[Roberta Cameron]: All right, so a little bit of background about the Community Preservation Act. As you know, this is a state program that enables communities to set aside funds for open space, recreation, outdoor recreation, affordable housing, and historic preservation. Communities have to vote to opt in to the Community Preservation Act, and Medford voted to opt in in the 2015 general election. So this places a 1.5% surcharge on a portion of property tax bills, which are partially matched with the state's Community Preservation Act trust fund. The Community Preservation Committee, who you see here today, were appointed to make recommendations about how the funds are going to be used. In order to be spent, the funding proposals must be recommended by the committee and then approved by city council. And the committee also has the responsibility of studying community needs and coordinating with other city departments and commissions and soliciting public input in making our determination about how to use our funding. So the way that Community Preservation Act funding, or the Community Preservation Act works is that, I'm gonna walk over to where I can point to the presentation. Good point, okay. Can I? Does the mouse work? Okay. I wanna. All right, starting with the Medford Community Preservation Fund is where all of the funds are collected that we collect through our local property tax surcharge. So the property taxes go into the Community Preservation Trust Fund. And that is also supplied with funds from the state's Community Preservation Trust Fund. These funds come from fees from the Registry of Deeds that are collected statewide, as well as some supplemental input from the state legislature. And some of the funds, the state funds, obviously go to other participating communities. So the funds that we receive in Medford's Community Preservation Trust Fund are then utilized to fund local projects in Medford, including all of the program areas that I described earlier, open space, outdoor recreation, historic preservation, and affordable housing. Thank you. Next slide. All right. So, the next thing I'm going to do is to present what are the funds that we have currently available. I think over the history of the three years that we've been collecting funds to date, we've collected somewhere in the order of $4.3 million, and currently, we spent uh, an amount in last year from the first 2 years of funds that were collected, and currently, we have approximately 1.9 million CPA funds in reserve for FY 2019. Now, 10 percent of those funds, a minimum of 10 percent of those funds must be spent or reserved for each of the program areas each year. So that leaves about 157,000 in each of the program area reserves for affordable housing, open space and recreation, and historic preservation. And that means that about 1.39 million are undesignated, that is, they can be spent in any of these program areas. And we've also committed $78,700 this year for administrative costs. Any administrative costs that aren't spent will be returned back to the reserve for the next year. So, that minimum amount, 10 percent for each program area, is a guarantee. However, the undesignated amount can be used in any program area. It is our hope that, or our intention, that the commission will be able to allocate approximately evenly among each of the program areas. Of course, our allocation is based on the proposals that we receive each year, and we are not committed to spending exactly evenly among the program areas, but if we were to reach these equal targets, approximately $600,000 would be spent in each of the three program areas. That's good. Thank you. We are, based on input that we received or feedback that we received after the first year of funding, we have instituted or we've made some changes to the application process that we'll be talking about today. And one of the first changes is the introduction of a small grants program. wherein we will be setting aside $50,000 of the total funds for small projects. These are projects where requests of up to $5,000 of CPA funding can be committed for a project that might have matching funds coming from another source that can cost up to $10,000 in total. And these small grants have a rolling application process, and the applications may be submitted at any time throughout the year. Who can apply for Community Preservation Act funds? The City of Medford, any department or division of the City of Medford, any organization legally registered in Massachusetts, and individuals. It is important to note that you must be applying for a project. They must be capital improvement projects, and the projects must pertain to an asset that is owned by the applicant or the applicant is a co-owner. For projects that entail City of Medford properties, the City of Medford obviously must be a co-owner, and it's very important that the applicant must coordinate through the mayor's office to ensure that there's coordination within the city through the correct department and person responsible in that department. And this coordination must occur prior to submitting an eligibility determination form. So, that's jumping ahead a little bit. Going back to what are the overall steps to application. The first step is completing, submitting an eligibility determination form. This is a short application with a project description that will be used by the committee to determine whether the project is eligible. And if the project is determined to be an eligible project, then we will invite the applicant to submit a full application. The proposals will be reviewed by the committee with public presentations being given by the applicants. And then the committee will deliberate and provide recommendations for each of the proposals. And these recommendations, the proposals that are recommended for funding will be submitted to the mayor and then to the city council for the city council to approve. And then after that, grant agreements will be signed into place so that the projects can proceed. So project eligibility is based on guidance that is in the state legislation. We have to abide by the rules that are laid out in the state legislation on the screen, which obviously you can't read from here, but printed versions of this are available, and we can point you to where to find a printed version easily. This matrix is intended to help guide proponents in understanding what constitute eligible projects. Across the top of the matrix are the four program areas, open space, recreational land, historic, resources, and community housing. And down the left side of the matrix are the actions that you can undertake within each of those program areas. Those actions include acquisition, creation, preservation, support, and rehabilitation and restoration. And you'll notice that there are yes and no's in each of the boxes in this matrix. That's because Within the legislation, it spells out that some of these actions are available for some program areas and not for others. And the small print within the boxes along the top row and the left are definitions, and it's very important to pay close attention to these definitions in defining a project so that it can meet these eligibility criteria. And next, after determining that the project is eligible and a proponent submits an application, the committee is going to review the application based on project evaluation criteria that are also available within the application packet. In fact, I believe the eligibility criteria themselves are part of the application packet as well. And so, just to review the criteria that we'll be looking at, we're looking for projects that align with community preservation plan goals and priorities. We prepared in 2017 a community preservation plan which will show momentarily some highlights of that plan that lay out how it is that what we have determined to be the needs and goals and priorities for the city. Also, the completeness of the application, projects that show comprehensive community-centered, multidisciplinary support, coordination and planning, public benefit, short versus long-term benefit and visibility, due diligence, readiness to proceed, preservation of existing resources versus new development, lifetime cost and impact, and the amount of funding requested relative to the actual funds available and the priority of competing requests. So the following slides, I'm not going to read through all of this information, but the information is within the 2017 Community Preservation Plan, and there are one-page summaries for each of the program areas showing what our goals and priorities are. One important thing to note is that we do allow some projects to apply off schedule. We'll review the timeline for the application schedule momentarily. Projects that proponents that are seeking to apply for projects outside of our prescribed timeline must be high priority projects according to the priorities that are spelled out in this plan. And as well, they must be driven by outside timing requirements that are the reason for the off-cycle application. So we'll just skip through each of these four slides that show the program area goals and recommendations. So finally, we'll just review the timeline. So today or this week have been pre-application info sessions. And of course, this information, it's not required that people attend this application info session. This is for your benefit, and you're welcome to contact the committee, contact Danielle Evans, our coordinator, for information at any time. The eligibility determination forms are due April 6th. I'm sorry, thank you, April 26th. And applicants will submit funding applications on September 20th, 2019. During the month of November, there will be community meetings for applicants to present their projects. And, um, we will deliberate, the committee will deliberate and submit its recommendations to the mayor and city council over the month of December. And we anticipate city council approval or vote on our recommendations in January of 2020. Um, and then we begin the review process all over again as we annually, um, collect public input and the input of boards and committees to determine what the needs and goals and priorities are for next year. Do you want to say a little bit about why the timeline is different than it was this year? Yes. So last year we had a very truncated timeline with two application rounds because we understood that there had been a pent-up demand for CPA funds, and we had been collecting funds for two years before we were able to commit all of those funds. So we squeezed two rounds into one year to give people um, multiple opportunities to apply. This year, we intended to have one funding round, begin to have one funding round each year, which will be our pattern going forward, and we've stretched it over a longer period this year, ending in 2020, because we found that this schedule We needed to migrate the schedule forward in order to fit with the city's fiscal schedule, as they're required to meet certain guidelines or certain benchmarks each year. the city's accounting, and so we needed our schedule to fall within their calendar. Next year, we'll be having another long cycle ending a little bit later in 2021, and then after that, we'll have a 12-month cycle going forward.