 Oh, I have it right here. Perfect. OK. Pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the meeting law, General Law Chapter 30A, Section 18. This meeting of the Resident Advisory Committee is being conducted via remote participation. Let's have a roll call to wave if you can hear me and if your video is working. Good. Everybody can hear me. Video is working. Yep. Let's say this reminder is being recorded to the web and could be shown on Amherst Media and broadcast on the town of Amherst YouTube channel. And this meeting is now called to order. So what do we got? First item is to approve the minutes from November 17. And anybody have any comments on that? No. So moved. Either in that case, all those in favor of approving the minutes and we'll go, we'll have you audibly say. So Kisha, what's your vote on that? Yeah, approve. And I? I. And I also, so it's unanimous the minutes have been approved. OK, review of interviews since last meeting. I'll go first. I haven't had any. I had public Shaitree committee. There were four candidates for, I believe, two vacancies at this time. And then it wasn't clear if there might be a third vacancy coming up. And there were a number of suitable candidates. So I haven't seen Paul's follow up memo yet. He's been pretty good about sending us all the memos when he's doing the written recommendation to the council. But I don't maybe between council meetings. And that's why. So I don't know for sure, sure who he's going to pick. I have an idea, but it was a little bit of a question mark on one person. I had one additional candidate for the community safety working group. They wanted a local teenager. And so we interviewed them. So they were a great candidate. Oh, that was in the paper. That was Darius. Yeah. He seemed so low to be there. Sorry. Yeah. OK, so Angela, what do we have coming up? Sorry, had to unmute. So I thought we were going to have affordable housing trust tomorrow. But there are lots of problems with the there's only one vacancy. And there are lots of problems with the time scheduling for Paul as we roll into budget hearing season. So I've had to push that to next maybe Tuesday. I'm waiting to hear back from the candidate. And then there's some discussion about all of the term dates for that group for affordable housing trust. So I'm doing some deep diving into town council approvals and memos from Paul and actual letters and certificates of appointment today. Knowing a little bit about housing trust, that's good. It's somewhat complicated because some of those terms, the way back to even a prior committee. So good research. It is definitely a hefty folio of documents today. So while we're on housing trust, I said I could be like, I could do it tomorrow. That's off now. That's fine. But Kisha, I think you did housing trust the last round. And so I was definitely. I did, but the time the three o'clock wouldn't work. No, but in the future one, I would defer to you if the next time weren't. There may be Angela, you could work. If Kisha wanted to do it again, would kind of work with her schedule as well. I know it's hard to get everybody. Right. Yep. Did you want to continue on with that, Kisha, with the trust? It's fine. But again, my schedule is harder right now with some kids remote. If my schedule is more open right now, so it's going to have to. I wouldn't want Angela to try to schedule it around me because that would be impossible. But I can try to make it for when the appointments are set. Right. So I would defer to either of you, but I'm the most flexible schedule. And I can probably do almost any time you pick Angela, I have a few carve outs, but not a lot. OK. I'm available for the 26th also if needed. So most of the committees only have, I mean, the vacancy list is getting shorter and shorter. I know that housing trust is a priority. And right now, everyone can meet quorum in terms of membership. But there are certain chairs who like to have a full complement. So we'll see what the push is in the next few weeks. But as I said, Paul's time is really tight with about 26 hours of budget hearing meetings with department heads. Can I make an editorial comment? I know some chairs want to have a full complement. But if they're not in risk of quorum, they can kind of chill a little on that. So it's their job to advocate and push. But I think it's also OK to have spaces in between and then have times when you're doing this. I mean, really, they can chill. Agreed. OK. I think that's it for talking about upcoming interviews. So I thought we'd have a small discussion on the post-interview survey responses that we got. Thanks to Angela for putting it all together and sending us the little PDFs that's appreciated. Sure. Anybody want to start off the discussion? I don't know. One, just my overall thoughts was I felt it was a positive response. Everything didn't get the highest response from everybody. But in general, nothing stood out as, whoa, here's something where we got really negative numbers. So I felt pretty good about it all. Probably the one that stood out the most for me, the question's four and five both had, actually, hang on a second. I'm going to mute myself and pick up that phone because. Fine. Well, Jim's doing that. I confess, I read it when you sent it out, Angela. I thought it was interesting, but I didn't pull it up for today. So I'm kind of going on a wing and a prayer here. I'm back. What did I miss? I said, I confessed I haven't looked at it since it got sent out. I'm kind of just going to follow along. Well, as I was saying, question four was the mission of the committee explained clearly, not our committee, the committee that people are applying for. And that one got mostly very well, which is the second to best response, and only a small number of the highest positive. Next question five was the time commitment and meeting schedule of the committee explained clearly. And that also, that one had a couple more negative ones, you know, only vaguely explained. But then quite a few positive, but hardly any very positive. So those struck me as things we might mention to Paul and to chairs is to, you know, try, you know, the chair should probably have a sort of little script ahead of time so they know what they're going to say about what the mission is going to be, and they know what they're going to say about what the time commitment is going to be. So it could be really clearly expressed as opposed to sort of being surprised by the question that they're coming up with something at the last minute. So, Jim, my comment, we talked about that a little bit even before the survey and about needing to kind of prep the chairs and the staff layers on for what they're going to do in the interviews. By now, they've all been through a number of these. So some of them get it, but some people do it a lot better than others. And I wonder if kind of writing a little summary of the survey to Paul, maybe something that could even go to council, that could also be circulated to committee chairs. It just reminds them that that's the expectation. And then, you know, I think their outcome of the survey was something that, you know, could be shared. And then some constructive comments about what, you know, what that suggests. You know, just to remind you, and both of those questions very well, which is the second, you know, very positive response got by far the most responses. So they weren't negative responses really. I understood, but I just wonder if it's a little bit of a teaching moment. Yeah, I think at the very least, and maybe I'll write something and let you guys see it and send it, just a reminder that chairs should be prepared ahead of time to give those two explanations. What's the mission of this group, you know, very succinctly, quickly, and what's the time commitment of the group. And those are just things that should be covered clearly. And I would say the staff liaison should be the backup for that. So they, you know, they should either augment something or if the chair can't be there, they should be prepared to do that. I was actually quite surprised that a strong majority thought that the length of the interview was just right. I expected to have many more people say too short, but they didn't. Yeah, that interested me as well, because then the next highest number was somewhat short. So people were OK with the length of time. And I think part of it is you either have your ideas and we'll get them across or not. You know, it's not always better to speak for an hour and a half. Sometimes people are still just not saying anything. You can't just speak longer. So I think I do understand in some circumstances, you know, maybe a 20 or 25 minute interview may be better. But I think the idea of having it be 15 minutes and occasionally running longer, I think, is a good idea. And it seems like a lot of people are comfortable with that. I sort of felt like the majority of people would feel neutral or positive toward the process. And I think that that is reflected in the responses. You know, very few negative responses, but some of those things are easily corrected. You know, like you brought up earlier about the mission of the committee, you know, the requirement, time commitment required. So I think, you know, it got to what we were looking for. And I think it will be a good way to go forward as well. I just think an idea for your draft, Jim, to also credit Angela for putting this out, that we had great staff support, you know, and I think we took some actions and then we went and surveyed kind of how people responded to the whole process, you know, kind of two years in. And I think that's it's really great. We did it. We probably wouldn't have been able to do it without Angela figuring out, you know, how to get all that information for us. And I think it's just a really worthwhile checkpoint for this whole interview process. And that's why I'd like to be able to share it. Yeah, we don't want her to get, you know, too much of a slow head, though, you know, so we should probably limit that a little bit. Yeah, well. You don't even know if she's still listening. I'm laughing. I'm laughing. Why are you laughing? Any other survey thoughts? No, it was really good to see the results. Thanks. Yeah, there was one great comment. I was happy to see the interview included a member of the Residence Advisory Committee, in addition to folks in the board and city manager. That must have been one of the ones where I was on the committee. Oh, of course. Anything else to talk about? No public comment, I presume? I'll just say one kind of observation from one of my interviews and a series of interviews. And I realized there was, like I said, with the public stream, there was one kind of, I had a different take than the other people in the interview, which I expressed, you know, after everyone, you know, cleared the screen of the interviewees. And I realized part of my perspective was this candidate had certain features. And I was looking at the perspective, from the perspective, if I were a volunteer member on that committee, would I want to take on that particular person's kind of needs? The chair and the staff liaison kind of wanted to take that on, but I felt like in order to keep all volunteers kind of happy with their service, I wasn't really ready to put on them I saw some extra needs that this candidate had. So just a perspective, not just, oh yeah, I could handle this person, but how would that be for other volunteers who maybe weren't part of wanting to take on that person? So I'm being vague, obviously, because I don't want to reveal the people, but so what I'm saying may not even make sense. I'm going to ask you, Angela, because you know all the candidates, do you know what I'm talking about? I do and I feel like I understand where you're coming from, but I also know that that committee has like a very physical presence at time. And so there are members of that committee who get motivated by the act of planting shade trees and getting out there and getting dirty. And then there are other members who really focus on the paperwork side of it and the kind of, are we going to save this tree over that tree and really acknowledging Alan Snow's, the tree warden's role? So I understand where you're coming from. I also think we have to be careful with the idea of diversity not just being relegated to socioeconomic and other things, but also including a range of ages. Understood, but... Did I have a question, Connie? In the post-interview discussion, were you able to express your concerns to the other people on the interview committee? I got as far as saying I had reservations after, you know, I was sort of mulling it over. And afterwards I had a couple of other thoughts and I texted Paul more explaining why said I'm okay with whoever you pick, but I want you to understand where my thinking was when I spoke against this. It's really hard to be the one person saying I would not choose this person, you know, and the other people interviewing one of that person. So I actually, as I contemplated it, I had some thoughts about that and texted it to Paul and he's receptive. And it wasn't really about changing his mind, it was more like trying to explain why I had spoken against this person in the other committee. It's hard, it's hard to, you know, it's hard to reject people, period. That's the part I don't like about this. Yeah. So that's all, just, that's what I want to do, not a big deal, that's all I got. Yes, I think, you know, I think it is both important and appropriate when we're in these post-interview discussions, even if everybody else seems unbarred with somebody, if you have a reservation, you know, we should say it. No one's going to be mad at us for saying it. Understood, understood. It's just, it's very short. And so sometimes, you know, you're kind of like, and so I did, I did follow up with Paul a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You know, in terms of the length of time, I've noticed that since we have the waiting room functioning in Zoom, they're ending much more on time than either the in-persons we used to have or even without the waiting room, there was more tendency to go over. But Paul's sitting there and he's seeing people in the waiting room. And so he does kind of keep it on the schedule. We're more disciplined with that now. Okay. You want to try and set a date for our next meeting or should I put out a doodle poll for it? What are people's thoughts on that? You know, do we need a meeting next month or should we do a two month interval? I would prefer a poll just cause it'll give me a little bit, a little bit of time to try to figure out times and days. Yeah. If you don't mind. I agree with that. Just going to have to take time for it now and that'll work fine. We go for like two months from now. That's the only reason of all we're- If Angela tells us we're not going to have a lot of interviews. Yeah, the only thing is Jim, if you wanted to do something with that memo, is there a way we can move that before two months or do we need to wait till we meet again? I think, let me think this through. I believe, so can I send it to you individually and ask for individual feedback? Not on content really more, that would be more editing. So I think for that, we could have a brief meeting in a month and maybe wrap that up and give us time to mark up. Maybe if you got us something a week before, we could mark it up. I mean, I also don't think the memo is that time critical. Since again, we're talking about a survey where everything was pretty positive anyway. True, true. I defer to your judgment either way. I'll shoot for something in the two month timeframe and I'll send out a proposed memo before then so we can talk about it at the meeting and change it if we want and then send it. And there probably won't be that much happening between now and then anyway, so it's okay. Sounds good to me. Okay. Anything else to talk about or should we adjourn and go watch TV? I move we adjourn. Okay. I second all those in favor of adjourning. You can just raise your hands. All right, great to see all of you and it's a great day today. Thank you everybody. Thanks Angela. Okay, bye all. Bye bye. Thank you, bye bye. Bye.