Slow Progress On Hauler Reform And New Street Light Policy

Report On The Meeting Of The Town Services And Outreach Committee (TSO), April 20, 2023

The meeting was held over Zoom and was recorded.  The recording can be viewed here.

Present 
Town Councilors Anika Lopes (Chair, District 4), Dorothy Pam (District 3), Andy Steinberg (at large), Ana Devlin Gauthier (District 5), and Shalini Bahl-Milne (District 5)

Staff:  Paul Bockelman, Town Manager; Athena O’Keefe, Clerk of Council

Also: Town Councilor Mandi Jo Hanneke (at large)

There was one member of the public present in the audience.

Public Comment
Tracy Zafian, Chair of the Transportation Advisory Committee (TAC) and a resident of District 3 offered two comments.

She reported that at their meeting of March 20, TAC passed unanimously a motion on the proposed new street light policy. They had previously discussed the proposed policy at three meetings and twice with the proposal’s sponsors. TAC supports the idea of reducing light pollution in Amherst and using the latest available technology to do so. However, they have concerns about the traffic safety impacts and the potential impacts on pedestrians and other vulnerable road users of removing selected lights. The motion additionally encourages the sponsors to make the following two changes to the proposal:`

1. add crosswalks and bus stops as locations where street lights will be provided.
2. removal of  phrasing that TAC considered very problematic:
   
   a) the section that says “street lights will not be provided by the town in residential neighborhoods for pedestrians and residential neighborhoods, unless certain criteria are met.”
   
   b) the phrase “because such lighting could be requested virtually everywhere in town.”

TAC offered to work with the sponsors to help them refine their proposal.

The second comment was about snow and ice on the sidewalks. Zafian asked if there could be a concerted effort regarding getting the word out about the new snow and ice policy now under consideration. She shared that she had found a letter that she had written to the DPW back in the 90’s about how sidewalks were not accessible in winter due to unremoved snow and how curb cuts were inaccessible, and what a safety and accessibility issue that was, particularly for vulnerable pedestrians and people with disabilities. “And it remains an issue every year so I would love this to be the year that it gets fixed,” she said. 

Committee Appointments
TSO considered the Town Manager’s nomination of six people for new appointments to four town boards, committees, and commissions (see here) for a full report on those nominations.  After a brief presentation, TSO approved unanimously (5-0) the nominations and sent them to the full town council for final approval.

Trash Hauler Bylaw
Bockelman provided a progress report on the proposed Trash Hauler Bylaw revision.  He noted that the town’s consultant, Susan Waite, has been out with COVID and that has interrupted her efforts to help the town develop a Request For Information (RFI) to go out to area haulers. He said that the priority is to get the RFI out soon to collect information from the haulers on the services they provide, to let them know about Amherst and what the town is looking for, and to seek information on how they would go about addressing the town’s needs. Waite was scheduled to meet with Superintendent of Public Works Guilford Mooring on April 21 to resume work on the RFI. 

Bockelman said that the RFI will also seek the names and contact information of other communities with which the haulers work. “Going through this process will give us a sense of the market,” he said.  He then listed a series of additional questions for which the town would like answers. For example, “Where do you take your trash? Where do you take your recyclables? Do you do single stream or dual stream recycling? What capacities do you have for managing curbside compost pickup?  What additional services might be available that the town might not have thought of? What do you charge for existing services? How long would it take to get started if we were to inItiate a contract?” 

Bockelman said that at this point, the town is not interested in getting into fine grained details but is looking for the macro-level picture.  He invited TSO to send him additional questions that might be incorporated into the RFI.

Bockelman added that he expects Waite to develop a schedule for moving forward after the information from the RFI comes in. He said that he hopes  to get the information back, have ample time to process it, have some community input meetings, and then start to share the information in a report by June 30, which is when Waite will finishing her work. Bockelman said that he has asked Waite to assign dates for these targets.

Councilors raised some additional questions during the discussion such as:

Where do haulers take their trash?
How effective is their recycling operation?
Where do compostable materials get processed?
How frequently do they pick up trash? 
Is bi-weekly trash pickup the current industry standard?
How does adoption of curbside composting impact the need for weekly pickup?
What kinds/sizes of trash toters are available?

Bahl-Milne closed the discussion by saying she is looking forward toward having a public forum in June where TSO can solicit public feedback on hauler reform and offer some clear answers to questions from the public.

New Street Lighting Policy
Councilor Mandi Jo Hanneke (at large) reported to TSO on revisions that she and co-sponosr Ana Devlin Gauthier (District 5) had made to their proposal for a new street lighting policy. The street lighting regulations, aimed at reducing light pollution in town, would change the types of bulbs and fixtures used for the town’s street lights and eventually create lighting zones that specify how much lighting is necessary in each zone.  Look here for background on the evolution of the proposal.

The revised document was not placed in the meeting packet.  The most recent publicly available version of the proposal can be found here and the town’s current policy can be found here. Hanneke reported that the sponsors have made several revisions after receiving feedback from multiple town committees. 

Hanneke pointed out two of the revisions:

1. Changing  the color temperature maximum from 2,200 Kelvin (K) to 2,700K because 2200K bulbs must be special ordered and that gets expensive. The proposed standard is still a much yellower light than the existing street light color temperature of 4,000K to 5,000 K.
   
2. The addition of transit bus stops to the recommended placement list. (Hanneke noted that light placement was a major concern of town committees and will require a lot more conversation).

Among questions raised by the committee:

1. Many street lights will eventually be mounted on utility poles that are taller than current light poles and will require a higher placement of the fixture than is now common. How will that higher placement impact the type of bulb and fixture used?
2. Should lighting of all crosswalks, including mid-block crossings, be mandated?
3. In discussion of safe street lighting, councilors raised concern about locations in town where sidewalks end abruptly, leading them to ask, not just about lighting policy for those truncations but also the policy that governs where sidewalks end.

Surveillance Bylaw
The planned discussion of the town’s surveillance bylaw with the Chief of Police was postponed until the next TSO meeting.