 Good evening and welcome back to Byline. This is our public affairs show here at Amherst Media and it's a show cosponsored by the Amherst League of Women Voters. And we've now had I think all of our counselors on and we've had some other guests come in to tell us about some of the work that they're doing that the council will be making decisions around. And today we have a very special guest. He's a singular figure in town because we have only one of them. Our town manager Paul Bockelman. So thank you for joining us this evening. Thanks for inviting me. And so as you know we're trying to help people understand what's going on with our transformation of our from our old form of government to our new form of government. So this is your fierce appearance. We hope it won't be the last. And I just want to start at the very beginning. So you know there's a saying in politics where you stand often depends upon where you sit. Where are you sitting these days. So we have a new town room organized specifically for the council and I sit in a separate some people call it the penalty box because it looks like a hockey penalty box and the town clerk or the clerk to the council and I sit in that separated from the legislative body which is the council. In the previous form of government the town manager sat next to the chair of the select board and it was part of the executive of the select board. But clearly the new charter has it as being that the town council is the legislative body and we had conversations about this. Should the town manager sit next to the president of the council or not. And it was to me it was like that the town council is the preeminent body in the town. The town manager is appointed and served serves the council and should sit separate. But yet it has to be present at every meeting. So you can be a resource to them. You can hear the debate. You can take the notes. You can get your direction. Correct. And you know what's going on. Exactly. So how has it been different in this new role for you given as you said a minute ago that you were part of the executive with the select board. It was a shared responsibility. But now you under the charter have a lot of the powers of the executive. The council has a few that are on the usual for a council but fine as a legislative body. But they mainly focus on policy and legislation. And you're responsible for most of the executive functions. So how is it different in your role having now served three whole months in our new form of government. Right. So it's a wholly different form. All the power emanates from the voters. That vote. All that power is then vested in the council. The voters also elect the board of library trustees and school committee and a couple others. But really the power does devolves devolves into the council. And that's where the power list lives. That power then they appoint the executive and they can determinate the executive at will. They they are served as a board of water and sewer commissioners. They serve as the board of the take care of the public ways. They have an appointing authority of the finance committee. And what's new is that any department head that I point goes to the town council for review and approval. OK. And so speaking of making appointments. Tell us what's different. Who you appointing now versus the council. And how's that all work. Yes. So the charter and its wisdom placed the major policy making boards as appointed by the council. That would be the planning board and the zoning board. There's a couple other. The participatory budgeting commission and the ranked choice voting committee. But those are sort of one offs. These are the major policy making boards for the town. All of the others are appointed by the town manager. That's not so different in the prior form of government to select board. They're about say there's 39 40 different boards out there. The selectman the support of the select board appointed about half of them and the town manager appointed about half of them. So now the town major has a half that that I point to previously plus the ones that the select that the select board had appointed. So there's more appointments over 200 people serve in this as volunteers on these committees. But the major ones that you know the major land use ones that have permanent really have permanent impact on the town are appointed by the council. Okay. But again who makes most of the appointments these days. The town major makes most of the appointments. Okay. Subject to review by every appointment is subject to review by the council. The council can accept reject or do nothing. Got it. Okay. So that's a lot more power in the hands of the in the hands of the town manager. But it's ultimately checked by the power of the council. So there are many there 15 of the boards were appointed by the town manager without checks by anybody. So there's some diminutive reduction of power to the power in that way. Yeah. Okay. And and all the town all the town department has were appointed by the town manager without review. These are all now reviewed by the council. Okay. And speaking of appointments because we focused on the show a couple of times on this whole area. Yeah. So the finance committee is fast at work already on the budget with with the town manager and the town departments. And there are if I'm remembering correctly for resident members will be appointed to that council who are non voting is it forward to well they they have I think they're settling on three they're settling on three okay that's going to be a difference. I'm not that's going to go to the council at some point for review. Okay. They have the five counselors who serve and then there's there's provision for non voting members. And the first iteration was to have four non voting members. I think the finance committee has been at their last meeting on Tuesday reviewed that charge and came out. I wasn't there for that this part of the meeting came out with three members as being an optimal number for the so they're advancing three the council will have to approve that. At that point anybody who wants to be in one of those three seats gets to go to the town website find the appropriate thing to click on and you'll find the application. Yes. To volunteer it's not an application specifically for the finance committee but a general volunteer application form. So we change the used to be called the citizen activity form. We I change that to say community activity form because you don't have to be a citizen to participate in local government. And so we and we change some other things where you can click any committee that you'd like to serve on. You can click an area if you want to do sustainability or finance. You don't know exactly what committee that hits or you can say I'm just want to volunteer someplace and you can check as many of those boxes as you want. And that comes in we start to review all those applications. Very good. So it's not too late. No. If our viewers are sitting there thinking I'd like to be a non voting member of the finance committee. Do you think those appointments are going to be made in time for that to work for this year or are we kind of getting laid in the process. Yeah. I don't think the intention is for it to be done for this year. I think they intend for it to happen early enough so they can start on July 1 for the FY 21 budget. Sounds good. It may be a little bit off on the language right in the in the charter. Although the charter might say up to four and therefore zero. The charter says may they don't have to appoint any residents to the finance committee if they choose not to. Excellent. So the fact that they're voting hopefully to do that. I just gave a bias. Try to be unbiased. But is consistent with the vision of the charter which is you really want to engage people in as many ways and opportunities as possible. But because it's may it doesn't have to happen this year. But this year they'll get it all set up so that it'll be ready for next year. That means the people who apply and get named will start at the very beginning of the budget process. Not be jumping into the middle. Which is actually not a really great thing. Correct. Because they're already going to be behind if they're appointed in a month or something like that. Okay. So anything else we should talk about on appointments. You got some hot stuff out here that the folks need to know about that you're looking for people. The thing I'm most excited about is the community participation officers. Okay. What we call CPOs. And we're going to have them on later this month I think it will be. But I would like you to explain briefly what they do. So the charter has a big emphasis on outreach to the public. And the community and they had called for a community participation officer. But I envision that as being not just one person who happens to have a really broad skill set. But I've chosen three people who are already on staff. Who each are serving as a team of community participation officers. And you know there are three people who have diverse views of the diverse opinions. Diverse parts of the community that they're part of. Two of them are coaches. They all have children in the school district. When you're a coach and you have kids that means you're hyper organized. And so they are people who go out and get them. And that's one of their things. It's improved communication to the public. One is our communications officer. And she is doing a lot in ramping up our social media and going to where people are. And so these three women are just powerhouses. And it's just that's I think that's probably the most exciting thing that's happening in our town. So that's really great. Well I was going to say that that's really great because you have existing staff as opposed to going out and posting one new job and investing all of that responsibility and authority to try to develop those functions that set of functions in one person. And you spread it across three existing people who have some experience in town government who reach into different parts of the community. And you didn't add to the bottom line of the budget. Right. All three went to college here. One grew up here as a child. And so it just brings a real interesting and exciting way to engage the public. That's really terrific. And on the show where we have them on, which is I think going to be in a few weeks, we'll have them explain what their functions are. But basically this was an innovation that was included in the charter, which was really designed to create a robust and dynamic civic engagement, capacity and interaction between the government and the people of the community. OK. So now what's your role around legislation? So the legislation is done by the council itself. And some of these things we're still working out, some of the counselors say that we're building the plane as we fly it. You know, in some ways it feels like. That's been said many times on this show. I was thinking about this. It feels like we have a new baby and we've cleaned it up and it looks presentable. But now it's starting to walk and we're saying, well, we'll be careful here, be careful here, because we're going to stumble. But we're figuring it out. The council is 13 talented people who bring a wide range of experiences to the table. Some have not been involved in government before. So there's a lot of education. Some have been involved for a long time. So it's a really nice balance. And the key, I think, is that they really like each other. Which I think is kind of, nobody knew. And they are building a relationship with each other. And I think that's the most positive aspect of the council so far. So you work with town meeting 240 or so people. You work with the select board, five individual active members. And now you've got a panel of 13. How is that different? So it's, for the town staff, it's much more challenging in a lot of ways. At town meeting, it was a defined period of time. An article came up or a budget came up. They had to make a decision that night. They would not adjourn until they made a decision. This is a much more iterative process, where if the council's not satisfied, they'll send staff back and say, we need more information on this or that or the other thing. I think it's a stronger form of government. I sort of felt that previously, but now that I'm in it, I'm experiencing that it's more demanding on staff in a good way. We're being held more accountable and the expectations are going to be higher because these are individuals who it's for many of them, it's a full-time job to be part of this government. And it shouldn't have to be because it's too much of a commitment because we want anybody to be able to participate. But they take it very seriously and they have high standards. But that also means that because they're having that kind of interaction on the policy level with the staff, they're getting detail that they need in order to make good decisions. And that's part of the strength of this, even though it's going to cause, it's going to create more work. But the end product is going to be better, which means it's going to work better in the end, which then may mean that some time that you would have spent further down the road trying to fix problems and trying to deal with chaos that might have been otherwise created gets eliminated. So maybe it's sort of front-end loaded as opposed to doing a lot of repair work further down the road. Yeah, I don't think there's a perfect form of government. There's a lot of examples of this form of government out there. But Amherst is unique. And I think everybody is watching this. Totally unique. I have experience in multiple cities and this place is much different and mostly in a good way because we've been doing interviews of people who want to be on our energy and climate action committee and so much talent that's marbled through this town. And people are engaged and the values of the community are very strongly, especially articulated in the charter about we want better engagement and more engagement, which I really appreciate. So speaking of the charter and surprises, things that you didn't anticipate that were either very positive and beneficial, some of which you've started to talk about and others that maybe were unanticipated that need to be thought about because it may not work as well as was imagined because there's a lot of really great ideas. But many of them have never been in practice in this community for sure and maybe nowhere else. So having a the best example so far has been the public forum on the budget. The concept, I think from the charter was to engage the public before the town manager set the budget. So you want the public should be coming in and saying what they what their values are, what their priorities are. And one of the things that they try to put in is that 50 percent of the time had to be spent listening to the public. And I think that was to put a metric in there to make sure that counselors or the town manager wasn't bloviating and just soaking up all the time. But that was really about enforcing listening practices. What happened is that you make a presentation and it's said to say it's a 20 30 minute presentation and then there's 20 minutes of comment. But we can't adjourn the meeting until we've allowed another 10 minutes or whatever time. And so people are sitting there quietly because we're listening to nothing. Nothing. And it was just a little bit awkwardness. I think part of it we own that because we could have done a better job at reaching out to the public. Maybe there's a different way to structure it to engage the public. You know, I think there's been a lot of positive feedback on how the school district did their listening sessions that was a different. You weren't people sitting in an auditorium raising their hand to be recognized. It was everybody was engaged around the table and multiple tables. So there's other things that we can learn from that. And another option might be shorter presentations. You're talking to the manager. I don't know if that's an option. OK, but also further down the road, excuse me, the chart is going to get reviewed. And at that point, that might be a type of problem that could be corrected in a revision of the charter. But that's years away. And in the meantime, you have to follow the charter and and importantly, follow the spirit of the charter. And this may be sort of off the wall. Is there is there anything that that jumps out at you from the experience with the charter that you want to particularly highlight as being a really great innovation? Well, I think we talked about the community participation officers as a really good innovation. I think aligning the policy making under the council and having the executive report to the council and be subject to the approval of the council. That's another good thing. So I think we have a more clarity of vision in our minds of staff. We as we're talking thinking about things, we want them to set the big picture and then we will carry out the mission. But it's really great to say the buck stops with the council. You tell us what what the goals are for the community. It's our job to implement. And you didn't mention in the list of positive innovations. But you mentioned earlier the provision in the charter that I don't remember the name of it. It comes out of Cambridge and it's the participatory budgeting, the participatory budgeting committee. So do you see that as an exciting innovation here? And can you also? I know Andy's coming on. Andy Steinberg, the finance chair in a week or two. But can you give us any insight into how that's coming together? Because people have to start preparing and thinking about how to use that tool because it goes into effect with this budget. Does it not? No, it doesn't. It does. So what the charter calls for is for the council to set up a participatory budgeting commission to study how to do it. And they have a reporting date, I think it's December of this year, to say here's what you think we think you need to do. And it's a recommendation to the council. We do a little snippet of that by having a community request form. If someone has a capital project, they think isn't on the list of our capital plans that they can submit that to the through the website. And we had six of those presented this morning to the Joint Capital Planning Committee of different things that people felt like the town wasn't addressing. And these are ideas. One was for renovations to the Cherry Hill Golf Course. One was for renovations to the North Amherst Library, Road Projects, things like that. And so people can write this in, submit it, and they'll get a hearing before the Joint Capital Planning Committee. And I think that's one piece of this. But participatory budgeting is new. Cambridge, I think, is the only community in this kind of wealth that does. And they allocate a certain sum of money out of the budget and say, you guys decide how you want to spend it. And that was my concern was we're getting further and further along in the budget process. And if a pool of money was set aside, and there wasn't enough time to engage the community and to make sensible decisions that we might be in a really tough spot in this budgeting cycle. So this is a planning year for that and a choice voting and ranked choice voting. And have has that committee been set up? No, not yet. That's and do they have a deadline that you think they're both in December as deadlines to do this year? OK, so those committees are going to have quite an active summer and fall to meet those deadlines. Economic development, can you give me some reflection on how you see as town manager having worked with people in the community on various things that were in the nature of economic development now with the new town structure. And I know there's talk about creating an economic development committee. So how does this look from the town manager's point of view as a function in town and how you think the new government is going to interact with that? So the town has been forward looking for many years and has a master plan. And that's when I came here, I read the master plan to understand what the mission was of the of the town. And what the town basically said is we love our rural character. And oftentimes I went to college here. So when people said, well, what's different? And I said, basically, the town looks kind of the same, at least my way out to Hampshire College, the farmland is still there. So the town's done a remarkable job at preserving landscapes and vistas. But the town said, but we need growth to sustain our operations. And so they said, concentrate our development into town centers. And that's been a real focus of development downtown North Amherst East East Amherst Pomeroy Village Atkins Corner. Those are the areas that we want to direct development into. So those there obviously have been development downtown and that has had mixed reviews. Some people love it. Some people don't. But the economic benefit to the town is is unmistakable. You know, one property that may have paid by a factor of 10 will have paid more taxes. And that is revenue coming into the town year after year after year. So the town council is presumably working on conceptualizing the charge of the Economic Development Committee, the kind of membership that they are looking for. Do you have any sense of timetable from conversations with the president? No. So what the what the town with the council, I think we'll finalize on Monday is they've done the hard work of basically creating the four major committees of the council. It's four big buckets that when something comes into them, they have to put it into a bucket. So the finance committee is required by the charter. So anything money goes into that. The they have a sort of a legislative committee called the governance organization and legislation committee, the GOL committee. So that's legislation finance. They have their important non-employment. So they have an outreach communications and appointments committee. So that's the third bucket. And then they have this fourth budget bucket that they're going to create called Community Resources Committee. And that's going to be for land use issues. That's how I see it at least. So anything with land use will go to so they now they have I think they've got the structure and it's not unusual for cities to have that kind of structure. But the council now has a place to put almost every issue that comes before them. They can say we can delve it delegated out to one of their committees. So with the would a fifth then potentially be economic development? No, I think that they've decided to separate out economic development to be a town committee, but not a council committee. So these these four committees, I just said, are committees of council of the council. OK, there are 39 committees. Otherwise, this would be a 40th committee to focus on economic development. And the climate change and energy committee that they're creating is a town committee. It's a town committee, but it happens to have two counselors that sit on it. OK, and so we're going to see some hybrids. As as they as the council figures out, we want to do work in a particular area. They also have to think about what's the structure and where does it belong? Is it a multi member committee? Is it a town council committee? Is it something else? So very good. Well, we are coming toward the end of our time together. Any final reflections on this transition and how it's going? Well, first credit to the council and the president in particular, who's they put an enormous amount of time to build this government. And it takes it's a lot. And I watch your first show and you laugh. You almost scoffed when she said, oh, we'll be done in a few months. And you said, no, it's trying to be controlled about it. But I heard her say that. And I thought, oh, my God, it's going to take you know long, long time. So it's it's years. And it can be anywhere from some of the issues are just so interesting. Like how how do they address each other? You know, yeah, councilor so and so Mr. Amiz so and so they finally said, this is too awkward for us. We're just going to say our first names because we like each other. We're going to do that. It's it's really interesting to see the dynamics play out of how it's yeah, because you're standing up something from from total scratch. You've got the blueprint in the charter. But there's a zillion things that have. Are they going to have assigned seats or not? Let me sit down. But it's a privilege to be part of this. It's so thrilling. It's just a lot of work for everybody. Well, you've always been high energy and you don't seem to have lost any of it from this. And you still have a full head of hair and you don't look like you're not sleeping. So thanks for all the great work that you're doing, helping make our government a success. So thank you and thank you for watching us and we'll see you again soon.