequate congregate space, places for doctors visits, places for counseling, all of these things. And this is something that we hope to be able to move toward a full-time day center throughout the year. I know this has been an interest to the council as well, because there's a lack of daytime activities. I think we also have to remind ourselves that this COVID time is, of course, tragic, but it's also presented some funding opportunities that have made things a little bit easier this season. We anticipate those funds will dissipate and go away once COVID goes away and we'll gladly take the healthy nation over funding for motels, but at the same time, it is unfortunate that things will go back to normal, which is unfortunately that we walk by people who are living on the streets and I'm not accusing anybody of anything. I'm just saying that it's sad that we have a system that enables people to be homeless in a country that's so wealthy and powerful. I mean, really, this goes back to the cutting of the HUD budget back in the 80s and has never really recovered. So we need a home and we are also this year because of some of the resources working on getting people into permanent affordable housing. We have 14 housing subsidies. So we're optimistic that we can make this work because of all the energy that's around not only your table, but ours and in the interfaith community as well. And now we have a regional effort with the participation of the Ecology and Hedley. I mean, we're actually running it, but the fact that we've made an entry into Hedley and there's been no problem so far, touch wood, we hope that there can be some kind of seamless regional approach between Northampton and Amherst and we can all share that Amherst is about now on the par with the level of guests that the city of Northampton has been housing. I think they're about at 45. We might have 47 currently in terms of capacity. So this is all good, but at the same time, COVID has also caused a lot more new people to become homeless. We haven't seen a lot of them yet, but we know that they're coming and we're seeing some people that we don't know from the year. So we haven't been able to dig deep enough to find out what the reasons are. Anyway, I'll shut up here and let you ask questions if you have any, but we're optimistic that we can identify a site and that we can continue this welcome cooperative relationship that we have with the town of Amherst. Thank you, Kevin. And I realized I didn't introduce you as the director of Craig Stores. So, okay, for the viewing public. So, do we have any of the counselors have questions? George. Here's one for Kevin and one for Paul, but let's start with Kevin first. Are you finding that the population this year is markedly different from past years because of COVID?  Are you still seeing that kind of phenomenon? So you have say housing right now, say for 47 people, but they're, you know, next week or a week after that, it could be a set of new people or is there a fair amount of change over from week to week or is it fairly consistent the same group pretty much throughout the season? Have you seen any differences this year in the COVID year from past years? Well, with the exception of a couple of people that I don't know and Dr. Lowry is on the call too she helped us as a volunteer last year. We're seeing pretty much the same group of people that we saw last year and they're managing. Remember when March came around last year, I hate to compare it to this, but it just felt to me personally like it was like some kind of atomic mob had dropped and there was nobody in the streets, that everything was closing. The only people on the streets were people who were homeless and there were very limited options for them to avail themselves of. And we did something that most agencies did not do. We expanded our services rather than retract them because of COVID. And because we thought we needed to, there was no other option. One of the things that the motels has afforded us an opportunity to do is to prioritize women and those who are elderly and more vulnerable. So we are seeing more women than we were before. So that would be the most or the market difference that I've seen between the two years that I've been back is that we're seeing a lot more women. And with COVID, there's a lot more domestic violence. And so we're seeing the effects of that. But no, generally speaking, the group is pretty similar. And there's some success stories. Some people have gotten into housing and they're not returning. So that's always very good. But we do need, I think it's fair to say that after decades of doing this, not me too, but the community, we can safely say that this problem isn't going to go away unless there's a massive attempt on the part of the federal government to house people as there was after World War II. I was just looking at the street names and amours that happened to come across Memorial Drive. I realized it was named for the World War II that we're coming back and seeking housing and probably most of the houses on that were VA housing. Now that the federal government has got out of that business, we're going to have this problem with us for a while. And so I think we need to be prepared with the site to respond to it. Otherwise, people will be on the streets. Thank you, Kevin. I appreciate that. Just a quick question for Paul. It's really more, maybe more of a comment, but here's a question really. You've said many times and I agree with you, this is a regional problem. And so it needs a regional response, but it often seems to me that it's essentially Northampton, Amherst, and Holyoke that are the region and everyone else is missing in action. This year for the first time, Hadley actually is in the game. I'm not sure that they chose to be, but they are. Do you have any sense that you, I mean, we have a partner in Sunderland now. I'm just looking for other communities that not necessarily saying they would put a shelter on the, but do we even have a chance to talk to them? Do they even answer our phone calls?  So any optimism there? Or it's, I know you're thinking about it, but I'm just curious if that's something that you think might produce results, especially now that we actually have a foothold in Hadley. So, well, first off, I want to say, the state really did set a step up in a big way financially. And Kevin, more than any other shelter director in the state was there to take the money and move forward. I mean, in many ways, this has been the best shelter season we've had. And I just, it's 100% due to Kevin and his team. So I just totally go ahead and give credit. He's done just a wonderful job of securing locations. You know, we think of it, or I think of it as more Greenfield, Northampton and Amherst. Holyoke hasn't done as much in the past. I think they, I'm not sure if they're doing anything now, but that seems to be the triad that we would be looking at because that seems to be where the relationships are. Yeah, I think you're right. Hadley as a community hasn't stepped up, I think there was a location found there, but that doesn't mean there aren't other, there can be locations in Hadley as well. We just want them to be the right locations. For our team, it's Dave Zomek who's been involved with this and Mary Beth O'Gilovitz, the director of senior services who's really grabbed on to this very aggressively and is, and we're, you know, I think I've said in my comment to report, we're going to be broadening this out a little bit more as we, as we start to really find permanent site because the clock is ticking as you all know. And we need to have a site ready because just what Kevin said earlier. Thank you, Paul. I see that Susan Lowry has her hand up and I would like to call on her because she, I believe she came to present and she's a doctor. She's formerly my doctor. And provide services for Craig Stores and is that true, Kevin? Yes, that is, I hope she's still on the call, she was.  Oh, good, good.  Here we go. I'm sorry, my dogs were fussing, so I had muted them so they wouldn't distract everyone else. They get jealous when I'm on a Zoom. But in addition to what Kevin was pointing out, one of the things that we have seen is that just, just basic hygiene and toileting were things that disappeared when all of the small businesses in town were closed. People used to be able to go to the library, to go to the town hall, to go to brookers. They could sit and have a cup of coffee and spend three or four hours on a rainy day and be able to use the indoor plumbing there. We have set up with Kevin's incredibly dogged persistence port-a-potties so that people had access to be able to, take care of basic bodily functions during this time. The fact that we might lose any of that in May or June, as a resident of Amherst, I find that embarrassing. That we cannot provide for the most vulnerable among us and that we would somehow, to think them less worthy of basic comforts. I would absolutely second Paul's mention that, there are many towns that, that are skipped over. People take the bus from Northampton to Amherst or from Greenfield to Amherst. This morning, I COVID tested a couple of guys who were picked up by the Sunderland police and brought to the center of Amherst and dropped off because they knew somebody would help them. And they walked all the way down to Amherst and they walked all the way to the Econelodge where I got a text at 5.30 in the morning and then did their screening so that tomorrow they can go to the UU and get a cot. I mean, what are we talking about here? I just would ask that we come up with something that is sustainable over the long haul so that we can say to those among us who have chronic mental illness or substance abuse disorders or lose their jobs because of the pandemic and have nowhere to go that we're gonna step up. I'm sorry, I spoke much too long but those are my thoughts as a medical person in the community. Thank you, Susan. Any final discussion on this? I think that we're going to be able to have regular updates as far as finding out from the town manager what's going to be happening with the task force that's gonna be created, I guess. So I think we can, unless anyone else has any other comments, George, you look like you're- Alyssa has her hand up. Oh, I'm sorry, Alyssa. Thank you, George. I just wanted to say two things and so given all the services you've provided, well actually three, because given all the services you've provided through the Survival Center and Craig's Doors et cetera, so you can talk, no one's gonna cut you off. So thank you for everything you've done. And to Kevin, of course, as well, who stepped up into a breach when he had thought he had retired. So thank you again for that history as well. I was very proud to be part of the Select Board when we first opened a warming place which people were pretty nervous about and then turned it into a shelter and now these years later, it's been Craig's Doors for many times. And so I really appreciate this new goal that the town council put together on exploring the possibility of creating a permanent seasonal year-round shelter. And it goes on, but I really liked what you just said, Darcy, about getting regular reports on what's happening here because this is the kind of thing that given all the other things we're working on, sometimes exploring possibilities doesn't get as much time and attention as it might. And obviously there's a timeliness to this issue and appreciating Sue's comments about, for example, making sure in the meantime, we keep the porta-pottys up, right? While we're figuring stuff out that we do some basic things like that. The only other, so the other comment I wanted to make sure I made is that the town, since we were gonna talk about the town managers report, anyway, the town managers report has suddenly started referring to this as an unhoused population concept. And I know the town managers going to say, Alyssa, Google Ability, really? Because unhoused population is not something people are gonna search for. They're gonna search for, what are you doing for the homeless population? I'm totally fine. If that's the new term of art in the field, I'm totally willing to change that thought process, but I would just like the reports to say formerly known as homeless because otherwise the word homeless doesn't appear in the town manager report. Whereas in fact, there's actually quite a bit of information about the unhoused population in the town managers report. So I just want us to avoid losing, being able to Google things because we're starting to use new terms of art. But hearing that we will hear regular updates both in the town manager report and here at TSO, I think will be really helpful to people, particularly as I said, any sort of temporary long-term things we can do associated with sanitation possibilities for people because stuff is not, despite Governor Baker's orders today, stuff is not suddenly gonna be open to everything and all the time. So we wanna make sure we allow people to still have for what we would all consider basic needs to be met in various locations, so I think. Okay, thank you. I think that we need to move on now. And I thank Kevin and Susan very much for their presentations. And like I said, we'll be regularly asking the town manager for an update on what's happening. So we are going to move on to- Thank you. And my apologies to Ben and Christine. I know you've been waiting for a long time. So we're going to move on to the Wayfinding Science presentation. Ben, are you the primary on this or what? Still here, yep. I am, let's see here. Yeah, so no problem. I'm happy to wait. That was all really interesting. And I've been on the other side of it where meetings go very long and make people wait. So it's all good. Yeah, I think it's hard stop at seven tonight, right? Because Andy has to leave and I'm not sure maybe other people have to leave at seven. So go ahead, Ben. Yeah, certainly. So I guess just for everyone to let you know where we are, obviously we presented to the Full Town Council on, let's see here, February 8th. And it was our concept for the Wayfinding Science. We presented our proposed locations for the science, the design of the signs as we have them now. And then the Full Town Council referred the motion to TSO for further refinement of the sign proposal for then recommendation by May 3rd to the Full Town Council. So I think the way we see this meeting today is kind of just a kickoff of the process with TSO to understand kind of what we need to do to get your support and the process moving along. And so I am going to just quickly pull up the presentation given to the Full Town Council, let's see here. And just kind of run through a little bit of the proposal as a reminder of where we're at and then we can kind of open it up for further discussion. And I see Alyssa's hand is up. Alyssa?  So the real question is, what were the Town Council questions that they actually referred to TSO? Because I didn't want it referred to TSO. And so what was the purpose of doing that? That's what we should be taking advantage of Ben's time here to discuss are the things that Town Council thought TSO would be a value add to this, not what we all vaguely remember from the February 8th meeting. I mean, they had specific things. I know it doesn't say that in the motion, but they had specific things that they wanted us to report back on. What were those things and how can we get Ben to help us with those things so we can get this over with? Were there specific things? I don't recall that. Ben, do you? I'm looking at my notes right here. I remember they asked for that, Alyssa. I don't think that... Yeah, my sense it was just a... Just clarifying the exact locations of the signs. And again, only two of the welcome signs are in the public right of way. The other two are either on private property or on the state right of way. So it's the two welcomes... Sorry, two welcome signs, one here and one here. And then the locations for the directional post signs throughout town. There wasn't a whole lot of debate or discussion at the town council meeting. I think they just wanted a committee to have one more look at it to kind of just look it over just look it over again. I don't remember any specific questions. I think there's a positive feeling about the design of the signs themselves. Here's the welcome sign and here's the directional post sign. But that's my recollection at least. George? It's all starting to come back to me like some bad dream. Languages, one councilor wanted different languages on the signs. Another councilor was fascinated by what gets chosen and what doesn't. I don't care these fascinations and concerns but they spend a fair amount of time talking about them. We haven't heard any more about that but I don't remember that quite explicitly. What gets picked and what languages they're in. And... Oh, right. Okay, that does come back to me now. Yeah. And I don't really know what to say about that but that's something I guess we could address. Do we feel there's a need for different languages? Do we feel that we need to weigh in on what particular points of interest or on what particular signs? I don't have any strong feelings about this one way or the other. I think there was a general agreement that we like the look of this. I think the look is great. I like the idea of creating some kind of unified series set of signage throughout the community. The locations I have absolutely no thought on whatsoever. It's, you know, I leave that up to people who think about this a lot more than I do. There may be something specific we need to just as a committee say about the two places of the public way where we have to just make a recommendation which I think would be fine. Go ahead, put it there. But maybe my colleagues have different thoughts. But far as the languages, you know, maybe somebody has some thoughts on this committee and as whether they care about how big they are or how easy they are to read or what gets on a sign and what doesn't, those are things that people raised. Christine. Thank you. I just wanted to make a couple of comments. We did discuss the issue of languages after the meeting with the town council. And we decided that there wasn't really room on these signs to put various languages and still have the signs be legible. We want these signs to be legible both from passing cars and also from bipedestrians and bicyclists. And if we start putting more languages on the signs, we're really going to make the lettering very small and make it hard to read. So that was one thing I wanted to note. The other thing I wanted to say was there, we've thought pretty carefully about the places that we think should be chosen to be put on these directional signs. And we think that the best route for figuring that out is to have the planning department staff and the DPW staff come together on this and then consult with the town manager and come up with a plan. Because I think that it's going to be very, very challenging for the five members, I think of this TSO and then 13 members of the town council to come to any agreement about the particular places that we're directing people to. So I think it would be better if you just put your faith in the planning department and the DPW staff and the town manager to make those choices. So that's all I wanted to say. Thank you, Christine. Evan. Well, I was just going to say that if we were wondering what the questions were from the council, although it sounds like many of them are coming back to our memory, I did go ahead and open the minutes of that meeting. Oh, thank you. And so, Shalindy asked about languages. Hanneke asked whether or not the council, if these would ever come back to the council if perhaps after they're approved. Councillor Pam raised questions about the colors and color blindness specifically. And Councillor Shane raised questions about whether direction to parking areas will be on the signs as part of the recommendation from the downtime parking working group or if signs and consistency in parking signs is a separate issue. So those are the things that were in the minutes as far as the questions that they expected us to answer. Alyssa? Yeah, I appreciate that we're actually using the minutes for something. So that was really useful. And thank you for bringing that up, Evan, because I was digging up my notes. And the only other thing that I came up with was a nuance around the idea of if it didn't go to TSO, which of course was what I was promoting, don't send it to TSO, is that the town council would never see it again and would not know which cultural institutions would be included. And I believe Chris just indicated that that was something staff was still working on. And that comment was also that even, it was worth it to refer to the TSO, even if it was just to wait for staff to answer those questions. So staff could answer those questions, tell those answers to TSO as Chris just did, for example, with the languages, could tell us as they continue to figure out which cultural institutions address the color blindness issue and the parking science issue, that come back to TSO, TSO says, yep, that seems to have answered the questions that were raised in the minutes. Now we have a whole bunch more questions for you. Or no, ideally we say, yes, we're done with it now and we send it back to the town council. Thank you. I have a couple of questions for Chris or Ben. One is, I saw in the presentation that in 2017, that these signs were proposed and they didn't go forward because of, they didn't like the designs or something like that. What happened during that period of time and what was the problem with the previous design? Do you want me to answer that? Yes, please. So the previous design didn't really have anything to do with what was proposed by Seth Gregory. We do have the presentation about the previous design on the town website and I'm trying to think of who it is. Maybe it's the planning department, but I could send you information about that. But we thought that it was prepared, it was part of a grant that we received from the state and we were assigned a designer from the Boston area and he came out and gave us kind of a set of signs that was very similar to signs that he'd done for other towns. And we just felt like it didn't really speak about Amherst and so we made the decision to then go out and hire our own sign designer to really look at Amherst in particular and spend time with us and not just kind of give us a cookie cutter approach. So we put those old signs aside as being too cookie cutter and we wanted something that was more personally related to Amherst, but if you do want to see those other signs I can certainly send them to you. No, well, that's interesting because I, and I'm just stating my own personal opinion now is that it makes a whole lot of sense to me to have the welcome signs in order to make sure that people come into downtown in order to use our businesses. The directional signs I actually, it's funny that you said that the previous signs were rejected because they were cookie cutter and that's sort of my reaction to the directional signs. I actually Googled cookie cutter today to see to see what it really meant. And I guess it's hard not to be cookie cutter. It's hard to have signs that are uniform like that and not feel like they're cookie cutter like they're like every other town that has signs like that. So yeah, I guess I have some problems with the directional signs. And I wondered if the ones that were not being asked to okay, the ones that are not on private property, are they going forward regardless, the private signs? So just to clarify, the two private signs are both the two welcome signs, not the direction. I think all the directional post signs are in the public right of way. Oh, they are, okay. It's two of the welcome signs that are in the state right of way or the others on private property. Yeah, and do we have any indication that people are in need of directions to go to those places? We do have an indication from talking to the bid that people really need directions to these places. They come into the center of town and they don't really know where the Dickinson Museum is or the West Cemetery. Now, granted people can go on their phones these days. These signs were, the idea for these signs was started, I don't know, five years ago when not everybody had a phone and not everybody was able to go and find every place on their phone. But we still think that this would be a welcoming sort of greeting to people coming to town to acknowledge to them that we think these places are important and we think these places are places that they might wanna visit and directing them to those places. And we did hear for years from the bid that people needed directions to these places. Thank you, George. I don't know that we wanna get into but this will be decided by my colleagues into redesigning or critiquing the look. But so I don't have any strong feelings one way or the other. I like the consistency and if that's cookie cutter, I guess I like cookies. My question has to do more with the welcome signs. I see that, you know, and maybe I'm just not reading this right but there are four of them, is that correct? Yes. Right. Two in the East and two, well, two in the East, one somewhat to the West and the others pretty much in the center of town. I'm wondering about the North and the South. Is it just because of the normal traffic flows or why wouldn't we also have or think of having a welcome sign to the North and a welcome sign to the South? Does that make sense? Especially you've got one on College Street. I mean, you kind of already in the center of Amherst almost really, so you get a bar in the center of Amherst. And the main street sign is pretty much in the center of Amherst. So I'm just wondering if there was thought given to maybe pushing them a little bit further out and certainly the North and South seems to be ignored. And maybe there's a good reason for that given the way most people come into Amherst. But I think Bustertown Road is a place a lot of people come into Amherst. I don't know. So that was the only thought I had about placement was with the welcome signs. Should there be more? And should they be maybe to the North and South and maybe a little bit farther to the West? Or I'm sorry, to the East. Yeah. Paul actually had a good answer to that at the meeting. Do you want to answer that, Paul? Or do you want me to paraphrase what you said? I remember everything Paul says in our meeting. So what can you say that you've gotten? He basically said that people come into Amherst and those signs are at intersections where their GPS might tell them to go somewhere other than toward downtown businesses. And so they're at strategic locations that try to direct people to come downtown. Whereas the North and the South, I mean, people are just on 116, pretty much going straight North, right? People coming up on 116, they're just heading for downtown. Although, I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about that. Yeah. No, you're right, Darcy. I mean, if UMass is up here where it says proposed locations and if you look, you know, folks might turn up on University Drive to bypass downtown and get straight to UMass. Likewise, Triangle Street is a cut through to get to UMass. So these three were placed at those locations as key intersection points to direct, just let people know that there is a town center that they can go visit.  One that's on the common, there wasn't really a good place eastbound of here to put such a sign. Once you get down to the intersection where the Florence Savings Bank is, things get so cluttered down there that it would probably just, you probably wouldn't even notice a sign there. So we really thought about a lot of different places along Belcher Town Road and College Street as you approach town from the east, but it didn't appear that there was another better location. What about the north and the south, thoughts on that? North and the south, we didn't really consider that. That wasn't really part of our plan, although certainly I think there may be enough money in the budget that we could do that. We're not maximizing the complete sign system here. We were focusing on the welcome signs and the post-signs because we thought we'd get those in place and then we could go back and look at kiosks and maybe we can look at signs coming from the north and south as well. And someone did mention that when the Pomeranian intersection is redone, there may be an appropriate place for a welcome sign at that point where you're kind of coming into the main part of Amherst. So we'd certainly be willing to consider signs coming from the north and south. I'm just worried about alienating the north and the south. That's all. Don't worry about the north. Okay, but then the south. I'm worried about the south, but anyway. Evan? Yeah, so as far as our role here in helping to answer these questions, I think we've heard Chris answer the languages question and the locations question. The one that I'm interested in hearing about, and maybe I just missed it, is the parking question. So in one of the examples, you showed parking on one of the directional signs. And I didn't know if that was just put there or if you actually intend to have direction to parking, public parking on these signs. And if that is being done as part of sort of that larger recommendation from the downtown parking working group to have a consistent formatting color font for all of our directions to parking. So are these going to take place to our current directional signs? We're going to take the mismatch ones down. I would probably leave the banner signs up, but we will make sure that all of these, as many of these post directional signs can incorporate directions to parking. And will that sort of set the standard for what our directional signs to parking are going forward? Will they be, will we maybe change the banners to be consistent with the directional signs at some point? We could do that. It was very, I would say it was a challenging project to get those banners in. And so changing them may be equally challenging, but if that's what you'd like us to look at, we could do that. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, the blue P with the circle is a pretty universal parking sign and that is what the banners currently have. And then I will say, as we developed the proposed locations, they were chosen with parking in mind. So pointing out the Amherst Cinema lot, the Boltwood Garage lot, and what we can point to the Spring Street lot. So the town hall lot behind town hall will be pointed out by this one as well. So that was definitely a consideration. Thank you, Alyssa. So having been through many, many iterations of many, many sign projects over the years, perhaps was why I was a little less interested in TSO talking about this. I think Evan's been quite specific about the things that we still are addressing. And just for those who out in the world who really are not sure we need all these signs is that we do. We've had committees created whose main recommendation was the reason nobody plays golf at Cherry Hill Golf Course in the past, of course they do now. Was because nobody could find it. And then they'd say, well, I thought we were gonna put up a sign about that. Well, we didn't put the sign up yet. And it was like ridiculous. It's like really hard to come up with a signage system that then is consistently placed and consistently. And so this has been through various fits and starts for lots of reasons. And it's not just about directional signs, it's about signage in general as complex. Also, when it comes to our partnership with UMass for many years, it was only through really diligent work of town staff working with receptive people at UMass because of course they don't own the Mullen Center. They have a relationship with the Mullen Center. And what would happen is when people would leave Mullen Center events, they were all directed to go to Hadley. So people just thought the only thing that was near the Mullen Center were chain restaurants. They had no idea there was a downtown Amherst. So this was before the bid existed. I mean, there were lots of these conversations about how do we get people to where they wanna go? Even if they have, now that everybody has phones, right? Even back then we had walking tour signs, right? Little pieces of paper you could carry around. There is some basic signage we do need to get people to these broad destinations. And so I'm really pleased that we are finally making some real progress in getting there in a way that the staff feels comfortable with and the way design review board feels comfortable with. We'll answer a couple more questions about the cultural institutions that are mentioned or not mentioned so that people don't feel left out. They feel like they've met the requirements. And then just finally on the parking, I appreciate absolutely that we need consistency there. That's been a chronic complaint since forever, since signs have existed. The blue P is, as you say, the standard. I just hope that when we, that we do in fact do where we can on the directional signs, the parking, and we don't diverge too much from the standard cookie cutter blue P because that is what people are looking for when they come to town. And eventually we might have a wholesale replacement of all references to parking, but I would not want that to be the enemy of doing the best we can right now with what we've got and to actually get these in the ground. Cause I really do think it would help people figure out all the amazing things that Amherst has to offer. Thank you, George. Do you have another comment? Just a time check, we need to wrap this up. That's exactly what I was going to try to do, but maybe Darcy, you can do it better, just sort of list specifically what it is we're asking staff to do. So if the next time they come back to us, they will have a series of specific responses and then hopefully we're ready to send this onto the council. What is the list? I was raised, I believe, I mean, again, people should speak up and clarify this, but cultural institutions, what's going to be the process for choosing them? I think it's not a very long list. I don't think, I think Christine has addressed a number of them this evening as has. So if we could just come up with a list so they know what, and maybe they can tell us, but specifically, what are we asking them to do so when they come back, we're done. And we can get this. Okay, so they have discussed the language issue. That's off, right. Given us a response, they haven't told us what the process is for choosing cultural institutions. What are the other issues, Evan? Well, so actually I raised my hand to say that I don't have a list anymore. For me, I don't personally care about the process they use to choose the cultural institutions. I think that Chris answered that question by saying that they're asking the council to have trust in planning and DPW. And I assume also working with the bid and chamber to figure that out. I don't necessarily want the council to have a debate over the process in which they're going to use those cultural institutions, or even worse, a debate about which institutions to put on those signs. I personally feel that they have dispensed with the questions that we've asked and I am actually satisfied and ready to send this back to the council. Okay, Alyssa? I second that. George? Do we have any specific public way things we need to weigh in on? I mean, I thought that was something that was where we just need to say, you know, these are fine. Just, just, or do we? Yeah, we're just, and could zero in on the two locations that are in the town way? Yep, yeah, here's one of them on the comments. And we've reviewed this location with the town engineer, and he thinks this is an appropriate location. Okay. So that's it. The second one is on Amity Street here at the intersection of Amity University and University North. This is actually going to be a two-sided sign. So this is the approach from the north and the south pointing towards town center. It needs to be decided to see it from the north part of University Drive and the southern part of University Drive. And then if you're on Rocky Hill Road, you'll be able to see the north face of the sign. And the directional signs are all in the public way also, right? That's correct. George, you still have a comment? Well, just then do we need to do something formal or just say we recommend to the town council that they accept all these locations in the public way? I certainly don't have any thoughts about it. I think, you know, I trust staff. I trust, you know, people have looked at this. So do we need to do something formally as a committee? Yeah, we can make a motion. If people are ready, Andy, you haven't weighed in at all. It sounds like you're, Pope Hasedic. I've been in agreement with the discussion. I think that we should have a motion to move this back to the council and to make the recommendation for the two locations in the public way as proposed. So it's not just the two locations, right? It's all, it's to approve the request to place wayfinding signs in the public way. Correct. Yeah, it's the two welcome signs. And we have here, where did it go? 11 directional signs. So we can just say as proposed. Yeah. So I move to recommend that the town council approve the request to place wayfinding signs in the public way as proposed. Second. Any more discussion? Briefly, Darcy. Yes, Alyssa. We should just, and I'm totally fine with the motion you just made. I would just ask that when we transmit it to the council in a report, we actually kind of put a dot, dot, dot in our minutes that we use the language that was the original language that staff asked us to use, right? When this originally went to the town council, just so that there's no indication that literally nothing has changed, okay? So what they asked us to pass the first time at town council is the thing we're going to recommend not just as proposed at TSO tonight. It was the original thing that was proposed. So that's part one. So just having the appropriate reference because you all know that on the motion sheet it doesn't just say as proposed, it says, you know, blah, blah, blah report dated such and such. And then, but that can just be picked up later. And then the second piece of it is just, I believe we are all agreed that the understanding is that with the TSO report, but not Darcy, it doesn't have to wait for it in writing the TSO report. Just that the town staff will through the town manager somehow communicate the additional information in terms of what was talked about in terms of languages, what was talked about in terms of parking, and what was talked about in terms of cultural institutions just because the council wanted those questions answered, but the TSO report doesn't have to wait for those. We're saying we believe that information is going to be provided and we believe it will be adequate for town council to make a decision. Can you list those things again, languages? Second thing, I didn't catch on the cultural institutions. The colors, cultural institutions. The color blindness issue and the cultural institutions. And parking. And parking. And parking. So it's actually four things. We didn't really address the color blindness issue, but I would say that there's really not much we can do about it. Well, they just, they wanted a mention of that. So just mention that, not much we could do about it. It's fine, you know, that's what it says. What do you want to memo from us to town council about these things? Yeah, I think it's like half a page. Okay, so we need to vote on this. Alyssa. Hi. RC, yes, Evan. Hi. George. Yes. Andy. Yes. Okay. Thank you, Christine and Ben. Welcome. I will sit that on in the report. So we have like about five minutes left. I think I'm going to, now, how many people have to leave at seven o'clock? Okay. The one thing that we really need to talk about, so I'm going to skip them and just put it on the next meeting. Is the fact that we have to figure out when we're going to have our outreach about what Pomeroy intersection. And my suggestion is that we add it to our March 25th meeting. We had said that we were going to put one in one of our meetings and one like on a Saturday. So my suggestion is the March 25th meeting, either at five or at six, depending on what you think. And then maybe that following Saturday, the 27th, if you guys are available, what do you think about that? And what would you expect then? Would you expect us to run through the whole Pomeroy Lane presentation that we gave you? I think it was, well, I don't remember when it was, but maybe January 25th. And then have questions from people in comments. Is that what you would expect from us? I'm assuming that we're going to have a presentation at both of those times, that the first would only be an hour because we'd have to have maybe a one hour of our two hour meeting. That's the way I'm thinking of it. So if other people have other ideas, please say so. And then I was thinking of the Saturday one as being two hours, have a presentation, and then just open it up to public comment. Whether, I don't know about having a back and forth. Alyssa? So I'm excited to hear that my twice now bringing up the idea that we're hosting this and that we need to be working with staff as to what this is going to look like as just like flown completely out the window, even though I've said it twice. So no, the answer is not, staff needs to redo the presentation from town council. That's absolutely not the answer. The answer is that Darcy or her designate or whatever else TSO decides needs to have somebody work through Paul with staff on what these things are going to look like. I appreciate that setting the date is really helpful, so that we can start publicizing these things to the various districts and in various newsletters, but we're not going to decide here as a group what that's going to include. And it definitely is not going to include giving the presentation that went to town council. It's going to be something that's oriented toward outreach and answering questions that we think need to be answered for people. Because otherwise it's just a video where we tell them what we're going to do, right? So if we're not going to give people a chance to have thoughts about decision points, then we can just publish a video and be done with it. If we're actually going to engage people in something, that's the conversation I thought I presented a couple of times already, where we need to figure out, given that it's, you know, this is not a time when we can all be sitting together doing super creative exercises in person. If there are decision points to be made, which there obviously is, right? There's the roundabout versus the signalized intersection. We don't, I do not have any interest in going to a public outreach thing that says, do you want to signalized intersection or roundabout? That's useless. People don't know the answer to that because they don't know the advantages or disadvantages. They don't know what kind of land takings might need to occur. They don't understand the ramifications of that. So I think we can pick these dates, but then somebody needs to be working together with staff and reporting back to TSO and intervening TSO meeting to say, this is what we'll actually accomplish. Because otherwise it's going to be like, oh, we had outreach. We told them the same thing. They could just watch the Old Town Council presentation. Like that's not outreach. That's just telling people stuff. So if what we're actually trying to do is get input that's informed as to whether or not people want a signalized or a roundabout, we have to give them some kind of interactivity at these two events. And I do think one can be shorter Darcy. I think that's totally reasonable to include it as part of our meeting. And then the other one can potentially be 90 minutes on a Saturday. Okay, thank you. Chris, do you have thoughts about that? I'm wondering, are you kind of indicating that you want a tutorial about what it's around about and how does that differ from a cross-intersection as a starter or what? Yeah, I think we're still trying to work it out, Chris. Paul, you have an idea? Yeah, just Chris, we will work this through with the chair and we'll come up with a plan of action. We don't have to discuss it now, because time is short. Yeah, yeah. We've already had some conversations with our staff about what they should look like. And I guess my main question to all of you is, does that work for you to have it be one hour of the March 25th meeting and then Saturday afternoon, the 27th, like two to four or something like that? George? Quickly, we'll know what we need to know by then. That's the assumption here. Okay, fine. Who are you asking that of? Well, really, if Christine and Paul, in other words, the information that we'll need to give to people, we'll have that information by then. So those dates are fine. So yeah, we just need to... Whatever it is that has to be done, we'll be done in time so that we'll have, you know, okay. We just need to be able to have information to send out to our constituents because I'm assuming that now that we know the dates and we can work something out with Paul and Christine, we can get the word out to the council to send it out to your networks and to get it in the town, public relations so that people know. And especially district five counselors sending out to people in district five because there's gonna be more interest there, obviously. Okay, so that's good. Let me just check and see if there's any public comment. This is the time for public comment. Sorry about that. It doesn't look like there's public comment unless this is the time. If you would like to give public comment, you can raise your hand. Does not look like public comment today. So we don't have any items not anticipated and so I think that's it. Liz says her hand up. Oh, sorry. I think it's important that for our next meeting because we basically just have one more meeting right before the 25th is to have a preliminary outline. And I mean, it does not have to be fancy for our prior to our next TSO meeting. So in our packet a day or two ahead of time that says this is what you decided with Paul or whoever you designate to help work on this will happen on the 25th and the 27th. And then we at TSO at our early March meeting can say, yes, those things make sense to us or no, we thought we were actually going in this direction because just not talking about it again except to say it's being planned I think is going to cause us unnecessary surprises. And as you say, if we have some basic information at our earlier March meeting, then we'll be better prepared to communicate with constituents, which we've already heard from one town councilor should not just be limited to district five, although of course there will be particular interest from district five. Right, no, that makes sense. Well, it's a good idea. And the March 11th meeting where we also have on the agenda the stormwater bylaws coming back to us. So I think that's it unless anybody else has anything else. No, I think I need to leave for the other meeting. Okay. Thank you. I think we're all gonna leave. Okay, thanks a lot. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. I declare us adjourned.


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