 On behalf of the Governance Task Group of Vision 2020 and the League of Women Voters of Arlington, we want to welcome you to an introduction to town meeting and we're very pleased this evening to have our town moderator, John Leone, who will be leading the presentation. John's been a town meeting member now for almost 20 years and he's starting his third term as our moderator. Thank you. Good evening. I'm John Leone. John Leone she introduced. I'm the moderator. I'm basically with the moderator, if you're familiar at all with town meeting or not, you'll get familiar with me pretty quickly. I'm essentially the chairman of town meeting. I sit up on the stage with the town clerk and the town stenographer, Gabe, clerk is Stephanie Luccarelli, and I run the show. It's the ring master, so to speak. I get to sit in the big throne and we go through the warrant. You all got this in either the advocate or in the packages you received. We'll go over this in a minute. How many people here are new town meeting members? All right, so you got your big package the other day, you looked through it and said, what the heck is all this stuff? We're going to go through that and after I finish, we'll have questions in the answer if you want to say anything. You're going to have to come up front because we are having this recorded for cable and they're going to rebroadcast it a couple of times for those who couldn't meet. So the first night we're going to be here is Monday the 22nd, which is just three or four days from now. You'll come in the front door and there's two sets of doors as you know in the town meeting hall. Go in the left door. You'll go in and there'll be a little table there with Janice Weaver, one of the assistant clerks who's going to check you in. You just tell your name, your precinct, your checked in, and then behind you as you come in, there's going to be a long eight foot table, there's going to be more material there. You're going to get more stuff than you know what to do with. Every Monday night there's also going to be the finance committee report. You'll want to pick one of those up. You'll want to pick up whatever else looks new and then keep it every night after you check in. Check that table because there's always new handouts, new materials, and that's really what's going to be important to us. Because the warrant that you received, this was compiled in December and January, December of last year, January this year, released out to the public. It is essentially the warrant, it's warning. This is warning the citizens of Arlington that we're going to talk about these 52 items and five items in a special town meeting and that's what we're going to discuss. This is our agenda. If it's not in the warrant, we're not going to discuss it. It also, the warrant articles lay out what the topic is and I is the moderator to get to decide if someone's motion or substitute or someone gets up and starts giving a speech that's not within the four corners of the warrant article. I can tell them to be quiet because it's outside the scope. The scope of the article is defined by the words printed in the warrant. Start talking beyond that, I'm going to shut you down. We have a strict seven minute first time rule for speaking. It's in our bylaws and five minutes your second time up. I adhere by those time limits pretty religiously. If I can tell you're at the very end and you've got two more seconds, I might let you finish but generally when it gets to 30 seconds near the end, I'm going to tell you. When it gets to seven minutes, I'm going to tell you again and there's a little red light in front of you. It's going to go on and it's going to start being annoying and buzzing and if you still don't be quiet, I'll gavel you down and the meeting will start yelling at me to yell at you if you don't stop talking because they want to hear everybody. Everybody should have a chance to speak. So we're going to start out the night on the 22nd. The minute man will hopefully be here. They'll march in. They'll give us a little fife and drum show. We'll have a pastor come in and give us a prayer and then we're going to jump right into it, article one, article two, so forth, right in. So we're going to start right away the first night. So you should look through your materials. You've been elected. That means you really want to do this. You want to be a town meeting member. You're here for all 52 articles. So these materials that you got are actually what we're going to be voting on. The warrant is just giving us a brief. What we're going to talk about. The board of selectmen report. They have a lot of, you'll look at that and it'll say I'm going to find one. This isn't a particularly long one. It must be a doggy one. It is. Article 14, by law amendment to allow itself serve gas stations. It says voted. Or it says voted. That is actually what we're going to discuss. We're going to talk about what's recommended vote of the selectmen. Or if this finance committee has the recommended vote, they deal with all the finance articles. They got the electronic study, electronic voting committee study. I'll go over that in a minute. The redevelopment board has recommended votes. So you have to actually do a little bit of juggling. You have to look and see what article in the warrant is. Find the recommended vote in the different committee's reports. And then flip back and forth. My first couple of years, most people you'll see they will be picking up books and putting them down. It's almost easiest to get your scissors out and cut and taste. I'm kind of anal about it. I do that. It makes it a lot easier because then you can just flip and say, okay, we're on article 14. Flip the page. We're on article 14. Otherwise, you're going to be picking the books up. It's not that bad. It's not as daunting as it seems. So we're only going to discuss what the recommended vote is. You'll see in some spots it says no action. If it says recommend a vote in no action, that means whoever was the proponent to the article, be it a citizen or be it with the select man or the town manager, they don't want to go forward with it. We vote no action. No action means we're not even going to discuss it. I'm going to say recommended vote in no action, all in favor. Even if one person says yes, I'm going to say, so we have vote in no action. I'm going to move on. We're not going to talk about it if there's no action. So if you want to talk about something, hey, don't worry about it. If you want to talk about something that's a no action vote, you have to have a substitute motion. I can give you, you got my letter that has my email address and phone number on it. Up the top, call me. Email me. I'll send you the substitute motion form. I'll tell you how to do it. I'll help you do it. Why do I do all that? I want town meeting to run smoothly. I want everybody to know what they're doing. One of the only hard and fast rules that I have that's not in the bylaws. If you do have a substitute motion or an amendment that's pretty substantial, one word, I'll let you slide. But if it's a radical change to what the recommended vote is, you have to have that on everybody's seats just as you got these little pieces of paper today, the day before we're going to talk about it. So if we were going to talk about it Wednesday, you have to have it to everybody Monday. The only exception is Monday because that's our first day. So if you have a recommended or an amendment or a substitute for Monday, bring it in. Put it on everybody's chair. Why do I do that? So you all can see what the substitute motions are, amended motions are, and you can be well educated and well informed about it. Because when I was a town meeting, we didn't have this rule. And we would get six or seven page amendments on our chair the night we're supposed to vote on. And I'll admit it, I'm a slow reader. I wouldn't be able to finish reading the thing before someone moved the question and we're supposed to vote on it. It just buggered me. So in the moderators, moderators have an association, as everybody does. One of the other moderators said they have a rule similar to this in their town, except they have a one week notice. And I said, well, Arlington won't go for that. I'm going to have a 48 hour rule. So that's in my letter. Hopefully you read my letter. I tried to explain all this. That's the 48 hour rule. I've been called a dictator trying to stifle debate, trying to control what goes on in the meeting. Call me what you want. I don't care. I have the rule and that's what it's going to be. Fortunately for me, bad for you, moderators, decisions aren't appealable. The only thing you can appeal is a vote. How do we vote? We get a recommended vote of the select man. Article 14, everybody gets up and talks. I'll explain that in a minute. Someone moves a question or no one else wants to talk. I'll say, OK, we have the recommended vote in Article 14. All in favor say yes. Everybody yells out yes. All in favor say no. Everyone yells out no. I choose. Which one was louder? Which one sounded better? And it's actually, I'd say I'm about 95% of the time. I get it right. If five members, random five people in the audience, think the moderator got it wrong, they stand up. And some will stand up and say, doubt the vote. And they'll look around and get five other people to stand. So we have a standing vote. I'll say, all in favor stand. Everybody who wants it stands up. I have four tellers. They count, and then they report back. And we do the math, and we see who won. That's how you appeal. If you really don't like it and you get 30 members to stand up, we have a roll call vote. Mr. Harrington in the back had our first roll call in about 15 years last year. We might get more this year. Wait till next year, we have electronic voting. Roll call is literally that. I have a list of all the town meeting members. I start a precinct one, the first name of the list, and I go through it. It took about 20 minutes. Well, that was just to do the call. Then we had to go up and add. So by the time we finished, it was probably 30, five, 40 minutes. We start to finish. Why would you want a roll call? You want to see how people voted. You wanted people to actually stand up and say, I'm in favor of this. I'm not in favor of that. Generally, unless it's a hot button issue, like the lead blowers was last year, people are happy with the standing vote. They don't really care if there's a roll call or not. If I said that, that was my second roll call in my 19 years as a town meeting member. I can't even remember what the first one was for. It had been so long ago. Patriot act. Nope. It was in the mid-90s. It was something about whether or not we were going to let either some guy become a cop or a firefighter to take the test when he was in his mid-40s or something like that. There's one of those on this year's warrant, too. You'll see it's around 48 or something, I think, around there. But there was a controversy. And we did a roll call on that issue. Or it had something to do with the cops or their pay or something like that. But generally, we don't have them. The meeting moves along. Most town meeting members, in their first year, they're sort of in awe. And like, what the heck is going on here? It takes them a year or two before they get their feet and want to stand up and talk. Others, first year, they're standing right up participating. I think that's great. The more new blood we can get in, the more people with different opinions than hearing the same 12 people talk in every single article. I'm all in favor of it. So if you want to talk on an article, after I call the article, I'll say, OK, Article 14, we're done with that. Now Article 15, recommend a vote of so-and-so. The select benefits, their article, because they're the ones reporting on it in their little book. Or the finance committee, if it's a finance article or the redevelopment board, if it's a zoning issue, they'll get up and give their presentation. And while they're presenting, you'll see your members all raising their hands like madmen. They're trying to get minus Stephanie's attention. We keep a list. I don't know all your names yet. It's going to take me a little while to figure out who you are. I'll say the guy in the black shirt four rows back until I get your name. And it sometimes takes me a day to remember who everybody is. I'm generally pretty good. Between us, we get people's names. And then once we recognize you, we'll either point at you or give you some sort of signal that I saw you raise your hand. You're on the list. You don't have to keep raising your hand. You may not know who you are on that list. You may not get called. You may not get reached. But you're on there. I saw you. It's just up to the crowd how long they want to talk about it. After we've heard debate for a while, things will start to repeat. I might say something like anything new to add. If there was anybody else have something we haven't heard about, people have a tendency. This guy over here gets up and tells us a five-minute colic. We have a why. It's so wonderful to walk his dog and let it poop on the sidewalk. The next person's going to get up and say the same thing. We heard it. We don't want to hear it again. Just get up and say, I agree with what he said. And if you had something new to add, say it. I've been saying that for six years. It doesn't work. People get up and repeat. It stretches the meeting up, but what are you going to do? Eventually, someone's going to get up and say these magic words. I move to terminate debate on the article and all issues before it. That's all you can say. If you don't say anything more than those words, it can't terminate debate. Terminating debate means I've had enough. I want to stop talking about it. I want to vote on it. You've now made a motion, which is a privileged motion in my letter. I also gave you a parliamentary guide. These are all the different kind of motions. Motion to terminate debate is a privileged motion. It, as soon as you make it, we stop talking about the article and I take a vote on termination of debate. It takes two thirds of the members to terminate debate. So two thirds of the other people want to stop. We're going to stop. If they don't, we keep going. If you get up and say, I motion to terminate debate because I really like to have dogs poop on the sidewalk and I don't want to have to pick it up, you've blown it. You can't terminate debate. You're done. You're off the list. We have to wait for someone else to do it. So if you want to, use just those words. And that's in our bylaws. Motion to terminate debate and the fact you can only use those words so you don't get a last crack at the argument. You just have to move right in and do it. So that's how you, what we're going to talk about. What we're going to, how we talk about it and how we terminate the debate and vote. At that point is when I call the vote, all in favor. I'll propose and we move on or we keep talking. If you don't like what they have written, you have the right to substitute or make a motion to amend. That is you are going to take, and you'll see these, I've already seen four or five of them. You'll see them on your chairs Monday night. People don't exactly like what the select and have recommended just cause they said it. Doesn't mean we have to do it. We're our own legislative body. We set the town bylaws. We set how our budget, if you add up all the money, we're going to spend about a hundred million dollars between the school budget, the town budget. We're going to go through all that. We're going to spend that money. We get to decide how it's spent. Al Tosti, chairman of finance committee is going to give it to us and say, this is it. You can't touch it. That's not true. If you want to make a motion to change some money from that account to that account, you can do it. You can make it up and make that motion to pay this person more, pay that person less or whatever it is. As long as we keep the budget balanced, you can move money around. You can add, you can subtract to any of the recommended votes in any of these booklets that you get. And that's done by that substitute motion. And then we vote on it. I'll get up and I'll say I have a motion to amend this article by Mr. Harrington. He wants to add the words such and such, such and such here and I'll take a vote on it. If the crowd likes it, that's in. And then at the end of the votes, we will then vote on it. So you as the legislative body, which we really are, have the right to change it, to amend it, vote it up, vote it down, decide not to do it. And then we're just gonna go through the warrant from the beginning to the end. We don't jump all around except in certain circumstances, one of which I will tell you about in a few minutes. We generally follow right from, so you're gonna be able to see where we started today and take a pretty good guess. We're gonna reach this article tomorrow. We're going pretty slow. We're not gonna reach that article for two days. So you'll know if you have a substitute, you'll know when you should get it ready. I think anybody who has such a substitute has had these for only a few days, but you should work on it over the weekend. You run up on me Monday, and you should have them ready by Monday night or Tuesday at the latest. I'm hoping Monday, besides all the pomp and circumstances, first thing we may get through, I'm hoping we get to article, at least article 12, Monday night. So it's most of them are housekeeping type articles, things that are there every year or they know actions. So we're gonna move right through and we could get up to 12 by Monday. Wednesday night, we're gonna open the regular town meeting, instantly adjourn it and open the special town meeting. You say, what's the special town meeting? Well, in the back of the warrant, you'll see it. A special town meeting is, the select men call it if they want or a hundred citizens can get together and get a warrant article. They call for a special town meeting on items that aren't in the regular annual, but they didn't get everything in time for the annual, so they come in with a special. Some town towns have a special every single fall no matter what. Arlington, we generally get it all done in the spring. We don't have too many fall specials only in certain circumstances. Hundred citizens get together and present the warrant article. They have to open it, they being the select men. So Wednesday, we're gonna have five articles on the special, the select men opened it and some other ones got thrown in there. Probably much to the extra grin, but what are you gonna do? Once they open it up, it's up to the citizens to do what they want to do to it. On the special, there's, far as I'm concerned, two big ones. One is the leaf blower one and the other is the plastic water bottles. Some high schoolers wanna be in these things. Say good luck for them. A little civics lesson personally. I like them. But I'm just a moderator, I can't stop them. I'm gonna have mine right there, see? You wanna take it away from me? And then we'll close the special hopefully Wednesday as well. And then that will be done, we'll go right back into the regular town meeting. Is that it? Oh, I thought someone said something. That's generally the flow of it. You can sit anywhere you want. I could tell you where certain clicks sit just cause I've been there long enough. But there are certain places where different clicks sit and some people will sit in the same exact chair year after year after year. So someone comes up to you and looks at ya. You might be in their chair, they can't ask you to move but they're gonna get there five minutes earlier to get their chair back. It's funny, you'll see it. People will grab that same chair year after year. I confounded people, I moved around all the time till I found something I like to joke with. So that's the basic functioning of town meeting. It's really not that intimidating, it's not that hard to figure out. It's just sort of once getting the rhythm and the flow. The town meeting does have a certain flow. It has a certain culture that we follow. Basically we have very few rules. Our rules are all set out in our bylaws. Like I said before, the only other rules that I can mandate is that 48 hour rule. Otherwise it's the way it is. It just kind of functions. Other towns have extremely detailed rules and procedures and I go to the moderator meetings and I just shake my head saying I could never get away with that. I couldn't do that. And they were amazed that I don't have a set of rules and procedures, but I don't think we need them. We're all adults, we all can act in a civil manner. Which brings me to another point. On the back of my letter, I gave you the Oath of Office. The Town Government Reorganization Committee a couple years ago changed our Oath of Office. They had been tasked with seeing if town government needed to be changed. The bottom line was they said it didn't except we did come up with a couple certain things that we did change that basically make it more transparent to the people, provide sets of financial data in easily readable fashion and formats and they changed the Oath of Office. Because the year before debate had oh my goodness, how do I want to put it? It had gotten a little nasty. People were name calling. They would get up and before I could stop them they would say he's a jerk for thinking that or he just got down to personal attacks which are not what we're all about. You can disagree with me but you can't call me a name. If you call me a name that means I'm just gonna get up and call you a name and it's gonna be a schoolyard fight and we don't want that. So in our pledge they made us promise we're not gonna do that. So hopefully we'll all follow with that fit of decorum. The only motions you can make when you're not called on if you want to just stand up is a point of privilege, personal privilege or point of order. Point of personal privilege in my interpretation of it is it's really hot in here. Can you open a window? It's very noisy back here. I can't hear. I don't know what we're voting on which point of order is the same. Mr. Moderator, this guy's not a town meeting member. He shouldn't be in the enclosure. Only town meeting members are supposed to be in on the floor. This point of order, they're a scope. They're beyond the scope of the article. Those are the only couple of things you can interrupt the speaker with. Otherwise you have to wait your turn. The rules that we do go by are contained in my favorite book, Town Meeting Time. It looks big. Half of its history of town meetings, how we arrived at where we are and the other half is a detailed explanation of all of these parliamentary guide, parliamentary facts. You'll read over here a certain motion in the book. It will tell you by page and a half why we have that motion, how it's used, how it's made, and how it's generally interpreted. We've used Town Meeting Time as our guide as opposed to a robber's rules of order. I don't know if you ever looked at robber's rules, they have about, I think, 685 rules. We don't need them. They're impossible to keep track of and they have such rules as, how many minutes before this, how many minutes, we don't need them. We go by Town Meeting Time. I have a little list up here. I'll give you afterwards. If you're interested, you can get your own copy of this. They have, I think they have some at the library. Go down and read them, take them out. It's an interesting book. If you plan on being at Town Meeting for any length of time or even the three year term, I'd suggest you go ahead and get it. It doesn't change that often. This one has been in publication, I believe, for about 15 years, 20 years and there's no abridgments in the offering, so they're not gonna be changing at any time soon. So if this is our, besides our few rules and the bylaws, this is what we use for rules. And if you question me, you'll see me getting the book. I'll get it out and I'll say, nope, Town Meeting Time, page 116, it says this. I've read it and then highlighted the things that people always discuss. Before I was the moderator, the point of personal privilege had gotten to the point where it was just abused. But she didn't like what I said. Point of privilege, he's got that wrong, your honor. His facts are, your honor, excuse me, I'm a lawyer, I used to go and talk to the judges. Mr. Moderator, his facts are wrong, it should be this. And it had gotten to the point where we were listening to two people arguing instead of the debate. So I cut that out, I just said, nope, point of personal privilege is exactly this and that's all I'm gonna allow. So it's really ended all of those kind of sidebar debates that don't add to the conversation, don't add to the discussion at all. This year, one of the things you did receive in the package was the vote of the electronic, was the report of the electronic voting study committee. I'm not gonna make a pitch for it, but basically the committee which I was on wants to get clickers so we can vote using clickers. It would instantly tally, it would instantly have a roll call pointing back at Steve who's on his phone who I hate in town meeting when people are on their phone, I'll yell at ya, so put it on vibrate. It'll instantly record it. So we can have a roll call, if we don't, if we just use it for tally, it's gonna record how you vote it and the next day it's gonna be on the website. Even if it's just a tally vote. Why do I like that? Because we're all representative town meeting members. Folks in my precinct should know how I voted. If they don't know how I voted, how do they know they want me to get back next year? How do they know I should be reelected? So your votes on all the articles will be recorded and somehow the town will make them get on the website. So we're gonna know. That's gonna change the culture of town meeting a little bit but not a whole lot because we're still gonna vote yes and no. It's just gonna be, you're gonna be responsible for your vote. I usually don't vote. Usually it doesn't matter. During the roll call last year I did vote. I recorded my vote because people should have an idea of how I voted and that's true for all of us. So that's what the electronic voting study committee is gonna be about and how it's one of the things that's gonna change our culture a little bit but not a lot. If you're ever at any point confused about what's going on, you're confused about what we're voting on, please stand up, point of order, Mr. Audurator, what are we voting on? What actually are we voting on? A lot of people will get up and with the warrant in their hand and say we're voting on something that's not in this. I'll roll my eyes at ya. Because you should ask the person next to you, get up and ask me before the meeting. I'm there at about 7.30 every night. I usually end up leaving about 11.30 to talk to people. We have a break at, when do we break? 8.30? 9.30? 9.30. We break at 9.30 for 10 minutes so we can all go out and get a cookie if someone's selling cookies or coffee or whatever. But people come up to me during the break and ask me questions. I want you to never be confused. I want you to always know what we're doing and I don't want anyone to not feel like they're welcome and don't have an opportunity to come talk to me. Or you'll be able to see who are the veteran town meeting members around you. They'll gladly explain to you what's going on, how you can do something, how you can make an amendment, how you can get up and speak, get on the list, what you were voting on. Nudge them to say, what are we doing? What are we voting on? They'll explain it to you. They're your fellow town members, they're fellow Arlingtonians, your fellow town meeting members. They want you to know what's going on. They're gonna explain it to you. They're gonna generally be kind and pleasant to you. If they're not, well, sit next to someone else the next day. Yeah, you don't want to sit next to that person because they're probably gonna be no fun anyways. In this handout, which was on your seat, it has various questions we tried to anticipate. This was off the town website. I kind of cut and tasted and modified it a little bit so it was a little more germane to us tonight. How do we prepare? Read everything. You probably aren't gonna get the FinCom report, Finance Committee report till Monday night. It might be on the town website by tomorrow afternoon under the town meeting. I don't know if you've ever been to Arlington town website. Go to the left hand, go down to town governance, town meeting, and there'll be a link to the site. All of the reports that you've received in the mail and the additional ones are gonna be on that site. We also have a town meeting members email list, which I have up front. Also, how you can join that list. Let's go to a certain website and put in your information. All of these reports are distributed on that list if you have substitute motions. You can post them to that list so your members, your fellow members can get them a day or two in advance. It's all about educating, all about making sure you know what's going on and are able to go into the meeting on any particular night and have a really good idea of what we're gonna debate and what the issues are so that you can form your opinion, besides trying to form it on the fly. I've explained what the warrant is, the warning to the citizens. I told you what to do when you get to town hall. Town meeting members have a right to speak. Get on the list. If you want to introduce somebody. Who asked you, Stephen, did you introduce? Bobby Jackson introduced Gary. Oh, okay, Bobby introduced Gary. Bobby came up to me before the meeting and said, Mr. Tibbets wants to speak on this article. Can you recognize me early? Citizens have a right to speak if they live in town, if they're from out of town. They're not an Arlington citizen, but they can speak if they're introduced and the town meeting member votes on it. A citizen just has to be introduced by a town meeting member. They have the right to speak for the seven minutes, but it's a combined seven minutes. So if Bobby Jefferson got up and spoke for two minutes, he only left Gary five. If he spoke for 30 seconds, Gary got six and a half minutes. So if you have someone you want to introduce to speak on an article, let me know before the meeting. Get there 10 minutes early, come up, just tell me. John, I want so-and-so to speak can make sure I get recognized early. I will. I'll recognize you right off the bat because if a citizen came down and it's that emotional about an issue and it has something good to tell us, I want to hear them. I'll get you right to the front of the list. If you fake me out and don't really have someone, your chances of getting called next time, you're on the bottom of the list. One town meeting member, she faked me out. I scolded her afterwards, but I'm not gonna say who it was because we had terminated debate and she said, oh, I'm not understanding something. She got up and tried to continue debate. Steve probably remembers who it is, but I'm not gonna say, God, I love the latest, so I'm not gonna say it. But don't do that. It pisses me off, frankly, and I'm not gonna recognize you next time around. I'm generally a fair guy. So you know what to do when you get there. And that's about it. It's really not a whole heck of a lot to prepare the hardest part, just to read everything, go through it. Does anyone have any questions about this part of it? Yeah, come on, you have to actually come up because we're gonna get it recorded so for the other town meeting members. Regarding substitute motions, do they need to be submitted before the town meeting or can they be submitted at the town meeting by hand raising? They should be substitute motions. You have to be on everybody's chair. You have to go to the manager's office with your substitute. They will let you use one of their copier machines. They'll print 300 copies for you. You have to get there before the meeting, put it on everybody's chair, but the meeting before we're gonna talk about it. Okay, that's all right, that's all right. Yeah, so if it's anything after article 12, have it on everybody's chair Monday, anything before that. I'm thinking article 12 is what we're gonna get to. But I'm not gonna tell you your substitute's bad or good. I just ask that you run up by me beforehand so I can tell you if your substitute was within the scope. If it's in the proper form, I'm not gonna rewrite it for you unless you ask me to do some stylistic changes so that it goes with the way the rest of the bylaws are written. We have two of our members, John Ward and the old moderator and John Ma, the old town council. About 10 years ago, went through the bylaws and straightened them out. They were after 200 years, they had gotten pretty messy. They recodified all the bylaws, got everything where it should be and they're very particular about it. They don't want them to get messed up again. So I'm helping them by looking at things beforehand and say, hey, you wanna put this as article, title two, article eight, section B3. This should really be B4. So let's put it in the right place so we don't have to have them trying to amend your amendment on the floor. So that's all I'm looking at. I'm not gonna say you shouldn't do this. You can't do that. I'm gonna just look at it, make sure it's stylistically right and within the scope of the article. Cause let me just print in 300 things, hand them all out and then have me shoot you down a town meeting floor. So that's the only thing on substitutes. Anyone else have a question? When and how exactly is the warrant created? It looks like the town manager has lots of insertions. Yeah. What are the exact rules for that? Yeah. Which committee? The town meeting procedure committee put a warrant article in four years ago that mandated they open the warrant on the first Friday of December and they can't close it till the third Friday of January. So the warrants open for those seven, eight weeks. During that time, any citizen can get a warrant article. You'll see some of them, 10 citizens. One was Mr. Jamison and 10 citizens. He thought about a warrant article, went out and got 10 of his neighbors to sign it, submitted it, it has to go in the warrant. That's your right as a citizen. After that third January, the warrant closes. The select men then order them. I'll go over the order in a second. And then that's it, it's finalized. Although they seem to slip a couple of warrant articles in after it closes because it's their warrant. By that I mean the state law charges the select men with the duty and the obligation to open the warrant, close the warrant and produce it and give it to town meeting. Once it's printed and once it's submitted to all the citizens, it's our warrant, town meetings. No one else can touch it. We decide, well moderator, decides how we're gonna do it, how we're gonna discuss it and they can't change it once it's printed. But that, this is what people come up with their substitute motions out of and the recommended votes of the select men and the things we actually discuss and vote on. This is the warning to the citizens. Okay, I just a follow up question. Yeah. Are all the bylaws for the town created in town meeting or do the select men, do they have a ratification capacity that? They can suggest bylaws. You'll see in here, I don't particularly know which number, I haven't memorized them. We're gonna change the dog rules this year. Before it just said basically section three, article one, you gotta keep your dog in a leash one sentence. We're gonna delete that and we're substituting in its place about two and a half pages of doggy rules. We're gonna talk a lot about it. We like to talk about dogs. We'll discuss dogs, we'll discuss dogs for half the meeting, maybe a whole meeting. Yeah. They suggest it, we approve it or we say no. We can vote it down. We can say no, we don't wanna do this and we can just vote no and it's dead. They can't bring it back. Same with all the zoning bylaws. The redevelopment board, you also got their recommended votes in their report. They make all the zoning bylaw recommendations. We're gonna change the zoning district. We're gonna change the height of the building. We're gonna change the amount of green space that has to be in any particular lot. And all that gets filtered into town meeting. It all gets given to us. We get to deal with it. We can say no, we don't wanna do that. We, as a legislative body, make the bylaws, make the zoning bylaws and spend the money. Any other questions on functioning at town meeting or how the work works? Is there a set ending time for the, every evening? Okay, I'm just gonna repeat. The question is basically what time do we end? We start at eight, break at nine, 30 for 10 minutes. We end at 11. If we're really close to the end of a warrant of article, looks like we're ready to vote on it. Sometimes we'll go five minutes early or if we've voted on something and instead of starting another article that's gonna take a half hour, an hour to debate, I'll ask someone if someone wants to make a motion to adjourn early. That usually doesn't happen. I like to go to at least 11. Cause of the past several years, in fact, as long as I can remember, we've always had about 70 warrant articles on the warrant and it takes anywhere from eight to 10 meetings to go through it. If we're, we start breaking early, we're just adding meetings and frankly there's no AC in there. The air doesn't really move too well through the room and if we're in here at the end of May, it's hot. It gets hot, it gets muggy, people's tempers get short. We wanna get out. By the end of, by the eighth meeting, I'm done, you're done, we just wanna end. And it's always down to the last, the housekeeping articles I call them. Things that are there every single year. Other post-employment benefits. Every year, OPEB, it's there. We have to vote money to OPEB. We don't have an option, state law, it says we have to do it. FINCOM says this is how much we're obligated to do this year. We gotta vote it, so we're gonna move through it. We're gonna do it. But if we cut all our meetings short, we're gonna come back someday for a half hour and vote on these housekeeping things. So I like to keep the meeting moving. I like to keep it there till 11. Any other questions? Yep. Hi, so if the Board of Selectmen recommend no action. Yeah. And is the only recourse to offer an amendment? If town meeting likes the article the way it is and doesn't want to amend it, doesn't want to amend it, can they override that? Yeah, if there's a warrant article. Again, that's just a warning. Selectmen say no action. It was one of their motions. They're the main movement on bylaws, zoning bylaws, is redevelopment board. Anything having to do with town personnel. The selectmen are the main movements of financial articles, the budgets. Money for parades, money for monuments, money for this, money for that, all come out of the FINCOM, the finance committee. They're the recommended votes that we'll vote on. If one of those bodies says no action, if you want to discuss it, you have to make a motion. You have to come up with a substitute motion from the no action. So you'll have come up to me, if you're changing what they say, it's an amendment. If it's a brand new and it's substituting in full, it's a substitute, you'll run up by me, everybody will have it, when it comes to article 12 or 13, whatever the no action, I know you have it because you've given it to me beforehand because you have to give me three signed originals. I'm gonna call you, what's your name? Gil, Irozeri. Irozeri? Irozeri. I'm gonna say, Mr. Irozeri, do you have something for us? And you're gonna get up and make your pitch and make your motion for a substitute. If you don't do that, we're moving on, we're on to the next article. Or if you just think you're gonna get up and it surprises with me, I'm not gonna know you want, I'm not gonna know you're gonna do it and I'm gonna move on before I even see your hand. Because there's no action unless I know about it, I'm not even gonna look up. See no action, all in favor, yes, boom, next article. And you'll be sitting there going, whoa, wait. It's like, you have to move to, if you don't like the way we voted, then you can move to reconsider if you voted on the prevailing side and then try and get the meeting to open the article back up again. Okay, good luck. That takes a two thirds vote as well. And once something's done, they really won't too often unless there's new facts or we did something highly illegal and town council finally figured it out or I figured it out or someone else figured it out and said, John, look, we can't do this. Someone will move and we'll reconsider. But otherwise, if it's just you are sleeping and missed it, they're not gonna take that. So you have to have your substitute motion ready. I gotta know about it before we reach the article. Just because I wanna make sure I understand clearly. If I like the Warren article the way it's written, I don't want to amend it or substitute it. I'm not looking at the Warren articles anymore. You're looking at the recommended votes. This thing is strictly your agenda at this point. Forget about what's written in here except for the bold highlighted topics, article 15, collective bargaining. Forget about everything below that. You're gonna look at FinCom report article 15 and see what their recommended vote is in this. Because this doesn't matter anymore. This is strictly our agenda. These are what matters. This is what we voted on. This is what becomes a town law. So if you like this, if you don't like this, you have to amend it. I see. Yeah, and if it's no action and you wanna, hey, I liked what was recommended in here, you're gonna call me and I'm gonna say, this is what you have to do. Okay, thank you. This is how we can take care of that. I did that this afternoon with the gentleman. I spent 15, 20 minutes with him. We wrote the new thing that he wants to do and he's gonna present it. You'll have it in your chair Monday. He's an older town meeting member. He knew what to do. But if you've got any questions, please call. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Related to the question of doing illegal things. Yeah. Particle 17, for instance, I think 18 as well, it's election vote, no action. And claim that the town meeting doesn't actually have the power to take the action complicated. Well, I'm gonna look and see what those two are and I'll tell you if they're right. So overnight part of the case was 17. Yeah. We, there's a strict definition of what we're allowed to do and what they're allowed to do and what's within their purview, what's in our purview. We don't have the power to tell the select men what to do. So 17 overnight parking fees, 18, 18 amendments safe overnight parking, daytime parking. We can't tell the select men what to do. But we can do a resolution. We resolved that it'd be really good if the select men did this. 252 people in favor of it, no one had opposed. We can't order them to do it, but we can tell them this is how we feel. Oh, they're gonna get up and they're gonna tell us, you can't do it, you can't tell us what to do and I'm gonna play it in. It's a resolution. I don't see any problem with it. And then we can vote on it. Because there's a few of those in here. There's three or four this year where they'll end up being resolutions or no actions, but we're expressing the will of the town meeting and through that the will of the citizens of the town. We're like one of the three checks and balances if you look at it that way. Anything else on the procedural end of it? Okay. You got the warrant. It follows, believe it or not, a pattern. We start off with the pomp and circumstance Monday night. Article two, state of the town. I guess Mr. Dunn's gonna get up and tell us what the state of the town is. We're in great financial shape because we have the override and everything's wonderful and we had a great parade. Yay. Article three, reports of committees. Every night I call for reports of committees. The various committees will get up. The first night the selectmen will get up. Say you've all received our report. They moved it all the recommended votes of the board of selectmen before the meeting. I'll take a yes vote. Everybody votes yes, no one votes. Some people might vote no, but it doesn't matter because it's just a perfunctory vote. What that essentially does is we have received all their report. We've received their votes and I don't have to read what their recommended vote is every time we come to an article. It's already before us. Same with all the FinCom articles. I don't have to read articles. I think the budgets might be mid-50s this year, maybe 55. I don't have to go through and read every single line item. It's before you. It's assumed we've all read it. So we go through first. It's the reports of committees. Measure of wooden bark. The heck is that? It's a colonial position. In the old days when you got your court of wood you think someone shorted you, you call the measure of wooden bark, they come down and measure it. See if you got your court. Or if you got your court of, I don't know how mulch is measured by the yard, cubic yard. If you think your cubic yard is short, the measure of wooden bark would go out and measure it for you. It's Elsie Fiori last few years. Before that had been another long time town meeting member who had passed away. Elsie is our, there's two long timers, over 50 years, Harry McCabe and Elsie. Harry deferred to Elsie. I asked them both which one, who wants to do it? And Harry said, give it to Elsie. So she's our measure of wooden bark. I'll have the selectman nominate her and we'll all vote yes and give Elsie a little hand. Clap for her and she'll look to my ear and smile at us. Don't let her fool you. Don't let her fool you. She's a smart lady. Then we elected an assistant town moderator. The assistant is if I ever get sick and I don't show up, he's gonna step in. Or if I have a conflict of interest, if there's an article comes up that I have a financial interest in, obviously I have to stand down. But they're on none this year so I'm not gonna have to do that. So we have an assistant. And then after that, it goes right into the zoning by-laws. If we're gonna change the zoning by-laws, it has to be by a two-third vote of town meeting. Two-thirds of the members have to agree that we wanna do this. If they don't, if it's a simple majority by one or two vote, it loses. You gotta get two-thirds of the voters to change a zoning by-law because we're dealing with people's land, we're dealing with their property, we're dealing with their property rights. We should, and I think it's corrected, by state law, you have to get a two-thirds vote to restrict my right to use my land. That seems fair to me. Then we go to the regular by-laws. Those are just a regular old majority vote. And after the regular by-laws, we get into a lot of the citizens articles. And eventually, we're gonna get into the budgets. So the first one you're gonna see is Article 27, endorsement of CDBG. Federal government gives us community-developed block grant money. They've been doing it from the 70s and they've never taken it away from us yet. There's not a whole heck of a lot of it. Over the years, it's been decreasing. Our funding from the feds has been decreasing pretty steadily as they run out of money. The spending of that money is controlled by HUD, Urban Housing and Urban Development rules and regulations to select and get to spend it however they want within those parameters. They get up and they tell us, we're gonna spend it on these 10, 12 things and this is how we're gonna spend it. It's a feel-good article. We get to vote yes. Well, we can say no, they're gonna still spend it the way they want. That's one of the ones where we can't tell them what to do. It's just strictly, this is, they're telling us we're gonna give the Boys and Girls Club money for an elevator. We're gonna rebuild the stone wall in front of the library, which they've been doing. That was HUD, CBGB money a couple of years back. They finally went through all the process in getting it. So every year they do that. They give the elder services money for a van so they can drive the elderly around town and get them to the center or voting or wherever they have to go. We buy them a van or we fund the van every year. Then we get into the budgets. First, the capital planning budget. Charlie Foskett of the capital planning committee, he's on the finance committee. He's gonna present that budget. He's gonna get up and tell us how we're gonna spend our capital money. Anything moved in five years is capital. We're gonna put it in a roof on town hall. We're gonna do, build the Thompson School. That's all capital's funding. That's all capital money. If we bond it, which we do, all the capital budgets are bonded. We float the money out. We get people to buy our bonds. Two-thirds vote for bonding. Because what we're doing with bonding is we are tying future town meetings hands on how money's gonna be spent. So to do that, we have to have a two-third vote. Then we get to the regular budget. The way I handle the regular budget is I ask them to print it bigger this year. The FinCon will give us a report with 0.2 pitch. I can't read it. I ask them to make it bigger. Literally, it's so teeny tiny. And it details out every single department, every position within each department, how many administrative secretaries, how many managers, how many clerk typists, how many this, how many tree climbers, how many cops, how many officers, how many, how much brass, how much patrolmen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's H, I think it goes to H, maybe 13 or 14 separate departments. What I'm gonna do and what I've been doing, it works really well, is I'm gonna go through and say does anyone wanna talk about the library? If you wanna talk about the library budget, yelled hold, I'll put a check next to it. I go through all the different budgets. Then I go back, okay, someone wanted to talk about library, who was it? That person might have one question. It might get down to 15, 20 minutes of debate on that particular budget. It's no one yelled hold, we're moving on. No one wants to talk about town council's budget, we're moving on. Otherwise, the only, then we vote on it en masse. The whole budget in one vote. The way they used to do it was all in favor of the police budget, yes, no. All in favor of the fire department budget, yes, no. It took too much time. So we do it this way, we get to the meat of it, that people really wanna talk about it, we talk about it, we'll debate it to death, and then we move on. Sort of my own inverse rule of proportion, the more money we spend, the less people will talk about it. We're gonna spend 500 bucks in a parade, we'll talk about it until it's dead. We spend 55 million dollars on the school, we'll talk about it for 10 minutes and move on. You'd think it'd be the other way around, I think the folks are just too daunted by it, but don't be. If you have a question about it, ask. Up the front of the room, you'll see me and Stephanie and Gabe on the stage in front of us, the Selecman, the Selecman staff, the finance committee, and this is as I'm looking down at them, so it'll be the opposite for you. So it'll be the Selecman over here, to the left of the center, Mike, their staff, the finance committee over on that corner, which is actually that corner of the room, is the redevelopment board, often the left-hand front corner, the chief of police, Bobby Jefferson, Fred Ryan, chief of police, Bobby Jefferson, chief of the fire department, Mr. Rademacher, the head of public works, and I think Karen Cove might sit up there too sometimes, head of the, you know, Board of Health sits on the left next to Dave Good, but up front I think is the head of human services, and over there in the far left is Board of Health, Dave Good, the tech guy, he's the head of the IT department, he runs that new big screen we have, I'll tell you about the screen, and then a couple other people rotating it out as their budgets come up or if they might have questions. If you have any questions for any of those people, any of the department heads, the selectmen, please, they want you to approach them now, tomorrow, Monday, before the meeting, ask them the question so that they can be prepared and give you an answer for it. They hate it if they get a gotcha question. How many times did you arrest someone for drunk driving on Mill Street? He doesn't know, but if you ask him today, he'll have that stacked for you Monday. They'll get the information you want because they want to give it to you. These are our town employees, they're our public servants, they want to give you the information, just give them the opportunity to do it, and they will, they're really friendly folks, none of them bite, they'll all get on a first name basis with you, and they want to provide that information to you, so please, just approach them, or if you're kind of hesitant about approaching them, ask me, I'll translate the question to them. Seems like half my job during, I don't do much work right before town meeting, I do town meeting work, that's all right, I can do what I was signing up for, but I'm glad to help you get that information you need. So then after we get to the budgets, we then have all the housekeeping stuff, appropriations for committees, appropriations for parades, all the appropriation articles, those are all FinCom articles. If you have questions about them, ask Al Tosti, ask Alan Jones. Alan, good guy, got a big ponytail and glasses, kind of looks like I left over hippie, but really smart, he'll give you any answer you want. Then we get into stabilization funds. Stabilization funds are a convenient place they've found to park money so we can't spend it. It takes a two thirds vote to create a stabilization fund, it takes a two thirds vote to put money into a stabilization fund, takes a two thirds vote to take the money out of a stabilization fund. What would you want a stabilization fund for? Right now, we voted that cool override. We're taking in more money than we need to run the town. That extra money is being put into a long term stabilization fund, so we don't have to have another override. So when our expenses are going that way because of health insurance and inflation and pay raises and all of this, our income's going this way, eventually we're not gonna have enough income. We'll take it out of the stabilization fund for a couple of years. That's the plan. We also have stabilization funds for, I think we have one for the rink. We have one for tip fees for Neswick. Our garbage all goes up to and over, I think it's burned in Neswick. I forget what Neswick means, but it's our incinerator. For a while we were getting excess money back. We weren't from them because, I don't know, the whole scheme, but we ended up with a whole bunch of extra money you can put into a stabilization fund so we can lower our tip fees. That tip fee is how much we have to pay to have. It's not waste. Whoever on new garbage hauler is. J.R., I think, yeah. For them to go up there and dump a truck cost 100 bucks. Neswick, I'm making the numbers up. We only pay 65 because we have money out of the stabilization fund. So we're offsetting future expenses with present money. That's what stabilization funds are for. So you'll see, this year we only have two things for stabilization. And then it comes out to my favorite. Free cash. I couldn't figure out what free cash was for a couple of years. It's extra money that they're just gonna put aside for when they overspend a budget, snow. They need to get that money to remove snow, especially this year. They budgeted 390,000 or whatever it is. Good year, you're all set. Bad year, they gotta pay the guys to plow. That comes out of free cash. It's the slush fund, but it's not a slush fund. It has to be accounted for. So that's sort of the warrant. Where the money goes, where it comes from and how we change this town laws. Any questions at all? And that's kind of a lot. Yep. That's a lot of issues in one single... Yeah. How many sheep does it give you? What are the expectations as far as... You can make... Can I say I've proposed it though. Tell them what rate it makes. It's paid $3,000 a year. I'd step down. I would ask them to be recognized and say, great idea. You can do that. Exactly. That would technically be under the clerk's budget. I'm played through the clerk. I get 500 bucks a year. You would make a motion to amend budget 15, B, moderator, delete 500, substitute 3,000. Al Tosti's gonna get up and say, oh, it's a balanced budget. Where are you gonna get the money? And you're either gonna say, well, I'm gonna take it out of the selectman's budget. The selectman only gonna get 500 bucks. So you could say, it's not my problem Al. It's your problem. Balance the budget. You're the thing, calm. You can make a recommendation. They're gonna say, how are you gonna do it? You can either tell them or you could throw it back in the lab. That's from the budgets. We are by state law obligated to have a balanced budget. Throwing a lot of money into free cash. You wanna give me 2,500 bucks more? Take it out of free cash. You can make any recommendation. You can tell them what to do. Just the same with the by law changes. You don't like it. You make a recommendation and change it. And town meeting will often go along with you. They aren't opposed to amending things on the floor. As long as they think you have a rational reason for doing it, what you're proposing sounds good. And it makes sense to them. They'll do it. They'll go along with you. Something like that, which can be expressed in one sentence. Yeah. Are you getting this? Okay. Yeah. No problem. So for something like that that could be expressed in one sentence, would that have to be written up and distributed in free hand copies? That I would, I'd let that slide because that is small. It's only one or two sentences. It's very easily understood. So that is, I've given myself a little discretion so I'm not a total dictator and I'm not stifling debate. Something minor like that I'd allow in. Because behind me, it's this big screen. It's a backlit, back projector. We've got a projector that's attached to a PowerPoint. We've gotten better over the last couple of years. It used to be a front lit and it would be in my eyes and I didn't want it up there and everybody hated it. Now we've gotten it much better. We're coming into the modern age. Dave Good is sitting there. He's a town meeting member so I don't want to put too much responsibility on Dave but if you have recommended votes or substitutes we can get them to him as well. He can project them on that screen. So the more sophisticated members know this and they get it to me and ask me to get it to Dave. Dave will get it up there on the screen. People can see it and they can see what they're voting on as well as a piece of paper. A little small one. Ooh, I want to give the moderator 3,000 bucks. He'll be able to type that in in a couple seconds. But again, he's there in his capacity as the IT department. He's there as a town meeting member so we don't want to overburden him because he's got a right to listen to. Yeah, got to come back up here. I mean, so this, you know, you sort of introduced as a doctrine, we're following this and we don't get outside of it but considering the scope of what we're covering then within that scope getting into areas such as adjusting your salary and taking out of let's say the assessors. That's within the scope. Right, so we can go into a million different ways, right? Because there's a lot of things to be considered with budget issues. It's in the scope of the budget. It's in the scope of that article. You can't vote on appropriation for parades to put a moderator salary for 3,000 bucks in scope of the parade article. That's outside the scope. But within the scope of the budget anything happened to do with how a spending money is fine. Yeah, I'm kind of lenient about scope within a broad sense. But if you get up and you start talking about you know, the police should really be able to talk to my neighbor about his noisy car because we're in the police budget. I'm gonna say, no, that's outside, that's outside of this budget scope. That's under something else. Or you gotta go talk to the chief of police. You gotta go talk to Fred Ryan, tell him to enforce the bylaws. So, you know, is it reasonable what you're trying to do in scope? Or is it just left field? It's left field, the crowd's gonna yell at ya. And I'm gonna have to tell you to bring it back in. Any other questions? Okay, y'all have a good idea of what it is and you're gonna call me up tomorrow and you have questions. You know, I'm serious when I say email me. You have, you got my letter in your package, up in the top right-hand corner. Where'd my letter go? There's my email address. I'm pretty good with that. I get back right away if I can. I'm on the computer all day. My office number and my home phone number. So please, any questions? I'd rather you come in knowledgeable than come in confused. All right, thank you for coming. Thank you. Yeah.