 Okay, so this is the meeting of Outreach Communications and Appointments, and I am calling us to order at 9.37 a.m. So you have several documents in your packet, including the agenda. There are, I have no announcements for today. And so we will jump right to agenda item three, which is discussion of the sufficiency of the pool for the ZBA vacancy, well it says vacancy, but there are multiple. So let's just sort of recap where we are with the ZBA. So we've had one vacancy on the ZBA since September 11th of 2019, and that was a vacancy of one of the regular member seats. At the time that that occurred, we decided to hold off on filling that vacancy because they were able to use their associates, and so that vacancy we felt did not impose any type of significant burden on the body. We then in December received notice that the ZBA chair, Mark Parent, who had been reappointed to a one year term ending June 30th, 2020, was going to resign his seat early on March 13th. I am not quite sure what the status is of that. The last conversation that I had heard of with Mark was that he had been impaneled for the current ZBA hearing on the University Drive South Project, and that he was going to stay on the ZBA beyond the 13th for the remainder of that. And so I don't know how much longer that will run for, but he is at the very least, has rescinded his resignation letter to the rest of my knowledge temporarily so that he can complete that panel for that project. I know there had been some conversation about if he's willing to stay on for the remainder of that project, would he just be willing to stay on for the remainder of his term? And I don't know the answer to that, but at this point in time, we are not expecting that Mark Parent is actually going to be stepping down on the 13th. He will at least be carrying out the remainder of that project. Alyssa. So I have a quick question since the ZBA was, even though Mark's been on a long time, the ZBA was recently confused as to who resigns to what at any given moment, and you don't resign to your staff support, for example, you resign to the town clerk. And so if he did resign to the town clerk, I hope he rescinded it with the town clerk as well. It's very typical that when people are on ZBA that they stay for a particular project just to see it through and say I'm not sitting through anything else, but I'm staying on that one. And, but legally, if he's resigned, it just calls questions. So I hope that we can ask staff to follow up on that, just to make sure that the town clerk feels like, if they were asked, that he's still officially impaneled for that purpose. I can check in on that. The last communication that I had seen, and I'm recalling this from memory, was that he had said to Maureen, how do I rescind my resignation so that I can continue to serve for the remainder of this? So I don't, I don't. I don't think Maureen knows the answer to that. And I think, and again, this is from memory, I'd have to dig through my email a little bit. I think that I saw the communication as part of a reply from the town manager to Maureen, instructing her how to instruct Mark how to do this. But I haven't seen any communication to the town clerk from Mark, so I can just follow up on that. We should have to, but just so we feel like we need to go question Mark later. Yeah. So at this point, I'm slightly less concerned about that second vacancy of the regular membership because we do know we have Mark, at least for the somewhat foreseeable future. However, we then recently received a letter of resignation from Aaron Arcello, who is one of our associate members. And his resignation is effective immediately. And so our one vacancy turned into two vacancies has turned into potentially three in the near future. And so I don't think we're at a point anymore where we can say, oh, that vacancy doesn't impose a burden on the body. And so the priority for today's discussion is whether or not we are ready to move forward with interviews to fill that ZBA vacancy. Now, the last time we had this conversation, if you recall, I said that it would be very difficult for us to assess the sufficiency of the pool because we did not have a pool. And so we had a discussion, I believe this was at our February 10th meeting about how we might be able to increase numbers in the applicant pool beyond zero. So we had this body decided, one by consensus and one by vote, two recommendations to try to increase recruitment for ZBA. One was to reach out to all of the planning board, all of the people who applied to be on the planning board but did not also check off ZBA. So several people had applied for both, but there were a handful of people who had applied for planning board and not ZBA. And there was a request that I reach out to this planning board people and ask if they would be interested in the ZBA. There was also a recommendation that I reach out to the town manager and ask him to come up with a list of people who he has interviewed for other town committee bodies that we haven't seen, that he thinks would be good people to be on the ZBA or might be interested in the ZBA and ask him to reach out to them and encourage them to submit a CAF. I reached out to the town manager, he told me that he did that. And so as a result of those two efforts, I think as you've noticed in your inboxes, we have seen an increase in applications. And so I do think that we're at a point where we can actually look at the pool and decide whether we want to move forward. And so I wanna do this sort of in two stages. The first is looking at the document that's in your packet on three ZBA sufficiency of the pool. And the second will be to look at the actual applicant pool and see if we want to vote to move forward. So let's start with that document. Darcy. And do we have a date set for interviews? We don't. I'm not gonna schedule one until we decide we wanna move forward. This is probably gonna be a little more complicated than with Planning Board. Just based on numbers, but let's one step at a time. All right, so you have a document which is labeled sufficiency of the pool discussion. It looks very similar to the document that we looked at for Planning Board back on January 5th, January 4th. And so the first page of this is just a relevant text from the adopted OCA process to remind us that before we can proceed to interviews, we have to by majority vote declare the applicant pool sufficient. Remember, we did not decide on any hard criteria by which to evaluate whether a pool is sufficient, but we did put goals that we strive towards. So we strive towards more applicants and vacancies. We strive towards a diverse applicant pool and we wanna make sure that the applicant pool has some people that meet the current needs of the body to be appointed and we want to consider any burdens on that body. The second page is an attempt to get at some of those questions. And so the first thing is that we need to make sure that there's been a vacancy notice published for at least 14 days before we move forward for an appointment. The vacancy notice was published on September 12th, so it has been 14 days. I also republished the vacancy announcement the first week in February. So actually that vacancy announcement has been published twice. The next thing is that the OCA Chair, Designee, shall contact any applicant who submitted their CAF prior, two years prior to the posting of the vacancy notice. I did that, I did that back in February, which yielded very little. So then we went through the process of reaching out to more people that I described earlier. So then as far as these three criteria, the number of applicants relative to the number of vacancies, we can confirm that there are more applicants than there are current vacancies. As far as demographic data, we can look at that in a minute, but that is on page four presented as we usually do, so that you, we're not saying the specific numbers, but you can look at percentages. And then I wanted to just make sure we understand the current needs of the body, including any burdens placed on it. So again, this is a body that technically has five regular member seats and four associate member seats. We appointed five regular members and three associate members last spring. We left one of those associate seats open. At this point, we have two vacancies in our associate members and two current associate members in their seats. And we have one vacancy and an impending second vacancy of regular members. What that basically means is that of the nine potential seats, we are soon to be in a position where only five will have people in them. Because you need five people on the panel, that puts the ZBA in a very precarious position and in conversation with staff about the ZBA and when they're looking at their current members travel schedules, especially for the summer because Amherst is Amherst, there is a lot of concern that without some new members, the work of the ZBA could grind to a halt because they just won't have the five people to sit on a panel with some travel schedules. And of course, with only five people, that also brings up concerns about if there's someone who has a conflict, if there's someone who's sick. To some extent, what's on our agenda tonight about the Mullen rule provides a little bit of cushion for that, but certainly not much. And so my personal opinion on this, and this is again personal, but I think is reflected by some of the conversations I've heard from staff is that once these three vacancies occur and there are only five seats of nine filled combined of associate and regular, that is actually a pretty significant imposition on the ZBA and could pretty dramatically impact their work. With regard to the needs, I have on page three, as per our process, I reached out to the chair of the planet of, sorry, the chair of the ZBA to ask for what he sees as the needs and skills that the body currently needs. They probably look very familiar to you. And the reason for that is I said, at this moment in time, what are the current needs of the ZBA? And he said, here's what I sent to you last time. And so I assume it's just, that's what the current needs remain. This is identical to what we received last spring. And then again, the final page is the demographic data. You will see that we do have some diversity as in far of the ages of our applicants, certainly more so than we had from the planning board. When it comes to gender and race, we are again looking at a pool that is exclusively white men, white and Caucasian men. Sorry, I don't wanna get called for, so before we look at names, I just wanna open up the floor to any comments or discussion about this document and specifically about diversity and the needs of the body and the burden placed on the body and how we're feeling about whether when it comes to numbers, needs, burdens and diversity, we're comfortable moving forward. So thoughts, D'Arcy. I just wanna add my regular comment of that I would like to add to the diversity bullet whether the person represents an unrepresented voice or underrepresented. But what does that mean? It means that... Certainly women and racial minorities would be underrepresented voices. Yes. In this body. I guess I'm talking political voices. So you want to, with race and gender, you also wanna put politics? Voice, including a racial, economic, gender and generational diversity or an unrepresented voice on the body, underrepresented voice on the body. So I think I understand what you're getting at, which is number five on our agenda tonight, different perspectives on town council-appointed bodies. Okay, so we'll get to that for that agenda item. Okay, so with that, so similar to what we did for Planning Board, I am going to be handing out what our current pool is because per our adopted policy, we don't disclose numbers or names. This is not a public document. I will be collecting it at the end of our discussion. The point of this is for you to take a moment to look at how many people we have, who they are considering in the context of what Merrick-Parent says. He feels like the body needs. So take a moment to look it over and then we will have a conversation about whether or not we feel that the pool is sufficient. Alyssa has pointed out that I made an error in the CAF dates in that some of these people have applied in the future. Anything that is 2020 should be 2019. They should all be 2019, except for the February and March submissions of 2020. So why don't we just do this. If it's a date that's in the future, it was supposed to be 2019. Okay, so we all through looking at this document. Okay, so remember we don't speak names or numbers, but do we have any, given the documents that I provided in the packet, and given this document, I'd like to open up the floor to any comments regarding whether or not we feel that we have a pool that is sufficient to move to interviews. The one thing I do wanna make sure I include in the framing of this discussion is the fact that while we do have two current vacancies and we'll have a third in the likely near future, that does not necessarily mean that we need to fill all three vacancies in this round of appointments. And so we need to make sure that the body is operable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to be able to see in this pool the capability of filling three full vacancies, because we can interview everyone and decide to only fill one of the vacancies or twos, but we do wanna make sure that the body is not impeded from operating. So opening up the floor to opinions from members of this committee about whether you feel as though given the information presented, the pool is sufficient to proceed to interviews. George. I feel the pool is sufficient to proceed to interviews. Okay, Darcy. I think it's unfortunate that there are no women who applied, but it seems like there are plenty of applicants and it does seem sufficient to me, other than needing women, minorities. Agreed, and as you see from the contact, some women were contacted, one of which did not respond, but also in conversation with staff, there's a thought that she is not an Amherst resident. There's some confusion about that. And the other I reached out to via email and then also followed up with an in-person conversation, trying to convince her to apply unsuccessfully. So I think that that will continue to be a difficulty for this body. So I guess what I'm saying is not for lack of trying, but it is an unfortunate situation that in the guidance that Mark Parent provided us, he did specifically call out another woman and someone who represents a minority, and this pool currently has neither of those. Other thoughts on this pool? Alyssa. We don't seem to have a copy of Arcelo's resignation. And if that resignation said anything other than I resign, if it said I resign because there aren't any women on this body or I resign because this, that or the other thing, that would be useful information for us to have in determining sufficiency of the pool. And the entire town council should have received a copy of that. Again, there's confusion about resignations. I mean, they should have gotten it. Like the clerk gets it, right? That's the important part. But since the town council appoints this, we should know when people quit because most people, again, say I quit or I'm busy. But if they said something more provocative, that would be worth knowing to make this decision. And I can, I do, yes, and yeah, I'd have to search for a copy, but I can try and dig it out. But what I will say is that Aaron Arcelo has resigned because he has taken a job in Wisconsin that has made it difficult for him to continue service on the board from Milwaukee. So, yes. So right now, two resignations that have gone into effect. One was Matthew Wilk, who resigned because of a capacity question and workload. And the other was Mr. Arcelo, who resigned because he took a job out of state. George. One amount of this is observation that since these are town council appointments, it would seem to be appropriate that counselors be apprised of resignations when they occur. Not just members of this committee, but all counselors. Is that something that we will continue to look into? Is that something that we feel, as long as the chair knows and communicates it to us? Or is it something that I should know and I was told and I just forgot, which is probably the answer. How do we ensure, should we ensure that this kind of information, once it goes to the clerk, gets communicated to the council as a whole? Seems to be what Alyssa is suggesting here and it doesn't happen. Athena. I'm gonna ask the town clerk staff to make sure that they send a copy. They should be sending a copy of resignation letters to other appointing authorities. So I'm just gonna follow up with them to make sure that they know that those bodies are appointed by the council and that they send me the resignation letter so I can send them out to you all. Great, thank you. Yeah, and I think this also has to do with just making sure that staff liaisons are aware in the short time that I've been doing this when I've seen resignations, that people are almost always submitting their resignation to the staff liaison, which I think probably makes sense because that's the town hall person they interact with most. And so I think that that staff liaison, making sure that they're also aware that when they receive that it needs to even go to the town clerk and then it comes to the council. So yeah. Okay, so I have heard from George and Darcy a feeling that this pool is sufficient to move to interviews. Sarah and Alyssa, do you have any thoughts? Alyssa? Same as what Darcy said, it is what it is. Okay, so then with that, I will entertain a motion. The motion would be to declare that the applicant pool for the zoning board of appeals is sufficient to proceed to interviews. George? I so move. Okay, George has moved. Is there a second? Thank you, Alyssa. Alyssa has seconded. And this needs to be majority vote. All the, any further discussion? All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Okay, and that is unanimous. So if you could hand these papers back to me. Photographic memory. Sorry, I didn't mark them up. That's, they're just going their side. Yeah. Sean just said that the wifi should be working. So if you want, y'all want to check. Okay. Is everyone connected at this point? Okay, great. So, we have now declared the applicant pool sufficient. And so we have just as a reminder, even though we very recently did this, our next steps are to schedule interviews. And so I am going to reach out to all of the applicants who are in the pool and try to find a date where they are all available and we are all available because there are more than there were for planning board. It might be more complicated than last time. That was a great practice run. I am, I am going to shoot for the same day of the week and time that the ZBA meets as we did with planning board. But I will ultimately try to choose a decision that works best for all parties. Which is when? I have no idea right now. Oh, wait, when is the? When do they usually meet? The ZBA meets every other, yeah. I recently looked at it too, but now I'm blanking. I will send out some information to try and get cause I also want to make sure all of us can be there. So I am going to do my best to schedule that interview in the near future. Alyssa. I mean, I can look it up separately and we can come back to it. But we might want to, before we leave here, if there's a particular Wednesday that none of us are going to be here. I mean, you might as well not offer that to candidates kind of thing. That is a good point. Is that on the new one when we meet though? Yeah, so actually my mistake, it does look like their meetings are Thursdays. Thursdays. Right, I had Wednesday in my head. Probably cause I was thinking about planning a board. And then I had Tuesday in my head cause I think that's when their administrative meetings are. Which are different. So. Thursday night. Thursday night, yes. So I will, so why don't we actually deal with this suggestion now? So I am likely going to try to schedule it for the same time when ZBA meets on Thursdays. Thursday nights, it looks like 6 p.m. is when they meet, obviously on a Thursday when the ZBA is not meeting. So if you all know that there is a Thursday over the next two months that you are not available, it would be useful to know that now cause then I won't offer that as a potential date. I don't see any for me. So if you come across a Thursday that you know you're not available, just let me know. Okay, so I'm gonna do that. The other two things that we need to do is selection guidance and interview questions. I would actually love us to take a moment now to think about selection guidance. Interview questions will come later because I will solicit questions from the council as I did for the planning board. And I will announce that to the council tonight that if they wanna send me ZBA questions, they should do so. There is another document here that ZBA selection guidance. If you remember when we did the planning board selection guidance, it was a, we ended up making a pretty simple document that had section A that was just copy and pasted from our adopted process. We added a four to it, which was characteristic. And then section B input from the body's chair, we literally just copy and pasted what we got from the chair of planning board. So I have put together selection guidance that is the process for A and B is just copy and pasted what the chair mark parent sent me. So my question is for the planning board, we also added an A four, which was characteristics that we thought would be useful for a planning board member that we came up with as a group during a meeting. We could in theory transfer those over here. And the reason I did it is because if you remember, we used Mark parents list of characteristics as our sort of springboard for our ideas of what to include. And because he has given us that same list, I sort of thought unnecessary, but I would love to have a conversation about the selection guidance. And whether or not we feel as though we would want it to be anything more than this. George. I appreciate Mark's doing what he did. I do have some questions about some of these terms as to what they mean. I don't know if that's a big deal for the rest of you. I'm not quite sure what professional means. Teacher, not professor could use some elaboration. Others are very clear, I think, to me. I don't know if people wanna go through them all or where they wanna just leave it as it is and we'll just deal with it in the heat of the moment. But a couple of these, at least one or two, a little puzzle as to how to interpret it. It's only one or two really, I think. And maybe most of you don't have a problem with it or it's not a big deal. And then do we wanna add things to this? That's another question. Sarah. So when I originally talked to Mark Parent, when he said teacher, not professor, it was because he believed that professors tend to pontificate and sometimes are rigid in their views. So he was thinking more of a teacher than a professor. So you can take that where you would like to take that. And professional, I think when he said professional to me, and of course Evan can say something different if he got something different from Mark when he talked to him. I didn't talk to him, I emailed him and he literally said, this is what I sent Sarah. Yeah, and so he, I think that when he was talking about professional in that sense, I believe he meant it as far as someone who is civil, someone who is mature, and someone who is willing to get work done. Thank you, Sarah. Darcy. So this is the list of selection guidance criteria that we're using this bulleted list. This is from the chair. No, I understand that, but I don't see anything other than that, other than we have a strong base of seasoned members, newer members. So I guess I just have a little trouble with this bulleted list because it seems a little random. And, you know, like unbiased and no agenda seem to be the same thing. And I think it's helpful to get the input from the chair, but I think that it's always, you know, if the current members of the planning board or the ZBA or whichever group have a monolithic opinion about how things should go and they don't want other people coming on who have an agenda, I'm not sure what that means. And so I guess, you know, we had talked about that we would consider having a criteria of whether the applicant offers a voice that's underrepresented on the body. And so we have never discussed it and that of course is different from saying unbiased and no agenda. You don't want to say the person has an agenda. But I think that there's something to be said for having a diversity of voices on all of these different boards. It's hard to, it's tricky because it's hard to sort that out in an interview process, but I'm just saying that, you know, you don't want all one opinion on any of these bodies. So I just want to finish this session. So we did the planning board selection guidance just because we did it for that doesn't mean we have to do it for this. But our idea was for B, input from the body's chair, we were going to put in whatever the body's chair told us. We weren't going to edit it, we weren't going to select it. So that section is done. And I agree that it feels a bit random and I shared some of George's confusion about some of these things and I appreciate Sarah's clarification of Mark's parents clearly anti-professor bias. But so that section is done. So the real question for this body, I think first and I think that's where this discussion lies is for the planning board, we did have an A4 which we labeled characteristics of a successful planning board member and we put some of the things that we as a group generated that was in addition to B. And so my point earlier was that we used B with this list actually to inform that. And so the question is, do we feel like we need an A4 that's our generated list of characteristics of an effective planning board member which would get at sort of I think Darcy's wanting of having something about diverse perspectives that would go under an A4. And so I think that's the first place we have to have this discussion is, do we as a group and I think the Darcy's answer is clearly yes on this, do we as a group feel as though there are more characteristics or qualifications that are not in this list under B that we want included in selection guidance that would therefore be an A4. So that is I think the first question. Before we get to what those were, what those might be, do we feel as though there are qualifications not captured in a list in B that we wanna make sure our selection guidance that would have to be captured in A4? Do we have that somewhere that we can look at or former? The planning board selection guidance, I will add it to the packet. Rather than picking it out as a specific thing. So when did we do? You want the report? Yeah, I want the report because that includes the questions too. And in fact, the questions I was going to suggest later that when you offered to the town council tonight that they should send you the questions, they should not send you random questions. They should look at the questions we asked of the planning board candidates and they should elaborate on those, not make them up out of their heads. And they would need that reminder as well. Let me make sure that I just uploaded a report. Let me just check real quick and make sure it's the correct report. It appears that it, I don't know why I don't have that full report in my folder labeled reports on my computer. So I am honestly just going to upload the selection guidance interview questions first. No, I have a Word document that doesn't include the attachments and I know that PDF has the attachments and it's for some reason not in the folder on my computer that it should be in. So I have at least for right now added the planning board selection guidance and planning board interview questions to this packet. So if you look, there is an, so for some reason in planning board we did, it's one D instead of a four consistency. And we added four characteristics which were open-minded, able to work in a collaborative spirit, openness to compromise and understanding of the regulatory body. I have just uploaded the packet, yes. So I think when, and I guess the reason I had a question about whether we wanted to add it is when I'm looking at what we did for planning board, open-minded, able to work in a collaborative spirit, openness to compromise, understanding of the regulatory function of the body, I felt as though those aren't necessarily said directly from Mark Parent, but in many ways, he did say must understand the judicial nature of the position which is again important here. He did say negotiating fields and mediation conflict resolution. And so I felt like a lot of those things were captured in his list. And so the question was did we feel, even though he didn't use the words that we used for planning board and I think some of those are transfer over, open-minded, unbiased, no agenda, I feel like these are synonymous in a lot of ways. And so the question was given that so much of what was in our list for planning board kind of came from his list, do we feel like we need our own list that would be an A4 or a 1D, however I might want. So thoughts? Darcy? Yeah, I immediately, as I was looking at it, it was confusing to me because it doesn't make sense to me to have the criteria listed under the input from the body's chair as ruling what we decide, which I mean, it's a good input, but it's just input. And so for us not to actually have our own characteristics seems like a problem. George? Well, I'm struggling to come up with ones that are different from the list. The one that I have in front of me is evidence of a record of hard work, which could also be simply committed. I think one of the things that I'm looking for in any applicant is some evidence or record that they've actually worked hard on something. One of the senses I get from this body in particular but probably applicable to many of the bodies that the town has volunteers serving on is the fact that people are willing, what Mark calls committed, but particularly with the ZVA, this is a demanding job. And so I'm looking for evidence in someone's record that they've had a demanding job or they've put in time that really required a sacrifice of their time and that they stuck to it. That to me is very important. But you could call that committed, I guess. Otherwise, I guess I'm struggling for what else we would add to this. And I'm quite open to suggestions, but evidence of record of collaboration, I think that's in his list as well. I think it's very important that we stress the judicial nature of this position that they're not making bylaws, they interpret and apply them. I guess here I do not agree. I think I'm more open to a discussion about viewpoints or whatever that's supposed to mean with the planning board, but with the zoning board, I would strongly resist any idea of trying to find disparate viewpoints. It's kind of like in baseball, you want an umpire who has a certain idea of maybe changing the game. There are rules here and you need to apply them and you need to respect them whether you like them or not. And I guess I'd also be looking, but this is hard to phrase, an experience or some kind of anecdote where someone could tell me where they had to apply a rule that they personally didn't agree with. Because that's really what sometimes you have to do on the CPA. Planning board I think is a different, somewhat different animal, but that's for another discussion. So I guess my question to my colleagues is what else do you want to add to this? Because I hear what Darcy's saying, we're pretty much taking what Mark has, but he's pretty much covered the waterfront as far as I can see, but it's just my two eyes. So maybe I'm missing something important. What's missing in this list? Sarah. So I understand what Darcy's saying about trying to make sure that we have people from that have diverse viewpoints, but I think that I would keep things the way they are because I think that, I know that what Mark Parent was saying was, and I tend to agree with this and I think I've said this on many occasions, is that we all have our own ideas about how things should be run, we have our own ideas about what values are, and we bring all of that rich tapestry to the work that we do, but I don't know that, I don't think that I want to have someone who, from when I hear agenda, I hear to me that means rigidity, that means that you know that that person is going to come down on one side of an argument the same way all the time, which maybe is exactly what I'm doing. You know they're always gonna come down the same way, and I think it also makes people think that someone might not have their ears open or they might not be open to what someone else is saying, which is challenging. I struggle with it, but I don't know that I would want to have, I worry about diversity of trying to put that in there because diversity of ideas sometimes again, I feel like it might be asking for an agenda, and I don't think I want that. Alyssa. So I got a little lost while I was uploading the whole report, but it's my understanding that where we are right now is we were talking about our selection guidance, and so if we're looking at the plan, our report to the town council and planning board, oh God, page numbers, you know. But anyway, it's planning board selection guidance adopted January 8th, it has the criteria as we've talked about a million times for effective healthy mental body. It has as you said that section D that we based on conversations we'd had that say open-minded able to work collaborative spirit, openness to compromise. That included item two, the input from the body's chair. So like you said, the input from the body's chair part unedited, that just goes in the way it says. So the only piece we're missing is the middle piece, right? We know what our healthy multiple member body piece is, we know what the chair's input is, and we're just deciding now if D, if I'm understanding this correctly, we're just deciding if the D that's currently in that report to the town council, characteristics of effective planning board members can just be switched to characteristics of effective ZBA members, open-minded, able to work in a collaborative spirit, openness to compromise, understanding of the regulatory function of the body is sufficient or if it needs to have something added to it. Or if we even need it in the ZBA. Well, we need it because we can't just have our generic theory about term limits or not and our really generic random bullet points from the chair, which is fine. I mean, I don't, and I'm really grateful that he went ahead and gave it to us, but I think we still have to come up with, we have to decide if we want D or if we want something else, but I don't think we flush it all together because then it's not selection criteria anymore. And so I guess my question was, okay, so I wanna do this in two stages then. I'm gonna do this in two stages then. And it's because my question was looking at that, it seemed like that is, although in different words, captured in what we got from Mark Perry. And so the question was if we would come up with those same things for ZBA, do we even need to add it if it's somewhat duplicative of what Mark Perry said? So here's the first question, and I'm hoping we can do this by consensus, is do we want, for this document, be an A for characteristics of an effective planet or do we want an A for characteristics of effective zoning board of appeals members which would add characteristics to supplement the list that Mark Perry went? That's the first question. Do we want to have that section in the ZBA selection guidance like we did in the planning board selection guidance? Okay, so great, that was easy. So the question is what do we put there? And so the first question is, do we want to carry over what's in the planning board selection guidance into the ZBA selection guidance? Let's start, before we talk about additions, let's start there, do we want to carry over what's in planning board selection guidance? Okay, George. It may not be really relevant, but Mark uses judicial, we use regulatory, does that matter? I might say understanding of the judicial function of the body, stealing from Mark's comments, but maybe regulatory is good enough. Judicial, yeah, I would suggest that as a possible slight change, but otherwise those four I'm perfectly willing to accept them and but I might suggest changing regulatory to judicial consensus on carrying them over except changing regulatory to judicial. Okay, I'm not hearing any opposition and I'm seeing some head nods. If you will please. Is it completely judicial? I guess it is, huh? It's in a judicial category. If you'll just give me literally a second to copy and paste that in. Okay, so make in progress. So the next question then is, do we want any additions to this? Darcy. I would just say that 1B sort of attempts to cover what I was suggesting with regard to new members. I'm sorry, what? 1B, these members bring new energy, outlooks and ideas to the body. You're talking, okay. So we're looking at a healthy multiple member body what I'm doing is I'm trying to figure out where in this could be included the idea that a diversity of voices is healthy. And so this does already say these members bring new energy, outlooks and ideas to the body. I think that might be Sarah's language. But so that is, I guess I'm just trying to figure out whether that is adequate for covering, maybe we could just say voices, bring new energy, voices and ideas to the body. And that obviously the new members are the ones that we're interviewing for new seats. I'm trying to understand is 1B, this is the planning board document that I'm looking at at the moment. The same in the other? The numbering's different, I just fixed the numbering that's on the board of appeals document for new members. But that item is there in the ZBA as well, is that correct? So it's already there? Yes. So I think what we were trying to talk about was 1D. 1B, at least in the planning document is in the ZBA document. I think that can be interpreted a lot in different ways but that's okay, it's there. And it's really the question about 1D, is there anything else you wanna add? Anyone wants to add to characteristics of effective ZBA board member beyond the four items that are listed there? And we've changed regulatory to judicial, but that's it. And so the question I think in front of us is what do we wanna do with 1D? Do we wanna add anything else? Alyssa. So I think what I'm hearing is that while we are currently focused on what George just said and what I thought I'd said, which was that we're focused on, how much of D are we changing from planning board to ZBA beyond the word and the regulatory word? And Darcy is suggesting that another way to approach it is rather than trying to say it's a particular characteristic of effective ZBA members, she's wondering if there's a way to change the section A through C to make clear that we are what she is looking for so that it would apply to like any time. It's like our, A through C are like our basic selection criteria. D is our based on this specific body and so it sounds like you're asking that it be incorporated into our basic selection criteria for anybody as opposed to it being particularly important for ZBA. Of course there's really only ZBA in planning board and finance committee, but so that's just two different approaches. One is to make sure it's covered in some fashion. In D, the other is to make sure it's covered in some fashion in. I guess it would have to be A, right? And because A or B, we're hearing from some people that these members bring new energy outlooks and ideas to the body and that that may or may not be sufficient to address this particular issue. I think that was part of our intention of writing it that way originally, was trying to address that. And so if rereading that, it still doesn't feel sufficient that I guess we need either suggested wording to change B or to add an additional item to D. Correct. Well stated, Alyssa. And so? I would like to, as George said, that sentence is capable of a number of different interpretations, so. But, and I like the word voice. So if we could change, we could either add to D a five that says a diversity of outlooks or voices, but that's difficult with the ZBA, I understand. Or we could put it in B and just say, these members bring new, or new members will bring new energy, new voices, and ideas to the body or whatever, something like that. Is anyone else interested in doing this? George. I'm just imagining how I might interpret B in an actual case. And for instance, if we're looking at a body where everybody's 65 or older, I might give some greater preference to a younger member. Unfortunately, we don't have, at least in that moment, we don't seem to have a diversity of gender. Also, you might consider a renter or someone of, so I mean, there are ways of looking at this that, well, I'm not sure exactly, because there's also the suggestion that you're looking for someone who has a different view on development or a different view on where they think Amherst should go or a different view on da-da-da-da-da. And that's when I get very nervous. So again, my understanding of B, I would apply it in those ways, providing a new perspective, new energy and new ideas in that sense. I would be very, very reluctant to apply it nor would I apply it in a sensible G. We don't have anybody on the zoning board who thinks that we shouldn't have any more buildings or we shouldn't have any more development or it doesn't like one East Pleasant or whatever. That's when I get testy. Even though a huge number of people in town have that view? I don't think that's the job of the zoning board. And until somebody changes the zoning board job description, I'm gonna maintain that position. It's not the job of the zoning board to make decisions of that regard. Their job is to interpret the zoning laws in a fair and impartial way to the best of their ability. Everyone does bring their perspective. Everybody does bring their background. There's no question of that. But I'm looking for someone who is able to be balanced and fair and does not have an agenda about how tall buildings are, how short they are, how ugly they are, or anything else. And if someone's looking for that kind of person on this body, I would speak strongly against it. But aren't you looking for someone with your agenda, George? I'm just asking for someone who doesn't have a view on that. It would not let their view on that determine their decision in front of the ZVA. So that's how I interpret B. I do think it allows for obviously different ways of thinking about it, which I think perhaps would include, well, I'll leave it at that. And that's how I would apply it in my own mind. That's how I would apply B. And also how I would not apply it. Alyssa. So in agreeing with George and adding a little more to it in that I don't believe any of us knows what the alleged agenda or bias of the seated ZVA and planning board members are. I believe that because they don't run for office like we do, they didn't talk about zoning moratoriums, building moratoriums, et cetera, during their campaign for elected office. They wish to be appointed to an office where they said they could work within the constraints. Planning board is a little different because although they do some special permitting where they have to do that adjustment, they also are looking at the bigger picture in terms of the master plan and saying, you know, given what everybody's been talking about, given the master plan we have, given what's recently happened downtown, maybe we should change some of our zoning bylaws and then they bring that to the town council. And the town council says, yeah, given where we're headed as a town, thank you for doing that or no, you guys are nuts. ZVA doesn't have that ability to bring forward new ideas as to what the zoning bylaw should look like. That's not their task, that's the planning board's task. So if someone is trying to get appointed to the zoning board of appeals to make judicial decisions on special permits, they should not be bringing the attitude of I hate the building downtown. That's not helpful for them to make a fair and balanced decision. The fact that permitting has occurred doesn't mean that some of the people who voted for it didn't like it. Like you don't have to personally like the way the building looks to have felt like in order to apply the law fairly, I have to make X, Y decision. And so the fact that permitting has occurred does not mean that the current body has an agenda, quote unquote, toward building downtown, density downtown or not. It's that they are to the best of their ability applying what they think is fair. Would you want like five members of the same family who agree on everything to make the ZVA decisions? Probably not because then they probably do look at things more similarly, although we all know about siblings and differences. But as long as you're not just leaving it up to one person, you are getting a diversity of opinion that says given the law we have, given the personal biases I bring to this, but given the law we have, here's how I need to vote. That feels very different to me than saying it should be, we should have some people on there who don't like the direction of downtown development. We should have some people on there who would have voted against it, like what? Like that's not why we're choosing people. That's what elections are for. And that's not so that we can, as counselors, load it up with our proxies. It's because we're looking for people who are there to do a job. We don't own them just because we appoint them. Okay, so stepping a little bit out of my chair real to add my comment on this, I think I agree with a lot of what Alyssa said. I guess my concern is this idea of trying to put people into these particular political boxes on an issue, which I think could be important. And so if we wanna think about planning board, we had three candidates who probably have three different viewpoints on every issue. And so trying to divide them between two types of groups of people seems not super effective. I think that if we're looking even at this body, there are a lot of issues that Alyssa and I agree on a lot. I'm also bracing for her to vote against my bylaw amendment tonight, right? Because there are issues that we also disagree on. And so I worry about this simplistic, we need people who are pro development or anti development. And Darcy, that is what you said in our meeting after the interview. You said there are two camps of people. There are people who want unfettered development and there are people who want fettered development. I think that's a direct quote. And I'm wary of trying to insert that sort of simple boxing of people or compartmentalizing of people and trying to put that into any type of policy or selection guidance. Because I don't necessarily think it's productive and I don't necessarily think that it actually represents the idea that everyone is different and has different feelings about different issues in different ways. And I'm also really concerned. It always makes me really uncomfortable trying to use the language of diversity around that. Because when I think about diversity, I think about protected classes, right? And I think about we need gender diversity, we need racial diversity. I think about all of these things. And when we basically say this group of older white men is diverse because they have different views on buildings of downtown, I think it sort of perverts what we typically think about with diversity. And so I would personally like to try to take that idea of political opinions out of these bodies. If there is consensus to put it into these bodies, I would really like us to avoid lumping it in with our statement about diversity around gender, race, and age. Because I think that that would be personally offensive to me and I think would be to a lot of people. I think that would be a completely separate category. So I think there's two things there. I don't really wanna see it in here at all but if it is in there, I would really encourage us to not try to lump it into our bullet point about looking for diversity of gender, age, race, and then political opinions. I think that that undercuts the other aspects of demographic diversity that we're actually looking for. So where do we stand with this? We have a document and the question is, do we want to add to 1D? We have four things under 1D. Open-minded, able to work in a collaborative sphere. Openness to compromise and understanding of the judicial function of the body. Do we want to add to that list? Alyssa. So the reason I feel like it's enough to have B right now, newer members, new energy outlooks and ideas to the body. The point of selection criteria because I've been having this conversation associated with the school committee vacancy. The point of selection criteria is so that we can sit here as a group and talk about why we prefer one candidate over another without saying, Bill wore a funny hat. I didn't like what he said about X. Instead we said that we were interested in new energy and outlooks. And I'm hearing a lot about a new outlook from candidate B and that's why I am looking to vote for candidate B. I mean, I'm really interested in that idea of a new energy and outlook. Otherwise, we may as well just ask people to tell us why they hate something or why they don't. Because, and yet, several of us disagree that that is an appropriate role for this body. So, I think it's perfectly justifiable for anybody who feels like there's not enough diversity of opinion and using that word diversity inappropriately that they can say that person and persons, I hope we all want people with new ideas, can sit here and say, I'm really excited to hear this new way of looking at things. I've never heard anybody from the ZBA talk about that way before. I think that will be a really valuable addition to the way the ZBA is working. I think that's incredibly helpful. I think that trying to define it as some sort of agenda, not agenda, bias, not bias just doesn't really work. But I hope we will, like we didn't just write these words for fun. Like, we wrote these because we want to be able to use them. So, at this point then, I am looking for one of two things. I am looking for someone to propose in addition to this list. Or, I am looking for someone to move that we adopt the Zoning Board of Appeals Selection Guidance as amended. And to let you know, the only things that have changed from the document you have in your packet is the addition of D, Characteristics of Effective Zoning Board of Appeals members, which has one, open-minded, two, able to work in a collaborative spirit, three, openness to compromise, and four, understanding of the judicial function of the body. And I have renumber lettered the document so that it is consistent with the lettering and numbering of the planning board document. So, it's not 1D as opposed to A4. But those are the only changes that have been made. So, I'm either looking for a motion to adopt or I am looking for someone to put forth something they would like to add to this document. George? I'm willing to make a motion to adopt the criteria for Zoning Board of Appeals Selection Guidance, thank you, as amended. George has moved, is there a second? Sarah has seconded. Is there any further discussion or any proposed amendments to this document? Alyssa? Just to clarify, so when we're looking at that whole thing from the planning board, that's just all been, like it says, adopted 1-8. It's basically that whole structure, like you said, because you've renumbered it, and then it has that wording change and it has the input from the body's chair. It's this whole thing. It's not just D that we're changing. It's that this is now our new document, Zoning Board of Appeals Selection Guidance, adopted 3-9. Yes, and it includes all those components. That's what I'm making sure, that that component of outlooks and ideas is still in there. Any further comments or amendments to this document before we vote? Okay, then I will call the question. All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye, that is unanimous. Okay, I am going to give us a five minute break, and then we will come back and move to the next agenda item. Anybody said to start without them? Okay, so we are back, and Darcy, you had a question. I just have a question that's off the agenda about, because I was looking for our minutes, and I couldn't find any going back to September, either draft or in any form, so. So we are way behind on minutes. If you remember, at some point in summer, I believe, we shift, when we got the minute taker, so I guess maybe that was September, we shifted how we did approval of minutes to delegating it to the chair, and honestly, I have had on my to-do list, OCA minutes, and it's one of those items that I keep pushing off as I have to do other things, and so we are way behind on minutes. As you are probably aware, I have spring break coming up, and I am not going anywhere, because I want to get coronavirus, and so one of the things that I have put on my spring break to-do list is catch up on all OCA minutes, and so they should be up by mid-March, but I apologize if that's on me, and it's just, I have been so at capacity with work, and that's been an easy thing to just say, okay, this doesn't need to be done today. Maybe we should just have minutes the regular way coming to us during our meetings, because I'd like to actually see the minutes on a regular basis. Does anybody else have any interest in that? I'm fighting apathy this week, it's okay. I'm not going to argue with someone taking work off my plate, so. I would just say that it might be easier for you, and I hate to see you have spring break, and then have to just be all those minutes, right? No. Well, I don't know if we want to approve all of the minutes going back to September, but I mean, I'm talking going forward to, you know, for a short life until June 30th. So is that the proposal then that he can deal with the backlog however he chooses, and then from starting today after Athena gets them ready and she sends them to him, and he can say, yeah, go ahead and send them to the rest of OCA, and then we'll approve them here. George. My custom is just to put it in the packet so that you have the minutes to look at before the meeting, so that's another way you can do it. Yeah, as long as it shows up in SharePoint. Yeah, I put it in the SharePoint packet, and then I assume people look at it, and then we just do it by consensus or whatever the chair wants to do, but then it's done. So I will work on, so our next meeting is after spring break, and so we will be in a better position then, and if we're not, you can yell at me. Okay, so I want to move on to agenda item four, which is a continuation of a conversation we had last time, which it was about community activity forms, and so the last time we met, we started talking about what was useful, what was not useful about community activity forms, and we threw out some ideas, and I promised you that I would have for today some mockups of what a revised CAF could look like given our discussion. I put two out there that are almost identical, except different in one way, and so there seemed to be a split on this committee about whether we wanted to separate out questions about experienced training qualifications into three separate questions, or if we wanted to maintain that question, but word it in a way so that it would, one, get us away from just listing of qualifications, and two, not scare anyone away, who might feel as though they didn't have those. I have put two CAFs, so I put them in your packet. Some of the wording is mine. I am perfectly willing to hear people tell me no. I don't wanna do any of this, or your wording is garbage, Evan, so whatever we wanna say, but I think that perhaps the conversation that we have had along the margins and sometimes more directly that relates to this is I keep hearing Alyssa say, well, I can't decide what to put on the CAF until we know what we're gonna do with them, and so I think it makes sense before we actually go through some of these recommended revisions, I think we do need to have the conversation about whether we are going to recommend to the council that CAFs remain personnel records and treated as we have been treating them, or whether or not we are going to recommend we shift CAFs to be public documents because the answer to that question may inform our final recommendation on revisions to the CAFs, and so depending on how that conversation happens today, we may not do any of these revisions, or we may wanna do more and come back to them, so I will open the floor, Darcy. I just, you probably all noticed that I sent you an email right at the beginning of the meeting with the Northampton language on their sea, their equivalent to our CAFs, and in red is the sentence that they add to their form, which basically makes it a public document when the person signs off, so it's as important once this form is submitted, it becomes a public document, if there's information you do not want open to the public, please do not include it on this form. So I'm hoping that we've all thought about this enough and come around to thinking that it makes sense to just have more transparency and just allow the CAFs to be public documents. Alyssa. So no, I have not come around to that viewpoint. I don't believe that the email which I know was while we were all settling in here and not having Wi-Fi, et cetera. Did you link us to the actual CAF form that Northampton uses? Cause if I don't know what's on their form, I don't really care what the disclosure says. I mean, if their form only has a person's name and the committee they're interested in, that's different than a form that has all the questions we have on it, but has a thing that says, sure, you can just, well, but I don't see it. I mean, I haven't been provided that. If this is such an important thing to do, then we should be looking at what the rest of their context is for that. Can I just see, so if you could get in that, could you put the link, could you put it in the packet, a link to it? Or download it. Either download it and put in the packet or you can upload a URL to the packet too, either way just so it's in the packet for today. I always forget how to do the upload URL part, but I'm sure Evan will tell us again. Yeah, you just do new link. Okay, so sorry to interrupt. Oh, just, I mean, we should go ahead and wait for that, but the other piece is there, one of the things that's always been a little weird is how much detail we would release, right? So we've had this conversation. So if we put on a checkbox that says, we're gonna release this, then we have to decide how much stuff this is, right? So as you framed so well at the beginning. If it just says, my name is Paul Smith and I'm interested in the ZBA, that's one kind of CAF to release. Paul Smith applied to the ZBA. Maybe there's 25 Paul Smiths in town, who knows? So that's transparency theater. That's not transparency. That's just a person's name, who cares? We don't even know if they live in Amherst. If you're going to include their address, for example, because they need to be an Amherst resident, not registered voter in these cases, but a resident, if you want people to look people up because you want to be transparent, then they have to release their address to us because that's how we know which Paul Smith it is. Are you gonna tell Paul Smith, who doesn't want his address published, on the town website that he can't apply? Well, or we're gonna just say Paul Smith's name, but not where he lives, but the other people that will have where they live. See, that's why I'm saying this is transparency theater. This is not actually accomplishing anything in terms of transparency. It's just giving out pieces of data that have no context. So I do want to add, I don't know that I have a firm opinion on this necessarily, and I think that I take Alyssa's point as it's also not an all or nothing. You release a full CAF or you release nothing. So there's lots of nuance here. But when it comes to the idea of transparency, I do want to return back to a conversation we had earlier on in the existence of this body, which was about balancing transparency and privacy interests, and protecting privacy interests so that people won't be scared off of applying for bodies. And I will say that I have spent the past month, month and a half, asking pretty much anyone who I think is reasonable and has a pulse, whether or not they want to be on the ZBA, whether they'd be willing to serve. So I have worked really hard to recruit people to the ZBA. And the most recent conversation I had with a person who did not end up applying, so this person was not in the pool, they said, well, first they said, well, what is the ZBA? And then I explained to them and they said, oh, okay, because they didn't necessarily want to do the zoning stuff that the planning board does. They didn't want to create new zoning bylaws. And they said, oh, that actually sounds interesting. And then they said, would I have to, this is a direct quote, would I have to go through that whole dog and pony show that you made planning board members go through? And I said, what do you mean by that? And they said, there's public interviews on camera. And I said, that's part of the process, the ZBA members will be interviewed. And they said, never mind then. And I said, well, why not? And they said, I don't want to have video of me interviewing for a body and then not get it. And so they were actually there to submit a CAF for ZBA. And I think they would have been good. And they decided against it because they didn't want to do a public interview because to them, that was too much. They didn't want to be on camera in front of an audience, have that out publicly and then not get it. Which confirmed a fear that I've had that this opening up the process is good in a lot of ways in that it shows the public more of the interworkings of the council, but there's a potential downside. And we've been talking about it as a hypothetical. And this was confirmation that it's not a hypothetical. There are people who are not going to apply for things because they don't want to do public interviews. And so there is the concern, of course, that again, this idea of a public CAF of everything you submit to us will also be sent to the public in there. And what that means can mean different things. It could just be that if someone submits a public records request, they're submitted. I know Darcy, you've talked in the past about wanting them actually uploaded to the website. So literally anyone can go and click on them. And so I want to make sure we understand that dynamic in this conversation, that there are potential downsides to these ideas that we're calling transparency. Because I think that's important to consider, that it's not a hypothetical that we might scare people away if we say, this is going to be a public document. So I think we need to think about that because I do think, again, there are different levels of what we do with this. It's not all public on the website available or not at all. There's different things in between and we want to find the way that best represents a level of usable transparency, but also ensures that we're not scaring potential new people away who are nervous about putting themselves out there. Darcy. I just sent you the form as a link in an email and I don't think I remember how to put it on SharePoint because I haven't done it since I wrote minutes. So. Okay, I will put it on. Just have to scroll down. Sorry, George. This isn't an easy one for me and that's okay, but when I hear Evan's story, I don't feel a lot of sympathy for this soul who is going to serve on a body that's going to make important decisions in front of the public and yet they don't want to put their name in the ring because they might be rejected and they don't want anyone to know that. Yes, it probably means that some potentially good people might not serve in the ZBA but surely there are a lot more good people out there and I guess I just don't find that argument very convincing. I need something stronger to push me away from the view that I'm finding attractive, which is look, this is the ZBA, this is the planning board. Public has the right to know who's supplied and what they, you know, who they are. Beyond just their name, seems not unreasonable that someone should be able to look at, you know, their statement. There is an interview process that's also public, I realize, so that certainly meets some of the concerns of transparency and openness, which is good and I resisted that originally, but I've come around to see that that makes, I think, some good sense. So I guess I'm struggling with why not go all the way and my mind is open here, I really am struggling with this but I guess I'm leaning at the moment towards a sense of, you know, the Northampton model may be the way for us to go. I guess I'm trying to get a sense of what are the serious downsides and I hear this, the arguments made by a number of my colleagues that some good people will not apply because of this process. Now this individual, Evan just mentioned that process that they objected to, we've already agreed to do, that's not gonna change. Public infuses, right? And so that's, you know, we're not gonna go back on that. So maybe it's just a matter of the folks and embers getting used to this and us making a stronger case with people who express these objections. Anyway, I guess I'm looking for reasons why we should not make these public views in the way that Darcy suggested and in the way that Northampton does it. And I'm just, I'm open here, but I'm struggling. Sarah. So I actually feel in a lot of ways the same way that George does is originally I really didn't want to have the CAFs be, you know, take all of these questions and I would make, you know, all of it public but I think that, I think there's a push for us to do that kind of real transparency and I think that for me, I'm still wondering if maybe doing so much of this out in the open and having all of these, you know, have a right of statement and put it out, maybe I feel like it might be what people want and maybe it will, it could raise the bar on people that we have applied, but at the same time, so I'm willing to say that let's give this a try but one thing I would really like to say is that I think that all of these measures that we take, I think that there should be somewhere written like what are possible drawbacks? I mean, we had talked about that about making the interviews public is will we have less people apply? Will we suddenly have a dearth of people? And I think that if you kind of look at where we came from when it was private, we had a lot more people applying and then when we went public, we had a lot less but I think we should give, I think it should be reviewed but I think it needs to have a couple, maybe two or three more years of doing it a certain way before we can say it definitely has a negative impact. Alyssa. So I'm following up on the Northampton situation so I appreciate you going and finding that Darcy which basically we copied much of our forms from each other because we use similar software. However, I don't see any evidence whatsoever that this becomes a public document upon application. When I look at their boards and committees description, it says after you submit an application, the application goes to the mayor by email. They look at the application, they put it on file for a year. If it exists, it's sent to a staff person. If vacancy exists, they send that application meaning that CAF to a staff person for review. The person might go to a meeting. Then eventually, if the mayor decides this person is worth looking at further, the application is then submitted to the city council, which at this point could well be a protected document just like we're treating it as a protected document here. It doesn't say that's when it gets, it doesn't say here when you apply, it becomes public. It doesn't say when it goes to the city council, it becomes public. What it does say eventually is that a city council meaning the applications referred to a committee, it never says here anywhere at which point, and so unless you know that answer because you've actually talked to someone in Northampton who's familiar with the actual process, I don't know when they do make the information public. And so just telling somebody that their CAF information is going to be public eventually is not actually the same as the transparency of as soon as you apply, there's like some scrolling list on the town website that says who's applied for ZBA for the past two years. Like you hit CAF and boom, it ends up there. You hit CAF and ends up there. So I need a better understanding of what we're actually trying to accomplish here. Darcy. I will keep looking on the website. I should have found this before this meeting, but I have searched on the Northampton website and found the actual applications of people that have applied for boards and committees, and you can read exactly what they put on their applications. I don't know exactly at what point they become public, but they're, it was available to me to read their applications. Okay, George and Sarah. It says once this form is submitted, it becomes a public document. Now I would read that as meaning once you click on your computer and send it to the town of Northampton, anyone can access it. Well, no. No. Right. Sure. Because all that, that means that it could be, it would be subject to a public records request. Right. There's a difference between saying this is a public record subject to a public records request, but it's only given to someone if they actually submit the request versus say they're gonna be on the website and anyone who wants to can access it. And so I think that's part of it. Sarah, you had your hand up. Okay. Darcy. Oh, I'm just telling you that you can search, I'm not looking right now to try to find out how, but it doesn't just require a public record request. Darcy, you don't know. Just admit it. You don't know. You found some records of CAFs. Great. You don't know at what point in the process was that at the point that they were voting? No, I don't know what point in the process. Was that at the point they were voting? So was it at the point that they were voting? Is it the point they applied? Is it the point that it was referred to a committee? All that matters to me in terms of content. So that's why I can't believe that after we've talked about this for a year that you don't know the answer to that question just because you found some CAFs online at some point in the process. It's important to me to understand if it's a scrolling thing, if it's when it gets referred to the committee like it goes to their equivalent of GOL, is it when it's in the full town council packet like how we have our report to the full town council? Are they in there then? Like when is it public? Because I for one for example would hope that no one would think it was a wonderful idea to leave a scrolling list of the last two years worth of CAFs just up because they turned them in and some of those people have moved away. Versus here's the pool at some decision point which I think is what we've talked about in the past more like some counselors have wished that it would be public at the point it came to OCA, some wish it would be public at the point it comes to town council as opposed to just our report. So but since even though this has been talked about for a year it's we still don't know what we're basing the proposal on except some Google results I'm uncomfortable with because they may have had an experience that helped inform their decision. Just like we're talking about collecting data and the other part is they ask for demographic data. So they ask you to just to talk about your race and age and so then you don't fill it out because you don't want that to be public. Well then what good is the question if you don't want it to be public and who's more likely to fill it out white people? I mean it's just I don't get the point. So it's clear that the Northampton application is a public document. We just don't know what that necessarily means right? And so again that could inform our discussion because there's a difference between saying this is subject to a public records request or proactively posting it on the website or something like that. It seems like it's possible that there's is a public record that you could get through a public records request but doesn't actually be released to the public necessarily until that person is up for appointment. So I think Alyssa's point that I'm hearing is that's an important distinction to make and if we're using Northampton as an example or a model we need clarification on that. Is that a sense that need for clarification or does our clarification a sense that other members of this committee have? I'm seeing yes from Sarah. George? I guess what I'm, even if Northampton, it turns out that Northampton's CAF becomes available like within a week of the time that you submit it. Why should that? I mean I'm not sure that's a reason for me to adopt that process. I'm open, I understand the idea of transparency and openness but the question that's coming to my mind more clearly and we talked about this and is that at what point does this become public? And I can see a strong argument for waiting until a certain point in the process that we would have to determine which might be the time of interviews but at that point clearly these documents should be made public but why should they be made? Maybe I need an argument from the other side now. Why do we need to have them public for the very moment or close to the very moment that you hit the submit button and it goes to the to tell? Wouldn't delaying that a bit might address some of the concerns that Alyssa's expressed and maybe she would say no, it still doesn't but in terms of encouraging people to be more forthright about their answers since they would be made clear to them this would only become public once they enter the interview process or we'd phrase it but that to me strikes as a compromise that might be workable and even if it turned out Northampton did make them public within a week of the time that you submit them that by itself wouldn't really move me very much one way or the other, it's more of the why does that make sense? And maybe Darcy has thoughts on that but I'm struggling to see why it has to be public right from the get-go and for two years or I mean just at what point do you, Ryan? Darcy? Well for one thing the public obviously has an interest in these town council bodies that we're talking about here and I think that were we to add that sentence to the CAF form, then it would be up to us to decide how we're going to interpret it. It would be Northampton and Amherst might do things differently but it doesn't, we could still add the sentence and then figure out what it meant at a later time. So it would just open it up to some way of doing it. Anyway, I'm glad to hear that there are some of us that are thinking in these terms now. So we're starting to run a little short on time. I don't think we can make a decision on this today given the discussion we've had. I'm also personally really hesitant to ever to add that sentence and say we'll figure out later because of course that means if someone, if we put that sentence on today and someone emails me tomorrow and says, I saw the sentence, how is it released publicly? And I say, eh, we're not sure yet. That's an uncomfortable position for you, right? Eh, you know, given how we work six months we'll let you know how we're gonna do that. So I don't think we can put that sentence on until we know how it's gonna, until we have a recommendation of how it's gonna be implemented. So this is a conversation I think that needs to be continued, which means we're not gonna get to look at the actual revisions to the CAS. Here's what I'm going to ask. Since it seems that we're using Northampton to some extent to inform this discussion since there are outstanding questions and since we have actually a fairly significant amount of time before our next meeting, I think our next meeting's like March 30th or something. Darcy, if you would be willing to take on a little bit of homework, if you could reach out to Northampton and just answer some of these questions that we have about what does that sentence mean, when are they released, are they on the website, how do they decide, if they are on the website, how do they decide when they go on the website, which ones go on the website. I think that would be really useful. Sure, I would be glad to do that. Thank you. Great, so I think that would be really useful. And if anyone else wants to check in on any other challenge, I mean feel free, yes Darcy. And I do have a question. What we're doing now is obviously not applying to the ZBA applications. Are we going to recommend that the full council ratify or take, adopt this process that we're working on right now about the CAFs? I don't think that this body has the ability to unilaterally change CAFs. So I think that whatever we come up with with regard to CAFs will be a recommendation to the council in the same way that we made a recommendation to the council to split out the CAFs and that was then voted on by the council. So yeah, I think we're all we're doing right now is developing a recommendation. Great, so hopefully have that information for the 30th and we'll start with this conversation on the 30th with the goal of figuring out if and how public CAFs might be and then that will help us think about any potential revisions to the content that we're gonna recommend. So think about, I mean we obviously had a good discussion. Think about that between now and the next meeting and also look at the mock ups and think about both which of those you prefer, CAF either, you could say I hate them both and also think about them in the context of would your opinion on those revisions change depending on the result of a conversation of public disclosure and level of public disclosure. Alyssa, you had something? One is yes, to me it absolutely would change what I wanted to have on the CAF based on when, at what point in the process it was getting disclosed and also why I would like, I would have thought we would know this information already but since Northampton's being held up as a model what they're actually doing with that demographic information when if they're treating it as a public record at some point someone's identification of white is showing up on a public record and so are they, I mean does anybody answer, my question is does anybody answer it and what do they do with that data because we're doing it all in a more anonymized way just like the town manager is doing it in a more anonymized way and so I think that's because as I talked about before when we moved up and I appreciated that you did that on the draft that we moved up the statement about our definition of diversity and what we were looking for I don't like having those demographic questions if they're not gonna be answered anyway and if we're telling people that it's gonna be public it's even less likely they're going to answer them so then I just would scrap those questions altogether because we're trying to get at the data in another way which is bringing me back to the writing prompt idea I realized that the third version of the CAF that I should perhaps write myself is that it would have part about the address which again not everybody's gonna want on the internet is more of a writing prompt that answers the same questions you've gotten little boxes but that's what's getting released it's this writing sample, writing prompt this is my, well and we're talking about it right now for school committee, it's a statement of interest so a statement of interest to me could technically be far more valuable than what looks like little data boxes on an Excel spreadsheet that's actually not data so the demographic stuff sort of is data but telling me your experience is that's not very useful in an Excel sort of sort but it could be useful as a writing sample and I have no problem at all with having people have to submit a statement of interest as part of their CAF as opposed to trying to wordsmith our questions perfectly on the CAF so I'm hoping we can consider that as a third option so for the meeting on the 30th I will also then bring in CAF revision option C so for us to look at Sarah. I also just came up with something that maybe be a revision to how we ask some of those statement of interest questions so do you want me just to send that to you? That would be great because if you just tell me right now I promise I'll forget. Yeah, no worries, no worries. I promise. Okay, great so we will continue this discussion this will be our this will not be our first agenda item on the 30th because our first agenda item will very likely be whatever happens between now and then with the ZBA and is it about CAF? No it's about CAF. Okay, so great so future agenda item so well actually let's maybe our agenda you've noticed I didn't submit a written report to the council for tonight I did not feel like we had anything necessarily to report that would merit making counselors read anymore but I will report tonight to the council that we have declared the applicant pool sufficient for the ZBA and that we have adopted selection guidance I will also send these things out to them and I will be asking the counselors to submit questions in the same way that they did for the planning board and I will ask them by a certain date so that I have time to compile them for our next meeting and so our primary agenda item for next meeting will be hopefully we will have an interview date and we will have a compilation of counselor submitted questions and so our primary agenda item for the 30th will be to develop interview questions for ZBA our secondary agenda item will be to continue this conversation about public disclosure of CAS and relatedly potential revisions to the CAS you wanna make sure I don't forget when soliciting questions, well two things one is soliciting questions from the full town council to send, resend them the packet from, to send, resend them the planning board packet that includes those questions or send out the separate questions if you want but I like the way the questions and selection criteria yeah I like the way it all fits together cause you've got like the vacancy notice you've got the selection criteria you've got the questions because then they can say well you know when I reread that notice of what the ZBA does I realized we should really ask a question about XYZ but I don't like them just like making up questions out of whole cloth and expecting them to go find the report is asking a lot so I will send and I'll probably just do it when we join this meeting cause I will send a request for questions that will have attached to it the selection guidance for ZBA that we just adopted the January 27th report to the town council which was about the planning board and I will also send them the committee handout for the ZBA that'd be useful as well okay I think that would be really valuable and in fact you could even you know while you're doing it you might as well send them the vacancy notice that you sent out to I mean really it's like the pre-written version of your report right it's all it's a bunch of the piece parts from the eventual report the other question I have about ZBA is we still haven't figured out what is gonna be the process for figuring out current associate members did we have a chance when I mean did you get a chance to ask the current associate members if they were even planning to stay beyond June 30th and if or with not they were planning to stay would they be interested in being full members because that's part of the mix here right is we before we make it doesn't have to be no we don't know it before the interviews but we have to know it before we decide so I in my email to the chair I asked a question well I guess the question I asked was about re-appointment of associates and whether they've been impaneled I got a cryptic answer and so I think that I just need to reach out to the staff liaison and ask that question so I'll try and give that information for I was just gonna recommend that you ask the staff liaison to simply pull the ZBA associates and say we're under you know that we have vacancies and we're trying to figure out who's interested in continuing to serve and in relatedly because I'm thinking this filling the ZBA vacancy is gonna be so much more complicated than the planning board just because we also have this division between regular and associate members and so in theory we could play musical ZBA chairs so I will ask whether they're interested in continuing to serve and also I should probably also ask whether they would be interested in a regular membership because maybe they don't right maybe they like being associate okay okay I think I understand all of my homework great well that was fun so with that our next meeting again I believe is March 30th and I am then going there's no public so there is no public there's no public presence so we have no public comment and with that I am going to adjourn us at 11 33 a.m. Thank you.