 All right, you're all set. Okay, good evening. I'm Darcy Dumont. I'm calling the September 17th, 2020 meeting of the Town of Amherst Town Service and Outreach Committee to order at somewhere around eight. Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law allows us to hold this virtual meeting of the Town Services and Outreach Committee. I'll call on each member by name. At that time, I'll confirm that you can hear me and we can hear you. Please remember to mute your mic after saying present. Alyssa Brewer. Present. Darcy Dumont here, Dorothy Pan. Here. George Ryan. Present. And I'm heard that we can hear the Town Manager. Okay. I don't think there is, are any, well, I don't know, there's seven. There is one attendee. Arch, if you want to give public comment, raise your hand. Some look like he does. Okay, no public comment. We are just meeting for one reason tonight and that is to look at the Town Manager appointments with two department heads that he's made recommendations for yesterday. So we're gonna be looking at the Human Resources Director recommendation and health director. We also did just get other memos regarding other committee appointments, which we will look at on September 24th. So we're just gonna look at the two tonight. So the first up is consideration of the Town Manager's recommendation for the position of health director. So I'm just going to let the Town Manager present that. Thank you. So my appointment for your consideration for the health director is Emma Dragon. Emma Dragon is employed by Cooley Dickinson Hospital. She's also on the Board of Health in town of Hadley and has a lot of varied experience throughout the Valley. And is also a disaster management specialist. When she's gone through a pretty robust interview process and the characteristics that people identified that they appreciated about her across the board with our interview team, which was a really terrific interview team, by the way. They were people driven, very personable, answered questions well. Every question was centered on the people that on the client that they were talking about. One of the members said, can't go wrong here. Complete package, top notch nurse, works in stressful, is used to working in stressful situations where she worked at the Javits Center, setting up one of the COVID situations down there. And she's a good leader, and she listens before making decisions. She also, as being a member of the Hadley Board of Health, reached out and became a member of the Massachusetts Local and Regional Public Health Advisory Committee, which I was impressed by that she made that initiative. So, and a registered nurse, someone who I think will fit in well with our community. So I'm here, I hope, happy to answer any questions that you may have. Questions or comments? Hi. George. Just a comment on the process, which I was impressed by. I thought it really was a stellar committee. I appreciate Paul's efforts to reach out to a wide variety of people. It's not just necessarily Amherst Center. I also appreciate the fact that given the current situation, I'm sure this is on his mind more than even mine, that he moved as quickly as he did. It's a large number of candidates and impressive interview team. And from what I can tell, at least a very impressive candidate, but Kudos Paul for putting together this team, which I'm sure was a great help to him in making this decision. Thank you for your comment, Dorothy. I was impressed with the caliber of the candidates and that made me wonder, because both holding responsible jobs, at what the salary is in town. And is that something that we can know or not? Yeah, it's public information. So the salary, I don't have the salary range in front of me. She will be at the mid-range, midpoint of the salary range. We try to bring people in at the midpoint, but sometimes I think what we're learning over the last couple of years is that our salaries will need to be evaluated. But her salary is 85, 121. Okay. And I think it is great to have somebody trained in disaster response. But again, that, you know, it means that she could very well be deployed. Yeah. That's something that... And again, that doesn't turn me off because that keeps you cutting edge, being deployed and helping other things. So just wondered if you have backup systems in mind for that? Yeah, it's a really good question because we did explore that. And it's sort of like being in the National Guard. So if there's an emergency, she gets called on and she may be deployed for a couple of weeks or whatever. You know, again, we have, you know, Jen Brown who is our public health nurse who's the acting health director now feel very confident in that, with that relationship. We also have a lot of strength throughout the community. And, you know, we have several, the Jill Constalina who is the nurse manager at the schools is a public health nurse also for the town of Wilburham. Ann Becker is a public health nurse for the University of Massachusetts. We have very tight relationship with Meredith O'Leary who is the public health nurse in Northampton. In fact, we have her working with us to support Jen Brown and I'm gonna keep her on through December to support the transition just cause COVID is so complex for Emma because I think that having building that team that also not having us call Meredith all the time and feeling like we're imposing on her now we have a contract with her and she will be providing the services. We can afford that because it's COVID related and so that's a good thing to do. And also she's very, it's in her best interest for us to have a very strong health director. So I think, and she knows Emma and Jeff Harness who was on the service committee and knew her from Cooley Dickinson. So I feel pretty confident in this appointment. Okay, good. Thank you. Alyssa. I was just gonna mention just earlier I think Dorothy had said something about meeting the candidates. We never meet the candidates. That's just not a thing we do but thank you for asking the salary question since we've literally never done that before either. The comment I had is it's mentioned in here that she works at Cooley and I know that just like firefighters and police officers or firefighters in particular often have additional jobs is the intention that aside from being deployed in an emergency that she will still be doing shifts at Cooley or has heard the intention that she's a full-time worker for us? That's a really good question. Again, something we discussed. She is a full-time employee of the town of Amherst. She wants to retain her ability to do per diem work at Cooley Dickinson on holidays or if there's a special need and she needs to take a vacation day or something like that. We'll work through that I think. She expressed an interest in staying in the nursing field and staying as a practitioner. She feels like that would help her service to the town. But if it's on her time as long as it's not impacting her job with the town of Amherst, I'd have to be okay with that. Other questions or comments? I was very, very impressed with the long list of experience that she had in disaster work. That was very impressive. So, well, if we don't have any other questions or comments, I guess we could move to a motion. I recommend that the town council approve the town manager's recommendation to appoint Emma Dragon as health director. Do I have a second? Second. Okay, Alyssa Brewer. I'm going to vote yes, but I want to make a comment for our report. And so, but if you will entertain that later. But yes, right now we're just voting, so I'm voting yes. Okay, I am voting yes. Dorothy? Yes. George? Yes. And would you like to make your comment now? Alyssa? Yes, I think it should be covered in our report, the fact that she will be working for us full-time and then it doesn't need to say anything else, but because the way the memo's phrased, it makes it seem like she's job sharing. So just saying she's working full-time for us and then what she does on her own time, like Paul says, is what she does on her own time and that's fine. But to make it clear, she is ours full-time because I know some places do have part-time health directors. Okay, moving on to the human resources director. Paul, would you like to present? Sure. So this is Donna Rae Keneally, who I'm really excited about, brings as a bundle of energy, very positive, has been working at Western New England University in a variety of roles. Most recently as the Associate Director of Human Resources and Title IX Investigator, which I think is very important for us to have that skill, she is an attorney, trained attorneys, and that's a skill that's set that she brings, which I think is very important as well. An enthusiastic positive attitude. Eagerness to take on a new challenge. Her supervisor at Western New England is a contemporary. So she was looking for that next step and it wasn't going to happen at Western New England University. So she lives nearby and so she was really excited and has always wanted to work for the town of Amherst has been driving by town hall. Really, again, you noted, but I'm going to go back to my interview to the screening committee. We're just fortunate to have Maria Judith Rodriguez from Amherst College, who was just super helpful on this and Catherine Porter from the personnel board is in terms of her background at UMass and they brought an outside advantage that was very important to this. She talked about, we talked in terms of HR sort of sets the tone for the organization in terms of transparency, being accessible, building trust and relationships and that being fair builds credibility and I think that she brings all those things. She does not have collective bargaining experience. We have one union contract coming up that expires June 30th of 2021 and then the rest of them happen the next year. She's eager to become more engaged in that. She has some background through classwork but was not really directly involved in that at Western New England University. In our community, we have an attorney, a labor lawyer who does the negotiations with us and almost every labor decision of consequence we filter through our labor attorney just as a matter of course. So I think that we were sort of scaffolded there to do that, to support that negotiations. The bigger thing that happens internally are the one-on-one kind of interactions with employees, grievances, things like that. We don't get a lot of grievances actually but it's more issues that come up between employees and there's a lot of complex things that we're dealing with now what we were talking about before the meeting started, helping employees be able to navigate COVID-19 but also be able to do their work and how are we fair to everybody and how are we able to support our employees in these types of things, in these difficult times. So again, very high on Donna Ray and she's very excited about working for the town. Questions? Alyssa. Paul already answered my question about collective bargaining experience because you obviously heard at the last town council meeting, I work for a union part-time, my husband's in a union at UMass and I do find that not having collective bargaining experience, it's not just when it's time to do the negotiation, it's kind of an everyday perception and attitude but it sounds like you've got it all structured so that she'll be learning about that. As you say, she is some familiarity with it from classwork, she does have the attorney to rely on, she still has Joanne to rely on and other people. So not everybody knows everything when they start a position. So it was just that that was specifically called out in the original thing but this was the pool that became available and it sounds like you're very enthusiastic about her for all the other reasons so I would not want to have that one thing stand in the way. And I'd like to point out one other thing is that we did open, we want to make sure that we looked out non-traditional sources, we didn't want just, we weren't requiring municipal experience, I purposely opened that up and we had some really creative, interesting people who applied because we tried to put that in the job description, we tried, I tried to boost up the job description or the job posting to make it a little more interesting to people, it's not just the normal thing that you would see. So I think that I felt comfortable that, the things that she was dealing with at Western New England University weren't that far afield from what we were dealing with. People I interviewed from the private sector was a little bit different experience, honestly. So that was gonna be a bigger leap. Thanks, George. Well, again, praise to the interview committee. Again, quite diverse and a lot of, I'm sure it was very helpful to you and I'm pleased by the way that you went out to reach out to people, I think that's impressive. Partly, I think you've answered my question but it clearly you consciously we're looking for people outside of those who had municipal experience. So, I mean, that's the only concern I had is that, but it seems that's something you really were looking for. Can you, I mean, I assume you had candidates who had fairly extensive municipal experience and yet you chose someone deliberately who doesn't. Can you talk a little bit more about the thinking behind that? Yeah, so you're right. We did have some people with municipal experience. You know, this is, so sometimes one of my beliefs is that you hire for attitude and you train and the people come sometimes, I want to disparage anybody who, the municipal experience drives you in a certain direction and it has you thinking a certain way. I think we're trying to get HR moving in a different, HR is not a creative field but it does need to be a people, it's a people position and that's literally what I was looking for, someone who's going to be connecting with people in a lot more personal, direct one-on-one way than we had been recently. Thank you. Dorothy. How common is it to have somebody in this position also be a lawyer? I was a little bit surprised by that, but I mean, maybe this isn't unusual, I don't know. No, it's unusual. Okay. Yeah, it's not, that's not the norm. Okay. But you gave a good answer as to why she would leave where she was doing well. Okay. Yeah. I would say that could only help her though when she's dealing with the regulations and stuff. Yeah, I have just a general question that doesn't really necessarily pertain to this application but I'm just interested to know if when the town, when a person applies to the town, they submit a cover letter and is there an application form to fill out? Yes. Is there anything in addition to the application form? Sometimes we'll require a writing sample. I'm just asking because 25 years ago, I applied to teach in the Amherst public schools. I had to fill out an additional form about my commitment to multicultural education and my experience in multicultural education. And I'm guessing that they still do that. So I kind of like the idea of somehow adding to our application process some kind of a screen. It's not really a screen but just sort of a statement of personal experience in our goal areas. So like in racial equity, in climate, what's their climate lens? And so that we can get, because this is a person who's going to be maybe doing training of staff in that area. Racial equity or climate or whatever, talking to all the department staff or, and so I guess my point, and I do wonder what questions were asked about those things and how do you get at that? Whether this would be a person who would be able to train in those areas? Yeah. I don't think we were hiring a trainer in those areas. So some of the questions that were asked by the interview team are, how would your vision for this position be aligned with this town's commitment to equity and diversity? I saw that, so that's good. And talk about mentorship. Yeah, so I guess my point is just that I'd like to see us moving in the direction of having all the applicants across the board have. Yeah, no, it's an interesting idea. I mean. Statement like they're required to do for the school department. They really have to, it's amazing, the hopes that you need to go through to get a job in schools. So one of the other questions is, Amherst greatly values the cultural diversity of its employees and residents describe your approach to attracting candidates from different cultural backgrounds. So those are the questions that the interview team came up with and before they did the interviews, they had a set list of questions that they asked everyone. Okay, well, does anybody have any other questions? I see Alyssa has her hand up. Find my unmute button. Thank you. It's been a while since we did a department head, Paul. So process wise, we need a copy of the posting that went up because the Charter, I know the Charter doesn't require this, but what the Charter does require, as you know, is it says that the vacancy notice needed to be published for 14 days. So we should have a copy of that in the packet just so that when people can see that, yes, there was 14 days notice provided. Obviously it was a lot more than 14 days in both cases. And so it should be dated. It should not just be the thing somebody drafted to have put on the website. It should be the actual archived item from the website. And then the other reason is, right, is that creative wording you use, we could have seen that and that would have helped us with the support that you just gave us, you know, what you were looking for, right? Because once we subscribe to those notices, which indeed we can do, we can subscribe to those notices like any member of the public can. I didn't keep it then when that happened. And so if you could attach that to the packet for when the town council sees it, that'd be really helpful to everybody, I think. Plus show off your creativity. Look at that. Okay, any other comments or questions? So okay, well, I think we're ready to move on this one too. I move to recommend that the town council approve the town manager's recommendation for appointment of Donna Rae Keneally for the position of Human Resources Director. Do I have a second? Second. Okay, Alyssa Brewer. Yes. Darcy Dumont, yes. Dorothy Pan. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Okay, so we have two unanimous votes to go to the town council for the Monday, September 21st meeting. Thank you, Paul. And yes, we'll look at the other appointments next Thursday. So just a late breaking news. Tonight, the conservation commission appointed their person to the CPA committee is going to be Anna Devlin-Gothier. So they're going to have a change of people on the... So once I get that in writing from the amend the CPA appointment, so you'll have the complete list for the CPA committee then. Okay, great. All right, so moving on, we have no presentations or discussion items. We are not approving any minutes. I don't have any announcements. Does anyone have any announcements? Good. The next meeting agenda, we're going to have those appointments that we mentioned. We're going to hear a preliminary presentation about Lincoln Avenue slash parking. Do we know if we're having any staff presentations on that evening? No, they're non-planned. It's just a presentation by the two sponsors and a document in the packet for people to read in advance. Okay, great. And Evan's going to be chairing that meeting. And... Am I correct, Darcy? You have a wedding? Is that correct? Yeah, my son's getting married the next day. We're having the dinner at that time. So... All right, well, congratulations. Where is that taking place? In my backyard. Oh, it's here now. Okay, just place. Yeah, it's only just FYI in case you think I'm having a big crowd. It's nine people. They're all isolating for two weeks in advance of the wedding. My son is like two miles away, but I don't get to see him for two weeks. And we are also all getting tested. So, like... You're going to Holyoke? Because you can now get it. I went to Holyoke Community College and I'm negative. So, everybody's getting tested. So we're like... Nobody can complain about us. So why are you missing the meeting? Party until all hours. But why am I missing the meeting? Just take it, just turn on the Zoom, you know. Join in. It's not that hard. I'm going to miss the Monday meeting too, as my... I can tell Winston that he doesn't have to worry about this. Then he can stay home that night. He doesn't have to go over there and check things out. Yes. If only that dog would stay that cute forever. Pardon? The dog is so cute, but he's going to turn into a big dog. He's going to be a big boy when he grows up. Is that Winston? No, I didn't realize who Winston was. Winston is that absolutely adorable, huge... I'm told he actually outranks Laramie. So... Anyway, I think that's all that's going to be on the agenda on the 24th. And then we're going to take up the Surveillance Technology By-law on the 8th, which they did divide in half, and they're going to just bring the facial recognition piece of it to the October 8th meeting. So if there are no items anticipated by the chair, 48 hours in advance. I could have a question. Yeah. Should I put this hand up first? That was goodbye. That was... It's not time for goodbye, George. Oh, let's have her hand up, though. Let's have her hand up. I just want to make sure the report says that we're adding the job description. I mean, the job posting, it's not the job description at all. That's absolutely factually incorrect. The vacancy notice per the charter is being added for the town council packet because you're going to be writing the TSO report possibly before they see that. So... Okay. Forward to seeing it, and that was off. And Dorothy, did you have a comment? I had a question for Paul, but I'll ask him afterwards. Okay. I declare this meeting adjourned. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, everyone. Good night. What time it is? 8.31. Good night. So Paul, I'll just say, there seems to be some confusion about whether TSO is going to be resuming or not resuming. And I did send you, forwarded you a letter from Tracy about two weeks ago. I didn't hear back. I think she said... She's talking about TAC, actually. TAC. I said the wrong thing every time. Just you have to just read my mind, not what I say. TAC, yes. And she wrote another letter today. And... Is this, because I guess she quoted Gofford as saying she thought that it wasn't going to resume because the council wanted to be involved. And Lynn's answer, which was in the mail she sends me was, she didn't know about that. So is there something here that we should know? Just that it was hard getting the committees back up because of the technology? I don't think we're... I'm not sure where... I need to talk to the council about what it wants TAC to be doing for them, in terms of, because there are a lot of questions before, and if they want TAC to be supporting those questions, what's going to go to them? We've never sorted that out. And I haven't asked the council to do that. So that's just something we need to make happen. Okay, I just have a general comment is that, a lot of us are feeling pretty overworked, and there's some knowledgeable people on TAC. So if there's a way to spread the work around, I'm for it. That's just my general position. If it makes it more complicated, which is what you're suggesting, maybe there's complications, then, you know... I think it... Yeah, I mean, like, yeah. So we can talk about this in terms of what the council wants that, what you would want the TAC to do, right? If you want that to be making recommendations on Lincoln F. Parking or whatever it is, you know, or studies that need to happen or something like that. Yes, I would need to know what it has done in the past, just to have an idea of the kinds of things that it's dealt with. And then I think we'd have a better idea of, gee, is there an overlap with TSO? Or is this helpful to TSO? Or, you know, because TSO didn't exist. And I, you know, so before I could answer any of those questions, I'd need to know a little bit more about what it has done. Yeah, so I think there's, you know, again, we're learning, like, about zoning, how, you know... Do we have committees? You know, we had the zoning subcommittee and there's some question. And I know the council's working that through with the planning board in terms of who's responsible for what and who's supposed to be delving into that. So I think it's the same thing with some of these other things. So that's sort of where, frankly, we're not really sure where, how the... I think you're still figuring out things, out how you want things to work. And so are we. And I'm hesitant, you know, I was hesitant to take things to the tack if it was gonna be in the council's prerogative and all the public way stuff is. And so, again, I think, you know, the Lincoln Ave thing was a learning point for us in terms of what is tax roll in Lincoln Ave, should it have gone to them or not? And so, you know... Well, I guess I thought they did with buses and I just, I guess I hope that the council doesn't have to deal with buses. I just, there's just so much we're dealing with. Yeah, it just seems like there's a lot of district issues having to do with traffic in all the different districts. You know, I sent a list of like seven different issues about district five to tack. And now they're just out in the, you know, we don't, you know, they're just not being dealt with. So anyway, yeah. I'm interested in this issue too, Paul. Yeah. I think we could send along the tack charge to the town council, Paul. That might just be a simple way of starting it and saying questions have been raised about the role of the tack, obviously, with the pandemic, people were not meeting, et cetera, and how they're gonna interface with TSO moving forward and just go ahead and send them the charge. And then because some people don't even realize what the charge says, right? And also how it evolved over time because it could be other committees. And I know that some of the members are gonna say, look, you already took away this committee, this committee and this committee, but there is probably a way that we can farm some work out to them. But then we have to make those lines as to who do people come to, Darcy? Like, do they come to you as a town council? Do they go to tack? Where do they go? Yeah, it's not clear. It's not clear. It's never been clear. So that's nothing new. So we can make it, we can start making it be clear. Yeah, no, that would be good if we had some kind of line of communication. Yes. All right. I, my little cursor is on end meeting for all. Covering, covering, like the little peak. Coming in. Coming in. Okay. I'm late. So much power. All right. See ya.