Good evening. It is Monday, March 3rd, 2021. Under Governors Bakers March 12th, order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. This allows us to hold this virtual town council meeting. Given that we have a quorum of the council present, I am calling the meeting to order at 6.31. Yeah, I'll call upon each council by name at that time. They're going to unmute and say present and then they will mute again. This meeting includes audio, video and is available live on Amherst media. There is no chat room. If you have technical issues, please let Athena or me know and we will make note of that and either pause the meeting or if necessary, go on with it. Athena will be monitoring councilor's connections and with that I'm going to go ahead and call the roll. I'm going to start with Alyssa Brewer. Present. Pat DeAndalus. Present. Darcy DeMondt. Present. Lynn Griesmer is present. Mandy Johannick. Present. Earthie Pam. Present. Evan Ross. Present. George Ryan. Present. Kathy Shane. Here. Steve Schreiber. Here. Andy Steinberg. Andy, can you. Thank you. Sarah Schwartz. Present. And Shalini Balmille. I'm here. There you are. Thank you. We are going to continue on with a couple of announcements and we're going to show those on the screen. I just want to point out to the audience a couple of key hearings that are coming up. One is on the proposed budget and that will be joint with the finance committee on the 17th. Another on the 24th is when we will hold the required hearing on the North Common. And then let me also point out that there will be a joint public hearing with the community resources committee and the planning board regarding article 15 includes inclusionary zoning and the temporary moratorium. And that will be on May 19th at seven and eight o'clock respectively. The finance committee also will have a number of seriously long and serious debate over the budget. That calendar can be found on the town website. And I just want to make note that the meetings begin at one, not the normal two o'clock, giving the council more time. And if counselors that are not on the finance committee wish to attend, please let Athena know as far in advance as possible so that if we need to call the committee of the whole, we can do so. I also want to point out while there is a GOL meeting on May 5th, there is no TSO meeting, town services and outreach committee meeting. It has been canceled on May 6th. One other quick announcement we're going to show you and that is we urge you to help honor high school graduates and they have a link that you can get to through the Amherst Regional High School website and allows you to order signs to honor a graduate. We're going to move on. There is no hearing tonight. Our next area is public comment and let me just mention this is one of two public comment periods tonight. This is the time for general public comment. Later, there is a special public comment period associated with the regional school budget. So with that, residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes based on the number of people who wish to speak. And I will ask for people to raise their hands momentarily. Kathy, you have your hand up? Yeah, I just had a request, Lynn, for the hearing on the North Commons, is it possible that we can post the diagram somewhere where people can find them of the two plan options? I just checked and engaged Amherst, they're not up yet. So that's just a great question. They're working on it. Thank you very much. I know Breonna just made one update already today with regard to zoning. So the council will not engage in dialogue or comment on a matter raised during general public comment. Just to participate, please raise your hand. At this point, I see three hands. First one is Zoe Crabtree. Please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Hi, everybody. My name is Zoe Crabtree and I live in District 5. Firstly, I want to just say that only being able to look at the budget for a couple minutes ahead of this is a little bit frustrating, but my first takes at looking at the executive summary and the very helpful chart at the beginning, thanks for adding that, is that I am very excited to see that there is funding for the Cres program, which I think is really lovely. However, it is only the $130,000 that was taken from frozen positions from the police department that you all froze last year, which is drastically less than the $2.2 million that the CSWG requested to fully fund and support this program. So I would urge everybody on this call to consider how such a program could be successful with such little funding compared to the budget that was devised for it to run. And that's what I will say on that today. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. We have caller 0810. Please identify yourself and where you live. It's star six to unmute. Yes. Okay. So I'm here. This is a Vincent O'Connor. Is this an appropriate time to make a comment? Yes, Vince. We can hear you go ahead, please. Okay. So I would like to renew a request I made, I think almost two years ago, that the council appoint an Amherst refugee and asylum applicant resettlement commission. At the point that I made the request, there was multiple litigation against the various facilities that were being used to house immigrants in really poor conditions. And we had a very unfriendly federal administration. We now have a much friendlier federal administration, but a substantially different situation where there are many unaccompanied minors who have applied for either refugee status or asylum in the United States. And I think I know that there are individuals who would like to do something. In fact, that I have spoken to a four or five Spanish speaking residents of the town who would be willing to serve on such a commission, but really finding a way for people to express their interest in housing somebody who is seeking refuge or asylum in the United States, I think is impossible for an individual to do. But if there were a local, a municipal commission that could solicit interest, interview interested parties, and make a brief report to the council that could be forwarded to the appropriate federal agency saying we have interviewed so many people, there appear to be so many slots available, please consider us. And for, you know, for people who don't have relatives in the United States, and we don't know how many there are of those folks.  We all know the United States' involvement in Central America, very tragic and sad history. And as much as we decry the history, we have an obligation to try to do something as individuals. And I think that a municipal commission would be able to accomplish what what individuals cannot do. And I would ask the council to refer the matter to the appropriate committee, inform me of when the committee would meet, and I would be happy to attend by Zoom, I suppose, to a committee meeting, provide them in writing with a proposal, and see if we could move forward and the names of people who are willing to volunteer so that they could be, have some guarantee that if a committee were established, it wouldn't be a half a year before there were enough volunteers. Vince, we want to thank you for your comment, your time is up. Yeah, thank you very much. Okay, thank you. Joanne Morse. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Please state your name and where to live. Hi, I'm Joanne Morse. I live on Potwine Lane in Amherst. It's nice to see many of you. Who have been at many meetings within the past. I was really disappointed to see that my signature was not counted for the put the library decision to voters. It was really interesting to have that example of voters disenfranchisement become so personal for a small thing.  But I'm really shocked that signatures seem to have been randomly, or at least without much explanation, not considered valid to bring the number of the petitioners right below the required number that was needed. I ask that you reconsider that, that you follow through with seeing our affidavits. I've signed an affidavits saying that, yes, this is actually me. I've lived in the same place for 13 years in Amherst. I know many of you. And I would like to not have my signature not counted as a voter in town. And I know that I'm not alone in being just a resident of town who signed that petition and what was not counted. So I look forward to hearing your response about that when it's appropriate. Thanks. Thank you for your comment. Bailey, please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Can people hear me? Great. My name is Bailey Batty. I live on North Whitney Street. I would like to start by reminding the town council that last year during the budget process you asked for research and you asked for somewhere to move APD money to so that it wouldn't be lost from the budget. The community safety working group have worked to some pretty intense deadlines to give you this alternative to do this research and have been given according to my math, which is often wrong. Please feel free to check me on this. What looks like six percent of the budget that they have asked for for this initiative for the Cres programme. And the police budget has actually slightly increased, I think. This is setting the Cres programme up to fail. They have proposed some really great things, they have done this research, but if they are not like if the Cres programme is not able to be run in a way that like can actually be successful, then of course it's going to look like this is not successful and like this is a failed initiative and that this isn't something we should be worth we should be working on. In addition to asking you to fully fund the Cres programme, I would also urge you not to cut the budget of one of the hardest hit and most important town services are schools. School staff have been working exponentially harder this year and the past year. In some cases for less pay and while risking frankly their lives in some of these situations to perform some pretty impossible things. I don't really like the phrasing that students are behind on things because it sort of makes it sound like education is a competition and I don't I don't agree with that. But it is definitely clear that students have struggled socially and academically through this pandemic and for several years coming after this now they are going to need significantly more support, not less support from Paras, from ELL services, from special education services. In conclusion, the proposed budget for the police department, the schools and the wildly small percentage of the Cres programme are going to continue to perpetuate and increase the harm done to our BIPOC house list and student populations in Amherst. Please consider taking money from the police budget to fully fund both the Cres programme and our school budgets. Thank you. Thank you for your comment, Bailey. Maria Capecchi, please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Hi, my name is Maria Capecchi, living in South Amherst. I'm speaking tonight in support of a thorough review of the certification process of the recent petition by Amherst voters. This resulted in the erroneous rejection of dozens of signatures of registered voters. The subject of the petition is irrelevant to the issue at hand. The particular ask of a petition may make you furious, it may make you ecstatic or you could give not a wit about it one way or the other. The issue here is that a petition had numerous signatures rejected and this resulted in that petition being denied. The petitioners have asked the appropriate bodies to review those rejections and correct these mistakes. Whatever one thinks or wants relative to the subject of the petition, we should all be concerned when people are disenfranchised. It's not only the individuals whose signatures were rejected in error who were affected. Every person on the petition was negatively impacted when the petition was erroneously certified. If not rectified, every resident in town will have been denied their right to vote. Thank you. Thank you for your comments, Maria. Mona Shadi, please state your name and where you live. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Thank you. My name is Mona Shadi. I currently live in East Hampton, but I have lived and worked in Amherst for many years. I am calling tonight because I am a former ELL student and I am deeply dismayed at the cuts that I see in the new proposed budget. I thought that maybe sort of talking about some of my experiences might help, but I have been out of ELL for 30 years. When I look around me, I see that access to those classes are not thriving. They are dwindling. I am very, very concerned about that. One of the things I would like to put past you is an analogy that really helped me a lot in understanding the dynamics of town funding. What I would like to do is compare the police department to the ambulance department. Excuse me. The police force is unique because they are the only public servants who are armed. Yet just as ambulance services act as the emergency room arm of our health system, police act as the emergency arm of our justice system. And they are armed because they cannot prevent violence. They can only meet or respond, act to deter or neutralize it, which is why they are armed and why ambulances at the same time have intubation and oxygen equipment. We don't ask ambulances to prevent car accidents or heart attacks. We ask them to respond after trauma has taken place. We know that preventing heart attacks and car accidents requires the work of several agencies, the public, and departments. It requires a focus on integration, safety, quality of life, research, and changes where needed. This is the job of our community. If we want a healthy and secure community, we need to look at it holistically. Asking emergency workers to ensure a community of fulfilled, healthy, and thriving people is like expecting EMTs to address the causes of cancer. We know that there are experts and doctors and nurses. Excuse me. Let's leave the health prevention to them. And let's leave the idea that more police equals a safe and thriving community. There are experts in this field. We need to defund the police and reallocate those resources to them. And certainly the people that stand to lose the most, the interpreters, the parrots, the teachers, the art teachers, these are the people that we need to be nourishing. And I would like to ask that we defund the Amherst police department in order to fund the Crest Program and to take that community, to take our community service budget out of 6% where it's been stagnant for the last few years. I thank you for your time. Thank you for your comments, Mona. Lydia Irons, please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. My name is Lydia Irons. I live on Jeffrey Lane in Amherst. And I'm making a comment tonight to ask you to fully fund the Crest Program at the $2.2 million that they asked for in their unbelievably well put together and well researched proposal. I'd like you all to remember back to the budget hearings that we had last year where many of you talked about if we had an alternative, we could maybe think about it. And then this amazing group of people came together and worked so hard for a very small amount of money and put so much of their own blood, sweat and tears into this proposal and to have 6% of that in this budget is pretty insulting. I also would like to point out that on page 65 of the budget that the public got maybe an hour, two hours before this meeting. On page 65, the public safety is 44% of the budget in that pie chart. So 44% is for public safety, but we can't even provide the Crest Program what they asked for for their pilot. I find that pretty enraging. Also, there's some very upsetting language in there. Quote, no other community in mass has such a program. This is ridiculously self-congratulatory if you're not going to fully fund the program that was put together by the community safety working group. 93.6% of calls to the APD are for nonviolent nonviolent calls and that would be answered by the Crest Program in theory. So if 93.6% of calls would be going to this pilot program, yet you are only giving them 130K, you are setting them up for failure. So I am going to ask you to when you see this budget presentation tonight, reject it and fully fund the Crest Program for what they asked for. Thank you for your comments, Lydia. Allegra, please enter the room, state your full name and where you live. Allegra, you need to unmute. Athena, can we help her? I've sent a request to unmute. Okay. Allegra, you've received a request on you. Please do so. Allegra, let's try one more time. Please unmute your mic. Is there any further instruction we can give her, Athena? No, if she's not at her keyboard, she might not see that request. I see. Okay. Then let's put her back into the attendees and we'll see if it works later. Okay. Lauren, please enter the room, state your full name and where you live. Lauren, you need to unmute. I'm sorry, my hand was not supposed to be raised. Sorry. Okay. Thank you, Lauren. Are there any other comments at this time? Allegra, did you figure out how to unmute? Okay. Are there any other comments at this time? Lydia, you already spoke, so I want to go to Adrienne Therese. Please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Good evening and thank you, Lynn. Thank you, town councillors. My name is Adrienne Therese. I do live in District 5 and tonight I'm speaking on behalf of the League of Women Voters of Amherst. Previously, I had attended and I'm speaking tonight about the District Advisory Board, which is coming before you later on. I have to say as background that I attended the April 7th and the April 21st meeting of the GOL Committee and I was pleased to hear their deliberations on a draft that the League of Women Voters was unable to support at that point in time. The official position of the League of Women Voters is that we believe in the responsibility for districting preferably should be vested in an independent special commission. So with that having been said, I want to thank and hats off to the GOL for presenting to the town council tonight an independent commission composed of nine, nine elected resident members who will come from the districts within the town. I also commend the GOL on the timeline that you've presented, although we don't expect census data block specific precinct level information until the until the end of the September early reading is it could be arriving by the end of this month. So I love your charge. Aside from that, the charge, the composition of the committee, your very effective timelines to get us up and running with census block data by the end of the month is all speaks well for our town in getting us to a redrawing of maps that are contiguous, compact and include communities of interest and just with one more thing. I hope the town council will also entertain on behalf of the residents of Amherst an opportunity to take a look at the maps that you've redrawn. Please allow us at least one public hearing. I know in past years during redistricting, people have said have comment. Why do I have a precinct change? What's this all about? I like my old polling place. And I think if we all work together and inform voters that redistricting is happening, that indeed we can have our individual input into how we draw our maps and then do outreach to inform everyone as to what's taking place and why then it's a win-win. So I'll conclude by saying GOL, terrific work. I really enjoyed listening to your two meetings. Thank you for accepting my public comments and on behalf of the League of Women Voters, let's do this together. Thank you. Thank you, Adrienne. Amara, please enter the room, state your name and where you live. Hi, my name is Amara Donovan and I live on Amity Street. I'm extremely disappointed to see the lack of funding for the Crest program using only the frozen police positions while seeing an increase in the police budget itself. This shows a clear lack of priority in centering our BIPOC residents and in honoring their lived experiences as valuable data when making decisions about our town. It's a check-the-box response to the critical needs of our community and is incredibly racist and oppressive. If any of you have followed the history of this town beyond Jeffrey Amherst, you know that this is not new. Generation after generation of BIPOC community members have served on committee after committee have been subjected to trauma over and over again and then ignored over and over again until the work is forgotten and started all over. Investment is a direct reflection of our values in this town and we continue to fail Black and Brown residents, families and young people. It's extremely disturbing to see the funding spent on other things in our town like $117 a day on gas for police officers to circle our town day after day, surveilling Black and Brown residents at alarming rates, even investing in the library as a building before we invest in the safety and well-being of Black and Brown people, children, families is ridiculous and again is a clear reflection of the values of the values those in leadership in our town today have, which can also be reflected on this very Zoom in the sheer absence of Black and Brown people on the council and in leadership positions. This is a problem. Even the police themselves expressed publicly on a community safety working group meeting that they would be, quote, dancing in the street, unquote, if they didn't have to handle nonviolent calls. The majority of all calls made to our police department. We must defund the police and invest in our BIPOC community based on the needs and solutions they identify. That is equity and that is anti-racism and amorous is falling behind. Thank you. Mara, thank you for your comments. Allegra, you've already spoken once today and so I'm actually going to go on. She hasn't spoken. Oh, I'm sorry. Allegra, you are the person that we were not able to unmute. Please enter the room and my apologies. Allegra, there you go. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. Sorry about that. I was just joining. My name is Allegra. I am a resident of Amherst. I live in District 2 and I was just right. I wanted to say that I hope that the town council will fully fund the CRUST program as the community service working group has put it forward at the $2.2 million with money reallocated from the police budget. It's my understanding that the two frozen positions from last year are being diverted into the community services budget to cover this and that there is an additional position that just became vacant last week and if that is in fact the case that that also be frozen and reallocated towards the CRUST program. Additionally, I'm interested to hear more about if money did come down from the stimulus package to fund education and if that would mean that we wouldn't be looking at cuts there and if we still are looking at cuts in the schools that we again think about reallocating funding away from the police because it has been a really difficult year for children and to take away supports and basically enriching activities for them I think is the wrong move. So that's what I want to say and I hope you have a good evening. Legra, thanks for your persistence and we're glad you could join us and unmute your phone. And thanks for your comment. Are there any other comments at this time? Okay, then we are going to go on to the consent agenda which will show on the screen. I just want to note, Adrienne, did you have your hand up or did you just not put it down? We're going to go on to the consent agenda. The following items were selected because they were considered to be routine and it was reasonable to expect they would pass with no controversy. After I read the items, please let me know if you would like to have an item removed. Removal of an item does not require a second. So I'm going to go ahead and read this as a motion and then I'll be looking for a second to move the following items in the printed motions there under and approve those items as a single unit. Six A, wave waiver of town council rules of procedure, rule 8.6 for agenda item 6.8, Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month Proclamation. Six A, adoption of the Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month Proclamation. Eight B, referral of the FY22 budget to the finance committee. Eight C, referral of the FY22 capital improvement program to finance committee. Nine A, approval of town manager reappointments to affordable housing trust and human rights commission and 11 approval of minutes. March 25th, 2021, joint town council and town services and outreach. Midi meeting minutes, public forum on primary village intersection. March 27th, during town council and town services and outreach. Midi meeting meetings, committee meeting minutes. Public forum on primary village intersection. April 5th, special town council meeting minutes. Public forum on library appropriations. April 5th, 2021, regular town council meeting minutes and April 12th, regular town council meeting minutes. Is there a second? Second, Ross. Thank you. Is there any item that anybody would like to have removed? Okay. Seeing no hands, I'm going to begin the voting with Melanie Beaumont. Yes. Alyssa Brewer. Aye. Kathy Angeles. Aye. Darcy DuMont. Yes. Lynn Grismers on aye. Mandy Johanicki. Aye. Dorothy Pam. Aye. Evan Ross. Aye. George Ryan. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Yes. Andy Steinberg. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Aye. Passes unanimously 13-0-0 and no absences. We're going to move on to the next agenda item, which at the request of the GOL, we're going to have a new practice, and that is given the item of the Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month Proclamation. George Ryan will say a few words about it. George. Thank you, Lynn. First, just a very brief thank you to Jen Moisten for bringing us to the council's attention and providing us with an initial draft. While the council this evening is seeking to honor and recognize the contributions of residents from Asia, India, and the Pacific Islands, and so therefore proclaims the month of May as Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and we ask you the public to join us in the town's first Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month virtual celebration on Monday, May 17, 2021 at 5 p.m. Thank you so much, George, and that will be a new practice of the council so that we recognize proclamations besides just listing them. We're going to move on to presentations. First one is an update on the library, and I'm going to call on town manager Paul Blockham. So thank you, Lynn. So a lot has happened since your vote on April 5th to fund the library. So at your meeting, you voted to authorize borrowing to fund the expansion renovation of the Jones library. Subsequent to that town council vote, residents initiated a petition to trigger section 8.4 of the Amherst home rule charter that provides for a voter veto protesting against the measure approved by the town council. To initiate this process, the petitioners needed to submit a petition physically, quote, physically signed by a minimum of 5% of the registered voters as of the date of the most recent town election, close quote. The town clerk determined that this number was 864 signatures. The petitioners had 14 days following the date on which the town council had voted to approve the measure. However, the 14th day was on Monday, April 19th, which is a holiday. So due to that holiday, the deadline became Tuesday, April 20th at 5pm. The town clerk's office received all signatures submitted by 5pm on that deadline and certified 842 signatures. The office received 12 written statements in proper form from voters who asked that their names not be certified. However, only two withdrawal letters were received prior to the filing of the petition, which is required for withdrawal. So only two were not certified. Because 864 votes signatures were required and 842 were submitted, the petition failed to produce enough signatures of registered voters to trigger the next step in section 8.4 of the home rule charter. A legal complaint was filed in Superior Court requesting, among other things, to extend the period of time for collecting signatures, to reduce the number of signatures required to 50% of the charter requirement, and to provide for the submission of electronic signatures. A hearing was held in Superior Court in Northampton on Wednesday, April 28th. The town was represented by the town attorney, Lauren Goldberg, in a detailed legal decision. The judge denied the complaint. I have submitted to the MBLC a certified copy of the town council vote and a signed contract and associated documents for the first disbursement prior to the April 30th 2021 deadline to meet the schedule that we have established. So that's the update on where we are today. Are there counts for questions at this time?  Yeah, I just wondered if you could give us an update on the status of the petitioner request appeal to the Board of Registers with regard to the names, additional names that they got affidavits for. So the deadline for submitting those affidavits is tomorrow Tuesday at 5 p.m. So the town attorney had recommended to the clerk to not call a meeting of the Board of Registers until 48 hours after that deadline. And I think they're looking at scheduling a meeting for the Board of Registers for Friday. At some point I don't know the exact time, but I know they were working together to get a quorum of the Board of Registers to be able to review the request that was before them. And we do have a legal opinion from the town attorney, which I can share with you about what the number of issues that have been raised by the petitioners at this point in time, that will help guide the decision making of the registrars at that point in time. Alyssa? Thank you. And thank you for answering that. So to follow up on another aspect of something that you mentioned, I know that several days before the petition deadline, people had contacted us and said they weren't clear on what they were signing. It wasn't that they thought one thing and then changed their minds. It's that they didn't understand what they were signing. And so we gave them a form to fill out and you said the X number of those. We keep hearing different numbers. We heard 20 at one point. Now we're hearing 12, then we're hearing two. And I'm wondering if we gave adequate information to the people who told us they wanted to do that because I'm hearing you now say they had to have them in before the petitions were filed. I believed at one point we said they had to have them in before the deadline for the petitions to be filed. So I don't understand if those larger numbers we're hearing about from individuals out in the community were because, you know, I don't know what time the petitions were filed, but say they were filed at three o'clock, that people didn't turn their signals, their withdrawals in until 345. I just would like you to clarify that because we've just got a lot of confusion out there about that issue as well as the other issue. So at the time that the the town clerk certified the signatures that 12 had been received by the office, more came in subsequent to that date, but at that point she had already said determined that those there weren't enough signatures to move to the next stage. And it is one of those things where it's like if the petition comes in first and you come in the next year, the next person in line, you say, I want to withdraw my signature, it's too late. That petition has already come in. They timestamp everything in the office. And that was the situation for the majority of people who asked to have their signatures removed. The process for the board of registrars is to start to look at if there was any fraud or anything like that in terms of signing the documents. Listen, did you have a follow-up question? Dorothy? Yes. As you know, I voted to support the library, but in my had a lot of experience with the board of registrars in New York City. And the protocol would be to take a signature on a petition and compare it to the voter card, not to a voter list. And in all the conversation I'm hearing, it's very unclear to me what the process was at our registrar's office. Were those signatures compared to the voter cards? Because there it doesn't matter if a signature is legible, as long as it matches. So I'm not an expert in this area. They have a very, the Secretary of State has issued a long sheet. I can share that out with you, that details exactly what the, whoever the clerk is who has access to the voter registration information system that the town clerk, that the State Secretary of the Commonwealth maintains. They have to follow a strict protocol. They do not look at the, they're not handwriting experts. They're not, they're trying to say that's a signature or not a signature. They're trying, there are certain rules that they have to follow. And our town clerk has experienced doing hundreds of petitions. You are all of your nomination papers. They go through this all the time. They follow the exact same rules. And it's an independent office and they go about their business. And this is what they come out with. Okay. So it was according to some state protocol, I will send you the protocol. Yes, I can do that to the council. Thank you. Steve Schreiber. Yeah. So I'm going to continue a conversation that just happened, but I too am concerned about voter disenfranchisement. And I'm concerned about those people who in good faith tried to have their names withdrawn. So we all know that the town clerk sent a actual email to somebody that was copied to a number of us, including me, that basically said, here's the form. You must email it, fax it or drop it in the drop box. There was no deadline given. Others trying to be helpful gave a deadline being April 20th because we knew that that was the deadline for the petition. So lots of people, we know that there's at least 10, but we think there's many more have tried to take their names off the petition through a good faith. And I'm very concerned that their desire to have their names withdrawn is being disenfranchised. So voter infranchisement is a two-way street, and we need to make sure that it's known that it's a two-way street. Also, and with all due respect, even right here, we've heard different deadlines given. And due respect to the town manager, but I think that one point you said the deadline was when the petitions were filed and another time you said when they're certified. That's very nuanced. In other words, I personally don't even know the, until now, what the difference between those are. But certainly, if I'm a voter in good faith, trying to do the right thing, I signed a petition by mistake.  I don't know the difference between filed and certified. I don't know that town halls closed on Monday. I leave it in the drop box like I'm told. And it's like a somebody happens to come on the front door of the town hall and get their petition time stamp before the town clerk is able to pick up the withdrawal form. That sounds like that does not sound right to me. So that's where I stand on this. Thank you, Steve. Are there any other comments at this time? Darcy? Yeah, I just wondered, Paul, if you could let us know what what are the legal issues that KP law is is looking at about the the Board of Registrar's hearing. I can say I can send you the opinion that she has written for the and which has been shared. I believe it's been I think the clerk has shared it with the Board of Registrar's can share it with the council if you'd like that. Yeah, I mean I think the you know what I didn't say is that the with the original complaint that went to the Superior Court last Wednesday and the judge issued a decision on Friday that the plaintiff has the ability to appeal that decision to Superior Court to wherever they appeal it to. So that is still an option as well.  I'm wondering how how will the public find out what those issues are that KP law is looking at? We can add it to this to the meeting's packet. Yeah, I mean I just want to be clear that my job as town manager is first to make sure that the town charter is honored and that that's you know that that's what the vote of the people have done and so that was the first order of business and my second order of business is to carry out the votes of the town council. So those are the two ways I look at the actions that we take as in town hall. Are there any other questions from the council? Okay, then we are going to go on to the next item and let me just say I want to make note on the agenda that this was posted at the last minute. It is the item referred to as the application permissibility opt out of state reclamation and mosquito control board spring. Our goal tonight is not to debate the merits of this. It is only to learn from Paul how we as a town are going to follow a process to try to get to the point that we make the right decision to move forward. So Paul, would you talk about that? Of course, so there's this has received a fair amount of interest in the community. So there is a new law under the law. The state has given expanded authority to engage in mosquito control and that's usually called aerial spraying only after the Department of Public Health declares that there's an elevated risk of Arba virus. DPH must publicly publish the data supporting this declaration. Under that authority, the state reclamation and mosquito control board can then be active throughout the state. This includes public education, standing water, drainage, ground, larvicide application and other steps in addition to aerial pesticide spraying. Before any spraying, there must be at least 48 hours advanced notice to the public, including notice to local boards of health, property owners who have opted out of spraying and farms, including beekeepers and certified organic farms. Anyone can use an online form if they want to, to be informed of aerial spraying in their region. The notice will include a process for people to opt out of spraying. Cities and cities and towns, which is us, can also opt out entirely from pesticide spraying. If they wish to opt out, however, they must have an approved alternative mosquito management plan. There is an overall directive in the bill that all actions taken under the authority of the section shall be designed to protect public health while minimizing to the extent feasible any adverse impact on the environment. So in this, no one can recall when there's been aerial spraying in the town of Amherst in recent memory in the last few decades for everyone I've talked with. There was one incident of aerial spraying last year, which was in Plymouth County. And they went through all the process, but this is a different thing. It changes the rules. And so the challenge for the town is that, or if you want to opt out, according to the current rules, you have to notify the state reclamation board and mosquito control board by May 15th, which is a Saturday. I've asked the health director to initiate the process for opting out and preparing a substitute plan that would then go to you, the town council for your action. It requires the town council to act to opt out. In this requirement, but in order for you to opt out, you have to have an alternative mosquito management plan and receive the advice and receive the advice of the Board of Health and listen to the public things like that. So I have contacted state officials at the board. There's a call today that we were alerted to and that we listened in on and also contacted our state senator and state representative to get an extension of time. So we have the time to create the alternative management plan. These things are not small or easy things that we can just take off the shelf. And we're not, and we found on this call and from our state legislators that we're not the only community doing this. Dozens, dozens and dozens of communities have the same concerns that we have. So we're moving to extend the deadline and failing that. Our goal is to get a, I've talked with the council president about having a special meeting of the council to be able to act on this prior to May 15th. Whether we can be in a position to have the information that you're going to need to make an informed decision is unclear. The town, the public health director is looking into this from looking how other communities have done it. Most communities, many communities are part of larger mosquito control districts. And they don't really have to address it because they're part of the district. We're not part of a district. We could join a district if we so chose, but there's a continuity. You have to pay to join in these districts. So that's the sort of lay of the land. And we will move, you know, the first order of business and I talked with our staff of the state senator's office to expedite a decision on whether they will extend our request or not. They've received lots of requests for extension of times. We're hoping that they will grant that that will give us time to get the information we need to make a coherent presentation to the council. Are there questions? Yes, Pat. I'm just wondering if you don't hear back from the state and or they say no extension, can we respond by the 15th? Yes, I talked with the council president. She estimated that she was going to see if we could call, if she could call a town council meeting on May 13th, which is a finance committee meeting, maybe immediately prior. I know she's talked with the finance committee chair on that. I think that's the backup plan is to take take that date as a date for the council to act. Let me just expand. I have talked with the chair of the finance committee meeting. We would do a poll and see whether or not we can have a sufficient number of counselors present to meet at noon on the 13th. If need be, hopefully we don't have to go that route. Hopefully we get the extension and we have a much greater opportunity to look at this with reasonable input from the public. Alyssa. So I wanted to bring up two things. One is that we, as some of us will recall and others might not, we have a nine nonbinding resolution on pollinators that we passed last spring, which is on our resolution page. And so we should be taking that into account when we explain our plan since we've already gone on record of saying that. And the second thing I want to point out is I really appreciate that we are attempting to extend the deadline and that we are not alone. And at the same time, I will point out that Senator Cumberford's office advised us of this program on March 19th. And we've had several town council meetings since then and had no idea that this needed to be dealt with by May 15th, even though, and hadn't been, even though we received that information back in March. So I appreciate that it's a new law and that it wasn't something we'd had experience with and that we're not part of a district. So I realized the many levels of complication for this. So I'm hoping that the board, I was disappointed to see the Board of Health doesn't appear to be taking it up this week on their agenda that they posted after this issue was brought to their attention. And I realized that we're now scrambling. So I hope they'll scramble a little bit too to be as supportive as they can of making, moving this forward, given Amherst history. Thanks, Alison. George. Yeah, my understanding is the Board of Health does not meet this week, but meets on the 13th. Now, maybe they've changed their date or maybe I misread the calendar, but I checked. And my understanding is they meet on the 13th. Does somebody know for a fact that they meet this week? Because my fact is the 13th. So if it isn't 13th, that's the very day that no, it is going to be this week. Oh, yeah. So they have scheduled a special meeting for this week initially to talk about mask. They have a local mask requirement that is out of step with the state's requirement about mask wearing at this point. They have, I haven't looked at the agenda, but my understanding from the health directors that they did not put the mosquito control thing on their agenda this week. But the health director felt she had enough ability to move forward on doing the research that needed to be done prior to your May 13th meeting. Okay, so we would hear from her. If we had to act quickly, because I'm very uncomfortable acting without getting some kind of reasonable input from the Board of Health, since this is a health matter as well. So it sounds like we will get something. Thank you. Okay, are there other questions or comments from Council? Okay, then I see that we have the superintendent of schools and we have Dr. Morris and also the finance director Dr. Slaughter with us. And so we're going to go on to our action items. We begin with the regional school budget. And because this is an issue that has picked up some controversy in the last couple of months, we're going to begin with a couple of items that myself and then this chair, the finance committee are going to just review for you the process. As with any decision of the council, there's a significant amount of lead time and work that goes into taking a vote. Each year we begin the budget process with financial indicators meeting. That meeting took place on November 20, 2020 and included the town council, the school committee and the Jones Library trustees. That was followed on November 19 with the required public forum where we really encourage residents to talk about their priorities for the coming year's budget. In December of 2020, the town council adopted budget guidelines and shared those with the town manager, the town council and the full discussion they were developed by the finance committee. And regarding this year's budget, we started by agreeing that all departments including the schools, both regional and elementary schools would develop budgets that included no increase. In February 2021, based upon updated financial information that all departments were told to develop budgets with a 1.5% increase. And in March 2021, that was increased to a 2.1% increase. In other words, all departments including the schools have received an increase in their budgets for the coming year. The adoption of the regional school budget is outlined in the charter, sections 5.4, 5.5 and there might be others. Time-wise, it is always out of step now that we have become the town otherwise, the city otherwise known as the town of Amherst. And the reason it's out of step is because it's a regional budget and includes four municipalities. The other three municipalities have town meetings that happen before we have to adopt our budget. And because elected representatives of all those four municipalities also meet, they did twice this year, once in December, on the 5th and once in February, on the 6th. The adoption of the regional school budget is a complicated and collaborative process. And I'm now going to turn to Andy Steinberg to talk about that. Thank you, Linda. This is a complicated topic. And if there are questions in the council, we have a lot of people who are pressing on the call who can help me to answer those questions. But basically for the members of who are attendees, I think most of the council realize this, but I'm not sure everybody in the community always recognizes that the regional school district is a separate entity with a separate process instead of laws on how budgets are adopted. So our elementary school budget, which is part of town government, and we have an elected school committee, has a proposed budget that is was available today through the routine budget process, which considers all other aspects of the town budget. But the regional budget is really a unique process because it is a separate corporate entity. And it is made up of multiple towns. And this, in our case, four towns, there's advantages to having a regional district. It gives size to the middle school and high school, which gives the ability to offer a wider range of options, both economic and extracurricular. But it really does pose a challenge for the member towns and the regional district to adopt the budget. The budget has to not only come up with amount, but has to have a methodology that allocates portions of it to each of the member towns. And we have the process that the president of the council just described that is really an effort to try and adequately fund the schools, but also recognize the unique budget pressures for every member town. And therefore, we go through a much more complicated process in some ways than we do for other kinds of aspects of the budget. The four town meetings are an opportunity for the superintendent and the regional school committee to explain their needs and for, as noted, the towns talk about their unique challenges, which can be financial and can be political. These meetings historically included select boards for finance committees and school committees of each member town. Now the council has replaced the towns our representation. The finance committee is aware that there's a lot of concern about the budget. There's some members of the council who've expressed concern about the growth in the budget and the fact that we have amongst the very highest cost per student of any of the towns in western Massachusetts. And that includes the regional budget having a very high cost per student. There are people who are concerned that there may be programs that are being lost. And we're trying, we tried as a finance committee to understand both. One of the things that I want to clarify is that this $1.2 million of budget cuts has been talked about, but it's sometimes a little bit misunderstood. Because when the region develops its budget, what it's doing is developing a level services budget initially as a first step in looking at revenues and seeing what the differences between the two. The gap between those two was $1.2 million. A portion of the gap was closed with adjustments and one time funds, like the savings from the employee health insurance plan, that proposed actual programmatic reductions are much smaller portion. But as noted, this is a regional process and the regional budget is proposed to increase by 0.72% through assessment, those assessments to excuse me to decrease, yes, I said decrease, but 0.72%. But the assessments to the four towns combined actually increased by 1.52%. And Amherst share is increasing by 2.1%. So that we actually right now are putting a higher level of increase than some of the other towns, which are actually having a decrease. And that's because of the assessment methodology to two of the towns have a decrease in budget. The major reason for the budget decrease, in fact, is because of non assessment revenues that are decreasing by around $500,000. So going on to the process going forward, the budget has to be passed by three member towns. If one town doesn't pass the budget, it's still binding on all of their towns. The only town that's already acted is Leverett because they had their town meeting last Saturday. They approved the budget and the assessment method, Pellum and Shoesbury, have town meetings in coming weeks. The assessment method must be passed by all towns. If the budget fails to pass in three towns, so the assessment method fails to pass the regional school committee can amend the budget and send it back to member towns. There's a time limit to their doing that action. And then ultimately, at that point, the commissioner of education can impose a temporary budget, one 12th budget until to give the towns and the region a longer opportunity. Eventually, if it is not passed, and there's still no budget passed, there's a date in which the commissioner of education can actually take fiscal control over the district. So in conclusion of my opening remarks, Amherst cannot vote to increase the budget that has now been submitted to member towns. And one other thing to note is that this year, the region has federal funds from previous COVID relief bills known as ESSER or elementary and secondary school emergency relief fund and money from the American Recovery Act. When we asked about that at the finance committee meeting, Dr. Morris indicated that there had not been time to talk about how American Recovery Act might be used, but that that is funds that are available to add to the budget that's been proposed before us. So that's basically the overview of the process that I was going to offer. So, Andy, do you have any particular comment you want to make with regard to the finance committee's review and discussion? That report is in your packet. Yeah. I think that the finance committee discussion was really focused pretty much on what I already said. I think that there are a couple of things. One is that there are questions that were raised by various members of the committee and the council members who participated in that particular meeting. And as far as the regional budget is concerned, we felt that the process has really gone on to a date that what we really were going to recommend to our three adjoining towns is that we have an opportunity over the summer to really look at some of these budget questions that were raised and have a dialogue about them with the schools. And Dr. Morris indicated that schools would be happy to participate in that kind of a process. So I was going to reach out to our neighboring towns and see if they are interested in joining us. So that's kind of the forward-looking part for the budget as far as this year's budget. I think that in the end, we concluded that the school committee very carefully worked with the superintendent to develop the budget that they felt that it made sense. We recognized that the American Recovery Act funds are available to address some of the issues that have been raised by members of the finance committee and that it was important that we engage in our process so that we can get the budget approved along with the other towns because of the complicated nature of what happens if two towns reject the budget. We don't even know if that would ever, if there's any other town that would be interested and we felt that it's a reasonable, well-thought-out budget and we would recommend that it be passed tonight. Okay. I just want to ask Superintendent Morris whether you have any additional comments you'd like to make at this time. Thank you for the opportunity. I think at this point, you know, given the hearing with the finance committee and the other with the town council prior, I don't think I have anything more I'd like to add. If it's okay with you, do you have Dr. Slaughter, if he is an opportunity, if he has anything else to add, but otherwise we're just here if there's questions. Thank you, Dr. Slaughter. No, I don't have any other comments to add at this time. All right. And we're going to have a council discussion, an opportunity for public comment, come back for any further council discussion and then a vote. And I might add that there are several votes that go with this particular item.  I'd like to ask Superintendent Morris if Amherst school system will be able to offer some kind of enriched summer program using some of the federal monies. Yep. Just to clarify, and I think I don't want to harp on this, but since this is just about the regional schools, I'm assuming that your question was not about the Amherst public schools, but the Amherst Pellum regional school district or secondary schools. I just wanted to make sure because that's a common point of confusion. We already have at the high school put out information about our summer programming options. And at the middle school that'll be coming soon. So we are having summer programming options for both for seven through 12 and Summit Academy because of the nature of a day school always has a summer program and there was actually a meeting about that today. So we are moving forward with more summer program, but in the neighborhood at the high school about a third more offerings than would typically have. Thank you. Thank you very much. Alissa, I don't have a comment on the budget at this time because thank you. We did have a good hearing about that before, but I just wanted to mention in terms of kind of a point of order is that when we get to this public comment period, I understand this is a separate public comment period than one we had before, but I know it came up in our original public comment period tonight and it's come up in recent meetings. Under our rules, we only have one person per public comment, one comment per person under our rules 5.1. And so that's up to you to manage what happened at the earlier public comment period. But just during this one, if people I just don't want people to be upset to feel like they should get to talk more than once because our rules say they talk once. And obviously we could we've talked about the idea of having work sessions under rule 3.9, but we don't have that yet. So given that, I'm hoping that people will not be offended when we restrict them to one public comment during this comment period. Thank you, Alissa. And I appreciate that reminder to me and the public. Are there any other questions from the council at this time? Darcy, you have to unmute Darcy. Darcy, you need to unmute. I just have a question about the process here. As far as council discussion, I see we have four different motions coming up. Yes. And so are we going to have separate discussion after each one or how is that going to work? Yes. The motion will be made seconded and then there'll be questions. Okay. For each of the four motions. Yes. But if you have a general question at this point, please ask. Yeah, I do have one general question. That is that if we fund a less than level services budget, does that then become the baseline for the next fiscal year budget? Yes, it does. We don't make that up. We don't assume we're going to make it up later. That's not been the past practice that I've experienced. Thanks. I'm working on my answers being succinct, so I hope that was okay. Got feedback and I'm working on it. We appreciate that. Shalini? I apologize. I wasn't attending any of the earlier discussions of this has already been answered, but I'm struggling with how to respond to kids and teachers who are, and if you could, who are especially in coming out of a pandemic when we're looking at core academic FDE reductions, reductions in para reduction in art, and given that we have funding coming from the state. Some of this is due to declining enrollment, and is that enrollment decline pertaining to this one year or was it? Just like how do we, what is that information gap? Because I know you all have been so thoughtful and you've struggled with this and you've come to this conclusion. So how can we, what is the information gap that might help us all understand better? Sure, so and I'm struggling with it too. So I'm right there with you. So I think a couple things. I think the first thing, the enrollment drop is very real. So we're anticipating unrelated to COVID and assuming that people come back. We're assuming not much over 800 students at our high school next year. That's a high school that for quite a while has been in the neighborhood of a thousand students. And this is a demographic shift. It's already been through our elementary schools. So if you look at our elementary schools, these same cohorts, it's not like, oh, people are fleeing. Our charter numbers have been very consistent for the last couple years. They were going up, up, and then they flattened. But if you look at the cohorts, our cohort, when these incoming ninth graders were incoming kindergarteners, it was a smaller group. And we've seen that shift over time. So that enrollment drop is very real. I think the part that gets where it gets tricky is that we're not making widgets. So it's not easy to make reductions based on in the overall context of the, of the district, a relatively minor drop. You know, I think it's been going on a couple years and we've been trying to sort of meet it.  And for us, especially at the high school level, it's really the students demand forces on the course, right. So we don't create the courses and just say students register, we look at the past courses that students take and then make decisions about what to offer as best we can. But that gets really hard. And I want to really honor and recognize the comments from staff and from students. There is a real, real loss of electives and opportunities when we make these reductions, even if it's accounting for very real reductions in number of students. If I'm an individual student, I still have less options than I had five years ago. Right. And some of that's related to budget and some of that's related to enrollment, but none of it feels very good. None of it's satisfying. And I struggle in the same way, again, that you raised that point. So I appreciate you raising it. In terms of the stimulus funds, you know, I know I talk with, you know, Doug and I talk with Paul and with Sean frequently. And as things become more clear on the use of those funds, we'll be having active conversations about whether they might be able to be used to assist in this regard. But at this point, I don't have, at least on the school side, the stimulus funds, we have three different estimates we've gotten from three different legislators, state, federal, and then another one from the state, none of them match. We have not gotten clear description of intended uses. We heard it's for three years and I heard the commissioner last week saying, no, maybe it'll be for four years. So there's a real lack of certainty right now on those funds that the funds we've already received from the ESSER, what's called ESSER. A lot of those are related to we still have ventilation we have to fix. We still have other things that we need to do as we continue to use more and more of our spaces. And so some of that is going to be earbarked specifically for COVID related in terms of the newer stimulus funds. Right now, we don't have full clarity. And when we do, you know, I know Paul and Sean have shared that they're very open to having conversations with us about seeing how things develop over time. Sorry, I didn't do well in the succinct part of that one, my apologies. No, I did actually quite well. And I really want to appreciate that. Having taught in high school 400, believe me, Amherst is looks like a great school district to me. One of two math teachers for 400 kids. So are there any other council questions? Then I'm going to ask if there's any questions from the audience. Please raise your hand. Okay, seeing none, then I'm going to begin the process. These are all orders, financial orders that were reviewed by the finance committee and recommended to the council. The first one is I moved in accordance with section 5.5c of the Amherst Homeworld Charter and in compliance with section 5.5a and 5.5b of the Amherst Homeworld Charter to separately consider and act on the Amherst Pellum Regional School District budgets and assessment method for fiscal year 2022 due to the agreement with the three other towns in the regional school district. Is there a second? Second, D'Angeles. Thank you, Pat. Any further discussion or questions? Seeing none, we're going to begin with Alyssa. Hi. Pat D'Angeles. Hi. Garcy. Yes. Grace Merzin. I, Mandy Jow. Hi. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Evan. Hi. George. Yes. Kathy. Yes. Steve Schreiber. Hi. Andy. Hi. Sarah. Hi. And Shalini. Yes. It's a unanimous 13-0-0 and no absences. The next one, in accordance with Charter section 5.5, having been referred to the finance committee, a public hearing held on April 5th, 2021, having been recommended by the finance committee report of May 3rd, 2021, a public hearing held on April 5th, 2021, notice which was posted for a minimum of 10 days on March 25th, 2021, to adopt council order 2020-01 in order approving the Amherst Pellum Regional School District Assessment Method for FY20-22 as presented. Is there a second? Second. Thank you. Any questions? Seeing none, I'm going to start with Pat D'Angeles. Hi. Garcy. Yes. Grace Merzin. Yes. Hanna Key. Hi. Garcy Pam. Yes. Evan. Hi. George. Yes. Kathy. Yes. Steve. Hi. Andy. Hi. Sarah. Hi. Alyssa. Hi. I'm sorry, I skipped Shalini. Shalini. Yes. And then Alyssa. Thank you. That's also unanimous, 13-0-0, and then absent. The next one, in accordance with Charter Section 5.5, having been referred to the finance committee, a public hearing held on April 5th, 2021, having been recommended by the finance committee report on May 3rd, May 3rd, 2021, a public hearing held on April 5th, 2021, notice of which was posted for a minimum of 10 days on March 25, 2021, to adopt Council Order 2020-02 in order approving the Amherst Regional School District FY22 budget and appropriating the town of Amherst share of the budget. Assessment. Sorry, went to the next page. Is there a second? Yes, second. Okay. Thank you. Any further questions? Yes, Darcy. That's the motion about the assessment method or about the budget? This is the motion about us appropriating our share to meet the budget. Yes. It is also about the budget. Yes. I'll have a comment. It's about the budget. Okay. Okay. Darcy. Yeah, I'm in agreement with the students and the speakers who commented about the school budget and how important it is to maintain at least level services from year to year. And I feel pretty strongly that we should have been able to figure out a way to do that either by by not taking so much from our capital budget or from moving from other departments. I guess I feel like once we take away something like dance or other electives, it's really hard to bring them back. And dance is exactly the type of class that motivates students to come to school and stay in school and an adjustment counselor, same type of thing. So as the students in the sunrise group requested, I really think we should be prioritizing education and restoring the school district budget by by relocating at least the funds equating to a certain number of APD positions toward the arts, middle school teaching, health and bilingual psychology. And I know that there are actually more than those two positions that we are we have seen already being used in the budget. So I've heard that there are up to five potential APD positions. Are you planning to make this as a motion? No, I am not. Okay. Dorothy. Well, I am going to vote for the budget because I know that we have to for the process to go forward with the towns, but I am taking a bet that somehow we will be able to do what Darcy suggests is to make the budget whole when we find a way to use additional funds. And that I'm hoping that all efforts will be made to do that because I do agree that the things that have students come to school are often things that get cut. But I know that we have to vote this tonight if all the process is not going to go forward properly. So I'm balancing hope and expectations. Thank you. Andy. Yeah, just in response for mine everyone, but I had reported on earlier, because since it is a four-town process, we don't own the budget the way we own the budget of our elementary schools. And our ability to increase the budget is not one that we can make as a single town. It is, it really has, even if we wanted to do that, and there's a lot of financial reasons, we'd have to consider the four-town process makes it a very difficult process to engage in. Kathy. I also, I'm not speaking against going forward with this, but one of the dilemmas I find myself in is that we get a budget efforts going through the school committee. So aside from the four-town side of it, if I were to look at declining enrollment and then what the allocations are, I would look to have we, is the administration, what's the administrative non-classroom staff look like? What do those line items look like over time? I would do more assessment and no Doug and Mike that you've been doing that, but I would be really hard noticed about it to see, you know, to protect classroom hours by looking to other parts of the budget. So that's the broader discussion that was just beginning to be touched on on Andy, because we are spending more, a lot more per student than surrounding towns are. So I'd also want to look at the, you know, what's happening with the mix of spec spending on regular classroom hours and special needs hours, but it's more an overall look at the budget to say, can we get more classroom hours and more pieces out of what we are spending? Because I don't think we're underspending per student in our school system. My question, more is how are there better ways to allocate it? And I absolutely agree with the statements on art, music, dance, anything that gets the kids involved. Because aside from what those are, I've been seeing these incredibly creative programs that teach STEM by dance, you know, bring kids in in ways that they wouldn't normally, the kids who dance are learning math and science, the kids who like math and science are learning how to dance. It's an enrichment program. And I would like to think that we can be creative in our budget and get more for a similar amount of dollars. So I am strongly in favor on how do we look closely at these budgets as we go forward in the years to come, as if enrollment is down, I'm looking at when my kids were there, how many top level staff who weren't in a classroom do we have? And now how many do we have 20 years later and asking, have we adjusted as much as we can? And those are questions I would love to have answered. Dr.  Yeah, thank you. I'll be brief. So one is that there is no production to the dance program. So I just want to be really clear, because I've heard that mentioned a couple of times. The second thing I'd like to say is we've caught about 20% of our staff at Central Office. And honestly, we've frustrated the heck out of certain counselors because we don't produce the level of documentation that some of you would want. And so I think just bluntly and succinctly as I'm trying, I think we've made a much higher percentage of reduction of non-classroom staff as we cut year after year after year. And at some point, we are running the risk of not being able to support what the community demands in terms of data and information. So I think that's really the tension point. And I think the mental note I'm taking on the conversation tonight is when we get to Fort Town meetings next year to have a more active conversation. Because the idea of those being before, especially the December one, before the school committee actually sees and interacts with the budget is that the Fort Towns give the feedback on their comfort level of what's being proposed. And so I think good feedback for me is to be a little more forceful of pushing the town to say, where are you on this? I think it's a delicate dance and maybe I'm dancing a little too much on the delicate side and a little less on the blunt side of saying, what schools do you want? Because that's essentially what it comes down to. So I'll own that part and I'll take that with me and may annoy a lot of people next Fort Town meeting next December by being that blunt. But I think it's really useful feedback and we'll certainly connect on that next year. Thank you. The motion on the table is the one that is to adopt council order FY 2020-02 and order approving Amherst Pellum Regional School District FY 2020 budget and appropriating the town of Amherst share of the budget assessment as presented. See no other questions. I'm going to move to a vote. Darcy? No. Lynn Griezmer is a yes. Mandy Jo Hanneken? Hi. Dorothy Pam? Yes. Evan Ross? Hi. George Ryan? Yes. Jane? Yes. Steve Schreiber? Yes. Andy Steinberg? Yes. Sarah Schwartz? Hi. Galenie Balmille? Yes. Elissa Brewer? Hi. Pat DeAngeles? Hi. The vote is 12 in favor, one opposed, no abstentions, and no absence. The last motion that is related to this item is the following. In accordance with Charter Section 5.5, having been referred to the Finance Committee of Public Hearing held on April 5, 2021, having been recommended by the Finance Committee Report on May 3, 2021, a public hearing held on April 5, 2021, notice of which was posted for a minimum of 10 days on March 25, 2021, to adopt Council Order FY 2020-03 in order approving the Amherst Regional and Amherst-Pellum Regional School District Debt Authorization for FY 2022 as presented. Is there a second? Second. Any further discussion or questions? Seeing none, I'm going to begin the vote with myself. Lynn Griezmer is an aye. Mandy Jo? Aye. Dorothy Pam? Yes. Evan Ross? Aye. George? Yes. Kathy? Yes. Steve? Aye. Andy? Aye. Sarah? Aye. Shalini? Yes. Yes. Alyssa? Aye. Pat? Aye. And Darcy? Yes. That vote is unanimous 13-0-0 and no absences. I want to thank the superintendent and the finance director from the schools for joining us, especially this evening. And we are going to take a five-minute break and be back for the budget. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Have a good night. Please mute. Yes. Thank you. Mute and also put your video. Alyssa and Darcy and George, are you back? Yes. Thank you. Sarah, are you back? I'm waiting for George and Sarah to put their cameras on. George and Sarah, are you back? Please put your cameras on. Okay, George. Sarah, are you back? I'm just going to briefly introduce this next, which is one of the main shows of the evening. It's really picking up on the budget process that we just discussed. Only in this case, it is the town of Amherst operating budget and capital improvement program that the town manager and his staff will be talking about. We've already voted to refer this to the finance committee. And I want to make note that there will be a hearing on the operating budget on May 17th and on the capital improvement program on June 7th. And somewhere in the month of June, it is hoped that after the finance committee has thoroughly explored the budget that the town council will vote the budget. I want to particularly thank the town manager, the finance director, the controller, and the many, many other staff who worked hard in long hours to bring us this budget. It's been driven by many factors, including the town council's budget policy guidelines and the town council's performance goals for the town manager for July 1st to June 30th, 2021, which have been amended at least twice. In addition, the finance committee will provide a brief update on the review of the town council's budget at our meetings on May 17th and 24th. So when we get to June, it won't be the first time you've heard about any deliberations. With that, I'm going to turn the podium over to the town manager, and we look forward to your presentation. Thank you, Lynn. So we're here. We put a lot of work into this process, so we're really excited to be here and thank you for the time that you're giving us. And I'm really proud of this FY 2022 budget. It's balanced. It aligns with the allocation of funds, with the goals that you've established by the town council. It identifies some of the challenges we have faced during the pandemic and what the town did to meet them. We emerged from this pandemic full of hope and optimism. We've built a strong foundation based on good planning, strong leadership and prudent financial decisions. Even so, there are many unknowns before us. Nevertheless, we are one community with mutual interest. Our institutional partners are reinvesting in our community and our economy has proven its resiliency. The budget before you, all 279 pages of it, has extensive information to provide the information you need to make wise decisions on behalf of the town's people. So just as context, this is a once in a century pandemic that none of us have ever experienced, both in municipal life or any other life. The pandemic hit Amherst particularly hard because the three institutions of higher education and our three largest employers pretty much shut down very quickly and sapped the economic energy out of our community. This created a budget crisis which we all lived through last year and we appreciate the work and the flexibility that you had and that the state government gave us to have a one month budget and then a year-long budget. Our focus, and you've heard me say this a million times, is continuity of operations and being able to adjust to new challenges. And I think, and I've said this before, also our strong creative leadership team was core and we continue to, we call it a COVID response team, core team. We continue to meet on a regular basis at least weekly to review anything that's coming up around COVID-19. And the last thing I want to mention is just how proud I am of our staff. One of my missions in this process was to try to avoid layoffs or furloughs because I believed that as a town employer, a local employer, maintaining people's jobs was a high, it was a very high priority.  And to do that, we had to ask our employees to do different things. And every time I asked staff to do something different, they asked, tell me what you need. Never did I hear anyone say, that's not in my job description. So really proud of all the staff who've stepped up and taken that on. So next slide. So this is usually, this is a slide that usually comes at the end, but I want to state right here and now and up front, thank you to our town staff, to our partners in higher education and the business and nonprofit communities, and all the community members who have battled through the pandemic and continue to contribute to the well-being of the town and our elected leaders. You guys have muscled through this entire time. And so it's, I think the community needs to recognize the work that you've put into it. Next slide. So as I mentioned, this is how we are starting our budget. It's a budget built on hope and optimism and sets the foundation for our reemergence from the COVID downside that we are coming out of. Next slide. So as we built this budget, we are fortunate to be in a very strong financial position. Our reserves are strong, 21.5% of our budget, and we have a strong AA plus bond rating. We're hoping to have that improved, but we're given the sort of general status of the economy. We're not sure we'll be able to achieve that. We maintain our core services, 2.1% increase for funds through all the, through all the different budgets to fund our operations, which means few new initiatives. And then we have this, the new thing that we've talked about, which is federal CARES funds, the new ARPA money, which no one knows what it means, and the ESSER funds that the schools are getting. And the exciting thing about this budget, I think, and where we are as a town, is that we have a funding plan to, thanks to Mr. Mangano, to fund our four capital projects with one, just one debt exclusion. And we have developed five-year operating and capital plans and have, are developing the basis for inventorying all of our capital needs. That will make us even stronger as we move forward. Next slide. So just so people know that the town's budget has five components. The municipal budget, which is, we're going to talk about tonight, which includes the four enterprise funds, the elementary school budget, the library budget, the Amherst Pellum Regional School District, which you just voted, and then the capital improvement program. There's also two pieces. If you want to see the town's budget in total, you should also look at the Community Preservation Act budget and the Community Development Block Grant budget. So that is everything in terms of a nutshell, and we tried to assemble this all together on one location on our website. Thank you. So, big highlights. Proposed budget, $85,566,836, sets the foundation for recovery, which is where we're starting to feel it already. It aligns the budgets directly with the goals adopted by the town council, and you will see that throughout our presentation and throughout the budget document. We have been able to afford modest operating budget increases of 2.1%, which went to the regional school district, to our elementary schools, to the town, and to the library. And we begin to restore our capital spending, moving it up to 8.5% of the levy. Last year, we used the capital expenditure to help balance the budget. It was down to 5%. So again, moving that to where we think it needs to be in order to move our whole operation forward. So overall, when you take into the fixed costs that get factored in, our budget increases 5.7%, but that's from a reduced base from last year. So it's a good increase, but we're still not where we were prior. I mentioned the new federal funds are coming forward. And then the other thing I really want to mention is that we have a new budget format and an interactive story map to make the budget more engaging. And it's going to look different. And it took a lot more work and effort than it ever did before, because of all the format changes. And at 6.25, Sean was still working on things like why isn't this not showing up my computer, right? So it was an exciting last couple of weeks, but we were here tonight. So thank you. So one of the big pieces of this is our capital improvement program, which we're going to talk a little bit more about. Again, talked about the restoring the budget. Incorporates the capital requirements of three of the four building projects in the existing budget. And we don't know the price of the schools yet this point. So that's not addressed. Address is deferred maintenance of existing infrastructure. Maintains, and this has been a high priority since I've been here, our investment in roads and sidewalks. And you'll notice in the capital improvement program that we've looked at all of our projects through the lens of the impact that they have on climate change and which ones are helping with that by a little green leaf on it. Next slide. So this is the new thing that we're presenting tonight, the budget story map. So we're going to go into a different format. And I'll tell you why we're doing this. So something new. You have the 279 pages that you can study at your heart's content, but that's not very accessible to the general public. They're not going to sit down and read it. Some people will. We have some people who live in town who will get into that, which is great. But we also want it to be accessible to other people. And this story map is easier to read than a PowerPoint. It's designed to be mobile friendly because a lot of people are accessing information on their pads or their phones and make it more easily accessible to people in a more friendly way. So Sean and I are going to tag team on this presentation. But before we start, I do want to thank everyone who built the budget. Sean is the finance director. He's guided the work, but the nuts and bolts and the crunching of the numbers was done by our esteemed comptroller Sonia Aldridge and assistant comptroller Holly Bowser, who are both Bowser, who are both here tonight. They worked hours on this, met and met and then met again with all of our department heads to get them in line. And then lastly, the whole concept of how to present this information, how to redesign the budget, which when you look at it in its totality, I think you're going to really like the view. It's much more visually pleasing was the work of Sean with communications manager Rihanna Sunred. So this is our sort of quote of the day where we're going to reemerge a stronger, safer, more resilient community with new initiatives that will invest significantly in our collective future. These are things that are the new initiatives are not fully funded, which we will address in a little bit, but they show a direction where we think that we can go. So next. So everybody hear me okay? Yeah. Okay. So Paul, before I go on to the budget overview, do you mind if I give a quick orientation of how this thing works? Perfect. So as Paul mentioned before we started working, I had to make sure it looked okay on my screen because I really wide monitors that are designed more for spreadsheets, but not so much for this. So I'm actually on a laptop right now and hopefully it looks okay to you all on the screen and the size is good. But the way this works is you can essentially scroll through it or you can click over to these different content areas at the top. And so the content areas are sort of a welcome message. There's a budget overview, which provides sort of the baseline knowledge that you need to understand the highlights of the budget. Some of what we've already gone over in the PowerPoint. This year we specifically added a section on COVID response because we know there's been a lot of questions about what has been done in response to COVID. And so we highlighted some of those things, but there's also a much more robust section on what we did for COVID in the budget book. And then the next six are all goals of the council for the town manager. So when we go through those, you'll see the goal for the council and then some of the highlights of what this budget, either new funds or existing funds, are doing related to that goal. And then we wrap it up with sort of how to get involved section. And also there's lots of hyperlinks as well for people to click on. Yep. So this section, budget overview, as Paul mentioned, hyperlink right there. So anyone viewing this can click to the whole budget document if they just click that line right there. Proposed overall FY22 budget, $85,566,836. Paul already mentioned about 2.1% increases for all operating budgets. Again, that started at 0% as more information came in. It was increased to 1.5%. And then more information came in again. We increased it to 2.1% to try to capture the latest information we could. Capital spending has increased about 2.6 million. Again, this is from a significantly reduced FY21 figure. So that's about 8.5% of the levy for capital. And it also includes a rollover of the FY21 Capital Reserve. For those that you remember last year, we didn't specifically allocate some of the money for projects because we wanted to be a reserve there in case there was an emergency. Fortunately, no emergencies have occurred this year. And so this proposal appropriates that to support a specific project in the Capital Improvement Program for FY22. We continue to fund pension and OPEB commitments. So one area we reduced in FY21 was our OPEB contribution. It went from $500,000 down to $250,000. This proposal increases at $50,000 back up to $300,000. And we've recently received the actuarial analysis. And it is important that we keep trying to stick to our funding plan for OPEB. It does impact our bond rating and things of that nature. And it affects our overall liability that we have on our books. This proposal includes a small commitment of funds from the American Rescue Plan. We're still learning more information about that grant, but we do have sort of the key areas that it can fund. And so we've put out some ideas of the specific things that we think are good ideas that are aligned with the goals. And then also there will be a process for allocating the much larger portion of that grant. And Paul already mentioned about the new budget format and this interactive companion piece. And again, the overall budget increases 5.7%. So the way you work through this is you just keep scrolling down and it kind of scrolls with you. So I won't spend a lot of time here, but here are the tables that you're used to seeing about the different departments and what their new allocations for FY22. And here's capital, retirement, and then other which is state assessments and some other areas. And then our overall budget. So the next piece, so that was more on the expense side of our general fund budget, this next part is about the revenues. So property taxes, we're projecting the 2.5% increase, allowable increase plus new growth. We've returned our new growth estimate to be more in line with where it's been in the past based on the projects that we know are in process right now. And there was some unused excess levy capacity last year that's also been included. So the overall property tax increases 4.1%. Local receipts are we're projecting a large increase because that was one of the areas that took the biggest hit in FY21. So the overall increase to local receipts is 23%. And that includes areas like excise taxes, hotel motel, rental revenue, departmental receipts, licenses, fees, penalties. For the first time, we did include a preliminary budget for the marijuana tax. That's not the impact money. It's just the excise tax portion of that. And so there is a budget for that included as well. State aid, we are estimated 2.6% increase. That's mostly due to an increase in the unrestricted general government aid allocation. Chapter 70 was pretty much flat. And there was a change in charter tuition reimbursement as well. And then the last major section of our revenues is other financing sources and we're projecting a 24% increase. Sorry, it's cut off a little bit by the people on my screen. And so the major areas there are ambulance receipts. We're projecting I think about a 7% increase in ambulance receipts. That was an area that was cut down for FY21. And as the university and college comes back, we anticipate that will recover a little bit. This area also includes that capital FY21 capital reserve that I mentioned before, appropriating that for FY22 is here. And the other kind of noteworthy account here is we are appropriating some of the cable money that we get that will fund the municipal fiber installation. The first year of that funding is appropriated here as well. So then we navigate to enterprise funds. So water expenses are projected to go up 9.4%. This, the two major drivers here are increases in our debt obligation and increases in capital expenditures. So one of the strategies that we use for FY21 to respond to the pandemic was we reduce capital and the enterprise funds quite a bit as well. And so the FY22 proposal here in water restores some of that capital spending. On the sewer side, it's a 7.6% increase and this is mostly some increases on the operating expense side. And also this also has some new debt obligations that will increase the payments for FY22. Transportation is a decrease of 17.1% where this is one of the really these top three enterprise funds are the ones that were worried about their revenues for next year because they were hit pretty hard by the pandemic. Transportation were projecting sort of a very slow recovery until we see things bounce back to where they used to be. And so this has been reduced. And so one of the ways that we, one of the items that we reduce in these budgets when revenues don't come in as much as we expect are the indirect costs that they pay to the general fund. And so when they're not bringing in all the revenues that they're supposed to, that does impact the general fund pretty directly. And so this is an area that we expect to recover, which will help the enterprise funds, but will also help the general fund in the future. And then the last one here is solid waste were projecting a 4.2% decrease. There was a sort of a temporary bump up in FY21 because we had a matching portion of a grant for the roll-off truck that we had sort of a one-time expense. And now that that grant has gone through and we have the roll-off truck, which you see here on the left side of your screen, we can take that matching expense out. Just some other notes on enterprise funds. So we do continue to project reduced water and sewer consumption. And that has a direct impact on the revenues as long as our consumption is sort of below normal levels. That translates to our revenues below normal levels and puts more stress on the enterprise fund. So we're projecting a little bit lower for FY22. And as we monitor things, we anticipate that it'll start to recover in the years after that. We've talked about water and sewer rates a little bit, but the proposed rates for FY22 are still below state average and a lot of our surrounding communities. Gradual upturn in business activity downtown. We're hoping we'll produce a modest increase in parking revenue, but we will see it hopefully when the college university's return. And we are proposing to use a modest amount of moderate amount of reserves in the sewer and solid waste fund for FY22. This is another area that we'll come back to when we do eventually talk in more detail about the American Rescue Plan Act funds. One of the explicit purposes for those funds is revenue replacement. And some of the areas where we've seen the biggest impact on revenues are in our enterprise funds. And then to the last key section here is our capital improvement program. So as the town manager said, continued commitment to repaving roads and sidewalks. This proposal has 850,000 for roads in addition to the chapter 90 money that also goes towards roads. 200,000 for sidewalks. And then we also noted that we have a couple of grants that will have some benefit for sidewalks as well, which is the multi-use path to Graff Park and some ADA improvements to the senior center. For the first time, I think the first time, we added a recurring item for sustainability projects. For FY22, it's 100,000. This is meant to fund things like upgrading vehicles to hybrid or fully electric, to do studies. We had a request during the Joint Capital Planning Committee to do a solar study. This money could fund something like that. That specific project we're pursuing grants for, but if the grants don't come through, it could fund a project such as that. And it can be serviced as a match to lever state grants as well. In that capital improvement program, we also have 100,000 for support services to update zoning bylaws. This specific 100,000 is a combination of about, I think it's $60,000 in new money and $40,000 that's been repurposed from an old article to come up with a total of 100,000. We also, for the first time, are putting in what we intend to be a recurring item for accessibility improvements. We had the ADA study that listed a whole bunch of areas where we could make improvements. And so this specific proposal, the capital improvement program includes 50,000. And that could fluctuate because we have other facility improvement money that could also be put towards accessibility improvements as well. But we intend for that to be a recurring item. And then sort of a big piece that we added is design and project management services for the fire station and for the public works. So really the next section or the next stage that we need to move to to further those projects is to start doing some design work. And before we can do design work, because of the amount of those projects, we're required to have a project owner's project manager. And so you'll see a borrowing authorization in the capital improvement program, which is roughly in the ballpark of 70 to 80 percent of what we anticipate to be the design cost and the project management cost for those buildings. And there's a little pie chart over here that you can click on. I'll make it a little bigger. We got some, I had some feedback earlier today that I couldn't fix, but I just wanted to clarify in case anybody has questions. This slice here, public works, administrative other, it looks like a very big slice. It's normally for things like the stormwater program or the transportation plan. It's a very big slice this year in particular, because this is where the borrowing authorization for the the DPW building is. And this is where, and the fire slice is big, because that's where the borrowing authorization for the fire station project is. So those, that borrowing authorization is part of this pie chart. And so those slices are bigger than they normally would be in a different year. And if anybody wants to, they can click to the full capital improvement program. By clicking this button, but I won't do that now. And with that, I'm going to pass it back to Paul to talk about the town's COVID response. So if there's a, thank you, Sean. So if there's a time magazine story of the year, obviously it's COVID and and everything that we've done during the last year and everything we're looking to do has is is framed by the by COVID. So we want to talk, take a few minutes to look at what what is what we're doing about COVID. So at the beginning of the pandemic and through the entire 14 months we're on, we've been looking at this, though we've been working to meet the needs of our most vulnerable people that the folks who are experiencing homelessness. The first thing we did when COVID first hit, it was the most is a very high priority was to identify a location for isolation and quarantine space with support services. We were fortunate that Hampshire College came through and dedicated an entire dormitory for our use and offered meals service and recognizing the population. They even established a designated smoking area on a virtually non-smoking campus. The staff and volunteers at Craig's Doors were creative in securing millions of dollars in state funds to help relocate the seasonal shelter, secure the university motor lodge and the O'Connor Lodge in Hadley for individual residences and provide better safer shelter for more people who are unhoused than the town has ever accommodated. The town supported these efforts and helped with permitting and facilitating and setting up a cooling shelter last summer. So there's a lot more work to be done. We understand the the need for a new location because the Unitarian Universalist Church will be terminating their relationship at this point with Craig's Doors because they want to reopen their building, but the building inspector has given a building commissioner has extended the occupancy of the Unitarian Universalist Church through July 31. So next. So the front and center in our in our COVID response has been our health department. They didn't miss a beat as we transitioned health directors and we're able to manage the cases that came before us and even clusters that have come through. We've done the contact tracing that we've had to do. We've built a robust vaccination program that has vaccinated nearly 10,000 people so far and that has expanded to offer with the fire department vaccines to homebound members of the region to ensure the reliability of our staff. We added four firefighter paramedics temporarily to the fire department for most of the year provided added staff support for the health department and we created that COVID ambassador's program which you know about. So we keep moving. So one of the key areas that we've so we just I just talked about this and we one of the last things we talked a little bit about redeploying people to current staffing needs like at Puffer's pond at Cherry Hill instead of hiring temporary employees our current our existing staff were able to fill those those slots. A key piece of our efforts has been on communication and under the guidance of our communications manager we are able to maintain multiple ways for the public to connect with our town government. We set up the COVID hotline that handled hundreds of calls and every one of them was answered in real time or returned if there was a message left. We set up a special COVID website to funnel all relevant local and state information into one location. We initiated weekly community chats with the town manager and the communication manager and special guests where members of the public could just join in to the conversation and we continued our monthly office hours in Cup of Joe with Paul. And in terms of digital services you all experience it we're experiencing it right we're experiencing it right now. We hustled to get zoom and teams up and running IT or miracle workers really at getting the technology and the systems in place to let us including our key decision makers to continue working and do the important work that they do. We just developed the engage Amherst online platform and then also expanded our bill paying online permitting and licensing online licensing for some of the work that we're doing right now. Paul and I'll just add real quick I'm sure you'll you'll touch on it later. We have an engage Amherst site set up for the FY 22 budget. For those who have seen the Pomeroy Village one or the four building project one it's a really nice way to submit questions and get answers and kind of log and then you can keep a kind of running list of those questions and answers which has been really helpful and so that is set up and if you click the engage Amherst link here or it's also in the budget document in a few places it'll bring you to the FY 22 page and people can send feedback and get questions answered. So one of the things that we had to maintain we had to set up new protocols for how we add access to buildings. All of our buildings have been utilized by town staff on a regular basis and our town facilities department has been spectacular about making sure everything is sanitary and we have the right air quality systems in place and so we just want to thank them for that work that they've done. Okay now business support was really crucial because that's the lifeblood of our downtown area and those businesses took a hammering. You know we saw Hastings closed for the first time in 100 years. That really was an indicator that things were different. We saw some restaurants closed and won't reopen. Others have staggered through the pandemic and will come back with and are excited to be returning.  The town council passed special temporary zoning to allow all this to happen and then we put through, put picnic tables in other locations in downtown at Cushman and on the parking lot. So this is where we start to launch into the goals of the council. We're just going to hit each one very briefly. There's a lot more detail in the written document that you have. Yeah so Paul and I are going to kind of flip back and forth on some of these. So most of them are broken down into some of funding and then staffing and there's a little bit of overlap somewhere, some places. So the capital improvement program as mentioned earlier allocates 100,000 for sustainability projects. We are proposing 10,000 from the American Rescue Plan Act funds for an intern to support sustainability. I believe that was a recommendation from the ECAC and so we're putting that forward as an idea. Valley bikes share an EV charging station so I know there's grants for EV charging stations in particular. There's grants being pursued currently and all the pre-development for the solar project at North landfill is getting completed and that's moving forward. I don't have an exact date Paul. I don't know if you but I know it's in the coming months that we're hoping groundbreaking for that. Yeah in the fall I think. So obviously we have staff that are making all these things happen. Well we've taken tangible steps to move forward on the community choice aggregation program which the town council has approved. You know staff are working on the development of solar projects including the assessor and then the assessors are also working on implementing the PACE program under the direction of the finance director. And there's more information on some like the PACE program and the community choice program in the budget book. So community health and safety another goal. So on the funding side we're probably over this now but we've expended rough you know over three million dollars to date on materials, equipment and services to support the town through COVID. Most of that funding has been from CARES or FEMA and it's still going. So it's a frustrating process at times because we have to submit just about everything for FEMA reimbursement and FEMA does not move quickly. And until we know what FEMA is going to reimburse we don't know how much of our CARES money we're going to use. We're almost to getting reimburse for our first request back in June. But in FEMA's defense they're getting probably you know 3,000 requests for funding or they're not used to dealing with that many. So but we have expended quite a bit and that supports all departments, schools, library, town. The provided families in need with free meals that we partner with local restaurants and a bit in the chamber on. We contracted for a social service support without reach of Amherst. This program specifically helps families who are negatively impacted by COVID through potentially a loss of a job or having a quarantine or something of that nature. And we are reallocating $130,000 from the police department budget to social services for the creation of a new community responder program. And so the initial funding is based on the work of the community safety working group. And in the budget book just so people can find it so there used to be a social services section of the budget book for the last couple of years there's been zero funding in it because there were some issues with the types of funding that used to be in that section. We have re-engaged that section of the budget. It's under community services and it's called social services and the only thing in that section right now is this $130,000. And so that was sort of our first attempt at where we thought this program should exist. But again this is an evolving thing. So we welcome your feedback on that. So I do want to talk about community safety a little bit more because that group has been working tirelessly for the past six months. The work is grueling. It's emotionally draining in a way that I can never fully comprehend and it's very important. They're working with their consultants to finalize the report and right now I think they're scheduled to come to the council on May 17th. And just because there were comments made, the $130,000 is not designed to staff an entire program for a year or anything like that. It's going to take time for us to build this program. I mentioned that it hasn't been done before in Massachusetts and I can only find two or three programs outside of Massachusetts where this is done all on pilot and programs in Albuquerque and in Rochester. Most of the programs you see out there are co-responder models that are located in the police department like the CAHOOTS program. And the community safety working group felt very strongly that this had to be independent of the police department. So that's what we're moving to build on. But it takes time to develop job descriptions, decide what calls are going to be handled by the group, hire the folks and establish the offices where they're going to work out of. So it takes time. So this $130,000 is set aside to help move that forward and we're committed to doing that. Do you want to touch on this too, Paul? Some of this is actually redundant with the COVID, but we thought that it kind of lives in both places. Staffing for Fire EMS and the Board of Health and the Ambassador Program. So the next goal is racial equity and social justice. So in FY21 we added 80,000 diversity equity and inclusion initiatives and to confront systematic racism. This proposal maintains that for a new round of initiatives in FY22 that will include training for staff and elected officials. And we also, I don't know if it was last year or this current fiscal year, became a member of the Government Alliance on Racial Equity. Yeah, so here to go a little bit off script, the community safety working group has offered a direction for the town to address the needs that have gotten unaddressed. They've recommended $1.1 million to fund and create a Department of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. And again, we're working with our core equity team and creating the position of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Coordinator to better address this mission. And so that's what this funding from ARPA and taking a current halftime position to try and bolster that activity. The next goal is economic vitality. And we mentioned earlier about the money to support the update of the zoning bylaw and the Capital Improvement Program. So yes, so filling the economic development director position so that we're poised to surge out of this pandemic in a good way. And then we'll also be having staff, i.e. Mr. Mangano, who's going to be really taking on the parking improvements that have been lying there ever since the community, the parking working downtown parking working group has been together. Yeah, it's weird. Whenever I bring up parking, everyone laughs at me. They all give me this look like, yeah, we've tried that before. You're going to do it. You're going to do it. So we've got a few more slides here on specific economic vitality, sort of projects that are going on. Paul, do you want to walk through some of these? Sure. So we, again, working with, this is our planning staff. So they've been working directly with the Business Improvement District and the Chamber to move forward on a lot of our initiatives that, again, there have been some grants that have been achieved by, that have been garnered by the bid in the Chamber. So I think there's a lot that will be happening downtown soon. So I think we're going to walk through these one by one. So the next few slides, and Paul, that you touch on, on the next few, as we scroll down are some projects that are in the works and that were mostly funded by outside sources. Yeah, I think that's one of the real exciting parts of our project, of what we're presenting tonight. So many of these projects are being funded by federal, state, or private funds. So we're just going to run through the things that we have on the list that are either being done or about to be done. And it's a pretty impressive list. So you already voted to go in a certain direction of the historic North Common. You have a public hearing coming up on that to make a final decision about parking and things like that. $1.4 million from multiple sources. We're hoping to get additional funds to either substitute for some of this money or to expand the scope to allow us to do some of the work around the Common to fix sidewalks and roads in the immediate vicinity of the Common. North Amherst Library, this came through as such a crucial point. A private donor offered to help support it and through going through sequentially, getting bids, doing design, making sure that designs were approved, were okay with everyone. Now we're in building up the construction phase. We will be going out to bid and then construction happening. And again, the anonymous donor is very eager to see this going forward. And this should not be costing the town hardly anything. We might be using some DPW crews to help with some of the landscaping and things like that, but this is a really game-changing moment for North Amherst, I think. The Pomeroy Village Center, many of you were there at the public meeting that we had. Again, a very successful $1.5 million grant from MassWorks to help look at that intersection that, again, is going to be in front of you and for your decision as to whether we're going to go in the route of the roundabout or if we want to go in the route of the signalized intersection. The East Adley Road multi-use path, we got another grant to extend it across South Pleasant Street and then go up Mill Lane to Groff Park. So we will have completed the ability to walk safely from a major concentration of residents, especially a lot of young residents, to the brand-new rehabilitated Groff Park, which we're really thrilled about. It's a multi-year, these things take 10 years and so this has been an effort for town staff for a long time, so we're so happy to see it coming into fruition. Again, downtown, a private park grant or a state park grant that allowed us to install a playground in Kendrick Park. It's one of the things that when we're doing downtown things, parents would say, you know, we don't have a place for our kids to go and this will help the downtown become more of a destination, so you can go get your slice of pizza, you can come down, let your kids play while you're enjoying your friends in a safe environment. And I'll just add that there was some CPA funding in addition to this $400,000 dollar grant to support that project. Dog Park, another grant from the Stanton Foundation to create the dog park on the South landfill and that project is moving forward as well. All right, the next goal is housing affordability. So some of these items are things that have been done recently. So Secure 730,000 to create the affordable housing future development at Belcher Town Road and that was CPA funding and funds from the Affordable Housing Trust. There's $30,000 allocated in the Capital Improvement Program for the Housing Production Plan Update and there have been allocations of grant funds for rental assistance and temporary shelter initiatives, some of that out of CARES funds, some of that I believe was also out of CDBG. So again, we have high level staff who are working on all these projects because these are high priorities for the town, both on the Belcher Town Road, E Street School, and the shelter. And then the last goal is capital investments. So the two pieces on the funding side proposing $100,000 of the American rescue money to hire a contract for or to hire or contract for a capital projects manager for when we have multiple building projects plus some other large-scale projects in the enterprise funds going. We wanted a position that could really focus on the day-to-day to keep things on budget and on time and not taking all the department head staff from these projects. And then the other piece here, as I mentioned before, is roughly a total $3.4 million which would fund design and OPM services for the fire station project and the DPW project. And then the last little piece Paul just had here is that staff have been assigned to support the school building committee. The procurement officer in particular spent a lot of time recently helping with the request for services for owner's project manager, putting a lot of time in to move that forward, and that committee is on track. And Paul's going to wrap it up with how to stay involved. Yes, so we have lots of different ways for people to contact us. Obviously, counselors can email me anytime and we'll get answers for your questions and we'll share them with all counselors. The FY22 page is up and we have the Engage Amherst page that's active right now. Members of the public can email counselors, all counselors at one time, by writing to town counselor to amherstma.gov. And all of our documents, every document you see here, plus additional documents, the school budgets, the library budgets are all available at their amherstma.gov.com. So with that, we took too much time. I apologize for the amount of time we took. So if we have questions you have. First of all, thank you to all of you that put so much time into the document that led them to be made of the book aid this way. We're going to just remind you that this is just the beginning of the process. I also want to remind you of what the charter allows us to do and does not allow us to do. It allows us to cut things but it doesn't allow us to add things. So are there council comments at this time? Dorothy. Just a brief comment of praise for the expansion of the North Amherst Public Library. It's beautiful and I hope that we get a chance to see more beautiful buildings. Thank you. Pat? I guess I'm struggling with $130,000 for the Cress program. It feels very inadequate. And so I just want to say that I have concern there. I'm going to be looking at it carefully. I just I heard what you said. I guess I would like to know what the process is and that and to have some kind of timeline to how it will be implemented and and quite literally are we actually going to do this or not because I'm concerned that we're not going to follow through and I don't pin this on any individual or anything but it just feels like my heart is aching in a certain kind of way. You're so little given to the program. I understand. I think you're not alone feeling that way and I'm sure others feel that way as well. So there is a design for a program that the community safety working group put together with a lot of work and a lot of effort. And I think I see that is where they have established where we need to get to. But we don't get there in one step. You know, we need to figure out again, like I said, what calls are going to be transit transitioned to community responders. We need to talk with the fire department and APD and understand exactly we can't let calls fall through the cracks. We need to hire people. We need to train people. We need to do job descriptions for people. And the reason I said that it's not been done in the Commonwealth is not for not to brag, but to say that is it makes it a bigger challenge. If there was a model that existed somewhere and said do this, that would be so much better for us and we'd be able to move, turn it around very quickly, but we're going to be breaking ground on every decision that we make. So it's going to take time. We are going to be assigning, I am assigning our high level staff to make sure it happens because we feel like this is something the council said we want to see happen. And so we are committed to doing that. And I think is 130,000 enough? I don't know. It depends how quickly we move forward on it. And we'll look at that as we move forward. Thank you. I just want to mention I can't raise my hand because I'm a co-host, but Paul, do you see this as an area for potential grant funding? Yes. There are Department of Mental Health has grants. And I think there will be a lot. There's a lot of groups out there who might find what we're doing based on the goals established by the working group is to be pretty attractive because it's really different than what other communities are doing. Yeah. Alyssa. My apologies. I didn't expect to get caught on so soon. Thank you. Thank you for the new format. I appreciate that it was a lot of work to consider trying to do something like this in a year like this. But I think it's a really creative approach. It took me a few minutes to figure out where Sean's material was coming from. And then I went to the Engage Amherst site and I found it because I'm so used to us getting slides of the paper that's in our packet. And that paper is not in our packet because it's an interactive website. So that's exciting. I just want the public to also understand because we had these comments earlier during public comment that we didn't have this budget either. As Paul mentioned, this was still getting refining touches on it tonight late. We didn't get it until during the meeting. So it's not like we the town council knew what was in it before the public did because we didn't. So it's all new to us. And so I really appreciate the highlights you've captured. One thing I will point out, which I suppose in the long run is not particularly problematic because you've got the important part, which is the funding parts. But when you transfer the policy goals portion of the town manager's performance goals to pages 24 and 25 and then also in the interactive story, it doesn't include the updated date from community health and safety. And it doesn't include the two resolutions. So it was using the wrong version of the goals. And so that happens when you have versions of goals. And that's why we started dating our versions. So yay for that. And one thing I wonder if you could speak to briefly tonight, Paul, is that when it comes to the work of the community safety working group, I know we've mentioned that we expect that they may be coming before the council on the 17th. But one of the things I've been emphasizing all along is that they're reporting to you, right? And so you were able to say, Hey, I was able to go to all their meetings. I know what kinds of things they want, even though the report's not ready yet, right? Because we had this really compressed timeframe. And so the reports do for May 15, potentially coming to town council. But again, the be all of their charge was not to report to the town council. It was to tell you what we needed to do to do things differently in the budget. And so that seems to have been accomplished. But one point of confusion that's come up with several community members is the consultant's work is not done with that report. That large consulting contract is not completed as a March 15 report or as of them coming along, I'm sorry, May 15th reporter them coming along on May 17th. There's a whole nother section of work that they're planning to do, right? Could you just elaborate on that a little bit? Because some people were thinking, Oh, well, they have reported to community safety working group already they're done. I'm like, huh, that was just the first part of what they were doing. So I mean, so, so I do the community safety working group did take votes on specific motions. And I mentioned those in the report. So they did take active positions on things and made that recommendation. They are working on their final report and they have a subcommittee working on that. The we recognize that the consultant had a compressed timeline that was known to everyone when the bidding happened. And I think the they're in close contact, the consultant with the leadership of the community safety working group to make sure that the community safety working groups gets the information it needs from the consultant to be able to build their report over the next couple of weeks. Did I follow up on that? Because I'm still lost. Please listen. So that contract was were over $50,000. It was not for a singular report that was due March 15. Is that covering all the items that were in the community safety working groups charge, including the whole part two of their charge that wasn't needing to be completed until June? Because right now we're we're hearing about an 18 page report and that I'm not I'm not understanding. Okay, I don't know how long the report is. But the we have a specific RFP that went out for specific things that were focused on the beginning the first half of the working groups mission, which was the more intensive research that needed to be done. So the second entire part of the charge is not going to be addressed by that consulting group that consulting group's work will be finished when this report to you March 15. I'm sorry, May 15 is done. Yeah, so this this I think this is the police oversight civilian oversight board or whatever it is that that whole part to isn't going to be covered, except in terms of general recommendation. Yeah, they're they're they're probably going to be joy. I'd rather leave it to the community safety working group to explain where they're going to come from. But they I think you'll see recommendations about how to handle that as well. Anything else, Melissa? I'm just a little confused about the charge, but we can talk more about that in the next meeting. Okay. And as Paul mentioned, they'll be coming for the council at our next meeting. Darcy. Yeah, I just also want to say that I think this budget looks way more accessible to the public. And I thank Sean and Brianna very much for that. I have two questions and they they both relate to staffing. First on climate action. I welcome the $100,000 set aside. Though the types of actions needed will clearly cost more in the future, more like in the millions. The funding request of ECAC was for a department level position based on the number and types of actions that will need to be implemented under the proposed climate action plan will need that type of position to be able to implement those actions. And I'm interested in finding out what you have in mind for the $10,000. I hear that it's for an intern, but I just would like you to respond to that request for a department level position. Also, the community safety working group also requested a department level position and the $30,000 coordinator position is not that. And can you explain that and where this position would fit in and what authority the coordinator would have? Paul, do you want me to take the first part? Yeah. So, so, so we haven't got received the official resiliency plan yet. So we did our best to try to, I mean, we've seen drafts of it, but we haven't seen the official version. So we tried our best to include some pieces into the FY22 budget proposal to help with that once it's officially released. But we know, again, that's an area that we'll have to come back to and revisit in future budgets. I know it's really not be enough. Thank you, Sean. I want to add also that as of just today, there was a request to move that agenda item to June because the report won't be ready yet. Okay, Dorothy, you had another part to your question, Paul. So the DEI coordinator role. And so what we're looking at for that is to leverage an existing position to create a DEI coordinator position and to work within the HR department and with the HR because that's where we want to focus our activities. This is a person who's really interested in developing their skills in this direction. And also we, I feel like it will be a big asset to the town to have to start to move in this direction. So what authority would that person have? Sorry. I'm just wondering what authority a coordinator would have. So a coordinator has a role that it's not a director position. It's a coordinator position. They have a role to contribute to conversations at all different levels to help coordinate outreach to areas to try and broaden the diversity of our workforce to also work on retention issues. So it's at a certain level, sort of. So, yeah. Yeah. And I think I'll just add, you know, and Paul and I have talked about this. We view this as sort of the start again of something that might evolve into the future. I've seen this work really well at the schools. I'm sure you've heard lots of good things about the school human resources department and a lot of their initiatives to diversify their staff and retain staff and recruit staff. And so again, this is sort of a first step and we've seen a model here in town where it's worked really well. Right. So I would just add that that is a super important piece of what we're doing with both equity and sustainability as far as integrating it into hiring and training and so on. But we also need staff to be able to implement on a department level so that they will have, you know, sort of equal status with the other department heads so that they can implement these programs easily. It's hard to be a coordinator and get the attention of department heads from what I can tell. Alyssa. Okay. Are there any other comments? Okay. Again, thank you. And this will now be referred to the finance committee. I really want to urge all counselors to make sure that if you have specific questions about various areas of the budget, please note the calendar that is in your packet tonight in terms of which departments and portions of the budget will be discuss