 Hello, my name is Anna Hankin, town meeting member for Precinct 6 and proponent of Warrant Article 22, vote provision of town email addresses for town meeting members. The text of my substitute motion for this article reads to see if the town will vote to provide email accounts for the use of primary contact by constituents and town business to members of the town meeting who request one or take any action related there to. My substitute motion for Article 22 is intended to mandate that the town provide official town email addresses to any town meeting member who requests one for use as a primary form of contact listed by the town. The intent is that these town email addresses would provide town meeting members with an option to publicly list an email address that is easy to reach, does not expose their personal email addresses to malicious actors, and improves transparency. While the use of an official address subjects the inbox and send email of that address to public records request laws, incoming emails to that address may be forwarded to a personal email inbox and answered from your preferred address. An official town email address makes it easy for constituents to reach town meeting members. Town meeting is the most direct link between residents and the decisions made by town government. We are the representative voters for our precincts and it's important that we hear though how those decisions will impact the people who have entrusted us with this responsibility. It's already difficult enough to encourage engagement from residents and every additional barrier to communication is another voice we don't hear from. Email is by far the easiest route of engagement for the majority of residents. Providing town emails rather than personal emails is also safer for town meeting members and adds an additional barrier to harassment or spam. Protecting the privacy of town meeting members is important. You shouldn't have to expose yourself to online harassment or privacy breaches to serve in town government. Having personal emails listed alongside other significant identifying information increases your chances of identity theft and many people use their personal emails as the login to social media and this can increase the ease with which online trolls can track down and harass town meeting members. As a woman who grew up in the digital age, I have seen exactly how hard peers of mine have had to work to shake online stalkers when they knew a primary email address. If your work in local government earns you the attention of online harassers, it's much harder to close off your personal email than to avoid them than it is for the town IT to move your official account to another official address, especially when you move on from the position. This article only mandates that this town webmail address be the primary listed contact for a town meeting member who requests one from the town in place of the current personal email. The law doesn't allow us to mandate and this warrant article doesn't dictate that town meeting members use this email for all town meeting member related business, simply that the town provides it as a primary contact. It's easy to answer incoming emails from whatever inbox works best via mail forwarding and for those town meeting members who cannot and do not wish to use email at all, it's simple to use the normal out of office bounce back feature to provide a constituent with a phone number and hours to call. This is all in line with the town's acceptable use policy for webmail. Having our interactions with constituents and officials like the town moderator be subject to public records requests is a good thing. We should want to have transparency in our work in government, just like we want transparency in any other facet of our government. We should hold ourselves to a standard we would want to see. Committing to transparency builds trust between us and the community. Hitching ourselves to this kind of accountability is the right thing to do and it is the backbone of integrity. We all ran for town meeting because we care about this community. The addresses used by the town, town.arlington.ma.us are provided by Microsoft with the specific specifications and certification required for governmental webmail clients. The quoted cost per user is $90. It may or may not be possible to negotiate a lower price per user for larger groups. If all 252 town meeting members requested a town email at once, that would cost around $22,000. It's very unlikely that every member would decide to request an official email immediately and the cost of adding town meeting members by request will likely be a few hundred to at most a few thousand dollars. Adding additional users to an already existing webmail system is a fairly straightforward task and would not represent an undue burden on the IT department. Town government isn't just a hobby. Town meeting members do important work that impacts the lives and livelihoods of the people who live in this town. The choices that are voted on in town meeting are a great responsibility and it's important that we just support that personally but logistically and systemically. It's important that constituents can reach town meeting members in a reliable official capacity and that town meeting members have a reliable safe way to be contacted. Thank you.