 Good evening, it's time for Byline right here at Amherst Media, and it's a program of public affairs sponsored by the Amherst League of Women Reuters and our local cable station. And we have our guest tonight to introduce, Jim Pistrang, is no stranger here in town. He was town moderator for I think six years and a town meeting member for 19, and he served on some very interesting but obscure committees, as I put it to him in our conversation before the show. One of them was on the Puffer's Pawn 2020 Committee, and another was as part of the team of people who worked on the selection process that led to our current town manager, Paul Buckleman. And there was one other committee in there, Electronic Voting. You were part of the committee to look at how to modernize our voting system here in Amherst. So it's quite eclectic group of projects that you worked on. The other one that I forgot to mention actually is the Dog Park Task Force, which is a currently very active committee. We're in the process of procuring a large grant from a private foundation to build a dog park in Amherst. Wonderful. So you really are a specialist in obscure but important subjects. The subject we're going to be discussing today is your role on the Resident Advisory Committee, which is not obscure at all because it has quite a serious responsibility. So why don't we begin by you explaining the origins of this committee and the charge of the committee. Okay. So the committee is named in our new charter. It says in the charter, I'm cheating here by reading, it says the town manager shall establish a residence advisory committee to assist with evaluation and selection of candidates for appointment. And our charge is very similar to assist the town manager with evaluation and selection of candidates for appointment to multi-membered bodies. And multi-membered bodies means people from the community. It might also mean some people from town council as well. And could it also include staff or other people in town government? Staff and town government aren't typically considered to be voting members of a committee, but they're often liaisons or work with a committee. So they could staff a committee but not be a voting member of the committee. Yes. Okay. So now we know the general charge and the direction of it. So let's rewind the tape and go pre-charter and how did the town manager get advice in the past? So I can't give a lot of detail, but in general, so first of all, stepping back even a little more, pre-charter, some volunteer committees were appointed by town manager, some by the select board, one or two by town moderator, and each of these different bodies went through processes fairly similar in terms of looking, seeking out people who were interested in being on committees. There was something called a citizen's activity form, which has been renamed the community activity form, which people fill out if they're interested in serving on one committee in specific or any committee actually. And that's been around for a very long time. That's been around for a while. But it's been recently reviewed and revised, maybe continually reviewed and revised. Yeah, I think it's a work in progress. So pre-charter, the town manager, would for the most part interview people when it was committees that he had the appointing authority for. I believe he would typically have a staff person there who would be the liaison to that committee and often another member of the committee, a seated member, typically the chair of the committee. I don't know that it was as structured or formalized as a process as it is now. Because what's happened now is the town manager has committed that every interview, every applicant will get an interview and every interview if possible will include the town manager, a staff person and a member of our committee, the resident advisory committee. So you folks are going to be sitting at the table or you are sitting at the table with the town manager as part of this process of reviewing applicants. Yes. And our committee is three people, only one will be at any given interview. We don't want to overwhelm the applicants with this giant group of people. And prior to that you are reviewing every applicant on paper. Typically actually no, just the member of our committee who is doing the interviews will receive the community activity form and take a look at it. So you are each designated either this is your week or your subject or whatever and then you get to see those and the other committee members are going to review the others. Yes. Participate in an interview, a meeting with the town manager, some staff. At the end of that what happens? At the end of that there is a discussion. So the way it works whenever possible they try and schedule a block of interviews. So maybe there will be five 15 minute interviews in a row with us taking, you know people taking notes. At the end of that there will just be a discussion of the interviewers, of the pros and cons of the different applicants. And it's the town manager who gets to make the final decision and decide who he wants to appoint. So it's really a fairly informal conversation just talking about the pros and cons of the different applicants. Okay. And so to get them to get to know them a little bit better, to ask questions about things that might be needing clarification from the form that they filled out, et cetera. Yes. How robust is this process at this point given that I read in the newspaper recently that something like 120 or 30 people have filled out this community activity form in just a matter of a few months? I'd say it's pretty robust. It's really happening. Every candidate is getting an interview for the committee that they are interested in being on. The town staff does a little triage first because some people just fill out a form and say I want to be on any committee or some people say I just want to be in this committee. Some people say here's three committees I want to be on. Typically somebody from the town manager's office will call and talk to a person ahead of time, talk to them about what they're interested in. They might have picked one committee. The town staff person might say we know there's this other committee that you also might be interested in and this has more vacancies, might you be interested in that. So that sort of triage is done but then the interviews are set up and there's currently a backlog in place because from the point in time when the town voted in the new charter the select board and the town manager stopped making appointments to committees. They really wanted to wait until the new government was in place. So a lot of committee members have had their terms extended for an extra year to get to this point in time. Typically they're three year terms and typically they end at the end of June of any given year. So there's a lot of vacancies now and a lot of people whose terms are expiring. So this is a big backlog now. So that's where it's nice to have those 120, 130 candidates fit into that. And that's terrific and the people who are going through these applications are considering them for the positions that they checked off as an applicant. But they're also thinking about other committees that a person may not have checked off and may approach the candidate and say, gee, did you think about this committee because we think based on what we know about you that you might be, we can't promise you this yet but if you want to be considered we think you should put your hat on the ring for this. And are people doing that? Yes. That's great. And I know from our meeting I had an interview with our community participation officers which as our viewers know from a previous show they are, it's a job split in three rather than hiring a whole new person to just be one person focused on that task. And they are working very collaboratively to identify ways to engage the community because that's one of the priorities of our charter was on the one hand it was transparency on the other hand with civic engagement, two of the major themes. And so transparency fits into this conversation as well as engagement. One of the focuses that they talked about was diversity and how much effort and commitment they have to trying to encourage the broad cross section of our community to think of themselves as potential applicants for these positions. How's that playing out? Are we seeing a diverse group of folks coming forward? What efforts are being made to try to encourage that? My personal feeling is we're not seeing as much diversity as we'd like to see. I think our officers are really working at it and working hard and it's a struggle. There's sort of traditionally non-engaged sections of the community and getting them to be engaged involves a lot of work. It's not as simple as just posting a job in the newspaper or something like that. So they're reaching out and they're working on it and just looking at the data that was published in the newspaper of what's in the pool. And it's interesting because in the community activity farm, excuse me, you don't have to put what your ethnic background is, racial background, economic education, anything. So some people volunteer, some information, others don't. So we don't really have data on the entire pool of applicants. But from what we see, it really isn't as diverse as I think a lot of people would want to be. Certainly not as diverse as I would want to be. So there's some tension here between the transparency that you would need in order to know more about the candidates so that you could create the kind of diversity you want. On the other hand, you basically are trying to allow people to define themselves. And by allowing that, you might have a lack of information. I suppose part of the solution to that is interview lots of people because you learn about their diversity as soon as they walk in the door and they sit down and have a conversation with you. Yeah, it's interesting because there's some things you shouldn't ask and don't want to ask. One item that used to be in the activity forum that's not there now is a question of whether you are a homeowner or a renter. And some people felt that was problematic. They didn't want people to feel, well, I'm a renter. They're not going to want me for this committee. So I shouldn't have to fill that out. But the flip side of that is people doing the interviews might want to have a committee that has some homeowners and some renters and feel that's important. And now we don't have that information. So it is exactly as you described it, it's that struggle between allowing people to feel comfortable and free, giving little information and yet wanting information for good reasons to build diverse committees. And what's your interaction as a committee? And by the way, who are the other members of your committee? The other members of my committee are Connie Krueger and Keisha Dennis. And so your interaction with the three of you, with the community participation officers, could you explain a little bit about how you work together with them? Yeah, so far we've been having bi-weekly meetings. And it'll probably be a little less once we get past June and past this big bubble of interviews that need to be done. But at least one of those officers has been to nearly every one of our meetings and there was one where all three came. Just so we could talk about the community activity form and talk about what they're doing and what we're doing. So we have a close relationship with them. And we're sort of, our primary role and our mission is to advise the town manager on appointments based on the interviews. We have sort of a secondary role which is working with the officers or at least advising them on our suggestions and our thoughts on good ways or better ways to reach out to the community. And they're very receptive to anything and everything that people have to offer. I think how successful they'll be kind of remains to be seen but you can't fault them for not trying. They're really doing a great job and working hard. And are there some efforts that your committee as a committee or the members of the committee are making individually to try to help raise the visibility of this committee, its function and the goal of the charter to really have robust civic engagement? Or are you really focused principally on doing a good job on helping to screen, if you will, and help evaluate candidates? I think we're focused principally on our main mission. I'm here, so I suppose this is one kind of outreach. And certainly I think all three of us just talk to people that we know about our committee and about the committees in town. It's amazing how many people don't have an understanding of how committees work and how valuable they are to a town and how many there are and how many people are involved at a volunteer level. So we try and talk it up individually to people we come in contact with. But there's not really a formal effort on our part. So that's a good segue for the next area that we should explore a little bit. So some committees, some of the appointments are being made to panels that are advisory in nature. Others have significant authority because they're actually the decision makers. Yes. If you are participating in an advisory capacity, you are still influencing decisions, but the decisions aren't yours. Yes. In the case of the more regulatory or decision making bodies, when you get appointed, you're going to be voting and you're going to be making decisions that will affect individuals, communities, I'm sorry, individuals, businesses, families, the community as a whole. Yes. Talk a little bit about that division and how you guys look at that and how many of these committees are really advisory and how many are really decision-making and I'm not looking for an exact count, but and some examples of sort of what that looks like. It's good that you don't want an exact count because I don't know. Good. So one thing at the very beginning of each interview, Mr. Balkamon explains to each candidate what the charge of the committee is and what they do and he makes it very clear whether they're advisory or regulatory in some way or have some other authority besides just advising because candidates don't always know. You know, sometimes they just sounds like a committee, I'm interested in this, but they don't really understand what the impact of the committee is. So we always try and make it clear in the first minute or two of an interview so the candidates understand that. Yeah, the differences are, it's a pretty broad spectrum. We have something like the Council on Aging, which is just an advisory committee, but you know, critical advice and they really, they work closely with our senior center and the town staff advising on things to do and how to raise funds and how to increase programming and stuff like that. The other extreme, probably the best of the other extreme is the Conservation Commission because the Conservation Commission also has some advisory stuff to the planning board, but the Conservation Commission, let me just read this because I cheated and wrote it down. That's on the back side. So they're responsible for administering and enforcing State Wetland Protection Act and Town of Amherst Wetland Protection Bylaws. So when something comes before a new development is happening, it comes before the Conservation Commission and they get to decide if it involves any of these wetland protection bylaws and then whether it's meeting those bylaws and that's critical information that can make or break a project or certainly change the way a project looks. But is somebody else making the decision, but they're advising? No, in this case, they're making a ruling, they're making the ruling on whether or not it meets the bylaw's standards. So can you give an example of where they might advise another panel? So the Dog Park Task Force went before the Conservation Commission because we're building, and this is a little public advice, a public advisory thing, we're building our new Dog Park on the old landfill. I was going to ask you more about it anyway, so thank you. It's on the old old landfill, the one that's on the south side of Route 9, on just a little portion of it. And we had to go before the Conservation Commission just to make sure that we weren't impinging on any wetlands that were nearby and if there was any mitigation that might be needed because of any impingement on wetlands. The result was that no, we weren't. We were close, but we weren't affected by any of the bylaws. But there was one little section where there's kind of a dip down at the very southern end that eventually leads into one of the ponds down there. And they gave advice on what they thought was a good design where we could build a little swell in there with some vegetation to make it work better and not impact anything. So that was an example of no mitigation was needed and we weren't really affected by the bylaws, but they still had some advice on what we could do to make it a better design. And was that a step of going and consulting with them? Was that recommended by somebody at Town Hall? Was that by somebody's experience in the group saying, hey, why don't we go get some advice because they may be some issues? Because a lot of people would be afraid to go to a regulatory body for advice. Worried that they would be opening up a can of worms and now find themselves in the middle of a controversy of decisions that are going to be taken out of your hands. I don't think it was even a choice. I think we had to go before them, but we wanted to anyway. Our staff liaison is Dave Zomek, who's the director of I forget what his title is, director of conservation and something, but also the assistant town manager and all around good guy and all around good guy. And it was clear talking to him that this was one of the many committees that we had to bring our design in front of. But I don't think it was a choice. I think it's just one of the things you have to do when you're designing something like this. But they didn't have to, quote, approve it. They had to guide. They they ruled that there wasn't any conflict with any existing bylaws. So in that sense, they approved it without having to take their ruling. Was there was nothing we were doing that was in conflict with anything. Got it. Got it. So now let's think about this a little bit more. So the town manager is appointing some people who are decision makers and appointing some people who give advice. You screen both groups or just the advisory groups. We screen any group on screen. We were part of the interview process part of the process for any committee that the town manager is the appointing authority for the committee. OK, but not if the council president is making an appointment. Right. Or the council as a whole or the council subcommittee with the really long name that I can't. But also the town manager once the interview has taken place on appointments that he would like to make, he brings those to the town council. Yeah, the process is when the town manager is the appointing authority, and I think I've got this right, is that he declares to the town council that these are my recommended appointees. These are people I want to appoint. I don't know what the exact phrasing is. And the town council can take three actions. They can actually formally vote and say, yes, we approve of these. They can formally vote and say, no, we don't approve of these. Or they can do nothing. And if after 30 days they've done nothing, then the appointment takes place. Right. So ultimately the elected people are actually making the appointments to these boards. Um, I don't know, technically, I guess that's how you describe it. That the town council can't say, no, we don't want this person, but we do want this person that has to come from the town manager. Manager. OK. And so the town manager, if a recommendation comes for from the town manager and the council has a question or a problem, they can bounce it back. I believe that's the case and discussion. So they play a significant role. Yeah. So it's like a sandwich. You guys are at the at the beginning part of this process through the interviews with the candidates, the town council, as at the other end of the process, basically in effect, blessing the work of your committee and the town manager when the final appointments are actually made. Yes. So all three all three points of this three three points of power in this situation and you have something to say. Town council has something to say on the town manager's point. Yes, I think my committee is the smallest of those three points of power, but still important. I guess. Yeah. Any other points or thoughts that you want to share as we all try to understand the role of this committee? Because the whole point of this show has been to understand our new government as it's unfolding. And so are there are there any things that we've missed in our conversation that you would like to touch on or emphasize that we haven't delved into deeply enough for people to understand the role of this group, which is an important body. I guess one concern I have, you know, there's a there's a large group of people who filled out the activity forms. You know, my concern is that that's going to drop down after the thrill of the new government passes. And but the needs of the community for these committees isn't going to drop down. And the struggle for the less glamorous. What's the word used again, the obscure you had some of the words. Yeah, I don't remember. But I think it was obscure. You know, the it's it's often tough getting people to serve on committees. You know, when I was moderator, I was the appointing authority for the finance committee. And occasionally somebody would fill out community activity form. But often you had to seek out people and ask them beg them whatever to serve in the finance committee. And that's the case with a fair number of committees. And and that's where these outreach officers hopefully will work on making that better. Part of the problem is convincing people in the community or at least getting information out, both on the importance of these committees and the fact that when you're on a committee, your voice really is heard. You know, it's not these aren't least the ones I've experienced with, they're not just sort of pro forma things that don't really do anything. They're really committees that matter and are listened to. So so it's it's a great way to be involved in your community. And I think there's people who first of all, either just don't understand it or else think, oh, no one would listen to me. I'm not an important person in this town. But, you know, that's that's the word that has to get out for people to trust that if they go to the effort to get on this committee that their voices really will be heard. And their work respected. Yeah. And people may still disagree with it, but hopefully respectfully disagree. And ultimately, it will still be incorporated into whatever the final decisions are and actions that are taken in our name as a community and as residents of our community. And so I want to thank you very much for the work that you folks are doing to help recruit, encourage, motivate people to participate in the community. And I want to thank you all for watching. And Jim's making a really critical point here that there are a tremendous number of opportunities to serve in this community. And if we don't step forward and volunteer and participate, there are a lot of things that a won't get done and be we won't have the diversity and range of voices that we need to get the best possible policies and programs and decisions made so that we can continue to have a robust and engaged community with a very high quality of life here in in the town of Amherst. And so thank you again to the legal women voters, to the staff here at Amherst Media. And thank you for joining us this evening.