 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Did I get the link? And I just lost it in my inbox. Cause I was looking for it. You usually send it out. And I found it on the town side, but was, was I missing something? I set the reminders to go out an hour before the meeting, a day before the meeting and a week before the meeting. Wow. Cause I don't think I got. So I had one from last week. Subject was panelists for residents advisory committee. Right. From last Thursday. I didn't get it. I didn't get more recent ones than that. There's a function on the, on the application on, in zoom. So when I click it, it should send it automatically a week before a day before and an hour before. It didn't, it did not. It did not do hour or day. I don't know why. I don't know. I don't know. I didn't get the hour or day either. I just got the one from last Thursday. Yeah. But of course it is, you know, the zoom links are on the calendar. So I thought it might be. It all worked out. Okay. It's interesting that you ended up in the panelists room. Yeah. Because the calendar zoom link is the public zoom link. Right. Yes. Yes, it is. Nobody knows how this works. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe keeping me in the waiting room or something like that. Correct. You would be out on the, yeah. All right. Well, it did work. So that's a whole. Anyway, I don't care. Here I am. All right. I assume Keisha's coming too. So we'll wait for her. Sure. So while we're chit chatting, we just can't really. We're not going to start yet. Although we do have a core. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to say. We've been watching the new season of the crown. Does anyone else. I've only seen the first episode. So don't talk about it. I won't. But we just saw the second one. Don't know. I'm not spoiling it. I'm not looking. I would just say that the portrayal of Margaret Thatcher. We've been watching British bake offs starting with season one. And we're up to see if you just finished season three. Good. No calories. Those are great. No, well, we also, we also bake on the weekend. So getting the calories doing our own baking. But yeah, Barbara in particular, but I can agree with her and this is just doesn't want to watch anything stressful or political or anything like that. It's just all so stressful. Yeah. I highly recommend. Yeah. I highly recommend I'll have what Phil's having or somebody feed Phil. He travels the world. Yes. He travels the world trying different countries, cuisines and he's the writer for everybody loves Raymond. Where can you find it? It's on Netflix. Okay. Somebody feed Phil. And on every episode, he checks in by Skype with his elderly parents who are in Manhattan. And for me, that's like my favorite part of the show because he, you know, they make fun of him. He makes fun of them. It's very. Entertaining from my perspective. I see Keisha. Should I am I supposed to read that stuff about. Yes, please. To Governor Baker. Okay. And this is before we call the meeting to order. Okay. Pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12th, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting laws, general law chapter 38 section 18. This meeting of the residence advisory committee is being conducted via remote participation. Now we do a roll call to check and make sure everybody's video and audio is working properly. So Jim, are you here? Yes, I am. Angela, are you here? Yes, I am. Okay. And just a reminder, this meeting is being recorded. Did you start recording? Yes. This meeting is being recorded to the web and could be shown on Amherst media and broadcast in the town of Amherst YouTube channel. Okay. Our meeting is called to order. That was fun. Yeah. So first time. Item on the agenda is to approve the minutes from the previous meeting, which was October 7th. Anybody have any thoughts or comments? Good to me. Good to me. All those in favor. Of approving the meeting and we'll just say raise your hand if you're in favor of approving the meeting. I see three hands raised. The meeting has been approved unanimously. So I haven't done any interviews since our last meeting. So that's my summary. Keisha, have you been done anything? I've done 15. Okay. Anything to report on them. We agreed on seven. So, okay. So I was present for 15. There were 18 interviews and we agreed on seven. To refer to the town council. Can you just say which committee? The community safety working group. Yeah. Okay. That's right. I knew you'd been busy. Right. Okay. And Connie, how about you? Well, I think. He should have asked for a break after that. Understandably. So I took. CDBG and Munson. Library. And I, I think it was around eight. Apologize for not counting. You might need member better. Angela. There were definitely more, a couple more candidates than slots for each of those. I think that's a stronger situation. So those are the ones I did. I didn't have a question just to follow up on that. So I saw, I think it was on the town's Facebook page, which I get that they were looking for members and they listed a number of committees and they listed. The CDBG committee. And we had filled all the vacancies I thought. So Angela, maybe you could update me. Did another vacancy come off after we did the recommendations? Yes. There is just one. It's due to a resignation. Can you say who resigned? Um, off the top of my head, I cannot actually, and I, I'm wondering if it's someone who serves from another group. Who didn't want to be, who didn't want to be reappointed. Okay. And so we view that as a vacancy and it, and it gets posted. So it gets put out even though. Right. Yeah. Even though it's leading. Yes. I wonder if there's a way to add a parentheses or something. When it, when it comes because. It's unfortunate when we recruit, you know, we ask people to join and then they either hear nothing. Because we're not really, it's not in the normal vacancy group. It's a representation. It's a set aside for a committee appointment. Right. I wonder if there's a way. Um, To annotate that because, you know, and just for me, it was a little distressing because I was like, wait a minute. We just did that one and we filled them off. Right. It would have been nice for me to know what was going on. Yeah. And that happened to us with a disability access advisory committee as well. We picked two people. We appointed them both. And then as soon as the person received their packet and read through the materials realized it was way too much of a commitment and pulled out before getting sworn into service. Right. But that wasn't a slot position. That was our open. Right. So is there a way to reexamine how that's put out when it's not really, truly open? Absolutely. Yeah. I can talk to Paul and Brianna about that. Okay. So I could just be in our minutes. Just a point. Um, okay. Okay. Angela, what can you tell us about upcoming interviews? Paul and I met briefly yesterday. There are two vacancies on public art, but the chair of public art had asked for us to wait until the percent for art by law had been passed and then. Re. You know, do another push through all of our PR. To get new applicants. And so we just put a call out for that one. And then we also, I think, included disability access advisory commission on. The most recent shout out for volunteers. So those are the, the top three. I. I'm with agcom. Um, it's a. It's a pretty specific board a lot like water supply protection. And so we do outreach in a different way for boards that require some type of technical knowledge. So agcom and local historic districts. We have to dig deep because we're looking for someone to represent the real estate community. So we reach out to that, um, clearing house for that profession and ask them for recommendations from within, you know, that profession. So Paul's on local historic. And then I think Dave's no max helping me with agcom. And is there one vacancy on each? Yes. Okay. So not a lot of activity for us in the near future. It looks like. Kind of a little bit. It'll feel like one offs. Cause, um, especially for the ones that have technical knowledge, it might be two people going for one spot. Yeah. Um, I'm happy to do shade tree. If we get to that. You know, it's winter. So I don't think it's a huge rush. They will, I mean, they do their planning work, but they're not having their events or planting tree things right now. Um, so I don't, I don't know how much of a rush there is, but I, I did, I think I did shade tree last time. I'm happy to do that one again. You know, the interesting conversation I had with, um, the staff liaison for the DAAC was maybe it's time because of the work that they're doing. And, and the, and the discussions they're having for them to have someone with ADA knowledge who might be a planner or an architect as part of the board for DAAC. So that would mean some recruitment to get them into the pool. Exactly. Exactly. Cause that's kind of a niche, right? I mean, I don't have extensive knowledge, but. Right. Cause they do plan review. Um, both development plans in sometimes building. Uh, plans for, uh, You know, sort of compliance and suggestions for improvements. But yeah, maybe a local architect or builder, somebody who's involved in it from that end who understands the law might be useful. Yeah. Um, I don't anything else on upcoming interviews. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We really, we don't have anything planned. I mean, with the uptick in, in COVID numbers, uh, the core team for the administration has been pretty busy, not just looking at numbers, but also kind of getting the infrastructure in place and discussing how we're going to. Tackle things like, you know, if we have to do a massive push for inoculations and all that stuff. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I'm not really not falling off the radar, but it's not right now at the, at the top of the list in terms of. Putting it on a calendar. Yep. Right. And all of the groups can meet quorum. So that's good. Yeah. I was thinking maybe we could just, we, you know, keeping track of what's going on where there's vacancies. Some of this targeted recruitment as it makes sense. Yeah. But I think on the big push. In the summer to fill up on the committees with the right time. So I think we could just say this. This is a, that front or not a front burner issue. So I, I'd like to say that, but the one thing I forgot to mention is personnel board. That is a group that I think Paul is looking to shuffle up along with Donna Ray Cannelly, the new HR director's help sooner rather than later. So that might be one where the turnaround time might be quick and I might reach out to all three of you and say, who can take what? Because we've had the same people on that board since 2016. Yeah, so if I could just add a footnote. So when I was on select board, I'm sorry my, let me get the turn the cell phone off. When I was on select, when I was the liaison to personnel, so I went to a lot of those meetings over those years. I'm wondering, Angela, do you know, is Charlie Sherpa still the employee representative? I don't know that information. And I, because Evelyn came in and then left and Donna Ray has just been hired, I'm not sure that they've met recently. Okay. What's the new HR person's name? Donna Ray Cannelly. Donna Ray Cannelly, okay. Okay, great, thanks for the update. Okay, I guess we can move on to looking at this draft survey I sent you all. Yeah, great. Who wants to start? Comments, do we still wanna do some kind of survey or do we think it's silly? What do we think? I'm happy to go, Jim. Okay. You wanna call me? Sure. I liked the idea of it, that we were gonna do it. And I just made a few edits when I reviewed this last night. So if people have it up, I would just tell you what I was thinking we might do, just another set of eyes on this. On the first one, I rewrote it a little bit. It's the same idea, just how clearly was the interview and appointment process explained to you before your scheduled interview? And you'll see, Jim, a couple of them, instead of how well did you understand, I tried to switch it to how well was it explained? Because we don't really know who understands what, even though it may have been explained well and they say it wasn't, that's a different issue. So this one, I just thought it was a little awkward preceding the interview, how clearly, I can go back over that language if you want. Right, so you said how well was the interview and appointment process, how clearly was the interview and appointment process explained to you before the interview? Yeah, before your scheduled interview. Yeah, that's okay. So on that same vein, if you go down to the one. Yeah, change the other one too, yeah. Where it goes following the interview, how clearly, I said, how clearly was the interview and appointment, process explained to you? And I think there's one more like that, and these are really minor. Oh, this is a little bit different. Your last one, the closing one, do you have any additional comments about the interview process and ideas for improving this process? Just to, and then I thought we could conclude with something perfunctory, like thank you for taking the time to answer the survey questions, and then resident advisory committee, and then put our three names. So people know who's surveying and why we're asked, who's involved and who's putting this out. Yeah, I'd say if you can send the wording to Angela, she can put it in the minutes. Is that good, Angela? Yeah, no, that's great. If you wanna send me your edits, that'd be wonderful. Oh, I mean, these are handwritten, so I'll pipe it up on the draft that Jim sent, okay? That sounds fine, or you can just take a photo of them and text them to me, either way. All right, if you're okay with that. You have beautiful writing, Connie. Not on this one, but yes, thank you. You'll see, you'll get it. You'd never want me to do that, I can say that. Well, these are tweaks, so I thought it was a really good idea. I don't see Keisha anymore, but she's still there. Maybe you drove away, I don't know. No. I don't see Keisha anymore, but she drove away. He looks like he's not in motion. Any thoughts, comments from you? I thought it was pretty good. I wasn't sure about some of the wording of some of the questions also, but I didn't type up any changes, but I thought it got to the heart of what you all were hoping to get from the survey questions. Angela, any comments, thoughts from you? No, I think more information is better. And we're asking a lot of people and it would be nice to know if, I thought the questions really hit, like Keisha said, to the heart of what we need in terms of moving forward and how to streamline the process, especially in this time of COVID where everything is remote, it's a good time to do this. So, Angela, you can give us sort of the new wording or you can put it in the minutes and where do we go from here? Yep. Sounds good. Should we start sending it out to people after their interviews? Do we want to start it in the new year or do we want to use the last four or five groups as guinea pigs? I hadn't thought of that, but that's not a bad idea. The other thing, let's go back, maybe the last two months and use it. If we agree or we could vote to accept this survey language as amended in today's meeting, then we don't have to review it again. And I think we could send it out and maybe a little intro to the email that sends it out from you, Angela, just saying this is new and we love it if you would respond to this. And it's our first time using it and we're gonna kind of a test run. So, Angela, I assume you have the software to package to set it up and to get the responses back and... I have lots of options. I have SurveyMonkey, which has lots of tools in terms of creating bar graphs and pie graphs and stuff on responses. And then I have Microsoft Forms, which from my perspective, doesn't give us the data breakdown that we need, but is very user-friendly and kind of... And I can put it in both and see what you prefer. That might be a good next step is to send it to the three of us and have us respond. Yeah, let's do a survey, yeah. And we can't, you know, by email, we can't talk about whether or not we like the format, I don't think. But we can respond and, Angela, you can tabulate the responses so we can see what it looks like from the three of us. Sounds good. We can even make up a couple pretend people and add some pretend responses just to make your graphs look more interesting. Then we fart pits. Yeah, so that way, Angela, you can be comfortable with it and if you're happy with the way it works, I'd say, like Kani said, we can have a boat here on it, but you can go ahead and send it out. Okay. I'll move that we accept the interview follow-up survey as amended. I second that. All in favor, raise your hand. We'll just do it visually. I see three hands. So that's been accepted unanimously. Cool. I didn't, one thing, I don't know if this matters. Now that we've accepted, I just wanna ask one other question of Angela. You know, I tried to phrase them all so we can have people can do a zero through five response. I don't know if you like zero through five as opposed to one through five. And do we want all the fives to be the more positive thing and the zeros or ones to be the more negative or do we not care? Cause they're really, cause we're gonna be looking them as granular as separate questions. No. I don't really have a preference and affective scales aren't my area of expertise. I would defer to the group. Does anyone know the convention? Like does five usually mean better or does it usually mean worse? I would say to drop the zero because I think it might be confusing, especially if one is the highest then zero would be one through five. It's more of a convention to have the five or 10 or whatever be the positive and the zero want to be the negative. You know, there's only one question that how did you feel about the length of the interview where I have zero way too short, five way too long. So really the three is the best answer. All the others, the five is the best answer. But I think that's okay. Yeah. It gets people to pay attention to it after me. Three is the mama bear. Just right. Okay. So it sounds like we already voted. We're gonna accept as amended Angela's gonna send us a survey and we're gonna respond just so she can make sure it all works. And then she's gonna send it out to everybody. Perfect. Is the data that you receive back considered public data that we can share with people? Will share with people or is it considered private internal data or do we care? So we can ask, we can make putting a name on it optional but then with the way that technology works we will have all of the data from where it emanates and also the email address will come back with it. So it's kind of a, we can tell them that we'll strip their personal information off of it and just use the raw numbers if we wanna go that direction. Anything that comes in to my email is considered public record. Okay. So it's public record but I would say in it that we'll strip the personal information off of that. Because if we had it on our agenda and we were talking about the results somebody could see that or report on it or Amherst Indy for just an example could pick that up and that would be okay because it wouldn't have in our discussion any identifying information. If they wanted to go as far as to do a public records request to Angela to figure out who would respond and that's a different thing. But if in our, the info that flows to us in our conversation we don't know any identities at least somebody listening to our conversation wouldn't have that. Right. And I just feel we don't need the identities for our committee. We just wanna know overall how we're doing and what can be improved or not which we get from the metadata and not from the people. Okay. Cool. I don't see any public. So I think there's no public comment. Anything else anyone wants to talk about? I don't know if it's not known for it. I probably should have brought it up when we're talking about how our past interviews went just to say I was really struggling after the last two committees I did about rejecting people. The spelling was part of this job I don't like. So this is when we have more people than slots and we're rejecting people. Sometimes we're rejecting somebody who's really quite a good candidate but it wasn't the right time or the right fit. And then I got to interview somebody a bunch of times and different committees and continually not getting an appointment. And it's just something I struggle with. I mean, I know it's part of what this job is but I don't know if I kind of think of a way to feel okay about that. I guess I think for the most part people coming into it understand that. I know I can't remember which one now but I know I had one set of interviews sometime in September, October that had one open spot and five people who were all fantastic and it happens sometimes and it's great when you get that many people who are interested and I feel that Paul and Angela are pretty good about following up with people and telling them you were fantastic but there's only a limited number of spots and I think it's sad to say no to people but it's a better scenario than if we didn't get enough people who want it to be on committees and we're never gonna get just the right number who want to be on committees. It's been a really interesting time because people are re-evaluating how they want to spend their time and so what I'm finding from a recruitment standpoint is the more I reach out to people and the more I try and get a diverse mix of people for the vacancies that we have never before have I heard so many responses of you know what, I'd really like to but at this time I have other priorities. That's interesting because I would have almost guessed you'd get more people want to do it because they're just sitting around with nothing else to do. Yeah, it's been fascinating to kind of and I am amazed at the amount of time that we're spending doing outreach work on a really one to one level trying to get especially I'm thinking back to the last two or three groups where there are certain charges that are written very specifically about the sections of town from which the people have to come like for the months and you have to live in South Amherst or it's suggested that you live in South Amherst and use the facility in order to be on the board of trustees for that group. Yeah, I was impressed for that one where you said you had two applicants for one spot. That's really good for the months and I think we have three. Yes, yeah, three for two. Me for two, three for two. It was good and there were strong candidates so that was good. Maybe there's sort of a cycle to all of this because when we first transitioned from Select Board to Town Council and it was kind of like a new beginning and a lot of excitement, there was a rash of new volunteers and now we're just in a different time out in the community and the world. So it's like the flow. Yeah. It's a good time to do the survey. Yeah. Okay, good. Great, good comment. Anything else or are we ready to adjourn? Oh, what about next meeting? Do you want to meet in December and see if we've caught any fish for the survey? I don't know, you think or do we wait till January? Oh, either way. Keisha? I don't have a preference. I mean, I'm at work now. So like, I don't have a preference. I would just be able to come from work, you know, sit in my car like now. I can do it, but it doesn't matter. What's the likelihood we'd have responses by December to look at? Judging from my conversation with certain individuals, I think we'd have responses for all the reasons that we've just discussed. I think we would definitely have a handful of responses, especially from the last two months. Okay, so. I would suggest, Jim, why don't we do a short, you know, let's assume it'll be short. Our main agenda item we'll be looking at responses and that may be when we want to tweak the survey based on what people say. So, Tuesday, December 15th. How does that sound at 11 o'clock? All days are equal right now, me. Yeah, I mean, right now that looks great for me. I just, I want to mention to the group that, in addition to sending the survey to you, I'd like to send the survey to Paul. Oh, definitely. Okay, sure. Yeah. I just, I'm sorry, I just pulled up my calendar and noticed on that day, I have a haircut appointment in Northampton at 12 o'clock. Those are pretty sacrosanct. So if we could either pick a different day or do it at nine o'clock or something like that. How about Wednesday, the 16th? Good for me. That should be fine for me. Okay. And did you say 10 o'clock, Jim? 11 again. 11 again, okay. Yeah. Wednesday, the 16th at 11. Yeah. Cool. Great. Okay. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, everyone. I'm all in favor of adjourning this meeting. Say aye by raising your hand. Aye. We all want to adjourn. Okay. This meeting is adjourned. Okay. Stay healthy. Watch your hands. Thank you, everybody. You too, Angela. Bye.