 We're starting our meeting at 333. And big thanks to John, who's agreed to take minutes today. Paige saying big thanks to John. John Paige, this one here. I am going to summarize the statement from the governor. Because of the COVID pandemic, the governor has changed some of the regulations around open meeting law, enabling us to meet all virtually through Zoom. And that's what we're doing. So I'm interested, Angela, if she's not there. I've attended a number of town committee meetings. And a lot of committees, chairs, don't do that at all. So I guess it depends on who's doing it. So let's review the agenda. And I will pull it up here. I thought I had it right here. So we'll review the agenda. Our goal is to put together, finalize our plan for interviewing key staff and committee members, and to review the materials. So the elements of that are timing, confirming how we're going to report, reviewing the materials, and so on. I think that's the only thing we really have to do at this meeting. Does that make sense to everyone? So we've determined the minute taker. Big thanks to John. Proved the minutes. Huge thanks to Liz, who did a terrific job. Anything you want to comment on here about the agenda? I didn't. Did you send out an agenda in advance? Yes, I sent it out Monday of MLK Day. Yeah, I did not receive that. Wow, did others receive it? I saw it on the website, but I didn't see it. I'm not sure if it went through. I must have made another, made some kind of mistake. So is this agenda OK with people? Well, I think that the minutes that we're approving are from July 7. But also, I have a new computer on its way. This one is, at the moment, will not let me access any documents. So unfortunately, any changes that need to be made to any of the documents that I've sent out, I cannot, at the moment, access them on my computer without shutting and rebooting, which will take five minutes. So if we have changes, someone else can do that. Yeah, sorry about that. OK, I have, I actually, OK, that's OK. It's on its way, though. I'm so excited. We're all doing our best in service to the town. So thank you. Wait, oh, I just don't know how that November. And I didn't, when I proofread it, I didn't see that. Is this the right day? Yeah. Anything else about the agenda? So I did send the minutes out. Did you all get those minutes? I sent them out Tuesday. Yeah, I got the minutes. Comments on the minutes. I thought they were really captured. The discussion really well is. I have one extremely minor one. My name, the last name has a C and a S-C-H-O-E-N. So not minor. Well, no, because it's this is how everyone pronounces it. They all say everyone says shown. So if you take this, but anyway, that happens in a, in a, in a, in a, in a way, that happens in the attendance one and then down below also. Okay. If you want, I can, I can download it and make that change right now. So if we want to get to final or I can, I'll just make actual with a pencil. I will make notes and I will fix it once I reboot. Okay. Thank you. Any other comments on the minutes? Okay. I am going to stop sharing so that we can see each other. I'm all in favor. I'm, I think we're supposed to call the roll. Kathy, as amended. Yes. John Fenske. Yes. Holly Bowser. Yes. John Page. I'll abstain because I was not present. Okay. Good. One abstention. The Liz. Yes. And myself, Meg Gage. Yes. Great. And Liz, I just noticed I appear later in a few places too, when you do committee assignments. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you're consistently spelling it the other way. So you can search. I'm just going to text John because he missed the last meeting sort of by accident. It seems I don't have his cell phone number. So I'll just send him a quick email in a minute. Or does someone have time, since I'm facilitating to send John McCabe a quick email, although I just sent the notice about the link. He must have gotten that. Let's give him a, let's just keep going and give him a few more minutes. And Meg, your host now, let me just look on participants because if he came in with your link, he won't be with us. He is, he's outside. You have to promote him to panelists. Okay. Let me just see. Oh wow. This is a new thing. So that's why you don't want to send that link. So you know, what do I, do I click allowed to talk or more? You promote to, since you are the host, you have to click on him and you can promote to panelists. Okay. There he is. Thank you for that help. And start video. Here we go. I've been knocking on the door for a while. We just realized what happened. Sorry. Angela left and I've actually never had done that before. So I don't know what people heard me, but when you get that first notice from Angela that here is it, that's an individual panelist invite. If you try to get in on the one that's posted, you do get in, but you get in the way John just did. You're out, you're out in the hinterlands until someone realizes you're there and grabs you and pulls you back. Yeah, it didn't give me any way to get in. Oh, I'm sorry. That's okay. We're all learning new, new tricks. Yeah. So we've just approved the minutes. John Page is taking minutes this time. And I'm going to put in our goal is to finalize our plan for the interviews. Just what did I, can I just ask a quick housekeeping question? I have been a little lax on getting the minutes onto our website. I noticed I've missed the last several meetings. So who has the, all of the final minutes? Cause I need to collect them and make sure I'm not missing any. So there's a different person for each different meeting. So why don't you and I talk Holly and I think I can figure that out. I need to update. We're going to have everybody volunteer to send the minutes to Holly that they have finalized. Why don't Holly and I just talk tomorrow morning and go over each meeting. I have all, I have all those, but I don't have them necessarily amended versions. Once they've been re amended, right? But I know who has them. I think. Okay. All right. I'll touch base with you tomorrow. So I will just live. Yeah. I'll, so I'll change that. I'll, I'll fix the spelling of Kathy's name in the current minutes and I'll send them to Holly. Thank you. All right. Okay. Good. So John, you could just note that Holly and I are going to, well, I've written it down here too. So are going to finalize that who has what. Thanks Holly for bringing that up. That's important. So why don't we start with reviewing the materials? Does that make sense? And thanks to Liz for doing, putting them together. I'm going to put, would it be helpful to have them on the screen? Is it, would it be helpful for me to put them on the screen? Yeah. Yes, please. Let's, should we start with what is participatory budgeting? Get it up here. And then Meg, are you going to be doing the changes into the draft that you've got since I cannot access it? Yes. I'm going to do that right now. Okay. You'll see that I've put one edit in myself already, but we can, not that it's going to, that we're going to discuss, what am I doing? That we're going to discuss. So this is the, it's not a page anymore. It's a little more than a page. So I've, I added one sentence, but this, why don't we all take turns commenting on any edits that we might want to make or additions or deletions. There are always ways of getting something on one page. I've just a question. This is what I'm looking at. Is it something you sent me or something Liz sent me? I sent it from Liz. It's forwarded from Liz. Liz sent it to me and I sent it to everyone. Yeah, I'm just looking for it. I just got it, Tuesday. So I have a general observation, which is that I think that, you know, the upper part, let's see, blah, blah, blah. Through point C, it all works for the three invites I'm going to send out. And those are all relevant to point B. And they're going to the town manager, to the council president and to the three CPOs collectively. But then I look at the questions and I really think that these questions all belong to the questions around point A. In other words, with possible exception, if you could scroll up Meg, so we can talk about them. Thank you. I'm sorry, down, I'm head down. So I think, so for example, the maybe the third bullet could work with the three that I'm sending invites to and the, I think it's the final bullet on the next page could possibly apply. But basically it would be at most those two bullets out of all these plus the points that we discussed last time that I introduced which are relevant, the questions relevant to point B that I would be issuing on my invites. And I just wondered if there's any dissension from that idea. I just don't see that the rest of these questions are relevant to asking about, you know, the things relative to facilitating and consulting with the citizenry on participation. I think when I, am I, yes, I am unmuted. When I was putting this together and I sent the, what I was calling the bonus questions, those are separately, that's that sent under, since they're just for the town manager, that is not on this document. But I was wondering if there's a benefit to telling the people who are interviewing, first of all, who else we're talking to. And also just so that, you know, here are the questions that we're asking of everybody. But when we go into the situation, when we go into it, maybe, you know, then we say, well, this is, you know, we wanted you to know all the questions, but here are the ones that we're really gonna focus on today. I think that's a great idea to let everybody know who the other people are. Well, excuse me though, for the town manager, there are actually two separate invites. There's an invite that's focused on these questions and there's an invite that's focused on the questions that are in the appendix, the separate document, the ones that I prepared. Right. So, I mean, I guess for the town manager, you could have them all together. But then of the three invites that I'm sending out, the council president and the CPOs, they're really only getting, or as I've understood it, they really should only be getting questions relevant to point B. And I just think it would be way too broad and it would be confusing them to give them all these other questions and to be talking about point A. Okay. I agree. And what I thought in my simple-minded way of thinking about what Liz has done is she's given us a Word document that you could say, these are the three things we're doing and I'm here to talk to you about, so you just send her sentence about B, dividing works that way and then you would do just what you've said, find the question and then you would only show them those questions. That's right. Yeah, I would be for... So you could edit this to the perfect document for that email. Well, that's my intention. That's another way of saying what I'm saying is, my intention is, and I'm gonna share with Liz the one for the CPOs and with Meg that one, but also the one for the town manager and the council president, a document that really basically goes through point C and then it gets to the questions that I developed around point B. Yep. But again, maybe the CPOs we could profit from hearing what they have to say about the third bullet and the final bullet that are here, but otherwise I think these points are relevant to the other set of interviews. And I think we've also agreed that we're sending these materials, but if the interviewees take it in some direction that isn't exactly what we anticipated, that's could be useful as well. Sure, yeah. There'll be dynamic meetings that we can't anticipate. Absolutely. I think that I have a feeling the CPOs are gonna be interested in this. Well, I'm really interested in to see what their questions are, but I think they all have a lot of curiosity about trying to do more along all these lines, A, B, and C, but. Okay, in other words, you would like, and again, I'm gonna send out a draft before I issue the invitation. I'll send it to Liz and you, but basically you're saying that for at least the CPOs, we ought to be asking all these questions as well. In other words, we're looking to get as much as possible in our discussion with them. I mean, I don't understand that much how what the long-run intention is or how much they participate already, but I thought that these questions were very specifically developed with key people who are already involved in Resident Capital Request Community Preservation Act, the CDBG, and so forth. I didn't mean that we would ask all these bullets of the CPOs. I don't think we would. I meant that they may be interested in A, B, and C. Oh, I see, right. We could talk about them in a general way without necessarily posing, putting those questions in the one pager to them. But for example, the first bullet, I'm not sure that would be useful to ask them. Exactly. So I would not send all the bullets to everybody. Kathy? Yeah, I think almost none of these bullets work for them. Yeah. But if you look at them, some of them have more about timeline outreach. It's timeline outreach, letting people know the length of time period. So certainly the last bullet would work on best of all, but it wouldn't be your committee. So we'd have to, I think whoever's doing the CPO should just edit these down to be relevant to they can do outreach, they can have ideas of how they could help coordinate, they can have ideas that in fact do cut across A, B, and C. Right. But they wouldn't know, is there flexibility in the budget? Right. You know, if I go through these specific ones. But we could come up those of, is it, John, is it just you and I and Liz doing that one too, right? Right. I'm sending out three invites. One is to the CPOs and that includes Liz and you and the other two are the council president and the town manager and that's just you and me. But I think we could come up the three of us with some bullets that would be specific for them. For example, having been in this job for whatever, what are your thoughts for increasing participation around, I'm not talking about great bullets right now, but I think we could come up with some that invite them to share their experience because they've all worked really hard at trying to increase community participation in a range of different ways. Yeah, no, I agree. This is the open-ended question idea. I would agree. I would say that A, B, and C are relevant, like Meg said, are relevant to everybody. Obviously you want to focus the conversation, but I think that any of these people might have comments on A, B, or C, but the bullets indeed would need to change. I'm thinking town manager, even town council president might have an idea around town-gown collaboration as well as B. They might even have a comment on the town council has a role in CPA requests. So maybe the town council president has some thoughts on that. So I think definitely talking about A, B, and C, but the actual bulleted questions might need to change for those books. So are we okay with entrusting the development of exact bullet points to the two or three people who are going to carry out these interviews? Yeah. And not, it seems to me that- Absolutely. We're all on this, we all know what we're trying to do here and it's not a good use of seven people's time if for us to wait till the next meeting or something, or let's get my pen here. Does that make sense that we'll all rearrange the, we'd agreed originally, so yeah. And I also think the questions that are in the other package, Liz's term them bonus questions, get at that broader scope, John Page. And so you'd still have this boilerplate on saying this is what we're thinking about, but then you jump at the Lynn and the Paul level and you can show them, I mean, Paul is going to be in at least two conversations. Lynn probably will be in just one. But- I want, before we can move on to that other document, is there more to say about this document? No, I don't, the only other thing I would say, you know, I'm thinking of the ones that I've been assigned to, I, the, probably the only edit, I'll edit, you know, formatting I will do is I'll say, we're seeking to talk to you about the resident capital request, right? You know, so I would just have one, you know, if that's what I'm reaching out to, or we're seeking to talk to you about the CPA process. So I would just have, you know, because it says, we're gonna, yeah, so that's the only kind of edit. It would be really minor because I think the questions are great. So that's the only thing I would do. Yeah, I think then that sentence that says below the questions we were putting, I think it's important that we let everybody know who else we're talking to, so that they're not saying, well, you have to talk to this person, you have to talk to this person, because like, yeah, we know. So that just, that would need to be edited as well, in the, below our questions, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm thinking that this is, you've managed to be so economical in the way you've written it, Liz, that there's enough- You said one page. You know, that the, at the end of this document, there's enough space where we can just say, we are talking to X and X for resident and Y and Y. I mean, we've got, we probably have enough space there if we just want to copy in from the minutes, you know, who's- Okay, are you saying at the end here? Well, just, I don't think we need to put names in there. I think as long as we say we're talking to representatives, because we don't know for certain that we're going to be able to talk to Sarah and Sam and whoever else from CPAC. Yeah, so I would just say, we are talking to, you know, at least two of us are talking to CPA, we're setting up- Right, right. Rather than specific names. Yeah. Well, I wanted to add a sentence up here just to leave open the allocation can come from the town budget, charitable contributions or a combination. Because a lot of, just to soften everybody's anxiety about where the money comes from. I know John McCabe and I have interested in exploring charitable contributions, but it's premature, because we don't know what we're talking about yet, but- Only one problem with that Meg, I mean, it certainly fits when we talk about the C, you know, other things. We went through with a percent for art. It's a fairly arduous process for Sonius to set up a way to take contributions to the town. You know, so it's an entirely, it's a very different concept if we're- Right, but in terms of laying out what participatory budgeting is in this first sentence, I think it's a paragraph. I mean, I think it listed an excellent job. I'm just suggesting adding where the funding comes from, but it's just my proposal, but we don't have to do it. Should we, other comments on it? You're saying you don't think we need it, Kathy? Well, because it's, well, because you're gonna raise objections from Sonia Aldrich, because the first sentence says, how does it spend part of the public budget? And it's not that easy to put in charitable contributions into a public budget. So I think we should definitely keep those words when you're, we're talking about, you know, what other ways that might be. I think you're just gonna raise flags. Are you talking about setting up a new fund where the town would collect? So I think it raises funds. How about we say in other, you know, in other communities are typically or- Well, I'm trying to explain what I think it will be a red flag that it will say, what do you mean by this? How would we collect this? It will take the conversation in a different way. But I think in the report, we can say that. I just think it's a red flag. Okay, others? Should we, it's not that big a deal. I'm gonna go along with Meg. What? I'm gonna go along with Meg only because I think it gets, shoulders go down. I think when people think that they're gonna get a percentage carve out of their money, they're gonna say, we're just gonna not wanna have the conversation, you know? I think, and I get your technical point, Kathy, but I think politically, when we saw it with Paul, he felt much more relaxed when we were saying, we think we could probably go find some money for this. And he thought, oh, oh, that's it. So just leave it in. You know, our focus questions are all about how do we rank? How do you distribute the money? So it's certainly in the conversation with Paul and Lynn or CPOs. I'm just, you know, we actually spent two days on this with Sonia explaining things that we couldn't easily do a public process with charitable contributions. I thought, you know, so like the anonymous donation to the library to build the library up here had to be in a separate, it couldn't be in a town account. It's just, it was interesting on. So leave it in. Kathy, I'm just curious. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded basically any participatory budgeting program in anywhere in New Jersey. Somehow they were able to do it. I'm just curious, Kathy, does it have to be, let's suppose the proposed to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation made a million dollars available to the town of Amherst, you know, let's just dream. Why would it have to be, and maybe it does have to be, but why would it have to be inserted into the budget? Why can't it be a standalone account? Well, it could be a standalone account in a 501C3 that the town wasn't running. So just look at the first sentence, how to spend part of the public budget. This sentence definitely goes with C, A, B, and C, potential town gown club. You know, it wouldn't have to run through the public budget is what you're saying. I'm gonna stop for some reason it was, you know, when the schools wanted to collect donations so that students could have Wi-Fi connections with hotspots, it had to do a go fund me. They couldn't run it through the school. So I don't know what the barrier is. I don't really know what the barrier is to doing this, but it was clearly collected for a public purpose and was, but it somehow, you know, I don't see why the town can't take donations. I think we can set up a charity. We might be able to set, leave it in. I'm spending way much time on this sentence. Is there any value to last thing on it? Is there any value to finding some town in Jersey and asking what they did? Yeah, on the road there is, I think if we're gonna, I don't think it's worth our time to. No, I said, just leave the sentence in. The only one who would flag it is probably, we're not interviewing her, so we're okay. But we could even say it in a different way that this paragraph here is about how participatory budgeting works generally in the, but we're doing it, we're doing a variation. So this would, it's totally accurate that many communities get charitable contributions, but John Fenske, you had your hand up. Just a way to finesse this might be just a small wording change. Funding sources might eventually be, might eventually come from. Or could eventually come from, oops, good. Yeah, right, that way, you know, Sonia would say, you're not saying they can, you're right. Right, I don't think it's worth our time. Okay, sorry, I flagged it. No, no, no, no, no, good discussion. Listen, let me finish my sentence, which this is an important topic, but in terms of preparing for these interviews, I don't think we need to spend any more time wondering how they do it. We know that places do do it, and if we ever have that opportunity, we'll figure it out, but we're not doing that. Is that okay? Any other comments on this excellent piece? So I just wanna summarize, I think we've agreed that each of the interview teams is gonna pull out and organize the bullets in a way that's appropriate to the particular interview. Right, and we don't all need to see it. So shall we look at the other piece that Liz developed? Well, that is specific to whoever's interviewing the town manager, and do we need to look at that again, or did we get all of it done last time when we... Well, let's just take a quick look and see what we think, stop share, and then I'm gonna start sharing again. So let me add, it would be a little misleading to say just the town manager, because those questions are again, therefore the three invites that I'm sending out, town manager, council president, and the three CPOs. Yep. I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I thought that these were for the secondary meeting that was with the town manager. The town manager is the only one of those three that has two meetings. You're right, it's for the secondary meeting, the one that I'm setting up, but there are also questions, and that's why I objected earlier on the other sheet to thinking that all those questions would go to the CPOs or the council president. In my view, the council president and the CPOs get principally these 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B questions. Yeah, I like these questions for that separate interview, and I think they work for Lynn quite well. I do too. And the comments? Other than adding one or two, and you've already talked about them for the CPOs because they have an outreach function, I think these work very well. Great. Okay. So excuse me, just as an illustration, one thing I imagine asking both Lynn and Paul, you know, thinking about residents that are under two, where you get detailed information on budgeting priorities to try to engage them in the idea that, well, right now you have these four major capital projects and there's a sequencing issue and there are forums to discuss these things and so forth. But in an ideal world, 2A and 2B are about getting more detailed information from the people out there to help make these decisions, to help with the sequencing and the prioritization of the four major capital projects. Does that make sense to people, to get them thinking in concrete terms about the current challenges facing them? Yes. Yep, yes. Okay. Great. So again, thank you, Liz. I wanna review what we agreed on at our last meeting about how we would report because a couple of people weren't at that meeting. So does somebody wanna summarize what we, it was in the minutes, but, so each team is going to, there's not, we're not gonna have a particular form for reporting that's got a lot of categories and answers. Each team will write a summary of what important points that came out of the meeting and circulate it. And then also questions that came out. I think the reports can be in bullet form, so it's not, doesn't have to be huge pages of notes. Does that describe what we agreed? Yeah, and what I said I would do when I get this document, now that I have this document, that goes in for the interviews, but I will set it up for myself to have lots of space between each question. And I'll just be, we'll figure out, one of us is scribe, one of us is lead or something. So someone is rat-a-tatting as we get into a discussion. Excellent. So maybe everybody wants to do that, put little creative worksheet with blank spaces. Holly? Nope, nothing, sorry. You know, I wanna thank Holly. I just read the minutes for the last CPAC committee meeting. And it says, Holly Bowser said, the Participatory Budget Commission is becoming to talk to you about outreach. It was a nice, it was a nice, you gave them a heads up. They were talking about kind of their plan for next year. And I just thought it was appropriate to let them know that other people are thinking about it too. Great, thank you. Okay, let's just also agree that everybody who participates in an interview will have a chance to vet the reports before they get circulated. I think that goes without saying, but and that you can circulate them. Let's now discuss the timeline for all of this. When do we want to carry out these interviews? Certainly by the end of February, our next meeting is in two weeks. It's probably- What's the date for the next meeting? The next meeting is February 4th. I think it's, well, what are your thoughts about timing? Schedule it. So what we have to do is, I think takes sometimes longer than we think, scheduling, conducting the interviews, writing up the notes. I don't think that can all happen in two weeks. What do you all think? I just have a question about the schedule. Did we, I thought we had worked on the schedule. So it happened, what were we doing at the week of the council meeting? Because the council, so I was just gonna suggest we might not be ready by the 4th, but target the 11th if we make- Okay. And it's, the council meets on the, I'm just suggesting this as, and then I think there might be time between now and the 11th to get these done or to get some of them done. So how does, so the proposal is to change our next meeting from the 4th to the 11th discussion. I thought we had already discussed in the last meeting that we were gonna try to shoot for the last week in January, first week in February on these because budget season was gonna be coming up quick and people were gonna get busy. And we were gonna talk about getting them scheduled as soon as possible, I thought. Yeah, and that's, I'm saying the same thing, Holly. I just think if we can get it scheduled can actually create- Right, I don't think we're gonna have them all completed and answers and ready to share information by the 4th, but I thought that our goal was to be having these meetings like next week or the first, the end of January, early February. I mean, we wouldn't be ready with the information to come back until probably the second meeting, not the next meeting, but to schedule them. We had a discussion right at the end of the meeting last time and I- So I agree with you. I mean, I was thinking of getting them scheduled next week and if we couldn't next week then the very first few days- I just meant I don't know for sure we will have reports ready by- Right, we might not be ready for that discussion at the next meeting, but we should shoot to have them definitely scheduled and hopefully completed. Let me ask this in a different way. Given that the work we're doing now is conducting interviews and then processing them- Maybe we should skip the next meeting. Well, the proposal was to have our meeting on the 11th rather than on the 4th. So let's just, do we all agree that it's asking too much to expect them to be scheduled, carried out and reports, you know, census reports written ahead of the meeting. It's not, I don't think it's okay to just send it out, you know. Two minutes before, right? No, I think that the 4th for the meeting- Okay, so we all- Would be too early. Conduct these as soon as we possibly can, hopefully before, you know, by the beginning of, you know, as early as possible in February. Shall we have the meeting on the 4th and have some other agenda? Shall we move our meeting to the 11th or shall we skip a meeting? I think we should skip until the 21st. Not with some looking wrong months, sorry. Eight to the 8th. So we have the 4th and the 18th for our next two meetings. Yeah, I like that idea that we skip. We aim to have all the reports ready for everybody else and distributed up to a week or at least a few days before the meeting of the 18th. Okay, good. So that's, I'm not- So if we got them out like- I think we take longer to do it. I'm just, if we want our reports to be thoughtful and to have a consensus of everybody who carried them out, review them and add things. Okay, so there's a proposal that we- And then we'll have time to read. And have our, instead our next meeting will be on the 18th. Okay, any more discussion? One thing, please. Meg, you had sent me an email saying that you said, John, you and John are going to do a community development block grant, is that John Page? Oh, that's me. I'm sorry. So we should decide. One of us will have to- That's the problem with John. Okay, let me see. Is it you and I, John? Is that John Page and John McKay? It's John Page, I'm so sorry. Okay, well I'm pretty friendly with Andrew, so I could reach out to him, but what's your idea? Sure, I was going to say we just need to choose one of us to write the email, including the questions and ask for a time. So if you want to do that, that's great. If you just copy- We go to the chair, I went to the meeting last week. The only person I know is Andrew Grant-Thomas. I didn't recognize the chair and they're way backed up because the feds are so out of control due to Trump, I think it's probably what it was. They have no money or information at all. So they have time on their hands at the moment. I think they've ranked their stuff and they've got no money. At our last meeting, we discussed who would do the calling, you two weren't here, so I'll just put nevermind, I'm not gonna, I don't have to pull it up, nevermind what I'm doing here. I don't have to share the documents. So I'm gonna put John under community development block grants, John Page, is that what you just agreed, or no, John McKay, right? So both of us are on that one. Is it not appropriate to just approach a member just because you know them? Should we approach the chairs? Is that the way it's probably- Yeah, you should send an email to Gail. See, I don't know who the, I can get all that from the town website. It's on the town website, yep. But I have talked to her over the garden fence so she is aware that this question is coming. Oh, that helps. And did she smile when she heard that they were coming or did she cringe? Well, I mean, no more so than my husband has cringed. Oh, that's right. I did see your husband was there. Yes, I did. I think it's important to follow the process that we agree with even if these people we know. Yeah, no. So yeah, Gail's information should be on the website. So why don't I do this? I don't see Gail's email, but I know the staff email is there. So I can ask for the chair's email and I can plan on sending that request. But we'll both be on it, John, McKayton. We're gonna request a Zoom meeting, yes? Yes. Great. That also works. Thank you, Liz. Right. And just, I think we probably said this, but these Zoom meetings can be personal Zoom accounts, right? Yes. Absolutely. Yes, it's not a committee. It's not an official committee. It's not a public meeting. It's not an anything. So you can use whatever you have access to. We're also, we're even allowed to use that for district meetings, personal. It's just there. We have to be willing to take on the risks of it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's unreasonable to expect Angela to set all these up. Great. So we need to review. So I just wanna make sure that we've agreed that we're not having the meeting on the fourth. Did, I don't think we need to vote on that, but looking around, does anybody object? Okay. And just to summarize, does everybody clear about who's doing the outreach? I think so, because we went over at our last meeting in detail. Which of us on which team? Okay, great. And also it's in Liz's minutes that we just read. So if anyone forgets. Right. Okay. Terrific. So I think we're all, can't believe it. We're almost finished with our meeting. Okay. Should we commit to sending our, if we had the meeting, which hopefully we all will, we need to commit to sending those, the report of the meeting to Meg, to the chair, or how would you like to handle that? By the 11th, I think was what it sounded like. I would say, yeah, if we got them to Meg a week early, so we could all get them, by that Friday or Monday to have time to read them, that would be helpful to me. Would you like to get them as they come in or all in a packet? Because what if somebody's really slow? It seems to me, what would be better? I think it would be better to have them all come in at one. Okay. Rather than, because then they don't, you don't have to worry about things getting lost and. Okay. So by the 11th. Excuse me. The idea is that by the 11th, the subcommittees or whatever we call them, the panels for the interviews will have agreed among themselves on a final draft. I mean, it may not be absolutely final. We might come up with more ideas, but we're, so for example, Liz and Meg and I are agreed that the CPO interview report is relatively final by the 11th. That's my vision. So I sort of liked the idea of having, and I don't remember who said it, like just your sort of notes or your bullet points. And then when we get together on the 18th, after we've all read them, then we can ask more detailed questions. Well, what did you mean by this? What did you mean by that? So it doesn't have to be, you know, a seven page report. It's just your, you know, notes, bullets, and then by the 18th, we'll have all read them and be able to ask for more information. Great. So I just want to summarize, we're going to get them into me by the 11th. That would be perfect. Okay, great. And I just, and okay, terrific. Are you going to send your format to everybody or are we all going to do something similar? Kathy's going to do a sort of worksheet. No, I'm taking Liz's Word document and hitting, if you do control, return, multiple columns, you open up white space. That's my very... That's how I do it. I do. That's what I do. I get a pencil. And if I had, if I'm typing on my iPad, when, if I ever succeed in setting up my second screen, which I bought and I just haven't done it, but what I'm typing on, I can just, it will get larger if that paragraph gets longer, you know, but I will have pre-opened it up. So I don't have to do that. But my question was, we'll all do that for ourselves. Yeah, because it's just, it's my simple, you know, a few of these things I think have yes, no answer. Some of them I'm going to open up with a big block of white space because it might be a more nuanced, you know, kind of chat. I want to say just about the scribe that we've set, just to clarify every, each group might, should probably choose someone to be the note taker, but everybody should be probably writing down little notes to be sure when you process the notes, so that you're not only, thank you, the light just went on, so that you're not, everybody can contribute to the notes. I'm a compulsive note taker and I completely agree with that. Very good. Very high. My notes sometimes are different than other people's notes, even though we were in the same meeting. That's why, you know. If you guys have pads, I have stickies. Yeah, actually, I kind of find it difficult to act with them. That's why, you know, there's so much clout and who does the agenda and who does the minutes. You know, that's where you create history. You know, just as a quick, just short anecdote, I worked with a woman who was taught when she was in graduate school to take copious notes because you remembered a conversation by taking notes. You know, it was a different way of remembering and so the challenge, she was the head of the foundation I worked with and often was chairing the meeting. My challenge to the staff person who was supposed to take notes is that they would get their notes more complete than Karen, who was chairing the meeting and they never succeeded. And I just said, how does someone chair and take notes at this level? But it is, it's, yeah, she was kind of amazing, but. Well, we're lucky we have those recordings so we don't even have to worry about, you know. Should we record this thing or no? No, no, no. I think. I think they need to be informal. Open meeting law doesn't apply so that these can be dynamic discussions that you can take in the direction that the interviewee has ideas and you know, where their creativity is or where their questions are. The other thing is whoever's zoom it is, you can record it but it's just on your computer then. Right. So if you wanted to capture the actual, you could do it. It's a hog of, it takes a lot of, pardon. We would have to inform them that we're doing that. Oh yeah. Yeah, so I don't think it's a good idea but it doesn't have to be posted to, it won't, it doesn't become a larger thing anywhere. It's not part of the public record. Yeah. We can take advantage of the fact that these are personal dynamic exchanges to get people, people clam up when they know they're being recorded. Sure. So, terrific. I think we're moving along here unless I'm wrong. I wanna, are we, I think we're finished with item four on the agenda. We're down to topics the chair didn't reasonably anticipate. I have one, which is, I was, I've been contacted by Scott Merzbach wanting an update on what we're doing. And my instinct, you know, my habit would be to pick up the phone and chat with him but I thought I would check with you to make sure that you don't, you would pick, read the paper and say, what the hell did she, why does she talk to him? It's his job to ask. I think, I personally think it would be great to have a kind of, we're moving along, we're interviewing people. I don't know if he would find that newsworthy enough to write an article, but I wanted to get your thoughts on this and this happened since 48 hours ago. Right. My preference would be to stay at a fairly general process level. You know, you could say what participatory budgeting has been elsewhere, but you know, we've come to, as far as I can tell, we've come to no conclusions. We have some directions we're investigating, but I wouldn't want him to write something that, you know, suddenly sets off a minor. Actually, right before the interviews we're doing with the rest of the folks. I don't think anything that we would say would be newsworthy, would be worth writing anything about, frankly, but we'll have to get more discussion. Is it best, maybe we should just do a, you know, a little press release kind of update that's in writing and then we don't have to worry about him. Then everything's in writing. We can say this is what we said and we can keep it as vague as we want. Happy? Yeah, I worry a little bit about it. I agreed with what John said, Fenske said staying very general because we need to get these interviews done which may, you know, be, I hate this idea or it has a kernel or something and we don't want to feel like there's newspaper, there's media pressure on anything we're thinking about. So you did a nice interview the very first time, you know, what is participant, it came out a while ago. So I was, I would almost say can he wait, you know, until the end of February. No, yeah, John. I just want to second Liz's point. I mean, I'm not going to speak ill of Scott but I've had my moments. When I was on the library board, I resigned for, I was a really angry person at that particular moment and I wrote a 700 word reservation note that was really cogent and thoughtful and he picked out 25 fighting words. Yeah. And Mass Live called me and said, did you really call the tea party? And I was like, oh God. And I said, would you like to print my 700 word statement? And they did. I think you need to, whatever, because you never know how it's going to play. You know, I burned pretty badly. And it was fine. Yeah, that's really good at respecting off the record. I've given him, but so it's really important when you're speaking with anyone to choose your words extremely carefully. I like handed in the written statement and said, could you publish how he said sure? And then he called out all the nastiest things. Wow. And it was like, oh, come on, man. And sometimes he misquotes people as well. So it's important to put to the, I, John? Well, some of the things that have been said reminded me that we do have a public forum phase coming up. And I think it might be most helpful if Scott's article could happen around that time. We should try to use it strategically to create interest in the public forum. Yeah, based on this discussion, I'm proposing that I get back and say, just carrying out some interviews. It's really not, we don't have much to say. I have, I never mind. I was gonna say how I've learned how to manage Scott Merzbach to say thank you for your, I'll make him eager to find out what we're doing in three weeks or four weeks that we're interviewing people. I will have a lot more to say soon. Okay, is that everybody satisfied with that decision? Great. I think that's smart, yeah. Okay, I'm gonna check if there's any public, which there isn't, I don't think. Is there any public who wants to speak? I'm looking at this participants here. Zero, no attendance. No attendance, okay. So I note there's nobody here. This is great, we were so efficient. I'm gonna review what the followup that we agreed. And if anything I say is not what you thought it was, speak up. Holly and Meg are going to determine where the minutes are and get them filed. Each interview team will finalize its own materials, will determine the note taker and the reporting format. And each team will approve the notes, let's call them notes and not minutes, the notes that will report on each conversation before they're submitted. All of the reports will be sent to me by the 11th and I will send them all out in a group. And I'm gonna do it right away on the 11th because so people really have a chance to process what comes out of these. We also agreed we're going to skip our next meeting and our next subsequent meeting is on the 18th to 18. I didn't, any other followup that is important to be sure we all agreed. I think it also was agreed that each group will create its own, we'll take what Liz did and we'll create its own invitation and summary to the each preparatory summary of what we want to talk with each group about. Does that summarize our plan? Yeah, is it helpful at all to like just to take two seconds and rather than email back and forth? I mean, John, when do you want to start like that sort of can we just nail that down verbally or? Sure, I, after this meeting I can probably, if I, once I get Gail's email, I can send that off but why don't I edit the CDBG one which I don't think I would change very much at all besides saying greetings Gail and adding a few things. Why don't I send that to you and I try to do that this either this week or this weekend, so by Monday. That'd be awesome. Yeah, school starts on Monday, but we'll get it done. And for my three invites I'll share those with Liz and Meg before sending them out and try to get likewise by this weekend at the latest I'll send you a draft and send the invites either on the weekend or early next week. Great, and I'm just looking at the notes. Kathy is going to contact Paul and Sean and I'm sure you've got that under control. And I'm on resident and CPAC, right? But you want to switch that with somebody's so you don't have to do it. No, I wanted to do both, yeah. So I sent out with the materials for this meeting, this I'm not going to try to share the screen because you don't really need to see it, but this I think is accurate list of the teams and the three asterisks mean you're the person who's doing the sending, the scheduling. Okay, so those materials, I don't think we received, but also that is in the minutes. It is the minutes. It's in Liz's minutes. Yeah, it's in the minutes. This you didn't, okay, I'll send it right after. No, it did, yeah, but it's in the minutes, so. Okay. Anything else? I just want to thank everyone for this level of hard work. This is a real hands-on project that we're undertaking with these interviews and I think it's terrific. I think we're going to get some good information and really appreciate everybody pitching in with thoughtful ideas and willingness to do this level of work between meetings. So it's, we earned missing a meeting. We earned skipping to the February 4th meeting because we're going to all have to work so hard between now and then. Any other comments or before we adjourn? No, okay. Well, I'm going to move that we adjourn and it is 4.30. Record time. Anyone in, anyone if they are all on tape? I'll second that. Let's just copy, yes. Second discussion, goodbye. Holly. Yes. You don't need to pull. We can just say. Yeah, we don't need to. Everybody agrees. Okay. Bye, everyone. Bye, everybody. Thank you very much. See you in touch soon. Okay, thanks, John.