 Are we broadcasting? Yeah, you're all set. Great. All right, so seeing a presence of a quorum, I am calling this meeting of the town council committee on outreach communications and appointments to order at 9.36 AM. We are at just quorum, but we are expecting Darcy Dumont and Sarah Swartz to be joining us soon. So there are several documents in the packet. I have no announcements to make at this time. And so we will jump right to agenda item three, discussion of sufficiency of the pool for planning board appointments. So just so we all are on the same page as to where we are, we do not have any vacancies on the planning board right now, but we do have three members whose terms are expiring at the end of June. And per our process, we treat any expiring term as an intending vacancy and treat it as if there were a vacancy. And so we are currently in the process of looking to move forward with appointments and or reappointments to the planning board. That said, you have a document in your packet. And apologies for getting too late last night. I was optimistic that things might change over the weekend and so had held off on posting it, but that optimism was not warranted. And so, hi, Sarah. Let me bring up this document. OK, so I am going to share my screen. We've gone through this before, so you know the drill with this. I'm going to share my screen. I'm going to walk through this document that I put together. And then we will talk about what our actual situation is. So. I'm sorry to interrupt, Evan. It looks like Darcy is added. She's joined as an attendee, so I'll bring her in. OK. Hi, Darcy. So for Darcy and Sarah, just we're going to look at the we're moving to agenda item three. And we're looking at sufficiency of the pool for the planning board, so I am going to share my screen so we can look at this document together. Some of the yelling outside of my house. Let's see. Here we go. OK, so we're all familiar with this document because you have seen it before a few times. And so this first section here is just copy and pasted from our process, as amended on 427. That describes how we determine sufficiency of the applicant pool. And then I have, as I have in the past, broken that information down to address each piece of this. And so the first piece is that there needs to be a vacancy notice published, and that vacancy notice must be published for a minimum of 14 days. Per the charter, it has to be published 14 days before we can make an appointment. But per our process, it has to be published 14 days before we can decide that the pool is sufficient. That vacancy notice was published on April 21. And so it has been published for 14 days, so we have met that requirement. The next has to do with collecting CAFs, although there is a mistake in here because our new process says, OK, I shall collect CAFs submitted over the preceding three years, which I did. And so I collected from Angela and from other sources that I had, such as my email inbox and past information, all CAFs that were submitted from April 21, 2017 to prison. So the past three years using the vacancy notice posting as the start date. The only ones that I took out of the pool were people who we know no longer live in Amherst or never lived in Amherst to begin with, and also people who are currently serving on the planning board. So the next piece of this is where I guess a little tricky. So we say that in looking at sufficiency of the applicant pool, we look at the number of applicants relative to the number of vacancies or impending vacancies. And we strive for more applicants than there are vacancies. There are no current vacancies on the planning board, but there are three impending vacancies, as I said before, in that there are three members whose terms are expiring at the end of June, and so those are impending vacancies. At this time, we have fewer applicants than we have impending vacancies. And I will share that document with you in a moment. We do not have any demographic information, and so we normally say that we strive for demographic diversity, but we have no demographic information to assess demographic diversity, so we cannot do that. The current needs of the body to be appointed. I did have a conversation with planning board chair Christine Gray Mullen. Obviously, there is no vacancy, so there is no current burden placed on that vacancy, but through our conversation, she did repeatedly stress that there is a burden that has been placed on the body by the lack of long-term experienced members of the planning board. She is someone who has four years of experience or slightly more than five years of experience, four or five years of experience on the planning board, and as I did that as the most experienced member, it has been very difficult for her because she still feels like she doesn't have all that much experience. So as you are all familiar with, at this point, I would normally have a paper copy spreadsheet to show you the responses and who is in the pool. I don't have that in hard copy because I'm not with you all in person. I am going to email this document to you. Remember that this is not considered a public document because our processes that we do not disclose names or numbers of applicants prior to the posting of the interviews. And so I'm not going to put it up on the screen. It's not part of the packet. It is going to be emailed to you. And so if you check your email, you will find that there. Take a moment to look over that. Take a moment to look that over. We can talk about it. Again, we're not going to use names or numbers, but you should find that information in your email now. I will give you a couple of minutes to look through that, but I would like to offer my opinion, which is that at this point, we should not declare the pool sufficient to proceed to interviews. I personally do not believe that the pool is at a point where we should say that we are ready to move forward to interviews, but I will give you all a chance to look over that and see if you concur with me. So take a minute, look through it, and then just raise your hand when you're ready to give your opinion as to whether you have questions or whether you feel as though we are or are not ready to move forward to interviews. Okay, George, you have your hand up. Looking at this list, where you have only one individual who has expressed a willingness to be considered, and we have three impending vacancies. I don't see how we... Do we have other thoughts on whether or not we feel as though we want to move forward? The alternative being we don't declare the pool sufficient at this time and we try to engage in some more recruitment. Has everyone seen the spreadsheet? I know, Sarah, you said it's not loading for you. It's not, Evan, and I haven't had... I've had troubles with my internet since last week, and so I don't know if it's that. It's like showing that it's spinning. I can see it, but it's just not loading. I can try and send it again, Alyssa and then Darcy. I can see it, I'm sorry if I somehow was reading and not listening to a full explanation of what all the coding means, and I realize we're in a very awkward position here because we've not generally, well, certainly we as a town council haven't, but in the past appointment processes, we have not generally publicly discussed who's willing to be reappointed and who isn't, but everyone is going to want to know the answer to that question. So if you could speak a little more to that concept without feeling like you're divulging people's personal information, although I don't know why it would matter if we're divulging their personal information given that they're already serving. So I'm just a little confused. With regard to strictly members who are seeking, who are potentially interested in reappointment. Correct. Right, so we have three, I'm sorry, I need clarity. What are you looking for? Okay, so in the olden days, okay, which is not today, but just as the way my brain is working is that in the olden days, we might mention at a meeting, oh, X number of people who are up for reappointment to a particular body are glad to be done because they have other things in their life and others are willing to move on. That information is not clear from the spreadsheet as to whether or not people have expressed a definitive opinion one way or the other. And so I'm wondering what you feel like you can say about that and maybe you said something about it already, but I didn't understand it. So I mean, when it comes time for the town council, which is a completely different thing to run for election, eventually people are gonna announce whether or not they're running for reelection. So this is not the same as that, but I'm not sure why we're not able to be clearer on which of the currently serving are interested in being reappointed or if some of them are feeling like they're some other things they need to get sorted before they can answer that question. Okay, right, great. Yeah, so the three current members are part of this table. This table is organized by date of CAF submission, which in retrospect, maybe I should have pulled the three members who are currently serving out so you could look at them separately. But you will notice the three members whose terms are expiring are David Levenstein, Christine Graham Mullen and Michael Burtwistle. Michael Burtwistle, as you can see, has expressed that he is interested in continuing on the planning board. Christine Graham Mullen, I do not have a definitive response from yet. We had a conversation about selection guidance that you'll see. And so we have had a conversation. At that point, she was not ready to state whether or not she was going to continue. And I don't want to give too much private information, but there's some personal things that she's currently dealing with. David Levenstein has notified Christine Breastrop and the town manager that he is not interested in being reappointed. So he's notified them, not their appointing authority? I will say I got that literally minutes before the OCO meeting started. I emailed Paul and I said, heard anything from David yet? And he said, oh, yeah. So that's a whole different thing. But we do, I actually changed David's answer literally as I was making the email to send this to you all. So that's where we're at with incumbent members. Does that answer your question? Yes, thank you. I mean, I realize they might feel more awkward than they have in the past in terms of more attention to them than was necessarily paid in the past. And certainly we all know that with the town manager appointments right now, he's just offering reappointment without any process like we're going through. So it is definitely different. And planning board, of course, when these people were appointed historically was a town manager appointment with just select board confirmation. So everybody's in a different place than they were before. Yeah. Darcy, your hand is up. You're muted. Letting me unmute. So I had the same confusion that Alyssa had there about the existing members. So we're not clear on how many seats we're actually looking for. At this point. At this point, we know that there is one member who is not seeking reappointment. So there will be at least one vacancy if we don't move. And the spreadsheet that you shared, the purple lines indicated they weren't knows. They were just, what, I didn't understand. The gray? Gray, yes, whatever. You know, I'm a big fan of color coding. So, right. So the green is we have a confirmed yes. The orange is red is I have reached out to them and they have responded that they're not interested. The gray is I have reached out to them and either they haven't responded or their response has been. And so the gray is we don't know one way or the other. What I will say is some of these grays, you will notice, how do I put this? Some of these grays are people who have been contacted again and again in the past couple rounds of appointments and have never responded. And so I'm responding to that. I'm reaching out to them every time but never getting a response. And so it seems a little bit unlikely but we're reaching out to them anyway. And that's specifically true for some of the older CAS. What's your process for, I mean, did you email them once or did you call them or what did you do? Every person has been emailed at least once. There's one member who I had a separate conversation with because I saw them, but yeah. Seems like more than one email would be warranted. Yeah, and I can do that. I don't want to put this. Yes, I can do that. I will say, given what I know about many of the people who are in gray, it is likely that they are not interested and will not respond. That doesn't mean I can't and won't reach out to them again but you will probably recognize some of those names. I recognize some of those names as people who are likely not interested anymore. So our purpose at this moment right now is to decide whether or not we can vote to declare the pool sufficient to move forward. My personal opinion is we're not at a place where we can do that yet. George, you echoed that others. Darcy? No, that was a mistake. Oh, sorry, lower hand. I don't know, Alissa or Sarah, if you want to weigh in here. Sarah, were you able to get that? Yes, finally I was able to get it and I would say that no, I don't think we have a sufficient pool at all, I would say. Okay, Darcy. So existing members who want to continue can simply continue until there is an interview process, correct? Yeah, I mean, so their terms don't expire until June 30 and so we do have a little bit of time here but yeah, I mean, I think that and Alissa will correct me if I misspeak here, I'm sure but my understanding in the past has been if we hit that term expiration date and now that things have been done they kind of just continue until we appoint. Now, they might decide, no, I want to be done and then they might step off but my hope is that we can do this by June 30 because it gives us about a month and a half which on the one hand is not that much time although you will also remember with CBA we went from a pool of basically nothing to actually a pretty rich pool over the course of three weeks because we actually engaged in some pretty heavy recruitment efforts. So I think with this, to me, the message from what we're talking about now and what you see is I've done a little bit of outreach around planning board, person to person and not in my capacity as chair just in my capacity as a human being but I think that what this shows us is we probably have to engage in a little bit more active recruitment than we had been. George, I see your hand up. You are all marveled right now. Yeah, sit back a little bit, George. Yeah, I don't know what's going on with your microphone, George, but you sound like a monster. Is this any better or is this still? That was 100% better. All right, I think Darcy was right. I leaned in and that was a mistake. So what did you say? Because I had no idea what you said. Now you're muted. We need to do recruitment. That was it. That's a lot of effort for that. Yes, okay. Oh, let's say your hand is up. So I'm feeling pretty stuck because truly given the, you know, for those watching in the future, we're in the middle of a pandemic here. And so I don't know how we're supposed to recruit effectively when people who in some cases are stuck at home and in other cases are essential workers and are under way more stress than usual. And everyone's under a huge amount of stress for a variety of reasons, blah, blah, blah. But if people aren't getting an email when some of them are stuck at home, I don't know how we're gonna get better responses and I don't know how you saw someone to speak to them Evan, but- It was a far away on a walk. Uh-huh, uh-huh. And so we can't do all the usual things we would be doing at say the farmer's market and every place else where we pepper people with, well, have you thought again about applying to planning board? So I guess my hope had been walking into today's conversation that the people who were currently serving would feel it was possible for them to continue purely so that we could just like move on and be talking about next time around because I don't see how we're going to fix this problem when we've already recruited. We are in no good position to do any in-person recruiting which we all know is the best thing. Even a distant sidewalk conversation is way better than an email. And I just am feeling very stuck. I also totally appreciate and respect that absolutely no planning board members should feel pressured to continue. They've been doing an immense amount of work. They've been continuing work during the pandemic. Everyone's life is in chaos and it's completely a reasonable thing that people re-evaluate their lives at this point and say, you know what? That's not what I'm gonna be doing moving forward after July 1st. So to Darcy's point, yes. And what you said earlier, of course they can continue to serve and if this drags on a little longer, technically they can legally continue to serve but Evan's point was good that they might not want to because they have made other choices in their life and are just looking forward to that June 30th date and no blame, absolutely great respect for all the work they've been doing. So I feel like, you know, on a normal month we might say, sure, let's recruit more but what on earth does that look like? Yeah, and I think this is where, and I will say that normally I would have been sort of proactively trying to talk to people, right? And I hadn't really been one because there's a lot of stuff going on that is occupying my time but two is because I had been sort of implicitly operating under the assumption that if the three members were willing to continue serving there wasn't necessarily that pressure to have to do a whole lot of recruitment. Not saying that we would just reappoint but we at least sort of had a backstop with David saying he's not interested we need to do at least some outreach. And so I guess the best thing I can think of is just reaching out to our networks and seeing if there's anyone just spreading the word and seeing if there's anyone who might be interested. I will say some of the people who came back for as a no or at least one of them, I think two of them they're no I'm not interested. It sounded like there's a lot going on right now. I just can't do it at this time. And so I do think that not only would the pandemic limit our ability to recruit because we can't physically be asking people but I also think that there are a lot of people who are thinking in this time right now in this uncertainty they're not willing to make that commitment either. So I think recruitment would be very difficult but I'm not sure given that there will be a vacancy that we have a better alternative. George, well, Darcy, is your hand up residual or is this a new hand? Residual. Okay, George. I hear a list a lot unclear but I'm not sure that we have much choice and it may be all in vain but there is the phone. Some people I would reach out to personally that way. Some obviously don't know but there are a couple of names that at least I could reach out to. Some of them actually I'm doing outreach for my other job and we have a large number of candidates at the moment or at least larger than this and so some of them might also potentially consider at some point. Wonder if Bachmann could also be enlisted. Maybe he's already obviously aware of it but obviously he sees a lot of names and a lot of people so that's another source. I think we just have to do our best. We have to get at it and see how far we can get. We have at least one position we have to fill and it may be more than one. Darcy. I guess I'm interested in knowing in your conversations with the existing members whether our process, the specter of having to go through the interview process, influence them and possibly not wanting to do another round. As far as the current members go, no one has said that outright to me. That could be part of Christina and David's regulations. If it is, it just hasn't been expressed to me. I will say that there is at least one person who's in gray who when I talked to said they weren't sure and part of that uncertainty was that they were really uncomfortable about having to do the whole public interview thing. So I didn't hear that from any incumbent members. I have sporadically heard that from folks I've reached out to in the public. Okay, so here's where I think we are with this. We're not ready to declare this pool, Alyssa. All the people who think Zoom meetings are fine are people who are not being recorded for posterity. That said, this is not a public document. At the same time, while I appreciate George saying, you know, while we got to work phones, we got to work contacts, there are people on this list who for a variety of reasons, we should not be pressuring to be part of the pool. And so if the outreach we're talking about doing is simply splitting up the people that are on the list and having us call them, they're literally people I would not want to have that conversation with. So if what we're talking about is finding some magical new way of recruitment that we've never had before or something else, but because someone fills out a CAF at one point in time does not mean they are obligated to respond nor are we obligated to strongly encourage them to be part of a process. We should be absolutely willing to interview anyone who says they want to be interviewed. But if they are not meeting us halfway, there are people I simply will not chase down because I have a hard time envisioning that I would ever vote for them. Yeah, so I think that my thought process on this is I will follow up with the people who have not responded as I've done in the past. But I think when we're thinking about recruitment, it really is, to me, my thought process is it's about looking outside of the list of people you have for you because these are people who have not responded. And so we all have some semblance of a network. And I think that our task as a committee, my thought at this point right now is we're not ready to move forward with this pool. We need to expand this pool. And so we need as OGA to take some time to think about who we might try to reach out to a network with to try to encourage people. Someone, I think George asked about the town manager. So that's the other thing. So when we had this issue with CBA where we had a very small pool, this committee empowered me to reach out to the town manager and ask him to reach out to people who he had interviewed and who he thought could be interested or good for planning board and just let them know that we were at the time of CBA, let them know that we were looking. That was a decision this committee made last time. I will say that was a decision that probably yielded us the most new applicants. We went from a small pool to actually pretty sizable pool and I would say a good number of those people were people who had been contacted by the town manager. So I'd be willing to do that again if this committee feels like that would be useful Alyssa, I see your hand. Again, awkward phrasing, but when Darcy was asking very specific questions about how did you do the outreach, Evan? Did you call them? Did you write to them? How many times did you write to them? Let's bear in mind that when we asked the town manager this question, one, he's in the middle of a pandemic like he was before and two, it's not necessarily him that's reaching out to anyone. It's whoever he delegates to do that with. So if someone's concerned about the detail level of how the emails written, how the phone calls stated what you say in the email, then they should also be aware that saying the town asking for the town manager's help does not mean the town manager is calling up individual people more than likely in this scenario. So let's not over but sell exactly what's happening here. People are not going to be so thrilled to open an email from the town manager himself perhaps. But at the same time, as you said, the yield was definitely increased. And I think whoever he delegates to do these things does a great job, but that's why I'm saying let's not concentrate too hard on exactly what those details are when each of us does the outreach because it's gonna be a mixed bag from whoever does it, whether it's town manager staff, whether it's us individually, et cetera. Any, so is that Darcy? I just have a question about your list of people that said no, and the comment is that they're already on some other committee, is that that they said that was their reason for no? Yes. For saying no? Yep. Okay. Yeah, even, so I mean, you'll notice there are a number of people who, because there's so much crossover between Planning Board and ZBA, even though we literally just appointed ZBA, I still actually reached out to all of those people and said, hey, we're appointed for Planning Board. You said, you're interested. Are you interested in the Planning Board? And most of them said, I'm confused. You just appointed me to ZBA. How much do you, and some of them said, do you really think I should serve on both? And I said, it's completely up to you. But yes, everyone who's in red was asked and confirmed, I didn't make that decision for anyone. George. I'm glad to hear that because I had the same, I wouldn't call it a dilemma, but I had to make the same decision for non-voting resident members. And I did what you did. I just contacted everybody, and I'm sure there are many who are gonna either not respond or ask me why are you contacting me? You just put me on export. But I'd agree with Darcy's point that she made a while back, that that's a decision to be made by the applicant, not by us. So I did this at the same time. Yeah, and there's always a chance that Planning Board is their dream committee they've always wanted to serve on and they could leave whatever body they're on. So yes, and everyone who submitted an application that I had in the pool was asked. And I did not pull anyone out without them telling me to pull them out. Um, so I do wanna move on. It sounds like we're not feeling like we're ready to just pull sufficient. It sounds like we agree that there needs to be some that for recruitment that may look different for different people. Alyssa, hand. Well, what does it look like? What's our homework? Walking out of here. We can talk about it at the end of the meeting. That's fine. I just wanna make sure we have some focus on what that means. We each are supposed to report back that we called three people or whatever you want it to be. So I was gonna say two things. So one is, I think all of our homework is just to reach out to anyone. You can call, email, text, yell, I don't, whatever. Who people you think would be good or would be interested or people you think that would know people who would be good or interested. I'm not gonna give you each a quota to meet because we all know different numbers of people and different types of people. But what I would ask as each member of this committee to reach out to people who they think could be good or could be interested or could themselves have a network of people who could be good and interested. And you can reach out however you want and just direct them to fill out anyone who's interested fill out a CAF. What I did wanna ask is if you all wanted me to do the same thing we did for ZVA and ask the town manager to identify people he thinks based on his interviews that might be good and reach out to them. Of course, given the caveat that Alyssa said which is he's now dealing with a public health crisis. And so it might not be his number one priority to help us recruit for a town council appointed thing. But it was fairly successful when we did it for ZVA. And so we could ask him and nothing comes of it, nothing comes of it. Is that something that you want me to do or not want me to do either way? Alyssa, is this a new hand or is it your hand? It's both, yes, I want you to do that. George. I would like you to do that, yes. Okay. Darcy, Sarah? Yeah, I'm okay with it. Okay. Darcy, we're good. Of asking us to reach out to people? Of following the same process we did for the town manager, for the ZVA of asking the town manager to think of people who he has interviewed, who might be interested in reaching out to them in time if they're interested to apply. That's fine. Okay, great. So I will do that. Okay, so we are going to close the book on that discussion then. And move on to the next agenda item which is the development of selection guidance. So even though we are not moving forward yet with interviews, I do want to try and come up with selection guidance because that doesn't matter who's in the pool, but I also, excuse me, think that doing that might help us think a little bit more about who we might want to reach out to and potentially could also be included in the request to the town manager to say, here's our selection guidance so anyone who you think would be good. So I think that even though we're not moving forward with interviews yet, we can move forward with selection guidance. And so you have in your packet, graphed selection guidance. No, why don't I, I can share my screen so we can all look at it on my screen. I can pull it up. So let me talk about this selection guidance once I find it in my, so you should be seeing my screen now, you should be seeing the selection guidance, it's also in your packet. You will notice the selection guidance looks very, very similar to the selection guidance we have for planning board back in January and I thought it would make sense to use that sort of as a starting point. So again, just to go through this, one criteria is taken from the criteria for a healthy multiple member body. A through C are literally just copy and pasted from our process. D characteristics of effective planning board members are the ones that we came up with last time. And then two is input from the body's chair. So here, you'll notice that this looks pretty much identical to last time. The reason for that is when I reached out to the planning board chair, I said, hey, here was the selection guidance that we adopted in January. Let me know what you want me to edit, change or whatnot. And so instead, I didn't ask her to start from scratch. I said, this is what you submitted last time. What, if anything has changed, what do you want me to change on this? She said mostly that she felt like all of this was still relevant and she basically changed only two things. One was 2E, before it said useful to have design experience. And she changed that to useful to have work experience in building design or construction, including development field experience in finance. And she felt like design experience was a bit too broad. And so she specified building design specifically from the perspective of construction field experience, but also one thing that she identified is a missing component on the planning board at current that she thought would be useful as someone who has some finance experience from the perspective of sort of financing, construction financing projects. And then the last thing was a new piece here, J that she asked to be add, which was for continuity of historical and process knowledge, it is desirable to have at least two of the seven members with more than two terms of membership and this reflected her statements about the difficulties of chairing the planning board, having so few members who have been doing this for a while and some of the lack of institutional knowledge. So as is our typical process, I have just put exactly what we got from the chair into input from the body's chair. So what we wanna look at really is one and specifically one D. I have a hand from Alyssa, go ahead. I didn't mean to derail your train of thought, I simply wanted to get my hand up there, which was it's different than in real life, right? Where you wait till people are done talking hopefully is I would ask that before we republish this again, which we obviously are gonna have time to do, would you ask Christine, cause I know you can't just change it cause that's what she said, would you ask her to clarify that she means more than six years, two terms is a meaningless concept when we have one, two and three year terms. I'm suspecting based on her previous public comments, she means six years and I'd like to put that in there, not terms. Okay, okay. So I can definitely, you're right, cause how we define a term matters. Okay, so yeah, so this is what we got from the planning board chair, other with the exception of those two changes, everything is the same as last time. So I want to open up for discussion. My hope was to adopt the selection guidance, although if we can deal with how we might deal with Alyssa's request and adoption after, but I want us to focus really on one, since we don't change two, that comes from the chair and talk about, is there anything that we feel as a body, as OKA, that we want to amend, add, change on the selection guidance that reflects what we think is needed on the planning board that is perhaps not covered by the chair or otherwise. And then one other thing I want to, I just want to do want to note, because I just thought of it, is that I would want to change is, under the body chair, we have, we have, oh my God, why can't I find this now? Oh, two H, it says already two lawyers on the planning board, which of course was reflecting the fact of we have enough lawyers. One of those lawyers is of course, David Levinstein, who will be leaving the body. So we may also want to very quick ask if she wants to revise that. This was given before David had announced that he was not seeking reappointments. So she was not aware when she said to keep this. Anyways, so opening up the floor to discussion about things that we might want to amend in section one. So if there are things you think need to be added, removed, we can do that. And if not, let me know that if you feel like this is fine to move forward, and then we can talk about potential adoption. George. It's my feeling that we have gone over this a great deal and talked about it a great deal. And since we're talking only about item one, which reflects all the hard work we put into it, I don't see anything outstanding that needs to be changed all through revise. That's just my personal opinion, but I think this is fine as we've written it and worked on it. Okay. Other members. I guess the one thing that came to mind to me is obviously all of this was written before we were in the midst of a global pandemic. And I didn't know if that might influence anything. And perhaps not, I reflect back to the conversation that occurred with school committee, where I believe it was counselor Shane who had said someone who would have experienced looking at budgets and thinking about the finances is newly relevant to me given the budgetary situation under the pandemic. Not to say that criteria is relevant to this, just saying that is there anything that you feel like having now moving into both the global pandemic and also the potential for our town to have some tough financial and economic times. Is there anything that strikes you might be useful to have on the planning board? And I don't have ideas just throwing it out. There's a point of discussion that this document was originally drafted in a different time. Alyssa. The finance piece. I think Christine Gray-Mullen hit on that sufficiently. And if I don't wanna pretend to know what's in Christine's mind, but based on previous conversations I've had with her and other planning board members, I'm guessing she's not, obviously no one's predicting a pandemic when they're writing this, but it's also that she's thinking about the practical aspect of finance in terms of helping the other members of the board out because that's always been something we've talked about throughout Amherst. As we make decisions, we talk about who's impacted, right? And we're often thinking of marginalized groups who are impacted who are not being included. But we have also found that sometimes we aren't including people with actual practical on the ground experience of, if I ask you to change this from 87 units to 62 units, what magnitude of scale are we talking about in terms of financial investment? Given that we obviously don't have people open up all their books, someone that just brings that perspective. And so I will reflect back, oh God, once again, to history, which is comprehensive planning committee for a long time did not have any sort of developer on it. And given that at one point, our membership was pushed up to 28 members, that didn't make any sense that we didn't have anyone with actual practical experience of building anything in Amherst that we were writing a master plan around. And so we specifically recruited one, which actually offended some people. They thought a developer should never have the ability to talk to us. It's gonna be much more difficult for someone who's a developer or even a property owner of any amassed property to serve on the planning board because of potential conflicts. It's not impossible, but it is going to make it trickier. It was certainly easier for something like the comprehensive planning committee, but it was something that it was an important perspective that we weren't necessarily hearing otherwise. I don't think it's quite the same as the scenario with school committee needing to crunch numbers more carefully in some town councilor's opinions than in past years. Okay. Yeah, and my assumption is that's what Christine meant to is someone who understands the finances behind construction and development for exactly that reason so that when, so that the books, again, the current composition of the board, if I remember it correctly, right, is Christine Graham Mullen's an engineer. David and Janet are lawyers. Jack, I believe is a hydrologist. Michael is sort of representing the view of laypeople. Doug is a planner. And who am I missing? I'm missing one person, but I can't think of who it is. But no one necessary, what she really identified as the needs are someone who is familiar with construction, real estate, and sort of financing those projects because those are, oh, Maria, Maria's an architect, sorry. So we have architect, we have lawyer, we have hydrologist, we have engineer, we have layperson, but given what they do, she said where they really have a lack of knowledge are people who are familiar with real estate, construction, development, and financing of those projects. And that would be a useful area. So, yeah, all right. So anything that we feel needs to be changed in one, Darcy or Sarah? I'm okay with it, right, as it is right now. Okay, Darcy? Yeah, no, I think we hashed this over pretty much in the past and I'm relatively satisfied that B says members bring new outlooks. Okay, so here's what I wanna do. So I do wanna try and adopt this so that we can check one of these things off. I recognize that two H that says already two lawyers on the board might want to be changed to reflect that one of those lawyers is leaving. And also, Alissa's point about Jay of just confirming that Christine means six years and not two terms. Darcy? Yeah, I thought we were just talking about one. Two, I actually feel pretty uncomfortable even having this section included because it gives an unbelievable amount of power to the planning board chair to pretty specifically state what her preference is and direct us toward particular people or particular types of people, which feels wrong. And if we went through the whole process in number one of really trying to make sure that we're assuming that everyone's going to be open-minded and we're not pointing anyone to any particular agendas, et cetera, then to be able to state just because she's the chair, she can state an agenda in her list under B. So I know that some people, sorry, I don't think that's an agenda, but she is stating that she wants people that have a certain position. And I don't think that's fair to have that in our criteria. And there's also a lot of redundancy between A and F. I don't know why that is, you know, both of them is there. The other thing, I'm just, you know, this is all making me realize that, you know, the list that we just looked at to see whether the pool was sufficient did not indicate with any of those people any of the substantive skills that any of them have. So how can we ever decide whether we have a sufficient pool unless we know these things about the people? This is a separate issue, but as far as approving this list, yeah, I have a lot of problem with not having the input from the chair be a lot more general and less specific about exactly what she wants. What's to prevent her from having a favorite person that she wants on the board, and then changing her input each time we have a new opening having her change her input so that it defines the person that she wants. That to me isn't fair. Alyssa, I see your hand up. So I'm kind of sitting here with my mouth hanging open, which I have my camera on so you can see that, is that, well, first of all, as Darcy fairly points out, it is really difficult that we never know if there's a person that she wants. Really difficult that we never know if the pool is sufficient because the CAF as originally written has never provided that information adequately. It certainly doesn't provide it three years after they have applied. And the statements of interest, right, aren't coming out until later in the process. So it's always been a very baseline sufficiency of the pool based on, right, we have a process that's basically based on a number and some demographic information if we've got it. It is the most basic baseline. It is not will all these people work out, which is why we always say we may not, in fact, actually even fill all the spots given the pool that we've been provided. So I agree that that's an uncomfortable position to be in, but it is literally the position we're in every time. The part where my mouth is hanging open is this idea that the chair is so Machiavellian as to sit there and rewrite these things in order to present a particular person as opposed to what I would characterize as the absolute ignorance of most members of the public and the vast majority of town counselors as to what the planning board does on a day-to-day basis. So the idea that people living in ignorance would get to choose randomly how somebody presents at a particular interview based on that as opposed to giving us some guidance as to what we're looking for from that body makes the zero sense to me. And if you're concerned with, you think that this Machiavellian person who's the chair has dictated this toward a particular person, first of all, we don't seem to have those people in the pool. And secondly, the point is they have made this public, which is incredibly important that they've said publicly this is what they want so that this comes out in a couple of ways Darcy. One is that if the other members of the planning board say, oh my God, I can't believe you said that, the planning board can get to us and tell us that, that this is inappropriate. They can't do that if this isn't public, if this is a private conversation. Then the other reason it's public is so the whole world can see what we're looking at. And the whole world can say, I know the chair said that, but I think that's nutty. I think these are the things you should be considering. The whole point of having this information is to not be acting in a vacuum of ignorance, which is exactly what we're acting on when we're appointing people to the planning board, which is something none of us, except for Steve, who's not on this committee, have actually served on. And he obviously has an agenda too. Just like we all do, that's how we got elected. So I know I'm going on because I'm just like freaked out that this is considered inappropriate. This is much more public than anything that's ever done anyplace else, okay? People are being very clear about what they think. They know this statement's going out in public. The whole public can react to that. And the public reads that, just like the town councilors read that and go, I think she's obviously talking about her friend, Betty Sue. Then clearly you disregard it. But if you don't solicit this information and publish it publicly, you are acting in a vacuum of ignorance and backroom deals. And I just can't believe that you would recommend we go in that direction rather than that we actually get hold someone accountable for what they said publicly about what they think is important. Just to provide potentially for ourselves and also for the public some historical context on how we got here, early on there had been the conversation about especially the town managers process who includes chairs in the interviews themselves. And we had talked about there is value in knowing what the chair thinks as the person who's been helping to manage the body but not wanting to actually have the chair sit in as part of interviews, especially potentially as we're facing right now in cases where the chair is up for reappointment. And so this selection guidance was born out of a desire to have input from the body's chair and the appointment without necessarily including the chair as part of the interviews or the interview committee. And so our idea here was that the, we would have a section of the selection guidance that would represent body input from the body's chair. And the decision we made back in January was to include that information verbatim. We're not gonna try and edit it or anything like that. We don't wanna misrepresent but then it would be very clearly marked as this is from the body's chair. So that doesn't necessarily mean that we're endorsing what said there that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to strictly apply that criteria. It's saying this is what we know from the body's chair and this is being considered because we have made a decision as a committee multiple times that it's important to hear from the body's chair. And so that's how we got to this point of just putting it in verbatim. We're not gonna edit it, but it's clearly marked as this is from planning board chair Christine Gray-Mullen. And so it's this isn't ours, right? This is hers and but it's something that of course we're gonna consider because the chair has knowledge that we don't. Sorry, Darcy, I didn't see your hand up, Darcy. Yeah, I guess I just feel like we can't edit what she has put in, but we could omit points that we feel are not appropriate to have in there like B. And like the last letter, which I can't see because it's off the page, but that her recommending that we do something that is against our own rules, which is, I don't know how she thinks we're going to choose people that have over six years of experience unless we are, I don't know how that will happen because the people on the board need to get more experience to get that far. So I don't know what she means by that. And there aren't that many people in the community that would fit that description. So I don't get that. Yeah, so let me just- Let me just- I think it should be omitted. So let me clarify and hand over to George. So first of all, I think that it'd be very dangerous for us to start to decide what input from the chair we're going to include and what should be omitted. And I think that's why we've always decided we just put it in, but make it clear that it's from the body's chair. And again, that doesn't necessarily mean that we all have to agree with it or that we're going to strictly apply it, but it is clearly from the body's chair. But I think picking and choosing what we're going to include and what we're doesn't opens up a pretty dangerous door. I know you have an issue with B. I, you know, for me, I can't understand why you have an issue with B, but instead of us hashing out that kind of debate, it seems better to just say, this is what the chair says. This is not what our committee says. This is not what the council says and just make them that clear. Just to me, as far as Jay goes, you know, it's not against our rule. Our rule is generally that we say there is no fixed limit on length of service normally limited to two terms, three years in length in cases where special trainer expertise are required, longer periods of service may be appropriate. And so our rule doesn't say six years and you're done. It says normally limited to that, but there's no fixed limit. This is something that we debated and something that we adopted. And so what she is saying is in this case for the planning board, we should be more frequently using this in cases where special trainer expertise longer periods of service may be appropriate. So nothing she's saying actually violates our rules because our rules specifically say no fixed limit on length. But again, we're saying this is what she says. It's not ours. We don't own this. She owns this. George, your hand is up. We have absolutely no business editing or submission or anybody's submission when it's input from the chair. I don't even know how we would do it. That would be an interesting process. Secondly, the discussion that we're having is a certainly appropriate one, but it should be held when we're actually have candidates in front of us and we're trying to decide who we wanna recommend. So some of the issues that Darcy raises would certainly be raised in that discussion. And it would be obviously in response or comment on some of the things that the chair has placed. But if we go through and edit it, then I guess we're just commenting on our own, what we want. So no, we don't edit this. And this discussion should take place later when we actually have candidates and we're looking at the criteria trying to decide who to recommend. Darcy, is this a residual hand or current hand? Well, that's current. I think it would be perfectly possible for us to, when we go get input from the chair to say, we want general information about what you need, about the substance of the types of experience that you need, but we don't want you to say anything about political agendas. We don't want you to say anything about preferences around areas that are our bailiwick, like term limits. So that is what I would suggest, is that we should say that to our chair and say, you can't say anything about these things if you do, we'll exclude it. So I'm going to hand over to Alissa, but I do want to just make clear. So when, excuse me, because I'm trying to pull up a document right now. So this is the process that we're operating under now. And under selection guidance, we say input from the body's chair. And so when I request input from the body's chair, and this is the same for the planning board chair and the ZBA chair, because we have done this twice before and with both times, we just took whatever they sent us and put it in. I specifically, what I say to them are these three things. I say, we're putting together selection guidance. Can you please provide input on, and I literally just copy and paste one through three. And so the guidance they're being given is to give us skills and characteristics, knowledge and expertise, prefer knowledge to meet the needs of the body. And so I just want to put that out there in case there were any questions about what I was actually asking for. Alissa. So we ask for more generic information associated with the handout, which I drafted in both cases for the ZBA and the planning board and then asked for input from staff and from members of those bodies to be clear that I didn't have it wrong. And so that handout is basically the generic piece of information that it sounds like Darcy is working toward. So we already have that information available to everyone and it's part of our package and it's part of our recruitment process and part of our evaluation process. When it comes to saying that there are political, we don't want them to talk about political agendas or term limits. Obviously we could talk for hours about political agendas. I will just say this, there is nothing in Christine Gray Mullen's statement that is a political agenda. And so Darcy and I can fight about that all day long but it is not a fact that there's anything in there about a political agenda because I don't perceive that to be a fact. So we're just gonna have to disagree on that. As George said, the time that we decide what matters to us and what doesn't matter to us is in the deliberation, right? Because that's when we have heard what people have to say. We've looked at all the documentation we've provided to them and that's when we have that conversation. The other thing I wanna mention about forbidding people from talking about breaking our rules, for example, term limits, as Evan clearly pointed out, as is clearly stated on this document and elsewhere, that we do make exceptions. We have made exceptions. We will continue to make exceptions and even if that weren't the case, let's bear in mind, and I would think this would be especially relevant to people who are often on the end of a losing vote, is that you don't have to agree with what the council has done associated with term limits. And so if you don't agree with that, it is perfectly within your right as a chair of a committee to say, you are making the wrong decision here and here's why. That is exactly the kind of thing we need to be able to hear from a board. That is incredibly important. It doesn't matter that it doesn't agree with what we're doing. What matters is that they think it and they think it for a reason and we should continue to hear that. We should, I disagree with her, but we should continue to hear that and the council that's in place three years from now may have a very different view of this scenario just as we have had planning board members in the past serve for 12 years. We've had people who are incredibly offended by the fact that we appointed any planning board member, no matter how much they walked on water for 12 years because they didn't perceive it as fair. So it is incredibly important for people to be able to continue to express their opinion about what our rules are so that someday you may find a majority who agrees with you that those shouldn't be the term limits. You won't have that if you don't continue to get that input. So I absolutely disagree with trying to narrow down what we want them to be allowed to talk about and what not to talk about. That is just not acceptable to me. This is actually their big chance to tell us. I don't want them to write to me personally to tell me this. I want them to say it in public. Darcy. I guess I just think that if we have a list of the items that they're supposed to address, that the body's chair is supposed to address, that we limit them to those subject areas. And I guess I would just argue that those two areas fall outside of it. So I think I've made my point there. Yeah, I mean, I think we're, you know, I would be uncomfortable with putting us in a situation where we're going to decide what is or is not a political agenda, what is or is not. I mean, one of the things we said is necessary experience. And if she's saying that, look, you need more than two terms to have the expertise and experience, you know, I think that that fits in, you might disagree. But I think that the safest way to go is to take whatever the chair says, put it in there, clearly labeled as this is from the chair, and then it's on us as a body, as the deliberative body, as the body who recommends to the appointing authority and as the appointing authority to look at that and say, all right, this is what the chair says, and maybe we don't agree with it, maybe we don't necessarily apply it, but at least we have that information. But I think doing anything where we're going to edit, omit or limit the chair, I think it puts us into a really uncomfortable situation. And certainly we didn't do it for the previous D selection guidance, not to say that we can't do things differently. Clearly we're changing processes as we learn new things, which I think is something that I've always really appreciated about the spot. Alyssa, is that a current hand or a residual hand? So here's what I would like to be able to do. I would like to adopt this selection guidance, but I would like to do it in a way that permits me to edit H and J, if the planning board chair wants to point those things out and say, Alyssa's point about terms versus years and my point about, do you want to change this given now that we know one of the lawyers is leaving? And so I'm not going to change it myself. It would only be if she requests it to be changed. If she says, no, I want to keep it as terms, then I'm going to keep it as terms, even though as Alyssa pointed out, that's a little confusing. So what I'd like to do is make a motion to adopt the planning board selection guidance as presented. I don't want to word this motion actually. Adopt the planning board selection guidance as presented, but allow the chair to revise section two in response to revisions from the planning board chair. Does that make sense? Alyssa, I rely on you to tell me that that motion is garbage. I'm sure it's close enough. Okay, so I'm going to make that motion. Is there a second? Second. Okay, any further discussion? Okay, so seeing none, I'm going to call the question. So again, we're voting to adopt the planning board selection guidance, allowing me to revise section two in response to revisions from the planning board chair. Brewer. Aye. Dumont. No. Ross is an aye. Ryan. Aye. And Swartz. Aye. Okay, so the vote is four in favor, one against, the motion prevails. And Darcy, just for the report sake, can I get the, what do you want me to write there? Why don't I write that part of it? Can you get it to me? Alyssa, sorry to hear. Oh, is it coming? Is it needed tonight? The chair's report is the chair's report. The chair's report has always been the chair's report. We've had many conversations about the fact that we do not include minority reports. We include, we characterize minority opinions. Otherwise, all five of us get to write our own separate reports and that's not okay. So you tell Evan what you want it to say, roughly what you want it to say, but he does not have to use it verbatim, just like he doesn't have to use anything I said verbatim or George says verbatim or Sarah says verbatim. Yes, Darcy. I think that this should be the subject of further conversation. I know that there's at least one other committee that allows the minority opinion holder to write that part of the report. So CRC does that. So just saying that isn't a practice that the whole council follows. But it isn't something we've agreed to on this committee. So you can't decide to change it by fiat until this committee decides it's going to do that. That's true, that's true. So we haven't decided not to do it and so... So what I want to do is... We have decided that. In the past, repeatedly we said, we are including our minority opinions. We are not writing separate minority opinions. Do not pretend we did not have this conversation. We actively decided this months ago. I don't think we had an official decision on this. So what I'm gonna ask, because Darcy, my assumption is your issue with the selection guidance was with regard to section two and concern about input from the chair. Is that correct? Yes, two B and two J. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna write the report. It probably won't be today. It's gonna be for town council meeting next week. And then I'll talk with Darcy to make sure that her view is accurately represented. All right, so I want to move on. So the next part of this was development of interview questions because I was very focused on pool stuff. I did not get to a point for that and because we haven't declared the pool sufficient, I don't think that that is a pressing concern right now. So we're not gonna do, we're gonna push development of interview questions off. So I'm gonna move on to section six. Discussion of open process to recommend appointments to multiple member bodies appointed by the town council. And this was something I added after the first posting. And we're not looking to amend our process. We've already done that. We've already decided the process. What I wanted to look at is a document that I put in the packet that I'm gonna bring up on the screen. And so let me give you a little bit of context here. So after we do these planning board appointments, OCA is going to dissolve. Already the appointing, the recommendation for appointments to the finance committee has moved over to GOL. George is now sharing in the fund of sharing that process. And after we finish, the authority to recommend to planning board and ZBA will move over to CRC. What I recognized was sort of two things. One was born out of the conversation we had last week in which Alyssa sort of pointed out that there are a lot of things that I do logistically to make this work that aren't written out in the process and that it would be useful to have that written down for people who inherit this. The second thing that came out was actually Dorothy's comment from last town council meeting when she was reading through and she made the claim on something along the lines of, this is a lot of words and it's sort of hard to understand what's actually being done here. And I thought, hmm, that might be true. And what I wanted to make sure we had is not just the process, but we had some clarity both for the chairs or the designees who inherit this process and having to implement it with the assumption that GOL and CRC will follow this. And I also wanted to be able to provide some guidance to the public because this can be a bit confusing. And I've heard from members of the public in the past that they don't know what our process is. And one of the things that I've done is when I reach out to applicants, once they're interested is I send them the process. But they don't wanna read through five pages of this process, right? And so my goal here was to have a single document that we could hand off to whoever is taking on recommendations to appointments assuming that they're gonna use our process. That includes both the process but sort of everything behind it and something that could be shared so people know what to do. That I see is sort of almost the final report of this committee. We can debate whether you feel like this is necessary but I wanna just run through what's in here. And so hopefully I posted this last I think Wednesday so that you all can have some time to look through this. So the first several pages are just the process. We don't need to discuss that because we've discussed this already, we've adopted it, but the first, I think seven pages or so are just the process as written. Page eight is guidance for the public and this was my attempt. I think it's honestly still a little long. This was my attempt to, if we had to explain to a member of the public what our process is, if they're interested in serving on the planning board and they wanna know how to do that. Being able to clearly articulate to them all of the different steps that are involved for them, the process is really the steps for us but this is the steps for them on how to get appointed. I broke it down into six steps, which maybe is a lot. Basically they are learn which is about reading the committee handouts, apply which is about filling out the CAS, confirm interest which is when council reaches out and say, hey you submitted a CF, you're still interested. Write the statement of interest information on interviews and then what happens after the interviews. And then the last piece which is longer than I thought it would be which I think is maybe a reminder how much we do to get these all together is guidance for chairs or appointment designations. And so this is something if George, George just had the benefit and the privilege of serving on OCA and so it was being unfamiliar with this process but in theory if he had never attended an OCA meeting and now was handed this as chair of GOL, this would be a document that he could read through to figure out what he or whoever he delegates this task this task to needs to do to get this up. And this is me to the best of my recollection writing down all of the things I do that are not necessarily covered in the process to get us to a point where we can make a recommendation. It's much longer than I expected but I guess there's a lot more than I do. And then a few appendices just to give people examples of what it looks like to post an agenda for the interviews before you have names, post the agenda after you have names, post the deliberation agenda and then examples of election guidance and interview questions. And so the whole point of this is just to have some comprehensive document so that if tomorrow Pat who has never been involved in OCA becomes chair of GOL and has to deal with finance committee appointments she could take this document first and just read through it and know everything she has to do. So what I wanna ask this committee are a few things. One, do you feel like this is even something we should have? And I'm fine with you say if you say I know you did some work on this but throw it out. And then two, if you do think it's useful things that you think should be added, removed, edited. So I will open the floor to discussion and I wanna recognize Sarah. So I'm the person that asked you to do this just because being chair before like I noticed I mean, there's a lot of things that we started to do and Evan you've totally like taken it to a new level and I thank you for doing this because I think it is really important that the work of this committee and especially the chair who obviously knows all the Lindsey Outs has recorded this for another committee. It's just gonna make it so much easier especially since we have argued and agreed and talked for so many hours that having everything written down of how to do something and why is amazing and something wonderful to hand to another committee who's gonna do these things. So thank you Evan so much. Okay, thank you. George. I wanna second or echo the remarks that have been made in terms of what I certainly what Evan suggested I think is a kind of gift if you wish or as we write off into the sunset we can leave behind this document and I think it would be very valuable and it really does I think capture as Sarah mentioned the enormous amount of work that all of us have put into this and discussion and so on. And so I think it's a fitting final statement of what we've accomplished and I think we've accomplished a great deal. I'm very grateful to Evan for doing this. It's certainly been useful to me. I've been following many of the procedures putting it like this is very helpful to say the least. So I'm very much like to see us. If not today, it's sometimes soon agree on this and then present it to the council as sort of our final or parting gift if you wish. The only thing I noticed Evan and I may have just missed it is because something I was struggling with recently is creating a vacancy notice for a committee. Writing a vacancy notice? Yeah, just what it would look like and I eventually crafted one for finance that in retrospect, I realized could have been better. Right. Yeah, so that might be added as a sample vacancy notice and maybe it's there and I missed it because I haven't read this entire document. I don't have to admit, but I very much value it. I appreciate what you've done and I hope we can agree soon to endorse it and then leave it and present it to the council. Okay, and no, you're right. I started this guidance for chairs or appointments as a means with collected CAFs. I completely stepped over that, but I think you're right. I think that would be a useful thing to include so thanks for pointing that out. Again, I was trying to write this all from memory and so chances are I missed a couple of things. Alyssa. This is why I really do try and let other people talk because George covered that exactly. And in fact, to poke a little at my friend George, of course, the previous announcements for vacancies were available on the town website. So you could have just copied them, but knowing that it's George and he didn't do that, I say we definitely need to have it in this process. We need to mention it. Not only, you do talk about the vacancy notice, but then to have it as an appendix and maybe include two different ones, like one where we were doing multiples and one where we were doing it for all three bodies and one where we were doing just for one, whichever are your favorites kind of thing too, because one of the reasons we keep going over and over some of our material is because we realize new things as we go along. And so hopefully each time we write one of these, they're a little bit clever and a little bit more engaging and including that as an appendix is great. And the other thing that needs to be included as the appendix is the committee handout. And I couldn't quite grasp where again, because I read bits and pieces of this, not as a totality again, right before this meeting, is the committee handout is something that, we know we're giving to people, it should also be something that's getting, redistributed to them, et cetera. So we need to make sure that's incorporated beyond just the stage of the vacancy notice, just reflecting that in the written words that you've provided so eloquently. Okay. Is there any other comments on this document, things that you think should be added or things that you said is that right or need to be changed? Again, this was written from memory. So there's definitely potential that I missed over something. So if you saw something, any other thoughts? Okay. So seeing none, I am going to, so I'm not going to have us vote on this then to adopt this today, because I do want to make some changes in response to George and Alyssa's statements, especially adding a section on vacancy notice and adding vacancy notice to the appendix and also the committee handout. Any other final comments? Alyssa, is this a new hand or residual? All right. So then I will bring, oh, Darcy. I know that you all know that I still have trouble with our changeover to this new process. And I do have a few questions about how it will all work. For example, one of the problems that we were trying to address was the fact that people had to repeatedly make out, fill out SOI or community activity forms. And doesn't the statement of interest have to be repeatedly filled out by repeat applicants? Yeah, so any time, so right, they would have to do that. Now, to some extent they could just reuse a one they had in the past. But one of the ideas behind this is that should selection guidance change, that one of the benefits is that they will be able to write in response to the selection guidance, right? And so even though they have to write it again and again potentially, it might not be the same every time because it's in response to the selection guidance. But the other aspect of this is because SOIs are sort of a different beast, they're there for the committee and post it publicly, they're not necessarily clogging up the database in the same way that the CAS are. But yeah, they would have to write an SOI again and again if they keep applying, keep not being appointed. And I think that could engender the same frustration. But again, the idea here being that because the needs of that body might change, let's say both David and Janet leave and all of a sudden the committee goes, oh my God, we don't have any lawyers anymore, we need a lawyer and that's considered like a big piece of selection guidance, then someone maybe who has a legal background might edit their SOI to bring that out more or something. And so that's the idea, they would have to do it again, but because it's in response to selection guidance, it's more likely to be a more fluid document and change every time they submit it. Yeah, I guess I can't get away from the thought that we have really made this a whole lot more complicated than it needs to be. And I did consider making a motion to reconsider today, but I didn't think I'd get anyone to second it. So I didn't do it. But, and one other big concern I have is just what I already mentioned is that I don't understand how if we don't have people filing CAFs and filling out CAFs, how we can determine the sufficiency of the pool. We've always had a little blurb about each person to be able to do that. And I just don't see how we'll be able to do that with just a list of names. So I continue to have some real basic problems with, and also with just having one person in charge of assembling the pool without the added check that we currently have of counselors receiving the CAFs. I think taking that piece out is very concerning to me. So two things I would say to this. So one is I agree with you that I think the process is more complex than I would like it to be. I think to some extent that's just a product of having the appointing authority be the counsel and having to do this through open meeting law. I think if we didn't have to follow open meeting law we couldn't simplify this a lot more. But that is the reason I tried to write out this sort of guidance for the public is, I do think that this is a very, very, very important is I do think that this is a difficult thing for the problem to navigate and there's a lot of uncertainty. And so I hope with this, and like I said, this might still be too long. Maybe we need like a cartoon or something, but I think we need something to clearly communicate to the public. Look, if you're interested in starting the ZBA here are the steps for this because that's my big concern is making sure the public is clear on how to get here. George. We have bent over backwards and sideways and in between to be transparent and to make this available to everyone. So they know what we do and why we do it. And that's one of the reasons that I think this is a valuable document. We will come back to it one more time. But I think this ideal of transparency, something that I've struggled with myself a bit has really triumphs. And I don't understand why some of us are not actually ecstatic at the degree to which we are trying to make the public aware of what we do and what the process is. And so that we can simply say, here it is. Yes, it's complicated in parts, but here it is. And you can read it and you can, you'll know what it is. And so transparency is triumph, it seems to me. Is that a good thing? Do not agree with that. So the one thing I did want to just say, Dorsey, though, is that I don't understand the statement that people don't have to file. People, in order to be considered, do have to file CAFs. So CAFs all go to the council. And so the council will see every CAF. And then I built into this guidance for chairs, this table that we looked at today, because I do think one of the, one thing that I never wanted to do was come to you and just say, here are the people who confirmed interest without telling you who had applied and who had not confirmed interest or who had said we want to withdraw. And so the idea that the councillors never will see CAFs is not true because everyone has to file a CAF. All of those CAFs go to the council. And then part of the thing that I've done that I'm hoping other people mimic is saying, here's the full list of everyone who submitted a CAF and here are their responses. And so the council always knows who's in the pool, who is applied, who is withdrawn, who has not responded. But it's impossible to get on a body without filing a CAF. Darcy. I will not know who has applied if they applied three years ago. Well, you know, you saw the table today, you saw CAF from three years ago. When the two months after you start receiving the applications, I will know when you come with the request to see if the pool is sufficient. But, you know, in October when we had those, October was when we applied for the planning board the last time the application process was opened. And we didn't see the pool until February. Well, you saw that. I know there were a lot of things going on then that stretched it out, but we saw some of the applications that came in but in the new process, we will not see them as sitting counselors because we won't see the ones that came in from people that applied three years ago or whatever. I don't even understand how that's going to work. I don't understand how if somebody is interested in applying but applied three years ago, how are they going to notify us? So in the same way that we've been, this didn't change with our amendment. It's the same way that it's always been, which is the chair of the Designee reaches out to every person who submitted a CAF for the past three years and says, hey, are you still interested? That's what we did for planning board in January. That's what we just did for ZBA. One of the applicants for planning board in January did not submit a new CAF. They were in the pool because I reached out to everyone who had applied to submit a CAF for the past three years and said, hey, remember on this date? In fact, I even put the email looks like and they said, yes, same thing with ZBA. Some of those were new applications. Some of those were ones we had on file and we reached out. So that actually hasn't changed. The only thing that changed is we lengthened it from two years to three years. So why would we not want everyone to file a new CAF so that all counselors would be able to see who was interested in the current offering? I mean, this was the conversation that we had last time and I'm not sure given that we had this, we spent three hours debating this at our last meeting and we adopted this process. I don't know how much we wanna relitigate this. I do see Alyssa's hand and I wanna make sure we recognize her. Thank you. Trying not to relitigate this because there are certain things we're just not gonna agree on is that Mandy Joe actually pointed out that just, and although she didn't say despite the cumbersome databases staff have had to deal with in the past and Evan knows how difficult that's been for them is that actually it's incredibly easy when you see the new town council to say one of the thousands of pieces of information you need is a new town counselor is all the CAFs that have been filed in the last three years for planning board ZBA and non-voting members of the finance committee. That is exactly something that new town counselors should be getting just like they should be provided directly not have to go hunt for it but be provided directly with the charges for the planning board, the ZBA and the finance committee so they know what they'll be appointed because we all expect all town counselors to be doing recruiting all the time. So it's going to be incredibly easy to do that. The reason as I'm sure we've litigated be in the past that you don't have people do this over and over again is that if somebody fills out a form and puts a bunch of information on it in November and then in January fills out a form and doesn't put a bunch of information on it which one are we supposed to choose? So the other point is that you want people to be able to express interest in July after we've already appointed everybody knowing that if an opening comes up or may not come up until the following June that they have put their notice in that they're interested. They should not have to just wait and see is there a vacancy notice yet? Is there a vacancy notice yet? We are doing this to encourage more members of the public to go ahead and strike while the iron is hot after they watched a planning board meeting or read a newspaper article and said, you know, I really could be useful there. I know they're not necessarily doing it right now but I'm gonna put my name in and those names will be provided to the counselors as they come in in the next term. We could even do it once a year while we're still here. Okay, so I wanna move on because we're running short on time and there's two things that we need to discuss before we head out here today. But this document that we was on the screen I am gonna bring back and I'm gonna edit I'm gonna bring back. And so we can look at it before we vote to send it off to the council. So one thing is minutes. We haven't voted on minutes for a while because our meetings keep going over and so we keep pushing them off. I'd like to not do that anymore. There are a number of sets of minutes. We have March 30th, April 13th, two sets of minutes from the 16th, the interviews and the deliberation and the 27th. They're all in the minutes folder. I don't know if you've had an opportunity to look through them. I have looked over all of them except for April 27th. So I'm ready to vote on the 30th to 13th both of the 16th minutes. I don't personally know if I'm ready to vote on the 27th because I haven't looked at them. But if some of you have looked at them and I would be willing to take your word if they looked okay. But I don't know if y'all have had the opportunity. So I just wanted to just get a sense of y'all if you feel ready to vote on all of these minutes, some of these minutes, if you've looked at them, especially those from April 27th. So minutes. I'm afraid I didn't look at them. Okay, other thoughts? We haven't done minutes in a while and I would like to but I guess we can push them off one more meeting if folks want to be able to read through them. Like I said, I have not looked at the 27th and I know they came in, they're very, very long because I think they're sort of just the raw minutes. So I don't feel like we should approve the 27th. The others, I do feel like we can but if people want to hold off so you have a chance to look at them, I'm open to that. I just need some response from y'all. Sarah? I wouldn't mind a little bit of time just to finish going over all of them Evan, if that's okay, but I'll be ready next time to do it. Alyssa? I have no opinion on the minutes, but I know we're running late and there was something else I wanted to mention about selection guidance before we go. So I'll do that at the proper time. Okay. So why don't, since Sarah has requested more time since Darcy hasn't had an opportunity to fully read them, why don't we hold them off until the next meeting? We'll have a lot of minutes to get through. Maybe we'll put that first on the agenda to make sure we get through them. So that brings me to the second thing we have to discuss which is when is our next meeting? So I say that because on our calendar, our next meeting is intended to be next week, May 18th at 9.30. There are two things to consider here. So one is TSO, which many of us serve on is also meeting that week. It was scheduled for 11.30. I then falsely told TSO that it was 9.30 mixing up my dates which probably confused many members of TSO. I know George was confused because he said, are you sure it's in my calendar for 11.30? I said, no, I'm positive it's 9.30 because I was wrong. But on top of this, looking at what's ahead of us, what we need to do, declare sufficiency of the pool, interview questions, adopt that document we just had. That document we just had, I don't think is super pressing because no other committee is taking up appointments right now, except for GOL and they're already on their way and George I'm sure is doing a fantastic job of that without this document. But he also has access to it if he's curious. Interview questions, we haven't even declared the pool sufficient yet. So I don't feel like those are necessarily pressing. So the last thing is sufficiency of the pool. And I would love to be able to declare this pool sufficient as soon as possible, but that requires warm bodies in the pool. I don't necessarily know if a week is enough time for us to do that. And so my thought on this is that given what's on our plate, it doesn't make sense for us to meet on May 18th because the major thing we have to do is just declare the pool sufficient. I just don't envision a whole lot's gonna change between now and next Monday. The following Monday is Memorial Day, so we're not gonna meet then. Our next scheduled meeting is after that is Monday, June 8th, but we could meet Monday, June 1. I know that might conflict with TSO. We could talk about ways to do that. But I would hope by that point we would have a bigger pool. So I guess my question for you all is, do you feel like we should meet next Monday or do you feel like we should put it off? And if we are gonna put it off, should we see if we can work with TSO to schedule a meeting for Monday, June 1st or just keep our meeting on Monday, June 8th? Sarah. So my 24th wedding anniversary is on June 1st, so y'all won't be seeing me at all on June 1st. And if you need me, I guess it would be, I'm open to any of the other possibilities that you had. Okay. So TSO or whatnot. Right. Okay. Okay. Because our next one is June 8th after that. We could meet then. My only concern is we start running a little bit up against. I mean, we have to ideally get these appointments done by June 30th. Could be done. And certainly we did sufficiency of the pool and interview questions in January. On January 5th for a January 22nd you, so it's certainly possible. Other thoughts on whether we should meet on Monday or wait until June 1st or June 8th? Alyssa, I see a hand. Sorry, I keep trying to maximize, minimize windows to be able to do this. I agree with you that we're probably not gonna see anything happen for Monday since you're not giving us a quota and since we all have really complicated lives right now and can't devote this as our primary focus. I'm not really clear on what, if anything, is going to happen to increase this pool at all. And yet at the same time, pushing us off that much further past June 1st, seems a bit problematic too. And so I wonder if it might make sense, Evan, to go ahead and schedule the eight if that still works for everybody. Not schedule the first if we know for sure. Sarah can't be there. But then if you, in the meantime, feel like you're getting enough information that you've heard back from more people, et cetera, since it's all funneling through you in the long run, that then we could set up a totally off-cycle meeting with 48 hours notice when five of us could, or even less, could get together and say, yes, now we have enough people because I too share the concern and you said it, we made it, but it's tight in terms of sufficiency of the pool, interview questions and the actual interview scheduling with enough notice, right? Because we hold ourselves to this large amount of notice before the interviews actually take place. So we were just getting kind of tight. Okay. I think that's reasonable. So I think my thought on this, and if someone has a different idea, please tell me. My thought is we won't hold the meeting on the 18th because it doesn't seem like it's necessary at this point. It doesn't seem like the pool will change. We will hold the meeting on the June 8th, but we're gonna leave open the door to an off-cycle sort of special meeting on a different day, strictly to do sufficiency of the pool and interview questions. Should we all of a sudden start getting some applicants in? Is that amenable to people? Okay. So we will do that. So we're not gonna hold the meeting on the 18th, but which means you have a little bit more time for your homework, which is to talk to people and convince them that they should serve on the planning board. Alyssa, you had something you said you wanted to say? Yes, yes, I did. So you're gonna go off to talk to Christine about the two things to make sure that there's still her words, right? We're not editing what she said. And then that document will be dated as voted today. And then when that document is edited and dated as of today, then I think it would be a great idea, just like we directed you to have the town manager reach out, I think it would be a great idea for us to now send the selection criteria out to all the town counselors and the entire planning board, not just to say this for the chair, but to the planning board, to ask them to help us recruit and say that we need more people and that's why they haven't seen interviewing being scheduled. I think reaching out to the planning board members, asking them to communicate to all members and all town counselors right now is way more a better idea than us saying, well, we still haven't, it's like, we got lots of colleagues, let them work on this too. I'll do that. I was planning once we had selection guides to send an email to the council to start soliciting interview questions. So I would probably just send one email that just says, here's the selection guidance. Please send interview questions and also please help us find living people to serve on the planning board. Any other final comments before we adjourn today? Okay, so our next, oh, Darcy. I just wanted to say that I will contact you people that are on TSO about whether we wanna possibly move our meeting up to 9.30 on the 18th, but I'll email you separately. Okay, there is no public comment because there is no public present. And so with that, our next scheduled meeting is going to be June 8th, but there may be the potential that we have a special meeting in the interim on an off day. And with that, I am going to adjourn us at 11.31 a.m. Thank you all.