 I am calling this meeting of Outreach Communications and Appointments to order at 9.31 a.m. So you have several documents in your packet, including an agenda. So the first thing is announcements, and I don't necessarily have any announcements, but what I do wanna do is just take a brief opportunity to thank the members of this committee for their work over the past month. So most town council committees meet twice a month. This is our fifth meeting this month. Some of those have been lengthy meetings. One of them was something brand new with our public interviews. And so we've worked really hard over the past month and then before that, over the previous three or four months to get a process in place that we could recommend appointments to the planning board and so that has been, I think a tremendous amount of work. I think that OCA has distinguished itself as a workhorse committee on the council, and I really appreciate the members of this committee for being willing to attend all of those meetings in this past month and go through everything that we did to get to the point where we are today, where we have a recommendation sitting in front of the town council for an appointment to the planning board. So thank you. I know there's been a lot of off-cycle meetings that we had to schedule, sometimes at the last minute, although always within the 48 hours under open meeting law. And so I wanna thank all of you for that. I also, while she's here, want to thank Athena, who has been incredible throughout all of this, and then also Angela as well, who is willing to sit with me on the phone on New Year's Eve trying to parse through community activity forms to figure out who was in the pool. Athena was great in getting everything posted on time and changing postings when they needed to be changed. So we wouldn't have been here without the support of Athena and Angela. And so I wanted to also extend my thanks to them. We have two major agenda items today. One is the three committee appointments that have been filed by the town manager for cultural council, council on aging, and participatory budgeting commission. And the other is I wanted to just do a debrief of the process. We've now fully implemented OCA's new process to recommend appointments to town council appointed multiple member bodies. Having done a run through, I think it's useful for us to think about what went well and what we might recommend changing in the future, especially if that process migrates to a body that is not OCA. I wanna start with the town manager appointments filed by the town clerk. The town manager has agreed to attend OCA's meeting today at 10 a.m. And so I thought we would first take an opportunity to discuss these as a group, see if we had any questions for the town manager. And then when he arrives, we can ask him. And if we finish that conversation before 10, we can start the second conversation and then move on. So why don't we go in order and start with cultural council? And so you have in your packet, cultural council appointments filed January 22nd, 2020. My assumption is that we've all read them prior to today's meeting. Did anyone have any questions or comments on cultural council? No? Alyssa? Just in general, I wanna, I hope that you will share with the town manager if I forget when he arrives at 10, that we appreciate that he got this out to us early enough in the week, knowing that we were going to MMA, that we were not gonna have time to read it over the weekend, like all of our other town council, almost all of our other town council materials weren't provided until right before the meeting when everybody was racing around. So we appreciate having him early enough in the week that we did have a chance to read them before we left. Yes, yes, I agreed. Personally, I didn't necessarily have any questions on the town council, I mean on the cultural council appointments, perhaps with the exception of Nicholas Graber Mitchell, for which I had both a comment and a question, a comment being, I think it's cool that he has a student that he's recommending to a committee. We often talk about trying to get students more involved and of course that can be difficult to convince a student to be on a committee since there's a level of commitment there, but he's got one and I think that's great. I was curious if this student had any particular background in the arts or humanities because that doesn't seem to be mentioned here, it's just he's enthusiastic. And so in that case, why cultural council and why not many of the other committees to which he could be appointed. No, thank you. We do need more enthusiasm. And so I was sort of curious what led him to put him on this committee, given that there doesn't seem to be anything in the arts and humanities in that, even like his major might have been useful if that was relevant. Any other thoughts or questions on cultural committee? Cultural council, okay, then I will close that and we will move to council on aging. You have a number of documents in your packet on council on aging. There was the town manager's original filing of council on aging appointments on January 22nd. There was an updated version submitted to the town council and town clerk this morning. And then there are several other things, including the general bylaws and the existing general bylaws and the recommended general bylaws, which the town manager's memo claimed were attached to that memo, but were actually not attached to that memo. And then also there is an email in here from Alyssa to the town manager, which sort of gives you the context of why you received an updated memo for today. So given that, are there any questions, comments on council on aging appointments? Alyssa. Thank you for being so succinct in describing that, Evan. The thing that we all need to be aware of, even though we only have a couple of committees that we appoint is that it's always worth looking at all the words and the charge to find out if there's a reference to a town meeting action and town meeting actions didn't necessarily result in bylaws. They were sometimes just a town meeting action, create a committee, but other times they actually also created a bylaw and it just so happened that some of us were on bylaw review recently. I was like, wasn't council on aging in the general bylaw? And in fact it is. And it said something specific that was not addressed in the town manager's original memo. And so that's why I asked that that IB dotted and TB crossed. And I think it's worth noting that the bylaw does, and the bylaw says that the town manager will consider the recommendations of the nominating committee of the council on aging in the town manager explained to us that that nominating committee does not currently exist. And so there were no recommendations to consider. So perhaps now with the full committee, that's something that might be reconstituted. Other questions, thoughts, comments, concerns on council on aging? Okay, and so the last one that we look at is participatory budgeting commission for which we have the chair present. So we have one appointment from participatory budgeting commission, Jonathan McCabe. Are there any questions, comments, concerns about this appointment? I am aware that Jonathan McCabe has been regularly attending participatory budgeting commission meetings as if he was a member, although certainly not taking votes. Comments, questions? Okay, seeing none. So I'm going to hold a vote on these until after the town manager arrives so that we can run anything additional by him. But it sounds as though we are likely ready to go on these, Alyssa. Just to clarify, none of us are making comments now because none of us intend to ask him any questions. That's my assumption. That's my assumption too. With the exception of my one question on cultural council. On the student, yes, and their background. Because, I mean, one, because no surprise is right, that's the point of having the conversation before he comes in. But then also, I would like it to be clear to him that the reason we don't have any questions isn't just because we're exhausted from our busy weekend. It's because we have worked back and forth to figure out what material he needs to give us and he gave it to us. Therefore, there's not a lot of questions to be asked. Right, we've gone through this iterative process of trying to figure out what information we're looking for and I think that with the one exception that I highlighted, we're seeing it. Committee charge is attached. In the case of council on aging, we now have other documents attached. We have the posting, the vacancy posting and the advertisement for these and then we also have a description of each person. And I think the time that Andrew did a good job in these of trying to connect it clearly to the committee itself. I think Jonathan McCabe's profile is a good example that shows sort of all the different things that he could bring in his background. So it should be a quick conversation with the town manager. Okay, so I want to move on then to debrief. It's formatted right on the agenda. Discussion of OCA process to recommend appointments to multiple member bodies appointed by the town council reflection. So we spent September through December constructing a process and then we spent January implementing and applying that process. And so that started with our meeting on January 6th in which we voted to declare the pool sufficient to proceed to interviews. It continued with our meeting on January 8th in which we developed selection guidance and interview questions. We then conducted our public interviews on January 22nd and then shortly after that meeting adjourned, had our deliberation to develop a recommendation. Certainly the timeline was tight, but we did it all. What I want to do is while it's fresh in our mind, I want to just have a discussion about what we thought went well and what we thought perhaps could be improved so that we could develop perhaps some notes going forward either for us or should this responsibility be migrated to another committee or potentially multiple committees? Those would be notes that we could pass on to them to say, hey, when you do this, here's some things that we wish we had done. Here's some things that could be done differently. And so I don't necessarily have a whole lot of structure in mind for this conversation and we'll do it until the town manager shows up. But what do you think worked and what do you think going forward we might want to consider or hope someone will consider doing differently? The floor is open. Sarah. Although I know that there's at least one person that's sitting here that might disagree with me on this. George. I thought actually, we thought that we would try having a group interview and there was some thought about whether or not that people would feel like they didn't have enough time or maybe it would be really awkward. I felt like what we were shooting for was that people would have the same environment, they would have consistency in their interviews and that we were hoping that people sitting together during one interview would have sort of a feeling of safety and bonding. And I think that I saw that. I haven't talked to any of those people obviously but it felt to me that it did not seem to be alienating. I felt that the people that were in front of us actually seemed pretty comfortable and were really talking to each other so I thought that meant a good aim and I still think that if there were seven or eight or 10 of them we could find a way to still, it would still be manageable. Okay. So you felt like at the end of the day the group interviews went well? And then the questions, I mean it was brought up to us by people actually who were being interviewed that there was things that they did not like about some of our questions so maybe that would be, that's something that was sort of thought provoking. So I've been thinking about that. Just a little bit about some yes or no questions whether or not we, like and again I know somebody, so whether or not they really are yes or no questions or they should be. I think there was especially the comment about open meeting law which I definitely wanted to hold on to. People felt like that was just a yes or no so that might be, I think it could be more than a yes or no and I would still like to keep it but I'm wondering what other people think about some of the questions. Okay, thank you. Other thoughts, Alyssa? Yes to the group interviews, worked out great. And then on the questions, I enjoyed all of the interviewees but it was a mistake on their part, not a mistake on our part to say that those were yes or no questions. That was their choice to interpret them as yes or no questions. They knew ahead of time what the question was. They, like all the questions and that's one of the things I wanted to make sure we make a note of was a really good idea. I'm really proud of the fact that we put out the questions, the selection guidance, all the material to them so that none of it was a surprise. This wasn't a gotcha kind of interview at all. And they were not yes, no questions and people who failed to understand that lost points in my opinion in their interview because they needed to be able to talk about why that wasn't a problem for them because we have had committee members. In fact, we still have some of them serving who have pointed out how difficult it is for them to comply with open meeting law and how frustrating they find it to be and they have to be reminded regularly that there is such a thing and I'm talking about not council committees. And so that was a place that they could have expressed either their familiarity with it from having experienced it by serving on it or watching it or why they thought it was important or that they knew it was going to be complicated but they were more than up for the task and they had been up for the task in some other respect. It was wide open and so for them to snark back at us that it was a yes or no question told me more about their personalities than perhaps they wished to tell me. So I would not want to give up that question although I could see possibly and I know we struggled with it initially as well if there's another way we can sort of finesse it to make it look, to make it clearer that we're not looking for a yes, no answer because we wouldn't write all those words if we were looking for a yes or no answer. Thank you. George. Alissa's point is well taken. I think we can finesse certainly six and seven in such a way that it would lead someone toward a more elaborate answer. So I think we could do that easily and I think it is important that we keep them. I was somewhat skeptical of it as I think some of you may recall but I think we should keep them and I think we can wordsmith them in a way without very little effort to get them to be pretty clear that they're not yes or no. There was an issue with number five. I don't know if we have time to talk about it now that we might want to spend some time thinking about whether given the fact that the master plan has many goals and we chose to focus on one again, whether that needs to be wordsmith or whether we want to leave it the way it is but one of the respondents I thought made a good point about question five though he still provided I think a thoughtful answer. I've heard a little bit of not just a bit of feedback in terms of the sort of canned nature of this and it may be it's just unavoidable in other words people are essentially some of the respondents understandably are reading answers that they've written out in advance and we knew that that's probably what would happen and I guess there's not much we can do about it. Really. So to offer my input on a couple of the things that were said as far as the yes no questions I agree that I think in the future we could probably I mean just say yes or no and why is as simple as is that I think the interesting thing was I also having spent the weekend interacting and I had ad hoc nature with various counselors who were not shy about giving their feedback on the process. I heard from one counselor who said I thought those yes no questions weren't super useful because they didn't elaborate and I wish they would have elaborated and then I heard from another counselor that said I liked that that distinguished between people who would just say yes or no or give a longer response and I liked when people just said yes because that showed that they weren't gonna just talking committee for no reason that they would get straight to the point and so they actually felt like they whereas Alyssa sort of felt like people who just said yes we're giving up an opportunity she sort of felt like that was a positive thing so certainly lots of feedback there. Question five I think could be wordsmith to just say one of the many goals of the master plan is this because the feedback we got was well not as many goals this isn't the sole goal. But to George's last point the fact that some respondents just read answers that they had written in advance I think I had a very interesting conversation with counselor Steinberg who said he thought the interviews weren't well his one critique was he felt like we should not have distributed the interview questions in advance because it did permit people to just write out answers to read and that that was not as useful as sort of a normal interview. When I explained to counselor Steinberg the reason we distributed those questions in advance the fact that because they were developed in a public meeting they were public documents and that we didn't want some people who know how the system works to have access to the questions in advance and others not to he noted that he hadn't thought of that and thought that given that situation it was appropriate to distribute the questions in advance but then offer perhaps one other suggestion which was to not develop the interview questions in a public meeting but instead designate one member of the committee likely the chair to put together the interview questions so his suggestion for going forward was just have the committee give feedback to the chair of what they're looking for in the questions but have the chair in the end develop the interview questions. I felt as though members of the committee wouldn't be comfortable with such an idea because then you wouldn't know what the interview questions were until the interview which certainly if I was not chair I might be uncomfortable with but I wanted to since it was a suggestion that was offered take a minute to maybe talk about that because that would be one way to not distribute interview questions in advance and avoid this idea of people just reading the interview questions. So thought I just talked for a while thoughts on anything of those three things. Darcy. I guess I also heard some feedback and agreed that because the applicants had the interview questions it felt can sort of in the way that some of our election forums were during the campaign for town council seats. And I felt like there that at the I didn't have enough information at the end of hearing the answers to their questions. And I felt like the, I mean you have all heard my opinions about the process that we put together but I felt like everything was too tightly controlled and that there shouldn't really be a reason for tightly controlling things in that manner. I would have liked to have been able to ask follow up questions and I would have liked to have extended the interviews a little bit longer it seemed a little strange to have ended the interviews so quickly and then had a big gap before we deliberated when we could have spent more time with the applicants asking them more questions. And I don't see where there is a problem with asking follow up questions and being open about whatever questions we asked. So yes, I would like things to be a little bit more holistic and free flowing. Other comments thoughts, Alyssa? So a couple of different things. One is when we developed the questions we made a point of not going too long because we had no way of knowing if we would have three applicants or eight applicants or 12 applicants or two applicants at that time. That gap had nothing to do with the number of questions we asked that gap had to do with our newness at managing what turned out to be the number of applicants and the amount of time that it needed to ask the questions because obviously if you do give time limits you can calculate out this takes three minutes this takes one minute, et cetera but if you don't know for sure how many people you have that's harder. We might be in a future situation where as we talked about as we develop this process where we may choose a date when we call for applicants we may be saying when we call for applicants for example to the people who are up for renewal and potentially new appointments is to say we're gonna have a meeting in May or April possibly that for X number of positions it's gonna be on such and such date then we might have a better and then if we have a closing date we know three of people are coming eight people are coming then we could back end our stuff in a different way than we were able to this time because we were trying to be flexible who knows how many people are gonna be there so that's part of what has to be taken into consideration is what part of the process we're in have we already figured out how many applicants we have and then we're developing the questions and potentially adding more and potentially adding more for follow up time so we didn't do anything wrong or inappropriate or not good we did what we could with the information that we had at that time given the way this particular one played out I'm really really not at all happy with the recommendation to have a chair or even another designee develop the questions with just some generic input this is exactly the consolidation of power question we talk about all the time at town council it's one of the reasons Oka which I so appreciate what you said at the beginning of our meeting why Oka basically got whipped on every other town council meeting for not being what some counselors thought we should be we were treated poorly frequently publicly at our meetings and we actually worked really hard to not only ourselves to be thoughtful about who got to make decisions but also in response to all the counselors who complained that one person was getting to make the appointment decision and I practically speaking Andy knows that if you let the person develop the questions what he asks us questions on his own based on his very best effort to reflect what he thinks we said at a meeting how many times did we go through our own questions saying no that's not what we meant no I wish we had put it this way that was when there was a group of us one person doing that so then when it comes to selection then after those questions are answered you express some frustration that maybe you didn't have the information you really wanted at the end of those questions even though we'd all agreed those were the questions but then it turned out maybe we didn't have all the information we wanted we're definitely not gonna have the information we all want if one person is developing those questions and so then I'm gonna sit here and go well if you'd ask that question a different way then maybe I would have gotten the answer but now I'm stuck and the poor applicants sitting there going I did my best and I'm just having to sit there going okay well and perhaps to some extent that plays into your follow up questions as well but the idea of one person developing them and I go back again to our transparency to our community we as you stated very clearly we did it so that people wouldn't dig through our stuff to figure out what our questions were we said these are our questions and the other thing I wanna say I know the town managers here is that it's really important that we give people a chance to be both verbal and written in their materials that's one of the reasons I feel like we didn't go directly to just well because somebody said to me why didn't you just have them all write down their answers and send them in and they wouldn't have had to do this because some people don't express themselves as well in writing and find it very daunting and that doesn't mean they wouldn't be a really good planning board member it means you probably don't want them to write a grant application but you don't have to do that to be a planning board member and so giving people that option we had an applicant who spoke off the cuff and felt comfortable doing that we had applicants who read really carefully and others who jumped around but that gave them more control over their answers just as we wouldn't wanna go strictly to written I also wouldn't wanna go strictly to surprise questions that were developed by the chair that they kinda heard about what we were talking about but they didn't know what the actual questions were I thought we worked that out very carefully and I stand by what we did. Okay, we're going to return back we're gonna switch gears we're gonna come back to this cause I wanna hear other people's opinions both on that one suggestion from council Steinberg and then also some other suggestions I've received from other counselors and just general thoughts but I wanna be respectful of the town manager's time. Thank you. Of course. How are you? Good. So we had a chance to go through the three sets of appointment that you have filed at the beginning of our meeting we had very few questions or concerns and wanna recognize that part of that is because we have worked with you to clarify on both ends expectations and feel as though what's have been submitted is what we've been looking for and are happy that we've been able to have that conversation and thank you for being responsive to those requests because it does help us look at these quickly and evaluate them. I also think it's a better work product and a good standard for the entire community not just for OCA for people looking at from the outside too. So thank you for the feedback. The one comment and question that I had and this is for me personally was on cultural council. The comment is that I think it's great that you found a student to serve on a town committee. It's something that we've been talking about engaging the student population more but can be very difficult to do and certainly some of us sitting here now how difficult it can be to engage students. So it's great. The question is Mr. Graber Mitchell seems enthusiastic about volunteering but there's nothing in the profile that says anything about arts, culture, humanities and so just a question about why cultural council for this individual as opposed to perhaps one of the other many committees that you're currently appointing. So it's a perceptive comment. He had applied for a different committee and his community activity form was geared towards that other committee that he did not get appointed to and so when we have someone who doesn't get appointed we reach out and say is there something we'd like you to be on something else is there something else that interests you or an angel will just call up everybody who's sort of in our pool of people who have put their name forward for something and say are you interested in this committee or that committee. For this one he said I am interested. I'd like to come in for an interview and he did and so we didn't ask him to submit a new CAF or anything like that so there was anything written about it and honestly he brought enthusiasm and interest but no background or orientation in the cultural council. The chair of the cultural council felt like many of us do that having students participate as a plus and saw a lot of benefits to having someone from the student body who could talk about engaging students in a better way through especially downtown cultural council. But he doesn't have any particular background or experience in the cultural council but we have space on the committee forum. Alyssa. I just follow up to say that I wouldn't hope that although I know that's generally how it's working out but that the profile I know that one of the reasons we struggled with profiles over time and I am the one who said make sure we say thank you that we struggled with profiles over time is that they were based on the CAF not on what necessarily came out during the interview and so just reprinting what was on a CAF that of course none of us have seen because it's not a council CAF is not necessarily the most useful information so that's how we got around to getting more information and I also think conversely you should feel free to say in the profile exactly what you just said everybody thought it was cool which is a totally reasonable thing to say rather than us just wondering did we miss something? That's the question so yeah sometimes it's just not the most obvious fit but it is the right fit and as you say you have that team there and they're giving you that insight. Well the other thing from my perspective also I mean we happen to have people who have always almost always have these incredible backgrounds and but sometimes you don't need to have an incredible background to be a really good board member and it's okay in a situation like this I just don't, there's other than saying enthusiastic and some committees you don't want just enthusiasm you want some background for it but in this situation this is a person who brought the enthusiasm and a perspective that we didn't have represented which is what I was trying to bring to. Darcy? I guess I would say I mean I'm going to vote for this person but I guess I would say that when you say he has enthusiasm I would hope that means he has arts appreciation and I think someone to be on this committee whether you're a student or whomever you should either have some arts background or be an arts appreciator of some sort but if the person has absolutely no knowledge of the arts or any experience even in appreciating the arts that seems a bit of a stretch but like I said I'll vote for him assuming that his enthusiasm means he's an arts appreciator why else would he want to be on this committee? Right I think one of the things that he brought to the interview was the interest in engaging the artist the art and cultural community of Amherst College to the town and trying to bridge that gap so while he individually, I think he does have an arts background I think he might be in theater or something like that but that's not why I mean it was really his sort of connection with the college and just someone who is in there below 25 that was a benefit to us I think Other comments on cultural council or any of the three sets of appointments for listen? Just a purely technical aspect on council on aging the new packet didn't include the two bylaws attached and so how forward that to Athena it included the sentences but it didn't include Right but it was not it's in your committee packet No it's not what we got this morning No I think it is on your it's on Oka's page those two things but I didn't I didn't zerox them part of this Athena? I believe it's attached to the meeting posting I thought that's what you asked for If you go to this meeting's packet they're in there Not the packet actually it's attached to the meeting The posting There's town council packets There are Oka packets that are in SharePoint There are Oka packets that are on the town website There are also attachments to meeting postings So it's somewhere between them It is online somewhere I thought this morning We probably were just looking for it in one of the other four places Yeah Because the revised memo says that the two bylaws are attached and they are not It's that simple The charge is there The their own bylaws are there But two more PDS haven't been added to the agenda So they're floating around there as their own document possibly attached to the meeting post Right they're here And so that's just if that is clear in tonight's packet for the counselors that'll be great right It'll just be under that item I don't know how it's attached It'll just be listed under the item Also just as a clarifying So these are not on the agenda for the council tonight These will be on the February 10th agenda So we have a little bit of time So we have a little bit of time to make sure Okay Just can I bring up one other thing Sure So we're advertising for others The big one is going to be the board of license commissioners Now those terms because of the timing of the first appointments and the first ones being one year Two things I want to point out Those are coming up at the end of February So we have one person who's interested in being reappointed and one person who has resigned So one vacancy So I will be bringing those forward for a March 1st begin date hopefully or sometime in that framework because their terms expire February 28th 29th, whatever the date is But then I would look for that to be a three year appointment and try to get them aligned on the July 1 schedule So I'm not sure exactly how to do it I'm gonna Because it says three years but we're sort of on this It's sort of the same thing that you had with the council president, vice president thing So do we appoint them for a three month period or not? You'll notice in some of my memos I said it's a one year appointment but it's really five months with the intention that we will align these up to a July 1 turn over time just so they're all We see what's going on So Okay Give your head up Thank you for your time Thank you Okay, so I will now entertain motions for these three sets of appointments I can read the motion and ask someone to make it if that would be easier for this committee So we will start with council on aging So the motion is to recommend that the town council approve the town manager approve the following town manager appointments to the cultural council effective immediately for a three year term expiring June 30th, 2022 Jacqueline Smith Crooks for a one year term expiring June 30th, 2020 Greg Baskoam and Timothy Neal I so move Is there a second? Okay, the motion's been made by George seconded by Darcy Is there any additional discussion? Okay, call the question All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye Aye And that's unanimous Okay, we will move on to cultural council So the motion is to recommend that the town council approve the following town manager appointments to the cultural council effective immediately for a three year term expiring June 30th, 2022 Arthur Perrow for a two year term expiring June 30th, 2021 Nicholas Graber Mitchell for a one year term expiring June 30th, 2020 Rachel Wang I so move The motion's been made Is there a second? Okay, the motion's been made by George seconded by Sarah Is there any additional discussion? Okay, call the question All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye Aye So that's unanimous Okay, and our final one is participatory budgeting And so the motion is to recommend that the town council approve the following town manager appointment to the participatory budgeting commission effective immediately for a Sorry, this one's formatted slightly differently for a term expiring December 1st, 2020 Jonathan McCabe I so move Second Okay, let's get to second and then we'll Okay, so it's been made by George seconded by Sarah Darcy You had a question That expire in 2020 So that's when participatory budget participatory budgeting is in ad hoc Oh, when the committee expires? Yeah, I think all of them expire December 1st, 2020 because that's when participatory budgeting has to submit their final report to the town council Yeah, I'm just kind of wondering why Meg is here and what she wanted if she wanted to say something I'm not But she is not here right now so and Okay All right So with that, I will call the question All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye And that's unanimous Okay, thank you So that is done I want to now return to the conversation we've had So just a reminder of what we're talking about because it's been 20 minutes 13 minutes So we're talking about sort of our reflections our thoughts of what went well and what might need improvement from discussion ideas that are on the table One was about the yes no questions and whether those were useful The second is about the ability to ask follow up questions The third is about whether or not about Councillor Steinberg's suggestion of perhaps having the chair develop questions in advance so that they are not a public document that need to be distributed in advance which would open the opportunity to have sort of more organic responses as opposed to canned responses and a thought that the interviews could go a bit longer You know, one thing I do want to know is that and I've already said this to this committee but I can perhaps say it now also for public purposes is that the reason of course that we had a fairly lengthy gap between the interview meeting and the deliberation meeting was because we originally had four applicants one of course we know withdrew and so when I did out the math and said there are seven questions let's say every applicant uses the full three minutes per questions that comes out to 84 minutes just in responses let's give in some time to ask the questions that's about an hour and a half let's think that there might be some remarks at the beginning and maybe we don't start exactly on time my math came out too if we start at six we'll probably wrap up by 7.40, 7.45 and then we'd probably want a brief break before that 8 p.m. meeting unfortunately that fourth applicant withdrew too late for me to change the meeting posting time and so I think in the future we wouldn't have such a large gap because we would have timed we would have scheduled it slightly differently I think the lesson I've learned in this is perhaps to just schedule those meetings so that they overlap a bit expectedly so that should the interview end earlier we can start earlier and that's something to consider going forward but I do think the idea of follow-up questions because I did hear from one counselor that said I really wish they could have been follow-up questions because you had time for them and I do think we always needed to consider that we're always operating under the assumption that we could have more applicants and even though and the statement that oh well we could have kept going the interviews ended pretty quickly well the interviews did still take about 45 minutes and so for an applicant who's sitting here if I was there I might wanna say well I've been here for 45 minutes I'm ready to go as opposed to just oh well this didn't take as long as we thought let's keep going so a couple things to think about here George I see you. Just a thought it would be possible just to post one meeting and then after the interviews have done you adjourn or we suspend for 15 or 20 minutes and then come back is that possible or is that not? The process that we adopted has in it the interviews are the sole agenda item of that meeting so no Alyssa. So just technically the other way to accommodate that is to schedule the other meeting for earlier than the second meeting to schedule the second meeting for earlier than you think the first meeting will end and then just start at late you can't ever start a posted meeting early and you'd get criticized if week after week you know we said town council was at 6.30 bad we didn't really start until eight like people start to get mad but legally you're okay to start late you're not okay to start early that's why we couldn't call it early so if we knew again it's what we knew at the time but if we knew we could potentially cause them to be closer together and we could even say the first meeting is gonna start with a recess so there are ways but that's why it was complicated but mainly because of our rule Other thoughts on any of this Sarah? So for yes or no questions what I was trying to get to and maybe I wasn't clear is that I don't think that very many questions are just yes or no right so I agree with Alyssa and the fact that if something was a yes or no that also I mean all these questions let somebody's personality shine through I mean I think whether you think that it's canned or not for people to have them I would say that they do you still do see the personality of the person the other thing I wanna say with about is that to say I know sometimes it's hard for me in a meeting to completely organize my thoughts I found out really quick that sometimes I got panicky when I had to say something off the cuff or was trying to read something to a television screen when I didn't have something in front of me so for the way that I think it was easier for me to write out what I was going to say so that I knew that I was gonna get out everything that I had thought of previously the people that were electing here were not electing that's the whole point we're appointing are not elected officials that often will have to say things off the cuff so I don't think that there's any problem with letting someone write down their answers and they also have to write down their answers so in that I would say I think you're still gonna get someone's personality they didn't all sit down together and decide what their written answers were the other thing that I wanna say is that as far as follow-up questions go I think that sort of what's being put forward this is what I interpreted to be and it may not be is sort of transparency or being open and really getting to the core of someone's personality seems like we would then all sit in a circle and then we wouldn't put a time limit on anything and then we could each counselor could then ask whatever follow-up questions they wanted in theory that might work and it does sound very warm and fuzzy and functional but in reality I don't think that it would be because what if one of us has a real issue with one of the people who's applying and then we really hammer them with follow-up questions but somebody doesn't I mean I would think that in the end when people when constituents were looking at that there might be some people who would maybe object to a follow-up question that was asked and none of us would have any control over whether something was asked or not asked so I don't know that it works functionally and also again just how this committee you know people have dogged us about how much time it takes us to make decisions but I do like the fact that we are making important decisions together and I myself would not want to have just one person coming up with questions since we are stills like two or three months later or you could say a year and two and three months later talking about those questions together. Okay, George. I'd like to shift the conversation slightly. Everyone's okay to selection guidance. Well before we do that does anyone have any final thoughts on comments on either I'll call on you, there's one out there. One follow-up questions and two the idea of submitting questions in advance versus letting the chair decide so Darcy and then if anyone else has a final comment on that and then we'll shift to a different topic. Darcy. So I understand what Sarah is saying about how follow-up questions could be problematic in some ways but if we just had an agreement that we could ask the question could you expand on that or something really neutral because a person starts talking about something that is of interest to members and you want to hear more about it. I mean we really need to be more flexible and secondly I would definitely nix the idea of one member deciding on the questions. I don't think that it would have the effect of making things less canned because that would still, oh anyway, I agree with Alyssa on the consolidation of power problem that we have here in the council. Okay. So it seems like not a whole lot of interest in changing how we develop interview questions. Okay, so I'll turn it back to George who wants to shift towards selection guidance. Speaking personally I found it very useful to have this document guiding me for the interviews and I was referring to it very frequently during our interviews and afterwards as well. I have one question about staff input or staff liaison input and whether that should be included in the guidance. We have the input from the body's chair which seems to me quite appropriate and obviously that would change somewhat slightly given each context because each time I assume we would reach out to the chair of that body and ask for some input and I think that's extremely valuable and we have been working on number one. We may need to come back to that but I'm wondering whether there should be an item number three. Just that there should also be, we should solicit input from a relevant staff member. Is that appropriate? Is that a good idea? That's just a question. It seems to me I would be interested in hearing from staff in terms of their impressions of the body and how it's functioning and what thoughts they might have but perhaps that's just not appropriate. The other one has to do with perspective so maybe we should come to that after. So I wanna maybe ask Sarah because I believe when you conducted interviews you had, was it Nate or Christine? Christine, can you talk to, yeah, that'd be great. So when I did those interviews I was directed both by the president of town council, I believe as well as this committee to when I did the interviews. It was suggested to me, I felt that I also, I did not have to take anyone's advice. I did not have to agree with the people who were there but that I did elicit some input from both the town manager and the relevant staff person. I don't think there's any problem with that as long as the person who's doing it is thinking for themselves. I think all councilors do that and maybe we wanna make what they say, it'll be in a public interview. I would say maybe we ask them while they are here because I will say that many people were not happy with the choices that I made but I will tell you that I did it heavily with listening to the input of both a staff member and the town manager. So I found it fine to get another perspective knowing that I did not have to take it, right? I could listen and then make up my own mind I was under no obligation to necessarily agree. Darcy. So George are you suggesting something more than the written selection criteria input that we already have that to have staff involved in the discussion, the deliberation? I think what I'm imagining is that we have a document in front of us and item one is criteria for healthy multiple member body with various points. Item two is input that was given to us by the chair of the body and I would envision item three also would be written down and it would be inputs solicited from the relevant staff person and it would be, it's a public, anyone can read it, see it, right? And it would guide us, it could be possible, useful for us in helping us make a decision. So that I would assume would be part of something that we would have in front of us written out. And if staff didn't want to respond or didn't respond, it wouldn't be there. But it wouldn't be, they wouldn't be asking questions, they, we would obviously have that role but we would be soliciting their input on the committee at this moment in time. That's what I'm imagining. And if that's a bad idea, I'd be glad to jettison it but I would think that as Sarah's just said, she found it helpful and I don't think, I think we would too. And but I would assume it would be something just in this format, it would be written down and we'd be looking at it. And anyone else, I may not hand this to anybody, if I can look at it too. So that's what I'm asking. Does that make sense? And should we add it as a item number three in terms of selection guidance? Doshi. My board is a board of the council. So I think it kind of muddies things if we, if we include staff, as you know, if we give staff the authority to be involved in our decision-making process, I guess I see it separate, the charter sets it up separately. So this is the committee of the council. So I guess I would assume that the staff could possibly be involved in the criteria that the planning board puts in place because they're involved in everything the planning board does. So I kind of feel like that is an adequate avenue for, and I bet Christine Breastrup was involved. I don't know, I'm not sure. Christie, I don't know if Christine Breastrup was involved in shaping number two. I, nothing that is in number two came from Christine Breastrup. I don't know if the chair, the other Christine, Christine Gray-Mullen, talked to Christine Breastrup beforehand, knowing Christine Gray-Mullen, she is a very independent thinker and I have a feeling this is, which there is from her. I do wanna make sure just for the purposes of the record, we clarify that the planning board is not a committee of the council. It is a committee of the town. It's just that we appoint it, so I don't wanna. Yes. Okay. Sarah. Please say that I found it helpful. I found it helpful to have that information. It was helpful, but again, I want to stress it wasn't something that I had to agree with or not agree with, but it did give me another great perspective on how a particular board worked. Okay. Alyssa. I'm trying to listen and type so fast, so I'd be less bluthery. I would like us to consider clarifying a couple of things. One is that when we ask the chair, we have not in the past made it clear that we would like the chair to be asking the rest of the members as well. And so that the email comes from the chair, but that they should discuss it at least briefly and publicly with their body that they're going to need to answer this question, because as it stands now, Christine Grimala may very well have done that, but we didn't ask her to. And it may be that they were so busy with their agendas, et cetera, that it never came up with the rest of the planning board. And that would be an unfortunate missed opportunity. And you'd hope that every chair would make time to do that, but we all know everybody gets super busy. So we should consider adding that in, that we're asking you to have this conversation publicly. You don't have to get it approved by the rest of your body, but please ask for their input publicly and worst case privately, but at least it would be nice to touch on it publicly. Because again, then it would be like everybody, had some input as to what's happening here. In terms of the staff, it gets a little more awkward and there are a couple of different reasons for that. On the one hand, it's really the staff help has been really important from the standpoint of one, working with Sarah in the past, but also that handout that we used back then when Sarah was doing this and that we use now, I wrote that handout. Christine Gray-Mullen didn't write it. Chris Breastrup didn't write it. I wrote it. Now to be fair, I stole a bunch of it from the town website, but I added things to it too. And then I ran it back past Breastrup and said, is this true? Like all these things that were on the town website and that I altered are these true facts about the role of the planning board in the ZBA. And the answer was yes. And in fact, then oddly enough, they kind of just updated it when we updated the zoning by-law to say that that part was fixed. And I don't know if they're continuing to concede it as their document or our document, but we wrote it. And so we really needed it from that standpoint. And I'd want it to be like run by staff to make sure something hadn't changed. Like if they start meeting a different time of the month or they get a new responsibility or something like that. In terms of their actual soliciting their input separately, I'm a little more uneasy about that because I like on the technical side, yes, they can tell us, right, the stuff in the handout. On the fuzzier skills stuff, it's a little trickier. And there's a couple of reasons for that that I think are underlying that nobody even talks about much less just the general awkwardness of day-to-day interactions. One is that when our town staff is evaluated for performance, committees are never solicited as to how effective town staff support has been. That has traditionally many, many years long before Paul not been a thing. So staff already isn't getting input. Committees aren't getting input as to how staff performs. And so it's, to me, that's an underlying gap in our evaluation process. And because of that, it puts staff in this kind of position. Like they just know everything about the committee and they work really hard to support committees, but I would want to take their comments and context. And part of the context is they never get evaluated for how committee members feel they're treated by staff. So that is that aspect. The other aspect that's really complicated is when we're looking to the chair for opinion, what if the chair is up for reappointment? And so the chair says, we need somebody with exactly my skill set. Won't that be perfect? And people are generally incredibly hardworking at not being biased, but the reality is it's there. And that's one of the things we've talked about with the town managers appointments is he's consistently including the chairs of committees in his appointments, whether they're up for reappointment or not, and then it turns out, oh right, because he's not even interviewing them. He's just giving them a reappointment because they asked for it. So it's, partly it's what kind of precedent are we trying to set for our very limited appointments in terms of what we think is community oriented and transparent. And so maybe we just need to be a little clearer in our directions to the chair saying, we realize you might be up for reappointment. We think you might want to talk to staff about this. Staff already helped us with this handout, but we should probably, whatever we choose, we should be clearer on who's telling us what. Sarah. So this is the thing I think I was trying to get to is that I was encouraged, and now that I'm thinking about it, was it in a meeting, was it privately? Because I did not have, you know, we had just been elected and it was, you know, said to me, you probably don't have that much experience. You need to take into consideration, you know, guidelines from the town manager and also from, you know, Christine who's part of staff. So what I would say is the council needs to decide whether or not we want to do that. And then we need to make it really clear that we are or are not doing that. And then whatever feedback we are given needs to be noted publicly like we do anything else. Because I think that there was some ambiguity there, in retrospect, about what I did or did not do. And then later on, I could not say yes or no. I think it needs to be very clear and then it needs to be very public. Okay, George. Well, I threw it out there as an idea and this is sort of the way I do think sometimes. And as I think about it and I hear Alyssa's comments and Sarah's comments, I'm beginning to think it's a bad idea. That it creates awkwardness and it just would be difficult to do in this sort of fashion. So I mean, that's just my initial response, hearing what a number of you said. I want to push back a little bit on Alyssa's point about input from the chair. I guess I would hope that they would talk to their colleagues on their body, but I'm not sure I want to give instruction. I mean, it reads number two, input from the body's chair and that's the way I think it should read. And if the chair just decides to say what they think and that's the way they do it, so be it. If they are more collegial, that perhaps would be better but that's really up to them. Otherwise we have to change two to input from the committee. And I don't really know what that means. It really, what we're really soliciting is the chair's opinion and how the chair goes about shaping it, forming it, writing it is really up to the chair. And we I think are smart enough and savvy enough and to take it with a grain of salt. But I'm not sure I want to get into providing further instruction with number two. That'd be my personal thought. And I'm thinking my suggestion number three perhaps should just be, got just thrown in the trash. And George, should you say you had another comment on selection guidance? Sorry, yes. This one's a touchier, but I think we do need to talk about it at some point, maybe not today. And that's the issue of perspective and whether that's something we want to add to number one or whether we don't. I'm not completely decided on this. I think I'm leaning one way but I'm open certainly to discussion. It came up obviously in our second meeting. There's nothing here. This is anything about perspective. And so unless we can come to some agreement about what that means and we can put it into the guidance, it really shouldn't be used as a criteria. That'd be my thought. But perhaps we want to put it in. We want to add it under D and then maybe we need to figure out what we mean by it. Could you explain that, George? I'm sorry? Could you explain that a little bit more? Well, this idea that the person brings some particular perspective seemed to be an issue that we wrestled with and it's not actually one of the criteria here that I see for selection. So my thought was that it's not appropriate. But if we put it in, then it becomes appropriate. At least I haven't, now I know, or at least maybe I know what it means or what I'm trying to apply. But that was my other thought. So one thing I'd probably say on this is that every time there's an appointment, OCO will have to develop and adopt selection guidance. And so there will be three appointments to the planning board this spring, I believe. And so at that point, we might decide to reuse this selection guidance, but we would have to formally adopt it again and that would be an opportunity to amend it. And I think the reason we've done this is because we recognize that over time, the needs of the body change, the context of the body changes, and certainly the composition of this committee will change. And so my knee-jerk reaction to that is when OCO developed this selection guidance, there was a discussion about whether to include that and the decision was not to. A future OCO, in a different context, may decide that is important. And I think what it comes down to for me is what the counselors that comprise the committee feel. And so I don't know, I'm happy to have this conversation now if the rest of the committee thinks it's important to have, but to me that's a conversation that will likely happen every time selection guidance is debated within a broader context. George? I think that you're right that there, each time this, I assume each time that this will be adopted by whomever has to do the interview, it may not be OCO. That may change or it may not, but I really would like to think that we can, and we have, I think, done a really good job and maybe we've done as much as can humanly be done, but I'd like to think that having hammered out this sort of selection guidance that it really wouldn't change much and shouldn't change much no matter who's doing the interviews. The thought that each time an interview has to be conducted, the committee, whoever it may be, whether it's OCO or some other body, has to go through this line by line and decide. So I would, I guess I would like to think that we could fashion something that would become essentially the model that we would use without much change, if any. The only thing that would really change would be item number two, but that may be just my perspective. I just, so I guess at some point I'd like us to talk about it doesn't have to be today, but that's, is this something we'd like to add? Is it general guidance to selection that part of what makes a healthy multi-member body is that someone brings a perspective, blah, blah, blah, blah? Sarah. I think this has been the most contentious question that OCO has wrestled with and it's been going on since we first formed because I think we continually will say, what is, unless we want to sit down and all start hashing out again what diversity means and maybe we do want to, I think that sounds like another five or six months worth of work, so I would really think about that. The other thing is, is I think that there, I mean, there's a reason why OCO is being dissolved and that appointments will go somewhere else. So on a, no, I'm just, well, my thought is unless, this is the lengthy and I think it will take us quite a while to get through and my thought is let's find out if OCO is still going to be together before we tackle it because we all have very different ideas about this and I do agree with in evidence some ways is that whoever the appointing body is, well, making recommendations is going to be, most likely will have their own opinion on this and I don't know if I want to take that fight up again until I know that this process is going to be OCOs. I think that I would rather do it, I would rather not do it until I know that it is our charge and not another of boards. Darcy, and then we'll go to Alyssa. I would just like to say that I'm glad that someone brought this up other than me. And I would be all for adding to D, has a perspective that is currently unrepresented on the board or something like that. And I'll just leave it at that other than on number two of selection criteria. We could conceivably take what Alyssa said and just say, instead of saying input from the body's chair, just say input from the planning board, which will come from the body's chair, obviously. But that would underline the fact that we want it to be a process that the full board is involved in. And that would probably mean the staff would be involved in it too. Alyssa? So everybody knows based on my comments at town council and at OCO last time that I'm really ripped about the fact that we are having to have our conversation in context of, oh yeah, you might not exist at all anymore. So I'm still really mad about that and I'm trying to not let my frustration with that quote unquote process negatively impact our work going forward. And so I don't believe at this point that any significant case has yet been made, partly because we haven't spent very much time on it yet at town council because as usual, our agendas are overfull. But I wanna move forward imagining that we are going to function the way we are functioning and that we are the body that is going to be interviewing for those planning board, which may or may not be vacancies, but people also decide to quit sometimes at the end of a term, even if it's not their time to be up. So there are all kinds of things that happen, but technically there appear to be three that are technically expiring all of which may be eligible for reappointment, but may or may not be interested in being reappointed. So I feel like we need to move forward with our process as though we're continuing in this job for the significant future because yes, it's true that we've talked about the idea of reorganizing committees once a year, but again, this is our first year to have an opportunity to reorganize committees. And so it isn't like, wow, we know we're gonna do that at a certain date, well, we didn't. And so I think we need to continue on where we are at and if that involves what I'm hearing slightly different views on the diversity of opinion and the perspective issue, at the very least we need to sort it out for our own process that we're planning to do this spring because I would like to see us be ready to announce that those terms are expiring and people are welcome to reapply and other people are welcome to apply. We've just gotten some attention for the fact that we're doing a planning board appointment. There is no reason to wait until April to try and set all of this up. We could say that we're gonna accept applications through X period of time. And this is all part of that conversation. We may end up with a split vote. We may end up with a way of wordsmithing it really clearly that is meaningful to people. I think I'm hearing different variations of what those words on perspective actually mean right now, but I believe we should go ahead and put the work in on that because if for no other reason, even if this gets yanked out from under us in February, whoever those people are, because it clearly won't be us because the five of us are not suddenly gonna become GOL, should know that we wrestled with this, that we worked hard on this. And that leads to my other comment, which is that I feel as though one of the reasons Oka has been so easy for people to whip on and say, well, just do this, we'll just do that. Well, why didn't you just do this? Well, it's simple, just do this thing. It's because they haven't sat here with five people trying to read the minds of the rest of our counselors and also our own. And yes, it's very easy to put things in by fiat. It's very easy to just say, just have the chair do it. But that's not the way we've been operating. And it turns out we have a lot of rationale behind the things that we do. And when we explain it, they often say, oh, okay then. But the initial gut response seems to be to assume we don't know what we're doing as opposed to, in fact, we've belabored this. And I wouldn't want it to come up at some new version of whether we split the appointments out between different committees, or it's all in one committee. That they say, huh, perspective. Nobody's ever talked about that before. It's like, oh yeah, baby, we've talked about that a lot. So let's go ahead and get that written down more, even if it doesn't, isn't ours to actually apply. George. I agree completely with Alyssa that we bop until we drop. We do our job until it's no longer our job. And this is part of our job. And I think it's something that we should wrestle with. I don't know if it's going to soothe my colleague, but the proposed revisions, or what do you wanna call it, are just that. And it's to get a conversation started. And I have no idea what will transpire, if anything. Though something might transpire tonight. The larger changes that GOL has been wrestling with and is still wrestling with, we haven't presented any final suggestions, but I think we've given you a pretty good sense of what we're thinking. That's all in process, and it may go nowhere. And so that's why, again, why we need to do our job. And so it does seem to me that the Planning Board, unlike ZBA, does have a perspectival aspect. It is a regulatory body, but it also is a body that plans and looks to the future. And while I have a certain idea where I'd like to see things go, that's my perspective. And clearly there are those who have a different perspective. I would never entertain this idea for a ZBA. It seemed to be totally inappropriate, but it does seem to me that it might have a place for planning. And so I'm open to at least the discussion of perhaps under D inserting a fifth Roman numeral five element where it says something like what Darcy suggested, brings perspective not currently represented on the board. And that could be something that I'd certainly like us to talk about and whether what we see is the pluses and minuses. But it does seem that this is a body that does have a perspectival aspect or role. And it's probably, it's just not honest of us to pretend that it doesn't. Whether we can incorporate this into selection criteria, selection guidance, I think we could, but we need to work on it. And I think it's something we should do. Okay, I want to, I'll give you the final say, but I do want to move on from this because I think that this discussion is larger and probably takes some forethought. And so it would be more appropriate as its own agenda item going forward. Sarah. So if you are asking me what I think Oka should do about this idea of adding perspective, I would say it is completely and totally not. You cannot do that without saying, we would like to know your bias. That is what you're saying. And then you are saying to people, tell us your bias. And the majority of us who agree with your bias will make sure you're on this board. You cannot do that. That is not fair. That is not democratic. You may say that you want new members to bring fresh ideas. You want everyone to be looking with an open mind and hopefully you get some new members that have a fresh eye. But I do, I would love to see how, and maybe we should work on it. I would love to see how somebody would words Smith something that would say we want to know a candidate's perspective that doesn't say we are asking for your bias. And however we are looking for it, we will judge you by that. So I'm going to reserve this issue as a future agenda item because I think that there's a lot of conversation to be had around this. I want to finish up this discussion about our reflection on the process, but I did want to make sure I put forth one other suggestion that I received from another counselor. And this was a counselor who attended the interviews, who said that they appreciated the fact that they were there as a member of the public. They wanted to be there to observe and not ask questions, but would have liked the opportunity to see the applicants as opposed to have been staring at their backs. And so there was a request in the future if counselors could be allowed to sit up in the front of the room, not as part of the committee, not as part of the meeting, not allowed to talk at all, but simply so that they could, given the great interest in this, simply so they could have the opportunity to actually see the faces of the applicants as they're entering questions as opposed to staring at their back. I'm not weighing, putting my thumb on the scale one way or the other, but it was actually two different counselors who said, I don't want to talk during the meeting, but it would have been nice to be able to see the people. So I want to throw that out there. We'll go to Sarah. If you are sitting at the table, you are sitting at the table, and whether or not you open your mouth to ask a question, you will be seen by whoever you are asking questions as part of the deciding committee, whether it be, it's just if you are sitting up here, that's what it looks like. I would say if they want to see the people's faces, then I would be more than willing if we could somehow add to that table, let Oka, or whoever's doing it, sit there with our backs to the people who also want to see and let the interviewees sit up here, because I feel that that's, I don't have any other thoughts on this suggestion. Alyssa. Following up on that, yes, we could certainly put the interviewees up here. Oka could sit there, especially when we only have one person asking the questions. That's no problem. The other change in dynamic that makes, however, is that it has been fortunate for the, so everything always says multiple layers here, guys. The people who are sitting here facing us don't have to watch the audience's faces. When they're sitting here looking at us, it's going to be much harder for them to ignore the audience's faces. This isn't the League of Women Voters election night where you're trying to convince all those people to vote for you. This is, you are talking to the Oka. So that might be our best compromise, but it is not anything other than a compromise. It is not an ideal flip either, because they want to be able to see their faces, then they can watch the video later, because there's a camera that points right at them. But if in future, particularly say, for example, when we're doing three planning board people, it might actually be more convenient to put them all up here, but then they're going to be looking all out there, and some of them are going to find that more threatening than others do. And so it's a thing, and we could explain that to them when they know they're coming in for the interview, so they could see it's different than this time, because everybody sees something once, and they figure that's how it works. But we need to be aware that it's going to cause different issues for the interviewees, purely for the good of a town counselor who wants to see their face. And I'm not sure where the balance to be struck in there is. Sarah. Then I would just reiterate that I would not want other people up here with, at this time would be OKA. Maybe something that would be a better solution is maybe we could set up a TV in another room so that counselors who wanted to actually see interviewees' faces could actually watch it that way. George. We are the interviewing body, so it seems to me that that's the only ones who should be up here. And I just, I mean, I can understand why they might like to see faces, but I've been to many meetings of other committees where I have to sit there and stare, it doesn't bother me. And I'm not, and as you said, you can watch it on the video if you're really that keen on studying people's visual reactions. And so I hear the concern, but I don't think it rises to the level that we need to do and anything about it, I think the current situation is adequate, not perfect, but adequate. OK, other thoughts on this particular suggestion? OK, so I want to move on from this discussion because there's three more things that we need to do. Are there any final thoughts, comments, on the process that we implemented over the month of January that have not been touched on yet? Alyssa. Yes, the other item you would want to include in your follow-up report is that the, I'm not sure how it's addressed in our goals because I haven't reread them for tonight, but in our goals for the town manager, it needs to be clear, again, for the millionth year, like it was every year for the select board, that there needs to be a better process for managing the data associated with appointments because part of the reason, not the entire reason, but part of the reason you were on the phone on New Year's Eve is because staff is not adequately resourced with getting the CAF information into a usable format for them to be able to slice and dice a spreadsheet, et cetera, and get information back. This can't be this hard, and we have struggled with this the entire time I've been in town. Elected Office, which would be 2007, to now. And we've had several computer systems, and there's still too much hand entry and hand having to do things. And that's not a good use of people's time. Talking to people is a good use of their time. Trying to get data moved back and forth from one packet to another is not a good use of time. And it seems like it doesn't matter most of the year, right? And then when you need to do a bunch of appointments, it's the same, again, she went task. Yeah. So, something about. It hit a, I do know that it hit a point when I was working with Angela that she went, you know what, it's gonna be easier for me to just find the papers, yeah, yes. And we started looking at them in paper, and I thought, oh God, Darcy. Just like to say that I thought that the process that we reported, we were going to use that we reported to the town council involved all of us asking the questions, which I think is a more egalitarian way of running the interviews than just having the chair ask the questions. So I would suggest that we do that in the future because, you know, it's nice feeling useful and not just sitting here. I do wanna just make sure I clarify the process that we adopted. If you remember the discussion we had about that line about whether it should be chair or chair designee or all members of the committee. Because the original process that we actually looked at the original draft that I gave this committee said, members of OCA will alternate asking questions. That was actually the original language and after discussion we changed that language to OCA, shall ask all questions, to give OCA the flexibility to decide whether we wanted all members to ask alternating, whether we wanted one person, whether that person's the chair that designee. So our process did not say that all members of OCA will ask questions and in fact, we revised the process so that it wouldn't say that and that was a unanimous vote, I believe, to do that. And then the decision was that every time we had interviews we would vote on who was gonna ask questions, whether it be one person in the whole committee and OCA did take that vote, had that discussion and the vote was for the chair. So that's something that's intended to be a discussion every time we do interviews is who's gonna ask them or are we all gonna ask them is one person, is that person the chair designee? Why, why did we do that? That was in that last meeting right before the interview. Yep, it was just decided that that was the most simple and straightforward way to do things. And it was a unanimous vote of those who were there. So that could change next time. Next time we do interviews the committee could decide and say, you know what, let's all alternate this time but the process was actually designed to build in flexibility so that we could decide every time how we wanted to do it and so in the future we could do it differently or we could do it the same but the process is designed to provide us flexibility. Yeah, well, I hope we do it differently the next time. Okay. Okay, so I'm gonna close this discussion although, cause I think we could probably go for a long time but I think we got a lot of information from we do include in a follow up report. I want, I'm gonna take things a little bit out of order, public comment. I don't think I need this either may gauge district one. I wanna add my to the chairs thanks for your hard work these last month and plus and it's complicated. I didn't come to speak about the topic of appointments but I'll say one quick thing having been involved probably in over a hundred hireings in my 35 years of career. It's a whole bunch I could have raised my hand and said, whatever. To me, let's call it hiring or appointing. The guideline is to be as nimble as possible so you have all the tools within the constraints of open meeting law and transparency, nimbleness. Like what did you mean by that? Or when you use that word, what do you think? But then I'm not gonna speak about that but it was a fascinating discussion. I just see nimble. Being nimble is the guideline cause you, I'm gonna try not to. I wanna thank you for appointing John to the Participatory Budgeting Commission. He's terrific, he's very well qualified and he's been attending our meetings and participating fully except for voting. So thank you. I wanna take this occasion to very briefly raise up the importance of the Participatory Budgeting Commission as one of the ways that the charter envisioned new and creative ways for people to participate. The timing is really tough because of the budget crisis and the word budget has a kind of, people have an allergic reaction like the antibodies are going. There are all sorts of ways that this can happen. Some play, we just had an interview with folks from a woman from the budget, an analyst from Greensboro, Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina. Their cycle is every two years. A number of places raise the money with fundraising and I just want to urge everyone to keep an open mind. The charter mandated that the committee be appointed within six months of the vote. It was appointed just in May, just barely by the time it was required but a meeting wasn't convened until late October even though several of us offered to set up the doodle poll and so on. So I'm not interpreting this as anything other than people are very busy. Being an optimistic person but I really want everyone to be open minded about the importance of this mechanism and there are lots and lots of ways it can happen. We have to think about participation more creatively and it's not good enough in my opinion to say, well, we scheduled stuff and they didn't come. It's not how do we get them to come to us? We have to think of how do we go to them? And we need to be, it's understandable with the incredible burden that you've all had and the other counselors and the manager setting this whole thing up. I personally don't like the metaphor about running an airplane, I'd rather it was a train where people get on and off but I so I understand that but this is the point when we're setting up new systems that we have to think creatively about participation because otherwise the participation will be outside of the government, banging and unhappy and we are creative enough to be able to engage people in positive ways where we're all working together. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so two more things before we... Three times. No, sorry. Two more things before we get out of here. So one is the agenda aim is discussion of 127, 2020 report to the town council. As I noted, the town manager appointments are not on the agenda for tonight's council. That'll be on the February 10th agenda but the planning board appointment is, I hope you've had an opportunity to look at the report that I sent to the town council. It's pretty detailed with regard to how we got to our decision and the rationale for our decision and so I am hoping to use up as little air time as possible tonight during the council meeting, working under the assumption that all the counselors have read the report but I do plan on highlighting to the town council how we ran the interviews and specifically I've gotten a few questions from people, both on the council and off about whether anyone was screened out of the process ahead of time and whether or not anyone was excluded from the interviews because they couldn't make the time and so I wanna make sure I reiterate to the council and the public that nobody was screened out. Everyone who was still interested was able to interview and so but I wanna just ask the committee if there's anything else you want to just make sure I highlight or stress in my report to the council. Okay, Alyssa? I guess the only other thing is maybe to mention since some of them might just decide to help fully raise their hands after your report is to say that you're happy to take any of their comments that you've been getting feedback offline, not during our meeting because I will be extremely frustrated if for example my friend Andy brings up his idea about questions during the town council meeting and then I'll feel obligated to respond and then we're off to the races. So if you could just offer them the opportunity that I've already heard from some of you and we are continuing to talk about it at OCA so please don't talk about it now. That would be really super helpful. Okay. All right, so the last thing I wanna discuss which is technically I guess under topics I did not reason I anticipate. I had forgotten until this morning when I said when's our next meeting after this that our next meeting is actually next Monday because I was trying to schedule them so that they are not consistently the morning of a council meeting. So thinking about that, I've been thinking about what we might tackle on that Monday and so I wanted to throw out a couple ideas to the committee. I know ultimately it's my responsibility as chair to set the agenda but I wanted to get your input on which things you would like for us to consider. To me there's three potential agenda items and then one option. So the potential agenda items one of which came up during today's meeting which was a discussion about whether or not to attempt to integrate perspective in some way into future committee selection guidance which I think that conversation shouldn't just be limited to the planning board but should be a conversation about all of the town council appointed committees and maybe we decide it's useful for some not others but I don't want us to think about it just as a planning board discussion. The second thing was early in September we had a very brief discussion about the community activity forms and the content on them and there seemed to be broad agreement on this committee that the community activity forms have some flaws that they're not always super useful and there might be some ways that we could revise them to be more useful. We of course now have complete control over the CIS for town council appointed committees at that time we didn't make any recommendations to change the CIS and part of that was in response to a point that Alyssa made which was she and I agreed with us did not want to recommend revisions to the CIS until we knew what the process was going to be and how they might be used now that we have that process we can return to the CIS. The last thing is we do currently have a vacancy on the ZBA and we will have a second vacancy on the ZBA in March. The ZBA can withstand one vacancy. I think they probably can withstand two because they do have three associate members but it starts to get more challenging. We could start the process of moving forward for how we might deal with the ZBA appointments although I will say that right now we don't have any new applicants for the ZBA and I'm not sure how much we could do. So those are the three potential agenda items would be perspective, CAS or ZBA. The other option is honestly we have had five meetings in January. We have no town manager filed appointments sitting on our desk as we took care of those this morning so there's no time constraints on us. The town manager has assured us he wouldn't have any new appointments in the next couple weeks. I am open to the idea if this committee is feeling exhausted in considering none of those three items are super time sensitive to also canceling that meeting in which case our next meeting would be later in February. I don't have the calendar right in front of me. Yes I do. In that case the next meeting would be February 20. So throwing it out there to the group I wanna hear your thoughts on this. Darcy. Are we, do you think about scheduling these meetings to coincide with the town council meetings? That would personally be helpful to me. So my goal is to schedule these meetings on off council weeks because that has posed the fact that they are often on the morning of council meetings has actually posed a significant challenge for us in the past when it comes to the time constraints that are placed on us especially when it comes to town manager appointments and department heads but also for town manager appointments generally we had the luxury in that the town manager filed the appointments we dealt with today late enough that the councils have to deal with them tonight they can deal with them on the 10th. If he had filed them earlier we would have to do them today and the council would consider them tonight and I personally feel very uncomfortable with voting on something that morning and then either having to scramble to get the council a report that they might not have time to read or providing no advance notice to the council. So the reason we often meet the mornings of councils honestly is because there are so many Monday holidays and so the going forward my goal is to have them on off council weeks. So are we available on February 10th? Because that would be two weeks and then two weeks until the 24th. So we could do again it's the morning of a town council meeting but we could do that. So I mean the question is both on potential agenda items for the next meeting and then whether or not we feel like we want to stay with our regular schedule of February 3rd meeting I'm open to either but I do know that we spent a lot of time and effort in the month of January we had five meetings and I would be understanding if this committee was a little bit exhausted and needed a little bit of a break and back to back meetings in a week, one week after another could be but if you wanna keep it then I'm fine with that too and I just want a little bit of input on which of those agenda items you think needs prioritizing. So thoughts? Darcy? Sounds like the agenda items are not appointments, appointment related or at least. I mean they're all appointment related. I feel like we should meet on either the 3rd or the 10th I'm open to either one. Okay, other thoughts for committee members? George? I like the idea of trying to get us off council cycle and so that's the only reservation I have about meeting on the 10th but I'm open to either. I could go either way. I think we do have some, we still have a lot of work to do I will have some work to do in terms of this process and I'd like us to continue to work on it. That doesn't mean we have to meet next week so I'm certainly open to waiting, giving us a week off but I would like us to get off cycle and I'd also, I don't know if you can do this Evan but if you could maybe construct a sample calendar for the rest of the year with dates that you feel would be twice a month essentially and off cycle. Yep. Other thoughts? We have it through February. It only goes through the 24th, yeah. But I can do that and I know that's something that Athena has asked of me several times. Alyssa? The only, I mean I'm more than happy to take a break but I'm concerned that I don't think we wanna wait until the 24th to talk about the ZVA vacancies. I think we need to, if nothing else, agree as a body at a public meeting. Yes Evan, it's time for you to do all the work to get the announcement out there to be clear to make sure that we've checked if we still have old, you know the two years worth that we haven't actually assigned. We haven't already appointed every one of them for something, I think that would be, I think we need to be ready for that because it would be unfortunate just because they have associates. You know when push comes to shove, it's great that they have associates but to be fair to them, we've known for months that they're gonna have a vacancy in March. We know that, we already know that they have a current vacancy. It feels a little unfair to them because it puts more pressure on all of them to be there for various things. So I would like to be respectful of their commitment and either meet on the third or the 10th with the primary goal of being the discussion about the ZBA and then secondarily, the perspective question so we don't lose sight of that while we're still having so much fun with it and then certainly we need to talk about the CAF issue but we need to get those other two things I think further along first. Other thoughts? Okay, so can I put out, let me put out a suggestion. I don't necessarily know that I am ready or that we would be ready to talk about the ZBA on the third because what I might ask and I would want the permission of this committee with the assent of this committee is what I would wanna do prior to having that discussion I think is get the two year pool of ZBA applicants and as I've learned from the planning board that's not as simple as it sounds and perhaps even do outreach to them to see if they are still interested because I don't know how much conversation we could have without having some semblance of what the pool might be. I also might, we posted a vacancy notice for the ZBA shortly after the resignation we got nothing. It might be useful to repost it, which it's already written so it could literally be reposted today but I wouldn't necessarily expect anything out of that over the next week but maybe if we have two weeks. So I might suggest even though it doesn't get us off cycle and I agree that that's a goal maybe shifting the meeting on the third to the 10th and then if you are comfortable with me collecting the CIS and reaching out to those applicants and reposting the vacancy notice to start doing some of that ground work we could actually have a discussion of the ZBA and then perhaps some of these other items as well. Thoughts on that? Does the 10th work for people? Alyssa? I left my phone in the car so yeah I'm sure it's fine. Yes and thank you and one of the things we can you could just go ahead as you said and repost the vacancy notice that would be wonderful if you did that on our behalf as well as doing that outreach. But the other thing I was gonna mention is that one of the things we can talk about on the 10th is that we may want to set a closing date for CAF so we may wanna go ahead and work backwards saying okay now how many meetings is this person March gonna be at or whatever and say what looking at our schedules right so go ahead and figure out our interview night and say please submit through such and such a date because the interviews are gonna be on such and such dates so it doesn't hurt anything to do it again and then redo it again after we have our conversation on the 10th but it also means that it's not really essential that you do it again right now so I would leave that up to your judgment but I think we may very well wanna consider putting out a vacancy notice that says and we have already determined that we are going to be interviewing in such and such dates so please print in your material by then if you have a problem with that date contact the chair. Okay so I am going to then move our meeting on the 3rd to February 10th and I am going to put as the primary agenda item the ZBA I will also add this conversation about perspective because I think we should continue with it while so a little bit fresh in our mind I will probably hold off on the CAF discussion until the 24th and unless there are issue I'm losing my transit here unless there are problems with this from other committee members I will repost the vacancy notice just to get it back on people's radar and I will work with Angela to collect the CAFs and start to assess what the pool is. Okay so then with that I am going to adjourn us at 11.20 a.m. Thank you.