This is a meeting of the Amherstown Council. It is January 25th, 2021. And seeing that we have a quorum of the council present, I am going to call the meeting to order at 633. I am going to read the ground and then I'm going to be calling on people to make sure you can hear us and we can hear you. Governor Baker's March 12th order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law allows us to hold this virtual town council meeting. I will call on each councilor by name and at that time they should unmute their mic and say present. This will indicate that they can hear us and we can hear them. Please remember to mute your mic after saying present. So I'm going to begin and Shalini Balmilne. Present. Alyssa Brewer. Present. Pat DeAngelis. Present. Darcy Dumont. Hold on one second. Please bring Darcy in from the attendees. Okay. And I'll come back and check with her. Lynn Griesmer is present. Mandy Johanicki. Present. Dorothy Pam. Present. George Ryan. Present. Kathy Shane. Here. Steve Schreiber. Present. Andy Steinberg. Present. And Sarah Schwartz. Present. And Darcy Dumont is now in the room. Darcy. I'm here. Thank you so much. So we are. Okay. This meeting includes audio video and is available live on Amherst media. It is also being recorded. There is no chat room for this meeting. If you have a technical issue, please make sure that Athena and I both know so that we can address it in the meeting, either make note that you were interrupted or help you get reconnected. Discussion may be suspended if we have a technical issue. And Athena will be monitoring cancer connections. Along the way. We're going to start with some announcements. I'm not going to read them. But I do want to call attention specifically. Sean, are we ready with the announcements? Okay. Thank you. I do want to call attention specifically to the February 4th meeting of the school committee. This is a meeting with residents at their request. It's at six o'clock PM. And all counselors are invited to attend it. Although we are not, is not one of our meetings. The link for the meeting will be able to be found on the school website. I'm told as of tomorrow. I also then want to go to one other announcement. And that is actually going to be that we're, instead of doing a full COVID update, we've asked a dragon as our director of health. Give us a quick update on COVID vaccinations. And we will not have questions because frankly, this is an ever moving target. And the answer to that question today may change tomorrow or even tonight. So if we could now go on to the. Public service announcement that Emma is doing, and there's a slide presentation, Sean. Is it my turn to go? I wasn't quite sure if that was just putting your slides up now. Oh, great. All right. It was like that moment of silence. Yeah. Let's all do a mindful minute of breathing before that. So I know there's just, can everyone hear me? All right. I'm not quite sure how my connection is here. Great. So there is just so much going on with public health. And just like how Lynn said, the information is changing day to day and even hour to hour again. It's very reminiscent for me for being back in March and February and public health with how the speed of the information that we're getting all the time. So here we have the first slide, which is just that we're going to do a special update with how COVID vaccine distribution is going in Massachusetts and how it's impacting us here locally in the town of Amherst. Next slide. So here we can see the phase distribution timeline in the state of Massachusetts. This is a really nice visual that's available at that mass.gov site about COVID vaccines, which can give you some overview on when we're going into those. And at the bottom of this infographic does give us some estimated time frames for when we are in each phase, but certainly those time frames are subject to adjustment based on availability of the vaccine. Next slide. So right now we are full force in phase one group of distribution, which is including all of the individuals and groups. And groups within phase one. It started with those COVID facing healthcare workers, then those long-term care facility resident and workers, first responders, which included EMS fire, police, and 911 dispatchers, congregate care settings, home-based healthcare workers, and then finally those non COVID facing healthcare workers, meaning healthcare workers that aren't knowingly taking care of those non-COVID patients at that time. So these are all of the many different groups that we're addressing with a phase one distribution. Now, next slide, coming very soon. And just now is this great map on the state site where individuals currently it's only for phase one individuals, but where you can use this interactive map on the state site to find a vaccination site near you. And they're trying to make it helpful with all of these different colored stars. So you can know what kind of site they are. But I know sometimes when we try to make things really specific, it can kind of look a little cluttered. But as you can see over here to the left of this picture of this map, you can see the green star over Amherst, which is the general vaccine site at UMass. And then you can start to see a little bit of yellow under there. And that's us, which is a local vaccination site, which is open to select cities and towns. And information for this map, it's currently only available for individuals in phase one distribution, but they are going to be expanding it to the other phases throughout the distribution. So residents will be able to see what vaccine sites are live or available at that time. And I put that link at the bottom of this slide to help us out. Next slide. So so far, we have done an amazing job with vaccine distribution and the amount that we were allocated. We stood up a site at the Bang Center and we ran dates from January 11th to 15th. And also another day on January 22nd, a total of 692 vaccines were distributed. All of the eligible phases, individuals were those phase one individuals. And I just can't say enough how this has really been possible with a partnership of our fire departments, public safety, us here in the health department as well, not just locally, but interagency with the multiple towns around us and in Hampshire County. And that we had a great experience having the COVID ambassadors come and assist to our clinics to help and do some education because this is just such a trying time. And I think I heard some, I know I've heard people say that, you know, why don't I just stop by the site to see if there's some extras or maybe at the end of the day. And some of its education and some of it is just really great relationship building, but those COVID ambassadors, my goodness, that's such a wonderful program. And our paramedics are vaccinating alongside our school nurses and our lead public health nurse, Jen Brown. It's just a really amazing team that's come together during this time. Next slide. So vaccines moving forward. I know this is all everyone's big question. I mean, it's my question too, as information kind of changes day to day. So right now we are administering the Moderna vaccine, which many people know, like the Pfizer vaccine, you need two doses to be able to be fully vaccinated on their schedule. And us as a town is very prepared to continue as a site for broader distribution. This might be at the bank center or at the high school. We're considering the high school is another site as well. Our plan has a capacity to do up to 200, 2,500 vaccines a week if we were to go to the high school. But certainly we can have all of these plans and energy and enthusiasm, but without the materials, without the supply in the supply chain coming down to us, we're really limited to that. Last night we were notified, and some people might have seen in the news today, or by Governor Baker's statement earlier today, that there is a supply shortage to the state of Massachusetts at this time with vaccine distribution. And that right now, local health departments are going to be limited to an allocation of 100 vaccines a week through the end of February. We do want to also recognize that UMass, as that general vaccine site is a regional site that's available to our residents. There are also plans of a mass size vaccination site, which is being planned to start at the Eastfield Mall in the next week or so. So there's more sites coming online. They also want us to encourage our residents to further communicate with their primary care providers, or there's also going to be pharmacies that will be carrying the vaccine as well. So there's going to be multiple different venues where people will be able to access the vaccine. But us on the public health side, we're ready to go if we're given the supply, because we want to be there for our communities in need. Next slide. So frequently asked questions. I know, oh my goodness, Mary Beth and Jen Reynolds and her staff at the Council on Aging are getting questions all the time. And I know we are as well, in addition to the COVID concerns line, Angela Mills and Jen Wailston, they are just rock stars. So many of the questions that we get here is a few seniors over 65 of age are in phase two. Yes, you are. So the order for phase two distribution is in order of who goes first as what they're listed, of priority. That was the word I was looking for. So the first step in phase two is those individuals that will be 75 and older. And then it will go down to the seniors, the wise individuals that are over 65 years of age or individuals that identify as having two or more medical comorbidities. And then after that, the third step is all of the great infrastructural workers, those teachers, food workers, grocery stores, DPW, all of our inspectors and public health workers. There's that huge group at the end of phase three, at the end of phase two for that. Caretakers and translators, of course they can accommodate those that are seeking the vaccine. We've already had that on occasion. We are working on making sure that we will be able to provide notification, education in multiple languages. We're also working with, I know Mary Beth has been communicating with many town groups so that way we can engage our different populations that speak multiple languages. So that way we can meet them where they're at and see our communities in need. And the final thing here is that home health care workers are eligible for the vaccine at this time. That did just change last week as all of phase one is now open and we're happy to have them register. We already have had a lot of local home health care workers come to our vaccine site. And that's not just home health care workers that work under an agency or a company. Those could be a family member that takes care of an elderly family member or a disabled family member. Those are also people that can identify as home health care workers. Next slide. How will I know when I can get the vaccine? So Mary Beth Ogilovitz made this great number, this<PHONE_NUMBER> number. It's a specific line that's a dedicated line that she's made, started to make a call list to be able to reach out to when the vaccine comes and when we have more information. We are also going to engage and do promotion by using all of the traditional media outlets that Brianna uses when any kind of widespread notification goes out. And then also one thing that we're really happy to announce is that we're going to be doing a call-in show, if you will, on Tuesday, February 2nd at 7 p.m. I'm very excited about this. For a Q&A, a great opportunity to have a table and a platform with myself as the health director with Mary Beth Ogilovitz from the senior services there and then some Cooley Dickinson medical professionals to join us as well as experts in this field and to be able to maybe answer some questions in terms of how maybe Cooley Dickinson might be able to help support her local efforts as well. And that Zoom, we will be sending out once it's available. Next slide. And I wanted to end this with these links that individuals can find regularly updated information and I think one of the challenges with the information changing so frequently is that, you know, I'm looking at this stuff many times throughout the day and even that can change during the day when I'm looking at it. So I really try to use these state resources, these state links to give the best information. We also update our local Amherst COVID-19 site with information when we're able to and when we have testing, not testing, sorry, when we're going to be having a vaccine clinic out. But this link in terms of when can I get the COVID vaccine? That's great for the phased updates. They try to update that on Tuesdays and Thursdays because they're constantly evaluating those groupings for priority. And then also just overview in terms of the entire vaccination program throughout the entire state is that second link. And that's all I got for now. Thank you so much, Emma. Oh, you're welcome. I'm so glad I was able to come. And thank you for staying on top of this and all the work that you and your colleagues are doing. We're going to move on to another piece that I want to make sure we announce and that people understand it. The governance organization, legislation committee has asked that we add the feature of a clock for timing both public comment and counselor comments. And so Sean and Athena have worked on that. And I've asked them to demonstrate that at this point. So basically what Sean has done is he's put the clock in his surface. And as long as we don't keep seeing his head or the posted over his film, we'll see the number so that it will basically count down from three minutes. And you will know when three minutes is up. Okay, we'll only be using that during public comment and during counselor comments. Okay, we're going to move on then to general public comment. So this is the only public comment this evening. Residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at it. And based on the number of people who wish to speak, the council will not engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter raised during general public comment. And so I'm going to ask people who would like to make public comment, raise their hands. And the way we do this is we invite you into the room. And you into the panelist area. And we ask you to state your name and where you live. And then you proceed and so forth. So we start with Aaron Hayden. Please come into the room. State your name and where you live. Hi. Well, I'm Aaron Hayden and I live in district five down here in South Amherst. I guess I'm flattered that I get to try out the, be the first one to try out the clock. This is an exciting update. Any event, it's good to speak to all about the improvements the town is considering for the Pomeroy Road, West street intersection. I chair the transportation advisory committee and wanted to take a moment of public comment to talk about the planning for this intersection since you all be looking at a little bit later and to consider its reference. The intersection between the arterial West street and the residential Pomeroy lanes in the middle of a growing village center has been thought about for a long time and planning its improvement has been a subject to request for funding before the community has grown quite a bit since the traffic control and non-automotive access for this intersection was designed many years ago. We don't do intersections like that anymore when we can help it. I don't know if you've ever been through it. You see it's a dreadful place to try to cross. There are many new families joining the community that are within walking distance of the services that the village center provides and the amount of traffic on West street continues to grow. As we move through the planning for this intersection, oh, I heard a comment. I wrote this out so I could just go through it. As we move through the planning for this intersection, the transportation advisory committee is hopeful that the priority on the design and the priority of the basis of design for the work shifts from one of shifts towards the community's safe and comfortable use of the intersection and away from the old idea of speeding more cars through. At the district five meeting, some of you heard from neighbors in this community on this strong desire for safe and I want to add attractive pedestrian crossing here. The idea is that when this intersection was built, you know, 50 years ago, it really was designed to move cars and ignore its people as they often did in the day. And it's very important that we change that, that we get back to the pedestrians. We feel it is important that the nearby intersections are kept in mind as well as this work goes forward. All of those intersections face the same challenge of safety, supporting more people from the community as they walk and bike across and along west street. I'm going to stop now because my time is running out and I'm going to look forward to seeing the presentation a little bit later. Thanks so much. Thank you, Aaron. And thanks for your work on the tack. Yeah. Harry Mullin, please enter the room. State your name and where you live. Hi, my name is Harry Mullin and I'm on North East street in district four. I'm speaking tonight to ask the council to consider adding the following language to the resolution about the insurgents on Capitol Hill. I'm going to start with by quoting the part that I would imagine it would be added to. So be it further resolved. We call on the town manager to condemn the actions of the insurrectionists and enact practices, behaviors and policies to ensure that planned peaceful demonstrations by black, brown and indigenous people are responded to by law enforcement and public safety personnel in an anti-racist manner. Consistent with the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution and exhibit no greater force, no greater show of force than is routinely used in peaceful demonstrations by white people. I'd like you to add and ensure that no greater force can be used to condemn the actions of the insurgents. I would also like to add that the mayor's town employee who has sworn to uphold the laws and constitution of the United States or the commonwealth of Massachusetts participated in the violence and siege of the US. Capitol on January 6, 2021 and be it further resolved. We call upon the Amherst police department chief living in the city of New York City in the city of New York City, which is the city of New York City. I'm a critic process. I sent this earlier and I got a clarification, which is why I took out one part about keeping the two officer positions frozen. And I got a response from Councillor Dangelis saying that if a town employee did something illegal in DC on January 6, involved is not a town action and therefore it cannot be added to the resolution. I personally disagree because there are standards of conduct that law enforcement's in town officials must be held to. It seems to me as an outsider looking in to be a very common place for people's conduct to be questioned by media and other folks. So it seems reasonable as the town council who's in my understanding are the current supervisors of most of the town that you could look into the current conduct of your employees. And then I also wanted to add because I'm a little confused on the who can preach the police positions. It seems like they are moving forward as being frozen until the CESWG can finish their report. I would like to speak in favor of that. And Birdie is the next person and state your full name and where you live. Hi, I'm Birdie Newman. I am a high school student in district for and I'm speaking as a member of Defund 413 Amherst. I'm really glad the town is putting out a resolution in response to the insurrection at the Capitol. In terms of the freeze on the police officer positions, I am following Terry in supporting that. I hope that town council members support the motion to extend that freeze today so that they can get the feedback that they'd initially envisioned from the community safety working group. That seems really crucial. I also agree that to the extent that Amherst can look into their employees conduct and ensure that no one was at the insurrection, I think that's really important. And I don't know all the legal stuff around it, but we saw that there was a version of the resolution that had that in there that was like, yeah, we're going to look into this and make sure nobody was there. And I am curious why that got removed and what it might look like to add it back in or to amend it and add it back in. So that those are my comments for today. Thank you. Thank you, Birdie. Glad you could join us. Myra Ross, please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Myra, you need to unmute. Thank you. Okay. Hi. I am here. Myra Ross, I live in District 4. I'm representing the Disability Access Advisory Committee. We sent a memo to you regarding the Pomeroy Lane intersection. And it's for us, it's very crucial that you think along the lines that Erin Hayden already asked you to think along, thinking about pedestrian safety rather than just zooming cars through because it is a very busy crossing intersection. And we are very concerned that it could end up being made like the Triangle Street rotary roundabout was made, which is very unsafe for visually impaired people, for blind people, for anybody who walks slowly because there's no way to slow the traffic. So I don't know yet what we want you to do, but I know that pedestrian safety and pedestrian safety for people with disabilities, including blindness and mobility impairments, has to be your paramount concern when you design the intersection rather than moving the cars through quickly. Myra, thank you for your comment. Allegra, please state your full name and where you live. My name is Allegra Clark, and I am a resident of District 4. I am also speaking tonight in support of the resolution against the insurrection. I thank you guys for taking a stand on that. I do think it's important for the public to know whether or not there were any Amherst officers involved as we have seen reports that there were local law enforcement personnel present at the Capitol on that day. And in addition, I would just ask that the community safety working group, which has been doing very good work trying to look at all the angles that it's been asked to tackle, be given the opportunity to fulfill their mission and ask that the extension that they're requesting is granted and that with that, the two police officer positions will remain frozen until they're able to come up with some of the possible alternatives for policing in the town. Allegra, thank you for your comments. Are there any other public comments at this time? Okay, seeing none, then we are going to return to the agenda and we're going to move on to the consent agenda, which tonight is quite short, but can we show it on the screen? In the meantime, I will read the motion and look for a second. Just a reminder, the consent agenda, the following items were selected because they were considered to be routine, and it was reasonable to expect that they would pass with no controversy. To remove an item from the consent agenda for discussion later in the meeting, ask that it be removed when I list the consent agenda items. The request to remove does not require a second. The motion is to move the following items in printed motion and the printed motions there under and approve those items as a single unit. Suspension of town council rules of procedure rule 8.4 for agenda item 8C, amendments to the town manager goals. This is so that we can either pass those tonight or not. The other two are minutes 11A to C, approval, it's actually A to B, approval of minutes. December 5th, 2020, special town council meeting minutes. That was the four towns meetings and December 21st, 2020, regular town council meeting minutes. Is there a second? Second, Ross. Thank you. Any further discussion? Hold on, I need to exit the full screen and just see if there's any hands. Okay, then this requires a roll call vote. I'm going to begin with Alyssa Brewer. Aye. All Pat D'Angelo's. Aye. Darcy Dumont. Darcy Dumont. Sorry, yes. And Griezmer is an aye. Hannake. Aye. Dorothy Pam. Aye. Evan Ross. Aye. George Ryan. Aye. Kathy Sheen. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Aye. And Shalini Balmille. Yes. The vote is 13, 4, none against, none abstained, and none absent. We are going to move on to the next item on our agenda. And this is a reworking of the agenda. So we have moved item 7A, the report from the community safety working group forward. And before I call on Paul Bachman and Paul Wiley, chair of the community safety working group and Brianna Owen, vice chair, I also want to recognize the other members, some of whom are with us tonight in the audience. Tashina Bowman. Darius Cage. Deborah Ferreria. I'm going to just apologize for pronouncing that. Pat Anabaku. Russ Vernon Jones. Alicia Walker. And Alicia Walker. And also thank Jennifer Moisten, who is the staff liaison. So with that, I'm going to also mention that the vote to extend the deadline and continue to freeze the positions will be later in the agenda. The purpose of this agenda item is to hear a report from the Public Safety Working Group. Paul, do you want to introduce further? Yes, I will. Thank you very much. So later in the committee meeting, there will be a request to extend the deadline for delivering a report to extend for two months. And there's also a contingency that we will hold those two positions vacant until that is done as well. So that should be a clear understanding. So we're just holding everything and giving the working group more time. The working group's been a spectacular group working together and taking on a very large task. And I credit the leaders of the group, Mr. Wiley and Ms. Owen, and turn it over to them for their presentation. They've done a good job in putting a presentation together. Okay. And would you choose for the presentation action and then go ahead, Paul. Thank you. Are you able to hear me? Yes. We want to thank the Town Council for giving us this opportunity to update you on the work of the Community Safety Working Group. And thank you also for introducing all of us. We'd like for you to know that Ms. Owen and myself are here representing the entire group, and I want to echo the comments already made that this group has been working extremely hard and putting in a lot of long hours already to begin what is a pretty daunting task, but something that's very doable in our eyes and very necessary for this town. Before we go any further, I just want to say that we started our work at the end of November slash beginning of December, so we're about eight weeks into the work of this group. And we're finding that the volume of work coming in and the volume of of tasks that we have to do is behind some of the requests for an extension. I think we're all committed to doing the work in the best possible way and going to really deep dive at this. So we hope that that extension can be approved going forward. So on behalf of Ms. Owen and myself, thank you for having us here and we can launch right into the next slide. So this is coming from our original document and the purpose of the community safety working group is twofold. Twofold to make recommendations on alternative ways of providing public safety services to the community and to make recommendations on reforms to the current organizational and oversight structures of the MRS police department. You'll see as we go down further that there's a lot behind those two statements and it comes in the form of the articulation of our charge, which is the, I believe on the next slide. So I think I'll just go to the first part. So I'm not, you know, monopolizing all the airtime here and I want to defer to Ms. Owen to go to the second. Set of bullets beyond the first three, but we're planning to study the complex issues of delivering community safety services currently provided through the police. We're recommending reforms at the culmination of our work to the current organizational and oversight structures and we're examining existing town funding priorities for delivering safety services. So all of these things in combination will be part of what we submit at the end of our tenure as a working group. Ms. Owen, maybe you want to go through the next section. So the working group is achieving this by learning from the previous work done by the town through previous studies and committees, examining current public safety services and how they're delivered, reviewing policies, complaints, current training practices, exploring models of resident oversight of police departments, collecting data from lived experiences and Amherst, engaging the communities most impacted by police, by policing to develop alternatives and identify solutions to diagnose problems and investigating alternative models such as the Eugene Cahoots crisis assistance helping out on the street in the Albuquerque community safety alternative. Thank you. Move to the next slide. So the work thus far, I think Ms. Owen, I'll go through the first five of these and maybe you can do the last three. I just want to say too, I want to interject that we're moving through this at a fairly rapid pace, but we're hoping to leave a few moments certainly for you to ask any questions and those things that we can answer tonight, we certainly will. However, if there's something that needs more work on our part, we will move that back to our working group and be happy to return those answers to the town council in a timely manner. So some of these things are very straightforward. We elected a chair and a vice chair, held eight meetings. Our agenda is public. And on the Amherst website, public comment is welcomed at the beginning of every meeting, conducted research on policing at the state and national level, attended webinars and viewed podcasts. And we've solicited and received additional resources such as articles, upcoming workshops, books, et cetera from the community. I want to say, given that I said when we first started, it was pretty slow. But now our presence in the town and as a result of our two forums that we've already held, we're getting a lot of traction within our community. And we've been blessed by the amount of input people are giving us. We've certainly been welcoming resources and suggestions. And the town has met that challenge completely. And we're happy to receive that and internalize it in our work. So Ms. Sohan? Outside of our research, we've also been in communication with the Amherst Police Department. So we've put together a list of questions so we can learn more about their policies, practices, and different information that we feel will lead our work. We've received those responses and requested additional information. We have done two public forums on two separate dates to hear lived experiences from the community with the Amherst Police Department and Safety Services. And we've asked that the community gives us their input on what they'd like to see in reform. And we have also created a survey online for people who couldn't make it for the forum to the forum so that they can remain anonymous but still provide feedback for our work through lived experiences and suggestions for alternative safety services. Thank you. Move that forward. So this is a copy of the flyer that we put together for our two separate forums. And Ms. Moyston was also able to help us put together a little QR code for our surveys. So there's these flyers in various locations in the community. So people knew about our forums and so they can see and scan the QR code to reach the anonymous survey. So in terms of the next steps and actions, one of the major tasks we're engaged in right now is acquiring missing data from the Amherst Police Department. And I want to say a little bit about that. The number of questions and categories we sent to the Amherst Police Department was pretty extensive. And much of that information is available. Sometimes it's not available in the forum that we can use it to best analyze and review our current situation in Amherst. And a lot of it has to be done by hand. So we have received some information. We processed some of that information. We've gone back to the Amherst Police Department and they just recently submitted a second round of responses to us, which we are now taking a look at more closely. And we're just trying to find out where the gaps are in terms of what we know and what we don't know. And certainly what we need to know in order to be able to inform our recommendations going forward. We're looking forward to hearing from Amherst nonprofits and organizations. Again, this is where the extensive work comes from. We've certainly heard from some people already and some organizations at during our forums. But we hope to extend our reach into the community more deeply through some other strategies where we get a chance to hear from organizations more closely in terms of dialogue and discourse. And we're considering a virtual meeting with the Amherst Police Department. That is yet to be formalized. But I think at some point there's only so much you can do with surveys and data and those kinds of things coming across in terms of emails and letters and those kinds of things. At some point we have to have a conversation. So we're hoping at some point to have this virtual meeting with the Amherst Police Department so we can have an in-person conversation. And I guess the last one then I'll turn it over to Ms. Owen is reviewing our survey responses. Ms. Owen mentioned that this survey and we hope to get more survey responses than we already have. Certainly people in the community have been very responsive to this and it is available on the website. So we're hoping that we'll continue to get more information. The more information we have from the broadest range of participants, the better we stand in terms of making recommendations for our community. Ms. Owen. So we are right now we're looking for a consultant to help us with research. As we dive deeper into this work we realize through people sharing lived experiences and through our own research that community safety overlaps with education in different institutions in the community. So we believe a consultant would be able to help us do our work better and more thoroughly. We are going to continue to do outreach in the community and move toward recommendations and we hope to secure the essential resources needed to organize and process our data, broaden and deepen our community outreach and eventually create a final report in June of this year. Okay. I guess the next slide. So this is our final slide and I wanted to refer back to Ms. Riesmer. After this I would like to welcome questions. If members of the Town Council have them would that be appropriate at that time after this slide? And then Ms. Owen and I have a comment we'd like to make in the form of a letter coming from our community's safety working group. We'd like to leave that with you at the end. Okay. So one of the things around the Town Council that we're looking for is to help spread the word about our community's survey. That seems to be a very quick and easy way for people who have access certainly to it to be able to share their thoughts with our community safety working group. That's an important piece of our research and we need that from our community. So we were hoping that the Town Council and other Town agencies will also support that work you know on our behalf. Attend our public meetings and forums to listen. And the last thing is the comment I wanted to make at the end but I thought at this point I would stop and see if the Town Council has any comments or questions about our work that Ms. Owen and I can feel at this point and perhaps the answer and if not as I said we'll dig back in and get those answers to you as soon as possible. And I want to again thank you for putting this together. I want to thank you all for the technical support and putting this up. Ms. Owen is being a little modest here. She actually did the flyers. She made the flyers. She made this presentation. She put this presentation together. So I'm glad she did it and not me. So that's why I came out so good. So we want to thank her for all that extra effort. And I also want to thank again for our members too in this group who are putting in numerous hours behind the scene reading and writing and thinking about this work. So it's not just meeting to meeting but there's a threat of commitment going through this group that I think is going to work well for us going forward. So thank you both. Thank you all again and thank you for having Ms. Owen and I speak. We're happy to take on any questions you might have at this point. Great. Thank you. First of all we've looked forward to hearing from you and while some members have been able to attend your meetings and listen to them and many of us were able to attend the two public forums and enjoyed the and really I don't want to say enjoyed but really we're very, very interested to hear the comments that you were able to receive from residents and former residents of Amherst. Also want to thank the working group. Having been on working groups like this when you're meeting once a week the turnaround time is extremely short and to pack all of this work into the kind of timeframe that we had to give you and that we did give you is commendable. We want to also make sure that you are welcome to come back anytime you would like and provide us with any announcements that you would like to make and make sure are made during our council meetings. We will do them at the beginning of the announcements just the way we did now and if there's special announcements beyond just meetings we also tend to make those in you know by announcing them as well as in print. So with that I'm going to ask councillors if they have questions and a question that I see is Kathy Shane. I want to echo Lynn's thanks. I thought both the presentation was superb and I went and looked at your survey and whoever designed that survey I think it's excellent. It really leaves a lot of space to probe personal and family but other experiences. So I have one comment and then a couple of questions. One is I think the larger title was racial and social justice and I think a lot of the interactions have a lot to have as much to do or a lot to do with class as well as race that if you're lower income and you're not used to confronting authority you're afraid so make sure you capture some of that you know just experiences. So encourage people to be reporting on that as well that just you felt you didn't know how to respond. So my questions were where and how we can help get more responses back to you. So I didn't know whether you've gone to the schools and thought of a way of having the schools announce that there is this survey and get the experience of elementary middle and high school students and or their families to report up. Can they feature it on the school website? Can they do it in a flyer? We've got district councils district meetings and we can certainly do that in a meeting and put your how to find the survey up and then up in where my district is it's up in the north of Amherst and we have pockets of very low income and multiple racial cultural and I'm just thinking of how we could go to some of those if there are flyers that can be distributed to let people know that this is available because they might not otherwise. So any ideas you have when you said how can we be helpful I think we would like to be helpful to get input and my last question was about the type of consultant you're looking for. So for what kinds of things I have from other walks of life a larger circle but I don't know whether that circle would be useful or not. So it's both schools you know how can we be helpful at the district level with flyers and then the type of consultant you're looking for. Okay maybe I can I can start in working working backwards very quickly and maybe Ms. Owen you could speak to the further outreach pieces of that. Let me first say that you know Mr. Brachelman who has been with us in this work has been you know very supportive as you know in terms of what we might need in terms of resources and I say that broadly in terms of resources sometimes that's a matter of people sometimes a matter of materials a matter of time. So I think we're right at the cusp of making a more formal recommendation to Mr. Brachelman we've already put some things on his desk he's responded to us already so we're engaged in that process and I think at this point we have to make some decisions on how specific we want to be around the resources we need so we can get exactly what we need to do the work we need to do. So I'm confident that that will happen. Let me just say off the top quickly I know we're going to need some help with collecting and analyzing data I think that's going to be a huge thing because there's so much information out there I think we're probably going to need some information I mean some support and and help around putting reports together and getting them in the form that's usable for readers as well as informative to the community so those two things just off the top of my head are you know these are things we you know have to discuss further with the with our group certainly but we're right in the thick of that because at this point we're we're starting to move with some more deliberate speed than we were in the first few weeks of our work and so having those resources in place is important and I feel we can we can get to that point pretty quickly. Ms. Owen I don't know in terms of the other questions about the approach that outreach and schools and etc. Hope with outreach and schools I think would be really helpful if any of you would be able to help aid in that in regards to the flyer for the survey what I'm thinking of bringing to the next meeting we have with the community safety working group is making another flyer with just the survey link in the qr code because the forums have already passed so I don't want people to see that see the dates and not read all the way down to the survey so once I read once I put something else together I think that would be great if we could spread that out around town wherever that could be and extra hands are always needed and thankful. Yeah I wanted and I think that just one other piece about the class piece I think that's a that's important to to note because these these they're connected quite tightly and you know race and class do intermingle in terms of whether people are getting treated fairly if social justice is being implemented in the proper ways across the board and I think we put racial out there and social justice because that's the that's kind of the overall thing you know if there's no racial and social if there's no social justice for example there's no economic justice as well so I think we you know we understand that and but you're highlighting that Miss Shown is extremely important to hear. And I just needed a criticism I just meant so that other people feel invited in where they've had the kind of experience and it's because yeah they were vulnerable for other kinds of reasons that were related to income and social status. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Andy Steinberg. Yes thank you. Actually I'm building a little bit on what Kathy said but with a slightly different perspective on one that I had shared with the council in the previous meeting and that is that my background before I got involved with the town government was that I was the director of Western Massachusetts legal services which is now community legal aid and in that capacity what we were providing was civil legal assistance to people who were in poverty and that was a group that was sort of implicit a little bit in what Kathy was talking about but not totally because I really am focusing on people in poverty and I've come at it from two different ways one is from my experience in those years that I was working in legal aid which is you know 30 years that people who are in poverty are frequently the victims of crime and also frequently the people who are affected if there is some type of police misconduct in the community so that they really are affected in both ways but that there's also the problem that poverty in and of itself is a barrier to participation and I did talk with the current managing attorney of the office that covers Hampshire county and asked her how we at legal aid are now serving people in this COVID era where there were no in-person court appearances or administrative hearing appearances going on and she acknowledged that it is a large problem because of the need for technology and the access to technology so I my quite that gets to my question is what kinds of efforts have you made or if you thought about that would make sure that we are reaching that population that has technological barriers to being able to participate in either zoom type of meetings or even getting access to technology to respond to surveys that are based on computer usage thank you for those those comments and I think I kind of have to go back to some other experiences I've had in this town being in the school system for some time and knowing how difficult it is to access certain resources and certain information because of the limitations of time and personal resources that many many families do have I think what you're talking about might come further down the line in terms of recommendations because if we're talking about increasing the level of participation across the community we're going to have to find ways to increase and open access ways for all people to be participants in this you know civic venture if you will and I you know so we this is something we will certainly talk about it we're not looking at this in a pocketed fashion certainly and I think your your comments Mr. Steinberg and Michelle are showing and demonstrating again how systemic this is and how you know structurally it could be you know work against people if we don't do it right so I I'm taking into account what you said and what Michelle said certainly to say these things will most likely be embedded in what we recommend for example I mean just the fact that we have a zoom meeting pretty simple for me maybe simple for other people maybe not for some others and those others may have some very important important things to say important things to contribute but their voices aren't heard for reasons not that you know not their fault so how do we raise those voices how do we open them up and how do we you know give people access again that's a social justice issue so you know I appreciate what you said I think that that could be coming down the line and it makes perfect sense so and I know I don't I don't have much to add I'm glad that you brought it up though I do think technological setbacks do exist I guess as I don't know I work with young people who are 18 through 26 and I also work with young kids who are in the foster care system and the strength of this area in western mass is the school system so one thing I've noticed more recently is more young people are working with organizations who can aid them and things like Chromebooks cell phones things like that to keep them connected but I do really appreciate your comment and I hope that we can find a way to hear the lived experiences of those that might not have a phone or a laptop to hop on zoom or fill out a survey thank you uh shall any hi uh I also just want to thank you again each one of you this I attended a couple of your meetings and there's so much work that's going on there so really thank you um the thing that I wanted to bring up was what I heard in one of the forums about the UMass police and I don't know if that's something that is within the domain of your work or is that something you need well or need to look at um and the other thing that I definitely support that you are hiring a researcher and if you've heard me before you probably know that I would recommend a human center designed research because especially given that we are in a COVID time and it's so hard to reach out to people and communities and seeing the work uh of some of the human center design around policing they've come up with really creative ways of um engaging different communities and a lot of that work is used for social problems so I know that there are few human centered design researchers at UMass and Hampshire College so that would be I think cool and um also the other thing I was thinking was in terms of within the BIPOC communities whether um there's a way to reach out to different groups within that for example um just BIPOC owned businesses and what might be their specific experiences or students what are their experiences and then residents in different districts or so just kind of finding a way to reach out to all of them and again um did anyone see how we are helping with the school I think that's a great idea to use the schools maybe mobile food markets or other such venues where we can have ways to interact with um different people legal women borders came up to in data okay that's all and please please do let us know how we can continue to support your work well this this inter interchange right now is very supportive I mean that we can continue this kind of interaction it's extremely helpful informative to us I do want to say that on the working group that we have have quite a varied background and they individually and we collectively bring a number of different resources to bear so some of the things that are being suggested here fall into the bailiwick of some of the experiences and a knowledge base that we have right on our on our very group which I'm fortunate to be a part of so you know taking this in and I'm you know some of them are I haven't looked at the attendee list certainly but some of them are not all of them are on this this meeting right now so they're listening and I'm sure they're taking in information as we as Miss Owen and I aren't thank you um are there any other comments or questions at this time okay seeing none and I'm going to turn back to Mr. Wiley and Miss Owen so thank you again for for this you know opportunity and the invitation to have additional opportunities going forward and we hope you will continue to support us as you have been doing it certainly tonight uh I want to preface the statement I'm reading on behalf of the community safety working group to state very plainly that this is extremely difficult work it requires uh much from us all of us on on a number of levels so this this comment uh and letter that we're submitting comes with the deepest respect for our work and also the the the deepest respect for our community and what we need to support going forward in order to make some of the things that we want to have happen happen in a way that's going to have meaning for not only our BIPOC community but for all members of our community so I'm going to read a statement that in the form of a letter to the council and then I think we'll we'll be done this week Mr. Wiley do you want me to read the second page and you read the first page since it's a little bit lengthier sure that would be great thank you or you can read the first page if you want okay why don't you go ahead and I'll finish okay dear town council we're writing to you with a sense of deep obligation to hold leaders in our community accountable for their words and actions our group and community were harmed by the actions of town member of town council member Elisa Brewer during the community forum on public safety that was held January 16th 2021 via zoom the space we created was clearly defined as one for residents to share their stories and experiences and to communicate their knowledge and expertise with our group a designated town body made up of BIPOC community members during the meeting we aimed to practice progressive stacking by asking BIPOC community members to share their comments first this is a practice used to increase equity in meeting spaces it was also specifically said in our opening statement that while we would not be responding to comments from the community we intended to listen deeply and respectfully so that the community feedback could help inform our work moving forward the purpose of this forum was to create a safe space for BIPOC residents to do so the community safety working group is one of two official bodies made up of BIPOC community members at the start of our BIPOC centered forum miss Brewer publicly reprimanded our group's tardiness and compliance with the open meeting laws although this comment may have been intended to be supportive it is important to recognize the difference between intention and the real life impact these actions have within our society and within our own community the impact of these actions brought up feelings of anger within our group distracted us from our important work and created mistrust between this group and our fellow town leaders we have spent a great deal of collective time thinking and healing as a result of these outrageous comments that could have been spent on our work or time with our families this is what racism looks like this is unacceptable and we deserve respect we're creating a safe space for folks traditionally marginalized by town governance systems as an elective as an elected official it is your responsibility to represent our community and it is your responsibility to be aware of the power dynamics that exist in this position instead miss Brewer disregarded disrespected and harmed members of our community by speaking directly in response to a community member defending herself while discrediting their voice and lived experiences the impact of this is detrimental to the community safety working groups work and causes the BIPOC community members to fear being reprimanded and retaliation in their own town if they step forward to share their truth in the future these are the very these are the very actions that perpetuate and enable systemic racism to continue within our governing and political bodies and it must stop the implication and the impact on our communities are massive and deserving acknowledgement and repair the town has asked the community safety working group to hold spaces to hear from and inform decisions within our community with this comes immense bravery and responsibility we take seriously this responsibility and know that it is our job and yours to represent our community we cannot do this if town officials publicly denounce community members and their lived experiences we must represent and not disregard our community these racist actions are why this group is so important because there is very little representation in the town's governing bodies these actions mirror what happens in our town at large disregard for the authority of BIPOC leaders and continuous microaggression or macroaggressions towards BIPOC community members who raise injustices causing immense harm the community safety working group respectfully requests that the town council do not give public comment or respond to public comments given at BIPOC centered forums we also urge the town council to invest in anti-racist education and work and to publicly acknowledge their own privilege and power dynamics when representing our community we enjoyed a strong turnout for our community forums and gain important insight into the experiences of individuals in the community with the Amherst police department we want to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to speak before the working group and I believe we fulfill that responsibility in both of our community forums we plan to address our BIPOC community in a separate letter to convey that we feel the guilt in allowing the spaces we promise would be safe to be invaded by a white person in a position of power to know that we are committed to the community safety working groups work and that we will center BIPOC community members in a more thoughtful way moving forward the community safety working group would welcome an apology from his brewer acknowledging the egregious nature of the comments and its impact on our work and a commitment to refrain from repeating that behavior in the future in addition we would welcome a commitment from the town council to monitor and continually educate its members on how difficult it often is for community members to speak in public and raise their level of awareness to this fact and we end by saying if you have any further questions please email the group directly at our email address cswg at amherstmass.gov and Miss Owen and I want to thank you for listening to us and hearing what we had to say this evening and thank you for your contributions. Let me just include this part of our meeting by stating the following um the clause uh through Mr. Bachman uh I was able to connect with Mr. Wiley this weekend and also able to view various tapes which have now been shared with everybody in the council. I've spent a number of spent some time talking with council council and councillor Alyssa Brewer and she has as of six o'clock this evening posted various documents including an apology in our packet and those were sent directly to Mr. Wiley so that he can make them available to his committee. Furthermore as I have stated to both the town council and to Mr. Wiley and Miss Owen the town council will also respond to your letter. However the response will require that the draft be presented a full town council meeting and that there be a vote for the president to send the letter with any amendments asked by the council. We all want that letter to be responsive and we and not be done in haste. Therefore as a town council we will have a draft response for a review at our meeting on February 8th. I have already informed the chair and vice chair as I mentioned before of the community safety working group of this process. I would like to suggest that we not move on with further comment and we move on to the next portion of our agenda if that is acceptable to everybody else and again we want to thank both Breanna and Miss Paul Wiley for being with us this evening. This has been a most informative conversation and we stand ready to help you in every way possible including we have five district meetings coming up during February and we'll make sure that all of the information that we can have out there for people in our district letters as well will be there. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation and the time you devoted to this we appreciate it. Absolutely. Come back anytime. So we are going to actually take a brief five minute break and come back we would like to move on to the Belcher Town Road property acquisition for affordable housing with various reports and council discussion and a vote. Please mute your mics and when you come back put your picture back up so that I know you're there. Thank you. Pretty much all back. I'm going to quickly make sure that councils are reconnected. I'm going to start with Pat DeAngelis. Present. Darcy DeMont. Here. Lynn Grishmere is here. Mindy Johannake. Present. Dorothy Pam. Present. Evan Ross. Present. George Ryan. Not a breath but present. Matthew Shane. Here. Steve Schreiber. Present. Andy Steinberg. Present. Sarah Schwartz. Present. Kalani Balmoun. Here. Elizabeth Rour. Present. Thank you. So I skipped over the proclamation. We are not skipping over it but I learned that one of the people involved in the Belcher Town Road property has a time constraint this evening and so we're going to move forward with the Belcher Town Road property and then come back to the and probably then do prom aura village and then do the proclamation. Is there any objection to that from the council? Okay. Seeing none. So we're going to do the Belcher Town Road property. We have a finance committee report. We have a community resources committee report. There's further opportunity for council discussion and then we have a motion and vote. So Andy or Kathy whichever of you is giving the finance report? Yes as mostly council knows I was otherwise preoccupied after our meeting on January 5th and Kathy Shane is Vice Chair took over and drafted the report and is going to present it tonight. Thank you Andy. Since you all got the report a few days ago and I hope hope I've had time to read it I'm just going to highlight some of what we put in the report. The first and probably most important is that we unanimously recommend going forward with the order to purchase the property and the order has three main parts. One is it authorizes the town manager to purchase the three properties. Secondly it appropriates 600,000 from CPA funds and authorizes borrowing of this amount and principal and debt service to be repaid by CPA and third it authorizes the town manager to enter into a long-term lease or some fee arrangement with the development company for purposes of developing community housing. So it's a purchase order but it also sets us on the road of developing these affordable this very exciting opportunity to purchase these three properties. The finance committee found that the proposed project is sound financially feasible and raises no legal concerns and is consistent with the Community Preservation Act. Moreover we've stated in the past that it's well within the purview of the CPAC committee but also the way Community Preservation Act works to enter into debt arrangements and repayment of loan from CPA money. There was a report that we got that showed in out years that this CPA will still have resources beyond the debt that they're incurring here so it's it is a financially sound proposal. There were just a few things that came up during the review that I thought were worth highlighting for everyone. The CPA the definition of affordable goes up to 100% of area median and this reaches well into workforce incomes for example and this is in the report for a family of four that's up to $119,000 or for a single person it's $83,000. The state definition of affordable for subsidy is at 80% range and that is also at the lower end of moderate income so the RFP that can follow with this within CPA guidelines can have quite a range of incomes within the new development that will all be considered affordable. It's not just poverty but it's solidly into the workforce. John Hornick made this point during his presentation. Secondly it can be packaged with the East Street School if there's a decision to do that and that reaches a scale with the new development plus each street school that makes it very attractive for developer because it spreads the overhead cost of applying for state funds over a larger number units. It's both financially more feasible and you reach economies of scale. The other point that in initial presentation we were told about houses that are on two of the properties and initially it was thought that we'd be able to gain rental income from these houses. After a legal council review the decision and advice was only one of the houses that's currently under lease would be rented up until the end of the current lease but we wouldn't continue to rent it because we can't manage it using CPA funds. Those funds would recoup so we will not be getting rental income from those houses although a developer could eventually and then the last is we raised one out out looking forward financial risk that was acknowledged not for the project but that the infrastructure the streets the sidewalks around the development are in very poor repair. They present a safety concern and there will need to be investment. It's a state road so we're hoping that we would gain state money similar to Pomeroy Lane but right now that's an unfunded need of this project if we really want to densify and have more families walking in this area or biking they can't do so safely right now. So those were the three points I just wanted to highlight that are in the report and again this there was unanimous support of this including our two resident non-voting members who both highly recommended the purchase. Is there any questions about finance committee reports from the council? Seeing none we're going to go. Mandy Jo Hanneke please. CRC. Thank you. I will make it brief. Kathy covered a whole lot of what CRC also talks about. CRC voted unanimously to recommend the town council vote to acquire the property. We as the report says it was very brief because the finance report is always very extensive. We in CRC are aware that we need a lot of affordable housing and we need more affordable housing in this project and the acquisition of the property will do that or will lead us to being able to do that and the location that is proposed for this is appropriate for housing of the size of proposed. It's because of its proximity to the village center and an elementary school that has recreation available playgrounds and all and recreation you know sports fields conservation and farming land that is being developed for community gardens and trail use and a location on a busy street that is served by public transportation. I'm happy to answer any other questions but I think Kathy covered the rest of it. Thank you. Are there any questions? Missy you have your hand up? Yeah I I really appreciated the way that both of you delved into like what will this really look like for affordability and so I understand that some of that is to be determined and so I appreciate that you tried to tease that out a little bit that there's different possible options associated with that and then the only thing I wanted to say about the finance committee report is it would be awesome to go ahead and include under the finance committee list of names the names of the people who are serving as non-voting members because you know they should get credit for that. Thank you. Will do. We agree and we will do. Any other comments from counselors or questions at this time? Okay then I'm going to read the motion and look for a second in accordance with Charter section 5.6 having been published on the town bulletin board for a minimum of 10 days on December 22nd 2020 a public forum held on January 4th 2021 and having been reviewed and recommended by the finance committee report of January 21st 2021 as well as recommended by the community resources committee report of January 21st 2021 to adopt council order FY21-08A an order appropriating authorizing debt and acquiring and disposing of three parcels for community housing purposes as presented. Is there a second? I second. Thank you. Thank you Dorothy. Any other further questions at this time? Let me point out the complete financial order is attached to your motion sheet for the evening and it is page in 3-4 so I'm not going to read it. Any further questions at this point? Hearing none I'm going to move for the vote and in this case I'm going to start with Darcy Dumont. Sorry yes. Riesmer is not I. Mechanically. I. Am. I. Ross. I. Ryan. Yes. Shane. Yes. Riber. I. Dainberg. I. Fort. I. Towney-Bohem. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. I. Matt Banshee. I. Is unanimous 13 in favor none opposed none abstaining and no equal absence. Thank you for all the hard work that has gone into moving us through this process and we look forward to updates. We're going to move on to the Pomeroy Village Mass Works Grant. And this is the action we're going to take tonight is to refer this to the town services and outreach committee. So we don't have to make decisions tonight but this is the more thorough presentation and will allow us as a council to identify things we want to make sure that TSL pays attention to. I will also mention that if there are further issues that in you know relate to the larger community there may need to be a later referral to CRC and if there's any further financial issues they would need to be referred to finance committee. So with that I'm going to call on I think it's Paul, Chris Brester and Gilford Mourney and David. So we have slides to show and while Sean is putting those up we just have a presentation to you as our introduction to this project that we're hoping to be able to do in a very near future. Really proud of our team for securing a $1.5 million grant from the state to totally rehabilitate this in key intersection that Mr. Hayden referenced earlier today. As the grant acquisition was a teamwork between the planning department and the public works department. Public works doing the engineering planning doing the planning part of it. And it'll be is a project that's been on our list for a long time as Mr. Hayden said and it'll be one that we'll be able to take off our list using state funds for the big bulk of it. Your main decision for the council is what kind of intersection do you want?  And we want you to think about both of those we want we'll give you information on both options and we want you to keep an open mind for both options because they each one has advantages and disadvantages. So we want to go through a pretty thorough process engage the public in a pretty thorough way as well. With your decision we'll be able to move forward with our design and we'll go through all that later this today. So the presentation we can talk about the intersection the challenges we face some of the history for the for the intersection the finances and what we're suggesting for public engagement. So we can go to the next slide and I'm going to talk a little bit about this but then turn it over to Dave Zomek very quickly. Pomeroy Village everyone knows is the intersection of West Street and Pomeroy Lane and West Pomeroy Lane. It's what we have defined as a village center that has restaurants retail stores a service station their offices two preschool centers there's an affordable housing cooperative a planned subdivision not far away there's apartments condominiums office parks it's in within very within two and a half miles there are I lost the screen but Sean but within two and a half miles are the the cultural district around Hampshire College plus the college itself and also it's with the acquisition of Hickory Ridge we will have we hope to create some walking paths to access this area from the apartment complexes on East Hadley Road and so that's that's a very exciting opportunity and this is all just coming together so wonderfully it's just a real opportunity so I'm going to turn it over to Dave to keep us going. Sure thank you Paul and thank you to the council for having us tonight we're going to run through this slide deck um fairly quickly because there's quite a few slides we were we were glad to be able to get this to you last week and we hope you had an opportunity to to skim through it and see and share our excitement about this incredible opportunity we have and really as Paul said it's an opportunity uh with this mass works grant to really re-envision what this intersection can be um and of course one of the reasons that we were able to get the grant is there are some deficiencies in the intersection and we're going to be honest about those as well and we'll talk about those um I was on the call the zoom earlier and I did hear the chair of the TAC talk about some of the goals of the TAC and and staff and and I'm sure the council share those goals about making this a walkable bikeable livable a more livable more bikeable more walkable intersection and and village center so next slide so there are many challenges here I'm sure any of you and many of you who either live in South Amherst or or recreate there or eat or dine or or spend time down this way toward Hampshire College and and other parts South understand that this this intersection was designed a long time ago and there are a number of inefficiencies and and safety issues from poor pedestrian access and amenities it is as Aaron Hayden said a very car centered design but there is an opportunity there there are a number of parcels that are available for development but also a number of underdeveloped parcels that that really could be redeveloped into something that contributes more to the village center next slide we want to make sure whenever we're doing planning work that we are following the master plan and and know that the council has spent a considerable amount of time in your first term talking about the master plan and of course in the planning department and conservation department and all departments we first looked at that plan to say what was called for and what were some of the goals and objectives outlined in the master plan and clearly the Pamara Village Center was one of those those areas of focus and that's one of the reasons why we applied for the grant so it's identified as a priority area for development and it can add to our tax base increase housing there's potential for affordable housing and a lot of other amenities next slide so as Paul said we were successful in getting a $1.5 million grant a highly competitive state process 1.5 million we all that's a that's a wonderful number I remember when we got the grant for the Triangle Street intersection we thought you know we were we were very thankful for that state support but 1.5 million doesn't go as far as it used to so we need to be careful we we clearly want to aim high and we want to we have aspirations for how how we how nice how aesthetically pleasing how safe this intersection could be but working with Mr. Moreing who you know that is his specialty with his engineering staff we need to keep it within budget as well we don't have unlimited funds down to redo this intersection so the focus will be on traffic bicycle and pedestrian safety and we look for a collaboration between departments but also a collaboration with the neighborhood with property owners with business owners and people who live in the village center and in the neighborhood surrounding the village center next slide as Paul mentioned we think this this investment from the state leverages significant opportunities we're continuing to work on the acquisition of the Hickory Ridge Golf Course and as Paul mentioned a number of opportunities could present themselves there with connections to other housing development and neighborhoods and the opportunity to spur private reinvestment in this village center and and we need to keep that front and center there is undeveloped land in the village center and we hope that some of the owners of that land will be as excited as we are about what's coming in the next couple of years next slide turn it over to Chris Brestra I am Chris Brestra planning director I'm I'm gonna cough I can't believe it this is a map from about 1830 showing the intersection of Palmer Lane and West Street we also know it as 116 before Palmer Lane only the east west roadway in South Amherst was Bay Road the only east west roadway was Bay Road but you can see at the bottom of the slide here this picture shows a building that was there around that time this building was built in 1825 it's called the Aaron Merrick house and it's the one of the earliest brick buildings built in Amherst in the 1950s and 60s the intersection was essentially across this roads the gas station small convenience store were built there and over the years the village center grew up next slide please the project is located along a critical north south transportation route route 116 that links important sites in Amherst with South Hadley Grandby and points south we also have Palmer Lane which is our east west link and it links south Amherst common where the Munson library is with Hadley and points west next slide please the area around the intersection is a mixed-use area and can contain subdivisions of single-family homes as well as apartment complexes along east Hadley Road and the apartment complex of Pomeray court the area also includes office buildings like Amherst office park owned by round the vertier and the two buildings owned by the slobby development corporation it's a high traffic intersection especially during commuter hours next slide please the site is located close to the hickory ridge golf course which is soon to be purchased by the town you can see that as a big white area to the left it is also located near high concentration of apartment complexes on east Hadley Road and this area is considered to be an environmental justice area meaning that there's a large population of people of various ethnic backgrounds many with low incomes who need to be included in the public process next slide please i'm going to show you an aerial view showing some of the more prominent land uses office buildings at the south town commons Amherst office park the speedway gas station and convenience store Jehovah's Witnesses kingdom hall the Montessori school and mission cantina and other businesses and then the next slide please the next slide shows areas of housing in the area um yes uh and gives you a sense of how many apartment units there are in any given building next slide please in the 1990s the state developed a plan for west street and route 116 including the pomegranate lane intersection but the town thought that the plan was overblown and overdeveloped and the town decided to take over the road so that it would have more control over what happened there so the town now owns the whole of this road going all the way starting at Amherst college at the top of the hill all the way down to country corners road in south Amherst just south of Atkins market and which is just north of the notch so the town has control over this road it's not a state highway anymore in 2004 traffic signals were installed by the town as an alternative to um this design that the state developed and then in 2008 2009 a little short while after i started working in town hall the planning department and the dpw put together a design a design plan for the intersection and as part of the process there was a lot of public process including public meetings and surveys then in 2013 the town applied for a mass works grant for this design but we were unsuccessful at that time but this year we were successful and we're so happy about that in 2020 we received 1.5 million dollars to improve the intersection next slide please i think the next slide has a list of deficiencies we've already talked about some of these things but it's really lack of pedestrian accessibility lack of sidewalks no bike lanes there's a lot of queuing going south in the afternoon next slide please the next slides are visions or views of what this intersection looks like right now here we are looking north toward the speedway gas station and then next slide please is looking east you can see the office building on the right and just beyond that is the kingdom hall and the montessori school now next slide please now we're looking south towards towards the notch next slide please and now we are looking west so if you kept going through the intersection you would be heading towards hadley next slide please um hmm i think during the early stages of work on this project the town council would need to decide if the town wants an enhanced signalized intersection or a roundabout and we'll be talking to you about that more in the future and now i'd like to turn it over to gilford mooring superintendent of public works is gilford there we don't hear you gilford gilford's mute he's not he's not muted he's gonna come back in okay we have a little connection problem so he's re-entering so i think as you can tell we're really excited about this project um and uh it's it's a good thing because we're not using town funds other than matching our our staff's work with it so um but there's some this decision for you is going to be a big one for you i think on it may i just say that it's clear that this project didn't come out of nowhere that it's been around since the 1990s so we're finally getting around to doing it and i'm really glad about that well we're waiting for gilford could somebody describe what an enhanced signalized intersection is it simply means better signals than there are there now so they'll be probably smart lights and things like that okay um is gilford back in yet i think that she's here it's here we just can't hear him i need to talk about it that we're not hearing you gilford so maybe we should just move on so the um can you uh show us the next slide please here's the enhanced um intersection that we designed back in 2008 2009 and it said improvements to it since so it's showing you a crossed intersection essentially what exists there now with added turning lanes northbound and southbound also added bike lanes and um new signals as as mr bachleman said and crosswalks and curb ramps in all directions next slide please the next slide shows you um the roundabout design and what that would be is there wouldn't be any signals you would have a roundabout probably similar to the one at triangle street and east pleasant street roughly that size and you would have all the amenities of added bike lanes pedestrian access and crosswalks and curb ramps and significant traffic calming next slide please so some of the things that the town council will need to consider when it's deciding which um design to approve would be um its impact on commercial businesses bicycle and pedestrian access and safety accommodations for buses ada considerations um meaning considerations for handicapped accessibility um place making benefits how do you create a village center here that's the village center has been developing slowly but we don't want to do anything that would um kind of put it off track and then cost comparisons which um which design can be done for the amount of money that we have the traffic volume and we're going to be working with an engineer to to figure that out and then safety features next slide please in terms of finances the estimated total project cost is about 1.658 million we have a mass works grant for 1.5 million and the town match is going to be staff time engineering planning and oversight etc next slide please we wanted to talk to you about the public engagement process so both the town staff and town council will be engaged in the public engagement process town staff will be working on meeting with abutting property owners meeting and we already started that to some degree meeting with commercial and business operators focusing on neighborhood meetings orchard valley carriage lane east headley road etc enhanced interactive website project webpage so that means that we will be displaying information about this project as it moves along and giving people an opportunity to comment on it and the town council will be holding council committee meetings um i understand that there are two open public meetings required for this project and you will also be soliciting written public comment next slide please this gives you an outline of what the timeline is for the public engagement process we've already begun we're having this staff presentation tonight so in january and february the town council will be discussing discussing what the public engagement process for this project should be and then referring this project to the appropriate council committee in march and april there'll be outreach to um individual neighbors and business operators and landowners and then the two council committee sponsored public meetings in april may and june the council committee review and recommendation will occur with the report to town council and town council will be making a choice about which design for the intersection it wishes to go with and that would happen probably sometime in may or june it really needs to happen by june next slide please so the overall project timeline um again we're starting in june of 2021 that's when we receive the money from the state um we'll begin design and uh surveying and engineering at that time and that will go on until approximately december of 2021 then in january of 2022 we'd be advertising bids and opening bids in february the contract would be awarded in february if everything goes well and construction would start in march of 2022 so that's march of next year and then um construction we hope will be complete in may of 2023 and that bottom item punch list what that means is that the project is essentially complete there may just be a few things that need to be finished like raising catch basin lids and things like that so with that i think we are finished with our program and we welcome your questions thank you so much for this thank you um would uh shan would you please take the thing down and also put the clock up for comments okay uh i'm going to call on since the clock comes up i'm calling on kathy shane but hold on the result kathy okay i'm on the timer okay i i have um i have a list of comments slash questions and i i don't think i need to get uh answers to them right now it's just for things that we need to be thinking about one um the speed limit on the north south road that's a state road um can we will we try to get it lowered well before the intersection so drop it down to 25 miles an hour quite a distance away as part of traffic slowing second um bus stops where are they now um where would they be that was already mentioned one of it um the sidewalks the third is how far will the how far will the sidewalk extend along pommel i can do we have enough money to extend it up to hickory ridge so if we get a development up there will you be able to walk along a sidewalk there where there isn't one now um i'm assuming because one of the diagrams showed it that if you had signalized there's enough money to repair the road and widen it to allow turning lanes um smart lights have already been mentioned but they are pretty useful for slowing traffic and allowing turning safely and then um one of the i've been doing work on because roundabouts were discussed up in north amherst on trying to gather information on them and one of the advice on them is if you're talking about higher density is that's your goal and you've got little kids inexperienced bikers crossing intersections and ADA kinds of concerns you're better with signalized intersection for pedestrian safety it may improve car safety but one pointed out that one accident with a bike or pedestrian is it tends to be pretty serious so um so i so that's just uh thinking of where we're going with this whatever the traffic volume is now if we densify this the traffic volume will be higher than it is now i mean that's part of the design of what we're doing in here and it's been pointed out there's preschool and little kids around here so it's not just the disabled but inexperienced walkers as pedestrians i think i am out of my time so those are my seven points about thinking about where we're going thank you Dorothy Pam please first of all reset the clock Sean thank you Dorothy okay well this sounds very exciting i have just two questions um to widen the road to allow for wide sidewalks and bike lanes does the town already own that right of way or would you have to buy it from people and how does that impact the situation and then i guess i kind of it's going to take 14 months to build which may in fact in intersection life not be a long time i don't know but um how much business disruption will there be during that time and are there any plans to keep it to reduce it somehow and that's my questions thank you um i'm going to pause for a moment and just ask chris and david if there's any response to any of the questions for example the issue of owning land that would be a gilford question gilford you hear me now yes i love my computer um one of the things we have to do in the design process is actually do a survey of the properties if you look at the drawings that show both the signalized intersection and the roundabout those are based on just the gis lines we have and there is some there is some doubt as to what we do own for right away in that area so there is going to be no matter which no matter which choice we take will be some land takings that have to um take place between now and construction i think the other questions are really part of the design as we go along i don't think they require answers tonight um i just could i answer one of them because i'm pretty definitive the budget does not include a sidewalk to hickory ridge um that is a very significant additional cost and a permitting challenge given that there's a a perennial stream that goes and wetland area um along west bummer lane so i just wanted to create realistic expectations that this will not connect by sidewalk to west bummer we're still looking at village center connections that might happen in other ways thank you thank you uh pat de angeles we'll start the clock for you i'm very familiar with this intersection because i lived at the pulmonary lane cooperative for the first five years that i lived in amherst um and i'm not going to uh recite um the issues about uh a da uh needs uh or children uh because they've been brought up eloquently by my myra ross and also talked about by kathy but i do want when i'm looking at the list of who's going to be reached out to uh a butters uh owner business owners etc etc and as liaison for the disability access advisory committee i'm really um coming off of a meeting where they were quite upset that they had not been contacted uh about this and there are the triangle roundabout really does not work for anyone with any kind of um disability or impairment um so i guess my question and i'm running out of time gosh um my question is why isn't the disability access advisory committee automatically um reached out to whenever any of these projects happen um they are a committee of the town they work very hard they are people many of them not all are differently abled and they have a perspective that this town needs on many levels i'll take that one please go ahead we we don't have all the information they're going to ask questions about we don't even have all the information you're asking questions about to take a project and automatically rule something out before you have gathered all the information you can to decide whether the pros and cons of which way you want to go is really a disservice to everyone including those with disabilities the goal should always be to look at all the options and one of the things i was going to talk about is really there's four options for this intersection right now option one is to leave it the way it is if we actually decide that we can live with the lights it is and just make a few improvements option two is to go to the fully fully designed intersection which is what mass highway proposed and no one really wanted at the time including a lot of people on a disabilities access committee because the time period to walk across the intersection was so large and it was so great they didn't really want to have things like that and that's one of the reasons why the town took the intersection over um do we need turn lanes now the design you saw was based on data from 2000 2001 and 2000 2000 and 2001 we're now almost 20 years away from there is are there different things we need to look at and the data needs to be different before you go and talk to a committee you need to have some of the answers of what their questions are going to be and that's really what we're trying to do here and to gather so i really it's not that we leave them out it's we don't have information to talk to them about sometimes i think though gilford that you need their questions to stimulate your thinking and so going to them much sooner than you're saying i think would be very helpful all right um shall we bomb them let's put the clock up okay here goes uh cost of maintenance so that could be another consideration as we are um deciding um the variables we had a great district meeting i would encourage you all to use the chat we sent you the copy of the chat because we made a summary of all the input that we got from the residents there um pros and cons of the roundabouts that and i suppose you're going to tell us that at some later point uh just for the council members uh i received this from an urban planner and this was also brought up in a district meeting uh one of the urban planners from us i think spoke in favor of the roundabouts which was very uh interesting for me because most of the residents including me were like no we don't want roundabouts because we wanted to be people-centered and be more user-friendly and all of that and build community and all of that but i got this from somebody it's called public square it's a publication with best practices and it actually says that unlike the big fast scary dangerous road traffic circles when they're designed properly they can actually be great for pacemaking and they said design property around about enhanced placemaking pedestrian experience and they're a gift to landscape architects and whatnot so i'll be really curious to hear how you know what is proposed over here and then in triangle street do we have like the yield signs because or i mean what is it about the triangle street that does not make it work for people with disabilities and why are people you know and what is the difference going i mean do we have all the things in place that could make a roundabout a really good people-centered is that possible and what are we not doing correctly what are we envisioning here um list of stakeholders what i'm hearing is that it would be really great to see that on the website that these are the different people including the committee for disabilities like the different stakeholders that are being reached out to and at what point they will be reached out to maybe or something so that people know that and i do appreciate the idea of going to them early on to even understand what to bring that lens to the whole problem you know like what to be looking for is my time right so go on keep talking um anything else i'm right plan there was a plan uh done long ago in 2008 or 2009 and i've been trying to find that is it possible to for all of us to see because that i believe had a lot of community engagement in it oh and then bus stops um i don't think we have bus stops there and benches and do we have money for beautification around it okay oh signage and signage to make it accessible and yeah okay time's up darcy yeah uh can you hear me yes uh i'm excited to see the work to be done um at promroy village and that the grant will pay for almost the entire project i was involved in um putting out some ideas way back when it was uh when the master plan was being looked at for promroy village um my my greatest hope would be that as a fully realized village center it could have an anchor business located there um and my real dream is that the amherst food co-op be be located there um so i would agree that we should outreach to relevant town committees just as a matter of course on these projects including disability access committee tac and the ecac all of them would potentially have thoughts or recommendations um and also i am interested to know more about the value of roundabouts um i've you know i've googled them and learned quite a bit more about them since our district five meeting uh that we had that erin mentioned um and i guess the question is um how much safety it provides because that seems to be its main value uh i was concerned at the public comment today about um the problems that visually impaired people might have with uh a roundabout so i i want to know about that um and i i um um i just want to know whether the additional safety provided is um it makes it worth having more so than what the amenities we could have if we didn't spend all of our money on the roundabout so um uh just you know want us to be looking into all of those details about and not just assume that we're going to do it i think it seems weird to a lot of normal people to have a roundabout when you only have an intersection of two streets um uh that seems odd to me too um so i think it just needs to be explained more the the merits the value of a roundabout i'm gonna pause and ask christine breastrift who has her hand up if she'd like to comment i wanted to say two things i think one of the counselors mentioned the fact that they thought that the roadway was still owned by the state and it's not owned by the state from the center of amherst all the way down to country corners road which is almost at the notch it's owned by the town so we make the decisions about what's going to happen there even though we're using state money and the other thing i wanted to say is the old design one of the counselors asked to see the old design and it is a good design but it's more expensive than what we're currently able to build i think it's quite a lot more expensive it went farther in all four directions than the current thought is to go so i don't think we're going to be able to build the old design and gilford probably has it somewhere in his files but i'm not sure that that's a good a road that we want to go down so to speak okay no pun intended right even schreiber hi so um what was it 10 years ago amherst had no experience with roundabouts and now i was trying to count we have five including the new one built at umass so it's somewhere around five and i remember when the first one was built um on the north side of the umass campus there was some discussion that the world was going to end and then when the double rotary was built closer to addkins the world was surely going to end but the the um apocalypse is going to be the triangle rotary so which is and that's the the triangle rotary i'm sorry roundabout is one that i go through multiple times per day on my bike on foot and it has made that intersection exceptionally safer and more effective so i hope by now the fears of um round up rotaries has dissipated and the the benefits of rotaries especially if you've lived here during the construction of all of these the benefits are enormous so i think that what counts what my rost said earlier that needs to be looked at i'm not um seen impaired but i do but i go through that intersection with lots of other people you know every day but i think that um how one deals with those issues needs to be addressed by bicycle through those intersections all the time it's um much safer than i was going through a signalized intersection so all of this is anecdotal so i'm telling my story others are telling their stories i think we need to have a more empirical you know look at the the benefits so anyway i think that wherever a roundabout can be built it should be built because it just it keeps idling traffic it just seems like a much more efficient way even with a modern smart signalized system it just seems like a more efficient way to keep all movement going pedestrians bicycles and cars the other thing i thought i say in 55 seconds the other thing i thought about triangle is that it was going to kill the prospect of development on those under developed lots right on that you know where the bank of america building is nothing has happened there but but that fear that everyone would be so worried about the the um roundabout that no one would ever want to you know visit those sites has not happened so it's not like the born rotary right or the fresh pond rotaries these are you know much calmer than ones that we might be used to in urban areas thank you i yield my 20 seconds to whoever and we don't do yields uh evan ross yeah thank you so um one of the slides in the presentation that i thought was really great i think chris presented it was the town council considerations that listed sort of all of the different you have to consider um which is great i because some of those maybe i wouldn't have thought of off the top of my head and it gives us a framework i wanted to just add one um which is um based on a lot of the focus of the council over the past two years um climate mitigation and resilience i think that's also an important lens to look at this through um years ago i went through uh um down or down a weird rabbit hole of looking at research papers on uh emissions reductions from roundabouts and there's a lot of research out there about how because they reduce idling um they reduce fuel consumption and and can actually pretty substantially reduce uh transportation emissions and then of course because you remove the lights you remove the safety hazard of what happens when a big storm comes through um and wipes out power and so there's a lot of climate research out there about why roundabouts are actually the better system for mitigation resilience and so i think as we're developing our um climate action plan and our goals that should always be a lens that we look through any infrastructure um uh project with and i think with this one there's actually research out there that's relevant to the decision we're making so i'm hoping we can just add that as a consideration to that long list of other very important considerations thank you lisa well that's a great segue because while we're adding things i don't think that any of us have a shared sense of what an environmental justice neighborhood is this is a new term to amherst we've not been using this term at the town council and prior times and certainly the entire community is not familiar with it so when we when we have a slide that says pomeroy village center town council considerations and we've mentioned twice that it's environmental justice neighborhood and we say nothing about environmental justice on that slide then we have a problem and so we need to figure out how to start talking about that in ways that our larger community understands ecac probably understands it completely but the larger community and i believe the shared town council does not in terms of the roundabouts um and pushing back on the and as steve said you know it's all each our anecdotal experience anecdata like we like so much is to say that a roundabout doesn't make sense for two streets is absolutely false in my reality i live just north of the first roundabout which is the one north of campus and it was two streets that were brought together basically and it makes perfect sense as does the slightly odd but now getting used to it new one at fearing in university so it doesn't have to be something that's three or four or five streets coming together in an anti-goggle and way but following up on that i was really concerned about what my ross shared earlier tonight about the triangle roundabout being unacceptable to people with certain disabilities this is news to those of us who supported the triangle roundabout yes we heard that the world was going to end and then the world didn't end but apparently there are still issues that need to be addressed so i'm all in support of figuring out ways to both mitigate that at triangle and to figure out how not to have that problem moving forward and then in terms of the outreach and the dac it does very clearly state in the slides the town staff is going to be meeting with a budding property owners meeting with commercial and business operators focused neighborhood meetings um and so just add dac there that's where it belongs as does tack and possibly ecac as well because i don't think it's suddenly becomes tso's job to go to those committees instead of staff when staff's meeting with all those other people in conjunction with committee members so i think that's one of the ways we start getting used to including dac tack and ecac where they belong in these processes thank you thank you um andy yeah and i'm following up on a list of lists and i were on the select board when we went through the pros and cons and ultimately took the vote on the triangle street uh roundabout and um as the liason to dac for the select board i can assure you that dac was very involved um saying that um and to follow up on one point elissa made uh miss ross was not a member of dac at the time and there was nobody with the site impairment who was a member of dac at that time so that um it is a perspective that was not heard i have talked with him i wrote since the uh completion of the uh round about um so i've had shared um i i i've heard her statements to me directly um the things that we heard and know is that um for most people crossing the intersection it's actually much safer than a long intersection with a um where the crosswalk is very long because the length of time and length of distance between each point where you're in a safe zone as a pedestrian and uh either on the island or the sidewalk and the next point is much shorter than crossing an entire intersection and traffic tends to speed up as the lights turn yellow as opposed to slow down roundabouts are in fact traffic calming devices in and of themselves if they're constructed properly and that was very much a part of the discussion in the design of the triangle street intersection uh the other oddities of triangle street to just complete sharing our experience from the prior time was that to do a signalized intersection there would have taken um a lot of land from kendrick park which we determined was a inappropriate use of the park that had been gifted to the town as a park and um there's also the oddity of the fact that it wasn't a cross intersection it was an x intersection and people coming from the university and trying to make a left turn into north pleasant street to go up towards kushman and north amherst by going up east pleasant street where uh that was a very difficult and dangerous turn to make so those were all factors that we considered that were unique to the intersection and um this is a unique intersection of itself and therefore we're going to have to go through a similar process now great thank you um uh sarah i saw your hand up but you've taken it down i'm just wondering if my question might be addressed later but i'm wondering when you put in a roundabout how close the new roundabout can be to an existing building either a business or a home and um i mean obviously we would see when when things were drawn up but just how that would then um affect i guess noise as far as if there was a home or a restaurant and also um existing parking lots and how um some of those businesses come together how um then just because of the the closeness how egresses would work but that's i'm sure that's sort of down the line okay are there any other comments from counselors at this time and let me just say before we make the motion that obviously uh tso will need to coordinate with the council in terms of agenda and setting of these meeting dates and so forth and some of them might be done during tso meetings or separate but not necessarily part of council meetings but i will work with the chair of tso to do that so with that the motion is as follows to refer the palm tree village mass works grant project to the town services and outreach committee for review and recommendation on the choice of intersection design and to guide public engagement with report back to the town council by may 3rd 2021 is there a second second thank you garcy any further questions or comments then we'll begin the vote and we begin with greasper and it's in the eye uh mandy joe i dorothy pam i ebb and ross i george ryan yes matthew shane yes beef schreiber i indy steinberg all right your schwarz i tally balmille yes lissa brewer all right patty angeles i and dorsey demont yes 13 000 okay thank you very much and thank you for that very thorough presentation clearly this is not the last we've heard of this one okay we are going to go back and do the proclamation in this case i did not put this on the consent agenda because it had been indicated to me that there might need to be additional discussion uh the proclamation uh did go to gol and i'm going to ask george to make the report on that yes lid this came to gol on january 20 and we discussed it and reviewed it and it was voted five zero to be deemed clear consistent and actionable um are there council questions on the proclamation yes mandy joe well i don't have a question but i'd like to speak as one of the cosponsors yes i'm sorry i should have recognized both of you as cosponsors mandy joe hannacky and patty angeles are the cosponsors of this and the authors of it so please speak to it thank you um you know i in my two years as a counselor i have become increasingly aware that it's our duty as elected officials to call out injustices even if they don't incur in our town and so when i saw what happened on january 6th and how detrimental to our democracy it is and what happened is um it decided we needed to say something and so um and then we received a request from defund 413 to do something similarly um so i reached out to pat and said would you help me and cosponsor something and so we drafted this and one of the things i was thinking of beyond the fact that i believe we increasingly i believe we have these duties to talk about things like this and condemn them when they happen is that back in the summer after the murder of george floyd our town manager our chief of the school superintendent of the schools but also our chief of police came out and condemned the actions of the police officer um the police officers and um spoke out against what happened in the murder of mr floyd yet in the aftermath of this one we heard from the town manager and we heard from the superintendent but we did not hear from the chief of police and while this resolution um and you know does not come out and specifically ask for something from the chief because we as a town council specifically cannot do that under our charter and it's one of the reasons things were changed in the draft from what came out of gol i was deeply disappointed that the chief didn't speak out condemning the insurrection or the actions of the insurrectionists or the disparate public safety responses between that day and the black lives matters peaceful protests that occurred after the murder of george floyd because if we are going to become an anti-racist town um both us as elected officials but also our leaders our town manager our public safety officials our other department heads need to be held the higher standards and condemn things like this when they happen especially when they have racist overtones um and white supremacist overtones with the which the actions of january 6th did so i just thought i had to say that um i hope this council will unanimously support this resolution and i am still conflicted about not um about removal of one section that i know the defund 413 um supporters would like to see in it um but i do think you know that's something that we might not be able to do as a council and so i'm not going to not support this because of that but i did feel like i had to say what i just said thank you pat you're also a co-sponsored if you have any comment at this time um a very personal one to Mandy gel uh because just a few months ago or a few weeks ago uh covid time is very bizarre you said you weren't very much a of a social justice person an activist social activist and i'm very proud of your growth and um my own uh in collaborating with you and um i am also hoping that the council can see the importance of this proclamation and i second Mandy joe's request uh or question about why our chief of police has not spoken out lisa i'm very sorry if i missed this part of of the very effective um discussion we've been having so far but did we ask him why he hasn't done so i mean i'm not trying to be provocative here i'm just i understand that there are lines of authority that we try not to cross but has there been any discussion with him as to why that gap has occurred i would call on town manager bachman yeah so when we drafted uh to be honest this was this uh our first uh statement was done very quickly on the weekend or that instantaneously we tried to get it out right away because we were mostly thinking about children being harmed by the by seeing the violence and that was the focus was on our statement was and jointly with the um the school department and look at that is the lens uh i did not invite the police chief in he would have i'm sure he would have just like with the george floy think he would have stepped up in instantaneously i know i think he would have done that and i i think i feel like it's it's a little bit unfair to him to disparage him for not speaking out um and it'd be a more on me i think because i didn't invite him to join in a statement and probably in retrospect i should have but at that moment our focus was on thinking about what this how this was um so disconcerting to children and to the other not just children but to people people who are immigrants and to the country who have experienced this in their own land so um and it seemed to me that at that moment it was important to hear from the school superintendent the town manager and not necessarily the police chief in that moment and you know with the you know the perspective of a couple weeks i think oh maybe we should have at that moment but at that moment it didn't you know it it was just like that didn't seem the right person to be standing up and saying something at that moment that was my my judgment so i take responsibility for that shallony you have your hand up um i also would like a clarification of why we're not a yg oil did not include the um the statement from defund about ensuring that no amazon employee who has sworn to uphold um and why is it that we can't is that i mean i understand kind of that it's not in our authority too is that what the reasoning is i'm gonna actually go again back to mr balkman although in your hand up as well and i think you probably want to speak to that yeah i can state unequivocally that no amherst police officers participated traveled or took part in the capital riots um we there are provisions in our rules and regulations and policies and procedures that officers must report any invest investigations arrests or anything where they become uh a plaintiff in a situation like that so if they are named they have to report that under our rules and regulations um there are um you know there will be um we have not asked every every officer but this is it's spoken in confidence from the the chief of police you know i think there are some um free speech issues that i worry about and also collective bargaining issues i worry about but mostly free speech issues if it's just traveling to a location um what does that mean um it i think that that opens up a real different animal that we're talking about if someone is has been if they're partly insurrection then that's that's that's cause for investigation for us um so that's where i think that's where i am on this is can i yes go ahead show me i just i'm not feeling like we've come to a resolution around i mean is it worth i mean we can't authorize that but could could you ask the police to chief to come up with the statement and not about the travel part but at least stating that uh no one to part in the actual whatever that word is insurrection i don't know that but but but it feels like we need to it's not it's not feeling resolved to me that we can ask for it and then i understand the free speech so keep the free speech part where people can travel so let's not do that but at least the part that we are because i think it's not i mean i don't believe i mean i'm i'm pretty confident that no one did from our town do that however i think just making these statements is more about us reinforcing the you know what we believe in and our valleys it's an opportunity to speak up and say okay this is where we stand on these issues even though it's redundant or whatever so it seems like it would be important to have some sort of a statement even if it's not part of the council did you want to speak further to that mr bachman yeah um i don't have a good answer uh response at this moment yeah i think it's something to think about yeah uh andy you have your hand up yes um be real quick about it uh i raised the issue um at the gol meeting because the charter is very clear about the town manager's responsibility for providing all supervision of employees and administering um the collective bargaining agreements and we're talking about people who are part of collective bargaining and uh it is not something that is specified as a council responsibility um nor are we empowered to make that uh to request information along those lines as uh as in the charter and what i said at the gol meeting is that i felt very uncomfortable with the idea that it would be an actionable item unless we had opinion from the town attorney that it was an appropriate step to take under the council under our charter rather and i just didn't feel that it was worth uh taking the time to hold up this particular action in order to get a town attorney opinion on a very narrow but a very important point and that the easier thing to do would be to um make the amendment that was made uh john we are supposed to be using the clock on these as well alissa yeah so following up on that concept from the charter one of the the areas i struggle with in the charter is section 2.8 investigations and access to information because this was a non this was not a part of the old town government act and there's a section about investigations and then information requests and then town manager and so the part under town manager says it's specific information to it on any matter within the jurisdiction of the town council so i totally get that that's not the police force right they're not under our jurisdiction but then why are there the first two parts talking about investigations investigating the affairs of the town and the conduct or performance of any town agency and then information requests for multiple member bodies i i don't i don't grasp the difference there so maybe that is a future town attorney concept whenever we come to issues of the charter i always look at mandy joe and say do you want to comment it could take us hours so i don't think it needs to be dealt with tonight okay great um are there any further questions all right then uh the motion for the proclamation is as follows um motion to adopt the resolution condemning the january 6 2021 insurrection and violence at the u.s capital as presented is there a second and a key seconds thank you um and we're going to move immediately to a vote starting with mandy joe hi hi northy pam hi evin ross hi with rime yes pat shane yes kief schreiber hi andy steinberg hi sarah schwarz hi uh shall we pull no yes elisabeth hi pat teangels hi garcy demont hi then greasemores and i that's 13 000 we are going to move on to the town managers goals and let me um preface this by saying we started out with one um request for a change that involves with the town managers goals and that's the one that was relevant to the presentation night which was the public safety presentation public safety working group committee so i'm going to ask that we deal with that one and see if we have the ability to vote on the changes as requested in that motion there are two others that have then been brought forward one deals with housing and specifically with the um adding to the town managers goals the exploration of a uh permanent either seasonal and or full time a year-round shelter for the homeless and then the third that is a motion that that added in uh really updates the racial equity and social justice um goal as it stands my opinion as your president is that these other two should be referred to gl because they could tie us up in knots for hours and i'm trying to shorten our meetings so i'm going to go back to the first goal the first goal is public safety goal and i'm going to read the motion uh that we amended by the way since the original um thing and that is to amend the town council performance goals for the town manager july 1 2020 to june 30 2021 adopted september 4 2020 by changing under policy goals section to community health and safety the dates results are presented to the town council from january 31st to that january 31st 2020 to january 31st 2020 if we do that the amendment would read that the approval of the 20 fy 21 operating budget is made with the explicit understanding with the town manager that two upcoming anticipated vacancy vacant positions in the police department's budget not be filled until the town manager in consultation with the town council and residents of amherst has fully explored alternative options of providing services and presented the results to the town council no later than march 31st 2021 pat i seem to remember um that i believe it was miss oan briana oan who talked about uh the report not being ready that they needed until june 21st uh june 30th uh 2021 um to complete their report so if that is true why aren't we extending the freeze to that time period i'm going to ask for a second on the motion and then sorry i'm sorry second thank you and then all can you respond to pat's question yeah so initially they're the working group has two sections in their charge one is to look at an alternative form of policing which is what was supposed to be done by this month and that will be march 31st and that's where you'd be wanting to have the resources available to shift if that were if they come up with something different and that's still on the table the other is more of an oversight of the police department and that's the second phase which and they're still targeting that for june 30th thank you thank you elissa you have your hand up so i touch base with the town manager today because the charge we were provided with this request has not yet been revised to show that the first written report to the town manager by january 15th obviously that date has passed and that written report hasn't been provided so i'm asking that he just clarify that although the town council worked with him on the initial charge it is my belief that the town council is no longer had never really was in charge of the charge for the community safety working group what we're in charge of is the deadline that this motion is the subject of but just to clarify because this is all new to all of us is that the community safety working groups reports written in their charge are the the date for the first one the written report on alternative options to public safety services currently provided by the amherst police department is going to be changed by the town manager not by the town council to march 15th because that still gives that two week gap right that's how we set it up originally two weeks before it was due to the town council so i'm assuming that that's going to happen with the charge based on the town manager's action after our meeting tonight assuming we agree on a date he'll pick something then for the community safety working group that's two weeks prior to that so that their charge is current and i'm seeing a nod from the town manager do you want to speak to that poll i agree 100% with that that once the council says that the march 31st state is okay then out of the charge will be adjusted great is there any other question elissa you still have your hand up but i assume it's because you haven't taken it down are there any other questions darcy you have your hand up yeah i just wonder how um how the state works with the whole budget process and the police department plumbing to the finance committee with their projected budget how does that all interrelate um so yes it um the idea i think the council chose january 31st so that there's plenty of time to be able to take any recommendation from the working group or the town manager to implement it in the current budget and also next year's budget so this delays it for two months it still gives us gives me time to implement anything that they want in next year's budget my budget doesn't get delivered to the town council till may 1st so that still gives us a month in there um to if there are substantive changes for next year's budget as well to be incorporated into the budget process okay thank you any other questions darcy you still have your hand up but i assume it's because you haven't taken it down okay so the motion has been made in second it are there any other questions okay then i'm going to begin the roll call with darcy pam hi evin ross hi with rime yes kathy shane yes eisha robber yes andy steinberg hi sarah schwarz hi balmy bomell yes elizabeth hi pat gandals hi racy demont yes in greece prison i mandage or hannity hi 13 000 okay you're going to move on to uh the presentation on no i'm sorry we still have to do the referral of the two recommended motions that change the goals on housing authority housing affordability and racial equity social justice before we do that motion i would like george ryan just to speak to the purpose of the uh recommended change to the housing affordability goal sure lind um i'm in a somewhat awkward position because i actually don't support the motion but uh we'll get to that eventually i suppose um in other words the motion to refer but a number of us have been concerned about i mean we've been very fortunate uh thanks to the hard work of of the craig's doors and the town staff and the town manager and the stepping forward of the uh the uu here in amherst and we have more than adequately met the challenge this year with the seasonal shelter but come at the end of the season as it's called the universal universalist church is going to want their community room back my understanding is that the the baptist church is no longer interested in being part of the shelter solution and so we're going to find ourselves again as we have in the past looking for a seasonal shelter in amherst and so what a number of us have mentioned and talked about informally is approaching the town manager and asking him to consider looking into the possibility of finding uh or whether it's possible to find some kind of surplus town land or property and or work with uh the local community to see if we can find a permanent uh solution to the problem whether it be seasonally year round and so that's the the basic thrust behind this motion that we take a step and ask the town manager to seriously look into what is possible either from the town's resources or working in cooperation with um private individuals or groups here in the town to affect a permanent site or solution to the to the seasonal shelter um issue are there any other comments on this particular one please raise your hand using the raise hand function garcy yeah i just wonder what the purpose of a referral would be um i guess i feel i feel like we're probably fairly ready to hold on this um i may not be right about that but but uh i am anyway so i just don't understand why what would be the purpose of a referral this has never been discussed at the council meeting before or at least not in recent in the recent months i should say and rather than spend a lot of time in discussion at counci