Often at party conferences the real headlines are made on the fringes. It's in those more informal settings and with TV cameras far away that Britain's leading politicians let their hair down and even get a little tipsy. It's been speculated that Booze was to blame for this controversial verbal flourish from Angela Rayner.  Those comments clearly went down well in the room. However, they created a lot of hand-ringing on social media about civility in politics. Speaking to Sky the following morning, Rayner refused to back down. Well I think anyone who leaves children hungry during a pandemic and can give billions of pounds to their mates on WhatsApp, I think that was pretty scummy. Now that is a phrase, and let me contextualise it. It's a phrase that you would hear very often in northern working-class towns that we'd even say it jovially to other people, you know, we say it's a scummy thing to do. And that to me is my street language, as you would say, about actually it's pretty appalling that people think that's okay to do. That was Angela Rayner doubling down on calling the Tories scum. However, Keir Starmer was less impressed. Well, Angela and I take different approaches and that is not language that I would use. Should she apologise? Well look, Angela said those words, she takes a different approach. To me we have different approaches to how we get our messages across. It's not language that I would have used. You're a courteous man, do you think she should apologise? Well look, that's a matter for Angela, Andrew, but I would not have used those words. And it goes back to my central point about the respectful way in which we have a debate. But look, at conference there's a fizz of ideas, there are rallies. That wasn't likely respectful, was it? Well there are fizz of ideas, there are arguments, disagreements, cullings together. Angela has said those words. It's not language I would use, conference is a fizz of ideas. A sign of a good political interview is that it's hard to tell which sentences were and weren't part of any briefing. Now it's Keir Starmer always fails on that front. Every sentence he said twice in that interview because he'd clearly been sent out with a bunch of dull talking points to try and change the subject. I would not have said that, which didn't really convince anyone. Ash, what's your take on Scumgate? So look, what this is, is that this is lifted straight from the establishment media playbook.  And I think that this is actually one of the things which was the core of the coverage of the anti-Semitism crisis in Labour.    And what we see is that the same standard has never held to people on the right. You had a Tory MP making a joke about bombing Annalisa Dodd's office and that has had nowhere near the same amount of media coverage. You look at the way in which Diane Abbott has been monstered from all corners of the press and also the Tory party in a way which was playing on sometimes explicit racism but also dog whistle racism, trying to present the fact that she is a dark-skinned black woman and make her out to be stupid, ignorant, unattractive and all of these things. Those smear tactics are never held to the same standard as the left-supposed incivility. Now people are going to have a different take on whether or not you think it's appropriate for a politician to call another politician scum. Personally, I think it's a bit of a road back from Nia Bevan's lower than vermin comments and he knew what he was talking about. But that's going to be according to personal taste. The thing that really bothers me is the way in which Keir Starmer is seemingly unable strategically to identify the box that he's being put in, being held to these impossible standards while his opponents get to say and do whatever they want about him, his party and also marginalise people in the country at large, working class people, welfare recipients, religious and ethnic minorities. And the more in which you play into this frame, more that ultimately you disempower yourself. I don't think anyone really expected him to go out there and say, no, the Tories are scum, she was right to say that. That's not the role he's playing and I think quite sensibly. Labour do need to win some Tory voters. Calling them scum isn't necessarily going to be the way to do that. But he could have gone out there and said, look, that's just Angie being Angie. That's why she's such a brilliant deputy leader. She's a rabble rouser and she has a lot of reasons to be very annoyed at the Tory party. You could give an answer which is much more natural, much more organic, which is a bit more entertaining to listen to. Keir Starmer's interviews are always just so dry and dull and they just make me feel depressed when I watch them. I was reading write-ups of this controversy of scumgate in the press this morning and there were suggestions from sort of some Labour sources and other Shadow Cabinet members that Angela Reina had done this on purpose to dry an overshadow Keir at his Keir Starmer at the Labour Party conference. I think a much more plausible explanation is that she was really, really steaming drunk. Now, I don't have confirmation of this, but why I believe this is because of other things she was saying that night. So Dan Bloom, I think he's a Daily Mirror journalist. He's probably the person who got the recording. He was sort of tweeting out some of the comments Angela Reina was saying that night.  There was more meat in my speech today than a chicken kebab down in Manchester.  It sounds to me like someone who's, you know, being carried away and pissed and having a good time. So I think Skumgate is probably not as deep as some people are making it out to be.


And I fully am blaming the hair at this point. Can we see just, we have a still maybe, probably don't, but the hair, the hair is a bit of a problem, okay? I'm gonna bring in Taylor along before we even go.  But I feel like Taylor, and you've kind of got a similar, let me see your hair. Okay, you have a hat on.  A little pointer. Yeah, the cloak tent. Yeah, the cloak tent's definitely what people are going for nowadays. I don't know, it's a natural thing. Well, I'll have to call it Joe and see what kind of product he uses, but I don't think we need to blame his hair. I think he's gonna be all right. And I think the way you just talked about it, you handled it with grace right there, okay? Because I think a lot of people in Bangles country are really overreacting. I'm trying. They're really overreacting. Well, it's not, it's not great, but I'm just gonna blame the hair because it's something that's like part of him, but not part of him, so I'm not really tearing him apart. But the decision to change the hair, that's where the swag went. I'm hearing from in the building, where's the swag on the squad? Like, well, when you're trying to look like Danny Zuko and meets like Patrick Swayze from The Outsiders, meets Clark Kent, like it's just not the vibe. Yeah, I did like the camp haircut. To me, and I don't know if you, this is a nostalgic show for you, but Sean from Boy Meets World. Sean Hunter.  And he was crushing it then too. But you know, I think that Bangles, the best part about the early in the season is fans, everybody, there's like the overreact. Just like, I overreact about the Cowboys week one, like you just, people just overreact, and then everything kind of starts to fall into place. Okay. And it's solely Will and it will for the Bangles. We're gonna take a short break here, we're gonna come back, we're gonna talk about the Cowboys, right off the top guys, do not go anywhere. I can't believe we just got a Sean Hunter played by the great writer Strong, by the way. I know everything, Mr. Feeney, Mr. Minkus, I gotta cover a little bit back. Should we go to, what is it called? Chubs? Chubbies. Chubbies, chubbies! All right.


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Hi everybody, Sean with jaspyscasebreaks.com and jaspys.com here doing a quick 1920 panini Chronicles basketball blaster box for Roger from our personal site jaspys.com He's already picked out his box. Now. It's just time to rip it I've got two up here, and then I've got We opened up a fresh case tonight, so I'm not sure exactly Roger this is yours You picked the box I Interstate I What do you mean fresh case? We I we've already been ripping it. It's the prism choice. It's not it's not a fresh case We opened a case today And I'll understand what you want what you mean show fresh case product We've already had it on screen. It's the prism prism choice that we already opened one box So Paul No, I don't know interstate I have no clue I didn't say the blaster came from a fresh case I said the prism choice that somebody's opening next or soon is came from a fresh case Quy Leonard Cam Reddish John Morant luminance very nice Ignace Brosdekis Kevin Porter Jr. Pink Trey Young Tyler Harrow threads RJ Barrett rookies and stars BAM out of bio Anthony Davis Lakers essentials Terrence Davis rated rookie Jerick Culver playbook Wow, there you go How about a rookie auto flux auto is this pink also? I think it is From a blaster very nice Congrats Roger Kobe white threads Kevin Putter Jr. Marquis Kobe white luminance Terrence Davis pink luminance Jordan McLaughlin Brandon Ingram Kobe white XR Matisse Diable Yannis playbook Keldon Johnson luminance Darius Garland Kobe white XR pink LeBron James LeBron James pink parallel of the base Grant Williams Jackson Hayes Anthony Davis Marquis John Morant playbook PJ Washington Jr Cameron Johnson hometown heroes Andre Drummond PJ Washington Jr. Essentials Eric Pascal PJ Washington Jr. Pink James Harden RJ Barrett and Matisse Diable Very nice Congrats. That was a very nice box for you Roger Guys, that was a 1920 Panini Chronicles blaster box for Roger Available on our jaspies.com personal break site. I'm Sean jaspiescasebreaks.com and jaspies.com. We'll see you next time


All right, thanks very much, Stefan, for the kind invitation to speak here to you at our medicine today. I'm going to be talking to you about a project that took place in the throws of the pandemic and how we solved the problem and how we continued to use the same rapidly developed software to improve our workflows and virology here at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver. So this is the backstory about why we got into this to this shiny development project in 2020. In summertime, particularly there was a worldwide shortage on reagents for SARS-CoV-2 testing for the high throughput automated platforms. And the sort of most notable automated fully automated platform at that time was the Roche Cobas 6800. It was really the only end to end on a platform where you could load a sample and walk away. We happened to already have one of those instruments when the pandemic started to do HIV testing, which we do some of the HIV testing, which we do for the province of British Columbia. And that meant that we could rapidly pivot and offer SARS-CoV-2 testing on the PCR on there. Problem was that a lot of other people had the same idea and the device is very easy to use. And so what happened is there became a shortage, both provincially, nationally and internationally on the reagent. And so suddenly we were faced with not having reagent at all. So it's going to car with no gasoline. And we did have some more manual methods. And at that time, the positivity rate for SARS-CoV-2 in the general population was low. And by low, I mean less than 5%. And so that allowed the strategy of sample pooling as a way of stretching the reagent supply and increasing the throughput. So let me give you a little bit of background on sample pooling. This is the most simple protocol for sample pooling. It's called Dorfman pooling. It was originally developed to stretch resources for serological testing. So the idea is quite simple. If you have low positivity rates of something that you're testing for in a population and you mix samples together and the mix tests negative, then you can impute that all of the individual samples are negative. And this works particularly well in PCR because the signal is amplified exponentially in the PCR process. It wouldn't work as well in other contexts where you pay quite a significant penalty on sensitivity. That is on limit of detection, but you don't pay much of a penalty in COVID testing. One of the things I will say though is that whenever you're doing sample handling on the deck, and by deck I mean a liquid handling robot, whenever you're doing handling of potentially very high concentration of viral load samples, on the deck you run the risk of contaminating neighboring samples. So pooling does introduce the possibility of pool contamination, but it is mitigated by the fact that you have to test individual samples when you get a positive pool. So when the sample positivity rate is low, this pooling strategy is great because you test one well and you get four tests out of it if that well tests negative. Now dwarfman pooling is the simplest kind of pooling and there are lots of other more sophisticated strategies for pooling and there's a large collection of papers that you can read about someone who's notable in this series at gentlemen and Chris Builder, D-I-L-D-E-R, so you can look that up. But the problem we had is we had a four week conception to deployment timeline and if you work in a clinical lab you'll realize that people really don't like things that are black boxes. So they didn't want to have a pooling strategy that wasn't abundantly transparent to them so that if they had to troubleshoot on a clinical level they would be able to do so. So complex pooling algorithms would require us to have a lot of automation on the liquid handler, custom automation. The liquid handler would have to get the results from the pooled results back and then automatically go back and select individual samples for retesting on a singleton basis because that's what you do when you get a positive pool you test all of the samples in that pool individually and that wasn't going to fly on a number of levels. The texts were already quite agitated that I was proposing to do sample pooling because they imagined themselves running around, you know, gathering specimens one by one and hand mixing them and things like that. So one of the development principles is I had to make their lives easier in every way that I could. The other thing that induces fear for technologists is related and this is an example strategy of a more sophisticated pooling strategy. You mix 12 samples together. If you get a positive pool from a 12-plex pool then you break it down into three 4-plex pools and if you get a positive one of those you test individually and the texts would see something like this and they would sort of have a moment of horror. So we didn't want to do anything except the bare bones Dorfman pooling and also we wanted to minimize the number of times that pipette tips would cross the liquid handling deck. So what do you actually stand to gain when you do sample pooling? Well it all depends on your sample positivity rate. So if you have a 1% positivity rate in the population what this graph does is tell you the number of results that you're going to get per test used. By test used I mean per squirt of reagents for that device. So for example if we're at 1% positivity rate for SARS-CoV-2 in our testing population you can see that the optimal throughput is going to be achieved when you mix 10 samples together. But as I said to you we were around 3-5% positivity so it seemed best to us to pick around a four plex pool although we did program four plex, six plex, eight plex and ten plex because we didn't know which way the pandemic would go. And of course if positivity rate gets too high you're not really buying you're buying one and a half tests for every one squirt of reagents so not so great once you get into high positivity rates. Now I know that people are there are aficionados and they're looking this that I've made a PowerPoint presentation and I use base R plotting and I know that that's in some minds gauche. So this is the sort of an outline of the analytical process. We have a Hamilton Vantage liquid handler which was our sort of main high throughput device it had a barcode scanner so it scanned all the barcodes on the individual samples. They were in 7.5 by 12 plastic tubes they'd been decanted from the original NP swab tube and then we used an R script to take the output of the Hamilton Vantage and convert it into XML that was compatible with the MP96 extraction device. So note that this is not the Roche Cobas 6800 this is a more manual workflow using a dedicated chemical extractor and a dedicated thermocycler and so we would generate an XML directly from the Vantage and we also took into account failed aspirations of the sample because the Vantage liquid handler has clot detection and if there were globs of mucus in the sample which turns out that was not an infrequent thing because you'd get snot in the sample the liquid handler would detect that as a clot and not piped it and that's a good thing because if it continued to pick it up it could drag a big strand of mucus right across the deck and contaminate other specimens. But if the sample was not properly aspirated we had to remove it from the pooling process and the sort of tracking of specimens through the system. So we just used SCP that is secure copy and I ran into a tool called I notify weight which sort of does what Dropbox does when you drop a file into a folder I notify weight sits and watches that folder and then does something. So I notify weight would look for the MP96 XML file and move it to a shared folder that was on network attached storage which I'll talk about in a moment. The chemical extraction would occur and then the samples and the files go over to the amplifier then in our script for some more post processing then to a Shiny app hosted on Ubuntu then to a middleware owned by this company SunQuest called Data Innovations and then out to the lab information system and to the electronic health record. So that's the general data flow. This is the actual sort of network diagram of what we did. So Roche did not want us directly connecting to the computers that control their devices the extractor and the thermocycler. So they put a mass and a hardware firewall in front of their devices but they did allow us to have one IP address connect to the mass and that is our pooling server which was Ubuntu with the Shiny server on top of that. And so this is how these are the devices that were connected. So we had three liquid handlers, three chemical extractors, three thermocyclers, the network attached storage and Roche diagnostics had remote access into their devices also and then the patient data would go out to this middleware and then finally to the lab information system. So obviously we had to validate the pipetting process, not just the data flow process but we had to make sure that our pooling software that was on the liquid handler was correct and so we made lots of colored solutions to make sure things were pipetting into the right places. That's sort of a low tech validation. Then we did a higher tech validation where we actually have four different container IDs for the four different specimens and then we make a concatenated ID for all of them. Unfortunately Roche software cut off the concatenated IDs. We needed like 50 some-odd characters and that cuts them off at 25 but we had to do some workarounds for that. There were many workarounds because we're asking things to happen that aren't usually supposed to happen and so we could compare our pool result to the expected pool result based on the individual patient samples. So in the validation process we tested each sample individually and then we pooled them and then we knew what we were supposed to get and we made sure that we got what we should get. But as I say because you're doing so much pipetting you do run the risk of contaminating individual specimens. So yes this is a spreadsheet but it is open office. So this is what the interface looks like. So you have to select the run that you want to process. So you select that from the thermocycler and it's on the network attached storage device which is just a little Linux server as it turns out. And so what we're seeing here is that yellow specimens are positive. This is their CT value and there's the concatenated container ID. So those are the four specimens that are actually unique identifiers that are actually associated with this and those specimens will be the ones that have to be individually tested and so we racked them in such a way that it would correspond to the well map in a 12 by 8 format which I'll show you in a moment. And then when it's time to send out the results to the lab information system only the negative results are going to go. The yellow results will be held back and that's held back by the software. So we made these little well maps that we could review and we have a positive in row A5. So we go down here to row A5 and we say these are the specimens that we need to pull and they're going to be in position A5 of four different racks of specimens. And so the text would pull those and then just submit them for individual analysis. And then this is what goes out to the lab information system. It's just a flat file. It gets dropped into a shared folder that's networked heterogeneously through SAMBA and then once that transfer has occurred every five minutes the lab information system slurps up whatever is in that folder and passes it over to the patient record. And so we wanted some statistics about what we're up to and what you'll see here in a moment or if you're paying attention to the figure there's more here than just COVID because people were so happy with the process of not having to do any manual transcriptions and not having to do anything with USB sticks that they wanted all the testing associated with this lab to be pushed through this app and so that's what happened subsequently. So in the time that we've had deployment we have had about 600,000 results go through. Those in traditional times would have been manually transcribed which may seem horrifying to you but it was a low volume highly specialized biology lab and at that time that was not a serious problem but when COVID came that became sort of untenable. So some key points as I mentioned primary tubes often contain fragments of the swab they always contain a fragment of the swab and they always contain a little bit of mucus and sometimes it's a problem and the liquid handler does not like this as you know and so we were having to do what we call pour over or pour off where we aspirate the sample into a secondary tube and leave the mucus and the swab tip into the primary collection tube that was used at the time of the patient collection. So some folks have turned off their liquid handler clot detection in order to avoid all these errors but we didn't think that was a very good idea because it meant the sample might not be adequately aspirated and as I said it can drag mucus all over the deck. We did consider doing pooling on the Roche 6800 but we didn't have any reagents so it didn't make sense but it is possible to do you can connect to the back end of the Roche 6800 and pull out the XML result file and manipulate it and so we set the pathway to do that but we didn't actually do it. So what were the tools of note? Well we used Shiny of course, we used Shiny Proxy which is a way of basically deploying multiple instances of individual Shiny servers inside of a Docker container so that more than one person can use the app at the same time and it allows you to, if you need to you can have authentication occur. So we used Shiny, Shiny Proxy, we also used Docker Swarm so we have actually two servers, two Linux servers that can replicate one another's behavior if one of them goes down. All of the software of course was stored on GitLab and then as I mentioned the networking was with Samba. So unfortunately the positivity rate started to climb in November of 2020 and it made it so that we came to a point where we couldn't pool and so we were really happy with pooling but quite sad that there came a point where it wasn't feasible anymore. So one afternoon we decided that the best thing to do would be to try to filter specimens out that were likely to be positive and the best predictor of positivity that we could find initially was just where they came from, their postal code or their zip code. Excuse me, we say postal code in Canada. So we wrote this app called Tanya's Little Helper and Tanya is the charge tech up in virology and you might recognize Santa's Little Helper there and so we would scan specimens and say whether they could be pooled or not. And this led to a effective positivity rate of the pooled samples which diverged from the patient whole population positivity rate very nicely so that worked well as a way of extending pooling but eventually by January 2021 we could no longer do any pooling. So we did come up with the idea that perhaps we could do better than just using postal code and that led us to try and build a machine learning app to use other features that we have in the patient record in order to determine a likely positivity. And so we tried a number of machine learning methods but settled on random forest because it worked very well and it was easy. And so we were able to decrease the effective positivity rate of samples targeted for pooling by about half but unfortunately the sample positivity rate after January 2021 remained up in the 20% range and so even cutting the effective positivity rate in half wouldn't solve our problem. So at the start we had many individualized processes. We had paper workflows, USB sticks, manual keying in of results and in the end we have no manual pipetting except that initial decanting event that is pour off event. We have automated pooling and singleton data workflows for all of the results coming out of the virology lab. We have 10 instruments and two Linux servers backing up one another and we have instantaneous lookup of prior results and in the associated raw data files. And a number of benefits have come about. We establish a pathway for Shiny app deployment. We've written some other Shiny apps in the intervening period to monitor our QC to look at our live patient turnaround times and obviously to do COVID dashboards and we've also managed to establish a pathway for AI machine learning model development inside of our lab which was not something that was likely to happen without a strong push through a practical project. I'd like to give acknowledgments to the people who helped me make this happen. The big ones are Mahdi Mabini who was the developer of the front end. I did only the back end programming and Grace Vandergoogten who did all of the liquid handling program. And with that I will stop and see if there's any time for questions. Thank you very much for your attention. Yeah this is very impressive. I had one question which you answered quite nicely whether there was any kind of validation that was done. Oh lots, yeah. And it was all in five weeks though. I mean like the pressure was really on Stefan. It was just like I've never felt so much pressure to get something done clinically in my life. So I, you know, being a laboratorian myself I noticed it's very, very unusual to get so much custom development done. What kinds of support or what kind of a structure do you need in your department to actually pull this off? And maybe as a follow-up question what do you actually need to pull it off and keep it sustainable? Well I mean you've really hit on it Stefan. And we've talked about this before you write software and then you become the de facto support person for that software. This particular piece was, we kept the features very, very tight and specific. And so it's me and one other person and it's functionally one other person. And the software is running uninterrupted for the entire duration. We did add the functionality of having the other viruses being going through it. But I would just say if Maddie leaves I'm probably going to have to contract him back if I want modifications or I'm going to have to do it myself. We don't really have an infrastructure for this. Theoretically there's an infrastructure but then they would have to crawl into the code with the same kind of pain and suffering that I would. So you know there's risks associated with in-house development. But I would say Roche has made a software solution for this but it was not health Canada cleared or FDA cleared at the time when we went to need it to deploy and so it didn't matter. Although they did give us a pat on the back for recapitulating the core functionality of their software in four weeks.


So the pie is constantly growing so it's not a limited amount that needs to be divvied up But an unlit potentially unlimited amount and indeed it is those often who get the bigger piece of the pie Who are the ones? responsible for Making the pie grow and if you took part of that Pie from them if you made them have a smaller piece the pie would grow slower Why is that why is it that the people who get the bigger part? Why is it that the wealthy are more responsible for economic growth than the poor? What are the wealthy do with their money? They save it. They invest it So they use their money to create economic activity, but most people would say well wait a minute that


So we should go ahead and get started. Although I think Jesse's technique, no. He should be coming. He should be coming. I was trying to think who is next on the note taking list. Steve, I think it might be you. Steve, OK. Steve, are you good to take notes minutes today? Excuse me. Sorry, Steve, you're on mute, but I'm a student. Thumbs up. You're good? Yeah, yeah, I'm good. Sorry, I'm not. It's in minutes.  Great. Do I need to record everybody who's present? Or do you do that and add them to the minutes? Usually it's in the minutes. Someone records that. OK. I usually take notes anyway. So I'm going to have to be doing a roll call vote for the election of officers anyway. So either way, it doesn't matter. So I'm going to post the agenda large so everyone can see it. OK, great. So we've got Steve set up to take minutes this time, so the next agenda item is reviewing minutes from last time. Actually, why don't I just put up the minutes then? Let me know when you see them. Sorry, are you seeing them yet or not? Yes. OK, good. I'll just slow up a little bit. Am I wrong in thinking that Andrew Glaze didn't come to this last meeting? He came to the previous meeting? No, he was at the last meeting. He was. I thought it was too mean. I don't think so. I think it was this last one. And Andrew is actually with us again as an attendee. OK, great. Hey, Jesse. I'm sorry I'm late. All right, we are just going through the minutes. OK, anybody want to motion or have any comments? I move we accept the minutes. Pardon me. Second. Great. So Stephanie, are you going to do the roll call? For. Frager? Yes. Drucker? Yes. DeMont? Yes. Der? Yes. Ruth? Yes. Rose? Yes. Selman? Abstain. Thank you. Well said. Great. Public comment. Andrew, do you have anything you'd like to add? So let me see. I just have to get Andrew. I'm going to stop my screen share for a second. OK. Andrew, you can speak if you want to say anything. OK. I don't think Andrew would have anything. But you all have to unmute yourself. How's that? Can you hear me now? Yes, now we can hear you. OK. I have nothing to add. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for letting me sit in. OK. Great. So let's move on to nominations and vote for chair and co-chair. I have a question about the minutes. I was just looking to see if Oshwin's name is there. And he doesn't seem to be present or absent for last time. He took the minutes. Paul, yeah, he did take the minutes. And he's still sitting there. Very good. Is that a friendly amendment? Sure, this time, yeah. I'll just say I haven't. OK. Thanks, doesn't mean. Sure, no problem. OK. So for the elections, Laura, maybe it would be best if I sort of oversee this part, given that you're likely to either nominate yourself. So for the role of chair and vice-chair, we're in a new fiscal year, which means we're in new terms. And so you can either nominate yourself if you are so interested. Laura can express her interest in wanting to remain as chair. So I guess first, start with Laura. Are you interested in remaining as chair? Yes. OK. And then someone else can either nominate themselves or another UCAC member as in the role of chair. Do I hear any motions? Well, that makes it easy. OK. I was going to offer this caveat that the pandemic and everything, so if somebody else really wants it, we can figure that out. But I'm happy to keep doing what I've been doing. All right, I'm going to still make this official. So do I have a motion to have Drucker remain as chair? I move that Laura Drucker remain chair of the UCAC. OK. And do I have a second? I'll be happy to second that. OK. I'm going to have to do a roll call vote, even though we don't know what's unanimous, but Brecker? Yes. Drucker? Yes. Dumont? Yes. Der? Yes. Steve, I think you might be muted. Oh, sorry. Yes. Rose? Yes. And Selman? Yes, with gratitude. Thank you. It is astonishing the effort you put in. And I think it has served this group well. Thank you, Jesse. Thank you, everybody. Yeah, there wasn't really time to express gratitude. So that's great, Jesse. And I will also just thank Lauren not only for doing the job, but for doing the job really well. And especially in this first year getting going, really been appreciate.  I also appreciate that you're willing to continue, given you have a new job and kids at home because of the pandemic and all the pressure. So I'm sure your family's under. Yeah, thank you. And I appreciate on just stepping up and helping out, particularly in these last few months. And I will continue to do that to call on folks to help out. So thanks, everybody. We've got a good group. And so now we also have a vote for the vice chair. So, Andrea, do you want to continue in the role as vice chair? Yes, I am willing to serve. Should I be elected? OK. In that case, I will ask if there is anyone else who would like to nominate themselves or another committee member for vice chair. All right, great. We have our team. Once again, thank you so much, Andrea. And so I need to do a roll call vote. So, Gregor. Do we have a motion first? Sorry about that. I did say yes, but yes. Brocker. Yes, but I think Steve asked whether we needed to do a motion first. Oh, I'm sorry. I apologize. A motion. Can someone make the motion that Rose continue? I think nominations don't require a motion. Just nominate. It doesn't require a second. I'm going to say Darcy moved to reappoint Andrea as vice chair. And Steve, you're going to second, right? I'm not going to. We're going to do it anyway. OK, so I'll start again. Gregor. Yes. Brocker. Yes. Eamont. Yes. Der. Yes. Roof. Yes. Rose. Yes. Bellman. Yes, with gratitude as per our chair and coach. You're here for that. Great. Excellent. Yes, thank you both for all the work you've done and are continuing to do. All right. So, Laura, it's back to you. Great. So, back to me. OK, so a couple of things. First, I just wanted to say that there is a Medigrant, a state Medigrant that's Technical Assistance that's opening on August 20th. And I've reached out to the building facilities manager for the town. And I'm going to meet with him. And hopefully we will identify some projects to apply for that grant. I don't have anything right now to tell you beyond that. So that's just a quick update. The second thing is I wanted to let you know if you haven't seen it, everyone who is asking me. But I did send you a list of the RSVP responses. I broke them down by sector group, task group. So you did receive those as an email, as a sort of late packet item.  So the process was that I sent out the Zoom invitation, assuming people were coming. Then the people that responded, I gave them till last Friday. And then I followed up yesterday with those that didn't respond. And I sent another email saying that I didn't receive your response. We would love to have you, basically. I invited them to participate once again. And that did actually yield a few more. I think I got at least four to five, maybe six more responses back. So that did actually yield more results. So at this point, tomorrow, what I'll do is I will give you the names of the people that did not respond either. There are also people who are on vacation. So I'll let you know the responses that just bounced back because people are on vacation and so they're not available. Those who said no because they're unavailable. And then the people that you can follow up with. So I'll do that tomorrow. I also had to, in setting up the Zoom meetings, I had to set up the panelists. And I had to do all that because I had to make sure that all the meetings got posted. So I was really anxious to just get that done. So I know some of you asked me a little bit earlier about the responses, but I had to get that done first. So all the meetings are posted. All the Zoom links went out. Now you have the RSVPs. So I think we're in pretty decent shape as far as that goes. And it looks like we consistently almost have a pretty similar set of numbers for each group at this point. So oh, and I'm sorry, one other thing. I did speak to the town manager the other day. I know that we wanted to potentially have some outdoor sessions for these task group meetings. And he didn't absolutely say no, but he really pointed out that it's really a challenge because of the separation that we have to have when we're doing these meetings, even outdoors. It's really hard for people to hear. I have to say from my own personal experience recently, when I was in a store talking to a clerk because I had a mask on, they were talking to me. And I absolutely couldn't hear what they were saying. It's really hard with a mask on, especially for some older folks. I'm going to include myself in that category now. That just couldn't, I just couldn't hear anything. So it can be really frustrating. And that means we'd have to have a sound system as well to set up those meetings. So I think given that, even though it's less intimate, he really guided us to really just stick with a virtual format for these meetings. So I just wanted to put that out there. And even though I know the building's committee had had one scheduled for their first, we had to change that because we did need to secure an ASL interpreter for one of our community members. And so in order to do that, we had to switch the schedule to accommodate. So that moved the meeting to evening hours, which unfortunately, again, lend themselves to being in a virtual format. So I just wanted to get that update. So that's all I have, Laura. Thanks, Stephanie. Does anybody have any questions for Stephanie? I'll just comment that I'm actually going to need to leave the meeting and apologize for that because my family's calling me and I'm on vacation. So I got to do that. So good luck with the rest of the meeting. Sorry to miss it. I was going to chat that, but I don't see a chat. Maybe that's a... Oh, we don't have a chat on this. We don't have a chat with this. OK, all right. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Thanks for joining us. I also need to mention that my family is having dinner at 6.30 not here. So I will be in transit at the end, not paying much attention. OK, thanks, Stephanie. So next up, we think we have ECAC member updates. Darcy, you have a few things? Yeah. Yeah. Am I on mute? No. One is if you read the minutes, it's noted that I was supposed to talk to the council president about our making a presentation. And we did get set up with one for August 3rd, which is next Monday. And Laura and Stephanie are going to do it. And because of that, I brought up the fact that our timeline that we had initially presented to us could be updated. And so I wondered if we there are just a few little notations that I asked for updates on the timeline. And they're basically related to the difference between the MVP process and the ECAC process. And anything related to the budget is really just us. It's just ECAC. It's not any requirement within the MVP process. So we kind of straighten that out. And does it make sense to pull it up so that people can see it? Because that is. Yeah. I have it open, Stephanie. Or yeah, let's see. Oh, I just highlighted in yellow. There are a few things at the end of the process in March, April, May, June, one of which was that for us to comply with the budget requirements in the town, the budget has to be submitted by May 1st. So we just need to, if we have something related to the budget, it has to be the final version has to be submitted well in advance of May 1st. So that seemed like we needed to finish our process before May 1st. Also, this is all according to dates. And so I hope you see number seven here. That's the time when the initial town budget gets submitted and it's right after we're supposed to be prioritizing actions. And so to the extent possible, if we can get any budget requests in that it seems like we're able to get together by that time, that would be number seven. And then also in March would be the kind of discussion and affirmation of the draft AARP. And then in April, then present it to the public, then finalize it. I'm suggesting April so that it will be done by that May 1st deadline, which just shortens the timeline by about a month. So I just wanted to discuss that with the consultants and with Laura and Stephanie. And that seemed to be something everybody was fine with. So I just wanted to make sure that the committee also saw it. Great. Stephanie or Jim or Lauren, do you folks have any comments? I have a couple of quick comments. So first, Darcy, this is great. Thank you for thinking this all through. And it's super valuable. We've been so focused on the front end of this process that somebody out thinking about the tail end of the process is very valuable to help line up when activities need to happen. From our perspective, this sounds great. The initial timeline had some space in it. Space is always nice, but hey, we actually are trying to do something here. And so from our perspective, yeah, this is great. And what will probably happen here is it will work with Stephanie to kind of reformulate some of the tail end schedule into something a little more solid that fits this, so that then we're all comfortable with how that goes. And from my perspective, I'll just say we did build in a little bit of padding in this anyway. So I don't foresee this as a big problem. Like Jim said, we'll just adjust. OK. And the budget request would be presumably in coordination with our annual report that we said we were going to do toward the end of the year. That's all. As long as we're all good with that, I just wanted to make sure people saw it. And because Stephanie and Laura are going to be reporting, I don't know if you're incorporating this in your presentation, but if we're talking to the council about a timeline, we just wanted to make sure we had the timeline that included the ECAC and the MVP headlines and timeline. And the council, for that matter, yes. Right, right. Great. I don't see any other questions. Oh, Steve, yeah. I have a new update if we're done with what Darcy was talking about. Yeah, the only thing I wanted to finish up with Darcy is just in terms of presenting on Monday, my intention would be just to remind us back to that conversation when we decided to do it. It was just to make sure we're still staying in the face of the council, know that we're doing work. So I will probably defer to Stephanie to talk about the specifics of the MVP process and then just fill in how ECAC has been involved with the task group co-chairs and the work that we're doing with the community leaders and the goal of coming back to them in the November, December timeframe with an annual report and a budget request. Anything missing? No, that's perfect. OK, great. And then Darcy, did you have one more thing to say, or is it OK to move to Steve? I do have another, but I would be glad to alternate. Go ahead, Steve. OK, I'm going to give an update from the Rocky Mountain Institute, the electrification program that I've been participating in along with Andra and Stephanie and some other folks in town. Turns out the attorney general just recently ruled that those bylaws that Arlington and Brookline passed are in conflict with state law. The attorney general ruled that the town bylaws cannot regulate fossil fuel infrastructure because that's the explicit role of statewide building codes and other regulations. So it seems to be a kind of a fatal blow to the program, but the RMI team and lawyers are analyzing it to see what possible ways can go forward, at least in terms of other communities trying to craft bylaws. We're not dead in the water because we are going to be talking, our team meeting with the Amherst people and our team helper is tomorrow afternoon. We are going to talk about other ways that we could further those same goals, the electrification and reduction of fossil fuel use in other ways without passing a bylaw. So incentives or education programs or whatnot, that's hard. That's where we'll be looking rather than putting effort into trying to create a bylaw. Unless there are wizards to figure out a way that we might be able to design a new bylaw, we'll see. But that's the status at the moment. And Andra or Stephanie can add anything to that if they wish. That's interesting, I guess, the right word. I don't know a lot of the history, but I know that the people who crafted these bylaws were well aware of the fact that local bylaws can't conflict with state building code. And they must have had some strategy or some hope that their bylaws would pass muster. But they didn't. Steve, did you know if it was looked at to make the process cumbersome in a positive way, for example, requiring extensive carbon accounting for these projects just to make it harder, but not actually to regulate? Do you know if that was one of the strategies? I don't think so. I understand of the bylaws. They were strictly about in the building permit process of not allowing new gas, fossil fuel, gas, or fuel oil. It was very simple in that way. No carbon counting, just new buildings, no gas, except there were a ton of exceptions. Yeah, exception. I should add that the Attorney General did state that they agreed with the policy. And they thought it was great policy, but they cannot decide the issue on policy. They have to decide it on existing law and previous cases. So the Attorney General was sort of sad. It seemed sad to have to rule that way and thought it was great policy, but the only fix was that the legislature either take up such a requirement or something else. There are other policies. It doesn't have to be exactly what Jacqueline did. So the accelerator is going on. We'll explore other possibilities. I have to say there were different interpretations of the AGs really. Somebody else sort of didn't think it was a, they didn't necessarily see it as the death knell for the bylaw. So I think it was just a matter of interpretation. And I think there were some folks who definitely were, again, the group is still going to continue on and investigate how to sort of work around that. Well, good. We hope then to be able to report in our future meetings that we have some fabulous solution and some great ideas to continue that effort. Thanks, Steve. Darcy, did you want to? Yeah. I, in your packet, you, I asked to include the town manager self-evaluation and the goals for FY20. And if we could pull those up, that would be really good. We're doing, the town council is currently doing two things. We're finishing up the FY20 evaluation based on those goals. And at the same time, we're putting together the goals for FY21. And I'm using the team that put together the FY20 goals. And I'm not on the team. It got switched to one of the actual standing committees of the council to put together the goals for FY21. And as we always do as a council, if it's in front of a different group of people, it has to be completely revamped. So I went to the GOL committee meeting this morning. And I'm going to talk to you about whether we want to make a recommendation about the goals for the upcoming fiscal year. But anyway, if you go to page, I think it's at the end, 14 through 16. These done right here. Yeah, so if you go down to number two, that's climate action. So these were our goals for this. We actually made them in January. And they were just for the six months until the end of this fiscal year that we're in. So they were pretty limited because of the knowledge that we wouldn't be able to do much in six months. But we did get a whole subsection of the goals, which was climate action using a lens of climate action to prioritize and begin to implement our action. And so I went to the GOL committee meeting this morning. They are the group that are going to do the FY21 goals. And there was a lot of I went because I would like to influence the goals for FY21, even though I'm not on that committee. And because I thought it would be good to propose that they look for a recommendation from this committee for the FY21 goals. Well, the problem is that they have to decide very quickly. And they're going to have a meeting next Wednesday too. And they're coming up with like a draft proposal, which they did. There was a lot of there is a lot of discussion today along the lines of what we can reasonably expect in the next year because of COVID-19. And do we need to reevaluate what's important to the town? And that kind of talk. So my antenna immediately went up. And I'm just I'm thinking should we propose something? Should we assign someone to look at what we might want to have for our goals for the next fiscal year before next Wednesday to get to them? And I'm just thinking that we would base it on our charge and base it on our goals document, our timeline. And we don't have time set aside in this meeting to go deeply into this. So I'm just seeking guidance from the rest of the committee as to what we should do. If we don't do something, then I'll probably do something on my own just as an individual counselor. Ending in my recommendations. But obviously, it would have more effect if it were from this committee. But again, we don't have it in front of us. So it would have to be something that was pulled together in the next week. Thoughts? Did I totally confuse you? I think it makes sense. And I think that it would be a shame to go from having them in there to not having anything about climate action in the goals. So I do think it's worthwhile to even, at a minimum, express, assuming the rest of the committee agrees, express our interest in keeping climate action as a focus area. And we've talked about a couple of things in our meetings that could be easy and fairly achievable sub-goals here. Like one of the things we've talked about in the past is ensuring that when relevant climate action and sustainability is included in job descriptions for replacement hires, for example, that could be something easy to put in here as a goal, I think. I think the budget, we could even simplify it into one goal around budget, ensuring that the budget, capital budget is assessed with operational costs and energy efficiency in mind, or in the climate goals in mind, or something like that. So we could simplify the list a little bit, but I think we could keep it. What do other folks think? Another comment that was made at the meeting was that the finance committee guidelines and need to jive with our goals. So one comment we could conceivably make is that the finance guidelines follow the town's goals rather than the opposite. That's a tough one. Will you say that again, Darcy? One of the comments that was made at the meeting this morning was that sometimes the town goals do not jive with the finance committee guidelines and the budget. And so the suggestion was made that they need to correlate. And so my suggestion is that the finance committee guidelines need to follow whatever goals the town council makes rather than vice versa. So in other words, if we make, and there is a problem there because the town manager has the power over the town budget and the town council has power over town policy, so you figure that one out. So we don't need to solve that here. I'm just saying that we could make a comment about it that we would hope that the budget reflects the climate priorities or something along those lines. Maybe similar, not quite as loaded. It would be D, where it says gather climate action plans that could begin to implement forthcoming climate action plan. And the suggestions we made in the budget for last year, I assume we would just carry them over. Well, hopefully we would have, yeah, and hopefully we'll have even more insight from the plan. Right. It is tricky because we have a whole year, a whole other year of climate action planning as opposed to implementation. But so that's sort of the question is what can we ask to be done before the plan is finalized? If I could, it's likely that during the draft of the climate action plan there are going to be items that will naturally sort of come to the forefront, that will be identified as being the first to be implemented. And I don't think you need to wait for the climate action plan to be complete before you identify those things. So it's likely that you'll have some idea before that deadline comes. So yeah, it's just a question of how we're going to ask the town manager to take the lead in implementing things that aren't yet part of a formalized climate action plan. Yeah, so we could work on the wordsmithing, but I think in how we put that in here as a smart goal, or if that's the intention. But it seems like folks are, so the three that have come up are like the job descriptions that could fit under the educate staff as well. We could keep that one in there. The climate plan and forthcoming climate plan and the budget. And then any other suggestions or thoughts? Anybody want to take the lead in wordsmithing an email? I can do that. OK, great. Thanks, Darcy. And this would go to the JOL, right? To you. The committee. OK.  That's fine. And then we'll put it in the packet for next time. Yeah, it has to actually be submitted by Wednesday, so. Yeah, I mean, just so everyone else can see it. Yeah, so I guess we'll assume that everybody's OK with her doing that. You have my full support, both of you. Thank you for taking this on, seriously. Keep it simple. And Darcy, if you could just include me in that correspondence with Laura. No, I didn't. Laura and Stephanie, yes. Thank you. OK, great. Thanks, Darcy, for raising this. Any other ECAC member updates? OK, great. So let's move on to. So we have two more main agenda items here. One is sort of identification of next steps for task group co-chairs, maybe get a little update on what's been going on. We heard from Stephanie around the planning, but Jim and Lauren may be talking about it and Ghazikaya from your perspective. And then, Andra, you had brought up a good point last time that we should also think about what we can be doing as ECAC as the task group work is ongoing. If there's other things that we could be working on, that would complement the task group work. And I sort of pitched that back out to Jim to give his thoughts as sort of what he thinks might be complementary. And then we can kind of go from there with that conversation. So if you want to start with the task group updates and co-chair, next steps. Sounds great. I'll jump in here and everybody can jump in as you see fit. So two big things have happened since the last committee meeting. One was that each task group facilitator group, we're going to be swimming in names of these things soon. So each task group facilitator group got a chance to meet, had great conversations. They were fantastic conversations. And went through a process of diving into what the task group should be doing and then trying to devise a framework for agendas. So each of the task groups did that. There are notes that have been back to each task group out of that. Task groups are still sort of looking at those notes. So those will all be shared together with the whole committee once everybody decides they're OK. And we make any changes. Out of that process, Lauren and Gazikaya and myself spent quite a bit of time sort of looking at those agendas, those draft agendas, and revising them based on a couple of key sort of inputs. I think that's a better way to describe it. I'm trying to use fancy words. I'm trying to keep it down here. Some ideas that came from some people. One was Laura's thought about looking at the agendas and was like, whoa, there's a lot of stuff in here. We really need to tone it down, which we were also feeling. And even though they're great and loaded with lots of really good stuff. And the other was the realization that we were going to have to think a little bit about how interpretation worked within the structure of a couple of the task group committees, task group meetings. And so we probably needed to tone it down a little so that things could have a more stately pace and that conversations could develop a little deeper. So in that process, we put together a sort of revised version. So myself and Lauren and Kazikaya put together a revised version of those agendas for each of the task groups and sort of working with the notes, those facilitator notes that everybody has gotten to really try and pull out the essence of what's going on in those notes and what people were thinking about. Have we sent those back to the co-facilitator teams? Though, as you note, I got it wrong on a couple of them. Thank you for your patience. And thank you, Stephanie and Lauren, for noticing. And so now we just had a gathering. Jesse and Sarah and Lauren and Kazikaya and myself had a quick conversation before this meeting, which was following up on that revised agenda. How do we want to work it? How did it feel? And then trying to develop what was necessary, and I would like to hand big kudos to Jesse and Sarah for really putting some thought into this process, put into understanding what their part was going to be and then what the whole flow was going to be. So that was really super useful. I hope it was useful for you. And so we need to probably do that with everybody just so that everybody understands what is being asked of them. They're comfortable with it. They like the flow of the meetings and are comfortable with where they're going and what we get out of them. The goal to get for these meetings is really to get a set sort of at the high level to get at least the beginning of a set of principles about how decisions on strategies and actions and goals get made in the plan. And so the task groups really are about at this point making those decisions and it being a joint process so that we can take it to the next meeting, the second meeting, and really start to look at what kinds of actions get prioritized and why and how they fit those principles so that we can then potentially take it to the third meeting and start to talk a little bit about how some of these things might happen, although we'll see. So next steps, wait, before I jump to next steps, anybody, Lauren, Kazikai, any thoughts or anybody else want to say anything in there? I'll follow after you. OK. I'm good. Great. So next steps to probably talk with each of the facilitation teams, the co-chairs, I've always got so many names, each of you. And just make sure we've got everything lined up that you feel comfortable with what you need to say and that it all feels like a good flow and we're ready to jump into those meetings. Just seeing the responses of the RSVPs, I'm actually kind of excited the RSVPs look great. I know we probably like some more folks, but darn, we did pretty well so far. And so we'll have a chance once those meetings happen. We'll probably want to do in those meetings try and schedule the next one, classic meeting stuff, and then do the same kind of process to plan for the next meeting as well. I'm going to stop, Lauren. And we can talk about other activities for the committee. Yeah, I just wanted to make a couple of notes about developing the stories that each of the co-chairs are putting together and about generally just the prepared parts of these meetings to, if possible, have those written out in advance and made available to our interpreters for those groups where we have interpretation because it will facilitate the interpretation process for the interpreters. So that is the buildings group. We'll have an ASL interpreter and the land use group will have Spanish interpretation. The other two groups, as I understand it, because you got it correct me if I'm wrong, don't currently have interpretation. So that was just that note I wanted to make. You're correct. Sorry, I was chewing and eating, so I have my video. Oh, no, no, no, no. Thank you. And then I also saw that under-asked a question earlier about in an email about whether or not we'll be using slides, and I thought that that might be a good thing with the group. Right, so in general, we're not expecting slides. And there was a, Kazika had made a comment in one of the settings about with ASL interpreter going back and forth between slides and not slides. Our general thought is that probably we don't really need slides unless there's something you really think is visual would be great to get across visually, in which he is happy to help you work on slides. And in that case, we would also probably want those delivered to the interpreters in advance if possible. If that's one of the interpreter groups, yeah. Yeah. Well, that would make it easy for the renewables and energy, because I think we really need slides to explain CCA, and we don't have heard interpretations. Right, yeah, great. And we're happy to help sort of, in general, and I think we sort of said this last time, but I'm going to say it again, because now it's much more in front of everybody's mind. We're happy to help put stuff together. If you want to think about what it is and get it all set, great. If you think about what it is and you get it half set, happy to follow through and help you to bring it to something that really looks cool and is expressive. Any questions before we get on from this? It's kind of a lot of stuff. I think I do have one question. We guess two questions. So should if the co-chairs need to, so like if Darcy and I need to communicate about how we do the introduction, for example, is that a meeting we should set up with everybody or should we just talk about it over email or either way it works? Yeah, I just, let me just, because these are not deliberations, they can be, you can actually talk to each other. So Jesse and Sarah, I don't know, Jesse, one of you can sort of talk about how you did this, but had a conversation together, shared a couple of things. And then we had a conversation to help think it through. And then there's probably a little bit more that goes on after that. So all of those, you want to use Google Doc, you want to share emails, whatever. Happy to do that in any way that works for you. I highly recommend a porch in the evening with a cocktail. But however you guys want to do it. OK, that sounds good. Great. And then the other question is probably for Gazekaya around, I know that there are, looking at the task group list, there's certainly some community leaders that have RCPed, which is wonderful. I know there are also a few community leaders who maybe don't want to join our full meetings for a host of reasons. So is that information able to be shared with the different task groups for which they may have community leaders that aren't joining the big group? And then how's the best way to work with you to facilitate one-on-one meetings for those community leaders? Yeah, great question. So far, everybody wants to come to the task group meetings, which is a huge success. There's been lots and lots and lots of conversations. There is one person that I think is slightly on the fence. And if that arises, I will put them in touch with a committee member if that's what they feel comfortable with. And otherwise, I'll just work with them one-on-one and then sort of be intermediary. One thing that has come up from almost all of the community leaders is that they have lots to share about every topic, not just the group that they've been placed in. So I would like for us to think about how to specifically provide opportunities for individuals to provide feedback or have an ability to talk on the different topics that the groups they're not in. So whoever has ideas around that, I think that would be really good because everyone's really excited and motivated to share and feeling like the feedback I've gotten is that this is the most they've ever been consulted and they are just brimming with ideas and input. So that's great. And even one person is considering running for town council and looking into that. So this is a big deal. And I just want to acknowledge that this is something significantly different for our town. And I appreciate you all's openness. Thanks, Kathy Kaya. That's making me tear up a little bit that they're interested in running for town council. Not that we did anything great, but that's exciting. So OK, yeah, let's talk about that. Maybe we could have one-off meetings for the different, I'm just thinking out loud, for the different areas where anybody from any of the community leaders could join just to give insight or something. But we can think about that maybe after the first meeting. Something that's come up in our facilitation group meetings was around that there are likely going to be offshoots of interest of different folks who are going to want to go deeper. Maybe a farmer's group who's going to want to talk about that carbon sequestration or a group of residents who are going to want to talk about tenants rights. So I think that hopefully after this first meeting, you'll get another chance to hear from everyone who's coming to the group and seeing where people's interests lie. And if separate self-organized groups in the community can be a result of this work, I think that would be awesome. Stephanie? I just had a thought that maybe we're going to be coming from the task group meetings and there'll be a draft document put together at some point. And the idea was that the draft document is going to be opened up to the community. At some point, we'll be having another full session. And maybe that's where all the information is. Maybe that's a point where it can be one big meeting with everybody. I think we should keep my suggestion. My suggestion is that we keep a kind of a flexible view on this. And let's see what turns out to be need to happen. But there may be times when we want to have people participating in more things. It may be that there's a structure done that happens. It makes it easier. I don't have a big feeling right now for what's the best route to really encourage activity. But I know this is one of those principal things, right? It's like, don't know how to do it, but I know that we want to do that. And so go ahead, Dizzy Ken. One of the pieces that is going to be helpful, I hope, is that I'll be at everybody's meetings. So I'll be sitting in one group and might think, oh, you know what? So-and-so is going to have an opinion on this. And so I can then, after that meeting, connect with that person and ask them if they want to, you know, in which way would they like to communicate their opinion. And I'll also be able to be sitting in a meeting and say, hey, I know this thing is really important to you. And that's something that's really being talked about in this other group. So let's connect on how we can make sure your information gets to that group. So that we can also encourage people sharing while not letting our groups get off on topics that we're not going to be able to address. And that's, you know, we'll have to see how that flows. But I think there will be a lot of that, especially from community leaders who just sort of see life as all one topic. And, you know, I want to make sure that we don't say to people, oh, that's not our group. So don't talk about it. But that we find ways to really say, like, oh, that is so important. And I see the connections that you made, and I'm going to really support you in making sure that the other group gets that information too. So we'll have to sort of see how that flows. But that's what I see my main role in these groups as being is making all those connections and thinking of the input that we can get sort of across the board. And I think that's going to be true for some of the other what we're calling the stakeholder leaders or sector leaders. I think that's just going to be true in general, because I know that there are other people who are in specific groups. And I was thinking of that today as I was putting together the lists and responding to folks that there are definitely people that definitely have crossover in different areas. So I can sort of look at the broad, you know, if you're focused on community leaders, I'll be focused on everybody else. So we can just make sure that that happens. Fantastic. And that actually brings up a point about sort of one piece of work for the committee to be doing in parallel to the task group process. And that is there's probably some holding and gathering of sort of things that crossover boundaries. It would be really valuable to be sort of an active process for committee members as the committee to take on. I'm not sure quite what that looks like, but I think that could be valuable. Jeff, did you have something? Oh, I think you're muted. No, you're good. Can we, yeah, Darcy, go ahead. I'm a little bit confused by whether the public is going to be invited to the initial task force meetings. They're gonna have to be posted as public meetings, right? So how will that work? Are you talking about the first group, the meetings that are happening this week and next week? Yeah. They're already posted. I've posted them all. So the public is attending as, are they webinars? So the public is attending as attendees? Correct, they're webinars. And I know that we've had this ongoing discussion about all kinds of participation and things, but the town is pretty firm and adamant on doing webinars. The sort of, you know, the webinars are a safer format, especially when you front-load all the panelists, which I did this time. And it's sort of a, we either get more safety and security with the webinar format, or if you're looking for a more public involved process where people are seen, then it's less safe. And then we open ourselves up to the potential for bombing. And the two instances where we kind of did that, that's what happened. We weren't following the very strict format. I'm just wondering who can attend one way or another. And if we want to attend all of them, are we, like, if I want to go to the ones that aren't mine, am I an attendee for a participant? I would think you'd be an attendee because the committee's part of the thought is that the task groups have some integrity and that integrity lives on over time. And there's not, we don't have public comment in the agenda, as I believe. That's what I was going to say, that at this point they don't have a public comment period. So yeah, you have to attend as an attendee, which could be quite interesting, I would think. And obviously you can send, people who attend as attendees can participate, can provide material to the task group through email or in other phone calls and things like that. Somebody refresh our memories real quick about exactly what each one of them is. I can do that. I have them lying here. I have them all written down. Land use is on the 30th tomorrow from six to 8 p.m. The renewables task group is on Monday, the third at 5.30 to 7.30. Buildings is on Wednesday, the fifth from six to 8 p.m. And transportation is next Thursday, the sixth from two to 4 p.m. And they're all in the town's calendar. They're all posted. So you'll be able to see them there. And I do want to just make a quick note that the land use group, their agenda may be a little off from what's posted. I don't think it's a big deal just because I didn't necessarily have the revised version. So that one is just not completely in sync with what was revised. But it's pretty general. Stephanie, could you repeat the date and the time for the last one, the transportation meeting? Sure. Transportation is Thursday, 8, 6, which is next Thursday from two to 4 p.m. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. So that's helpful. And it's great that we're all gonna have our first meetings before our next ECAC meeting because then I think we can spend a lot of time debriefing but also sort of having this running thought around this idea of offshoots or other ways that we're sort of collectively addressing issues that maybe hearing from folks that wanna talk about different things or addressing issues that aren't clearly delineated in our different groups, but that are coming up. So I think that will be great. That's sort of my one big thought about things that need to be happening. This committee is amazingly active and fantastic. And do you have your hands full right now? But if you want more, I think that the activities for the committee will start to come bubble up out of these task groups, things that as you say are not really gonna be within the purview of the task group, but definitely are at a higher level and within the purview of the public committee. I would like to note, unfortunately, that I am going to have to leave this meeting in about five minutes. Lauren and Kizikaya will do a fabulous job, I'm sure. So that I can go run another Zoom webinar. Does anybody have any questions, maybe specifically about the task group meetings coming up for the next two weeks? And then we can maybe do a little more talking around ECAC and other things we wanna be focused on or tracking. I just quickly wanted to say, Laura, that I'm actually gonna be on vacation for the next ECAC meeting. So any packet information, I absolutely will have to have by next Friday. Okay, good to know. And also I will have someone from IT hosting the meeting. I mean, you can be co-host, but they'll be generally handling the IT piece. Perfect. So I don't know, I guess the only group for which, well, maybe the group on the transportation group was on the sixth and then the group that was on the fifth and maybe a tight turnaround to get notes from those meetings to you for the packet, but we'll do the best we can. Great. So very excited for these first meetings. So do we wanna talk about sort of as ECAC, I think we have a couple, of course the electrification group work going on with Steve and Andra and Stephanie, the CCA work that's going on with Andra, Stephanie, Dwayne and Darcy, I don't know if you're involved with that still or not. Is there anything else that folks feel like we should be have our pulse on or otherwise things that the group wants to make sure we're talking about sort of in parallel to this process with the caveat that this process is very time consuming. So I don't think that we necessarily have to be doing anything else either. You know, I think the kind of more, the newish I would say agenda approach of having like the ECAC member updates, I think has worked well for people to bring things up that are kind of front of mind or things we wanna talk about. But just wanted to open it up for any thoughts. Andra, this was sort of your, I know you may be running out as we speak, but I know this was something you had mentioned last time. So I don't know if you had any additional thoughts. Yeah, Jesse. I have two things, neither of which are necessarily work for people, but maybe just seeds to plant in people's heads. One is, and I've talked about this in our task group a little bit, is a little bit about just the notion of the branding or essence of the work we're doing. And I just encourage people to think about that and give feedback to Linnean about how this work portrays itself to the town, in particular, and how it may be consistent and digestible and enjoyable and beautiful and exciting. So that's one sort of back of the head thing. And I don't know if branding is the right word. I don't, I'm gonna keep saying it though because I think it is the right word. I think it's just like how, like the visuals and things. I think it's important. I think it's worth considering. That's one. And then the other is, this is something Sarah brought up when we were talking about our task group is just this kind of COVID acknowledgement and to know that what we will be proposing is gonna be, we're gonna be proposing this into a different world than the world that we started working in. And I think there are already starting to emerge a lot of really great lessons and some not so great lessons. And I think for us all to have that in our heads to respect the sort of the new financial stresses that people may be under, but also the new comfort level other people may be under with traveling less or driving less. And I think, and I think this really relates strongly to the resilience piece, to the, you know, the food shortages, the panic buying, all these things like does Amherst have a local business that's making carbon sequestration net zero masks? I don't know, not yet, but that could be a great thing in our town. So those are just two pieces that I think, I think they're big, they're big for me as far as acknowledging at least. Nessie, can I respond to that? To both of your points, actually. So on the notion of branding and the essence of what this plan is going to convey, what this work is about, absolutely, please feel free to send your thoughts and ideas our way. You can just send them to me anytime. And then around the COVID acknowledgement piece, I think that's such an important thing to be keeping in mind as we do this work. I think one of the, I want you to write down everything that you just said, because one of the things that I've been thinking about in terms of sort of being an outsider, witnessing this process that the committee is leading and going through is how cool it would be to have the committee's reflections on that process be part of what comes out. Because I think this is a really unique process and to the extent that it can be held up as a case study and a model for others. Would be really awesome. I think it's something we've all talked about in different contexts. And so I would just encourage you as committee members, kind of what Jesse was just doing, like reflecting on what this process means in the context of COVID and how it has been impacted by that and what it's made possible, what it's made more difficult. All of those things I think are just great reflections to have and hopefully towards the end of this process, we can revisit the conversation and maybe have that, those reflections be incorporated into the plan. Because I think you're absolutely right, Jesse. It's a totally different world than when we started this process and it would be silly not to acknowledge that. So I just wanted to put that out there and thank you for your time. So I just wanted to put that out there and thank you for raising both of those points. Laurie muted. Yeah, Stephanie and Darcy, sorry. I just did want to, instead of talking about the difference in the world we were in and the world we're in now, also I think, and I know Jesse, you touched on it a little bit about how there are some great and not so great lessons, but I would also want to really point out the ways in which this is really, really different for people and how they're experiencing it because I know lately, I've just seen all these Facebook postings and there are people talking about how it's so great that we get to relax a little bit. My life has slowed down and it's so much better. And then I'm thinking there are people who have lost their jobs. I feel like there are some, for some people it's this great thing and on some level, and for other people it's absolutely devastating. And I just think that there are probably a good number of folks in our community that are having a really hard time. So how are we gonna reflect that in what we're doing as well? Yeah, I think that's the most important piece to me. The work we set out to do oftentimes comes into this wall of, well, we can't afford that. And I think that wall is being fortified in some ways by this, the financial situation and the uncertainty of work and labor and jobs. It's the, in some ways it's an, it's already a big ask to have people think about something that is oftentimes theoretical and to throw that on top of all this stress I think is, it's an acknowledgement. It's a tricky one. I don't know the answer myself. I credit Sarah for kind of bringing it to my attention as something we need to really pay attention to. Yeah, Darcy. I think, I hope that Amherst is ready to think about just new ways of looking at the problem just like we're kind of hoping that Amherst is ready to look at racial equity in a different way. That I would hope that this would start a conversation about looking at prioritizing climate action in a different way. I feel kind of like we're at a disadvantage because of the timing compared to places like Concord that sort of just got their baseline climate action plan done sort of under the line. So, I feel like I'd like to see what that baseline plan would be and then what the considerations would change about it. I mean, it's unfortunate that we don't, we may not have that ever to compare against. I know Lauren, you had a question or a point. I also wanted to maybe, Andra, put a spot on you since you spoke in the beginning about your involvement with the legislative process and lots of bills are up and being discussed. What is the, I mean, I know from my experience in the NGO community, you know, build back better like trying to use this as an opportunity and a moment. And I don't think that's all for naught. I think some of that is real. So I'd be interested in knowing how you are seeing that play out. So, I mean, that is happening in Massachusetts. The house just passed an economic development bill that had a lot of green recovery and environmental justice in it. And they passed a number of amendments that strengthened those aspects, not everything we wanted, but, you know, the activists were pushing for, but a lot. So, and then the one that's up right now is a pure climate bill and it's starting the reconciliation process between the Senate and the house and it'll be voted on tomorrow. So, in terms of specific ones that are really relevant to us, our senators sponsored the net zero stretch code bill in the Senate and the same one is being proposed in the house as an amendment to this bill. So, there's definitely opportunities to get involved. I imagine that next session will also be wanting to get involved in some legislation that might come out of this RMI process to allow more municipal choices. Did I answer that question at all? Yeah, I know that was helpful. And maybe potentially at the next meeting or a future meeting, we could go over once the dust settles on the current session, getting data on where the state landed might be helpful for the group. Okay, yeah. Lauren, did you have a... Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on what Darcy mentioned about the sort of parallels between the transformation that the town is experiencing around racial equity and climate justice and the connections there. And I think that that's another great reflection for this committee to be integrating into their process as we go forward because there are so many intersections there and as with COVID-19, these things really are changing the experience of what it means to be alive right now. So, I think that baseline, we might never go back to it, Darcy, to your point. So, it's also an opportunity to think really transformationally and I think that is what's happening. So, yeah, I just wanted to elevate that point about racial equity and climate justice. Yeah, and I think it'd be helpful to maybe have a, like a little bit of an opening statement, kind of trying to reflect this a little bit, both the acknowledging all the things really, but sort of with that take that, you know, I guess I personally have felt the hope that I've felt in these past few months, which is mostly not been hopeful, but I have felt moments of hopefulness in it. I think it's because of, I think this six months ago, you know, things felt so, change felt so hard. And now we've seen when we're forced to, we change really quickly. And I think it's opened up this whole other minefield of like all the things we could do if we were just open to being, to change from the racial equity piece in particular and like how we're pushing for it in a way that, you know, many people have been doing for many, many, many years. And, you know, I think that the change is possible in a way that it wasn't pre COVID because we were kind of set in our ways. And so I hope that that is true. I think it is true with the work we're doing as well. Yeah. Sorry, I was muted there. I just also wanted to say that a great place to potentially reflect on that as co-chairs is where in the first meetings, all of the agendas have a brief introduction to part of the ECAC charge that talks about public participation, community engagement. And that might be a great place to add some reflections on racial equity and what's happening there. So, but yeah, because it kind of has a point. I just wanted to caution you all on really considering if you are going to make a statement around racial equity or around equity in general, that it's a statement that you can support with some sort of committed action. In my experience in community with Black, Indigenous and people of color, it is far worse to hear somebody make some sort of very progressive sounding statement and not follow it up with action than it is to hear it completely avoided. It's a slap in the face, honestly. And our town has been through a couple of weeks of those kinds of statements. So I just really wanna ask that you all consider being very thoughtful about what you actually can commit to if you think about it, making some sort of statement. Yeah, that's really a good point, I think that's a guy I think going.  So anything that's recommended, has to sort of go through the gauntlet. So I think the point is to sort of, I think it's one of those things where we talk about sort of that aspirations for sort of what long-term you know, could look like and what we would like to see because I think we also don't wanna get into position where we don't sort of think about the fact that we have this pretty lofty goal that we need to meet and I think it's gonna take moving towards some of those things to get us there.  Which is where the caution comes in, yeah. Yeah, and I think maybe more along the lines of, let's not use COVID and the financial implications of COVID to narrow us on a very limited scope of work that we feel is only possible, but yet, but let's maybe still, let's still come to the discussion and the meetings with these big ideas and things that we, we know where we need to go. That's clear, right? So like, I don't want us to, I want us to have the current situation in front of mind, but that's almost not our role. I'm thinking out loud now but that's almost not our role in some respects, right? Like, it's up to us to identify what we need to do as a town to support our community and to push forward environmental justice around climate change and meet our goals. And so we need to prioritize our actions based on that and then we need to figure out how we do it from like a financial perspective or all of those other things. And that has to be a lens we apply, but I don't wanna limit our discussion in a way that just limits that, if that makes sense. Yeah, Darcy. I think if you're thinking of what you're gonna say in your presentation next week, I think it's good to push the town council on the issue of racial equity because we need it. You know, like assume there's an expectation that we're gonna do more and do it soon. Yeah, that's a good point, Darcy. And I didn't- Our action was disappointing to many in the town, our lack of action. Yeah. And I think we can use the presentation to the town council on Monday to also tee up to Lauren's point. I don't think we're ready now to have any really robust reflection on the process and we're just getting into it, but to tee up the fact that we will want to supply the council and other committees with a robust reflection on how we did this process, what worked, what didn't work, what they could do, you know, so I think we should, I'll make a note to kind of like tee that up in that presentation, Stephanie and I can do that. Yeah, I was gonna say, Laura, we need to coordinate because I had some thoughts about that too. So I think we're both wanting to say some of the same things, so let's just talk after. All right, folks. Well, unless there's any other pressing issues, I think we could call it a meeting. In terms of the next agenda, I think a big part will be sort of debriefing from our task group meetings, keeping in mind sort of how we're engaging with our community leaders and our stakeholders and if there's other ways we want to engage with them outside of the task groups or as we move forward, the process. Laura, I'm sorry, I just wanted to jump in real quick and this might be, I don't know if Lauren, Mike and Gazika, I might have thoughts on this as our consultants, but there are a few sectors, stakeholder leaders who couldn't necessarily make the first meeting, but are interested in contributing or attending future meetings. So I just wondered, I know we're trying to sort of create this sort of more closed kind of group, for the task group work, so I just wondered how people felt about that, about people joining in for the second and third meeting if they can't make the first one. Yeah, that's a good question, Stephanie. Are there many folks in that position or is it just one or two? Just a couple, literally just maybe two. And there's a few that can't make it and then just want to be able to somehow get involved in the process some other way, which I would just direct them to the co-chairs. Yeah, I was gonna suggest if we have a few people that are not going to be able to make it to one or more meetings, but want to participate, maybe we could have a separate session for those folks if it's a big enough group, just so that they still have a conversation, but it's not disruptive to the task groups that have already been underway. But I'm sort of on the fence. Yeah, I also think it could be worth considering offering to them what we've offered to the community leaders around having one-on-one conversations outside of group time. So if they want to check in and rather than jump into the group late that if they want to talk outside of group with the committee members or with Lauren, Jim or I or yourself and contribute that that would be welcome and that we could offer them reflections on what's happening in the groups and get their input. And that might be a way for them to be participating alongside without disrupting sort of the relationship building that's gonna be happening in the groups. Yeah, that definitely works. Yeah, I would say that I think I wouldn't want them to go cold into meeting too. Right. So I think that there would need to be some accommodation, reasonable accommodation. I don't think that we should meet with 10 individual people or so. You know, I may think we would have to look at the numbers and figure it out, but that would be my. Like I said, it's not many. So I think, you know, the logical thing is to sort of just get them in touch with the co-chairs. Great. Great. So just in terms of action, it is beyond the task group. Darcy, you were gonna draft up those goals for the, to submit for consideration for the town manager. Am I missing anything else? Okay. Well, I think that, Andrew, did you have any public comment to close us out? You're muted if you wanted to say anything. No, again, thank you for letting me sit in. I'm very interested in the process and how it plays out and I'd like to, I have 40 years experience in energy efficiency and buildings and I'd like to be seen as a resource to the committee. And I'm happy to be here. Thank you. Great. Thank you. All right, everybody. Well, good luck with everybody's task group meetings and we'll reconvene. Okay, awesome. Bye.


Hi I hope you're well, it was just to let you know that I was a guest on the Irish Medieval History podcast with Philip and Michael from Clans and Dynasties if you want to check it out. There was a lot of technical issues but it's still worth a watch or listen. I'll put the link below to the podcast and you should also check out and subscribe to Irish Medieval History and Clans and Dynasties. All the links are in the description below. Thanks, more videos are coming soon.