 Thank you for helping me with that. Okay. No, no. Yeah. Now it's. Yeah. The meeting to order. At three 39. And. I'm going to. Let's see. I think I'll call. Say who's present. John Feskey. Here. Present. Kathy Shane. Here. Holly Bowser. Here. I'll call you. I'll call you. I'll call you. I'll call you. Liz Larson. Here. My gauge present here. John Page. Let me know that he has something come up suddenly and is not going to be able to join us. I'm not sure why John. What happened to John McCabe. Hang on here for a second. I've got a. Yeah. I thought I had this all up. But it disappeared. Oh, sorry, it all up anyway. I got it here. On January, March, let me just pull this. Okay. On March 12. Meg, it's okay if you add lib it a little bit. I'm going to add lib it. Here it is. Actually, on March 10, Governor Baker, an active pursuant with the powers provided in chapter 639. The following changes to open meeting law, as defined in section 18 of chapter 30 a to meaning that hereby the requirements of section 20 of chapter 30 a that meetings are conducted in a public place are no longer active because of the COVID that people can meet by zone. I should have just done that from the start. Add lib it. I'll get that next time. Usually, Angela sends it to me. I've gotten spoiled. Let's go over, does everybody have the agenda or shall I put it on the screen? I think it's helpful if you for me it's helpful if you put it on the screen. Okay. I'm walking it right here is. Did it share yet. There is. Okay. Again, I put my little notes in there. And read just to, um, so we're going to review the agenda. I have identified two goals. One is to plan the interviews with the key staff and committee members, including assignments, questions, materials, and writing the one pager. And the second is to review draft five of the participatory budgeting concepts. Those goals make sense to people. John, yep, the thumbs up. The first one is unable to attend. So our agenda, the sort of the pro forma things at the beginning. These are the topics here related to planning the interviews I added. Liz's intro to this agenda since I emailed it to you that she emailed to all of us this afternoon. It's excellent. And it's pretty straightforward. Comments seem like the right priorities. Okay. I think I should can stop sharing. Now don't you think it was pretty straightforward and then we can see each other. Thanks to Liz for taking the minutes. Appreciate it. Let's approve the minutes that John sent. Thank you, John. I just want to say how useful it is. This was in my opinion, exactly the right level of detail. Because it allows us to remember the meeting, especially what was held quite a while ago and we've had a lot of stuff going on since then. But not too much mundane detail was, I thought they were perfect. Did anybody have any changes to the minutes. I don't know how helpful it is to put the video link so people did want to go back and check something that's right there at the top. Okay, all in favor, I'm going to vote on approving the minutes. Okay, I'm just going to go ahead. Okay, I just want to make one comment for a variety of reasons, I haven't thoroughly read these minutes. So when we vote, I'm going to abstain, but it's not because I have any problem with them. But it's because I haven't read them. Well, I did the great. Any other comments. That's helpful Kathy so we don't wonder why did she abstain. What's going on with that. All right. I'm going to take a vote. Oh, and I think we have to go individually right John. Penske group. In favor, engage in favor, Liz. Yes. Yes, okay. Holly. Hi. And Kathy abstain. Okay, thank you. Let's jump right into the planning. I should have said at the beginning, I may get a very short important phone call. And I, if I do, I'll just step away. I hope it just be for less than a minute. Scheduling something. So we start with looking at the questions. Where do you think that's what I had first year? Where do you want to start with this discussion of. Our plan for. Conversations. We have John's. Questions we start with that. So I think we said we wanted the questions to be open ended enough that. The, the interviewee could take them where it made the most sense. I think that's a good question. Does that still sound like a good plan? Well, my, my take on that was, I think you wanted to start and end with open ended questions, but the ones in the middle inside the sandwich. Right. I think could be very specific. They wouldn't necessarily be open ended. Right. That still sound like our plan. Or we could start with one page. You want to take one page or. So John, do you want to take us through this? You mean the, the. Additional questions I sent. Yes. Okay. Let's see. You know, I've said before, I think of these as a bit different from the other questions, because the other questions seem to revolve around the. that charter commission through to, you know, over into our court to take care of. And this is, so section, what is it? 3B in the draft, along with my small edits, represents an effort to get at this. And now the questions are my ways of thinking about how to see if the town manager or the council president or the community participation officers respond positively to these things at all. And these things, what are they and how are they different? I mean, I see them as it's mostly about consulting and facilitating by consulting, I mean the surveys, the referenda and so forth. And by facilitating, I mean giving if needed, if useful, some additional tools or handles to the residents of Amherst to understand, get into budgeting quicker. I mean, I go to, I've had a lot of experience with at least project budgeting. And I go to the website and there's just a wealth of material there and it makes sense, but you really have to get deeply into it before you can make sense of it. And that's kind of the situation I'm concerned about. But anyway, that's my way of introduction. And then in what I've sent you and this is really, I wanna hear what the rest of you say and it's ours collectively to add it. I had some remarks that I thought might set the stage when we talk to people. And then questions about one A and one B are about facilitating and two A and two B are about consulting. So that's what I have to say. Just a reminder, I guess it's obvious, but these are the questions for the town manager, the council president and the CPOs. Right, there could be other people. I just haven't thought that carefully. Others have finer grained understandings of the community development block grants or whatever they're called and the CPA. I just didn't think of these as particularly relevant, but people who have been involved in town affairs for a while will have ideas about these things and that it may make sense to ask it of more people. I didn't mean to limit it to the CPOs and the town manager and president. That's something we may be thinking about as we go through this, especially when you have in mind, if I'm sure everybody got a chance to see the assignments, although we could change it if you want to, in terms of which group you're gonna be part of. So thank you, John. I'm trying to figure out, do people have any comments on this? Should we go through it? I'm sorry, but can you tell me exactly which document I'm supposed to be looking at? This is the one that has, it looks like this. It's John Fenske sent it. I forwarded it to you yesterday, this morning, actually. He sent it last night, but I was totally preoccupied with the things of the world. Should I share my screen or the? That would be, I would love it if you would do great. Because I opened a couple of things, I opened a couple and it didn't look right to me. So that's, yeah. You might have to, I don't know if you could share it. Do I have to give me? Yeah, no, no, I think I can do it. No, he can, he should be able to. Are you good? That do it? Perfect. So now just make it bigger. Oh. You can make it bigger just by any way you want, but the view can be, yeah. That good? Yeah. Perfect. Larger? No, that's good. I can read it. All right. Thank you. So again, just to repeat what I was saying, one A and one B, I think of as facilitating and two A and two B are consulting. And I think of them as fundamentally different from what we're doing with recommendations three A and three C. So this is in relation to, I'm sure it's obvious to everybody, but to our memo budgeting concepts. John, are you imagining that we would actually say this at the beginning of the conversation? Well, you know, we've battered a bunch of things around. And one of the things I've heard frequently is I think Liz is the most frequent proponent of this is that we have a common set of questions that we ask everyone. And I suppose that's good. If we're doing a real survey, you want to be, you want to have comparables. You want to take same things to everybody. On the other hand, like I say, I initially imagined this, but I need the help from the rest of you that these are most appropriate for certain people, particularly the town manager, town council president and the CPO's. I also was thinking as I wrote this that it's quite a bit of material. I mean, you could spend a half an hour. If not, the town manager could probably talk for an hour and a half about these things. So I don't know, we have to choose carefully. And that's why it's a group discussion. I don't know what to say other than that. This is my starting proposal. It's very helpful. My suggestion, oh, Kathy. John. Okay, and just tell us how you want us to weigh in, Meg. Okay, raise your hand if we're talking about the opening, how to start these conversations. And we don't want to overthink it, but Kathy, do you want to speak and then I will. Yeah, that'd be great. I think this opening works really well when we're talking about, as John just said, Section B, where we're talking about what do people know? How can we increase general participation? I mean, it's a good flow to that section. It works less well for me if we want to see his face go white or say, that's an interesting idea if we want to say, could we make the resident capital proposals more robust and really set aside a pot of money or commit to at least funding a few of them every year? What do you think about that? So that to me is an entirely different topic. So I'm gonna ask this as a question rather than do we have two sets of interviews with Paul is a unique person here, right? And one is he's in charge of the whole budgeting process and the other he's in charge of the capital screen. And if we want to get a reaction to the idea of we have a thing on the books called resident capital, does he think of it? I'm gonna just add lib here. I don't mean I would ever write these words. Is it a pain in the neck? Should we figure out ways to make, to really solicit, make it clear that we would like to receive some of these? How might we provide more staff support and helping people price it out if they don't already know how to do it? So I would have the questions be focused more narrowly for what we're calling section A of the outline than I would for B. That's my reaction. Cause I think this lead in works on a, we have budget forums, we have this, we have that, but if, you know, how do people even weigh in if they don't know the basics about budgets? So this is a really good lead in for the other one. So that's my thought. And I don't know how we wanna structure the interviews and would Paul be willing to give us two separate hours might be one, if you're thinking about it, you know, one focused one way, one focused another. I think he might, I think he's cares a lot about what we're doing and wants to have an influence on the outcome, possibly in order to not make it too ambitious, but still. So a question about the, well, I guess same question about Lynn, would she be willing to give us two hours or is she so busy that she's gonna say, forget it, you get 45 minutes and that's it. I'm sure she would. Okay, and the CPOs was our idea to visit, to interview the three of them separately? Well, I think it should all be at once because they can then cross-pallinate and listen to each other and interact. It's also a prediction. Okay, yeah, I mean, I'm personally, you know, I'm not overbooked by Kathy or Paul or Lynn, but, you know, I'd be happy to do two sets of interviews. I think it makes sense. I wouldn't want to, I wrote this and I felt it was overburdening the kinds of questions that Liz had prepared for us. It would, you know, to, this is shifting gears. It's a very different kind of animal from recommendations 3A and 3C. And I think, you know, when you asked all together, getting this crew, this group of five people in the room for this bigger discussion makes total sense, makes total sense. I wouldn't do them separately. I'm sorry, this group of five people would... Town Manager, Town Council President and the three CPOs. Oh, you think doing, oh, okay. All right, I had thought... All together? Is that what you're saying, Kathy? Yeah, that's at least my first reaction. Okay, here's my objection to that. I think if you go to the Town Manager and Town Council President separately and the CPOs then in a third group, you're going to get very different answers. I think the... I take it back. I take it back. It's just, you know, it's efficient, but I'm afraid that we lose the diversity of opinions and so forth. Particularly the CPOs, you want to give them all the latitude they have. Yeah, yeah. Without their boss in the room. I mean, you know, you folks know them better than I do. I think the Town Manager and the Town Council President are independent-minded enough. It wouldn't matter. We could interview them together. Holly, Holly, did you start? I was sort of thinking along those same lines as well, is that I think you'd get more honest answers out of CPOs without Paul present. Yeah, I agreed with John spoke. The one good thing about having just drawn John is you just have to say John. John spoke what I was one of the things I was going to say. It seems to me that in addition to the one page, we need to have some sort of general opening of what we've been doing, which we've been exploring ways of increasing resident participation. And with the pandemic, we've modified our vision. And something that's just a little more explaining where we're at. But, Meg, I thought we were going to do either a one or one and a half pager. Yeah, but I just needed a sentence going from the one pager to the, maybe not. I mean, I think when you sit down, I say, thanks so much for making time to meet with us. We're, you know, a little something of like, we're meeting with a number of people, exploring different ideas for how people could And I guess what I was thinking, if there's a one pager and you say, this meeting is focused on what we're going to call section 3B or 2B, which is the following. So that kind of lead in that links it back to this other thing you've done. Yeah, I definitely think it's not like, hi there. You know, we need to. Right, and we had, I thought we'd agreed last time that in a sense, we want to keep a lot of the messy details of the draft of the draft working paper hidden from these people. We want to present very carefully in the lead in paragraph, in the introductory material, the one pager, what it is we've been doing and what we'd like to learn from them because, you know, some of our ideas are, what do I want to say, you know, way out there and you know, might be a little bit, I don't know, I'm not quite sure how to phrase this, but I tried in working on this to strike the right tone, give them the right amount of information without committing us to a particular recommendation about facilitation or consultation. Right, well, we could start out by just saying, did you get a chance to read the one pager? For sure. That establishes that that's the. Right, but I always assume in situations like this, and I've interviewed lots of people in my life that you just have to assume they haven't read it and you have to have a few sentences prepared that let you lead in and set the stage for the questions you're going to ask. That's all, that's exactly what I was trying to say. We need a little something, and we're probably not going to read this anyway. So just a thought on that as well is when you go to set these meetings up, you're going to give some bit of an introduction then, like hi, I'd like to set a time to meet with you about, so you have that also as a bit of a lead in when you do the invitations to these meetings. Right, that's when the one pager should go out, the one pager for that specific set of interviews. Okay, any more comments on the opening? You mean the optional lead in remarks? Is that what you're? Optional lead in remarks or thoughts? So what we've said again, what we've said before is we'll have the one pager. What I hadn't realized till just now is we're going to have two different one pagers. Well, I thought there were going to be multiple ones, depending on the particular audience. We had, I thought Liz had started to designate in parentheses the target audience for certain questions. Okay. Is that right? Liz? Liz, in your questions, hadn't you started to designate particular questions for particular audiences? Yeah, I did. There are many overlaps, but they aren't all the same questions for everyone. Yeah. But I think that's right. Okay. Okay. So discuss briefly here 1A and 1B on facility, this is on facilitation. Yeah, yeah, this is what, right. I call it facilitation or giving tools or handles to residents on the assumption that some people are ranked beginners or just occasional participants in budgeting questions and they need quick ways to get at it, but these quick ways ought to be useful. They ought to translate into activity, participation in town deliberations that help the deciders, the town council and the town manager. So I would like to add in here or we could put it in the one pager, but to share very briefly some of the research we've done of the tools that exist in this field, particularly the project management tool that Berkeley's developed and the voting tool that Stanford's developed, both of which are free. We can just give them the link so they can be aware that we're not necessarily asking people to take on a whole lot of work or do something like that. Hmm, you know, I don't know. I'm reluctant to think that that's gonna help a kind of conversation we wanna have with the town manager or the president or the CPOs, only because you really get into the weeds to describe what the tool is and how it might help. I think what we wanna sell, if anything, if that's the right term or inquire about is whether they themselves already have the inklings or the sense that they could use more information and better information and more detailed information from the residents. And, you know, right now, for example, I think that the tools are the annual presentations, the budgetary information on the website and so forth, the meetings, the request for public comment, those are the kinds of handles that are offered to people today. But anyway, that's... Let's hear what some other people think. So I'm not saying we give a big speech about it, but just my point, I'll just make a counterpoint to John, interested in what others think, of course, is that this is a field that's fairly well, that's quite well-developed. And there are resources that the town could take advantage of, even if it's almost as short as that. But excuse me, just a minor point. Aren't you talking, Meg, really, about the consulting part, the 2A and 2B? When you talk about these tools that exist, you're talking about surveys and getting feedback from people, not about improving the ways people can get information. 1A and 1B are about, you know, kind of minor tinkering improvements, like benchmarks and price tags and... Extremely good point, John. I wish I'd waited till 2B to say that. Okay, any other comments on this 1A and 1B? And if you are about, particularly, whether we... Kathy? Well, I think 1B is a little bit long, but I like what it asks. And I'm segwagging into 2A and 2B, what John was talking about. I think we need to stay pretty open-ended to see if there is interest at all. Yeah. On getting opening up a bit more, where 1A and 1B are just making sure that town residents have any idea about where our money goes, where it comes from, you know, and when, if ever, they can weigh in on it. And then 2A and 2B, I think jumps right into some of the really tough decisions we're facing and we'll be facing forever, but, oh, you've got four big building projects and you've only got this much money. Right, right. How do you know what people's priorities are well before you make a final decision? You know, how do you give people an opportunity? And that's where, you know, let me just anchor it into something that is gonna happen pretty soon. We at the council have to make a decision about the Jones Library expansion project because there is a grant that we will have to decide to keep or not. We have asked for a lot more information so the council will have a meeting. How do we know whether residents have read any of that information, have anything to say when they read, and we've actually asked for information about accept the grant. Here are the cost implications, do repairs. So it's not compared to doing nothing. You know, here is what's involved with that. How will we know that? And that discussion, unfortunately, will probably be anchored in just the library rather than, oh, by the way, next year we have a school decision or this competes with roads or this compete, you know, name another big ticket item. Two A and two B, how would we know how people feel? Would you want more, provide access for more informed discussion? So, and I'm not sure I know how to do this, by the way, regardless of what the tools are, because I got emailed by a person, well, I'm gonna have a long discussion with because I know a lot more than she does, but we're just gonna talk about it. And I'm thinking, how do you give people enough information so they know what they're talking about before they say my priority is one, two, three, four? And I think it's premature to ask about tools here because I am not sure there's an interest in opening it up, you know, like we've got district meetings, you know, in really getting a big broad survey out, getting a tool out that you all come. Right, right. I mean, I've got, did I have this expression here in which you can be confident about representativeness? I mean, these things are huge complicated issues. I mean, let me just give a quick vision of the future and the final recommendation we make. I think we're gonna kind of be like the charter commission and kick the can down the road on this. I mean, I don't see, these things are interesting, I think in and of themselves, unless Paul and Lynn and the CPOs all shoot it down quickly, I think they're interesting, but I really think it requires a lot of detailed work to get this right. And that's the sense out of which I say, Meg, I think that introducing one of these tools that other places have developed is not the right. I think you need the general concept to see whether there's interesting in that in getting people's getting a high confidence survey or response from the community about ranking big projects or something like that. But how you do it, I have no clue at this point. I'm not saying we should try to advocate that we adopt tools just that there's, we're not making this stuff up. This is, there's a big field, a big of people who are working on increasing participation and budgeting in all sorts of ways and that there are some resources should the town ever wanna go, that might even in that direction, might even be something we put in the one pager. Well, I guess I still think it's premature. And when I look at those tools, they are not geared for these super big thorny issues in quite the way. I think it's an easier when you're drilling down on some small tangible kinds of things rather than you have to write a lot about each of them before you feel, yeah, I just... Well, I agree with you, the project, the project, the tool for helping groups create project development could be something that the CPA makes available for community groups who wanna do something, right? So they're not just on their own, for example. So I'm not, I agree that Paul and Lynn probably aren't gonna care about the voting tools because they, it's problematic if you're dealing with the kind of thorny issues you've just described. Yeah, so I would love it if we came out of this with a sense that there is real interest in trying to do this better. There's an open or there's not, that they're already, they think they pushed the envelope about there's this new bang the table, I have no idea what that tool really is, trying to find clever ways of people weighing in. So taking copious notes as we open up these issues and hearing what they, what each person has to say, I think would be well worth our while. Right, what's at stake here in my one A, one B, two A, two B is just trying to get, you know, useful information from these people about what path we should chart. And again, I don't think we're gonna solve any of this. I think we'll probably hand off what we've done to a successor participatory budgeting commission because it takes a lot of detailed work to get this stuff right. Yep. Any other comments, especially on two A and two B? So am I to understand that people agree that it's worth setting up a second interview with at least with Paul and separately with Lynn and the separately with the three CPOs to address just this set of questions. Is that what I'm hearing? Rich said this whole thing. This set. Yeah, this set, you know, my questions concerning the recommendations in section three B. I mean, this means nothing to them, but that's what the sense of the lead-in remarks is about to the stage when, you know, something like that needs to be said to set the stage. Right. And presumably it's it or something similar is in the one pager that we sent to them for the second interview. I'd like, I like this set. So what I was thinking in rather than answering your question right now, John, which I think is the right question is let's go through the other sets with a judgment on how much time will we be asking of people if we look at the, some of the things that I think are more focused on spent carving out some money in some way. And I would do this set second, but also when we look at Liz's other set, what I'm thinking is like when we have Paul in the room, my imagination of the one page summary is something like where the PB commissioned, blah, blah, blah. We have, we're not talking about doing it exactly the way other communities have done it. We have three different ideas we're working on. One is, using, building on some places we have now and making them more robust. Two is, three is broader participation. Right now we're here focusing on one. That's what we're focusing today. And the same could be the same lead in them with the CPA people. Right now we're just focusing on one with you with CPA where you already can get resident proposals and we're not gonna go to, they get the same three part thing. We're just here to talk to you about this. So if we can look at the whole set, we think is that first interview with Paul, Paul plus Sean or something mainly focused on the resident capital proposals. Do we wanna talk also about CPA because CPA would need some staff support to make it easier for residents to apply? So just, I'd need to get the whole thing on how can we schedule these interviews and have them all done by the end of February, for example, or our target dates. Because I'd be willing, let me just give you my bottom line. If we found some things are so murky for people and there's a kind of resistance, we could write a shorter report and just have some sections be really short on other ideas that haven't really developed that we think need to be developed in the future. So we get some idea of shortening and how to focus the final report that comes out of here. So I just need to see the whole set because I think focusing on this makes sense to me and I would do it toward after we've done the others. So we don't shut off the conversation for the others before we do this. That's just my sense. Other comments on this? So is there more to say on the 2A and 2B? I'm still a little, so we're talking about two separate meetings with both Paul and Lynn. For some reason, I didn't have on my doodle, Paul our meeting was Lynn, so we'll have to create that. I don't think I'd include Lynn in the other meetings. I think this is the only one I'd include. This focus that John has. Right, but I didn't do a include that in the doodle poll. It didn't get brainstormed. So well, that's no big deal to add. Oh, I see what you mean, that you didn't have Lynn on the list as a separate, anything, yeah. Well, Lynn, just say what you said. Though Lynn is would be, which I just got confused by what you just said, Kathy. Lynn would be. I think John said of questions that I just saw and focused on now are good questions for Lynn. I don't think the questions on resident capital requests, CPA, staffing, we need Paul and the people who control those right now to be open to those. So I wouldn't focus on those with Lynn alone in the room. But are you saying both these sets for Lynn? One, the entire set of John's, the entire St. John's, because for Lynn, as the council president, if we had better ways of doing some of this or we had some ways of doing some of this, when we're doing public forums, we might figure out ways of getting more of the public talking because it's part of what the council is supposed to be doing. And so it directly plays in to the council. Yeah. I have a feeling if we're just talking to Lynn, we could do both of these A and one and two. Well, I was thinking A, one and two, go to Paul, go to Lynn, go to the CPOs. I wasn't gonna separate them. Yeah, okay. I mean, I like one A, one B, one two. And I think it's a nice set of, I think of it as four questions. Maybe I misunderstood. I always thought of... There was some talk of two meetings with Paul and two meetings. The separate meeting with Paul is on resident capital requests. I mean, JCPC for Paul, yes, because... That's the other me. It's a completely different focus on how do you get participation more broadly. It's... Got it, got it, got it, got it. Okay. So that is two meetings, got it. Okay, great. Times two. Right, you already have Paul down technically for the two meetings. You have the town manager meeting and then you have the resident capital request joint capital planning committee, which would be Paul and Sean probably. And then one with just Paul as town manager, not focusing on resident capital, but focusing more on just budget and information in general. Yeah. Right? Okay. I see Kathy shaking her head. No, that's what I thought we were doing exactly when we set up what those... Well, Paul was always on twice, even though it said resident capital request, that to me is Paul. That's Paul, right. Okay, good. So I think that's just the confusion. So any more on this, on what John prepared? Lynn, or you have to... Liz, do you have anything you wanna add? No. So we go to Liz's. Okay, we're gonna move now to... This is... You sent this piece. Shall I share it? I just have to say, it's really helpful for me when you share it because I don't print them out. Yeah. I bought a separate monitor, but I haven't hitched it up yet to figure out how to have one screen showing something and the other screen. I know that's a good thing to do. I just haven't mastered that skill yet. That's why I keep doing this today as I finally got my second monitor. Great, all right, here we go. Thank you, Liz. Do you wanna say anything, Liz? I haven't read this in a month, so... I thought it was excellent introduction, sort of like the beginning of our one pager. Well, this was basically a cut and paste, and I sent out the original draft, and after feedbacks, everybody said cut it, so I cut it. Right. You know, and the only thing I might... I like this a lot. I like the... The only thing I might do on A is put a colon and do our list. Resident Capital Quest Community Participation Act, and if I say... I always seem to get it wrong, but the... The DBG. The DBG, you know, just, you know, build on and enhance to propose projects annually in the following three areas that we've identified or something, you know, I would just put that right in A, and then B and C, I think look perfect. Great. Tell me what the three areas are after the colon and A. Okay, so A, I would go build on and enhance to propose projects annually, and I would add the words in existing programs, and colon, and it would be Resident Capital Request, semi-colon, Community Participation Act, Project Proposals. Community Preservation Act. Wait, CPA. CPA, yep. CPA and Community Development Black Grant. Great. And so I think that turns it into either a two or three sentence, but not very long. I mean, it's still pretty, it's nice and tight. Yeah. All right, I will edit that and get it back out. So is this gonna be the one pager? It's great, it's a half a page. I really like it. I wonder, it seems like we have so much more that we've said about building on, I think it's great too, a half a page, what the heck. But can we, I might wanna add, I don't wanna make it longer because we wanted to make it shorter, but I might, could we all, I'm gonna offer a slight edit, which I haven't done yet, but I'm not sure I am, but let's agree that anybody who wants to add any further edits should do it within the next week, right? So let me just say how I think this might work, but I'm agreeing with you if someone has edits, but if this is the lead on, then what you were worried about, what you were saying we need to do a lead in, we're here to talk to you about. That's what, right. And so when we're with Paul, we're here to talk to you about resident capital requests because they were put on the books in X, Y and Z and they don't get a lot of participation and there's not staff support. So you can put four more sentences, we're here to you, here are our questions. We're here to talk to you about the Preservation Act. Only sometimes residents can propose, but it doesn't very often happen. There's not a lot of support currently on how to do it, here are our questions. And then we're here to talk to you about, so the next thing can be the lead in that you wanted to question set number one, question set number two, question set number three. And then the John ones, we're here to talk to you about more effective ways to solicit public priorities. And that's the lead in sentence then. So here's our big picture, half a page and then our question set follows. Right. Good. And what I did just then, I did it really quickly, but I've been thinking, in that lead in sentence for resident capital requests or the CPAC thing, we'd put just enough that people can do it. We realized that they can, in CPAC, it's within these three priorities, but currently there's not a lot of help to figure out how to do a proposal or cost it out and you don't often get them. And something that said two more sentences like with resident capital requests, similarly, it's on the books, but it doesn't get used very often and people have to do guesstimates. So we're here, so we could flush them out just enough to not have it be too long and not have it be too judgmental. Yeah, I guess I would be concerned. I wouldn't want to ask or do anything that might be leading. Right, so that's why I was saying, I'm not wording quite right, I just want to go, you know, these are on the books we want to talk to you about these sentences you've already got, Liz, build on and enhance, how one we might build on and enhance. So I said too much on each of these because your questions get out at them. But that's why I think rather than making this longer that next the segue into the questions could say just a little bit more. Yeah. Good. So this is a piece of work if we're gonna write different versions of this for different... Oh, I wasn't saying that I would leave exactly this. And then the question said, has the lead in sentence? That's what I would, structurally, I was just saying there was a question set for the people we're talking to that's attached to this half pager. I wouldn't rework this at all. But that was my... The questions are what John did. John did questions for me, for me. Right. Okay, good. I mean, that's, I have this structural thing, like the, you know, in my head that this is a beautiful half a page that say we're here to talk to you about this, here are our questions. Good. So Liz, is this something you can take on or should one of the others of us do that? Okay, can you clarify what this that I should take on is? I'm sorry, I'm not, I thought... I was thinking of offering to take it on myself but I'm not, I'm afraid I would ask that I need a little bit more talking through what Kathy you're thinking of and I don't really wanna take everybody's time. I think I do understand what Kathy is saying. And so I guess what I can do is I can put together, here is the sample packet, as I'm understanding that our intention is to send it to the people we're interviewing. So here is the sample packet that would be sent ahead of time to them. And I can send those around and that way we can be sure that we're all on the same page. Great. What were you gonna hand up? Yeah, that's pretty close. I think this is perfect the way it is and it's just that the questions underneath are different and there may be some verbal, some a few things we say when we sit down when we get on Zoom that clarify where the questions are going. Good, thank you Liz for doing the draft and then we can comment on that. So it seems like we're getting pretty ready to start scheduling these. So are the questions, have we already agreed on the set of questions for each of those other interviews? Yeah, could we put those up on the screen, the questions that as they ended up edited? Yeah, I'm just saying if I could get a quick look at them because I think we're very far along and Liz can, I trust Liz to put together the packet but I just wanna see what they look like. Is that from our last meeting? I'm gonna stop. It is, can you let me share? I've got it right here. Okay, go for it. Great, I have it but I think we can all share at this point. Yeah, it just means someone has to unshare what you did. I just did, yeah, perfect, good. Can you see them or do I need to send them? Get them up, maybe 150%. Bigger would be great, yeah. I'm gonna have to sit so close with her. Oh, I see. They are? Yeah, that's better. Okay. So this is where, so I can, if you remember Liz's great cover which now says on A, colon, we're here three, particularly these three programs colon ABC. It would just have a lead in, it says town official staff, it has a leading, we're here to talk to you about the resident capital requests. And then, in your opinion, what works well. So it would have that lead in, if it's that we're here talking to the resident, we're here to talk about the Community Preservation Act. We're here to talk to you about the CDBG. So that's all I'm thinking, something simple that has the page one, it's the half a page. And then, when you think about resident capital request, what works and what doesn't work? How do you, these work pretty well for me. How do you, what's the process now for ranking and assessing? You know, what's the current, I'm reading down them thinking, okay, first it's resident capital requests. I don't really, what's, I don't know what the process is Holly right now when you, we don't get that many resident capital requests, but someone must take a quick look at it. I know Guilford will say, you can't do a sidewalk for that amount of money or something. You know, there must be some input, but somewhere along the line. Yeah, with capital requests, I'm not really sure. I haven't been involved in that the last couple of years. I know there's some, so I think this, I'm just going through what is the current input from town staff or departments, because if you're over in Community Preservation Act, it gets, they'll describe that if it's historical, it gets sent over to the historic commission. And if it doesn't fit, they throw it out. If it's, they don't feel like you've described the costs. You know, so I think to me, these kind of work right now, if I'm running it through the lens of each of those. So there's a, after that one, two, three bullet Liz, where it says, what is the current input from town staff or departments required to assess question mark? I would make the next its own bullet. Could town staff be made available to assist? You know, just, it's a separate thought to me. So it's just a, it's a bullet rather than part of the first. Yeah, just like that. And then is that other bullet that's indented just should be in? No, I think that's related to town staff. If the town staff is available, what would there? Yeah. Yeah. So I'll just, that goes up there. Perfect. No, I think this, I think this works well to get a conversation started. And it will be the working script. And it may be in some, the whole conversation focuses on the first four or five of these, you know, you know, if they, is there any flexibility to commit met? How would you do, you know, why or why not? You know, so we might get only halfway through some of these because it becomes a longer conversation, which would be good, right? I mean, it wouldn't, it would be great. Good. So for the CPOs, let me just ask, it's completely clear to me for this set of questions for whoever we're talking to for CPAC, for CDBG, for the resident capital requests, JCPC. Then with CPOs, they're big picture people. They're the people who, you know, it feels like a different set of questions because I'm not sure I would ask them anything on this list specifically. No, I agree. I think it's separate. And I think that goes back to John's questions. Those ones are more for the higher level for town manager, town council, CPO. No. Because those are more of the bigger picture. And maybe in this set, depending on who we're talking to, could the CPOs be helpful in getting the word out, you know, about the open period is open, the whatever period is open, but the CPOs can only do what they're asked to do. Although they've had a lot of experience getting thrown participation tasks. And I think that very last bullet, best of all possible, those questions, that's appropriate to them. That's what I was just going to say. Right. And I think that the open periods of proposals is that something that they could help and facilitate and align and can open periods of proposals be aligned across budgets and committees? I think that that would be something that CPOs would maybe have some thought or input into as well. So those two kind of are the ones that stick out to me that CPOs would be. So in our CPO packet, those two might go into that packet in addition to the broader participation things, right? I mean, there's, and that would lead in, would have to say something like, we have these resident capital proposals, we have the this, that and the other thing. Could you be helpful during the open periods? Could you be more helpful in getting the word out or something, you know, letting people know? But I think the first up into those, it doesn't seem like there's something to interview them about, about the open period definitely. And the last one, best of all possible world, that's a good one. Maybe we could combine the questions in, I had the 2A and 2B, I mean, 1A, the things on devising better ways of soliciting citizen priorities. Maybe we could combine that with everything we want from this list that we'd like to ask the CPOs. Seems to be there's only a couple of bullets here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just was going to remove them from the big list here, but Holly pointed out two of these really work well for them. So move it on to the other interview list. Thanks. So are we ready to move on to talk about our timeline for doing these, how we're going to report back and the teams for doing the interviews? I think so, if Liz is clear enough on what we just did quickly. I think I'm okay. Okay. So let me understand the, so the idea is that Liz is now going to take a first cut at generating the various so-called one-pagers that are going to go out with the interview scheduling. And then, but then we'll come back and we'll do one last crack together at saying, yeah, this all works for me. This works for me. Is that the idea that? Oh, well, I'm going to do what I think I believe I have agreed to do is I will do the one page cover that and then the specific questions like what is on the screen right now that will be edited and targeted to the different, the town official staffing committee. So not anything above academic stakeholders. So that will be the packet that would be going out initially once we set up the meetings. I don't know depending on what the next part of the conversation is with our timing. I don't know how that has another crack at it but I think maybe the tweaking of questions is better done between the people who are going to be doing the interviews and agreeing to do that rather than coming back to the committee as a whole. I think that's a good idea. Can I stop sharing? Yes. What you just described, Liz, made total sense to me. Did it make sense to everybody else? Yes. Great. So I want to get a sense of maybe we don't need to do this now depending on what our timeline is going to be of a format with others on the commission. Thoughts on that? I didn't hear what you said, Meg, but you said something about format, what? How we want, do we want to say a few words about how the different groups, the small groups doing these interviews will report back? So I, excuse me, I just have a process question. Are we going to get booted like we were last time in five, 10 minutes? I got that double checked. That was ridiculous, that was unfortunate. But it still would be great to end at five-ish because that's what we've said we're going to do. So we've got 20 minutes, so. But so the three, the things left to talk about is how, whether, and maybe we can put off reporting until our next meeting, depending on, we want to also talk about what our timing is. Remind me when the next meeting is. Well, I think it's in two weeks. That's what it's on our agenda to discuss. I think we've agreed to the next meeting is January 21st, and then we have February, I'm hoping February 4th, February 18th, March 4th and March 18th. Do me a big favor and mail that out to us also. It's at the end of the agenda, but I'll mail it again. I know, just a separate week. Separate, yep. So here's, in response to your thing, I think what I'd like as a report back is you go in with these questions. There's always going to be at least two people coming from our group, right? And we've pre-decided that someone will bring, will have their laptop or something open to type and or record. And so as much as possible, it's a report back on the responses to the actual questions and then a summary up at top of a sense of there was a lot of interest in this. Not sure there's much interest in this, sort of a concluding kind of feedback to us. But I'd like as much as possible that the people doing the interview are the eyes and the ears of the rest of us so I can hear what was said in the other meetings without having to be there. Right. So that sounds good to me. Let me just summarize what I think I heard. Someone in the pair or trio doing the interviews will be taking notes. After the meeting, they'll summarize the kind of major bullet points at the top of how, you know, what was concluded. And that will be circulated. I think it should also be, we should expect that we'll give verbal reports as well because that's often how you communicate some of the nuance. And my example, if I were to describe, I would take Liz's question set, the word version of it, and have it open on my computer with a lot of space underneath each question so I can just quickly type in what happened there, you know, rather than having to reproduce the question. Right. My famous example of not doing this well was my son was doing a project on penguins and he found a world expert on penguins and he sent him off question one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The guy mailed them back and said, answer to one is yes. Answer to two is not sure. And he couldn't find the questions he'd asked so he didn't know what the answer meant. So the putting the answer right under the question, it was something I wished we'd say, could you just fill this, you know, hand right in the answer? I was like, yes, no, maybe. I have a very practical question, which is who is actually making the appointments and sending the one-pager? Okay, let's do that next. Okay. And for that, we can turn to the committees. I think it should be someone who's on the group. So I pulled that up, that document. Yes, please. Okay, doki. Let's see. Open. Go. To this. Okay. I have two or three people on each one. I have a situation that may take me out of commission for a week or so. So I put myself as a third person, but now that we're adding down here, council president, I'm sure I won't be, I'll have some knowledge, but of whether I'm, when I'm gonna be out. First of all, do we want to, seemed like everyone should be on two. We had six people and five slots, but now we have six slots because we're adding the president. So we could have two people on each one. Does that make sense? Meg, if I could be dropped from the CDBG, I'll be happy to do the council president. That way I get all the ones that are relevant to the questions I've worked on. Good. Excellent. And I don't mind being on three. You've got me on the third one with a Perenn. I really want to hear the response on resident capital requests. So that's my highest level preference. The doodle poll didn't have highest preference. So am I only on two right now? You're on two. Okay. Oh, no, you're on three. Town manager. This is the town manager more general. I don't need to be on that one. I really want to be on CPAC and resident capital. Okay. Then you are. Yeah. So I was just saying my prayer because I think those process, those are opportunities that we really, I feel like we can build on them whether there's a willingness to build on them or not. I don't know. Yeah. Okay. I think you've touched on an important point. Don't we need to identify for each of these whether there is one or two interview sessions? So for example, the council president, I think it's only one. It's on the questions I had. Whereas others are going to have the CPOs are gonna have, no, they get only one, the CPOs. Right. Well, and which we don't have is what Holly said, resident capital requests, who are we talking to? We're talking to Paul and probably Sean. You know, those would be the two. CPAC, I think we're talking to the current share and to Anthony maybe. Would that be the right other person? Or Ben. Ben. Ben. Maybe it's Sarah and Ben because Ben is, the person who's trying to figure out how to get more proposals coming to them. And then, but I would say also Anthony, because Anthony kind of knows how the current application process, the budget, you know. Yeah. Good. But that's CPOs not CPAC to the top. I'm sorry. Good. Right. Wrong place. Yep. Okay. So it's Sarah Marshall. Yep. I just put initials. And it's not, his name isn't Ben, what I was confused. His name is Sam. Oh, Sam. I was like, I was thinking Ben is on the school committee. Who, Ben, it's Sam. I'm thinking of a guy. Sam McLeod. Yeah. Sam McLeod. Anthony. Okay. The person I was thinking of was a different, it is somebody named Ben, but it's obviously not the right person. Okay. So I just wanted to put that. So it's Paul is on twice here is the point I was making. No one else is on more than once in terms of the amount of time we're asking for. Okay. So other, we need one more person to do the council president. And I could take myself off of one of these, the resident capital requests and join John. Liz, are you happy with your assignments? The thing, Lynn, I'm on her campaign team. So I don't think it's appropriate that I do that. So I'm just wondering about asking. I interrupted my, I'll jump on, unless somebody else wants to do the council president, I can jump on that and take myself off of something else. Like, this says Kathy and John, you don't need me there. Okay. And if someone else want to meet with the town manager. No, you know, so the three Johns, are each of the three Johns on two? Yes. John P. there, John without an H. I'm just scanning it. I think this looks pretty good. So shall we have each of these teams just to save time? Agree on who's going to once, when we don't have the one page is quite yet, who's going to send the email and make the request? So to start at the top, what's the first one? Well, I'm just wondering, do we want to just agree that we'll just do that among ourselves after the meeting? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. After the meeting, we'll all the pairs will, and I'll send you this updated version when I send you the schedule of meetings. Good. No, actually, can we, since there's only six, is it possible to just do it now so that we're not kicking this can down the road and someone forgets? Okay. John Fenske, do you want me or you to contact a town manager? I can do for the three meetings, you know, doing three is not that much harder than doing one. I'll be happy to do all three, you know, we'll consult ahead of time on the material, the one pager. And then, and, but somebody give me a tip, do I just have a touch with the, I guess his, one of his assistants. And for the call. If you email Paul, Angela always gets it also. So you can email him directly. What about Lynn? She's like, Lynn is the only way to get to Lynn is Lynn. Yeah. So email directly to the... Yeah, I have, I'm sure you have their emails, but if you don't. Okay. And then the community participation officers, I just need to know they're all three names. I think I've met them all serially. I think there is, Holly, am I right that there's a way of doing CPO and you get all three of them? I believe there is, yep. Oh, that would be great. And it's, and then you can then get the three names and say, hello, Brianna and, and, and, and, and I'm, yeah. Okay. And I see that Meg actually, you're on the three, yeah, you're in the same three interview assignments. And Liz is just on one of them for the CPOs. So I can copy, I'll do all three. I'll copy Liz on it and she can just ignore the other two that she's not involved in. Okay. I didn't totally follow that, but That was for the consultation before setting in, you know, the materials they could set up. So I'm, I'm going to volunteer for, for the two I'm on in part because I've got a tight schedule. And so CPAC and resident capital request. And I'm going to be, I have to talk with Paul and Sean anyway, because I'm chair of JCPC. So it would be, so I will do JCPC and CPAC. Good. And I'm liaison to CPAC. Just, it's just, it's for me to do that. Community Development Block Grants. A John or neither of the Johns are here. So you'll just tell one of them has to take care of that. Yep. Okay. So when do we want to do these? I'm trying to, I wish I pulled up my timeline, which Well, for my two, my thought would be, we're just starting the new JCPC. It's, for budget stuff, the intensity of the budget is March and April. So CPAC, so I would try to do these as soon as possible, as soon as I got the script, because CPAC has already done all the projects for the year. And now, they're going to have to do another presentation. They don't have another year opening up for a while. So it's a little bit of a lull period to them. And so grabbing, allowing the three people time to say what slot and are we asking for like an hour? Yeah, 45 minutes. So I would try to get these all set up pretty soon. And, you know, Holly's probably laughing at the thought that Sean or Paul aren't working madly every minute from now until May. I know, yeah, not quite that, but I was thinking about me every minute from now until March or April. But I think we're in intense budget season right now where the departments are sending up your ideas. J.C.P. So would we... I'm sorry, I guess my question would be, do we need to wait till the next meeting to do this or are we going to be thinking about doing it before the next meeting? So if the next meeting is January 21st and we should be good to go immediately after that. So say the first week in February. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, definitely probably for the week in February, and then we'll have it for the meeting after that, hopefully. No, I think that sounds good to me because we'll have Liz's packets then. So if there's any fine tuning, or as long as they come in word, we can, you know, modify them slightly. If we don't want to schedule them before we have the packet, right? Because we want to set the packet, but it's another way of doing it would be to schedule it and say we'll be sending you a packet, which we would send immediately after the January, if we wanted to start. So you could do the last week in January. Yeah. Just say we'd like to meet with you sometime after January 21st before the middle of February. I think it's helpful to have the packet, right? When we asked for the meeting. Exactly. I just think so because busy people want to know what they're putting on their calendar. Yes, but we also have to know that the packet will need to be sent again before the meeting. Yeah. So it'll be sent right. It'll be sent when we schedule it and then we'll be sending a heads up we're due to meet tomorrow or whatever. Yeah. Question about terminology. You folks are saying packet, are we talking about more than a one pager? No, I actually think it's, I think it's evolved to be one page that's a half a page and one page of questions unless Liz can, unless it all fits someone. So it's two pages that could be one two-sided page. Right. We're talking about the half page intro plus whatever questions are appropriate. Got it. Got it. Okay. Thank you. Okay, we're doing awesome. What we didn't get to yet is, and we won't again, we haven't gotten to it for a while, is any more discussion about the participatory budgeting concepts, which has had some edits since we've discussed it last edits that we haven't discussed, but I've suggested at this point in our meeting that we put that off. Well, in fact, I would just add, I'm a great fan of whoever said that, hey, after these interviews, we're going to have a lot of different ideas about this draft. I would let it set fallow, not lost. Because anything, the edits now just wouldn't make sense because we should be redoing this when we're going toward more, what we think is a quasi final budget document that we're going to have a larger audience see. And we may delete, change wording, and we already left open that we want to report out on these initial feedback we got. You know, sharing here. Right, so obviously that's a great idea. I just had it on my mind that we haven't looked, so thanks to Liz and John for adding some more edits, they're excellent, and I added some too. So let's put it fallow, but not forgotten was a good concept. I'm going to, does anybody have anything they want to say before we acknowledge that there's nobody here for public comment? The one thing I would just say for my, Holly can do this or maybe Angel is helping. If that last double set of edits and stuff, if you can place it in, save it on the website, I don't always know which, when someone is sending something with an attachment. So if you made some changes Meg, and if Liz made some changes and John Penske made some changes, I don't know whether I'm looking at a document with all of those changes in it, which is not a problem for me. I just need them labeled John Penske edit, Meg edit, Liz edit, so that I know I've got three documents that do something compared to the last time it was in my computer. And I can then, if I just get them labeled, and I don't, it can't be like draft five, because it's or draft six, because each person who edits it, it's a changing draft. So just whatever we can do to keep the record straight would be really helpful to me, because I don't know what, whether I should be opening three documents right now, which I don't mind doing. I just- I think that they're all being added together into the one document, aren't they? Well, the mine was set out separately. I don't know. See, that's what I think. John's was separate from Liz's. I had no idea you made changes, Meg. So I don't know which document you were on. No, I've just the things you added about the tools and options. You glomped in what I put, said you. So the stuff you sent was already in the document that John worked on and Liz worked on. What I was saying was something, we're going to make it fallow, but not forgotten. And we'll note that since the last time we actually discussed it, at least three of us have made comments, but there's no reason to discuss them now because we'll have plenty of opportunity. Well, except that, beware, version, confusion. I think we need one common document and you use the various track changes options to see for yourself what's a final draft, what's comments only and so forth. We just have multiple copies now. And I'm a bit disappointed. That's what I was raising. And if someone points me to, if it's just a Fenske ad, which I knew I just said do it, John. And if Liz's were already in that, but we can color code them too. So not just the comments that, one's yellow, one's pink, one's blue. And then when we come back to it, we can see that it's something that's been added. So I'd like to look at just one version if we can. So my request was only, I don't know how many we've got out there right now. If it's only one, that's great. Is there any way, I don't know with open meeting law, any way to have it on say Google Drive? Or something like that? We're not technically allowed to work on Google Drive is what we were told because the changes don't get tracked in the same way. So, well, what about one note? Or one of something, some document sharing web browser based something? I will check, but I think you can, cause you're not technically deliberating unless you're, there's nothing. We're not voting on it. Well, it is the dropping in new things and identifying as that I think is fine. And then we can come back together, replacing something that was written before. It's this, it's weird, right? So I'll give you one example of what Lynn did, which I thought was the most painful thing I'd ever seen, but she got comments from a whole bunch of people and she put them all in. So she put, someone said, delete this someone said, expand this, and that's we painful, we went through something and she just copied and pasted each thing into where to avoid. But so Holly can check, I would love it what you just said, Liz, if we could just look at a Google Docs and do it's Google Doc one, it's version whatever and keep watching it as it morphs. But I think using something like the Microsoft cloud-based thing, you can do one so that only one person has editing ability. So that would be you, Kathy, but then other people can add comments to it. And that way you would still retain control to it, but everybody would be able to see the comments. So we're not all making the same comments or all correcting the same spelling. Okay, so let me double check that, because that would be perfect, you're dropping in comment bubbles, which can be, here's a paragraph to add. But as long as we're all dropping the comment bubbles into only to the same document, not to three separate documents. Yeah, I would just like to add, I like what both Liz and Kathy are saying that I think one person should have control and the rest of us can see what it is. Okay, so I noticed there's nobody here beside the five of us. So if you believe there's no public comment, but acknowledging that I asked for it, or we're noting that we're not having it because there's nobody participating, but and there are no topics that I, the chair didn't anticipate. Anything else to say before we adjourn? No, we're adjourning kind of on time since we started a few minutes late. That's great. It's not bad. And we didn't get cut off. That was really unfortunate, but oh, well, we succeeded. But thank you everyone. And if I don't think I said it to everyone, but happy new year. We are still happy new year, even though it's feeling older already, it's happy new year. Oh my God, 13 days. What, how much stuff could happen? Right. So you need to vote on adjourning. I forget. No, we can just say meetings adjourned. Okay, good meetings adjourned. Thank you all. Very much everyone. Bye.