##VIDEO ID:yBLfWh1Ph4A## okay today is Wednesday September 18th and I'd like did we start like to call the meeting of the economic development commission to and uh we may get a couple people coming late but we've got a quorum so far I'm the chair Greg DIY Serena Fuller Bill Terry stepen roach great okay and we've got a big agenda so we're going to jump into it right away first of all i' like to welcome our new commission members Stephen and and Bill uh we really need your help we gota and we're gonna make this meeting kind of a lot for a fiscal year and talk about all our goals and all of that is on the agenda and I also want to get into election of officers which is supposed to be down at the beginning of each fiscal year and the way I'd like to do it is I want to make sure that anybody who is an officer is really wants to do it has the time to do it and and you know speaks to that um so I want to have first people talk about well and I may not do all of it this meeting because I want to have time for and and Jean is not here but I for example I'll just say what I would say for myself I've only recently taken over his chair with Inga having to leave for health and I would say I'm willing to go through this next year got a lot of projects started so you know anybody's free to nominate somebody else as well but I'm saying I'm willing to do that you know for Year and that said I would like to keep it open for somebody else to do it the following year I don't need to do it every year it's good sometimes to train new people and that would be a position the vice chair is vacant now uh so maybe that's one we'll wait till next meeting to discuss the vice chair but I want everybody to think about whether that's something they would have the time and the commitment to do that could be an advisor and could fill in if if needed and also potentially train to be chair next year for the next fiscal year after you next fall um because I think as I say it's good to rotate those if we have people that are willing so you're standing in the Gap right now basically yeah I'll I'll well we'll go through the process if anybody else wants to step up and and go for the chair now we can nominate and vote you get a nomination in a second we can vote on that say I'll I'll maybe wait a little bit for any of the votes because we have a couple people that may show up late and currently Jack is the the clerk and I'd like to see whether what his position I'm continuing that what are the various positions chair Vice chair just chair VI those are positions um and Jack is a has been in finance and has been a CFO so that's kind of why he fell into the position of Clerk and we're just starting to get a handle on on that he is supposed to report on some of the changes in the in the town process for purchase orders and submission of expenses I think they have been simplified I'm I'm hoping they are I think it's the influence of our new town CEO Nicole and uh because they were pretty difficult as it was I don't know if you had that at the library I simplified okay well you know unless there's a real reason for waiting for them I'd like to move that you bu the position of President and then the only reason is that we could get a fuller vote if they they came in but we have you said we Mark is on yes and then another guest I'm here okay I would I Mo to nominate you as sure okay can well I like simple votes all in favor say I I okay since dragon all right so that vote is complete um I'd like to wait till we find out if Jack shows up before we do the clerk and again I'd like people to think about next week and I want to give Gan a chance to think about it and you know anybody in I mean the positions he he is currently the the clerk but it's according to the handbook you're supposed to vote these in each year supposed to start by you know in in the select board they actually rotate their positions every year you know the person who's the chair goes to the clerk the vice chair goes to the chair I mean we don't have that automatic rotation but we should we're supposed to vote at the beginning of each each year on on who takes those positions what I mean we're into tell I mean because the last two meetings we didn't have a forum so we going have voted in anyway right well I didn't get sworn in until day before yesterday so you could out anyway that was the fault of I don't know why it took cons L to get the the the new listings over to the clerk I'm happy you got where that you were able to go in because last minute so the other thing I want to do now that we have a quum is to finally approve our minuts now I've sent all the mens out separately so I didn't get any changes from anybody and that's the process I'd like to do as people submit changes but I'll ask does anybody have changes that no that they didn't submit no okay we've got four meetings to catch up on let's just vote for all of them you know all in favor of approving the minutes from the last four meetings say I hi hi hi it's unanimous SO meetings are approved Julie you can take care of getting those posted I'd like to be up to on minutes um now I also presented that proposal for signage promoting as as you all know one of the priorities in our survey of businesses at second priority was to promote Southwick as a recreational destination and I presented to all of you the idea for some kind kind of permanent signs at key places at the kiosks on the bike trail and the New England trail and the boat ramps and Granville Gorge and maybe Wally Park and wherever where where it would have the QR code and take people to you know the website with all the the destinations and as well as there would be an Avenue for the shop Southwick and just as an update shop southwick's up to a over 700 unique users 7750 and 3500 uh page views I want it to be 10 times that but it's a start and this will will help and it takes promotion to do that in addition to these semi in these permanent installations I also want to create some smaller ones that could be posted in restaurants and other businesses as well did you price them no I didn't want to take it too far without the backing of the whole commission isn't the next step before we do detailed proposal though is to get we have to if we new DET notna I don't want to vote today for for proceeding with it I just want to vote that we should proceed with with a full quing and development of a proposal that we should proceed with develop in a a serious proposal for this sign process and and also I've I've presented the same presentation to the Conservation Commission to the agricultural commission to the parks and rec and to the um Lake management group and the historical commission they all received all very positive about doing it and I I wanted to do that first just to know that we had the support of everyone I I didn't present it to say you know we want you to do anything I said I just want you you to know what we're thinking about and get your thoughts on it and everybody was very supportive and the next step is is to prepare a serious and detailed presentation to put out to the select board for their approval GRE Greg yes Greg um just a comment I think this is a terrific idea you know we've been um putting together some some great um resources uh that can really you know um change I think um even the you know the perception of the public and the businesses about about the town you know one of the things this is such a good idea one of the things we may want to talk to uh the select board about maybe it's included in what we look at with this particular um um suggestion is like permanent welcome to Southwick signage that can include some of the things like you know the QR code to click on for the restaurant guide I mean I I just think it's it's a terrific idea are you are you thinking at the where would these go on in and out in and out of town on the major routs so you got 57 you've got um you know coming up from somewhere um on on College Highway where you're catching like maybe into the downtown area and then on the other side you know after you get past like Tractor Supply or something so not necessarily at the Town Line but when may maybe but some place where you're going to get you'd have to assess it to say is the town line the right place or in the case of like putting it a little further up and down College Highway if you put it right at the at the line you're going to miss people coming from some you know fairly trafficked roads but not ma major Thorofare so I think if you strategically place them also where there's a good line of sight and visibility to them I I think it would be a there's no like welcome to that I know of Welcome to southw science yeah the one thing about a QR code is it's it's much better if you can walk up to it than when you're driving you're not you're going to be distracted if the passenger the passenger would click the QR code not the driver no but it could be something like the website that you know people remember that come see us you know that will be part of the proposal and you know we may even discuss and we don't have time to get into the details of that today but we may even want to develop a a subgroup that really digs into this we need to go to designers get quotes and get production quotes and and all of that before we can present it my my goal would be to aim for installation in early spring when people are starting to get outside so yeah a good good point but yeah why don't we you know I want to move through all these things why don't we go ahead and and somebody want to make a motion for doing this I'll make the motion as stated okay motion to uh create a detailed presentation on the sign proposal for the select board to get approval all right so we've got the the mo motion the second all in favor say I I I so it's unanimous we got another vote before we have like two or three going out and Chase the thing on down can we sort of shake it out at some future meeting just like we started to right then I don't think we should take the time now necessarily but before two or three are charged with this and yeah yeah we'll get we'll get to all this once we we get down and maybe we'll you know toward the end of the meeting if we're not running too late we could come back to this topic but I I don't want to get bogged down on it this could take and speaking not getting bogged down is there any way that we could just have a brief introduction from the new members here I mean oh yeah now that we have the bigger group we had them introduce themselves when they first because they have attended a couple of the meetings well Bill you've been to a couple of them and and Stephen you've been to one at least okay uh so they introduced themselves first time they they came as visitors but introduce yourself to the bill Terry have lived in town since 1991 um owned my own business for last 20s something years um in my second term as Constable for the town of Southwick um you know my wife she was a of the planning board for a number of years I know what else you need to know what are your interests as far as EDC gos I mean I want to learn frankly see what a committee like this commission like this can actually do how it inter works with the select board how it inter works with the state how funding actually comes from the state to something like this to try to drive development and I just I think that as a business owner kind of to my wheelhouse yeah yeah that business owner outside of south lake correct which is actually I think an advantage there's no yeah sales people that roll over no England so they were pretty broad what is your business we sell electrical construction equipment the switches receptacles the boxes on the wall it's very likely my company sold [Music] those my name is Stephen roach I live on Powder Mill Road been a resident here for three years uh my day job is working for DOD writing oversight on government contracts um outside of work had previously volunteered with Milli Park children museum to put on the whop City breef bestest in Westfield and my main kind of interests are kind of second learning about what the board can kind of do it's my first kind of involvement in a town board as well as I live in walking distance to downtown so I'd like to be kind of part of ensuring that it's viable good nice um yeah I I name okay good all right good now before we go any further with the normal agenda we do have a guest and yes I'd like to and we had on the on our agenda for seeing to present is is the progress so far in the proposal for we'd like to to move forward with a specific amount of content that we actually put on our website as soon as possible but i' like to open up for your comment however you would like uh first you can describe you know your your job how long you've been there at the library everybody my name is Lynn I work at the South Public Library I've been here uh just a little over five years now so um and I've originally I worked in um Westampton so I've been in large libraries small libraries um and my husband and I moved to Westfield a couple years ago um so we now pretty much locals um so the library um I wanted to I reached out and Jean got in touch with me so one of our goals is to really kind of collaborate with a lot of the organizations in town we've done stuff with the ad commission um I work with the board of health nurse a lot to do progr programs and whatnot um and I would kind of love to work with the EDC as well um a lot of what we do um we have obviously a collection that people can borrow from you know materials on writing resumés starting your own business that's a really really big thing right now is a lot of people are considering starting their own businesses so we want to have resources for them and maybe that's where you guys can come in as well if you if you have resources like physical things that you want people to have access to in addition to your online content you know we could potentially be a home for them is one idea um we also do a lot with um we have a online resource that people can use um that they can get help with their resumés help with job searching there's live coaches that they can talk to submit their resume get feedback practice interview skills kind of everything like that um and on the flip side we also really want to a big part of what we do is programming um so we did have a grant a couple years ago through the state where all Pathways to success so we had a lot of people speak on um you know job searching resume skills like that but also um you know we had a speaker on starting your own business we had um the woman from designer consigner I think I got that right I flip it around sometimes um on the main stretch there and she talked about starting your own business um and we really want to keep that programming going so I was hoping to kind of make a connection with you guys um and you know hopefully if we ever have an idea for an event or a speaker maybe we can ask you you might know the right person likewise if there's something that you guys want to post a program on I mean we have the space we have the resources we have a right reach with our social media our email um you really want to post more programs on starting your own business entrepreneurship anything like that um I'll give you I have little pamphlets this is just about our our job searching software if you want to pass those around if you're curious um but I'm also happy to answer any questions anybody has or anything like that have you been in touch with maranne Marana from the high scho they have that school to Career I've been on the board of that for like 30 years yeah yeah had um we've worked with her before um we've had her interns that work with us which is a really great connection as well because we can take people who are interested in library stuff but we can also take students who are interested in like marketing Communications anything like that so I think that's a really good as well Y how often people come into the library with resources you know I would say some frequently that the good thing about that type of resource is people can also access it from home sure um so we have a lot of people who they do recognize the library as a place to go I I would hope so yeah yeah but we're also really trying to spread the word I think one of the problems is that we have is we have a lot and we we're really trying to kind of work on the best way to Market what we have because I think you know especially in this day and age people are so overwhelmed with all of the information out there so we're really working to kind of this is a good start to just spread the word about what we do what we have and how we can help and also what we can potentially have that would help people as well that is all great we absolutely want to partner with you and we can help you you can help us a lot of these things and and one of the priorities that I'm going to get to later in the meeting is to fill out our website we put the first priority on doing our business directory which is up and running now we want to fill out all the other parts of it that are targeted to two different two or three different other audiences the business directory is to the residents people using the businesses now we want to Target it to existing businesses resources that they can use to help them and to people who are interested either in coming in or starting a business in town resources they could use and then people that are looking you know for jobs and employment some other audience and resources that'll help them vacancies in town as well as other kind of job and resume information they would find helpful absolutely love to be included any online resources you have so I'd like to you know start as soon as possible and I like to do things in in Little Steps we don't have to have a massive master plan of how we do it but just start with pieces of it we've got a bunch of tabs I'm putting up all the content myself on the website we don't we don't have to worry about a a middle person to work through or our early rates you know if we have our main goal with all this other information is we're not generating we don't have the ability to generate content ourselves we want to link to content that already exists because all of us exists different places you're about well I'm just trying to think how as businesses we can use a portion of this you know to get the need on out as far as help on as well and I'm just seeing this here secondly that so you need yourself with hard to walk in is that limit people's access that they don't have yeah so they just need a card but it's it's super easy to sign up um by a couple minutes and we can get them ready to go I know you have a huge amount of inter Library access for other towns if somebody outside the town wanted to get the online is that still pretty easy for you get in yeah well how it works with with a lot of our resources is that we pay for it for just a lot of them um without getting too complicated you know our South Library hard it will recognize if somebody's not from Southwick so because you know if we were to purchase something and you were to have the whole of Westfield use it then technically we're paying a certain amount and everybody everybody else is using it too but the good news is is that a lot of the libraries each have their own type of something going on so you could refer if they're from Westfield you could say you can get the same stuff in westfi home they want use it on one of our ERS it doesn't care where you're from you know it's mainly just you know the way it's set up is to just monitor you know who's using it from home because they don't want somebody from Arkansas Florida you know what I mean so but yeah but any of our we have we have a lot of Public Access computers which people use very frequently so any anything that that they can they can do it on our computers as well so where is where is the list of jobs are available than as people access L where do you get that list from that is um the the job listings are generated um through the company that does that so it's honestly probably not exhaustive you know if somebody were to come in looking for job resources you know we would direct them to to a bunch of other places you know this is only just a starting point for people can an employer contact you say they have openings and you can open that up to job Seekers who are looking to get the rums generated yeah I mean we've never we've never considered that before you know if if somebody were to contact us that's I and we're thinking that on our website we could post job you know that kind of listing um I'm thinking that we could direct you know our focus is mainly to generate business and your focus is to help people find jobs they're both obviously inter related but I was just thinking as an employer you pay a fee if you want to go on indeed or any other source would this have been a free source for people to post their job openings well as I see our website can be a source that they could access through the library sure because the library would say well here's another resource you can go to the EDC website and they have some job postings so there's a lot of back and forth and we obviously would offer all all our services for free I suppose you know there's there's opportunity for us I mean we have a a small website a small sub page on our website that's just for businesses entrepreneurs job Seekers you know there's always the chance for us to you know link more resources there if there's already you know trusted lists through through certain you know I don't I don't know if we' think like something as big as indeed but if there's other smaller like I know like Northampton has like its own like job job and I'm thinking of something as simple as as having it here's here's another resource say in your website here's a link that has a resource from the Southwick Economic Development commission that does have some job listings and some information for you know in various categories about businesses so it's just you know at the very minimum we would have mutual links and our website would link to the library as a resource you would link to us absolutely um that would be the kind of the starting point and uh then we'll build it from there as it makes sense and graad Gan isn't here because I wanted him to propose a starting point because I want to actually populate these pages and we're going to get to our detailed goals here in a little bit anything else on the library and you're welcome to stay as long as you want say I do have to scoot out in a few but I just wanted to thank you for taking the time well thank you for coming to talk everybody um and if anybody has any questions that pop up any ideas I'm definitely ly what's your last name Blair Blair y yeah this is one area that we're really looking to kind of expand on so so please it's it's new to me so I'm happy to hear any ideas or anything that anybody has okay thank you very much thank you for coming than okay and now we have Jack Cody here at our meeting so talking about you jack l y NN and then Blair BL a i r okay um so to catch you up Jack we we talked about the need to elect new offices officers in each fisal year which began in July but we didn't have a quum until today um and what I had suggested is that we make sure before we nominate anybody that they're willing to serve and and want to serve uh and we already and what I said is that I was willing to be chair for the coming year and and you know I just had gotten started with with Enga leaving and you know potentially have somebody new next year but I would do it for this year if somebody wanted to nominate they did and we voted um for the position of clerk what is your you you in that position now what is your thought about uh continuing or didn't we also talk about Jack not having a choice well we could make an exception we voted a in right we were GNA take a vote before you got here but no I said I I would like people to be willing because you don't want somebody that's you know not I'm fine with being CLK but I'm also fine if somebody else wants to step up and well anybody else want to to step up I move to nominate Jack SP okay second second okay all in favor say I I I you're out all right okay so we've got that done and then I I said in terms of the vacancy of Vice chair I want to do that next meeting because jeina isn't here and I want everybody to have a chance to think about whether they would want to put themselves out there for that position so I said I want to nominate if there's one or two or three that want to we'll we'll you know wrestle out in the boat but if they want to be Vice chair they should be sure they have the time and the commitment to fill on a meeting and potentially be trained to take over his chair next time because I'm kind of in favor of rotating some of these positions around um it's good to get fresh ideas and fresh energy into different positions doesn't have to be changed but but I like to leave that open so let's bring that up in the next meeting and have anybody that that wants to think about putting themselves out okay are we up to all nine members now again no we're still one chart so a quum for be five uh it's yeah it's it the quum stays the the same whether it was yeah nine yeah probably is the same whether it's eight or nine but it's it's still five and but it's going to be easier to hit that now when we're not down by three we're only down by one so that you can find out if anybody else wants to put themselves out for it because that position can be filled any any time through the year that we can uh bring it back in so but we're we're much better off and and uh we already voted on approving the minuts I assumed you approved it didn't have any change so now caught up on minuts and my process on the minuts is to put them out within a few days after the meeting because I like to use them not only is the official minuts which are required by all the procedures but also is making it clear what assignments were given what people are expected to do in the next meeting it's a good communication to keep projects going between meetings so also make sure we're all on the same page yeah and and then by getting them out within a few days I would like to get feedback before the next meeting so that we can quickly approve the minutes so if if somebody has a correction give it to me you know you don't don't reply at all just reply to me and I'll I'll put it in and and then the next time I will say we'll have a vote to proove it with this one or two or three Corrections or whatever that I would I would get we can still do it fairly quickly all right um then we voted to proceed with developing a proposal for the the signs and then I'd also like to vote I presented this proposal about upgrading Our Town Center with the goal of making it more business friendly to slow have a slower speed limit and crosswalks makes it it fits directly into the a new master plan talks about walkability and and making it livable workable walkable downtown walkable is used 13 times in our master plan and I know that the vision is for what the time will be in 2040 but we need to start with little pieces whatever is easy first and so I think I'm am going to be on the agenda for this coming Monday at the select board to make the presentation there you have the verbage somewhere I I sent it out with the with my uh agenda I sent a copy it was attached okay both things the sign proposal I can send it again if you want it but it's it basically goes through the the arguments for why we should slow it down um what this speed it's it starts out at 40 and what I mean by Town Center is the part that has sidewalks in both sides from hry tractor apped to [Music] here just College Highway I'm talking about right now I know but sou College help I'm just to here oh just the sidewalks go to here now that's not to say that we shouldn't consider other things but my idea is start with something welldefined town center and maybe that will be the stimulus to reconsider some of the other speed limits too but you only have to you know you only one chance to kiss the pig as they say you know well I don't think so I think there's there there are other and and maybe this is something that SB will have input on but you know once you start saying well maybe we should go all the way you know down and this to that point and to another point and and then you say well what about the side streets and 57 in both directions I just wanted to keep it the initial proposal for the Town Center because as it's part of The Proposal I showed that 40% of the accidents happen in this mile and a half of Highway which it represents 2% of the 90 miles of Highway in South l so that alone is is a good argument plus there are a whole bunch of other aru being able to pull out into the highway turn in and out of businesses I know people that some that are older say they avoid coming downtown it scares them to drive through this town with people speeding through and hard to turn in and out and you know that center lane and people going so past I mean West didn't have a problem dropping all over well the difference and I I talked to Kirk Sanders quite a bit about about this he was a police officer for 40 years and retired a few years ago and he worked with the state on a couple speed limit things and he said it's different than Westfield in that Westfield maintains their sections of college highway state maintains our sections so it's a little bit different um but I think the difference is he was just trying to go directly to them what I'm proposing is that we follow the process outlined in the Massachusetts General laws there is a process where you can get a town to decide to designate a place to 25 mil hour which is what I'm proposing for the middle of town that it takes a vote of the legislature in the region and for our town that would be the town meeting so vote a town meeting would would be the process and select would probably be the one to put it out there so that's why I'm presenting it to them I've talked to people people for a couple years now about this I've yet to find a single person who didn't agree with it people think yeah that would and and a big part of it is I did a bunch of TS I drove that length at the two different speed limits and the difference was 14 seconds you can't go at the full speed to there because there's people turning and stopping in traffic lights and so why have it where people speed up to slow down to speed up to slow down it just makes it more dangerous you just relax and calm it all down and go through are you saying 25 miles an hour all the way through that mile and a half um from tractor right now from Tractor Supply to IBS it's 40 mil hour so I suggested take that to 30 and then from IBS to here it's 35 I recommend taking that to 25 that is all written up in what I proposed which I sent out as an attachment for B review again so what I wanted to do here was to see whether we all would support that because if I take it to the select board on Monday I like to say the economic development and all the members are behind it if you're not be honest but um because I I want the the true I just don't was all inclusive enough I mean I we have had so many accidents our place people are out of here they're stepping on it and they're going I mean and you slow down even more it's going to get even worse I know that's I you know I think it's crazy to speed it up before that turn for sure I why speed it up only to soil down again I that doesn't make sense to me but I would like to make that a separate prop proposal and I don't again that may go outside of I'm proposing it the reason I'm arguing it from economic development is because this is the the business center of town and so I I think we have you know a position on what that speed should be in the business District you know once we get outside of the business district it's it's more of a safety issue and you know I hear what you're saying and I will bring up because of what you're saying I'll I'll say yeah the the EDC all supported it their only question was they wished it would go further well the business district does will forther the business district doesn't necessarily but it is a business oh there are no I understand there's still businesses they're more spread out I me in one sense there's businesses the whole length of College Highway through the whole town but if the goal is to make downtown more walkable containing it to the areas where there's actually sidewalks make sense that's that's what I wanted to do initially because right it's G to slow it down make it harder to pass if I put everything in one proposal now maybe at the same time maybe if if we had to take it to town meeting for example we would do it in two or three or four proposals okay we want to change in the town center now we want to change it you know down to your place at least maybe it should even be slower all the way all the way to one McDon but those I think we split them up into separate proposals I'd hate to have somebody vote it down in town Center because they thought it was too extensive well why can't they just break it up in two proposals within the same andar yeah exactly I'll I'll let the select board decide that I just thought from a position of Economic Development our strongest argument was for the central business district of the town because that and sidewalks it's where the side walks are it's where you want it to be walkable um and it's it's a mile and a half section and it it's not going to take any time people think they're saving time by speeding through the middle of the town you don't you save seconds you know if you go a few miles an hour faster go into Boston yeah you can save some time 10 minutes or 15 minutes but if you go 10 miles an hour faster through the middle of town you save almost nothing because you can't keep up the speed anyway there's people turning and traffic lights can you briefly explain to me what the process of from proposal to implementation looks like so this would be an initial proposal to select board they would say we are we are not empowered to implement yeah anything like this so our power is in making an argument making a proposal being persuasive and so you know what I what I picture is that if once I presented to the select board uh they would decide whether to take it to town meeting I don't know if we having haven't heard whether we're having a special one in November this year or well but not if not then we're you know it's going to not going to be till next anyway okay um but they're going to want to you know I didn't talk to Police Department or anybody else I want to take it straight to the select Board and they'll probably want to consult with police and with uh planning board and whoever else and that was one of my kind of you know maybe Town attorney and I'll let them take it to the next step I just thought as Economic Development we should take a position on this and we should be kind of an initiator of it I don't know why this wasn't done 10 20 years ago somebody you know we just got to start it and do it um the initial proposal also had um something about crosswalks in there right I want to do both it kind of goes together you can't do crosswalks without the speed change so the first step lower speed change and at the same time do crosswalks now I all I took on that I said it could be as simple as paint um I also noticed and this is something new I just drove through Le a few days ago they used to have the little signs that that were in the center that just stood up and and said pedestrian Crossing now they have these about 3ot tall white posts that are spring mounted and they're right there in the middle of the between the two lanes and if you well yeah but the idea is if you hit them they just no go down they're not not damaging anything but they're they they are there how they look either side of they look good on either side of the crosswalk so you have the crosswalk and right in in the middle of the crosswalk where the middle of the lane is there's these two white posts that are are mounted so that they're not going to damage if somebody hits them and that kind of when you walk with crosswalk you go between them and I think where you have that Middle Lane you do four of them is there not a way to request that we be part of all this hashing I mean certainly as EDC we're coming to based on this we don't have all the answers sitting here right now but it seems like we areested to be part of that process I was going to offer for us to to help in any way we could and I also say you know one thing I want to bring up here is any of you are welcome to join me and I looked up it's probably going to be on the agenda in the next couple days but I want to confirm that it's on the agenda it would have been on the last meeting but they had were doing all the appointments and Nicole actually apologized to me well I wanted to put you on on there but it was we had all these appointments so no problem and she's I think is going to put me on for this coming Monday so anybody that wants to join that I'll I'll send out a a node once I get their agenda on where it's going to be and I'll just do that same presentation I asked her to be able to share it on there on their Zoom screen I me I was I would be supportive of lobing this in there but I don't know we have all the answers right now and I would like for them to engage Us in the process yeah I could I could ask for that I we're not we're not the traffic commission we're not the you know police we're not we're not experts on all of all of the other things but we do know that it's really needed to help the business right there's a lot of good arguments I put all of the the acent statistics in and the laws and just as a reference but yeah um we could we could ask we could say we limited it to to this is as the scope of our economic development but we're you know a lot of our members are in favor of doing even more extending it even further so I'll say we've got we'll take a vote here and the vote will just be not you know should it be bigger but just are we in favor of this as a minimum proposal so uh I guess I could make the motion I'll I move that we uh show our support for this is at least a minimum proposal that involves you know the lowering to 25 M hour lowering reducing the speed limit in this town center where the sidewalks are by 10 miles an hour and adding two or three crosswalks I'll second it okay so all in favor say I I I any oppos now so that'll just help me to be able to go and save the our whole commission supports it some would definitely like to see it extended even further Mark Mark Mark did you say I yes okay hi hi okay so unanimous support of that okay so now since we have Mark's attention we'd like to go on to the next agenda item where Mark has a report and we've got it if you if Julie you could share the PowerPoint file on there mark you could talk us through what what you have learned about business vacancies and present that so go ahead and share that so starting uh back in in June we started tracking um business vacancies and uh we did um produce a preliminary report um on business properties that were for lease or for sale I even looked at uh entire businesses that uh were for sale in the town and um the list that you see on the screen with the exception of um the 681 College Highway um there's been no change um in in the vacancy of of those properties so um you have you know several you have a commercial and a retail uh property that's currently for lease in town uh and three properties for sale and one um business that uh is for sale as well as one parcel of commercial land at 74 College Highway it's 10.8 Acres um that uh is also for S so the only change that occurred uh when I ran the two reports was that the 681 College Highway uh retail location that's the former Family Dollar Store is currently off the market and I don't know if that's been um U leased or if the owner just decide to uh take it off off the market um I don't know if anybody has any additional information on that um location I had heard is one of the Cannabis people were interested in that renting it I don't know if they're going to buy it or rent it is that one of the finalists that's what I thought one of the on chosen yeah okay that could well be yeah um but 681 college high was currently off the market I couldn't find any trace of it um of it being you know currently listed um so if you go to the next slide some recommendations um I was asked to provide you know some recommendations and even some thoughts about the content for um uh the website so one of the things I would recommend is that we continue to do this tracking and update on at least a monthly or quarterly basis I think it's a really good idea to know what's vacant um what is being marketed and and things that move and you know in addition to that um maybe getting a little bit more proactive about uh when a business does you know um change hands like in the case of 681 if there's a new tenant coming in we should probably figure out a way to reach out to that person I know we've done that with some other you know business starts in town but this could be a way that we track um you know changes in in occupancy within within the town um the other thing that we could do is obviously kind of go upstream and and work with the realators that are marketing those properties um to uh to help them understand what we can offer their perspective so um just a couple of thoughts that are not on this particular list of recommendations but that I would add um to to my recommendations um with regard to um uh website content I think having resources for businesses that are considering Southwick uh that may have an interest uh in in Southwick certainly something that says hey we're welcome and open for business on the website a way for them to directly contact us I know that there is a link on the economic development um uh page now to to contact us but if we're going to have a specific location for businesses are you interested in Southwick um then then that should certainly be included I think having a link to um the most common real estate property online listing loopnet makes sense um I think that having links to other uh resources within town would would make a lot of sense you know when when you need to do business in southw where do you go and you know directing them to whether it's Town departments or um other Town boards and commissions if they they want to do business in Southwick how can we help them get to the to the right place and then uh lastly um a link to the state Economic Development website they have that One-Stop shop um uh for business assistance that helps direct um uh owners of businesses or those contemplating owning a business in Massachusetts with um all different types of um information including loans and so we don't have to reinvent the wheel they have it we could just link it um uh uh to them and I had uh spoken U with the assistant secretary about this and she said absolutely we're ready to go um and make that connection they'd be more than happy to uh to help us with it and then um lastly um uh coordinating with with other boards and commissions um regarding changes that happen so if in fact um you know the 681 uh College Highway property has you know transitioned and another department um or or commission or or um even the planning board themselves find out about something that we get you know proactively notified so we can kind of do our thing reaching out and helping that business in any way we can um uh through through the uh sort of what I'll call the town on boarding proc instance so I'll stop there see if there's any any uh questions or additional suggestions yeah I I think this is a good start there's probably some some more additions but is this something you could do a quick Word document on what you would see the website saying I could put it up on the website okay could do a word docum and maybe have it prepared by our next meeting and and vote to make it go live sure the the I welcome you know folks that might have a better perspective um to jump in and help as well um so yeah be glad to take a stab at it but other folks want to you know jump in to to help um you glad glad to get the assistance yeah and we are going to go through our our goals here we can leave enough time for it and I want to get everybody involved in these various goals and one of the goals is to fill out these web pages and I want to have people talk about what they think they're best able to do and we want everybody working rather than just have a few people doing all the work so that's that's her goal the question I have additionally is is there potential in any of our business Parks over on Hudson Drive or the other is there space available there for expansion um there there may be but um it's not currently on the market so if it's on the market it would show up on you know on on one of the listings but there may be I mean I think that's a little different exercise I think that would be you know sort of taking this you know one one additional step which is a good idea and that's creating an inventory of you know potential sites um so land owner or the the in the case of a building owner uh if they're not marketing it then you know that's something that would not you know show up in the things that I've been tracking but right and we we do want to go deeper we want to make contact with you know whether they're Property Owners at the the industrial or business Parks uh and talk talk with them and see how do people go about getting in touch because I also as I as I told you at that uh evening get together the economic development Partners the western Mass I did make contact with a guy by the name of Shan O'Donnell who is with a company called West Mass area Development Corporation and what they do is they work with towns to bring people into industrial parks that work for development of industrial parks are certainly currently working with Northfield on development of some of their industrial parks and he said he'd like to meet with us and talk with us and find out you know what kind of space and opportunity there might be available I think that's a great idea I think you know getting you know getting more proactive but they work with they help find funding within governments they're familiar with those resources so they work with the towns and the governments to bring people together they're kind of a middleman as I understand it it's a terrific idea any way that we can get more hands um you know to help with this especially people that have the connection to um funding beautiful yeah they're they're they're will willing to meet with us and and talk about it but we need to do our homework and find out what are the the capacity of of various potential properties and they're base they have offices in downtown Springfield in the one marar place so if we can can we put a query out to the planning board and ask I mean they must have a a tracking or or probably have the best resources um to to see what you know what Parcels are out there that are zoned um in in different ways like for different Ty business use to direct us to property owners that are open to that kind of development as I understand there's potential on Hudson Drive to expand into the old querry area that some of it may be worked out and there's some potent expansion potential plus they're going to put that connector through to Sam West and that could open up more expansion potential there for appropriate you know type of businesses so two things what what's the area and what type of businesses would be appropriate for that area and then getting you know our our position would be to help get parties together on this to help get this you know middleman with property owners with the planning board to kind of you know help be the Catalyst to get some of these things going going yeah CU somebody must have those records in town I mean obviously somebody's paying property tax you know on on on the parcel so having a way to you know um identify what those Parcels are and who the owners are um would be I think a good first step yeah it's just a networking job here that going from that though I mean we we probably have four partials down there that we're not using but you know it just you just sort of wait until the right well we try to make connections we try to reach out to some of these outside groups we have you know the western Mass EDC with u you know they they have people contacting them that they can pass on if they're if we make them aware like Rick Sullivan make him aware of the types of properties we might have and the types of businesses that would be acceptable you know he could pass that on and ultimately we also need to help be part of a quick response team that I would see having people from this group at least one person from select board at least one person from planning board that would if if we had an inquiry from a potential business to be able to do a quick evaluation on whether that's appropriate but if a business is looking to come into town is that the route they go or do they contact a commercial realtor and Commercial realtor finds available pieces of property and says this is you might want to look at that I don't know if if a bus com direct it's not listed if it's not on the market I don't know that they would find it that through that Avenue right but if it's not St it's not on the market it's it's a reasonable assumption it's not available you were just you were just saying the same thing you four pieces of property that are being unused I I think you don't want to waste time with a lot of Lookers I think up our position and so we've sort of sat back until and and we've done you know we've built out several pares down like this when the right person comes along you know it but I'm not opposed to I mean again you don't lob it on out there for everybody to start wasting your time either so no we and that's part of the reason for going through some of these other parties like the western Mass DC you know the because they get inquiries coming through there they're kind of a central place for all of Western Mass and if they know we've got certain things we're interested in they might refer people to us that wouldn't have thought of us if it's appropriate at the same time I just don't understand the value spring out people that are not appropriate I just don't understand the value of having a list of property that we don't know is available to be sold or developed anyway just because it's there and it's zoned commercial doesn't mean the people that own it would even entertain someone buying it and developing it I'm not talking about just putting a listing out I'm talking about getting a network going of of people like you would get you know this outside party this Western ma Mass Development Group they could come out and look at it talk to the people that own it and and talk about the connections they have um you know it's I saying yeah doesn't seem yeah I know it seems like that's the job of those entities whether it's a nonprofit or what it is and Realtors I don't I don't really know know if that's something that we as a committee in town have a place I may be wrong but I don't know it just seems that it's somebody else's job and that's and they're good at it we're not yeah would seem to me that we would want to put the properties that our listed right and possibly provide a zoning map that shows where the areas are commercial or not not and then people can then do their own work to say geez that looks like a nice piece of property I wonder loans it and then they can trade right yeah well yeah what you're talking about is being a conduit for those uh land owners that might or or building owners that that might want to Market a property that's essentially what economic development groups have typically been involved in that kind of thing um and help you know go out and find you know good fits for a community to promote the community to potential businesses that type of thing that's part of the purpose of our website is to you know try to Target appropriate businesses and convince them that Southwick is a is a good potential location so it's it's kind of a I would say almost a marketing function that I'm envisioning here and you say wow that's real estate should all do that I understand the marketing function if if a piece of property is available for development absolutely well we're marketing Our Town not just the property itself marketing our town as a as a location that people should consider sorry Jack's Point having a a listing of what property in town is zoned commercial what property in town is zoned industrial and having that available I think is valuable because that's Markin a and that's something we need to do on our website we need that's another one of the goals is to get a good handle on the zoning situation in the town and maybe even make recommendations for changes y I see that as within our yeah you know for example the the whole we're going to get into the a new business valuation proposal and and we did some further development on that and we applied it to the Dollar General situation um and what our recommendation would be we want to be a resource where we can come out with an opinion strong opinion one of the reasons I got on this is because I saw what happened with carvana that should have been much earlier they should have jumped in and made a a recommendation that this is not a good fit we could have saved a lot of pain if people would have jumped on it quickly seems like we have some housek keeping to do within our own town though as well when you and I have had some discussions about this yeah with regards to transparency and you know unfair evaluations and things like that and so it's hard for me to go on on a daily basis and convince people to come to a town that's not treating businesses fairly right so I think we want to be a champion for for business we need to talk about that and uh and again do some house c as best we can but I'm also thinking that yes I think there's plenty of properties available but I think we need to know what we want to look like when we grow up and so I think there's certain businesses that we can dream and say Bo wouldn't it great be great to have that in this town here I think we need to come up with that short list and parket those and I think the properties are available well we do have a master plan now and I encourage everybody to read every word of the economic development section of that master plan because they put a huge amount of work in there and it's not up you know we don't really have the flexibility to just impose our own personal opinions we are there to help promote what the master plan that has been passed and and is in place so that's something we should be very familiar with and what we everything we do should be in support of that and that's one thing that we never had until this year so now we have very a very quite detailed plan with a lot of very clear action plans some dealing with this what this committee does and I've tried to use that as a guide for the goal goals that I've tried to push through this commission Mark those are really good actions yeah and job right I I appreciate your work on that if we could take it to I we don't have to do everything at once I My Philosophy is to take the steps that we can do the easy things first and then add to that and that's why I say if you could come up with a an initial proposed content for you know whatever tabs and you can kind of Define that and then we can look at that in the next meeting and and if we all agree with it we will make it live on our website we need to start seriously filling out the content on the website okay anything else on this top because we have a lot of a lot of topics here and it's already 7:14 um so thanks for that report Mark and uh Jean is not here so we'll skip that we did talk about the library um Jack you had we Ted last time to to talk about website content relating to business assistance resources correct and what I've done is because I not familiar with PowerPoint I put together a Word document that's fine and uh listen what I looked at was what we had currently business assistant and when I looked at it it before I hand this out I have copies here for everybody what I'm thinking of and looks like somebody put a lot of work in it I would assume it was probably you uh building a lot of different tabs and well Pam did some of the initial work on the other tabs I worked mostly on the the uh directory part of it but before I get into it I just want to point out that on that business assistance we have two links to small business administration we have three separate links to the score uh we have order to mass. and we have one to mass uh GC Mass don't I forgot it's called but Mass growth Capital what I'm thinking of is it seems like a lot there's like 16 different pages I jump right out at you yeah and and just to say there that was kind of a quick placeholder there was not that was not something we all involved in and that we put a lot of thought in I think Pam picked it up from other content put it in the new format correct all I'm thinking of this to me it seemed like a lot to take in at once and so I thought about simplifying it and leading tabs that would then bring you to separate pages so that when you first land on it it's not so confusing yeah so I looked looked at one of our sister towns and kind of saw what they did and said maybe we can mimic a lot of the things that they did we said we should borrow everything that that we think's good I love borrowing and so it's a work in practice since is Stephen you said you wanted to help on this yeah sure and so by no means I saying this is what we have to do it's what I'm proposing and we both to work with stepen now that you're remember be over coming as well so what I'm thinking is you come to the page and this is what you see first uh demographics being one tab you click on that and that would bring you to the next page that I have these four document on there would be two sources I saw for demographics that I thought we could use one is from federal ca.gov and there's the link and down below is Pioneer Valley Planning Commission statistics for our town so then the next page would be we already it's already on this tab just making it a separate blate drop down would be uh software commercial real estate I borrow the Lang which it's already there that you see and then this must have been pan built a link and it's actually much better than just going on mnet there's a quite a bit there uh that you can go in and pick this software you can pick different aspects and I would advise anybody wants to look at it to go there and you see what the options are that are currently under the tab called southware commercial real estate so uh you know this happened to come from Westfield they had you know I made note they have something called business retention program but they also have a city advancement officer full-time yeah they have so I'm thinking maybe we don't want to have anything unless we want to give the uh Chairman's contact information in a sense the business retention program is their EDC they don't have an economic development group as such instead they have full-time business retention that kind of functions plus they have their their Chamber of Commerce corre so whether we do this or not if he like when I put something blue it's like I'm not really sure whether we want to do anything with this or not so that's for that's and blue the next one is the big p small business resources so instead of all the tabs that we have currently I'm thinking we have one section for small business administration there's are three three separate uh tabs we have on homepage for small business assistant I'm just saying make them a drop down once you click on this tab and read it from places telling you what you can get at these locations out of the three that we had for score I have them listed here and then so on there's a number of ones here and it continues on to the next page how about adding the C library as a resource on there absolutely um yeah good suggestion yeah then one of the thoughts was business licenses and permits kind of touched upon that yeah where are you going things so I noticed on the town website there's something there's a site page called fors and applications so I put that on there maybe we could add a little bit of description here which sure Steve would love to help with and uh other towns direct them to the mayor I'm thinking do we want to put in a chief administrative officer and other towns and then I thought maybe to select board if you came into town somebody wanted to go pro Sam they have the sech they're on ABC website why they need to search go back to the town to find the select board and if you go back to the very first page considering what we're doing is there's a Southwick I'm thinking of trying to customize it as much for our town southw building department maybe just put a direct link from our site directly right to the building department they can get setback rules and whatever regulations that they need and the same thing the planning board so um again I didn't have a good computer way to present this yeah I mean it would I think we should keep it fairly simple but we can use images to make it attractive and then have simple direct language with with the embedded links yeah that's what I was trying to do I mean this is great somebody did this but if you're F this is what you get you get this this and you get this and you know you know I'm a I'm in business been in business you know administrate aside for my entire life I go in here and start clicking on these lenss like w there's a lot there it would be nice to know what you're going to what where it's coming from and why you're getting right we should be the simple link the simple organizational site that they can go to for Southwick that's relevant to Southwick and it takes them to the outside resources that's why put in the town as Market mentioned some of the town uh you know departments that you'd want to see come in here and you know we could start doing this I thought this was a start but that's not for the committee the state wants to help flush it out a little bit more we can I think in this case this is this is a lot of really good information and I think it will take you know um you know get a group which will flush it out I can you know we're going to talk a little later about what the goals are not going to have a lot of time left to to do that but my general concept is to find out what everybody's talent and their their passion is like is there anybody Among Us it's too bad we don't have Pam she was a passionate web designer okay [Music] um I'm able to do the web I'm not a designer and background marketer in background but I I can do WordPress and I can put this stuff up on the site but if there's somebody else that can do WordPress and has some design ability love to have them step up in do this not see anybody jumping up certainly not me I'm not a chy at [Music] all com a kid right I can I can put it up I mean I did the directory the business direct and uh the uh one other comment I had about the website is we have in there Grant assistance and if you read it and uh our team has extensive experience in grant writing that's why I was desperate that's why I was desperate to get these changes made I don't I saw that and I don't want that there yeah I want to yeah I don't want to promise what we don't have I want to send people to the places that have the information correct and you know I hope I'm not coming across wrong I'm just pointing you know you know I went in and looked at it and these what I find yeah I have done just be clear I've done nothing with any of the other tabs except I focused on the the directory okay one last comment is there's a picture there that brings you to the business resources but as I look at this I would assume that picture brings you to Grant resources yeah it's not labeled I don't know if there's a way to label that yeah we we can I'm a big believer in in captions for pictures or labels of some type right you know when I in my heare is in marketing we were we understand that where people's eyes go they go to the headline curves then they go to the pictures then they go to the captions then they go to the subhead and at the very end they read the body copy captions are more important than body copy people look at the picture and then they what's this picture they read a caption if you don't give them to it you kind of wasted your picture I have no idea how to do these things I'm just pointing out that right I I think it's all fairly easy to do in in WordPress because it's done with blocks you have a block of text block of a little bit likee then what a little bit like working with Adobe where you have a box and you like text yeah like and and for images they have a library you put all your images in a library and then when you use it on a tab or a page you just call for it out of the library how are we going to implement these changes on the website does one person have access to those website like if we come up with ideas for changes are they need be proposed to everybody and then one person implements them or is can we have one person well unless somebody jums up I'm the only one that is working directly with the website you share your login commercials so so this is way way beyond my technical capabilities so this is not a volunteering but a suggestion that we do have a Web Master because I think there should be one person controlling the content that's approved to put up on the site because otherwise you're going to have problems and right now I'm I'm essentially the Web Master but that said it's easy for me to share the the access and the credentials uh and we could have people who let's say have certain pages or tabs that they want to be able to manage directly that needs kind of a regular updating can you make edits to a page and not make it live yes so you could share your loging credentials with anybody you go and you make the edits the Web Master reviews the edits and then we as a committee decide whether to make it live or not is that possible I don't even know yes okay absolutely good process that there that's a good suggestion yeah I can go in in the business directory and and put in a new business I can make changes to an existing one but unless I click update it doesn't become live unless it's something urgent that I would say that Greg is Chairman it's something urgent that needs to be done that you know I and I don't even have an example of what urgent would be but there could be a situation where something has to get done and I would say you know Greg's chair you would have that um ability to do that without taking things to the committee if it like it's urgent has to right little things and I I do that now I watch I watch I've got a a Google sheet where if somebody a new business comes in because we have that free business listing it'll show up in my Google sheet and I'll put it in or if somebody sends me a an email through the EDC and says please change this on my business listing I just go Ahad and change it and I I did that in the process those are just standard updates the the different thing is if we create a whole new tab yeah we probably want to have the group look at it and review it before we go live with it yeah you know Jack I think this is good but can I rain on the pray just for a second here as uh and I don't know why this has comeing to my mind but as as we're here trying to encourage other businesses um it's just like on the gas station we have lottery I hate Lottery but we have it down there but we also have next to it you know how to get out of a gambling problem and so forth I think that with respect to business I think it's important that we um have a reality check is too bad we can't have a component to all this that says not everybody is for small business I've been doing this for 55 years and I don't know what the average small business last but it is in 55 years and I just think that it's important I mean if if we could have a reality picture on out there what it takes to make a business work you might not make money for five years you got 14 hour days for a few years you know I mean that's that's the reality because the only one that makes money up with things like this is is Buzzy with signs okay and the town with permits and so forth I don't mind Buzzy making money uh I do mind the town taking fees and so forth on the only last three year three months you're absolutely right and I've been in it was till I retired Lester business for 47 years working for a privately owned company and and being having bottom line responsibility so I know it's what it takes we don't want failures in this town I'm just thinking of and that's part of the reason for giving this information is so that that they don't jump in naively so that that they have information that says wait have you thought of this have you developed a plan do you have funding do you you know you have plan how how you going to make it work Lyn from the library mentioned the pathways to success program which I believe might be a state program which brings actual business owners to present to potential business owners I think that might be a great venue to actually have a all right everything seems to be out there grants and everything but this is real life how it actually kind of works I think that would be a good thing to implement through our website I think we ow it to the business Community especially in this town not to have a bunch of failures yeah I mean we're not going to eliminate all failures because that's part of the you know the cycle of businesses and you know the advantage of dealing with small businesses is that that you can have a turnover if you have a have a big business that comes in and you know Dollar General we talk about an amount we have time I don't know if you followed their their stock they had a crash just a few weeks ago of 30% they're down almost 50% on their stock price year to dat or from their High well from the start of the year um you know I hate to see them come in and you know build a big box and cloes I mean you had a you know Key Bank branch that came in beautiful branch but it's small enough they fill in with you know Dental surgy uh it's maybe harder to fill in a you know an ugly Dollar General box so those are considerations the impact on the town is worse of a big big business would have abandoned halfway through there Paving a th Acres or whatever it was treat lat or whatever but I totally agree that we want realistic uh advice we don't want to encourage naive I'm SE to be a little more blunt than that you know and just have almost a disclaimer on out there um that says here's a reality check are you sure this is for you that's all somewhere I don't know that it would hurt yeah I that should be part of the advice so we we'll see I don't I don't want to get bogged out on the detail of that but we've got a good start here I think let's keep our agenda going forward it's already 7:34 uh let me see how I can condense this agenda I I really don't want to keep people more than two hours so we got kind of a hard stop at eight um I put out that list of of goals and it doesn't look like we're have time to go through those goals this meeting we defer that but I want everybody to read that list think about what we should add I know Serena had a recommendation that one of our goals should be have representative at business openings like they had for the W the w expans i noticed it said to Greg I I saw this in the paper where they had the opening grand opening of the wall and we weren't there oh I know well yeah yeah so where did you have the goals was that in an email an email attachment because I don't remember when I sent it was in the body of the email where I sent out the agenda items if you scroll down the goals the right there of that I I think I had 10 or so goals and the idea of a goal is a very well defined task that we can actually complete right before the end of June which is the end of the fiscal year and I want to come up with tasks that are small enough that we can actually complete them and these were were some of them I wanted to do but let's think of others I was looking at the most recent one from Julie wasn't in there yeah I got right I just it wasn't part of the official agenda but I sent it out at the bottom of the agenda in the email so read that through think of what else we want to add and then also think about which goals you would like to work on because I want everybody to be working on two or three of these at least in a serious way because we can't you know we can't accomplish a lot in two hours of meeting we have to be working on things in between meetings um so like working and and an example here is is this and maybe just doing it through email between you and Steve and anybody else want to work on a website page you know to come up with flushing out in a Word document is fine because I can transfer from a Word document Excel PDF whatever you want I can transfer that copy and paste it into the website okay well this is a Word document so I'll work with State you send it back right yeah we we'll keep moving that forward but what is you think in terms of what's your experience what things you good at what what you are you passionate about doing with the EDC look through those goals what can I contribute because we want everybody working we want a sense of ownership we don't want a bunch of people waiting to be told what to do we want people that can exercise initiative and and jump in and create some things bring it for the meeting and voting on it and endorsing it and moving it forward and completing it we want everybody working on that and you know we're we've got next meeting we want to talk about Southwick and Bloom whether we can get started on that there's a project I know that that that is something you brought up and proposed so that's one of the goals that I've got in there as among the 10 gos and we can talk about that next time how do we can we start planning on us so that by early spring we can make that happen and for those that don't understand what that is is it's so encouraging businesses to enter kind of a competent while you describe itead describe well it's actually my wife's idea that's why we hopefully we get some big Improvement here because she's the brain child of that but yeah um it's it's um we would sponsor some kind of an incentive you know for competition every 6 months or maybe once a year or something like that you know whether it be flower boxes or you know whoever has got the most improved storefront or along the along the lines of um you like a shelburn Falls with the flowers and and all that that type of thing really brds of flower yes yeah just really Mak me tell you know move up to the next level here now look like a dump yeah because there's there's businesses some some are doing a good job and keeping up their their front and others are not even trying but if you get this competition maybe shame everybody into upgrading but it also encourages the local you know egg side of our town as well as far as incentives for buying flowers and right there would be certain providers that would you know whether it's Blossom or or Cali or whatever that would they would actually could put on their display you know materials from caliber user I think the intent was not just to have it like for a one month thing it's it's over the course of long period of time so yeah you want it to just out a couple contest so right be through the be a display that would be through the whole um from spring into summer yeah there's a write up on it I'll have to dig that out maybe there say it could be a couple times you could have a fall display right but that would impress visitors we want to make you know in the bigger picture we want to make Southwick a wonderful place to have a business where it's we did that survey you know what a year ago I want to redo that s survey at some point when we think we have an improvement and ask him see if we get an improvement uh on whether it's a great place to do business and the town government is is helpful and cooperative and all of that we want to create that environment well I mentioned before I forget town government did when you got sworn in did they give you the the manual I've already got it from you got it yeah have you done the open meeting training no the ethics training well ethics I have but open meeting no so and did they give you anything on ethics or open Med gave me the packet but just sa it to that okay and they they have I think an online yeah thing you go through for open Meeting those are important we want to absolutely follow the aico guidelines in terms of the ideas that you know we are acting on behalf of the Town we're not acting on behalf of ourselves we've got to keep the principles of democracy in there that's part of the open meeting is we don't meet as a quorum unless it is an open meeting open to the public recorded on online anybody can come in here uh those are all the principles behind those so we've got to be careful that when we communicate online I always say don't respond to all because that becomes like I said ear I want to learn and that open meeting stuff is part of the stuff I don't know I didn't it wasn't required of me as Constable ethics was but as a it's an entity the EDC we have no Authority we have no responsibility so why do we have to abide by open meeting laws we I'm not saying we shouldn't I'm just curious why we we the the economic development commission is okay is a a commission described in the Massachusetts general laws it is something that is an official state sanctioned commission and we do have influence we don't have the authority to to do things but we do have a tremendous amount of influence we want to have more influence and yeah we don't affect people as much as the Conservation Commission or yeah I can understand planning board planning board um select board but we still need we still need to follow the open meeting now the open meeting only applies if there's a quorum so you can have a subcommittee that can meet and discuss things and then bring it back to the full commission we do that all the time we had the one that we we may not have time to present it today and Jean is not here anyway to present his piece of it I think what I'll do is I will send the presentations Mark did one I did one I will send those out after the meeting for everybody to review on their own uh what we did and I know I'm wandering around on the the agenda here but we developed a new business process a new business evaluation idea is if somebody comes in we want to be able to rec make a recommendation very quickly on whether we think this is a good bet with southw you part of this is to you know jump on it early like if it's Caron not let it get all the way through to you know long-term proposal before we say hey this is a terrible fit so what we did is we de developed this process and we applied it to Dollar General which was turned down but it's not over they're coming back and you know with lawsuits saying you have all and blah blah but Greg I think it's important for everybody to understand we we use that as a case study um retrospective retrospectively because the decision's already been passed and it was um it was done so we could apply you know sort of a real life scenario that everybody's familiar with to what we're suggesting this process could could be right the reason for it is not so much you know it's too late for Dollar General in that sense but we wanted to use it to create the template for future types of business a document The Business Review we're creating we're creating it now the document um we split it up into three pieces that one of them was to look at it the piece I did was to look at it relative to the master plan does this business fit into the what we established as as our goals for master plan and then marked it one where does this um well Mark you explain your piece well it it was really um to look at does this business impact potentially impact the town's you know broader business environment so you know with sub questions being you know does it does it make us stronger or weaker um in in the long run um will it drive more customers more um you know traffic business traffic in into the town and then secondly um does it um increase you know competitive pressures on existing business is this going to be complimentary is it going to be healthy competition or is it going to be excuse me predatory um in terms of um you know trying to trying to capture you know market and market share away from an existing business because you know that that could be a bit of a challenge um and then third does it um help our local employment situation um and by that does it offer you know good paying jobs that um Can yield a a living wage that have good benefits in a career pin um and and so those would be the criteria and Greg I suggested a similar scale uh that we would rate each of those criteria on to come up with sort of an aggregate score for that particular and that's one of three Gregs being the other um but one of three um areas that the businesses would be evaluating right the the third area which Jean was working on is the impact on revenues for the town tax revenues and the impact on expenses or services and infrastructure and and and that what is the net gain for the town net gain or loss from a revenue expense standpoint so it's kind of Revenue expense one piece you know my piece how does it impact our master plan and then Mark's piece is how does it affect the general business environment competitively and employment wise so we we want to and we rate it on a scale as as Mark said I proposed that a very simple scale zero would be neutral no no real impact in in a given area and we divide all of these three big areas into smaller pieces specific pieces that we try to do as objectively as possible with zero no impact plus one moderately positive plus two strongly positive minus one moderately negative impact minus two strongly negative impact and then for each of the areas we evaluate um we will do a weighted average of those and then present that as an input to both the selectboard and the planning board planning board in particular to to be an impact they're looking at and the difference is we're looking at kind of a bigger Longer term picture the planning board is looking at much more narrow view but how do we get behind something like that let's say Serena just loves Dollar General or or whatever General well these are objective objective things that we're trying to do not we're so opion how do we present that planning board any unified we we we come up we have a group that does the initial template very quickly and if we have time to run it by everybody maybe we send it out to everybody and and we get we get a vote I mean the planning board has narrow votes they narrowly voted to turn down Dollar General I they don't all agree you know we may not all agree but we will try to be objective in our our measurements and at least raise the ISS I think you would have to be objective completely objective because you start throwing subjective analysis into things and well that's that's uncomfortable ground oh absolutely we want to sounds like a lawsuit yeah yeah right well these are this is just a recommendation and it's a it's it's just doing what we would do anyway in in evaluating these things but tries to break it up into more discreet more objective pieces and do a deeper dive and thought on each of those pieces like you know on I'll just one of the objections to carvana is nobody did a real analysis of what's the tax revenue and what's the impact of expense you know maybe we can't get that down to the penny but we it's worth looking at we met with the the uh assessors board to start discussing how we might do that that at the very least in the case of Dollar General we can look at the you know the potential assessment based on the assessors in in agam and Westfield they have Dollar Generals and each of those and we can compare that and somebody needs to to look at that kind of thing and you know we could talk with you know Highway Department with other service areas to see what what kind of impact would there be we're just trying to take a bigger picture view than than the planning board might do on on some of these things okay you know what's the impact on traffic and would you need to put in new traffic signals and you know all the expense associated with that uh we just want we don't have as you say the the right to turn them down or to approve them but we want to be an advisor we want to put out our paper and say Here's the advice of the EDC on on this and be able to do it pretty quickly that's why we want a template in place where we can sit down and within a couple days come up with something that we can all review and and vote on maybe it won't be unanimous but it'll be thoughtful so that's that's the goal of that and we are running out of time let me see if there's anything else we I wanted to bring up the something that Doug moglin suggested we do is put our Dy Southwick signs at the soft the the softball game between fire and police that's this Saturday at Wally Park anybody going to that first of all and I guess what I I should just do is I'll call the fire department and find out who who the contact would be and maybe I could do that I'm tied up most of the day on on Saturday but if I could they could tell me either where to put it I could go really early and put them out and take them up late in the day or if somebody there wants to take the signs I'll just let the fire department put them out is they're responsible for the setup I could set them up I'm not going to be able to go to the game but I could get there early and up some place as long as I know where to put them right and I I just have to we just have to find that out from whoever's Doug gave me a couple names which I didn't write down he he talked like he was gonna get in touch and I might not have bothered with this except he Starly recommended it so I want to do it and we want to see we can measure the impact of these signs like we could tell how many we got a good bump of traffic from the open Farm day and we'll see if there's a bump of traffic from this kind of event we got I've got four signs in my car right now and I'll I'll just see if they if that's going to be hassle I'll just since I've got them in my car I'll just try to contact the the department and see what permission I'll and as I say I'll either go out and set them up early in the morning or maybe they can give them to somebody there to set them in it's just a matter of stick them in the ground and then they have to be pulled they can't stay overnight I guess so they have to be pulled up I can go pull them up at the end of the day whatever we just wanted to touch base on that [Music] um we wanted to do the goals we we defer that to next time and everybody review it in the the meantime we will send out you know maybe if maybe we'll wait on Jean to get the third part of this if he gets better in the next week or so we'll send out our proposed new business evaluation process everybody before the next meeting MH so there's time to review that we don't take a lot of time in the meeting to present it [Music] um and anything else that I missed here we wanted to Jack can you make one minute comment on the new uh accounting process and for paybl I think it's great for us to anything under $3,000 you can put right on Google sheet down I think you'll be able to if sounds like you're familiar with Google Sheets which I'm not um that you should be able to just fill it out print it sign it and turn it in with the invoice there email that there email there was an email they you sent okay yeah I didn't I didn't follow through the the link I didn't take time to I could not save it and keep the dropdowns working okay again I don't know enough about all right I'll take a look at sheets I would just save the email print it out as far as you know are we up to date on our bills our bills as far as I know but getting information has not exactly been forthcoming you know if asked for budgets and I've asked for where we're at and never received anything well oh I can follow up Julie follow up if you can to get the information and if you have trouble let me know I will come down to the accounting office and talk to them you need a because they're going to want an account number and we probably only have one line but we possibly may have two one for website and one for General services so as should put in the bill you pick the vendor you put the amount you put what then it's an accounting code the code that the account that it goes to it's just one of those two yeah either a website or not a website correct okay but there's none of this pre-approval with the AP with the purchase orders which was for us at our level was causing a bond down system right and the important thing then is to make sure when we do submit an expense it has all the approvals I think I need to approve it so if there's I believe you to put it on there okay all right so if anybody in the future as an expense well run it through me or whatever it takes I just want to avoid this we had this problem where we would submit it to accounting they' send it back to us and say no it needs to be this way we'd send it back and they'd say oh you now you need to get this added or signed or they need a new invoice from the got person because they didn't put whatever on it I it was a mess we some months before they get paid minimum seemed like a minimum six weeks or eight I I don't that's if everything was going kind of smooth South Woods get paid I believe so yeah everything submitted I think has been paid but we asked how did we end up last year and we never receiv received that and then yeah can we have the budget lines for this year we haven't down and and then we're still waiting to get our revolving account approved by at the state level I think yeah it was voted the town voted to approve it at the town meeting in May and we're still waiting to get it has to be approved by the Attorney General whatever because it would and weon need doubt I think to takeing the fees for your destination that right which is going to take a little while to get to that but we we don't want it to but that would be the mechanism we want to keep going and the destination map plus this sign proposal I pictured if we have a significant expense in that it's got to come out of that gift account which would be available through the revolving account the how much is in that gift account now 3500 or something 36700 36 somewhere 3,000 something yeah and I think that would be a good application if we wanted to use it to some for signs for for these signs with QR codes that will you know promote Southwick as recreational destination and the the printed map we're going to get financed by fees from the participating businesses but the signs I want to you know we don't have another unless some other commission wants to kick in some budget for that but we we've got we haven't got the quotes shed or anything so it's too early that but if they simplified the process for our which is good okay I think we've gone through that somebody want to make a motion toour I'll make a motion second okay all in papers say I