 I thought one way of proceeding would be to deal with two sets of changes we might be able to make today. We got feedback on some of our yellow highlights and also some of our blue that I think got a pretty good sentiment of the full council that we could go ahead and make a change if we agree on it. There are only a few. There's some that were still left hanging. Then the other was I saw one as I was looking at my own oversight of these rules. I saw at least one rule I'd like to propose that we add that I think was missing. And so if anyone else had, gee, we didn't have a rule on this. It would be good to have a rule on this, raise it as part of this discussion where we consider those. So those would be my two ways aside from a general discussion because I don't think we got much feedback on the full document partly and because we deliberately focus people on the new and interesting or innovations or changes or places we didn't agree. So we, in a few instances it was clear it would have been helpful if people had read, had been able to read where this was inserted to understand it wasn't getting rid of. So I was thinking about the interaction if a member of the public made a comment to us that we were willing to ask, refer to get an answer to a question. But it was, the person who asked this wasn't looking at the contacts where we said we're not entering into a dialogue. This is an opening of that. So there were just a few instances like that. But I didn't think most people had had time to go through from page one to page 22. So my way of proceeding this morning I would think was dive in for those of us who took notes. All the yellow highlights in blue, well blue was out of sequence but the yellow were in order that they appear in the document. So it's kind of easy since yellow was yellow to go back through yellows and I believe Mandy was, when we got to the blues was keeping a record of, you know, everyone wanted to change, most of them wanted to change or there was a vote for one or the other of the options. Is that correct Mandy? Yeah, I've got extensive notes on both the yellow highlighted and the blue highlighted sections of even who said what so we could go back and figure it out. So the most efficient way of doing this might be just to start at the beginning and hit the yellows and as we're getting to the yellow there was something that occurred to us that was missing in a section. Might be the best way. So that would be the way I'd suggest. That sounds super to me and I also have some notes I took last night that are perhaps not legible to other people but in terms of where I write notes. But it's also in today's folder that says rules feedback from council five, six and that should have my initials next to it, it just doesn't happen to. So just as other people took notes variety of ways of my set of notes is in there and that's what I'll be working from this morning. I just have one additional rule that I, or not just a comment on one of our rules that I wanna talk about. And just wondering if we have thoughts about, when the rest of the members have a chance to look through all of the rules and they come back, do we assume that they're gonna bring all of those to the next council meeting or to our meeting next Monday because I'm assuming people are gonna read the rules and say, oh, well, this may not be highlighted in blue or yellow, but I'm interested in this thing, whatever it is. So when are they gonna bring those up? So I think two things about that. One is what I was saying earlier and what we said a couple times last night, which is that they are to get all of their comments to Margaret by close of business Thursday this week. She is going to turn them back to us on Friday, having inserted them into some sort of texture word document that takes out any identifying information. So they will be completely random notes, like you might get if somebody handed a bunch of stuff to you at a forum. And so we'll be able to digest those over the weekend ourselves and it'll turn out some of them of course will be very similar and others will be things we had never thought of, et cetera. And so that will be like we went off and did some additional research in another community. It's just that it's in our own community and we'll bring that back with us Tuesday. It's entirely possible some members of the council will come next Tuesday because Lynn, our president, asked that it also be posted as a meeting of the council. So I'm not gonna change our posting in that respect. I may mention it, but there will be a separate posting that shows it's also a meeting of the council in case a quorum decides to show up and come give us their feedback directly because right you say it's entirely possible some won't write it down, some will just wanna bring it to us and some will think about it more after Margaret's deadline. And so that gives them the opportunity to come and tell us that on Tuesday. But after that I would think that at the end of our meeting on Tuesday we might say okay you go off and edit this section or the other section but we will not be taking additional new written input, new actual changes from the rest of the council before the 20th at that point because they'll have had two shots. They'll have had the end of this week and they'll have up to and including our meeting on Tuesday and then after that they need to just bring what they think after that to the meeting on the 20th. And then we have time to revise again between that time and June 3rd so it will be. We're on a really good schedule. We can actually send, I think it would be important to send out a reminder so to the extent we haven't gotten comments by the end of this week and nobody shows up next Tuesday, just next Tuesday say please if you have a chance get us any comments so that we can insert, do whatever adjustments. So one thing just in terms of the final final and this could be a question for Lynn for June 3rd. If we don't have a huge number of revisions between now and then we always intended to have this have a cover and a table of contents to make it really easy to find. So what I thought we would do if we don't have a lot of changes is just before the final one I like tables of contents that actually have hot links to the sections but we could say we have a little bit more work to do after June 3rd just to make that the thing that gets posted up on the web that makes it a public document now. But I'm not, I don't wanna put a table of contents in until the contents have stopped moving. Excellent idea. So should we start with the first yellow highlight? Rule 1.6. One thing that came up last night as a comment and it's on that same page, the repeal, amended repeal. Shalini raised that where people were asking a question about something maybe we should expand our definitions. So that came up once when we had an earlier discussion Darcy wanted to know what a measure was, how, when do we think something is a policy? And then it was more around what's a dialogue, what's a work sessions. So I just would come back to this on do we wanna put a few more definitions in or do they only occur once in the document and we're already defining it later? So I don't wanna address that now but it was something mentally. I thought of is there more of a reader's guide that we need to think of so we should just keep a record of where those terms appear. So on this first one on the yellow, the two, a vote of the full council at two separate meetings. One of the issue, questions that occurred to me as I read what we had done was are we literally saying a vote at two separate meetings or are we saying we're considering the change at our first meeting and voting on it at the second meeting so that we're not reading and then but are we voting and examples if it was, I could see wanting where it's a real bylaw and you're changing the way you're gonna live forever you wanna vote on it twice. If we are saying we wanna add a rule or two we didn't think of something simple. We say we can reorganize at any time which might mean we have six committees or we've changed the names of the committees and the charges and I wouldn't, I don't think we would have to necessarily bring those to a vote twice but we might wanna talk about the changes and come back so Mandy I believe you had put in the double voting maybe talk about that. I don't even know who put in the double voting but it's clearly there. So I think it's a substitute for a supermajority and rules generally almost many rules require a supermajority instead of a simple majority and so the double vote might be considered a substitute for that. So instead of requiring two thirds to adopt rules or you know, a remender or appeal you could go with two votes at two separate meetings just to make sure this is what we want. We don't actually, our charter doesn't require two votes for bylaws so this would be the only thing that requires two votes which does kind of make it weird so maybe we wanna just change it to a supermajority which is more typically found in rules of procedures. Well that's what I wanted to go back and check cause I actually, when I went through my scan of the 30-ish I was looking for other things so what I saw is there was quite a bit of variation on this and it was clear it was a majority of the full council, they didn't wanna just whoever happened to be at that council meeting so I don't know how often this, you know when you said most I don't know whether it's 75% said super and 25% said just a majority, they don't change them very often when you can see the amendments, you know they're not amended very often so I was fine with getting rid of supermajority but I also don't mind it if it would stop us from having to have two meetings and two votes on simple changes. Seems like the problem is that there are some, most of the things in the rules are simple but there are a few things that are, you know, more important so I don't know, I don't know what we can do about that that you know you would sort of seem that you should have a supermajority for like three things and you know not for the rest of the thousand things that are in there. I would say if we want a supermajority for certain ones it would be easy to get that supermajority for all the others and so that maybe that's the way to go is require a two thirds for mending or repealing the rules, we can always do that and yeah if we're just substituting the names of committees that's gonna be a no brainer for people to get that supermajority. So do we wanna go ahead and make that change? I just wanna make sure I'm clear on what problem we're solving here and so I think consistency is one of the issues not having just whoever happens to be at that meeting make the rules change that one night without perhaps having I don't know read all of the rules et cetera before they make the vote and so what's, I guess my point is what do people think is the cleanest way of doing it? You know if I were, my first choice on this would have been to rewrite this that can shall consider proposed changes at one meeting and vote on them at a separate so you get a second chance to think of including if we had some clean up things that we don't wanna do this very often so I wouldn't have gone toward supermajority I would have gone to consider potential changes at a meeting and then voted at a second meeting. So we could just mirror the bylaw language that they shall be read at two separate meetings? That work. Because the bylaw reading is not just like what we did with sort of the budget say where it was presented but it wasn't fully here's the motion here's the changes it's here you know the bylaw reading requirement is not oh we're thinking of changing a bylaw and here's my you know here's some possibilities that's here's the proposed change that comes to a meeting and then at the next meeting is the vote on it so it could just be reading at two meetings. Dorsey what do you think about? That's basically the same thing just saying it a different way. It says we don't have to vote on it twice I just thought bringing it up twice was time consuming to take a vote on it each time as opposed to talk about the changes we wanna make at one meeting and then come back and vote on it. Yeah it's basically the same thing except it means that the first one is not a generic oh we're thinking of changing this rule and we're not sure what we're changing it to the first reading it's specifying that that first consideration has to have the proposed change in it not a general discussion of well we might change it. So. Same okay. Okay and I'm gonna need, I'm not gonna type this in right now unless you dictate it to me on how I'm changing it up. Yeah and you know what I'd like is to make sure it says it still says it requires a maturity vote and maybe it's period you know to be read first at one meeting and voted on this on a second meeting. So the bylaw language in the charter is prior to final passage each proposed bylaw shall be read at two separate council meetings. So we could say prior to final passage each proposed amendment and rescission is an amendment. Each proposed these were you know so it would just be prior to final passage each proposed amendment of these rules of procedures shall be read at two separate council meetings and then a second sentence could be amending or repealing these rules shall require a majority vote of the full town council or the full council I guess is what it is. So the second sentence mirrors what's in there now except gets rid of the clause at two separate meetings of the council and wherever you put the first one either before or after. So I actually so I just the second sentence the first sentence you just said I made second so I have amending repealing these rules of procedure shall require majority vote of the full council period prior to final passage each proposed amendment shall be read at two separate meetings of the council. Yeah, done. The next is on page five. We actually did not flag in yellow. Kathy did the charts and I didn't think it was enough to bring to attention that we had if the president's not there then it's the vice president but the vice president's not there then it's the whatever so I thought we'll just leave that there. So this was no agenda item shall be brought forth after 10 p.m. The one comment I heard there was Lynn tried valiantly to get to 10 guess at 10 last night but Andy raised the issue that we to try to at least have this be at least an aspiration we have to make sure we look at an agenda and anything that needs to be decided that night you know is time dependent has to be nearer to the beginning so it doesn't run into that we have to make a decision before 10. So that was the only sort of qualifying comment and it wasn't so much that didn't like this as an aspiration but just it had implications as people were thinking about the organization of the agenda. I actually found that comment kind of strange because the president always has the prerogative to move things around on the agenda and he knows that. So maybe what he was worried about is because we have, oh he didn't say this I meant to ask him about it afterwards maybe what he was worried about is because we have an order in our rules maybe we just need to say a qualifier in the section that's the order that if we haven't already which I kind of thought we did but I'd happen to have looked at it that says it's okay this is the rule but the president still has the ability to move things around. We have a permissive rule it says to follow the order unless the president or presiding officer determines we need to shift the order we've made that permissive now that this is the general order but shifted around and we've been operating that way. I mean we've moved things up or down. Absolutely. So then I think I didn't hear any objections to this being an aspiration. I have the same notes as you did and as Alyssa did. I wonder though, do we want you know the way it's worded and I might just think about this for next week. It's we can't bring it forth unless we determine which means any time after 10 we'd have to have a vote every time or should we switch that around that after 10 a counselor may object to continuing on. I don't know so make it a a affirmative objection to require a vote and if there's no affirmative objection we just continue or do we want to keep it as every agenda item needs a vote before we continue? You know which and maybe it's something I need to think about before next week. I have a strong opinion about this but Lynn first. So do I. I want you to envision a meeting at which we have remote participation and every time we want to go to the next item we have to do it by roll call. Darcy. Why do we have to mention agenda items? Why can't we just say no regular meeting shall continue after 10 p.m. unless the council otherwise determines or something like that. So it doesn't have anything to do with agenda items. That would make it easier. So it's not a vote on each one. It's just we make a decision to continue and what Lynn is pointing out that if someone's on the phone we have to do a quick roll call vote saying are you willing to stay on? I'm thinking of when I was in Switzerland at three in the morning I was on for the duration so you would have gotten mine. So yeah, a hybrid I think of all these things is the way to go. And so at town meeting we would have to bring up each particular article which is what we're trying to say I wish to consider this article even though it's after 10 o'clock and then we'd have to do it for the next one and the next one. And so rather than having to do that for exact reason of the roll call I'm less comfortable saying somebody has to actively object. So I like the idea of what Darcy brought up which kind of meets in the middle which is that the meeting continues we make one decision that the meeting is gonna continue. So would the reword be meetings shall aim to end by 10 p.m. unless the council otherwise determines. So it would be we're aiming to end by 10 unless we determine we're gonna keep going. I know it's not your preference as to option but what kind of wording would you like to get out of it? I don't know. That's why I said I kind of wanna bring it up as maybe we need to reword this but I'm not sure I'm capable right now of coming up with a new wording. I can certainly think about it and forward a potential wording on to Kathy who's maintaining sort of the draft. So if you wanna make a place marker for it Kathy just as you said it and then we can reword Smith it later but are we in general agree? It sounds like Manny Jo you might not be sure that you agree with this but so that's part of the wording issue but is that is the general consensus that rather than having to bring up each actual article as we want to do it after 10 o'clock each agenda item the equivalent of an article or measure do we wanna just say it's after 10 o'clock it's a time check do we wanna continue? I would much prefer that affirmative action than to say then they have everybody doing like they did at town meeting it's five to 10 it's five to 10 it's five to 10 when somebody gonna decide if we're still meeting after 10 o'clock so I would prefer to take the actual action. I can come up with wording that matches Darcy's proposal not a problem I'm just not sure I'm capable of doing that right now. Yeah and I like pulling it off of specific agendas. Yeah that's what I'm suggesting I'll send something to Kathy. Okay so what I have is the placeholder meeting shall aim to end by 10 p.m. comma unless the council otherwise determines and it's when you look at it Mandy it follows D which says meeting shall start at 6.30 p.m. so this is like here's the beginning point and here's our ending point unless we decide to keep going so that's the rough draft of it. And that leaves it open for the president to say take a vote on it and then we can vote on well we'll end by 10.30 so at least we won't think that we're going on and on forever as per usual. And we could even be saying let's at least get through item number X and aim for 10.30 you know like we were trying to not get through everything. The next follows the getting draft minutes out in a timely way. You know there was this is the one where we're gonna interact with the clerk on what is possible. Clearly you know when we put the aspiration of four days there was a no and I started thinking you know if we say four plus three working days it gets us we'd see the draft minutes by Wednesday before the Monday thing and that would actually be helpful for me to get them a little bit earlier but we're gonna talk are we the pieces to talk to Margaret on what would be possible on I'm talking about the minutes because I think there was an agreement that we could get the votes out by within two days in any case because if anything else she's typing up you know it could be a mimeograph of the votes we took you know it's already so I didn't hear an objection as much on A it was more about four days for drafts. Yeah I intended to say last night which I always do this the morning after like this is what I should have said last night that Bernie Kubiak had said that you know when he was a town manager he got his minutes out in 48 hours draft minutes. So clearly it can be done but I know that we you know don't like telling the town manager what to do. So I think some of what's at least the time consuming part is when you have a four or five hour meeting where there was quite a bit of back and forth our clerk is and Athena there's taking the time to go back and watch the videotape and really try to do a summary of a discussion that's reflective and even then many of us are sending in there was more of a discussion there was more content than this so it's not just the typo side. So I think having done one set of minutes for a finance committee meeting at which I discovered no one had done minutes. So I went back and watched the tapes it took me a while because it had been one when there's a lot of meaty discussion and trying to capture it without it having being a verbatim wasn't easy. So I think that's the challenge of making that draft a pretty good draft as opposed to you know, this was discussed that was discussed, this was discussed. So the council seemed to not like be the draft minutes close of business at four days. I think and the clerk has said it would be impossible to meet was her email. Do we need it in here? And do we wanna try and change it to a different time? Should we delete that section? And just essentially say, I mean we already she has not object the clerk has not objected to that they're approved by the majority of the council at the next council meeting that did not and there was no objection to that in the email that I saw from the clerk. And so it's more of figuring out when people are going to see them does that need to be in the rules? Could we delete that? I got the thinking that the record of votes is almost more important than the content of the discussion for people to see quickly. And so I would argue we should keep that in there and figure out a way for the clerk to be able to do that somehow efficiently. So the B number one minute shall be approved by a majority at the next council meeting. In fact does imply that we got them in time by the next meeting. So the only thing is for me I would, it would be easier if I got them at least a day or two before I get the whole packet because I read through the whole thing and having the minutes out of the way would be useful. You know every once in a while I don't do it often I go back and I said my memory. And so I've sent, there was a confusing one once where it really was not quite, the wrong person was saying things. You know I mean it was a reverse. Someone had said this but it was actually they had an opposing view and the other was positive. So I would spend more time on minutes if I didn't get them with 10 other things. So it's mainly thinking of that you know the Thursday before you know we think we're getting our packets by the Thursday before but we're often getting our packets on Friday. So it's trying to get the minutes just a little bit earlier but otherwise I'm fine because if we're approving the draft on the next Monday that we're meeting I had to have gotten them over the weekend otherwise I couldn't be approving them. Absolutely. So I mean again as we continue to go through this when we put it in here to begin with we knew it was aspirational. I would argue that it doesn't make any difference to me if the town manager hasn't provided us enough hours in staff support to do what we want. If we say we want it then it should be found to have a way to do it. At the same time practically speaking we know that right now we know for sure that four days is too soon. And I think reflecting so we could either given all that taking it out all together and just letting it be what it is in state law but I am tempted to go ahead and put something in instead that's kind of a mix of the two which is rather than just saying well whatever state law says because then that again is not our rule it's like out of our control whenever staff gets around to doing it is when they get around to doing it maybe saying the Wednesday or Thursday before the next meeting would be the simplest way of accomplishing that. When we first see the drafts is when everyone else first sees the draft also? Yes? At this point that's what's been going on, yeah? I believe so, they've been going on in the packet at the same time they've been in our SharePoint folder? I think, I haven't been checking the online website packet. Lynn do you know whether? No, they're not publishing on the mom the town website until after we approve them. So if this said draft ministry will be available to the council by the Wednesday before? Yes, that's what I'm looking for because then that way what they end up you know you'll be able to people will be able to give real feedback, right? If they get them on Wednesday or Thursday and then the typical thing they've been doing right now is saying turn in edits by like noon on X and then once they do that then they put not only that final version final pre-vote version in our SharePoint packet that's the one they also ended putting in the public packet. I mean Dorothy's concern is she only wants to see she wants a near final draft so that she can read it once rather than twice. So that gets away though from what this one was aiming for because this one was the town website so part of this was the council gets it but this was also we want them up sooner for the people to see not and Steve said he was concerned about that that the near finals should be the only ones maybe that are put on the website not the non near final. So if I moved where B is right now is publication of draft minutes it's an A and a B. If I move B up to be a little A under minutes shall be approved by majority of the council and underneath that a little A that said draft minutes shall be sent to the council by Wednesday before the meeting. It would be when is the council's getting a chance to see it the Wednesday before. So I'd move it up because we're not publishing that first version. But that's changing the meeting the meaning of what this one was though. That's why I was moving it out under because publication of draft minutes clearly is publication I was just gonna take rather than deleting the sentence altogether I was gonna move it up to be a sub under minutes shall be approved by majority underneath that said the council shall receive draft minutes three days prior to keep the same language three days prior to the meeting at which they are. Yes, let's make it as complex as possible. But it would match the language in our packet publication language which we should probably aim for. So three days prior to the meeting no later than three days prior to the meeting is what the language in the next article is. So can we accept in order to in order to give some deference to the actual practical reality that we're being told is our reality based on the amount of staff support we've been given to do what Kathy said so that the first item which is minutes shall be approved right and in order to approve them you will get them to us by a certain time. So that's great so that covers that issue and then for the publication for the public part rather than calling it publication of draft minutes do we instead say do we give up on the idea right now not forever but right now of saying how soon everything will be published for the public because that becomes public records requests and draft minutes and all that jazz do we just say publication of votes? So do we clean it up by just saying the important thing is that we wanna know that consistently the council's gonna get them far enough ahead that we can really look at them without having to also be reading the budget at the same time et cetera and all these reports and then can we say that the public will get the record of votes and will that be sufficient to get us through this iteration of the rules and then maybe in the future we need to add another section that we were attempting to originally here by saying okay now that we've got that rhythm down and we've already started doing the publication of those now do we wanna add another layer that says we want to be aspirational about how soon the minutes get put on the town website. So is your suggestion little A, a record instead of two being publication of drafts minute I can just move A up to so the first would be minutes shall be approved by majority vote and then we have council shall receive draft minutes no later than three days prior and then the third could be a record of votes taken at the meeting shall be available on the town website. I may make that first, would that be better as a C? Is it one, two, and three was what I'm wondering. I think it's a B, adoption and publication of minutes. One is they're approved at the next council meeting. Two is draft are available no later than three days and then a C is a record of votes taken at a council meeting shall be made available to on the town website by close of business the day after the meeting because it doesn't really go to minutes. It's just the votes. It's not really minutes. So it could be a C. Votes are kind of a subset of the price. I see you're bringing it out all the way out to the to the next, the next higher outline level. I just have a question about draft minutes and that is so the draft minutes that we get with our packet or right before we get the packet that ask us to for any changes that we want to make to the minutes. Are they considered draft minutes? Yes, so legally they're subject to public records requests. Legally they have to be given to people who ask for them. However, we are not yet putting them on the town website because again for that reason of people don't want to read four versions of our minutes, right? So I'm guessing that the Bernie Kubiak version of draft minutes is like real draft minutes because I'm sure that the draft minutes that Athena and Margaret have been giving us have been refined by them. In other words, they've gone through and corrected whatever and but I'm wondering if there is a version of minutes that is like raw minutes that we could put out sooner that would be less onerous for them administratively. I do. I think that's where we ended up with the votes issue because rather than some really thin segment of minutes, they're not taking minutes the way you're taking minutes, Darcy, right now. That's not actually what's happening at council meetings. So they don't have what you have, the equivalent of what you have that you're taking right today at the end of the council meeting. But what they do have is definitely the votes and some notes and so rather than asking them to put out both the votes and those really thin notes, we're asking in my proposal here, we're asking that they put out the votes that those get to because those are gonna get to the public right away much like town meeting votes did and then we're asking to make sure that we have a rhythm where we're getting the notes they have then crafted, the minutes they've crafted after they leave here and they go home and they go back to work and they watch part of the tape, then they send those out like you said usually a couple days before they send the packet out, not always and ask for our feedback and then the ones that have had feedback are the ones that end up on the public website so that the public sees something that's hopefully pretty close to final because everybody's turned in their notes about what they are, although occasionally people read them later in the weekend and realize that. But that's why we wanna back up the when they get them to the council so that there's enough time for council to do that so it's more likely that we can actually just approve them, get the public will then have seen both the draft ones that are in the public packet and then they'll also shortly after that see the approved ones because we will have just approved them at the meeting. But they will get the votes if we ask for this and that to me is like the draft draft version that accomplishes what you're talking about to the best that we seem to be able to given the staffing that we have. I just would be interested to know what other towns do and to write their notes from the meeting because it seems like there should be some way to have the draft version immediately. I mean, if we can have it immediately after our meetings, why can't the clerk? And it seems like there should also be a technological way of if it's being videotaped, having a transcript of the videotape technologically produced immediately. You could probably do that pretty easily. You could transcript, you know, if people wanted to go and actually read the meeting rather than see the meeting you could probably do that. There's an easy way of turning on. There is a technological way of doing that. YouTube does it automatically. When you upload a video to YouTube they'll create a transcript for you. It's not great, but it's done automatically. So in effect we have a record of our meeting. Amherst Media has been pretty good on getting these up 48 hours. So let me just suggest we keep moving and I'm just gonna read you back the edit I did right now and this is certainly not the last time. So right now Little B says, just what it always says adoption publication minutes then I made number one in terms of the order is the council shall receive draft minutes no later than three days prior to the next council meeting. Number two under this minute shall be approved by the majority of the council at the next council meeting. That sentence is the same. Now there's a new little C that says a record of votes taken at the meeting shall be available on the town website by the close of business the next day. So the minutes piece has two pieces when we see it and when it's approved. And I guess it's assumed that if we're approving it at a meeting it's in the packet. You know it's been published by that point. I mean everyone gets to see it. I think. Do we, would it just help some people in terms of particularly our fellow councilors? Do we need to or is it clear? I mean it's clear to us because we've been doing this awhile that votes are a subset of minutes, right? They're not the full minutes but they are actually gonna be part of the minutes eventually even though they won't like reattach that to the minutes. But would it be better to say adoption and publication of meeting records including minutes or minutes on other records or just minutes and votes? Do we wanna say anything different in the header to make it clear to people? So then I could move little C back under that would be great. Yeah, so if we just redo the header a little bit. So adoption and record of the meeting and publication of minutes. So it'd be adoption, publication of minutes and records of the meeting. Something like that. Whatever looks better. Record of vote. Okay. The little C would move to a three then. Yes, so it'll be one, two and three. That'll look, it'll look a whole lot better. And I may make that the first thing. So we'll come back and look at it when you see the draft. So the next section was the public dialogue and work session. We got two comments. One was that work sessions were a great idea. Another one was that the public dialogues, there wasn't a real clarity as to how it was different from a forum or a district meeting. And so was it necessary to have a separately named thing? It wasn't asking for, the comment wasn't asking for deletion. It was more of how many of these names and special meetings can we have. And I think that's where Shalini's comment of maybe add the definitions of each meeting somewhere in. But I don't know whether. And this one, because of the way we drafted this, I mean Dorsey asked this way back when. Why is 3.8 here and not just over in the, because this is a, it doesn't tell you what a public dialogue is here. It refills you over to the place we tell you what it is. And I think we held it here because the public dialogue would be part of the regular council meeting. You know, I mean, it would be. So the simplest thing, it makes you have to know too many things in this one page and it probably would hit you less if public dialogue was just over in public dialogue. You're just the one time over in rule 5. Fine with the leading public dialogue from this completely and moving work sessions to 3.8. Yeah, so it would still say work sessions here and just when you get to public dialogue at least two times a year and then it would go on. So our rationale for that, I mean beyond obviously, that it was confusing for people. And I think again, it reflects back to what you said is that if people had read the entire rules document in detail, perhaps they wouldn't have felt the need for definitions because I wouldn't wanna define work sessions for example, because it's defined really well right here. But for public dialogue, are we saying that the reason it would be beyond confusion, that it would be just as reasonable to move it is because things like district meetings are not included in here because they're not a count of council meeting. So a dialogue isn't a kind of meeting. I mean, except the only reason I think it really is in here is because we were talking about posting them as meetings. We defined it as they shall comply with open meeting law which I think is why we had the cross-reference in rule three. Because whereas the district meeting is a very different kind of meeting in that we don't intend to post them as council meetings. I don't think it does any harm to leave it in here. It's just a reference to where it is. So if people were reading it, they would understand it. Okay. I think if they read the full context. Yeah, I think that was literally the only issue lesson. We were hitting a lot of things at once and public dialogue could have just as easily been over under public participation. So I'm fine with leaving it. And that made me think I've skipped ahead to 5.3 for that reason and I know the concern was expressed that well, how does this really differ than district meetings and my initial, I mean, we didn't get into all the details but of course my initial reaction was this is for everybody here. You don't have to go out to a district to go do it. It's here where everybody could hear it. And so that's exactly why it's different than a district meeting, even though the issues might be the same. Yeah, I think that's right. And so I don't know if we can make that clearer somehow. I think we did last night. So it sounds like we're just keeping everything the same and moving on, right? And people nodded and this will be when we're trying it out and seeing whether people come, right? But we feel like they kind of got it by the time we were through it. Okay, cool. So then work sessions I thought went well and people liked the idea of it, so no change there. There was no comments on the 4.3 public comment during agenda items matter. And so the next one would be 5.1. At least the, I already had said this, I thought the main comments on this was because it wasn't in context. Yeah, that's what I had. You didn't get to see the first part that said not to engage in a discussion or a debate. So that these were subs underneath that. So I don't think we need to change anything. No, I don't think we need to change anything at this point. I think if you read the whole thing, we answer the question. So it's 5.1E. 1.1E, so public comment is for us to hear comments not to engage in discussion and then we added if there was a question about fact the president could recognize someone to answer it or you could ask the person who's making the comment. I didn't quite understand your comment. So opened up not the beginning of a long discussion but at least some interaction with the person. So we're leaving it as is. Which brings us to 6.2 options. The courtesy and decorum. So this one, the vote was option one had six choices six votes and option two had seven votes. And there was some either way, there was some thoughts and support for keeping it on a revisit list as a future. This is one that we should think about more as we get more involved with meetings that have sort of higher levels of disagreement in the public as to is it working or not? Could I ask a question here? Just in terms of order of things, I arranged my brain associated with all the yellows and then all the blues. Sorry. So could we? I'd rather do what you wanted me to just do. You know, it's from my brain goes from the beginning to the end. Okay. I thought we were doing all the yellows and then all the blues. Well, I was gonna do all the comments but I know we took the vote but the my notes were also, if we need this, we could always add it. The president could also rather than making it a, you just can't do this. Then the president could say, you know, we'd appreciate no undo whatever is. All those things were said but the vote still came out really super close. Yes. And I have to say the presentation on this wasn't as neutral as I would have preferred but in any case, you're right. So I definitely think it's something that the GOL should be thinking about. I held off talking about this but when I watched the British Parliament and other parts of the world, they want the public to come and so it's not a court proceeding in the same way where the judge clears the courtroom if people, you know, clears the courtroom of disruptive behavior but so, because this literally prohibits it. I guess the one comment that, you know, I was in the option one section last night but the one comment that made me think option two might be nice was not, it was not the comments that it's not pleasant for counselors to hear say Hissing. We were elected. We got to deal with both. It was what does someone who didn't support or didn't, you know, didn't support the winning side, whatever that is or supported the winning side and there's a lot of no's out there. What does the resident in the audience feel like for, you know, say that school vote if they didn't support the schools and there's all this cheering, how do they feel in terms of welcome at a meeting? That's the one that got me more than it's unpleasant to sit up here while being booed because that's part of being an elected official but it's more of is that welcoming to the public if they're not on, if they're on the yay side and they hear all this booing? I'm sorry if anyone thought last night that the reason I thought Hissing was bad was only because it was unpleasant to listen to as a counselor, certainly not true because it was always a problem as opposed to British Parliament in town meeting where people did behave badly and it made the people sitting around them feel bad and like they didn't wanna be there anymore. That's what we were trying to avoid just like, I mean the schools it's hard to believe that somebody would be upset but they might've been at town meeting it made people feel like I don't wanna engage in this process anymore when I see this kind of behavior is happening. I guess I would say that the practicality is that it only works when it's enforced and it's unlikely to be enforced for example, when there's the school vote that we had. And that's the president's discretion. Right, right. So if it's at the president's discretion anyway, I guess I don't know why we would wanna have it because it feels people unfriendly to me. It feels like, I don't know. And it feels people unfriendly to me to be sitting in the audience when people are clapping and hissing. Go ahead, Lynn. If you want, if what the rules committee wants is the option to kind of outcome as someone who's now presided over meetings for close to six months, I'd just as soon have the statement and then I would include it in our statement of public comment on every agenda. Right, just have it up front. What to expect at our meetings? We've often had handouts like that. I mean, I will say that on the two occasions we've had demonstrations, Paul and I've had a discussion about that and I felt comfortable because it was so positive but I would not feel comfortable if it was negative. So I feel like I can't differentiate. So Lynn, are you thinking the current sentences, those presidents shall not engage and what you're saying is the president would announce just the way we're operating as you, we appreciate you're not engaging in audible, there's a two paragraph statement on every agenda about public comment and I would just add the sentence that is not. But that doesn't take it out of here. It's still our rules and that she's talking about how it can be practically useful. I'm saying leave it in here and then we add it to that the public comment part of the amendment. The vote was to put option two and I actually would recommend getting rid of the word audible if we're gonna go this route. If the route is because of people who might be feeling uncomfortable that allows you a person to say, well my hand gesture was not audible and so it did not violate the rules. And I'm thinking hand gestures both ways. I can't do it with two hands, I'm holding a mic. The clapping hand gesture in American Sign Language that's just shaking your hands that a lot of schools in all use to indicate approval or happiness and along with then less fun hand gestures too. So if we get rid of the word audible, you need to get rid of the word audible anyway because I mean I'm used to University of Massachusetts trustee meetings where people came in with demonstrated signs. That's where I was getting, that's one of the reasons we put that audible was in here at one point is because how do we also address the signage issue? Then take it out. Then take it out. But by taking it out, you feel like it covers both the signs and the clapping. And that's part of what we were trying to do is because I have seen it done where you can't bring signs in and so they make you check the sign at the door but they do allow you to clap or hiss. And so I'm saying, I wanna prevent the, and I wanna prevent the hand gestures and so that's why it was trying to get at that but if you think it better gets at that by taking audible out because audible seems exclusionary whereas I was thinking it was adding an additional level of demonstration, right? So it's just in your interpretation. I would have some people say demonstration just means they brought signs and that's not what demonstration means. That doesn't mean they can't pick it outside building. Right. It just means we're not gonna allow picketing in meetings and stuff like that. Even just in the hall. Because it's absolutely true that we don't wanna limit it to audible because we also don't want them shaking signs at us which can be quiet. Right. So, whichever. Do we want it before D or before the original D or after the original D? I think that we need to let the council take a vote on this. They did last night. That was a straw vote. It was still a vote. And so. That was a straw vote. We're not gonna put straw votes, we are not gonna put back as let's re-litigate the whole thing all over again. I would put it in. We're gonna rewrite it. And give them the choice. No. I would put it in as a track change. Right. And if the people who voted last night don't agree with that, then they'll bring that back up. Exactly, that's how they do it. I would say the council is split. They'd love to hear the kids and clap for them, but. You know, there's a difference. So I'm gonna leave it highlighted. We can make it any color we want, but there's a difference of a show of appreciation. I don't think it was so much. We were clapping because we did the boxes, but these kids have been so brave. So that's a different, you know, to be silent when people got all their courage up to talk to you, we loved it. So it's different than a, yay, we passed the Affordable Care Act, which did get a lot of cheers when that happened. Yes, and I would argue that. Even though it says those present, if the council burst into spontaneous applause because we want to applaud their graders, I think that's different than, and like, oh, you know, we did this special thing for the kids. It is under public courtesy and decorum, not the council courtesy and decorum. It gives us a little tiny space. There's a little bit of argument you could make. The council can do it. Yes, exactly. And after about a minute of applause, I can say, normally we don't allow that in this case. Exactly, exactly. And even Pistrang, I think, did that. But that's what I'm talking about, you know? Like, we are going to allow it when we want it, you know? Once a year. No, I mean, we've done it numerous times with various resolutions that we've passed and... Once was the school vote, second was housing vote, and the third was the kids. I think there was applause with one of the resolutions we passed. At least one of them, yeah. I just want to remind us that, again, you know, when we did Indigenous Peoples Day, a whole bunch of people clapped for that, and the people who were really upset about Italian heritage, you can be dismissive of their concerns, but who were upset about that felt bad about everyone around them cheering rather than just being satisfied with their vote. And so we don't get to pick and choose what our community, even if it's a very small part of our community, is upset about. I just want to be clear in terms of how we're bringing this forward. We are going to, we are not putting out options anymore in the next draft. That is no longer a choice. What we are doing is we are putting forward, not today, after next week's meeting, a track changes version that shows the difference between this, which had options, and the actual written rule. It will not be... Did you just decide that by fear? Because it's not, it's a rules document. It's not a vote on separate pieces of the rules document. And so then if, and then we would describe in the report, we have captured the various things you've talked about. We draw your attention back to page 13, page whatever. That's what we think the track changes incorporates. All the things because people don't know what people are going to have said between last night and next week. We think we've incorporated everything. But here, if you want to look at a clean version of the rules, it'll be rules and people will be options. Putting it in as an option, I'm just yellow highlighting it. Yeah. Because it's yellow highlighting it. I think it should remain highlighted as... It turns to yellow. Yes. The idea is that it's written as words, not as options, but it's drawing attention to it in case people run out of time to read the whole thing again. Are we ready to move on to 6-4? Yes. Appeal the president's decision. Sorry, Darcy. Why is it turning from blue to yellow? Because we're not gonna do... It's gonna stay yellow because A, it's changed and it was controversial, but B, we're no longer gonna have you can either do this way or that way, which was the way our blues did before. Right. So we could adopt one more color if we wanted to, which is there was a near-split vote on... In other words, we could do another kind of coloring. We're not asking you to vote, we're just reminding you, you guys made this decision with a split vote and we adhered to it. So I think we can move on and figure that one out. Yeah, I think we should highlight it again because we also changed the wording and it was such a close vote. And so bringing it up for another potential discussion, as Darcy said, straw votes can be changed and as we discuss it a little more, that might come out. We should recognize though that we took the straw vote majority opinion and then modified it even more. Exactly, because we may find additional word smithing in the comments that we're getting between now and next Tuesday, and then when we all look at it for Tuesday with fresh eyes, we may come up with even yet another alternative on any of these sections. So my goal is to eventually have the rules document that we put out be available in both the track changes version so people can see what changed from last night to the 20th, not every single iteration, but the two different versions, which there are multiple in between versions of. And then to yellow highlight, just because I think yellow is the easiest, to draw attention to not all the same yellow things anymore, like that section of highlighting is passed as far as I'm concerned. Now we've moved on to rather than picking another color, we've moved on to highlighting the things we really want you to look at. Not we corrected a typo, but the things we really want you to look at in the track changes version is particularly this one, and there'll be a couple of others. So 6.4, peeling the decision of the chair. There was some discussion on, do we need it? If it's just tracking Robert's rules, should we delete it? Because it is just tracking Robert's rules, or is it a change from Robert's rules so it needs to be included in here because the default Robert's rules is not what we want? So that's where I, as you remember, I was getting confused about this before and explained it again last night. Are we in a, no, not that I know of, is the conversation around anything we do that we have in our rules, that people want to do something that they feel like is not covered in our rules? They go to Robert's. I express discomfort with the fact that every time somebody doesn't like the way we do something that they go to Robert's and say, well because Robert says I can do it, I can do it. But that is in fact our backup plan. So the question is, is this something that's important enough that we need to state something affirmatively about it one way or the other, which is either to repeat Robert's rules or to go the opposite direction and say, unlike Robert's rules would allow you to do, which isn't unspoken, we are not allowing this to happen because if our rules said you cannot appeal the president's decision, then you can't go to Robert's rules and say, well Robert's rules says you can. So if we think it's okay for, I think that was part of the decision point, right? Is it okay to appeal the president's decision? If it's okay to appeal the president's decision, then arguably you don't need it because we could remain silent on it and it's in Robert's rules with a specific way to do it. So on the rare occasion it came up, somebody would say, wow, I don't like that decision. Is there some way to appeal that? And Manny Jo would say, yes, Robert's rules says X, Y, Z. And then you just don't say anything about it unless it comes up. You would want to say something about it if you want to refuse to let that happen. I didn't hear any indication last night. I think it's enough of an esoteric thing that people were like, I don't know, I don't care. And so I don't know if this is important to people. The only reason I can see it is being really important to put in the document is if we were in fact saying what isn't in Robert's rules which is we would say no, you can't. And so if the sentiment that I don't really hear much in the way of feedback on this as to, because I think people need a more concrete example of what would be a thing we would even bother to appeal. So. I'm all for just getting rid of the whole highlighted section so that it just says, just president decides all questions of orders I think by staying silent, you default to Robert's rules so it can be appealed. It can be appealed and we don't expect, it's not like we're in a scenario where we feel like we have to say the president cannot be questioned, right? That I didn't hear any sentiment like that, so. Exactly. It is gone. That takes us to rule 10. Everything else is in rule 10. Well, who knows if everybody had actually read the rules, they might have had more questions. We need to stop at rule nine. 9.2. The first paragraph needs modified. It should just track the second paragraph because of how we changed rule 1.6. And the reference should change from rule 8.3 to rule 1.6. So my change was that the council must read a proposed amendment to the rules of procedure at two separate meetings before voting on it. That means it can vote at the second meeting, right? Yes. Thank you. So we didn't have some completely other process. Right. And then it would. So, Mandy, am I putting it in front of the sentence that says the council must vote on a change? So that's the sentence on changing? Yes, that one, that's the one you're changing because of our change to rule 1.6. So now it would read the council must read a proposed amendment to the rules of procedure at two separate meetings before voting on it. And then the reference is 1.6, not 8.3. I think we must have had it in 8 at some point. And had already threw a reference in that was wrong. Yeah, we'd already realized that one was off, but it was too late to fix it. And strangely, no one noticed. Just give me the cross-reference again. I'm going to fix it here. Rule 1.6. 1.6. And then down in the number of votes required, rule 9.5, the items requiring at least seven votes in favor for passage, the very last bullet point just has the wrong reference. The amending council rules of procedures needs to read rule 1.6, not rule 8.3. That's the one Alyssa caught. Yeah, like you say, it was just when we moved things around. We didn't catch it. In an effort to type without my normal mistakes, it's under 9.5. Tell me exactly where I'm going. The last bullet point under the third underlined section, the underlined section is the items requiring at least seven votes in favor for passage. Yep. The last bullet point that reads amending council rules of procedure, the reference needs to be 1.6, not 8.3. Same mistake twice, that's good. We were consistent. It's because it was an old number, that's fine. In the committee section I have, this is a place I wanted to make an addition. So please remind me after we get through the blues and yellows, okay? The first blue is 10.1. Council committees, this one's what? Authority, sort of the authority to act. This is one that the council last night didn't take a straw vote. So I'm not sure what we should be doing with this one. The thoughts were all over the place. And part of it was the definition of policy. Yeah. And could we decide, could we possibly, these 13 people agree, what is a policy? Which was the kind of, because each, I felt like each person who spoke to policy being the important thing to them, that they weren't willing to let a committee do, that their definition of policy might have been a little different than the other person who thought, who also wanted to make sure that policy, because I agree that policy needs to be established by the full town council. The question is just, what is policy versus practice versus measure? I wonder if we maybe get rid of both options and move it back to what Darcy suggested. And I think Kathy, you suggested, the two of you, where it was like committees shall take no action that bind the council or something like that. That's a little more, it's still open to some interpretation, but it's less open to interpretation, I think. I found that after we'd all been meeting in about four different councils, it rules that had a very strong declarative sentence like that. So would underbinding then, for example, under, just to make sure we all agree on what is binding or not, so that we can give that example, so would, I know it's a hot topic issue, but would you say that OCA deciding what their process was for making confirmations of town manager appointments or for making recommendations to the town council and town council appointments is binding the council because I would argue it's not because what council is is council gets to confirm the appointments or council gets to make the appointments. And so it's actually councils making that decision. So I guess then the question is, if we say binding, I think that gets us closer to where we're trying to go, but I'm still not sure we all agree on what binding means. I'll say yes. Not so much that you would be an intermediate for the council, I always understood that. I think the decision on who would get to see the caps among the council was a binding decision that was made. There are elements of the process, and I'll just point one out, but I'll see how it works. I have, in all the time I've been in external work trying to select someone for a position including commission, always put two people in the room actively interviewing for a couple reasons. It's a second set of ears that hears things, so someone is taking notes and says, would you clarify that? Could you tell us a little bit more so that you don't have a one person filter? It's a bit like going into a doctor's office that your advice as a patient brings someone because you hear some things, but the other person's hearing others. So it's binding in that we end up as a council not having information that we need to make a decision in a very different way than deciding on a format. But I agree, this kind of wording would allow us, binding would allow us to what extent did it tie our hands from doing something we might otherwise have done? Reaching a different decision. So OCA did not make a decision not to give the CAF to the council. OCA, those are personnel records that do not normally get distributed. So I think that's part of where some of this falls apart is that I don't agree that that was a binding decision because it wasn't actually a decision made by OCA, it was a decision made originally by staff and then various things fell out from it. And OCA is not deciding and will never decide to give CAFs or not to the council. That was a large decision. It was definitely presented to us as a decision by your team. Whether you thought you were making that decision because of an understanding of what you could or couldn't do, it was never brought to us did we want to. So I'm just giving it as an example. And I don't know what in the future might be like this because the CRC committee is likely to have a lot more issues that we would not want them to move ahead and we certainly wouldn't want them to be taking a position on something before it came to the council just because of the nature of the topics and you wouldn't want finance to either if there was a question on should this be in or out. So we've, the CPA pieces that are coming to two separate entities may have different opinions or votes on them, but it shouldn't be binding. You know, in the same way. So some are clear because we wrote it clearly into the charge, but I think this sweeping language gets us to at least considering whether we were feeling bound by a decision without even being asked about it. So do we, to set the, try and set the OCA process aside for a moment because CRC is the one that's gonna get the most complicated. It's pretty straightforward to say a group has heard JCPC recommendations and is now gonna make a recommendation to the council because only the council can vote on JCPC recommendations and so they can't bind them as opposed to the kind of binding you were talking about. There might be slightly different feelings around other issues that get CRC that aren't that very clear only council can vote on zoning bylaws. Only council can vote on a budget. So, and I know we talked about the charge. So does that, does it help us get closer? Yes, I think this sweeping language, my interpretation of why other towns have put this or cities have put it into the rules, it helps you. It's the sweeping language so that if you happen to have not written a charge as carefully as you wanted to or stopping behavior so the shall not bind, I think is strong wording that I think we need. And then we could still disagree later as to what binding means or not, right? Like we might disagree on that, but it gets us much closer to what we were trying to get at as opposed to any measure, right? We were talking about anything like a formatting thing. Dorsey, do you, does that make sense? I'm looking at Dorsey's face. Yeah, no, this is the language that we found in multiple towns, committees of the council shall not take any action that binds the council or adding language about committees of the council or advisory and shall not take any action that binds the council. So, yeah. So I can add one or the other of those versions just verbatim and verbatim in that we... I like the first one without the word advisory. I'm not sure how I can explain why. So I'm not sure I'm gonna try, but having come from a position where I would like to see our councils a little stronger, I am actually in support of a non-binding, the language about binding versus adding the words advisory and so I could support the council committees can take no actions that shall bind the council or whatever it was Dorsey said. And I think your thinking about advisory also plays into the way you interpret binding and again we can then have a discussion at council as hey wait, I think that's more than, I think that's binding, I don't think it's binding, but at least this is the direction we're giving all the committees whether we've revisited their charges or not, we're saying binding. So this, what I just typed in is council committees shall take no action that would bind the council. And I'm deleting the blues. And I'm yellow highlighting the sentence because it's a statement of the other policy in a different way. So people will see it. One of the things I wonder about Manny Jo, I know that this is maybe more of a GOL function, but is there a way that I'm forgetting is in here or a way to somehow reference in here that we have charges, that charges are a thing? We attach the charges to the rules, yeah. But you refer to them somehow as being, what I'm trying to get at is that by the way when you write charges, which is a GOL thing, when you write charges, let's address this issue so that we all know what we meant when we write the next charge. Yeah, I mean, 10-3 just says the council has established the following of five council committees, see appendix B for charges. At least it just says that. I think in the report that comes to the council, I assume it'll be the June 3rd report that says here's the other things. I think this should be on that list of someone needs to take a good look at those early charges that we adopted, because we've gotten a whole lot better at charge writing in the last five months and so those first ones need a relook. Yeah, live and learn, that's what we're trying to do. That brings us to what, 10-2? Yeah, 10-2-D. 10-2-D, eight councillors. Why do I only have 12 voting? Maybe. Why, because it pertained to the president, I abstained. No, there were two abstentions, two noes and, oh, three noes. That's why. Eight, in the straw vote, eight councillors liked option one. Three councillors liked option two and two councillors abstained. Although there was a lot of requests to potentially reword to put in there the president's duty to oversee from the charter and maybe define what that means. And then there's also the town attorney's email opinion that indicates even option one might lead to violations of open meeting law so that maybe we need to look at a better way to word that, even if that's the option we go with. So the attorney, it's interesting because I found this in the attorney general decisions on this, whether there was a violation, they said as long as the councillor is sitting in the audience and participates the same way as other members, it's completely okay. It made me wonder if her interpretation was, you know, entitled to participate as members of the public but still calling themselves councillor. I'm not sure what her interpretation was but I was also confused as Alyssa mentioned last night. Sometimes you're just confused by the attorney's opinions. Because the AG has been very clear. And the AG didn't even do as you can't even say you're a council member. They just said they have to be during public, you could identify yourself any way you want. It wasn't a restriction. It was interesting because they, in one of the decisions, because I went back and was reading one of the decisions, the determining thing is the person, the extra councillor was out there and came up and sat here. So they were behind the bench or in front of the bench or whatever and were clearly active participants and they said then you, and there were three of them and it was a committee that was already quorum sized. So they almost got to their full council but they said if they had sat out there and during public comment time, maybe comments, it would have been fine. Yeah. Is there a potential rewording of option one that is instead of our entitled to participate as members of the public are entitled to participate in the same manner that members of the public participate. And that might. Do you feel like that? That might clarify it a little bit more. And I don't know whether it helps but in the same manner might help be more clear. And we can always look at it and see if we feel like it. We can add it. And then so councillors who aren't appointed are, then that goes on. And then are we adding the president in his charter language shall oversee and by oversee it means the following. We want to define oversee in the rules I think is the question. Because we've actually, the councillors comma including the president comma takes that away unless we add it. You know it says the president's just like the rest of us and the president does have this other role of overseeing. But that's not, I hear that and I think that it just doesn't belong here but I think we need to, I do think we need to define oversee. I don't think coming to a meeting is part of overseeing. I think that overseeing is actually a broader issue which is not only, which includes a point is already called out as a separate issue, but overseeing is also saying, I thought you said you were going to get X done at X particular time. That's the kind of oversight. I would argue that oversee in the charter does not mean the president's required to come to every meeting in order to oversee the work of the council. That would be a really horrible burden that I hope the charter commission did not intend. And so maybe it's that we need to define oversee rather than just copying what the charter says some at the beginning with the president's role as to what overseeing. If we define it, I would put it in whatever rule is defining the president's duties. Rather than because that's where it is. And then is this section, this council is not appointed. Is it appropriate in process to establish council committees? Or is it better in like powers and duties of standing in ad hoc council committees, even though it's not really a power in duty of the committee? Like it doesn't really, to me it's not really a process. It doesn't fit. It doesn't seem to fit in the process part, but I'm not sure if there's anywhere that really does fit. Unless we move it to courtesy and to quorum, but that would be a weird spot. It certainly would. If we moving it to follow the council show review it's committee to organize each year. If this followed that, at least it wouldn't be in the middle of the other things. That would probably be better than even if we keep it in 10-2. You know, right now 10-2C, if this was a subset under C, a number one, presence asking, and then they get appointed and then C little one would be, if you're not appointed, you're entitled to participate in the same manner. It also fits as a subheader under that rather than all the way out. Ooh, if we take B as B, and then 10-2B, the president appoints members of all council committees and then C is a subset of B. The, and whatever D option is a subset of B. Then that works much better. That works for X. Exactly, exactly. But what are we deciding about the options? Well, we were, there was a definitive vote that ex-officio died. So the way it would read now is the president appoints members of all council committees as the top level. Then underneath that, the president first asked counselors for their preferences and then they get notification and then a second line says counselors, including the president who are not appointed member, are entitled to participate in the same manner as members of the public. In the same manner, right, because we changed that. And then we're gonna go back to rule two. So yeah, back in rule two, it's funny when you look at it now, you know, nice and clean, overseas and ceremonial are the only two that don't have a reference to something else. And so do we just go ahead and break it out here or do we actually need a whole rule about what overseas means? I mean, I think we have lots of choices. What would the, how would our current president just say, for example, hypothetically, how would our current president feel like what your brain thinks of as overseas, how could that be communicated in words so that people understood what you interpret overseas to mean? I can describe when I've shown up for meetings, I can describe what I've tried to do. But in my mind, it's trying to help a committee get their job done. Yeah. Which is clunky. Right, but if a committee was struggling, right, that's what overseas helps, is that you come in and help them figure out, okay. Right. The other times I would have to say that in OCA, because of just how the committee struggled with the whole appointment process, and because so much of the issue was new to me, okay. I also went because it was educational and I felt as president I needed to understand it. So it wasn't, sometimes my going to OCA was more making sure I understood the nuances of all of the options and everything else. And so that's, but I don't know that that was really done, that I don't know that that was overseeing. I think it was more making sure. Facilitating. Well, not even that. It's building like understanding though, because same thing for CRC. Now CRC is not doing anything complicated yet, but when they start to. But I've actually gone to all CRC meetings and there I feel the role I've been playing and also David has been playing is to help the group get on track, define a doable set of things they're gonna do. I mean, they have this broad, you know, drive a truck through it charge and trying to help them prioritize. That's what it's been about. So I have a suggestion on this. It's 2.2 actually. We had it always here at D says overseas council committee. It's always been there. No, it's always been there. One way to handle this without putting lots of words right there. I have no idea where the embers does this ever, but we could footnote this and say by overseeing, it means the following kinds of thing. You know, another just define it if we wanted to. Put it back up in the definition section you're saying rather than putting it in. Or I could just footnote overseas council committees and just down at the bottom, I literally a footnote, but why don't we come back to it? Because this is nice and clean right now. Exactly. But it doesn't have a reference. And so that's why I wonder if we could reference that definition. The reference with 2.2B, charter section 2.2B. I think when we split out into A, B, C, D, E, the charter section 2.2B in F was really meant for D, E, and F because those three things are exactly what comes from the charter. Yeah. So potentially listening to what our current president said, you could write maybe overseas council committees in order to facilitate the work of the committee. It still doesn't really define it, but it gives it a little more substance to what I have. And its relationship to the full council. And let me just say, because a lot of what I've done is say, oh, and on the agenda on such and such a date or we need you to do this so we can start that process. Right, exactly. Well, I just expand it. And what I'm noticing is 2.2B is also the source of F and it's also the source actually of appointing councilor. So 2.2B is actually governs this whole thing, doesn't it? Pretty much. Yeah. So the president- A through F is 2.2B and then G is 2.2C. So can we just take 2.2B and 2.2C and put them next to the heading for 2.2 and stop adding it at the end of every sentence? Because I do think it's important that in A, B, and C, we reference rules. So it goes powers and duties of the president. Charter section. And then charter these two sections. Yeah, because then that way, that way it's cleaner that really all of this is from those two sections, but rather than putting it next to the ones that- Okay, I'll try that and you can look at it in the next construction. So what I have right now is oversee council committees in order to facilitate the work of the committee and its relationship to the full councils. Ooh, I like that. Because that makes, because that change of the definition of oversee in some people's minds from, we'll stand there and scold you to exactly what it's supposed to be and what it's being. In moving the charter references up, do we still wanna keep in A, B, and C rule four, three, and 10? We could put a C in front of them that's more like, hey, it's not from rule four, but rule four expounds on this. Like C rule four, C rule 10. We took out all the C's. Oh, okay. No. That was a convention where we took out all the C's. No, you took out all the C's. Well, there were some C's and there were some not C's. There was no, there was no we. It was inconsistent. It was inconsistent. So we don't say C charter sections. In my role as president, I need to leave. No, in my role as counselor for district two, I need to leave to go to office hours, but in my role as president, I just wanna mention that Kathy and, that Alyssa and Kathy, I've CC'd you on two emails as followup to Margaret based on last night's meeting. But one of the things is that she is asked, you're asking her to review the full set of rules from her eyes as our clerk. And then the other one is anything you want legal opinion on. So my question about legal opinion and I know you need to go is that was confusing when that was asked for in an isolated circumstance, not by this committee. And so do we want given, after, do we wanna see what Margaret says? First, do we wanna assume that we need, I mean, our timeline is our timeline. But I guess I'd rather have Margaret look at it first, give us feedback, and then if she thought we needed any town council thought and any town attorney. I'm so sorry, it's so hard to change. Town attorney opinion on it. But I don't think that if she doesn't see that and if we haven't thought of something based on something we get feedback from that we haven't heard yet, I don't believe we're under any, it's really gonna help us much to ask KP law to look at our rules document, unless there's a question. So I guess my assumption is that we'll give Margaret a fairly tight turnaround that we'll ask her to look at this, maybe today's draft, would that make more sense? I think sending today's draft off instead of what the council saw is better. Yeah, so we'll send today's draft to Margaret and see if she says, oh, just like we've looked up many AGO opinions ourselves, if she knows of some other opinion that we haven't, that we're not familiar with. I also sent an email along with a draft agenda for a committee of the whole for your meeting on, I guess it's two weeks from today or something. No, next week. Next week. And I also mentioned the idea that counselors would be getting her comments. So somebody, Alyssa, you need to send whatever draft you want counselors to review and get comments to Margaret back by close business Thursday. No, wait, what? We're not sending anything out to counselors. I think the counselors should review what was presented to them last night. Yes, did you want me to just remind them of that? Yeah, it should be last night's version. Yeah, exactly what we kept saying last night. Tell us, tell us, tell us. That'd be great. Okay, I'm just gonna make a quick argument for C rule four and C rule three because we're actually saying, we say more about the preparation of the agenda here. It's not that we're creating a rule about creating. So the reason the word C was in there, it's defining how the appointments go. We have a, she's gonna first ask us or he's gonna first ask us. So that's why the word C was there. So it wasn't there consistently. And so I took it out so it would be consistently not there. But my question is, is why are we saying C rule when we don't say C charter and we don't say C rule? I think the C is used as a sort of indicator of it's not just, it expounds on this thing. It's not just a repeat or the legal reference that says we can do it. It's an expansion of that role or that thing. And so you'd be missing something if you didn't then reference that rule versus here's where the legal authority came from. Well, I would argue you're missing that as well on some charter sections because we don't repeat the charter verbatim. And so when we do mention the charter, it's not simply, we have the authority. But if you think it's cleaner then I don't have a problem as long as we do it consistently for C rule. But it sounds like we're not gonna have it. So I'll give you the example of what we saw in some of the other town rules of procedure is they didn't do this, what I feel is a pretty clean organization of putting some structure on it. They'd say prepare agenda and then have two paragraphs about what preparing agenda was. And we've done it more under the agenda section. So we put everything to do with the agenda over there. How does the president go about making appointments? We say she has the right to do it but over here we tell you how. So that's why it's a cross-reference rather than a citation. So I think the charter ones are much more the citation. We didn't make these up, these came from this source. So we'll go back and look and see whether the C works because the other one is the cross-referenced on public dialogue. But there we say we don't even define what they are. So you have to go look at, we actually are setting this up here. That one you really do have to, yeah. Okay. Okay, so as long as you put it in before all of them, that's fine. So then I think we're at 10.7 and 10.9 our last two, the, so we'll start at 10.7. There's a yellow highlight in 10.6. I don't think that needs discussed though. Yeah, there are a couple highlights that didn't make it a slag. We didn't slag it, it was just, we liked the language. Right. I used my discretion when I made the charts and saying would everyone want to have a discussion whether we should be creative, probably not. Yeah, so 10.7. We were trying to encourage people to read the whole thing. 10.7 didn't really have any questions. It was why is the president appointing that one and we kind of answered that one. Right, it wasn't really anything. And it was also why didn't we list the participatory, you know, and my memory, Mandy, you gave an expanded reason last night, but originally you said this isn't gonna be an existence very long, so writing it into our rule didn't seem to make sense. I would still rather see be gone completely. And I still wanted it in there because that person could quit. Right, and so we'll just remove it when that commission is dissolved, then we can just amend the rules to get rid of it. But yeah, so I don't think we have to change anything in 10.7, which takes us to Darcy, 10.8. Right now, I got it. I got it, I got it. This obviously applies right now to the Energy and Climate Action Committee. And I would like to, I like that there's the provision for counselors to vote on the, to council members to vote on the council members on the committee if one is established. But it seems to, I guess I've never been comfortable with the process that we have taken on based on an interpretation of a KP law opinion that the town manager is the appointing authority for both the counselors and the resident members. And I know that's the way it currently stands, but I'd rather not codify it in our rules by saying the president shall then forward those names to the town manager either, I mean, my preference would be to say that the appointing authority for the counselors is the town council. And if we could agree on that, that would be great. If we can't, we could just eliminate the final sentence so that it leaves it open in case in the future we get another opinion that's more clear on that issue because I cannot even imagine that the town manager has the authority to appoint town counselors to anything. This was the question I raised. I actually raised it when we got the legal opinion directly to Paul that the legal opinion never addressed separation of powers. They literally never used those words. So if they had looked at it, they might have said that the charter has been pointed out to charter didn't envision this situation, but if it had envisioned it, it probably would have had the council deciding who they were sending over to the committee rather than the manager picking which counselor he or she wanted. So I think what Darcy's suggesting is we got that legal opinion but if it doesn't, you're thinking it helps if we remove the present shall then forward. Just take it out. So we're just saying we are the group that's deciding who's going and we don't, I mean, since the town manager is always in all our meetings, he will know right away. Well, I think that's exactly what part of the point was. The only reason we really added that on because I totally agree that it would have been the other way if we'd had the option. But the president is forwarding those names to the town manager because otherwise we're saying, hey, town manager, you paying attention? Those are the names. It's an actual, it's an order. This is where we came back to that idea. We don't have orders yet, but when we have an order, it's the order of the town council that the town manager is to appoint these people. I think what this aim as Alyssa was getting at is a work around the failure of the charter commission to consider town committees that had counselors on it. And therefore, since the charter essentially says the town manager does all of those appointments, the way we're working around to essentially make it a council appointment of some sort, but not the presidents is that the council picks the exact number of names that need to be appointed and those are the only names that are forwarded to the manager as a, we're recognizing that the charter might have screwed up on this, but we're still keeping as much authority as we can on this. And so you're just gonna send that name back to us, but we've already said here's who we want. And I think it's that work around because the commission didn't sort of foresee this and plan for it well enough in the charter to keep that authority as best as possible without violating the charter's requirements. I get what you're saying. And I really like that we have this section because it in a way encourages us to be creative and it acknowledges that we have this, what I consider a hybrid committee. But I think that, well, I just would repeat what I said. I would rather not endorse the idea that the town manager will continue in perpetuity to be the appointing authority for the councillors. So I have a question of, what if we reward it? The president shall then provide that decision to the town manager. That's the equivalent of the order is the decision rather than the names. Does that address the matter? Yes, so then I'm just saying the council made a decision, these are the two or these are the one. Because name still seems like optional. Yes, so it's not an option. Forward the decision, what? Forward this decision. Yeah, forward the decision. Forward the outcome of the vote. We're making the decision. I was taking the word names out. Yeah. We're making the decision. Forward the outcome of the vote or forward the decision? Shall vote at a meeting on council to serve on the multiple member body. The president shall forward that vote to the town manager. I think Kathy's trying to make, you know, give more power to the town council by... Using the word decision. Yes. Yeah, I like decision. Yeah, decision versus names, because names still sound kind of flexible. The decision is done. This comes back to someday. GOLs can talk about orders. Because other councils don't just depend on their minutes to reflect actions. They've asked the town manager to do. So tentatively we've done it to present. I just made one more word. The president shall then forward the council decision to the town manager. Ooh, the council decision. Very nice. I like it. Should I yellow highlight it? Or should I just assume we didn't even highlight it at the beginning? I think it's fine to just leave it in direct changes. Does that then bring... The next one is the drawing straws on liaison. That one, my notes are that people didn't really like that. That there was a concern that it might not take into account what councillor, because of what committees, council committees they're on might be best there as a liaison to certain committees that someone else said it's more of the president's job to curate the service. So while this is a councilor appointment, we need to really think about the order of things being done. There were all sorts of, they don't really like it. I think we just need to draft something and figure out. So as you said, there were several concerns. One, we all assume we will work this out rather than we're just gonna come. And this implies the way we do this is you randomly get assigned to a thing whether you want it or not. And some committees might well wanna say we wanna have liaisons with X, Y, and Z. And I saw the planning board specifically has liaisons with an X, Y, and Z. Steven, an earlier meeting, the meeting before said, you know, CRC will have liaisons to a gazillion things if we do it that way. So we might wanna spread the wealth. Right. So we just need to figure out there's, the notion is there's some sorting process if a lot of people want, if six people say they want the same liaison thing, trying to figure out, well, if you have three choices, well, you'll go here, I'll go here. And Andy raised that the finance people and the people on finance before tended to do finance-like things just to keep, you know, if they're dealing with money. So I think someone just needs to either delete this altogether and come up with a sorting process. I was gonna suggest maybe we delete I and leave it sort of nothing's picked and the first time we have to do that we kind of just figure it out. We figure out our process. Yeah, I was thinking. So we just end with you've indicated your preferences. You've indicated your preferences and then just leave it alone. And then we're just silent. No, that's what I was thinking. We're gonna figure this out the first time we hit it because I don't even know how many people raised their hands for, you know, I raised my hands for several figuring some of the other people would want them to. So once we do it the first couple times or even not even this, so the first time we can decide do we need to make this now. We might be able to memorialize it a little easier than once we actually have said, oh, that's what we actually need to do. Yeah, I do kind of, you know, feel like we need to have some kind of fair process though. And when that was brought up yesterday about CRC I immediately thought CRC has, you know, is connected to. They would pretty much be the liaisons to every community that. Right, yeah, right. I thought I thought that. Everybody's substantive issue. All our priority ones, you know, and half of the twos have a link to that. Yeah. And that doesn't feel fair to me. It's not even just time-wise. Unrealistic. It's not realistic. It's only five people. So. And then there are a few like CPA that have clearly also a link to finance and also link to JCPC and it's gonna be, well, how many things do you wanna do? And because CPA has housing in it, you know, it's gonna be five people can't do it and should not do all of it. Other of us need to follow these committees. Exactly, because otherwise it becomes, well, if you're not on CRC then you don't get to not only not be on CRC, you also don't get to be a liaison to any of the top committees. That's obviously not. So my suggestion on this is if anyone comes up with, what they think of, everyone will feel, it was an efficient as well as a fair product. You know, like we don't wanna spend forever on this trading horses, but, and maybe our anticipation is people are wise and they're not saying, you know, there's some people on CRC who can't meet during the day and these committees meet during, you know, there may be some primary ones. And then the other thing is some of the things we thought should, we should at least know what's going on, had a potential council member on the entity that's been left unresolved, that there was a select board actually as a voting member. And clearly you wouldn't be able to liaison if you had a member. So let's just delete that last one and leave it open. Except we can't. So now I've just changed my mind again. So because otherwise I believe the automatic interpretation most people are gonna make is that after we make the reason we put this in here, one of the other reasons we put it in here is because people will make the interpretation that then the president gets to decide. And that was not our intention. We believe that there would be some sort of open process rather than the president getting to decide. So do we instead say this next, this sentence effectively serving as a placeholder, the method of determining. The council shall establish a procedure for. Yes. Determining. One of those words. Something like whatever it is, the council shall establish the procedure for naming liaisons or something. Yeah, exactly. I did agree, but now we don't wanna make it appear to default. And then the council could make an active decision actually to let the president decide or the council can make an active decision to let people thumb wrestle or to do drawing straws, right? But they would have to make an active decision. It's not just assumed it defaults to something. It's done. So why don't we, why don't we. What's the wording you came up with, Kathy? You just said the council shall establish a procedure for naming liaisons or for assigning liaisons. Can we say, put in the word fairly, for fairly determining. I know that. Unfair, we want an unfair process. Well, no, I just think that that will underline that we want it to be something like drawing straws or some way that we can make sure that everybody has an equal chance, yes? I'm okay with that wording. Everyone can interpret it differently. I don't necessarily just interpret it as an equal chance. I also interpret it as one councilor will not have six liaison ships and another one have none, you know, just fairly on lots of distribution too. Yeah. I'm writing Chalice Dent that for assigning liaisons, fairly set, good enough, nice and short. And then Kathy, you wanted to add something in this section. Yeah. Oh, is this the place? We'll have it waiting somewhere in this. And then I want to go back shortly, quickly to 6.3. So what was in the 6.3? Okay, so we have 10, 6K? You got it. 10, 6K when we're dealing with reports, committee reports. I want to add probably maybe break this up or make it a KL, make it an L. Committees shall review the report before it is sent to the council. Would be one way of saying it, that a report can't go to the council representing a committee's view unless they've been given a chance to review it. The second way this could be done is committees shall determine whether they want to review a report and take a vote among their members. So there would be two ways of doing this, but I don't think committee chairs should write a report and submit it without the other people who have been working on the issue of getting a chance to read it. And I've served on many committees where I and I understand that you're frustrated with my reports, but clearly. But I work on many other committees where I'm perfectly fine with that chair being empowered to do that. But if so, I would be fine with you saying that it's up to the committee to make a decision as to how that's gonna manage so that each committee can make that decision because the president most assuredly does not check in with any of the committee chairs necessarily before they issue reports about issues they think are important. And so I think it's all practically speaking just as we can't be too aspirational with what we went up on the town website when et cetera as much as we'd love to be is that practically speaking, we are adding a whole nother week into a process because most counselors now and in the future are not going to have time to draft another, to draft the report and get it out to the council without because that would be an expression of opinion. So you're adding a meeting every time you ask them to report. On the other committee that I'm on, we get the report before it gets sent out and we send comments to the chair. It's an expression of opinion then that's a violation of open meeting law that is made perfectly clear by the division of open government in numerous personal applications. It just goes to the writer. It goes to the writer. It's an expression of the opinion of the writer. No, maybe I'm not explaining this right. The opinion of the chair is being expressed to the entire committee that they are chair of. That is the violation of open meeting law unless you do it at a posted meeting. I know it's insane. I know it's inefficient, but it is also true. Then I will check because in finance we've received a copy of the report before. It goes to the full council, particularly on a re... And I reviewed one. So I have never in my life served on a committee where the final version of a collective report wasn't read by the collective, never. I understand exactly what you are saying and I've had this exact argument with the division of open government in person on numerous occasions that they have changed. And I have said, you realize this is insane, right? We have to be able to report on what we learned at a meeting, we all talked about it, and now we're just memorializing that and putting it in a report so that everybody can read the report. And they said, yes, we understand what you're saying. We understand that's the way real life works, but that's not the way open meeting law works. You have expressed an opinion to a quorum. So this was my propose. I have the two ways of doing it, but my understanding is we actually had one report that was submitted and then not accepted because a committee member objected to the content and then it was taken back and revised. I know about that. Yeah, I knew you would know about that. And I think that's appropriate. I think a report submitted as co-authored by five people should at least have had had the opportunity for the five. So if you're saying logistically, we are prohibited from sending a draft out. We have been sending drafts of our rules document out and coming in. So you're saying we've got to get the report ready a week in advance because we can't do it by email. So I just want to get that verified because Mandy, can I just, on GOL you've had a, you voted to get, you get it to everyone two days before? GOL has voted by the full committee that the report drafter would draft the report and send it out to GOL, the full committee, a few days in advance of when it is due to the president and the clerk and then would finalize it prior to and that silence would be approval of that report. So if you don't hear from anyone and that people could make recommendations but that the chair has, or the person drafting the report has the authority to take or not take those recommendations because it is ultimately the drafter's final say and what goes in it, a lot of it is done on trust, obviously. But it is seen by all before submitted but it is submitted by one person and that person has final sort of say on what goes in and all. My understanding of open meeting law is that that wouldn't technically be a violation because one person has sole authority to submit the report and to do or do not with suggestions anything they want. There's a line there and the question is where is that line and it's fuzzy. And that is the procedure in finance and it's not just an issue of trust but the review picked up, that isn't quite what happened and you missed an important decision in a report and there was one on the station road bridge road that it was purely adding some and the chair had total discreet, the person who was writing had total discretion whether to take those comments but and was extremely grateful that people picked up on. In theory a report is not adding to anything is not disclosing or creating any new stuff because it is reporting essentially similar to minutes. It is reporting what has happened and an accurate description of any discussion and he votes any of that. So there's not really an expression of opinion per se in it which is why I say there's a line somewhere and that line is very fuzzy. Exactly, exactly. And so if we can somehow address that in here that the more formal way that people have typically been doing things which has in some communities been found to be in violation of open meeting law is that what we're talking about is a relatively formal process that each of these committees is adopting in a different way. What we do want to avoid however is a very informal process that I've seen happen at other committees in town where and potentially including council committees that say you know what we were talking about go ahead and write it down and send it out to us and see if we agree. And so once it becomes different than a variation of minutes when it's a variation of minutes it isn't an expression of opinion except except that's not true because think about Lauren standing right here saying that it was actually not okay for people to look at minutes together that you could not have more than one person looking at the minutes on the council because then I was like you're insane Lauren there's no way I mean that's not to me that wasn't an expression of opinion minutes how could minutes be an expression of opinion unless you just left stuff out or totally changed what somebody said that would then no longer be factual minutes but she said we could not have send we could not send our minutes out to our committee for approval why would a report therefore be allowed for us to do that? I thought it was crazy and it went that far of the fuzzy gray line because I was like willing to interpret it for reports but say oh come on minutes too and she said minutes too we were not supposed to look at our minutes within our committees ahead of time. So are people gonna actually do that? I don't know. So what's the real thing we're trying to get at in terms of nobody wants to feel misrepresented? So what language are you proposing? So what would you, what really gets it not misrepresenting? Right now the last sentence of this paragraph says written report shall be provided to the president clerk at least three days in advance. I would like to insert a draft reports shall be reviewed by committee members for any comments or suggestions and then final written report shall be submitted to the president at least three days in advance. The alternative was committees can decide on the extent to which they want to review it but I basically want to put something about the committee either making a decision that they don't want to review a report or my preference would be to say committees get to review the report. I'm fine with clarifying that it should be an active decision point by a committee. I am not fine with making a rule about it here but I think each committee should decide it and it might depend on their issue. It might depend on their charge how important that is to them but they should, I agree, I'm totally fine with saying one of the things committees should do just like they have to figure out who's taking their minutes until we actually have adequate staff support to take our minutes like North Hampton has then we should also organize ourselves around what's our committee's expectation about this. I don't think it's necessary for the town council rules to decide that that's the expectation. We could just put in there, committees shall adopt a practice or who? Hesitate to use that word. And you don't want to necessarily use approval of reports because that implies a vote of some sort but on submission of reports to a practice regarding written reports or something, something that's vague. But that somehow addresses. Addresses. You shouldn't have this conversation. Your committee should have the conversation so that no one's surprised by what's happening and people should get to argue about it if they want to. But I'm loathe to say that every committee has to do it this way because some working group may not work as well for them to have to do it the way we're outlining. Are you okay with that, Kathy? So how can, do we just, do we just insert it? Let's wait a minute. I'm typing. So I'm figuring, so I mean this of course is just about the written report. Reports shall include the date, list, records, committees shall adopt. So the sentence I've added, committees shall adopt a practice for review and comment on written reports before submission to the council. And then the last sentence would be written, report shall be provided to the president. So I've just made this paragraph longer. If that, rather than breaking them out as separate pieces. How about, how about that, here's a consideration. So looking at current K, okay? The way it is the nice block of text it is now. The first two sentences remain K. Then when the third sentence starts reports, that could be indented under here, like A or whatever we're calling things now. And then have all that, blah, blah, blah. And B is establish a practice or whatever we wanna call it. And C is the three days in advance. So it breaks that up more. It's like you're gonna report, you have to have things in writing. Then those written reports falls in it as an indented. That works really well. And includes that. And then it falls out. That works extremely well. So it's got one sentence, committee shall report any recommendations must be submitted in writing. And then we have one, two, three underneath that. That works perfectly. That works perfectly. And then the final endpoint being getting three days in advance of the kind of submitting. Done. Can we hop back to 6.3? Let me just, I'm gonna alert you. I'm going to yellow highlight the adoptive practice because that's something we've put in. Sounds good. Okay. So this is something, hopefully it won't be that hard. It's some of them, it looks like Kathy changed them and all. And so my question was on some of these. I'm sorry, where are we going? At 6.3. And there was a whole bunch. And I don't know whether Kathy changed them all or not. But this was decorum and all of that where we kept referencing requests through the president. The president is the one that preserves decorum and order. And there were all these references to the president but this was not just council meetings. It was also committee meetings decorum. And so- I know what you're gonna bring up. It's not- Yeah, council committees. So should all those references to who's sort of preserving stuff should be presiding officer? I know some of them might've been changed. I don't know whether all of them were. We changed a few, but then we didn't go systematically to change it. So like you can see 6.3A says presiding officer. And then B goes back to the president. So I think, and I remember you told, I think I was- I had written a comment that was like should we be presiding officer instead of president? Should one of us go through, do we want it to, when it's sort of talking about not just council meetings but committee meetings or that type thing, do we wanna make it generic if we can and if it makes sense? It goes also though back to 6.4. President shall preserve decorum and order may speak to points in order of preference. And maybe that should be presiding officer. I think that makes sense. Right. I don't know where all of them are because I didn't mark them all but I think most of it is in rule six, not anywhere else. So I- Maybe there's some in rule seven with motions. So in 6.3 and 6.4, I will go through and do, I can do a, I wanna do a careful search and replace because sometimes it has to be the president. Right. Yeah. Only the president is appointing, we're not gonna- Right. Other presiding officer might be there that day. So it can't just be a search. It's in specific instances when we're talking about, I think the running of meetings and how they're run that it should probably be presiding officer not president. Right and it works so well like for Jay, for example already to make it clear that we aren't just talking about council meetings. We're saying that when you're at CRC and you have a question, you should tell the presiding officer of CRC that. Right. Yeah. So I just wanted to bring it up but I don't think we have to go through now and figure it all out. I think we could just say Kathy do it or Mandy do it. And someone else, someone do it. Mandy's been a good second reader and then Alyssa also still picked up some, you know, we were changing but didn't do it, you know. So there is, I guess there's a reason everyone does presiding officer rather than chair because they're providing all presiding officer. So, okay. Yeah. I mean, for a while we had chair in some places but we, okay. Yeah, I think we're moving toward presiding officer just so as not to have a chair and thereby accident when the chair is not a thing. Could we go back to 10-8 for a second? Are we done with that? Yeah, did you say 10-8? Yeah. I reserve my right to change my mind. Just like Alyssa just did a little while ago. I would rather take out the last sentence than put in that sentence because as long as it refers to the town manager, I think I just don't want reference to the town manager in the section. I guess my only concern would be if we do that I would want to send this on to the town attorney because we know there's a conflict with what the town attorney has already said in terms of who the appointing authority is. She wasn't clear on that though. Well, so that's why I think I'd want to send it on to get is this in violation of the charter or not maybe we should send it on either way. I don't think we do need to. I mean, I really think that this is a fundamental disagreement about what the charter should have done. It didn't do that. So the reality is as long, I understand not wanting to realize the fact that the charter might have been written better in this particular aspect and the emphasizing it bothers people because it's already unfortunate. But at the same time, the reality is there's no way to get the decision made and then processed unless we give the information to the town manager. So you don't have to like it that we give it to the town manager. I don't think you're giving him authority here Dorothy. We have to, he's doing all the rest. And he said he's doing all the rest of it so he has to have the names. So that's, I don't think we're giving, I don't think we're ceding authority in this work. Well, actually we're actually trying to take some authority back. We're trying to clarify that. The difference is whether it is a committee of the town manager or whether it's a hybrid committee of the town manager and the town council and right now it's set up as a committee of the town manager. But that's based on a somewhat big opinion of... From someone who wrote the charter, one of the ones, the charter has two thoughts on who appointing authorities are. Either the council president or the town manager. The council president appoints council committees. The town manager appoints every single other committee. Called a multiple member body. So if it's not a council committee, there's no in the charter consideration of a place where the committees would have multiple appointing authorities. So for example, there's other committees here that will get the names from the town manager, but he didn't pick them also. When you look at CPA committee, five of the members come from other committees. He will technically be the appointing authority and be the one that appoints those five, but he's at this point saying, hey, housing authority, who do you want on CPA? Give me that name and I will forward it onto the council and be the formal appointing. And so the charter itself doesn't have this split anywhere and we can't say we're not gonna follow the charter and we can't create something that the charter didn't do. The charter defaults to if there's no appoint, if there's no exception in the charter, here's who appoints, that's the default. And we can't change that default if we don't like it until we change the charter. All we can do is say we're gonna work around that default and this provision is an attempt to work around that default that the charter commissioners screwed up. Because we didn't think. I just don't like the fact that it codifies the current situation, which I don't agree with. Does it, is it stronger, Darcy, if we say the president shall then inform the town manager of the council's decision? You just don't wanna mention the town manager at all. You have to, so I'm doing JCPC although another, so schools pick whoever they're sending. Library picks whoever they're sending. Council picks whoever we're sending. So we're picking and sending to somebody where they're not actually appointing, Mandy, you know? I mean, you know, in the fact. JCPC is different because it is mentioned in the charter, so it's got different things. So I think CPE is the best one to look at because it has five members who come from other committees in town. The state requires that those committees send their people. That's what it comes down to. But the only way you can get appointed is the conservation commission can't appoint a CPA member. There's no triggering point for them to do that. So it has to go through, used to be the select board, will be the town manager just to say, yes, conservation sent me this person, therefore I send them an appointment letter. I get no judgment call associated with that. I just have to do it. If you didn't say that he had to do it, then it would never get done because the conservation commission literally has no methodology of appointing their person to CPA unless the town manager actually makes the appointment. And so it's only recognizing that we're stuck with that, but we're telling him what to do. We're trying to clarify. We're telling him what to do. He doesn't get to decide. We're telling him. I get that. But if we took out the final sentence, that isn't really saying anything. It just leaves it open. We're not saying that we are the appointing authority. We're just leaving that silent. And it's open to interpretation. I think that we could do that and that would just leave it open. I actually think without the third sentence, it's weaker. I think the third. If we make it that we've made a decision and here it is, town manager is stronger than just saying we take a vote, it could leave a gray area that he would never do it. He would choose two other counselors. Yeah, and I understand, and I don't think any of us are in disagreement, and I'm part of the problem. We screwed up on the charter commission for this particular thing. And it's on my list of things when the charter review committee comes back. You guys need to fix it. We screwed up. But at the same time, that screw up actually might give the council a little more authority on who serves on those because otherwise it would be the president appointing those members, not the council voting on who those appointments are because they would be council committees and therefore the president appoints the counselors. So this is I think a way to take that authority, whatever that authority and those appointments are and say this is how it's going to happen. And yes, that name technically has to be done by the town manager, but we're gonna have a council vote on it. And taking out that sentence then leaves it up to, well then does the president appoint them? Does the manager appoint them? Is it a council appointment? It leaves up this, we're not even sure what happens with that vote. It also leaves the implication potentially that the council is the appointing authority and if that's the interpretation, that's unfortunately at this point, it's a violation of the charter. We can hate what the charter requires and say the charter commission screwed up, but we can't violate it. We can just recommend it be modified at some point. And we don't wanna leave it open to be inadvertently, we don't wanna inadvertently not comply with the charter. And so even if we like the idea, I'm not complying with the charter. So, and the other thing is that actual thing is a real thing about leaving it open. I know that we like to imagine that we would always have the same town manager we have, but having worked under several, I can tell you of one who may well have made a decision otherwise about which counselors he would put on unless we said this is what you will do. Oh, I didn't know that that was a demand. I just thought it was an idea. Yeah, you guys don't work under that town manager. I'm glad that it's giving us the ability to vote on the people who are on the committee. I just feel like we also could, don't need to cede part ownership of the committee. But the charter already did that. I don't agree, but we can disagree. How do you have it reading now, Kathy, after we've gone over it several different times? Change it for the last one. Okay, so good. So tell it to us again. Officer. Oh, nevermind then. Okay, the president shall then, so the first two sentences have never been changed. And the last one, the president shall then forward the council decision to the town manager. And that's way, it's our decision. And now if you do something else, it's on you, because we gave you a decision. Yeah, and so that forewarns the town manager. If those aren't the names that come back to us as being appointed, you got problems. Since we can reject the recommendation within 30 days, and when we have a second chance at saying we're enforcing this, I mean it's not gonna happen because this is the same human who has to be evaluated by us. Yeah, and the other thing it really helps is it helps, just whatever OCA's process is right now, right? So it helps OCA to have had an order, so to speak, from the council that says town manager, you will appoint these people. Then when it comes, when he gives OCA the list, we can say where's that list? We don't have to say where's the minutes? Where was that discussion? When do we do it? We say where's that list? That list says boom, you were supposed to do this. And so it's very clean. There aren't any, you know, I had a question on charter revisions. There are no such things as technical revisions that can happen sooner, because one of the oddities about this new committee situation which is different than JCPC is that the counselor goes through an interview process, you know, under the general process of town manager appointments. So you pick two counselors and they have to go and sit for an interview for the position. So maybe OCA could at least address that in the instance where a counselor has been voted on, they don't have to go through a separate interview process. This process might allow the manager to say, we don't interview, I'm not going to interview counselors. Although there could be a purpose on a hybrid committee for the manager interviewing the counselors to be able to better inform the residents that would be his decision on the residents that would be appointed. But no, so a charter can be amended to answer that question. A charter can be amended at any time. It doesn't have to wait for a charter review commission or a charter review committee or a new charter commission itself. But, and it can be started in any number of manners. There is some unclearity in what happens that that amendments to charters need passed by the council. But then there's some, and then they get forwarded to the AG's office and probably to DHCD, Department of Housing and Community Development. And then there's some unclearity as to whether all amendments always have to go to a vote of the entire town. So be put on an election ballot or whether only certain amendments need to be put on an election ballot. There's a difference in interpretation and so I wouldn't want to declare which one that is, but amendments need passed by a council in general first. And those amendments could come from counselors, they can come from people. There's various rules in the state law on how a charter gets amended and those are the rules that essentially govern this amendment, any amendments. If it would help your comfort level at all, Darcy, my husband is a very retired lawyer. You know, I mean, he's not a practicing lawyer, but my sense is adding that sentence makes it stronger but I can ask him to read it to see if it makes it stronger that it's taking back, I'm reading it as stronger taking back authority where it's not clear that we have it. So I could just ask him, does the absence of that sentence make it weaker or stronger? I actually think that we do need to at some point ask I guess KP Law again to clarify the opinion about this because I just can't imagine that the town manager is the appointing authority for the council. So we were asked anything where we wanted a legal, that was another issue that came up. Can counselors ask for legal opinions? Or does it always have to go through the president? It normally goes, it's typically practiced so that we don't have a rule that the president has to go through the town manager. But can any, that I understood would go through him because they're hired by the town but could any of us be the origin of, I'd like to get a legal opinion on this and ask the town manager. If it went to the president but not directly to the town manager. So we can't, is that informal practice or is that by law or? It's informal practice because the contract with the town is with him and so if we don't go through the president then you've got 13 different counselors potentially asking the town manager to ask KP law things. Because this is one I wanted to go back to them on when I first saw it and I flagged it for Paul that it's missing the word separation of power and I'd like a little bit of research on this because I'd never seen a legislative authority, elected body, a seating appointment authority to someone they hired. I'd just never seen and I wanted to know whether, yes I understand the charter has this problem but there's a higher level of separation of powers that often gets, you don't want this to go to court decision but I mean gets a court saying you wouldn't, you just wouldn't do that and they didn't ever use those words. We looked, they looked at case law and other things but they never looked at anything on separation of powers. I would love to see that whole issue referred to GOL to say this is a real sticking point for us here. We really find this, we're not gonna get a different opinion out of KP law than we already did and they're not gonna express it anymore clearly in a way that changes the reality. So that doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to push as Kathy's talking about to say there needs to be further legal discussion about this in the future. I don't think it has anything to do with our rules right now. Okay, you know I'm not, you've got a longer history within than I do but I've been watching the requests that go to them. They're often framed in a way that it frames the question and they answer to the framing of the question. If the question had been framed, do we have a power problem here with the separation of power? They might have answered it in a different way. So it's a, the guidance you give to your legal counsel so that you can be protected. You would, anyone would, would wanna frame it. So I'm just, so you're saying they would never go back and look at what they thought of before and say oh, we didn't think of that. No, I'm saying that at this point in the rules process I would ask that we not do that to change this part of the rules process. But that we put that high on the list of things. Okay, so this is, so you're saying if GLL took a look at this and wanted to go back to the attorneys. And said if we'd framed this question differently, would you have answered it differently? Yes. And I, because I think it will, I think at this point, given our deadline, the charter is what the charter is. And we can continue to do like that. This is one where I would technically amend our rules if we got something, yes. So yes, I don't wanna slow us meeting the deadline. So I'm just. So I wanna get, but can we somehow prioritize that this list of things that we don't like have yet. But in the past of things that GLL is gonna look at, I think that we could very proactively state that. That we remain concerned about the legal opinion we've received and we understand it's the conditions we're working under. But maybe if we talk about it differently, we get a different interpretation. And then we can fix the rules that we do. I haven't finished the discussion on this because Kathy's gonna ask her husband for an opinion. So maybe we can discuss it again on next Tuesday. And then Shalini's here. Okay, so we'll bring this back and it is also a discussion of, this is recommending that we don't ask for, I'm not trying to slow this down because we could always come and fix it up after June 3rd, you know, one way or the other. Right, can we specifically add this to the, so we could either ask GLL to do the asking or we could just ask ourselves, say to Lynn, we would wanna ask this question. So we can just come back to that next time we meet, I think. I've got a list of stuff for recommended follow up that I have just noted to myself that I will send in a more formal written up manner that can then be dumped into a committee report so that I will send to Alyssa for dumping into a committee report. So that would make a lot of sense, right? Is to have that as part of our last report to the council, not only is here the clean version, but we're asking you to disband us and here is the list of things we specifically want somebody to be working on. We don't wanna lose sight of these things because these are issues that we remain concerned about and then as soon as some of them get resolved then GLL can bring the rule back to us and we can fix the rule if we can get it to go the other way. Okay. And I'm gonna do the presiding officer. Boy, it's amazing how many times the word the president appears. So we may need to put, we may need to put it into the definition at the beginning presiding officer means who's ever running the meeting the day of the meeting. We weren't taking away from the president all of the following. Okay. So I'm basically done other than that. In terms of this document. Every change we talked about in it other than presiding officer. So if any of the four of us read, I can, I will upload this once I've done presiding officer and I just called it ROPV7 revised on today's date post council. So it has this little label that this is where we got to. So can we then say, just based on how realistic it is that you're doing all these edits for us, Kathy, when do you feel comfortable that we can turn it back to, we can turn it to the clerk? This is separate from the comment period that the town council's making to the clerk. But we wanna turn it to clerk to see if anything else jumps out. I'll have this done. I have finance from two to four. This will be done by the end of the day. You know, I'll have it done potentially by five o'clock, but it'll be end of my Tuesday. Great. And so if you'll forward that along then, I think, let me find that actual email from Lynn that asked for that. Okay. And we can just respond to that email. Here it is. Yeah. Right. And I'll do it as an attached document so we don't risk changing this in any way. I'll just attach a document with a copy to everybody so they can just see where we go. You can reach the airport or you can read the attached document. Yeah. I'll keep the thread going that Lynn started about having the clerk. So let me, I'll pull that up again forward that. And then you can just attach it to that and reply to all those people. That'll be cool. And you know, in terms of getting ready to get this to final, I think, Mandy, you've done this before. I've only done it once where when we wanna create the table of contents, there's a way of taking the bolts and having it naturally appear. So we just need to build into our timeline of doing that or agree that that doesn't have to be done by June 3rd and it can be done after June 3rd. You know, whatever. That's the final getting the thing spiffy. I mean, everyone's got this document now in the public arena and it'll just be a better reader's guide to the... If we don't wanna do it by June 3rd, it could go on the list of things to do later past the full rules. It's missing a table of contents. We recommend that GOL add a table of conducts and an index so that there's some time there. It can be time consuming because if you change one more thing, it interacts with it. So you wanna leave it that till last. But I would rather send that over to GOL and along with our report that includes the section about all the things we want them to look at and say that our work is done because the rules have been accepted. But the insuring that the links are in there, the insuring that the table of contents and index of people wanna add. And I don't wanna add the text of the charges till this is done either the same way. And we will be unusual to do that, to do the full charge of the document, but it's fine with me. Give us a place to keep them in the meantime till we get this other structure going till we get what GOL's gonna apparently work hard on to get structured on the town website and which by-law review also talked about, right? They were talking about a structure. Here's the by-laws, here's the general by-law here and the policies, here's the rules of procedure and like people could actually go find everything. It would be amazing. I think we did it. We're done. So can I move to adjourn? Or do we have minutes to- I just do, that is a question, is would people, would someone take responsibility? Kathy, you had worked on this really hard for us the other week, is to where we are with minutes? Where are we with minutes? As of last week, we were 100% caught up. I don't remember who took minutes at the last meeting. I did not. I did, and they're in a folder. They're in the draft minutes. So we were doing me reviewing it, but we were all the way to the finish line other than doing last weeks. So how are we approving those minutes? By a vote. Okay, so we'll do that next time. Well, that's what I was wondering is when do we do that? So minutes from last week and this week, we will have on the 514 agenda. That means I move to adjourn. Is there a second? Okay, all those in favor? I third it. Aye. So this meeting is adjourned at 12, 21 PM so that all the people who are on the finance committee can go get some lunch before finance committee starts.