 I am calling to order the meeting of outreach, communications, and appointments at 9.45 a.m. We are missing one of our members, Sarah Swartz, who is unfortunately out with the flu, and we are expecting our other member, Darcy Dumont, to arrive late today. The town manager should be joining us now-ish to talk about appointments. So my hope is that we can turn first to those to see if there are any questions or comments on appointments for when the town manager shows up. George? I looked it over, I had none. I thought both candidates that were proposed were fine. They fit the criteria, the process was followed, so I have no questions for the town manager. Alyssa? It's not a question, it's just an error in the packet which I already emailed him about and so I imagine he'll be providing the current charge for the Public Shade Tree Committee rather than the several year old charge that inadvertently made its way into the packet. Okay. I had certainly no questions on Public Shade Tree. I thought the person he's putting forward seems very well qualified for that position. And same thing for Energy and Climate Action Committee. We already have an architect on the committee but I guess it doesn't hurt to have two. So with that, Alyssa? Unrelated to these specific appointments but two appointments in general, especially since we're going to be having a discussion about OCA's role moving forward. I wonder if we could get an updated lit, one of the things we could ask him for that he could provide soon is an updated list of current vacancies in any particular committees that are still left over. I think that's appropriate. Okay. So we will hold off on that until the town manager look at that perfect timing. Just flawless. He was waiting for his entrance. How are you, Mr. Balkaman? Good. So we looked at both sets of appointments. There were no questions or concerns from the committee. I don't know if you wanted to speak to either of the appointments since you're here. And I got Alyssa's email about the charge and so I don't know, I asked Angela to look into that. I'm not sure if she got back on that yet or not. No, just on the ECAC, again, another really strong group of applicants and just really a credit to the town, I think. And a lot of conversation I think in ECAC about the roles that people who might have other roles for people to play who can continue to contribute in smaller groups or something like that. I think I'm not sure if ECAC has talked about subgroups or not, but sector groups or something like that. So, but this is a person, Mr. is someone who that the chair felt was very strong, was important to have for the ECAC group to help move their mission forward. What was there, so one sort of question that I had and I have sort of a way of position of also serving on the ECAC, Mr. is an architect? She's not an architect, she works at an architecture firm. Okay, there is currently an architect serving on ECAC. The position that's being filled was someone in agriculture. Was there any thought given to the fact that perhaps there's a doubling up of expertise and not replacing the loss of an agricultural sector person? So we didn't have someone from the agricultural sector choose from and this person is more of about a communication. Her skill set is communication, that's why she was, I selected her because I think ECAC is moving more to how do we get our message out and sense that she was a person who was really interested in taking on real tasks to do work and felt like she would be a work, someone who's capable of writing and bringing things to the committee for consideration. Great, thank you. Any other questions, comments for the 10 man John? Either a public shade tree or ECAC, Mr. Starcy? I haven't really composed my thoughts, but I know that there, I would love to know how many people applied. I heard from some people who applied who seemed like they were good candidates and this person seems like she could definitely be a good candidate too. So I'm gonna trust your judgment. I think as you were coming in, I was saying that we had a lot of really good candidates that had applied, that was really hard. Again, which has been the ECAC's history of having a strong candidate pool. So we had a good number of strong people in this based on what the, we felt the committee needed at this point. This was the right match for it. You had something else you wanted to say? Yeah, so the thing is looking at this, so sometimes you'll see an appointment that goes till June 30th of 2020 and you say, well, it's five months away, that seems really, but we do try to match up everything on a July one turnover date. So if someone gets appointed between now and June 30th, it means that they're looking for a renewal then. It's, I don't wanna appoint people for like a year from February, it just sort of gets out of whack. So for the folks who are being appointed, I usually have to explain that to them. So the thought is that for Ms. Lawler, there will likely be a reappointment in front of us at the end of June. Yes. Okay. Alyssa? So on that note, one of the things perhaps this committee or another in the future will recommend to Town Council is that maybe it no longer makes sense to say on our motion sheets, which we have historically done, that it's a one-year appointment, a two-year appointment. What matters is the time like, right? And then we all know that term limits aside, we know that they're options. And so it sounds funny to say a one-year appointment that's only five months away. But rather than trying to fix it tonight, maybe in future just say, like it does in the motion, effective immediately through such and such. Maybe take the one-year thing out. And take out the one-year, two-year, and three-year thing because it's just one more thing to have become bursum in there. And whenever we're ready to reappoint, we always are gonna look back at the records and go, oh yeah, they've been here two and a half years. Let's see what we wanna do. Yeah, that's exactly where the confusion arises, yeah. Seeing no other questions or comments, I will let the town manager. Great. Thank you. And I will entertain a motion. We will do public shade tree committee first. The motion would be to recommend the town council approve the town manager's appointment to the public shade tree committee effective immediately for a term expiring June 30th, 2020, Sarah Lawler. Does anyone wanna make the motion? Seven. Alyssa has made the motion. Is there a second? Second. George has seconded. Is there any additional discussion? Okay, call the question. All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. That's unanimous. So we will move to energy and climate action committee. The motion would be to recommend the town council approve the town manager's appointment to the energy and climate action committee effective immediately for a term expiring June 30th, 2021, Sarah Durr. Is there a motion? Aye. So moved. George has moved. Is there a second? Second. Alyssa has seconded. Any further conversation? Okay, call the question. All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Okay, thank you. So I will send these to the town council for consideration on their agenda, hopefully for February 24th. Okay, the next item on our agenda, item three, discussion of GOL committee restructuring proposal. So when the council met on January 27th, there was some sense from members of this committee that there was a desire to discuss the proposal to dissolve OCA and redistribute appointments to different committees. And so I wanted to give us an opportunity, again, to have a discussion about this so that there's a feeling that any input that we might have as a committee could be clearly communicated to both GOL and to the council. I want to give George perhaps an opportunity if he wanted to update OCA on where this restructuring proposal stands at this moment. You also don't have to, but if I don't know if the members of the committee have necessarily read the report or for the public either. We spent, and you'll hear this again tonight briefly, probably we spent a fair amount of our last meeting time going through the question of appointments. And if OCA were dissolved, where might appointments go? And we came, I think, to a consensus as a committee, and my hope is that our next meeting will be able to put together a proposal that would include our suggestion or our thought of where appointments might go. So the first part of our suggested proposal was carried out at the last council meeting when we dissolved the audit committee and moved its duties to finance. The second sort of portion of our proposal is the proposal to take CRC and divide it into two. And having done that, it was felt that it would be appropriate to at least consider dissolving OCA and moving its appointments elsewhere and the outreach function would be sent to a separate committee. So at the moment, we are, I think, very close to having a proposal to present to the council. I hope it would be at our, not this coming meeting, but the next meeting. So that's where we stand at the moment. Alyssa. So once again, I remain frustrated by the process. One committee deciding for another committee, something is going to move forward without taking input from that committee. So because of a number of timing issues that we discussed in the past, GOL chose to move forward with making a proposal to the entire council and it was a proposal. It wasn't just a think about, get rid of OCA. It was a proposal to get rid of OCA without OCA ever having taken a position on that. So that got promoted to the council as a proposal. Yes, it's not a done deal yet, but there was not an OCA discussion about disbanding its committee, which again, I will argue is significantly different than the minor role that audit committee had that sit fit into finance committee. This committee has been doing way more work than the audit committee ever did. And that's because that's the nature of the audit committee and the nature of our work. So the fact that it was initially brought to the full town council without any OCA input, aside from the fact that two of our members serve on GOL but had not pulled this group to find out what we thought of that, it's now going to be brought forward in yet another proposal to do that. It's in tonight's report and it's also, I'm hearing you say, we GOL are pretty close to promoting something else. And again, you're not telling us what it is before you propose it or before you consider it again at GOL. So I don't understand a process that involves getting rid of a committee that doesn't involve talking to that committee. So I don't know why you're moving forward the first time or the second time without having heard from this body as to what we think as opposed to just what random counselors wrote to you after you promoted it to the full town council without our input. So I'm confused by the timeline here. Yeah, I do want to weigh in here because I think as chair, I bear some responsibility for this, but and I do want to just again remind members of this committee that this was on the OCA agenda for December 20th. It was discussed on December 20th by the members of this committee, which was well in advance of a proposal being sent to the council. The issue of course was that two members of our committee were not present for that discussion and that two of the members who were present already knew what was going on because they serve on GOL, which I think is frustrating and certainly was frustrating to the two counselors who were not here. At the same time, I as chair cannot control whether or not one counselor is sick and whether or not one counselor leaves early. And so I take a lot of responsibility for not bringing this to the committee earlier, but I don't want there to be this message that it wasn't until after the town council received the proposal or after the town council discussed this that it was brought to this committee. It was brought to this committee in advance. It's just most of the committee wasn't here and we weren't able to have a fuller discussion of it until the morning of that council meeting on January 6th, when a proposal had already been released. But to some extent that was out of my hand because two members were not here for that meeting in which we were scheduled to discuss it. And again, it was also scheduled to be on the agenda for the December 9th meeting that had to be bumped because our process took longer. And so there were certainly efforts to make sure that happened. And then of course, we were able to discuss it more fully at the January 6th meeting, which at this point was over a month ago. And that feedback has been taken into consideration by GOL. And in fact, the most recent proposal actually looks very similar to what Sarah had proposed during the OCA meeting on January 6th. And so I think that OCA did have an opportunity to weigh in at that point. And so I would take issue with some of the timeline comment. Darcy, you had your hand up and then we'll go to George. I guess I would just say that, I think that OCA should have been clued into what GOL was talking about from the first meeting that, you know, the time, whenever GOL first started talking about it, that should have been when OCA was clued into what the discussions were, what discussions were happening. And I also feel like get, you know, coming to OCA to ask us how we think our function should be divvied out among other committees now is not the question as far as I'm concerned. The question is whether or not we should dissolve. And I'm not convinced that we should. So, you know, I feel like we perform an important function that, you know, we already know what we're doing. And if we, I wouldn't mind sending out our outreach function or communications to other groups or just deciding that we're not going to do them. But I don't see any reason why this group should dissolve other than maybe other, you know, I don't think we should dissolve because we're creating another committee. That shouldn't be the reason why we dissolve. And if there's a reason for us to continue to exist and we're performing an important function, we might end up doing it less frequently because of the fact that we've figured out some of the processes that we're going to use, then so be it. I don't, you know, if we had a committee that met once a month to do just appointments, why not continue to have that committee function? And I think it just makes it complicated to put the appointment function in multiple different committees. That seems overly complicated to me. George. I think just one thing I hope I can make clear is that throughout the entire GOL discussion, it was not at all motivated by any judgment of OCA or its performance. That I can say with absolute certainty, partly because two of the members of GOL were on OCA and they would have risen to the defense of OCA if that were the case. But it wasn't anything motivated by that at all. And your arguments about where appointments should go or whether OCA should continue to be the appointments committee, I think is a legitimate argument. I don't agree with it, but it's a discussion that we will have as a council as to how we want our committees to be best structured. What was driven, what drove this whole process was a thought that, okay, we've had a year and we've under our belts and we can see that there's, at least some of us felt that there's some room for improvement in terms of just the structuring. And I proposed something which was rather modest and Evan proposed something that was more, I think, ultimately, I think was a better proposal. But anyway, we had a couple of proposals in front of us with the purpose of trying to simply make the council more effective. And that was what was driving the whole discussion. There was never ever any sense. Certainly I'm not on my part and I didn't hear anything in our discussion where it was about, oh gee, OCA is not doing their job or we need to get rid of them because there was nothing to do with that at all. And so we'll make our case hopefully within a few weeks or a month at the most. But, and then the council will decide what it wants to do. It really, the issue before the council is what do you all think as a council individually is the best way for us to structure our committees. And we have a proposal to put before you. I think you have a pretty good idea of its rough outlines. And I solicited comments from all councilors and quite frankly, all the comments came back where no one said anything, they all seem to be open to this general sort of movement of restructuring. But the issue of appointments I think is still wide open and we're gonna suggest a way to do it. And then we're gonna talk about it. So I guess the final thing is that we on GOL did talk about the issue of process and that we'd heard from some councilors that they were not happy with it. And we talked about it for a few minutes as I recall and a number of people spoke up. And the sense that I got wasn't just mine was that we felt that what we were doing was A, not a judgment on any committee whatsoever, wasn't a judgment on audit, wasn't a judgment on OCA or anybody else. It was just an attempt to do what we felt was actually part of our charge on a yearly basis to review the performance of our committees as a whole and think is there a way that we could do this better? And that's what drove it. And so the feeling was that we didn't, we weren't going to apologize for the way we did it. And so I realized there's disagreement about that. But I hope that we can focus now on, what makes the most sense for the council? And it may be that OCA should stay. Maybe that does have a function as just an appointments committee. But when we did the sort of restructuring, it looked like when all things fell out, it seemed like there's a good case to be made for sharing appointments among various committees. So for instance, CRC, it might make sense for them since they deal with issues related to zoning and planning, it might make sense for them to take on that task and so forth. So that's the argument. And in the end you may not be persuaded and you may have many others who agree with you. But that's an open question where appointments should go. But if you, if we do start sharing out appointments, then it does seem to be reasonable to dissolve OCA because its functions have been taken by other bodies. But again, just repeat, I don't know if I can say it too many times, it is not and never was a judgment on OCA. I've served on this body as you know and I'm proud of what it did. And it faced some really extraordinary challenges and rose to the occasion. So that's enough I think. I would just like to say you did receive one comment saying that for me, that I didn't think we should even be discussing it in GOL, that it should be something that should have originated at a retreat or a discussion among the full council. And I think there Darcy, it's just an issue of how we see the function of our committee, GOL. We felt this is well within our charge and we were just doing our job. And without any intent to criticize or judge anybody, it's just looking at the overall structure of the council committees and seeing if we could figure out a way to do it better. And ultimately it's the decision made by you and the council as a whole, not by us. And maybe it'll come back to us and you'll say no. We don't wanna change. Sure. Alyssa. So obviously we are going to have to agree to disagree because I appreciate the updates on the timelines where we did have relatively brief discussions but they were of course not under our control that not everybody was there, et cetera. I remain steadfast in my complaint that a proposal was made to the full town council without discussing it with this committee before the written proposal was submitted. That still happened and if it had, I know you talked about the timing with December and January but it didn't include anything about the fact that we weren't happy about this. The GOL reports have all sounded like, yeah, councils are pretty much in favor of this. So that I think is where the disconnect is, is that I don't feel like we got in the loop soon enough but then secondarily we were not, our concerns were not laid out in those reports to town council. And to be really blunt, I mean, I don't go to finance committee meetings. I don't watch how they do their job. I would not think that my opinion of how finance committee works is particularly useful. My opinion of how OCA works is particularly useful because I've been doing it all this time and so it's nice that other counselors think it's no problem to break up this committee but they're not here. They're not doing the work. So I would have thought that if that, and you did in fact talk to finance committee before you made the written proposal, you did have that discussion with them and they said, sure, fine, we'll take audit. That'll be great. So to say that it's not disrespect of OCA, I know that's not how you intended it but it's really hard not to take it that way because of the criticism we have faced so many times from other counselors who are not on this committee. I understand that that's not how you saw it at all and so you're just like, God, would you stop belaboring this? But it's a different, it's just a completely different viewpoint on how it was handled. So moving forward, you say you solicited comments. Well, you didn't, I would argue that they weren't particularly well characterized in the reports that have gone to town council so far as were made at this committee. You also indicated that you're at a point of a second proposal. Were you gonna tell us about it now before you go ahead and put it out to the council so that we can have some feedback to it because I heard that you say that it was based in part on Sarah's suggestion here that perhaps we break up the three committees. I don't know why we wouldn't get any input on your new variation of the proposal before you put it out and writing again, again because it's about our committee. I wouldn't expect you to take it to finance committee when it's not about their committee, but why wouldn't you get our input on this part? And then my other question that's along the lines with that is you had made some indication, perhaps before we argued about it again, that there might be a way of phasing this in. Say for example, after we do the ZBA appointments, after July 1st, after something like that, that we could start the other committees and populate the other committees because we've all served generally on multiple committees at the same time and let OCA sort of fade away per se if that's what's to happen because that's what the majority wants rather than it abruptly happening mid-appointment season. So understanding, I assume you've had some discussion about that because the two of you have been there and you know that we've talked about that in general terms too, as well as on feedback. So if you could tell us of your thoughts on that, that would be helpful. And then finally, the CAF revisions, one of the reasons I'm really hesitant to dump this out into separate committees right now, even though I did not have, I mean, I was like, oh, that's kind of a cool idea when Sarah said that and I don't have a problem with you pursuing that, but is that we cannot have three separate committees deciding to make revisions to the CAF, especially since the only committee members who have had many minutes of discussion around that issue are sitting, these five people sitting here. So giving it out to committees that never had that discussion, I think it was very clear based on what we've done so far for appointment processes that it's really easy for counselors to sit out there and say, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? Why didn't you do the other thing? It's because they weren't here having those discussions and so I don't want them all changing the CAF. If we wanna fix the CAF any, I think we should do that before we get gotten rid of. So if you could give us a sense of what timeline your current proposal that I know is still in the formative stages, that would be helpful. Well, I think I wanna work backwards. I think there's two suggestions. There's certainly the first one about CAF is a good one. We do need to sort this out before any major, if we do start moving appointments around. So that's maybe something for us to put on the front burner. Phasing in also is a possibility. I think, you know, we'll see. We're not thinking in those terms at the moment but that's why we're gonna have this discussion with the council and that could be a very, that could be a factor. In terms of comments, I tend to put in my reports only written, summaries of written comments. So, for instance, Darcy sent me a written comment as she mentioned. I've gotten comments from either because they were on my committee or they have sent me written comments from nine of the 13 councilors. I have not received them from some. And so I'm looking for written comments that, and then what we do as a committee is we read them and we discuss them. And this is what we did at our last meeting. We read every single comment and we discussed it. And that's a practice that I've learned from Evan. I think it's a very fruitful one. So the councilor's voices are heard by everyone and they have in their packet the actual comments. But no names are attached. So we don't discuss people by name, but we just say one, two, three, four, five. So all those comments were presented to my committee, all were discussed. And in my next report, not this one, but the next one they would be summarized, I hope. So I encourage councilors who feel strongly about this, about the proposal or what we're moving towards to just send me written comments because they will get included in the record and they will be discussed by the committee. As far as the actual proposal, as you said, Alyssa, it's still being worked on. Hopefully at our meeting on Wednesday, we will be able to hammer out something concrete that I'm ready to tell the president, here's what we've got and our report will summarize the general outlines of it and it then goes to the council for discussion. So that's where it stands at the moment, it's still in process. The basic outlines I think you have a pretty clear sense of. But where the appointments are going is something that I still need to resolve with my committee. Yeah, so I wanna address two things. And first, I want, I'm getting increasingly frustrated with this discussion as I think we all are. And I think part of that is that much of this is due to the fact there's some concern that finance was discussed, was counseled before and Anoka wasn't again, had all things gone perfectly, had we not had to debate our process for an entire extra meeting longer than I had projected we would have, this would have been on the OCA agenda for December 9th, it was on the OCA agenda for December 9th, if you go back and you look at the original version, which was around when finance discussed it in their committee, which was before GOL fully discussed the proposal. I mean, we were on track to do that. We had something very important that we had to do that ended up bumping that. And that was an executive decision I made and you can criticize me for it, but I won't take the criticism that GOL didn't even think about consulting OCA until it was too late. It was literally on that December 9th agenda before it was revised because we spent longer than I anticipated on that process. And then it was again discussed in December, which frustrated me a little bit about this discussion is the same thing that frustrated me with much of the discussion on January 6th, which is the whole premise of this discussion is for OCA to give input on the proposal itself. And yet today, much like January 6th, the discussion seems to be more of a criticism of the process and a criticism of George and myself, which does not necessarily help us offer input on the proposal itself. There was some input offered on the 6th with regard to appointments where we heard pretty strongly within this committee that it might be a lot to give all appointments to one committee. There was a proposal by Sarah to distribute them. She also brought that up in the council meeting. That was then reflected in many of the comments we received and that's something that we're being responsive to. But I'm not getting from this discussion right now anything useful that could be taken to GOL to influence the proposal to say here is OCA's input on this proposal. What I'm hearing is just criticism of the process that brought us here. And I'm not finding that particularly useful in envisioning what I'm supposed to do with that when we get to GOL. With regard to the CAF thing, I agree completely and that's been one of my concerns as we've thought about what might happen with this. If you remember on our meeting on January 27th, I made the statement that the CAF was something that I was looking to put on one of our next agendas. I had wanted to put it on this agenda when we discussed as a committee whether it should be on this agenda or the next agenda. There was a feeling that we wanted to talk about differing viewpoints on the planning board because that was still fresh in our mind. And so the CAF were put on two different agendas. So you should expect to see that on the agenda for February 24th. I agree that's something this committee needs to discuss and hopefully make a recommendation on before any potential dissolution of this committee. So we will talk about that on February 24th. I don't know how long that discussion will take and that discussion may influence when we phase in any potential restructuring. But that is something that is on my radar. I had wanted to put it on today's agenda but then other things bumped it. So hopefully we were able to do that. So I guess what I'm trying to get my head wrapped around is what in my role as chair, what am I supposed to be communicating to GOL from this committee regarding the proposal on the table that can help GOL be responsive to OCA's concerns in input and perhaps influence whatever proposal ends up in front of the council a month or so from now. Alyssa. One, there isn't a proposal on the table. We have nothing to respond to. The proposal looks, the report just as with the report that says we're still working on it. So you haven't given us a proposal. So that's why I can't give you feedback about the proposal and I express that. Where's the second proposal that's still in formative stages? I'm sorry that you're offended. I really am because what I'm not getting across because I'm so frustrated with this is it's not about you didn't schedule it. Of course you scheduled it. Of course other things came up. George was here too. He knew these things were happening. We all saw that we had to push things back because everything takes forever like this is taking forever. At the same time, what I would like GOL to get as a takeaway is even if other committees don't have time to get to their stuff, let them know that if you don't hear from them by X time, you're going forward. That's my frustration is that I didn't hear that process wise. I think that's a very fair thing to expect. It's totally reasonable that GOL can say, well gosh darn it. I thought you guys put it on your agenda three times. We have to move forward because we feel for reasons I don't actually understand but we feel like we have to move forward. We're bringing this to the council. You missed your window. We hope to talk to you about it again as it unfolds. Another frustration I'm feeling here is that I believe it was just communicated that it doesn't really matter what US chair would take back to GOL because that was not necessarily communicated that more was focused on what individual counselors wrote at a particular moment. And so that I think is also a process issue. I heard George say, I only take into account written comments. I didn't know I had to write comments for them to get incorporated. I thought that was why we were discussing it at OCA. So I'm possibly just what you guys said verbally at GOL covered what we said at OCA but OCA didn't give you a report in writing of what we thought. And I didn't give you a report in writing of what I thought so I'm one of those counselors that's not the nine because I didn't know I had to because I thought that was why we were discussing it here. So I'm glad Darcy did because she got her comment included. So again, process wise please be clear on what the expectation is. If the expectation is since we missed our window now we're only going with individual comments, cool. But tell us that. I know you solicited individual comments and we're careful in terms of not putting names on them, et cetera, but I presumed that the OCA discussion such as it was was also going to be included without having to be put in writing because none of us put it in writing. So just it's a process issue with GOL going forward whether it's any other committee because who knows what other variations we'll make on this as we move forward. It's just to be clear what window of opportunity people have to comment and if they're doing it as an existing committee or as individuals that would be really helpful. If we had an actual proposal to respond to you today we could be doing that. So I mean we can do it right now. I can tell you right now. Cool. If it is useful. I think we have other business to do and we talked about the process issue in GOL and that was the only feedback that I got from this committee was there was an issue about the process. Did not get any specific feedback except from Darcy about the point about maybe this is better handled in a retreat. That's the only specific comment that I could present to my committee from this committee other than complaints about the process. We discussed the process issue. And as I said earlier, and I'll say one more time and hopefully I won't say it again the sense of the committee was that we didn't accept that criticism. We heard it, we discussed it and the sense was that what we were looking for and I'm still looking for and welcome completely our thoughts about the general idea of taking CRC and splitting it into two and creating a town services committee which also would take on the task of outreach and the issue of whether appointments can be spread out amongst other committees rather than having a body that is simply a appointments body and Darcy's raised some issues about that today. And it would be helpful to me if she could just jot a few of those down and send them to me as an email but she can also communicate to me other ways but that is useful. But I think ultimately this will come out in a council discussion but I can convey those concerns on Wednesday if I have them. So what I'm looking for to repeat I think what the chair said are specific comments about the general idea of dividing CRC and spreading appointments around in such a way that OKA no longer is needed. So if people feel that and Darcy's given some reasons and maybe others have other thoughts that's what I'm looking for. I'm not ready to discuss a specific proposal because quite frankly we don't have it yet. My committee meets on Wednesday and we have a huge agenda and what's happened the last time we met and it may happen this time by the time we get to these larger issues we just don't have any time. And I think time is important that if we are going to make a serious change or at least consider it we need to do it sooner rather than later. So part of the challenge for me on Wednesday will be as Evan is feeling right now how do you manage meeting so you get done what's important. I think it is important and we're gonna try and get it done on Wednesday but I don't think this is the time for us to get into the details because quite frankly I still have to iron it out with my committee. So I just follow up from what George said. Yes. If you have something in your packet for your GOL meeting on Wednesday could you share it directly with this committee so that we can just get it on our radar quickly? So here's what I think I wanna bring this to and I know there's concern about other items of our agenda but I wanna given that we are GOL is talking about this on Wednesday and given that there is a desire for there to be an OKA input to this. I want to have something that I can take to GOL on Wednesday. And so essentially the reason there was one part of the reason there's no OKA response is when we discussed this on January 6th there were varying opinions within OKA. We didn't vote on this, right? But at the time and I will say I have since changed my position on this at the time I thought it would be useful to keep appointments together and put them into GOL. At the time Sarah said that she thought it would be better to distribute appointments across committees. At the time Darcy said what she said today which is have a standalone appointments committee essentially. And so there was no way to say here is OKA's response to this because there was no consensus response. But it seems like there is a desire to have some message from OKA and I would like to have that message for GOL's meeting on Wednesday because what I don't want is for us to continuously feel like we have to push back GOL's discussion because OKA hasn't had a chance to discuss this yet. And so I understand there are other things on this agenda but I don't want to keep pushing. I want this committee to feel like it has had a say and I want to do that right now because I am happy to put off the other things on our agenda to a future meeting because at this point I don't view them as pressing and I will explain why for the next item. So what I want to talk about and what I want some message from OKA and I'm tired of talking about the process. I understand the frustrations. I think those complaints have been those concerns have been registered. There are two aspects to the proposal. One is that OKA will be dissolved and outreach will be incorporated into another committee. That has not received any comments from this committee at any point in time, part of which I think is perhaps because this committee has done almost nothing on outreach in the past year that it has existed. The other part is the issue of appointments. The original proposal as you saw had appointments in GOL. It looks like given the comments that were received, we are moving towards more similar to what Sarah proposed which is distributing appointments. Darcy has put forth an idea of having OKA possibly remain as an appointments committee that meets when needed or perhaps once a month. What I think would be useful is given what our experience in appointments and given our experience in outreach. What input do we want to give GOL as they are deciding what they are going to recommend with regard to those two components and where they go? What do they need to consider? What advice do we have for them? That's what I think would be useful to GOL. So I think that to me, the most useful thing so far that's come out of this for GOL is the issue of the CIS. And I think that's important to consider as GOL is discussing this. What else does GOL need to consider with regard to these two issues? What other input do we want to give as a committee? Darcy? I think that one reason why I think that that the appointment should stay in one place is that the body that does appointments needs to have a continuing relationship with the town manager on will the town manager be coming to multiple venues to talk about appointments? Our relationship with the community participation officers and with the resident advisory committee, I think we also have to consider overarching issues, process issues that would affect all appointments. I think that if a process issue came up, having to deal with multiple different venues where appointments happen to try to figure out how to deal with that process issue and to communicate with the town manager through multiple groups is not workable. So as I said, I think that we shouldn't complicate things. We should do things in the simplest way possible and not make a decision based, make a structural decision based on the fact that something else is happening somewhere else in the council. We're creating another committee so that somehow means we need to get rid of a committee. I guess I just really feel like there are skills that the appointments committee has gained and it's not that easy to just blithely transfer them to everybody else on the council. And the relationship issue is another piece of it. So I think that's a good point. So I don't know if I'm the only person on the council who thinks that OCA should not be dissolved. But I just think we shouldn't complicate things by putting it in multiple committees. Other thoughts on appointments or outreach? Alyssa. I appreciate us attempting to get to the meat of the matter since we don't have an actual new proposal per se in front of us. But to be able to focus on those two aspects is really useful. And I'm assuming that based on what you said that coming out of this, Darcy and I don't have to go home and write what we said to George because that's the only way he's gonna incorporate it. It's that he's writing it down now. So we don't have to worry about that disconnect like we had previously when we didn't understand that the only way it was gonna get to the report is if we said that. And so yes, it's absolutely true that we were kind of all over the place on a whole bunch of different things. I don't see any reason to disband OCA. So there's another vote for don't disband OCA. And for the reasons Darcy talked about. And specifically it is not, I am not saying it's not possible to do in the future. I'm not saying it's not even possible to do at some point over the course of say the next year, maybe even during this year. But at this point, I'm not seeing that we're quite ready because for one, the CAF discussion should be held here, should not be held at GOL, should not be held by the full town council immediately. It should be held here first because of all the work we've done associated with what does it mean and what is useful and what should be released and all those conversations that despite GOL having two of its five members be us, that's not the same as this full group. And so that I would not want, I would not want us to be disbanded. Okay, so A, don't disband us. Two, if we're going to be disbanded, do it after the CAF revisions to A, to B, do it after we fill the ZBA openings that we're currently in process of trying to fill. Ideally subset, do it after July one when hopefully the town manager actually submits most of his reappointments prior to the July one changeover just to get the bulk of the work done by the five people who've been doing it. Then once we're through that and we assume that by this point the CRC's other group has been appointed that and has started to meet and started to feel its way around things, it may well then become obvious to all of us that, oh, this would work out if we did the split that Sarah was talking about. We've already fixed the CAF, we've already gotten through the bulk of the annual appointments, we've filled our immediate vacancies that we need to fill as a town council and then we're ready to shift to another way of doing things just like August's ready to shift. But so I'd be looking at a timeline that took us through July or August kind of thing and then talk about it again. The other, sure. I just want to make sure I'm following as you pointed out earlier in this meeting I hadn't had enough coffee. So are you essentially proposing, not proposing, suggest, I don't, verb, some verb that we perhaps move forward with the division of CRC and create TSO, creating another standing committee, essentially retaining OCA perhaps temporarily as an appointments committee to get through and then once TSO has sort of founded its footing, have a discussion about whether an appointments committee is actually needed or could be, but sort of dividing and creating and then saying, okay, now that you've been working, how would you feel about taking this? Is that sort of what, okay. That's exactly what I'm looking at because I don't see any point in the theoretical divide of three ways into a committee that includes a committee that's being changed. So it was one, I don't approve of the proposal to put it all into GOL, so that's a no on that and then when it comes to dividing it up, I don't think the CRC and its variation are ready for that division yet. Finance committee might well be, but again, if we get through the CAS, we get through the bulk of the appointments and reappointments for July one, then I think we will all be able to see it with clearer eyes because we will be able to see, oh, this is how these various things are functioning. There was another aspect to this, oh, outreach. So one of the reasons we haven't done much outreach is because we've been not, we've been, what's the word, discouraged by our interactions with what our role is vis-a-vis the CPO and vis-a-vis the RAC. So I think because we had so much else on our plates, we never bothered trying to sort it out any further. We had some meetings, we had some discussion, it was kind of useful, but we never really found what's our footing because the CPO saw a really distinct role for themselves. The RAC saw a really distinct role for itself that I think was not necessarily what Oka thought it was gonna be. And then we were like, oh, and then we just kind of said, okay, well, we got other stuff to do. So I'm totally fine with pushing the outreach. I don't even know that there really is any outreach to be done by the town council itself given the role of the town managers, given the CPO's and the support they've provided to counselors. But if there is one to put it outside of the appointments, I think originally we had this really cool idea that, first of all, let's remember that all of our committees were created on the back of a napkin basically and just voted on by the town council as sure those sound like good descriptions. But so of course we're visiting where we are at this point. And but I think part of the reason we thought outreach was important for us was because of our appointments, right? We go and find people to apply. And we've done that individually and through district meetings but I think maybe not in the way we originally envisioned it was gonna work. So I think it's okay and it's actually probably good to keep it on somebody, some committees charge and help them and so they can help figure out what they think the right role of outreach should be. So I don't have a problem with shifting that away and that would make this the appointments committee for the time being. And so you could go ahead and create CRC's new committee as you like, just don't give our appointments to GOL yet. So I'm gonna chime in as Oka. You wanna have an opinion? Yeah, I was gonna say, this is something that I would like to say again in Oka on Wednesday but since it relates to this committee you would like to say now. So I think that one of the ways, so I have certainly shifted in my thinking from the original proposal of putting all appointments in GOL which I will say was actually a product of that idea came in December and what's happened between December and now is that we actually went through the process of appointing a planning board member and having gone through that process and the fact that it and perhaps it will get easier but it was more work than I think I expected it to be and part because of things like how hard it was just to piece together the CAF pool because of our different technologies and databases I felt like putting all appointments in a committee that already has a decent workload would be too much for that committee and so I've been more amenable to the idea of splitting them up. The thought that and I liked what Sarah's proposal was which she has said publicly many times which was to put department heads and perhaps town committees in the TSO town services put ZBA planning board in CRC and then put appointments of counselors into GOL which would be essentially liaisons and also to put finance committee. I think there's, to me personally I think there could be an argument made of putting the finance appointments in finance except for the fact that it's really weird that a committee chooses its own numbers in that way and so that would have to go elsewhere. This is all getting around to my thought which is in my concern which sort of relates to what Darcy said. I think that when appointments get split up there needs to be some consideration of the process of dealing with the appointments and the town managers appointments we have a pretty straightforward process that we dealt with today which is we look at the appointments we have a discussion about them as a committee the ideal doesn't always happen of what comments or questions do we have the town manager comes we ask him those comments and questions we make a decision whether we wanna recommend approval. I think that's one process and then the other process is the process that we would use that we just did with a planning board that we assume also be used for ZBA and for non-voting resident members of the finance committee. Those are two very, very, very separate processes and I don't think those need to be in the same committee together because they have nothing to do with each other and so I have no issue saying town manager department heads and town committees go to one committee, go to TSO say. I don't think that's actually a problem at all and I don't think we need to keep appointments together in that sense because they have those two processes those two appointments have literally nothing to do with each other one involves a relationship with the town manager as Darcy said which is why I think you wouldn't wanna split up department heads and town committees but the other one non-voting resident members of the finance committee ZBA planning board have literally nothing to do with the town manager at all and so relationship to the town manager doesn't matter there and so I don't think there's any issue in splitting those up. I do have some concerns despite being supportive of distributing across different committees I do have some concerns about the fact that OCA has adopted a process and the assumption is that that process will be used by whichever body takes aboard these appointments but gets perhaps a little more complicated when those appointments are split between two other committees and so if GOL is doing non-voting resident members of finance and CRC is doing ZBA our assumption is that they're using that same process but maybe they won't be and they have once it's in their thing it becomes their process not our process and they could revise it and so I don't buy the argument of keeping appointments together I don't think that's necessary when it comes to town manager appointments and town council appointments I think there's absolutely no reason those need to be together and I think they're so different from each other the process is so different we can split them up. I do even though I perhaps in recommending this proposal do have some reservations about splitting up town council appointments because there's an assumption that the process will be the same and it could be complicated by going to two different committees. The one other thing I want to say is that OCA is responsible for right now non-voting town council liaisons. OCA had what I think was a very good rich discussion about which committees should have liaisons which will be on the town council's agenda tonight which hopefully our colleagues have actually read the report and won't just be coming in with suggestions of committees that they want us to have. That said, the next step should the council say yes those nine committees look good would be OCA deciding how we actually recommend who becomes those liaisons that's an appointment that sits in OCA and that's actually an appointment process that we haven't discussed yet at all. And so this to me there's still a big X factor out there which is we've done a really good job that I think perfecting our how we handle town manager appointments. I think that we have done a really good job of figuring out a process for appointing members of the public that are appointed by the town council. We have not yet figured out how we appoint town counselors that are town council appointments. And I question whether that's something that OCA should discuss or if it's because we've literally never even talked about it there's nothing to be gained by us doing it first in the same way that there is for the CAFs right? The CAFs we have to discuss first because we've been dealing with them but we haven't dealt with any town council appointments of counselors and so maybe it never needs to come to us. And so George I'm sorry if you try and take notes during that long winding ramble but I think those are all of my thoughts from an OCA perspective from appointments going into this. Darcy. It occurs to me that if if the CRC got the planning board and ZBA appointments that would add a considerable amount to their workload which is already huge even if it's divided in half by creating another committee. It's a massive load. And one argument for keeping an appointments committee is simply that we don't want to load the other committees down with additional work and take them away from their substantive agendas that they have. The other thing that I was thinking is that there may be some kind of issue with CRC having the planning board and zoning board of appeals appointments I can't really it almost feels like they're too close to the issues that we need a little bit more independence or something. It almost feels like it doesn't it makes less sense to have the body that deals with the planning board and the planning staff day in and day out or whatever be the ones who are choosing those members of the planning board maybe it is better to have a separate appointments committee to choose them. Anyway, I think there are many reasons to have a separate appointments committee that those being among some of the reasons. Okay, are there any other thoughts that we want to take to GOL? Yes, Alyssa. So I to emphasize I am strongly in favor of waiting to shift any appointments out of this committee until the next variation of CRC gets its feet wet and we get through the July one appointments. I am not saying that in order to say no again in August I am looking forward to there being a structure that I feel like can take it on because they don't have so many millions of other things to do. I am also really concerned obviously as has been stated with the fact that once this process leaves this committee and gets assigned out elsewhere there is nothing stopping other committees from having their own process which I would argue is not going to be as well informed as this one if they are not really looking carefully at why we did what we did which I think we talked about in our very long reports that you've written on our behalf and that Sarah wrote before that. When it comes to the liaisons however I think it was important that this body have that conversation partly because I'm on it and I knew a lot about committees to be quite blunt. You made a conversation we had in the 20s. Yeah, about which things should get liaisons. I also thought it was useful because we'd been seeing directly more of the reports from the town manager about why he was appointing different people to different types of committees and we were seeing that committee information twice basically, right? His appointment going to us so we could make a recommendation the full town council. So we had the most familiarity arguably with all committees just based on our role for appointments. However, now that we did that groundwork and we came up with the ideas of which committees need them in terms of the process to appoint them I don't care at all. So frankly that could go to GOL as sort of I put that kind of in their same box where they're looking at committee charges and improving those over the past year. And so the process for liaisons which is so not a committee appointment that I even like the idea of separating it away from the committee that does appointments because it's not that kind of committee appointment. So, because you're not serving as a voting member of a committee like the other things are that we're appointing except of course for the non-voting resident. It's because nothing is simple. But so, and I don't know and I will say I don't know how I feel about finance committee members appointing the non-resident. I'm not sure, I don't have definitive feelings one way or the other on that and I understand that some people do and I understand the uneasiness part about things being too close. So I think that's all something we can discuss again in June, July, August. We could continue to meet perhaps less often particularly if we dump the liaisons conversation and so then that's not our problem anymore because GOL has already said by the versions of the proposal that they've put forward so far that they are able to absorb all of our work. That's been GOL's position all along that they have enough room on their bandwidth and in their space to absorb all of Oka's work because that was your proposal. So therefore, since you have the time to do that you should easily have the time to deal with the liaisons conversation and we can talk later about what other kinds of things we're actually willing to transfer over there as well. I also hear Evan's comment about town manager department heads and town manager appointments. Emphasizing again process-wise that it took us until December to get, it took us a year to get a process we were comfortable with with the town manager appointments to consistently turn that out but I think we now have that as you said and so I can conceive of going ahead and splitting off to keep them together rather than just department heads. I see the point of treating them as a coupling in terms of department heads which hopefully we don't have to do very often and the town manager appointments which do happen pretty often that arguably I could see that going to GOL but I don't think there's any necessity to give it to them yet. So I, you know, or TSO arguably is who you'd really like to give it to and given that they again, since we have no idea who'll be on these things we have no reason to believe, I have no reason to believe that the three members that are on this committee who will be fired if we get rid of OCA are necessarily gonna be on TSO. So I'm not quite ready to give them the process when they haven't even been populated yet and started meeting about what their roles are but I can see keeping those two things together. That part does make sense to me. All right, so I think actually this is very useful to inform GOL's Wednesday conversation about this. I am going to, that was a very heavy conversation. I'm gonna give us a three minute break and then we will return to the agenda and we're back at 11.02 AM. Okay, so the next agenda item is discussion of ZBA appointments and I expect this will be a fairly brief discussion. We have currently one vacancy on the ZBA. We've had that vacancy since I believe September 11th is when we had that vacancy. The ZBA has been operating without significant burden under that vacancy because there are three associate members. We will have a second vacancy on the ZBA on March 13th. Mark Parent, who is the current chair of ZBA who is appointed for a one year term whose term was scheduled to expire June 30th, 2020, has decided to leave early. He notified us of this, I believe in October, but he submitted his letter of resignation but it had an effective date of March 13th and so we have about a month until we have two vacancies on the ZBA. The ZBA has been able to weather a single vacancy fairly easily. I question whether they could similarly do so with two vacancies. Given that, after our discussion at our last meeting, I told you that I would begin the process of pulling together the pool for ZBA and so I have done so. I reached out to Angela. I got the CAFs that were submitted for the ZBA for the past two years so actually from the posting date of the vacancy notice which was, I believe, also September 11th. So from September 11th, 2017 until now, I went through every CAF that has been submitted for the ZBA. I took out of the pool people who we confirmed no longer live in Amherst or never lived in Amherst to begin with but still submitted a CAF. I took out from the pool those people who have already been appointed to the ZBA and I was left with a very, very small number of CAFs. I have reached out to those people who had submitted CAFs and I have gotten withdrawals from the pool and I have gotten no responses which means that at current, we don't have a pool. And so we are not in a position right now where we can move forward with ZBA appointments because there's nothing to move forward with. So I have reposted the vacancy notice on the town bulletin board that said, I think we, I don't wanna speak for all of us but certainly my opinion is that postings on the town bulletin board of vacancy notices are of very limited utility for recruitment and so I think this is perhaps a discussion I may mention to our CPOs who are looking at outreach and recruitment but I did wanna open briefly to this committee if there are thoughts on whether we should be involved in recruitment given that we've not really ever been or if we want to give this to the CPOs but at this point we cannot move forward with addressing either the current or the impending ZBA vacancy because there's no pool. This second question I had for this committee is perhaps more complicated but town staff when they need to fill a vacancy and when they don't have sufficient CAFs for that committee they will go to people who listed general interest and so there are many people who are being pointed to committees who never actually applied to be on that committee but clicked the general interest and then were asked if they want to be on the committee. One possible thing that we could do is go to those people who have submitted general interest CAFs and ask if they would be interested in the CAF that would go from having a pool of nothing to honestly a huge number of people. Many who have already been appointed to a town committee but in theory could be appointed to a second town committee if they're still interested. My personal opinion is that would make for a huge complication and would be very difficult to manage but it is an option if we are feeling that this is pressing. So those are the two questions on the table. Floor is open for discussion. Darcy. Can't we just look at people who have applied to relevant committees? Like have we looked at the recent planning board applicants because a lot of them are interested in both planning board and ZBA. Many people who have applied for the planning board list both of them if they are interested in both of them and those people have been contacted, yes. So but my thought was that we could contact all of them plus I don't know if there are other like people that have applied for the design review board or people that have really applied for related things. Yeah, I think that's an option. If we want to go that way, we'd have to have a discussion of what related committees would be but certainly. George. Have you communicated this or would you communicate this to the town manager and ask for his, because he sees obviously far more people than we do and there might be some that he might have in mind. Now it's not disappointment, I understand that but just in terms of trying to spread our net as widely as possible. Is that something you might consider doing? I would do that if this committee felt that that was an appropriate course of action. I would consider it appropriate. Okay. George, you're saying just ask the town manager? Well, in the sense of given the number, he's seen huge numbers of people over the last year filling all kinds of committees and he might have some individuals that he has interviewed that he might consider potential candidates and then one could reach out to them. We're trying to just find a way to get the most, to get a good pool, to get a pool period actually but I think the ZBA is a particular body that requires a certain set of experiences and also knowledge and a willingness to, it's quite a commitment. So yeah. I would have a little bit of a problem with doing it that way because these are bodies appointed by the town council appointed by the town council and I think that we would tend to give weight to people that the town manager suggests. I just think that that is probably a good practice to get into myself. But I would like to us to talk about what applications for what committees could we target and ask to have to look at all those people that have applied for these five committees or whatever. Alyssa. So two things. One is what we all do associated with outreach right now is we all talk to individual people and we talk at various meetings that we go to and try and buttonhole people and get people to call in favors, et cetera to apply to things. I think the way to utilize the town manager's exposure to lots of applicants is for him to reach out. We is for Evan to ask the town manager to reach out to the people that he was like, you know, I really wish I found a spot for you but this wasn't the right spot and tell that person to turn in a CAF for ZBA. That way we don't know where that CAF came from. We don't know that I told the person to do it, that Darcy told the person to do it, or the town manager. Unless of course they include that on their CAF which they are welcome to do. My friend Alyssa said she'd kill me if I didn't do this. So whatever they want to put on their CAF. But I don't think it's appropriate for us to have him give us some names. I think it's appropriate for him to reach out to his contacts that he's been wishing he could find a spot for and ask them to fill out a CAF. And I think that's it and we'll never know if he did that with one person or 25 people and that's fine because we gave him the opportunity again because just like we are looking at people who didn't make it for a planning board but were interested for ZBA, it makes sense that he would do the same thing. And then in terms of putting aside to a point the incredibly creaky process we have for keeping track of these people which is no fault of the staffs, it's what they inherited over many years and hasn't been resourced to fix is that I don't think there's a need to call out Design Review Board, Historical Commission, Ag Commission, I think that it and it should actually be easier despite the creakiness of the system that we should send one to everyone who's on file for the last two years and say here is the ZBA description, the handout that we wrote. Not just are you interested just like for general interest. I would never wanna say oh are you interested in ZBA? They're like ZBA what? Send them that thing and say we said we'd keep your CAF on file for two years, we can go ahead tell you this is what the ZBA is if you are interested fill out a CAF by X time because otherwise I'm not sure am I gonna pick AgCom, am I gonna pick Design Review Board and then it seems like it would be easier to just pick everybody who hasn't gotten appointed to something and I realize what you're saying that people can of course be appointed to more than one thing but I've never liked the general interest category that the town manager added himself a year ago. We've never had that in the past because a lot of people do wanna do a lot of cool things but it's a whole different thing to say I wanna be helpful on the Shade Tree Committee and plant some trees than it is to say I'm willing to deal with this incredibly detailed situation associated with the zoning bylaw. So but I'm also not entirely convinced that we only wanna reach out to people who've already thought they've signed up for that. So if we were gonna do that kind of outreach I'd be tempted to just send it to everybody but again, always with the actual ZBA handout and then they will call themselves out if they are not interested in that particular area but most people in town don't even know what the ZBA does. George. What about the Residence Advisory Committee also as potential, same treat them the same as Paul in the sense that they see a lot of people, is that? No, yes. I mean so the Residence Advisory Committee exists to serve the town manager and so I would assume that if we followed Alyssa's suggestion, which I think is a good suggestion my assumption would be that he would do it in consultation with the Residence Advisory Committee. Maybe he wouldn't but I think that would be my assumption. I'm not, I mean we are not in a position where we can ask something of the Residence Advisory Committee. I could suggest that Paul consult them but ultimately I would hope that he would do that anyway. I like that idea of Alyssa's of saying the town manager has seen lots and lots of people, perhaps there are people that he would have loved to appoint to a committee that was maybe close however we define close. I think there's a lot of, to me close is ability to implement or apply dense regulations more than anything else so but maybe he would see someone and then having him reach out to them to suggest they submit an application for the council. I am really, I will do whatever this committee tells me to do. I will say I do not want to contact every person who has submitted ACAF with general interest over the past two years saying here's the ZBA if you're interested here's how to apply it. I will do that if asked to by this committee. I think that is logistically complicated. I think that is very time consuming and I think that it is time consuming with likely very marginal impact. I have seen some of the general interest CAFs just because of as Alyssa said are very clunky or creaky I think was the word you used. Creaky system that has meant that as I have requested CAFs for planning a board and ZBA there are often general interest ones mixed in and so I have seen some of them and I will say that given that there are a lot of people who apply and say I'm really interested in climate change I wanna be on the, this is not what I read. This is for the sake of example just to go on record saying that I'm really interested in climate change I wanna be on the ECAC I wanna be active in the climate change and for me to reach out to that person and say here's the ZBA if you're interested I'm not sure that's a good use of my time personally but again if this committee commands me to do it I am an obedient chair so the floor remains open about so actually let's do this. There's been a suggestion that Alyssa has made that I reach out to the town manager and ask him in consultation with the RAC to think about if there's anyone that he has come across their desk who he thinks would be good for ZBA to reach out to them, to encourage them to apply to the ZBA is there consensus on committee that that would be an appropriate course of action for recruitment? Darcy? No, there is not a consensus. Okay. I think when we have our own committee when we're working with appointments to our committees we should be doing it ourselves. That's my opinion is that But I'm not. We're not looking for what the town manager wants to shape our planning board like. We're shaping it ourselves and so I would not agree with that at all but I would like us to look at all the people that have applied for planning board, ZBA design review board and maybe a few other things in here like the Amherst Affordable Housing Trust things that are related to planning. So maybe three or four different committees and just contact the people that have applied for those things. So what one thing I do want to push back on with that. So of course I've already contacted everyone who's applied for ZBA. Those people almost always had planning board and ZBA as check marks. I think there's probably a lot of people who don't know the difference or just apply for both. Beyond that suggestions of designer review board, housing trust, historical commission any of these that might seem, we don't have their CAFs to contact them. And so for us to contact them would require a request to the town manager that he share with this committee. All CAFs for several of those committees given that he has his practice thus far has been not to distribute CAFs for committees that he appoints. I'm not sure that he would agree to that. And so I think we would have to say we have a list of committees that we want CAFs for that you have never been willing to share with us before and that you will now be selectively sharing all CAFs for certain committees. I think perhaps sets up a potential conflict with the town manager. And so I'm not quite sure how we reasonably could do that for committees for which we don't have CAFs which at this point are only three different bodies. George. Ultimately it's the council by its vote which shapes and so far as it shapes anything shapes these two bodies. Right now we're trying to find bodies to serve on these bodies. And the town manager working with RAC and the CPOs have a lot more sheer knowledge of people out there who potentially might be interested. So encouraging the town manager in consultation with RAC and it sounds like also perhaps directly reaching out the CPOs with a plea for help where if they think of anyone that might be appropriate that they could approach and encourage them to consider applying would be it seems to me a helpful step. Leaving it just up to us as we have seen over the past umpteen months has produced a pool that at the moment seems to be basically empty. This is not an easy body to fill. But right now I think we're just trying to think of ways to get a sufficient pool. In the end it's the council who decides who serves on that body not the town manager, not the CPOs, not RAC. Alyssa. So I don't know and it's hard without all five of us here too to hear that thinking as well if we wanna actually take a vote on that reaching out to the town manager part. I think the reaching out to the town manager part which I understand Darcy agrees with because it sounds like she's afraid that it will front load our applicant pool with people the town manager likes which given we have no pool right now doesn't necessarily, I mean I understand it but yet at the same time we got nothing. So not sure that's a bad thing given that we would then offer those people interviews and then we'd move on. I mean assuming that they read the ZBA handout than just the town manager told them about it they read it and they're oh no not doing that or yay that sounds great. I understand what you're saying about the CEF so that was why my theory was to just have through Paul's staff through Paul I request to Paul because I request I requested the CPOs we don't request the CPOs to ask them for their ideas on this either. No we go to Paul when we're OCA we're going to Paul and we go to Paul and we say so we're stuck we had this discussion. Some of us thought this some of us thought that do you have any ideas great but we know we're not going directly to CPOs or the RAC you're telling us what they and maybe they'll come up with another cool idea I don't know I mean that's what they do now as part of their actual full time paid jobs as opposed to as part time elected officials. So I think that we do have to decide before we leave here today if we're asking Paul for help or not and I think that we may have to agree on that depending on how this plays out but I still feel like I can interview the person to go through the interview process we just used and if I find that all of them seem like clones of some belief system and skill set that I don't agree with then I can say I don't think any of them are qualified. I mean so I don't have a problem with however they got into the pool. I'm just glad there is a pool and so I don't care how they got there and so I'm not seeing it as taking away any of the town council's authority because as George points out we interview them we make a recommendation the town council ultimately decides if any of us are uncomfortable with them for whatever reason we state that just like we did with the planning board pieces. The other thing I wanna make sure we don't lose sight of but I don't wanna distract us as we're trying to end our meeting is that I don't brace yourselves for the old days. The reason you have associates is so you can move associates up to fill vacancies. It's not just so that you have other things. So it would be important to reach out to the chair of the ZBA just as it is every year when you make reappointments to the ZBA to say are any of these associates actually ready to move up and when I say that I don't mean it as a personal judgment on them what that means is our associates for the last several years have not they don't get mixed into every decision right they only get called upon to serve if the others can't so there could be associates serving for two or three years who've never served on a panel therefore that does not make them any more qualified than a person we're playing off the street who's just applied aside from the fact that hopefully there's been some a couple of administrative meetings that they've been to but maybe or maybe not. On the other hand, if one or more of them has served on several panels and found it to be a productive experience and the chair and staff support have also found it to be a productive experience it may make sense to consider at some point in this process we need to consider if we're moving any of the associates up and therefore we're looking for both associates and full because we actually have room for one more associate right don't we still have four in the bylaw and then we may or may not I mean arguably if you'd had associates who'd been doing a lot you could just plug them in right now and be like ooh we've done, we fixed our problem except we now we need new associates that may not be the case because it's my understanding that the associates panel that we've had has not had much opportunity to serve but we still need to consider that see if any of them are ready and figure out how we're going to compare that to the people who are applying because the people who are applying should actually technically be applying for both positions they should be applying for full ZBA member and associate member and arguably a long time ago they would have only been applying for associate member and then eventually moved up to full member so I think that we can we have the authority to appoint them to either but we need to be respectful of the associate pool and whatever they've been able to be willing to do as to whether or not we can how we rank them in with our choices of new members. Yeah I think that's useful and the vacancy notice does say that we are soliciting applications for regular or I think it says and or associate members and so leaving ourselves the opportunity to do so and so I can reach out. So I wanna be able to have an action item leaving here it sounds like there's some disagreement about the idea of approaching the town manager so I do think it would be prudent for us to have a vote on that and so the motion that I'm gonna try and construct off the top of my head would be to authorize a chair of OCA to reach out to the town manager to ask him in consultation with the CPOs and the RAC to identify applicants that would be that might be interested in the ZBA and encourage them to submit a CAF. Does anyone have an issue with that motion? The construction of it, not the content. Okay, does anyone wanna make that motion? I would make that motion. Is there a second? Could you read it again? Athena, any chance you got that? To authorize the chair of OCA to reach out to the town manager to ask him in consultation with CPOs and the RAC to identify applicants that might be interested in the ZBA and encourage them to submit a CAF. I'll spell all those things out in a minute. I just wanna make sure it covered all the bases and they get to apply, they apply themselves. He doesn't tell us directly who they are. Okay, so we have a motion from George, a second from Alyssa Darcy. I just wanna make a comment that this is, the charter was written in a way to separate the powers of the town manager and the town council. And doing this particular action on a ZBA appointment is just completely obliterating that separation. And I think that we should be much more mindful of why it was put in the charter and that we should be conducting ourselves as the town council and not involving the town manager and our decision making in that part of what we do. Okay, your comments been noted. With that, I will call the question. All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, and so is three in favor, one opposed with one absent. George. You're looking for action items and probably it's on your list, I'm sure, but I would hope that you would also talk to the chair about this, so good, thank you. Alyssa. I'm sorry, was that in regards to telling the chair about associates? I'm sorry, I didn't complete my thought. Yeah, I've talked to chair about associates and whether Annie could possibly move up. What's their status? Yeah, I think this would be part of the, to me, part of the conversation that, let me back up, part of our process would be that the chair would talk, the chair of this committee would talk to the chair of that committee to talk about the needs of that body that eventually gets woven into selection guidance. And I think that the dynamic of the current associates would be part of that conversation because part of the needs will be, part of the needs that we will need to know as OCA will be, do you need a regular member or do you need an associate member because you can move up one of your associate members? And so I see it as part of that conversation about the current dynamics of the body. Darcy and then Alyssa. And Evan, did you agree to contact all of the people who have applied to be on the planning committee to see if they're interested in this? I can do that if this committee wants me to do that. So. Any reason not to? I think the reason not to would just be where are we drawing lines? And so, for example, would I also contact everyone who had applied to be on finance committee because they were in our broader pool of applicants and might also be interested? I guess that would be my question is if the link is only both planning and ZBA are sort of planning related, then we can make that argument. If the argument is we should contact anyone who's applied to a council position to try and get the pool, then I would actually expand that and I wouldn't wanna do that without knowing where this committee stands. Darcy? It would be fine with me to contact both groups. Planning seems like it's more related, but I think that either pool could probably handle being on the planning board. Alyssa? So I feel like we're still mixing things together here. Okay, ZBA, we've been there, done that. Planning board, I thought you said that anybody who'd marked both planning board and ZBA you'd already talked to. If that's not true, then we need to talk to the planning board people because planning board and ZBA are interchangeable and a lot of applicants minds even though the reality is not true. If we have already done that, then I feel like we're done with that conversation because I'm not willing to draw lines between AgCom, Conservation Commission, DRB and all those things that actually aren't ours. But I do wanna hear that planning board applicants were contacted. So, okay, so let me clarify. Any planning, and I believe I don't wanna say this is abject fact because I did this like two weeks ago and so I'd have to go back and look. I believe off the top of my head that every planning board member that was considered as part of the pool that we just looked at also applied for ZBA and therefore was contacted. I cannot say that for people who removed themselves, who were contacted for the last planning board who theoretically submitted ACF to the planning board but who removed themselves from the pool. And so I don't know that. And so if you want, I can go back and check those people because just because they removed themselves from the planning board pool for our last process, they may be interested in the ZBA. And so it's a weird distinction. I contacted people who were in our most recent planning board pool but there are people who withdrew from that pool or who I never heard back from who perhaps I could reach out to if that is the sense of this committee. George? I don't have an issue with that. Just a small point, and you may do this anyway or you may not wanna do it but I would send them the ZBA description. I wouldn't just say, are you interested? I would probably word it in the way that Alyssa suggested which is we're recruiting for ZBA. Here is the ZBA committee. If you're interested, get back to me. Thank you. Send me to ZBA. Okay, so it seems like there's consensus to at the very least contact the people who have applied for planning board including those who I did not hear back from or who withdrew from the pool in the last. Yes. Darcy? Are we scheduled to end at 11.30 today? That was the plan and I so. I actually have to leave so. Okay. Okay, so my action items for ZBA are to reach out to the town manager and reach out to those people who have submitted planning board, CAS over the past two years including those who did not respond the last time or who withdrew from the pool. Okay, so I will put this item back on our agenda for the February 20, our next meeting which is on February 24th and hopefully I will have an update and perhaps we will have an applicant pool for that. So I am going to, let's see, we're going to table discussion of importance of different viewpoints on the planning board, zoning board of appeals and finance committee since we do not have time for that right now. I will likely, I will not be putting that on the February 24th agenda because I think has been made clear from our discussion today, I think that our conversation about community activity forms needs to be prioritized and I have a feeling that will be a full discussion and so will be the primary agenda item and so for the time being I am going to push back this conversation since we are not currently in the process of appointing planning board, zoning board of appeals or finance committee and so it is not necessarily super pressing. Discussion of 2010-2020 report to town council. So you hopefully saw my report to the town council. It was especially for this committee very brief just recommending approval of three sets of time manager appointments. I intend to be very brief similarly in the council tonight with regard to that and so there's two things I want to ask this committee. One is, is there anything you want to make sure I highlight with that and the second thing is I believe we will be talking about liaisons tonight which involves a committee report that was written over a month ago. Is there anything you want to be sure I highlight or emphasize when I talk about that because to be perfectly honest I haven't thought about what I'm actually going to report out on that because my hope and assumption is that the councilors have read the report but is there anything you think it is particularly necessary to emphasize or highlight and either of those two reports tonight? Okay, Elisa. I mean, I know Darcy's not still here I went on to Sarah but if you felt it was not I mean it might be helpful to the rest of the council to hear that while these are our recommendations to the bodies, we don't yet as you say in the report that was written weeks ago we don't have the process yet for determining what that is and we are not particularly beholden to owning that. There's been some discussion as to whether or not we need to own that process, not to say like just because Elisa said give it up not saying that we're willing to give it up but that we don't know what it looks like yet and that might just be interesting to people to know that because we've been so organized we don't have a next step for that one and it's not our highest priority on the 24th unless the whole council asked this to be because the CAF is what I believe you just indicated is our focus and following up on the CAF issue I would ask especially since Darcy had to go that you send out an email to us that says in preparation for that meeting if anybody has examples of what forms look like elsewhere that they like that they should submit those to you to be placed in the packet. And I don't think that would be an expression of opinion it's just here's North Hampton, let's be honest here's North Hampton's form and or whatever other form other people have liked and for that matter the entire council could do that. And that way we'd have a better sense of what kinds of things people are looking for because we've certainly talked about it but it may help shift our thinking if we see something on somebody else's form. Okay. Okay. Public comment? Okay. There's no public comment. One other thing I just want to point your attention to this was added to the packet yesterday evening is the OCA calendar. So I have made at multiple after multiple requests from multiple people many of whom are in this room I have made an OCA calendar it was added to the packet somewhat late last night and so I assume you have not had a chance to look at it I think that's fine because we've had our next meeting February 24th scheduled for some time now but what I will ask and I will email the members of the other members who are absent is between now and the 24th just look at these dates and just make sure you don't see any obvious conflicts. Again, I did my best to try to stagger them so that they are not the morning of council meetings and as always because we meet on Mondays because this country loves to put holidays on Mondays a lot of times that was unavoidable and so it's not always perfect, but I did try but if you see some glaring issue in any of these please bring that to our next meeting. If I don't hear anything I will schedule the meetings following this calendar which is in the it's a twice a month. Okay. So then we will meet again on February 24th again the primary and perhaps only agenda item will be to discuss community activity forms and with that I am adjourning us at 1141 a.m.