c and they'll put a sign in their window saying yes we've done we've got the right circulation we've got the proper distance seating all those types of things to try and create a more of a culture of people willing to go inside uh because as long as it's done safely and and healthy um and in terms of our town government you know we may talk a little bit later about elections and a big issue on that where we know that weather's going to be turning and we need to get people inside the town hall so they can conduct their business inside we're looking at an option for that um and then the special zoning that town council approved that went to 180 days will be up for review for you in the fall to decide if you want to continue that or not so the last slide is so these are all the things that we talked about last week um so uh just making keeping track of it so I guess we'll just open it up if you have questions for us looking for questions yes Alyssa thank you I have I have two one is I believe that the other big takeaway from the shall we say how we scripted community forum that UMass presented was that as we had requested repeatedly I believe I heard our partner Ann Becker say that in comparison to what was true until then that UMass will indeed provide quarantine and isolation space for off campus students if they need it because as was pointed out you know some students want to go home their parents want them to go home even though that takes their case somewhere else but I believe she indicated that so I just wanted to be clear on that because that was something we asked for repeatedly and they didn't send like a giant press release about that like they did about the testing and the testing as you say is huge offering that but it also is important because we know that students live with people from all different states and then they go home and live in their apartment and it's like how do you quarantine and isolate when you're a student living in a an apartment like that and so knowing that that is available to students is really huge so I would appreciate just having that confirmed and the other item is more associated with our enforcement around the mask provisions or shall we say lack thereof because we are taking this educational approach right just like UMass is taking an educational approach and so I guess it ends up being more of a comment although the question that is associated with that is historically when we find people for noise violations and we do the $300 per person thing historically anecdotally many times we've been told that judges throw that out that they don't actually make the kids pay the fines so there was a big article in the paper about how all these have out even though they were not particularly huge parties that there were parties where people were fined given that the courts have been closed because of the pandemic given the historic reputation of the courts not actually enforcing these fines I think it would be helpful for the town council to hear at some point in the future how that's being looked at right now because you know there's all this discussion about enforcement of masking but along those lines we have the enforcement associated with noise violations which is the only enforcement we're doing and if that doesn't turn out to be effective then I'm then I want to be able to say well we're not doing that so I don't know how you expect we'll be able to do the other with the other caveat to that being you know one of the things that looking at the the broader picture municipalities always complain rightfully so that we don't get enough back of the state's money right and so when the state does offer us the ability to tax ourselves say for example the small percentage that we're allowed to offer associated with restaurant meals tax that that will then belongs to us some communities don't take advantage of it but they still complain and say the state's not sending back enough money but they don't actually aren't willing to tax themselves to do that so when we say we're not willing to enforce the mask requirements because we think education is a better way to do it and I have many positive thoughts about that but you know again the state can say hey we gave you the option of being able to enforce this and you're choosing not to do it so I would just like us to get updated on just how that approach evolves over time and partly that's going to be a fall winter thing right but also because of the court's involvement there you know we can send we can have we can have education we can have police but if nobody follows through in the court system then really what was the point of everybody going to all that work so thank you well since I'd like you I've also visited the UMass center and where they're doing all the testing and been in the meetings they are they are offering off-campus students quarantine on campus what happens when a student is identified they spend a lot of time on the phone with them talking about what the diagnosis what kind of support they need with they need food whether they have roommates etc etc and so that whole big room that overlooks the Mullins center area is where they're doing all these phone calls from and so they have a whole protocol setup and they've been using public health students and also nursing students as part of the whole team and so it's become an educational process well so I think that UMass Amherst is really really stepped up on both testing and on handling off-campus students and on taking care of people as they've been diagnosed I I want to sing their praises for what they've done Paul do you want to talk about the enforcement issue yeah I mean the court's issue is always a challenge especially at this time so we tend not to talk about that but we will see how the courts are going to process all fines that we're issuing at this point in time I think yes last weekend there were 22 noise complaints and 18 tickets issued and so I think we take issuing tickets pretty seriously the police officers have to document why they're issuing a ticket and it has to be grounded in reality and so there's a lot of work for them when they do issue a ticket they have to do it willy-nilly so we take it seriously we hope the courts do as well let me also mention that these tickets are not only going to students we have a problem with our other residents as well and so again we may be a college town but our students are not the only people violating they're acting quite responsibly for the most part gathie yeah I just this is uh occurred in my family where people were going to be either traveling out of state to a state that was a high risk state higher risk state or traveling in from a self quarantine so I thought I was checking out where you can get tested and I thought we might if we haven't already Paul so maybe we have put where people can get tested so there are a couple places in Holy York that will do free tests and it's quick it's very quick turnaround time too so if you're supposed to come in if you're coming in from a california and you're supposed to quarantine for 14 days you could get a test and get the test results back in two days so we might want to just do that as we hit when I'm thinking we're going into Thanksgiving holiday season where people might have family members traveling in and out unless we miraculously are distributing a covid vaccine and we're all safe and comfy um on on telling people how to do that because some of the local places like express strip the one on route nine to extent they had anything that could test they were telling you 14 days to get the test result back which doesn't do you any good if you're supposed to quarantine for 14 days for a traveler so just this traveling in and out it's again it's your point Lynn it's not just students that are traveling in and out and so it may be for holiday seasons or for long weekends um that people are finally trying to see family people that they haven't seen for months um so and they're not just coming from that nice set of states which you are and it's a pretty heavy fine if you don't quarantine although I'm not sure how the state will know that you entered the state and you did or didn't quarantine but but I'm just thinking make it easy to find um it is on our website but I don't it's not easy that's not readily apparent and it's on the covid website yeah Dorothy um I was talking about vaccination with someone who had done some research and um he brought up a lot of issues that we should be very concerned about which is it just as like the beginning we're we're gonna since there's no national coordination we're going to run out of of the needles syringes the chemicals um and then the two shot I hear that that one of the vaccines being considered has to be stored at 20 degrees below zero and another one at 40 degrees below zero it's 80 below Celsius yeah 80 oh okay and so it's it's really really difficult and complicated and um I was very excited when UMass um made their own company for um testing I'm wondering what can be done in terms of that by this UMass uh corporation in terms of of the vaccine because if we're a little town we're not really very important as far as this world is concerned or as least as in the US and if we don't have a plan we're not going to have that vaccine for very many people and we'll just be sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting forever so I'm just wondering if there's any talk or plans about how we can get set for this with the equipment or even the storage facilities I mean what what kind of thoughts have you had on that well I can tell you that I I share your concern too because that's the one drug the vaccine by Pfizer it's the minus 80 Celsius and most freezers are minus 20 so I don't know where these freezers are going to be are they going to ship it to us on dry ice and that you know that's going to be problematic so you know one thing that you know I have been working with is you know our partners the Hampshire preparedness health oh no the hphc Hampshire public health coalition and then there's the public health and medical coalition so these are our emergency preparedness um partners so we're beginning these conversations possibly we'll hear more about that over time any other questions if not I'd like to move on to the next item which actually is going to be the percent for art so Bill Cason who has been waiting patiently and Eric Brody who's been waiting patiently okay um thank you both for that very thorough update and thanks Jim for watching out for all of us thank you very much great so we're going to go for the percent for it and let me just start by saying this is a bylaw that has history and so I've asked Andy Steinberg who was also part of that history along with others that you hear from as well to give us a little bit of that history and then we're going to go to um Bill Cason who is presently chairing the public arts commission and then Kathy Shane who chairs the ad hoc committee so Andy yes uh thank you and I'll try and be quick because of the hour but you had asked me to briefly recount the history of the percent for our bylaw from the select board and town meeting period the public art commission presented a proposal to the select board on February 8 2016 to submit a percent for our bylaw town meeting first proposal was about an uh an amount equal to one percent of a project uh the cost of a project that it one percent be allocated to art select board was uncomfortable with the amount but encouraged the concept as a result the public art commission presented a proposal to the 2016 annual town meeting that won half of one percent at that town meeting there was substantial discussion and the desire of some members that um art supported by the bylaw include performing art and not just uh visual art um and as a result of that town meeting passed a motion to refer the article back to the public art commission in order to fund performing art such as music the commission found that it would need to establish a public art fund as a part of the bylaw however that would require special legislation so they proposed a revised bylaw to the 2017 annual town meeting that established such a fund and authorized the select board to petition the legislature to authorize the town to establish a public art fund the bylaw passed in the select board submitted a request to the legislature fraction in 2018 a bill was passed in the house but ran into a problem the senate the senate committee asked for an opinion from the department of revenue ended november of 2018 near the end of the session it advised the the senate committee that it did not support the request the senate therefore did not act on the legislation there were reasons that it stated for that which i think bill kason might talk about later the council was elected november 2018 and the question was passed along from the the percent for art bylaw then became something that was in the council's jurisdiction and the council created the ad hoc committee that was chaired by kathy shane so that was basically the context of what led up to the council action on it and i'm sure that bill is prepared if people are interested in knowing how we resolve the the problem that the department of revenue identified but it was resolved and so i'll leave it for there let me just also say we'll be hearing from eric brody who lives in my pat's in my district and i heard from eric brody about this in december of 2018 so he was right on it we're going to hear from him later so bill we're going to put your slides up and have you start okay thank you can everybody hear me can you hear me yes yes let me just get my uh our point set up okay thank you very much for having me it's been a long winding road to get to this point but i'm so glad to be here and to be able to present to you on this i start with this slide because it features judithing blaze's mural at the bang center and to me it really epitomizes the best of what we've been able to accomplish so far regarding public art and amherst this was a public art commission project all the long before my time so i can't take any credit for it but we can think about something like this and even more ambitious if we do pass a percent for art bylaw next slide so just to cover a few definitions and i'll return to i'll return to these a bit later but what are we talking about when we talk about public art public art is art that's available to the public for free and when we talk about the proposed percent for art bylaw like other percent for art bylaws what we're proposing to do is is publicly fund the creation of public art next slide so the public art commission does this already on on almost zero budget with very very very small amount of money but we've been able to accomplish accomplish things over the years i've been on the commission for three years or so now i've only been chair for the last six months or so right around the time covid hit and electrify amherst has been a real feather in our cap i think that that we've accomplished since i've been on the commission it's the project to paint the electrical boxes in town and i imagine that if we do pass the percent for art bylaw the administration of it will work in a similar way but just on a bigger scale so what we can talk about that in a later slide next slide so percent for art programs serve according to the national assembly of state arts agencies economic development create a placemaking and social justice economic development because strong artworks in a strong arts community attracts visitors to a town like amherst create a placemaking because public art serves residents and workers as well as our visitors and social justice to the degree that free public art reaches populations who might not otherwise have access to art next slide so these are some big numbers put out by the mass cultural council about the impact of the arts in general uh financially on the state so three out of four residents participate or they did before covid in at least one cultural event each month and certainly that will resume the nice thing i will add about the kind of public art we're proposing is that it's very suitable to to times like covid because small numbers of people can see these things they're often outside but anyway in 2019 the arts in massachusetts according to the cultural council generated 97 million in direct revenue 880 million in indirect spending in 2.3 billion dollars with their total impact on the state as a whole next slide so amherst currently gives the town of amherst itself almost no money to support the arts really no money to support the arts and you know we always compare amherst to our neighbor north hampton but gee we don't do anything like what our much smaller neighbor east hampton does when it comes to funding the arts publicly so i would just say you know maybe now's the time that we could step up and stop being so stodgy and really create through the town itself an even stronger arts community and arts culture than we've had before here next slide so what is the proposed bylaw it's half a percent of the budget for capital construction projects over a million dollars will be used for on-site visual artworks and this is a bit different than the way the bylaw had been proposed previously is as andy had just described and i will go through some of the changes that we made in the ad hoc committee getting to the version of the bylaw we have now which i think is is in many ways much improved next slide so how are we defining in this new version of the bylaw public art well the one part i don't like about it is unfortunately we weren't able to include the performing arts and hopefully the town will find other ways to do so and we have lots of ideas on the public art commission about how it might do that but what we mean by public art is permanent on-site art projects that are integral part of a town-owned building or site percent for art projects will be considered part of qualified construction projects and will be developed along with that project from the beginning so we will select an artist who will work with the construction manager the architect of the town to create an artwork that will be integral part of new capital construction projects that qualify and we built in provisions to avoid delays so let's say you never know you get a temperamental artist or there's there's supply line issues and the art piece of a project is hanging up that project well in the new bylaw they can stop that project to get a to get a building built you know if we need that new fire station and we can't wait for the art because it's taking too long well it might have to just be set aside but that is possible with this new version of the bylaw next slide administration how will this be administered so the authority for administering this will lie with the town manager the town manager will work with the public art commission in a mat and in a manner that's similar to how electrify Amherst works and we'll work with the town manager and town staff to do so right now with electrify Amherst we I think have very little there's very little demand that we put on either the manager or town staff this the percent for art bylaw will create bigger projects so there will be more demand but we really see the public art commission doing the the lifting the heavy lifting with with these projects and there will be an art selection advisory panel appointed by the town manager with input from the public art commission that will work with us every step of the way and the idea is that rather than a jury this will be a commission of people drawn from the greater area potentially from around the country real experts artists public public art professionals etc who then will inform the decision-making process which will all be of course public and that the that the public art commission will actually do the final make make the final decision and consultation with the town manager about the artworks the reason we decided on this is because the public art commission is made up of Amherst residents and so it will be residents deciding with resident input but with broader input from from experts from around the area around the country what gets built here next slide and then there's the issue of financing Kathy will talk a little bit more about this but one of the biggest changes is that we raise the threshold for the trigger for projects from $100,000 to a million big change so that means only bonded projects will be will be eligible the half percent that we're drawing from only applies to the amount of finance from the town's general fund this means no money will be pulled from enterprise funds and no money from grants unless the grant explicitly says that it can be used for works of art any unspent funds will return to the general fund which also means that if we have a huge pile of money and that we decided a mural is more appropriate for a project in a that a bronze sculpture a mural is significantly less expensive the rest of that money would go back to the general fund and the piece that I think is really crucial I think now in times of COVID and concerns about finances um that the council can lower or eliminate any given percent for art project what if they feel the town doesn't have the money or they feel that a particular um uh uh capital capital project uh doesn't qualify for one reason or another next slide so i want to end with just some examples of great works of public art from around the country that you know to trigger our imaginations and get thinking about what could be possible here um I've I've tried to pick examples that draw from fire departments from DPWs and potentially from schools because those are the three big three of the four big building projects coming down the pike so this is a really famous now mural from Cambridge Massachusetts who has a long-standing percent for art program the only other city in Massachusetts that has one way back in 1976 an Inman Square will landmark for Cambridge the firefighters from a fire company um with the founding fathers to celebrate the bicentennial massive mural if you've ever been in Inman Square you can't mess it that's really iconic could use a new coated paint but uh next slide here in New York City which has probably the biggest percent for art program in the country not not surprisingly um uh the artist Julian Laverdiere who did the Tower of Light tribute at the World Trade Center worked hand in hand with the architects to design this remarkable sort of postmodern or neo-modern really fire station and he designed these this light display in the front where there's a high pressure hose and a fire axe as part of the facade next slide and here in New York at the Newton Creek water treatment facility this remarkable fountain that takes that clean water from all that polluted water from the Newton Creek on the border of Brooklyn and Queens and pipes it in this in this water display from the outside of the building and it wraps inside the building all throughout the visitor center so should our DPW have a visitor center or big public presence you know we might want to think about something along these lines next slide and here a playful park bench in Cambridge but you could certainly imagine something like this at a school yard the new elementary school hopscotch course come to life next slide and one of my favorite projects actually built on a landfill in New York but again you could easily imagine this at a school a carousel where there was a contest where children did drawings submitted them to the contest and they were chosen as what were then turned into sculptures the sculptural animals that the kids could ride on at the carousel next slide and I just would like to point out you know we looked at Cambridge we looked at New York City that's definitely out of Amherst League but the Americans for the Arts describes and says public arts it's not just for big cities percent for art programs and other public art programs are in about a third of the of the of the towns that have these programs in the country so 150,000 people or less actually have programs towns of 150,000 or less have programs that are similar to the ones we're proposing for Amherst and I'd like to show you two final examples next slide here in in Roanoke Virginia a fun project a bike rack shaped like a giant comb by pop-up design the comb bike rack again think about this at one of the at the new elementary school or one of the schools and last but not least in Missoula, Montana a sculpture very modernist looking sculpture but one that actually references the dogs that go running around it in the dog park where it was newly built and here you see a cute little girl playing on the dog sculpture and my last slide because it's late I will just leave that I won't sit there and read it to you but it's a wonderful quote from the National Governors Governors Association describing the economic and social impact that programs like the one we're proposing for Amherst has on towns like ours thank you for the time and I am here to help answer questions and I thank the members of the ad hoc committee and the council for all the work they put in on this thank you it's bell we're going to move right on to Kathy okay so you'll search so I get Bill gets to do the exciting beautiful pictures and I get to do the finance side of this and I think everyone knows you have a large package that Lynn creatively helped us put it all together so the report from the ad hoc committee the full report is in there the report from the finance committee as it reviewed the financial impact is in there as is the bylaw so I'm just going to highlight a few things from the finance committee report because we were we now I was the chair of the ad hoc committee but also on finance so it's a big we here we're asked specifically to look at a financial impact and bill just quickly outlined all the major areas where this revised proposed bylaw made significant changes including this raising of the threshold to a million dollars and I just want to emphasize that by doing that it means that ordinarily this will always be financed with long-term debt so it'll be integral to the larger construction project and we'll go out for 20 or 30 years and that spreads the cost it finances the artwork but it spreads the cost to the town over multiple years and we do have an escape clause to go down on the percent or eliminate it if we just can't but we also have a we we want to um if the delay would happen or it's not accessible in some way so we put some safeguards in it to make sure this is public art that's publicly accessible so go to the next slide we were asked in the committee by a couple members of the committee to try to do some illustrated examples of the financial impact so these are just a couple um if you were trying to finance a 10 million dollar construction project or 20 million what does 0.5% equal so that's the total cost that could be up to that amount allocated to art and then what if you went out with a 20-year bond at 3% or 30-year bond at 3% and and the way the town has been financing bonds it's a declining amount so you can see illustrated in this that the cost declines you're not financing the whole 50,000 in one year you're spreading it out over time and it spreads out even more if you do it longer and I might add that bond rates are now in the 2% range so this would be even smaller if it was financed by a debt service override if that was the larger project it would be two dollars to 250 per taxpayer per year so we tried to show why the impact is less on the town budget because we're spreading it out and that's the importance of this going up on the higher threshold and tagging it to be integral to the overall project. Next slide. Bill quickly summarized some of these what are the benefits of it but we had quite a bit of discussion in the finance committee and Chalene did some research for us on the economic benefits of it as well as the cultural benefits and gave us some citations and as Bill came and did presentations of the kind of art we could be financing because we were attaching it to large buildings that potentially is going to attract national or international artists or the kinds of things of beauty he just demonstrated Sharon Pavanelli who's on our finance committee as a resident member and runs a store downtown said oh it's going to be bringing visitors out it's going to be people to town and we've talked often about a two season economy and this creating these kinds of public art in Amherst contributes to that so it's enhancing the public space but drawing residents to Amherst and drawing the residents out Amherst out to meet play and use our public art so we got increasingly excited about it both in the finance committee which normally doesn't get too excited about things it just is costing things out but also in the ad hoc committee for because the revisions really make this a solid bylaw and I'm going to end there. Thank you and so let's take that down and I'd like to invite Eric Brody who is kind of the father of this thing if he would like to say a few words Eric thank you thank you to the council and thank you Bill and Kathy I thought you made very compelling arguments to promote public art thanks for calling me the way you think of these the father I kind of think of myself now after all this time is if there was such a thing as a godfather for a bylaw I feel like I would be a godfather of this one this began over four years ago under a different town manager and different different people on the on what is the town council now with the select board then although there are three people on your council that were involved pretty much from the beginning still so they they have some of the history I was the former chair of the public art commission when this began over four years ago and I'm really excited now to see that has finally reached this stage development after all this time so I want to thank again the committees of the town council that have been responsible for bringing it to this stage I think I just want to say a couple of words of support I think that the percent for art concept was a good idea four years ago when we started and it's still a good idea it passed town meeting by over 70 percent of a positive vote and it was clearly something that the members of town meeting at that time thought would be a good thing for emerson something that they wanted to see in the town the changes that have been made that that you've just heard about have changed the original idea the original concept I think to make it more palatable to the times you're living in right now the changes so there's basically no risk at all to having this impact the finances of the town is the if the town feels the need to pull back on any project like this as you've heard at the the most the the percent could be reduced or the or eliminated entirely need be which I would hope would not would not occur with any project there are so few of them in the works there's probably a maximum four projects on the boards for the next decade or so and maybe only three so I would urge you to think about when you when the time comes to vote on this that not to let the current financial considerations and situation of the town because of COVID control your decision because the pandemic will pass in time we'll get through this and the town will recover and it will build the structures that the town needs and whenever that happens the maximum for of any project for art that will go for public art is still only one half of one percent of the total construction costs we said at the beginning when we began this over for years ago and I made my first presentation town meeting that it would cost the average taxpayer no more than a cup of coffee per year and I see from the the new presentation of the finances that that's still pretty much the case the average person I think it started remember just seeing those around two dollars two dollars and fifty cents or something like that on average so it's I think it's in a very affordable way to get significant pieces of work into the downtown downtown streetscape that Amherst otherwise would never be able to afford or or acquire so I would just encourage you to think about this carefully and don't be deterred by the current financial situations we would have I think if this passes one of the least expensive public art percent for our programs in the country thanks for the opportunity to talk to you thank you so this is just the first reading the second will be next week and so I want to have the opportunity for people to ask questions and we'll start with Mandy Joe I just wanted to give the report of the community resources thank you so much Mandy I goofed on that community resources committee Mandy Joe so community resources committee can consider this at at least two meetings the first meeting was January 8th of 2020 and the second meeting was January 29th 2020 in between the public uh the percent for art ad hoc committee went back and reviewed the concerns that the CRC had at its first consideration which related to the jury and then presented a modified bylaw to CRC on January 29th at that meeting CRC voted four to one foreign favor one against recommending the council adopt the percent for art bylaw as presented at the January 29th meeting the and and I will defer to pat de angeles who was the one against if she wants to expand on it the reasons for opposing the recommendation to adopt at the time of the January 29th meeting and councillor de angeles stated that she had very much concern about increasing the tax burden on town residents even at what appears to be a small amount to any one taxpayer for one project um so that that was the vote um and if I didn't summarize that properly uh pat I encourage you to state that for the opposition to the recommendation pat would you like to make a further comment okay then we're moving on to the finance committee report which was included in your packet we'll get to questions in a moment Dorothy uh Andy yeah I think Kathy's really already given the finance committee report so I don't need to repeat it she's vice chair of the committee and served in that dual role and the only thing I would add is it was unanimously voted out in favor um yes and the sense of the two non-voting the three non-voting residents also expressed support for this okay and then George Ryan yeah um folks can read the committee report it's in the it's in the packet the vote was four to one it was on march 11 the one vote against it was four to one in favor the one vote against was because the item had come at the last minute and the committee member felt uncomfortable voting without more time for deliberation so but the majority of the committee um approved it clear consistent actionable um we also complained a little bit about kp law that's the time for another discussion perhaps um can I also mention so in other words this was geared up and ready to come to the council at the time covid hit amherst and so it is our attempt to try to catch up if you will Dorothy you have your hand up okay well I certainly support the percent for art and um I was in on many meetings in which this has been refined and developed and the committee under kathy has done a great job but there were a couple of issues that I brought up that people seem to agree with but I don't see reflected in the final report and that has to do with um kind of soft reference to local responses um I had said that I thought that the people who worked in the building in or on which the new art project was going to be should be consulted or brought into the picture in some manner um also I see the excitement for internationally talented artists but I don't want that to mean that local artists a local meaning you know Pioneer Valley western mass or whatever not just the town of embers but that local artists um feel not wanted um so it's really just uh make sure that the outreach includes strong access to local artists to participate and that the people who work in the building upon which the art should be should be consulted because I really would hate to have one of these things where you know international committee comes up when supports a work of art and the people who work there bitch about it every day because I really want the percent art to be successful and to create end up in creating a lot more art in the town of embers that everybody loves Bill you have your hand up I assume you want to respond to that and Kathy does as well yeah yeah thank you uh Dorothy and absolutely I think that that level of detail over the exact composition of who will serve on the advisory committee and what the RFP will look like um is going to be part of the administrative process but but absolutely 100 percent for sure this wouldn't exclude local artists in any way and we certainly would bring the people the people who use the building would be you know when we do electrify embers we always reach out to the abutters and invite them to be on the jury this is just part of our part of what we do um so that's absolutely uh in our mind as as as being baked into the process but we didn't want to get to that level of specificity in the bylaw because there has to be flexibility in terms of how the the program is administered and each one will be a little bit different too so and I just I just want to read um because we Bill you're right we didn't get to super specificity but we wrote in users so the selection committee shall also include key stakeholders including but not limited to users of the building neighbors of the project and other members of the public so we wanted you know the people that were the abutters and would see it every day as well as the people who were in the building and this is the committee that would be selecting and talking about the art so um we did um try to write in a broad committee it's not just artists who are selecting the art but people who are daily in the building Kathy thank you Kathy any other questions from the council at this point I yes Alyssa I sometimes feel like we we rush a little when it comes to our comments and questions and we say well it's just the first reading but hopefully we get everything out on the table during the first reading so that with the second reading goes super smoothly and um we just hear some public comment and then we move on but literally and eric brody will probably faint when I say this I am in full support of the revised bylaw so thank you for all the work that has gone in to making this work in the reality that we're in and in the reality that will be in in the future I think the flexibility that's been built in and just every aspect also excellent slide presentation on bill's part and on Kathy's part and on everybody who put together packages so this was incredibly comprehensive caught us up to where we needed to be and actually addressed literally every concern that I had and that many other people had over the many years so thank you everyone it's been amazing to see this come together because honestly I didn't expect whatever happened so yay I think it's terrific that you have your hand up please I'm going to be voting yes on passing this okay um I do want to just say that but before next week we want to clarify how the jones library fits into this both in terms of renovation and also in terms of um a full library edition so we'll I'll be working with Kathy and the town manager on that okay any other comments at this time thank you all for your wonderful presentations and especially Eric for your work in the past and the future and bill and Kathy and the rest of the committee Andy uh Steve Schreiber and there was one other person oh the other person from the commission uh the arts commission uh for the being on the ad hoc committee thank you right here next week on this one move on to the plastic bag single use plastic bag prohibition and in this case we're going to call on Darcy Dumont and Darcy is the let me just give you the background although it's in the package very quickly this was one of the bills the bylaws that came to us for revision from the bylaw review committee we adopted it but then Darcy said there were some pieces that she felt were taken out and she wanted to see then put back in again and that led to this being referred to go along with other bylaws where the same kinds of questions were um asked as well so it's gone through all that process and it's gone through several discussions at gol and it's now back before the council and so I'm going to call on Darcy for a brief presentation and then on George for the gol report Darcy unmute please Darcy please unmute and would you like us to put the red-lined copy up on the screen sure okay so I won't go over the background that Lynn just put out I just would like to make sure that anyone I don't think we have very many attendees left but I think we might have gotten a few people excited about thinking that we were passing a single-use plastic bag bylaw when in fact it's been us we've had the bylaw since 2016 so but I won't go into how this all transpired we I was I was asked to bring my case to the to the gol committee to bring up the original objections that I had back in January to to including it in the in the general bylaw so mine you may know that in March Governor Baker issued an executive order lifting local single-use plastic bag bands and then vacated that order in July in the middle of that the gol took the issue up in June and the main objections I had were that the bylaw review committee had removed language encouraging the use of reusable bags so if you see in on this on the screen the former section three in the use regulation which I think you see where it says retail establishments are strongly encouraged to make reusable bags available for sale to customers at a reasonable price that sentence was the reason why the the bylaw review committee felt that because it was just words of encouragement and wasn't enforceable then that should come out and as well as all of the definitions of alternative types of bags that we could retail retailers could use again because they thought and they in fact were not that was not an enforceable part of the bylaw so they remove the language they also remove the language regarding the purpose in section a and that language appeared in the finding section of the original bylaw you don't see it here because this is not being amended from the original bylaw if you want to see that history you can go to the other memo in the packet which gives several other versions since 2016 um so I argued that these changes were substantive and shouldn't have been made by the bylaw review committee the gol committee in january or no in june pardon me agreed four to one that a slight variation of the original bylaw language could be retained Mandy joe voted no based on still wanting the language to be enforceable the gol committee also decided on its own to remove the last paragraph about deferments based on the fact that years had passed since the enactment of the bylaw enough time for retailers to have noticed of its existence so as noted in george ryan's report on this matter gol met one more time on the issue in order to try to counter arguments about enforceability I researched and found Sierra Club model language that provided enforceability but is conditional on retailers choosing to provide alternate alternate bags once this language was added the gol committee voted unanimously to support it that's the language you see in section c2 uh if any retail establishment provides a checkout bag to customers the bag shall comply with the requirements of being either a recyclable bag a compostable bag a biodegradable bag a reusable or a reusable bag um so adding that sentence in c2 also negated any objections to including the definitions putting the definitions back in the definitions of alternate bags so I know we're not voting tonight but I hope that the council will vote for these changes when it comes to second reading rather than putting it through any further process I think thanks I believe we can take this down at this time and I'm going to call on george to give the gol report well I think garcy has pretty much given it um which is fine by me I'd only point out one other small thing if you were looking for the exemption there's still an exemption for certain permissible single-use plastic bag moved from the use regulation section to the definition section so that's one thing that you might have been looking for and couldn't find otherwise garcy's pretty much given you the story of what geol did with it two votes and how it was revised the second time to meet the objections of one of the geol colleagues and that's what you have now this bylaw is the first reading because the bylaw that was posted on the town website was actually incorrect we will not be able to do the second reading until October 5th because it has to be posted for 14 days before we vote so we were allowed to discuss it tonight we just weren't allowed to vote next week so it will come back on the agenda on October 5th Evan you have a question I have comments so I guess reading through what was in the packet my understanding of what was being done was what was being referred to geol was a request to add back in what bylaw review had taken out what we've gotten is something different which is a bylaw that's been changed substantively in two in two ways I would argue that what bylaw review committee did were non substantive changes I would argue what we have today are substantive changes and so my first concern is process concern which is that the moment that the bylaw started to go into substantive territory it really left the jurisdiction of geol and really should have gone over to CRC we saw that with the noise bylaw which geol sent over to CRC once that conversation became substantive I'm not quite sure why that didn't happen with this and the reason for that is based on the two major changes so one is that I think it's C2 about if any retail establishment provides a checkout bag it shall comply with the requirements and then it gets some requirements that's a new requirement that didn't exist in the bylaw that's been on the book since 2016 that's that's something brand new that potentially could impact our businesses and so you can argue that's not a substantive change and in fact when I read that I thought you know do the business do all the businesses already comply with this um you know I went I've been doing a lot of takeout in the past week and I went and looked at all the takeout bags and I was thinking well you know like this one from Formosa is probably recyclable but doesn't meet the criteria that it say it's recyclable on it or say please recycle but maybe it's considered biodegradable and I started to get a little bit confused about does this there's this bag that I got four days ago from Formosa meet the new requirement that's being put in this bylaw that says that if they give out bags they shall be required to do these types and I thought if I'm confused there's a chance a restaurant owner might be confused um and might be surprised that this new requirement is being put on these businesses without them ever knowing because it was done through GOL the second thing was the removal of the the removal of the deferments uh Pat and Alyssa will remember our conversation in bylaw review committee where I brought up the question of why should we get rid of the deferment since I always understood it to be a transition uh provision and certainly we've been long enough and what we heard from the other members of the bylaw review committee who had been there in the original bylaw review committee where that when they talked to the health department they found out that they're still giving deferments to some restaurants who have shown a burden and in fact they cited one restaurant in particular who has a delivery driver who is disabled for whom available non-plastic bags are very hard for him to carry because he only has one arm and so they've been allowed to continue to use plastic bags at least at the time they talked to them because they saw that that was a burden they didn't want to put an undue burden on one of their employees with a disability and so my question to GOL would be did you talk to the health department to ask whether there are any active deferments um and when there any restaurants have continued to seek deferments because if they are um then this is a pretty major change to take that away and this is where I come back to I don't understand why it didn't go to CRC because that would have been the place to say hey local businesses uh there's a new provision being added that wasn't in there before is this going to affect you or to bring in the health department and say what's going on with deferments um are there any active deferments because in by law review committee heard that there were still restaurants that were requesting deferments and that should be part of the conversation perhaps GOL had those conversations I imagine they didn't because it's not in their purview and so I'm not saying I'm not supportive of these changes but from a process perspective I'm concerned that it went through GOL and that these conversations might not have happened um is there anybody who would like to respond specifically to that Darcy I was expecting Evan to bring up both of those points um and he did uh and I would say that that's they're probably valid um I would I would disagree that the original problems with the by law review committee were not substantive also but um and I would just like to point out that the the this has been you know I feel like the entire process has been pretty much unnecessary because the original by-law review committee uh that Paul appointed which was three residents which I objected to if I recall but which they were the three residents Bernie Kubiak, Bob Ritchie and someone else um they had a very light hand and they they proposed the exact same words that was that was in my proposal they didn't they didn't propose taking out any of the stuff that the later by-law review committee proposed taking out so I'm sure you have something to say about that but but um I beg you all not to send this to another committee please the next time that's why I said previously please don't add any more process to this um if you think that it's okay the way it is when we have our second reading the next time um but I do agree with Evan that GOL can have the tendency of of getting substantive when they shouldn't be uh George I guess all I can say in defense is this was sent to us by the council so I'm going to blame the council you sent it to us and told us to deal with it told Darcy to go to GOL with her recommendations so we dealt with it so council wants to put it somewhere else now go ahead but we did what we thought we were supposed to do and you sent it to us in the first place okay Andy yes um speaking only on the deferment issue I was the select board liaison to the refuse and recycle management committee which was the committee that proposed the original bylaw to town meeting and the deferment section was added in the development of that bylaw for a very limited and specific purpose and that was that if uh establishments had problems getting recyclable bags that were appropriate for the establishment or had an undisupply of purchased already bags or for other similar reasons that it could ask for a deferment um for a limited period of up to a year if you look at the language for the deferment section of the original bylaw it applied to the entire um establishment being able to defer its participation in the by in the bylaw risk requirement it was not a specific to a specific type of bag so that the original purpose uh was no longer served and uh the suggestion that had been made to eliminate that section therefore made sense at the time that it was made which was really before go l i'm going to just ask straightforward is anybody going to make a motion to send this to crc alissa that's not why i raised my hand okay is anybody going to make a motion to send this to crc okay alissa would you like to comment please so given that i'm not making a motion to send it crc i i i share the chagrin uh surprise that even though the sponsor said they totally expected the questions haven't brought up they didn't bother to address them because i don't understand why we wouldn't have had the petitioner check in this goes back to perhaps some conversations we're going to have at tso as to whose responsibility is it to do what right how much is gol how much is crc how much is the petitioner and i would argue in this case that was the petitioner's responsibility to ensure that restaurants do in fact understand this when we went back as as andy just said we had there's a lot of history here as to how they understood it and i in fact used to take jeff kravitz my takeout bags and we've written in sharpie where they came from because they were clearly not in compliance and so you know we we've dealt with this over the years we are focused on education not on finding people and so a change to the bylaw that says we're changing the requirement without actually letting restaurants know that just seems incredibly odd i'm not going to send a crc at this point because it's been through enough of a mess i do not know exactly what the problem was with the bulletin board posting but i will reflect to the fact that i had already emailed george about the fact that just as when we discussed this briefly at previous meeting this was in unintelligible when it was presented to us last time the big the big report this time really helped in terms of sorting out what changed and when it's been incredibly complex i can't imagine that most members of the public have been able to follow it and what was submitted to as the change to the bylaw is in at least three different colors and different styles this does not even comply with our own rules and is certainly far less transparent than what we did with representative town meeting and warrants we need to get our act together in terms of how we're presenting bylaw changes in a very simple way we need a good report like we had this time and we need a clear key at the top of the item that says this is pink this is purple this is why this is underlined this is why this is green which seems to combine more than one version of the bylaw it was a mess it was extremely difficult and i'm i'm actually thinking of voting against it just because it's been such a mess but i appreciate that people tried their best to work around things i don't expect to see something this messy brought to us again and i don't expect us to see something that impacts the business community not having been discussed with them because they just it just wasn't i don't understand that Evan yeah so i i will say i think this should have gone to crc once it became substantive i'm not going to move to refer to crc because i sort of feel like uh horses out of the cage whatever that saying is uh where i don't know where people keep horses the barn barn sure horses out of the barn so i'm not going to try to think as the appetite in this council to do it but i will say i'm glad it's not on for a second reading next week because that gives time and what i am hoping for is between now and the next reading essentially one um some some uh action on the part of the petitioner to actually make sure maybe through the bid or the chamber that businesses that could be impacted by this at least know it's happening so when we come to public comment if this is a concern to any business they have an opportunity to express that and the second thing i want to know is if there are any restaurants that have active deferments right now when this was before by law review committee we were told there was at least one and i don't want us to change the by law strip the deferments and then have business surprise you don't have that deferment anymore so i don't want to make any changes without people who this is going to impact knowing those changes are coming um and i'll feel comfortable comfortable not referring to crc if we can have that those two things done by the next by the second reading okay got it andy so just coming back to the deferment thing one more time um the other question then comes up to what um evan just said is to if the um board of health or um has been giving deferments on specific types of bags to restaurants then it is uh in violation of the prior language in the deferment section of the by law which is what you really have to go back to at that time because it really does say upon written application from retail establishment the board of health after public hearing may temporarily defer application of this by law for retail establishment for up to a year upon a showing by the retail establishment of um that the conditions of the by law would cause undue hardship so if a deferment section is appropriate i think that it's now too far down the line and if there are establishments that have that feeling that a suggestion should be made to add a deferment section back that is appropriate but the deferment section as it was written in the by law should not be used now it was not the intent and it was not the wording of the by law are there any other comments then Darcy I'll work with you to see make sure we get the answers to those questions okay yes too well we'll also we'll also make sure yeah thank you okay uh we're going to move on to uh the D which is the North Amherst Library expenditure a gift i'm going to ask that uh Paul speak to this and then we just have a brief thing to show you on the screen thank you Lynn so you saw the presentation before um and at that point we were still searching what was required from the town council so the town council doesn't have to vote to accept the gift but the town council does have to vote to expend the gift so before we move forward on this there is a proposed motion for you to actually expend the gift and so this is the addition for the North Amherst Library this is for the first phase of the design and outreach into the community that will come up with plans that are construction ready at that point we'll pause if the anonymous donor wants to give additional funds to do the actual construction that offer of a gift will come back to the council and you'll have the ability to make the decision if you want to move forward with the construction or not so the action tonight would be to accept a gift of $200,000 to do the construction plans for the North Amherst Library in your packet is a memo from the town manager so i'm going to place in motion uh to authorize the acceptance and the expenditure of the following grants and donations donor name anonymous amount $200,000 purpose design engineering costs associated with improvements to the North Amherst Library basically it is on the page you see right now is there a second to the motion second hey you can have a pat all right i've got that one are there any other questions or comments okay seeing none then we're going to move to a vote and i'm just going to pick somebody Kathy Shane yes uh Steve Schreiber yes Andy Steinberg yes Sarah Schwartz yes Shalini Balmille yes Alyssa Brewer yes D'Angels yes Darcy DeMarc yes Lynn Grease Murray yes Mandy Johanicki yes Dorothy Pam yes Evan Ross yes George Ryan yes passes unanimously moving on next topic is the town council performance goals for the town manager and we're going to put up on the screen the show the version that shows the modest changes and i'm going to call upon George Ryan so can you all see that it's on my screen is very small i'm trying to open it up so i can see it more clearly on my screen my other screen again the GOL report describes the discussion we spent a fair amount of time with the question of whether we should interweave racial equity and social justice goals into policy and or management goals and i tried to capture the the sense of the committee was that um that was not appropriate or that was something that we felt that all these goals are important and that i'm trying to pick out one and interweave it into all the others basically would require us to prioritize goals and we had shied away from that from the beginning and so what we did was introduce a sentence in the preamble actually not a sentence but a fragment um acknowledging that these goals are these policy goals are deeply interrelated and overarching and then continue with the original draft actually version six this is now draft seven um and so that was um an attempt to acknowledge that all these goals are important and interconnected and overarching but we did not have a formal vote on this but one member of the committee felt strongly that we should still nonetheless interweave racial equity and social justice into all the other goals and the majority of the members of the committee did not agree so that fragment or part of a sentence was introduced into the preamble the other changes are there before you they are not particularly i don't think substantial but they're there for you to review um what we did under goals we simply strike the the under management goals we took out the management word just to highlight the goal bring it out and i do have a question i don't quite understand myself what happened to the title it now reads town council performance objective goals for the town manager um thank you great town manager performance goals yeah perhaps in strike objective is that was what we suggested that okay that's um thank you for that are there questions from the council pati i think george just addressed my question um did he take the word objective out and leave the word goals okay because i kept thinking what do we is that as opposed to a subjective goal so we we just i kept this change this change was made shall we say remotely and i don't think i understood what i was being asked when i agreed to it okay this evening i thought what does this mean okay that was my only question i just wanted to make sure i understood that the word objective is going and the word goals is staying thank you but it's not so that's why i was confused so yes that you have your hand up yes i wanted to say that um during the gll meeting um we did put in this sentence about interrelated and overarching but i feel strongly uh and the reason that we didn't accept um the uh the proposals presented by the racial equity task force or the energy climate action committee um goals was because they had not all been voted on by the council and therefore it was agreed by the committee that they did not um specifying things that hadn't been voted on would be inappropriate and there is an act there is some accuracy about that however what i suggested then and i'm going to suggest now is both the racial equity task force goals and responses to the town manager's evaluation and the energy climate action committee's proposals be put in sort of as an appendix so that both paul and um community members could have access to the kinds of thinking that we're working on so i would like to propose those be added that i need to clarify what are the two things that you want to add uh the racial equity task force put out i i apologize i don't have it in front of me they put out a series of recommendations about racial equity in amherst and in reference to the town manager's evaluation goals and how and what our alka i'll bring the other i want to know what the other document was the energy climate action committee has also created a document at another time that listed all the potential proposals they were making to the council and that um it was felt if that those were also goals that could be interspersed or intertwined uh and the decision was that that wouldn't be appropriate either but i would like to see those goals also added as an appendix does that help at all win yes so are i'm going to ask you that you put that in the form of abortion i hate doing that um i move that we amend the town council performance goals for the town manager by adding as an appendix the um evaluate the racial equity task force goals recommendations for the town manager goals and also the energy um energy and climate action committees uh recommendations about energy um sustainability to help me to hear Darcy um for to also be included in this appendix so that they as we vote on them it could be clarified and and seen i don't know does that help i hate doing that part is there a second i can that okay is there any further discussion about the motion to attach these two documents Alyssa i was originally going to speak about something else but since that motion came up i i will not vote for that that we will not add appendices i think both those documents are very valuable but they are not adopted by the town council they therefore are not part of the goals Darcy yeah i just wanted to say that the that the document is was you know officially sent from the ECAC um to the GOL committee to request town you know town manager climate action goals and they were based uh in large part on last year's goals which were much more extensive and detailed than this year's so they repeated a lot of those and so they they are goals that were already they've already been in our set of goals last year so yes they were the official officially requested by ECAC is Kathy Shane comment um yeah i i'm uncomfortable unless i had a list of what we're specifically talking about to include it as an appendix um i would be fine with um saying you know these are evolving i think Alyssa at one point said this is a living document so you know if as we go along we say yes we endorse doing this yes we endorse doing that that can be broadening it but um i know what was in last year's performance goals i just didn't want to rework and rework and rework these and so i don't know which specifics were in last years and we didn't do them all so i i would just be very uncomfortable having an appendix see see these specifics on either topic and i'm not saying i don't i disagree with any of the specifics i just haven't had heard a discussion about them um and i'd want to be saying is this the right set we've got these very general climate action policy goals and that are overarching policy goals that i think are pretty strongly worded um that should be then taken into account in each of the other activities this is a restructured way of doing performance goals so i am very uncomfortable about putting an appendix on of things that i would have to go through each one of them um and i don't think that that would be a good use of our time. Shalini, any further comments? I i i would want to know what the purpose for adding the appendix is um if um yeah i'm not sure why we are adding that i mean if there's specific things we want from those documents we should be discussing those for example i'm still interested in in having i don't know discussion or what at this point but more like a consensus amongst us is a town council how important is the equity racial equity goal for us and given that this is the first year we're talking about it to me it feels really important to include it as a lens we bring to all the goals and um just because it's a new thing it's important and if you don't do that then it doesn't create a measurement around that if it's not part of the economic goal as well and we're not considering it then it's not going to make Paul look into it specifically because it's not part of the economic goal and it's not therefore there is no measurement around that and so i don't know to me just feels important to include it and i'd love to hear what the other counselors have to say about there's a motion on the floor to amend and there's a motion to attach to the town manager's performance goals through documents one is a document that came from the racial equity task force that i get the name right yes and the other one is a document that came from ecac the document that came from the racial equity task force uh was sent to all of the council but it's not ever been discussed by the council the document that came from ecac was sent to um gel but has not ever come before the full council is there further comment on the motion to attach george no Dorothy okay i i think attaching is just a way of acting as if we have paid attention and listened to them but it means we haven't really done the work we haven't gotten to the arguments and the fights that would result if we went through each of those and decided do we really want to put that in that here or that there which maybe is work we should do but so i think attaching although i might be very interested in many of the ideas in them is is is a meaningless activity so i would be against attaching them elissa any further comment on this on the on the amendment to attach or the motion to attach elissa your hand keeps going up and off it's it's like it's like i'm that kid who keeps doing that and no it's it's it's my computer thank you okay then i'm gonna ask that we vote on the motion to attach those two documents your vote is yes it means you want to attach the documents if your vote is no it means you do not i will start with uh steve schreiber he's asleep oh and but he called him andy no why don't you call steve and wake him up andy please mute unmute he already said no i said no one i did vote no and then i um mute myself i'll uh try and find the phone number and see if i can call him right now okay sarah schwarz no shallony ball mill no elissa brewer no pat the angeles yes darcy jennett yes reese merz and no anarchy no dorthy pamm no evan ross no leon is punchy it's been a long night and it's getting not getting any younger i vote is no we're trying don't know tethyshane no do you trust i'm a no okay so it is uh two in favor and 11 no so the motion dies so now we're back to the original performance goals and the motion is to adopt the town council performance goals for the town manager july 1st 2020 june 30th 2021 as amended is there a second george my second okay do you have a further comment i think that we have consensus on six strong goals that we have tied to specific council actions that we are all committed to we think they are all important the attempt to take one or two of these and try and make them rank them or interweave them or however you want to describe it is going to be extremely difficult painful and i think extremely unproductive process this is the seventh draft of these goals they're well overdue paul has now a clear sense of what we think are the six important policy areas and specific goals we'd like to accomplish same in the area of management i think time is now for us to adopt these goals and and let paul set to work implementing them and in the course of time we can come back and revise them rethink them and discuss them but at this point i think it's time for us finally to vote and make a decision elissa thank you well i would have preferred a way to interweave i hear dr george's strong statement and i stand by what i said before about relooking at things as as time develops and we certainly will take that lens from both the uh energy and climate and also the social equity the racial equity and social justice goal and we will apply it to the other things as we are going along and it's important i think maybe this helps encourage us this discussion about the attachment etc to not just say oh my gosh we finally finished the town manager goals and now they sit on the shelf until it's time to figure out how to do the actual evaluation except for the mid-year report from paul so maybe this will encourage us to continue to reflect on what's actually happening associated with these the one question i did have that i didn't see addressed in the report so i must have just missed it because like you said george you've done this like a million times now on page three under what's now called finance instead of financial management the last sentence says uh talking about reflecting uh looking at fees every so often and saying the cost of providing services and you crossed out are in line with other municipalities why on earth would we remove that we had a good reason and hopefully my colleagues can help me here um can any of my colleagues help me um i think we just assumed that that was a natural process to compare i can help with that excellent there was concern that there are some services that we may have a good reason to not be actually in line with other municipalities or we don't know what that they're charging and that we shouldn't be looking to necessarily just align ours with other municipalities because that's what other municipalities charge and so that's why we we changed reflect to consider so that we're looking at how much it costs us to do it um while looking at what other municipalities charge but it doesn't have to be necessarily in line with what they charge if say ours our cost of providing services is less or maybe we make concerted decision that our cost is more or about the same as the other municipalities but we want to subsidize that and not necessarily in you know charge fees that would cover the entire cost of providing that service so it was the GL i believe felt it was too restrictive to put that sentence in there thank you i think please that that reflects my recollection of the conversation as well good mercy okay so i can yeah i just wanted to uh say that you know i agree with all these goals and i'm going to vote for them but i'm disappointed in them because i you know i feel like two years ago we started with you know that long list of over a hundred questions that we had for the time manager which none of us we all realized that we had to get away from that um and then last year we had uh not nearly the level of detail but we did have a fair amount of detail and i didn't feel like that was onerous to do at all as far as our doing the evaluation i feel like this is swinging the pendulum way too far in the other direction not um not requiring much at all specific of the time manager and um so i i really would like us to go back to um more like what we had for the this last fiscal year you still have your hand up yeah i just wanted to just say that i feel rather dismissed by that um explanation and that i understand that that was a conversation that took place at gol and i appreciate the work they did but that's not at all the way i interpret the words and the sentence going back to my thing about providing services i didn't the sentence didn't mean that we couldn't charge more or less because we weren't in line with other communities what the sentence meant was the reason that we would say that was because they need to be in line with other municipalities or they're needed to be an explanation for it we have never other than water and sewer fees we have never received a report and the entire time i've been in elected office that explained why we charge what we charge for any particular fee in some cases mgl requires you just charge x amount and that's a fact we've never gotten an explanation of why we would charge more or less for anything and we hear complaints from our community it's not just a theoretical concept and so the idea that we don't need to know what other municipalities charge and that that is somehow going to automatically be included i i can tell you we have no history of including that information so that's why i found it was important to keep it in there any other comments at this time okay the motion has been made and seconded it is to adopt the town manager performance goals of a town council performance goals for the town manager july 1st 2020 to june 30th 2021 as amended i'm going to start with sarah schwarz yes shall we go now yes elissa brewer now pat de angeles yes garcy demont yes greasemors yes hannoky yes bam yes ross yes ryan yes chain abstain driver yes steinberg yes 1141 against one abstention okay we're going to move on to the 10 managers contract compensation discussion let me just say this is a result of our meeting uh in executive session two weeks ago 31st of august and um i just want to point out that in the uh let me make the motion first and then um have a second in accordance with the town manager's contract to grant a two percent cost of living increase effective september 1 2020 is there a second second hannoky okay the town manager's contract basically says in section 6.2 in subsequent years of this employment agreement which was made a year ago the town manager sat shall subject to the provision of 3.5 of the town manager of the town charter receive an annual increase in salary equal to that provided to other non-union employees for cost of living and at the sole discretion of the council based upon the annual evaluation of the town manager by the council any additional performance based adjustment as approved so in our um executive session we decided that we would go ahead and do the two percent as required by contract as much as we are absolutely appreciative of the work that paul has done and especially in this last uh three months during co vid um we want to we felt that financially we did not want to add an additional uh performance base so that was the discussion is there any further discussion at this time okay this is to confirm this cost of living increase and i'm beginning with baal melm yes grower yes the angeles yes goodmont yes priest merges yes hannoky yes sam yes ross yes ryan yes jane yes driver yes steinberg yes short yes yes junean all right we are going to skip the council liaison discussion i will be in touch with you by email and bring that back on september 21st we have no appointments so we're going to move on to committee and liaison reports of crc um andy gem tomorrow crc and it is labeled as a it is posted as a council meeting full council meeting at 2 p.m we'll be discussing zoning um with presentations by rob mora and christine breast drop and a presentation not presentation but um the new chair of the planning board jack gemstick will be there to talk about the planning board memo too we hoped it will be a good discussion and a start of a discussion on zoning priorities and i hope everyone that can make it can come finance committee andy steinberg yeah i really don't have much to report we had one meeting since the last council meeting and have one scheduled not this not tomorrow but a week from tomorrow so the one for your report next meeting we did begin work on the discussion of the uh inventory and that um the to propose back to the council and uh that was also reported then to discuss the jcpcs kathy might report uh but there was no decisions made to report to you well george we'll be meeting on wednesday um and our focus will be exclusively on the wage theft bylaw we have gotten the uh written comments uh from capy law and we'll be going through those in detail and hopefully uh making a decision finally that we'll see great uh jcpc kathy just unmuting uh we met jcpc met on september 9th and i'll just point out that it's unusual for jcpc to meet in the fall at all so this was uh meeting we'd set up because we had unfinished business and the this the main report is we set up a reserve fund in the capital area and none of it has been tapped so far that the town has been able to build some of the capital expenses to the carers act and during the jcpc meeting um we were told we'll get a full report on how much money we have potentially available in carers but how much we've spent so both in schools and other parts of the town um we did get um the same amount of road money and the grant program so that was what we had predicted but it was flat so roads come in and then the other thing we did we quickly reviewed inventory um mainly on categories and decided you know was talking about what is the goal of having an inventory and to extent there are any comments they're going to be sent to finance and the final thing is we were going to be looking at a five-year capital plan but because we're in the middle mid-stretch of everything we don't know what the revenues are going to be and the Sean and staff are going to be giving us alternative revenue forecasts for how much we'll have available for capital so there's going to be a way of presenting capital to us that will have what do we need to do to maintain existing buildings make maintain equipment and then have something I call it below the line let's say new projects in the waiting room so in the attempt to get to a balanced budget we'll have some things that we don't have to do because they would be considered new that was presented conceptually we don't have a list yet of what would be considered new and so we didn't have specifics and I we didn't we will not be having another meeting I think until we start to discuss the forecasts and set indicators so I think that's all we have some of us had expected more detail and there was a pretty good explanation of why we couldn't have it yet in terms of we don't quite know how much money we've got in any of those years including the next two years TSO Darcy we are having am I on mute no we are having a meeting on this Thursday at 8 p.m. just to look at the two town manager appointments one for human resources director and one for health director so it's that's all that meeting is going to be about it's just those those appointments and then we're going to have another meeting on the 24th where we'll be talking about Lincoln Avenue and or other more townwide parking solutions and other town manager appointments and then the following meeting will be on October 8th when we're going to look at the facial recognition part of the surveillance technology bylaw okay are there any liaison reports besides the fact that yes CP AC Kathy I just want to um Lynn put up the announcement that the the proposable period is open but to extend any of you in other districts can let people know in a strong way it's open because we've got over well over one million dollars and it's only going to be open for one month period of of our tax dollars but it's under CPA and there was a reserve fund set up last year the most recent fiscal year because there weren't sufficient projects that weren't spending all of it so um encouraging people to apply and letting people know it's open I think it's important not to forget that that is a source of money it can only be sent in certain categories but that the guidelines are up and it's only a four-week window when this is open right now okay um we have one set of minutes and that is to approve the august 10 2020 special town council meeting minutes as presented is there a second ten or two seconds is there any amendments or changes okay then we'll move to a vote uh brewer stain the angeles yes gomot abstain grease mersey yes anarchy girls um ham abstain ross yes ryan yes gang yes driver yes steinberg yes towards girls and bomb elm then did you say abstain yes okay so i have one two one three um nine and nine in favor none against and four abstentions right uh we're going to move on to the town manager report thank you lin um so i don't really have anything on the town manager report you have a second memo in there that talks about the voting from the uh primary election uh the town clerk will be at our i think i can't remember if it's our next election or next meeting or the october meeting um doing a report on the polling locations and the experience uh that happened there she is meeting with the um our temporary town clerk is meeting with the wardens on wednesday so she wants to collect that information before she comes in so she will be available to talk about the and i can answer any questions that i can on the uh information i provided to you if you have any questions any questions um i i just i have one question um i'm sorry to just but neither my husband or i never received a mail ballot even though we requested one the official tracking site shows us having been mailed a ballot on august 8th and then we went down on early voting and voted and it shows us having voted with our mail ballots on the 24th but that's not what happened you know we actually never got it so is there any way of tracking just non-receive i mean we did vote in a ballot but it wasn't a ballot that we ever got in the post office and we called the secretary of state saying how do we register we don't even know where it went so paul it's just a question and and it's probably not a big detail but i didn't know whether it's just a handful of people never got it um and early voting was a savior here because there was nobody there when we went to early vote so we early voted but on the website of the secretary of state it makes it look like they mailed it we got it and we voted which was not what happened i can check into it i don't know the answer main to joe you have your hand up yeah i'll just do a couple of quick things um for consideration as we go into november um i visited a number of the polling locations and some of the things that were said were it's my understanding that mass law requires that the the early votes and the absentee vote ballots get counted sort of during the day at the polling location and they were feeding them in and all well they the they're fed into the machines day of um that that's what i was seeing um you know they were they were tracking them and they were feeding them into the machines day of and there was concern that if polling locations are busier and the absentee and early votes are larger that there may not be time to do so um so really thinking about how that stack of mail-in vote ballots will be counted on election day i think it's going to be important going forward given that the polling locations might be busier and the request for better signage at the locations especially those that have multiple parking lots or multiple entrances and exits um that you might not be able to see um so that it's clear where you go in where you go out and where you find that um better messaging a lot of the polling locations had people bringing their early voting ballots to the polling locations so we need to have better messaging around where you can drop them off on election day so that people don't have to go differently it's okay if they're bringing their own to the right precinct because they can just essentially um void that ballot and have them vote in person but if they're bringing their family members they then have to go to their location and then for the ballot drop location uh maybe as you're as we gave you the authority for temporary parking create more five or 15 minute slots in front of that during the course of early voting drop-off so that it's easy to just stop and drop a ballot off um let me just add I agree with a ballot drop-off and also do want to say that I thought for the precincts that uh did that that were being changed particularly precinct too that the signage was very significant and it was there early so thank you for that well so just so the state doesn't require that the ballots be counted at the polling location so there was supposed we were going to have a centralized tabulation facility that's that again has to be visible to the public that didn't work out so the backup plan was that the ballots were taken to the polling locations we will have a centralized tabulation facility um at a different location this time and we anticipate that that will be a dedicated crew just handling all those mail-in ballots and they will sequentially go through it precinct by precinct so that that's why that happened that way and it wasn't intended to be that way just sort of happen that way but it was happening in every precinct where the the folded ballot pile up and then they would jam so any uh listen I just wanted to thank Paul for the comprehensive report because I had said to him the report better not be limited to um it went well because it did go well but I wanted more detail and it was really interesting to see you know that so many people got absent you requested their ballots and of course Kathy is a separate situation and then how many people actually return them right because we were all guessing how this was going to work and the fact that this was a contested election made a big difference so I appreciate everyone's comments about signage etc and also we'll pile on to the idea of needing to maybe have some additional spaces for the ballot drop off be so that we don't clog up that driveway behind town hall because that's what I did when I turned ours in into separate batches so that would be very helpful to have and I I do appreciate also the concept about um I'm sorry I'll skip that so thank you okay any further comments at this time any questions of the town manager okay then we're moving on I have nothing further to report um are there any future agenda items that have not been mentioned Darcy um Darcy you had your hand up go ahead yeah yeah um I as a result of a conversation that I had was um constituent uh I am interested in having a discussion with the council about um increasing our salaries uh and I I know from the charter that that we may not be able to do that after a hundred days from the beginning of the the this question um but um it moved me that she said that you know low and moderate income people can't even contemplate running for town council because they can't afford to um so I think that it it requires a discussion okay so I've noted that uh Luisa you have your hand up I'm so sorry I remembered the thing I choked on earlier that I was going to ask Paul if you would just pass along to the town clerk and we heard this content earlier today about data about data management and getting other people to crunch data for us given the concerns that were raised all through our discussion about polling consolidation we know we all know that there are books except now they're iPads but they're still books that show whether or not somebody voted right so there are records that I don't see how you voted right but it says whether or not you participated in the election and I wonder if we've ever found a way or we've asked um a partner of some sort to crunch data for us on apartment complexes participation because we talk a lot about oh this is an easy place to walk to or this is an easy place to drive to oh but wait now we're in a pandemic so you can't take the bus or you're not as comfortable taking the bus have we ever actually analyzed it's it's great that we always do these great pushes I've been part of voter registration before but if people aren't actually submitting their ballots especially given the conditions we're under now is there a way for us to do a check-in to say you know what all these people are registered fairly recently none of them actually voted in the election is there a way we can do some additional outreach some targeted outreach to different areas especially if people are having difficulty with they're concerned about the mail if they're having difficulty with transportation to get to drop off their ballot etc so okay thank you um are there other councilor comments george just very briefly then but um as many of you know I go to the campus and community coalition meetings and I wanted to end on a positive note because at those meetings you get police department fire department Hadley you get a whole group of people together they tend to be fairly frank and direct with each other and their initial take on the first month with students returning is very positive they've had good interaction with students Labor Day weekend was obviously a busy one but this was after the Labor Day weekend and Captain Tang and Bill Laramie said the students aren't the problem they are they're they're getting good cooperation when they go in and have these conversations they're being listened to so I was very positive message the campus is very quiet not surprisingly the fire department has very few calls to the campus right now so their their calls are way down that's not surprising either but it's a very positive message at least in this first month that came across at the ccc meeting and then maybe paul go ahead paul just a quick note this is the first weekend where we didn't transport someone for alcohol from the from a student or anything like that unheard of is really remarkable and then just very briefly evan and i both were invited to attend the i of c meeting which is the Interpretority Council this is the the greek body and i haven't could speak for himself if he wants to but i was impressed they're very strong on having these are off campus houses one of the kids one of the heads of the house said trying to convince his peers he said look it's wicked easy those are his words to get tested so they were pushing that they're very conscious of their responsibility i was impressed they're also doing some outreach one of them went on 9 11 one of the houses went with donuts and coffee to the first responders another house is doing some kind of a tutoring with one of the local elementary schools so we're going to also hope to meet this week with the panel and a council and and get their input because we're also asking them you know what's what's it like for you and obviously it's it's very different academically socially and so on but i i least was very impressed by their positive attitude and their willingness to to do what's needed in this time of crisis and steve schreiber so there's an old saying that nothing good happens after midnight and so as you know our last council meeting went after midnight so i um the next day i got a couple of emails regarding what i may or may not have said during the discussion of the planning board candidates so i just thought it'd be useful to make it clear to the counselors that i was very upset that letters what i call testimony those are letters of reference were being read about some candidates but not all candidates but i did not mean to infer that any particular candidate had solicited those letters so i think we need to discuss that process but i did listen to the tape as to what i did say and i see how that could be inferred so i do apologize for any candidates that think i was inferring that okay thank you any further comments at this time we have no issues that are under the 48 hour rule no executive session although i believe we may have one next week to approve previous minutes and so the meeting is adjourned at 11 27 have a good evening thank you Lynn yeah thank you