 So I've got 6 p.m. on Monday, March 7th. I will call to order this regular meeting of the Lewinowski City Council. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Councillor Grant Oakley. Thank you. I pledge allegiance to the flag, the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Agenda review is next. Are there any questions or concerns with the order of the agenda? So next is our consent agenda. Item A is approval of our meeting minutes from Council of Liquor Control and Windows E-Community Development Trust from February 22nd. Only Councillors Oakley, Finn Duncan, and myself were present for those meetings. So I would ask if you have a motion, or I'm sorry, for our new Councillors, since you weren't present for those meetings, you don't need to participate in the vote for this piece. Item B is our accounts payable warrant for March 3rd and April 4th, February 6th to 19th. That item we can all vote on. So separating those, do I have any questions or concerns about the consent agenda? And Thomas and Aurora, if you do have questions about the warrant or anything, like feel free to ask now, or contact staff later. Okay. So do I have a motion to approve item A, the Council of Liquor Control and WCDT minutes? So moved. Motion by Bryn, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. And so for item B, do I have a motion to approve the accounts payable warrant and hero warrant? So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And then Thomas and Aurora, you can say aye to approve or hold, and I will ask for abstaining or you can say nay as well. All right, the motion carries. Thank you. So we are on to council reports. So we use this part of our agenda for counselors to share updates on any activities they've been doing between meetings that are relevant or that they would like the rest of the counselor the public to know. Jim, do you have anything to update on? I don't have anything in particular to share tonight. All right, thank you. Bryn, what about you? Just brief update. The municipal infrastructure committee met last week. It was our first meeting since December. We elected, welcomed the new commissioners and opted to appoint a chair and a co-chair for six months. The duration of 12 months felt like too big of a commitment. So we're breaking it down to six months, see more palpable and then rotating the seat after that. Majority of the time was spent providing orientation and going over priorities as well as progress on capital projects to date. And per your request with staff changes and hope to review it, city manager this month we are pausing until next month for our next meeting. I don't have any specific updates except to say welcome to our newly elected counselors. It's great to have you on here and to see you elected to the council after all of your efforts. Tonight's meeting is kind of focused on orientation items. So I hope it's really helpful and feel free to ask questions at any time. Okay. Wendy, any city updates? Just a couple of things, mayor and council. And yes, first congratulations and welcome to the new council members. The first update is that we had a very successful local election. So I wanna thank the members of the BCA who helped and the clerk, Jenny Willingham for doing such a great job. We had 938 voters and that included 54 new all resident voters. The budget and the fire truck were both supported by the residents. And even though the election is over if residents do have questions about any item even though it's passed please feel free to contact staff. The other item I wanna mention and give an update is the mask mandate. As you know, the city of Winooski has a mask mandate that will expire automatically if it's not renewed on March 21st. And the city's mandate unlike some other local mandates does not have an enforcement mechanism. And that was intentional because the purpose of the mandate was to provide consistency and a common message that particularly the businesses could use to encourage mask wearing. With the state's message that it will no longer require masks in indoors effective March 14th. We aren't sure if that does impact the city's mandate. It would actually be helpful if it did. But the situation currently is that the city's mandate which has no enforcement is in effect until March 21st. Staff does not anticipate recommending an extension of that mandate. Under current conditions, we would not support or recommend an extension. So that is my update. And if anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer them. I also realized while you're speaking that I skipped public comment. Oh my, yes. So I need to go back to that. I'm so sorry everyone. So public comment is for any attendees, members of the public who want to speak to any topic that's not included in the agenda. So if you're here for an item that's on the agenda we ask you to wait until we get to it. But if you have something to say that is not related to an agenda item now is an opportunity. We will like debate or decision make during public comment but it's a time where issues can be raised and maybe we can revisit them in the future as in. So I'll pause there and see if there's anyone in attendance in city hall that has public comment if you could raise your hand and Thomas or Aurora, you could let me know if somebody is wishing to speak. Yes, we do have a hand raised. Okay, great. And so for members of the public if you could please state your name before you speak. There might be a microphone in there. Yes, thank you. Hello, my name is Sierra McCarris. I'm a Moonewski resident. And funnily enough what I had wanted to mention was actually just mentioned read the renewal of the mask mandate. I am heartened to hear that it will likely not be renewed come March 21st. And I would just like to reiterate in case situations, in case circumstances in the future such as next winter might precipitate in stating it again I would like to reiterate that the evidence for masking is very slim that this is not novel information. This has been known in pandemic planning since at least 2009 with pandemic planning organizations like that of the UK and that of Johns Hopkins in the US that no matter whether we see a new spike in cases next winter that ultimately a mask mandate while it might be a visual indicator of care for the community is really a placebo effect. And as such is not something that we should be turning our attention to rather than the actual material conditions needed for public health to thrive. Thank you. Thank you for that. Is there any additional public comment from attendees in the chambers? I see no others looking to make comment. What about our virtual attendees? You can use the raise hand feature or chat if you have any. So seeing no further comment we'll get back to our regular agenda. We are at our regular items. First up is item A and this was the oath of office for our two new council members. I believe that has already taken place. So you all have both already been sworn in and are fully participating in this meeting. For item B we have a centennial celebration resolution. So today is actually very exciting. It is when you use 100th birthday it's been 100 years since we became our own city. So we have a resolution here in our agenda outlining some of our history from the 9,000 years of historical activity that has taken place in this area starting with the indigenous peoples who were here first, the Abenaki tribe whose language actually generates the name Wynuski. Further, we had European settlers here in this unceded land that founded the mills which we still see in our downtown. We were part of Colchester for a period of time and on March 7th in 1922 we actually officially separated. Throughout our history as a city we have been a welcoming place and so we are resolving that we recognize March 7th as our 100th municipal anniversary and welcome our residents and visitors to reflect on our important history as we look forward to the next 100 years. So you can join us in celebration by visiting legacy.wynuskibt.gov to see our features, events and offerings and be sure to save the date for a community birthday party that will take place this summer, June 4th, 2022. I am looking for a motion to approve this resolution recognizing our sentinels today. I'll make the motion. I'll second. Motion and I'm sorry, do you for Tom or Thomas? Thomas. Okay, just making sure. Motion by Thomas, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Thank you. The motion carries the thank you and happy birthday to Wynuski. And thank you to Paul and our centennial committee for all of their work putting together all of the events that we'll see this week. So our next item is orientation for council and I am going to share my screen and talk through this with the help of our interim manager, Wendy. Okay, can you all see this presentation? Excellent. So the goal for tonight is for our new counselors and for the public to get a better understanding of our organization and how we work as a council. We have some information about who we are as a city, the council and manager authority. So the staff and council roles, some legal requirements and council protocols, communications, update on master plan, finances and our commissions and emerging issues. Sort of a big picture of our work as a city council. So this actually was just included in our resolution as well. This is our value statement or vision statement about the city of Wynuski for which we need to update for 100 years now, not almost. We have welcome strivers, people looking to build a better life for themselves and their families. And we continue to be a community where everyone can participate and be engaged. And this vision statement drives our strategic vision here which is what we need to guide a lot of our planning and what we have our commissions aligned to as well. And so these are sort of the four big buckets of where through a community vision process, a lot of community conversations, this is what we've heard folks want us to prioritize in Wynuski. We have in the last, oh wow, 2019. In the last three plus years, have started a focus on equity inclusion in the city as well. So there's a little bit of history here. We started a community dialogue in 2019 which there was some working groups out of that developed into our application for the working communities challenge grants, the hiring of Yasmin Gorn as our equity director. And there are some goals and a potential equity commission as part of that work. You will learn much more about this and other initiatives along the way. But wanted to include it in here to set that as a priority of something that we have as a city and as on city council and with staff leadership committed to bringing more focus to equity and bring more equity into the work group. And as we think about trying to serve all of our community wanted to share some information here what's fairly demographic about who we are, who is in Wynuski and who we are representing. We are a very small and dense city. We're on the younger side. We have a significant population of folks who are born outside of the US and who speak other languages. We have a deep refugee resettlement program here. Our average household size is quite small, 2.2 but we also have a lot of very large families. So we really run the range of sizes there. We are heavier renter occupied than owner occupied and this has shifted a little bit in recent years. However, that's been the case for over a decade. We have a high poverty rate. We have the lowest median household income in Chittenden County. And so that's something we need to be mindful of is there are a lot of meat. We're a high needs community, but we're also small. So we don't have a ton of resources to work with. And so we have to be very thoughtful about the decisions that we make. We also have lower than average vehicle ownership. And this is something you might see reflected in community vision and master planning around a focus on multimodal transportation. So it's just a little snapshot of who we are here in use. And I'm going to pass it to Wendy to speak a little bit to our form of government. Great, thank you, Mayor. I just realized as we were talking about the city's anniversary, the council manager form of government was developed in the 1930s. So it's roughly 100 years old also. And it was developed in response to corruption that was seen, that was pretty rampant in city governments at the time. And the purpose is to have clear and meaningful roles with the mayor and the council directly reflecting and representing the public. Because obviously it's a democratic organization. And our point is to serve the public. So the mayor and the council as the direct representatives and voted representatives, you have the authority to understand, authority and responsibility. And it's not always easy to understand as much as you can of what is needed for the city and to express that as a policy. So when you meet together in your retreat, those are the kinds of things you'll be discussing. You'll look at the demographics, your own experience, your own experience with your neighbors to determine what's important. So you set the course and you establish the priorities. And then where the staff comes in is the manager is intended to be a professional person who is not part of the elected portion. And it's very important to just keep those. The manager does not participate in elections at all. That's a violation of ethics. There's the International City Management Association has established ethics roles, one of which is that the manager and staff to some extent, but especially the manager stays out of electoral politics to keep that separate. Because the intention is that the manager takes the policy directives and translates them into action. It's the how versus the what. The council decides the what and then the manager determines the how. So the manager runs the day-to-day operations of the city, directs the staff and supports the council in developing policy. So the roles are not all, the boundaries aren't always clear. So it's always a, there's discussion, which is healthy. And I won't go over this entire slide, but the council's area is in the top two where you define the mission and you vote on the policy. And then the administration and the management are the manager and the staff's sphere. And I did go over this a little bit with the elected, the newly elected folks. So I won't labor this, but if you do want to talk about this, this is obviously the time to do it because it can get complicated. But I'll continue. I just wanted to add in there, our role is not to direct the operations and what's happening day-to-day on the ground, but it's easy to go there. And sometimes we do in our discussions and it's the manager's job and my job to try to catch that and pull us back up. But sometimes that doesn't happen. But if I just want to put a word of warning out there that if we do start to, discussion does start to get too deep in the weeds on operations, we might be told to pull back a little bit. Yes, and this is a kind of a situation that individual managers and councils develop as you develop the relationship. Sometimes questions can be seen as directing. What the council absolutely cannot do is direct staff. And there are reasons for that. Staff can't have two bosses and you are elected as a group. You're not elected individually to run the city. There are strong mayors who do have that role. So that role does exist, but in the city's form of government, you're elected as a body, like a legislature, like a small legislature, essentially. So you don't have individual authority. You have authority as a group. Having said that, my personal feeling is that you can ask any question you want. And a meeting may very well not be the place for it. You might ask the question elsewhere. You know, ask the manager offline or outside of a meeting, but you should have information that you need to make a decision. Some of you will be content with less information than others of you. It is interesting stuff and you obviously care. That's why you're here. So when you do hire a new manager, you'll establish that relationship. And again, your authority is as a group and that's really important. So you have to vote on something to make it official. The budget, obviously, you know that you vote on that. Any appointments that you make, you see the appointments that are the council authority are on the right-hand side of the slide. The city treasurer, the city attorney, the health officer, those are all votes responsible for the financial affairs of the city. That is mostly a staff operation, but you are ultimately responsible because you're the elected official, because you're the council. Anybody have any questions on this? Okay. So then the mayor is a member of the council, but then also has additional authority. The mayor serves as the presiding officer in meetings and chairs the strategic planning committee, access the liaison, and then also sets the agenda, which is one of the most important things that the mayor does. And in Winooski, the mayor does that with the council, and we'll talk more about the agenda setting in another item on this agenda. And then I would just add here to that, the mayor serves as, you know, the primary point of contact with the city manager, although everyone, all members of council should have contact with the city manager and feel welcome to meet and discuss. But the mayor also serves as liaison to other agencies or government offices. And so if you get inquiries, it's best to direct those to me and I am obligated to speak on behalf of the city council and not, you know, as an individual in those instances. Right. And so then the authority of the manager is to appoint manager, spend or remove city employees and appointed officers, essentially direct and supervise the administration of all departments of the city, attend all council meetings. I won't read all these to you. And then you can see the list of appointees on the right. So it's a very broad authority. It's described in the charter and it's also described in statutes, the Vermont statutes. So if you have any questions, ask me. Ultimately, you can ask the city attorney, obviously the new manager. But it's very important that the manager be able to operate with their full authority because things will not get done well without that. It's a big puzzle, like a big machine to keep moving with a lot of parts and those parts need to have one supervisor. So that's why it's so important to be aware of your role. It's not just something that's nice. It's something that's essential. And then the manager's authority is not unrestricted. There are several positions that have requirements under statutes that the manager has no part in. For example, the zoning administrator is a good example of that. In this case, he has regulations that he needs to abide by. The police chief has not just statutory but additional regulations that as the manager, I do not set those and I do not enforce those. There's a separate body that enforces those. Fire staff and building inspection staff. Again, there's state statutes on that and also with the city clerk in the recent election. Although the manager is the supervisor of the city clerk, the city clerk has rules other than those of the manager that must be followed for elections. And now I'll send it back to the mayor. So I included an organizational chart here. It's not, I don't believe these numbers are up today. I think they're from last year, but it's close. But the org chart is accurate and just wanted to provide this to show you kind of here all the staff that are supervised under the manager and highlighted here that nine of these positions are currently funded through grants and temporary funding. So this is something that's gonna come up in future financial discussion this year. There's some guidelines here about communicating with staff. As Wendy was speaking to earlier, the manager really is the person keeping an eye on everything that's going on operationally. And so it's important that when we as council communicate with staff, we make sure to copy the manager so they know what communications are happening with their employees. You should feel free to reach out to the manager at any time. And they may direct you to specific staff who are experts in different areas. And so also feel free to share questions there. I really want to encourage you, especially as you're getting up to speed and as a reminder for the rest of us too, if you see something in a council meeting packet that you're not familiar with yet and you want more background, you should absolutely feel free to reach out and ask for that and try to get information ahead of the meeting that you would like. Oh, and also, if you're getting questions from residents, like why hasn't my street been plowed yet or what's going on with the community gardens, those should be directed to the manager and for staff to handle rather than us trying to mediate those us elected representatives. Some legal requirements for us, we cannot do decision making in private, right? Like everything we do needs to happen in a public forum. That's why all of our meetings are warned in advance. If we're communicating via email, it's okay to share information like scheduling, but we can't be deliberating or debating in any way. So be very careful of replying all. You know, if we get an email from staff with information, we shouldn't have a group thread going on about that. We need to wait until we're in public. We're gonna run, when you ski small, we're gonna run into each other out in public and that's totally fine, but three members of council is a decision-making forum. And so if there are three of us talking to each other, we shouldn't talk about city business because we need to avoid having, you know, a private discussion about decision-making. Then finally, some items do get discussed in private and out of public view in executive session. You know, usually this is related to a legal issue or HR or something and anything that is said in that executive session needs to be kept private and shouldn't be sharing that out. If you get an email marked confidential or for executive session, please don't forward it to anyone or copy anyone else. Little bit of ethics for us as city councilors and Wendy might be able to speak better to this. The example that I have heard previously about a conflict of interest with us, with decision-making that we're doing. If we're talking about the budget, and you know, the city budget impacts each of us financially, but not any differently than any other resident of the community. So that's not an issue. But if we were talking about hiring a contractor for a Main Street project and one of us had a family business related to that and we wanted to apply, we need to recuse ourselves. So if there's some way that you might have a financial or personal gain from a decision that's being made, you should make that known to the rest of council. And we can, if you are uncertain, if you should recuse yourself from participating in that decision, we can make that decision in public, whether or not it's appropriate with staff support. Little process, we generally meet the first and third Monday of the month. There's some flexibility there and we'll look at the schedule later in this meeting. We follow Robert's rules of order. So that is, I can share a resource with you too about that, but there's a little bit of procedure, right? We have the agenda in a certain order. We have items for discussion or approval. We do that so the public knows if something is being discussed or if there's actually approval action taking motions. So you have to make a motion to approve something. Motions need to be in the affirmative. So if you don't want something to go forward, you don't make a motion on it. If nobody makes a motion or if the motion isn't seconded, the item fails. So that's how like a negative action is. One counselor will make a motion to move something. It needs to be seconded to move forward and then we vote. I just had something I wanted to share about that. Oh, I will often prompt for somebody to make a motion when we've had discussion and it feels like we are working towards the decision but you can actually move an item at any point. You don't have to wait for me to solicit that action. I mentioned earlier about the mayor being charged with speaking on behalf of the council. You may also be reached out to by members of the press and you can typically direct those to the manager and myself. If you do speak with a member of the press, you just need to be very clear when you're speaking for yourself or about a council decision. If there's a topic we haven't taken up as council then we can't say, you know, if we give any feedback on it needs to be very clear that that's a personal opinion and not on behalf of the council. And then in emergency situations, the manager is the point of contact there and we'll typically keep council up to date but we should await those updates from staff and not try to get involved, you know, they really need to focus on emergency responses. Jim, I see your hand. Thank you, mares. I wanted to clarify or ask for just one direction on an item, but it hasn't been voted on that. Still, we wouldn't speak for the council to say, the council is probably gonna do this. We can speak again for a personal experience but it's really about things that have been voted on. It's something that I kind of have tried to keep myself going back to in the past years. That's a good point of clarification, Jim, and a good rule to fall back on. If we haven't actually taken a vote on something then we haven't made a decision. And so if you are asked about something that has not specifically been voted on then yeah, you can't say like council feels this way about it or we, royal we as the city are thinking a certain way. You need to be very clear when you're talking about your opinions. And by you, we, me as well. We have our city media and outreach channels here. These are all the sort of social posting forums that our communications coordinator manages for us. So a little bit more into the meat of the work. We have a master plan. This is a statutorily required documents that our planning commission, the Chittinay County Regional Planning Commission supported and all of our other commissions helped put together based on community input. And it's an eight year plan, essentially a roadmap for our future decision-making for how we're gonna get towards the community's vision of what we should look like. It's organized by strategic vision area and has a series of goals. So there's goals for housing, goals for economic vitality, et cetera. There's a lot of supporting plans underneath of that. I have most of them listed here, but like we did a transportation master plan. There's a housing needs assessment, parks and open space master plan. This stuff informs that overarching master plan. And the master plan is something that we should always look to in decision-making or when we're thinking about how our decisions are gonna impact UNISC and future growth and development. It already has a lot of community input into it. And so it's a great starting place for like if I'm uncertain about a decision and how it's going to meet the needs of the community, I can refer to the master plan and go back to these are the goals that we could set for ourselves. Does this decision align with those? Wendy mentioned earlier our fiduciary responsibility. One of the big parts of our role is every year helping guide the budget. Staff puts it together, but we provide that high level mission policy guidance that helps them figure out where we're spending our resources. We also take a lot of votes on purchases or use of revenues or other fund issues. We have excellent staff supporting us with that and making sure that we're following laws and we have the information we need. But it is our decision-making that creates the long-term financial situation of our system. I have this slide in here about development and affordability. This is from 2020. I haven't been able to update it. So it's a little bit out of date, but something that I wanted to show here is one of the reasons that voters supported foreign-based code for denser development in our gateways is because growth and development generate new tax revenue for the city and so they offset increasing costs. If we were to stay exactly the same size and never add any additional development, we would have to continuously increase taxes to be able to pay for the same services. We generally see a small increase every year anyway, but growth and development really offsets those increasing costs. I don't wanna talk about growth and development only in terms of finances though. We have a really serious housing crisis in our area as well. And so another important piece is providing housing to our community where even folks who live here already could face displacement. Oh, and the other thing included here is that our growth rate is about 1% annually. So often because everything happens, happens on the gateways, it's very visible. Often people feel like we're growing really rapidly. It's compared to the overall size of our city. It's not as significant as it used to be. In our neighborhoods and most of when you see, you don't see a lot of new development or new housing in the area. We have a list of facilities here that the city is responsible for. We have to pay for and maintain and update these facilities that support our city and our infrastructure, including a number of parks which is very exciting. So we have an annual priorities and strategy retreats that council and the staff leadership team do together. We typically go back and look at what's our progress like against master plan goals? What have we accomplished over the last year? What do we need to prioritize in the upcoming year? This helps us create a shared work plan for council and staff to focus what is being prioritized and worked on for the coming year. We also develop commission work plans out of that to focus where we want commissions to put more input into advising us on policy. And then staff provides a quarterly update for each of the strategic vision areas. How, what progress have we made to date on our goals that we set for a safe, healthy community? We have not been following that schedule stringently for the past several months but we are aiming to get back to it and get back to getting these regular quarterly updates. So speaking of commissions, I've included a slide here listing the commissions that we have and the current staff liaison for each one. So commissions are advisory to us as council. They're meant to do policy advisory. So if there is something in municipal infrastructure that we want to go further in the weeds on policy, we can direct our commission to do that for us and then they can bring recommendations to us as the council to do the ultimate decision-making. Each member of council serves as a liaison to a commission so that there is a feedback loop in place. You know, we create work plans for commissions after the based on that annual priority and strategy session. But sometimes that can change, priorities can shift or something else can pop up. So it's important to have a council liaison there to help ensure that the work of the commission is staying aligned to those priorities but also to bring what the commission is talking about back to the council. So we all hear updates kind of what conversations are happening across commissions. And so you heard Bryn share her update for municipal infrastructure commission earlier in our council reports today. A staff liaison also supports each commission, works with the commission chair to set agendas and prepare for meetings. I think one thing that can be confusing that I wanted to make clear here is like our role, the commission chair drives the agenda and leads the meeting. Our role as council liaison is more passive and really to create that feedback loop only providing guidance where needed and then making sure the communication is helpful. So some emerging issues. We are hiring a new city manager. We're gonna have an item on that tonight on the agenda, so I won't get into it now. Updating the policy priority and strategy we're gonna have to schedule that soon. Get that on folks calendars. Lot 17, I'm sorry, lot 17, 17, Avonaki way of redevelopment. This is the surface lot over by Casavante where we are working to bring another municipal garage on the hotel into the downtown. That work has been delayed throughout the pandemic but it's still moving forward. So that's something that will be coming up to council. TIF planning, the tax increment finance district, the debt that the city took out to redevelop our downtown. We should be paying that off in 2024 and we're gonna see new revenue come into the general fund. So we need to plan for that. That connects back to those temporarily funded staff roles I mentioned earlier. Those discussions should be connected as well as to the American Rescue Plan Act, $2 million in COVID relief funds that the city has been awarded. We'll be having, we've started some community conversations around that and there will be decision-making that we'll have to do in the coming months. We have the working for these challenge grant that I mentioned earlier. We have received a group, I don't really know how to phrase this. The city of Winnowski is getting a seat added to the Burlington airport's advisory committee. I am still waiting for guidance from the city of Burlington on how to proceed with that but at some point we'll need to figure out who's gonna be appointed to fill in that role. We've been having discussions for a number of years about regional, setting up a regional dispatch with our neighboring communities. That is also progressing slowly but moving forward and something that will be coming up. Fire truck bond, I had this in red because I thought I would have to update this potentially after the vote, but it passed. So we will have, we will be purchasing a new truck for the fire department and we'll have some financial decision-making to be there as well. We have the Champlain Housing Trust project being built out in front of the O'Brien Community Center. We should be starting our Main Street revitalization project later this year. We are still doing, I believe, right-of-way acquisitions along Main Street to support that project. We have a city-wide reappraisal starting this spring. The state ordered us to reappraise our home values so that'll be coming up and then union negotiations. This is a big list and a lot of stuff and I put it to you tonight to get on your radar. I think over the course of the, as you're settling into these roles, you'll probably want to have some conversations with staff to get caught up on these items. I will try to flag when we have something coming on an agenda to let you know with some heads up time so you have time to think about it and maybe have a meeting or ask for more information. Bryn. And I just wanted to mention, I don't think it's come up on an earlier slide about councilors having a chance to request agenda items be added to a meeting. Thank you for that, Bryn. Yeah, so staff keeps an agenda planner that they try to share with us by weekly so we can see in advance what's coming up and have a sense of that. The agenda planner is a planning document. So if it says something's on a date, it won't necessarily stick to that, but generally it does. And if there is an item of interest, something that you want to see on an agenda, something that you want council to take up or talk about, reach out to me. As was mentioned, I manage the agenda with the city manager. If I say no to something, you can get a second councillor to request it as well. And I cannot decline a request from two councillors. That's a lot. I will pause here if there are any questions about the procedures we've discussed, the role or any of these emergent issues. Bryn. And I guess one other thing, because it's relatively recent is the BCA and council role as it relates to the BCA. Oh yes, thank you for that. So the board of civil authority includes us, justices of the piece. We are members of that by default. And so we can work at the election or like support the elections process. We can participate in the BCA meetings for planning elections with the caveat. If you are on the ballot, you can't do that. You can't be staffing at the polls. And the board of civil authority also has some other duties. What's the word I want? Wendy, when somebody asks for like an adjustment of their assessment. Oh, right. The, it's to act as a judge for appeals. Yes, yes, of property values, I believe. Yeah, so that's come up before too. This reminds me, another role that I will add a little detail to is we are part of the staff grievance process. So where the manager is responsible for hiring, firing all staff and disciplinary actions, there is a process for staff to go up the chain of command with the grievance. If they disagree with the city manager's decision, they can bring it to us, the city council. And there's a pretty stringent process we follow there, you get legal guidance, but it has come up in the past. So just a word of warning could happen. All right. And that's another reason to be careful about your role because it could make that process not possible. You have to recuse yourself. I should say too that members of the public are more than welcome to ask questions as well by raising your hand, either in person or in museum. All right. Well, I hope that was helpful. You have it in the packet if you wanna revisit anything there and can reach out again to myself or Wendy directly for more follow-up. So let's move on to item D, appointment of deputy mayor. All right. And mayor, the information that we've provided to you is an excerpt from the charter that just says that council shall elect from its members a deputy mayor who shall act as mayor during the absence or disability of the mayor. And if there's a vacancy then the deputy mayors would become the mayor. I will turn it back to you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that one. I would like to nominate Jim to serve in the deputy mayor role as the counselor with the longest tenure on the body. If folks are generally in support of that someone could make a motion. He moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those abstaining? Me? Yeah, I think so. Motion carries. Thank you and welcome deputy mayor Duncan. Thank you so much. Moving on to item E. This is mayor and council procedures policy. Okay, so this is where it really gets fun. These are the details. And many of these structures are from statute. Some of them are from the city's charter. Staff is proposing just one change to the procedures this year. And that's on page four and part of article, I'm sorry, page two, article four under council meeting agendas where currently it says that the agendas in the first paragraph, small eye, it says that items that are requested to be added need to, folks need to contact the mayor or the manager by the end of business on Thursday. That's what it currently says. That gives us very minimal time, basically Thursday night when we're not working to review that item because the agenda is distributed on Friday, hopefully Friday morning. So staff is proposing that the deadline be Wednesday close of business instead of Thursday close of business. Still gives us a very limited time to do any research that we need to do because it's obviously better for you to have the information that you need prior to discussing and taking action. And it's just one day earlier for the public. So we don't think it should be a problem but just wanted to bring it to your attention. Thank you, Wendy. Jim. I think that's a really reasonable suggestion and I fully support it. As someone who tends to do council work at night, I was wondering if you would be amenable to like a start of business Thursday deadline. So like an 8.30 a.m. Thursday potentially similar effect giving you a full extra working day but allowing those of us who do our work at night to have that time on Wednesday. If I think it would be harder to manage a timeframe, a time limit that's at the beginning of the day because it's not as strict of a deadline. We get things now past the deadline and especially if it's important, if it's necessary, we'll get it on the agenda if that gives you any consolation. I just really think a hard deadline is important and a deadline of the beginning of the day isn't as definable as the end of the day because then it'll end up being, what about nine o'clock? What about 10 o'clock? What about 11 o'clock? That kind of thing. But if that's what the council wants, of course I'll change it. I mean, I would be happy to put a time in if you want that. I think that would, I would be concerned that it can be, there's flexibility in receiving it but if there's a sense of not wanting to do it using the fact that comes in at 5.30 on a Wednesday instead of 4.30 on a Wednesday which is the closest city hall, right? Then that being a reason not to include it on the agenda. And I think we've had close of business that has moved around over time. City Hall has been closed at 3.30 or 4.30 over the pandemic. So I could see even just adding a time to that rather than defining it as a kind of general time we could just include a time. I'm not tied to it. I just, there's generally gonna be flexibility to take last minute items that come in at Wednesday at 10 o'clock at night. Then that's great, but I'm happy to defer what others think best on this one. Do you wanna say midnight, Wednesday at midnight? Yeah, what if we call it end of day, Wednesday? I would address my request. I see some head nods in chambers. Are folks okay with that change? Yeah. Yeah, and I can confirm from my own work that morning tends to, morning specifically deadlines tend to go later and later. So I think having that specific time sounds good. All right. And Mary, did you want me to go over any other aspects of the procedures? Did everyone have a chance to look at them? Okay. Bryn? If we're just gonna ask questions. Sorry, I don't wanna jump in the middle of a full review. Section four, section B. I noticed that we named TD Bank and the OCC. I'd either like to add or replace TD Bank, the senior center. Feels like that should be a reasonable public space that we can get agendas posted. So I recall having this discussion last year or the year before about the posting locations. And there was a reason staff selected those two because we already go there or like staff is already there or something. And we, and there was concern about committing to additional locations and then failing to meet our duty or what have you. Paul, I see your hand is raised. Thanks, Mayor Lawn and the councilor Oakley. I think the TD Bank piece and Jenny, feel free to chime in here too. I'm not sure Carol had, you know, our previous city clerk, Carol had been posting lots of things at TD Bank that suffice there as well. During COVID, we, what should say before COVID, we were also, there were some other complimentary places that we were posting stuff as well. Those two locations were at the O'Brien Community Center when there was a bulletin board down there and at the Williamsky Memorial Library. So the places that we've worn things physically right now, city council meetings and board and commission meetings are the lobby upstairs at Williamsky City Hall right outside the clerk's office vault at the library. And then of course on all the digital platforms. That's sort of the working list that we have right now. Thanks, Paul. And rereading this now, I misread it. This wording did address that because it says we'll endeavor to post it to TD Bank and O'Brien. And so Bryn, you're asking about the endeavor list, not the, okay, I'm sorry, I misunderstood you. Right, yep, yep. What other folks see value in trying to post these agendas at senior centers? I think, yeah, go ahead. I was gonna say, I think the more places we can post it, the better, right? The question I would have is, do we have staff there usually on a Friday? Like would somebody be there already to post it? Maybe that's what we would rely on. Ray? Yeah, so Friday is a little hit and miss for Barb in terms of her schedule. She's often not on site Friday because she works a shortened week. With that said, we could very easily get, you know, myself, Zara, somebody from our department over there if the council would like that additional posting location. I don't think that the staffing can be accommodated as long as that endeavor is left and not something that we are sort of committed to hard fast if there's for whatever reason, a week we can't cover that. Okay, thank you Ray. I would be on board with adding senior center trying to post there. I see head nods for that too. That was my only comment. Thank you. Are there any other questions? Aurora? So this is also going a little bit off topic, I guess, but I was wondering about the process or if these are posted with a way for some request interpretation. I understand that it's a very short timeline and that would be another reason to give more time as if people wanted it interpreted or translated. At this time, we don't have like a procedure for translation. We've been doing that in sort of an ad hoc method. And I think it's, I believe it's on the radar is something for staff to work on. But yeah, so I would say at the moment we don't have a process and we acknowledge that and it's something that we can work on in the future. Gotcha, especially probably with the equity audit when that's finished, that might give some additional guidance. Yeah, I think that will give us some more priority information about where we should be prioritizing language access, for example, potentially. Thank you. Right, and Mayor, there's language access, which I know that the equity director is working on with Paul and then there's also ADA access and that we will provide. So when we talk about access, just need to talk about all of it. Thank you. Are there any other questions? Any questions or comments from members of the public? Could I have a motion to approve the mayor and council procedures policy with the two changes to add the senior center to the locations we endeavor to post our agenda and to change the due date for our agenda items to end of day, midnight, Wednesday. So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Next up is item F, the conflict of interest policy. First, thank you all for reading these in advance. That's great. This policy is an extension of the conversation that we had earlier about conflict of interest. It does need to be approved annually. And the purpose of that is to make sure that everyone who is on the council understands the policy. So you'll each get a copy of, you'll each sign a copy of this policy and the proceeding policies in the next few days. And it does define conflict of interest, which the mayor discussed previously, director and direct personal or financial interest. And it can get, it can get challenging to determine what is a conflict of interest. Generally, best practice is if you're not sure, disclose it and then it's public and you don't need to think about it anymore to make a decision and then move on. But disclosing is generally the recommended action. Ex parte communication, you might be familiar with that from your personal life or your professional life. I don't see page numbers, but it's at the top of a page. That has to do with situations where you're acting in a quasi-judicial manner so that you're considering something that could, especially something that could impact someone's property, that you need to be very careful not to have conversations outside of the process with either folks who are for or against whatever it is that you're discussing. And if you get into something like that, the city is a good reference and can help you through that. I don't know if that's happened recently. It hasn't happened since I've been here that you've had that sort of situation. I think a similar situation might be when we are talking about like the hotel development, for example, we shouldn't be having like private conversations with invested parties about that outside of our public deliberation and the executive session potential content. Right, right. And it's always good to just, you might want to talk about when a council member has a question for the city attorney. Those should be, how do you handle that? Yeah, direct those to the manager and then the manager can contact the city attorney because it could be helpful. The manager has more insight and can know like, maybe there's a follow-up question that should come from yours. And then if you have that question, likely others will have it. So the answer would be given to all of the council members. Brent, did you have a question? I have a brief question. Go ahead. Would another example be like the grievance process of an employee? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I don't think that's an expert. Maybe it would be expert, yeah. It could be. It's definitely a situation where you contact the attorney and if you need to, but you do not have a conversation with individual involved. Are there any other questions? I mean, the bottom line is that you're here to serve the public and not yourself, which makes sense. Okay, so this needs to be approved by a motion and then signed later this week. Do we have a motion to approve the conflict of interest policy? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Now we're on to item G, the council schedule. So on. Yes, and hopefully you had a chance to look at this also. It's important to lay out the schedule of regular meetings and some of the special meetings. Well in advance, because it's important to have all of you at all of the meetings is the goal. So if you know any conflicts, you don't need to let us know now, but let the mayor and me know as soon as you can. Something coming up soon is the prioritization retreat. The strategy prioritization retreat and we'll have some dates for you in the next week or so on that. I'm pulling staff currently to find out what would work for them. Thank you, Wendy. Yeah, and that's in the past typically, it's been like a half day, like a Saturday morning or something. So that's why it has to be scheduled in advance. Otherwise, no one will have the free time for it. Bryn, question. Yeah, I'm just curious about the second meeting in November. And if that's gonna be a whole vacation week for folks. Yeah, that's the one day before Thanksgiving. Right. We could consider doing the meeting the week before if that was necessary, sort of the way we do front load December. I don't have a conflict with it where it is now. But if others do, I see some heads, no, not in the issue. Jim. I'll share that I have to make the July and August dates fall on already planned vacations for me. I can attend the August 8th one if necessary, but the July 11th one I will not be able to attend if it stays on that date. And that's okay, but just sharing that with the rest of the council. As soon as you brought it up, Jim, I will also be away for the July 11th meeting. So that one, the first Monday is the four, which is why it's not assigned. Should we potentially move it to the 18th and just hold it on the third Monday of the month? I'm trying with the 18th. Yeah, that will work for me. Wendy, do you know if there was a reason for staff to choose the 11th over the 18th? I do not. I will check unless staff here wants to speak up, but I can check and get back to you tomorrow. And then August, we just always only do one week, one meeting in August, because people tend to be on vacation that time of year. You know, Jim, you said you might miss the 8th. Is the August 8th a concern for anyone else? Any other dates here of concern? I likely will miss the November 21st. And it's okay if you miss a meeting once or twice a year for all of your answers. Oh, and I should say if you are, you know in advance you're going to miss a meeting. You can submit comments ahead of the meeting if you want your input on a topic shared, you know, even if you're not there for live discussion and decision-making, you can still get your thoughts included. Aurora, were you raising your hand or is it just open? Sort of. I was just looking, I guess this would probably fall under other activities, but comparing the schedule to the schedule we have for the city manager, I see that we have staff scheduled for that the week of March 14th. So even though that's not a regularly scheduled meeting, we'll probably have one at that time, a special meeting. Yeah, we'll talk more with our recruiter in our next item about that, but that's true. That's not covered here. And we could have special meetings at other times. We can call a special meeting when there's a reason that necessitates it. And as long as we are following the warning process and making sure it's publicly warned, it's okay if we add them. Or we can even choose later in the year to make an adjustment and move a meeting date and update the schedule that we need to. Okay. So I think we should not vote on this now, let Wendy check with staff about moving the July date and then we'll put it in for approval in our next meeting agenda. But let's all plan to meet again on March 21st. Since we are not voting to take a vote on that one, we will move on to item H and this is our city manager hiring process update. And so we're gonna bring in Mike Jaylet who is our recruiter, our consultant from GovHR. And in the council packet, you have the timeline that we've been following thus far and that has outlined our process. There's also links to two prior memos just to give you some historical background on how we got where we are today in this process. Welcome Mike. Welcome, glad to be here. Hello everyone. Yeah, so with us are the rest of city council. So you know myself and council Duncan, we have councilor Brent Oakley here and then our two brand new counselors who it's their first meeting today since our election last week. Councilors Rora Hurd and Thomas Renner. Good to meet you all. Hi. Mike, would you like to introduce yourself and then maybe just talk us through where we are in this recruitment time? Okay. So myself, I'm a vice president at GovHR USA which is a consulting firm that you've hired for this process we're a national firm conducting recruitment in 41 of the 50 states and so we're pretty broad in our coverage. I'll also say that I was town manager for 36 years, 34 years actually. The last 32 years I was serving in one community westward Massachusetts which is a community just outside of Boston. I retired two years ago and I've been working for GovHR since as a recruiter. We were elated to have been selected by the city council or yes by the city council for this search. We think that we can do, we thought we could do a good job and I think we have been doing a good job. This is a very interesting community. I've come to love it and to represent it to potential candidates who are excited to be in the candidate pool. I'll just go through the steps that we've taken and then where we're going from here. When we first were hired we set out to prepare an advertisement for the position, an announcement we refer to it and a brochure that we could distribute to potential candidates to give them some insight into the community issues, what you were looking for in the city manager, what the community was like and that sort of thing along with some pictures to make it inviting for people to read through it as well. We used material that you had prepared for the first round of your recruitment and added some sections that we, in particular, add to our brochures. We also distributed to get more information from the department heads and from council at the time, a questionnaire to get an idea of what the traits were, what the experience of the candidates you were looking for and also to identify the issues that the new city manager would be confronting when they would be hired. We worked closely with the mayor and with Wendy and BB at the time to develop these brochures and the position announcement. Then we advertised the position. We have sources that we always advertise in. We pay particular attention to hiring a diverse pool of candidates. And so we have special efforts to do that. And in this instance, Wunuski had advertised to a large list of sources of their own in a first round, an attempt to solicit a diverse pool of candidates. And so Wunuski and BB re-advertised in those sources. So we had broad coverage from a point of view of advertising the position. In addition to that, we emailed over 5,000 professionals in the business throughout the United States that are on lists that we have. And I spent some time with Wendy identifying some candidates in Vermont that we also I sent personalized emails to invite them to apply. And so that effort netted 19 candidates, which seems small, but given that it's your second round that it is a good sized candidate pool. I think more interesting is that five people of color are in the candidate pool. And what did I say? Three people and five females, which shows a good diversity. And of those 19, nine were selected to be interviewed by me in an hour long Zoom, not to get more information. Those were people that I aimed to meet the minimum qualifications for the position. I interviewed them to get a better understanding of what their experience is, their personality and get a better idea whether or not I thought they fit well with what the community was looking for. We also conducted a Google search by staff. We have professional staff in the offices in Illinois and they conducted a Google search to identify any issues that were out there among the candidates that we need to know about that could be embarrassing if it became public. So we incorporated that into our consideration. Those nine candidates were presented then to the search committee. You have a search committee that was appointed by the council to do the preliminary interviews of the candidates. All nine candidates were presented to them with some recommendations and some observations that I made. The result of that discussion resulted in the selection of five candidates that I would go, that the search committee itself would interview from a prepared script. They conducted hour long Zoom interviews from that prepared script. At the end of that day, which was a process that took three days or three evenings, they selected four candidates. The day deemed to be candidates that they would feel comfortable having as city manager of Lnusky. Those four candidates have a diverse, experience and approach to things. So it will give the council itself a wide range of individuals to consider to find the one that is the best fit for the community. If I can. Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. I was just gonna interrupt briefly to share about the composition of the search committee. So we had invited our first search committee members to come back. Not all were able to. And so the previous council decision had been that the committee's representation should remain consistent. And so we did have representative from the school. We had a Kamal Dahal from the school board. We had a member of the business community. So we had Ali Navel again from Mule Bar, not Mule Bar. Monkey Bar and Waking Windows who did participate the first time around. We had myself and then Jim representing the council. We had Prashant Singh, a resident at large who also was a member of our charter change commission. Amila Merjanovic, the executive director of USCRI as we wanted a refugee support partner included. And I feel like I'm forgetting somebody. Oh, and then George Cross, another resident at large who was a longtime resident who had experience in the city and an interim city manager role in the past. So just wanted to share an update on what the composition was. Sorry about that, Mike. No, no, no, I'm glad you did that. I couldn't have done that. So the finalists have been subjected now to background checks and reference checks that I've now been able to review. The individuals have been invited, the four individuals have been invited to attend the final interviews which we conducted this weekend. They've all accepted in there making their travel plans to get to the community. Just to review, the final interviews will be broken up into an interview conducted by the department heads of each of the candidates. And I will summarize their feelings about each of the candidates which I'll present to you after you've interviewed the candidates, but before you make a final decision so you can incorporate the department's thoughts about the candidates. The candidates will also get a tour of the community to get a sense for Winooski, the issues, places of interest and that sort of thing. We will make available to them a real estate professional to talk to them about housing situations. There's a residency requirement in your charter and so each of them have to consider, and three of them will be coming from far and off a way that they definitely have to consider housing in the area. And in the evening, we'll have a reception for the candidates to introduce the candidates to the community itself. Each of the candidates will be asked to speak for five to seven minutes introducing themselves what they know about Winooski and what it is that, why it is that they're looking to service its next city manager. On Saturday then, there'll be in-person interviews with the council and the mayor in order to protect the anonymity of the candidate throughout this process so that they don't jeopardize their current employment. We will be referring to candidates throughout the process as candidates A, B, C, and D. You will know them based on the material that you'll be providing. I will be providing you in the next few days a book which will summarize or provide all the application material we have on all four candidates. And I'll also give you a list of all the candidates we've considered, so it's all the transparent that the council will know that you've seen and that we've reviewed all the candidates in this is not a fair process and an open process. The council and the mayor will ultimately select one of the candidates to serve as your next city manager and you'll be making that appointment in public session at the end of the process. And it usually takes between 45 and 60 days for individuals, especially those that are employed, to be able to terminate their current position or transition out of their current position and into the new law. Accomplishments to date, I'll just note these quickly. 19 candidates was a very good fit, very good showing for the community on its second posting. The diversity pool is very good. 16% of the candidates were of color and that represents the percentage of managers or people in this executive position nationwide on an average. 47% of the pool was interviewed, which is very high, almost half the pool was interviewed at one level or another. And 21% of that pool are being presented to you as finalists, which I think is terrific. It doesn't mean that they'll all show up. During a week, somebody could get offered a position and take it, but at present, I don't believe that's gonna be the case. I think we'll have four here next weekend. Or this weekend. I believe that the council will find that the skill and experience level of the finalists are very varied, so you'll have a good ability to select the right fit for your community format. We stuck with the schedule that we established with the onset, we were gonna end on the 11th and the 12th, and we're gonna end on the 11th and the 12th. I think that's been a very good outcome. I think the other thing worth mentioning is the search committee put in a good effort. They attended all of the meetings, all of the interviews, and were very thoughtful in their questions, in their review, and their selection of the four candidates for you, so I think that's been terrific. And finally, the timing of the final interviews with the newly selected members of the council, I think it's very good. The candidates will want to know that they've been selected by the people that I actually will be working for. So I think the timing of the election and the sitting of the council is perfect with the timing of the finalists and the groups. Those are just a few things that I've noted while I was sitting here listening to the rest of the meeting that I've wanted to just acknowledge that they've been accomplished so far. Thanks, Mike. I think Aurora has a question. I'm just wondering if you're able to share the demographics or general percentage demographics of the four finalists? Once, I'm going to see if I have that right here. It might be a second here. You're right. So I'll just tell you where they're from. Portsmouth, Virginia, Berry, Vermont, Overland Park, Kansas, and Los Angeles, California. That's those are the four finalists. And they're very positioned to our... Should we go into executive session if we're going to talk in this level of detail about candidates? Yeah, if it gets nervous. Yeah. Preserve. Yeah. Let's do that. Okay. Brendan, did you have a question before that? Okay, go ahead. Yeah. Can Mayor, if you would, describe a little bit more about the schedule and timing? Okay, so Saturday, the current plan would be to meet at 8 a.m. to do the interviews. We're going to assume four one-hour interviews. I think we should try to reserve at least 30 minutes to debrief together afterwards. And so that would put us at 8 a.m. to 12, 30 p.m. That is not set in stone. So if folks have feedback about the start or end times, now is the time. Aurora? Oh, sorry. Is that workable for folks? That window of time? Yes, I've reserved the date. Okay, awesome. And then for Friday, for the reception that's open to the public, that is going to be at the Bryan Community Center lobby. I don't know if we finalized the time for that yet, if it will be at 5 or 6 p.m. Wendy, sorry, what is it? Go ahead, Brendan. Oh, wait. We have not finalized it. We're leaning toward 6 p.m. because the community normally meets at 6 p.m. It would be an hour and a half. Yeah, most of our stuff historically has tended to be later, so more like 6 p.m. And I know the school board also does their stuff at 6 p.m. And that would be warned, publicly warned, so that members of the public would know to come. Members of council are also able to attend, so we're going to warn that there could be a forum, but we should not be engaging in any discussion, right? It's a chance to just informally mingle with candidates. The Saturday meeting would be warned too, but it's going to be fully in an executive session because it's just going to be interviews of these candidates. We're not going to make a public vote decision on who to offer to at Saturday. That will happen at the future meeting. Okay, you had more questions? Yeah, so Saturday in person at City Hall, correct? I think at City Hall, we're investigating if we should do it at the hotel that candidates will stay at, but if not, it would be City Hall. Yeah, so obviously the plans for Friday haven't been announced yet because the time hasn't been confirmed. It says reception, so are we planning on providing dinner or just like, you know, well- Drinks, soft drinks. Yeah, before we get a piece of it, be interested to come on a Friday evening, usually food helps. But also wondering about the timing of the announcement so folks can have that on their radar to attend. I mean, I think the goal is to get it out tomorrow. I see Paul's hand raised now. Thank you, Mayor Christine and Councilor Bryn. Yes, so the goal is to have that out as soon as possible. I would love to get that out tomorrow morning. I'm going, the plan is to do, to warn both meetings at the same time. So all of that information will be in one news update and then looking at you, Councilor, certainly if you can help put that out on your channels, wherever else we'll hit all of the normal spots, certainly gonna do a lot of direct outreach from my desk. And yeah, we're hoping for a good turnout on Friday. Yeah, we should be reaching out to individuals and community members and inviting them to this. I should mention too, at the Bryn Center, I work this out with town meeting TV. It'll be an in-person only event, which the consensus so far has been that that will be good. For hybrid meetings, the preference for town meeting TV is of course to be at City Hall. Obviously there is a benefit at having something like this at the O'Brien Center, but town meeting TV has a really elaborate setup that you're sitting in right now that makes it very easy to have a hybrid meeting. Otherwise it's essentially just pointing a laptop at a group of people. It doesn't generally work that well. So, thanks. Thank you, Paul. And I do recall the previous public reception that we had, there were some childcare provided. Are we intending to offer the same? I don't know that staff has arranged that. We have not arranged it. If we have staffing for it, that would be great. We're short staffed in that department right now. Okay. And of course, apologies for the scatter shot questions. Just haven't heard any of the details yet. So thank you. No need to apologize. The logistics have been coming together very rapidly as we figured out where the finalists were. Working on this tight timeline is a little bit of a challenge. It's actually helpful to have the questions. Thank you. Yeah. And ideally we could have worn this sooner. Not ideal to do it kind of this short notice, but I think that's what puts more pressure on us to be thoughtful about when we reach out to try to get the word out. And then one other thought that I can anticipate the response to is if there's ability to have some of the centennial apparel and mobile for sale at the venue. Good idea. We may be able to do that. The online site is connected to our friends with downtown Winnieski. And I know this is a really silly sort of specific operational thing, but there is a credit card reader that is tied to the ability to do that. We can't do the petty cash thing right now. I'll check with Meredith at downtown Winnieski to see if that's possible. We do have, if that doesn't work out, which it definitely would be a great opportunity for that, but if that doesn't work out, we are currently restocking the O'Brien Center with what we have available at City Hall and we are going to be doing a pretty big push for that stuff. And then on the community birthday party in June, we're also going to be having a huge sale, which will be in the sun of the hour, and it will be great. So, thanks for that comment. All right. Can I ask, going back to something outside of the schedule? Yeah, sure. Also something that I think should be discussed before we go into executive session. So two questions that I have, and sorry, I should have been more specific on the first one is I'm wondering about the diversity demographics of the four candidates. And I'm also wondering if we can speak to how the equity director, how Yasmin, was a part of this process. Mike, I don't know if you want to share demographics for the finalists now or wait until we're in executive session. I think that we should wait until we're in executive session. We got to Yasmin, she was part of the process in the beginning, reviewed material, gave comments, which were incorporated into the process. There was a very important element in the recruitment and we took it seriously and listened to the comments and what we appreciated. Wonderful. Thank you. Because I noticed that was a part of the memorandum from September. Yeah, and some of those recommendations were incorporated into the process. Okay. I'm looking for it. Oh, so the timeframe is one of the pieces, like keeping a tighter timeframe. Yeah. Trying to be transparent. I think the tighter timeframe for me personally has made that somewhat challenging. I know I haven't been able to bring as many updates to meetings as I had previously, but we haven't had, yeah, it's dropping out in the same news last time. We did, Mike mentioned earlier, the survey about qualifications or competencies or what have you. That was made public. And I think another part that one of those previous recommendations is coming out right now where we need to participate in outreach to bring community members in. Yas, if you want to share anything about your participation at the beginning before we launched the search committee the second time, feel free, but also feel obligated. Thanks for the invitation to speak, Christine. Yeah, so my involvement at the very beginning was, like as Mike said, reviewing some of the documents that went out initially, the job posting, the brochure that went out, and I provided input in the questionnaire that was provided to leadership to give input at the very beginning as well. Those were really the three things that I did have a part in. As far as the process itself, I have not been involved in the process at all. Thank you so much. Yeah, we made a decision not to include staff roles in the search committee this time around versus last time we had to include the staff roles. But then there will be an interview, I'm sorry. Yes, so that decision though on the search committee, that decision about having staff roles on the committee was made in partnership with staff, and they have a role this time around of doing their own interview of candidates, which will be taking place on that day. Brynn? I noticed a member of the public had their hand up for a while. Yeah, let's bring Daisy over. Can you all hear me? This is Daisy. Yes, welcome. Thanks so much. Hi, I just want to say congratulations and welcome to the new counselors and deputy mayor. And I think Aurora just sort of touched on what my comment was going to be regarding our director of equity, having really being hopefully a focal point of guiding this important new role in our community. So I hope that all of the counselors and mayor will continue to use her expertise and her influence that she has in our community as someone who really gives us residents a lot of hope and represents so much of that for all of our community, especially given what we're seeing across other communities, just across the river, that hit a lot of Vermonters hard watching that turnover. And I hope that the most diverse community in Vermont can really prove that this isn't just a performative role that we actually respect this role. And we're going to show people just exactly how much we can do with it. So thanks. Thank you, Daisy. Are there any more questions? Folks need to ask before executive, before we move into an executive session. Okay. So Wendy, did you set up another link for us to do executive session? No, I did not. I apologize. I wonder if we can, if Paul can I have to be from- I compressed this meeting. No, it would have to be from an external account other than mine because the two meetings can't overlap. But I mean, could we have folks exit from this meeting? Can you do a breakout room for us? Not while we're in the meeting. We would have ended us at that up before. I'm sorry. If you or, Christine, I believe if you're able to go into your account and maybe use your account's ID or just create a new meeting and then email it to the counselors, that should work. Okay, I'm making one right now. Thank you. Okay, I've just set a new meeting link. So, Thomas and Aurora. Thomas, I see you have your laptop. Yep. Would you be able to join the link there? And oh, you have your sewer. Jenny, would you be able to let the counselors into the back office if somewhere so they can meet not in front of the town meeting TV? She just stepped out. Oh, shit. I can let them back. Oh, Angela, thank you. Okay, so I am looking for a motion to find that pursuant to state statute section 3133 because we're discussing the appointment or employment or evaluation of a public employee. We should not have this discussion in public. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Brynn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And then I am looking for a motion to motion carries. A motion to move into executive session inviting our recruiter, Mike Jaylett and our city manager, Wendy Harris. So moved. Second. Motion by Brynn, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And the link does not appear to be live, am I wrong? So you might need to copy and paste it. It didn't work in the email I'm saying. It's just not a live link. Oh, I see what you mean. It's me. Okay, I sent it again. Okay, so we will move over to that Zoom line to discuss just the employee information, the candidate information, and then we'll come back out here to this regular meeting. Thank you. Thank you.