 Good evening and welcome back to Byline. This is a public affair show sponsored by the Amherst League of Women Voters and we are here in the studios of Amherst Media on College Street here in Amherst and we're continuing our series of conversations with committee chairs and vice chairs about various things that are happening and today we're going to be talking with Alyssa Bruehl who's the chair of a committee and Kathy Shane who's the vice chair of a committee and it's the same committee but it's a committee that's going out of business. How do you like that? They finish their job they're going to go out of business. And we finished it early. And you finished it early on time and on budget. Right. You got it. So what was the name of the committee? The committee on. Rules of procedure. Rules of procedure. So give us a reminder about why this committee got set up, where its authority came from, etc. Right. So Stan asked me to speak about this briefly and I was like okay I had like an hour and a half. No, no. Really briefly. Really briefly. So the charter requires rules of procedure to be set up for the council. Our old charter didn't have that for town meeting. Town meeting had town meeting time. It was done a different way. The legislature, the great and general court does it a different way. But our charter specifically said the council has to have rules of procedure. They at minimum have to include these few topics. One was for example that there has to be public comment at every regular meeting. That's not something that's required by mass general law but the people who wrote the charter and the people who voted in the charter wanted to be part of our town government. There has to be at least one meeting a month. There has to be a recording of all votes unless they are unanimous votes. It has to be by name. And so there was a minimum set of rules. Of course it was very short in the charter and we came up with a very large document of rules because what we're trying to do is not only have it be a reference for counselors as to how things work but also for the public. Because this is really a sea change in how we're doing town government in Amherst. It's the biggest change we've made since 1954. And so people don't know why we're doing what we're doing. Sometimes we are struggling with why we're doing what we're doing at any given moment. Because you're creating something new. Because one of the things to keep in mind is of course professional staff continues to do their job every day. But at the same time the elected officials are trying to find different ways and different structures to make it accessible both to us not just to put a document on a shelf and say we did that done but something we can refer to and that's why it's important to have things like how many votes do we need for certain things to be in there in addition to being written in our charter. A handy reference for all. And this isn't the first edition because we had some interim rules and so Kathy can you share. As Alyssa said you know we had some basic how are we going to start because we had to have some how are we going to start based on the charter so we did codify those. But then when we turned to looking at what is the purpose of this we said it's a really statement of our values. What do we value as a town what do we value as town council and how are we going to conduct ourselves to adhere to those values. In fact we even have an appendix that's called a value statement. Now what are things we believe in. So it was it ended up being quite a research project for us too because as we said OK we're brand new let's look at cross towns and cities that have a council form of government with or without a mayor. You know look like us are a little different. And what you saw is if we looked at 30 plus is many of them had a core set that was the same as Alyssa said how many votes do we need to do X Y and Z. How do you make a motion. But then there were variations and that's where we honed in on what specific do we want in Amherst and what do we not find anywhere that we might want. So it was a quite a creative process as we got into it. So let's stick with that theme for a minute about the value statement. So the charters pretty clear that we want to transparent and engaged. We want to transparent government and engage citizenry. How do the rules relate to that. Exactly. Well it is actually the opening sentences of our rules. So I just I just thought I'd bring him here as Amherst town council commits to the highest levels of inclusion openness and transparency and its meetings and deliberation. You know so we made that a strong statement and then we said wherever possible we want robust public participation and deliberations and we have a variety of activities that were written into the charter such as districts should have district council meetings at least twice a year and we're doing them more often or we're going to do a public forum on the budget on capital on the master plan. But we said beyond what we have to do because the charter said let's talk about a way of bringing the public into council discussions and as just a couple examples we've set up something called a work session that we haven't used yet. But it's a time that the council can invite other people in who have expertise say we want to talk about the master plan. I hear you talked about that earlier. But we're not making a decision. We just want to have a strong conversation about it. We can set up a work session to think through the issues. We've also set up for our committees or for the full council something called a study group or work group where we're going to do something on an issue but we want to know the pluses and minuses. You know there's a good way a bad way of doing it and again reaching beyond just the 13 council members. So those would be two examples where we wrote it in in a permissive way. We can do this when we need to do it and then endorse it. We should do it whenever we need to. So these would be new tools in the toolbox for the council to engage among themselves but also to engage with interested and perhaps even expert parties from outside of the council and it could be staff of the town. It could be residents of the town. It could be other members of other committees. Absolutely. In town that you would bring in. You could bring in someone from another town where the other town has done something that we want to know more about and we need that. And we all know what Amherst is like. I mean we have such a rich population in terms of knowledge and past participation and we didn't want to lose that ability to tap into people who have been long-time participants or also new participants but know a lot beyond what we might already know. This is all very consistent with what you and I talked about in an earlier show when maybe even your first appearance here how important the process of engagement was to you. Absolutely. And Alyssa you've had so many years of experience in town government so you've operated under and seen lots of different types of meetings, types of activities and how structure is critical to making sure that people know what to expect. And so could you talk a little bit about some of the things that you were working on and focusing on in the committee to ensure that people would they would be very crisp and clear rules of procedure so that everybody understood that this was going to be an open and fair debate and process. Yeah I was just it just buzzed through my head as we were talking about this like we could have this been a much more dramatic sort of show like what was it like developing the rules of procedure? Because it was rather dramatic on some occasions and partly there were some strong feelings on many sides and a lot of it is because I for example have been doing this a long time three of the members had not been doing it at all and so they did an immense amount of research and I would then push back and say well I know the words say that but what's the practical application of that but yet we didn't want to box ourselves in either because the last thing any of us wants is you know a little box that we are forced to work within so trying to express the kinds of things we're trying to express in words that somehow made sense to not only the five of us but then to the entire town council because that's another part of the push-pull associated with the work we did is how much does the full town council entrust to a subcommittee because we are all just to be clear to everyone out in the world we are all meeting at least 12 hours a week in meetings right now so for a part-time council job much less preparation research that was all done outside of those meetings so how much do you entrust the subcommittee versus the full rules committee and so we went to the full council a couple of times and said this is where we're at these are some particularly interesting parts and Kathy can talk more about that and then you know these are the highlights because it's a lot to process but also in terms of giving people the tools as we talked about earlier so for example a tool that I'd found really useful at town meeting for many years was the idea of no audible displays of approval or disapproval and the reason for that was not to quash people or make it be super formal but because even though it might seem like 85% of the audience thinks something's an amazing idea and wants to cheer for it there could be that five or three or two percent of people who feel really quashed by the enthusiasm that's displayed if there's hooting and hollering and then maybe you're less willing to bring something of theirs up in the future because they feel like they're not being represented or even to speak up on that particular issue as it's being debated in the in the town meeting at that point and it could be the town council but if you haven't actually seen that happen which I did see happen in town meeting when it spontaneously would erupt and the moderator would say okay we all agreed that we don't have public displays people who hadn't seen that worried that that meant we were somehow quashing people's enthusiasm and the last thing we want to do is that right we want people to feel fully engaged in our so we went back and forth as to how do we describe that how do we talk about divisiveness versus enthusiasm versus engagement versus rules that are just seem to be for the sake of rules which we we are this is Amherst we would avoid that and it went back and forth in terms of what we felt on our group at the committee level and then when it went back to council and so it went back and forth a couple of different ways before it got finalized as a version of what we had been using at town meeting just to give another tool to the president or the presiding officer of any of our groups and so but it just goes to show that there there can be a huge amount of difference of opinion we're all trying to get to the same place and just how do you actually codify that in a way that feels comfortable to people that doesn't feel draconian yeah and some of these things are pretty cut and dry how many votes do we need you know it's either x y or z pick one it's not in the middle of x and y it's yes one of them but here's a set of ideas that involve judgment absolutely and and the sensitivity to trying to encourage engagement and allow people to express themselves both as a speaker and as an audience how do you balance those so you went back and forth four times something like that he and the council but you ultimately figured out a path forward and that's been incorporated in the rules any other examples of things that you were particularly focused on well I'm particular just had what I thought was a very simple suggestion about the fact that we had already informally agreed that we would have our president service spokesperson to the press and that made some people uncomfortable to put that in writing because it felt like maybe it would prevent other people from speaking which in all reality in my experience is the appropriate thing to do you do ask the president to be or the chair in the past to be the spokesperson and then they may say you're the expert on the capital plan please do all the speaking about the capital plan it doesn't force that person to be the expert on everything but that's the go-to person for everything and people were uncomfortable putting that writing for fear that it would put not necessarily this president but a president in the position of just having all the control and feeling the burden of all that and not feeling like they could delegate so then do you say or their designee and so finally just got scrapped but it's in a list of follow-up items and so that's one of the really interesting things to me about this whole ebb and flow of process here is that now that rules of procedure yay got our work done weeks ahead of time which was amazing given how much work it was and it was a really starting Kathy was an excellent taskmaster in case of keeping us on schedule and then we got done early is that now we have a list of things that the governance organization and legislation g.o.l not go g.o.l committee can continue to work on and say well they love they looked at this what might we consider in the future so it can be a living document that we continue to tweak over time and that press issue maybe one that fits in well once we talk about it more as to who does what when and Kathy other no just a little bit on the process because Alyssa jumped in we because it's a long document when we went back to the council they all got the full document and what we did was highlight little yellow literally literally the areas that we weren't the same as all towns you know so it wasn't that no other city or town did it this way but that pay attention to this and then areas where we didn't agree as five people we went ahead and put two options in saying we we are recommending committee we're not a decision-making committee so if there were two sets of ideas that were happening in our small group the larger group of 13 should also hear those ideas and so we go to those blue when we went in just on here two ways and I thought it was a very healthy example going forward because we're in trust we're gonna rely a lot on our committees to be delegated work we're we're referring it to a committee but we don't want them to make final decisions on key actions without at least us knowing that there were two or three ways of going on this and there was not one clear way but even you know there were three people that like this to who like that we should hear hear that without having to go to every meeting so I thought it set a precedent so where there's consensus on a point you might not put that in but where there's a division you might highlight the couple of two or three options and give some context for how people thought about those and leave it to the council to understand that there wasn't unanimity on something and what I liked about this is often when you think of a policy that is going forward or not you have the I don't like it or I do like it group but if you said I I do like it if the following so it could be this way or that way it wasn't that we didn't like the idea it was there to I think it's a healthier way of ultimately getting to yes you know unless you just hate it but and so that there is buy-in and and you know people think compromises a dirty word in politics but it's in the nature of the enterprise you're going to have conflicting views rather than do nothing you figure out what's a path where there's enough common ground upon which we can build a solution and so that's part of what you're doing here yeah and it was a this is one it was an ad hoc committee we had a deadline meet this deadline and as you said at the beginning we go out of business you know there is now a document but it is a living document one of the things we wrote in is that we can change it you know if the majority of the council wants to amend it and change it some towns said it had to be a super majority we just said if there is a majority that something's not working we want to add something or subtract something because we or we want to expand a definition whatever it might be we want to make it easy to do but at least revisit it once a year so we've had at least once a year we should come back and take a look at how we're how how are we doing based on how we said we wanted to behave and and act so you see annual reviews in the legislature for example the state legislature because the terms are two years on swearing in day a set of temporary rules is adopted which are the rules from the last term and a rules committee is named to review the rules and make recommendations and usually within two to three months a permanent set of rules for that term are adopted and it's usually 95 or 98 percent of it is identical to what you already had so it's not like you're changing with the wind but as circumstances arise things like what do you do about technology in the chamber now that everybody's got an iPad and a cell phone that was not anticipated a hundred years ago so you you adapt with the time so the way you're seeing this is that this will be an annual exercise at least to come back and take a look at it at a minimum we've specified in our document the committees of the council so we've gone out of business but we have five standing committees it will trigger if we didn't do it automatically anyway it will trigger how's this working you know we've got a committee with a huge domain or jurisdiction should it be two is it is it working well and the committees are written into the rules they're written into the rules and we made it a little bit easy on ourselves by just writing down here are the committees and then putting their charges and an appendix or cross referencing so to the extent we want to go back and expand limits subdivide charges we can go ahead and instead of going to the whole document but but we tried to make it the living document term Alyssa used it would be a way of coming back and so you might come back and just look at that the whole issue of public comments came up very early that yes it's required but we're under an operating framework now and two things that were interesting at the very beginning it was a do you just want general public comments or if there is a new issue that we're going to be deliberating on do you want to take specific comments to this the first time we talk about it so we've got a an agenda that states we will always take public comments and then we will have an additional time permitting public comment period that was put in specifically to allow for people to know oh they're getting to this at 8 o'clock at night and that's what I want to talk about you know I don't have a more general the other thing we did right at the get-go as people said try to be as welcoming and informal as possible and we decided we would all call each other by our first names and is that in the rules that you're sticking with it yeah we put it in a sentence and someone said let's just write it in because it was popular I mean people actually wrote us hooray you know sometimes I don't even know how to pronounce your last name so it's Kathy I can deal with but you know who knows how this is and right now we're really lucky we have 13 different names so it's we don't that works it works right now and you know we asked our president would she be willing to be instead of president which has such a wonderful title which she won't be willing to be Lynn and she said oh yes you know so it was a it was something we did write at the beginning which which had a good feeling to it still seems to be working well yeah and I heard a counselor addressing speaking about another counselor and referenced counselor Pam right well I had to laugh when we were down I was thinking of you counselor Dorothy sorry I'm sorry it was not counselor Pam was counselor Dorothy and so because it was the first name yeah and I had not heard that before and I said oh that works yeah right and actually it's usually just Dorothy it's not usually counselor so sometimes because we're still getting used to it but we did think of you and your suggestions because we realized the great general court is more formal and we did take into account what you suggested in terms of it perhaps being a bit of a distancing I don't want to misspeak and mischaracterize your words but a bit of a distancing thing so it makes it easier to say my esteemed colleague again and counselor maintain the forum in an environment when people might otherwise degenerate to fisticuffs and and so we just went ahead and took the informal route and it seemed to be working as we said we got a lot of positive feedback and all as prescriptive as this charter is in comparison to our former former government where town meeting did not have to readapt its rules of behavior every year they just were what they were according to the moderator and then little tweaks might be made associated with the bylaw process but unlike the great general court that has to actually actively adopt something we don't in municipal government basically something continues along until you change it but because of the way we set it up with the appendices and treating it as a living document we figure we'll be referring back to it on a regular basis and saying what didn't we put in here what's in here that's create that's too cumbersome that we need to rewrite a different way so that we're all understanding it and working from it because we have people of such a wide variety and particularly as we bring in more people from the public to each of our different working groups etc these are the rules that we're working under so they can see great and earlier you referenced the goal committee gol which is now the committee of jurisdiction for all matters relating to rules and so the future discussion about going back and and trying to resolve some of those questions where you had two ideas and left it to the future some of those are gonna now be looked at by the goal committee and most of them if it's in writing we resolved it okay so as Alyssa said in one instance we remained silent rather than put it in writing okay and so it's some a top come back and then I'll give another example we we have established there can be work groups study groups that can include people beyond the council we just and then we hit how do we set these up who does the appointment can anyone just do them any time they feel like and said well we need to think this through on how it might work and call a few towns that have these you know since we that we don't want to all be in meetings all the time and we want to do them only when it's absolutely necessary but it allows you to it's it's short of a commission you know where you might say this is a big idea we're gonna create a commission and have them report back this would be something that doesn't rise quite to that but it wouldn't be long-lived you know we want them to go back and be situational two months three months whatever the time period is the best example I have of when we've had in the past with the old government is the marijuana committee that Alyssa was on which had a variety of people on it was set up to wrestle with a particular thing that the town wanted was go moving ahead on but there could be luck we don't know yet what issues but that one is where GOL government will say this these are three different ways we could operate and we'll come back and say exactly how this might work so we it's there but it's just not there in its full details and then the other thing to be clear on for our audience of course many of them are legal and voters members so they totally understand this already but the rules of procedure are completely different than our bylaws and so bylaw review is happening at this very time as we're speaking to you because not only do you have to look at the town bylaws and do a find-and-replace for town meeting and select board but there's more to it than that because there are changes in executive and legislative authority and then there are also bylaws from 1939 that have never been revisited so that's going to be a huge another huge piece of work and so we have an ad hoc committee working on that too but that's also going to be under GOL and that'll work nicely together that GOL is the umbrella then for the rules that are our day-to-day operating procedures and over here are the bylaws and so it's just a central place where everybody will know that's where revisions can be made and the things that affect the running of the government are all being handled over there so I think it'll be a lot clearer to people as this evolves over time who does what and when and then it will come back to the full council as they make recommendations and I do really appreciate what Kathy said about that this method of highlighting differences because again we're doing this is new you know town meeting didn't have committees that brought it things that were of town meeting so much in as opposed to the historical commission and so to be able to say we thought about this in depth we had public sessions about it because everything unlike the decree in general court subject to open meeting law we can't just hammer it out in back rooms we have to do it all in public and provide those options to the full council to make the full decision great well job well done and as you say you got it done early and here we are we aren't even six months into the new government and you did all of that work and we have now a quote permanent set of rules that are available for review and revision at any time along the way when it makes sense to do so so thank you both for being here and so much for the good work that you guys are doing and thanks to me I mean it's pretty amazing we said you're gonna have a half hour on rules of procedure oh my goodness and there's so much that's interesting and I hope I hope everybody learned a little bit here but again it all goes back to the values that are inherent in the charter which is a transparent and engaged process so thank you all for being with us and we look forward to having another conversation with another group soon thank you thank you