 Good evening and welcome to Byline. It's Friday evening and we are once again visiting with a member of our town council. This show is co-sponsored by Amherst Media and the Amherst League of Women Voters. It's an opportunity for us to get to know our new legislators better both on Beacon Hill so we will be seeing Mindy and Joe over time. But tonight we have our guest, Elissa Brewer, who comes to us with quite a bit of experience because as you may remember she was a member of the Select Board for a number of years and so I think this is really fascinating. You're the first of the two who had served on the Select Board who are now at large city councilors so it's really interesting to me to think about the fact that you sit at that table with two hats. You are an at large member of the council and therefore have a responsibility to represent the whole community and you also have the hat of having a lot of history because of having served on the Select Board. Talk about that experience that is there a tension between what you're doing today and and how you are thinking about being an at-large councilor with all that experience you had on the Select Board and how do you balance that? That is an excellent question and I guess people should watch every week to watch me struggle with that challenge. It is really interesting and one of the things I think is important is that the Select Board was of course elected at large and so it makes sense that the two former Select Board members who moved on to the council after a hard-fought election would also be at large rather than moving to a district position so it isn't so much that there's a hierarchy although there is in other cities and other cities people tend to run for district seats, ward seats and then move up to at large. I don't think since this is brand new to us that anyone is yet perceiving that here but I think just because both Mr. Steinberg and myself represented the voters at large for several years that we would continue to do so in our role here and also because we're bigger picture thinkers. I mean the association with being part of the executive branch is what we were now we're not part of the executive branch anymore which is that huge source of challenge for us but it also meant that you know we had to think about things as policy and then we had to think about how they might get through the legislative branch at town meeting and so now we're thinking about those things as the legislators themselves and so it actually carries over so far in a very fluid sort of way it doesn't feel awkward at all what does feel challenging is trying to help people figure out including ourselves but also our fellow counselors many of which have had absolutely no experience in Amherst government what the difference is between a legislative body and an executive body given that there's no longer an elected executive body because there's that little quirk in the charter about policy leadership and none of us really knows exactly what policy leadership means yet it was clear when we were part for example those of us were on the select board that it was part of the executive it was a five-person elected team with a town manager school committee still that way with the superintendent not the same now with the council and so while the town manager has the often has the desire to talk to the council about things particularly as things are new doesn't have the requirement to do so in a way that they did before so that's elective on his part right and so he's navigating exactly he's got to figure that out he's got to figure out because the under the charter he has a lot of power he does a lot of executive power and it's interesting that you reference the select board as part of the executive so i don't think most people think about it in that way so quite a number of members of the council actually served in town meetings so they were in a policy leadership role and so they are carrying that experience to the council do you see it that way i don't if the select okay so go with that so i don't because select people were part of the executive before and didn't provide policy leadership but now you do and somebody had to provide the policy leadership so maybe i didn't explain it effectively okay so that would be my fault okay um or maybe i didn't understand under the town government act the select board did clearly have policy authority over the town manager who was then supposed to implement the policies that we had so we weren't supposed to tell people how to do the day-to-day jobs of collecting taxes and working on the roads etc but we were supposed to set policy priorities for those things town meeting set policy in a very different way because it was reactive and so town meeting aside from individuals bringing petition articles forward and aside from committees bringing things through the system town meeting was forced to be reactive you know what budget is presented to us what bylaws presented to us and we will then as in their policymaking they will agree to the bylaw or not but it's not policymaking from the standpoint that the new legislative body is which is that bylaws can be created by and then voted on by this body so town meeting as a whole although individual members would work on initiatives or as committee members that then brought those initiatives forward to town meeting town meeting was forced to be largely reactive whereas the legislative body now can be much more proactive and in fact we've already had a discussion that you might want to talk to Mr Steinberg about associated with the sustainability energy reliance legislation that was just brought up this week is to be cautious are we creating a committee that's already been vested with some authority as though a bylaw had been created or are we simply moving forward with the clear sense of what our community wants to do and so at what point in there does it turn from being the town council is just going to work on this to oh we should probably actually have a formal structure of a bylaw that says we can do this and then there are things like orders that other communities have we don't even know what that means in terms of our legislative body so we are still figuring all of this out got it okay well that's that's a really interesting it's really different yeah it's very different so the the what is the interaction now between this town council and the operating departments within the government and is that is that different than the former select board that is one place that things I think perhaps are more similar in that elected officials I think traditionally in Amherst we've worked to create a culture and it's ebbed and flowed over time but certainly the most recent culture we had on the select board was to not as select board elected officials interact with staff directly unless we were at a committee together a presentation together now for example we're getting a lot of workshops as town council members talking about what is the work of all these different departments and so they've been doing a fabulous job of bringing us great amounts of information and that opportunity for questions and reflection at that time but normally it's not the place of a select board member in the town of Amherst versus in a little tiny town where there are only three select people and no full-time manager to call up the DPW director and say so about that pothole that's normally not the elected officials job normal and so that'll be interesting to see how we navigate that associated with the legislator because of course a lot of people especially who are district related are gonna say where's my stop sign and so then how's that gonna work and so rather than calling the DPW director coming back to the council talking to the town manager where's that on the priority list do we need as a council to take a vote on something that that establishes these things as a priority will there be a committee like transportation advisory committee was envisioned some years ago that will vet those proposals right so that everybody knows where to take their stop sign requests so we'll be trying to figure that out but I think there's still a sense that we need to be thoughtful about that wall that's not wall sounds bad especially in today's lingo I perhaps should not abuse that word but we do try and keep some distance in the divisions of responsibility between the elected officials because the town staff are wonderful at recognizing that the reason they work for a town rather than a private corporation is because they want to be responsive to the community but especially with the number of people we have just like we couldn't have 240 town meeting members calling up the individual staff we can't have 13 counselors doing that either so that will have to funnel through the town manager and I was at that first workshop where a couple of municipal experts addressed the newly elected but not yet sworn in council members and basically said you know remember the divisions of responsibility and think about what it would be like if you're the DPW director and in one week you get a call from each of the counselors telling you that you have to fix this in each of their districts and how are you supposed to prioritize that etc and I said understand the departments understand their functions and what their needs are and respect what they do but work through the town manager was essentially the message that absolutely they were giving because it goes back to what you said before you're really now a legislature and you're developing policy and that's what you got to focus on constituents want their services of course but having a clear protocol of how that gets done and respecting the process is really critical yeah so committees there's a lot of activity going on around committees so I understand that you have been named to a couple of ad hoc committees and you're on at least one standing committee maybe two well I'll review this in my in my head here but let's start with the the rules committee that's an ad hoc committee right it's something every legislative body needs rules and procedures talk about that a little bit and what what that committee's responsibility is what you think the timeline is and then are there some specific things you are hoping to incorporate within the rules and procedures that you think are particularly important and run with that wow so as you know we are just barely starting this process and so the rules committee has had one meeting has another one next week other committees that I'm part of and that others are part of meeting for the first time next week and so we barely have the names hammered out in fact we've already realized that one of the committees that was named has an acronym that conflicts with an existing state mandated committee so we should probably change that before we get too used to calling it one thing or another so we are really still at that level of figuring out what do the words behind each of those committees mean and some committees were mandated by the charter and others were not and so the one that's not as perfectly named as it might be was not mandated by the charter the rules of procedure was and basically just as you said we need a set of rules to function as a legislative body on the one hand with my old hat of select board member that feels very alien to me as a select board member versus as a member of town meeting which have also been for a long time town meeting had town meeting time right and the moderator interpreted that and occasionally changes to the bylaw came through and said okay we're going to make this little tweak but all the actual day-to-day stuff that was decided by the moderator we all just knew that going in now we're having to develop a set of rules for this new legislature and what will those look like based on other cities that have mayors based on other cities that have town managers based on what we remember as working well with town meeting obviously a very different sized body again policy being upfront responsibility of the legislature so we are looking at lots of other people's documentation and then of course we all know that documentation versus actual practice don't actually necessarily go together and so you're trying to figure out oh it says this but what do you actually do when the circumstance comes up and certainly we had mandated by the charter the bylaw review a bylaw review committee was set up that started to look at okay we have a town government act that says all these things that include references to town managers and select board and town meeting well obviously those are all going to have to be fixed but what needs to be adjusted what are some old things in there that we never fixed that we intended to get rid of or we intended to alter but we never got around to it et cetera so a huge amount of work was already done on that and so some full presentation has been provided to the town council at one of those workshops that you mentioned in a meeting and that work will be ongoing and so the charter demands that that bylaw review work will be ongoing for another year and then it happens every year that ends in a six so it's an ongoing thing so that's one time in six so every six yes so but we're supposed to we need to obviously the the vast majority of the work a huge amount of it's already been done but in terms of sorting those pieces out now as to which were pieces that were simply find and replace for the word select board versus the oh wait are we actually doing this this way and did we really want to do it this way which goes into another pile of things to work on and so that'll take place over the next year and fortunately we're able to retain two of the three members who originally worked on that because that was it's been a huge amount of work and so far and we want to just keep building on that but then the rules of procedure was also put in the charter to say you need to figure this out and so they gave us an example rules of procedure also through the bylaw work and we said well we like these pieces and not those so we have some interim rules right now just you know till we can work day to day but we are working out what those will look like and one of the things that I think is a tension point that we're trying to figure out is the charter very specifically not required by massachusetts general law at all but the charter very specifically requires public comment at every regular public meeting which is interesting because in Amherst of course we have almost always had public comment at meetings and that's part of transparency and civil engagement and hearing the people as you go along and it sounds so simple but the reality is once you've actually done it for several years in my case or a few times in other people's cases it really matters if you put it at the beginning or the end of the meeting what kind of comment do you allow for during a meeting that's not a public hearing but you might want to hear from the public during your deliberations how can you limit that effectively without being perceived to be limiting it right we don't want to just say well only five people can talk so fight amongst yourselves as to which five are going to talk or the first five will come in the door right and that's right and so you totally don't want people to disengage from that standpoint on the other hand we also are trying to set up a process that will make it clear that in fact public comment is kind of your I would argue place of last resort their emails phone calls letters meetings with individual counselors to describe your point you can potentially get a counselor then to talk about your point during a regular agenda item rather than having to come and throw it out a public comment because one of the things we have realized over many years in Amherst is that public comment doesn't work well if you do it as a dialogue and so people feel frustrated because they come in with their impassioned speech about something that's incredibly important to them and we're also saying thank you and there's no necessary follow-up so that's where then so that is then related to so many other pieces in the charter associated with the resident advisory community community participation officers regularly held forums so there is going to be the way this is set up there is this web of interconnectedness associated with public engagement and so that public comment will no longer feel like that one pressure point like if i don't do it there where will i be heard the charter still requires a million different places so it will still happen and how will we do it effectively and um do you have a bias whether it should be at the beginning of the meeting or the end of the meeting absolutely i have a bias that it should be at the end of the meeting because because otherwise i have experienced directly that someone will have heard about something in the newspaper or they'll have an ongoing frustration or any number of things they come in they set the tone of the meeting at the beginning of the meeting and then sometimes you all look at each other as elected officials and say can we just go home now because everybody's going to be unhappy you know we can't have a dialogue about this this is a really hot button issue maybe the person just complained about an employee all kinds of awkwardness ensues in terms of then setting the tone for the rest of the meeting we would much rather find a way to have it be at the end encourage people to talk to us other ways but also find limited but transparent ways that people can interact with us around the actual agenda items so you just gave an example of talking about an employee that might suggest creating some rules for the public comment period right and that the presiding officer could say i'm sorry the subject you just start on i'm sorry to interrupt but you just brought up something that is not allowed in a public comment period such as talking about a performance of an individual and so i'm going to ask you to go on to another subject and we'll organize it so that you can have a conversation with the appropriate people in town government yes and that certainly has been done at select board and school committee for example being the most publicly visible ones because they're on tv and the most likely to have those levels of tension brought to them but it is tricky and disruptive and makes everybody frustrated and once somebody said something it's not unlike many other places once it's been said it can't really reel it back in anymore and so hearing components to the work of standing committees yes i think that a lot of the committees are really that be part of your rules i think that will end up being part of the rules i think there are a lot of structural things for a lot of people to come in and do a lot of what they might do might otherwise do at the select board excuse me at the town council meeting because they will have had that opportunity yes i think that people sometimes were frustrated in the past by not really knowing which thing do i go to to make a difference if i try and go to town meeting i have no idea what item they'll be on and given that if i try and go to select board but then where does it go after select board or how did it get to select board and i think that this interconnected web of committees that will have i think a lot more people will end up being engaged by both simply observing and reading or reading the minutes of but then also coming to hearings associated with standing committees that we have on different issues which for example i mentioned a couple are just starting next week including of course the finance committee which is a different kind of finance committee than we've had before as well and you're not sitting on the finance no thank goodness i'm chair of the temporary rules committee you're on the bylaws and you're a member of the standing committee on communications outreach and appointments very good so that's a we're going to change the name though so you can forget it portfolio exactly so but before we go on to that i just want to sort of tie up on this question that on this discussion that arose as a result of the talking about the public comment so the charter is pretty clear among the fundamental principles embedded in the charter are transparency and civic engagement absolutely those are two things that the town has valued over a very long period of time right and so the authors of the charter and the people who then voted for it said they wanted to retain that so it sounds like as you are thinking about the rules and the rules committee and the procedures and as the council is building their systems those are going to be two fundamental principles that you're always going to be chasing and asking how does this compromise or enhance transparency or opportunities for people to engage meaningfully but that doesn't mean that all of the old structures such as a public comment period which is again required in the charter has to be done in exactly the same way because they're going to be so many new opportunities for engagement and when the town council meets the legislature is meeting and usually the public comment comes through public hearings through direct communication with their elected representatives and there's a back and forth on that level and so given that it's been a tradition to have public comment at the select select board meetings now the town council and it's in the charter that's totally appropriate but figuring out how to balance those and get people to think differently about what you bring to the public comment period of the town council is some work that the citizens have to do as well in town but you folks have to provide guidance but you have to make sure that they always have that opportunity so just because they don't have it there doesn't mean they've lost it because they picked it up in three other places right and I think that's what you were trying to suggest I think you explained that very well I'm sorry we won't be able to just run this segment of the meeting at our meeting next week maybe I should give a public comment exactly okay so talk about the the standing committee that you're going to sit on I know they haven't well by the time this airs there will probably be a chair etc but tell me what your view of the work of that committee is and what you're hoping you can accomplish there so it's interesting because our various standing committees again some are dictated by the charter some just seem to be indicated by best practices elsewhere and what's a place we could refer something to rather than the council trying to figure something out so one of the things that's new in the charter is the idea that or the fact that the town council has to confirm many many town manager appointments department heads not all employees but department heads and appointments to committees that is very different than the way it was before there were a few committees that when the select board was part of the executive the select board had to confirm the town manager's appointment to those particular committees they were generally committees that had legal authority like conservation commission planning board historical commission but the rest of his appointments he just made appointments especially for staff and as you can imagine it's a rather fraught situation when you're hiring a department head because the charter very clearly says you will have to publish this person's name it goes it goes to the town clerk it goes to the town council and then in the case of department heads there's a 14 day window for the town council to act the town council can actively confirm as we in fact just did Monday night with the first opportunity we had to do this the town council can let the clock run out or the town council can say no or the town council can meet at some point in between there 14 days is not a lot of time and but i'm sure it's an excruciating amount of time for the town manager and for the candidate because now it's known out in the world that they may or may not get hired somewhere else so this is incredibly awkward and public bodies are having problems with this everywhere state government deals with this UMass deals with it any public agency when they're engaged in high-level hiring this presents a real challenge it really does and so i mean it was one thing when you know we were incredibly transparent when we hired both when we hired john when we moved him up to be town manager and when we hired paul and even when we hired temporary town managers like pete hekenblokner so we everybody understands the transparency associated with the town manager hire or school superintendent hire but the department head hires is a new thing for us and in terms of you know the ability to both recruit retain you know we get people to feel comfortable that they're gonna have that this process exists in amour so what this committee is supposed to do one of its most important roles will be to figure out what's a sort of decision tree for how we will do that for certain types of appointments certainly department heads completely separate from committee appointments although they will share some commonalities and that they're both required by the charter there's a 30 day window on committee appointments but that's not the same as somebody getting a job or not having a job and so how can we both be respectful of the town manager's decision-making process and at the same time not just say well whatever he says is fine right because there there is there is a point to a confirmation process but what on earth does it look like is the question and there are going to be two other functions of that committee relating to outreach and communications which maybe we'll pick up in more detail when you visit again because i wanted to ask you about one other thing before we run out of time and that is the previous town government structures were engaged on the question of marijuana big and controversial issue in communities all across the state and not so long ago three agreements were signed between the town and private providers where do you think we're headed with marijuana here in the community so this is a fascinating industry an economic development engine i mean i was just teasing someone the other day while springfield has its casino but we get to have marijuana yay um it you know it passed overwhelmingly in amherst marijuana too however although it's been going slowly for them amherst has actually been on the forefront of this a couple of us from the select board as well as the department heads and especially jeff gravitz our economic development director went around to many hearings wrote letters etc to influence the legislation from basically the day the ballot question passed and so some of us have been very engaged in how to make this work at the municipal level safe and deliberate implementation and of course the biggest thing here in amherst is we get a brand new population every year and it's not just undergraduates right it's people from it's graduate students from other countries and it's staff from other countries and you know and we have all these day employees we forget about sometimes in amherst we have thousands of people coming into work during the day and how does this impact them so i think the thing i just keep trying to keep in front of people is this is still a work in progress as well one of the things that has literally just come up as well is the cannabis control commission is potentially looking for legislation that says very clearly that they have the authority to look at to examine the host community agreements that each municipality as we just signed three and but then the question is well with what does that mean review review with an eye to what are they looking at social justice are they looking at you asked for too much money are they looking at specifics and so certainly the question has been if they're asking for too much money because they have been very variable but i mean municipalities also right should have the ability to contract with providers yet on the other hand why is the marijuana industry different than any other industry any any guidance at all in that yes but one of the things that's difficult about the way it's written is it says that you can use the money there's a three percent community impact fee you're allowed to ask for it says you can use that money toward education which will be so important in amherst every year not just the first year law enforcement things like infrastructure like intersection redesign because of traffic concerns as we've seen traffic concerns in other communities this place out and so those can all be addressed by those fees but you're asking for them prospectively it's the other difficult thing and so you're guessing and so many of these agreements across the Commonwealth also ask for donations associated with additional education efforts and it will be really interesting to see how that plays out because we just have to grapple with as a community what do we want uh social consumption it's a huge deal right you can't have you cannot consume in public and you can't consume it if you're in say uh affordable housing that has any federal funding associated with it so where can you go well then people say well of course you should be allowed to smoke people can't smoke now so how would you smoke an ongoing story and absolutely gather again uh hopefully there'll be some progress and providing definition and assistance from the state and with that we're winding up tonight's show and if you want to see it again it's on Monday night at 6 p.m and in between uh from tonight forward you can see it on Amherst Media's website and on Amherst Media YouTube so thank you for joining us and we look forward to having another guest next week and hopefully we'll see you again