 I believe you have to read the statement as well again, right, Angela? Yeah, the statement from the chair. I just emailed it to you again, Meg, if you need it. Okay. And then, and clearly we can all hear you, but you're supposed to it just confirm that each of us are here and we can hear you. It's just about to do all those things. Right. I'm trying to find the thing I'm supposed to read. Oh yeah, here it is. Got it. I get so much junk email and it's actually like the 15th email down. So pursuant to Governor Baker's, first of all, I think I call the meeting to order first, right? I'm calling the meeting to order 332. And I'm going to take attendance and then I'm going to read Baker's statement. So Kathy Shane. Here. John Fenske. John Page. Here. John McCabe. Here. John Bowser. No. Angela Mills. Yes, I'm here with a caveat that I am the only person on the mezzanine today, so I'm popping in and out of the meeting and answering phone calls. The record that Liz is going to miss the meeting because of her husband's back surgery today. And I'm going to read this statement pursuant to Governor Baker's, March 12th, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, general law chapter 30a section 18, this meeting of the participatory budgeting commission is being held via remote participation. Okay. And the significance there is that previously remote participation did not count as a quorum and now it does. Any questions about that? I want to appreciate Angela's amazing minutes and thank her for agreeing to do minutes again today. And when I asked you earlier today, I didn't know you were the only one on the mezzanine answering the phone. So let us know if it becomes too much of a burden, but Angela, you're a saint. Thank you. Okay. You're still able to do it? That's your answer. And Meg, that is the other virtue what people, minute takers have been going back and watching the tape to the extent they miss Lincoln. I did that for the minutes that she did because she had to leave the meeting early. So it's easier to take them live. So I'm doubly grateful to her for doing it. She can't actually be here, but I'll thank her again when she gets back on. Let's approve. I wanted to review the agenda before we go further. And one thing I'd like to change on the agenda is that I, number eight, the timeline. I drafted that before I had carefully read Kathy's memo. And there are numerous things that I would change on it right now. Also, John was very busy and wasn't able to collaborate. So I would like to take, we can look at it and discuss it, but it needs to be dramatically changed. Based on what Kathy wrote. So I'm suggesting we eliminate eight or don't try to approve it. Okay. Any other comments about the agenda? So let's take a look at the minutes. Thanks again to Angela. Are you back? I am back. Thank you for these awesome minutes. And while you were off, I was, thank you for agreeing to take the minutes. And it's clear that you're going to have to use the video, but yes. Thank you very much. No problem. You're an awesome minute taker. So John Fenske and I both made some changes based on our things that related to what we had said at the last meeting. I didn't receive any other edits. So let me ask now, are people, are there any changes people would like to make to the minutes? The reason I want to be really careful about amending and approving these minutes is that they're an excellent document of the consensus we reached. I think remarkably, after having not met for six months, luckily having prepared statements that clearly people were prepared to give. But I thought it was a remarkable meeting and that we seem to reach consensus on what our plan is going forward. And I want to be sure that everybody's comments are as they intended them since this is the, I think a cornerstone, these minutes are kind of cornerstone document of that agreement. And they're reflected carefully in Kathy's memo. Comments on the minutes. And I apologize. I pasted in John's section on page two, I didn't change the font, but that's okay. Any comments? Edits? Everybody happy? Okay. Hearing none. Do I have a motion to approve the minutes? Meg, I'm just reading them a little bit more carefully on the paragraph that on Shane opined, the last second page, page two. Well, it's after Larsen. Yes, page two. The last sentence noted that CDBG fund can be used for capital budgeting costs. What I noted is that it can be used for social services. It's the only one that can. Okay. So you're thinking capital budgeting costs to social service costs? Yes. Okay. And so, so just if you get rid of capital budgeting costs and then just delete, delete and say, can be used for social service. It can also be used for capital, but it's the only one the others cannot. So it can, for example, support the survival center operating costs, it can support assistance for getting a housing loan. I mean, it's as opposed to building a house. So it's just can be. So just change that. Okay. So we're, we're changing everything after the word for we're deleting capital budgeting costs thereby okay to use for great. Any other changes, particularly to things that you said? Um, well, just as you said, you focus on my own. I'll look at the tape again, but my point was CPA funds could go toward resident proposals. I avoided ever officially calling this participatory budget. So CPA funds could go to resident proposals. Same paragraph. It says so outreach, CPO, use volunteers, JCPC. CPA funds could go toward resident proposals instead of toward PB. So it's not, it's not a pot of money called PB. It's just, um, they, they're allowed to, they can go, you know, but with CPA funds, they still have to fit within a specific criteria. Yes. So I had a little longer, you know, within fitting within the criteria. So it's not, this reads like we could just grab the money and put it someplace else. So I'll look at the tape on what I actually said. I know what I said in my memo in the earlier one, CPA funds can go toward resident proposals, you know, within the CPA categories is the whole sentence. So without objection, I'd be happy to make this change, suggest this change so we can approve the minutes without you having to go back and see what you said. But if you feel that you'd be more, have more integrity for you to do that, I'm happy. Well, I think that's good because we wouldn't want to have something be inaccurate in the minutes. Right. Just because I didn't speak in a full sentence. Right. I'm a big believer in that. Right. Any other comments, particularly about things you said? Again, I made a couple myself before I even sent it out. So I mean, places where I would have hopefully wished I'd said things a little more elegantly than it looks like I did, but I corrected the things that I didn't think were accurate. So okay, I'm looking around. I just want to be sure that this format on Zoom gives everyone a chance to speak who wants to. So I'm going to try to do more looking around or, you know, raise your hand if you have something to say that I'm not noticing. I was just going to say that I think I have some thoughts. I've thought more about it to what to elaborate on, but that wouldn't be part of the minutes. So as soon as you prove these, I have some thoughts. Okay, great. Some of those can, probably others of us do as well, and Cassie's written a fairly brilliant outline that will enable us, will give us the vehicle for doing that, I think. Perfect. Yes. So hearing no comments about the minutes, all in favor of the minutes. I'm in a motion to approve the minutes. I, no, wait, do I have to go around and say everybody's name, right, Angela? No, she's not there. Yeah, I'm here. Okay. That would be lovely. Okay. Holly? Do you? Yes. Meg, I'm going in the order I've picked. Yes. John McCabe? John P? Yes. John Fenske? Kathy? Yes. Okay. Unanimous. Perfect. Thank you. So next on our agenda is, let you know that the council approved our request for an extension. I sent you the document. Any comments on that? Nope. The rank choice voting commission also got an extension. The same amount of time. So Angela is going to, so we haven't, no one suggested changing the agenda order. So next on the agenda is the PowerPoint presentation that Angela has prepared with Brianna and Jennifer for describing their work. And that was something that came up at our last meeting of people request wanting to know more about what they're doing, how much time they have, and so on. So if this works for you, Angela, with your phone answering and everything. Yeah, this is great. So I'm just going to quickly run through this. CPOs, because we all need more acronyms in our life. CPO stands for community participation officers. And this was created as part of the home rule charter. There are three CPOs for the town of Amherst. Jennifer and I work on the mezzanine and Brianna also works on the mezzanine. But in addition to the title of CPO, we have other job designations. So our official titles are as follows. Jennifer is split between HR and the town manager's office. Brianna, in addition to working for the information technology department, is also our communications manager. And my official title is, as you see, executive assistant to the town manager. And so this is section 3.3 from the home rule charter that speaks directly to the community participation officers. And so we each kind of have embraced a different pet project. When we meet as CPOs, Jennifer has really focused on high density populations in Amherst. I have focused on elementary school age through high school and then also the elderly population. And Brianna is trying to do the communications piece on every facet of our government and our populists. And then she also brings a wealth of knowledge from the outside. And as we host meetings and connect with the attorney general's office and provide different avenues for enrichment in terms of workshops, we type up memos and Paul includes them in his town manager's report to the council on a bi-monthly basis. So this was Paul's report on the 17th of December in 2018 when he named all three of us as CPOs. And I just want to make clear for this committee and also for anyone who's listening or watching that all three of us were invited to do this. We were asked and invited. And so we definitely see this as a passion project for each of us. It's not just another thing that we're shoving on our plate of things to do. So this is a quick rundown and I won't read through all of this. But as we look back over our work, it took a while for us to kind of get a feel for things and decide how and where we would put our energies. COVID has definitely invited us to think about outreach in a new way. And at this very moment, Jennifer just left to go set up a table at the mobile market at Fort River, which we've been trying to partner with the mobile market and reach people in different neighborhoods and give them mass and give them hand sanitizer and talk to them a little bit about how things are going during the time of COVID and what they need from town government. So it's been great in terms of taking a temperature read and also it's been wonderful to hear how people are developing their own coping mechanisms. So as our ongoing mission, we look at community conversations. We look at public participation technology. Briana's working hard to integrate Bang the Table, which is a new kind of portal that will allow people to participate in projects and not necessarily do it real time. So you could offer your opinion on something like the North Amherst Library, but not necessarily have to write that down and save up an evening of your time to present your opinion at a meeting. You could enter in through Bang the Table and jot it on a virtual post-it note and add it to a bulletin board and then all of that feedback culminates into a report of some type and gets reflected back to the community. Jennifer, do you want us to ask questions as you go along if something's not clear? Sure. No, that'd be great. Could you say another a little bit more you just mentioned the virtual tables? Yes. So Briana is working on technology enhancement and one of the new things that she's working on is a system, a platform called Bang the Table. It's like that's the brand name of the platform. And so what it would do is enable people to share their input and share their feelings about certain projects, but not necessarily on a timetable. So as I was saying, you could have a strong feeling about the North Amherst Library reconstruction project and instead of going to a Zoom meeting or waiting for a Zoom meeting to happen, you could just go to this Bang the Table site and you could write down your thoughts or write down your presentation and that gets filtered into the project feedback. It's not operational yet though, right? Very shortly. So I just wanted to add on that on the library what Paul told me is as an example, if they get to, if they convene a building committee and it comes up with a more detailed design, instead of having everyone come to a public forum, they might still do that, you know, to Q&A back and forth. You can do it through this Bang the Table. So it makes it asynchronous with while gathering all the comments or ideas. I think it sounds fabulous. So one of, read two, everything Kathy said. So my curiosity which is probably premature is how people are going to find out about it and ideas for working with community groups so that they can spread the idea in applicable ways for each different organization or community group. It's very exciting. It is very exciting. And so lastly, ongoing projects for CPOs, definitely more cultural events when we can gather together in large groups. And then we have our dedicated flag raisings for lots of different cultural and significant events. Great. Amherst complete census count. This was kind of a passion project for Brianna. She worked very closely with Athena and the clerk's office to make sure that Amherst's count is as complete as possible. And we did that lots of different ways. The summer care kits were a big hit. They went out to kids through the mobile meals project and they included things like a tiny art kit and sidewalk chalk and hand sanitizer and a bag that said Amherst counts. And they were well received, which is great. And so we have our own page on the town website. It's the Get Involved page. And you can reach all three of us with one email address, getinvolved.amherstma.gov. And then there is a specific part of the website that is dedicated to COVID. And we have up to the minute case counts and then lists of resources at amherstcovid19.org. And then we are also staffing the COVID concern line. And we have a dedicated email address COVID concerns at amherstma.gov, which both have had a lot of use in the past month and a half. Those have been live since the end of August. So I guess it's almost two months. Yikes. And finally, CPOs help support town counselors at public events and also at district events. And these are all the different ways that we do that. I just want to say this isn't a small task. So Angela, for example, when we were having real-time district meetings, she created posters that we could stick up and made copies for me so Sarah and I could carry it around and stick it up on bulletin boards, did agendas, and now that we're on Zoom, they're staffing the Zoom meetings. So there are only three of them and there are five districts. So I am assuming that they are doing double time because I know when I went to a district five meeting they were helping run the video project, the projector, to show some slides that people were putting up and carrying the materials back and forth to the meeting. So it's a labor of love, I guess is what I would call it, and totally valued. Thank you, Kathy. And so these are kind of our, as we looked ahead and we did some strategic planning, we would love to start a student civic group and that was something that I worked on over the summer with our intern from Amherst College. Our intern was funded through the Houston program at Amherst College and she did a great job of looking at best practices across lots of different municipalities and then also she looked into the private sector to see what works best in terms of engaging youth and teaching them a skill set that they need to become great leaders. And our hope for the student civic group is to also get people involved in government and for kids to see government as a viable work pathway. And then Brianna, one of her passion projects would be to start a civic academy for residents. So for adults of any age to learn more about town government and encourage active participation and then the civic academy would also create an opportunity for residents to share their opinions. And that would take place through lots of different formats. In pre-COVID times we were talking about doing a trolley tour of all of the different municipal buildings so that residents could get a feel for how much the town of Amherst owns in terms of conservation land and DPW sites and all the different recreation areas because what we've discovered in our work with residents is that they're very knowledgeable about the specific place where they live but not so knowledgeable about the other side of town. So kind of trying to connect people to different parts of town. And finally our hope is that we can get neighbors to celebrate neighbors and really thrive on that small town feeling and COVID has taught us that we are in fact in this all together. Sorry to interrupt Angela. I think this phone number is Liz so if there's a way we can move her to panelists she'd be able to join us. Great. So it's not giving me that option when I'm next to her name but I can allow her to talk if you'd like me to. Maybe we can is there in the instructions on how to join us um do we have that we could put it up on the screen because I'm assuming she can hear us and it's there's that dial-in way that you can dial in. Right and I think I see if she dials in if she dials in you can't make her a panelist correct. Can you bring her into the meeting? I'm going to text her too and see if she can is listening. Okay she can hear us. So if you if you'd like for me to allow her to talk I'm just I'm happy to press on that. Okay. So Liz I've allowed you to kind of contribute if you'd like to you just need to unmute when you're ready to speak. Great. Can you hear me? Yes we can. Okay success. All right I'm here. Yay awesome. And I'm only on the phone so I'm not seeing any slides. Okay um I don't know if you're near your laptop but the slides were sent out but you can just listen and you'll get the just so I'm just going to let you know I'm sitting in the parking lot at the hotel at the hospital. Oh dear. So it's 356 and happily Liz has joined by phone. I had just quickly on that last slide uh Angela really quickly there's a national movement to lower the voting age to 16. This was something I tried to get in the charter which didn't succeed but uh it's there are a lot of resources around that movement that you can find online. Yes we um we looked into that and it was um hotly debated at one of our weekly meetings with our intern. Uh-huh. I was for it she was against it. I'm very much for it but it's a I have I don't still understand why it's controversial but having known many a 16 and an 18 year old uh but anyway. Yes. Okay uh and so I think that brings me to the end of my slideshow and I wanted to thank everyone for giving us an opportunity to kind of reflect on the work we've been doing. We don't often make time to do that. We just kind of plow through so thank you. Are there any questions uh oh how charming. I have a comment um it's just to observe that the the slide that listed the responsibilities or the various roles of the community participation officers the first three points seemed to be at an abstract level totally in sync with what participatory budgeting is about. That's all that I I just want to note that. Oh great. The first three points it was the one of the earlier slides. Is it would be hard to go back and look at that? Not at all. That's a really helpful observation. So here we are and I think you're talking about these three. I think you have to share your screen again. Oh okay I thought I did that. Screen share sorry. Yeah that's it one two and three it seemed seems to me are totally in sync at an abstract level with what we're trying to get accomplished. Yep. Totally agree. So I just I wanted to point out seven. Yeah. Catch y'all. Yeah. Without comment. Point it out without comment. Yes. Message received. Smile around. No because I don't think you even listed all of it because I know I'm pretty sure it is it one of you is the liaison to the human resources committee and is has got a title under not human no not human human rights committee the ones chaired by Matthew charity. Yes. So these are there are other hats which means they're staffing that meeting but also an active participant as the staff person in town just to worry about these issues. Yeah. Yes. That's Jennifer Boyston. That's Jennifer. Yeah. Liz did you just want were you just raising your hand or starting to say something. No. No. Sorry. Okay. But when you have something to say I have a question for you. Angela. And that's how how has COVID changed what you do because something I've been struggling since our last participatory budgeting meeting is all our recommendations are well and good. But there are things the community participation officers were trying to do beforehand. And I'm not sure how you do them in a COVID world. It sounds like we're exploring some technology that might help with that. But how has COVID changed what you do. So a lot of what we've done has shifted onto the Zoom platform. And so I'm president this meeting. I also schedule and help coordinate the Zoom links for the agendas of several different commissions committees and boards. There had to be someone who could get that stuff up and posted in time. And so we've added that kind of to the list of things to do. And then in terms of trying to build community by assuaging fear, we accepted the challenge to staff the COVID concern line. And tomorrow I'll spend a couple of hours training the ambassadors so that they can answer the COVID concern line in real time. And then it's you know, it's taking the feedback from the public on these initiatives that we've started and trying to fine tune them. So the concern line many people have comments and criticisms about the ambassadors and their role and their visibility. And it's giving that to the appropriate people and fine tuning it to meet the needs of our community. So we also spent the afternoon, Tuesday afternoon, I think Monday afternoon at the survival center. And Paul was with us. And as people were picking up boxes of food, we tried to touch base with them and get them mass if they needed them. But also we're really focused on the rental assistance that's been made available through community action. And that second round has just opened up. And then we're also trying to connect people with other COVID related needs that will become more prominent as the moratorium ceases on the 17th of this month. It's really just finding ways to get out there and still be safe. It's a tricky line to kind of walk. And yet we're trying to walk it and make it real. No, it's really impressive. It seems to be the same challenge when I read you know kind of our recommendations. How do we engage people? At least for now. Right. Are there other observations or questions particularly related to what the topic of our commission? One of the things that's the biggest challenge seems to me in generating participation is two things. One is for people to know about the opportunities. And then to understand second is to understand why it's matters to them or what the benefits might be for them to participate. And those are just enormous challenges with people when people are so busy and have so much going on. So I just want to apologize for leaving the room, but I had to take that call. Sorry. Okay. Any other comments or questions about the community participation officers? The only comment I was going to make, Angela, is I thought that was a fabulous presentation. So I am going to recommend to Paul and Lynn that we do it once for the whole council. Oh, for sure. Thank you, Kathy. That's nice to hear. You haven't already done that? Nope. Wow. Second that moment. Everybody, I think we all agree. Thumbs up by everybody. Great. Yeah, it's a fabulous presentation. And the thing to get it on public television or get it, I don't know, just so people know you that you're there and can start to see ways that you could be helpful. That's the challenge. It's easy to get people involved who are already involved. Okay. Now we're moving with no more seeing no more comment to the big topic of the meeting, which is a discussion of Kathy's excellent outline. She calls it an outline. I call it it's a paper. It's an outline. I thought we could start, Kathy, I don't know if you want to say anything before we start. I was going to suggest that we start with people, if people have any clarification questions. Kathy, why don't you say, do you have some? Yeah, I would just say a few words. When I sent it back to Meg, I just did a one sentence, but I tried to capture people's words or concepts where I could as I went through because when I went back and listened to the tape, Liz, you weren't on when I first said this, but the fact that these are being videotaped has been very helpful because I had taken notes, but I could see where we had a lot of agreement in certain areas and where people were also offering ideas that were like a part B or a part C. And I wanted to make sure I understood the difference for example between John McCabe's part B and John Fenske's because they were different conceptually. And so and then Meg sent me the document that you read to us. So I wanted to capture some of those words about what do we mean about meaningful participation. So this was authored by me, but I think of it as a group effort is the way I would talk about it. So I had Liz's words or at least when she was saying, I like what the way you said that or something. So I want to just thank everyone for that last meeting because I think people came with a lot of thought and Holly's what can we do, we were enthusiastic, where are we going? So this to me is a working outline and I didn't probably put enough on a not sure we can do this. We would have to check whether this is legal, not sure, you know, X, Y and Z how to carry some of this off. And that Meg ultimately will work back to your timeline of when we do what some of these things may not be possible with the way a particular process is already set up. So we would have to figure out how to make that some of the concepts in this, it's clearly some things are easily, some things are not easy. So I didn't put enough of those, not sure this is legal, not sure whether we'll need a bylaw here, not sure, you know, kinds of little things. So that's all I want to say is the overview of putting it together. Great. And I'll say again what I said at the beginning before Liz got on. Thank you, Kathy. This is really helpful. And I think we had a remarkable meeting as you just said in that we seem to come from different places and reach the outline anyway of consensus. The question about what's legal and not the different levels of that some something could be need a bylaw change or approval by the council. Sometimes things need to go to the Massachusetts legislature. But that's what I'm saying. Like I just said, if we like what's on this page, one of the things would be, you know, before we write a lot of words about it, say what if anything would it take to make this possible? And we could talk to Paul and or CPA is governed by a statute, for example, and it has a committee that's authorized. So it's sort of that interaction. We don't want to put a concept on where someone says, you actually can't do that. And or we get you could do this if the following X, Y, or Z. So that's this is just my caveat that to me I see no reason why this wouldn't be in theory possible other than it might not be possible because of the way the statutes are framed. So great. So let's let's just go around and give everybody who wants to a chance to ask any clarifying questions or make overall comments. So make do you want to put it up on the screen so if people want to say on page two or whatever or no she hasn't I can share that my screen I think let me yeah I just think if people want to do however people want to do it but then they can say you know I didn't understand this or I don't agree with this but they could reference some piece of it. Right, let me see if I let me pull it up see introduction. Okay now let me share my screen. Okay but let's see it first of all people have John Page's hand up on why don't you yeah I'm tempted not to share the screen until we see what general comments people have but John Page. Sure so I first want to thank Kathy this is a really great start so that we have something to work from that's such important structure and I kind of envision we probably will have a maybe a goals section where we do talk about what is authentic participation and engagement. Meg you have some great language on that that I think would be perfect and then I almost view A, B, and C which I think those three buckets really captured what we talked about as strategies and building on what you just said Kathy my one fear well two fears one the COVID piece that I mentioned this is temporary but I just wonder it's awkward to talk about this during this time but the second one was my only hesitation is around with CPA and CDBG where I think there's a lot of room for new engagement and increasing participation I would hate for us to get to May and then say to these hardworking committees we have suggestions about how you do your work so maybe we can and this this would get to the schedule but maybe we can bring them in and incorporate them in some way so that we're not telling them our thoughts about their hard work but we're helping to increase the participation in it so this gets this raises the question that we're going to probably not talk about in much of our timeline and when we engage people in the process of writing a final report which people and how we do it and how we frame it other comments I I just want you want it to be interactive at all you know what John just said um I totally I totally agree with what you just said and thinking about these as strategies and uh talking sooner rather than later before what I was trying to say is before we put a lot of words on a piece of paper you know having an informal discussion because CDBG is a good example it's a specific thing it's uh got all sorts of guidelines they go through public hearings on it so people might say we'd love to get more ideas and that's and keeping the position open longer but that's about as far as we can go we still have to be the decision makers because it goes up to the governor it has to you know so it might be some of these some of our concepts would work well with and others maybe not so if we want you know within these are both within a but if we want those we all like them then kind of trying to tease it out a little bit before we go much further on it because maybe CDBG gets dropped or put in in a very different way you know that two things can happen this way this is going to happen differently um so I just I think and then strategy B and strategy C you know all of these are like how do we do any of them right now but um so I do think flushing each of these out a little bit more but within a doing something earlier if what's what stays on the page to explore um and I raised already under the capital budget and is this is in the town managers domain it's not even in we can decrease it but not movement so there would have to be some would there be agreement could there be agreement make you're wondering can there be voting like do we hit a stone wall so just trying to have those conversations before this gets bigger first um yeah um and that's why I'm exactly why I'm proposing we not discuss the timeline too much because their implications for changes that aren't even worth our time just they're so obvious that they need to be made the proposed timeline with screen sharing I can't see everybody at the same time other let me just tell you you can you can go up there's one of the ways to view and you can make that it I just don't see Liz's phone that way but yeah Liz's phone is the you can't see a phone well before I saw her phone yeah I don't see her phone either other other general thank you for that Kathy are there other any other comments or initial observations I feel that one little small thing that it we we need to more explicitly acknowledge the pandemic that we're operating in this dramatically changed climate that has every kind of implication for the town and the budget and uh that we need to refer to that I think a little bit about what can be done in this climate and what could be done in this climate that could leave doors open down the road 10 years from now or whatever for something else but that suggests a whole other section but that's one of my thoughts as I read it well were we thinking that at some point we would suggest that it be revisited in like five to seven years so could that be the door that's left in there something yeah I don't want to say now what it is but I just think the pandemic changed everything you couldn't think of a worse project to be doing during a pandemic than this because of what has stunned to our town budget and uh this is the desperate needs of our downtown businesses and so on that there's something like that Liz I agree I think that's you know and and it could probably be in two places it could be early on yeah the town just had to cut way back on what we spend in every we have a revenue shortfall and then toward a conclusion revisit five to seven years you know I mean I can see in two places that we're in extraordinary times you know my only and and I would want to you know we figure out how to write it but um I think this is partly because I'm a liaison to the community develop block grant and it's got money and I'm worried it doesn't have good proposals so I'm thinking maybe you know maybe in extraordinary times is when you do some extraordinary efforts to bring the residents in like give us your idea you know pound the pavement a bit more um do some support if people have a great idea help them flush it out because I you know last year 400,000 of the 1.1 million went into a reserve because they didn't have enough good projects so it's available for this year it didn't go away but there's a tendency then if it's not a bad project to let it in you know so of the project you have if you can fund 10 why not fund 10 if that's all you get kind of thing so the extraordinary time when we write it up I think could have be written in two two ways here um this is a good time to be inviting people in where we can and to make it make it feel like people have a voice great yeah just a clarification is the cdbg money in any way use it or lose it it can I just I think that Kathy said cdbg and I think that Kathy meant cpa I meant cpa if I meant sorry okay so cpa is it you said it went into a reserve I was just curious to know if you don't use it all in one year do you get allocated less the next year no it's it's it's a surcharge the way it's funded it's a surcharge on our property taxes so whatever our property taxes each year raise a certain amount of money and then the state puts in some additional money based on and holly correct me because you know this better they put in some additional money based on the year before so we get it was a higher match earlier on if you don't use it if the town and explicitly says we're reserving it for general all the purposes it's there so we technically get more to spend the following year but we have to spend it so we you want it you don't like you can't build it up to have millions and millions and millions of dollars but you know it's not a user to lose it each year that's also see go ahead that's also important because there for cpa there are the different categories and there's rules about how much you can use for each category so if you've got a year so there's housing open space and recreation and historic preservation if in a single year you've got no historic preservation applications there would there there would be a requirement to reserve some of that again this is this is the cpa and it's 10 for the three biggies but if one year you get spent a lot you can do an average and so for example with with historic this year this past year we didn't spend up to the full amount so there was explicitly 50 000 reserve for historic so it wasn't just a general reserve you all come to to meet that bottom line but so in one way to think about there's 10 10 and 10 but 70 is could go anywhere within the within the categories it can't go toward it can't go toward build a school holly thanks for clarification because i was a little confused thank you holly cpa too many i want to jump back to what liz said which was ironically and i think this is what we're struggling with a little bit we don't we don't render a decision on participatory budgeting yet in this so at some point we should look at our charge and make a statement which i think we came to somewhat of a conclusion is this is a good thing but a form of participatory budgeting process is just not going to work at this time but we strongly encourage or whatever language is appropriate to revisit so i think that definitely will have to be in here because we don't and i may unless i might have missed it but we don't explicitly say that so somewhere we'll have to commit that that's where we fell because that's our charge is to kind of render a decision i think i read it's i read it's wrote it subtly later john but if it didn't jump out at you it's rather than the official we're going to build on things we have here but but it should be an official there is something known as this thing this animal and we are not a variant of it we're something different um and we can explain why yeah but i actually disagree i think participatory budgeting has many many different forms right the key if we're still you know under b the thing for me that's is the b on page one of some effective way of giving people participation and decision-making that's that's what participatory budgeting is all about and we don't know if we can do that yet but we haven't taken that off the table and i would just say that first sentence i wrote it is the wording it is propose a measure to adopt participatory budgeting or other methods of resident participation in the budgeting you know it wasn't a stylized thing meg i agree it's written very broadly to be or wouldn't have passed it was the only way you know it was controversial and it was written very broadly so i would not say we haven't yet i would feel strongly that we are not ready to say we haven't fulfilled that what kathy quoted there in that first uh sentence right up here i think well i think i would agree i wouldn't want this to be used as justification for never looking into a formal pb process is i think is what i was trying to articulate in the future that was really important notes what you just said liz okay built yeah building on what john was saying what meg was saying um and is do we put in the introduction somewhere that you know we started this process we were looking at various forms of participatory budgeting but then the pandemic hit and given all of the circumstances we our committee is moving in this direction for a recommendation here's why here's what we liked about things here's why we would go there but also don't want to close the door for changing it down the road and put that in the introduction to explain what we were doing why we're going this direction great because of the pandemic great i think definitely and it's what we can look at this as we actually start a team writing i i always have a preference and it's probably because someone threw threatened to throw my 50 page document in the trash can unless i could have a one page summary that told me exactly what i was recommending and so it was like do some quick summary and then go into how did you get there so it's i absolutely liz agree with what you just said so if we can keep it short but i wanted to and it was really i if you are a busy this was at the federal level if you're busy x y or z if you can't tell them what you want to do on the first page clearly they won't read it if you entice them in you know so it's i think we should do something here and then we should do something more because we actually reviewed a bunch of towns and cities we did a lot of thinking we didn't just you know start out going here and talk about what we did so i'm taking notes because like it can certainly go in the introduction and this isn't meant to be an executive summary here could be called anything i started to call it an overview and i didn't know what it was i just had to start so john i like the uh a video went funny and he's going to join again in a minute silence so i i like sorry kathy i like every uh the idea of the executive the one page abstract here's what you're going to find if you choose to read it further so just in terms of formatting i think that that's uh very helpful i wish i'd want earrings that made noise when i'm nodding my head here so you can hear me rings if you have a little bell in the car ring the bell so i have a process question which would be i think we have some great ideas but and i think kathy mentioned group group writing how do we um contribute to this in a way that works with open meeting law because i would love to to be helpful in adding to it um we've in a couple of the times i've been in open meeting law trying so we just went through the percent for art rewriting the bylaw we did a group review like we're doing now um and uh whoever had a pen and pencil was taking copious notes on add this here change this there and two of us were delegated to go and come up with a second draft um and it was always brought back with track changes and comments about why this or that was changed so you could watch its which watch its evolution and then the group was looking at that and um that was just it was i shouldn't say just a group it was five people but um that seemed to be fine then the other one we were with and i was in which was the rules of procedure that the council was going to live by there were a bunch of us and strong personalities and we came up with a structure which you said you know here's the outline of what we're doing people dropped in ideas in a shared document that we could see we came back and we talked about it and then someone was delegated to write up the section you know say why don't you take a stab at part two or part five and then that came back as here's the document and that we had a we had 10 10 different areas in that document and it ended up only two of us were really doing much writing because it just became easier to keep version control so cope but everyone knew they had dropped in because you you're allowed to drop in comments just not talk about them outline so you could come in and show where i i would change this i would change that but you couldn't talk together except for the people who were told go firm this up so that was two different models one was two people we literally sat in the same room and said here there and i don't like your sentence here's my sentence and one of us was typing and the other was chatting and then the other one was totally separate but a different section someone was going to draft the section and then this next meeting we looked at the section so those were the two models i had where we did group writing um in in public it seems to me the of the those two see if john did you agree uh the first at the stage this is at that having two people work on all would be the better way to go what do you think kathy and john either makes sense to me um because john i'd be happy to work with you and i i'm just looking at on the screen right now i i did buy a second monitor so i could have my own document open and be doing comment bubbles on each of these but right now i don't have the ability to do that but that's i'm doing it on a page you know this do some add something here uh put goals somewhere you know say sooner gold COVID um yeah so i'd be happy to you know once we figure out what do we do want to do with this document to um team team right with you where in any way you wanted to that would work john are you up for that yeah i can volunteer for that um and we'd of course bring it back to the committee so then we get more more changes and it would evolve over time so let's then give more comments if we have them i have a couple i've been sort of holding back do other people have comments they want to questions or comments about excellent draft holly i just want to say that i very much appreciate it because i am way better with numbers than i am with words and so i would not volunteer for that committee oh it's great and it and it seems to faithfully reflect what people you know i mean you just drop the drop the stuff in um i'm happy to have you guys do that but in if and then if you want you could admit couldn't the co-writers request as you're going along and say i really need more clarity on you know something that someone has contributed to go back to that person and say give me more you know yeah but that i that would be fabulous that was this and other so on b and c you know one came from you and one came from the other john um i'm trying to remember john mccabe you were the one i had an exchange with correct you know you yeah i yeah and you just dropped the burby right in and i know it was like you know grant supported get you mass more involved and i said you have any more not thinking about this and you said not yet you know but it's like this is like this was as far as i could get on that and if it you know so over time i'll think about this is this is more like i think this is because meg and i talked to put to these different towns that were college towns i would want to make it more i think more open-ended it isn't just like looking for a grant or something it's just looking looking looking at this i think it's a great idea to use our current funding streams but i think if we just talk about that when it's almost like we're not asking to do anything if we could add sort of tickle paul's creative funny bone you know i'm saying what else can we do with this you know we there's probably lots of things we could do so i'm sure we can figure that out and and that to me is a good example of that's not quite right this thing called c and so we rework it to be something that was closer to what you were thinking about but also with a little bit more meat on its bones because i can guarantee you that paul bakerman won't be the one doing it it's going to have you know it's going to be at some other level of volunteer committees or who knows what you know to yeah so c was one of the points that i was going to ask about if we want to keep going with the content just i think it definitely needs i'm glad this that you all feel it needs more clarification there were several things about it that i don't understand uh like is it college the students does that refer to college students could i mean i left it really open ended it seems like i mean what we discovered meg was that there there's there's academic interest in and particularly budgeting out there so there's an opportunity there for perhaps we have we actually have people in public policy and policy and who knows what else uh chances to pull in both faculty and students to to to help man some of this because we don't have a lot of money i'm also just curious uh in terms of the in terms of our budget hole that we will face i would say to liz i just i don't want to say that we that we should we should park this down the road seven years um it might be uh it might be that in a few years some of our better endowed college friends around here might might want to help the town so now and this might be a mechanism for doing it you know also that one of our district one neighborhood association meetings uh we learned that there are hundreds and hundreds of students involved in community community involvement of i can't i attempted to say thousands but that's probably no i can't remember the number but there are numerous you know the survival center totally depends on college students uh that there's just a resource that we can think more creatively about yeah they can do it for credit they can do it for fun they could do it as part of a class curriculum you know there's so many different ways it could go right when i was on this puffers pond committee we got these students to do this astonishing study of the uh biology of the pond and the botany of it as well it was amazing what they put together as a presentation for us with just for college credit if you look down to the last page not last page second to last where i tried to expand on this not the a b c but get into c i mean that's the section i'm saying expand on this because i didn't use the word grants as often it's you know is harness some of this energy and i didn't restrict it on who the students would be meg so this is it could be grant supported um onto your john you used the word more entrepreneurial thinking i just was literally winging it in here well it's probably should be a little wingy because it's sort of a sort of speculative suggestion you know it's it could be lots of things yes it's like we're just trying to get people to think i'm not going to say outside the box i hate it when people say that but you know and so that's where it's what sparked global interest so it could be seed money so i didn't want to turn any but it was like how is seed different than a few other things so this is a really good example of not i don't want to use the word work you know making this get closer to it whatever the idea is um yeah because you have the longer section like around page three or four i can look at that and you know so copy and pasting whatever is here and then saying that's a start but maybe you want to start all over um send i'll send it to you you can punch it back in or whatever you want to do with it right and it doesn't need to even on this i said with foundation of grant support maybe they were all volunteers so i didn't necessarily mean it but i think a lot of i think you know professors get their graduate students so they're undergraduates involved and they might get town students and when they turned it to a student project where they have to report back on it it's a double win um yeah yeah just in general i think that we don't partner enough with our with our five colleges i mean really i i think play it when it kind of off there's more like 12 colleges you know the colleges are happy to be left alone and just just i'm not gonna say that but i mean we well because they you know i think they should be putting more i think they should be giving more back to the town uh i don't know that they necessarily agree with that but here's a way that you can reach out to them as well in a positive way you know um i'll i'll see if i can but i i think it should just be a a list of possibilities not a direct proposal because i i guarantee you that the entrepreneurial folks out there in on the academic side they they could bring they could bring um if you give them an opportunity they might bring something to it i don't know and i also think here you know currently it's written as two paragraphs you're listing i love bullets you know when we don't have a fully fleshed out here are some ideas or something dot dot dot um is a good way of saying we don't have answers yeah i just have just possibly you know just just it's like a thought experiment what could we what what what what else could this thing turn into you know i've often used the phrase leverage resources um when talking about the colleges and universities because those can be everything from technology which can sometimes as we know with zoom and everything else be very expensive but from technology to people power to financial of course so i've used that term leverage resources as a kind of broad catchall sure um a couple i have a page four i wanted to ask kathy could you you had said um this uh drafting note john fenske remarks need to expand could you say a little more about that so john uh okay so he said there's if we want to get people right generally involved and he's he's on he's on the video so but what he was my understanding john of what you said was there's a more general set of issues that's not just carving out a piece of money but early on before we're about to do something do a referendum in a way that could that we really find out what people's priorities are um whether it was voting something and i just plugged in a couple examples i think you talked about the police as an example but there was also the big building projects that you in your remarks talked about if we are going to we think we're going to need to do a tax override go out really early to talk about the choices we face and why do we think we need to do this and what is it anyway um so you had some good examples and i didn't know whether you meant to my mind you know we had these listening sessions and i so much wished rather than a couple hundred people or even 150 because some people came to all of them so i don't know how much we double counted i wished we had said we have four projects we're going to explain them to you we've got short videos can you tell me your top priorities one two three and four and that i got seven thousand ten thousand people weighing in on if i could only do one this is the one i would do if i could do two these are the two i would do um rather than the listening sessions revealed those priorities but i thought we had them from such a smaller number of people um and so you would influence council decisions in a big way about these and right now we have such a budget crisis we're going to need to know that there's there's a support for whatever kinds of choices are made um so that's what i heard you saying so i threw these two in not knowing where to go with it again you know not knowing how to expand it so i could you know just go over some of the things i tried to say maybe add a couple points um this is not a well thought out proposal on my part i think you're giving it more form in in under your explanation of point b than than i had in mind but um you've hit on some of the highlights i think of this generally and again i my starting point is i've seen what we've talked about is participatory budgeting what's done elsewhere it's a kind of allure it's a pot of money that's put out there to stimulate citizen participation i think that's all great the things i've heard are wonderful i'm just trying to get us to think a little more broadly and see if if the rest of you are on board for such a concept and what i mean by thinking more broadly is uh for example and this is going to pretty much what kathy was just saying it's helping town council and the town manager to have a continuously updated better understanding of citizen priorities and that might be some kind of continuous polling i mean we don't have enough money or energy or time to do this but what what would it mean you know what would it mean to do a regular continuous polling of residents on on important topics uh there are related issues i mean then there are the you know the things that um uh the the hot button items that are already out there the police green technologies staffing issues such as with the firefighters benefits for library part timers those are all things that come up they kind of get discussed for a while batted around but nobody has a real sense of where the consensus if you could call it that or the you know the bulk of opinion in town is on on on such a matter um the referenda overrides those are especially important uh and not to forget people um i'm you know i'm people who would rather see taxes stay level or go lower uh you know are are these issues addressed at all um let's see uh i mentioned as well in in the notes i think i made it a little clearer in my my edit that i think town council compensation is a really hot button issue it's sort of uh you know can the council vote itself a race forget it uh i mean they'd have to ultimately but uh this is an issue about how uh how much we're willing to pay for our government and what we think they should be doing and how much time they spend um you know and anyway it's it's just something that i think part is good participatory budgeting would help the leadership of the town to know how to go about it um and then i had a point that was maybe a little more detailed it has to do with um helping the public to enter into budgetary discussions more quickly i mean i i've had myself a lot of experience with budgeting for projects and i can read spreadsheets i think maybe the kind of people or even the the bulk of the citizenry don't have that much experience and could use some uh some help in getting into it i don't mean just posting these things online uh i mean for example um having a regularized standardized helpful public budgeting math what do i mean by that i mean things like uh giving price tags for significant items and by a price tag i mean showing it as a percent of operating or capital budget the impact on the tax rate or on the typical median tax bill and also an especially benchmarking i know this is done in some areas i find these discussions very interesting and it would be helpful to know what best practices are elsewhere what percentage of a town budget comparable massachusetts town budget is devoted to the kind of thing that we're that's under discussion um and then i mentioned as a side point that there's this perennial thorny issue in town how do we count the students as part of the population uh i noted that there are some discussions of per capita expenditures that seem a little strange and i think it has to do with the issue of of the full the year round residents versus the student population and the special expenditures associated with with the universities so that's the random pot of ideas i had along these lines that i think didn't fit clearly into uh what's called participatory budgeting elsewhere but i think i'd like us to you know think it through and it might require some real nitty gritty work to get um uh some of these useful tools or useful ways of helping the public get into discussions more quickly or how to do continuous polling voila yeah john i didn't clearly i didn't there's a reason i did hear you talk about counselor counselor pay and that i didn't put it in as a bullet bullet for probably but that's that's exactly what i'm talking about now but for clear for clear reasons but one thing you just said i thought if i think back to angela's slides that civic engagement they had with the adults and residents on the uh a more a better understanding we did um we did a tiny bit of this once up here with the neighborhood association and the north amherst on what's in our budget how much goes for what where do we have any wiggle room um and most people had not seen anything like that i mean i just very it was simplified but tried to be interactive and back and forth a little bit and it was you know even with uh this much goes here if we want to do more money there it would be this many fewer people working in the school system or something you know that it's money doesn't grow on trees kind of feeling like um but i thought there wasn't any place to go for any of that information you know i just worked up a bunch of things and we did a back and forth but something like that would probably be really helpful if people wanted in some way to engage with this conceptually yeah thank you john and kathy yeah um i wanted to make any other i want to make a comment but i invite anybody else first somewhere up here in section a i had a um of i sort of i guess instead of suggest i would suggest an idea of not where it should go necessarily we could make a big contribution by uh encouraging uh active engagement of many many different community groups both those that are part of government and those that are independent because i think that's how when people join an organization they join it because they're interested in it and um that's the place where you can get their attention often the charter commission had uh these listening sessions and we decided to have one with specific outreach to seniors and we worked through the senior center and we had about 40 seniors and heard all sorts of things that i had never heard before in terms of what worked in the town and what didn't work in terms of uh of course it didn't really relate to the charter it was things but uh pavements that were uneven and um the inadequacy of the kitchen and the senior center uh but we engaged them in the charter process by going to them and listening to what their concerns were and i'm still blown away that a new senior center doesn't appear anywhere on any of the capital plans but i'm not going to bring that up that's for sure but uh but there that's just one example this big brothers big sisters Meg where would would you put them under your in general in a i'm listening um would this be part of the outreach making people aware of what's available using groups like that um go out to them so in that section that follows later that's outreach getting the word out um yeah that's exactly where i wrote it in my copy right in here okay okay i'm just see this right here yeah this is my cursor show yep in my my hand written my hand written right all a lot of that right in here but i'm not necessarily saying it would go there but i think uh it isn't if you scroll down didn't i might have forgotten it it's like how could we do outreach but i might not have done very much on we could expand on how could we do the outreach so it's not just angela and two cpo's exactly yeah so whatever program we propose it builds in outreach to the myriad community organizations that people have joined because they have an interest in something related to our town either their seniors or their low income or they're taking their spending a afternoon a week with a child who needs you know with the big brother big sister um their latino organizations or there are it's just tons of different um they're more now like i think four different racial justice groups that are of different but i i think you're let me see but i think there are two ways you're talking about this both whoever's at the core of this activity is reaching out to them but they've been or saying hey there's an opportunity next year let's let's brainstorm about some ideas come up with our own possible projects so they would be also a place that might be generating generating ideas or proposals yes right here where my cursor is going over this section here yeah expand that that's all i'm saying yeah and i know that the cpo's have a great list of those organizations angela showed it to me once and uh some of them have uh listservs so all of them have listservs they're also neighborhood they're probably about i don't know 15 or so neighborhood email lists and maybe more than that but you know the people who live up above uh by atkins reservoir they have one and a lot of neighborhood amherst woods has one uh email lists for reaching people with information that they might not otherwise hear may i have to go is that okay sure yeah i'm sorry i'm just going to call me oh i see that kind of have to go yes in the kitchen john um put it down okay hold on hold on please yes go ahead so if you have comments on the uh let you can email them to me on the meeting schedule is it next week or or is it we've been doing it every two weeks so i proposed i'm fine with it every two sure and then i did some dancing around thanksgiving and chris the holidays okay it's all good i'll send you something kathy in the next before the next meeting um i'm pretty busy but i'm not it'll still be pretty vague but i'll i'll try to add some more stuff that's fine um so shut go ahead kathy i think said that's fine i just said that's fine yeah so shall we do people have i think any of us can send emails to kathy and john right so do anything else anyone would like to say in front of the group i guess let me i have a question um we have some great specific ideas of things that are missing completely from this right now including john's goals and then we have some and liz bring covid back in and also talk about the future and you're talking about the future um and also liz talked about things we considered but then didn't do or because of so i have some specifics of what to add back in meg's comments right now were a couple of the bullets need a paragraph or more written about them on how you might do it so what i would think is maybe um for the next time we look at this if john and i try to draft some new things to bring in um and maybe just try one expansion on this but everyone come back with um so i didn't want to be i couldn't be too prescriptive i didn't have much time to write this so um you know i think any of these bullets probably can have another paragraph underneath them on how would you do that how would you do that if we're trying to get beyond just a strategy so if people flag things they think a bullet's more than enough or this one i'd like to see at least a paragraph more about it um and that john and i don't try to do that right now we try to bring in the things that you know that goals is missing covid's missing the sense of we looked at the larger that transition statement and we try to just work on that um and then meg you have the outreach i do understand that one we could do but we hold off of doing much more because i think if we get disparate if everyone marks this up with other ideas we're not having this discussion so i'd like it to be consensus before we make a change okay okay so yeah similarly go ahead my thought was going to be when i heard you sharing meg about um that outreach i actually kind of put that under outreach and support staff maybe we should make a stronger statement about empowering uh cpo's or you know giving them more time so that's a bit broader discussion but yeah i think i think we can go through this and i think we can have a strong second draft and then see what we're still missing but certainly we have a lot to add already yeah but are you saying john and kathy that we should not send you more suggestions by email yes that's what i'm saying because that's where i think we're going beyond if we didn't talk about it now as let's work on these things i mean clearly you can say there's a typo you you know holly's you keep saying cdba when you meant to say cpa or whatever that stuff can happen right but but i think um if we are all nodding our heads this section needs to be expanded or broken into two parts that's where we can put words on it um um i won't there's a lot more on page three that could be said about this pilot project we haven't talked about that and i think we probably don't want to keep i i'm sensing that we're ready to move on but this is a big topic so meg why don't you if you want to move on and pilot we won't touch that draft an expansion on that so we can all look at it okay okay i totally agree i think that's a big discussion so i agree let's literally pop it out to something else and say this is the word and we have but here's more that could be discussed whatever and then we can have it as a separate piece i just i literally popped it in there because i thought maybe pilot you know i'm don't noting that in the minute for the minutes that i will write but not circuit but for the next meeting but we'll discuss a draft expansion of pilot program and there's a second place and we won't touch that right there's another general topic that we haven't discussed i'm reluctant to keep being the one bringing up one more topic but on the top of page two i don't know if we want to certainly not talk about it now there are or somewhere in here i'm not to question um whether we want to explore a high school based participatory budgeting project um which would involve a school committee and um allocating some amount of money that would be entirely done within the high school so meg i would just write that up because the schools right now have such i could not drop that in here without you having explained how could that possibly work so i i think for discussion fine but i've just been looking at what the school budget is they're cutting out all the after school programs they're cutting out support for support staff and so if you're talking about out of their budget getting them involved or if you're talking about having high school students come up with ideas and just so everyone knows we do have two high school students have proposed solar panels for the parking lot to the capital budgeting committee so that absolutely you know engineering like where do you see things so if you would just write it up more meg um are you thinking out of the school budget or out of one of these other vehicles that would be great okay thank you okay any more comments i think we have a plan i'll summarize to see if it's correct kathy and first of all i want to thank kathy again for this very very helpful draft i don't know how you did it because i know you were squeezed for time thank you it's really helpful the next step is john and kathy will expand and address the topics that have come up in this discussion only um and i will write a section on the pilot and on the school that i will i will send out whenever we agree we're going to get these done by um shall we try to do these for the next meeting and then john and john the other john john and john they're each working on a section two so again john page and i will not touch those you know they're going to be what is currently in this document is in the document these will just be separate memo whatever they look like when they come in okay excuse me you're saying that i'm going to provide a draft for section b if if you have anything more you want to put in it go ahead and do it as just a separate if you want to just wait i did i did take notes on everything you did so if you want to have us to take a stab at saying more in b we can do that that's your choice i i could i could take a stab at a draft or you could i i think it maybe makes more sense as i said my ideas are are half or only quarter baked and um i'm you know i'm i'm happy to have other people interpret and add or subtract from them okay so why don't we and i i might be tempted to put that unmentionable thing in there um so what's that giving the counselors a race oh i thought of my um does john lowering taxes lowering taxes so i think let's say we we take a stab at doing a little bit more and we come back and have a full discussion of that so nobody you don't have to okay is it your understanding kathy that john mccabe agreed to write a section yeah he said he would take what i wrote and look at it and figure out what's bothering him and expand on it change it around and he had yes that is my understanding he and then he had some for example a bcd you know a bunch of ideas you know that we're not being prescriptive in that one it's wide open okay got it okay anything else anyone wants to say on this excellent outline before we move on this was a really helpful discussion it wouldn't have been possible without this draft so and meg just i just have to say you know i i can be here for a few more minutes but it's i think it's five o'clock and are we are we scheduled for two hours well we've been saying one and a half but we've been going over but let's can we try to end in five minutes okay that would be good really good for me so i would like to not discuss as i said the timeline because it's this this conversation in the memo suggests a totally uh somewhat different timeline and actually speeding up the draft for memo won't be well before the end of december at the rate we're going so i will do that for the next meeting um if we could look at the uh draft meeting schedule uh i have this every two weeks with the skipping the week around thanksgiving and and you'll see around the holidays as well could you could you pull it up on the screen because it's hard for me to do it all in this tiny laptop all right let me see if i will do that um open meeting schedule did you just see it there you have to open you have to share a new document go back to share okay oh i'm not getting my share thing coming up here oh i go up here to stop share stop share okay screen chair yep you got it yeah thank you very much okay and now i of course don't see it but i will there it is all right um i don't think we have to decide every meeting until may but i wanted to have a schedule so people can get them in there but on the other hand if we're ready to do that that would be great so that these meetings get on our calendars and we plan around them um so it's every two weeks up until set the thanksgiving which happens to be two weeks after november 12th so here we would go three weeks and at this point we would go from december 3rd every other week we would skip uh obviously the end of december go to january so my only comment is i'm not sure we're going this is a lot of meetings and let's see how far we get so um if we start drafting and then we need to meet with some staff along the way and get reports back there might be sometimes where we want to do your have these three weeks apart to allow allow time to for something to have happened for the next thing to happen that's a good point so i'm i'm tentatively fine through november 12th i guess um but if we can just revisit this um when we see how far do we get by the 15th um and then what's the next big thing we want to do um so that's just my only thought we might want to do you know december 3rd and then not again till january 7th but i don't know which ones make you know to leave a bigger chunk of time so that's where i'm just saying there may be a period of time where twice a month isn't needed because we need to set something up for something more major um the other possibility is if we have a big zoom forum some evening at seven o'clock we wouldn't that would be a lieu of a meeting right and if we were going to do something like that to invite a larger group to react or we were going to you know these committees are not going to want to meet with us as a committee so it may be one or two of us go over and chit chat with them and come back with a report but we will want the report to be written up i'm just saying that we may need more than a two-week time space between what we decide to do it next so so let's just to cut to the chase here let's if people could mark these four on the calendar and i'm going to when i do the draft timeline which i'm not going to ask john to help me with it because you've got yourself in deep here with this rewriting of the memo if somebody wants to help me with the timeline or if i is that would be helpful if somebody wants to volunteer read it the timeline might affect would it definitely affect this a meeting schedule anybody want to be though i'm giving again my feeling is it's a draft um you know i agree with kathy there may be things that need to be changed but i think it's important to kind of start with a starting point good okay yeah my one admission to be completely what i think i told meg is which is true of all is there's just so much going on right now so i will put all these in my calendar but in terms of my two-day job hats are economic development and housing so it is a crazy time so i'll just lay that out there now that i am here and i'm fully committed but certainly it is a pretty crazy time so i might not be able to join us for every single one of these meetings right and john and i will talk talk after this on whether how far we think we can get by the 15th um do we need to do wait till the 29th you know it just it is literally what else is going on i think i'm good for that um but i i work fast when i'm starting from nothing it's harder to then go back and figure out how to rearrange it um so so let's those first four i think are tentatively okay with me right now all right so four look good okay and um i'm just trying to move this along here uh there are no topics that i didn't foresee 48 hours ago is there any public comment we have no do we have any people i'm just looking at angela i'm here and i do not see anyone in the attendees except for elizabeth larson yeah okay so i think we just reviewed the follow-up we don't need to do that again and our next meeting uh we are confirming for the 15th of october at 3 30 thanks everyone and now do we have a motion to adjourn i move john f seconds it um and all in favor i'm going to ask hi holly we're allowed we don't even have to vote we don't know i've been voted in this in the council so i think we can say okay we all vote to adjourn die and mara hi everybody bye now thank you all excellent meeting everyone thank you good job good night everyone thanks night bye now thanks angela