We are ready to begin. This is the meeting of the Governance Organization Legislation Committee. It is October 2nd. And we are being recorded. You don't need to affix your TV screens or your computer screens. I'm not Mandy. I have been made chair or elected chair. I guess that's the correct term. Mandy has moved on to CRC. And we'd also like to welcome our note taker, Megan, which is a great addition to our team. So we're calling ourselves to order at 10.37 on October 2nd. And everyone should have the agenda in front of them, either in hard copy or on their computer screens. And the first item on for discussion today is the Town Council FAQ for the public relating to resolutions, proclamations, commemorations, and citations. And thanks to Evan, we do have a document. We may actually have more than one, but Evan, as I know, is up. He did some editing. And I think we should open that and begin our discussion there. This is the document that has Ross, 10, 1, 2019. I'm going to open that up on my computer so I can find it. Evan, since you, I think, made a number of edits to this based on our discussion in the last meeting, the first one I notice is right under item two. Do you want to take us through this, or how do you want it? So Evan, take it. Sure. So I downloaded the version that was in our packet from last meeting. I know that I think that Mandy and George had been taking notes on things to maybe fix in our last meeting on it. Was it? No, it wasn't the last time. We've been at this awhile. Oh, god. Doesn't matter. I downloaded what I thought was the most recent version. There were changes that I thought had either been made or we had decided to make that warrant in that to the best of my ability. I tried to remember them and add them so that we don't have a million different documents going around. So some of them were very basic things, like adding that A to charter section 8.2A under number two, which we had recognized earlier, but in the document I hadn't been updated. A few other things I tried. Again, working, I didn't have notes on this, so working from memory. But the biggest change was the deletion of six, which has been a discussion point for some time now. And working the concept or intent of six into one, but reframing it. And so this was done last night. So by which I'm saying I am not wedded to this language, it is an idea. But one of the things that I had said last meeting was I like the idea of sort of putting out there what kind of things we might consider or might want, but framing it more in a positive. I'm not sure I accomplished that. So the language that I wrote was resolutions, proclamation, citations, and commemorations. Submitted to the town council should have a direct bearing on the town of Amherst Orr's residence or recognize an Amherst resident organization. Those measures without a clear connection to Amherst may be more appropriate for a different legislative body. That's almost copy and pasted from George's language, just without the, we might not act on them otherwise. And sort of with the idea that there are other places you can send these if it doesn't have a direct connection to Amherst. It's not really that different from what George had. It's just moved. Mandy, any thoughts on what you're seeing here? And then you can take a moment to read it, because everyone is seeing this really, I know Mandy is seeing it pretty much for the first time. I mean, at first glance, that addition to number one that Evan just read, I think captures what we were discussing and we're concerned about. So I don't really have any recommendations for that. You're happy with the language as you see it at the moment. Again, the idea of a direct bearing on the town of Amherst Orr's residence or recognize an Amherst resident organization. And those measures without a clear connection to Amherst may be more appropriate for a different legislative body. I guess the one thing we could add, the commemoration section says person organization or event. So recognize an Amherst resident organization or event, maybe. We could add event. So sort of make it a little more consistent with our definitions at the top. How do you feel about that, Evan, is that? Excuse me, that's fine. I think that I had actually written that and then deleted it because in my, and the reason for that was in my mind, I was like, oh wait, would event mean like Black History Month, which is not like an Amherst thing, it's an ever, but then I realized that's a proclamation. Have we done a commemoration for an event? I don't believe we've done a commemoration, though. But I'm literally looking at it now and realizing where my mind went wrong there. So, yeah, so event, we could add event. And finally, those measures that are clear connection to Amherst may be more appropriate for different legislative body. I like that in a sense that we're not making any threats. We're not saying, you know, we're gonna do this X, Y, or Z, which is making a suggestion that the, as you said, when someone reads this, there's sort of a logic to it starting at the top where you have definitions and then a brief statement of, you know, what broadly speaking would be appropriate. And then we get into more detail. So I think moving it up was a good suggestion. I'm comfortable with keeping this. We might get some pushback from the council, but that's, you know, we'll have a discussion. We'll see what people think. Some might say direct bearing and that could be a discussion on that. But I think it's worth having that discussion with the council. Maybe we'll find out that others feel differently, but it sounds like Evan and I and perhaps Mandy think that this is worth putting up top. Doesn't say what we will or won't do. Doesn't make any kinds of threats or anything like that. It just does what I think we want. So I'm happy with it as it is now with that one edition of event. Any other thoughts? This is of one really minor request. That's okay. In the proclamation definition, it is the only definition that we didn't italicize something. That's true. And so for consistency, should we pick the words to italicize? I mean... It would be, I think, to make something known. Yeah, that's what I'd pick. Let's look at the other items quickly. I don't recall. We have, I think we have figured out, I tried to get the link for frequently asked questions. I assume that's actually right and it's in the document, but I have no confidence. It looked like it to me, I think, when I checked it. Yeah, okay, good. So as far as them, and we can always fix it. And then number five, it was there, I think just after it's formal review, GOL will forward the measure to the full council along with its report. Agendas are set by the president of the council and the president may use their discretion in placing items on the agenda. It's just descriptive and just tells them, broadly speaking, what will happen. Yep. So just to throw out there, again, I did my best to remember what we had done and so the change I made to five was to take out the language that said usually it would be taken up at the next council meeting. And then the other thing was removed. The original language was forward the measure to the full council with its recommendation for action and I deleted that and replaced it with report, which is what I think we settled on. But again, I'm relying on memory here. So those are the two changes I did make there. I've got a clean version and it looks like, let me breeze through quickly. What was it? Number three sponsors or petitioners?  Yes. The thought was with recommendation that it might give a false sense that somehow we're approving. And so I thought the suggestion of report is better and more accurate really, so good. Any other, because I'm willing to entertain a motion for this as amended today. Unless people feel uncomfortable with just three members present. So I will move that we adopt the FAQ on resolutions, proclamations, citations and commemorations as amended. I'll second. Okay, we have a motion and we have a second discussion. Just a quick one. Is this something we're sending onto the council or is this one that we're just adopting and keeping as our own GOL thing? No, I think now is a good time. We should, because we might want to amend the motion or maybe we'll just do a second motion or maybe we won't do anything. But I think it's a fair question and I think we should discuss it now. So what happens to this? If it's approved, what happens to it? So as far as I'm concerned, this is an FAQ that we are adopting and it does not need adoption by the council whereas the rule change on resolutions, proclamations, citations, commemorations does need adoption. What I was going to suggest is that in the report that's presented to the council about all of this, we provide this FAQ to the council and we give the council an opportunity to offer feedback if they would like to. But I do not want the council voting on this. I think that this is our document that we've developed. So I think the council should see it and I think they should have the opportunity to give feedback to it but I don't think it should be voted on. I think it's an attachment to a report. Sounds good to me. So we would like the chair in submitting his report to town council to mention that or to alert the council that this change has been made or this FAQ has been created and something to the fact that we would welcome any feedback but we're not soliciting it at the meeting. Let me just think. Would be in their packet, I could attach it. Again, I'm just new at this so I'm trying to think. Would this be something we would include in our submission to the council for that meeting so that people in theory could look at it in advance or we simply going to let them know that we've made this, we've created this FAQ and it's going to be put up on the town website and we welcome any comments. Sounds like Evan, you're leaning more in the direction of just letting them know that we've created this and it's going to go up on the town website and if you have any thoughts about it or comments you can submit them to me or tell the chair but it wouldn't be attached to what we're submitting at the council meeting. What's the order of thoughts on that? I would attach it so I don't know what your plans are for reports to the council. So my first question is for Mandy because you're most likely to know this. The recommended revisions to rule eight are they likely to be on the agenda for 10-7? They are. Okay, so I don't necessarily expect our chair to provide a written report to the council for the 10-7 meeting since you'd want to submit that like today. It's already drafted. So maybe we just. I did forwarded that to, I think I forwarded you the draft, George. So maybe we just, if we adopt this today we just attach that to that report. You could add just a sentence to the rule eight section that says something about we also adopted an FAQ related to these changes. And that's also. And it's attached. It's attached. So you'd like it attached. And mention it may be attached and mention it will wait. Okay. And then I think the question is do we actually want feedback for the council? So we can actively say during the, in either in the report or during the meeting please look at this. And if you have thoughts or feedback send it to the chair or we can just say, hey, we also adopted this FAQ attach it. And then if someone's reading I have an issue with this then they can reach out. There's a difference between actively soliciting feedback and then just accepting feedback if someone feels so inclined. I think it's up to the chair. Yeah. Okay. Unless you have strong feelings I'll decide one way or the other. I think if we do attach it it's conceivable given some of the members of the council are very good about looking at just about everything. I do not include myself in that category but that's neither here nor there. So it's conceivable that we could get into a discussion about this at the council meeting. But I will attach it and I will mention it in the report. Leave it at that and see what happens. So we have a motion that's been seconded. It's on the floor. I'm ready to go to vote, call the question. Any further discussion? Okay. All those in favor of the motion and do we need to read the motion again or could we have the no taker repeated for us? No, it's all right. We're all, you next make two of us. So we're learning together here. It's no problem. No, I'm sorry. Yeah. We just want to make sure that it's in the minutes and then it's what we, okay, so. Probably what you said, Evan. And we're said, okay, that's sufficient. All right. So that's the motion that's been moved and seconded. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Raise their hands. Aye. All those opposed. And there are two absents. So it is unanimous. It's three to zero, three in favor and no against. And two absent, the motion carries. All right. Item number three in our agenda is a follow up discussion and possible vote on revisions to rules of procedure rule 10 for ad hoc committee and rule 10 five work groups. So we've had considerable discussion on this and I believe council Ross has been also at work here. So we have a document in our documents list here. Members will help me. Which ones do we, we're going to look at which one first here. So the same one, the only difference is if you're viewing them on SharePoint, they look the exact same. One of them is a red lined version and one is a clean version. So they're the same thing, but if you want to see what I actually changed, you'll need to download the one that says red lined and that will show all of the track changes. Open the red line, try to open the red line. So, and I should also say that it's a red lined version of just those two and it is a red lined version of the current town council rule. So this is not a red lined version of what we put before the council, which was draft work group rules and revised ad hoc council committee rules. So the, what you're seeing here red lined is the text of what are current town council rules. And when I open this document, what I'm saying is just 10.4 ad hoc council committees. So either I'm okay. And I'm not seeing any red lining, but that's probably me and the computer. Maybe that's my problem. I just, that's something I'm not too very good at doing. I can read it, but. So no, I'm sure you did. If you download the red line is red lined because I've got that one up. So my problem is just the simple act of downloading as opposed to just opening. Well, I'm going to be looking at it as it is so we can move ahead. And Evan, do you want to take us through this again? If you don't mind, since you've done the lion share here and let's just open this to discussion with Evan taking the lead. Sure. So as we agreed in our last meeting, I took the work group, the draft work group rules that I had written a while back that we had then revised and sent to the council and modified them to be ad hoc council committee rules and then used that language to modify our current ad hoc council committee rules and then just deleted what currently is simply a header that says 10.5 work groups. You'll notice the language is almost identical to what was our work group rules except where it used to say work group. It says ad hoc committee. There are two things that remained. Well, so the first, this sort of intro text is almost identical to what's our current ad hoc council committee. The only thing is I put the council and by majority vote just to, I'm not sure if that's important but I think there's Northampton. You know, when I was looking at their select committee rules it has to be like a two thirds vote. And so I wasn't sure if it was useful or necessary to specify but I figured I put it in and we can delete it if not. And then as far as the lettered list goes there are two which is F and I that are holdovers from the original 10.4. But the rest is all from work group rules. The only two that I added were B and C so let me do C first because it's simpler. It was just ad hoc committees may contain non-counselors to respond to the fact that what people really wanted out of work groups was the ability to have people who are not counselors so staff are the members of the public so that's what C is. I didn't write out members of the public or staff or anything. I thought just saying non-counselors is a simpler way to encompass everything. B is something I added on my own with no direction. So feel free to tell me you hate it but there was some discussion. One of the things that work group allowed is it allowed a council committee to create a work group which many saw it was necessary. We discussed that last time I asked for some guidance on whether we wanted to retain that with ad hoc and this committee seemed to come to consensus around the fact that a council committee should not be able to start a work group especially because the president is the appointing authority and so it creates some awkwardness there but I still wanted to sort of respond to this desire to have council committees be able to create work groups and so the language I have in there is a little bit of mix from our draft work group rules. It says standing council committees may recommend to the town council the creation of an ad hoc committee to consider an issue or measure if they determine that it is sufficiently complex to warrant in-depth research beyond the capabilities of the standing council committee that the longer part of that language pulled actually not just from the original draft work group rules but the actual language that was forward to us from rules and procedure long ago. It's probably an unnecessary one but I wanted to at least throw out there that even though council committees can't themselves create an ad hoc committee they could request the council or recommend to the council create one and so I'm open to some feedback on that but I felt like removing the ability for council committees to create these groups would perhaps be of concern to some councilors and I wanted to respond to that in some way. I don't know if this is the right way. So I'll address that one. I actually liked that because sometimes stating something in the affirmative even if it's not needed because by not stating it it's by implication allowed I thought it was a good thing to state to say hey these might not always be creations really of the council these may be at the request of committees instead of the council determining it. So I actually liked the affirmative statement there. E is actually where I had most of my changes. C I had a few changes and then a lot of consistency changes which you guys will hate but I'll start with C I hated the word contain. I was like that just seems weird. So I wrote may include non-counselors as members because just the phrasing seemed really weird to me of may contain non-counselors so may include non-counselors as members, councilors as members. I'm just made. Yep. So I had other than really Scrivner type consistency changes I had no recommended changes to be from me. I just want to think about this for a moment out loud. I'm sorry. And then I don't want to as we do us to get through this but the idea is that you I'm thinking of your own your committee now or the committee which you chair would be a logical place where this would take what would happen where you are seeing an issue that's sufficiently complex and you want to create an ad hoc committee you are comfortable with the idea that you're gonna have to go through the council to do it so it's gonna take some time. And you're also comfortable with the idea that the person who actually appoints the members of this ad hoc committee which is actually something that your committee wants to create and obviously has some ideas about I would assume the members of this committee will be appointed by the council president not by you or by the members of your committee. You're okay with I mean I'm just describing the process not necessarily asking people to weigh in pro or con but that's as I understand it. And the reason for this is because we are all agreed or we seem to be agreed as a body that we want the council president to be the appointing authority. So the charter requires the president to be the appointing authority and I since we were sworn in have stood by that requirement. So to now say no I'm not okay with that would be really weird I am that that was the intention of the charter commission and I support that intention for any council committee. So yeah personally I'm okay with that and as now chair of a committee that will likely be bringing these recommendations I it might slow it down a little bit but as I think we get into a potentially slower more deliberative manner of operating it's not gonna slow it down so much that it's gonna hamper the work of the committees a two week delay in getting a committee an ad hoc committee up and running is essentially a one meeting delay to the committee that requested it for when it might come back to that committee and I don't see that sort of two week delay is if the issue is so complex that the committee itself doesn't feel like it can handle it I don't see how a two week delay is going to affect its review. I agree you know there's a couple other pieces of language that I toyed with throwing in here there's a few things I wrote and then deleted one of which was like the president shall prioritize this recommendation and on the next meeting agenda or something to try to give a sense of expediency I kind of hated it and so I deleted it right yeah I think that there's some anyways because that was a thought if we recommended the creation of an ad hoc council committee today in theory we could talk to Lynn and it could be on like agenda for Monday and so it's I don't feel like it's that big of a delay and my hope in how this would work would be that the standing committee whether it be CRC or Oak or whatever would write out the motion and then just hand it to the council so they would see it ahead of time and then just say all right we want this or we don't and then the president could appoint pretty quickly okay I mean I mean that's how I was thinking if it if the recommendation comes from a council committee in theory that recommendation includes everything included in D that the motion needs to have and so the council committee in its recommendation would essentially be writing the motion and then in a report putting forth its reasons why it's making that recommendation. Would this include well apparently would include the composition of the committee so you'd be saying and we'd like X Y and Z to be on this committee is that my understanding so when you send this report to the council president you'd also be listing the names of the people that you would prefer to her or he to choose I'm not necessarily saying I mean I'm just again thinking this out but that's what I assume you would do the council president is perfectly free to say I don't like those names and give you some other names and that's could happen I guess is what I'm saying. I mean it could happen that way I read composition as essentially numbers and also how many counselors versus members of the public versus oh hey we're gonna actually seek a staff member that's how I read composition not particularly names I know there's a difference in opinion on the council with that one. So speaking of text that I wrote and then deleted originally in D one I had written some language the effect of the composition of the committee motion cannot include names of individuals or something like that because my thought is right they could say this many counselors this many members of public or much like we did with percent for art two members of the public art commission or something like that but to me the moment you put actual names down you are trying to make yourself the appointing authority and that's in conflict with the charter and I wasn't sure if that was something that should be written into the rule or if that was something that we just all understand that if you put names in you are de facto making the appointment even though technically the president could reject the name but maybe with these counselors that's not understood. Well you just had an example of your chair who you know reading that without thinking for a moment of the charter provision just thought well that this could easily include specific names and I am hearing quite clearly and I think cogently that that really should not happen that you should not be sending names. Right and totally inappropriate but do we need to say that I guess Evan's question clearly is should that be explicitly stated here so that there's no doubt and no lack of clarity that this is just about the numbers and you know how many counselors, how many members of the public and what do you want staff people but. I mean it could be but I also look at it and I go if CRC really wanted a member and say through it in the motion that they passed the president in theory when reviewing the motion sheet and seeing that would just change it before it's presented to the council. I mean take the names out and change it to counselors similar to what she did when she made the motion on work groups that for the charge you know she made it sort of as the charge where we had for a percent for art bylaw working group we had actually as GOL said, well you're essentially defining two specific individuals. We should just name those individuals if you're defining them in such strict terms that we know who they are and when she made her motion she changed it back out to not those two to just say members of the percent for art or the public art commission. So I mean someone could try to. I think the optics would really not be good if you have specific names attached to the creation of a committee. I would assume there would be any competent president and we certainly have one would consult very closely with the chair and the committee involved and take their recommendations very seriously but you're right the charter is explicit it's the president's final decision. So I guess the question here is do we feel that item one as stated is clear enough that no one would assume or expect that there would actually be names or are we saying that even if someone thought that say I said well does that include names the answer is so explicit that the charter makes it clear that the president is the one who chooses who serves on these bodies. So can we leave it like this or should we word Smith it a bit? I would leave it because the word Smithing I think would get more complicated almost because I think it would be harder to word it's not just number it's also types of members. So maybe a discussion with the council when this goes before them for approval we would try one of us hope for the chair or someone would make the point or do you think it's not even worth raising? I mean I go back to the template of the charge template we adopted where the heading is composition and it doesn't list specific names in general even when we know the name say because we're naming the town manager or the town clerk it lists title. And so using the word composition here if you relate it back to that template it generally doesn't list specific names. I guess I'm just thinking I would really like to be clear to the council when this goes before them that D1 does not include specific names and again it also can just come up in discussion and I can just bring it up myself if I want. I certainly wouldn't do it if you felt it would muddy the water but I'm leaning toward the thought let's leave it as it is that seems to be the consensus if it comes up in discussion it does and we'll address it. I'm just a little concerned that in the future some folks who aren't as conversant with the charter or familiar with will just assume that when they are making an ad hoc committee they can sort of throw in bunch of names of people who they want the council to appoint and that's a no-no. I mean what we're saying is that's just not appropriate and it's not permissible and if you do it the president's just gonna throw them out and you shouldn't do it anyway. We can continue to think about it. I was gonna say maybe for now leave it and if we see I do worry actually a little bit about what Mandy said in that I don't want a situation in which you have, so right now we have three of the five standing committee chairs sitting at this table so we obviously would not do this but should there be a change of leadership in one of the committees I feel a little uncomfortable with the situation where a committee votes on a motion to send that includes names and then the president just changes it because I feel like that could create some conflict between the two and I assume the president would reach out to them first and say hey just so you know you can't do this and change ahead of time but I don't want council debate to ever be. The president changed our motion or anything like that but I also kind of feel like this is a situation where if that happens or if some committee starts doing that this rule can always be amended later on or revised later on. I would probably say something at a council meeting either in my report or during the discussion on this item unless I hear from my committee members they prefer that I not say anything. So just as a heads up but I certainly would take your advice seriously just to you know in the course of discussing or presenting it I would say you know by the way it does not include naming this you know just the composition in the process. Yes sir Evan. What I would probably so at our last meeting Alissa praised Mandy for her well written reports that included sort of some discussion of the deliberation and how we got where I probably just say in the as a starting point in the report just note that we had this discussion with the assumption that counselors will read the report. That's right. And we'll see and so maybe one and so they'll have they already have been primed for that and if they have strong feelings they can come into the meeting with them. Yeah and just put it out there in the report. We had this discussion we decided to go. We leave languages it is. Name should not be in the charges. We had a discussion about whether actually right then to the rules we decided not to in the end but at least they know that discussion happened and then if one counselor says and I really think it should be in the rules then it can be discussed. Okay. Sorry I keep doing this and then it goes to mute which so the audience out there is probably gonna wonder why Mr. Ryan suddenly doesn't have a voice. Do you wanna do this? Do we wanna talk a little bit about majority versus two thirds? Evan mentioned the North Hamptonist two thirds. I can see a kind of reason for that kind of logic and it might be an appropriate question raised by someone on the council or even by someone here that why isn't it two thirds since these are... So what are people, any thoughts on that? Can we talk about it for a moment? The majority versus two thirds? And is it that in one part would be that it would might make it harder to create these bodies and obviously it would make it harder. I mean I guess my thought is majority makes sense yet if the goal is to create less ad hoc committees then maybe two thirds sends the message. With the way this particular council has been voting I'm not sure two thirds is too hard a bar to get over for ad hoc committees but maybe creating that bar just setting forth a higher bar sends a message that these should not be done frequently that they should really have some thought put into them because they do require additional work outside of the standing committees and outside of sort of for the public to figure out where to go. They are an additional sort of layer into the hardness of transparency the difficulty in following government and so maybe even though the two thirds bar might not be hard to reach maybe it would send that message but I'm not sold on requiring it. So we create our council committees by majority vote and so it seems to me like it would be a little strange for ad hoc council committee votes to be separate. I think that when it came to work groups this was actually something I was more interested in because I was more in favor of for a council committee to create a work group. I felt as though three votes should not be sufficient to have to create an entire and so I wanted like a minimum of four which I didn't end up writing into the rules but this was something when it to me when it's a smaller body it makes sense to have a higher vote threshold for the council I think majority vote is fine but I do understand you we don't want the council just sort of rapid fire creating ad hoc committee so there's something to be said about I under many's point I think is well taken that likely it wouldn't be hard to get a two thirds vote but it at least sends a message that these shouldn't be created unless necessary so the percent for art was nine votes so it was just barely two thirds but even that which was sort of well it was contentious for other reasons got two thirds so I don't have a super strong preference on this. It seems like we're not really strong one way or the other. I hear Mandy's idea of two thirds is raising the bar and I think that makes sense. Evan points out that of course already councils committees are created by a majority vote so why are we making this different? So perhaps we'll leave it as it is for the moment and if it comes up to discussion unless there's a feeling that I'm not getting that sense from the other two of you that there's a strong desire to change it so I think we'll just leave it then. I just wanted to have that discussion briefly. So now Mandy if we want to go back to your item so we've gotten through. I had one other thing in D. So we've made some revisions to C. Evan has entered those into the document and so go ahead Mandy. So the word must in D. I think we've tried to stay away from must and instead you shall. Very first second sentence. The motion to create an ad hoc committee shall include instead of must include. You got it? Yep. And we've just tried to stay away from the word must and then E. I mean D says they can be made by motion but I could foresee an ad hoc committee where we might want to not create it by motion that we might actually want to charge. For example you could consider the bylaw review committee and ad hoc committee but it was an extensive one. It's going to be operating for a very long time. This one or the rank choice voting or something like that. These that we expect to be operating for a year or a year and a half maybe but it's not going to be a standing committee if something in the future comes similar to when the state was legalizing marijuana and we needed a committee to be looking at that specific thing. It's not going to be a standing committee but it's also not going to be a two month thing. It's going to be a longer term ad hoc committee. It might be worthwhile to have a formal charge for that committee because it'll be easier to be found when committee membership potentially turns over and stuff. So I had some changes to this and so the first sentence I wanted to change the period to a comma and then say although the council may choose to adopt one so that it doesn't require the charge but we could choose to put it to create this committee through a charge and then I would just delete the whole second sentence of E. I found it redundant because the D kind of says in a way the purpose. I mean it doesn't set out, I mean the composition is in D and the purpose is kind of the measure issue that'll be the committee's focus. So I found that second sentence a little bit redundant. I know it came out of our work group section and so it was a copy over but in reading this again I didn't think it was necessary but I liked the idea of again affirmatively stating we can do it by motion but we could also do it by charge. So again, speaking of things that I wrote and then deleted this, the previous version of the E before I actually uploaded had a third sentence that said the council may create a charge for committee or something along those lines for the same thought that there are another one rules of procedure, right? Like I'm glad that one had a charge. And so I deleted it because I felt like just saying they do not require, it doesn't prohibit but I get your point of affirmatively stating and so I'm open to that language. I agree with the second sentence I'm not quite sure why I kept that in there because it is redundant. So I would actually be in favor of Mandy's language if she could repeat it and I can change this. Amanda, go ahead. So ad hoc committees do not require a committee charge comma although the council may choose to adopt one. So that item now is specifically about committee charge and that's it, it's clear and says what, I think it's fine, I agree with both of you that the second sentence really is redundant given what's been said above and often we may prefer not to have it because I assume a committee charge then has to it does have to go to GOL, right? So it slows things down a bit and that's good in some cases but I think we're also trying to get some flexibility so this again continues to theme of flexibility. You can have a charge if you feel it's necessary but otherwise not so I'm happy with the change that Mandy recommends. Any other edit changes that you, Mandy, want to make or help me? So I had just a couple of consistency edits. The rest of the rules just refer to the town council as the council. So deleting the word town in the many instances it precedes the word council. There's, I don't know, one, two, three, four, five, I think I count six, six. In A there's two, in B there's one, in D you got them all. Yep, and the other sort of consistency one was the title of the chart, the rule is ad hoc council committees and throughout we refer to it as ad hoc committees should we be inserting the word council in there? I mean it's kind of redundant but not but wordy. It creates a lot of wordiness to it and there's a lot more of those. Well maybe not one, two, three, four, five, seven from my count, maybe seven but eight, something like that. So that's one that I'm not as, we don't have a consistency on that but that's what the title of the rule is so maybe that's how we should refer to them. Short other things, periods need added at the end of all the sentences. If this comes to the council which I'm guessing it will, the two other things that would need to be in the motion is that we'd need to renumber all following rule 10 things. So I think there's a bunch of them after it so they'd need renumbered because 10.5 is being deleted and the table of contents would need updated because 10.5 is being deleted so it would need updated for more than just page updates, it would need contents updates. Which is an easy thing to do because I set up the table of contents to be able to update with the correct word sort of settings. This would be part of the motion. It would need part of the motion, yeah. At least the table of contents I don't think we should show and then the motion I think you could just say whatever the wording is, renumber the headings for rules, however it would be worded. 10.9, yeah and we should, before we do all that we should make sure there's no cross-referencing to any of those rules. One of us can be assigned to do that. I'm happy to be assigned to do that to see if that would require any changes because that would need to be in the motion that this comes back with is the removal, the renumbering of all those cross-references. And then the one other weird consistency thing I had. Oh sure. So I agree that I thought it was weird that the title was ad hoc council committees and then used ad hoc committees throughout. That was, that's what our current rules do. Which is why I did, because I thought it was weird too but I just thought I would, I was making drastic changes to our current rules but in many ways also trying to preserve them as much as I could. But I thought that was weird that we did that in the original rules. But I, from a what's easier perspective I would rather just delete council from the 10.4 heading and just say ad hoc committees except that the title of this section is committees of the council and committees of the town. And so I think you do need to, even though only one of the rules is about committees of the town, which should probably just be, anyways. Because it just says something that we already know we can do. How do we feel, do we want me to put the word council after the word ad hoc in each of these references for consistency? Or do we feel like it's unnecessary? I don't really, but. Well Mandy I know it cares. Evan doesn't really care. I would, I lean towards the least amount of work for someone who are already working very hard. So Evan is making some changes or making changes to this document as we speak. And just to assume, I mean it's pretty clear from context what we're talking about here. So I'm happy to leave it as it is. I guess that's one, basically two to one. But I think it's. But yeah. Any other changes? One last one. Because I'm gonna ignore my other second to last one. The second sentence that starts such committees.  Could we just say ad hoc committees? We do it everywhere else where we just say ad hoc committees and then there's this one time in the rule that says such committees. That was it. Do you want me to check the cross references for anything else in preparation for a motion assuming this passes us? That would be a kindness. Are we comfortable with going to a vote on this? Again, there are only three members present. We also would like this to get really to the council, right, so thoughts on whether we're ready for a vote. Certainly if we've gone through it today pretty thoroughly, I think we have consensus with all the changes that have been made. And all the other issues that we've raised, I think would have to be raised by the council. Do we, are we comfortable with going ahead with the three of us? Or do you want me to postpone this vote for another two weeks? Mendy, with your vice president hat on, do you have any idea of what the timeline is for when Lynn wants to put this on the agenda? I know we have some very packed agenda. So the October 7th agenda is packed. The October 21st agenda is becoming packed. So, yeah, it might end up being packed. And we don't know whether we're doing an October 28th. Oh no, we are doing an October 28th council meeting because that's the planned public forum for the master plan it looks like. There has to be a public forum on the master plan every year per the charter. And we're running out of time. So, between that and the general bylaw presentation that I have my notes on that might come on the 28th, you're on the bylaw review. That's not coming on the 28th. I sent an email to Lynn that requested five minutes of time on the 21st and then the bylaw review shouldn't be there until December 2nd. Okay, because I had some notes from, I guess, a previous mention somewhere that it might be ready for the 28th, because that would pack the 28th then. Okay, so potentially if we have a meeting on the 28th, which I think we are because of my notes, but my notes may be wrong on when that public forum's happening, we could put it to the 28th. From my own scheduling point of view for GOL, the next thing on today's agenda, or one of the next things coming up, is rule 10.9 liaisons. I almost feel like if we're gonna be bringing changes to rule 10, maybe we bring them all at once instead of rule 10.4, so that people can get into rule 10. Just like we're doing rule eight together, maybe we could do a rule 10.9 that has both these liaison changes that we're talked about at the retreat and these ad hoc committees, and we don't necessarily have to have them on the same motion, but we could maybe talk about them the same night. Or Evan is Oka chair is like, I don't know. Absolutely nothing to do with that. I'm pretending Oka doesn't exist right now for other reasons. Right camera. My concern, I like the idea of presenting all of rule 10 together, so liaisons is part of that. I don't know if we intend to have a full discussion and vote on that today. If we do, I would say let's vote on these and try to get them on the council agenda for the 28th. The problem is if we don't do it today, we don't mean to get until the 23rd. And I don't think that it's enough time to vote on things on the 20. I don't feel comfortable voting the morning of the 23rd on both of these things. And then having them on the agenda for the 28th and having George like write a report. I mean, you could pre-write the report easily, but it's still, it's a very quick turnaround, but then that would push stuff out to the 18th. I know. And the 18th is our only meeting in November, so it's likely to be packed as we're determining. I know ECAC is hoping to be on the agenda for the 18th. So I would, this all that started with should we vote on this now. My only hesitation with not voting on this, we had essentially Steve's consent last meeting. My only hesitation is we haven't gotten the input of Pat and she was someone who was actually fairly in favor of maintaining work rules, but I don't necessarily know that we have the luxury of waiting, so I would say let's just do it. We can always vote. We can, then you, George, you could either talk to Lin yourself or authorize me to talk to her about agenda on this, but I would recommend you talk to her about when to get this on the agenda and if it's not gonna be on the 21st or the 28th because of her stance, we could always bring it back for another round here when Pat is in attendance. And if we would bring it back and do it again? We could, I'm not saying it's wise, I'm just saying we could if it ends up being sat on by the president for months. I mean if a member like Pat really felt strongly that she wanted to address this.  Yeah, right. So I think I'm for voting today and seeing where she'd put it. Well, I'm hearing amongst three of us, a consensus for moving ahead with a vote, revisions to rules of procedure, rule 10.4 and 10.5 and we construct a motion. Can someone construct a motion that would, we can then act on. So I'm open to a motion on this item if we can construct one. So Mandy, what do you have? I move to recommend that the town council adopt the revisions to rule 10.4 and 10.5 and the resulting Scrivner revisions. Could we just say as amended? As amended at the October 2nd, 2019 GOL meeting. I have the note, take a repeat that in just a moment. So we're clear on what it states. Mandy can repeat that if you need it. Yeah, so it's understood in that motion. And I'll second that. Okay, so we have a motion on the floor and it's been seconded by council Ross. Any further discussion? Seeing no discussion. I'm ready to call the question. All those, excuse me, in favor of this motion, please signify by raising your hand and say aye. Aye. All those opposed and none opposed. So it's again, three in favor, none opposed and two absent.  So I was taking, keeping track of this. So I can send a clean version to you, but I just wanna be clear. Mandy, you're gonna go through and cross check references. Do we wanna present this as just this or do we want to present a full rules document that has everything or does that really depend on the results of Mandy's work? So I think given the scope of the changes to 10.4 that we just recommended that the motion maybe be rescind and adopt a new 10.4, delete 10.4, 10.5 and renumber whatever appropriately. I can attempt to craft a motion, but instead of presenting a red-lined version of 10.4, it might be better to ask that the motion be, because otherwise we have to show, we have to, the motion is like this red-lined and there's so many of repeal and replace of 10.4 might be the cleanest motion that, which means that's what would be presented. That doesn't mean we don't show them a red-lined version, but the clean version is what would in theory be part of the motion. And here we're just for clarity's sake, we're talking about the motion to the council. Is that what we've just been doing? No. Change it so both would be, or are we thinking of two different nights or is that just not... They'd be two different motions. I would definitely be two different motions. But potentially the same night if we're ready. Yeah. So it would be GOL night and so that in communicating to, in communicating to Lynn, she'd suggest that that's what we have in mind is trying to do them both together. And that would certainly impact her in terms of agenda. So we'd like to do both 10.4 and five and also what is it, 10.0. You want me to work on the language to that motion? That would be appreciated. Yeah, okay. So I'm ready to move ahead to the next item, which is item number four, related to non-voting liaisons, which is rules procedure rule 10.9. If everyone's ready to do that, I'd like to give Mandy a moment. I think I had to take the time. Is this the one I'm presenting, George? I believe it is. I hope so because otherwise it's gonna be a very brief discussion. So I pretty much just uploaded this from my notes at the retreat, so apologize if it's not readable. Because it's how I just kind of notated it at the retreat. But at the retreat, the council obviously had a discussion on non-voting liaisons. And some of the things that came out said maybe we need to look at revising the rule. And so apparently I have some notes that I might not even understand myself. But these were the notes I took during that discussion on what counselors were looking for. It looks like the underlined language was that counselors were thinking about not commenting during public comment instead of rather than during public comment, I think is what my note is indicating. And then the underlined not expected to be ceded. I think counselors wanted clarity on what that meant instead of not expected won't be ceded with the voting members or some sort of language that was much clearer on that expectation instead of the wishy-washy that might sort of be there now. And then the notes at the bottom add that liaisons are not allowed to express personal opinions. The clarity on ceding and speaking with the chair I think are what relates to those underlines at the top of the second paragraph and guidance on how to speak that we should show in there that liaisons should not speak at a meeting unless recognized by the chair. And then instead of the word can, the word may, those are the notes I had from the retreat. Again, we only have three members present. I don't have a sense really of how strongly either Evan, excuse me, Steve or Pat feel on this. Do we want to even have a discussion? Post problem until the next meeting when everyone has a chance to read this carefully. I'm open to suggestions here. That's how to proceed. We can just go through it together and talk about it. Go back 10, 15 minutes, most. Hold the post problem until ideally we have at least four, if not five members, but any thoughts on that? If we want to postpone, I couldn't turn these notes into potential changes of language instead of just the notes that might make it easier to discuss if there's a draft re-wording. And we can also just discuss for a few minutes and give Mandy some more thoughts about how to shape this. But Evan, what are your thoughts? Do you have some particular thoughts on this at the moment? Do you want to go through it line by line or do you want to postpone after let Mandy craft some language? What's your thoughts? Yeah. So I'm looking at this also through my role on OCA. And so OCA is gonna be taking up liaisons at their October 21st meeting. I have no sense of how long that will take or if it will be accomplished in one meeting. But my original intent was for OCA to talk about it and hopefully make some decisions on October 21st to be on the council's agenda for October 28th. With that said, I have some desire to see these rules in place prior to liaisons being appointed. That timing already doesn't work. If I actually do want them on October 28th, it might work if I say OCA is gonna vote on these on October 21st, but we don't want them to go before the council until November 18th, which I think is reasonable. But considering that rule changes need two readings, if we want to do, I would like, long story short, I would like the rule change to be adopted either before or at the same meeting as liaisons being appointed. And so I'm fine putting this off until we have a fuller committee or until we have a little bit more of a proposal other than notes, but also recognizing that the longer it takes for us to do this, I will probably tell the president, regardless of what OCA decides on the 21st, to hold off on putting on the council agenda until the second reading of this revised rule. And so the sooner we do this, the sooner we can actually have liaisons, because I don't want to appoint liaisons before we revise this rule. So if I come back with language on the 23rd, we can probably vote on the 23rd here, which could put a first reading on the 28th, assuming we have a meeting. And then in November, the second reading and the OCA recommendations could be heard together at that one November meeting that might be overloaded. The other option is to wordsmith it, sorry, George, wordsmith it now, vote today and then try and put it on both the 21st and the 28th for OCA 28. We said we want to pair all of our rule tender issues. I do like that idea, but we just talked about putting work group, I got to stop saying that, ad hoc council committees on the 28th, not the 21st. Do we want to try and put them on the 21st instead? I'm beginning to lose track of who's agenda we're talking about, the council agenda or our agenda. I think we as a body simply have to proceed, limited to what we can control in terms of what goes on the council agenda, what doesn't. I hear Evan's concern about appointing liaisons before we have clear rules as to what they can or cannot do. I'm somewhat more loosey-goosey about that, but that's maybe not a good thing. It certainly does seem reasonable that you would like to have a clear sense of what the rule of liaison is before you actually start appointing them. So it just may turn out that liaisons aren't going to get appointed as quickly as we would really like. It's already been longer than we'd like, but it may be even longer than we'd like while we do what we have to do. We have, what we'd be wordsmithing today are just notes. It probably makes sense for us to wordsmith something that's closer to a finished product such as we did today with what Evan did. So it probably does make sense to postpone this until Mandy has a chance to put it into a form that, in theory, could be wordsmithed by the committee and put into a finished product and voted on. And also, hopefully, we would have the other two members of our committee present. And maybe we're just gonna have to not try to, I don't think we can really fit this artwork into the larger work of the council, the agenda setting, and so on. And also, the idea of trying to get liaisons up and running, we can only do what we can do. And we can do it expeditiously, but we don't want to rush it. And I think we try to wordsmith this now. We have a great discussion, we always do. But it still would need to have to go back to Mandy to put it into some formal shape. And I would still have to come back to this committee for final voting. So I'd say let's have Mandy, if she's willing, I'll put this into a more formal shape. Could be posted, would be posted, I assume, on our, for our next agenda. And so everyone would have a chance to look at it in advance. And I would certainly encourage them to do so so that we could get out of it. But I don't know, how does that really, that doesn't really address your concerns. So what are your thoughts here in terms of, I'm feeling the timing here, we can only control our own timing. And so, yeah. I'm fine with this. I'm fine. All right. There are rules, there are rules in currently place. It's just the changes that, so, you know, if we appointed liaisons, there would be rules they have to follow. Because, you know, we've already adopted them, so. I was wearing two hats here and it's kind of weird, right?  And they're not having a happy conversation. I will, as chair of OCA, ask the president not to bring forth a liaison discussion until we're having the second reading of these rules. And I actually have no issue, if that's not until November or even December, because I don't think that these committees can't survive another month and a half without liaisons. But it might conflict with the expectations of some other counselors. I don't have an issue with that. And if this committee doesn't either, then I'm fine. And I think I would rather look at a proposal than notes. So. So, we are going to, as I said, put this off for any formal discussion or voting until the next chewable meeting. And then the interim, Andy, will craft something which we will be able to discuss. Brings us to item agenda number five. Advise on a procedure for posting and cataloging adopted council and town policies and regulations, including adopted prior to the change in government. I have absolutely no thoughts on this whatsoever, so I hope someone does. I'll at least explain why this is on here. So, the rules of procedure ad hoc committee gave us, the GOL committee, a list at the original adoption of the rules of things to look at. And on this list was this advise on a procedure for posting and catalog adopting policies and council and town policies and regulations. So, there's been complaints and concern that the council or the select board or someone else adopts a town-wide policy. Think our public ways policy that we've adopted or as we saw this commemorative flag policy, we've been flying in and out a couple of times trying to work on and it gets adopted. And then it kind of gets lost in the ether in terms of is it still in effect? Where do you find it? Apparently the town has adopted a dark streets type policy about street lights, but it's hard to find it. And so the thought was, should have GOL talk about what should the town do when policies like that are adopted either by the town council, by some executive board or by another town committee. If transportation advisory committee or the planning board adopts a policy or the housing in a trust adopts a policy, where do they get housed and could there be a central repository of them? So that's why it's on here. And the town, there is a webpage right now that has been created for town council policies on the town website. It might not be easily findable, but there is one and it's where our current rules of procedure sit. I'm not sure what else is on it because I didn't think to look this morning, but it is where the rules of procedure sit. So I mean, our recommendation could be as simple as adopt, create a webpage that says town policies with a subheading town council, subheading something else and then just link to all of them. And any thoughts? So the webpage Mandy is referring to. If you go to the town council, immerse.ma.gov slash town council, there's a webpage which actually is already labeled town policies. It's just that the only things that are there, there are three things which is publication of candidate statements, rules of procedure and public ways policy under a subheading town policies adopted by the Amherst town council. But the webpage itself is labeled town policies, which honestly has been a point of confusion for me for longer than I want to admit and has been something that I have been curious about but haven't brought up because I don't want to admit that my life has become so boring that something that causes me concern is the mislabeling of a webpage on the town council site. So I have kept this to myself to date, but it has struck me that there is a webpage that is already labeled town policies with a subheading town policies adopted by the Amherst town council and nothing else. So it seems to me that we, there should just be also heading town policies adopted by the town manager and town policies adopted by the select board and we can just populate them into an existing, in this existing webpage. Town council and town executive or something. So yeah. Again, my first instinct is to say we can only control what we can control. So we can certainly address the issue of making sure there's a place, which there already is a place apparently, but making sure that it's properly labeled. I think Evan is right. That does matter regarding town council policies. So at the very least, we could address our energies to making sure that there is a clearly labeled webpage that is a place for people to go for any town council policies. But the other question is being raised here is that of course there are many, many policies this town has and citizens might have a legitimate, what's the policy of X? And my initial thought would be, well go to the relevant committee or place and find it. But there does seem to be some thought in some quarters that you should have a page for all policies. And we've been asked to sort of think about that and maybe even plan about it. I'm not sure I actually agree with that idea that there should be a place to go for all policies because we're gonna find out there are a lot of them and what's a policy and it's gonna get pretty dicey. And it's certainly a job that we are probably not suited for and we're now creating more work for our beleaguered staff. So I guess I would like us to focus first on just town council policies. If we could just identify what they are, I'm not saying we do it right now, but we identify what they are and we know where they are going to live and that that place is labeled in such a way that we can easily tell someone if you wanna know about town council policies, they're all here at this location and it doesn't say town policies, it says town council policies. That would be my preference first because it seems like that's a doable manageable thing. The second larger question has been raised and we've been asked to think about it is what do we wanna do or do we wanna do anything about the larger question of policies across the board, whether it's a particular board or it's a town manager policy, right? I mean, this could really get hairy. So that's a legitimate question, we need to talk about it a little bit at least today, not too much, Mandy. Alyssa during the rules process when she proposed adopting an appendix to the rules that would list forth policies and regulations currently in effect created her own list of them. And we do have that and there are 15. I don't know. I'm sorry, these are council. Well, no, so I'll just read the titles of the policies so that people get an idea of what she did, remote participation policy, which is one that maybe we should put on a town council even though it's not a council policy, we abide by it and reappointment policy. I think that's for the appointment policy related to it says appointed committee handbook. So I think it's to committees parking regulations, but it's apparently missing a couple of actions. She says permit parking regulations, lunch cart rules regulating the use and operation, taxi rules regulating the use and operation, commemorative flag policy, which we're working on right now ourselves, complete streets policy, DPW policy for approval of major transportation or roadway projects, public shade tree regulations, filling elected board vacancies, select board and then some that relate specifically to certain years, select board FY20 budget policy guidelines, finance committee preliminary FY20 budget policy guidelines, select board FY19 town manager performance goals and financial management policies and objectives. So that one might not be specific to a year, but the other ones that I just last, the three before that are sort of year specific. So those are the lists she came up with. I don't know whether it is complete, but it's at least a place to start. This list is just for my sake, Alyssa's list is where again, it's on. I pulled it out of our council pack, our GOL meeting packet for the September 11th meeting. So it's 9-11 GOL package. Yep. This is something she created in a document of her own concoction. It's not something that's available on the web at the moment for anyone in the town to access. It's just- Other than in our packet. Right. Yes, yes. And that's a place to start. And the chair could start there, but I could use some direction of guidance or thoughts on this. Do you want me to go to that site, go to that list of Alyssa's and at least that would give me something to think about. Because it certainly addresses exactly what I raised. Most of those are not actually town council policies. Yet, they would be things that someone dealing with the town council might like to know. So I can understand the idea that you might like to have some things on this page, imaginary page, that wouldn't strictly be town council policies. They're policies with town council follows and would be relevant to many things we do. And it would make sense, perhaps, to have them all in one place. But a kind of page that has every policy of every committee and every board strikes me as not a good idea. So could we start with that list and make a recommendation to the council? Because we were supposed to advise the council on this. That says, here was a list created by a fellow counselor. Of those on this list, we recommend the council advise the town manager to post on this page, town policies page, that's already been created, the following policies. And at least start with that. And see which ones of these that were on that list we might recommend posting. That's at least a way forward. It might not finish the job, but it's a way forward. So like eight minutes ago, I liked the idea of having a town webpage that listed all the policies separated by the authority. Then you read that list, and I think I changed my mind because I went, well, some of those are regulations, not policies. Well, what's the difference? Well, but if you're gonna do lunch cart regulations, shouldn't you do all board of health regulations? Would that be on there? And then I started driving myself crazy. I still kind of like that idea. I don't think it's a good use of this body's time to determine which goes on there and which doesn't. It seems to me like we should be making sure that all of the relevant town council policies are available, but beyond that, I don't think we need to bring in all of these others. I think what we could do is we could say to the town manager, you should talk to IT and think about getting like a repository for all policies that someone can go to. Because honestly, what would actually be great is if you could just go, and maybe you already can, I don't know, go to like a webpage and type in lunch cart, and then it scrolls you down to the lunch cart regulations, right? Something like that. To me, that's beyond what this committee should be doing. And I think we can say to the town manager, you should consider this, but it's there. To what George is doing, or one of you said, I don't remember now. As far as getting the correct town council policies, I think that if we have ideas of some that should be on that webpage that I read that's mislabeled and aren't there, I think that we can, I don't think we should waste the town council's time by having a town council discussion and vote on which policy should go on the website. I think it's within our jurisdiction to decide that as this committee and to just say to the town manager, GOL wants you to add these. Or the town clerk, or our clerk of the council. Thank you. Because it's a town council webpage, so I think that would go to Arsh Click. One thought I had, sorry George. Is this better something for the goals ad hoc committee now to say, as you're formulating stuff, think about creating a goal because really most of this is an executive side of the town, not a legislative side. To create a goal for the manager to collect and organize and post in a central repository or centralized location, all town adopted town policies and regulations. Is that maybe where it goes? Because then if we adopt it as a goal, it then goes to the manager where it probably regularly belongs. So maybe that's something to, we as a committee just forward on to the ad hoc goals committee of, hey, we want you to consider this as a goal for the manager in the upcoming year, this collection of policies for ease of transparency or resident use or however we'd formulate it. I like that, because you're right, I think that this is something the town manager has to direct his staff to do. And so maybe it's not something, I really don't feel like it sits well within this committee and that makes more sense, because once you set as a goal, you'll be evaluated on it. And so he would have to do it. And I like it because it takes it off of our plate and puts it onto a committee that I don't serve on. Yeah, unfortunately it's a committee I serve on. So is that, well, she hasn't appointed it yet. You may, you may be off of it. Who knows? I have no problem with that. It's just that I do think there is an issue with, that we could address if you are an agreement, but maybe not that there are policies that the council is crafting or has crafted. And there are some policies that directly relate to or would seem reasonably to be related to our work. And there is an existing page that's mislabeled that could be, that could be. So is it, do you want the chair to look at that town policies webpage, which he has not done, and take some notes and to look at Alyssa's list and ponder whether it's worth our time in discussion to craft something specifically related to town council policies. And then in addition, the chair could, the committee could go ahead and advise the subcommittee on goals to urge the town manager to create a much more elaborate and complex or, right, relating to town policies in general. So specifically, do you want the chair, do you think it's worth his time or the committee's time more importantly to try and come up with something based on Alyssa's document and the existing town policies webpage mislabeled for this committee to look at and discuss in terms of what they think is, would make sense for us to put out there. So people come to us, we'd say, well, I don't know about the town manager, I don't know about all those other folks, but here's where our stuff is. Is that worth pursuing right now? And I'd be willing to try and do something with it, or in case we should just right now leave it to some future date and just say to the goals committee urge the manager. So the three policies listed on that page are the three that I have noted as adopted by the town council. I don't think it's missing any that town council has formally adopted. So all three are there. All three are listed there that the council has adopted. There's others we have to follow like that remote participation that aren't there that might be appropriate for this page. But I think a motion that I'd be willing to make that directs the chair to contact the incoming chair or the members of the goals ad hoc committee with our recommendations that they consider as part of the town manager's goals for the upcoming year, you know. Well, I don't know if we need that motion. Or we can just direct you to do that. I think that might be able to solve our thing and get it off our agenda. And you're okay. I mean, your thought right now is that the three policies that we have created are available for the public and they can find them if they want them. And the other additional ones, we'll just for the moment we'll wait on that. I mean, if you're directing me to pass a message along to the ad hoc goals committee and for the moment we're gonna let this sit. I will actually take some look at this, but because I haven't before. Item agenda six, we're running out of time. That's not uncommon. As we look at the remaining items on the agenda, six, seven, eight, we do not have public presence. So there's no need for nine. So we have six, seven, eight, 10, and we do have 11 actually. So maybe we need to, I'm hoping to suggestions here, but I'm thinking of jumping to 11. Actually, we could do 10. Actually, the minutes are there. I did make them, but there's a couple of problems. So maybe we'll just pose, we'll deal with that. We'll postpone 10. But the minutes have been posted. The one or two gaps notes were not sufficient. Otherwise, I think they're fine. We've been asked to, I'm gonna jump to 11 unless there's strong feeling. And we're going to have to skip the other items for the moment, unless we can come back to them. We've been asked to consider a proclamation. And this came somewhat in a roundabout fashion, but as they sometimes seem to do. Can people open this item? This has to do with the Kanagasaki resolution. Can open that. This has been presented to us. I think what we have in front of us here is. Do you want me to give some up? Yeah, if you want to. Okay, background on this. Yeah. So we have a Kanagasaki sister city in Japan. And last spring, when generally every spring, some middle school students from Kanagasaki visit our middle school and are housed by some of our middle school families. And we have had that relationship for almost a quarter century now, I believe. 1993 and beyond. And so this year, the program in Kanagasaki that that exchange is run under is celebrating its 40th anniversary, the lifelong learning program. And Councillor Steinberg, who has been as a member of the select board, he attended Kanagasaki's celebration in the anniversary of founding of that town when he was a select board member as a delegate from the town of Amherst and has been involved in the sister city committee, thought that it would be appropriate for the town council and this upcoming celebration, which is in about two weeks, the 19th of October, to send over a proclamation from the town council to sort of proclaiming our sister city relationship and celebrating their 40th anniversary of the lifelong learning program that sort of created our sister city relationship. And so I think what he did was took the proclamation that was probably passed by the select board back at the anniversary of the founding of the town and that he took over then and crafted it a little bit to make it more applicable to today or add some additional items and it is now presented to us to try and get it out of GOL for a vote at town council on the seventh. And so obviously it doesn't have a seal on any of that on because it's being done very quickly. Right. Actually, he was truly tried to do what Andy did and create it with the seal, but that failed miserably. But we do have the proclamation and we do have it, I think in rough, in pretty good form. I found there's one, I think small typo that the computer points out. There's a double the in the now therefore. But other than that, and I just, the title, normally we have something like Puerto Rican Day Proclamation or something in the title, but here I tried to, I actually created the title for this in my version and it's like two lines long. It could be something like proclamation on the anniversary of the Kanagasaki Life Long Learning Program. It's long, but. That's right, we could do that. It's better than town of Amherst, Massachusetts proclamation. On the occasion of, that's the celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of Kanagasaki's lifelong learning program, which is a two line, so again, town of Amherst, we said town of Amherst proclamation, celebrating. Right now I typed proclamation on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the founding of Kanagasaki's lifelong learning programs. That's really long, it could be proclamation celebrating the 40th anniversary of Kanagasaki's lifelong learning programs. Would be a little bit shorter. And then underneath I just left town of Amherst. The thought is something like that rather than just proclamation would be. We were deleting the extra in the now therefore. Right. And you are correct that Andy did take the proclamation and basically deleted a number of items that are no longer really appropriate to this and inserted one, which is whereas the town of Kanagasaki was the first town in Japan to create a lifelong learning center and is a national model. And that is based on some article that he forwarded to us. So the assumption is that is correct. I haven't done any further research other than what Andy gave me. But it seemed like a nice touch, assuming that's correct. Do you know why he highlighted the homestead portion? I have not. Okay. It has a special Emily Dickinson section created from gifts from the town of Amherst, the Jones Library and the homestead and the homestead. And I assume we want a comma there, don't we? That's your Oxford comma. Oxford comma. Cause it's then and the separate clause. It's a separate clause, that's correct. And has expanded that collection with items obtained during visits to the town of Amherst. I don't know. Shall we just leave it? It's a little awkward, actually. The Jones Library and the homestead and the homestead. And we could say end the Emily Dickinson homestead. And the homestead and has expanded, is not English. Could end the sentence, the whereases are supposed to be one sentence at a time, aren't they? I mean, it could introduce a separate whereas and whereas, in respect to the question of why it's here at all. And I don't know the answer to that. Sure, question please. With all due respect to the author of this proclamation. An esteemed fine gentleman. Who is great? What is this? Because you're right. Each whereas is meant to be one line, right? Because it's each whereas, so first whereas, right? Should have the first two, first three whereases have a comma before the end, whereas the rest of them have a semicolon before the end. So there's some inconsistency there, but these are meant to be sort of one sentence, semicolon, one sentence, semicolon, one sentence, semicolon. I mean, that's the structure of a proclamation. And yet the majority of these are multiple sentence whereases, which is completely wrong for the format of this. Could just add the whereases before each individual sentence. For each sentence, I, that scene, I mean, it would be long, but. I will start doing that so that then we can reread this. Yeah, I have other things. In the. What, semicolons or commas before the end? Semicolons is how all of our proclamations have been. In our now therefore section in the second paragraph, he capitalizes sister city, which is not capitalized in the final whereas. I don't know if sister city is intended to be capitalized or not. We should make a decision on that. Is this an official title? That's a proper name that should be capitalized or is it more descriptive? Sister city also appears in the, well, Mandy's changing all the whereases anyway. So one, two, three, four in the fifth and six whereas we have lower the, yeah, where, sure. Where am I? Two, three, four. Center might be different than the program. I, yeah, I don't, that I'm not as concerned about because the level of learning center is a thing, level of learning programs. Program should be capitalized, but sister city is it capitalized or not? Because it's okay. So it needs to be capitalized in those two places where it's currently not. We do insert something here just for the committee's knowledge that we have to respect the, to our time limit that our note takers are working on. They don't get overtime. And so we may have to just dismiss her and finish the notes ourselves or we will just have to, we do need to wordsmith this and we need to approve it. Perhaps we can do that in seven minutes or less, but we do need a hard stop at 12.30 or actually five minutes according to that clock.  So just a note there. We have basically five minutes to complete wordsmithing. Mandy will do the wordsmithing and we'll have that document. Do we wanna just go ahead and formally approve this as amended even though we haven't finished amending it? And, okay, take your time. Now therefore is, can be multiple sentences, right? Yeah. Okay, so I think I've got them all now. You wanna go through it one last time? We're down. Shall I read it very quickly? Can I read it very quickly? Go ahead and read it. So the title is Proclamation on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the founding of Kanagasaki's lifelong learning programs. Town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Whereas Amherst, Massachusetts has an historic and long-term friendship with Japanese and its people. And whereas the town of Kanagasaki was the first town in Japan to create a lifelong learning center and it is a national model. Semicolon, right? Semicolons each time. And whereas the Lifelong Learning Center building includes the town library and whereas the town of Kanagasaki library has a special Emily Dickinson section created from gifts from the town of Amherst, the Jones Library and the Emily Dickinson homestead. And whereas the town of Kanagasaki has expanded that collection with items obtained during visits to the town of Amherst. I mean that could just be deleted quite frankly. And whereas the towns of Kanagasaki and Amherst are committed to the education of youth and to lifelong learning. Should that lifelong learning be capitalized? I don't think so. And whereas both towns maintain quality schools, libraries and continuing education opportunities for all ages and recognize that sister city relationships with communities and other nations are vital to these goals. And whereas in 1987 Kanagasaki and Amherst began an education exchange program for students. And whereas groups of Kanagasaki students make and annual visits during which they stay in the homes of Amherst families attend an Amherst public school and see an American town similar in size to their own home. And whereas this relationship was expanded with a sister city agreement in 1993 renewed in 2013 and 15 and whereas the affiliation allows for the exchange of officials from each community cooperation between libraries and schools. And whereas the relationship brought delegations from Amherst to Kanagasaki to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the new town of Kanagasaki and to commemorate this anniversary of the founding of the lifelong learning program. I'm sorry, there was a problem with the original text but you fixed that, you fixed that, thank you. Well, no, literally, and brought delegations from Amherst including to celebrate. Okay, you caught that. The new whereas before that the affiliation allows for the exchange of officials from each community and cooperation between the libraries and schools. Thank you. Yes, I fixed the one in the delegation one. So now therefore the town of Amherst congratulates the people in the town of Kanagasaki on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the founding of Kanagasaki's lifelong learning programs. We affirm our friendship and our commitment to our sister city relationship that binds us together through educational, cultural, enterprise, economic and other exchanges with the Oxford comma added. Strengthens the friendship and mutual understanding between our two towns, adds to the goodwill between our countries and strives to contribute to the peace and prosperity of the world. In witness whereof Amherstown council voted to cause the official seal of the town of Amherst, Massachusetts to be fixed, affixed to this proclamation the seventh day of October, 2019, signed. All right, there's a motion to approve this as amended. The signature part should just say signature should have. Trust that Athena will get it onto the correct paper and do that properly. But we're satisfied with the wording and the changes. I move to declare this proclamation whose title I already forgot, but as amended, clear, consistent and actionable. Second. All right, all those in favor, please raise your hands and say aye. Aye. All opposed? So this motion would to approve the... Declare. Declare the proclamation. Proclamation celebrating. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the founding of Kanagasaki's lifelong learning program. As clear, consistent and actionable. Moved by... Yeah, we voted it. We passed it, thank you. We need to get Megan out of here. When there's three of us, it tends to never be the chair, so... We turn to the president, so there's no public comment and I'm declaring this meeting. Megan, thank you so much. Take care.


Hello, I'm Pukie and this is Lyra and Lyra is my daughter and she's 14? No, eight. Eight, Lyra's eight. Now today I got an exciting looking book in the post, I get these kind of things a lot and Lyra often reads them for me and I thought that rather than just her giving me her opinion that she should tell all of you. So Lyra's going to tell us about The Mermaid Who Couldn't. I'll give you a brief summary from the back of the book first and then Lyra will tell us what she thought. I am a useless mermaid, Mariana thought. I can't do anything. Mariana is not like the other mermaids, abandoned by a careless mother on the ocean floor. She has never laughed or played. She can't sing and can barely even swim. Then she meets a turtle called Muriel who welcomes her into her family and shows her all the things she can do. Wishing for children age four to nine and beyond, this picture book shows how children who lack confidence can learn to find a sense of self-worth. Does that sound about right? So tell us about, tell us what happened in the story, Lyra. So there was a mermaid who couldn't swim and she was just lying on the ocean floor. Yeah, so she's lying on the ocean floor. Sad. And then she got pulled up in a net and then she got really sad. So a fisherman caught her? Yeah. Why did that make her sad? Because she was in a net. So the fisherman took one look at her and then he pushed and then he let her go right back into the sea. Then she got scared because she just went, she just went flying down in there. But then she was happier because Muriel caught her on his back. So Muriel's the turtle. Let's just show everyone a picture of Muriel so you can see Muriel rescuing her here. And then what does Muriel teach to our mermaid? That Muriel and his family teaches her that she can swim if she tries hard. And she learns how to swim and then she's a very happy mermaid. Does she learn how to do other things as well? Yeah. And is it happily ever after or does she sometimes need some more help? She still knows that Muriel is there if she needs any help but it ends happily. That's good, isn't it? Shall we show, you had a couple of pages that were your favorite. Do you want to, if I just show them, in fact I can put them in a cutout, do you want to read these pages and then I can show them on the video after I've put magic in there. Mariana met Muriel's family who taught her how to swim. When Muriel told Mariana that she would always be nearby, Mariana smiled, a small sad smile. Together they swam from dark to light and back again. Mariana began to feel somewhat loved and a little bit happy. After some time she and Matt and Muriel paddled back to the Mermaid's Cove. I'll be right here dear whispered Muriel. So that's a bit like in psychology, so when teachers and other people who work with kids learn about how to make children feel happy and safe then we learn, you don't need to know all the technical stuff, but we learn about children having what's called a safe base so you form a secure attachment with an adult. So that would be like you have with Mummy and Daddy, so you know that if we, when we went to Priory Park last week and you wanted to ride your bike or go off and buy an ice cream on your own, you knew you could do that and we'd be there if you needed to come back you had safe base to go back to. And it sounds like that's what Muriel and his family did for Mariana, isn't it? So she knew she could be safe now. What was the other page that you really liked? This one, Mariana and the Mermaids spent many, spent many a day since they're singing, then singing sea songs, racing with dolphins and diving for pearls. So it ends pretty happily. Oh and what happens here, this feels important. But if she feels low as she sometimes still does, Muriel is always close enough to remind her to look up at the sky a clear blue wave and sing her own sweet mighty song as every mermaid should. That's really nice and I think that's quite important actually, isn't it? Because sometimes we have bits in our life that are a bit difficult and then things change and makes it better but that doesn't mean that every day for evermore is going to be beautiful and wonderful and perfect, does it? Sometimes we still need a little bit of help, don't we? So if you had to give this book a mark out of 10, what would you give it? 10. Yeah? Can you imagine using it in school, like maybe in the learning zone or something like that if you were feeling sad? Yeah. Is it suitable for everyone or just suitable for some kids? Suitable for everyone. And what was the thing you most liked about this book? That it was a happy ending and basically Muriel, Turtle taught her how to have a happy life. That's nice, isn't it? And do you think that it's just a story or do you think there's something that you can learn from it? So what can you learn from it? Or what could other kids learn from it?  And in the blurb then it suggests that this book is particularly suitable for working with children who are adopted or in foster care and certainly you can imagine that this would be a really nice and powerful story to use working with a child who perhaps was with a new family and was finding it difficult to sort of establish trust and have maybe had quite a difficult past. This kind of shows that yeah things don't have to stay that way, do they? Things can change and that we can become part of a new family and they might not look like us and they might be different to us but they can still kind of take us on board, teach us to swim and teach us to sing, can't they? Yeah. Well thank you Lyra, would you be happy to review books for me again another time? Should we ask, so everyone who's watching would you like to hear Lyra's views again in the future? I'm like waiting for a reply but actually they'll put them in the comments after I've uploaded the video. I'm sure they'll let us know. Well thanks Lyra, that was great and yeah we'll see you again soon. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. You can do that by clicking here and yeah see you soon, bye. We have two silly hands now, bye. Love you.


For more than 150 years, going back to President Lincoln's solemn vow to care for him who shall have borne the battle, the VA health care system has been embodiment of our national promise. Yet today some are proposing to make it just another choice among health care providers while others are calling for the VA to be downsized or eliminated. But for millions of veterans wounded, injured, or ill from their service, there is only one choice for receiving the specialized care they need, and that is a healthy and robust VA. Mr. Chairman, while far too soon to settle on how to reform the VA health care system and integrate non-VA care, we can at least outline a framework for rebuilding, restructuring, realigning, and reforming the VA health care system. First rebuild and sustain VA's capacity by recruiting, hiring, and retaining sufficient clinical staff and by funding a long-term strategy to repair and maintain VA facilities. Second, restructure the many non-VA care programs into a single, integrated, extended care network which incorporates the best features of fee-based, ARCH, PC3, and other purchase care programs and provide this program with a separate and guaranteed funding source. Third, realign and expand VA health care to meet the diverse needs of future generations of veterans, including women veterans. This should include new urgent care nationwide with extended operating hours. Fourth, reform VA management by redesigning its performance and accountability report and restructuring its budget process by implementing a PPBE system which stands for planning, programming, budget, and execution. Mr. Chairman, this framework is not intended to be a final or detailed plan, nor could it be part of one at this point, but it offers a new pathway towards a future that truly fulfills Lincoln's promise. That concludes my testimony. I'll be happy to answer any questions.