 I'm calling the committee on outreach, communication and appointments to order at 9.35 a.m. So you have a packet today. There's not too much in it, but it has our agenda. However, I'd like to actually start by just asking the committee. I obviously was not at the last council meeting and forgive me, but I have not watched the six hour video of what happened. So I'm just curious how the committee report went and if the council had any questions or input on it. I asked for a show of hands as to people who'd actually read it and most people raised their hands whether, you know, so there's something. And I said that we would have our recommendations for the two that he had sent us. Speaking of the other issue, the two that he had sent us, but that we wouldn't have a written report for tonight because there wouldn't be any good way to write a report between this morning and tonight. But in terms of response to what was the content of the report, I don't think that we didn't really ask for any and I didn't really ask for anything. Okay, easy enough. All right, so in that we'll move on to agenda item three, consideration of time and your appointments to multiple member bodies filed with the town clerk. We have two, I did talk to Paul. He is going to be here. I asked if he could try to be here between 950 and 10 a.m. I thought that would give us some time to just look at those and see beforehand if we have any questions for him so that we don't have to come up with them as he's here. So if we could perhaps start with Board of Assessors just because that's the first one. So this is two people, LeGrande Hines and Ken Hargreaves. Both of them are reappointments. Is there anything that stood out to any member of the committee? Any questions, any concerns, any comments? Darcy? Well, it looks like people on this committee need to be or both of them have completed the required training to be an assessor. I guess you don't have to, that isn't a requirement but seems like it certainly is helpful for the Board of Assessors. Do we know that it's a requirement? Alyssa? It's required by the state. It says in the charge the required. It's required by the state. It's not the same kind of training that Dave Burgess gets. It's for boards of assessors and it is very specifically tailored to them and yes, they are required to have it. And if he had appointed someone who didn't have it yet then they would just be required to do it within X period of time. Okay, any other comments on these? Alyssa? I have a process thing and it's in no way intended to be a criticism given all the things that we are dealing with. But in terms of process moving forward, if what you're going to do is simply reappoint people then to me there's no point in not having done that prior to July 1st. And so I totally appreciate the triage involved in okay, this body doesn't have quorum and so I really need to interview people for that and I need to do this and I need to do that. But if it's very straightforward like it was on both of these bodies, in fact there was only basically one that needed to be appointed to the other body. It just feels like it leaves people less with that hanging thing because I think we've all been hearing feedback from individuals who are like so am I going to get reappointed? What's going to happen? I don't know what the process is and just part of that continuing communication part would be I don't think that normally there's a, we have had several abnormal years of late I would argue but that normally one would be respectful of their service by getting it done prior to July 1st. Because it doesn't actually look like there was a process here, right? The summary of process is just these are reappointments because we know he doesn't interview so the point is that if we knew we were just going to reappoint these people why did it take until the end of August? It's a good question I think for Paul. I'm just going to guess that this is probably something that's not immediately required. So the body, this body probably will not be doing its work right away, I'm just guessing. Maybe I should just shut up and let Paul in. I think that'd be the one. But that follows up on the fact, what I'm sorry I'm not had enough caffeine this morning. What I'm trying to get across is I don't think he did a bad thing by not getting it done because he was focused on other things. But I think in future he should plan for that his workload includes getting it done prior to July 1st especially when it's going to be fairly straightforward which he may well have already realized months ago and just because he knew he had to get some interviews done on other bodies and that sort of thing, it got pushed to the side. But I think that even though we realize, maybe they're not doing a lot of work at this time of year or maybe they're not struggling with quorum or maybe they normally don't meet in the summer anyway, it's just that impression you give applicants and that you give people who are serving to say it's going to be fine, thank you so much for continuing to do this especially since you're already trained in this area we're really grateful to still have you. So it's not that it was actively insulting to not do it, it's just that it's more encouraging to people to have it done and so in future whatever the new, as we continue to improve process it just feels like one of the things we should all strive for is to beat the deadline. So the sort of process question I have perhaps for Paul which is a little bit more hypothetical is so there were essentially two vacancies, right? Two seats opening, there were two people both already there who were up for reappointment. I don't know that there was a flood of applications for the Board of Assessors because I don't know that it's one of our sexier committees but I would be curious in a situation in which there were a few applications for Board of Assessors and because they knew there were vacancies coming up, what happens to those applications, right? If it's a given at this point that you're just reappointed, does it, do we even accept applicant? I mean, there's a weirdness to me of if someone did apply for Board of Assessors is their application I assume is just sitting there until maybe Rich Morse's term expires in a year from now but I guess my question is what do we do with people, if you know that you're going to just reappoint the committee, what do we do with people who are applying for that committee because in reality there isn't a vacancy? Alyssa? Yeah, I think that's a really, and again, like you say it's not specific to Board of Assessors but it's a larger process question is that we have always accepted applications all year round. We've only recently been a couple of times sporadically in the past and now more regularly because of the charter saying you're supposed to let people know their vacancies, right? And of course there's that separate conversation of are there actually vacancies if you're planning to just reappoint but at any rate people put in things because they want to and they don't get thrown away, it's not like the job market sometimes where it's like oh we're not looking for anybody right now buh-bye rather than keeping it somewhere that you can find it again but the other part of that then I think is are we communicating with them that it's not happening, that we're about to, we're so pleased that they applied as opposed to just the generic thank you. Like is there a way to engage them then because then do they become somebody that we should all know about as somebody who's interested in serving the town do they become sort of that personally loathed but perhaps useful general interest sort of category because they wanted to do something and there's not something available in that area but it might be that we're forming some other group that their skills would be really useful for and we'd not know about them in any fashion because it's not, if the council wouldn't know about them because it's not our appointment the town manager would know, he'd be like oh yeah I saw that piece have come across from so and so who wanted to be interested we'd never know about that for our appointment. Great, Darcy? Yeah I guess I'm unclear too about not just about whether we, whether the town affirmatively reaches out or advertises each time, you know each, after each term for each committee rather than just being open to people who have applied or you know do people that are on a committee kind of have a right to have their second term without the town going out and advertising. Alyssa? So following up on that, yes, sporadically in the past the town would say oh by the way we're gonna be having some openings please apply for things but we did not do it in a regular precise basis the charter requires that we do it now and so the question is since the chart I suppose in terms of that process pieces there's no question but that we have to do it and we've done it and that's why we've included it in our packets that show that we did that solicitation because that's required but it also practically speaking what does that mean in terms of how far ahead should it, it's required to be done I believe it's 14 days ahead of double charter but the question is should we be doing it much more 14 days ahead of what? When are we gonna start interviews? Certainly not 14 days ahead of July 1st I mean it's way before that so it's a period of time prior to something and then how often do we remind people do we do it at another time of year too I mean these are all, the charter has certain words but beyond that practically speaking what would be a good way of engaging people on a regular basis on that question and that a small part of that becomes the question I've raised before which is that if you have every intention of appointing all the people who have already served one term to a second term then why are you advertising them as vacancies because they're not really paid? And so I think figuring out how to answer those questions and in what timeline I think would be really valuable I mean we did this months ago because it was the first time we did it in February basically but what is that right time of year? Is there another two times of year in order to both comply and to do good outreach and to do realistic? And I don't know if we specifically advertised for Board of Assessors, we the town because I am looking at the most recent announcement Town Manager seeks members for boards and committees and they called out specific ones that they're looking for. Right, and so I don't ever. No, and this was posted August 13th so this was posted after he filed this and our website is clunky and I can't find back ones. But his packet to us for the Board of Assessors should include based on what we've been doing for our own appointments and that we're volunteers is that his packet should include the idea of the actual announcement that he made for that body and if that in many cases is a generic announcement it's the one from February that just says everybody, everybody but or if it's specific like the one you just pulled out which was specific about several committees which that should now get attached to those committee appointments in the future to show how that was done and so if that which now that I think about it hasn't been done for this packet that should be part of the packet that we're asking for because otherwise we come back to George's question. How do we know the process was followed if it's not addressed one way or the other? Sarah? So as I'm waking up a little bit, usually we do have like a list of side we've asked for the announcement and then we asked for a little bit about like what the process was. And we kind of have a summary of the process but it just says I'm reappointing. I don't know if we want in both candidates had completed the training. So does that mean that we just assume that like Alyssa said this was you just decided because maybe nobody else applied or these people are just really fantastic and it would not make sense to not reappoint them if he can but we don't know any of that. That wasn't said so if those are things that we are usually asking for even if there's a good reason why he didn't do them I feel like we should also just see something saying I didn't do this or because of, didn't do A because of B. No it does. Right, okay. Just because I want to make sure we talk about it before he gets here which may or may not be seen. Can we look at design review board? This has two appointments and one new member. Jerk. Just notice under summary process I reviewed those who had expressed interest in serving on the design review board and reached out to all applicants. One responded. He's just describing what happened. Do people feel that that would raise the issue of large enough pool? Just reflect what do people make of that? If anything maybe you make nothing of it. Good, bad, or indifferent. So we had to fill a vacancy and we had a pool of one? Well it suggests that the pool was, the size was unknown but only one person responded. So he reached out to, I mean I'm just again surmising but I assume he reached out to a number of people and they just didn't get back to him or they said I'm no longer interested and only one came in for or said yes I'm interested and so we interviewed that one person. Again my feeling is that I come from this from the perspective of he's trying to fill committees and if people are interested he's going to try and put them on that committee if they qualify in any way shape or form versus the idea that while that's not a big enough pool you've got to continue to look until you get more respondents. The same time the charter says you must notify as soon as there's a vacancy there seems to be the implication that we should move quickly and fill this vacancy. So it seems that these are not necessarily conflict but there's a tension here between the desire to have as many possible applicants as possible versus the desire to make sure that committees are up to full strength and that's a balancing act. I don't know what, so here one person assuming there was more interest than just one but only one responded. Paul I assume probably found them to be perfectly competent from the description and they were recommended. Do people have a problem with that? Thoughts? Darcy? I don't know Erica but I know of her. She's one of my constituents. She lives in district five and she attended one of my office hours and she seems very competent. You know she's a local architect and I could see that the interviewing team would think that she would fulfill the requirement definitely. George? I guess my question is about size of pool which I've heard a number of times from not just from Darcy but from many of you and I understand it's a question that many of you have but here's a good example where do you feel that this is not you personally Darcy but the committee members feel that this is an example where this would rise to the level of concern. Again balancing the desire to fill positions versus the desire to have as many people as possible apply where you draw the line. My tendency would be on the side of trying to fill the committee as quickly as possible with competent people and I wouldn't be that concerned about quote unquote size of pool but that's just my opinion. I'm wondering what others think. Sarah? So that raises I think an interesting question because I actually do know Erica's a ghost and I've known her for a really long time and so I look at that and go oh well that's fabulous. Thank goodness she was the one person who applied but I think that I probably should not be as biased because if I didn't know Erica I might be like wow. Like this is great for this appointment right now but we really need to start stepping up and trying to find ways to engage more people. So I don't know how much bias should always work. I would say normally I don't know if I would stop the process but I think it would definitely be one of those things where we could list and say wow we should really somehow start trying to let more people know about this and try to drum up some interest. Alyssa? So speaking again of Erica's praises I think Erica's terrific I've known her for years and I'm really pleased she'll be able to fill this role for us. I think that the issue that we're speaking of right now which is tied into all these other things like the 14 days notice and all of that and because how do people know? I mean did they see the notice in February? Did they know because they ran into a community participation officer or they went to an office hour or how do they know? But aside from all that is that this is the disadvantage of and I think it goes along with our ongoing challenges memo that we gave to the council last week is this is part of that ongoing challenges if we're not gonna report the size of the pool on a regular basis then we're not gonna know anything about the size of the pool. I mean it's that simple. And so although this one does give us surprisingly more information implied by the statement that's in there about one responding that doesn't tell us whether or not there were seven or two other applications. And I know that we've talked at great length about what's the right net size and the fact that we don't know and the fact that town manager is not in a position currently that he's willing to tell us the size of the pool. But that's something we've talked about with our appointments too and as we continue to develop our appointment process maybe this just feeds into that conversation of okay well we've expressed this concern about the town manager's appointments about not knowing should we be going out and doing some additional work even if the person's terrific. Or if we don't set that precedent ourselves within our group so it doesn't really make sense to say well the town manager should tell us the size of the pool if we're not willing to say the size of the pool and then I guess the question is how finally we're dicing it are we willing to say the size of the pool that the town council knows the size of the pool or the entire community knows the size of the pool because that reflects back to that whole how much of this is transparent. So the town council arguably knows the size of the pool that's already been winnowed by staff by the time it gets to our designee because we are not seeing the raw data on those applications because there's some people who have already interacted with staff and said no I'm not interested at this time or no I'm focused on this other thing so we're not getting raw data to begin with but we are getting closer to the pool whereas with the town manager appointments we're not seeing anything other than the people and so I think it just reflects back to our process then trying to set the precedent that we would like to encourage to be true for other appointments. Final thoughts on that? I wanna be respectful of the town manager's time. Morning. Morning Paul, how are you? Good. So we have gone through board of assessors and designer view board. There are a few questions that we do have none of which are about the individuals who have been appointed but about the process. So with regard to board of assessors but not necessarily specific to board of assessors so both appointments are reappointments. There was some question about so at this point it seems as though if you were currently serving on the committee and you're in your first term barring something substantial you get a second term on the committee. And so there's no I mean there's no interview there's no real process right? I mean it's just they're reappointed. And so the question I guess we had was in a situation like that are we actively advertising for committees that have a whole bunch of reappointments such as board of assessors? Are we marketing these as vacancies as the charter requires if there's not really a vacancy because there's sort of an automatic reappointment and if people do apply we don't know if other people applied for board of assessors we can make some assumptions but if other people did apply for something like board of assessors where there were vacancies but not really vacancies because there were these automatic reappointments do we have any type of communication with people who applied to basically say look we're actually not appointing to this committee but we'll keep it on file or is it just a thank you for applying? So thanks for having me. I think the I wouldn't say there are at automatic reappointments. I think that's not how I look at this. Board of Assessors is an odd one to discuss because it's one that very few people express an interest in it's also one that you have to go to school for a week to be qualified to become a member of the board of assessors. So I think that that's part of it. So this is that's an odd one. But we can have a general conversation about how it applies to lots of different committees. So if someone applies they get interviewed. If they've said I want to be a member of the board of assessors even if there are the sort of so-called automatic reappointments I would want to interview them. If nothing else just to out of courtesy but also to say is this someone, they're often resignations they're often people who move for this board or they might be some interest in something else. So you never know really what it is. So if someone raises their hand and wants to volunteer for something we try to recognize that. So for board of assessors these were the two who have been going through the schools. They've been showing commitment. There's a long educational process and we're gonna actually start that tonight with the town council too because assessing is something no one's familiar with and there's gotta be some kind of education. The select board has been educated over a number of years so they're already up to speed but their assessing is a wholly different thing. In the general terms though if there are multiple vacancies if there are renewals, people who are eligible for a second term I would interview other people as well because again we look at the total mix of what is coming of what the committee needs. So and I think there are some committees that have a lot of interest like this CPAC committee and so that will be one that there are might be one or two people who are eligible for reappointment but we'll wanna look at that whole menu of people who have expressed interest. For DRB there were a handful of people who were interested but when we reached out they had chosen other things and or moved or something else. One of the challenges we get because I know you think about the pool is it big enough is to say no to people and so we had an email this morning from someone who said I didn't get appointed to the last two things, I'm really upset because I've been recruited to put my name forward and she's still in the running for other things so and I think she will but it was that kind of experience of you come in and you say hey put your name in and then you say but you're not good enough is a real I mean I think it's a downer for people we wanna welcome as many people and get them find a role for them wherever we can but we also have certain standards we're trying to meet for our committees and boards so that they people are gonna succeed on the committee or board that they serve so I wouldn't really focus a whole lot on the if the greatest person on earth walks through on the size of the pool I think if the greatest person walks through the door on the first day just like you're fine with DRB that's good enough you know your perspective is this person that's in front of me a good person for this role that's how I and I guess the way you're thinking of it is there someone even better out there and maybe there is but we don't have their name in front of us so I'm sort of a rambling sort of bunch of ideas so I'm not sure if I answered your questions. So I guess just to clarify because I think we're still trying to figure out how reappointments work so in theory using Board of Assessors as an example and ignoring the weirdness around it recognizing there were two people up for reappointment, two vacancies had other people applied they would have still been interviewed. Oh sure, yes. Okay and in theory if one of them was like stellar someone might not have been reappointed. We might have had a conversation with the other with one of the people said how interested are you in continuing on? Okay, yeah. Are there follow-ups, questions, comments, George? Just to point out to the film members of my committee that in what Paul is saying this is also a way that he can do recruitment. I'm really pleased and impressed by the fact that he interviews everybody no matter what and secondly that when he has the person in front of him while they may not be appropriate for a particular body that they're particularly talking about where he has the opportunity and sounds like he does try to think where are the places where they might fit and I like that very much. It's a way of doing recruitment but first of all it's a way of simply acknowledging as I think the committee has expressed a desire to recognize everyone who has expressed an interest and the best way to do that is actually to talk to them and the manager has said that that's what he does and I think that's excellent and also gives him an opportunity to think of other bodies where these folks might also fit. So it's a good way to do recruitment. Alyssa. So two parts following up on what George said one was the other bodies part and we talked about that briefly before we'd asked the town manager to join us which is that one of the things is he then finds out about people who are appropriate for other bodies but we don't have any way of knowing that those people exist because we don't know what applicants are out there. So that's unfortunate it's true he certainly has a lot more appointments to do than we do and maybe he could encourage people to fill out the yet to be designed future town council CAF that's just for town council appointments but which was just one more form that people will complain about filling out but the other part is I'm gonna push back on the please we're interviewing everybody no matter what cause that's not true. What you're talking about is new applicants are being interviewed no matter what. In fact it was just clearly stated that we're not even sure of the level of enthusiasm reappointments have for continuing because they haven't been talked to before they get reappointed. So yes we're embracing new people and that's terrific and to the other part of that I'm still going to constantly refrain that once in does not mean that you have tenure and therefore and tenure isn't even that kind of thing as we all know at this table. So the fact that there's not even a conversation held with those people to say how enthusiastic are you about this or would you be just as happy to give it up after another year if I can find somebody else which is obviously not the way you phrase it but what is the thing I've heard back from applicants for reappointment in the past like wow I was really kind of hoping I was done but I'd be happy to continue on for another year but never having had that conversation and just reappointing them because they're still sitting there is to me not interviewing everybody. So I don't have that individual conversations but I do either talk to the staff or the chair of the committee to say I wouldn't just reappoint someone without having someone said do you want to be reappointed? And maybe it would be a better thing for me to have that conversation so I can read in some nuance into it like you've suggested I might ask a chair you've got two people who are up for reappointment can you ask them if they want to be reappointed or not at your next meeting and they do and they say yes or no or whatever but I don't have that conversation but it wouldn't be a hard, a big ask for me to do that if you thought that was, yeah. If there was a substantive difference there. Troy? I think it's a judgment call I trust the manager's judgment I think that if I were in his shoes I would do just as he said I would reach out to the chair I'd just touch base but there are only so many hours in the day and he has an enormous number of appointments to make and with reappointments I don't have the problem that maybe some do that somehow he has to sit down and talk to every single human being that's potentially going to be appointed or reappointed. I like very much the idea of reaching out to new people I think that's laudable and I trust his judgment with the rest and I would assume that he does well I would do what he suggests which is talk to the chair and or at least somebody on the body to make sure everybody's copacetic and if there are problems then maybe an interview would be required but I don't share the difficulty that some seem to have with him having to speak to every single person that gets appointed or reappointed. Are there comments on this? There are questions from the town manager? Alyssa? So I guess I'm just in the mood to fight with George a little bit more but George I'm going to say I have appointed people to committees and I have dealt with chairs who have not had good relationships with the other members of their board and therefore just asking their opinion on a simple yes or no would not have gotten me the answer I was looking for when I was doing a reappointment nor has asking a staff member which in many committees don't have staff members and doesn't mean they aren't important committees. The most important ones obviously do but they also have differing opinions and you're going to have really hard press to find a staff member who's going to say anything even mildly negative about any of our wonderful volunteers because of course they don't do that just like they don't say that about members of the public they interact with them in other ways. So I find your explanation not based on experience but based on this assumption that everybody just gets along and everybody does their work and I've not experienced that on committees I've experienced members who don't show up regularly who are difficult when they come who are there to fight. I've had chairs who are like that too who don't like that there are other members there who aren't there to fight. So I would see value in that conversation coming from the appointing authority with the person certainly perhaps prefaced by a conversation with the staff member for example that would help them understand what dangerous territories they might be wading into with that particular chair at that particular moment. But so I do appreciate that. The other thing is I didn't know Evan based on the conversation we had before we got here if we were gonna talk about the so to speak recruitment notice that's compliant with the charter. So if you're next with that then that's the next yes. So any other comments on it sounds like where we are with reappointments is so everyone who is applied who applies it is interviewed. Reappointment is not necessarily always guaranteed if there are other candidates who apply for a position there might be a conversation with someone who's up for reappointment. Currently there's a conversation with the chair to make sure there or staff member to make sure there is interest in reappointment. But there might be some feeling on this committee that there should at least be a cursory conversation with the actual person to make sure that they're willing to and interested and continue serving and for the term I mean what I remember when we were with Mark Parent I mean the question was he only wanted to do one more year and so we wouldn't have wanted to appoint him to a three year term. So the final thing there's no final comments or questions on this. The one other thing we had was about recruitment notices. So we noticed that the one that went out on August 13th sort of named individual committees versus the one that went out in February that was just sort of a general or we're recruiting. We don't know for these two I don't know if there was ever one that said we're looking for people for board of assessors or design review board or if it was part of that general one but because we don't know there was some interest in having those recruitment notices as part of the packet so that we can sort of see what was done because there is sort of a difference between just saying we're looking for people with boards and committees and hey maybe they'll apply for design review board versus what we're seeing from this August 13th one that just said we're actively looking for people for these committees or I know when energy and climate action was first formed there were like two notices that were like this committee here's what it does and we're looking for people. And so that's useful context for us to have to know was the recruitment notice a general one was it specific and that might inform sort of some of these questions about pool or candidates? Does that adequately sum up what we talked about? Alyssa? Yeah, just to be clear we've always attached it to our appointment so it's not like it's hard to obtain we've always included it in our better town council appointments. So I think early on every committee had vacancies. So we just sort of said every committee has vacancies and as we sort of got through the first bulk of appointments we're now saying now we need a more targeted recruitment because we needed more people to apply and that's why we were more specific about these particular ones where we knew there were vacancies to be had and because otherwise people get overwhelmed I felt and so we picked six or eight or whatever it was and said these are the ones that we're really focused on. We have some, I mean we have some we have a lot of interviews coming up over the next couple of weeks which is really exciting. We have a lot of interest in the disability access committee and for the renewed interest in the council on aging which is really exciting. The other things just to give you the other things that are timely that we're gonna be prioritizing our CPA and CDBG because that's a process that they need to get appointed and get through the process hopefully by the end of September with the council so they can get started early in October. There's a few one-off appointments you know where someone there was one vacancy left or something so we're sort of trying to find people for those like participatory budgeting is one, public art has a vacancy and there's a resignation I believe from LSSE so there's certain things there's just some one-offs that we might be able to pull through really quickly so that's where human rights has a student member we have to wait for the high school to get back into session before we can request for the student member. So those are sort of the high priority that's how we're prioritizing right now to get through the next month basically of interviews and referrals to you. If I can ask a question since you're here that isn't directly, my committee would permit since you mentioned it, participatory budgeting we know there's one vacancy. I know that they also have not met yet is the intention that you want to fill that vacancy before they ever meet and has that been communicated to the, I'm worried because they do have a deadline that's already fairly tight and if we don't get someone appointed I don't know what communication has been to the four people who have been appointed who might be sitting there wondering why they haven't met yet. So I think the idea is to have them meet after Labor Day when we talked about this with staff who are gonna be calling that first meeting I believe would be after Labor Day and they should meet whether they have an appointment of that seat filled or not but they need to get moving on that. Thank you. George. I don't know about the rest of you but I've not memorized the charter and so I'm just gonna read the, what I assume is the relevant charter passage as to vacancies on multiple member bodies which is for those who are interested 912E. Whenever a vacancy occurs or is about to occur on a multiple member body, the appointing authority shall immediately cause public notice of the vacancy or a pending vacancy to be published published on the town bulletin board for a period of not less than 14 days. It doesn't seem to, that's pretty strong. That's something that happens automatically whenever there's a vacancy on anybody or even an impending, not quite sure even how to interpret that but are you comfortable with that, Paul, in terms of, I mean, it's been a tremendous number of vacancies recently but going forward, does that language cause you any pause or are you okay with it? No, once, the immediately is the key. That's a challenge but it's in the charter so we need to make more attention to that, I think, actually. The 14 days is not an issue but making sure as soon as we, as soon as the clerk receives notice that we have to advertise right away. Yeah, that's what it seems to say, yeah. Thanks for reading that. Well, I just. Darcy, I just have another slightly unrelated question. When I was looking at the design review board appointment, I was interested to look at the committee charge for the design review board and just wondering if that's actually the way it's printed with just the reference to the bylaw or whether it actually states the summary in the actual committee charge cause we don't have it here. We just have references to the bylaw, to the zoning bylaw, says committee charge summary. So, that's just of interest to me to have the actual committee charge summary when we're getting the appointment. That's the committee charge that exists, Darcy. That's the only committee charge that exists is what he gave us. He gave us the exact thing. We need to clean them all up, but yeah. They're messy. Remember that long memo you got from the select board? They're messy. There's a town council committee that's very interested in having a committee reformer at their charges. Yes, Alyssa. So to follow up on a couple of things. One is in regards to calling the first meeting after Labor Day, whether the seats filled or not didn't actually answer the question as to whether or not the four people understand that. So that would be worth noting. And the other part is that the 14 days, I totally appreciate we're doing this new thing. We talked about that before you got here where we just did it irregularly in the past and now we have this thing where we're required to do it and it's so much different. Even though it reads just like the sections on jobs, it's very different, right? Because you always have a closing period on a job whereas with appointments, you know, it doesn't have to have a closing date per se. You're balancing things over the course of the year. So one of the things we talked about and that we'll talk about more just in terms of appointments and then hope to talk to you about more is what does 14 days mean in terms of what time of year, right? Like it's obviously not 14 days prior to July one because I wouldn't give you any time to actually interview anybody but is February the right time of year or should we be doing like a twice a year thing? We did what we needed to do this year because that's what was required but just trying to think of the whole outreach aspect of it, what's the most sensible way of doing that? And then like you've talked about there's the generic ones and then there's also the very specific ones when you're looking for specific skills or needing to drum up particular interest about a group and this is clearly one of the reasons the community participation officers were invented or the concept not divided into three was invented in the first place was to ensure that more information was getting out there about these things because otherwise speaking with the rain cloud as a few of our constituents do over your head is, well, if you're on a committee, you stay on a committee. Yeah, they might interview you but whatever and maybe you didn't know about it and maybe the form was hard to fill out and there's like all these difficulties that supposedly explain why we don't and so we're just trying to be clear all the time. Look, here's the information, it's out there. There's a way to do it and just being able to say that over and over again figuring out maybe better times of year. I mean, we recently got comment about the town manager evaluation process which asked for things that we'd already done but they didn't see them anyway. They asked for a form that already existed. They asked for a time for notifications that had already occurred but they didn't see them which means that there are other people out there that didn't see them. So just figuring out more ways to get that out there and so maybe figuring out when we have because we know we always have a bunch for July one. Beyond the individual onesie twosie things is I think there has to be one opposite a process in place for when somebody resigns that we immediately know that we have to do this 14 day notice and there should be like a template on file, right? Boom, that one goes out but then in addition to that for the big annual push are there a couple of annual pushes? Is there one and do we set a deadline because otherwise, how long do we keep trying to obtain that pool? Any other further comments or questions for the town manager? Paul, is there anything else you'd like to add? Thank you. He did that several times and never gave us council on aging and so he just cut and paste from the previous report and it still wasn't in there so. All right. So with that, I will entertain a motion to recommend the town council approve the town manager's appointments to the board of assessors. I still move. Yeah, we should. We name them in the town council motion. Do we feel like we need to name them? Yeah, we should name them here because where else are they gonna be in our minutes? Fair enough. So the whole revised that motion. So correct my language as I stumble along. I move that we recommend the appointments of the town manager to the board of assessors namely Ligrand Heinz and Ken Hargreaves. So we. I'm thank you and these are both. Mr. Heinz is for a three year term and Mr. Hargreaves is for a two year term. Do we have that motion written down? Is that butchered notion? Clear enough for you? That's right. Yes, please do it the way we always do it very much. Not the way I do it, but the way we do it. Are you pulling it up Alyssa? There's no reason to do this differently than what's on the motion sheet. Did you break that for them or did they figure it out themselves? They figured it out. Hold on, let's make sure we get the motion. Okay, so it would be, so I'm gonna make this motion. I move that OCA recommend the town council approve the following town manager appointments to the board of assessors effective immediately. For a three year term to expire June 30th, 2022 Ligren-Heinz reappointment for a two year term to expire June 30th, 2021 Ken Hargreaves. I second that motion. Is that that parallels the town council motion? Is there any further discussion? Alyssa. I regret the fact that because I went off on the segue about the 14 day notice that we did not pin down the town manager to providing the council with the actual notice that went to the public, just like we always provide on all of ours. And I think that should be provided tonight for the council to show what notice went out, whether it was the generic notice or if you later wrote a more specific notice for board of assessors and design review board both. So I'm gonna say that about both of them. And I can't support providing its town council without what we consider to be a relatively complete packet. How do you know he followed the process? There's no proof that he followed the process. So I can either vote against it as it stands or I can encourage the rest of you to say we should tell him that he wants to. Fully attend, I'll send him an email after our meeting. Any other discussion? Okay, all those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay, that's unanimous. I was board of assessors, right? So then I will now move that we recommend the town council approve the following town manager appointments to design review board effective immediately for three year term to expire June 30th, 2022. Lindsey Schnarr reappointment for a two year term to expire June 30th, 2021. Catherine Porter reappointment for a one year term to expire June 30th, 2020. Erica Zecos. Hi. Which one? Zeko Z-E-K-O-S. It's Erica with a K. Is it Erica with a K? It's what it is here. It's different on the town council motion sheet. Okay. So I will also contact the town clerk. Maybe it is, but here at the cat. I second that motion. Okay, is there any discussion? All those in favor, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Aye. It's unanimous. Okay. So I just have a question, random question about term limits. And the town handbook suggests that people should be limited to two terms without saying how many years that would be. So if somebody is appointed for one term and then gets reappointed for another term of three years, I mean, if someone gets appointed for a term of one year and then a regular term of three years, is he or she somehow done after those two terms or what? Because then he or she wouldn't have an equivalent amount of time to someone who got three a three-year term and then a three-year term. Alyssa? The assumption that we wrote that with was a total of six years. And so it doesn't matter how many different terms those were because sometimes terms are only one year, two years, or three years. For the reason of rotation, that doesn't mean that they should be automatically disadvantaged by only having had a one-year term to start. So the assumption was six years, roughly, you know. That's not in the handbook though, right? No, but the handbook says two terms and the handbook doesn't presume that some terms, well, the handbook doesn't cover the fact in that section about the fact that some people only get appointed to a one-year term initially. That's why it doesn't talk about six years is because it just, the handbook section that talks about two terms assumes that the reader is believing that those are three-year terms because that's just what we always have. Even though in all reality, we always have terms that are not three years long. The assumption on our part as an appointing authority, which we were the appointing authority for half of our committees, would be that six years was the basic idea unless we saw a reason to have someone else. Seems like that should be added to the handbook so that it was clear, wasn't clear to me. So this time, probably because you hadn't been, the problem with doing appointments for years and years is that you know what it means versus what it says. And so, and again, it doesn't anywhere in there address the fact that some people only start with a one-year or two-year appointment. It also doesn't address the fact that, for example, cultural council is limited to six years, absolutely like on a date-to-date basis, not even on a whenever we appoint them for, it's like you appointed them in March, they better be done in March and they don't come out. But that's the way the state looks at it. And so it doesn't get into that level of detail either. We would not, we should at this point be looking at the appointed committee handbook. I think that would be a good thing for our body to be looking at, but I would not change that in and of itself by itself as a thing to fix right now because I don't think there's been any agreement on the part of the council that we want to give people any particular preference for a second term in terms of the entire council. But I agree that when we do fix that, that would be something to talk about more because it doesn't reflect the reality that we're seeing, which is that plenty of people only get one or two year terms to begin with and then they later get a three. That's like, ooh, you had three terms but they were each only one year. That's not the same thing as somebody getting two, three year terms. Other comments on appointments before we move on? So agenda item four is discussion of tonight's report to town council. My intention is to give a very brief oral report that basically summarizes the conversation we had today around design review board and board of assessor since those two appointments, sets of appointments are on tonight's town council agenda. Is there anything in particular members of this committee would like me to include or just make sure I say? Sarah? I know we wanna keep it brief, but I think that one of the things that we've been trying to do here in this committee is make sure that the appointments process and all the information that's given out in sort of a packet, we understand why it wasn't uniform before, but now we're trying to make it uniform. So maybe it might just be good to mention to the council the things that we're hoping to establish before all appointments going forward, like talking about the 14 days or when all those things that we want in the packet and some of the timing just so that it's out there in another place and we can keep sort of reaffirming as we go along, nope, we'll bring it back. Like this is what we definitely wanna have every time. Okay, anything else people wanna make sure I include? Okay, so that I wanna turn to agenda item five, which is our fall meeting schedule. So if you go into the packet, there is a calendar. So this obviously has some colors on it and I was a very bad scientist and didn't give you a key. So let me briefly tell you what all these things are. So red are holidays, green are town council meetings and the circled blue are OCA meeting dates. My initial intention when I went to put this together was to maintain our current schedule of meeting twice a month. My secondary objective was for us to not have our meeting on town council meeting days. You will notice that I failed on that. And the reason for that, miserably, the reason for that is because if you remember back in December or January when we were trying to set our town council meeting calendar for the fall, meeting on Mondays in the fall is very difficult because there are so many Monday holidays in the fall. So September has Labor Day, October has Columbus Day and November has Veterans Day. So looking at September, knocking off the second for Labor Day because we won't be meeting on a holiday, the 16th, and I don't remember exactly why, but Alyssa and I have a bylaw review committee meeting scheduled for the morning of the 16th that would conflict with this meeting. And so that took the 16th off the table. Obviously I didn't want to wait from August 26th to September 30th to have an OCA meeting. And so unfortunately, and both of our OCA meetings in September will fall on town council meeting dates. The same is true for October because we have a town council meeting scheduled at least tentatively for every Monday in October that is not Columbus Day. And so it is literally impossible to have, that meeting on the 28th is of course, if needed meeting, I don't know if that will actually occur, but it's literally impossible to have one in October that does not fall on a town council meeting day. November, I propose November 4th, which is not a town council meeting day. And then November 18th, which is because the only other alternative was November 25th, which is the week of Thanksgiving. And I'm always has it, even though Thanksgiving is not until Thursday, people travel. I know UMass gives folks the entire week off. I often take off for that entire week. And so I wanted to be respectful of that. And then same December, the only wanting to avoid the period between Christmas and New Year's where people travel a lot. And also the 23rd felt a little bit too close to Christmas on people might be traveling that left only the second, the ninth and the 16th. I didn't wanna have to do back to back meetings. I wanted to try and schedule a meeting the latest in December as was reasonable so that we could take care of whatever was filed before the new year, especially given the possibility that this committee could be reconstituted given the new year, since that's within the authority of the president every year. And so I picked the second and the 16th. So I am open to feedback on this calendar, but with the understanding that it is a logistically challenging period of year to meet on Mondays. If people want to meet on not Mondays, we can have that discussion and that opens up a lot more dates, but I didn't wanna make that dramatic a change. So are there any thoughts on this? Darcy. I'm just, I just have a question. Do you know why the town council isn't meeting on November 4th? Yes, it's the election day. Or election day Eve. Election night. Oh, okay. And there was a decision not to. That makes sense. We've had that conversation at council twice. Yeah, which is why we scheduled the if needed October 28th meeting. All right. Are there any other questions, comments, concerns about this calendar? Recognizing that it is far from the ideal I had hoped for, but... I guess my only concern is if we get wrapped up in some kind of new initiative creating new processes or whatever we're doing in the fall that's different, that we might need more time than that. That we might need some additional meetings, but I just don't know. Right. So my intention right now is for us, again, given the prospect that this committee could be reconstituted in January, I don't know if that will happen, if the president will reconstitute any committees, but in theory could. And given that we went through the arduous process of the first set of appointments, I really want it to be the members of this sitting committee here coming up with a new process because we're the ones that went through the prior one, which means that we have sort of that experience and knowledge of what it was like to improve it. And so my hope is that by the end of December we can have a new process. It took us a lot longer to come up with the first one, but my hope is having done all of that work, this should be faster. My intention right now is to do this sort of chronologically. And so my thoughts at the moment are to use September to have discussions about CAFs, how we, what information we're looking for on CAFs, what was useful in CAFs and what wasn't, how we think the CAF should change. There's an idea that I had that Alyssa mentioned about perhaps having a separate CAF for town council appointments that we have full control over since there are only two town council appointments that would be a planning board and ZBA CAF that we would have complete control over its handling. So all of these are questions I'd like to handle in September, which is how do people apply for town council appointed committees. October, my thought is so what do we do with the applicant pool? How do we decide when an applicant pool is sufficient? How do we decide when we're moving forward scheduling interviews? And then my thought is to use November and December to do what I think will be the hardest part, which is once we have an applicant pool, once we're ready to set up interviews, what do interviews look like and how do we actually go about picking candidates? And I think inherent within that will probably also be some of the questions we've been wrestling with around criteria for picking candidates, including perhaps questions of whether or not we wanna recommend to the council a term limit policy that is a continuation of what exists or something different. So mentally, that is my plan for the fall is to sort of use each month to take care of one step of the process. Whether or not that requires more meetings, I don't know, I think we have to be open to the possibility that we might have to add more meetings to get it done. But my hope is one month on CAFs, one month on sending up interviews, determining the pool and two months on the actual interview process and how we bring candidates forward. Our last two meetings have been fairly brief because we're pretty much ready to wrap up. I don't expect the fall meetings to be quite so brief because we will also be handling some of the town manager's appointments, but my hope is as we've been working out this process with the town manager of what we're looking for that we can do those a bit more expeditiously. Darcy. So are you just talking in those general categories about town council appointments? Correct. And what is happening with our Outreach Subcommittee? So that was a question I was gonna ask because this committee is, we had an Outreach Subcommittee, technically we still have one, right? And technically we never dissolved. It has not met for a while, it stopped meeting once it became very clear that our workload was beyond our capacity to have a subcommittee. I think that I'm open to having that start meet again, but I am also a little wary that the same thing could happen as last time of, we meet from 9.30 to 11 and that committee meets from 11, 11.30, but then this committee ends up meeting longer. And so I was actually going to ask the other three members of that subcommittee. Well, so one whether or not they was interesting getting it going again for the fall. And if so, if there was a feeling that that subcommittee needed to meet separately from this committee, not just tacked on to the end. And so I'd love to hear the thoughts from Darcy. Well, we do, we have one project that is ongoing, that we haven't received the responses from all the counselors, but that could result in just a spreadsheet that we could share with the council or the public or both, presumably both. So at the very least, we should do, we should follow through with that. Right, absolutely. Alyssa? I would hope that we would look at the subcommittee as only meeting as needed to deal with the things that we assign the subcommittee to do. I don't want it, especially since it's four or five of us, it would be very easy for it to devolve into similar conversations that we'll be having at the full committee meeting. And so I would like to, even though it's always fun to talk about stuff more, I would recommend that, for example, the current focus, right, is on still dragging a few counselors kicking and screaming into answering those questions. And then that'll be done. And then to say here at this body, okay, what's the next thing we want, what's the next thing the outreach subcommittee wants to do? Does that make sense to us? And let's send them up to do that, just like we might assign people off to go find out more things specifically about other people's appointment processes or something. So I see it as a body that's particularly focused on outreach that perhaps has a relationship with the CPOs, but then is doing tasks as assigned as opposed to an ongoing, well, why are we meeting this week kind of thing. Okay. Any other thoughts on the outreach subcommittee? Just struggling with, I hear Alyssa, and I agree with her that there would be the very real danger of us wandering off into other areas that really are not the purview of the subcommittee. My understanding is that, and pretty vague at this point, that this body, this subcommittee was formed to look fairly broadly, I think, at the whole issue of outreach. We really have spent almost all our time, understandably, on appointments. And I think maybe Sarah can speak to this too, but there was a sense of really neglecting the outreach component. And so I guess I would lean a little bit toward, I agree with Alyssa, it has to be, we have to be clear on what this body and this subcommittee is supposed to be doing, but I guess I have a more, perhaps just a vaguer, but also a more broad sense that I'd like it to be able to talk and reflect a bit on the whole outreach process and the council's role in that. And so I guess I would have a hard time putting my finger on exactly beyond this specific issue of town councilors responding to a poll or to what Darcy sent out. I'm not sure I could actually put my finger on something as specific as that, and yet I would like this body to continue to meet and continue to talk in some broad terms about outreach. And I don't know if that would satisfy Alyssa's concern or not, maybe it wouldn't. But, or maybe some people have some very specific things right now that they can just list that we, the subcommittee could focus on. But right now, I guess if someone asked me, I would say, well, this subcommittee is focused on the issue of outreach and the council's role in that, how well we're doing it, how we could do it better. And that would be about as specific as I could get at the moment. Sarah. So originally, the reason why I wanted to take the time to have a subcommittee that dealt with outreach is because the council president specifically said to me, what are you doing? What is your committee doing for outreach? And I said, we're looking into what our role actually is. But even if we wanted to dedicate, to address Alyssa's concerns, we have a certain amount of time that in our meeting together as OCA to talk about this, I think that us actually looking at what roles town councilors have for outreach, how we can establish like, what is the protocol for how often we reach out to people? Do we have a role actually, or do we want to have a role? As far as, we're looking at the pool, that's one of our things for town council appointments. Does OCA want to have a hand in some of the outreach and or is that appropriate? I think looking at our charge, I think we still have unresolved issues about what our role for outreach is and then what like the RAC is and what the community participation officers do. And I feel like we can't just let that go. I feel like that's something that's a privilege or a power that OCA was given. And I think that even, I think that we need to think about what we want our role to be in those things without just sort of handing them off or saying, well, we'll just deal with it as it comes up. But that's just my opinion. George? Inviting CPOs to come and meet with the subcommittee. Would that be another words on occasionally just to hear from them what they're doing and rather than having it be the entire committee, that could be something that we could do specifically. But I agree with Sarah that it's a fairly broad area that I'd like us to explore and talk about. And so I'd like a lot of leeway with the understanding that it is not a forum for us to be doing the full committee business. It's specifically on the issue of outreach. So what I think I'm gonna do is take a slight pause on this and my, I wanna have a conversation with Paul about when and with what level of confidence he expects to hand us this mountain of appointments. And if he expects that for the ninth, then I would not wanna schedule, given the other things we have to do, I would not wanna schedule an outreach of committee on the ninth. If he's expecting the 23rd, then I wouldn't wanna do it then. But I think that it would be useful for the outreach of committee to have at least a half an hour meeting in September to say, we have this one project going on, the Darcy is spearheading, but what else do we need to be doing? That's a meeting about, to some extent, recalibrating what our role is given what we've gone through. What I would say is that should be on the ninth or the 23rd and it should be sort of a check-in meeting of we sort of let this lapse, what are we gonna do going forward over the next month, recognizing we will have some limitations on our time. I would prefer not to have to schedule these for another day of the week, but I would also say if we are gonna do it the way we had done it before, then this committee would have to commit to actually ending by whatever time that subcommittee starts. George? Remind me who's on the subcommittee. Everyone but Alyssa. And I'm wondering if, and this is just the coming up top of my head, whether it would make sense to relieve Evan of being on that subcommittee, given all his other duties. He's now taken on the duty of being chair. I don't know how Evan feels about this. Maybe he would feel strongly that he wants to be on it and that's fine, he'd be welcome. But I'm also offering him the thought or for suggesting the idea that maybe he should hand this task over to the three who are currently serving and he could step away from it. And then we would just report back to the committee. Is that something you'd be open to or would you rather continue to be on this subcommittee? I'm always open to stuff being removed from my play at this point. But I would still want to, I would still want to post the meetings. You've want to post the meetings? Because I want to make sure that I, I don't want to lose sight of what was going on. It would be our responsibility to make sure that you know when and what. Because it's still a part of this committee. But we're not going to tell you what we do. We're going to keep complete you completely in the dark. And what I'm saying is I think I'd like a first meeting, a check-in meeting to just say, what are we going to do that, because you know the whole idea of subcommittees is to have them focus, but they always report back to the committee itself. And I just don't, other than this one product we have going on, I don't know what the outreach committee wants to do. And so I'm perfectly happy stepping back from it, more than happy to step back from it. But I would want to be in probably that first meeting just to help understand what is going to happen. Darcy, you had something? I just also, I looked and saw that there were just two counselors that haven't responded to that survey, one of whom thinks that she has. So there's really just one. And so I think that we can get that done very quickly. And so the question is, what do we want to do? I don't know whether we want to talk about that here. We're not having an outreach subcommittee meeting in a while, we might want to just figure out. We want to publish that or what we want to do with it. Right, so I think what I'm going to do is schedule an outreach subcommittee meeting for either the 9th or the 23rd, depending on what it looks like, we'll have more town manager appointments. And I think the purpose of that, the agenda of that would be two things. One, a discussion of we have all this information now, what are we going to do with it? And two, if we're figuring that that project is sort of starting to wrap up, what's the next focus thing this group is going to work on? Because what I don't want it to be is just a group to meet together and be like, outreach is great, we should do more of it. How should we do it? I don't know. And so I'd like there to be sort of specific deliverables that we're looking at for it to bring back to the committee. I'm going to go, Sarah. No, I think there's lots of hints, so. So I would just say, given the fact that it sounds to me like most of the, this OCA does not want to have like a splinter group where you don't know what's going on or it's not clear or we're going in a different direction. And after that one meeting, would you be expecting us to sort of report back to you where we think we're at? And then OCA as a whole, we'll decide whether or not outreach and communications is actually part of our purview. And then how OCA as a whole would then deal with that? Yes. Yeah. George. I hesitate to say this, but I do find that these back-to-back meetings are really difficult. We, my brain is usually fried by the end of a typical OCA meeting. Maybe this will change and things will become so routine and dull that I'll be full of energy at the end of two plus hours of OCA discussion. But in the past I've been, when we've had done this, I'm gasping for breath. And so I know you're not gonna like this, but I really think that if we're going to be, do a good job and we wanna do this, we should try and find another time. And one option would be to do it on the Monday where we're not meeting. That's one possibility though, that means we have meetings every Monday and or at least three Mondays in September, whatever. Anyway, this is just my personal feeling. I can be easily outvoted, but I find back-to-back meetings extremely difficult to do. I don't know if the others have that problem, but I do. Darcy, you have something? I'm fine with that idea of meeting on and off Monday. I also think that if I get the remaining information on the forms before our next meeting, I'll just, and Google Forms has their own graphic visualizations for showing the data. I'll just send what I have to Evan so we can put it in the packet for our meeting the next time so we can just look at it and see if that's just something that we wanna share with the full council in a council packet and report on it or whether we wanna do something different with that. Or we can just wait until the next subcommittee meeting to figure those questions out. I mean, because the data might say something to us that we'd need to be doing something else. I don't know, or we might wanna just share it so that the rest of the full council and the public can see what we've been doing for our own outreach in our districts. Alyssa? I have the privilege of not actually staying for those meetings. I will of course disagree with my friend, George. I would actually rather see us end at 11 o'clock and start that at 11 because all the conversations you're having at the subcommittee are decisions that need to be made by OCA. The reason you're having a subcommittee is so you have specific deliverables a way of interacting with CPOs or RAC that's different than asking them to come to a full meeting or a way of doing something like a survey or a following up on a specific thing. There should be no separate meeting of a wide ranging discussion about the theory of outreach. That should be taking place right here, right now on this camera because that's part of this committee's charge until it's recommended that it not be part of this committee's charge. So I don't want a group that goes off and just decides a whole bunch of things about process around appointments. We do that as a group. I don't want a group that goes off and decides a bunch of things about outreach. We do that as a group. So that's why I'm just looking for specific deliverables which I think is a shorter meeting, perhaps homework in between in terms of what to bring back to the group, like bringing back a survey that was written and those results and then having the wider range discussions here. And so which makes the subcommittee meeting shorter and easier to tack on at the end of these things. So the other, the one other thing, we've spent far more time in the fall schedule than I expected us to, but that's fine. Because the one other thing that I was gonna bring up because it's, we haven't talked about it in a while, was is the timing of these meetings work for people. I've been scheduling them for 9.30 to 11.30. I think we've always hoped we could end by 11. Does that time work for people? Is there anyone who's interested in either moving the meeting forward or moving it back a bit? And one thing that could perhaps address both Alyssa and George's concerns is we could say that OCA meets at 10 a.m. instead of 9.30 and that the subcommittee when it meets meets at 9.30. And so sometimes it's, I think that the discussions of the subcommittee might be less emotionally exhausting than the discussions of the full committee. And so perhaps there's a possibility of the subcommittee meeting for a half an hour before the full meeting and then reporting directly in the full meeting to what that is and then the full meeting meets from 10 to 11.30. Is there any interest in that? So then it's back to back meetings, but you're sort of front loading the easier meeting. Sarah? I'm willing to do that for the one meeting we have that we're talking about, we're finishing up our project. But then what I would say is, it sounds to me like we're sort of leaning towards having everybody here for all of those discussions. So I would say let's just plan that one earlier and then we'll report back to you. And then instead of just saying, this is definitely a time we meet, which I think is what you're saying, is that we just maybe dissolve the subcommittee unless it has, unless when we come back and report to you, to all of OCA, we think we've got such a workload that we'd need extra time. But I'm hearing from Alyssa that most of these things should be part of all of OCA's purview no matter what as one. And two, I'm also sort of hearing this, and that could be wrong. I'm just saying I'm hearing it, so I could be a misconception that perhaps one of the things that we come to is that this committee decides that outreach is not part of our purview. So maybe we just schedule one, and then talk as OCA as a whole and decide where we wanna go. Okay, George. So then a prominent item on that agenda for the night would be the function, role, and future existence of the subcommittee. Is that what people are? So we may not talk much about CAFs on September 9th. We may be talking more about this subcommittee and its role and whether it has a future. Fair enough. And we're going, I'm willing to. We haven't made any decisions. No, we haven't. I just put it out as an idea to deal with keeping them on the same day but not having to do it after, which has been a problem in the past. Alyssa? I don't wanna spend any of our September 9th OCA meeting talking about the role of the subcommittee unless they've had a brief meeting that said this is what they think their role is. I do not wanna have a wide-ranging committee meeting about that. And I wanna come back to the September CAF and October and November conversation before we finish today. Okay. So I wanna close this conversation. I do wanna just ask the committee generally is the 930 to 1130 meeting slot working for people? Or is there any interest in changing that while we're looking at our schedule more broadly? Thumbs up if it's working or... Since we're looking at the schedule more broadly, we've been meeting since January at 930 in the morning. Is that timing working for people? Or is there any interest in meeting earlier or starting our meeting later? I certainly could do earlier. I would not like to do later. But 930 is working fine. I'd be happy to do nine o'clock. Maybe before that it's getting a bit cruel. But 930 is fine for me. Okay. That's fine. I didn't have any problem with it. I just wanted to check in. Alyssa? And the other thing you wanna talk about? So you know me well enough by now to know that it's very difficult for me to compartmentalize things. And so I'm having real difficulty with the idea of focusing on the CAF before we know what our actual process is gonna be. Because to me, the CAF and what's on it is directly related to all the other pieces. And so if we decide that we're going to have a completely, for example, not saying this as an example, hypothetically speaking, that we are going to have a completely open cattle call where we just have everybody come in and say their piece and we don't have anything in writing, then we don't need a CAF. Or if we're gonna have a CAF that basically just gives us contact information so we can tell them what time the big group interview is. Or we actually want insight as to who they are based on a writing sample, based on a question that's related to the actual work of since we are fortunate to have a relatively limited number of committees, generally the planning board and ZVS. And we want them to write about why they think they bring something to the table for that, not just a list of their amazing accomplishments from their LinkedIn profile. And so, to me, I need to understand better what we're doing with them at the end or even in the midpoint, like when we decide whether or not to interview people because we have a big enough pool. Well, how will we know if we have a big enough pool except for what people have put on, how many people have turned in whatever the CAF looks like. And if the CAF doesn't have the CAF, I would argue that most of us have expressed at some point or another that the CAF is not entirely adequate at telling us whether or not we have an adequate pool as it currently stands. So we can't make those decisions. So I'm not denying your structure. I'm just saying it's gonna be really difficult for me to stay on topic from the standpoint of I'm gonna need to understand what the relationship is of these wonderful, we can design a form all day long and make it beautiful. But that doesn't make it easy to work with. Speaking of examples, town manager evaluation. The form was a lot easier to deal with in past years. Some people liked the survey monkey. I found it incredibly frustrating and would not have written the questions, the goals, the way I wrote them if I knew that that was the instrument we were gonna use at the end. And so I'm just trying to figure out, I'm not just to some extent wanna backward engineer what we're trying to, what are we trying to accomplish? So maybe part of that's part of that initial conversation and then it's, so the CAF, so that's one set of issues, the October issues, the November issues, and they all fit in with that. But I think they're more directly, whereas I feel like we're gonna have members of the public come up and say, you should put this on the CAF and it should be publicly available. Well, that's fine, but how does that actually get us closer to appointing people who wanna be on committees and boards and will bring valuable ideas. Okay, all right, I'll think about how we're gonna make that. Yeah, just a quick comment. All right. Any final comments on any of this? Alyssa. So at what point, because you laid that out nicely, at what point does it fit in to have the conversation again or the continued conversation, trying not to just repeat all elements of it about when to say no to the town manager's appointments? I mean, we're still taking that on a case-by-case basis. We don't have, we have our old decision tree, we have our recent conversations, but are we gonna come up with a real thing that we can hand to the council based on the wonderful report that you just wrote about our various challenges with this that say, until further notice, these are the things we're considering for the town manager's appointments and so you're not gonna see anything different come from us until XYZ conversation happens because I don't know, for example, that as a town counselor that isn't on this body, that if I read that people were being reappointed, I would not believe, I would not assume those people weren't interviewed. And so it doesn't say in there, I didn't interview them. So I would assume that if I was a regular town counselor that this body would think that. Now, I know George and I disagree on the issue of reappointment, but I'm saying by not having the words in there as a generic counselor, okay, you reappointed some people to talk to them, no. Okay, they're great, but I'm not pleased by the idea that we were told that our job was to decide whether or not the person in front of us was a good person. That's not our only job in my opinion. And so to fill the role as to whether or not, of course they're wonderful and we're very glad they're continuing to serve. I don't think that's our only role. I think diversity and outreach is a goal of this entire council as opposed to necessarily a really useful part, our particular charge. So I feel uncomfortable having to say, Evan, would you please mention or Alyssa will obnoxiously mention during the conversation tonight. By the way, you know, he didn't interview any of those people, right? Just because again, what position does that put them in? I mean, they're not gonna say no. I mean, we're really happy these people are serving, but on the other hand, it's I don't think it's the majority of the councilor's desire to assume that that's a good thing. And so I just wonder if there's some sort of documentation that just takes a little bit further over what the report was last time. These are the six things we look for when we say yes, this is how you know, this is the recommendation is based on this amount of information. Other thoughts, comments? So on our agenda update on town manager evaluation, I've been keeping as a placeholder in case we have any updates at some point after the town manager evaluation fully concludes, we should have a discussion as Oka about what it actually meant to have that in our charge. There is no public comment because there is no public present today. If I may ask your indulgence one more time the about the town manager evaluation because of course after we get through tonight's meeting and then we have a public session on the night for town council and then basically that portion of the town managers evaluation is done and the goal setting starts. I think it needs to be very clear from the very beginning of that goal conversation that we still have a stake in this at this committee because we are still interested in how that whole process works rather than assuming that instead there should just based on our interactions with information flow back and forth with the town manager and the kinds of things we've asked for and that he's given us, et cetera that we already have that going on. It doesn't make sense to me for the president to say, oh and now we're gonna have a subcommittee that's gonna figure out the evaluation for next time that doesn't include us. So I wanna have that off at the pass from the standpoint of saying we still see that as part of our charge unless you all don't and that I do think based on our current relationships associated with appointments it makes sense for us to also continue that relationship from the standpoint of evaluation. Not that we get to decide what's in the whole thing. We don't get to decide all the goals but that we are very familiar with how difficult process is based on our experiences here and I think we would bring a lot to that discussion rather than it being a whole new group. Okay. I'd agree with that totally and that's another reason why it may be necessary to have additional meetings at various times of the year because that's going to be a big job. Yeah. Other comments? There are no topics that I did not reasonably anticipate that we haven't already talked about. So if there are no further comments, questions from the committee then I will adjourn us at 11.14 AM.