The open meeting law requires that I notify the public that this meeting is being recorded . Therefore recording in progress. Please be aware that an audio and visual recording of this meeting is being made by Boston City TV, a part of the city of Boston office of Cable Communications and it is being broadcast on Xfinity Channel twenty six RCN Channel 13 and Fayose Channel nine six as well as live streamed on YouTube. Let's take it away.  Good evening everyone. This is where speaking I hope everyone has had a good month so far it's been warm weather so we're lucky because summer is coming and that's always nice to know. I wanted to go ahead and get started with our agenda so that we can get accomplished as much as we can. We're going to start introductions as we usually do and I will go first again.  My name is West Ireland. I am the board chair of this board and I am a mail using sign language and I will use that language in the course of this meeting I have to voice interpreters who will be voicing for me and you might hear a female voice as well. So I will call on each board member in succession to identify yourself. Please introduce yourself according to my screen what I see next is Olivia Olivia would you introduce yourself please?  Sure. My name is Olivia Richard.  I am a board member.  Brian and I use a manual wheelchair to get around.  This is West. Thank you for that Olivia. I just realized actually that I didn't mention where I'm from and the region of Boston I live in so I'm from the north end and next I see Alice Alice, would you introduce yourself please?  Alice you are muted about it said oh yes OK. Alice Fisher, member of the board from the South End this is West. Thank you Alice.  Charlie go ahead.  Hi my name's Charlie. I'm a resident of the North and I'm on the board representing parents and caregivers of children with disabilities.  Thank you Charlie. It's great to see you.  All right. I'm Paul.  Why don't you go next over that's all carer I live in the Western and I'm an advocate for mental thank you.  Thank you Richard. Go ahead. Introduce yourself please everybody.  Richard BlueSky I live in Back Bay a member of the commission I my particular particular interest mental health children's mental health in particular.  Thanks Richard and Paulette, would you introduce yourself please? Good evening everybody. My name is Paulette and I live in the mid section of Boston.  Thanks Paulette.  I also see Juan Carlos is with us but maybe not on camera. Juan Carlos, would you introduce yourself please? Yes, I think it was hello everyone. My name is one card. Offer me this board member. I live in South Bend some of my interests are adaptive sports.  Thank you very much, Juan Carlos. Uh, are there other board members maybe somebody on the phone I was a board member on the phone. Anybody who hasn't introduced themselves yet.  Oh, Elizabeth just joined let Elizabeth come inside and then hi Elizabeth. We are just doing introductions . Do you mind introducing yourself please?  I'm Elizabeth, our Dorchester Advisory Board for Mrs. West. Thank you very much, Elizabeth . And I would like to ask Commissioner Marcos to introduce yourself please things was hi everyone. I'm Christa MacLeish and I'm the disability commissioner and title to coordinator for the city of Boston.  Thank you, Commissioner.  I think that's everyone that I see on my screen, all the board members that I'm aware of . OK, so now because we have a quorum right.  We can go ahead and vote to approve the minutes from last month which is the first item on our agenda. Does anyone have any questions or comments related to the minutes from last meeting as currently written?  OK, see none. Can someone make a motion please to have the board meeting minutes approved from the last meeting I make the motion, Charlie. I see your hand. Sorry the interpreter Mr. just said that said make the motion Paula oh thank.  This is West.  I think Paulette made a motion. So Charlie, you've got your hand up to second. Let's do that all in favor please raise your hand by say or excuse me signify by raising your hand or saying hi. I want any post.  So then the board meeting minutes from last month are passed as written. Thank you very much for that and let's see where we are on our agenda. We will have a presentation this evening and I have to say before we welcome our presenter to the floor that we are very lucky to have him. You're the perfect timing. I would like to thank Kevin Simon Dr. Kevin Simon for coming and being with us this evening to talk about behavioral health.  He is the first appointed chief of behavioral health, the chief behavioral health officer and he has been leading our community in the public health strategies around mental health, behavioral health and we are very glad to have him here in front of the commission because we know that behavioral mental health are an important need in our community. So Dr. Simon, please take away you can everyone him and so thank you for joining and taking the time to providing these and updating and how long do I have time in about ten minutes and then for Q&A ten minutes to talk about OK, I'll let you know what I'm talking about.  All right. So I'm going to share my screen and for those who are on board you will be able to have access to a copy of the and that each the commission staff presentation.  But interrupt Dr. Sam and we're having a little trouble hearing you. Can you speak up really a little closer to your mike? Thank you so much.  Yes, I will move in close. So perfect.  I'm unsure of my video that we are looking at my forehead but I now speak very loudly into the mike. Hopefully everyone can hear me ok ok so in terms of to be in my will be an understanding of this topic going to help are shaped by my experiences. I have implicit biases we actually have implicit biases in part because it's part of the human condition but I do try to stay in a learning frame until it is not my intention to offend any person that is present here listening or looking in in the event that I do. Please let me know or let the commission know so we'll do a brief introduction of myself to what the state of behavioral health as it relates to Boston and then also this nationally and then look at the initiative that we have going on in the mental and behavioral health space to this from a background this is my family. I share this because before I quote unquote Dr. Simon, I'm somebody is a little brother and this is my sister Michelle with Michelle Natasha Natasha. We always are standing in the same orientation.  This is me of my parents Deacon Nucleosome and Lady Sign and they are still in the same house that we grew up in. This is my wife Dr. Alford. She's an internist at Beth Israel. She says hello, these are kids Brooke who's five and K.J. who's three. That's my family. And so I like to orient people to the fact I'm a normal person like we are and exactly what grounds me in terms of the work that we're trying to do in terms of career trajectory. This is like a smattering of CV and PowerPoint form.  I went to an HSBC and Morgan State University in Baltimore to Savarin in Brooklyn. That's where I grew up medical school in the Midwest Saluki some research at Wisconsin, even the cheese curds in Wisconsin research at Pittsburgh I did my dog psychiatry residency at Grady Hospital Grady critical of Boston Medical Center here is the fifth largest public hospital that care for a lot of individuals that have Medicaid or in our state we call it myself and I came to Boston Children's Hospital to get additional training in pediatric psychiatry as well as teaching medicine to those are the three kind of doctors I am psychiatrist pediatric psychiatry and addiction medicine and I do research as it relates to mental health services trying to get individuals classic we do not get those services better access to such services and you can see here the list hospital within the region that I provided services that to on any given day I might be called one of these things. However, I most most most identify as a learner in part any space and I have something to learn and people to learn from the engaging with communities because trigonometric is we're only able to do what we can by learning from them and nothing that I'm really saying is just of my own caught up a lot of mental responses and so this is just a picture of some of them by our own or to continue with the commissioner for public health here Monica Brown used to be the commissioner for the Department of Public Health and is acknowledging this is not just some pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Truth is I've had a lot of help and support in terms of Mary Lou. I met her two years ago and she really had a question about can I have it's not really I but can we help them? And so it really was about describing the state of behavioral and reasoning using behavioral health and instead of just mental health in policy, world behavioral health also encompass is substance use disorder like alcohol use or nicotine.  So it's acknowledging that behavioral is to imply both the traditional psychiatric condition that people might think about generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder schizophrenia, bipolar and so forth as well as nicotine alcohol opioids and we want to be thinking about behavior as it relates to youth . And so in terms of the data that you're going to see and I'm going to say is related to national data and then I will highlight specific Boston specific data but one in five youth will have experiences condition within the past year one third of youth will experience psychiatric disorder within their lifetime half of the conditions actually begin in early adolescence.  Adolescence just from a chronology standpoint is when puberty starts get less than half of children receive appropriate evidence for evidence based treatment and services.  And so what ends up happening is we have almost a 10 year average delay between the onset of symptoms and then actual engagement in treatment and that's the average. So there are individuals fifteen years between onset and treatment or twenty and what does that look like? Look, I'm going to speak my Boston children's side and you can see here this is preceding that boarding people who present to our hospital in emergency room with a psychiatric concern and there's a need for psychiatric third get the beds not available because there are many beds available in our state.  You can see the warning was rising predebate.  The pandemic has only worsened since then and there are a number of things that we're trying to do. Think about locally about how to help our Boston in time for myself and why might it be a person that could be involved in this?  I've taken time over the course of my career to think about my work with research teams looking at disparities of pediatric and behavioral health care, treatment of black boys, people involved over the treatment of black adolescents and teens, mitigating systemic racism.  So just acknowledging that I and a team dial quite a bit about behavioral health for quite some time and then in terms of what we're really talking about is the idea of social determinants of mental health and I won't to do each one of these but we know for sure in many parts of our community there are families that don't it's just one of these boxes but sometimes all right.  So whether we're talking about ,you know, heat exposure in certain parts of our community that have less foliage or we're talking poverty or unequal access, maybe to transportation or ACS the built environment, homelessness, lower education, the all of these factors impact a person's mental remember it really isn't just one thing but when you have these negative social determinants they need to, you know, reduce psychological stress and then undoubtedly adverse health outcomes. And so think about upstream policies and so the next slide I'm going to hear is a short video of mayor highlighting some of the things that I'm going to highlight after the break. Media is right now in that last point to ingredients will help almost like farmers. It's not just about those struggling with the many of us but provide is complete with income support.  We need to be more we need more homework.  The question of the composition from the Supreme will how do we treat these problems?  How to what we talk about working closely with I think in the of if we're going to extend to you heard her reference the center for Behavioral Health and Wellness and I like to think of the center as a slash and burn that it exists CPAC which itself is made up of several bureaus including our emergency medical services that call nine one one recovery services and services Bureau initiatives. And then we also collaborate with the city like Boston Public Schools, Boston Public Library in Boston Police Department and the librarian that we now have social workers available at the Copley Library because persons who are housed who may actually benefit from applying for disability services which needs support the services department, the mental health librarians are not necessarily helping that person navigate the bill that is not with our clinical social workers.  And so they've been we've seen the at the other end of our library in reference to the initiatives that the mayor described in the video last month. We we acknowledge putting one million dollar initiative to support students to provide stability and how are we going to do that? I'm going to highlight some those initiatives in the next six months. Celine Dion Community Health Needs Assessment and we have implementation plans and Kreenholm needs assessment highlighted these three things as most concerning to constituent within the realm of behavioral health as relates to you to one increasing the workforce, widening public awareness and then also helping to provide youth with improved social activity to improve the increasing the number of diverse behavioral health workforce. You heard about 200000 residents will be supported in their pursuit of careers.  That was through the five million dollar funding opportunity that was awarded to UMass Boston. And so UMass was incredibly will support two hundred thousand over the next two and a half years in addition to peer mentorship by counselors,  recovery coaches and that support is to mitigate the cost related to pursuing the behavioral. That's one example of the workforce and some of those individuals will then go on to work at our personal schools.  Another thing that we found was a widening public awareness of the behavioral resources that we do have. And so one of the things that we recently it is actually probably our first of Boston mental health Report and which is really available if you had just that healthy Boston mental health for and for instance, here is an example of things that were identified. So this is with regards to Boston Public High School students over the last several years. You can see this is about persistent sadness has gone up and down.  And so I in terms of the public awareness talk and a lot of places you know something we have to get are you know, Jayson Tatum to think about mental health or my wife to be on TV. Are we talking to V.A. in terms of continuing access to virtual services in the did put out a public health campaign and PowerPoint apparently on its own schedule. The we put out the email campaign that is actually underway and their focus was being had in reference to how is it that we can best ensure that constituents all across the city are aware of the resources that are available and then in reference to providing you with engaging social activities? We do have a youth advisory board and commission and either some of youth on the advisory board either you can see SNAPPER'S but they wanted to form a podcast. We have a podcast break the line where they can interview city officials about any number of activities. So we encourage download and try to break the line so that you can recognize that they are making impact and we had a recent smooth transition. We had a recent RFP that is about from informal support system transformation and we're waiting for PowerPoint the moment where we're going to be partnering with and BPO schools to try to change what we might call an ecosystem of the school such that not just the students but the staff within the school feel better supported and thinking about how to best support themselves and the students and for whatever reason my computer is moving forward. So years looking at the interview that I and so that award was with Flourish Agenda and so they'll start to work with the ten schools over the course of the summer and then over the next year, year and a half I'd like forward but seemingly there you go.  So that's the trauma of school transformation. I started with family time. I'm going to handle the family so it's my dad you can classroom and a month into my role he wrote me a letter.  Tell that to your baby Kate. Be on to you in your household . As I reflect on the consequences for the past two years, I want to tell you about since you're in a new position and you try to hold this I beg you to always be nice if you come across that would be considered new or the transparency and keep your integrity until you go.  Aren't you afraid of seeing people losing on the floor in their life or stupid things at work but your children in your way as you have self in the world you know the hard work so I try to in my dad's life and work with being transparent and so I'm Dr. Sun, your chief health officer can see you but literally I guess in that letter people in my household still became full stop sharing and opens up for conversation requesting that we in in our office turn my camera on acts like this is westling here and I'm call on each person if they need a question.  I have Olivia and that if you can go first Olivia yes.  This is Olivia Richard, is there an effort made a two include disability as one of the diversity needs for the targeted funding for creating new behavioral health providers and also are there efforts being made with Boston youth and families that are not schools system based? We know that there are youth that are not involved in the school system either they go to private schools, charter schools, 766 etc. Yeah so to you be the first one was starting to ensuring that persons that have disabilities are eligible in reference to the workforce so was in the RFP it was it explicitly stated that diverse populations including those with disabilities be included as potential recipients or the vendor in this case UMass Boston so that population is included or the workforce and in reference to the schools our first effort is the yes, but that's not to say that our last effort is just the first one that I'm represent. So in terms of the other school and then yes, in terms of capturing students that perhaps are not attending because for any number of reasons we do have efforts across the city not just the trying to reach larger excellent.  Thank you. We'll move on to Charlie. You can ask your question.  Thank you.  So thanks for your presentation of those really great informative in relation to the actual I think the number of mistakes I remember when this was announced is pretty exciting as of twenty one million dollar allocation specifically for reuse and is that a multi year because I know that you mentioned that the UMass has was granted the first charge but is that just over this fiscal year is that multi year and then if so what I only saw presented it was like about twelve million dollars.  Where is the other night are you able to kind of speak to that because on the perspective of youth and students just wondering how is that actually getting down to that right.  When are they going to see these programs and if it is falling under one it's up to you. That's great too. Yeah.  So the funds are in relationships are built into the point one million is out into six but not just this year and then again I happen to only hear the first few are things that have been reported and so there are other dollars that will be awarded. So for instance an example of this is within the commission we have a they had the Boston Education Center they had is already an internal program that we're putting some funds toward expand the number of youth that participate in another avenue for some of the funds in reference to E.M.S. which is not specific.  So in reference to there are more dollars to be allocated and it's not just for one now I'm going to call on right for your question need to sign and my name is Paulette and I'm interested in the focus groups and conduct them and how they were recruited to conduct the focus groups get the great question so the vendor that is awarded the public campaign is called the targets Bank Targets and I argues in terms the focus groups they surveyed the nationwide who are the communities who are the nonprofit organizations that we should be supporting. They should be limited in terms of attempting to have focus groups and so I think being targeted as the lender and across our commission we provided or provided the name of a variety of individuals,  stakeholders, nonprofit organizations, stakeholders,  community centers, churches. So that's that was the process . This is sign here. I did type my question in the chat. I don't know if you have announced any other or who the ten schools are for Boston Public Schools is that publicly available can be shared yeah.  So just not to forget it I'm not going to pretend like I can I've never but that is publicly available and we can get that excellent.  Thank you very much for your presentation, Dr. Simon. I'm going to ask the other board members if they have any questions or comments at this time.  All right. Thank you very much again for your presentation. Dr. Simon, we can always follow up with you on Twitter Instagram if there is any further questions at a later time. Yeah, that is and thank you all for providing space to you know, you'll have the rest of the thank you. Take care.  And this is Wesley here.  We're going to continue with the board meeting agenda.  Oh well funnily enough it is the church report so it's my turn to present it.  Just pull that up. Hang on just one second. So I have it in front of OK so for my church report this evening I have two items that I wanted to share with the board and the public regarding the statewide captioning bill letter that the advisory board approved and sent to specific legislators last month I was able to meet with State Senator Michael Barrett's aide to figure out why his office had one version of the legislative bill that differs from the other bill that is more similar to the city of Boston's captioning ordinance. So I finally found the reason why the quote unquote patron asking upon request phrasing was mentioned that patrons would ask to turn the captions on and why that was part of Senator Barrett's Senate bill version.  He raised concerns about the level of compliance Boston businesses so his team literally went out to a number of establishments in the city of Boston to see how many had closed captioning enabled on their TVs of the Boston establishments I visited a little more than 50 percent had closed captioning enabled on their TVs.  So he's finding his team's finding was just a small number just eleven establishments in the downtown and Fenway neighborhoods.  So of those eleven six had closed captioning enabled on their TV from Senator Barrett's view he found this compliance rate to be quite low and his concern is that it would even lower if this was extended extended statewide in my opinion I'm glad to see that at least half of these businesses are complying to this law.  I think the concern with the city ordinance does not include any fines as compared to other cities nationwide and this is probably why some don't really follow this ordinance.  I would suggest either an amendment to this ordinance to add a fine or include another city department to ensure that businesses comply with this.  I know that this has been passed since the end of twenty twenty two and this is somewhat challenging and I suggest the Disability Commission take further action on next steps to improve its compliance.  Also we need to find a way to gather data on this.  That is the first item I wanted to discuss. The second part of my report mentions in part of Commissioner MacLeish's report last on the City Council's consideration to add handicapped parking permits for pregnant women, I would like to ask the advisory board for feedback regarding us at next month's meeting.  We do not expect the City Council to pass any ordinance regarding this as they are wrapping up their fiscal year budgets and the new fiscal year starts in July and it's very likely that this topic will come up in the city council on that month. So I would like to ask everyone on the advisory board to prepare your thoughts and concerns and bring this up at next month's meeting so we can prepare our statement of where we stand or send a letter to the city councilors on our position in the possible movement.  So that concludes my report. I'd like to open up the floor to questions and comments from board members.  I see several hands there. Yours was first and then we'll have Charlie go ahead.  Thank you very much for those.  So my question is about it's not a question of a comment.  Randy refers to physicalness but instead I like to recommend especially great for them and have fun coming back for you.  Oh, you're right. Of course you're right. Thank you. Yes, I know I know better. Absolutely. I just hadn't figured out the correct terminology.  Thank you for the parking spaces et cetera. Yes. No you're right. I appreciate that.  So physical physically accessible OK yeah you can just say accessible.  Yeah OK great. And then the second comment is you already talked about our community community we with the community I guess my this is coming from the background of making sure that when we have a public meeting in person I that we actually to address some of this collection of ourselves because we have many of constituents who may not be able to see us.  And so I think you mentioned should be part of the culture when we do and I went to a meeting and think that this is a you know, I just said I feel sure that there is some it doesn't have to moderate. It's just something to be respectful of making accessible for me for the absence of this says West. Thank you very much. Appreciate that fantastic comments well received and I think we will add physical visual descriptions to ourselves going forward.  I do mention in my introduction every time that I'm signing it I'm a male using sign language and that I use primarily female sign language interpreter.  So that's the voice that you'll hear. But I think beyond just saying yes here signing the people who like you said don't have visual access to me who can't follow the conversation necessarily with just that description, it might be useful to add that visual description as well. So next month at our meeting I will remind everyone to include not only their name and what part of Boston they're from but also a visual description.  So thank you very much for that suggestion and just reading something in the chat and OK, Charlie I see your hand is raised. Please go ahead. Yeah, I think this may be a question in response to when you were talking about us together I thought about potentially writing a letter or something to to council. This question probably is for commissioner.  Are we able just to have let's say some input are we able to respectfully call a city councilor to come and kind of discuss with us?  It's difficult for me to try to formulate any opinions around something that I'm not exactly sure where to find that the information in the discussion about this particular matter that that that it was to say it's going to come up in city council. Yeah, So thank you for that question. The city has intergovernmental relations office that functions as a liaison between city departments and the city council so our office doesn't directly interact with the city council because we work for the mayor and you know, separation of government.  That's the legislative branch. So they we work in the executive branch so to speak for the mayor and so we would have to go through our interim intergovernmental relations office. We try to see if we would get a city councilor to come to a meeting or to have a meeting with board members that's something that we can look into. If you did have more questions . Yes, thank you. I just wanted to bring that up as a question.  I don't I don't have any strong thoughts on it. I just if if the request from Cheryl West is that we are to do that I just would like to somehow get additional information or some guidance on where the right information is and the complete amount of information so I can formulate an opinion that would be productive to to contribute . We did share the hearing with everybody and Andrew and I were able to meet with some of the city council staff city council himself and his staff.  So we do have more information that we could share. But if you had direct questions ,things like that, we can certainly look into that.  Mrs. West.  Thank you, Commissioner Mikage ,would you mind sharing that information with the board members maybe in advance of the next meeting next month? That would be helpful. Yeah, terrific.  Thank you.  All right. Any other questions or comments related to the chair report at just have a comment w on your yeah. So talking about the captions ordinance, I know that you are thinking that compliance is an issue and I think that you're right. I you we discussed this internally a little bit and you know among our staff and we didn't think that just over half the restaurants being compliance on like you know, on a whim of of the investigation was that terrible because we haven't done a lot of outreach on the program and you know, so it's not great but we didn't think it was the worst thing in the world. But it does speak to the need for more outreach to be done to to get compliance numbers up. But I think that the first step would be outreach and you know, training and providing more information to restaurants rather than going directly to proposing any sort of fine system does a lot of complications when it comes to hosting a fine. When we started working on this ordinance, one of the biggest reasons that we got so much buy in from City departments was because we were not going to be posing any sort of fined.  In fact our office would be able to take any kind of fine money so it wouldn't be something that we could really process. It would be a very complicated structure. We would have to work out and you know, there are other ways that we can work on enforcement like we talked about outreach. We talked about writing letters to let people know and I know Andrew has written some letters to some businesses we saw that weren't in compliance and typically we get a good response from them.  Usually it's just a matter of raising awareness and then we also work with the city's licensing board which licenses certain businesses in the city restaurants to have a TV and we can always go down that road of you potentially calling businesses and for a hearing if they are compliance with the ordinance after so many notifications. But there are a lot of steps that we can take before we go immediately to a fine because like I said, it's going to be a complicated structure to set up. It's not something that our office to process and I don't think there'd be a big appetite in City Hall to propose something like that.  This is the less I appreciate that. Thank you, Commissioner, for that context. I think the fine would be the last resort.  I think we could keep it on the back burner until we meet it and that's probably a good use of that option. But I think maybe what we're seeing so far is that things have been a bit passive and so we can be more assertive in outreach and I know that there are other cities that are working with a fine structure.  So the research that I've done shows that and I think it can be effective but we can certainly put other ideas on the table, other solutions and I'm very happy to talk to anybody about this offline.  Charlie, I think your hand is up. Is it still did you have more to say? And then I see Jerry as well.  Yeah, I did have another comment that on the other but put on this this component I know that compliance and I know your passion towards you've spoken like I just thought maybe kind of tired what I brought in last week about goals maybe is part of the we are part of the advisory board. We can think about maybe seeing how we can collaborate with the disabilities commissioner Andrew in the group to think about how we can move towards a better number. I think what the commissioner was saying there's there's an initial pool that was our poll that was out there. Maybe we set goals for a long term like next year or the year after of what that compliance is and we collaboratively work with the commission to figure out how that outreach happens and maybe we we hold the commission accountable for how that plan gets executed when it comes to outreach awareness because I think it is it is something that seems to be that has to be broad outreach. There's a lot of follow up and all that I think it's going to take a lot of meaningful thought into figuring out a good strategy to to get to a number that we all agree is, you know, as a collective or that we would agree is acceptable and amenable to to meet to meet what you you know, you would like to see it. Can I just add that that was one dimension as well as you had mentioned the survey of some some sort of businesses. I know Andrew has something in the works. I don't know if there's anything that she wants to talk about right now but we have been talking about some sort of survey Andreasberg things. Yeah, hot off the presses after our conversation was where you mentioned that sort of informal survey.  It looks like we will have something done certainly within the next fiscal year or so by June of next year. We're still working out how big it will be, how much money we have to like hire folks who can actually go and see for themselves and how we're going to select to make sure that we have a representative sample across the city in that kind of thing. So very early stages. But yes, we will have a survey done certainly by the end of do next year.  This was great. Thank you for that information Commissioner Andrea Terry, I see your hand.  Go ahead.  Thank you. Wes Anderson.  And forgive me but I may have come in a little late or didn't hear the issue of the compliance that come up from your meeting with a state senator and and was he did you know where I came from?  Was he not moving forward with state wide legislation because he thought that that was the compliance was high enough is that would with what the context is?  This is Westshore Terry. I can catch you up.  I don't know where the bill stands at the moment but I have a feeling that he's waiting to see how the city of Boston can improve compliance before he would recommend it to be state wide. So fingers crossed we can get some some dents, we can make some progress and that will affect whether he perceives statewide.  Sure. And in terms of the accessible parking for or potential accessible parking for pregnant women, are you saying that there's going to be a hearing on that issue this Swiss I believe that this was previously discussed and that we maybe somebody else has more information. Sure. Sorry. So I can do to jump the commissioner we did meet with the counselor and he is still interested in having a hearing . We did emphasize that we believe that the hearing should be more focused on information sharing and raising awareness that women who are pregnant and have a disability can already apply for the placard rather than creating some new category which we have to happen at the state level anyway. So I believe the council's intention is to hold hearings but I don't think it would be anytime in the next two months . So we will definitely keep an eye on it and let the board know when we hear anything that being scheduled is.  Thank you Commissioner Boet because I thought in your report last you had said you had said that so you know, I was a little bit confused by your report but thank you for the clarification and thank you for your hard work, especially around the around the captioning ordinance and in pushing that to the statewide wide level and I'm sure that the advisory board will look to support that. And I think Charlie's idea of working with the commission and and city staff to to really think about like OK, so we have 50 percent compliance when we have the small number of people that we have establishments that we surveyed.  There are some target goals that we want going forward.  I think that that would be good work for the for you know, our advisory board and the commission to work on together and this is Christian. Just to add one other thing,  Andrew chat I don't know if they're very sorry but our office does have business cards like a wallet sized card with information on the ordinance. So anyone who wants to take some we could send them out to people and you can give them out to restaurant staff if you come across a place that doesn't have captions on this just explains the requirements and then you don't have to actually make a complaint or make a request even you could just hand out the card.  This is worse. Thank you Commissioner Mikage I appreciate that the one idea that I may have which I don't know what other people are going to think about this going into places and asking for a manager you know maybe that business card could be taped on the door before the businesses are open in the same way that they're licensure is put in the doorway or in the in the window. That's just one idea of a way to make it more permanent. Reminder.  OK, uh, so I believe that is the end of the questions and comments regarding the chair's report.  I'd like to thank everyone for your attention. I'm pretty sure I'd lost the agenda because I closed that window by accident so I can no longer see it. But I think the commissioner's report might be next. So why don't we go with that if you're right thanks to us so we'll pull up my slides and my report will be fairly brief time just I was on vacation for ten days so I just got back Monday so I will have a more brief report today so I will start off by talking about some disability commission events. As you all know, we had the Disability Community Forum two weeks ago and I want to thank the advisory board members who are able to attend. I really appreciate your presence in the community and having community members have the opportunity to be able to see you and learn about your work. So that was very much appreciated. We had nearly one hundred people in the disability community who participated to resume and a person that probably includes some city staff. But it's really great that we are able to get so much support internally to have staff come out because it's a really great chance for people in the disability community to meet other staff members besides people from our office and ask questions and get to know who they can reach out to if they do have questions moving forward. So we are happy with the turnout and we got some really great questions every year after the forum we send out a document with the questions all the questions that were asked along to answers so that people who weren't able to attend can see what we discussed and then if anybody missed any answers that we had given, it's all in one document. So we're working on that now and we plan to get that out hopefully by the end of the month.  Also at the forum I presented our twenty twenty three annual report.  It's summarized the work of our department and of the advisory board so if you didn't get a chance to get a paper copy, if you were their person there's a link in the slide deck so you can see all the work that we did over the past year and then finally the community forum is now available on our YouTube channel at the link provided on the next event that we have coming up as day twenty twenty four. This will be on Wednesday, July 17th from 12:00 noon to two p.m. at City Hall Plaza.  I believe most of you have attended in the past. It was a really fun celebration of the anniversary of the past we always have resource fair with we're shooting just thirty disability organizations and city departments this year we had put in for a larger tent so we'll have more space for shelter from sun and rain so hopefully we can have more tables, more organizations attend so we really like to try to offer the opportunity for people with disabilities to connect with services and resources that they may not know about and also what city departments.  So we're excited about that this year we're going to be recognizing the Department of Innovation and Technology in the city of Austin known as Do It Internally and we're going to be recognizing them for their work on digital access for the city we're currently in the beginning stages of talking about digital accessibility plans for the whole city now that the federal government is giving some guidelines on digital access requirements and municipal governments.  So we're looking at that and then also launching our disability data standardization guidelines over the next few few weeks in the next month or two. So save that data. I hope we can all attend. And then next slide is just some city Boston events. I had these on my report last month but just to let you know that the mayor's neighborhood coffee hours are continuing, they'll be going through June June twenty sixth their this week because the mayor is out of the country shoots at the Vatican with Governor Healey so she won't be doing any events locally but they will pick back up when she returns. So the coffee hours are really great opportunities to get to meet the mayor and city staff and raise your concerns. You directly linked to the mayor and the administration so if you're available, please check out the schedule.  It can be found at the link in the slide deck says mayor's coffee hours and hopefully they'll be in a park near you.  Also Boston is doing open streets again this year.  The first one was held last weekend in Dorchester but we have a few more coming up throughout the summer from June to October . And these are half day events that close off a street and allow businesses and community agencies and families to come and you know, have a closed street, make space for music and games and cycling and dealing with information. So if anyone hasn't been to one, I'd recommend it there really great community events and we do work closely with the different city departments who run these events to ensure that we have access at every open streets event.  Next slide.  So then just some general updates on that department work. As I mentioned a few minutes ago, we have completed the final draft of our disability data standardization project. So this is going to create a policy on when, how and why city departments will collect data on disability and what we found from the focus groups in our discussion and looking at literature review and national trends.  What we really heard loud and clear was that people with disabilities would rather talk about the accommodations they need rather than their actual disability like diagnosis or identity. So moving forward we're going to be directing city departments not to ask if somebody is blind or deaf or has mobility command but rather what accommodations do they typically need like do you usually use a screen reader or are usually the ASL interpreter? This is for two reasons. We feel like it's more respectful and less invasive of asking information of people with disabilities.  We don't really need to know any anything that we don't need to know so what would be helpful for us is to know about accommodations more than what the actual disability is and if we collected on accommodations that will help us figure out like what funding we may need like you know, we get a lot of feedback that people use ASL interpreters.  It would make a good case for us to get more funding to make sure we provided hamburger's if we see you know, not that many people usually use Braille it may you know, for us to look at like audio descriptions or you know, audio recordings or things like that when Braille isn't really use that much so we don't we'll find out but that is going to be the guidance that we'll provide to city departments moving forward is to oust data on accommodations rather than the actual disability the next fall it talks about an RFP we have out to hire a consultant to update the city Boston's transition plan we did an initial transition plan in 1993 when it was required when the ED was passed.  It's a very old plan now so we want to update it.  It doesn't mean that the work hasn't been done. The city's done a ton of work on accessibility upgrades since nineteen ninety three. It just means we don't have it all located in one central place. So this consultant will kind of pull together all the buildings and facilities assessments that have been done communication accommodation and services that we have and programs and policies things like that that we consider part of the city is accessible like plan under the ADA. So things like the digital accessibility plan I mentioned that be part of this it will probably be a webpage on the city website and it will just be kind of like a dashboard where you can go and see all the accessibility improvements that the city has made over the last thirty years and where we stand today. So we're excited about that.  An update on training. We have a training specialist who's been here not quite one year and they have done so far fifteen trainings since coming on board. They're currently working on recording some evergreen trainings on important announcements in American Sign Language. So this will be something like a heat emergency or a snow emergency or schools closed. So those things can be very general announcements that we can release in, you know, to the public when we have something like that arise.  It doesn't necessarily have to say danger times but the message will be NASL so that people in the deaf community who use ASL will get the information in their native language so that is going to be a big piece of our training specialists work so excited about that they've also given some of the fifty trains that given have been on various topics including diversity interacting with people who have disabilities kind of like a disability one on one also in accessibility one on one for some patients at Spalding who are newly disabled and just trying to figure out like what access means, what their rights are, what you know, what services that the city provides as far parking and other things like that. So that was an accessibility one to one.  They've also developed a training on service animals.  And on that note I did want to mention that a lot of you may have seen in the news that there was an incident recently in Chinatown where a customer was denied entry to a restaurant because they had a service dog. So things like that directly under our control because we work on DHL too, which is access to local government services whereas restaurants would fall under title three. But if you remember last month when I talked about our work plan for twenty twenty four,  one of the things that we are kind of branching out to right now is Title three to ensure that the city of Boston other than the government is also accessible as successful as it can.  So in instances like this I will write a letter to restaurant and just say, you know, reminding them of their responsibilities and requirements of the ADA to allow people with service access to their business. So it was a disturbing article . We don't like to hear those. Unfortunately we do hear complaints about service also being denied. So I trained specialist is was already working on a training about service animals but that's something that we hope to, you know, get out widely and it will also be recorded on our Web page so we can always refer businesses to that training. So we're excited.  And then finally we testified in front of the Boston City Council on April to to present our department's proposed budget for Ashli twenty five and that runs from July 1st thirtieth of next year. So we feel good about our budget and we feel very supported by the equity inclusion cabinet and mayor. Well so we're hoping fingers crossed that that will be seamless, it will be approved and we'll be good to go and end. The last slide is just again I left a scene from last month in case anyone's interested. I know the executive committee had mentioned before that they'd like to know like our plans for work that's coming up rather than just reporting on it after I've already been done. So rather than summarizing what everything we've done this is looking ahead to what we plan to do for the rest of this year due next year. Thirty and so again our main task and responsibilities each to so again working on the transition plan trainings that I just mentioned and increasing access systemically to checklists and language blurbs resources to other city departments A.D.A Title three Again this is more broadly improving access across the city.  So outreach and enforcement in the captions ordinance like we talked about training on free and low cost barrier removal for small businesses and we're going to work with Main Street's on that and then again sending indications of requirements we call it I do the right thing letter that's a letter that I can write to businesses when we get a complaint of noncompliance.  And then finally we are working on financial empowerment and economic mobility of people with disabilities. We know this is a really tough one because people disabilities are often limited in their income and savings and there are a lot of disincentives to work and you know, work is one of the best ways to improve your economic mobility. So some things we're working on is the return of Disability Mentoring Day in Boston City Hall with mass we had commission now known as mass ability.  That will be a day where we bring in Boston residents who are seeking jobs and they'll get some mentoring from different city departments had a session with the Human Resources Office where they can actually apply for a job. We also hosted webinars on employment in October during Disability Employment Awareness Month. So this year we were used to the last few years we've done one on getting a job with the city of Boston kind of demystifying the process this year. We hope to expand it to do maybe two or three webinars one on saving and banking with a disability and housing and then we are also talking about hosting an interview or hiring event for qualified job residents, Boston residents who are disabled. So be like a one day event where people with disabilities can come in and meet hiring managers and actually apply for jobs on the spot so it can be a great way to connect people directly with hiring managers and they can have a chance to apply directly for a job and that will be another way to break down a barrier to employment because sometimes just getting that first interview is a real barrier. So if we can kind of remove that piece of it then hopefully it will lead to more people with disabilities getting hired by the city and that is the end of our work. But I'm happy to take questions if anyone has any this is Wesley here signing and I'm looking across the green room. Oh, we've got a question. Elizabeth, would you like to go ahead and ask your question?  Thanks, Commissioner. I just have a couple of quick questions about for well, a question for ADA Day. That's great to hear that there'll be a larger tent. I think that will be helpful for the vendors and seeking shelter if it's a hot day.  I don't know how much ahead the tee shirts are ordered or were ordered but it seemed like some of the size is like large 1x but it seems like they either at the very small sizes are like two plants or whatever that they seem the middle sizes seem to run out more quickly. So I just saw that in the yeah we can definitely make sure that we're always trying to ballpark what we need the most of so we have definitely rearranged the size quantities in the last few years but we can definitely keep that comment in mind. What we do are the t shirts. Thank Wesley here again to add to Elizabeth's comment about ADHD if it is a hot day it is a concern for me. I'm sure it is for most of you . I would suggest that the tent at Bandz or some kind of cooling mechanism like mist that can be on those are and other suggestions that I want to add.  Thanks for I know that the one city department does give like blankets but I like Mr. to us so we can definitely get to that and give each year always brings a buzz every year cooling bus so people can seek shelter inside the bus if necessary and one year we actually did cancel it not last year the year before we postponed it a couple of weeks because of the heat it was like a bit of a heat wave and we don't want subject people to that. So we definitely are always keeping tabs on the weather but that is a great idea about like a distinction excellent.  Thank you and very did you have a comment from reporter?  I'm wondering if food should be taken there but my favorite movies here well maybe I'm one of the things that you wanted to find out was whether you could actually have one of our community farms on the far.  Is there any kind of paperwork that we need to get permission for before the you know, benefit from, you know, Yeah.  Why don't you follow up with our office? We you have a number of vehicles. It's just a matter of like make sure we have enough space because we do have like an emergency. Ms. Ambulance, we have the NBC bus. We have like the food and or sometimes a radio station but yeah, I'd be happy to look into it. Just follow up with me directly and we can see what we can figure out from this is Wesley here.  Are there any other questions or comments for the commissioners or for CNN?  Thank you for the report Commissioner Mikage and I'm sorry Elizabeth your hand is still restricted. You have another no other problem. Thanks.  OK, I'll move forward with the agenda now next up is announcement does anyone have any announced something to share with us?  Seems like there are no announcements. We'll move on.  Is does anyone have any items that are needing to be brought up?  I don't know how my thumbs up showed up. That's weird. I don't think I did that. Charlie, I see your hand. Go ahead.  Oh, thank you. I was just I think we have is running a business but Commissioner, I know that the Boston Public Schools Transportation is supposed to give you I believe a quarterly update. I didn't know if they had missed the last one if there was any update from them as we are going into year end. But I think the biggest thing that that parents going into the summer there's two main things that they say they do get anxiety over is our programing for our kids. Right. Especially the kids with disabilities. What is available but there is in the school system it's called extended school year and that requires transportation. So Boston public schools busses and because it's such a truncated period they have to negotiate everything. I was wondering if they had any updates on that because that's always been a sore spot for parents because it takes by the time they figure out the routes the that that summer summer extended year is basically winding down.  So kids miss programing. Yeah, no, that's a very important point. Usually I would reach out to to get that data. I have not reached out.  I think the last time we got the data was February.  This is Andrea the what they offered actually was not quarterly was three times a year end of the school year end of the summer and in December so we can reach out they usually pretty responsive and pretty proactive but because the school are still a couple more weeks in it, we have got those numbers yet.  OK, so just a clarification,  Anderson. The three points were end of school year, end of summer and end of December that yes. Is that correct? Did they give it any explanation rationale around why those specific times and periods is that like a period of great reconciliation or a data epiphany or anything like that? They didn't provide a detailed description but my understanding was at the sort of natural points of the school year beginning of the school year looking back at the summer December, looking back the first semester and then end of the second semester was my understanding of the thinking. But they didn't they didn't give me a great deal information. They were like these are the three times it makes sense to ask what do you think? And it made sense to us at the time. But if there's a different timeline that makes sense to you, let me know.  Thanks.  Thanks for the explanation and clarification.  This is was I have a little question actually I'm assuming that the next time we will have more information maybe by the month of July will we have more information by the end of the school year? Will happened do we not have a meeting?  We should have an update for you in due course during the month for skipping, right? Well, I don't know. I didn't know when the school year ended. I guess that my questions are I was I was assuming that the information would be ready by July. >> We may be able to get an update by June. Let me look at when we meet next week.  Great. Thank you, Anthony . Any other old business?  OK, we'll move on to new business. I I actually as chair have an item I wanted to discuss with her new business that there's clean that up. So first state law or state law the commission advisory board meetings have to occur at least ten times a year and for the twenty ten times a calendar year for the twenty twenty four calendar year we have a total of eleven meetings where the combined November and December meeting scheduled for early December and that means that we can cancel one meeting because we have to have ten we are allowed to cancel one because we're up to eleven and so I would like to propose that with the summer coming that we go ahead and cancel one of our summer meetings. I was thinking of August so I wanted to see how the board members would feel about that.  I wouldn't go ahead and cancel that meeting without getting input from others but I wanted to put that to the board and see what folks think about canceling August.  Charlie, I see your hat I yes. So I didn't want to kind of tie this into that.  One of my questions that I had previous I know that there's that there's a statute saying ten we have eleven I I would just like to understand the work that we're trying to achieve this year. Right. And that ties into what are what is this we're trying to have his goals for the year so for me to to just meet a statute or say hey let's remove a meeting without knowing what our work should be or if we set any goals we did set our goals. I would probably propose maybe we should meet all twelve months or do more than the statute. Right. If if we did have that and I just I just bring that up to everybody is this this question that you bring up is is if it's just going to be reports and not just they're very important. We are the meetings we do have very important discussions. However without us setting or collaborating to get what type of work we want to get done for twenty twenty four it would be hard for me just to to kind of say should we just hit ten right versus keeping the eleven . So I'm sorry to make it more typical for us.  I think it's just I'm just trying to really get that point across.  This is where I appreciate that Charlie. Thank you for that comment.  Uh, I'm wondering what other board members have to say, what other people think about that. Any questions or concerns?  What are what are their thoughts? I and I see Paul go ahead Pollit So I agree with the elimination of August. I think that as you can see tonight our attendance is down a little bit and I think that by August people might just need a break and rather than waiting around and hoping that we get a quorum that we just plan the work that we have to do August is going to be a month that you're free but then we the ground running again in September. So I with the elimination of the OK, great thanks very much Paulette and yeah I'm in the same boat as you so I think my opinion is clear. Olivia, go ahead.  Sorry it took me a minute. Tell me it myself.  This is Olivia. I don't think we should cancel a meeting for the sake of canceling the meeting I I think we should keep it in case something happens later on as a buffer particularly November December and if we go back to in-person meetings in September as was proposed over the email chain, I think we should keep a safety net there.  This is w thanks Olivia. Any other comments or thoughts about this topic?  I'm sorry. Go ahead. I just told them maybe not to write about the next meeting because I'm single and I feel like you know, if you haven't we can keep them between this time frames that'd be bad but then you never know. I think, you know, knowing what we can kind of figure out what we need to do within that time but I guess I think we can stay through some of our family's vacation.  It would be nice to have that ability.  I know I certainly don't want to miss but at the same time I would appreciate that flexibility of having at least one returns.  I'm thinking December one but he's one of those Mrs. W thanks very appreciate that. Yeah, I agree. I think that either August or December I guess what we can do is what Syria suggested let folks think about it and we can revisit this this question in June.  We'll add that to the agenda. Does that work for everybody? We'll have vote in June.  All right. There was one other thing I am for new business as some of you had mentioned working on goals which Charlie has just brought up again and I proposed last month that we establish a subcommittee to work on this topic. So what I will do is over the next few weeks I will send the board members a whole and see who is interested in joining the subcommittee to work on these goals and when collect the data the names of how many folks are interested then hopefully will be able to start that subcommittee up next.  OK, uh, Billy, also someone just type something on the chat that I missed so let me go back and look at that and an announcement from Jerry.  What announcement? Oh great. OK, OK so there's an event tomorrow part of the Boston Center for Independent Living and the anniversary there is a panel discussion number two a panel discussion we will see second original panel discussion wins at Boston and a friend of fiftieth anniversary . OK, thanks Jerry for that. Any other new business from the board members that we'd like to discuss Libya?  Go ahead. This is Olivia.  I want to put it on people's radar that we're actually right now in the housing bonfield Sisa for Massachusetts to fund affordable housing through the next few years. One of the things that's been brought up is the state recovery for people en masse health who receive benefits through the program or through mass health benefits when you pass away if you have a house,  if you own significant property buy like stocks, bonds, whatever mass health comes in and takes that as kind of a repayment for keeping you alive throughout your your time with disability.  It's disgusting. It needs to end and there's a bill of that is being proposed in the memory of Joe Tripodi from Western Massachusetts to end the state recovery from A-s. I think it's something that if it comes up to state we should support it.  The Swiss thank you, Olivia, for bringing up this bill. Very important. I actually was not aware of it at all so I appreciate it being brought to your attention if you can find out which the what Senator Bill numbers those are, please send that to the board.  That would be really helpful. So we're clear on which bills especially that we're following and then we can take a look at them, read through the language and form opinions. Excellent particularly to support from the board's perspective.  Will the any other new business OK, just one second. All right. So this is the portion of our evening our public meeting where we offer space for public comment.  Are there any members of the public here tonight who would like to make public comment? Please introduce yourself wait to be given the ability to announce and then you have two minutes to make your comment or ask your question.  OK, this is Wes Jerry and you just your mike turned on. Did you have something to add? But no, no, no I you know, trigger finger no problem.  OK, the next item on our agenda is to adjourn this meeting so I would need someone to make a motion in that direction.  This is Jerry.  I would love to join the meeting.  Thank you very much, Jerry.  We have a second also terrific . Thank you very much. Who just like was it very well . Very terrific. Thank you. I didn't see who done I appreciate that all in favor of adjourning this meeting. Please raise your hand or say I just signify right. All right. This meeting is adjourned at seven five pm.  Go see those houses. Have a good night, everybody.