I realized that I skipped the lecture, so I have to go back now. Some of the stuff I was talking to you about last lecture you had no idea what I'm talking about. I apologize for that. I looked at the calendar and I didn't take into account that we didn't have a class because of the snow. So I want to start with a classic experiment that was done in the 1960s that is called Cayman's blocking. And Cayman's blocking is a good example of how learning theory is used to explain behavior in animals. Now the way we're going to do it is we're going to use two kinds of algorithms. We're going to use the common filter algorithm to describe what's going on. And then we're going to use the simple LMS algorithm to explain what's going on. And basically the difference in these two things is that in the common filter algorithm of state estimation, what we're going to end up with is a learning rate, the common gain that depends on the history of the past inputs, the covariance matrix. Whereas in the LMS, we're just going to have our learning rate, which depends on the prediction error and the states that were experienced on that particular trial. And that is not going to depend on the history of past errors. So it turns out for this particular experiment called Cayman's blocking, both of them work. And they explained the idea that really the way animal is learning is based on prediction error. The first thing we're going to see is that the way the animal is learning this task is based on making a prediction and that prediction is different from what he observes and therefore he learns from it. And if that isn't there, if the prediction error isn't there, he's not going to learn anything. Next we're going to talk about a different experiment that was done that demonstrates how LMS no longer works. And this is a version of the task where the order in which the experiment was done is just simply reversed. And by doing that, we'll see that LMS now fails, whereas the state estimation framework still continues to explain things well. So here's the basic experiment. In the 60s, Cayman took some rats and trained them to press a lever to get food. Basically, you know, press, press, press, press, at some point the animal gets food. So the animal is just constantly more or less pressing food. Now what happens is that they turn on a light for three minutes. So these animals, these rodents, don't like light. So they naturally get a little bit scared of light. And at the end of the three-minute period, so first they get a light, then what they're going to do is at the end of the three-minute period, they're going to pass a little bit of electricity on the grid where the animal is standing on. So they're going to shock the animal. So then what happens is that the animal gets scared, learns to associate the light with the shock. And so therefore he doesn't press the lever because he's scared. He freezes. So the mechanism by assaying learning in the animal is that how much does he reduce his pressing of the lever when he sees the light. Okay? All right. So simple experiment. Light comes on. A few minutes later, the animal gets shocked. As a consequence, next time the light comes on, the animal doesn't press the lever because he expects to get shocked. Now what Cayman blocking is about is the following. First they train the animal with the light shock pairing. Light comes, shock is going to come. Next what they do is take the same animals and during the time when the light is being displayed, they also play a tone. So they're too stimuli now. So let's write it down. Before I forget, what am I talking about? I'm talking about chapter 6.1 to 6.4 today. So the first experiment is Cayman blocking and it goes as follows. So the animal sees a light and then he's going to get shocked. He learns to pair, to associate these things. Light isn't good. Then what is going to happen, what he's going to see is that he's going to see light and he's going to hear a tone and now he's still going to get shocked. Okay? So the interesting observation is that after the animal is trained with these two sets of blocks of training, now if you just give the animal tone, oh god, let's see if we can do better. So if you just give tone, what happens? What do you think? Press the lever but then they realize that there's, oh so there's no shock. Yeah, so we want to know what's the animal going to do when he hears a tone.  Not care. Who says not care? One, two, three. Who says four? Who says be afraid? So a little bit more people think be afraid and you know people, I think psychologists when they did this experiment, they were kind of surprised that the animal was not afraid of the tone because you know he saw the light and he heard the tone and he was shocked. So why is he not afraid of the tone? It turns out that the animal was not afraid of the tone. Basically it didn't care. And the interesting result is that the reason why he didn't care is because light predicted the shock in both cases. So there was nothing new with the tone even though it occurred, the fact that the animal knew he was going to get shocked and he got shocked made it so that he didn't seem to learn this extra thing associated with the tone. So to explain this, the theorists in the 60s use the LMS algorithm. And let me begin with the LMS because it's a nice reminder for us to what was LMS. So I'm going to do the geometric interpretation of LMS. So let's see what this experiment does. Let's suppose that x is, David do you think you might be able to find me another pen? Thank you man. So say that x is light and tone. So meaning that if light is on, then x is equal to 1, 0. OK. Simple way of it. Now the animal is going to have to learn that there's going to be a shock or not. So y is shock and it's equal to 1 if shock was given. And what the animal is going to learn is a very simple mapping that y hat is equal to w transpose x. So he's going to learn to associate the stimuli light and tone with shock and he's going to give him a weight w. So how he might do this, in LMS what we do is that we imagine this two-dimensional, w is going to be a two-dimensional vector, x is a two-dimensional vector. So suppose that in this space, here's w. Here's this vector w on trial end. And x is another vector, it's a two-dimensional vector. Here's x here on trial end. So in this case, maybe the light and the tone are both on. So the x is a 1, 1 vector and w is another vector. What do we mean when we say project w onto x? So what does this mean here? W transpose x. Well, w transpose x, what this means is that take the magnitude of w, take the magnitude of x and multiply it by the cosine of alpha where alpha is the angle between x and w. So let's see what that means in this graphical representation. So here's w, here's x, here's the angle between them alpha. And if I want to project w onto x, what I would do is I would say, well, take the magnitude of w, so this length here is going to be the magnitude of w times cosine of alpha, right? Do you agree? Cosine of alpha is this length divided by this length. So what's cosine of alpha? Cosine of alpha is. So this quantity, this projection here, I'm going to call that p, this length from here to here. It's called that p. So then p is equal to w times cosine of alpha, which is that. So that's how this projection is related to w transpose x. W transpose x is going to be equal to this projection, except that it's divided by the magnitude of x. All right. So that's our guess. Suppose that now what we wanted isn't y hat. So how this is related to y hat? This is related to y hat as follows, right? So this projection is related to y hat, my guess on that trial. You see that? So it's just y hat divided by x. That's what that projection is. Well, what is it that I want? What is the true y that I want is y? This is my observation, right? So I want some other length that I should have had. And say that the length that I wanted is this length. Out here. Let me draw it here. Suppose this is the y that I wanted. This is the y that I predicted. This is the y that I wanted. So there's this difference here between what I wanted and what I predicted. It's called that delta. So what I want to do is change my w by another vector here. I'll call that delta. I'll call this, this is the y that I wanted. This is what I predicted. Projection that I predicted, this is what I wanted. So I want to change my estimate by this amount delta. Change my w so that when I project it onto x, I get my observation y. So this is what I predict. This is what I get. This is what I observe. I mean, so pre-observation is y hat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So y hat is my prediction based on my model. y is what I observe. And now what I want to do is change my w, right? Yeah, yeah, it is. It is, yeah, yeah. We're going to make sense of that. So let me call this, I guess, p prime. Maybe p prime is better. p is what I predicted. p prime is what I wanted. And p prime is going to be y divided by x, right? Thank you, David. OK, we can throw these two away too. Excellent. So this vector delta, the thing that I want to add to my w, is going to be equal to y divided by x minus y hat divided by x, like this, this subtracted out. That's a scalar quantity multiplied by a vector that's in the same direction as x, which is x divided by its magnitude. So this is a vector. x is a vector. This is the magnitude of x. This is a normalized vector of unit 1. This is the amount that I should change my w by. So this is equal to 1 over magnitude of x squared times y minus y hat times the vector x. So my learning rule is w of n plus 1 is w of n plus some proportion of this amount that I should change my w, which is 1 over x of n, its magnitude squared times y of n minus y hat of n times x of n. So that's just our usual LMS with this normalization here that says, if you wanted to learn the whole error, here's how much you would learn it by delta. But generally, we want to learn a fraction of the error, which is what this a to this. Well, that's your simple LMS. OK? All right. So if you want to do the same problem in using state estimation, we would do something like this. We would say, there's some w that I'm trying to estimate. There's this x that I can see that gives me a y that I can see. And I want to estimate this w. And I have this generative model that says, well, my w is where this is a vector. And then I have an observation y of n is equal to w of n transpose x of n plus epsilon y, where this is a scalar. So here's my state equation. Here's my measurement equation. Now, what I want to estimate is w. So what I do is I say, all right, my posterior estimate is my prior estimate plus my common gain times the difference between what I observe and what I predicted, y of n minus y hat of n, which is going to be w of n given n minus 1 transpose x of n. This is my prediction error. And this gain here, what is this gain? It's going to be my prior uncertainty times this vector divided by the observation uncertainty, which is the scalar. Yeah, so that works out. I think that the units work out. This is a 2 by 2. It's a 2 by 1.  And I think that the denominator works as well. And then my posterior uncertainty is i minus k of n times x of n times the prior uncertainty. And then w hat of n plus 1 given n is equal to w hat of n given n. And then p of n plus 1 given n is equal to p of n given n plus q. So what I want to do now is I want to go back to our problem of this animal learning this task. Light and then light plus tone. Let's compare what this does to what LMS does. Do you have any questions before I do that? OK, so the only difference between these two algorithms is in k, right? This is what matters. And so if you look at k here, you notice that it depends on p. And what does p depend on? p depends on x and the x's that you've been getting. So the history of x's. So what was the prior history? And what we're going to see is that when light and tone appear together as opposed to when light appears alone or when tone appears alone, then the uncertainty matrix is going to be different. And when the uncertainty matrix is different about x, when the animal has an error associated with a prediction, it will distribute that error to its estimates differently. So basically, the more uncertain you are about one variable, the more you're going to assign credit to it, right? So that's what the uncertainty matrix does. That's all our story so far. OK, so first what we're going to do is we're going to do this Cayman blocking. And then after we're done with that, we're going to do the reverse blocking. So this is the normal way of doing it. And we're going to see that both of these algorithms predict the same thing. So everything's happy. And next what we're going to do, we're going to look at it in a reverse way. What if the animal was first trained with light and the tone together like this? Then he was trained with light alone. What does he say about tone now? So those are the two conditions that we're going to compare these two algorithms. All right, so let's begin with the experiment where we have light comes first. And so we have, say, we're going to have some number of trials, maybe 40 trials, let's say. And our stimulus pattern is as follows. First we're going to have light on, but no tone. So light is x1. So light is going to be up here. So this is plus 1. Light's going to be on throughout the whole thing. So this is x1, which is light. And then tone is going to come on in the second half of the experiment. So then tone does this. This is x2, which is tone. And down here is trial. And then what is our observation? It's y. y is related to y star, which is the uncorrupted way of thinking about y. So y is what we observe, but it's always a noisy measure of the actual shock. So the shock is always the same, but we're going to assume that the animal has some noise associated with the way he evaluates the shock. So there's y, which is observation. And then there's y star, which is the actual shock. And we assume that y is equal to y star plus some noise, plus epsilon y. So there's some small amount of random noise that's added to what the animal observes. So y star is going to be 1. Shock is always on. Say that's y star, which is shock. OK, so our objective is to estimate w1 and w2. All right, so let's do the LMS. LMS element. What does LMS do? So we have what is going to be y hat? Well, we're going to assume that we don't have any reason to not like light and tone to begin with. So then with training, we're going to learn that we're going to expect the shock. This is going to be y hat, some amount of training. And how does that happen? Well, in this experiment, light is on. So w1 does this. Actually, I should put some noise on this. It actually looks like this. There's some wiggle on the y hat that we make. So w1 is going to look like this. w2 is going to look like this. So we're going to assign all the weight associated with the error that we see to light. Now, what happens is that both the light and the tone are on, but the shock is still there. And our prediction error is zero because we predicted as long as there's light on, there's going to be a shock. So now what happens is that this stays where it is, y hat stays where it is, w1 stays where it is, w2 stays where it is. So we don't learn to associate the tone with the shock. Why? Because we have no prediction error. You know, when the light is coming on, it doesn't matter that the tone came on. Well, I still got shock. And I predicted that I'm going to get shock. So there's nothing to learn. Okay, does that make sense? So prediction error is central to the learning. Without it, you know, there could be many stimuli that are on, but because I have no prediction error, I don't learn. All right, now let's consider what the common filter does. Very similar, very similar story. So except now we have a K and we have uncertainty P. So P is a two by two matrix. So I'm going to try to draw the components of it for you. So, you know, we again have these two variables. We're going to have y hat where, you know, y hat goes up and then stays there basically. So this is now the common filter, state of state. This is y hat. What is w1 and w2? It's going to look very similar. W1 is going to, you know, rise up, stay there. W2 is going to stay down here. Next I'm going to plot for you the uncertainty matrix. So this is one. Now the uncertainty matrix, in the case where we begin, we only have, in our example, we only have the light on. We only have x1. So what happens is that in the first 20 trials, I'm going to plot P11, which is P11. So remember P is going to be the uncertainty associated with variants of w1, variants of w2, the covariance of w1, w2, and the covariance of w2, w1. That's what P is. So my estimate of w1 and w2 is here. That's the mean of my posterior uncertainty. The variance of my posterior uncertainty, what it's going to look like is that, well, P11, I'm going to see a whole lot of times when light is on, but there is no tone. So my uncertainty for w1 is going to definitely decline. It's going to go down here. What about my uncertainty for w2? Well, I don't know anything about w2. It's going to stay up here. P22 is going to stay up there. P11 is going to fall. P22 is going to stay up there because I never see it, you know, tone. I don't know anything about tone. The covariance is going to be zero-two. P12. Of course, P21 is equal to P12. Then what happens is that both of them come on. So now, this covariance goes to negative numbers. So this is negative. This is positive. And both of these now begin to fall. Something like this. All right, okay, so as far as we can tell, the stated estimator and LMS behave very similarly. They both say that when I get to the stage where you ask me how much I know about tone, I'm going to say tone is not a dangerous thing. If I hear a tone, I don't care. The weight associated with it is zero. Even though I heard the tone and I got shocked because I heard it in the context of light, it made no difference. All right, so now let's compare this to the reverse scenario. So what happens in the reverse scenario? In our next experiment, what's going to happen is called backwards blocking. And now what happens is the light and tone are on at the same time. So again, let's do 40 trials. We begin with light and tone both up here. So this is light or X1. It is on. And for the first 20 trials, tone is on too. And then tone goes away. And I'm going to get shocked the whole time. That's why I start. My shock. Okay, so the interesting question is this. I saw light and tone together when I got shocked, okay? So that means that both bad. I'm going to assign some credit to light, some credit to tone. Maybe half of shock is coming because I got light, half of it is coming because I heard the tone. And now what happens is that I don't hear tone anymore. All I'm seeing is the light and I'm getting shocked just as much. So what should I believe about tone? How important is tone? Should I be afraid of tone or not? What do you think? How many think at the end of this, I should be afraid of tone? Nobody. How many think I should be afraid of, I should not be afraid of tone? Okay, so most people think that we should now realize tone wasn't important, right? Okay. And that's what the animal does. The animal says, oh, I used to be afraid of tone, but I didn't hear tone. I just took a shock and therefore assigns basically nothing to tone. Now what's interesting here is that the animal did not hear the tone, but changed its belief about tone. So how did he do that? How did he know that the lack of the stimulus itself was interesting? So if you look at LMS, look at LMS here. LMS says, what's an X? Did you hear the light? Did you hear the tone and did you see the light? So if the X associated with the value associated with tone is zero, I didn't hear the tone.  So what LMS is gonna do, it says follows. So it's gonna learn to predict Y hat. So here's Y hat, it's gonna go to one. And now, how is it gonna divide up to W1 and W2? What was gonna say, well, basically I'm gonna go up to point five. I'm gonna, this is gonna be my W1 and this is gonna be my W2. Half the stimulus is coming because of the tone, half of it is coming because of the light. That's a rational way of dividing up the problem. Now, what happens is that I hear nothing, but I see the light. And when I see the light, I still get all of the shock. So by the end of here, I say, if I just see the light, if the light comes on, I should get half of the shock, but I don't get half the shock. I get all of the shock. So now what happens is that W1 goes up here. So I have a prediction error, right? Because all of a sudden here, I say I should get this, but I get all of it. But I never saw, I never heard the tone in the second half. So W2 stays where it is because X2 is zero. I can't change, I can't change the weights for stimulus that's not there. So LMS says that if you were afraid of the tone at the end of the experiment, at the end of the first half, you're still gonna be afraid of it at the end. Okay, now what does the Coleman filter say? Coleman filter says the case depend on the uncertainty matrix P. And if you heard the light, sorry, if you heard the tone and you saw the light together, what that means is that your uncertainty matrix has negative off diagonal elements. So if one went away, the other one must change. Basically, if this goes up, this has to go down because that's what the uncertainty matrix says what happens because the uncertainty matrix is keeping the record of this history. It is true that X2 is zero, but I'm gonna change the weight associated with it anyway because the P matrix has negative cross off diagonal elements. So if I do the same thing in a common way, when I get my Y hat's gonna look exactly the same, but my W, so in the state estimation, here's what happens. W1 and W2 change together and then W1 goes up, W2 comes down. And the reason is because the P matrix in the first half, so here's the P matrix, here's positive, here's negative, I'm gonna plot for you P12, P12.  And now because of this, the K matrix is gonna behave in such a way to make W2 move in the opposite direction because it remembers that these two things that I'm trying to estimate, W1 and W2 have a negative covariance. If one goes up, the other one has to go down. So W1 and W2 change. Now, they did an experiment to see how this actually works in real animals. And here's the experiment that they did. The following, I'll draw it down here. So they did experiment as follows. They had three tones, three different tones. Let's call it A, B, and X. So three different sounds. And they first played A and X together. And if A and X together were played, it predicted the tone B. Okay, so A and X come together, that's gonna give me tone B. And if A comes by itself, it's also gonna predict tone B.  And so now they ask, what do you know about X and what do you know about A? Let's think about this for a second.  But so do you see its analogy to the reverse blocking? So if the animal has learned that A and X together give you B, A by itself gives you B, but X must give you nothing. So I'm not afraid of X, but I'm very afraid of A. And this is as compared to the control group, which does the following. A and X give me B, and A gives me C, and B gives me shock. So now I ask, what does A give you? What does X give you? How afraid of X and A are you? And you're afraid of both A and X. Because I learned that B is bad, half of A predicts B, half of X predicts B, both of them predict B, so I'm afraid of both A and X. I think it's pretty cool. Any questions, guys? Yeah? That's negative. Right, because in our model, we have W1, X1 plus W2, X2 is equal to Y. Right? So if X1 and X2 are both one, in this model, W1, if it increases, W2 has to decrease. Otherwise, how can you be both at the same time equal to one? Yeah, it's implicit in our model, that covariance. This idea is for, why don't we have one and minus one and one and zero? Yeah, that's fine. So you mean if it exists, it's one. If it doesn't exist, it's minus one? Yeah, then we can modify it that way. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah. So let's think about that. So would it change, of course it would change LMS. Yeah, if it's not there, if it's minus one, I'd have to think about it. In how would, In many situations, I've seen that, to avoid the problem of not modifying the words. Yeah. With the minus one. Yeah, yeah. Something happens to other people. Sure, sure. It should have happened to us. If somebody asked me the same question, I would not necessarily behave the same way they did. So why do you think that me as an animal behave in a different way than this animal? Because for me, I can say, okay, it might be, it does not matter. Even if it's like light or some, maybe both of them do the same thing, or maybe they must be at present together. And there are many different combinations that can give you the show. And maybe it's like, it's part of the make a conclusion. It's just a random guess if there will be a show cut at the end of the note. Yeah, yeah. Right, right. But the animals behave consistently. So that, okay. The experimental data is collected. And in its first, it is a little surprising that even though the animal heard the tone in the context of getting shocked, he's not afraid of it. So the first experiment illustrates that the concept of prediction error as being important. So the fact that the stimulus was there by itself wasn't important. What seemed to be important is the fact that the animal made a prediction, but that prediction indeed came to fruition. Shock was predicted and it occurred. The fact that he was in a room with the tone and all these other things didn't seem to register nearly as much as the fact that the light was associated with the tone. And I guess you asked a number of questions. So let me think about, I would be interested in asking if we were to change the mathematics so that X's are represented not in terms of zero and one, but in terms of minus one and plus one, would it all fundamentally alter the results? I don't know, we would have to simulate it. But if we represent it as a minus one, what we're saying is that we already know that that stimulus is not present, right? So there are many things that are not present when you're at a particular situation. If you assume that it's a, that you know that it's not present, you're giving it importance, right? So when you're in this room, there are many stimuli around you. If I say light comes on and you get shocked, well, there are 50 other stimuli as well that we're not on. The fact that if you assign minus one to those, you're saying that I know these are important and they were not on, as opposed to saying this was important. So I guess it's a philosophical, but I think it's reasonably important. You asked many questions, so I'm not sure if I addressed them. To expand what you say, maybe, if a stimuli that's off goes on, then you can keep each other a stimuli that's off. It attracts your attention and therefore... Like, if you have light and sound, then you get shocked, but if you have light and sound and a door opens, then you don't get shocked. So the door opening inhibits the other to... Yes, yes, yes, yes, that's right, that's right. You would have to, right, right, yeah. You would have to also be repeated. So I wanna next do an experiment because on last week, I mentioned to you this idea of doing a state estimation from the perspective of learning and these are goggles that have been slightly modified and we're gonna do an experiment, so I wanna volunteer. So put on the goggles and come on up here. Yeah, this should be able to go around your glasses. It's perfect. All right, yeah, yeah, excellent. This is very cool. Don't move around too much. Stand still. Stand still, okay. So I'm gonna take some data from you, so yeah. Yeah, just go instead. Touch the board so you're gonna get a sense of, you're left-handed or right-handed? Right. Okay, use your right hand, touch the board. Okay, go bring your arm down. Put it all with the goggles. This is all distorted. We shall tell you in a moment. So I'm gonna put up a dot here. Hold on, hold on to this. Yeah, so what you're gonna do is you're gonna try to hit the dot. Okay. Okay? Quickly? Yeah, just go ahead, something like this. Keep your finger down. I'm just gonna go ahead and touch it, you don't like this. Okay. Just go ahead and do it once. Okay. Okay. Put the dot there, okay. That's okay, that's all right.  Let's do the dot again. Yeah, just keep looking at the dot, do it again. Do it again. Yep. I did it past, oh there you go. Nope. Just focus on the dot. Yeah, focus on the dot. Focus on the dot, yeah. Keep focusing on the dot. There you go. No, no, no, this is data.  Keep doing it, excellent. Yep. Keep focusing on the dot. Okay, that's great. That's great, all right. Stand where you are. All right, go ahead and take it off. Yeah, hold on to it. Great. Okay, let's focus on the dot. Hit it again. Do it. All right, so you cheated, you cheated, right? So where did your arm go when you first? I think it went over here. No, put your hand up. All right, let's do this again. Put that on. Didn't feel good, whatever happened. No, it was in my head. So you were just doing fine, all right. So go ahead and hit it. Yep, no, I want you to hit it. Don't stop your hand, yeah. I have to go back to my resting. Yeah, yeah, put you down.  All right, keep your finger down. I'm gonna go ahead and remove it. All right, look at the dot. Make a nice quick move when I hit it. All right, good. So most people, what they do is that they miss and then they learn. Now I don't know how it is in you. What you are doing is that you're sort of going over here but then you correct it for it. Most people have what we call after effects. In the 1960s, I'm gonna pass around some of these so you guys can try it on your own. In the 1960s, the scientists became interested, wanna come up here, wanna try one? In trying these things because they were sending, the United States was sending astronauts to space and space has, of course, no gravity or reduced gravity and they were interested in understanding what can astronauts adapt to lack of gravity and can they compensate for it? So they began doing experiments like this and the, yeah, you guys, if you wanna try it, basically you need to have a target. You gotta have to point to it and then see what that feels like. So one of the classic experiments in this field was as follows and it had to do with the concept of prediction error.  Basically what you're seeing is that light is bent as it goes through it. So if you look at somebody wearing these glasses, their eyes are pointing to the side because for them, that's straight ahead. So what Dick Held did is that he considered this experiment. So he had people put on prism goggles and then he put the subject's arm in a board, basically, and then he moved the board in front of them like this so that they could see their arm moving, okay? And he compared that to when they themselves moved their arm. So if I myself move my arm, what happens is that I send the command to my arm and I see it move just like what we saw here. He sends a command to his arm to go here but he sees it out here, right? He misses it completely. So there's a prediction error. And so trial after trial, he's learning from it. Now imagine if I had taken his arm and moved it for him, right, and he himself moving it. And what Dick Held saw was that when people saw their arm move, even though they were in the prism glasses, they didn't learn from that. But they learned if they themselves moved their arm. So we think of it as you send the command to your body, you expect a certain sensory consequence.  So you have a prediction error. And that that prediction error was the thing that you need to adapt, to learn. So it turns out that the ability to compensate for these kinds of perturbations depends on a part of our brain called the cerebellum. Patients with cerebellum damage, so here's a cerebellum, have significant difficulty learning to compensate for these kinds of perturbations. Okay, if there are no questions, any questions? Yeah. Yeah, it's involved probably in much more than motor learning, the kinds of learning that we've been talking about because we know that it connects to many areas in the brain other than the motor areas like the frontal lobe and the parietal cortex, a prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex, but it has been dominated by studies of motor learning. Although recently people have begun looking at learning in other kinds of domains, cognitive types of domains to ask if there's this notion of an internal model associated with it, even though it's not internal model of my own actions, but my models are how I believe the environment should behave. Now, this is a very different kind of a memory system than what I told you about HM. So HM had an issue with his, here's a temporal lobe and in the middle part of his, medial part of his temporal lobe is an area called the hippocampus. And this hippocampus seems to be important for our ability to remember our autobiography, basically what's happened to us in terms of events, faces, places that we've been in our recent past. And one can have a no ability to remember that I've seen you before, I've had you in a class, but yet being able to do something that suggests that I remember something about the particular thing I learned here. So I learned in this room to perform an action, like to compensate for prisms, even though I don't remember ever putting on the prism on my head or you that give me the prisms. So that memory of being in a room and being given this thing that I put on my eye is a hippocampal memory. The action that I just did, if I were to repeat it and get good at it, would be something that the next time that I put the prisms on, I know from the very first try how to do it. Well, not the next time, next 20th time that I do it, I would know that this prism glasses altered the world around me and I know how to compensate for it on the first try. That would be a memory that would be not dependent on the hippocampus, but probably the cerebellum. Yeah, hippocampal lesion. Yeah, he had a disease that had caused in his brain to have seizures and because he couldn't live with his seizures, the surgeons have removed his hippocampus, his hippocampi on both sides and it made it so that the seizures went away, but they had this devastating side effect that he couldn't remember being in a context that he had been before. So psychologists use this word declarative memory to refer to the ability to remember that you've been in, that you know something, like when you get tested next, on Wednesday on what you know, that's a declarative memory. You can declare what you know. Why is it called declarative memory? Yeah, because it's a part of programming, right? When you think about programming, at the beginning of programming, you declare a variable as an integer. It's real. It's a declarative part of the programming. It comes from computer science and then you have the procedural part of it where you write down the algorithms of what to do with the parameters and that's called procedural memory. So psychologists in the 70s and 80s when they talked about memory, they divided it up into two parts, declarative, things that you can declare. I know X squared, what it means. I know the map of Johns Hopkins. And then procedural, I know how to ski. I know how to play tennis. I can't tell you how to ski. I just, I have to show you. That's called procedural memory. These two things come from computer science, the way you program. Why does it come from computer science? Because the person who came up with these two terms was a psychologist at, his name was Larry Squire, is Larry Squire, who basically at the time, at the AI lab, where people were talking about programming was introduced these concepts of declarative programming and procedural.  Okay, thank you for your time. Quiz on or midterm on Wednesday.


Good evening. This is September 29, 2020, and we are actually having two meetings tonight. The first is something that we invented when we first started doing public forums, and it's something we call a primer, and it allows us to have an in-depth presentation about an issue, in this case, the master plan. So I'm going to start by just saying Governor Baker's March 12 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law allows us to hold this virtual meeting. I will call upon each counselor by name at that time they should unmute and their mic and say present. This will indicate that they can hear us and we can hear them, and then please re-mute your mic again. This will allow how we'll also do counselor comments throughout meeting along with the raised hand function. So given that we have a quorum of the council, I am calling the meeting of the Amherstown Council to order at 633. There is no chat room meeting includes audio video and is available live on Amherst media, and it is also being recorded and will be available after the fact. If we have technical issues, we will suspend the discussion or make note of that and move on. I do want to bring to your attention. Three announcements that we wanted to make sure the public knew so Athena would you put those up please. Oh, I'm sorry. I haven't taken roll yet. So, I'm going to start out with shall any Balmille present. Alyssa Brewer. Not present yet. Not present yet. Melissa Dela. President. Darcy DeMont. President. Lynn Griesper. President. And Joannikie. President. Dorothy Pam. President yet. Evan Ross. President. George Ryan. President. Kathy Shane. President. Steve Schreiber. And Sarah Schwartz has informed me she will be absent. And if somebody would let me know if they see others as they arrive. So now we're gonna just put these three announcements up on the slide very quickly. Thank you. We just wanna call, no, that's the connection slide. Thank you. We wanna just call attention to the fact that there is a COVID-19 concern hotline and also email. We wanna also make sure that people are aware that the Community Preservation Act proposals are due on October 12th. And a new round of funding for emergency rental assistance is now available. And you can go on the town website and find that information as well. We'll leave that up for just a moment. All right, thank you. We can take that down. So the first part of our meeting tonight is an overview of the master plan. This is prior to having a public forum on the master plan which we will begin at immediately following this meeting. Christine Brestrup will be providing us with the overview. And she is also going to give us just a brief review of the upcoming zoning bylaw review. While we will provide an opportunity for counselors to ask clarifying questions during the primer, we will not have public comment until we officially begin the public forum. We will not be taking action on any item during this meeting. So with that, Christine, please go ahead. Good evening. I'm Christine Brestrup, Planning Director.  And then during the public forum to hear comments from the public about the master plan. But first I wanted to say a few words in general. The master plan is a dynamic long-term planning document that provides a conceptual layout to guide future growth and development. The master plan is not the same as zoning. And I think that's hard to understand sometimes. The master plan doesn't tell us how wide the sidewalk should be or how high buildings in the downtown should be. It doesn't tell us what style of architecture should prevail. It's really much more general than that. So getting down to specifics, we have other plans that map out details for us. And since the master plan was completed in 2010, we've had many other plans that have been created by the town, some of which are as follows. We have a sewer extension master plan. We have a housing production plan, a housing market study, a transportation plan that was adopted by the planning board and then incorporated into the master plan by vote of the planning board on June 10th, 2015. We have an open space and recreation plan which was updated in 2017. We have a bicycle and pedestrian network plan, a community field master plan. And we currently have a plan being developed by the ECAC, the Energy and Climate Action Committee, which will be completed by the end of the year. There are probably other plans being developed now that I don't have listed here. We've also made many changes to our zoning bylaw since the adoption of the master plan. And these changes were considered implementation of the master plan. And we're currently working with the CRC and the planning board on a number of other changes, including a complete rewrite and recodification of the master plan or excuse me, of the zoning bylaw incorporating many of the suggestions that the master plan makes. So this master plan that we're gonna talk about tonight was created over a period of about five years from 2005 until 2010. And the town should think about starting the process for a new master plan in about four years with the goal of having a new master plan in place by 2030. Meanwhile, we should work on implementing the master plan that we have, including continuing to create new plans to address issues that are important to the town, including changes to our zoning bylaw. So let's talk about the master plan. May I have the next slide, please?  A master plan is a community's general longterm blueprint for its future. It's a dynamic document and the beginning, not the end of a process. Next slide, please. What does the law say about a master plan? Well, the mass general law chapter 41, section 81D, requires that cities and towns in Massachusetts create and adopt a master plan. This is usually done by the planning board. In Amherst, the planning board adopted the master plan in February of 2010. Our Amherst home rule charter requires the adoption of a new master plan by the town council every 20 years. So 2030 would be the target date for a new master plan. Next slide, please. This master plan was the first in Amherst for nearly 40 years, and it was based on an extensive public input. You can see us all gathered here in the cafeteria of the high school talking with our consultant about our vision for the future. In addition to public input, the master plan was also based on research on the community's existing conditions and anticipated trends for the future. There's a whole section of our town website that's devoted to the creation of the master plan. And whoever hasn't had a chance to look at that, you might find it interesting to see all the different aspects of creating the master plan. So this master plan represents Amherst's best effort to balance competing interests of a diverse population. Next slide, please. So the master plan began really in the 70s as a result of a lot of development in town and people were wondering how to be able to control development. The town established a select committee on goals in 1971, and they worked for the next two years and created a report that we call the SCOG report. It's an unfortunate name, but it's a good document. And this conceptual plan that's shown here in black and white shows the basic plan for the town that they came up with, which was to focus development in the downtown, which is that rectangle in the middle and in the village centers, which are the circles scattered around the map of Amherst and to try to preserve the outlying areas as much as possible. And since then, we've actually done a pretty good job at doing just that. So in the late nineties, we had an Amherst visioning process. The town hired Walt Kudnowski of the Conway School of Landscape Design, and he and his staff or team developed this Amherst visions plan. And then in 2005, town meeting voted to appropriate $65,000 for a new master plan. Next slide, please. So the process really began in earnest in 2006 and lasted until 2010. In 2006, the process was called Planning Amherst Together, and a consultant was chosen. The consultant was ACP, and they were based in Ohio at the University of Ohio, I believe, and also in New York City. So they had a wide range of expertise. Town meeting voted an additional $135,000. So we had a total of $200,000 to work on the master plan. And a lot of data was gathered, and that was really done by ACP. So in 2007, we held many idea gatherings, group workshops, and sent out a community survey to about 600 randomly chosen households. And we've got a pretty good return on the survey. And again, that information is online. And we developed the first draft of the master plan. And then between 2008 and 2010, the master plan subcommittee of the planning board along with the planning department director added the draft. And in 2010, in January, a public forum was held on the draft master plan. And then in February, the planning board voted to adopt the master plan. Next slide, please. So the master plan contains chapters as required by mass general law. And the chapters are as follows. The first one is goals and policies. So that's kind of a broad general statement about what the town wants itself to be. The second chapter is the land use chapter, which is the one that I'm most familiar with and work with most often. And that helps us to determine how we want to develop the town of Amherst. The next one is demographics and housing. So that analyzes who lives here and how are they housed. Economic development is another chapter. And that is obviously focused on how do we get more economic development in our town. Natural and cultural resources is another chapter, open space and recreation services and facilities. And this one focuses on the fire department, the police department, the schools, the building roadways and things like that. And then transportation and circulation. And the last chapter is in the implementation chapter, which has some text in it, but it also has a really good matrix listing all of the strategies that are in the master plan and then encourages us to think about which things we have done and which things need to be done and who's responsible for them. Along the way, we have implemented a lot of the strategies of the master plan. I would say though, we haven't been deliberate about checking on this implementation matrix to make sure that we're actually doing the things on the matrix. So the planning board is thinking of establishing a subcommittee to track the implementation of the master plan. Next slide, please. So the master plan is organized in different ways. And the first thing in the master plan that you see is key directions. And this is a list of things that the community thinks are really important. Maintaining Amherst's existing community character is one of them. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, providing housing that meets the needs of all residents while minimizing impact on the environment. Diversifying and expanding the economic base and promoting an ethic of sustainable environmental energy practices and all town activities. And that's an ongoing activity. Next slide, please. So I'm gonna go through, I think it's four of the chapters just to highlight some of the things that are contained in those chapters. And the first chapter is land use. So among the objectives contained in the land use section, there are many, many objectives, but among them that I thought were particularly important were preferentially direct future development to existing built up areas. And that's exactly what the SCOG plan said. Preserve key undeveloped land. Again, that's coming right from the SCOG plan, keeping the outlying lands undeveloped. Protecting key farmland and farming in Amherst. Guiding new housing growth while minimizing impact on open space and small town character. We've done a good job with that too, I think. And we've developed the cluster housing subdivision form of development. And honoring historic and cultural character and beauty of neighborhoods. And an example of that would be the establishment of the local historic districts of the Lincoln Sunset neighborhood and the Emily Dickinson neighborhood. Next slide, please. In terms of demographics and housing, among the objectives were to encourage a greater mix of housing types, sizes, and prices serving a wider range of income levels. Preserving and expanding the number of affordable and moderately priced rental units and housing stock. Encouraging production of housing in an environmentally sound manner. And improving housing and services for people who are homeless. And that's something that I'll talk about later. Next slide, please. Natural and cultural resources. I think we've done a pretty good job with this. Promoting preservation, appreciation, and sustainable use of our historical and cultural resources. And applying principles of environmental sustainability town-wide. We've been learning more and more about this as time has gone on. And these images show the solar array at the at Hampshire College. And the current center at Hampshire College, which is part of the living building challenge. It's a completely self-sustaining building. Next slide, please. In terms of transportation and circulation, some of the objectives were to actively promote alternative modes of transportation. Provide adequate public parking to support existing and desired new development in the downtown and elsewhere. And to pursue funding strategies for achieving transportation goals. We're continuing to pursue funding strategies by applying for grants whenever we see them. We did apply for a mass works grant recently for improvements to the Pomeray Village Center. And we've been applying for monies from the state to help us with our realignment of our downtown so that we can provide dining opportunities for the restaurants. Next slide, please. So in terms of implementation, as I said, we do have an implementation section of the bylaw. We've been implementing, or excuse me, the master plan. We've been implementing the master plan but we're not always deliberate about checking off the boxes and saying, yes, we did this. So the implementation chapter asks that the town provides sufficient resources to implement the master plan. Involve a wide variety of stakeholders in implementation and require concurrence with the master plan. So that's something that we have to do every time we adopt a new zoning bylaw. We have to state that it is in current concurrence with the master plan. Next slide, please. So I just wanted to give you a brief idea of what we've accomplished since we adopted the master plan and how have we implemented the master plan's objectives and strategies. And I'm going to focus on housing. Next slide, please. So these are examples of affordable housing developments that have been built since the master plan was adopted. The one on the left is the Olympia Oaks project up in North Amherst, an Olympia Drive, which contains 44 units of affordable housing for 80% or less of area median income. And the main street housing project on the right is probably something that you pass by every day. That has 11 units of affordable housing that was developed by the Amherst Housing Authority. Next slide, please. The way we get affordable housing is through multiple avenues. We preserve existing units as we did at Rolling Green. We work with developers to create new units as we did with the Beacon communities at North Square. We work continually with Habitat for Humanity and this image shows a picture of Habitat Crew working on a house on East Pleasant Street that eventually was acquired by two families. And then we've been working with Valley CDC on their individual single room occupancy apartment house at 132 North Hampton Road. Another mechanism we use is inclusionary zoning and we've had some pretty good success with that. We have six units of the presidential apartments. We have four at University Drive, the new building that Barry Roberts developed and Espen Heights is a new building that's being developed on North Hampton Road. And I think we have 11 units there of affordable housing. So little by little we're building up our numbers and the town can help by the zoning by-law. We have an inclusionary zoning by-law, but we know that there are improvements that could be made to that to allow us to get more affordable units. We act as a facilitator. We help the developer and the state and consultants get together to put together projects that provide affordable housing. The town provides funding in terms of CPA funds and tax incentives. We gave a tax incentive to the Beacon communities when they were developing their project in North Amherst. We also help with permitting and sometimes the town donates land to affordable housing projects. Next slide please. So these are some recent projects. North Square at the Mill District, which is the one on the upper left is completed and is being occupied now. University Drive is the Barry Roberts project with the four affordable units and I think 32 market rate units. And then Espen Heights on North Hampton Road, 88 units overall and 11 affordable units. Next slide please. We've also been working with the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust and here's an image of the East Street School. It's property that is owned by the town, but the town has been working with the trust to try to develop that property for affordable family housing. And we do have some good conceptual plans as to how that property could be developed in that way. Next slide please. So we're continuing to work on several things that are contained in the master plan. We're trying to address homelessness and the need for more affordable housing by working on the North Hampton Road project with Valley CDC and the East Street School project with the housing trust. The DPW is continually repairing aging infrastructure and we've been seeking funds to help them do that. Constructing new sidewalks and bicycle lanes. We have a community development block grant program going on on East Hadley Road. Developing a multi-use path there. Working on a comprehensive budget plan to address the four new large capital projects which you're all familiar with. Updating the zoning by-law, which is something I'll talk about in a minute and applying the principles of environmental sustainability town-wide. So the town adopted the stretch building code which is a few steps above the state building code and it requires that buildings be more energy efficient and the town also adopted the net zero requirement for municipal buildings. Next slide, please. So I just wanted to tell you a little about our efforts to redo the zoning by-law or to update the zoning by-law. I've been working with the building commissioner and we had a presentation to the CRC a few weeks ago about this. The overall goal is to create a new zoning by-law with new formatting and correct a lot of the problems in the zoning by-law that we know are conflicts. One chapter says one thing and the other chapter says something else and we have to constantly be trying to figure out, well, what do we do here with these two conflicting requirements? We're also trying to incorporate as many of the desires of the planning board and the CRC as near as they can agree on what they would like to see done. So it's going to be a big project, complete rewrite and incorporating a lot of the things that we've been talking about for the last few years in terms of improving our inclusionary zoning by-law, fixing some of the things that are wrong with the parking requirements, making them more realistic, fixing our mixed use building requirements. We have a lot of problems with the signed by-law. So little by little, we're working through those. And so I think the planning department and the building commissioner are working with the CRC and the planning board to develop this new zoning by-law. And I hope that you stay tuned and listen to us as we move forward. I think that's all I have to say for now. Thank you. Thanks. So I just want to mention for the people who joined us later, this is a primer period meeting and we're going to ask for, I'm going to ask for any questions or comments from the town council at this point. We will have public comment once we start the public forum, which will be as immediately following this meeting. So are there counselors who at this point would like to ask a question or make a comment?  Yeah, thank you, Chris, for that presentation. And I found the bullets very helpful to bring out some points. My question is, and I'll pick out a couple of your bullet points. If the master plan is a concept that's called the small town rural character or provide alternative means of transportation. When the planning board is reviewing a site plan or when reviewing your proposal, to what extent is the master planner, those words, he said it doesn't dictate zoning laws, but is it open for interpretation of what those mean as you're looking at what is being proposed and have you in the implementation. So that's my question, here's a concept and then here's something specific that you're considering and how do you go back and forth? And I can pick out others because you said, some of them are not necessarily mutually supportive. Some of your bullet points. So may I answer that now? Please. So I can think of two examples of maintaining the small town rural character. And I think one of them is the Emerson media project that's being developed on Main Street. When that first came to the planning board in the spring of 2019, the planning board was very disappointed in the proposed development of that site. And over the course of the next year, the Emerson media worked with the local historic district commission and then worked with the planning board to come up with a plan for that site that really did maintain the small town rural character of that neighborhood. It didn't allow a big inappropriate building to be built there. And it thought very carefully about the views that would be preserved. Another project that I can think of is the cluster subdivision in South Amherst along West Street which is down, it's kind of across from Atkins Farm, but it's a cluster subdivision that has eight housing units, but about seven acres of that property. I think there were 11 acres all together and seven acres is being preserved and will eventually be given to the town. And I think that's a really good example of trying to accommodate the needs that we have for more housing, but to create it in a way that is maintaining the small town rural character. It's part of the South Amherst village center. It's close by to the Hampshire village and Applewood and Atkins Farm. So it's kind of all a part of one and the buildings are also looking like they belong in Amherst. In terms of alternative means of transportation, I think that when the planning board reviews projects, it really tries hard to understand what is available. For instance, two housing developments that were recently approved by the planning board, one on Main Street, 462 Main Street, which is being built right now. It's right near the railroad tracks. The planning board thought carefully about how many cars, how many parking spaces would be needed there because that property is within walking distance of Amherst College and UMass and the downtown. It's on a bus route and parking for bicycles was provided. And that same type of thinking went into the plan for Amir McChes property on Southeast Street, which I hope will eventually get built. But there was a lot of conversation about alternative means of transportation and not requiring the number of parking spaces that would normally be required for that project. So those things are on top of the planning board's minds when they're reviewing these projects. Thank you. Thank you. Questions from the council at this time? Yes, Shalami. I have a question about the land use, numbers that are presented on, I don't know, what page. But anyway, it says, yeah, it's under land use. And so it says that the residential, I find these numbers really interesting and I have a question related to them. So the numbers that are there say that residential is 23% of the land protected agriculture is 18%, conservation 18% and land owned by the three institutions is 16%. So that adds up to 75%. And then the town has only 3.6% designated as commercial, retail, or industrial zones. So my question was that out of the 3.6%, is that all already developed or do we have more space? And then the difference between, like if it's only 75 and three, like do we have some scope for that unaccounted land? Is that available for more development? So those numbers are leftovers from the 2010 master plan and those numbers will be revised when we do our new master plan in 2025 to 2030. I have tried to work with our IT department to update those numbers for now and it's hard for them to understand where those numbers came from. The mass GIS was used back in 2005 to 2010 to develop those numbers and we can't quite reproduce how those came about. So would you repeat your question about the developable land? I might be able to answer that. Yeah, so I mean, just based on the numbers that are given so far, it just adds up to 75 plus three is like about 78% of the land is accounted for. And so I was wondering if this scope for more development for commercial use, either within the 3.6% that's mentioned or do we have land right now that could be rezoned and used? That's not protected and not residential and could be used for that's more developable. I think that the way the town is zoned right now in terms of the zoning map is probably a reasonable zoning map. We do have land that is undeveloped in North Amherst and quite a bit of land, it's in the PRP Professional Research Park. One reason that it hasn't been developed to date is because it doesn't have sewer and water going to it. So if the town really wanted to have those properties developed, the town could consider extending sewer and water up there. There are small pockets of PRP land off Belcher Town Road that could still be developed. And there are many, how can I say this, underdeveloped parcels of land in the commercial and the business limited districts that if you really look at them, you could say, well, do we really need one story building on that property or would it make more sense to put something bigger and maybe allow commercial and retail on the ground floor and housing up above? So there are a lot of underdeveloped properties that are potentially ripe for redevelopment in places that are already zoned for development. Thank you. Are there any other comments or questions from the council at this time? Okay, then seeing none, I'm going to adjourn this part of the meeting. Don't go anywhere. We're using the same connection. We've already made sure everybody can hear us. I do want to note that Councillor Brewer has joined us since I took roll call. And we are going to move into the public forum period of our meeting, okay? So the meeting, the primer is officially adjourned. And so now I'm going to call the public forum to order and note that we are calling, given that we have a quorum of the council, I'm calling the meeting to order at 7.06. And let me just explain, we're going to actually show how you can connect if you're watching through Amherst Media. So Athena, let's put that slide up. Thank you. I just want to make sure that you can connect either by coming in on Zoom, which is the first bullet and when you come in, you are in the audience and I'll be going to the audience in a moment to see who's raised their hand and would like to speak. I also want to then indicate that you please use the raise hand function. If you wish to join by telephone, you can use the phone numbers that we're showing here and you use the pound nine or the star nine on your phone if you wish to indicate that you would like to make a comment. So leave that up for just a moment and see if there's other additional people. Right now I have somewhere around 20 attendees and some of those people that have joined us are people from the planning board who we made a specific effort to make sure they knew we were doing this tonight. Okay, so let's take that down and the public comment period is open. Again, I want to stress, this is a requirement of the towns charter. It requires that half a time be spent with public comment, although we do have an opportunity to have more of a dialogue if you have questions and we're able to answer those questions. So at this time, if you would like to make public comment, please raise your hand. Could be a very short evening gang. Is there anybody in the audience? Yes, Johanna Newman. Please come forward, state your name and where you live and make your comment or ask your question. Can you hear us? Hello? Hi, can you hear me now? We can, thank you very much. Apologies, technical difficulties. My name is Johanna Newman. I live at 137 Stanley Street in Amherst, newly appointed member of the planning board so definitely still learning my ropes there, but I just want to reiterate how upon, like before I applied for the planning board, I reread the master plan and was once again, just reminded of how much of it is relevant to Amherst, but that the, and where I think we should go as a town, the planning board covers the zoning issues, but there are obviously a lot of other parts to the master plan that are relevant to actually reaching this vision. So I'll just say that I'm really excited about not only my role on the planning board, but also just some of the cross-cutting issues that involve the town council and the zoning board of appeals and the department of public works so that we can fully realize the kind of walkable, bikeable communities available to everyone in Amherst. That's all I have to say. Thank you for your work. Thank you, Johanna. Are there other people who would like to make public comment at this time? Yes, Ira Brick, please come forward, unmute and make your comment. Hi, everybody. I don't want to be repetitious of things that I've said before and I actually got on late, so I did not hear the primer, but have some idea of what it is. And I think that there's a lot of people in Amherst who are not represented in the direction of the town and it's not because anybody is closing them out, but they are busy people who don't feel the will or enthusiasm to get involved in town government. And I would urge this town to do something that people don't really do who run towns and cities is to just have a modern way of taking the pulse and explain what the town might look like in 10 years. I'm sure that if you have a vision of what the town looks like and you describe it, people are gonna say, I agree with that or I don't agree with that. And it doesn't matter what philosophy of planning it's based on. There are people that do not wanna lose the small town feel of downtown who don't want continuation of the buildings that are downtown who don't agree with the idea that smart growth basically means that there's a lot of principles to it, but it's not smart growth. The other term I'm forgetting is that basically build more of what's there already. I would just urge you to reach out in some modern digital way to take more of the pulse to have a listening session that is efficient and online and that if you can prove your case by getting public opinion behind you a lot of people that disagree with what you're doing would probably just fall in line, including me if it was the will of the people. But I think right now the will of the people disagrees with a lot of the direction of the master plan. I say that respectfully, but we are a small town and run by a very small number of people. And I think that small number of people need to reach out. I know it's ironic since I'm one of two people that even is participating from the public right now. So far, thank you, Ira. We appreciate your comments. Ludmila, please state your full name and where you live. Ludmila Pavlovicillum, I live at 350 Montague Road in Precinct One. I just want to say that as a former member of the planning board who watched and participated during the development of the master plan and then was on the board when I voted to adopt the master plan some almost 10 years later. I think it was a very good document that took into account a great deal of input from multiple sectors of the community at that time. But towns do change, communities change. And I think it would be important, like Ira said, just to look and find ways to invite or go to communities where we could share the information about the master plan. And more importantly, even discuss the map that was finally developed and adopted and added to the master plan in the last sort of six months of the process because so much of the preamble was about gathering information, designing the goals, setting up the strategies. And the final map was the very last thing that was added at the end of the planning board if my memory is correct. So I think starting with that map and using it to educate our main constituents at different levels of the community would be an important way to at least start from a baseline and bring everyone along who hasn't been involved the way I have been, for example, in this conversation. Over what is now 22 years, I think the comprehensive master plan was started right about 20 years ago when I was still relatively new and so I was interested in the conversation. And I think there are a lot of new people who will be interested in what we're doing and we need to be able to find ways to get out to them. Thank you for doing this work and for hearing me out. Lou Miller, thank you so much for your previous service and thank you for your comments tonight. Bruce Baird, I think it is. Bruce, please state your name properly and where you live. Hi, this is Jeannie Hardy with my husband, Bruce Baird and we live at 116 East Pleasant Street in Amherst. And I'm familiar with the master plan and the most critical component of it that I'm really in support of is the idea that we not change the community feel of our town. So we live right downtown. We live one block from Primo II Pizzeria and a large building that was constructed during the time we've lived in town, right across the street. And we kind of feel split because we love being in town. We like to be able to walk to things. We like to walk to the pizza shop. We like to walk to Hennie and Bakery. We like to walk to CVS and we would like to be able to walk to a grocery store. But we'd like to be able to also enjoy living where we live. And one of the things that makes us enjoy it a little less is when we don't feel like our kids can be safe going downtown either because of people who are hanging out on the street or because of buildings that have such small setbacks that you can't even see around the corner. And so the part of the master plan about maintaining the feeling of the community that's important to me is to develop downtown and Amherst in general in such a way that people can still live in this neighborhood and feel like they live in a small town, not feel like they live in a crowded Manhattan street where there's no room for a bike lane. There's barely room for two people to pass on the street and definitely not room for two people to pass on the street with six feet of social distancing between them. And I think there've been efforts by developers to make use of every single inch of space and turn it into expensive housing. And that does change the feel because when you use up every single inch of space there's no green, there's no space, there's no setbacks. Luckily where these new buildings downtown are have Kendrick Park across from them. And so that adds some green space to the area. But an area that was recently considered for 40R across the street from us would have two huge buildings right next to each other with no setbacks. And I think it's crazy that the setbacks for buildings like that can be less than the setbacks that a property owner can have for putting in a swimming pool or building a garage. And, but yet they're right next door to us. So I would really urge this committee to take into consideration that there are people who are not super conservative or old fashioned or even old who also want to maintain sort of this small town feel that Amherst has. Thank you. Jeannie, thank you very much for your comment. Are there other comments at this time? Yes, Jane, I'm glad you were able to connect. Please state your name and where you live. Thank you for helping me get in Lynn. My name is Jane Pearl. I live at Six Ducksbury Lane in Echo Hill since 1993 and one of the apartments, Mill Valley Estates before that for a year. And I appreciate learning about the master plan. It was an excellent presentation. Thank you.  And now I'm getting more, I think that the issues are more obvious to me with the new buildings that were in town. And my understanding was that originally those five-story buildings were supposed to be four stories, that they were supposed to have parking and they were supposed to be affordable housing. I'm aside for the aesthetics, which I do not like at all. And that's saying it mildly. I would like to understand how those three requirements and possibly others were changed midstream because that's what's there is not what my understanding is what was voted and approved. Thank you for your comment. Chris, did you have any response to that particular comment? Yes, I would like to respond. So the new buildings that were built, the Kendrick place, excuse me, one East pleasant and the one that's currently under construction on Spring Street were proposed and approved after the town adopted five stories as the maximum building height in the downtown. So there had been a zoning by-law that only allowed four stories, but somewhere around 2010, 2011, something like that. The zoning by-law was changed to allow five stories without a special permit. In addition to that, those buildings were built in the municipal parking district and the municipal parking district doesn't require on-site parking for most uses. I think it does require it for some institutional uses, but not for residential or office or restaurants or anything like that. And that's something that we need to look at to decide whether we want to maintain that municipal parking district the way it is or to change it. The other thing that the speaker brought up, Ms. Pearl, is affordable housing. So affordable housing was not required of those buildings because they didn't require a special permit for use. They only required a special permit for certain dimensional modifications. And that's another thing that we can look at when we're examining our zoning by-law. Exactly what kinds of projects do we want to require to have affordable housing? And that's something that I think we will be looking at. So thank you for your comments. Okay, thank you. Are there other comments at this time? Yes, Brian Yellen, please state your full name and where you live. Hello, my name is Brian Yellen. I live at 13 Norweitex Circle in South Amherst. And I generally feel positive about what I've read from the master plan and support higher density residential, especially in the commercial centers. Just wanted to sort of share my enthusiasm for further development of Pomeroy Corners. It's sort of a great growing commercial center in South Amherst with high density housing on three of the four corners. And I think the imminent conservation of Hickory Ridge presents a lot of really exciting opportunities to sort of further enhance that part of town, especially connecting neighborhoods on East Hadley Road that to Pomeroy Corners better through development of that conservation area and really engaging all the neighboring folks to Hickory Ridge in the process of conserving it and shaping how it goes. So I know, obviously that's not part of the master plan because it is a recent development, but excited for the opportunities that it presents with respect to developing Pomeroy Corner. Thank you. Thank you for your comment, Brian. Are there other comments? Yes, Ginny Hamilton, are you able to bring Ginny in? She lowered her hand. I'm not sure that she still wants to speak. She's still listed. Ginny, please, yes, she's in now. Please unmute and state your name and where you live. Hey, Hamilton, I live in South Amherst at 140 Middle Street and agreeing with Brian's comments in terms of the development right up the street for me as a good location for bringing community together both for housing and for the land conservation. When I look at something like our master plan, I see the long-term implications and that the goals that her set forth take more than just a few years to accomplish. And so being able to see where we are now as an earlier commenter said, updating people who maybe don't have these details for them and drawing in their attention so that we can see where we still need to go. And for me personally, one of the highest priorities this is regards to our affordable housing goals given our current situation and the current stressors for low-income renters in particular, being able to keep a high priority on meeting those challenging and yet high priority goals for the value of who gets to live in Amherst, who gets to stay in Amherst. So I wanted to highlight the importance of the affordable housing goals as part of our plan and hope that we can keep with moving forward rather than reinventing the wheel. Thank you. Thank you, Ginny. Are there other comments at this time? Yes. Myla Sherman, please state your name and where you live. Hey, this is Woody Sherman, Mila's husband. Yeah, this is a great discussion. So thanks for having this and thanks for letting us talk. Really just wanted to urge everybody and I presume everybody's thinking this way but just to make it very clear in the decision-making that the buildings in the future downtown maintain the character of the town and leave the open space, the park space, the green space and sidewalks that are not having very tight corners and that there's space for people. And we have a big town and we don't have that many people and it shouldn't be that hard. And it just feels like maybe the developers are pushing people around a little bit because I presume everybody here feels the same way. So it almost shouldn't be a discussion but just wanted to say that and urge everybody to stand up for what you all believe in and what I think I'll want for the town. So thank you. Thank you for your comments, Woody. Bruce, you had another comment. Yes, this is actually Bruce Baird this time from 116 East Pleasant Street in Amherst. And I have a kind of, I guess I have a question about how we're conceiving of affordable housing. My understanding of the sociological literature is that the best way to sort of generate kind of maximum equality in a community is to integrate people, like have a wide kind of integration of various kinds of people all together into a community. And so I'm wondering if we're conceiving of 10% affordable housing in an apartment building which is predominantly otherwise directed towards UMass students to really fulfill the goals of affordable housing in terms of integration into a community. So that's kind of a half question, half comment. Thank you. I'm actually going to ask Chris Brestrup to basically give just some general sense of affordable housing and also the percentage that the town of Amherst is presently at. So the town of Amherst presently has about, I think it's 12.7 something percent affordable housing which is really good. And we did receive an award for our efforts with regard to affordable housing a few years ago and we're very proud of that. Now we realize that we need to do much more because there are a lot of people who can't afford to live here and a lot of people who live here already who can't really afford to live here. But we do constantly strive to develop housing for people who make what we call 80% or less of AMI area median income. So that's really the benchmark for considering housing affordable at least as far as the state goes. We recognize the fact that there are people here who make more than that, who also can't really afford to live here or can barely afford to live here. And that is a, what should I say an issue that is harder to deal with because there aren't tax incentives and there aren't state grants and there aren't the number of funding sources for that kind of moderate priced housing. So as much as we can, we would like to allow that to happen, allow that to be developed, but developers are not necessarily incentivized to do that. So we have to figure out a way of doing that, but we are constantly striving to create more housing for people who make 80% or less of area median income. And the development on Northampton Road is actually a very good development because it's providing housing for formerly homeless people, for people who make 30% or less of AMI, 50% or less of AMI and 80% or less of AMI. So it's gonna be a stratified development that will have a fairly good integration of individuals who have those different income levels. But they're also, it's hard to think about someone who doesn't make very much money but lives in a building that where apartments are going for $3,000 a month. So integrating affordable housing into some of our new buildings that are downtown is going to be more challenging, but we're continuing to work on that. And I wanna thank you for your comment. Elizabeth, curling, please come forward, state your name. Anu, where you live? Yes, this is Elizabeth Veerling and I live at 36 Cottage Street in Amherst. And I guess I would like to start really by thanking Christine for what I thought was a very clear and informative presentation of the master plan and really overall for what I think is her excellent awareness and concern for town planning issues. And I really appreciate your work. I would just like to reiterate that I think the zoning bylaws that allowed the construction of One East Pleasant and Kendrick Place demonstrate the true inadequacy of those bylaws for central Amherst relative to the master plan. So I think there are communities across the country that demonstrate smart growth that is much more consistent with the master plan. And I sincerely hope that going forward that the bylaws for central Amherst are consistent with the master plan. I would also like to comment on the fact that I've seen much more consideration for every detail of the 132, I think that's the number, project for low income housing compared to the amount of consideration that has been given to the 40R proposal. So I hope that the kind of consideration I've seen for the 132 project really figures into how we reformulate the zoning bylaws. Thank you. Thank you for your comment, Elizabeth. Are there other comments? Are there other comments from the audience at this time? Seeing none, then let me just thank Christine for your press trip for your excellent presentation and for fielding the questions. And also to just say, this is a ongoing conversation just like the master plan is a living document. And as we get further into discussions regarding zoning changes, obviously we will come back to what we feel the master plan has kind of given us and whether we're listening well. We wanna thank all of you for your comments tonight and we look forward to hearing from you in the future. With that, I'm going to adjourn the meeting.


Moving on now, Cabinet State Governor Artiku Bagudo says President Mohamed Rohori has mandated seven Northwest Governors including himself to end Banditry in the zone. Bagudo, who is also the chairman of the APC Governors Forum, said this at the continuation of a fuller knee-stakeholder's peace, security and unity made in health and burning Cabbie. The governor said the President's directive was to ensure the urgent restoration of normalcy in the region. He stated that the President was fully committed to adequately protecting the lives and property of all lower Biden and peaceful citizens of the country. Bagudo acknowledged the relentless efforts of the military and other security agencies in tackling the nation's security challenges.