 Welcome to this meeting of the residents advisory committee. My name is Angela Mills and I work for the town manager. I'm now turning this over to Jim Pistrang. At some point, this will be uploaded to Town of Amherst YouTube channel. Thank you. Okay, so first, before I even call the meeting to order, I have to read this thing. Pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, general law chapter 30 a section 18. This meeting of the residents advisory committee is being conducted via remote participation. Now everybody should wave so I know that they can hear me. Good. You don't hear me. And you should check to make sure you can talk. We've already heard you on a stage. Can you talk if need be? Check your audio. Yes. Good. Okay. Another reminder, even though Angela just told you, we are being recorded for the web and might be shown in Amherst media or broadcast on the Town of Amherst YouTube channel. There. This meeting is now called to order. I read the script. I call to order. So my first agenda item is welcome to the new members. So welcome new members. And I'm very excited to see both of you and thank you for volunteering to do this. And I think you'll find it a fairly entertaining and painless committee, which is what I promised when I talked to you both. But I think it really is. We get to hang out with Angela now and then. Okay. So that's very cool thing. Yes. The first thing we need to do actually is rather odd, which is we need to approve the minutes of a meeting that neither one of you were ever at. So you will kind of have to take my word for it that the minutes from our Monday, April 11th, 22 meeting are accurate and all of that stuff really happened. I don't know if you have any comments or questions at this point in time. You can express them. If you don't, I will just call for a vote by hand. All those in favor of approving the minutes from Monday, April 11th, please raise your hand. Oh, wait, don't we abstain? Do we vote? Okay. So approve, raise your hand. Do not approve, raise your hand. And if you abstain, raise your hand. You can abstain. Okay. So we have two approvals. Yeah, that's fine. Either way is fine. And so two out of three counts is an approval though. So we can write that on the webpage. Thank you. Well, I'm happy to approve if that would be helpful. You can be an abstention. That's fine too. Gotta take your moral ground here. So the next thing on my list is review of RAC best practices. And I thought I'd say a couple things first and then open it up for discussion. So I believe I sent to both of you this document called recommended script for town council appointees to town board committee commission. Did you get that? It's kind of a little script. It looks like this if you print it. And it's a script of what has been sent to the chairs of all committees and to the town liaison committees and to us and to Paul. And it's kind of a general script of the things you want to cover in a 15 minute interview. And it's not set in stone. And there's variables then that can affect how it changes. You might have people applying for committees who've been on that committee in the past already know exactly how it works. You might have chairs of the committee who don't know how anything works and have never done an interview before. So there's all different variations. But in general, we follow this script. And our job, in my opinion, our job as RAC members is first of all, we've got one place where Paul will say, you know, may I gotta stay? Whoever is there, they'll say, do you have any questions? And the question I typically ask is something along the lines of what we have in the script. I ask if they've attended any meetings, how familiar are familiar, familiar they are with the committee, have they ever watched a zoom recording that sort of thing, which leaves, opens up the discussion a little. Sometimes they'll have already said all that in the committee, in which case I might ask a different question. I try and so a different question I might ask, you know, is there any particular agenda item that drove you to be on this committee, but they might have answered that already too. I kind of will wing it. One thing I do try and do if I ask a different question, I try and follow up and ask a similar question to other people in the interview group. So everybody we interviewed had the same same sort of questions asked of them. But and sometimes hang on just a second, sometimes we'll get to me and they'll already answered everything and I'm just stuck and I'll say nope, I don't have any questions. Yeah, Meg. Do we have a chance for the meeting to discuss whether a particular candidate raises issues that we want to be sure? So say if Anastasia or I has something we either know or wonder about, do we raise that ahead of time with you or do we so nobody's surprised? No, we typically don't. They'll typically be a conversation after the batch of meetings between the town manager, the chair, the staff liaison and us. And that would be the appropriate time to mention something if you have something to mention. Right, after the interview. Yeah. Go ahead. And when I look at that outline that I just looked at, thank you for sending. You asked the questions and do Anastasia and I ask follow up questions? Oh, let me explain. One of the three of us will be at any given interview. Oh, right, right, right. Okay. So for any given interview, Angela sets up a batch of interviews, then she sends out these desperate emails saying who can come to this group of interviews and we'll answer whether we're available or not. And I think I think I mentioned this in our interviews. If there's a particular committee that you're very interested in and you know a lot about and you want to be the person for that, you can tell Angela. I personally don't have any, but other people do. I know when Connie Kruger was on the group, you know, if there are things having to do with things that she had passed and very involved and she would say, can I be an interview on this? So, but yeah, it's only one of the three of us at any given interview. It's so basically the interviewers are just going to be a RAC member, Paul, the chair of the given committee, and the staff liaison to that committee. Typically it's those four people plus the person being interviewed. So the other job in my mind of the RAC person, Hi Paul, is to make sure that the other interviewers do their jobs. So for instance, the chair's going to read the chair of the committee, or sometimes the staff person briefly explains the scope of the committee, what they're doing, but then they also explain how many meetings per month, the duration of the meetings, kind of, you know, what the time commitment is to be on this committee. And occasionally they forget that. So what I would do towards the end of the interview, I wouldn't interrupt in the middle at the end, I might gently say, you know, so Joe or Margaret, whoever you are, you know, can you tell us a little bit more about the time commitment and when the meetings are, you know, sort of gently, proud to do that. Occasionally, although it's incredibly rare, the town manager might forget to tell the person the decision process, you know, the timeline of what they're gonna figure out. So you might say, so Paul, can you tell us a little bit about how this is going to be decided? So just to gently prompt if they forget those things. What he means is wake him up. So, so I see that as kind of an important role in our part to make sure that the interview is thorough and the interviewee gets all the information they're going to need. Comments, questions for me to review about any of that stuff? Yeah. So I think the script looks great. And, you know, it's very simple. And I know that what we're trying to do is sort of assess candidates, you know, interest and skill set and encourage more people to serve on different committees, right? So we don't want to, you know, increase the barriers for that. My question, though, is about, I know that in the application that the town has on its website for people first applying to, you know, the various committees, that there's a question there about interest as to why people are interested in running for a position. I'm curious if this committee would be well served to also ask that during the interview process just to hear what folks have to say. You know, I find that sometimes what people write may not always be necessarily the way that they're thinking about things. And it's helpful to hear the way that they're talking or thinking about, you know, a question like that. And so yeah, I was just, you know, curious again if that's something that this committee has considered. So pretty typically it's a question that Paul asks. So, you know, more often than not, if not all the time, he'll say, you know, so what led you to be interested in this committee? It's a little tricky because sometimes all that led them was Angela, you know, calling them on the phone and begging, please, would give you, you know, they might not have even heard of the committee. But it's still it's it's often a question that Paul asks. And if he doesn't, it would be a perfectly good and legitimate question for Iraq, the rack representative to ask. I should point out, I should mention this also, prior to the interviews, Angela sends out to whoever she's wrangled to do that batch of interviews, she sends out the schedule of when they happen, the zoom link, and the community activity forms that were filled out by the applicants. So you'll get that form by email that shows, you know, which committees they were interested in a little about their background. And sometimes they barely answer anything. They just say, you know, want to be on a committee. Other times we'll get two pages of stuff about their background, their resume. So it varies what we get. But we will have that community activity form information. Perfect. Thank you. Anything else? Yeah, we're still on the subject of the script, right? Or not? Yeah, sort of script and what we do. I had some other questions on I had some. Well, when we're finished talking about what we do in the interview, I had some questions about recruitment. Yeah, let's hold off just a second and talk about that. Yeah, I'll break it down so we make sure we get to it. That'll come under other items not anticipated by the chair 48 hours of the meeting. Anything else having to do with interview best practice? Oh, by the way, if there had been public at this meeting, I would have acknowledged them and told them how to comment or something. I think the very first meeting we ever had, we had one public. And other than that, this is a pretty quiet group. We don't get the public much. So anything else about the interview itself, best practices, how they work? I should say in the, in the post interview conversation, I'd say 95% of the time, maybe just 90, this is sort of a clear consensus of all the interviewers, you know, it's pretty clear. Sometimes it's clear because it's only, you know, there's three openings and two people interviewed. But often it's pretty clear based on what we've seen. When there's not, we have a discussion about it. My own personal feeling is I will say my opinion, but with almost without exception, just about always, you know, I feel at any rate that the opinion of the chair and the town manager are kind of more important than my opinion. I'll express my opinion, and maybe I'll try and persuade somebody, but I also respectfully consider my opinion slightly secondary to the town manager, who's the one who's actually pointing and the chair, who's the one who's actually going to have to deal with this person. But sometimes there are people who are being interviewed who, I don't have that much experience in the town, nor does the chair of the committee who might be new. And so knowing someone like, okay, this person has served on 17 committees and they never fulfill a term or whatever it is that might come up. It's like, just you should be aware of this information about this, just some guidance. Yeah, yeah, absolutely good. Yeah, that's pretty much all I have about the interviews and best practices. What we usually do next at these sort of rare rack meetings is we'll each go over kind of what we've done since the last rack meeting, how many interviews we've done. I don't know how necessary that is for this one. What I do personally is I actually keep a spreadsheet just for myself that has everybody who I've interviewed, everybody where I've been the rack representative, their name, the committee they were applying for and the date that we did it. And I find it helpful because it gives me a sense of what I've been up to. And occasionally we get somebody who I'm pretty sure I've interviewed in the past and I can look them up on this spreadsheet and I can say, oh, back in 2019 and December 4th, I interviewed them for this other committee and I could even look up their CAF from then and then or something like that. So I keep track of that. Not necessary, but I find it handy. And I use that at these meetings to say everything I've done since the last meeting. In this case, I've done about 25 interviews since our last meeting in April. That was April a long time ago. And I'm not going to bore you with the details, I don't think. But you divide that by three now. Well, going forward. Two of them were Anastasia and me. So one of the other things that pops up is people, someone will put in, they just want to volunteer for the town and they click 17 boxes or something like that. I like number 17. So interesting fact, if you go up the Hampshire College driveway, it's the speed limit is 17 miles per hour because it's the math professor there. There was a reason for it. There was a meeting we're all glad we didn't go to. And so people will say, well, why'd you choose this committee? Well, I don't know. I just want to do something for the town. And so, Angela does do a lot of sort of education and guidance for folks and trying to gather people like, is this a good fit for you or not? But we try to be as open as possible. We don't interview everybody who just has general interest because that was just becoming a zoo. Too many people who just didn't know what the conservation commission does. But so Angela is sort of amazing. It's sort of like, here's what this group does is that your interest or not. But sometimes people are like, there's some triaging that goes along. So like the historic district commission, the historical commission, we meet together with them. And then they sort of divvy up the candidate pool because it's people sort of don't know which one they're really applying for. Thank you. I think we're ready to move on to other items not anticipated before we get to recruitment. I had one other thing I wanted to mention, which is I've been the chair of this committee since its inception in 2019. And you guys are brand new and I'm not asking them to do anything yet. But you might think in a couple months, six months, whatever, somebody else being the chair besides me. And there's huge, huge benefits to being the chair. First of all, there's the money that slipped under the table to me, everyone. But basically all the chair does is I schedule our RAC meetings. I work with Angela to determine the agenda. Angela then posts the meetings. I do this, I facilitate the meetings. I read that exciting Governor Baker script at the beginning of the meetings. And that's about it. So maybe you guys can think about one of you being the chair sometime in the not so distant future, just because it's so much fun. Thank you. Okay. But no pressure. You don't have to think about it yet. Yeah. So the only other item is to talk a little more about recruitment. I actually have three questions, but can they all be covered? I'm really interested in recruitment, not necessarily doing it. First of all, I'm going to take a really low profile role for a while to be sure I understand the spirit of the committee and so on. But as I said in my interview, the reason this committee is interesting to me is my interest in trying to improve recruitment, particularly of people who don't normally haven't typically applied for committees. And so I'm interested in, doesn't have to be right now, but just to put my cards on the table down the road or soon, or maybe as soon as you want to answer my question, I'd like to guidance on what's appropriate and what's not. I had an experience about a month ago where a staff person whose chair is a committee called me up and asked me if I would apply to be on her committee. And I actually thought about it for a few seconds, even though I don't have time and I don't think I'm quite qualified for it. The person said things to me that made me feel valued. And I actually called two other people as a result of that who were very qualified to be on that committee. And I just think it doesn't have to be the three of us doing those. I'm very interested in thinking about how we can personalize our recruitment so that we get individuals who otherwise might not, just might not be on their radar screen. But again, I'm going to, I'm not going to push it, but I've just, I want to see how it's going. And I don't want to be a change anything that isn't the way it's supposed to be. I want to follow the way, Jim, you want this to go. But related to that is that it would be helpful to know if you, if we're going to do that, where, what are the priority committees, where they're opening. So I happened to be in a conversation with Pamela Young about something else. And she mentioned there are three openings on the Human Rights Commission. That seems like quite a few openings. So let's look, if you have Paul, if you have committees where there's real priority openings, we might be able to put our thinking caps on to help pull in people. Yeah. So on the, so Angela keeps that track of all of that. And on the town's committee's page, there's a list of all the openings and what, where the vacancies are. And that gets updated very regularly. Okay. Great. I'm looking right now, vacancies. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's really helpful. Really helpful. Great. And just to define it, TM means town manager, special SME equals special municipal employees. It's well, agricultural would funny, but it's there's nine members. And it usually is the term, the terms in the left hand column is the number of vacancies in the parenthesis, the parentheses. Is that right? Angela, take it. That's correct. Yeah. No, that's correct. So we have five on agcom and one on the board of health and the housing trust fund board of trustees and HRC does have three. And months in memorial and rec has two. So this is the comprehensive list. We just, the end of June is a really busy time for us because we do a lot of reappointments and then people choose to term off or to resign. And so here we are. This is the most recent list. Great. I'll look at that. I'll pretend it out. Yeah. Thank you. My feeling is, you know, I think I've mentioned this, you know, and sort of, I don't tend to do much specific, you know, looking at this list and say, okay, who might be on a cultural call people? But I will pretty often in casual conversations with people who I know live in town just mentioned, hey, everything about serving on a committee in town. It's a fun thing to do. And, you know, mostly they look at me in terror and run away, but occasionally people are interested and want to do it. So, but I don't see, you know, so long as we're not promising people positions on committees, I see absolutely no harm in doing as much recruitment as we want to do. It still has to go through the normal process and still have to be interviewed. And my sense is we're always looking for people. And, and I think the three of us and Paul and Angela all have the same agenda of wanting to get not so much the usual suspects who've been on those 17 committees for people who've never even thought of it and don't know anything about it. That's, that's the sort of people we're interested in. Right. We have a thought of changing the name of the community activity form to the community participation form. Maybe it doesn't really matter, but that word participation sounds more engaging than activity. Activity could be, I don't know, it's like needing. It's not really, I don't know, just a thought. I would take any recommendation that may make that an agenda item for next meeting. Yeah. Okay. We're not wedded to that. We actually, I mean, we changed the name from citizen activity form a few years ago to community just to get rid of the word citizen. Cause you do not have to be a citizen to serve. Right. But it's been the calf as long as I can remember. Yeah. Well, I know, there's that problem. Yeah. Okay. I've already, it's going to be on our agenda for our next meeting whenever that might be. Great. What else? Anything? Anybody? So I do have perhaps an interview for one of you to sit in on I'm trying for 130 on Tuesday. It's an interview for a single candidate to be appointed to the recreation commission. So I will be sending that out as an opportunity for good times shortly. You get to meet Ray Harper. If you haven't met Ray, our recreation director. And I love that on zoom. It's all on zoom. Yeah. Oh, that's a good question. I'd love to do it, but I'm not available. Is it one of my people? Yes. So that's the zoom question was a good question. Cause this has come up in past rack meetings and there's pros and cons, you know, and obviously we had no choice for a while. And I don't know if technically we do have a choice now or not, but at some point in the future we will, you know, the advantage of in person is it's in person. You get to see the person look in their eyes, talk to them. The disadvantage for us is we have to make our way into town for, you know, these little, it's less convenient than doing it soon. And when you, we talk to different people who are interviewed, you get that mix also. Some people say, you know, well, it's not as good as an interview in person. I wish it'd be in person, but you get an awful lot of people saying, boy, it was so convenient that I just had to schedule a 15 minute chunk out of my day when I was already sitting at my computer. So the consensus of the three of us back in April, when we last talked about this, I should look at my minutes to be sure I'm not lying here, but I'm pretty sure we all agreed that for us, it seemed that zoom was the way to go for now, just because it was more convenient for everybody. But that's something we can think about for future meetings, you know, especially after you've done some of these by zoom, it's something to think about how much more valuable would it be if it was in person? I would say also that I think it's a, it's a question for the candidates too, right? In terms of what their availability is there, you know, just flexibility for getting through an in-person meeting. Yeah. Yeah. And especially for them, it's just a 15 minute meeting. And, you know, it takes the time of traveling, parking, go climbing up all those stairs, climbing back down, un-parking, traveling back, you know, three, four times as much time as the committee. Yeah. Un-parking. I just had to do everything in reverse to make it symmetrical. You know, so they're spending three or four times as much time not meeting as they are the actual interview. In other words, for us, at least they're in batches. So it makes a little more sense. Yeah, Meg. Unless you can do several in a row. So I was once interviewed for a committee. Actually, was this committee the first time I applied? Anyway, there were several people. No, it wasn't this committee. It was for the charter. What was it for? The charter commission. I mean, the participatory budgeting. And there were several of us interviewed at the same one after the other. That would be really efficient. Right. Well, that's the way it works. No, you can do that. That's the way it works. Angela will have, you know, four people wanting to be in the agricultural commission dream on. And she'll try and schedule them in four 15 minute intervals right after each other. So we're on Zoom for an hour doing these four interviews. But that's where it was coming into the town hall for, if it's, yeah. Right. But not necessarily worth it for the four people being interviewed because for them, it's still the 15 minute. Right. Exactly. Yeah. The interviewees. Yeah. Yeah, but it's something else to think about. You know, I personally like the Zoom interviews just because, you know, I'm still working and it's easier to take that chunk out of my work day if I don't have to, you know, do all that stuff, including unparking at the end. The sun is coming around the corner of movement. Okay. We might be done. Anything else people want to talk about at this point? Thank you. Thank you. Very efficient. I love a 27 minute meeting. Yes. Probably maybe. So one more question, actually. I could try and schedule another meeting in December at some point just to see how everyone's doing two months later. I might wait and see how many actual interviews there are and maybe January or even early February might be better. I think you're likely. Yeah. I think December is going to be tough. Yeah. Early. So think early February. I'll probably schedule another meeting. Got to be. I'm busy doing a show in January. So I'm busy then. Good luck with that. Yeah. What's the show this year? Disney's Little Mermaid. Oh, it will be fun. It's a popular show. It is what it is. I'm the stage manager, so I'm backstage and I don't care what the show is. I have a great time. I thought you were using the pool at UMass. I heard rumor that you were going to do it in the pool. Would that be cool? That would be awesome. No, we're actually having flying because it's like swimming. Yeah. So which is fun for the audience and saying headaches if you're involved in the tech stuff, but fun also for us. Wow. Yeah. Anybody has an urge to work backstage in community theater, talk to me outside of the theater. Okay. Been there, done that. You know what? I do think someone should direct a play in the parking lot behind where Judy's used to be. It's really perfect. You could have backstage be down in the underground garage and people come out of the building. It would be perfect for a little arena. You could do a nice thank to arena for about 150 people. It's great. Keep that in mind, Jim. Okay. Okay. If there's nothing else, I move that we adjourn the meeting. All those in favor, raise your hands. I see unanimous approval of adjourning the meeting, so we are adjourned. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you very much, everybody. Bye. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy the day.