 I am calling to order the November 18th meeting of the Town Council Committee on Outreach, Communications and Appointments at 9.36 a.m. So you have a fairly light packet for today because we don't have a whole lot on our agenda today, which does not mean that we don't have a whole lot to do. So the first thing, announcements, two things I wanted to announce to this committee. One is that last week I was invited to attend the meeting of the Residence Advisory Committee and did attend that meeting as chair of OCA. They, Paul had brought to them for that meeting many of the things that we had brought to his attention during our last meeting. And so I was actually initially brought in to talk about what we're recommending with CIS, which was a very short discussion since we don't have any recommendations yet. But it was coincidental that it just also happened to be the meeting that Paul was bringing forth to then some of the things that we had suggested in our last meeting. We had a nice discussion sort of about the differences between our two processes as they currently exist with regard to interviews of reappointments, with regard to how you define a vacancy, with regard to chairs sitting in on interviews. We sort of landed where we started, which was OCO's processes to interview reappointments. The members of the RAC did not continue to feel that it is not a good use of the town manager's time to interview reappointments. Same thing with having chairs and committees. The RAC felt that in their interviews they thought it was very useful to have the chair even if they're up for reappointment sitting in on the committee. But we did have a really good discussion about sort of what defines a vacancy in my question to them, which was if you have someone who's up for reappointment and their term is ending, do you consider that a vacancy that you actually advertise for if it's almost a guarantee that they're going to get reappointed? And the RAC felt like that was a really interesting question that they had not necessarily considered. And so I informed them that my plan should I continue next year as chair of OCA, it's for us to use the beginning part of the winter to actually look into the CAFs and see if we want to recommend any revisions to the CAFs and said that that would be a great time for OCA and RAC to work together. Because one of the things that we kept talking about was the fact that because we're different appointing authorities, it's fine and it makes sense that there might be differences in process between the two. But wherever there can be consistency, there should be consistency. So it keeps things simple for residents. And so the thought being that if we're recommending revisions to the CAF, then they might also want to follow suit and adopt those revisions if they feel like they're good. There was some difference in opinion. One member of the RAC felt like the CAFs have not been super useful and is very open to revising them. The one member of the RAC felt as though they liked how the CAFs are now and didn't want to make any changes to them. And so I think that'll be a really interesting discussion come this winter. The second announcement is that we have received a letter of resignation from Mark Parent to the ZBA, effective in March. And so unlike the previous ZBA resignation, which was effective immediately and gives us a current vacancy on the ZBA, this one does not become effective until March. If you remember, we only had given Mark Parent a one year appointment to help with their transitions. So he was going to be stepping off of the committee in June. This is not a huge change. It's just a sort of two month bump up in the timeline of when he's stepping down. But it does mean that at some point we'll be having another conversation about when we look to fill the current vacancy, do we want, do we have two vacancies to fill? It also might inform how we approach the spring and how many vacancies we have. So two announcements. One was my attendance at the RAC meeting and one was Mark Parent's letter of resignation. Alyssa. So I'm not pretending I just searched for it in my email but I don't believe the town council has received Mark Parent's letter of resignation. So how do we know this? Well, I know this because I was CC'd on the letter of resignation. Why aren't people resigning to us? This happened with a previous resignation. Also they're resigning to the town manager as though he has anything to do with this appointment. I'm confused. So that's something that we can discuss with regard to where people's resignations go. I would be not resigning to their appointment. I mean, I've just, I've never seen this problem occur before and we used to have a huge division of select board appointments. I mean, much to the public's surprise, the select board didn't just confirm town manager appointments. We actually had a whole bunch of appointments that were our own, far more than the town council has. But when people were appointed by us, they resigned to us or they, ideally they resigned to the town clerk in all reality and copy the appointing authority. But either way, it should be going to us immediately and I don't see any indication that the town council's been informed of this resignation so I don't understand what's going on. And so even if the applicant doesn't realize that because we haven't made that clear, whoever did get the resignation should be forwarding it to the entire town council as the appointing authority immediately upon receipt. I'm just confused by that. I'm not blaming you. I'm just, I don't get it. No, I'm not. Right, so the resignation was sent to the town council president, the town manager, Chris Brestrup, and Maureen Pollock. I actually was not, I thought I was in the original one. I was not, I was secede on the reply of the town council president. So it was received by the president, but not then. Our tradition prior to the change in government had been that it wasn't, the town clerk did not accept that someone had resigned until she had assigned resignation. And so that resignation does not even count since it didn't go to the town clerk. And it's not appropriate for the president to forward it to the clerk. The person needs to resign to the clerk. So we should follow up on that and see if that process is being followed for town manager appointments. Yeah, so this is, this I think is a good question that we need to pursue because we've now received this fall three resignations from town council appointed bodies. One from the planning board and two from the ZBA. Who those resignations were submitted to and the form in which they were submitted varied across all three. Although I, and don't quote me on this even though I'm on camera in there a minute, but I don't believe the town clerk was on any of those emails. So I think that this is something that we have to clarify and then figure out how to make known to. Other questions, comments about the announcements. Darcy? Was the whole RAC all three members present? Yes. It's wondered. Yeah, it was myself, the three members of the RAC, the town manager and Angela Mills were present at the meeting and there are minutes at the meeting. It was, I think it was a good discussion and we sort of saw it as the first opportunity to start having broader discussions about where the two processes might overlap. Darcy? So I'm kind of interested in finding out what the town manager brought to them or someone took minutes presumably and we could see them. Yep, yep, Angela took a minute. She turned around pretty quickly. I haven't necessarily looked at them. All right, so then I wanna turn our attention to what is our primary and really only agenda item today which is continuing through the document process to appoint members of multiple member bodies appointed by the town council. You have in your packet two documents. One is, so basically I took all of the discussion we had last week and the changes that we came to consensus to and I went through and I made those changes. What you have in your packet is a marked up version that shows the changes that were made and then because that's hard to read, a clean version. All the changes that were made were changes in response to areas that we had come to some consensus around last meeting. There were two comments I had written down that I could not remember or could not figure out exactly how to accommodate and we can go through those if you would like. One is on in section three, sufficiency of the applicant pool. I have a comment that just says, want list of why people might not be considered and I wasn't quite sure when I actually went to make these changes what that note meant. Does anyone remember being the person who put forth that comment and what was intended by that, Darcy? I think it's probably a comment that I made but I don't, I will retract it. I guess the question is, are we going to continue our tradition of interviewing every applicant and if the answer to that is yes, then. Okay, I think we'll probably come to that when we get to section six. Well, it actually pertains to this section, not the highlighted section but disclosing the total number of applicants to the public or to the press. If we are publicly interviewing all the applicants, then it doesn't really make sense to not to just strike that sentence. So I think there's two things from that. I think one is we don't disclose until we schedule. Obviously, if we are doing public interviews, once interviews are scheduled, the number of applicants will be known because they'll be on an agenda. My thought for that, and we could clarify this was two-fold. One is that we wouldn't do it ahead of time. So if someone reached out to us and they say, hey, I'm thinking about applying to the ZBA, how many applicants do you have? We wouldn't release the total number ahead of time. And then the secondary aspect is depending on total number of applicants, I think is different necessarily from how we define the applicant pool, which is that if someone decides to withdraw their application, if someone decides that they don't wanna do the interview, that could be a number of applicants. And so in other words, the only applicants numbers that would be known would be the ones who are interviewed, not necessarily all who applied and they wouldn't know the former until the actual interviews are scheduled. That was my thought with that. And why that convoluted thinking? Alessa? I'm not sure what part of it you think is convoluted, but it based on my experience with repeatedly having to do a form of election to replace elected officials like school committee members or library trustees who had resigned, you have an application process where there's a deadline to people turn in their applications. And after the interview schedule is set up, you go ahead and you tell everyone at once how many people there are. It does not make any sense at all for someone to call up and say, are there three applicants or five applicants? I'm thinking of applying, but I'm not sure if there are three or five. That's irrelevant. That's not a piece of information they need to make their decision as to whether or not they should be applying. It's also not the press's job to know how many people are applying prior to the start of the actual process. And so, yes, there would be in the packet then all the information about the people who had applied. So the press would see it more than generally 48 hours ahead of time, just like everybody else would see it. Otherwise, what you have the situation of is you have a situation of a counselor tells a friend to call and find out how many applicants there are for the planning board when it doesn't make any sense to have these sort of machinations behind the scene. There's no reason for anyone to know how many have applied until you're actually in the process. Are there other thoughts from committee members on this? Okay. I disagree. I would have to say that there's no reason not to be completely transparent. I don't think people are going to be calling and asking those questions. And I just, you know, I'm hoping that by the time we're done we'll agree that we can just strike that sentence because it's, you know, anti-transparency. Alyssa? I absolutely disagree to say, well, I don't think it would matter. Actually, it does because I've actually done this before Darcy and people do call and they do ask. And it's an inappropriate question because if you call it two o'clock and there are two applicants and if somebody submits a CAF 10 minutes later, am I supposed to call you back and say no, actually the number of applicants has changed and don't let me call you back tomorrow, the number of applicants has changed. That's not transparency, that's fake transparency. No, you just say the number of applications at this time may change and right now it's so many. I just don't see the problem was telling the public how many people have applied. But anyway, just saying that I personally would like that sentence to begin. I will say that I have had people, how many people have applied for a planning board? People have reached out to me and I've told them, you know, we don't disclose the number of people who have applied. And so people do ask. I don't personally, I would take issue with saying that it's anti-transparency. I think that. I don't see the problem with, if someone asked just telling them if we know how many people have applied, what would be the problem with that? Do other members of the committee have one way in on this? I'm gonna highlight this as something that we might need to take a vote on at some point. But if other people have comment. Sorry. So I think the point of it is that human beings, being human beings, that calling and asking like how many people actually sort of would, it definitely would put an artificial mechanic in who would run and who would not. Because if you're thinking about running, right? And you're thinking it might be great and you call and you say, hey, how many people are there? And somebody says 15 and you're like, oh, I'm just not good enough. And you don't, you know, that's gonna psych you out from the beginning because it's human nature. What if you were the best person for it and you were simply psyched out because there were, there was two places and there was 15 people who had already applied. Similarly, I think that if you live in a, and it is a small town, I know that there's traffic as an issue when we talk about all these people, but it is essentially a small town. So if you had heard that you thought that two people who you thought either you really loved or that you just disliked greatly their political opinions, you called and there was one opening. You asked how many people and you were told two and you had a pretty good word on the street who those two were. That could make you either, even if you didn't want to necessarily run, jump in because you didn't want either of those two people that you're pretty sure because it's a small town are running or maybe you wouldn't run because you thought, oh, those two people are so great and I'm just gonna leave it alone. So I think it seems like something simple and transparent, but I think if you take into account human nature, it ends up artificially already messing with a pool of people. That would be my take. Okay. All right, so where we left, thank you, sir. Where we left off last time was in selection. So we made it completely through sections one, two, three. And we were in section four and where we left off was in four AC, which was criteria for a healthy multiple member body. And I'm just trying to bring this up. One of the changes that has been made was per one of our member suggestions. I had sort of in four AC paraphrased the language from the appointed committee handbook. And there was sort of a suggestion instead of paraphrasing it to just copy it. And so the language I've put in there is now copied from the appointed handbook with reference to the section that it's in. I'm noticing I'm missing an open parentheses. So I want to continue our discussion of four AC, which is do we as OCA want to adopt this language from the appointed committee handbook as part of our consideration officially? We have been sort of operating under the appointed committee handbook because in the absence of something new, that's just what we're doing. But we have never proactively necessarily said, this is what we're doing, proactively adopted any of it. And so this is our chance to do so because one of the things we're gonna be looking at when we're considering multi-member body is how long people have served on a committee and whatnot. So thoughts, Darcy? I think one thing that was mentioned the last time is that the last sentence in cases where special training or expertise is required, it could conceivably provide a kind of a loophole so that if you had somebody on a committee that everybody really liked and they were really good and you can't even imagine them leaving, that would be a way for them to stay because they have special training and expertise. But someone, I think it was Sarah the last time, said that we should somehow, if we could add in parentheses, like in cases where special training or expertise in parentheses not including that gained as a committee member. In other words, we want, somebody has special training or expertise like they're on the water commission and they have a special degree and something about water. That is very rare in the general public. That kind of expertise is what we're talking about, right? Not because they are an architect or something like that on the planning committee, of which we have many in town that could conceivably be applying and could be new. Do you understand what I mean? Like we don't want to have this be a way to allow people who have just been on the committee for six years and they're really good to stay because of that. If there are new comers that can come up to speed. George. We're talking about basically two specific bodies, zoning and planning. Correct. So the expertise, special training, et cetera, applies to zoning and planning. And my sense has been that if you have someone who is qualified in those areas that should be something we would take seriously and give them some, what? Step up over someone who has zero experience in those areas. This is an area that is not just, it's not like, well, anyway, I'll wake up in a few minutes, let's let someone else be. Sure. Sarah. So I would say that my point was a different one. I don't think that we should be disqualifying or discounting or hampering someone who is doing a great job. I mean, that would not be my point. I think that my point is that what this is saying that's hinging on is quote, unquote, experience and training. And because the town at this time is not offering any initial training in these areas, I feel like what that sets us up for could be something that ends up being unfair to people who would like to apply to these bodies because if we take it about, if we were simply saying people that have a lot of expertise, I would assume that then you would continually cling to, and perhaps whether they were good or bad, you're gonna continually cling to the same people, which could then end up discouraging other new people from applying because they don't, there's no way for them to get experience, right? That initial bit of experience really, so if George and I are looking at candidate X and George is like, you know, this person is really doing an excellent job and the only way to get this training is to be on this body and they're doing great, then I think that what ends up happening is it's like trying to get a job out of college where if you don't have experience, you can't get a job, but how are you gonna get a job if you don't have experience? So I think that not putting an end on terms might then make it without putting in training in the very beginning, without having people access to training in the beginning, which I think would have a more of a level playing field, it might just artificially start making it that the same four or five members that are long term, if they wanna stay, always stay. So to me, it's more about sort of bringing in fresh ideas over time and not always clinging to older ones, but I'm not doing that in saying if someone's really great, we should take them out no matter what, it's just making sure that you do have a natural turnover that keeps a fresh perspective. Alyssa, did you have something? So in fact, it is true that, A, like you say, we don't provide appropriate training to new planning board or ZB made members, not saying it's inappropriate, I'm saying it's insufficient and they've all stated that themselves that it's insufficient. So that's a place we can't control, but we can try and influence perhaps, by the way we're phrasing things. It's also true that traditionally in my 20 years in town, the planning board was having the same members reappointed over and over again because they knew what was going on and nobody else did. And very much like what you said, not saying they weren't good at it, but they also did bring a base of knowledge that had it been lost, the planning board or the ZBA would have had a much harder time functioning. So it is very difficult to figure out how to phrase this to incorporate the new ideas to ask for training that we can't control except as a town council perhaps to suggest to the town manager that he somehow provide more of. But I think the other thing that we have to make sure we're not missing here is the actual, the other actual practical aspect, which is that we reappointed Mark Parent not because he had some outside degree like water supply protection. We reappointed Mark Parent because we thought the ZBA needed to be able to transition over the next year as to who was going to take on the leadership reins given the newness of several members of the ZBA that were coming up. And while some of the members had substantial experience, others did not. And so it was a mentoring sort of thing to make sure there was an appropriate transition. Could one argue that that should have been done before? Well, sure, we can argue all kinds of things, but the reality was it didn't happen and nobody was ready to step into that role and Mark kindly agreed to keep doing it. So if he hadn't agreed to keep doing it, it's not clear what would have happened at that point and the same things happened and did happen with planning board in that we didn't reappoint the person that some people thought really would help with the next transition and the planning board has had some struggle since then. So we're trying to not micromanage what they do, but yet at the same time set them up for success. And so I don't want the phrasing to be so tight that it ignores what Darcy, I think, just suggested we ignore. She suggested we ignore experience gained on the committee and I'm not willing to ignore it, but I'm also not willing to say it absolutely always qualifies somebody over someone who based on qualifications is in fact less qualified than that person was because they haven't had the experience yet, but we're looking for a turnover of people's experiences on committees. George. If you had hard and fast term limits, it would in some ways make our life so much easier. Really. Oh, two terms, you're done. Next, but that may be what the committee decides to do. But the way this is phrased now and keeping it somewhat not having hard term limits essentially, which is what this at the moment is trying to articulate, makes our job much harder, but perhaps much more realistic. Maybe I'm the only one who feels like we're all dancing around the simple fact that there's an undeniable political element to these two bodies. And if you're not happy with what's happening with planning and zoning for whatever reason, then you probably are eager to see some kind of changes. And you're going to be looking for fresh faces or people's whose views are closer to what you imagine would be the right views. And that just seems to be a fact of this, these two bodies. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. What does bother me is the idea that somehow we're gonna have a hard and fast set of term limits. And you know, because we just constantly want a constant new set of faces in there to keep things healthy and fresh and whatever, you know. And I'm not really all that concerned about that. I'm more concerned about overall functioning and health and direction of the two bodies. And I guess I see these bodies very differently from the way I see most if not all of the other multiple member bodies. And I guess I have to think that that's the reason or one of the reasons, maybe we can ask, the Charter Commission took these two out and put them in the authority of the council because they have, I think, an undeniable, political component, they're controversial. And that doesn't bother me. So maybe we'll decide we'll just have hard and fast term limits, two and you're out. And then we just don't have to worry. We just have to go, okay, now we gotta replace X and Y and Z. But if we leave it the way it's phrased right now, we're gonna have to have some pretty, well, potentially frank and sometimes bruising conversations about whether you like the way things should go and there you don't. And I can express my opinion on that and I'm sure there are different opinions on this body. But it seems that's inescapable here. Sarah. Really makes me angry that every time we have the decision somebody has to say, well, let's just not dance around it, it's political. It's not political to me. It's not political to me. I ended up making a decision that I thought taking someone actually who was chair off who I absolutely love and I love in his entire body of work, even in business, okay? For me it's not political, not at all. It is about the fact that there is an issue that I have with having always the same people for 12 to 15 to 20 years, even if they're fantastic. Always on there because if they're truly fantastic and they're doing wonderful, you're right. Why would we take them off? But at the same time, I think that there is, that you can end up having a bias or a flavor or maybe the people just don't think outside the box if there sometimes isn't one other very qualified. I'm not asking just new for new. I am saying someone who is qualified and who can help that committee and be up to speed and do well, which is where I think training comes in. I'm not saying let's just take people off for the fact that if they don't do something my way, they're out of here. I'm not saying that. I just think it's healthy at certain points in a body's lifetime to have one or two new people. It doesn't mean that I would say you're so great that I'm gonna penalize you because of great service. I am absolutely not saying that, but sometimes it's some point. I mean, think about how long 15 years this. After 15 years, you might wanna have someone who is very qualified to give you some more information. I don't think that that's political. Town council, somebody asked if I would run again and I said I would probably either not after a first term or a second because they don't think somebody should be in for forever. So I just wanna make it really clear that I think that term limits is something that is important to me, but it's not political, it's about the health of a body. George, you have a response? I think this is the kind of discussion that we're gonna be having if we keep this the way it is and I think that's a perfectly legitimate discussion that we would have. Someone has been on this body for X number of years and da da da da da and we have to decide. So I welcome that discussion. We obviously are... I mean what happened the first time out is we really didn't have that discussion, I don't think. Probably because we're all inexperienced and we're doing this for the first time. I don't think the characterization that Sarah just gave of a hypothetical fits the first decision that we made. I didn't feel it at the time and I don't feel it now. But I agree with her that this is an issue that should come up and it should come up on a regular basis, but I don't... And that's a decision we'll make in each case. Whether we feel that this is something that needs a change or doesn't and then we need reasons for why it needs a change. But just the number of years doesn't really, by itself, lead me to any particular conclusion one way or the other. So I wanna offer my opinion on this. And so I would be supportive of including this language, which again is not something that we all developed it's something that's directly transferred over from a document that we're currently working under. And there's two things I wanna say. One is in conversations I've had with individual, both current and former members of the planning board and the ZBA, one of the things I consistently hear is that it takes a while to get up to speed on these committees, that they're hard committees to work on and that it takes time to really understand the material. And one of the things I keep hearing is three years and I think we're also gonna be finding this. Three years is not a long time to really feel comfortable with the material. And so in other communities, planning board terms are longer. We have it at three years and that's not something we can change. It's in our charter that ZBA and planning board are three year terms. And so in my ideal world, I would probably say let's do two terms but make each term slightly longer. We don't have the ability to do that without amending the charter. And so that's one reason that I'm for these bodies and we're only really talking about two sort of three bodies. One reason why I'm amenable to having people allowed to serve over two terms. I think what we have to think about for me is the whole text together. And actually, as you can see, this is from two sections, 2.3 and 2.5, but I think it makes sense to bring them together. Cause what it says is when you're on the committee for one term and you're up for reappointment, we give you a preference for reappointment. It means that it's more likely than not you'll be reappointed, not guaranteed, but more likely than not that you'll be reappointed. What it says after that though is once you complete a second term, if there's another good person, it's more likely than not that you'll be leaving the body. And so again, it's not a guarantee that you're leaving the body, but it is more likely than not that if there's a qualified other person, they're gonna be put on the body. And that generally speaking, we want to limit service to two, three year terms. However, under some circumstances where trainer expertise is required, we're willing to make sure that that two term is not a hard limit, right? Now that doesn't negate the fact of that second sentence that says, it's still more likely than not that you won't be reappointed. They're still gonna be preference given to a newcomer, but we're not gonna hold on hard and fast to those two terms where we see training and expertise. And so let me give you an example of that. The planning board covers a lot of different things. And one of the things that we'll be talking about in section 4B is input from the body's chair. And what we've seen is that right now the planning board has on it a hydrologist, two lawyers, someone who doesn't necessarily have expertise in any of the fields of the planning board, an architect and an engineer. Well, there's no one who's involved in real estate. There's no one who has really a depth of zoning in there, right? Or development. There's no one who's ever actually done development, which are all important things. So let's say hypothetically, but let's say, and there's also only one architect on, right? And I think that's something that we can all agree is a useful thing, right? An architect. I don't know who that is, but if they can mute it. So let's say that the architect, the only architect is completing their second term. And there's a pool of qualified applicants, but they're all lawyers. And the planning board already has two lawyers on it. Well, architecture is an expertise that is really important to this body. And we might look at that situation and say, you know what? We can either keep an architect on, which we know is important for a third term, we can bend our typical policy, or we can give preference to a newcomer. But all the newcomers are lawyers and we already have two lawyers. And so in this case, because there is some expertise required for this body and losing that architect will mean losing that expertise, we're willing to bend that policy. And that's the way I view this text is you have to view it as a whole, which basically says, look, if you're up for a second, a third term, you're probably not gonna get it. But there are some circumstances because this body does require some expertise on it, where we might bend that policy because losing your expertise would be to the detriment of the committee. That doesn't guarantee it'll be on, but I think we have to consider that. When we say expertise, there are specific areas of expertise. So it's not enough to say, oh, well, there's other applicants who bring other things because sometimes we need that architecture expertise, or we need that zoning expertise, or we need the hydrology expertise. And we might wanna say, you know what, we really wanna keep that expertise on there. Darcy. I think that last sentence is in the town manager committee handbook because there are some town manager committees that do actually require special training or expertise. And I don't think these committees do. I don't think they require particular special training or expertise to be a member of these committees. So I think this was specially put in the town manager handbook for those committees like the Water Commission, et cetera, that require special training and expertise. So I think this for our three committees is just an out. And I think, I personally listening to Sarah and George, I've come around to thinking that it would just be a whole lot simpler and more fair to have a fairly hard and fast term limit of six years. The complaint I've heard from the community is that it doesn't make sense to have a six year term limit if in the situation where a person's term limit expires and there's no other people available to take their place, which I think is highly unlikely for these three committees. But I don't think the exception should be where special training and expertise is required because it's not required for these committees. So one thing I do want to note, there's no such thing as the town manager appointed committee. There is just the appointed committee handbook for the town that applies to all multiple member bodies of the town. But these discussions haven't happened until now and a little bit in the spring since we've had the new form of government and one of the reasons I wanted to include this section is because I wanted us to weigh in on whether we were actually, as OCA, affirming what was already in the appointed committee handbook. Alyssa, you had? I'm flipping out. Over here, actually, as is probably obvious. As is really clear, it's never been a town manager committee handbook. I don't know why you're referring to it that way. It is the select board's appointed committee handbook because the select board appointed many, many bodies on its own authority with no relationship to the town manager. The town manager didn't write it. The select board wrote it. It was written years ago. It did cover things like the ZBA, which the select board appointed without any discussion with the town manager. It's also true that they affirmed the town manager's appointments to planning board. So this was written with every intention. I can't believe you could say you think you know why it was written. You weren't there. It was written for all the committees that we appointed, which were many and vast. And I'm just laying here stunned that you would say that, oh well, water supply protection committee, yes. In the charge, it says it needs certain things, which again, has nothing to do with the select board or the town council because neither one of us appointed that body. That was always the town manager appointment. But to say that zoning and planning don't require any special expertise, I'm thinking you mean because their charges don't say that. That doesn't mean because it's not an absolute reality. And we've had people serve on those committees who had nothing to do with any of the fields that Evan talked about. And it has not been particularly effective. So to say that because their charge doesn't say it is really not the point here at all. It's not an out until you're willing to take the lead on fixing the charges to reflect what you think they need to reflect. To say that because the charges don't say that, it doesn't matter. I'm just, I don't understand. George? I think there's a sense among some and it's not completely unreasonable. I'm not sure I agree with it, but that anyone could serve on a planning board or ZBI. That you don't require any kind of background in the law or engineering or development or real estate, give them some training, which I agree, it's been said a number of times now and I've heard this from members of the CPA in planning and they do get training, but it's not systematic and it's not to the degree that they would like it. They appreciate a great deal. Anyway, the thought is that give them enough training and they'll be fine. And then there's the view that these are again. I mean, part of what's frustrating me is that this wording and the committee handbook was designed to cover a vast array of potential appointments and we're talking essentially about two and we really should, I think, be have a session or at least part of our meeting where someone sits down and talks to us about these bodies and how they are composed elsewhere and the kinds of skills, and Alyson I'm sure has a great deal of knowledge of this, having done it, but the kinds of skills that these bodies require and even though it's not written in their charge, if you're creating a planning board or a ZBA, this is what you're looking for. This kind of background, this kind of experience and then there's the view and maybe some should speak to it today that look, anyone can do this, just give them some training and they'll be fine. Sarah. So I just want to make it clear that it's not me who thinks that. I don't think that anybody could be dragged off the street and function completely perfectly. I think that you need to listen to the chair. The chair will generally give you an idea of what sort of professions are helpful, right? And you're looking for a successful board. You're not looking just for something new or a different opinion to put a monkey wrench into something. I believe that you're looking to make something work. So I don't have that view. What I am saying is that I believe that you take a look at everyone, say the chair tells you you need someone in real estate, okay, like great. So you're looking for somebody in real estate. Maybe somebody has been on for 15 years and you find somebody else that's also in real estate. I don't know if the chair said we want one or two. Say they want one. If there was someone who was in real estate who was fabulous, I think that it would be a more level playing field in electing someone and maybe someone new if the person in real estate or the lawyer also had, and I realize we cannot impose this, but I think it's something that I would like to suggest and maybe help along to the town manager and to the town that there was some initial training that happened so that that person was not, the new person was not, also was not penalized for not having a certain amount of training and information, okay? So I don't think anybody could do it. I'm just, and maybe I'm not making this clear. I think that you're looking for people who are qualified. You're not looking for people who aren't. So I don't feel that way. I'm saying there should be training so that if somebody new coming in would have a shot at coming in because they have the qualifications and they would have a certain amount of training. I just think it would be helpful to a functional board. That's, so I don't think that we're actually all that far off. Because I agree with you and where I'm at is, so again, using that example, if we have someone who's completed, you were putting 15 years in there, but it lets six years. It's completing a second term who knows real estate really well and then there's someone else who applies who knows real estate really well. I have no issue with saying, you know what, let's make a transfer. What I would have an issue with is saying, here's someone who's completing their sixth year, they know real estate really well. We have three applicants and they're sort of general people who are just like, planning sounds cool, right? I, yeah. And then we say, well, we're gonna lose the expertise of real estate because they're finishing two terms and we're gonna put them in with someone who doesn't bring any real expertise to the table. That's where I have an issue and that's where I would say, you know what? Maybe we give this person a third term because it would be really tough to lose that expertise. Sarah? We're not far off and I'm a realist. I mean, the reason why this clause is in there is for a very good reason because you could have someone who's been in for six years or nine years and perhaps no one is gonna run against them. We cannot find anyone or the only people we find were, and I don't wanna be great circus clowns but they're only, right? I mean, no, for real, or just something that's not related at all. So then you've, so then it is a skill but not one that's applicable to this board because I can't juggle. But, so I'm a realist. I realize that we need to have this in there otherwise it's going to hurt us, right? But what I'm also saying is I want to be careful of, and this could be for many different reasons because of you know someone personally and you just think they're the bee's knees or you know they do things exactly the way you yourself like them that there could be, I'm just gonna put it this way, I will vote I think for this wording. But what I'm going to say is, is that I have a real fear that this could be used as a loophole and you know we joke, you know maybe 15 years is a long time but let's look at some of the longer serving members who might be 10 years, right? Or 12 years. I mean so 15, you could roll your eyes at me but it's not unheard of, right? Thank you. So that's what I'm saying is I think that I think this could be a loophole that could be used the wrong way as well as something that definitely allows us to deal with a difficult situation and because you have to look at the whole and you have to make sure you're taking care of everybody then I think this loophole has to stay here but I want to just say I see the inherent problem with having it if there are many people on the council who maybe have different reasons for keeping someone on for a really, really, really long time and I'm not saying we're going to do that. I'm just saying I see a potential for abuse but I know that it won't always be taken. So because we are at 10.30 and we still haven't left section four and I do want to get through the entire document today I'm going to move us on but I have highlighted that section for AC. No, I didn't make it numbers. For AC as something that we're going to take an individual vote on for AB. Comments on that. So again, all of this is in the context of OKA putting together selection guidance based on these two pieces of criteria that could be sent to the council to help them make their decision and so this sort of follows on something that we have, I'm hoping for AB as non-controversial because it's something that we've been doing. We did that with the original planning board as owning board of appeals where we talked to the two chairs at the time and got their input, which was a varying utility. We certainly did it for finance committee where we got input from the chair, fairly extensive input from the chair and the vice chair of that committee. I have, because we've already made that part of our process, I didn't feel like that was something that need to be independently adopted for me to do and so I have already had a conversation with the chair of the planning board in preparation for that appointment about what that body needs but is there anything that stands out as needing editing or in for AB? If not, I will move us on to five interview questions and so this is again something that we have already been doing which is OCO will adopt interview questions. We have adopted a standard set of interview questions that were asked of planning boards, EBA, ranked choice voting and participatory budgeting and then also I don't, I think, did we edit them slightly for finance committee? I thought so, okay. Substantial. Substantial, okay. In the favor of what finance committee wants. Okay. So my thought with this is every time we do an appointment, we would adopt a set of interview questions because it might change from thing to thing. Two things that I added here that are certainly my opinion and which is why they're in yellow. So one is that we would do the selection guidance first because that might influence questions that we ask with regard especially to for A, I mean for B, we might want to ask some specific questions if the chair highlights a specific targeted need that the body absolutely needs and then the second thing and I actually want to edit my own language or say OCO may also solicit questions from the town council in advance and attempt to include them and I would actually say OCO shall and this is something that is different from what we've done in the past which is in order to feel like make town councilors feel like their questions weren't answered, I would want OCO to reach out to the full town council in advance of OCO adopting interview questions and saying what questions do you want to make sure since this is a town council appointment what questions do you want to make sure we ask these candidates, what are you curious about and then OCO would do its best to integrate questions from individual town councilors into our adopted questions. And so with that I will open, I think George you had your hand up initially and I'll go to Darcy. Just quickly, the idea of this is to create a level playing field so that all the candidates get the same basic question. Right, is that the, so we're, I think originally we did this because only one person was going to be asking the questions. Now we are all present. So I guess I'm asking why do we even need this and my thought was well we need this because we want to make sure that each candidate gets basically if not exactly the same questions so that we're comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. I mean my initial thought was that once we sit down and talk about, we do the selection criteria guidance, selection criteria, we hear from the chair, blah, blah, blah, blah, then we just have the candidates come in and we ask them questions. And some might get asked this, some might get asked that but we've already had a good conversation about what we're looking for, we've heard from the chair, we have a sense of what, we talked about that and now the candidates come in and we just Darcy asks a question, Sarah asks a question, maybe I don't ask any questions, maybe I'm like Clarence Thomas, I never ask any questions. But what I'm hearing is that we, what you've suggested is that we have a set of fixed questions that the only question will be who gets to ask which question. So Darcy might get number two and I might get number five unless it gets number three. And that makes sense to me if what we're doing is trying to maintain a kind of, so when we get the answers back, we can compare, right? We asked Smith this and Jones this and they, you know, is that the idea behind this now? Is it that it's just to keep kind of a level playing field, apples to apples, oranges to oranges? Because we're not, we're all here, so we don't need to have, the original reason seems not to apply. So I can respond to that and I think this is why we're having this discussion, right? Because perhaps we don't feel like this is needed. So my thought on this was sort of threefold. One is it's an efficiency thing, it just makes sure going into the interviews we know what we're asking ahead of time which I think will make the interviews go much smoother than just sitting around and be like, so does anyone have any questions? Two, I think it allows us to let the town council and the applicants know what kind of questions we're asking ahead of time which I think will make already if we're moving to a public process, I think that is intimidating to applicants and so I think having them be able to see the questions ahead of time release some of that stress because it's not like they're just gonna be, you know, any random questions, they know sort of what to expect and it lets the town council know what we're gonna be asking so that they feel sort of comfortable doing that. And then the other thing is, I think being able, and this will come in when we talk about six and it depends on how we do the actual interviews but I think the ability for town counselors to sort of submit their questions ahead of time and us to work them together will help. It makes sure that we have a discussion about what's being asked ahead of time, making sure the questions get to that and make sure everyone's questions sort of are being worked in a way other than one member of the town council submitting 12 questions to Sarah so that Sarah can ask them and then we have an interview that goes on forever. Well, so this is, we haven't decided that, right? And so in my mind, this is a way of just making the interviews more streamlined, more efficient and also making sure both the counselors and the public are sort of comfortable with what's about to happen, Sarah. Oh, Darcy, you had a question first, right? Yeah, no, I can see where this, it would be good to have like a set of default questions that we start from for each of the three committees and then that could get revised for each time we have an interview session. I'd like it to be a little bit holistic so that we feel that we can ask a follow-up question or so it's a little, it's not so controlled because I think that's what the public will want. But the problem with that, obviously, is if we're trying to cram them into 20 minutes. So I am not sure how this is gonna work because I saw somewhere here that then counselors are gonna be given the other counselors given the opportunity to ask questions. I, no way we're gonna keep that in 20 minutes. So, I mean, part of this is figuring out what the format is going to be too and how that will work. But it would be, it would feel better to have some give and take between the interviewees and the counselors. Sarah? So, yes, I have two comments on that. One is that I think that we've learned by experience that the rest of the town council wants to feel that it has participated in and has been there for these interviews and that many counselors will have very specific questions that they feel like they want to have answered. And I think that if we want this to be smooth, right? As smooth as possible that more we bring in counselors, the better because if they feel like they haven't gotten a certain amount of information that they want, then when it comes to the entire town council voting, it's either going to end up with people feeling angry because they feel like their hand has been forced because this person has already been pre-selected but they didn't get their answers. The questions, they didn't have the answers to the questions that they wanted. So I think in that respect, soliciting questions from other counselors obviously is a no-brainer. I also wonder a little bit though, if we do want to have it sort of free-form to be able to ask follow-up questions, for some reason that makes me feel a little uneasy. And I'm not exactly sure why. And I'll have to explore that but having a little bit of free-form of being able to go a little bit further on something for some reason it makes me feel uneasy and I'll have to suss that out. Alyssa. In terms of that, first in regards to item five, since we started, we went right past the part about where you were now changing, May to shall, I want the second sentence to also say shall. Focus shall consider the adopted selection guidance, it's not should, it's will. And will shall solicit questions from the town council in advance, although it is fair to say that we will attempt to include them, we won't necessarily include them, we will do our best to incorporate, just as we do now when the chairs give us input as to what and when finance committee had ideas that they acted as though were brand new questions even though they were in fact our standard questions and then they had some additional questions which we did our best to incorporate. I am adamantly opposed to a free-form section of the interview and I'll tell you exactly why, this isn't hard. So you go through your standard questions and then a counselor says, what did you think when we built those horrible buildings downtown? Why don't we have an inclusionary bylaw that would have insisted that that not happen? That's not an appropriate question for these interviews, no matter how much you might personally feel about those things, that's not an appropriate question for interviews and there is no way to stop that question from coming out of someone's mouth if you don't have a structured set of questions. And so if the entire town council writes to us and says you have to ask about this controversial project then we have a decision to make as OCA whether or not we're gonna ask about a controversial project. But the idea that we're pretending that it'll just be gentle follow-ups when we all know these are political bodies and people have very strong political opinions and I am not in any way open to the idea that someone just gets to randomly ask them a question because it was kind of interesting what they said earlier. Let's also remember that again, you know I had a hard time trying to separate these threads that Evans made this nice structure but you guys keep talking about well what's gonna happen in a 20 minute individual interview. Nobody agreed that we're having 20 minute individual interviews yet. So you're reflecting back to a process that we already know we're discarding in some part. So let's try and keep an open mind about this and we'll have to probably revisit some of our decisions in light of whatever it is we decide is the process. But the reality is if you leave it open just as we did not specifically leave it open for Sarah or Evan or George or Darcy to ask some burning question they had when it was an interview, if we weren't willing to do that in private, to do that to people in public is just there's no way. I mean this is gonna be hard for people to accept whether you end up with not getting my vote on a process that is an individual interview or in a group interview. People are gonna feel worried about that and if they think they can get asked any random thing off the street they are not going to even participate to begin with. Sarah. I'm hoping that this will actually give me a little bit of credit for feeling like it was the wrong thing. The only thing that came to my mind the only thing that came to my mind is that somebody could sort of attack someone else but I didn't know a really nice way to say that. So I'd like some props for at least thinking that that was probably not a good idea. Will you add props to Sarah to the official minutes? Evan? George. Oh sorry Darcy. At the risk of being the minority opinion here what would be the problem with asking interviewees a question about if they had a position on downtown development or whatever. Isn't that what we're interested in finding out? George? I mean, well I think that most of the, I mean a lot of the, you know a lot of applicants will be privately backed by different members of the council and they'll know already where those people stand. So why should the public not also know? George. This really feels like Supreme Court nominations. There, you can't, you're not supposed to, you can't, I don't know what the specific rule is but you can't say of some candidate, you know how would you, you know, an X, Y, or Z, right? You're always trying to think of a way to ask a question that will elicit from them their philosophy without getting into any specifics. So you can't say for instance to a candidate, what do you think about that lousy decision that was made two years ago about X, Y, or Z? That's what you're dying to ask them and that's what you want them to talk about but you can't do that and it seems like we're, I mean maybe this is silly analogy but the idea is that, you know, what Alyssa's suggesting is you don't want to get in a situation where you're saying, specifically about this project or that project, you know, what do you think about that decision? What would you do if you were on the board at that time? At the same time, you're trying to get a feel for, you know, how do they view development? How do they view the role of the planning board, zoning board? I mean, we're trying to get a sense of temperament, trying to get a sense of whether they are open minded and blah, blah, blah. So, I also feel that there's something to be said for just, somebody gets a question they're not expecting. I mean, you want to see how they think under pressure. I mean, these are pressure, these are not just, you know, they have to make tough decisions. So, I hear the point that we need to have specific questions and people need to know what they're getting into when they go into it and maybe in the end that's what we'll decide but there is something to be said for the fact that, you know, at least one or two of the questions may very well be something that you, you know, wasn't written down on a piece of paper before you went into the meeting. Cause I like to see how people respond to something that is unexpected. So, if there's no follow up and it's just five questions and then something that the counselors have said must be asked, it's pretty rigid, pretty fixed. Maybe that's the way we'll go but I can hear some merit to, you know, a certain degree of flexibility, a certain degree of the unexpected but I, you know, the other side of it is that surely someone will blurt out something they're not supposed to blurt out and all heck will break loose. So, I wanna just follow up on what George said cause I think what you said probably reinforced me wanting us to adopt interview questions, which is you just sort of thought through how can you very carefully get at answers to questions that you think are important without necessarily making it problematic, right? And so maybe you do wanna know, you wanna hear from them what they think the role of the planning board is or what their vision for downtime development is but you wanna make sure the question isn't asked of would you have voted for Spring Street, right? Cause that would be really problematic or even more problematic if they were to say if there was a project that was in the pipeline that they could be voting for, right? I mean, if there's a project that we know is in the future and someone just says, would you support that? And they say yes or no on that, we should not have that information before someone goes on to planning board and so I think the point of this is it gives Oka a time to say what are the questions we want and make sure that we can spend time carefully doing it cause sometimes and we've probably all done this on the town council we ask a question on the fly that we think later I could have asked that better I could have worded that better, right? This gives us time to really have a deliberative process of what's the information we're trying to get from people and how can we ask those in the most effective way to get that information? And I think that doing it sort of just an idea comes into your head that can be a problem sometime so that's why I think we need sort of a careful consideration of what are we trying to get and how do we ask this in an effective way? Darcy? I think we can ask it. I think that what we don't want is to have just show interviews that don't result in our getting any real valuable information about these people and so we might be able to have some kind of open-ended question about what is your philosophy of planning or development? Something that would give them the opportunity to give a little bit of a sense of who they are not just that they're smart and efficient and have expertise or whatever but just who they are as potential committee members. So I just think that we wanna get something out of them that gives us confidence about how we're gonna vote on them. Alyssa? I don't believe you. You're not asking, we are going to ask better questions. We've already got a set of questions that we're pretty comfortable with that we can modify and we can throw out some of the more generic aspects of them because we could put some of that in writing, for example. If we had people do a writing sample or not a resume per se but something that kind of functioned like a resume instead of the CAF that we wouldn't have to waste our time during the interview being like and then I went to Rutgers and then I did this like we don't need to ask those questions, right? We wanna know more about how they're gonna function on the committee and we wouldn't have to believe or how many years they worked for some agency but when we say how they're gonna work on a committee that is a solid question we can ask, we can find a way to ask it to ask if they've had experience in dealing with controversial topics, for example, and how they listen to other people when it's that they feel really strongly about something, I really feel like when I hear you saying this, all I hear you saying is I wanna hear that you're for a downtown building moratorium or I wanna hear that you're for a specific kind of inclusionary zoning and I don't wanna hear that because these people are not running for office. They are not running for office. They do not need to be held to the same standard that we were held to when we ran for office. They're volunteering for a committee that we hope they'll be able to function on and if we can't figure out pre-designed questions we sure as hell can't figure out how to ask one on the fly that's going to elicit what we want. We need to be able to figure it out ahead of time and it's not a show and it's not that there are cabals of people out there supporting different candidates. I don't know what political reality you're operating in but it's not mine. Amherst forward is not putting forward certain people. The independence party maybe is putting forward certain people but Amherst forward is not and so I am just so offended by the idea that we're pretending that if we ask standard questions that what we're just doing a pretend thing but if we ask on the fly questions that somehow we're really getting to what the public wants to know. I think that's completely misguided. Sarah and then George. So I think one of the things I was gonna say is that in bringing up more pointed questions I feel like what's being said I would agree with Alyssa is that it seems like what is being suggested is that we're asking questions to reveal a bias and I think that or a political bias and I don't think that that's what we should be doing. I think the thing that we should be eliciting and looking for is someone who is competent and is open-minded and is actually someone who likes to listen to other people and to their ideas and actually has a mind of their own but doesn't have their mind already made up on how they would rule on anything. You want someone who would take all of the information and do something with that without a bias. They might have their own opinions. They might be very smart and have their own brain but I don't think we want to have someone with a bias. George. So the purpose of these interviews seems to sound like we're beginning to sound like trying to gauge someone's temperament and their ability to work with others than it is to elicit and I'm just asking this as an honest question or a description, elicit a particular philosophy of planning or what's your vision of Amherst in the 21st century? Do you wanna see, do you support the master plan? Do you agree with the basic vision of the master plan? And I think this is something that we need to talk about a little bit, I think. Whether those are legitimate questions, I'd be curious what Alyssa thinks. Is that the kind of thing that crosses the line? Is it more, our task is more to gauge temperament and sort of ability to work with others and get some sense of what they're bringing to the table and we really should pretty much stay away completely from anything about these kinds of broader questions of, what's your philosophy of planning? What's your vision of Amherst? What's your view on the master plan? Those are the kinds of things that really are not appropriate in this context. Alyssa? Yeah. No, so we cannot ask the question, do you agree with the basic vision of the master plan? Because that is a stupid question. That is not going to elicit anything helpful except people who hate certain aspects of it. We can come up with, shared a question about some, either the master plan or some aspect of the master plan that is of particular relevance to conversations the town council has been having at this time as opposed to two years from now. And so I would never wanna ask somebody, so do you support the master plan? Well, if you don't, you're an idiot and I'm not possibly gonna vote for you because it's a thing that hundreds of people spent thousands of hours on. So if you don't support it, there's literally something wrong with you. But if you wanna ask about some aspect of things, I think we could, despite our very different views, come up with something that gets at an approach and I think it's totally reasonable to ask about something like the master plan as opposed to what about Spring Street or inclusionary zoning, things that will be right in front of them or that were just passed, but the master plan is actually an excellent way to get at it but to find a way to amongst ourselves, come up with questions, could be two questions, that reflect some aspect of the master plan that we are trying to get at because in all reality, would the town council, a majority of the town council, be interested in a candidate who said the master plan was crap? Like, I don't care what qualifications they have at that point, that they're just not a functioning committee member at that point because of the way that plan was developed. So I don't wanna ask a litmus test question in such a way that it just makes a person look bad. But so I think there is a point to eliciting their philosophy. I just think we have to be careful about doing it and that's why we do a structured set of questions ahead of time rather than just coming up with stuff on the fly. But they aren't just boring generic questions. I'm saying put the boring generic questions right ahead of time like everybody can read, you went to Rutgers, great. But not that. So, right, so what I think that I wanted to say was that I agree with Alyssa and I think that to me, one of the more important pieces of this is actually getting questions from counselors in advance so that they, when we get to the stage of actually voting on these, people feel like their questions have been addressed to the best of our ability. And if we see six counselors say, ask something about the master plan. I don't know what, but I want something on the master plan. Then we as a group can say, so we've heard pretty clearly from the full council they want a question on the master plan. Some of them maybe gave us exact questions. We don't wanna be duplicative and ask all of these same questions, right? But also some people maybe gave us some vague ones. What should we ask about that? And I think having that conversation ahead of time is really important than just hoping someone's gonna ask a good question. Because what I worry about is, there's gonna be limit. We don't wanna take an exorbitant amount of these people's time, right? And what I... Our time. Of our time, but also the volunteers' times. And what I don't, so using the master plan as an example, if we hear from a bunch of people that want to question the master plan, we all can all sort of figure out what question or questions we're gonna ask. But what I don't want is something where you ask a question on the master plan and it's not really the question I was curious about on the master plan. So then I ask a question and then Darcy's like, well, I also had a question about the master plan but it's sort of, to me that's an inefficient process as opposed to us meeting ahead of time and saying, so here are all the things on the master plan. Do we need to design one, maybe two, maybe three questions that we know going in are about the master plan. I think it helps us organize ourselves. I think it helps us be more efficient and I think it helps us integrate the desires of not just the five members of this committee but the 13 members of the council. I do want to, I think that six is sort of continues to loom over us as the biggest question. And so I have again highlighted interview questions as something that we'll take an individual vote on but I want to turn on to six. And so let me prep us for six a little bit. So six is the actual format of the interviews. My hope is that the first sentence is uncontroversial although it will depend on what we end up doing with five but basically this is the same in advance of the interviews we'll distribute to both the council and to the interviewees the selection guidance, the interview questions and the committee handouts so that they have that. Of course, if we don't do adopted interview questions that will change but my assumption is we'll at least send the committee handouts and the selection guidance and my rationale for sending the selection guidance to the actual interview candidates is of course if we're developing and adopting them they will be public documents. Some people in our town are really good at finding public documents and following the proceedings of committees. Some are not and so to make it a level playing field all of them should, we should just send it to all of them because it wouldn't be fair to some people who know how to go through our packet or something. So the real, what I think is the real meat of six is the format of these interviews. And I've put forth five different formats. How I'm going to, you've had this document now for two and a half weeks so my assumption is that you all have read and considered this and probably hopefully have a favorite option. I am going to for the sake of the committee and also for the sake of the public summarize each very briefly highlighting their differences and then I'm going to ask each member of the committee which is their preference and why. So option A would be an OCA meeting but it would be a special OCA meeting so it would not be held during this time. It'd be an OCA meeting held probably at night that would be run by OCA presided over by a chair of OCA but could also be called as a special town council meeting and in that meeting we would bring in all of the interviewees to have a group interview where we would probably as the committee take turns asking questions whether what happens with five or not of the group and then each would answer the questions. So it would be a special OCA meeting run by OCA but could be called as a special meeting of the town council it'd be a group interview. Option B is similar except instead of a group interview it would still be on the same day but we would interview each candidate individually. We'd have to decide how much time we do for each interview I have 20 minutes in there but of course that could be changed but we would essentially schedule back to back interviews and the committee would interview each candidate individually. Remember of course that these are public meetings so that does not preclude the other candidates from being in the room during that interview but it would do one candidate at a time. Option C is also an OCA meeting doing individual interviews but over the course of multiple days instead of requiring all candidates to come on one day we would schedule interviews over the course of several days. This of course would require multiple OCA posted meetings. Option D is that OCA sets up the whole process but then turns it over to a special town council meeting so it would not be run by OCA it would be run by it'd be a special town council meeting presided over by the town council president and then so option D is the group interview and then option E would be the individual interviews but as a special town council meeting I did not put special town council meeting individual interviews multiple days because I felt like that was completely unrealistic to expect there to be potentially multiple special town council meetings presided over by the president. So are there any clarifying questions about these five options? There are obviously details within each that we could debate but what I'd like to hear is each person's preference and why for a general concept without necessarily digging into some of the nitty gritty details. Clarifying questions. Okay, why don't we just go down the line and why don't we start with Darcy? I prefer the to be an OCA meeting because I think that we should be in charge of this that's our charge and I think that from the perspective of the applicants it really is for me it would be far preferable to have an individual interview and I just think it would because of how long it takes I think it would take multiple days. If it could take one day that would be great but it would be longer than a two hour meeting so I think it would just take multiple days to do that and I think that would be the best way to really get to know each individual without having them be influenced by everyone along the line answering the same question. Okay, Alyssa. In every respect, including the fact that there is no freaking way I'm coming to multiple interviews for these, if we have 12 applicants, we're gonna, what? What is your preference Alyssa? There's no way. I'm coming to all of those. We just need a letter. Alyssa, we just need a letter. Well Darcy need a letter. I inferred that you chose option C. Darcy is C. A. Is there a particular reason why you want to give? For all the reasons why C is horrible? A, because I do want OKA to be in charge. There are specifics in here. I don't want in here that, but you said that we wouldn't talk about those. Let's just try and just think. So in terms of the general concept, the group, these are not people we're hiring to be caregivers for our family members. These are not people who are running for elected office, town-wide or district. These are people who are trying to serve on a committee and we're trying to ensure that they are qualified in the ways that we all think are qualified and that they can get along with other people. They don't need special little individual interviews to accomplish that. George, I'm gonna pass over myself for now. At the moment, at the risk of upsetting Alyssa even more, I'm leaning toward B or C, but I'm not, this is good. They were having this conversation. It should be OKA. I'm not happy with D or E. So I eliminate those immediately. So the short answer is B slash C. The thought of, I hear Alyssa 100% coming back over multiple nights, that just seems, yeah, not very attractive to say the least. So I certainly would like to be able to get this done in one day. So that does, well, for the moment, B. Sarah. Option A, for a few reasons when I think that OGA should still have precedence or control over how these interviews go, I think it allows for other counselors to still have their questions presented and answered. I don't want two things about having everybody at one time. One is, yeah, I'm with Alyssa, I don't wanna come multiple nights. The other is, when I think about this in sort of the Amherst Women's Voters Forum where everybody was there and then we all had questions, I actually feel like, especially because we couldn't really repeat what somebody said before us, I think that it actually made each one of us shine. I really liked how that worked and I feel like it would be a good way to interview people because I think you would get much more of an individual flavor of each person actually having them interviewed together. Okay, so I have, I have thought, so I'll give my, I'll give my, you know I can't do that, George. So I've gone back and forth over this for a while between A and B. I think the logistics of doing multiple days is very tricky, especially if we want to potentially also call these as a special time council meeting to allow other counselors to come. It would of course be more likely if it was just one night. Whether we have individual interviews or group interview, I've gone back and forth on as I think I stated in the last meeting. I have personally always despised group interviews when I've had to be part of one, like when I interviewed for American Eagle and we had to role play in front of each other as customer sales associates, which was real fun for my social anxiety. That said, I am personally probably leaning towards option A and the reason for that is twofold. One is I think it would just be easier to have that one question asked one time of the group and I think it would probably be more efficient. The second thing is open meeting law considerations. If we as OCA or the town council could meet in a private room to do these interviews, I actually would probably prefer option B. But what I think makes me uncomfortable is the fact that these are public meetings. And so if I was someone who had a lot of time, I might say, you know what? I wanna hear what everyone else is gonna say and it's a public meeting so I'm gonna go and I'm gonna sit in on all of the interviews. And some people might show up just for their interview and people, if someone said something that is, I think that it creates this weird discomfort for me that some people, that there might be public present, including people who are about to be interviewed who are sitting there watching everyone else's interviews while there are other people who won't be there watching other people's interviews. And I think it makes sense for us just to go all at once. The other aspect of this is if we have a bunch of people, you know, I know when I had to do the rank choice voting interviews and I think we did 10 in a row, by number 10 I was tired, I was cranky, I was hungry. And I interacted differently with those people because the first one I was like, let's go, rank choice voting. And by the last one I was like, okay, who are you? What do you want? And so I think that as far as consistency goes, having everyone done it once, I think it just makes it easier. I think that we can do it all at once and we don't have to worry about someone coming in and watching all the interviews and prepping for their interview because they're the final person and they can take notes on what everyone else did. I don't think we have to worry about the fact that the atmosphere and the room might change between interviews, we might change between interviews. And I think it just creates sort of a consistent approach. I'm open personally to either, but I do have a preference for A. So at this point I will open up the floor to general debate on this. Darcy. Seems like it would not make that much difference about the length of time that we would be putting into this process, whether we go with A or B. And, but it would make a huge difference to the applicants because they, it's a difference between there being in the limelight for 20 minutes versus whatever, four hours or something. However long it takes us to interview, you know, say we have 15 people, where are we gonna put them? Maybe we won't. Maybe we'll just have eight, I don't know. But if we do have 15, what will we do with them? Alyssa. We've had nine. It's perfectly plausible to put them in this room. Yes, we have a different structure in the room now than we did before. It's not like we can't figure this out. We could even move to a different room if we wanted to, but we can easily put them in here. We can find a way to do it. If worst case, we switch seats, we could go out there and they could be up here. If there's too many of them. So that's not a practical consideration that needs to be concerned about. There is absolutely a difference as you stated as I have found with interviews of different types in town hall that between the first interview and the seventh interview, there's just no question, but there's differences. And I'm especially concerned with something that you brought up, so thank you for reminding me of that thing that was nagging in the back of my head, just like Sarah earlier, which is that so you have your political friends and enemies all sitting out here during the group interview, that's fine, but you're the first person and nobody else is here. And you're the second person and there's two people having a conversation in the back of the room like people always do when they're at public meetings during your interview. And at the third interview, the next three applicants happened to be sitting and waiting to hear what you said. Like, it's a different vibe for each of those sets of people and that feels very unfair to me. And there are gonna be counselors who can show up to some of those, but can't show up to others. Whereas if the time block is the time block, then that's the time. George. I think I'm starting to head in this direction, but I'm trying to just imagine, visualize or imagine this process. So let's say we have five set questions, whatever, that we're going to ask and we're agreed that these are the questions we're gonna ask. And we have nine candidates. And it is then like the forums, I guess that you're describing. So one of us asks question number one and then we start at this end and each person answers and then Evan asks question number two and maybe we start at the other end. So we would make her. You can start the second person. So okay, fine, okay, all right. And okay, all right. And time limits. Yeah, no, there's gonna have to be, it's gonna be a challenge and Darcy's right. What if we have 15, I mean just, maybe, well, we'll figure it out, but maybe we'd have it over two nights, then you'd have to split it up into two nights. No, you don't. You do all 15. Alyssa, you're... I've done nine, it's perfectly plausible. About 30. Sarah. Yeah, I think you could do it in a couple of hours and I think if you're just again, thinking about how the forums went, maybe other people didn't like them. I found it the hardest out of anything we had to do running was to sit there with everybody there and then have to shine, you know, right? Without a limelight on you, you also had to shine. And I think that it worked because you had time limits and I think that it worked because there would be a time in which you were probably the first one who would be able to answer a question. So it still seemed fair. Again, what Alyssa said with opening and closing statements also worked and for, at least for me, the time actually went by very quickly because you're sort of thinking, you're sort of formulating by the time someone gets to you. I mean, I think that it's engaging enough that I feel like even if it did take us two hours or three hours, I think it would be engaging. I do think it would be engaging. I mean, you're talking to a whole bunch of different people who have different questions. I think the time would probably go by pretty quickly. George. Is anyone at all concerned about how this might drive certain very qualified and excellent candidates away? Just the format of this sort of, because it's, as Alyssa pointed out, these are not elected officials. And yet we're basically going to subject them to a process that is pretty much identical to what we subject elected officials to. We're following that format and so forth and it makes a certain sense. But I guess the thought in my mind is, is this going to keep some qualified people from applying when they see my God, I'm gonna have to sit there with eight, nine, 10 other people. And the alternative is a more, I think, interviewee-friendly format where it's one-on-one and they don't feel like they're, you know, in the huge public glare. So maybe there's nothing we can do about it. Maybe I'm the only one who shares this concern, but I'm a little concerned that this format that we're envisioning, while it gets us through in one night, it's public, as it must be anyway, does anyone share or have any concern about how this might? Short answer, for me, yes. But it's my concern about making this process public in general, right? I mean, that's been my, when I was at the residence advisory committee meeting last week, I sort of offhand mentioned that OCO is likely moving to an open process and every person in that room said that's gonna scare off applicants because every member of the RAC has said publicly they would not have applied for that committee if it was going to be a public interview process. And they said they've heard from applicants that they've interviewed for town manager once that have said, oh, if this interview was a public thing, I wouldn't have gone forward. So I have that concern about making these public in general. And so, to me, any of these options is gonna end up being the best worst option because I think this is a concern, generally, with people's privacy, but we spent five months trying to find a OML compliant process that wouldn't scare people off and we didn't do great at the end because we found it very difficult. So I guess your question is what's the one, if we have to go public, what's the one that scares people the least? Right, and I agree. I think that group interviews are intimidating. Those forums, I think were useful, but they were kind of intimidating, right? I mean, I think that's the thing, but I do also think that when it comes down to it, making sure everyone is treated consistently and fairly, to me, is going to make for a better result. I wanna go, I think Darcy had her hand up first, and then I'll go to Sarah. I was just going to agree that it is, I think it would be a fairly excruciating process to be the interviewee. And I think that it probably will discourage people, the prospect of having a group interview. Just knowing that you're only gonna be in the limelight for 20 minutes also versus the whole evening and being compared to all these other people is problematic in my mind, but I don't really care that much, I don't have to say whatever we decide, but I personally think it just would be much better for the applicants to not have to endure the group interview. Sarah. So I agree with the fact that I think that having an open interview makes it more excruciating. I think we've already winnowed down the pool of people who will be willing to do this in public. That's what we don't have an option, because when we tried to do it another way, there was so much outcry, not just from the public, but also from other counselors who really wanted to be able to see how we did that and how we made our decision. So we don't have that for an option right now. The other thing is that when you're talking about how excruciating or unfair one thing would be to the other, I'd also like you to take in consideration to a couple of things that have been said. One is that the vibe in the room could be very different from the first interview to the last interview, even if we spaced them out over five nights. The other thing is it is a public meeting, so then you would also have the problem, like Alyssa said, of who's in the audience or if somebody didn't turn off their phone and all of a sudden in the middle of you trying to keep your train of thought, somebody's phone does something really outrageous and then you've lost everything and you're the kind of person who can't get that thread back. The other is different styles of preparing for something, right? So what if you've prepared and you're the first person in, it's public, everybody sees it, people running, well, there we are running against you, are seeing it and it's somebody who's prepared, they've done their thing, they've got it, but then you have someone whose style is to be there for everybody else's interview and to take notes so that they can just knock it out of the park at the last one because they've prepared, they've prepared to shine where everybody else has sort of maybe quote unquote fallen down. That's also unfair. I would rather be in one room with the same vibe, with the same distractions and have the same amount of time as everyone else and not have things possibly skewed to someone else. So I mean, I think it's just different. I think it's more fair to have everybody in the same room at the same time. I think you're gonna get the, you're definitely gonna get a feel of people. I mean, I think you get a feel of people within two or three questions. And if you're wondering how people get along with each other or how they're gonna function together, I think also putting them in one room is a really good way to once see how people do wonder pressure, right? It's one thing George brought up and also how they work with other people and how they react to other people when they say things. So I think it could actually be a really good way to get a better feel of someone in a lot of different areas. Alyssa. Everything Sarah said, especially how they react to other people. So if somebody does say something like I hate that master plan, then depending on how the next person responds to that, right? Or if they like viciously attack them like I just did, or if they have a different way of responding to that, I think that is useful for us to see because there will be serious disagreements on the planning board and the ZBA at various points and having them yell at each other is not particularly helpful. And so seeing if anybody has that personality vibe when they're with other people, that's the way we're gonna find that out. Not if we're just in an interview with the five of us and them. We're not gonna be able to tell that. So if you're looking for that test, that's a way to have that test. But again, I mean, I think that everybody's definition of excruciating is different and I totally get the part about the role playing. Role playing is off the table for everything. We could role play something with planning board. And imagine. And we're never doing a retreat where it involves singing because I've been there, done that. We are not doing that. No trust falls, no singing, no role playing. So I get it that we all wanna learn from that. So our definitions all being different, I really feel like we're all in this together. Like we're all kind of looking at each other going, man, this is kind of tough. Versus I know that somebody who hates me is sitting in the back of the room but they're not sitting there for the next person's interview. That's really uncomfortable for me as an individual. So yeah, at least if we're kind of all together and like we know that that's the group that's out there, that's just the group that's out there and then they come and go but they're not coming and going for your individual thing. They're not staring you down from the back of you. And I think that that is actually providing people kind of more of a camaraderie sort of thing than an individual thing. Again, just because it's public, right? It would be a different conversation if it wasn't public. And that's where I said if these could be private, I wouldn't for a second do the group interviews but because they're public. I think I'm picturing an interview where there's potentially 13 counselors, right? Because if any counselor could show up here and then people in the audience and then one person at that table and I'm thinking, oh, that could actually feel much more intimidating than 13 counselors but there's five people and you have someone next to you and would those League of Women Voter forums have been more intimidating and fixed instead of sitting between David Raphson and Jackie Madonna I was by myself up on that stage in front of the crowd and that probably would have been even more uncomfortable. And so I think you're right. What's excruciating to me? Any public interview would be excruciating but if we have to do that, I think maybe because it's going to be public because there are going to potentially be people in the seats, baby, and maybe there won't be. But it actually might be more comforting to be part of a group as opposed to just the lone person at that table. I'm going to go to Sarah, but the one thing I do want to just say, so it's 11.26, we normally end our meetings at 11.30. We technically have the room until 12.30. We haven't gotten nearly as much through this document as possible. Are the members of this committee able to stay until noon? Let's start with the committee. All right, members of the committee able to stay until noon? Yeah, I always post it to longer but I always try and get us out of here within two hours. As far as our minute taker, you're only two hours, I believe, right? Are you paid for the meeting? Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to give Sarah a chance to say what she's going to say. I'm going to let us take a brief bathroom break and then I want us to come back and I want us to make a decision on one of these options. Sarah, what were you going to say? So I just wanted to reiterate something that Alyssa said, which I had also thought of, which is I'm going to compare it to when you have a baby and people say, oh, put the baby in the playpen and then you get to roam around everywhere and then someone said to me, well, what are you trying to protect if you're going to do a painting or whatever? Why don't you put yourself on the playpen and let the kid do their thing? So I would also like to bring up that there might be less intimidating or more workable actually, depending on the people we have, we might want to put them here and then we could be there and either we could do anything. We could have like three people up there or four people up there to ask questions or we could rotate. So I mean, I think if we're looking at the comfort of people, we don't have to be fixed and we're here, they're there. You know, if we're asking a fixed set of questions, is it really, I don't really, I don't care who asked them. I mean, one person could ask all the questions as long as we're agreed is what they are and we're all there to hear the answers. So we could just have one person asking all the questions. We don't have to rotate that. All right, so I am going to let us go to, it's 11.28 and we will come back at 11.32 and we're back at 11.32. So I think that we've had enough discussion on these five options generally. So no one liked options D or E and so we are eliminating those. So we have to pick between A, B and C, which are the three options, which at least one member of the committee presented a preference for. Yeah, we can eliminate C, I'll go with B. Okay, so we are now going between A and B. I think probably the easiest way to just see where we are right now after having some discussion is to have a straw vote on this and to move forward with whatever one has majority. And the reason I'm going to call it a straw vote is I don't want to have a vote given that for whatever option we choose we're going to change some of the language below it. So I don't want us to necessarily adopt one of these two options. So those of you who are in favor of option A, please raise your hand and option B, okay. So we're going to move forward with option A, of course, that wasn't an official vote and so nothing's official until it's official, right? So looking at the text of option A, this was my best attempt to construct what this could look like. So let me just walk through it. You all have it in front of you, but for the members of our devoted viewing public, let me just walk through it. So in this case it would be an OCA meeting and so the OCA chair would schedule and post the OCA meeting, my assumption being they would first reach out to all interviewees and try to find a time that works for everyone so that everyone could be present. The most logical time might also be the time when that body would meet. And so I didn't write this in here, but it would perhaps also be an option that we could say we would schedule planning board interviews when the planning board would normally meet. And so that would make sense because we're going to hope they have that time available at any point. I wrote that the town council president at their discretion may also post it as a special town council meeting. We would want to invite counselors to come to hear their responses so that they feel included and so we want to make sure that all we need is two counselors to show up and we're at quorum of the full council so it might make sense to just call it as a special town council meeting. I put that we would want to provide interviewees with at least three weeks notice. That was an arbitrary number that I put out there so don't ask me why three weeks. But my thought was we'd want to give interviewees sufficient time to be able to make sure they have that time free, especially those who might need to arrange childcare or transportation. We'd want to make sure they were sufficient. If we were only doing it one night, we want to make sure that everyone could be there that night so we want to make sure we're giving sufficient notice. One thing I put in here which you can all disagree on is I put an interviewee may request to participate remotely. I know I see some cringes and I'm just throwing out ideas that we can debate but I do think if we want to make sure that it would be really hard for me to have a really great candidate not be able to make that meeting and then not be considered. And so my thought was we could have someone participate remotely so that if they have a vacation that's already scheduled during that week, I don't want to penalize anyone because they're going on vacation. The sole agenda item would be that. I put in here shall not include public comment. If it is a OCA meeting, we are required to have public comment. It would make me incredibly uncomfortable to allow for public comment at interviews. And so I think that would require a rule change of the town council rules to perhaps exempt interviews from public comment during committee meetings. And so we'd have to figure out how to do that but it makes me uncomfortable for there to be public comment. And then of course the OCA chair would preside. We'd interview members as a group. I wrote in here that members of OCA will alternate asking the adopted interview questions which of course depends on whether we adopt an interview for questions. But as George said, that's also open. We could just decide that the chair or the designee will be the person who asked the interview questions. We could have the candidates up here and the chair there and everyone else can sit in the audience. I mean, there's ways to do this. One thing that I wrote in here for consideration but actually am incredibly opposed to is the line if the meeting is also posted as a special town council meeting at the conclusion of the adopted interview questions the OCA chair may at their discretion permit non-OCA counselors in attendance to ask questions. I put that in there as an option because it was something that was mentioned when we talked about this at our 10-21 meeting although I personally would feel uncomfortable with that and it seems to negate as having adopted an interview question. So that's a run through of what option A looks like and I am now looking forward to hearing you all care my idea part. So George, you grabbed your mic fast so I assume you have something to say. Well, first of all, what I'm wondering what people think about remotely. I mean, I like the idea that it would be terrible if somebody is eliminated just because of a vacation or something. And so remote participation would allow for that but we know that this can be difficult but maybe that's just the way it is and we have to live with it. That was the first thought little just concerned about remote participation. Yeah, I was gonna say, why don't we just try and take one thing at a time? Okay. So other thoughts about whether we would allow people to participate remotely, Alyssa? No, absolutely not. We're not capable of doing it. We've proven that time and again that we're terrible at it for town council even with two additional staff members here we're not able to manage it effectively. It totally screws up the meeting. It's a mess. They're not likely actually to use it at planning board or ZBA, they can technically but they're not likely to because of the types of work that they do but it's also, this is a matter of, we're part way down the stream because we've already solicited CAFs but for example, when we are ready assuming we have some version of this process for when we have vacancies the next time when we're prospectively looking for members rather than having to react to the loss of members like we are now we could very well as has been done in the past with replacing as I said many times now school committee members, library trustees we've picked a night ahead of time when we announced the vacancy that already worked in that case for all the remaining school committee members and all the remaining select board members for example which was no picnic to come up with but everybody knew before they even applied so we may have lost some people right there who couldn't have been to that thing. Where we're at associated with this given that we were already mid stream is we would need to do some work to figure out a time that everybody can be there but we would pick a time everybody can be there. So if you have a vacation plan we won't schedule it for that week. Yes, people get sick. Yes, people have childcare emergencies. Yes, they have work emergencies. Yes, their flights get canceled. That sucks. But we wouldn't end too bad. So and if all those things have happened they're not likely to be able to effectively remotely participate anyway because remote participation works best when it's not required to but it works best when you're planning it ahead like I'm stuck in a hotel in Ohio and I can just sit there and do it. If we know you're gonna be stuck in a hotel in Ohio we just won't schedule it for that night. So I'm absolutely dedicated to ensuring that any body group that has applied so far and that whenever we decide the pool is sufficient that we would pick a night that they could do it even if it was less than our preferred night even if it did end up not being like than the usual planning board night if for some reason that was like the only time everybody could do it. But I'm not at all down with remote participation. Other thoughts on remote participation? Darcy. I'm fine with remote participation. I just have, you know, I've been, I've had a number of meetings of the ECAC where we've had remote participation and that was important for those people to be included. So, you know, if we have a lot of applicants we're bound to have some people that are having, you know, are gonna have some trouble being there but you know, anyway, that's just how I feel. Sarah. I wouldn't wanna try to dabble with remote participation. I have to agree but I think that it often doesn't work and then I think it's gonna throw everybody else who's in that room off their game. There's also the consideration that you might not be comfortable in a room full of people so you might take the option of remote participation or more than one person could do it because maybe you think being interviewed in a group is too hard. I'm not saying for sure but that could also happen. You don't want five people doing remote participation that would be a nightmare. And then something that was said to me before was that so if we're being flexible enough to really try to make sure that we have a time set where everybody can come, I think that the fact that if you really wanna be there, and again, this is someone who's often not around because of life circumstances but I do think that there is something to be said for the fact that if you are really interested in this you will do your best to be there so. Other, George, I know you wanna say something. There's a technological side which we've all struggled with but is that a good enough reason? Maybe it is. But there's also the thought that now is another way we're gonna eliminate some people. I'm pretty sure we're not gonna have anybody left. Why wouldn't we eliminate them? We're scheduling around them. So I went back and forth on this one as well and I sympathetic to both sides. As someone who has had to remote participate in a town council meeting on the phone driving to Boston it was very difficult. I did get disconnected three different times. People told me they couldn't hear me very well and so I do think technologically it has been a challenge. But I also do have concerns looking at our upcoming process given our current timeline where we're at and where we're likely to be. It seems likely that we're probably going to be scheduling interviews for planning board in early January and in a community that has such a high number of academics who often take off for that period of time. Would we tell someone you can't serve because you're taking a month even though you could Skype in? Doesn't mean they won't be able to serve adequately in the future. It just means that they currently have something scheduled for. Maybe they're doing their research in Houston for January. So I think it's really tough because I wanna make sure everyone who applies is able to interview. But I also recognize that remote participation has been really difficult. George, you had your finger on the button. Just takes another tool out of our toolbox and maybe we wanna take it out but it is a tool and it's an instrument and it is frustrating at times but it's something we can use. If we remove it then we can't use it. We leave it in, I understand. Sarah's point, what five people wanna make use of it then it really does become a nightmare. I don't know, Alyssa. It doesn't become a nightmare, it becomes unworkable. I mean, you're saying, oh, it's uncut. Well, you know, Evan, you got disconnected three times. Well, Alyssa, you heard part of the meeting and you didn't hear part of it. It's an interview. They can't miss part of the meeting. They can't drop out during their question and it's not fair to them if they don't get to hear the other people's questions answers just like the other people did. So we, if what I would strongly suggest is that we take it out of this and if we find we're having trouble, we just can't schedule something. It just can't be done because somebody's in Malaysia in January and we thought, sure, we were gonna do this in January. Then let's revisit it because we know it's one person that we absolutely have to schedule around. But as a general rule to have it available we are not actually capable of managing it effectively. It's not the same as when if we were having an OKA meeting and somebody was calling in just like eCat that would work out fine more than likely. That's not an interview situation. The public's not gonna be able to hear them private. We've seen this happen but we can obviously talk about it again if it turns out we're having an impossible time scheduling people. We won't just say, well, I guess we'll never fill that opening because we can't schedule it. We'll talk about it again then but I'd like to take it out and then revisit it if we need it. Sarah. So thinking about academic schedules say you do have five people. We've seen how many people who serve on town council and other committees, a lot of them are academics. So maybe it'd be better if we can possibly hold off to maybe the last week of January when people are back instead of having almost every single person because they're academics having to participate remotely. And it maybe isn't even a problem. George. Again, small point but the way it's worded is that an interview may request to participate remotely but the answer could be no. I mean, it doesn't, an interview can participate remotely. Simply may and it allows for Alyssa's suggestion that if we are really in a difficult situation we have the option but you find the language is just, you just would like to strike it completely. Okay. There's no legal requirement that we need to. No, no, absolutely, I understand but the language is such that the chair is perfectly free to say no for any number of reasons. But if, yeah. It's also worded so that the chair could say yes you can but you can't because you have a good reason and you don't. Right, no that's true. Which is totally not what we want to put in writing somewhere because I know that Evan would love to be capricious in that fashion but we are actually encouraging a future chair to be capricious in that fashion if we include that wording. So let's vote on this. I want to vote on this language. Because I think I'm really torn with this especially given one of the members that we appointed to RCV was a remote participant interview. You know I think that there's good reason to do it. I am sort of amenable to what Alyssa said about we don't have to put it in but we also, I don't also want it prohibited outright in the text. You're suggesting just taking this out. You're not suggesting adding language that says interviewees may not participate remotely. So if it becomes an issue and we have a circumstance we can decide as OCA to allow a member because it's not prohibited but we're not putting it out there. Well I think your motion would be to strike the sentence. Is that? I move to strike the sentence. I'm gonna second that. And my rationale being that we still have that tool available to us. We don't need to write it in here to have the tool available to us. It's not implied to be capricious and it also is not ripe for abuse which it is ripe for abuse if we put it in there. All right. All those in favor of the motion to strike that sentence? Raise your hand and say aye. Opposed? Okay, so that is four to one. Okay, so that takes care of that sentence. Other things people wanna bring up about this. Darcy. I just have a question if we take it out but we're still open to using it then we can be capricious, right? Oh yeah. We can do whatever we want. No, we as a group are going to sit here and say, by gosh we've asked so and so to set up these many interviews and we've tried all these different dates and we were so close and we thought we had it but then one person just can't do it. What do you think? Should we go ahead and go ahead or should we wait till they're back the following when it turns out everybody can actually come that week even though it doesn't meet our initial timeline? So you're saying we can use it under certain circumstances when needed. Right. If we as a body agree. I think it would have to be a discussion and potentially a vote of the body. Circumstances that arise, right? Because are we under a time pressure? Are they under a time pressure? Who's under time pressure? Okay, Sarah. So I'd like to take exception to having, it's okay for me if other counselors are here, I'm gonna bring up a whole different topic. If we wanna call it a meeting of, the special meeting of the town council and have other counselors here, I'm fine with that but I don't want other counselors actually asking questions at the time simply because I think it would end up getting awkward in a few different ways. I think it's fine if we ask other counselors other questions that you would like to have asked and then the entire council agrees on what questions need to be asked but I think it would be confusing for OCA and I think it would be confusing for candidates to maybe then have a question lobbed at them from someone who's not on OCA. I think it's unwieldy. Okay. So Sarah's taking issue with the final sentence. Other thoughts on the final sentence? Darcy. I would like to get rid of that sentence too and I'd also like to change the second sentence just to say. Let's take one at a time. Okay, all right, last sentence. So let me, is there anyone, George? Is there anyone who likes the last, who wants to keep the last sentence? Nope. Okay, then by consensus, let's just remove it. All right, wow, that was easy. Can we do the rest of them like this? It's because we had such good discussion that happened to this point. Okay, so Darcy, you had a recommendation on the second sentence. I think just to give us a little flexibility, we could just say OCA will ask the adopted interview questions of the group and each interviewee will have an opportunity to answer each question instead of saying alternate. Yeah, I want to get over alternate, I agree. We can just leave that open so that we can figure that out. What's good language that makes it clear we're going to ask a set of questions but what do you say and who's going to ask them? OCA will ask the adopted interview questions of the group and each interviewee will have the opportunity to answer each question. So then that leaves it open as to whether it's going to be Evan doing it, it's going to leave it open as to whether we're going to alternate and we can figure that out. So Darcy made a suggestion to change the language. OCA will ask the adopted interview questions which provides us flexibility as to whether that, what that format will look like. Georgia agrees, other thoughts? It would just be OCA will ask the adopted interview questions. OCA will ask the adopted interview questions. So just strike alternate. Okay, so I'm okay with that too. Because my thought is that we probably have a pre-interview meeting of OCA where we decide all the logistics and we can vote. Okay, other thoughts? On this section, we so far removed two sentences and altered another. Alyssa? Three weeks is too long. 14 days is perfectly adequate and it's a time frame we use for lots of other things. Are there thoughts on length of time? So, can I follow up? So I feel like this is kind of mixing a couple of different issues together just in terms of what the impression is. So what we're doing is this makes it, the way this is phrased, one might perceive which is probably not one's intent that we're just gonna pick a date that's three weeks from now, that's on a planning board night and you better be there. We're not doing that. We are actually at a time most convenient as it says to all interviewees and then we only need 14 days notice to those interviewees and the public. So just, it's just like a little tweak to, I mean beyond the 14 days versus 21s is to make it really clear that we are, like you say, most convenient to all interviewees and then letting them know what we settle on at least 14 days ahead of time. Sarah. The only thing I wonder about that is that there are certain jobs where schedules come out every two weeks and you have to give a little bit more than two weeks. Notice if you want a night off or a certain morning off. So I guess I would just maybe, we can say two weeks, if somebody's like, hey, I work at Target and I have, this is a night you picked but I actually work like Tuesday through Saturday every single night from four to closing and I need a few more days before like the two weeks schedule goes out to ask my manager for that night off. I would also want to work with that because not every, people have different types of jobs. George. I'm actually going in a different direction at the moment. This idea of a time most convenient to all interviewees. I'm just, first of all, practically, I'm thinking of a chair trying to get, I mean, who knows, five, six, seven, eight, nine, people all agree on one night. That's just not gonna work. And also, look, this is a public body of some serious authority. This is a big deal. And we're gonna set the night and we're gonna try to be as humane and flexible, whatever, but the bottom line is, this is the night. If we're gonna do this format and it's gonna be probably the night and say the planning board meets whatever, it's just gonna be, right? And if you can't make it, that's the way it goes. I just think trying to come up with a night, I mean, if we're talking one or two candidates or three candidates, probably that would be, not an issue, but I can imagine a situation where you're dealing with a lot of different people and it seems to me that there's a limit to what we can do and I'm leaning somewhat towards saying, look, this is, you know, we give you adequate notice, this is what it's gonna be and we have the option that we don't broadcast too much that we maybe could do something remotely in a very extreme case. But otherwise, look, if you can't make it, we're sorry, but you know, what do people think? I mean, this idea of trying to get a time that all the interviewees can meet. Darcy. Well, I think I agree that it's probably going to have to be on a Wednesday night at the time of the planning board because that makes sense, right? That we want people to be available at that time. So, but I don't get what you're saying, George, what about the three weeks notice? Two weeks, I mean, I don't care so much about two or three weeks, I mean, the more the barrier in a way, but it's just whatever date we set is the date we set and just trying to have, tell the chair, find a date that's agreeable to all the interview candidates. I don't see why. If they can't make it, one day, I mean, it's gonna involve night meetings, it's gonna involve public service, it's gonna be a pain, that's the nature of the beast. We're not trying to be arbitrary, we're not trying to rule people out, but obviously if you work nights and the planning board or zoning board meets at night, this is not a position you can apply for anyway. So there's just a lot of things that are gonna rule you out. I'm just thinking, let's pick a night, give them at least two, maybe three weeks, but at least give them adequate notice and we've done our job. Alyssa. So I think we're not talking about different things, we're actually talking about the same thing, we're just talking about a little bit differently, which is that I wanna give people a choice of basically two nights and see which works for the majority of the people. If it turns out they both work for all of them, then great, but I don't wanna just pick a night and have it turn out that three people can't come that night. If I had just chosen the other week, they would have all been able to come. I'm not talking about a doodle poll for every conceivable night of the week, which also brings us to the question I know we're out of time, is are we running this on the same night as during a planning board meeting, which is the actual night of the month they normally need to be there because of the way they meet every two weeks, or which forces them to miss the planning board meeting scheduled for that night, as well as the planning board members to miss the meeting for that night, which seems a little bit funny, or do we put it on the off week and in which case, since they normally meet twice a month, do we just pick the two off weeks and say it's normally whichever it is, the second and fourth, but we're picking the third and the fifth this one time, I mean, it's not gonna be perfect, but I'm thinking we offer two dates, we don't offer the whole universe of dates. So I'm open to 14 days, but also I do think that we wanna work with people to try our best to find a time that works, and if it happens to be a Tuesday night that everyone's magically available, I don't think we need to be committed to, it should be during the regular planning meetings. I think the language was at at least three weeks, and I think if it's at least 14 days, that means that we need to give at least 14 days notice to the public, to the council, to everyone, but if we hear back from someone like, I can make that night, but if you give me an extra week so that I can put in a request to have that night offered, or to find someone to swap a shift, then we can say, okay, it's gonna be 21 days. To me, it's the at least, I don't mind lowering that bar because we're not doing it that most, but I do think that we wanna try, I know people who have been able to shift their work schedule, like if you're someone who works retail and you normally work nights, you might not be able to make that night two weeks from now, but you can shift to mornings or something. So I think writing people, I think you wanna work with people, and Angela has done this fairly successfully. I mean, she and I would hope that the Oka chair would be able to work with her on this because he currently would be intimidated by such a task, but I mean, we got 10 rank choice voting interviews on the same day, and I think there's ways to do it, but you gotta work with people, and that's my thought. It's usually first and third. George. Well, if it's only two nights, you're choosing from. We're all here. Sarah. So, and I just wanna make sure that we get people from like all different walks of life. I mean, there are plenty of people who do work a job where you do have to ask for time off a little bit before, at least two weeks before, but that doesn't mean if you wanted to apply for this that you didn't have a chance to then say, look, I'll work Sundays, but I really need to always have Wednesday night off because if I get on this committee, I'm serving it. I just, I don't wanna sort of knock out a demographic that might have a harder time just getting that two weeks notice, and that's all I'm saying. I don't know how long it takes to get childcare because some people might need to get childcare also. I guess I would lean toward the most notice that we can give because of the importance of these particular committees and because of the public interest in finding out about them and in general. So I kind of like the three weeks myself. So it is now a little past noon. I was hoping we could get through this whole document, but I also knew that was ambitious. So our next meeting is December 2nd. We are going to have to finish up on, so let me talk for five more minutes. One on timeline, one on tonight. For meeting on the 2nd, we're gonna have to finish up this wordsmithing editing, this option A section. You're also going to need to take a look at sections seven and eight. I'm hoping we can get through those quickly. Seven is OCA making a recommendation, and then eight is what happens when it comes to the town council. There's some alternate language in there because there was some disagreement on October 21st about whether OCA needed to make an actual recommendation or whether OCA's job was to do all of the stuff that we've talked about today. And then just to say, all right, town council, you have the CIS, you've seen the interviews. We're not making a recommendation because you've already seen everything. You don't need our input. And so thinking about those two things, what the plan is going to be, so I will make some of the edits that we talked about today. So we'll talk about finish talking about section six, and we'll talk about section seven and eight. And then I'm going to ask us to go back through and the things that I highlighted that we're gonna have individual votes on. So OCA's disclosure of total number of applicants and section four AC and section five, were the three things that I'd marked as individual votes. We're going to then take those individual votes and then we are going to vote on the entire process. The goal is for us to have, as OCA, adopted this process by the end of our meeting on December 2nd. Then the goal is to present the process to town council at their meeting on December 16th. I've had many conversations with our town council president about whether the town council needs to officially approve our process. I have remained steadfast in my belief that the internal processes of a committee do not require the vote of the town council. And so I believe that is going, that's the case. That said, the agreement that I came to the president is that we would provide this process to the council for them to see so that they know what we're doing. We're not going to ask for an affirmative vote of the council, but if members of the council have serious issues with parts of it, of course, they are free to make a motion to say, no, you can't. So we're not necessarily asking for a debate about it or just saying, here's what we're doing, after which point we'll actually schedule the interview. So all of this requires us, if we wanna have interviews in January, which I think the councilors do, and certainly the planning board is itching for a new member, we need to be able to finish our part of this up on the second so that it can be discussed at the council on the 16th so that we can move forward with interviews. Are there any questions about this timeline? Alyssa. So that means we need to finish that on the 16th at town council and they can tell us what we got wrong, but we'll see whether or not we need to meet again about that. But the reality is we'll intend on the 17th to assuming we have staff support to do it, schedule interviews. Because we'll be tight if we're trying to look at it. So we'll need to have that okay. So this is where I guess a little bit tight. So my intent was to use the second to finish this, well, my intent now, given that we didn't get through it today, was to use the second to finish this up and vote. Our next OCA meeting and the final one of the year after that is December 9th, which I had set aside completely for our liaisons discussion, which we have pushed to the back burner because this was more important. And us to bring, we would also be bringing liaisons to the council for the 16th. There's some desire to have that discussion brought to the council before sort of the annual potential reorganization of committees. That said, if we adopt to this process, we don't actually schedule interviews until we have done section three, which is declared that the pool is sufficient. And so we would need to have an additional OCA meeting to say the pool is sufficient if we don't do it on the 9th. So we can't have interviews in January if we're giving at least 14 days notice to people, realistically, given that it's gonna take a few hours of- What I'm hinting at is the possibility of scheduling an additional OCA meeting. Well, it really depends on, I have to look at the timeline. And it could be the end of, we could have an OCA meeting in very early January and schedule them for mid to late January. But I do have to look at the timeline. We didn't get through as much as today as I had hoped. My hope was to do that discussion on the second, but it's clear now that we're not gonna be able to do that. Alyssa. It feels like we need, okay, I'm gonna say right now, the pool's not sufficient. And so I feel like we need to have our process ready and re-announce to people that we're about to do this to see if we get any additional people interested before we declare the pool sufficient because people have been unclear enough on the process up to this point, that to have, to let people know what the process is and thus leave the applications open for a relatively short period of time, I know holidays, blah, blah, blah. But to say that, so that then we might get some additional applications and then we can decide that the pool's sufficient and then we have the 14 days notice and after we've had some leg work by Angela and so I'm still saying January's not looking very feasible, but my impression I guess was just in my own mind that it's not like the public knows we're doing this. And so yes, they'll hear it at the town council, but I'm not sure it'll be clear to them then that we aren't just talking about a process that's for people that already applied. We're still looking actively for people right now. Okay. So the one last agenda item that we'll just finish up right now is report at tonight town council. That's in the packet. It is a pretty brief report. It just says what we did on those six set of appointments from the town manager, all of which we did recommend approval unanimously and it provides some content on the debate we had. I intend to keep my all report to be just we unanimously approved. And if you're curious about the discussion, I assume you read the report. And I also intend to give the council a heads up to expect this process at some time in December. The original goal was to give it to them for the December 2nd meeting, but that doesn't seem like it's gonna happen. So to let them know that this is coming. Anything anyone else wants to add or questions? Darcy. Are we expecting or maybe you said this already, any appointments from the town manager? The last conversation I had with the town manager, I said, you're not going to submit anything for our next meeting because I won't consider them, right? And he said, yeah, I don't have anything coming to you immediately. For the December 2nd meeting. So I have to check in with him for about the December 2nd meeting as I was just asking particularly about this meeting, given that it is November 18th, any thing filed today on could be considered at the December 16th meeting. Yeah, in his report, he listed, you know, four or five committees that he's looking. Right. So, but in that case, any town manager appointments given the timing I would save until the December 2nd meeting. I mean, December 9th meeting. All right, so with that, I am adjourning us at 12, 13 p.m. Thank you.