Um, so I'm going to call a meeting to order Governor Baker's March 12 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. General law C 30 a paragraph 20 allows us to hold this virtual town council meeting. This is our first town council meeting using zoom. We've used teams for the previous two. And it is also our first virtual town council meeting, where we have provided for public comment, and we'll have more about that later. Um, I will call upon each counselor by name. At that time, they should unmute their mic and say present. This will indicate that they can hear me and we can hear them. Please remember to mute your mic after saying present. So let's start with shallony ball mill present. Alyssa Brewer present and I just want to add for the newer people that you don't have to press the mute button. You can just press and hold down your spacebar.  Thank you. Pat D'Angelo's present. Darcy DuMont. Present. Lynn Griezmer present. Mandy Joe Hanneke present. Dorothy Pam. Present. Evan Ross. I am present. George Ryan. Present. Kathy Shane. Present. Steve Schreiber. Present. Andy Steinberg. Present. And Sarah Schwartz is still not present. We have a quorum at the council present. I'm calling the March 30, 2020 meeting to order. And we are doing this meeting as we mentioned virtually. And the time is now about 635. This meeting includes audio video and is available live on Amherst media. It is also being recorded. And there will be minutes of the meeting as normal. We have a few questions and answers. Only use the chat can be technical questions or issues. To make a comment or ask a question, please click raise hand. Make sure you can all find raise hand at this point. And if technical difficulties arise every as a result of you utilizing remote participation. And if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section below. And they will actually make sure it's taken care of. You do not need to call or text or send an email. If it gets desperate, somehow or another, I guess you could text me and I'll see if I can. Let them know. We're going to start with announcements. Until we can get that person back on unless it becomes impossible. And then we will have to go ahead to the meeting. So upcoming town council meetings that are scheduled this present. Are both April 6 and April 13 at 630. They will be virtual. They will include zoom, such as tonight. And they will be broadcast by Amherst media. They will include public comment, which can be done by zoom or phone. And the instructions are at the end of the agenda and on the screen at this time. We're also restarting our standing committee meetings. We had one today, which was okay. And zoom will be included for public comment. At those as well. And you can either make public comment by zoom or by phone. And then we will have to go ahead and get that person back on. And then we will have to go ahead and make public comment. And then the instructions will be included in all of those agendas. The first meeting is going to be on Monday, April 6 at 930. And that is the organized organizing meeting of the town services and outreach. Tuesday, April 7th. At 2 30 is the finance committee meeting. Wednesday, April 8 at 830. At 2 30 is the governance organization and legislation committee. We do have our joint special meetings of the town council and school committee coming up to build school committee vacancy. They will be by zoom and with Amherst media. And the first of those and perhaps the only one we don't know yet until the candidates have all filed their papers. The second one is on Tuesday, the 14th at 6. If we need to, we will go on to Tuesday, the 16th at 6. We'll discuss that later on. I want to call attention. To these third volunteers needed slide. So the Amherst senior center, which joined us last week. And Mary back with us. She mentioned that she got a particularly great response. Out of the announcement on the show. Or on the council meeting. And so, please contact Donna Hancock. At 413259. 3164. You can sign up on the website. Count of Amherst senior center under request support offer. So we're going to go on to general public comment. And I'd like you to put the instructions back up, Sean. So if you would like to make. A comment. You need to your. If you're on the site. Then you need to actually raise your hand. And by, and if you're not on the site and you're calling in by phone, then you need to press star nine. And that will allow us to see who would like to make public comment. Is there any public comment at this time? Sean, are you. And I think are you checking all that with me? Yes, I am. Okay. I'm sorry. I think we're going to go on with our agenda. We have no proclamations at this time. We're going to go on to presentations and discussion. And the first actually will be called bottle man. Because we're going to actually wait for the people from. Cooley Dickinson hospital. To come in when they will come in at seven 15. So Paul, I turn it over to you. Thank you. And you get the sort of present.  Can you hear me now? Is that any better or not? I hear you. Clearly. Okay. Thank you. So, um, So amid the chaos that we have going on, um, we have a, before we start this update, I have a very important day coming up, which is April 1st, which is Wednesday and that's census day. Um, I'm hoping that everybody who's been watching or is on this, um, Zoom chat, um, has filled out their census form. Um, It's a very important thing for the town of Amherst, because so much of our, um, federal funds and state funds are dependent on how we do on the census. This will be a very challenging year. We had a really good team out working the, um, To make sure everybody was going to be counted and then a lot of social networking and then, um, The sort of social distancing droid little hole in that whole strategy. So we have to do other means of getting everyone to, um, Sign up for the census. And we ask you to help us. And, you know, All of our weight well laid plans were shot. Um, And so do it now. If you have tenants, We ask you to make sure that you fill out or they fill out their forms and, um, And if you are doing zoom cocktail parties, It's a great conversation starter for any cocktail party that you might have. Next slide. So, Um, So this, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, So this tonight, we have the same kind of setup. So I'm going to give you a status for our public health update is just going to be a Q and a for any questions the councillors have for Julie Federman. Uh, And then we have. Our president CEO of Kulin Dickinson, and they're in director of Community Health in government relations. as you saw last week, another thing major new. There was the new statement by the president of the United States, noting that his sort of advisory is going out to the end of April. From our point of view, town staff, we're looking at this in terms of months, not days or weeks. We think this is gonna be a long-term new situation. And that's how we're preparing our staff. That's how we're preparing our operations. While we know everybody's looking at May 1st, we're, I think that's gonna be closer to June 1st. It certainly won't be over by Easter. And we are going to be adjusting and moving forward. The next slide. And there is a typo on the slide, first off. So it's not 339,000 patients tested, it's 39,000. There's two threes in there, so you ignore that. But even this information is updated. As of today, there are 5,752 total cases. That's an up 797 from yesterday. There are almost 43,000, I'm sorry. There are 56 deaths up from 48, and there's 43,000 patients tested so far. So they're making progress on the testing. Cases are starting to go, continue to go up as are the deaths. Next slide. So the two new things from the town of Amherst is that as of today, I've asked as many employees as possible to work remotely, we really need to keep our workforces separated. Our core team, which you will see later, is we will no longer be meeting together, which we had been because it's, we all know the value of being together as part of just for better level of communication. And as members of the council mentioned earlier, you get to read who everybody is and you can see their faces. And it's really important for team building. And we feel like the health of our core team is really important. And so we're all working separately in separate locations when we do our meetings from now on. As you know, we do these every morning for one or two hours, and sometimes at night too, just to keep up to speed on things. The other thing that we did in conjunction with the superintendent of schools, we closed off all of our playground equipment and broke them off so they can't be used. We did that because we could not keep up and continue to sanitize the playground equipment. We will maintain access to our plate, to our parks and outdoor spaces because we think people need to recreate, but we will not, we're gonna keep people, we're trying to keep people off of the playground equipment itself. Next slide. So we're sort of, we're moving forward with trying to communicate with the public. And so we have first a new website that is up and that's live and it will be becoming more and more populated with information. It's about AmherstCOVID19.org. And so you can go look at that now if you'd like. It's, well, more and more information will be updated. It's updated on a daily basis. We are also going to be doing two one hour call-in events or call-in, text-in, chat-in, however we're gonna do it. These will be Zoom events that will be shared widely. So it's, we looked at Facebook Live, but felt that was just a certain segment of our population and we wanted to make sure anybody who had an internet connection could be participating. So that's gonna be Thursday, April 2nd. We're gonna do two, one at 12 noon and one at 5 p.m. And on that, those events, there'll be me as town manager, the superintendent of schools, Mike Morris and our health director, Julie Fetterman. So this is, there's no presentation. It's just gonna be us answering any kind of questions that folks have and we'll be there, we are ready to be there an hour and see how that goes. So, and the third thing that we'll be doing is I think I'm going to continue my cup of joe, but we're gonna do it virtually. So I'll be at my kitchen counter and you'll be wherever you are and we can share a cup of coffee on Friday, April 10th from eight to 9.30, next slide. So this is, we usually, every morning we start with a status report of how that, about the health of our firefighters, our police officers, our dispatchers, our DPW workers. And just so you know, again, over the last week we're in really good shape. We have a few people in quarantine and that's not unusual for an organization this size. The, we've added additional firefighters, moved up some folks from the student and call force. And so they're training, so they're ready to go and fill in the gaps if needed. We have added a wastewater treatment plan officer a treatment person. And then two things I want to mention, the wastewater treatment plan, we have to dedicate a fair number of staff now to flushing the sewer mains because people are putting those disposable wipes and gloves and things down, flushing them down the toilet. And they don't just go away, they get clogged in our pipes and that causes sewer backups. And we've got much work that we have to do. To have two crews going out for various projects next week, it's things we'd rather have them doing something else but now they're fixing these kinds of problems that are developing. So again, we always ask you the flushable wipes are not flushable, don't flush wipes, flush twice. We need the revenue. So the other thing was transfer station is having modified their processes and they're basically creating social distancing, trying to minimize the number of cars that are on site and doing a pretty good job. We got a nice letter this morning. So I'm congratulating us and thanking the staff at the transfer station for doing such a terrific job. Pretty soon you'll see road work starting. We have been doing road work on East Havley Road. We're getting work started at Groff Park. These are projects that can happen outside because they are socially distanced when they're doing the work. The other road work that you'll see is on Southeast Street, Pelham Road and Henry Street. These are projects that will come forward. They can't start until the plants open so you can get the material so the plants haven't opened yet because the weather hasn't been cooperative. Next slide. So I talked about we're moving more and more people into working remotely. Next week we will be starting to roll out our regular meetings for all the other committees that there's a lot of pent-up demand and so we wanna start working that through starting with our adjudicatory committees and other committees that have time schedules and things like that. We're gonna manage that through the month of April because it takes, as you can see, a fair amount of IT support to make these things work. It's a new technology for everybody and we wanna make sure that the public isn't excluded so that we're having a product that we can make sure the public is included on. So this week our staff are working on those committees and we'll just get a schedule for the month of April so we can keep the work of the town moving because this is the way we're gonna be doing business for at least two months, I think, probably longer. And then I mentioned already the AmherstCOVID19.org website and the other things. So the one thing I want to say about Zoom is that think of it as a meeting room and if you wanna have a meeting of your committee, you can't schedule a meeting of a public meeting of a committee without scheduling a room. So in order to post a meeting at the town parks office, you're gonna have to have a Zoom address and it can't be your own personal account because it has to be the one that the town is approving and so that it's got all the requirements, it has the recording capability and all that stuff. We really are gonna work very hard because we don't want committees setting up random meetings without them being posted properly. You wouldn't have a meeting in your living room of your committee because you have to post it, you have to use it in a public space that people are used to getting to. So that's the stuff that we're gonna be communicating to our board and committee chairs. So next. Okay, so we're going to go to the public health update and I wonder if Julie is still around. You're, you're. I'm sure, and can you hear me? I'm on my phone.  So, we're gonna go to the next slide. So again, this is a reminder who our core team is and Julie is the health director. Tim Nelson is our EMS director and course fire chief Scott Livingstone has been our is our police chief and he really is coordinating our dispatch units. Guilford is our DPW superintendent, Sonia. He's about to take her turn in the spotlight as we start to talk about finances coming forward. And that's what we expect to be doing next week for the council and getting the meetings of JCPC and finance committee lined up as well. And Dave Zomek is the assistant town manager and he does pretty much everything. So just looking to see if Julie is available and go to the next slide. Are you able to hear me in the meeting? That sounds really good, Julie. So just to introduce Julie. So Julie is our health director and then Brown is our public health nurse. Jen isn't with us, but I just wanted to make sure you knew who our team was in the health department. So I guess the question for Lynn is if there are folks who have questions, you don't really have a presentation piece for this but I want to make Julie available at every council meeting for questions. So on the council side, if you have questions, Julie, please raise your hand. Julie, you provided us with very, very thorough updates and continue to keep the website updated as well. At this point, I'm not seeing any hands. Okay. Okay, is there anything specific you want to make sure we know about? No, there wasn't anything specific. I think that Paul and I just wanted you to know that I would be available throughout the call today. So that if anything comes up throughout the course of the meeting, I would be available for questions. Okay, thank you. Appreciate that. Paul, is there anything more with the slides? Darcy, I see Darcy's hand. Oh, I'm sorry. Darcy, please unmute, ask your question. Wondered if you could give us any information about where there might be local testing that's coming available. That's a great question, Darcy. I think that later on in the call, Jeff Harness and Joanne Marcosi from Cooley Dickinson Hospital are going to be addressing that. So I think that I should leave that question for them. Okay. I can just jump in on that. So the town would not do any testing. If someone wanted to do a testing site in town, we would coordinate with them and provide the facilities that they need to support that. But it's up to the hospitals too, with the medical professionals to provide that service. I have a question, but I don't want to raise my hand. I'm sorry, Steve. I see your hand, but there is a thing at the very end if you put participant up and then you're under panelists, which is us. And then you can raise your hand. I should know how to do it, but oh, here it is. Can I? Excellent. Okay, Steve, go ahead. So this is a question that I had sent to Paul and I copied Julie, but we're starting to see, we live in an area not far from the university and after a week of quiet, after spring break, we've seen really a flood of apparently students moving back into town and there might be a number of reasons for that. One is tired of being with their parents somewhere else. And two is that they might be from an area that seems to have a curfew or three is who knows why. But with those students, we're also seeing an uptick in parties and we're really concerned about that up for the obvious social contact reason, but it just seems incredibly reckless for that to be happening. And I was wondering if there's any action that the town could take to have a stricter limit than the state or, and I know that the police are not supposed to be, they really don't have authority to be breaking up these types of parties. But to me, it seems incredibly reckless to have this happening and putting us all at risk. Yeah, so I can take that Julie. That's a really good question. It's something that we did discuss with our group. The police chief sees his role and his force role in terms of educating the public. And so having, if there is a party or a group of more than 10 people, they're please report that and they will go and they will start to talk to the folks who are there, educate them about the dangers. His force is totally educated and understand the situation and try to keep parties and gatherings lower than 10. That's what we think is the safe. We think the safe thing is to be home without going out to any other groups, but we know that that might not be realistic for some age groups. So again, anything over 10, that's the number we're working from and he's happy to send his police officers to have a conversation with folks, I guess is how I'd say it. Thank you.  Please unmute and go ahead. So this seems to be conflicting information about masks and it would be really helpful to know who should be wearing it and what kind of masks different people can wear and should wear. Thank you. Thank you, Shalini. I'll take that question. This is Julie. So yes, there have been some things going around by email about masks in the past few days. And I wanna reiterate that what we're following is the recommendation that comes from the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Public Health, which is that no one is wearing a mask unless they've been instructed by a healthcare provider to put on a simple mask as they bring themselves to a doctor's office for potential testing or if they've been instructed to wear one at home for some reason because their ability to isolate or quarantine at home is compromised a bit in terms of how many rooms they have in their house. So, and then the other people who wear masks are healthcare providers and first responders who are possibly going to be coming in contact with an active case. They then wear N95s, which people are becoming more familiar with. Those are the more complex respirators that are used because healthcare workers and first responders, if they're dealing directly with a patient, they're coming in close contact with them. Does that answer your question? Shalini, you're on mute. Oh, okay. Can you hear me? Am I on muted now? Oh boy. Okay. Yes, we wanted to know if that answered your question. Yes, I had a follow up question. Given that the symptoms are not known till later, especially for some people like, let's say cashiers at grocery stores. Oh, would it make sense to ask them because if the symptoms are not showing, they're not being asked to wear it, but they have so much contact. So could we identify maybe populations that have more interaction and have them wear some kind of mask? What do you think? It's a good question, Shalini. And we talk about these things with the Department of Public Health on our biweekly calls now. And the science is still showing us that there is this possibility that asymptomatic people could be transmitting the virus, but it doesn't look like they're going to be doing that through. You're breaking up, Julie. And we have the coughing and sneezing. So through your nose too. So I think all of the grocery stores are taking very good care to have wipes and for there to be gloves and to make sure surfaces are clean because so many people are coming through there. But there's been no guidance to suggest that having any kind of store clerk wearing a mask is actually going to protect the public. Dorothy, you have a question, please on you. Okay, can you hear me now? Yes. This afternoon, I received a robo call from a skin doctor in town saying that people coming in for skin questions, nothing to do with any COVID-19 symptoms whatsoever, were to come in with their own masks on and to understand that everybody in the doctor's office would be masked. And if you didn't, if that wasn't convenient, you could sit in your car and do it from the phone. They're trying to get people to take, do virtual skin things by taking photos of it. So this had nothing to do with any flu symptoms. I think we're going to be masked. So I know that the official position now is no, but I just, I personally think it's coming in a few days. And if you go online, you'll can find the directions to make your own masks. And a lot of people are doing this. And if you, you know, these are not medical masks, they're not perfect, they don't, these are nothing that a medical person would wear if they had any other choice, maybe in colorful fabrics, but I think that we're going to be, need to be masked if we go outside. My opinion. Well, certainly, as with any type of, of health. Julie, you're not coming through. Good sir. I'm not coming through. No. Now you are. Now I am. Okay. So Dorothy, thank you for that. I think if people feel more comfortable wearing a homemade mask, I, you know, we're not saying that people shouldn't do that. I just can't at this time say that I have science behind me that says that that is an action that we recommend people take. We're paying close attention to this. If I, if I learned different differently, of course we would alert the community. I do want to say that it's very important that people not waste what we call simple masks or surgical masks because those are really needed by healthcare providers to put on people who are potentially contagious to protect them in the, when they're working with them. But yeah, so at this time, I can't say that I know one way or the other if a recommendation is coming that people wear masks. Are there any other questions from the council? I believe Paul that our guests from Cooley Dickinson have joined us and why don't you go ahead and introduce them? Okay, so you're the next slide and the next slide. So we're really privileged to have Joanne Markuzzi who is here as the president and CEO of Cooley Dickinson and Jeff Arnes who's the director of community health and government relations. These two folks have been working day and night as you can imagine. I can't believe that they gave us the time to be part of our meeting tonight. So I really appreciate that they've done that. And so we asked them to just do an update on what's going on with Cooley Dickinson. It's such an important facility and our whole part of the state. And Joanne and Jeff are two of the top people there. So we really appreciate you being here. And Joanne, if you wanna start off or see what we had, I posed a few questions to you the types of things that I think most people are gonna be asking. So thank you for being here. Thank you. We're actually pleased to be here. We do see that one of our many important jobs right now is to communicate with the public to let you know both what we're doing and what information we have about best practices, et cetera. So if I could just start with maybe three or four minutes and share some information with you and then I'll ask Jeff to comment briefly on what we're doing with various community-based organizations and local municipality-selected officials. And then we are more than happy to take any questions. So I wanna start with our staff and just say how incredible they are. You should be really proud and confident of the kinds of people who work at Cooley. They are working in extremely difficult situations. And I have to say, are doing it brilliantly. Not only doing everything clinically, they can, but really being sensitive to how challenging this is for patients, particularly in patients who can't have visitors right now and trying to make up for that real loss. So we, I thank them and I just wanna be clear how proud I am of them. We're also really grateful and about the kind of support we've gotten from everybody throughout our community, whether that's donation of supplies, financial support that people have given us and also just the expressions of appreciation that the community puts up, whether it's signs that they post or things on our website or letters we get and we share those with our staff and it really means a lot during this time. I also want to comment on how fortunate we are. And I always feel this, but particularly during this pandemic to be a part of Mass General, which is also a part of partners. We are getting tremendous support and resources, certainly incredibly information about best practice. These are people who are world famous infectious disease physicians, lots of policies and we are in touch with them at least every day, if not more often. Also, we have an I'd say unprecedented amount of collaboration with the other hospitals in Western Mass. So Bay State and Holyoke and Mercy and Berkshire so that we can try to make sure that together we aren't duplicating efforts and that we're sharing information and eventually resources when we need to, what we call use our surge capacity. So if one hospital has room in an ICU and the other doesn't, we will quickly make sure that we best use all of our capacity. I heard a lot of questions about testing and we certainly get those a lot. So let me share with you the Cooley perspective on testing. It's still very limited and it's a little complicated. People think, well, how hard can it be to do tests? There are actually a number of different resources you need to be able to do a certain amount of testing. So from the staff who can do the tests who have to wear their personal protective equipment so the special masks you heard about to specific supplies you have to use when doing these tests to the what's called transport viral media which is how you then take the test, put them in a thing, I'm not a clinician so some kind of thing and then it goes to the lab and the lab has to have capacity. So over the last few weeks, there's been variation each day on which of those different parts of the chain, if you will, are most limited. The good news is we are now definitely increasing the capacity on most days over what it was the day before. So we've done about almost 400 tests since this started. So in some ways you could say that's a lot but when you think about the size of our entire community, that's obviously a very small part of it. And so we have very strict criteria about who can get tested. You have to be referred by a primary care physician. You have to meet certain categories of people who are at high risk. You absolutely have to be symptomatic. And even if you're symptomatic, if you have mild symptoms, your doctor will likely tell you there is no value in your getting tested. As you know, we have no treatment right now. And in fact, you are just putting yourself more at risk to come out for the testing and you're certainly putting others at risk. And so typically you'll be told to self-isolate at home and to be in touch with your doctor if things get worse. So we do envision that over the next weeks that the capacity will slowly start to increase and we will therefore relax our criteria. But we're always trying to make sure that without limited resource, we're using it for the people who need it the most. Certainly inpatients are our top priority as our healthcare workers who are symptomatic. So we can get them back on the job if they are not positive. If you don't have a primary care physician, we actually can get you linked up with one and they can do the introduction and the care telephonically. So you just can call or we have a special COVID community resource line we set up and you can call that, you can find it on our website and they'll link you up to a primary care physician. So we have, as you probably know, in recent weeks stopped all elective care and that's both to save our supplies so that we have as much supplies as we can when the volume of COVID patients increases. And we also wanted to stop people coming in and having social distancing as much as we could. So in addition to elective surgeries and some people were happy that they now had an excuse not to get their colonoscopy. But in fact, we also have very little care coming to the physician offices and other outpatient practices. So in general, people are asked to call their physician if it's a visit that can be deferred like it was your annual physical. Typically they'll look to reschedule that. Otherwise they're trying to do as much on the phone as possible and then only limiting what people come in when they really need to be seen. They do not ask that the patients coming in to be seen for a non-respiratory issue wear a mask. So that dermatology practice is not one of ours. And then we are also planning for what we know will come which is a real surge in the volume. Right now we're relatively quiet although getting busier in our ICU. Today we had 12 positive patients in the hospital with several more who were waiting for test results. So and that has grown each day. But we are planning for how can we increase our capacity over the next few weeks. And we've already figured out how to about double both our ICU capacity and our med surge capacity. I know someone's gonna ask me, is that enough? And I don't know, nobody knows, right? We don't know whether this will be as bad as some of the countries where it's really hit or all of the efforts around social distancing and hand hygiene and all the preparing will make the difference. So I also wanna talk a little bit about what we're doing for our staff because as I said, they're an amazing resource and we need them and you need them in the weeks to come. So in addition to trying all we can to get them the supplies and equipment to keep themselves safe which is a constant battle. We're watching our supplies every day and trying to make sure that we have at least a week's worth and hoping that the next shipment comes in. We also have allowed as many employees as we can to work remotely. And then other employees who are available because let's say we've significantly reduced our physical therapy visits. Those staff are available then to work elsewhere. And if there's really no work for them to do, we actually have offered people up to eight weeks of a wage security program. So if they go home because we don't have work for them to do, they will continue to get paid for up to eight weeks as long as they remain available to come back in if and when we need them. And then all of the emotional and mental health support we can give them. We have 24 seven employee assistance program and myriad of different kinds of resources and videos and documents and materials to help them deal with what's such a difficult situation for themselves and also for their family. So I feel like before I turn it over to Jeff and I know you have heard this a million times, but I can't, I have to say it again. I can't tell you how important following the social distancing, the hand hygiene, the cleaning of surfaces is. This is the way that we can make a difference here and we're a little bit fortunate in being a little bit more rural than Boston. And I think it's coming to us a little after them. So we started the social distancing at an earlier stage and I think we should be able to be more successful at social distancing so we could hopefully avoid a surge that outstrips our capacity. So what I'm saying is whatever level of care and diligence you were doing yesterday, double it tomorrow. And even things like, I just wanna comment on the masks and you could say, well, it doesn't hurt to wear the homemade masks. You should know how suboptimal they are. We hope we never have to use them for our staff, but what worries me, and again, I'm not a clinician, I'm not a nurse. I just worry that people wearing these homemade masks are going to have a false sense of security and that they're gonna stop social distancing, they're gonna get too close to each other, they're gonna think they can go out and that is not a good idea. So it certainly doesn't hurt to have something covering you but don't make that change anything you would do because it's the only way our community is really gonna be able to get through this. So with that, I'll turn it over to Jeff and then we are both happy to take any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Joanne and hello, Town Council. I wanted to just give you a brief snapshot of some of the ways that we're in regular communication with our nonprofit peers, health and social service agencies. As everybody can imagine, people are concerned about getting their basic needs met. So access to food, housing, transportation, all of those things become really, really magnified when you don't have those services as available as you typically do. We also are thinking about people with mental health challenges and people who have a substance use disorder who need their medication. So those are all things that we are in the midst of working through with our community partners at nonprofits and also with municipal organizations. So working with health department leaders like Julie Federman and Amherst and others. Working with fire chiefs like Tim Nielsen and Amherst and other communities. And certainly Tom Manager Bachmann. But also elected officials, whether mayors, local senators and the representatives and to some extent our federal senators and representatives as well. To make sure that we're all staying informed, connected, trying to identify problems very, very early as they develop, trying to identify solutions very, very early as they become available. And I also want to point out to people that there is a list of resources on Cooley Dickinson's website. So folks that may be watching at home, if you are in need of resources, you can go to CooleyDickinson.org. You'll see the COVID-19 page very quickly and you will see a link and a boxed out information on the right that says COVID-19 Community Resources. So if you're in need of housing or whatnot, you can go to that website and look up and we have as much of information there as we can. We were updating that regularly as new information comes in. And Joanne mentioned the Community Call Center number that's available on our website. But let me read it out also just in case someone watching may not have access to the web. The telephone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. And we'll be announcing some expanded hours tomorrow, but essentially it's daytime, seven days a week. And again, the number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. So with that, I'll stop and turn it back over to you for questions and confidence. First of all, thank you so much for taking your very valuable time in this middle of this crisis to join us and to allow the public to hear what Cooley Dickinson has been doing as we go through this crisis. I'd like to ask the council, if you have questions at this time, please use the raise the hand function. Yes, Shalini, please unmute your mic and ask your question and then mute it again. Yes, again, thank you so much for taking time to be here. The question I had was in trying to figure out who goes out for testing, so what symptoms do we have or is that some, I mean, it's just like I know that the health professionals will tell us and guide us through that process, but I'm sure it's on everyone's mind at what point do we get sent for testing. And secondly, you mentioned 400 tests were done. Do you have a sense of what percentage of those came back positive? Thank you. Sure.  That's what they're there for and they will talk to you through that. And obviously it's a complicated, it depends on who you are and what your other comorbidities are in your health status. So I wouldn't want to comment on that. Plus I'm not a doctor or a nurse, so that wouldn't be appropriate. So just call your primary care physician. They're there and they can help you through it. So of the 388 tests of this morning that we had done, there were still almost 60. We were waiting results, although again, that's better turnaround time, fewer that we were waiting than in the past. And there were 51 positive.  Could you please ask your question? If you have any questions, make sure you unmute. This is a procedural question. On the chat bar. There are two questions from people. A very specific about, um, about methodics, whether they're at higher risk for succumbing to Corona virus. And somebody who tested positive and wants to know how he should be taken care of myself. So the question is how do those, is somebody answering those questions? Or how do they get answered? Dorothy, thank you for drawing your attention to the chat bar. The first question is, are meth addicts at higher risk for succumbing to Corona virus? This is Julie, would you like me to take that question? Sure. Okay. So. You're at the question is meth addicts. So, um, I think that would speak to the fact that anyone who's a meth addict, their general overall health status is not going to be very good. So they're at more risk for more severe disease. Should they contract it? Thank you. Another question is if you test positive. What are you supposed to do to take care of yourself? Julie, probably that's for you as well. Sure. So if you test positive, you will be given information by your healthcare provider. And then according to the town that you live in, so if you live Amherst, a public health nurse will be calling you to review with you what you should do. So the basic parameters are that you're in isolation. And so you should be staying home and not leaving the house. You should have your own room to sleep in. You should not be sharing bed clothes or towels or dishes with anyone. If you have the ability to have your own bathroom to use, you should not share your bathroom. You should not have to worry about cleaning it up specifically with disinfecting products because you're already ill. If you do have to share a bathroom with other people in your home, you want to have disinfecting supplies in that bathroom. And if you're well enough to clean up surfaces yourself in the bathroom. You stay home and isolated in your own room away from everyone else.  So the idea is social distancing is, is a giant continuum. And so when you're in isolation, you're at the far end of that continuum because you're actually actively contagious.  Would you please ask your question? Thank you. My question is for Joanne and Jeff and it's not necessarily a question, but sort of a reaffirmation. I've been watching the, and as many people probably have the statewide numbers. And they split it up by county. And at this point, Hampshire County is quite lucky in that we have beyond the islands, the lowest number of diagnosed cases. But you know, you talked about our social distancing starting earlier, we're a little bit more rural. Should this, that number, I'm afraid that that number might give people a wrong sense of security. And so, you know, what, what would you say to that number?  Or is it just because we're lagging behind everyone else? No, I don't think anyone really knows, but I would remind us that we're a relatively small county as well. When I've looked at the numbers, although we are certainly less as a percentage than a place like Boston, I, I, I wouldn't say we're way behind other non-urban areas. And it, we have, you know, we'll probably see increased numbers over the next week, because as we start to have more testing capacity. So what we don't know is all the people out there who are positive, but aren't getting tested because they don't meet this strict criteria. So we should assume that there are many people in our community who has it. And that's why we encourage so much social distancing. Thank you. Are there any other questions from the council at this time? Yes, Dorothy. I'm, I'm hoping that there'll be a test. When things calm down to find out if you had it, because I know that many people have it with very few symptoms or even no symptoms. And I know it's not clear yet whether having it. In that mild way is in fact like a vaccination, but I would really, I'm really interested in that. And do you know if there's any movement in that direction or any planning for that in the future? There's definitely research being done into, to do that. That would be one more great thing to have in the future. Are there any other questions from the council? Yes. Paul, you have a question. I do. For Joanne or maybe more for Jeff, what can the community do to help and support. I think that's great. I think that's good. Coolie Dickinson your, I have so much respect for the people who are working there. And some of the things you see on TV healthcare providers are just really the heroes and is putting themselves. In the middle of this waiting in. It's just kind of amazing. So. For people at home or people who want to support CDH, what would you say they can do. That would best serve you without getting in the way in essence. Okay. I'll say a few words first and then maybe you'd like to add to it. Well, certainly if people would like to donate money, that's extremely valuable to us right now because not only is our revenue. Lower than typical because we are not currently doing elective procedures, but also our expenses are unpredictable right now because we're having to buy so much personal protective equipment. So, but I think that the value of donations is extremely valuable to us. Beyond that on our website, I believe on our website, I'm not sure I can quickly find it, but there is a list of things that we could use support for and a way to make donations. We have someone in our development department who is designated to handle donations and be the interface on that. And beyond that, I will say, and I think Joanne probably would like to echo. I think that we have the community support behind this. You know, for the, for our colleagues on the front lines, our doctors, nurses, texts, who are going in every day to work with patients directly to know that the community is supporting them really, really means a lot and is greatly appreciated and needed. So I would add to what Jeff said that first of all, the donation of medical grade supplies, you might think that well, who would have them. For example, if you're a vet, turns out that offices have those and other people in the research community. So just talking that up to see who have particularly masks and gloves and things like that. So we can have as much on hand to protect our staff as possible. There are also people who have volunteered to do things like help the healthcare workers to get their gardening done or things like that. So anything you can do to help our staff is much appreciated. But I also think back to what Jeff said at the earlier, that there's so many people who are suffering right now in the community that we know are dealing with food insecurity. And so I think that doing all you can to address all the social determinants of health that just make it more likely that these people are going to really suffer if they do get the disease and also whatever can be done to get people housing and other support during this time. And I would like to add one more thing now that I have the webpage open and that is blood donations. That is needed in our region all the time, but particularly right now when people are more likely to stay at home, which we do want. However, for people who feel healthy and feel inspired to give blood, there is a regional need for that. So I actually went yesterday to donate blood at Bay State. Sometimes people think we just compete. That's not true. And I have to say it was very well set up. It's not, you're not in a little trailer. You're in a big room where you can really be separated, very well done to feel comfortable and confident that you're not at risk. And at least for me, it felt really good to be able to do that because I know how much we all need that blood. So I think that's a good point. Thank you. Thank you. Was that in their whole yoga facility? Yes. Yeah. So you don't even have to go all the way to Springfield. Thank you, Darcy. You have a question. Yeah, I just wanted to. Also thank you for all of the work that you're doing. And just wanted to make a comment about the idea that. Testing. Not necessarily being valuable. I mean, if I had it, I could see where it would be fine to just not go for testing. But if you're living with others. Just having the information. That you're positive. Is extremely value, valuable information to the rest of your family unit. Yeah, I'm sorry if I, if I'm in any way imply that it is valuable information to the rest of your family. Well, here's the harsh reality. We just don't have enough test to test all the people we'd like to test. And so. Criteria are in order to use the limited supply we have of testing materials so that we can test the highest priority, but absolutely we are working hard to try to get more of those supplies. And those resources so we can gradually. Get more of that information. Right. And the other reason that people. And I know you already know this. That people will want to know whether they have the immunity when at some point we can open our doors and go outside and do things. No, we will want to have that information. Whether or not we, we had it or not. So right now there is a, there is not a test to know if you have the immunity and you're immune so that, but hopefully they're working on creating that. But yes, there is so much more than needs to be done to, to expand the testing options in the testing capacity. And from what I understand from reading newspapers and again, I'm not a clinician either, but from what I understand, even if you have had it does not necessarily, immunity is not necessarily a given. There may be a period of time where you have immunity, but I think that's the case and how strong it is, is not known at this time. You have a question? Yes, I do. When you talked about revenues being down, can you right now both for Medicare and other health insurers, if you do virtual consults or if any of your doctors do them, rather than have people come in, can you get paid for those visits? Yes. Well, the governor has said that, that the insurers are required to pass and Medicare and Medicaid have said they would. Until now, Massachusetts was actually behind most states in terms of having policies that support telemedicine. So if there's anything good that can come out of this, I'm hoping that at least we will start to really have telemedicine as an option way past this pandemic. So yes, we believe we will get paid how much, and if we don't know. But we also know that certainly doesn't make up for the loss of revenue for all the physical therapy visits and surgical, elective surgeries that would have been done, but it will help. Thank you. And Dorothy Pam, you have a question. Yes. Dorothy, you need to unmute Dorothy. You need to unmute. Is that it now? Can you hear me now? Okay. This is the same process question about the chat text. Can public members, there was a public member who asked if he could unmute his microphone so he could ask a question. It was one of the people that asked a question about how to take care of oneself. I'm just not, you know, I'm just not sure how this thing is working yet. Is the public allowed to do that or is that not allowed? I've asked them to type their questions. And we would then be able to care, send them forward. We did not. On this being a public comment period. You've typed, you've typed the request that they do. That's good. Okay. I got it. Yes. Are there any counselors with additional questions? For questions. Okay. Maybe the best thing for us to do at this time would be to say, if people have additional questions, what would be the best way for them to get answers to those? Julie. Go ahead, Joanne, please. So if they have questions for Cooley, if they call the COVID community resource line, they either can hopefully give them an answer or be able to refer them to who can give them an answer. I don't know if that's a good idea. I don't know if that's a good idea. I'm going to repeat it, but you can also find it on our website. I'll say it one more time. It's<PHONE_NUMBER>. Thank you. If you don't have health insurance is, and you're feeling ill. How would you go about getting attention if you don't have a doctor. We don't refuse care. If somebody comes to our emergency department, we treat everybody regardless of ability to pay. And we can also help people get on the various insurance programs. And as you know, in Massachusetts, we have a lot more of the universal health insurance than in those states. And if I could add one more thing, Joanne, someone without health insurance who is experiencing COVID symptoms, we would ask them to not come to the emergency department as their first step. Unless they were clearly in an emergency situation, we would ask them to call that community call center number that I gave earlier and, and wait for instructions. And Jeff, would you repeat the phone number again so that if somebody has a question that they would like to call? Yes. Again, it is on our website. And the phone number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. There's one question that asks whether or not a person's racial or ethnic background seems to make a difference. I can answer that. No, we have no evidence to show that this is really about the fact that this disease is very highly communicable. And then a person's own personal health. Is really what is partly what is involved with how severely ill and get. But there are no racial, racial or ethnic differences. Any other questions from the council? Let me just check and see. Yes, Dorothy, you have a question. Dorothy. I'm getting cute. Yes. I can really see how somebody who is scared. Really would like to talk to a person. Is there no place where with proper social distancing. Someone who is concerned could go and talk to a person. I mean, I know that when somebody's feeling anxious, it's very hard even to remember a number or to dial a phone number or whatever. And there's just a sense of.  I'm just hoping there's some way that sometimes people could speak to a person in, in person with social distancing. Yeah. You would have to ask some of the, how patient mental health agencies, how they're dealing with that. And how they're making their decisions about who they see, who they serve telephonically versus in person. Okay. Yes, Dorothy. I'd like to add to that. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Yeah. And being isolated is. Is just so hard. So there are many different phone numbers that people can call to get a warm voice on the other, other end of the line. Amherst residents. And if they're feeling incredibly isolated, call the health department at. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Seven seven and we can talk people through. Their concerns and then also refer them. To other lines where they can. People with counseling backgrounds. I think unfortunately this is the. Of what's happening is. There really aren't places to go face to face. And I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Isolated and lonely. And you have concerns about them. I would encourage everyone to reach out. And try to watch out for one another. Okay. Alyssa, you have a question. I have a frustration. I realize we are all doing the very best we can here. But just as last time we counselors are not supposed to be giving people contact information or references. This is not an informal conversation. This is not a radio call-in show. This is a town council legislative meeting. I believe that Paul told us about two call-in shows that are going to be held later this week. Perhaps we could leave that up on the screen. So that some of our attendees could see that information and feel like they might be able to get their questions better answered. It's also clear that some of the questions we are getting are not real. They are not real questions. Kathy, you have a question. Yes, I have. Am I okay? Yes, you are. So I have two. One, do you have an estimate or a guess of when you're going to have more testing capacity is the first part? And the second is. You know, what we saw that Germany was able to do that if someone who was infected and fairly serious, they were able to trace the contacts that people had had and at least alert them so that you could create a network around and potentially start isolating or quarantining. Are we able to do that either in western Massachusetts or at all in Massachusetts? Those are the two questions. Julie, do you want to take the second one? And then I'll answer the first. Absolutely. Contact tracing. Yeah, so I'll start with the second one. Sure. So thank you for that question. Contact tracing is. Is what we're all about with this because once that first case is identified, we immediately want to get that person into isolation. But just as quickly, we want to identify all the contacts that that person has had. So that is exactly what we do. And that process happens by interviewing the case and having long conversations with them about who they live with, what they've been doing, where they've been. This is something that public health nurses all across Massachusetts are always doing. We have over 60, um, reportable diseases in Massachusetts. And part of all of that work is interviewing people to find out, depending on the disease, what type of contact they had where. So we are well positioned as public health nurses to be doing this for COVID-19 cases. And it is an integral part of containing the spread. So you can be assured that every case. In Massachusetts that is coming across as positive. Nurses are being notified and are. Speaking with those, those people and then notifying the contacts and having the same deep kind of conversations with them that they have to have, because then they have to go into quarantine. So to answer the, the question about testing capacity. I, I know how frustrating this is. I wish all of us had better answers. I can tell you that no one in the whole state knows something. There's no secrets being kept. So we all are trying to struggle with the same issues, but I am recently confident that our testing capacity will continue to increase, albeit slowly, but that every week we'll be able to test more people per day than we were able to test a few days prior. But at the same time, it's likely that the illness will spread. And so I'm not sure how quickly we'll be able to open up the criteria as more people get sick. And we prior make these difficult decisions about who to prioritize when you simply don't have enough resources to do as much as we wish we could do. I want to mention again that we do have these call in events that are coming up on April 2nd at 12 noon and 5pm. And we also have the website, AmherstCOVID19.org that you can go to for update the information. That also includes how to get a hold of our health department, as well as other resources as well. Alyssa, is your hand still up or do you have another question? Yes, that's a defective part of Zoom. Yes. Thank you for the reminder to remove that. Okay. I don't see any other hands up at this time. I want to thank our special guests for this evening. And thank you so much for all the work you and our healthcare providers are doing for our community. Thank you. Thank you, Lynn. So we're going to go on to our poll. Is there anything else in your report? Yeah, I just wanted to, again, let you know that next week we'll be talking about. We will again have a meeting next week, weekly update from the town manager and staff on what's going on on this event. We'll also be beginning the conversation with you about financial implications.  We're not really focused directly on that, but it is something that's going to really impact our budget for this year and next fiscal year. So we want to start to have that conversation with the committee. So we're going to go on to our poll. That concludes my report. Okay. So Sean, would you please put the agenda back up? So we are actually. Almost through with the presentations and discussions. But we're going on to the standing committee agendas. And that is a set of six slides, five slides. Excuse me. And I've asked each of the. Members of the committee. We're going to go to the table in which they identified. You might want to go to the slide, Sean. We're going to start with community resources. So we asked them to identify upcoming items that were kind of on their agendas. And needing to be attended to. We asked them to decide if they, they felt they were critical. Whether they were time sensitive. Or were they able to be delayed. So we're going to go to the table. And then we're going to go to the table. And then we're going to have notes on the timing. And then other notes as well. Very first one. If we could enlarge this, please. I'm just pausing to wait. To see if we can have it. Okay. Very first one is the community resources committee. Mandy Joe. Hanneke is presently the chair of that committee. And Mandy Joe, do you want to speak to any of these particular items. At this time. I'll speak briefly to all of them. The first one that I labeled critical would be the zoning by law revision on the vote quantum for site plan review. That one was set to be reviewed by the planning board in. At their last meeting that had to be canceled. Once they forward it to the town council, there will be statutory deadlines. I do not know the status of bills in the state onto whether those deadlines will be waived or not. So that one, if it gets forward and if they're ready to, we'll need to deal with master plan updates. They were, the planning board also had in its packet, the, the land use section for master plan update revisions. Before that meeting was canceled. So that's going to go forward. We'll have to discuss. How quickly we want to deal with that. I think some of that depends on where the planning board goes with that. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. And comprehensive housing policy. This one will probably get that more delayed. And simply because it's going to be hard to talk about on a zoom meeting instead of in person. And then the other two are things that when Lynn asked us to create this, what we thought might be coming in front of us. So I put them on there. But, but I do believe they are delayable. As I coined the word, I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. Very quickly. Are there any questions from the council about this committee? Again, this group will be meeting for the first time in a while. On the eighth of April. Next slide. This is the town services and outreach committee. And while we have a number of things here. This slide was developed basically by Mandy Joe. Because these are things that were. In the last couple of years, we've been looking at CRC that now get referred to the town services. This group will be meeting for its initial meeting. And talking about both. First of all, electing the chair and a vice chair. And then talking about. The charge to the committee and looking at some of these agenda items. The. And some of them are critical into. The committee. And so I think that. The council member is continuing to work on those. And in addition to that, we have some that are time sensitive. With regard to actual. Efforts that are going on. And some may be able to be delayed. Frankly, because there's no students. And so parking isn't. As much of a problem on Lincoln Abbas. It was before. So are there any questions on this. And then we're going to go on to the finance committee. Andy. Okay. I hope everybody hears me. I'm having somewhat of a choppy. Connection to hear you. So I hope that you're hearing. Clearly. What you see is what I put down for committee actions. It sort of gets at the complexity of what is going on with the finance committee, when it comes to the finance committee. And that is for the town, which Paul alluded to in. His. Report. We said that we would be talking about it a little bit more next week. Obviously the finance committee is interested in the same issues. It has been working on a number of the issues. So what I ended up doing was. Developing an outline of the issues that are. Facing us as a. needs to understand and then try and see how they break out as far as the finance committee's work which really involves scheduling, trying to figure out what the course of the process needs to be, what's happening this year for FY20 and how we're working ahead for FY21 and those end up being major issues. It's obvious that for FY20 we need to look at how expense projections are going to come up. What Paul is referring to is the expenses that are being incurred now and other changes and revenue projections that we might have. What are the collection rates? What does it mean to waive interest and penalties if permitted to do so by state law if there are financial implications to it? What's happening to state aid? Are we going to face the kind of cuts in state aid that were previously faced in 2008 and 2009 when we went through the recession? Will the state be forced to consider doing that again? Those of us who lived through that period of time it was a very difficult course. Then there are obviously other things like meals and lodging taxes and other kinds of income that are going to be affected but a big part of our work is going to be planning for FY21 and setting up a process to do that and understand it's going to have to be revisited because we know that revenue projections for next year are going to change tremendously and what happened in November and December when we received the report at the financial planning meeting and then developed the budget guidelines that were approved by the council will have to be reviewed as to whether they're realistic for property tax, state aid, and other local revenue and whether we have to adjust our spending guidance for the town manager. Fortunately we do have some flexibility about the process timeline some of which we've already acted on one subject will come up is an additional request later in this meeting and so the committee is going to have to work very closely with Paul to figure that out but in the end when we come to an understanding of the amount of funds that are going to be available what's going to happen is that it's up to the town manager to give a budget to the council for the council to refer to the finance committee and for the finance committee to review it. Two other things to quickly note are regional schools. A lot of what I just said as far as what's happening to the town budget is also going to happen to the regional school budget so we're going to have to have a revisit some of those processes and that's something that I've been working on already and that includes the assessment method. Two other things of course are capital and enterprise funds and so we're trying to work all of those and everything else is secondary that is I think really what's most critical. Thanks Andy. I want to go on to GOL, are there any questions of Andy at this time? Then go on to GOL George. Yeah I think the chart speaks for itself we don't have anything that's of any critical nature. I do want to quickly mention two items that are not on the chart just so that the council is aware if they're not that we have moved on the percent for art bylaw and when the president is ready that could be brought to the council and we are proposing to the council a very minor revision to the rules of procedure 10.8 related to liaisons that's also ready for council action but and there's a report that goes with that when it finally does get to you but as far as the chart goes I think it's pretty clear that we have nothing on a critical nature. We've got a number of a lot of work to do with bylaws but that's where we're at. Thank you. Are there any questions of George at this time? Okay then we're going to go on to JCPC Kathy. I'm just unmuting I probably should have labeled this critical but it's time sensitive also if you think of everything that Andy just said about the uncertainty of the current year budget with and even more uncertainty about the projections of what revenues we're going to have for FY 21 we have had a target of 10 percent of general revenues allocated for capital and up until this stopping of everything in the economy happened we were still working with that in terms of that's the total amount of money available and the initial proposals from the libraries and schools came in but we hadn't yet done the town proposals. Lynn last time we met last Monday had said that we would probably be meeting on April 8th and I believe Paul and Sonia thought it would be better if we waited till the 15th because we have to have some sense if we're talking about looking forward how much total money we have to look at and that requires some notion of how much the operating budget how much our schools are going to need how much town staff are going to need because capital we may not be able to come anywhere near 10 percent and 10 percent of something that is shrinking in terms of revenues in any case will be a smaller number so it's we have a deadline and we will we're going to be talking about this later that the charter had required this to be done by May 1st but if we move it to June 30th we should by the second half of April and May have a better sense of the pot of money we're working with and we're advisory the joint capital planning committee is advisory to the town manager so it will be what capital projects rise to the top as top priorities that we could be recommending that would be part of the total budget that comes back to the council. Thank you Kathy and Evan I know you gave us a report that was filed late earlier this afternoon and some of that may speak to the next chart which is OCA but why don't you go ahead now and maybe we don't have to do the report later. Yeah I'd actually like to just talk about it now and not do the report later so in the table which I'm just realizing and all my looking at this never caught that it should be outreach communications and appointments the critical thing is the ZBA appointments we as I noted in our last meeting and in the report of the nine available seats on ZBA currently only five are filled and so we see that as something critical we're at a point now where we're ready to schedule an interview we've adopted selection guidance we've adopted interview questions both of which are attached to the report we've determined our interview protocol and so the only thing that is left is to actually schedule the interviews I am waiting on one applicant to confirm a date before I can schedule the interviews but it will very likely be mid-April potentially the evening of April 16th so if you're interested in attending those obviously virtually I would hold the evening of April 16th you're already holding that for the school committee vacancy if this was to occur that date it would be potentially after that so we're ready to move on the ZBA vacancy and the one other thing that's important with regard to that is the idea that we might not necessarily fill all four seats but we do feel that there's some that participate to fill at least one or two of them to give the body a little bit of breathing room the next thing after that is that all ZBA associates are up are on one year term so they're all up for reappointment this year so there's two of those and then there are three planning board members who are up for reappointment and so once we finish the ZBA dealing with the ZBA vacancies we're going to have to deal with reappointments for planning board and also for ZBA associates and so those are time sensitive and that they really shouldn't be done before the terms expire on June 30th and then the final thing is that OCA is working on community activity forms and potential revisions to them that's time sensitive only in the sense that OCA has an ad hoc committee sunsets at the end of June and so we have to move on those relative quickly but right now the only thing that's on your immediate horizon is filling the ZBA vacancies. Kathy Shane you have a question please unmute and ask your question. Yes Lynn I'm not sure if these questions relate specifically to the report that we got about the ZBA appointments should I be and the questionnaire should I be asking those now or are they going to come back yes or no? I don't I don't intend to give another committee report on this since it's in the packet so now would be a good time. Okay then I have I have two questions one I saw in the report I read the the questions the interview questions that you had come up with and I saw that you noted that you deleted one that you or the type of question you'd ask when you did the planning board on asking the person to talk about any relevant experience or expertise that they would bring if they were appointed to this board so I had I wonder why you had deleted that because I think it's useful you have a final question of like why would you be a good person on the board but you know what would you contribute but I I think a probe that goes more specifically to that notion of experience of expertise that just let people expand so that's my first question then the second is I saw your note and you just mentioned now that you you have enough applicants to say that you have an applicant pool but you may not fill them all do you have a plan then to try to enrich the applicant pool on for example find some women to apply is that would why you wouldn't try to fill them all now and so reopen it to cast the search broader thinking we're in a critical time so what's your thinking on a fill just some now and then go out and get more names so those are the two questions okay so with regard to the first question and this was a fairly lengthy conversation that we had this morning looking at the interview questions and there was a feeling as though the two things that we were really trying to get at from the applicants were do they understand the role of the ZBA and do they have experience that would be relevant to that role and so that's why you have that first question about understanding the role and then the second question that we felt really got at experience was the one about applying rules and regulations you know the the role of the ZBA is much narrower than that of the planning board and it's really in a judicatory body and so there was a feeling that the primary expertise or experience that we were looking for was some experience applying rules and regulations in multiple contexts and so there was a feeling that between those two questions we really got a sense of what we were looking for and then of course if they felt like there was something that they had that was an experience that wasn't covered they had the opportunity to offer that in the final two questions but what we really wanted to get at was some experience objectively applying rules and regulations because that after all is the role of the ZBA and so there was a feeling that the an additional question about what's your relevant expertise or experience seemed a bit superfluous given that the other questions should get to what we're really looking for with regard to your second question which is now currently escaping me oh it was about the pool I don't think the decision the statement that we don't necessarily feel need to fill all of the seats is necessarily directly related to the lack of diversity in the pool certainly we spent a lot of time trying to recruit recruit the pool we have that was articulated in the report when we first published the vacancy notice back in September when we returned to the pool in January or February despite the vacancy notice having been up for months we had a pool of zero and so then we started a little bit more proactively recruiting as was described in the report both through the town manager looking at planning board people and I think also just person to person I personally asked a number of women that I thought would be good on this EBA if they'd be interested unfortunately they all declined one I thought was going to apply but ended up deciding not to and so I don't think there's a feeling that we're not going to fill all the seats so that we can go out and try to recruit more aggressively I think my point there is just that we don't necessarily feel that we need to fill all of the seats and so there's four seats and I don't want people I don't want to give the impression that they're going to be getting four names and a recommendation because you might just have one or two or three and so I'm not saying that we won't fill all of them I'm saying that we don't feel as though we need to fill all of them if we don't find four people in the pool that we feel meet the the guidance or criteria that we're really looking for that the body can operate with just a few more of those seats filled and that we don't feel like we we don't feel like we have to take what we can get I guess is part of that and the other thing because the other thing to consider is that this this is a much more complicated puzzle than it was for the planning board the planning board we had three applicants we had one vacancy here we have several applicants we technically have four vacancies and there's this combination of associate and regular members and so there's also some math to determine uh or some you know calculus not in the literal sense of uh you know do we want to move some associate members to regular member positions um and so how we fill these things there's really a lot of options before us and so the point of that statement is just to show there's a lot of options and what might come forward might not be a clean we're replacing these two regular members with these two people okay glen can i just follow up on the the experience question i what i'm curious about is even uh since i know you don't do follow-up questions i'll i'll take myself as an example that i worked for a little over a decade with a labor union if i knew had some idea of a frame of reference of what experience you might think relevant if i was prompted um we had to read contract rules all the time and decide whether employers had or hadn't complied i might not know that rules and regulations were that broadly if you asked me what experience i could bring in you know trying to think of uh working with a committee or how to do interpretation i would bring in my union experience so in interview experiences i've had these kind of open ended about experience that you think are relevant people come in and think of what do i have um so it's not the expertise as much but great you know they were a lawyer and they had been a mediator and an adjudicant you know they've done this but there will be a big range so i'm i i'll just push a little bit on it even to say tell us more or something that gets people to talk because not everyone does a good job selling their broader experience and one thing to of course note is that the applicants will have these interview questions at least two weeks in advance and so they'll have time to sit and think with them and so if they immediately see rules and regulations and they think well i'm not quite sure um what experience i have that connects to that they have the time to think of that and so in your example i would hope that that person would think oh well my experience with contract rules or regulations uh is relevant here and this is what i'm going to talk about um and so the our idea was actually to have slightly more focused questions due to the narrower role of the body in question um mandy joe you have a question yes um evan you touched on it slightly but my question related to the associate members and now that there are non-associate member openings is that being considered and are they being brought in for an interview or is that just sort of another consideration without necessarily being interviewed but part of that conversation as to whether the associate members make it bump up the full members or not so that's certainly going to be part of the conversation again that's what makes this a much more difficult uh puzzle than the um than the planning board is we do have the option of moving associate members up to to regular membership certainly the council voted to do that uh or certainly uh that was done uh last spring when the zba immediately went to five members and some of the associate members had to be moved up um i i have a an outstanding request to the town manager um for some information on uh how much if uh any experience those uh associate members have um being impaneled because technically they could have been serving for an associate member for a year and have never been called on and therefore would have as much experience as uh any person who's applying now um and also whether there is an interest or willingness among those zba members uh to be moved up uh and so i think uh those will be questions that will need to be answered by that time and will be part of that conversation so are they interested in moving up and have they actually been impaneled yet uh would be important considerations before we make this decision uh but no associate members are not being brought in to be interviewed um for this thank you i'd like to move on from this particular agenda item and uh we're moving on to our action items uh the first item on the action is our consent agenda and if you have a motion sheet it says the following items were selected because they were considered to be routine and it was reasonable to expect they would pass with no controversy three move an item from the consent agenda for discussion later in the meeting ask that it be removed and uh when i list them and the request to remove an item for a consent agenda does not require a second um the various items that appear on the consent agenda are um seven b the amendment to general bylaw two point two this is non-criminal disposition we had a first reading of this we have posted it and we actually were going to wait until next week but since we were meeting this week we moved it up to this week is there any question about this item being on the consent agenda okay the next item on the consent agenda actually is the item that requires us to suspend the town council rules or procedure eight point four and we need to do this for agenda item seven c um this is the extension of capital improvement plan deadline uh under chap uh the charter section five point seven c and that is related to the next one which is in fact the extension of the capital improvement plan deadline charter section five point seven c last week we did a couple of extensions on other budget items we did not do this one and so this one basically is just bringing this in mind with the rest of is there any question on this one okay seeing none and the last one is the approval of march 23rd 2020 special council meeting minutes as presented is there any question on those all right then i'm going to look for a second to the following motion to move the following items and be and the printed motions they're under and approve those items as a single unit seven b amendment to general bylaw two point two non the script non-criminal disposition seven c to suspend town council rules or procedure rule eight point four for agenda item seven c extension of capital improvement plan deadline charters section five point seven c item seven point c is the extension of the capital improvement plan deadline charters section five point seven c and item ten point a approval of march 23rd 2020 special council meeting uh minutes as presented is there a second lenn yes darsie i i've been trying to remove a okay um okay we're going to remove a and take that up after we get done with this okay is there any other ones that we want to remove mandy joe i'm curious what she means by a because there's nothing labeled a you mean seven b b sorry b seven b the non-criminal disposition one yes okay thanks for that clarification are there any others that people want to remove okay then the motion is as follows to move the following items and printed motions they're under and approve those items as a single unit seven c which is to suspend rule it's to suspend eight point four allows us to suspend the reading rule the extension of capital improvement plan deadline and then the approval of the march 23 2020 special council minutes is there a second second okay thank you um any further discussion any questions okay then i'm going to do a roll call vote starting with brewer please unmute and say i hi or nay or abstain thank you uh de angeles pat i thank you suman hi resmer is an i hanneke hi um ham hi ross hi ryan hi shown i think i heard that as an i from i uh schreiber hi steinberg hi and schwarz is absent and so it is zero and i i'm sorry i'm sorry shallony and you know what um yes so shallony is an i thank you so it's 1200 and one absent okay uh we're moving on to uh then taking up separately the amendment to the general bylaw 2.2 non-discriminational non-criminal disposition so this is to amend the bylaw the general bylaw 2.2 violations criminal complaint and non-criminal disposition by inserting the language underlined and deleting the language shown with strength maybe joe you've been working on this one would you continue with the non with what's in that particular item yes sorry i had to unmute everything and and all and this was is a follow-up to the um part i did for the board of licensed commissioners where we approved or consented to um approved their regulations they had passed over the summer um they would like to not have us to have to do that every single time because it's a little more efficient um and it recognizes their authority in order to do that we actually have to change our bylaws this is the proposal for that it has been through gol i'll let george report on that and the the results of this bylaw passing would mean that regulations passed by boards not just the board of licensed commissioners but potentially the board of health or another board um that or department that is subject to a specific penalty for non-criminalistic position could be without waiting for our approval on an agenda to approve that regulation could be enforced non criminally immediately george ryan you have a question not a question but i'm ready to speak uh on this matter related to gol whenever you're ready okay uh why don't you go ahead and do that okay i just want to remind the council that gol did meet on february 26 and did vote four to zero with one absent to declare um this item to be clear consistent and actionable this is in the march 9th report from gol and also that we voted at the same time four to zero uh to recommend that that this be uh passed for three reasons that i think echo someone went uh a manager's been saying that basically it makes clear for the board of licensed commissioners uh as to how its regulations can be enforced so there's an element of clarity here it improves actionability for the regulations themselves making them enforceable by non criminal disposition from the moment they're adopted and from the point of view of governance it takes a load i think off the council so it doesn't have to be constantly uh dealing with these matters so um we not only voted to clear consistent actionable but we also went further and uh voted four zero with one absent to recommend it for those reasons Dorothy Pam you have a question so why why was this law here in the first place i don't actually i have to admit i find it very confusing i don't really understand what it was supposed to do who put it in there why it doesn't work and why we're changing it that's it's maybe joe or george would you like to speak to that uh i can try to speak to some of that um i don't know why it was in there originally it got i i don't know if it was in our bylaws before we moved them over with the bylaw review committee so i can't speak to that but when we adopted them after the bylaw review committee it's in there it does not have to be in there um so i can't speak to the history as to why it was put in there there are many cities and towns that do not have this requirement for a separate approval by the town council that just do it the way that essentially remove that clause that that i have proposed removal of for the reasons george stated of it gives our regulatory authorities the authority to immediately enforce them non-criminally without us as a legislative body having to watch when they're instituting regulations whether they have non-criminal disposition in them that they would like to be able to enforce that way and then to get it on an agenda to make sure that it gets approved by us so that they can actually do that enforcement the way they would like to and and also it's it's just a little bit more efficient in that sense both for us and for them so i have a follow-up um does anybody look at those changes that they have made that the different regulatory boards make because it seems to kind of this would be this is looser this relieves something looser than the rest of the government is so that's that's why i'm kind of confused i can understand why it would be annoying to do it okay but maybe somebody should look at changes that are made by the different boards i'm not saying us but somebody should look at it so i'll respond to that the board has every right to enact a regulation um and we we can enact bylaws but we cannot we cannot enact regulations for them if they choose to enact a regulation they can enact that regulation um that's their authority under the charter to do so and so if we want them to do something some specific way we have to enact a bylaw if they want to do something if they want to regulate for the board of license commissioners a license they can enact a regulation to regulate that and this is just saying when they do that if they want to be able to issue fines they can that without us having to approve that fine but they have the ability to enact the regulation and issue criminal fines potentially i think but also things like pulling of permits pulling of licenses things like that they can say well this is your consequence this is just giving them another way of enforcing that regulation without needing our approval to do it that way okay rafi is that clear i have a better idea of it um but i guess there's no rogue commissions i mean nobody looks at what they do what if they started issuing all kinds of big fines and everybody gets mad at the town council or the town manager and we can't seem to raise my hand so i'm sorry there is may i speak please if we go back into article one of the original bylaws you'll see that under 1.2 violations criminal complaint non-criminal disposition section b which is the non-criminal disposition reads very much like what we have here with the corrections made for math general law etc so this is not new to the bylaws per se article one was administrative provisions we do not have it listed that way in the current bylaws that was on the bylaw review committee so pat thank you for going back to that is there any further question about this at this time all right um so min joe would you make the motion um so i move to amend general bylaw 2.2 violations criminal complaint and non-criminal disposition by inserting the language underlined and deleting the language sung with strike through uh do i need to read the whole thing it was in our packet and it was posted i don't think so is there a second second thank you any further discussion then we'll move to a roll call vote and i'll try to remember to come back to people at the beginning of the alphabet the angeles please unmute and state your vote all right demont yes grease mercy yes hannokie yes ham yes ross yes ryan yes shane yes shriver hi steinberg yes schwarz is absent ball mill please mute unmute yes okay thank you and elissa brood okay it is 12 0 0 and 1 absent okay um we are now moving on to the school committee interview questions and i spent some time again with um listening both to the school committee i got various pieces of feedback from each of you and i also um spent about an hour and a half again with um allison mcdonald uh from the chair of the school committee we deleted several questions and we now have it down to the fact that we probably be spending no more than about a half an hour with each candidate uh which at this point given the number of candidates it's reasonable let me mention that the candidate uh applicant pool closes tomorrow and we will be posting the names of the applicants on friday um i also want to change one moment one item on here if we have difficulty technologically uh we will actually then have the candidates write down their answers and they must provide them to us less than two days later on april 16th 2020 at two o'clock p.m. and in that case we would then have to meet at six o'clock on the 16th of april as in order to make a final decision um given that we think fairly successful tonight i'm hoping we have no technological failures and that we will be able to go ahead with this meeting on april 14th at six o'clock i don't want to go through editing on this media is there if there are questions generally let's have them and if not if you have any other questions about the questions please send them to me i see one hand raised and that's elissa brower i realize things continue to unfold but we are getting mixed messages about what's happening with the one or two nights i realize we are not saying how many applicants we have and we could always get a ton more tomorrow by the deadline that could entirely happen and that will have you will then have to decide if we can do it in one night or two we've done as many as eight in one night before i don't know why we have to go to two but you and i've had that conversation before what i don't understand is what the definition of technological difficulties will be what the threshold will be because i don't know why we would need to give them a whole nother day to answer the questions in writing if they were prepared to answer them that night verbally and then have to have a separate meeting on thursday when as evan indicated we could actually be having zba interviews that night so i appreciate that we're trying to maintain flexibility but at the same time i don't understand under what conditions we would use that flexibility all right so let me explain first of all when a person's interviewing they may not actually write out the full answer but in fact they may want to just make some notes if we have technological difficulties one is maybe they have to phone in because they can't come in by computer for some reason maybe we have a whole failure of the system that night whatever the issue may be you want to account for the possibility of technological difficulties i don't anticipate them i anticipate that we will be able to interview the candidates on the 14th and depending on the number that we will know by the end of the day tomorrow whether or not we will be able to also vote on the night of the 14th we can change that we're still two weeks over two weeks away and at this point evan and i have also discussed the possibility that the zba interviews would probably not start until about seven thirty that night yes elissa thank you very much for that clarification and i realize it is somewhat fluid depending on the number that shows up tomorrow and of course technology doesn't always work as we expect at the same time i would suggest strongly that we go ahead and tell people they're going to need to be prepared to turn in their answers on on tuesday if they we should consider having them be prepared to turn in their answers on tuesday that way if their call drops out etc i'm just not comfortable with this option but hopefully we won't need to execute it anyway and it will all be a move point all right so we left open the issue some people felt you needed to vote the questions other people said that you wanted to authorize the town council president to work with the amherst school committee chair to continue to revise the verbal and written interview questions um which what is the wish of the council could i have a motion Dorothy Pam Dorothy okay i think is it okay i move that we authorized the town council president and the school board rep to um do any more work on these if it needs to be done they look fine is there a second second is there a further discussion then joe hannity yeah i i guess this is just procedural can we get that motion is the motion that's on the yes so i'll read the motion to offer as the town council president to work with the amherst school committee chair continue to revise the verbal and or written interview questions as amended to be used to fill the i'm sorry more funds a school committee vacancy under amherst home rule charter section 4.1 c yes that's Dorothy moved the motion is there a second i believe george yes okay any further discussion then i'm going to do a roll call vote we'll start this time with darsie germanc darsie can you hear me yep now i can yes i'm sorry yes okay uh grease mercy yes hannity yes ham yes ross yes ryan yes yes shane yes schreiber yes steinberg yes yes swartz's absence balmille yes brewer yes de angeles yes 12 0 0 and one absent all right thank you um there are no appointments at this time uh are there anything additional that any of the committees want to report at this time okay uh we've approved the minutes paul is there anything else you'd like to add in terms of reporting on the town at this point uh no thank you i'm sorry no okay thank you um i just wanted to mention uh under town council comments that in a similar way to what you saw for the committees i'm working on an analysis of the council agenda items that were kind of stacked up before we went into the present situation and um it continues to evolve but we will try to bring that forward and sometime within the next meeting or two are there any future agenda items or questions uh yes evan yeah thank you uh so i just wanted to say uh so this was the first meeting we attempted public comment and i think uh it has been working overdrive to find a public comment format that would be workable i think what we saw tonight showed that what we had planned for was not workable we had attendees who were able to utilize the chat function um we had counselors who were responding to attendees in the chat uh we had counselors who were reading the chat and then reading the chat out loud and so it was kind of chaotic and messy and so i'm just going to request and i think this is a request of the president and the vice president and the town manager and it to take another look at public comment and to not schedule public comment again until we have that figured out because i don't want us to have another public comment situation that we did today and i i know we were aware of the potential for spammers to come in i think we saw them come in i think some people recognized it was happening and others did not and went along with it but i think that was really unfortunate and so uh what my request would be is to figure out how to deal with that and then i think that we actually need some type of written protocol to counselors about how to handle public comment because i think we saw a lot of counselors uh uh not following any type of protocol clearly and doing some things that i think were really problematic so thank you thank you evin uh elissa thank you yes i have an easier problem to solve which is that we had just decided upon liaisons when this emergency descended upon us and i was thinking that we probably had not had a chance to have the president reach out to all the various committees and boards and say these are the people that have liaisons these are the people who don't this is what to expect and it's really lucky we didn't do that because you know none of those things can be expected at this moment but i assume that that'll show up on our chart as something that can reasonably be delayed in case anybody asks about it and then my other thing i suppose probably fit but i wasn't there to wave my hand under just committee reports in general and that is that i know we're planning to start committee meetings next week council committee meetings that is and we have to do the reorganization that we've certainly gotten our rules and that we intended to do and i would just ask that as we did with the most recent president and vice president of the council agenda that those for the sake of optics democracy participation we do not just have someone walk in and say i'm taking nominations for chair okay chair nominated second vote and be done with it because that looks to the public like we decided it outside the meeting so i would hope that each of those meetings leaves a little time for the committees to say oh here's how the chairmanship worked for the last year for us now we've got some new members and given that the charge has changed a little bit maybe we might want to do chair and vice chair split up differently blah blah blah give people a few minutes at each of those meetings to decide that and then to go ahead and have the election even though that means more of your timeline upfront since you're there to run the elections actually i think that's a terrific suggestion thank you very much uh kathy hi i just want to weigh in on public comments um i do think that we could have been trained a little bit more on zoom to say where we were on teams um i'm seeing that some people had already run through it like the ochre group had already used the zoom but i think it worked amazingly well given that we had no training and i agree we agree not to interact i do wonder um having seen some of the verbatim comments whether there's a screening tool where you can say this one's just not from a real person and i don't know what that question is um you rephrased one very nicely lin to get at um a different kind of question so i think giving people access to be able to send in something by a text or phone or during the public is is a good um piece you know the alternative just um from my perspective is that i have some pretty active residents in the district in district one they can text me while we're having a meeting and say i have a question could you answer that ask this question for me but that means that i'm looking over at a different device to try to get a question in um and i don't mind doing that but but it is a way of getting questions asked more generally so i would like to keep working on it but not obliterate it and i'm just wondering whether there's not a screening out i i know we did it when i did something like this internationally where we had people from everywhere the moderator could see the question and we were all instructed that the moderator would handle them and hand them you know up to the equivalent of you to call on them so we just very strict instructions so i'll stop there um i did have a general question some of us volunteered to help the agenda setters and come you know i have on my calendar a meeting with you and paul on uh the next few weeks i'm assuming we're not doing that but are you trying to keep that process so would we be in a virtual on a the next agendas are we trying to go to a new mode given what's going on so that's a question on on what i should do about my calendar okay let me uh say we did not try to do that in the last two or three weeks of chaos um but we will get back to it and uh the one counselor that therefore did not get to participate because um we were in this new mode uh we will reschedule so um athena will inform you of when those are they are virtual we are doing agenda setting every week now uh at the moment so let me look at that schedule and make sure everybody's properly informed okay great that's okay steve schreiber yeah so um echoing what's been said by many i don't understand why we don't or maybe there's a possibility of just disabling the chat function because i don't see a particular use for it other than to raise the hand but we don't have a chat function when we meet face to face so i think it's risky to have a chat function when we are meeting virtually all right thank you i we will be exploring this because this is an interesting experience but please don't throw out zoom i love zoom i'm sorry go ahead i said please don't throw out zoom with the bathwalk no i won't paul bachelman you have your hand yes yes so thank you um so i've been talked to with shawn um and so we he will be looking at the options available under zoom there is i'm sure it's a setting and we can funnel comments through a theme or however the chair however the president however you want to do that so we'll work on that before your next meeting okay mandy joe yeah i was going to echo what steven evan said um we have to remember that we are meeting as if we're in the town room which means what happened with the questions from the what we would think the audience would never have happened at a meeting in the town room because they would never have been recognized and they wouldn't have been able to forward questions to us through a chat function and i think that's we're not in a small meeting conference we have to remember we're as if we're in the town room and that the protocols that happen in the town room should be happening here which means if the item is not supposed to have public comment then chat function comments from audience members should probably not be accepted either i know it's hard to think about that but but that's this is a substitute for being in the town room darcy um yeah wait a minute wait i guess i'm open um i uh on the issue of public comment i actually think that um you know i really uh prefer the the zoom um forum and i i think that it is has the capability of really um expanding the possibilities for public comment if we don't want it in the chat that's one thing but um we might want to have it both at the beginning and the end of a meeting or something like that i'd like to be able to see the person who is speaking during public comment and i find it um unfortunate that um not that no one participated during the actual public comment today when um this meeting was chalked full of valuable information and i can't imagine that there wouldn't be a lot of people that would be interested in in participating in the meeting so i think that we we can get the word out a lot better than we have been about the fact that this is something that people can participate in and that we want them to um so um that's what i'm looking forward to thank you Dorothy well i'm i'm i'm immune yes what what i see is in public comment people do not ask questions isn't that correct because i believe you say in public comment that you're not going to answer the public comment so public comment people make statements here we had people asking questions which has not been part of our format however i think one of the questions was real and the person gave their name uh so with when paul does the uh the video chats that is the time for questions but so i think that this is not going to work for public comment unless people make comments so i don't know how that works are there any other comments at this point let me just say i totally agree that uh and i will be working with paul and shawn and athena to come up with a better way to continue public comment but not have the kind of situation that arose at one point tonight with regarding uh liaisons uh we will get the notifications out it is possible that some of those committees will start meeting in another couple of weeks uh and uh frankly under the circumstances they might like to have um the council be there as a liaison um but if you have other thoughts in that please send me an email um and alissa i truly do appreciate as we approach the election of the chairs of and vice chairs of each of these that we have some discussion about the role of the chair and uh we have some time with the new member and also look at the charge of the committee uh is there any other comments from counselors at this time um there are no topics um under the 48 hour rule we are not going into executive session and i am going to adjourn this meeting at eight fifty three