 Welcome, I am James Milan and this is town meeting matters. We have with us today, our town meeting moderator john Leone and I'll tell you that this whole idea of town meeting matters came up last spring when we had any very unusual town meeting that needed to be arranged and we needed to get important information out to folks about how that would look and feel. And john was a the authoritative source for that at that time and then pulled off the meeting that you may recall happened on Pierce field at the high school. That was incredibly smooth so with that preface john we thought well let's have you back to explain what's going to happen this time because it's again very different from what town meetings have been in the past. So first of all, as always thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. You're welcome. Glad to do it. Appreciate it. And yes we we basically what we want to do here is just present for town meeting members themselves but also for the broader audience. What town meeting is going to look and feel like this time around. So first of all, we need to acknowledge that it's happening in mid November, which is not a normal thing. Yes, in that sense this is a special town meeting even though what you're really doing I think is taking care of all the business that needed to be deferred, or much of the business that needed to be deferred from the spring is that right. Correct yeah so it is technically a special town meeting because it's not our annual, which the annuals held in the spring that specials are held any other time of the year. We're picking up 24 article 25 2425 articles now, several of which were deferred from the spring, but not all of the citizen articles, the 10 registered voter articles chose to go forward. This time around a couple of them are deferring till next spring but frankly I think. Unless we get our. COVID vaccine up. This is going to be a good dry run for next spring. Right. Yes, I mean we might have thought and hoped that it was going to be a temporary solution that was required back in the spring of this year. But now it's clear for all of us that this is a world we're going to be living in for a while. Yes. Walk us through john what town meetings going to be like because this is going to be a virtual town meeting it's going to be a virtual town meeting which I started calling VTM for short. So our virtual meeting is going to be held similar to this zoom conference that we're on right now, except it's going to have an added portal to it. So we've adopted from the town of Lexington, their spring town meeting and their specials have been using this portal. We've got the rights to that and have been working with the developer and have changed it to meet our needs the town of Arlington's needs our town meetings are held differently, every town sell differently. So basically, the town meeting members will log in. They each have their own name, your own account and password they log into the portal, which is basically similar to coming in and logging in with the town clerk and checking into town hall once they log in the portal. They will participate in the meeting and they have another button to open zoom and only town meeting members and some town staff, who will be speaking roles such as chief of police, the head of public works head of planning and will also have attendee privileges for obvious reasons that they will have been beyond the zoom and the portal allows the town meeting members to participate fully in the meeting. However, as it's presented as a zoom webinar so they won't be as live as they are on town meeting floor but they will have the ability to one of the screens they can access to raise their hands to raise points of order. And because of the way the legislation authorizing virtual town meeting is. It will be visible to the public. Who has actually raised their hand and is on the speaking list, it will be visible to the public who has made a point of order. My job is the moderator in conjunction with, I have two staff members who are working with me during the meeting one is the zoom controller, and one is the display controller. I'm going to go on Mr Milan, and I'll announce James Milan wants to speak, the zoom controller will find them, and you will come up a photograph you, not a live feed, and you'll be able to speak for your seven minutes if you have a presentation. I'm working with ACMI to have presentations drafted recorded and put on to some YouTube channel I don't know what act it is, but it's going to be those will be available on the town meeting website in advance so we can watch them. Those presentations will pop up on the screen by the display controller will watch your presentation and then just like in town meeting question and answers I will call through the people with their. Questions and we'll go through a town meeting as if we were in the same room with the aid of the. The, the portal. And when someone moves to terminate the date just like in town meeting we're going to take a vote. And when the votes happen. I call for the vote the display controller brings up the voting screen. He authorizes voting. And I say he because it's a gentleman who's doing it, he'll authorize voting, and on town meeting portal page, they have. Yes, no one abstain, and they cast their vote, and it tells them how they voted and on our end of it. There's a screen saying that James has voted. And when voting closes, it'll tell us and show us how everybody voted. Yes, no or abstain, and it gives us a percentage to say whether or not the article passed, and then the actual tally, which is our official vote. The problem is in town meeting we have 20 seconds to vote here. It might take up to two minutes, because people have to navigate from the zoom screen to the portal screen they have to figure out where they are they got to make sure their portal is refreshed and they have the right buttons. And I can see on my screen, because I have one of the hosts, I can see who hasn't voted yet. And I'll ask Mr Milan you haven't voted you having a problem. And if you do, you're going to use the zoom raise hand feature. I'll promote you to speaking, and I'll say what's your problem Jim, and you'll say I can't find my zoom screen I can't find this and we have the ability to then have you give us your vote verbally and enter it for you. And if you have you announced I vote yes on this article, I would repeat it, and then we would manually log you in and vote for you, while one of our IT staff works with you behind the scenes to make sure you can participate and vote on the next one. So we have our zoom controller, we got our display controller. We got a backup for each of them, and we're going to have an IT staff of at least four people every night to make this happen. It's a lot of behind the scenes effort on the town's part to make this go. Well, I think there's about, besides me is about 12 town people I've been working with over the last few weeks to get this up and running along with Len Diggins, our select man Eric Helm with our volunteer techie, who has, they both put a lot of time in as well. To say John, from what you've just described, it sounds like, if all goes well. It will be a relatively seamless transition from what is a normal town meeting taking place in town hall to getting the business done virtually in the ways that you've described it. And of course, the big if there is if everything goes smoothly because it does seem like the process you just described as a number of places in which things can get can just start to take much longer than they than they normally would to resolve these things. It's going to be longer. So if we can move through articles pretty quickly in town meeting, don't anticipate quickly moving through anything. If that means on that we can anticipate as a community that town meeting is likely to go through a number of sessions for you to be able to get to to and through all the articles. Yes. I've put about a dozen articles on a consent agenda. So that will take care of half the warrant and I'm typing just to clarify for people what a consent agenda is basically you're taking your grouping all these articles. Right. And there's a single yay or nay or abstain on. And that vote gets translated down to all of the other articles and those are the things that are not on uncontroversial elevation warrant any debate we should just vote yes or no. And how meeting members have the ability to take things off the consent agenda by using the raised hands feature on zoom. Yes, and three, maybe four meetings to do those other 1213 articles. And my understanding is that the obviously that we know that town meeting starts in next Monday 16 16. And then you will be proceeding on the usual town meeting schedule of Mondays and Wednesday nights. Right. So, if it goes to a fourth session is that does that going. That's the night before Thanksgiving right. Yeah, I'm not going to be there. All right, so maybe we're all figures cross for three sessions right. I'm not going to count them till the 30th. Okay, so we don't interfere with pie preparation for thanks. All right, so people but people can and should anticipate that it is most likely that there will be a session on the 16th another on the 18th another on the 23rd and then we'll see what happens. So, the, and I'm going to again rely on Lexington's experience their biggest issues they had were people logging on log on issues, being flipping from the zoom screen to the portal. If they are technically in depth they can shrink each one of them down and figure out how to bounce back and forth they. Great respect for our town meeting members and I think about 95% of them are going to just take this right up. And the other 5% will walk through they'll get it to. We have a couple folks who don't even have computers, don't have cable TV so they're going to be able to vote by telephoning in their vote or I'll make other arrangements with them one way or another. We don't want to disenfranchise any of our town meeting members and their rights to vote here. So we're working with everybody. Well, I think I think town meeting members will be heartened and appreciative of the fact that you're, you're, you're the numbers you put up there 95%. Yeah, of them, you have confidence will will will be able to do this without much trouble. We've gone through seven nights of training hour and a half to two hours long each night with groups of town meeting members between 25 and 45 people. And I'm pretty heartened by the responses we've gotten and the ability of them to pick it up and get right on it and being able to flip between the two screens and vote. What do you anticipate. And you have touched on this already but just to just to distill it a little bit. What do you foresee as the greatest challenges for the town meeting members in making this transition to a new format, and then out of curiosity for yourself what do you anticipate will be the great, great challenge. The challenge with town meeting members will be handling the technology aspect of it and getting used to the fact. We are not all together in the hall, and they wanted to do something. It's a multi step process. I'm sorry about that phone ring in the back. It's a multi step process it's not, you know, raise your hand and stand up and yell at me it's, they've got to do things more in advance. Everything has to be done in advance it's going to be less spontaneity, and I've been stressing that the town meeting members do mailings and emails that you know we got to plan this out this isn't the normal floor of town meeting. It's the same person. Pick the phone up. And the challenge for me will be that same thing. Just working with the technology. I like to move the meeting along. And I've been working at it to get an efficient meeting this is going to slow our pace down a lot, just like the voting. You know, 20 seconds we've got a vote we're moved on to the next article. Here, we've got to twiddle our thumbs for a couple minutes to make sure everybody's voted. And if someone's having an issue I got to find out why, you know, because their vote could make a difference. And we want to make sure everyone's voted. I remember back in June. How surprised and delighted. The majority of both town meeting members and, and others in the community were with how smoothly everything went on Pierce Field that day it was quite remarkable and in a real testament to the planning that had gone in on your end and and a lot of other people's. So I guess we just need to kind of look at this is, you know, on balance in 2020 you'll have had a normal town meeting a much faster one than you thought in, in June and, and, you know, probably a slower one this time around. Well, true we had a record quick 45 minute annual town meeting. I think that was the one for the record books and this is going to be one also I mean, we're going to do a zoom town meeting now or virtual to be team virtual. And I think, frankly, we're going to be doing it again in the spring. I don't see us being able to all gather in town hall come April. But I do look forward to getting back into town hall and having a good old fashion. Yeah, it will. I think, like so many other things right just returning to what we had always thought of as normal and taking for granted is going to feel like quite the luxury and the privilege for a while. I'm going to miss the big sale. That too right. No virtual cookies just don't do it. But anything else, John that we should make sure that people understand again either as town meeting members who I know have, as you've already described been through already a fairly extensive process and there is a mock town meeting schedule we were speaking today, Monday the mock town meeting schedule for tomorrow night. Our nights address rehearsal. That is going to be with all 252 town meeting members hopefully. And so this, our staff and I are going to be on. And really attested if we've part of those trainings has been to get us trained. So that we have a smooth flow and a, we're able to present a polished product, basically to everybody because the first night is a little rough by the top last one we were working pretty well together. So we're going to ask town meeting members and the town to bear with us because it's the first time out for us to. And we're trying, I think we'll get it. I think if it's not clear enough already, particularly for town meeting members themselves, but for everybody in the community patients is the byword here and obviously just understanding that everybody's doing the best they can. And, and, you know, you just kind of need to go with the flow so hopefully you get a good night's sleep tonight in preparation for tomorrow's run through. And then, and then everybody gets some good nights sleep proceeding those meetings because it does seem like, you know, as always there will be substantive issues that that are of great importance to the community that need to be done with thoughtfully. And then there's going to be this added, this added burden of just being patient with the technology. And it's, I have full faith we'll be able to do it well we'll get a good town meeting done and we'll move forward. Keep this town going. You're here. If you don't feel like there's anything else that needs to be addressed, we can let you go. I think we did a pretty good job and if anybody has any questions they can email my town address. And I'm glad to answer any questions anyone has. Yeah, otherwise you'll be twiddling your thumbs between now and next week I'm sure. Oh yeah. I have been speaking with our town moderator, our town meeting moderator, John Leone who, you know, really has at quite the task in front of him over this long, long year of ours, and so far so good. Keep up the good work John best of luck next week. Thank you very much appreciate it. This is James Milan you've been watching town meeting matters, and we'll see you in the future.