Hi everyone. Today we're going to talk about seasonal special events and caring for collections. So we're going to start. It should be fun. I just want to remind you that the Connecting to Collections Care Forum is online and there are people that will answer your questions within a day. It is the only part of our website where you need a password and need to register everything else on the website, including reading the forum, is open to anyone. So just keep that in mind. This is our website and you can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. If you need to contact me, this is my email address and I'm happy to hear from you anytime. And coming up in 2016 in January, we're going to have a webinar on caring for furniture and one on frames and probably within the next two weeks, the entire schedule for until May will be posted. So keep an eye on the calendar and look out for that. And we want to wish you all happy holidays from us and thank you for having a great year this year. It was our first year as Connecting to Collections Care. So now I'm going to turn it over to Rebecca and Rebecca Newberry and Gretchen Anderson and they'll take over. Thank you. Thank you, Susan. I'm Rebecca Newberry and Gretchen and I are really thrilled to be able to present this webinar for you guys today. A little bit of background. Gretchen and I both have an extensive background in natural history and preventive conservation and we really focus a lot on integrated pest management and cleaning and things like that. So that's a lot of what this focus is going to be on. We both work for fairly large museums as well. So when we start talking about the amount of people that we use and the staff that's involved in these events, it can be pretty daunting if you work at a small institution. So just know that it's the roles that need to be filled, not necessarily the amount of people. You know, one person can do several different roles, of course. And then please, please ask your questions and we will stop about two-thirds of the way through the webinar and see if there's questions that need to be answered and then there'll be plenty of time at the end as well. So the webinar is organized into three sections. We'll start with some general guidelines for special events. There are, in your handout, there's a couple really good resources that are more in-depth on guidelines for special events and I'd really encourage you to seek those out. We'll just do a quick overview. Then we'll talk about our seasonal special events and then we'll talk about our favorite topic, which is navigating institutional politics. So obviously, events can bring up some unnecessary foes within your institution so it's good to keep everyone happy and working together. So what makes a special event? Why is an event special? Generally, they're unique. They're a special occasion. They're really designed to grow your audience, to bring in people who may not come to your institution all the time. They're used to raise money. They're used to cater to donors or to make a profit on one day a year or something like that. They're also, generally, you want to have food and drink at the party so you want to make sure that there's maybe more food and drink available during a special event than you would have during a regular day-to-day process at your museum or your institution. You may have bands. You may have dancing. You may have extra flower arrangements. These are all things that increase the risk to your collection, but that's what makes the event special. Of course, when looking at seasonal special events, these can become very cherished events in your yearly calendar. People may only come to your institution to see how you've decorated Christmas trees, for example, in December or for your spring flower event or for your creepy zombie Halloween party. That's super fun. So you have a vested interest in having these special events and working as a team within your institution to keep them being successful. So they are really important. We're going to start our first survey question, poll question number one. We can pull that over. The first question is, do you have a special events policy? I'll wait for a second to see. It's great to have policies for everything, right? If you have something written down, then you have a place to start when talking about what's good and what isn't good for your collections. It looks like a healthy majority of you do not have a special events policy. I would encourage you to create one. A general special event policy is really handy, especially if it's specific. It can talk about exactly how food and drink and flowers and DJ equipment can be delivered into your institution, where you can have food, where you can have drink. Having a really specific policy is great. It's also really important to bake that policy as a team, so getting buy-in from everyone involved, making sure that you're working with your membership and development people and working with your security people and your custodial staff and caterers just to make sure that you're writing a policy that protects collections but is also a workable document. You can't just say absolutely no food ever in the museum because people eat and you need to have food for people to make them happy. These are sorts of things that you need to work together with people. You can have a specific special event policy. You could have a general policy, but you could also have specific guidelines for certain events, especially if you're bringing in people from outside of the museum. You're bringing in your women's committee who are volunteering to set up floral decorations. You can have a specific set of guidelines just for your flower show or just for your sleepovers, things like that. You don't just have to have one policy. It's nice to have an overarching one, but it's also good to have specific ones. When you're signing contracts, if you're doing an event rental or something like that, you really need to see that collections protection language is included in that. So if someone's going to rent out your beautiful historic ballroom for a wedding, you want to make sure that you've got language in there that protects your collections as well. Some very general guidelines would be to make sure you're keeping your food and your drink away from collections areas. This brings up our second poll question that's kind of right on top of each other. So the second poll question is, do you allow food or drinks and or drinks in your galleries? And you can pick all that apply. All right, I have a little bit of background in surveying on this topic. I've been working on best practices for food and museums document through the Conservation Committee of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections. And we posted an online survey about a year and a half ago and found that about 5% of respondents said they allow food and drink in their galleries at all times. But when we said, do you allow food and drink only during special events, they went up to about half of respondents. So this looks like it's a sort of a similar result, which is really interesting. So you definitely want to keep your food and your drink away from collections areas. But you know that once a special event occurs, there may be a push to increase the amount of places in your museum where you can allow drinks. So that's where your policy can be really good about being specific. You can choose different galleries. Like in the lower left-hand picture here, we have a special table, a high-top table set up within a gallery that's all fossil material. And you can have drinks in this gallery during an event. The sign specifically asks you to put your drink or place your things on the table rather than on top of the vitrine that's located behind it. You know, people will set things down on any flat surface they can find. So it's saying set your drink here. And that table serves as a safety place to maybe prevent spills. And also knowing that this gallery is only fossil material and it's less likely to be damaged by, you know, insect infestation or something like that from spilled drinks. And also that most of the material is fairly easy to clean should there be a damaged piece. Signage is really great. The middle picture is an example of an area where food was set up for an event in a part of the museum that doesn't have collections, that just has like an interactive station, but they still don't want you putting your drink on the interactive surface. So there's a little sign that says, please do not place things here, but the food's right next to it. So it's clearly delineated here or not here. That's what the red circle is for. So it's always good to communicate. So high-top tables are really great in any event, especially if you are delineating between you can have food in one gallery and not another. So at the entrance to the gallery where food or drink is not allowed, having a tray stand or having a high-top table is a place where someone can put their drink. And so they have a place to leave it. It helps them help you. You know, you really want to encourage good behavior and helping people behave is important and predicting where people might be setting things. And you can obviously, as you have events, find the best places to put these tables and put these things. You want to make sure you're clearing empties in the event. We have this middle picture that's just a table completely full of beer bottles that are empty. When my museum, the Science Museum of Minnesota has an event where you can have drinks in the galleries, we actually have one catering staff assigned just to clear those empties and make sure that there's not drinks placed places. So obviously they didn't quite get to this one in time. But you can also use floor mats underneath places where there will be a concentration of drinks so that if there should be a spill, it'll go onto the mat and not into your carpet or onto your historic flooring surface, which is even more daunting. So you want to make sure you use mats. And the catering setup, so where they're setting up their bars, where they're setting up places to put trays of food or whatever, you want to make sure that those are well away from collections. So here you have your special event and now all of a sudden you need to have, you're getting pressure to have food in your galleries or drinks in your galleries. So like I said before, identifying galleries that maybe carry lower risk to the objects. If you have drinks in them, like places where there are cases, so for this example in this picture from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, you have a diorama gallery where the dioramas are behind glass so there's nothing out in the open. So having drinks in that area is less risky to the specimens because they're covered. You can also use stanchions or other barriers to protect objects in the open. So say everything is glazed or in cases except for one piece in the middle of the floor. You could put a rope barrier or stanchions around it just to keep people from getting too close to it with their beverages. And if worse comes to worse, you may have to temporarily move objects out of the way. If you have a small place and you're having a big party, it really might make sense to take a vulnerable piece off the floor for the event. And you can kind of use this to leverage maybe some work you need to have done. Like maybe that piece needs to come off the floor to have some documentation or conservation done to it or something like that. And maybe you can use your event as an inspiration to do that. Maybe they'll pay the labor cost to get that off the floor. So always be thinking about things like that. So of course housekeeping is really key for special events. You want to make sure you're cleaned beforehand and that you have someone responsible for cleaning during the event. On call to mop up any spills. And obviously you want to clean after the event as well. Immediately after the event is the best time to clean up after it. And we don't want to let something sit overnight waiting until the next morning to be cleaned. At the National Museum of Natural History, they have a policy called the event never happened. And I love this idea, which is that the event, you could have 3,000 people in your museum for an evening event. And they could have drinks in all your galleries. But the next morning when you open to the public, it doesn't look like anything's even happened. So everything's cleaned up. All the furniture and decorations and everything have been removed. And the place has been restored back to the way it was. It's kind of a leave no trace of that policy, I guess. So really kind of think about that. You really want to make sure that you're cleaning immediately after the event. You don't want to let that stuff sitting around and letting insects or a vertebrate pest get into it. So the people that are coming to your events, they want to have a good time. And they also obviously are interested in your institution because they've come. So you want to help them have good behavior. So once again, using signs, communicating expectations about behavior, which a lot of times it's signs or it's your staff saying, oh, would you mind leaving your drink on this table? Things like that is really important. And making sure that you are staffed well enough, that you have extra security. You have custodial staff catering staff. Everyone's heard horror stories about understaffed events. There's the famous one about the art museum that had all you could drink martini party that turned into a crazy fest where everyone was drunk and climbing out sculptures. And they only had scheduled one security officer. So think about that poor person. So you want to make sure that you have more people than you need and less. And then see if you can continue to have events and maybe not need that one extra person, then you can think about cutting them. It's better to start with more than have to add. And integrated pest management, of course, is really important for your special event. You want to make sure you know where the food and where maybe plants may be coming in. You want to know where they're being prepped, where they're being distributed. Maybe you would want to increase your pest monitoring in those areas. You also want to make sure that you stipulate that only greenhouse grown flowers are allowed for events. So these are things that have been grown in a pest free or really low pest environment with maybe a lot of pesticides. You don't want to bring in wild flowers for events because they bring in insects. And you want to make sure your caterers are setting up away from collections and they're bringing things into your event away from collections as well. So it's not a great idea if they're setting up on one side of the gallery and they have to pass through a gallery with their things to access the event. You want to make sure that they're not moving through areas of collections. You want to make sure you're wasting recycling and removed promptly and obviously once again cleaning immediately after the event. There's a terrible story from an anonymous museum in a very large city that would not clean immediately after their events.  So they were really like the party was over and then the rats moved in for the second party. So they were able, the conservation staff at that institution was able to convince their facilities staff and event staff to clean up immediately afterwards and it greatly reduced that infestation. So it's not just you that's being affected. It can be everybody. And one of the last things to think about is noise in your events. Oftentimes we'll bring in bands or DJs because people want to have a good time. So you want to make sure that the noise isn't causing enough vibration to affect your collection, especially if you have collections that are on mezzanines or balconies which are already a part of the building which may have more vibration. So monitor objects during noisy events and think about controlling the amplification that's allowed for your musicians and for your DJs if you can see that objects are being affected. You can get a decibel meter, you can get a little micrometers. So I am going to pass this over now to Gretchen and she's going to talk to us about winter events. I'm on. Hello there. As Rebecca mentioned, I used to be with the Science Museum of Minnesota and she and I had the pleasure of working together for many years. So we tend to answer each other's, finish each other's sentences. I'm now with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History which is really big and very complicated. All right, the winter season is upon us. It's time to deck the halls or maybe not. How do you apply the general guidelines that Rebecca has been talking about without coming off as a total scrooge? As she was mentioning, you start with a risk assessment. You assess the potential damage and potential hazards to your collections and to your building. I have the pleasure now of working in a historic structure as well as with a very, very large collection. So I'm learning to appreciate the historic nature of the building. So one of the things you want to do is take a look at how many hazards there are to the collection. So for your winter holiday events, you have Christmas trees, you have candles, lights, decorative food and plants, and decorations. There's a ton of stuff that can go wrong. Let's take a look at the candles specifically. Candles basically should not be allowed.  You do not want this. So come up with an alternative. As Rebecca was mentioning, we need to work closely with our other colleagues and come up with solutions. Today you can purchase candles with LED lights that look amazingly good. Use these instead of real candles. If you decorate with lights, check your wiring just to make sure that it can handle it. If you have a historic house, your older electrical wiring might not be up to the task. With one of the big issues, especially in historic houses, is to deal with historic collections that are used as decorations. You might actually have a collection of decorations that you want to bring out. You can do this, but approach it as a temporary exhibition. Do not hang these on real trees. The trees can drip sap on the artifacts and will cause additional problems in the future. Set up the display so that it looks real. Use fake plants and make sure that your plants are separated from your collections or from the traffic flow. Keep them behind barriers so that they don't get bumped. Excuse me, I'm fighting the cold here. Christmas trees. This is the season for Christmas trees, and they're wonderful. They smell great, they look great. However, if you can, use fake trees. Real trees pose all sorts of potential problems to your collections and your building. You might be dropping sap on objects, on the floors, on your historic floors. There's always a danger with real trees of spilling the water when you go to refill the pans. Needles can fall off. Any of us who've actually had real trees in our houses know that you're vacuuming up needles for months after the event has taken place. Also, bugs can pop out at any time. If the tree has some kind of infestation, a bug might come back alive, might reestablish itself during the warmth of being inside. There's also a fire damage. The fake tree solves many of these problems. You don't have any water, they don't shed, they don't drip, and most of them are fire resistant. This is a one-time expense as well. Check with your fire marshal to make sure that you are not violating any fire code if you have to use real trees. The fire marshal will also help you make sure that your fire precautions are adequate. If you do end up using real trees, if you are pressured into it, then take all the precautions you can. Place plastic under them to prevent leaks. Provide plenty of a room around the trees so that they are not bumped and don't fall over. You can use barriers. Also, argue for fake garlands and swags. If you wrap garlands around say, Newell posts or drape them on mantles, the fake ones, again, will not leave as much residue. At the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, we have a magnificent display of decorated trees done each year. It's gorgeous. These are all real trees. We also have a huge space. The trees are placed in a gallery near the front of the museum that houses architectural models. These are actual casts of real architectural places. As the conservator that I spoke with puts it, she said, this is painted plaster and marble. There's not much damage that can be done. So she doesn't spend too much time worrying about this space. There's plenty of room to move around the trees, and there's a clear delineation between the trees and where the public flows. Meet Jane. Jane is a juvenile T. rex. You will be pleased to know that she is a cast and easily repaired if damaged. The curator responsible for this cast was consulted before she was ever decorated, and the paleontology staff works closely with exhibits to install the decorations and take them off. Repairs, if needed, are done immediately. Remember, she is a cast. This is not something I would recommend at any time. However, it was worked with. It was made clear, done in collaboration with the curatorial staff as well as our marketing staff. Avoid tinsel. At least, tinsel directly on your objects or furniture. Tinsel is very sharp and will cause damage. It can cause scrapes on delicate surfaces. It can break off and combine with the surfaces that it's on. For example, it might fall off into your carpeting or I've seen tinsel draped over antlers and around taxidermy. It's very difficult to get the tinsel fragments out and your taxidermy might glitter for many years to come. As Rebecca mentioned, housekeeping is absolutely vital. Clearly define as long as you keep the area clean during the event, you clean before, during, and after, that will reduce the amount of damage that is potential. You want to clearly define installation and cleaning protocols. At the Carnegie, we have a strict time schedule for installation of trees and decorations as well as for taking them down. Maintenance follows along closely to make sure that everything is cleaned at the end of the four-week event. This includes cleaning up all of the air and time needles. And conservation walks through after the event to make sure that there is no damage. If there is damage, we fix it immediately. Integrated pest management is always a challenge. It's a challenge on a regular day as well as especially for special events. It takes careful planning to avoid disaster. You have to increase your monitoring, especially if you have live plants. Also, always purchase the healthiest-looking plants. These are usually the best-looking. Avoid edible decorations. Popcorn, cranberries, dried fruit, or nuts that are used to decorate, to make garlands with. That will add an additional attraction to the bugs and vertebrate pests. Always consider where you place your trees, other plants, and food. If possible, don't place your trees in the same space as your collections. For historic houses, this will be very difficult. And again, good housekeeping is your primary defense against pests once the trees are in place. No sooner are your winter events done than spring has arrived. The gardens are coming to life. We all deserve to celebrate, and many museums hold flower shows. At the Carnegie, we hold a four-day event called Art in Bloom in which the participants interpret specific works of art in the floral arrangements. I should tell you that at the Carnegie, we are actually four museums. Two museums share a building. Natural history and art. So I, of course, am very concerned about the spring events. It's a beautiful event. It's quite spectacular. And it's organized by a special group of donors called the Women's Committee. The key to a successful event is to reduce the risk to the collections. Do you notice a trend here? First of all, develop guidelines and procedures for what should be done. Those guidelines should include what flowers are allowed and not allowed, where and when the arrangements should be delivered, what is the process for installation, and what is the process and timeline for removing the plants. Excuse me for a moment. I haven't coughed all day. Now I'm starting. So what you want to do is develop procedures as a team. Collaborate with your colleagues at the museum and with the external stakeholders, such as our Women's Committee. Everyone needs and concerns need to be discussed and addressed to come up with the best solutions. Keep the procedure simple and assign roles. Communicate those guidelines to the participants ahead of time so that they know what to do and to expect. In that way, you can head off problems ahead of time. And don't just turn the participants loose. Supervise the process of installation. Make sure that there are plenty of staff around who can help. Integrated pest management. You knew this one was coming. It's spring. The plants are alive. The bugs are alive. Everything is alive. As my colleague Tom Strang, the IPM guru from the Canadian Conservation Institute put it, use pesticide perfect plants when you have to use fresh plants. Greenhouse plants are grown with systemic pesticides. They are pest resistant and are less likely to bring in the pests than are the homegrown ones. And again, if you choose the best looking plants for your displays, so much the better. Those will be the healthiest. I just heard of a situation where during a spring flower show, a praying mantis crawled out of one of the arrangements once it had warmed up. These plants came from the local garden and the mantis was sleeping peacefully until it came inside. They found it wandering around the gallery. So avoid homegrown wildflowers if possible. Here are some of the guidelines that we use at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The conservators remove, examine all plants before they come in. All these are cut flowers. Any plants that do not meet the criteria that the conservators have set are removed. They're not allowed in the building. Lilies are a favorite plant for flower rangers. But their stamen are very messy. They tend to drop their pollen, and the pollen is sticky and will cause staining. So the conservator has made the decision that as she puts it, either spray or spay these plants. It's their choice. In other words, they remove the stamen, either cut the stamen out or, as is the case with this particular lily, or hit the flower with a squirt of hairspray. This will hold everything together for the four-day event. The exhibitors, each exhibitor is escorted into the gallery by exhibit staff. Their water is contained in closed containers. And the exhibit staff has already identified where everything is to be displayed. CMA provides the pedestals. They're placed in the galleries and weighted and secured so they cannot be moved. This includes using tacky wax on to the floor, which is a marble floor. Exhibits has placed plastic sheeting to protect any of the artwork that is close. The arrangements are not watered or sprayed once they are installed. Containers are waxed down to the pedestals, and the use of flower arrangement foam is recommended. There are no arrangements that are directly on the museum objects. Do not place flower arrangements on your historic furniture if that's what you have. It can cause serious damage. A few more guidelines, a rather process. The pedestals are capped about three feet away from the artwork. This allows the artists to create their arrangements. It also allows for a broad spray of the arrangement. And it keeps the art work away from, or it keeps the plants away from the artwork. Floors are covered if necessary. Once the exhibit is completed the day before it opens, maintenance thoroughly cleans up after the installation has happened. All the debris is removed, all of the plastic is removed. Conservation walks through each day of the event, removing the dead blooms. Water is under control the entire time, and the arrangements are all removed at the end of the fourth day. The containers are saved for the exhibitors to pick up, and if they want their flowers back they have to make special arrangements. Okay, I'm going to turn this back over to Rebecca. Thanks, Gretchen. So, another event that can happen in your calendar, sometimes in the spring or sometimes over the summer, are sleepovers or campings. And these are really fun events where either school groups or Boy Scout groups or Girl Scout groups or even just families can come to the museum and they can sleep over, you know, sleep under the dinosaurs, those kinds of events. Obviously, you can foresee a lot of problems that might come from letting a bunch of kids crash in your galleries overnight. So, one of the most important things to do is to write down guidelines and communicate them to the participants ahead of time. Here at the Science Museum we've been doing campings for about 30 years, and we send a whole packet of information to the participants ahead of time so they know what to expect when they get here and what they can bring and what they can't bring. They're allowed to bring sleeping pads and pillows and sleeping bags but they're asked not to bring tall mattresses, you know, like the big air beds. They're also not allowed to bring cots because we want to make sure everyone's low to the ground so we can keep an eye on them while they're sleeping. And then they're also communicated specifically for collections protection. There's absolutely no interacting with the exhibits once lights are out, so once you go to bed you don't get to, you know, get up in the middle of the night and jump in the dinosaur diorama or go play with an interactive. And there's never any food or drink allowed in the galleries. In this event we never allow food or drink in the galleries, even in water bottles. People need to go to the drinking fountains if they need to drink in the middle of the night. Another thing that's important is that we enforce a minimum one to eight chaperone to youth ratio so that there's, you know, the chaperones aren't overwhelmed with the amount of kids that they need to keep an eye on. So this is a way to set up expectations of good behavior and it's also we're taking a chance to communicate with our chaperones to make sure that they're ready to supervise their youth. That's not our responsibility. Our responsibility is to keep everyone safe and to keep the collections safe and to make a fun event. So it's also important in doing that to sort of emphasize the special nature of the event, you know, that this is a privilege and this is a treat. We do work with a lot of Boy Scout troops that come year after year. So we have ended up developing really good relationships with some Scoutmasters who really take it upon themselves to also help us enforce those rules. So when the kids come we have to provide secure storage for their belongings. As you can imagine there's a lot of stuff.  But, you know, they have a place to keep it. They have a reintroduction to your guidelines and what your night is going to be like. And then once again, you know, emphasizing food and beverage being in non-collection areas. And then we have a lot of activities planned for the campers. So they get to spend some time in the galleries. They get to go to the movie. They get a theater show. They get dinner. They get some more things to do. They get a late night snack. And then in the morning they're woken up fairly early and they have a breakfast and they have more entertainment and activities in the morning. So there's not a lot of downtime for people to get in trouble. So one of the main things we really want to try and do is to staff these adequately. Over 30 years of experience, we've kind of come to the happy place of knowing that we need about 12 to 18 camp-in staff. So these are staff that are just dedicated to the camp-in for 500 guests. That's about the average size of our camp-in. So that doesn't include the gallery staff that are already working, facilities, staff, security, custodial. Those people as well would be in addition to the 12 to 18 camp-in staff. We have six staff that stay overnight.  So they make rounds. The camp-in staff, we have a large atrium with a stairway that goes down it. So the camp-in staff actually camp on the landings of the stairways so they can sort of watch the people and make sure people aren't getting into trouble. And we keep those messages about behavior consistent the whole time. The sort of funny thing is that we have more trouble with our chaperones misbehaving than with the youth misbehaving, because adults always think they can get away with things. And one of the biggest problems is people trying to sleep on couches, the few couches we have through the museum rather than sleeping on the floor. We don't want them to do that. And then obviously housekeeping is really important. When they're having their late night snack, our third shift custodial crew comes in and they clean the bathrooms and make sure that the area is clean for the campers to sleep in. Then they set up their stuff and they sleep overnight. And when they get up in the morning and go to breakfast, our day cleaning staff comes in and cleans up after them. And then our exhibits maintenance staff also comes in at that point just to check for damage to make sure that anything hasn't been broken overnight. And we've really been really successful over the years by keeping high levels of staffing and keeping these consistent messages about behavior. I asked the guy who organizes them what's the worst thing that's ever happened. And he said once there were two kids who grabbed a bottle of soda pop and poured it from a bridge on one floor down to the floor below. They didn't hit any collections, they didn't hit any exhibits, and they were promptly sent home. And they made a big deal about cleaning up the mess just so the other kids could see that there's consequences for your behavior. Another event that might happen, maybe Halloween, I know that Halloween's become more and more of an adult holiday and more of a party kind of thing. And more and more museums are also hosting 21 and over events because we all want to get the millennials into our museums and get them excited and make them lifelong members and lifelong enthusiasts for our institutions. So having 21 and over events is something that's really popular. And merging that with the Halloween event is something that happens frequently. So when we have a Halloween event and we want to emphasize safety and security, we want to make sure that people have a good time, that they're safe, that the collections are safe. So we want to make sure for Halloween events specifically that our costumes, if people are coming in costumes, that those costumes aren't going to damage collections. So we don't want people wearing masks because we don't want them to trip and fall. We don't want them in messy costumes or large costumes. And we want to make sure we have enough staff, security, custodial, you know, again, catering staff just to make sure that there's enough people to make sure that people aren't going to get away with things. And we want to make sure there's fun activities planned. If there's things to do, people are engaged in that. It's a more fun activity and a more fun event for them and they'll keep coming back. So we also want to make sure those fun activities are clean. We had an event that was a murder at the museum night around Halloween. And you had to solve a murder mystery and there were all these different forensic activity stations. And one was a fingerprinting station where you would dust for fingerprints. Well, they let visitors have like free reign with the fingerprint dusting powder initially. And it was in an area that didn't have any collections, you know, it was just an activity station. And I remember walking up to it and seeing just clouds of this dark black dust and everyone's hands were filthy and everything was filthy. And you could see the people organizing it were like, oh God, what have we done? So they were quickly trying to like restrict the powder and get things to clean people's hands. And I just happened to run into the head of our custodians and he was just shaking his head and laughing because he knew he had some work ahead of him to clean up. So think about those kinds of activities and maybe change them for the next time. It's always good to learn from your mistakes. So at Halloween, you know, we really do want to encourage this good behavior again. So setting up, you know, tables to set your drinks on, things to control your zombies. The zombie is actually Gretchen's husband, Clint. So we had to throw this picture and this is from a Carnegie event earlier this year. So scheduling extra security and custodial staff is really important. And thinking about the alcohol that is served at the event, if it's a 21 and over event, people are going to come wanting to have drinks. So you don't want them to drink too much. So if you're going to offer, you know, a drink with the ticket, then maybe just offer one drink. And if you are going to sell drinks, then price them at a point that it discourages binge drinking. So if they have to pay, you know, five, six, seven dollars for a beer, they're not going to drink a ton of beers necessarily. And that combined with activities and different things to do will keep people from getting ratty and out of hand. And obviously, once again, with your housekeeping, keep it clean, clean during and after the event. Another thing to think about is your IPM during a Halloween event. This is probably a real urge to put pumpkins out and, you know, pumpkins can get messy really fast. So if you are going to have pumpkins or other plant-based decorations, you know, gourds or multi-colored corn, things like that, you want to make sure that they are treated like floral arrangements would be at another special event where they come in for the event, they're used and they're removed. You don't want to have things lingering around. And you want to obviously, once again, monitor during and after the event for pests and clean immediately. They're all very important. So I'm going to pass it back to Gretchen, and she's going to talk about politics. But before we do that, do we have any questions we need to answer right away or can we wait till the end? We do have a question about what specific flowers you should not allow. And I think Gretchen mentioned lilies are problematic. Do you have a list, Gretchen, of flowers that aren't allowed at your event? No, I do not. That's something we are working on. But there are several sites that are available. I think Detroit has a list. Detroit Institute of Arts, and there are several others that are available that I will try and look up and post later. And then another question about copies of special event policies to share. I am ashamed to admit that I don't have a current special events policy to share. But I know some good ones I can ask the writers of those if they'd be willing to share them. And the last question is what about camp and opportunities at small institutions? You know, I think the same recommendations exist. You know, you just want to make sure you have enough staff that you're planning, that you're telling people how to behave, and encouraging them to follow your guidelines. I think you can scale it down or up depending on, and you'll let experience be your guide. So I think we should probably switch up, go on to politics now, since we're running out of time. Okay. Flowers and plants, there is a recommendation to keep low, low light plants, plants that survive well in low light levels. I think that's mostly for living plants as opposed to cutting flowers. But I will try and find some resources. Okay. It is, as collections care professionals, it's our responsibility to think of the worst case scenarios for both the collection and the building. We need to recognize that what we see may seem reactionary. What our concerns are may seem reactionary to some of our colleagues and try and come up with some workable solutions. And that we can only do if all the stakeholders sit down together and work on it. Everybody, all of our stakeholders have different perspectives that they're coming from. So how do we approach that?  Who do we need to work with to make sure that the event is both successful and safe for the collections? You've got a whole range of people inside the museum, administration, development, marketing, education, the board. You've got funders. We're all trying to bring in more money to the museums so we can keep our doors open. And these include the donors, again the board, special interest groups. And then the people personally I think are the most important are our public. And that covers a huge range of people. So first of all you need to recognize who holds the power and who holds the money. You also have to understand why the event is important. What is the event for? Is it to bring in money? Is it to bring in a new audience? There's a huge push these days to have what they're calling over 21 parties. These can be managed successfully. And hopefully they're going to be bringing in us a new audience. Is it just to bring attention to the museum? Or is it to keep donors happy? As collections care professionals need to recognize what the benefits to the institution that these special events are. We're all on the same team. We need to work together. We need to work with our stakeholders to identify our common goals and to recognize that we need to work together. In identifying roles and responsibilities of each group and understanding why they want this. So if marketing comes to you and says we have to do this big Christmas event, it's see that they are trying to bring an awareness of the museum as well as bringing more audience and more revenue. They're driving membership. The administrative functions of the museum are to increase the support for the museum. If our museums are healthy and making money, it's more likely that we can develop better collections. We can take care of our collections in a better manner. So they're all good reasons to have collections or to have these events and we need to keep our traditions alive. In order to do this, you have to create staff allies among your staff and your stakeholders. Cultivate collections advocates. You want to educate your colleagues and the outside stakeholders as to what it takes to take care of our museum collections. We are trying to align common interests. We all are coming at it from different perspectives. We want to have, we need to have these events to keep the museum open. The other thing, this is a little aside, is if you can develop your collections, if you can develop collections advocates throughout the stakeholders, you might find someone else that can say no when an event occurs or something at the event happens that you don't, that you didn't want. So for example, if you've got maintenance on your side, they don't want to clean up that powder that Rebecca was talking about any more than you wanted the powder there.  They will help support the collections care activities. We're all in it for the same thing. We're working at the museum. We're supporting the museum because we're passionate about the history, the art, the collections. And the other thing you need to remember is you need to be able to stick to your standards. So you have, if you've established your collections care standards, you need to be able to look at those standards and hold the line at some point. There are times when you have to say no. The more your colleagues understand this and they understand where you are coming from, the better the no will come off. Be proactive. If you suggest win-win solutions to the team, then again, they are more likely to listen to you in the future. If you just say, no, we can't have food and drink in the gallery, period, they're not going to listen to you. And they will fight you all the way. If you try and understand and listen to what their concerns are and what their needs are and work at developing these kinds of compromises, then you can come up with workable solutions. The more people thinking about those solutions, the better. There are times that you have to compromise. Again, if you're bringing food and drink into the gallery because you're being pressured to, you can look at it. If you can't stop it, then you think about different methods that you can mitigate that risk. It comes back again to the risk assessment. If you develop, once you develop your allies on staff and in the special interest groups, you can start leveraging the budgets to be used for funding collections work. Don't fear the event. There are always ways to make it work. You develop relationships with your colleagues, you learn how to trust your colleagues, and they will learn how to trust you. You build coalitions, then you can face the hordes of zombies. I'm sorry, I mean party goers with confidence and survive and even enjoy the event. Rebecca and I would like to thank the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Science Museum of Minnesota for allowing us to use images. And Vern Anderson, who is the cartoonist. So, questions? Rebecca, do you have anything to add? I think the last thing I would add that I meant to say before that I didn't was that it's important that you also attend your events. Sometimes it can seem like an extra burden to go to all these nighttime events if you're working all day, but it's good to go so that you can see how it's playing out on the ground so that you can offer constructive feedback. Maybe, hey, maybe we should put the tables on this side of the doorway instead of that side of the doorway next time or something like that. And that's the kind of thing that you do when you're building your status with your stakeholders. You're saying you're building collections advocates, but you should also be making yourself a custodial advocate and an event planning advocate as well so that you are working together. Agreed. And it looks like one more person is typing, but I don't see any more questions. If anyone has any questions, please type them out. I don't see any questions either. We do have an evaluation, and it's really important to do them, and we'll bring over the evaluation link in a minute. It says, what is your policy on use of sternum by caters? I would discourage sternum because it's an open flame. I would look for a better way to keep food hot. I don't know what do you think, Gretchen? I would agree with that. You may not be able to control it, but again, check with your fire marshal. Yeah, your fire marshal can say no. Yeah, it's really nice when the fire marshal says no. And if you are stuck using sternum, I would make sure you keep a close eye on it and monitor it to see if it's casting off any soot, if it could damage your collections, or just making sure it's controlled. They use them all the time, all over the place, so I would imagine the biggest thing would be combustion products. Water bottles in a private meeting held in a gallery. So water bottles are nice in that they are closed. So if you're having a meeting in a gallery and people have water bottles, as long as they're only open while they're drinking from them, and then they are closed immediately afterwards, there's really not much risk from them. So I think setting that as a policy, yes, you can have water bottles, but they have to remain closed unless you're drinking from them at that time. It's probably just fine. I'm sorry. The one question is often collection staff is required to oversee the event because we are the ones with collections expertise to enforce rules. And yet that is not our job to oversee rentals. Any thought on this? Should we train and trust our colleagues or continue to do it? It takes away from collections work. I am divided on this issue. I think that training and trusting our colleagues is really important. And so I was talking to a colleague about a weekly farmers market that they held in her institution. And when they first suggested it, she thought they did want to outside, but then they wanted to do a winter farmers market inside. And she was like, oh, this could be a really hard thing to do. But she worked really closely with it and was there to inspect all the incoming produce and be there through the event. But that meant getting there at 4 a.m. every Saturday. And so once she had done it for several weeks, there was the other people that were running the event. They were also there. And they learned from her what to look for. So she was able to build that trust with people who were already scheduled to work that event. And then they were able to fill that role for her. So really training and trusting I think is important because we only have so much time in the day to take care of things. So I think building those relationships with people and making your collections advocates, cultivating that is important. I would agree with that. And it's even more important, the more we can trust, we can train and trust our colleagues, they are our eyes in the galleries on a normal day. Once you get this information to them and they know that we respect them enough to let them help us, it's amazing what they come up with. They'll see things that you will never see. Yeah. And then the next two are about the same. Methods, sorry. Methods for business assessment. Yeah. Greshan, do you want to take that one? Sure. The methods I use are based on Rob Waller's methodology for risk assessment. Combining that with the... I'm a huge fan of the Canadian Conservation Institute's framework for preservation. They do have a new chart out that helps guide you through risk assessment. So you can figure out the best way, the most efficient way of preserving your collection and dealing with what you should look at as a procedure as opposed to other methods to block your risks. So that's the way that I go. And the more you do it, the more you look at things and think about how the damage can occur, the better you will get at saying, okay, well, this is a reasonable way to do it to solve the problem. Yeah, I would second that. I mean, Rob Waller is a great resource. And you can search. He's got several articles that are available online that are pretty easily found through Google just to get familiar with his technique. And obviously there's no one overarching, you know, this is what you should do, this is what you should do. A risk assessment is really unique to your institution and your collection. So you really have to do the work to go through it to figure out where your risks are and how you mitigate them. Emily has a follow-up on that. And the amount of risk that you've got is going to depend on your collection and where the event is being held. Yeah. Sorry, Emily, the answer to that is it depends. Yes, sure. But then you're from Ottawa, I'm sure you're used to Rob's methodology. And I think that almost all of Rob's papers are posted in the resources library on the Connecting to Collections Care website. How come that doesn't surprise me? So I'm looking at Julie's question about your HVAC system is turned off during events and the damage is not to causing temperature fluctuations. Is there any reason why they turned the HVAC system off during your events? Is it something that's programmed to go down at night? And so that's curious. I don't know. I would say ask them why your HVAC system has to go off during your events. It seems like you might have a lot of people in the museum and you want to keep that running. So the first tactic would be to ask, why does the HVAC system go off? Is it something that's programmed to go down at a certain time and it's difficult to override that programming? I mean, I don't know. I think that you should ask to be able to keep that. Keep it? I don't know. Oh, it's cold in the library. Oh, got it. OK, so people come in and it's too cold, so they want it to be warmed up. People are going to warm it up anyways, I guess. So that might be something that you can use signage to. Like why is it so cold in here? The cold preserves the books. Have a sweater. I don't know. I mean, something to warn people that it's kept colder in there than regular room temperature, so that they may come to the event with an extra sweater or things like that. I mean, that might be a way to do it. Or maybe you can hit a happy medium of raising the temperatures slightly for the event and then bringing it back down gradually.  But I don't know. It's probably maybe not the most politic response. Two thoughts. First of all, yeah, I agree with Rebecca that you would, if you could moderate it, not just turning the HVAC off, but allowing it to drift a little bit more. It's probably better for your HVAC as well. It would be more cost efficient. Also, yeah, use the temperature and relative humidity that is in your gallery as an educational moment. I think every time we can use it as educational moments, that is a good thing. And I think that's all of our questions. So we're going to wish everybody a happy New Year. We'll see you in January. And thank you to Rebecca and Gretchen. All three of us have had voice problems today, so I'm glad you all stayed and managed through our hacking. And don't forget the evaluation, please. They're very important, and we really look forward to them. And I read them. So we will see you in January for care of furniture. And I think that's it. So bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I will post the recording in the next few days. I'll post the handouts again, the PowerPoint slides, and I'll try to put together any additional resources from Rebecca and Gretchen and also the ones that were hosted in the chat box. So thank you very much. Bye-bye.


I'm Lisa Savage, thanks for joining us for Pathways to Progress. I'm here with your counselors, your city counselors, Roberta Rodriguez and Victoria Pelletier. One of our most popular shows in the past was the one where we talked about what was on the ballot in November. Based on feedback from viewers, many people said that was very helpful. It was a confusing ballot, there were a lot of items on it. Come Tuesday, this coming Tuesday, June 13th, there'll only be two items on the ballot. So our discussion is much easier today, but thanks so much for taking time to be with us and to talk about it. I do wanna emphasize this is not a debate or even a forum type of show. It's a chance for two of your newer and more progressive counselors to give their views about what's going on in the city of Portland, what's going on in city government. And so tonight we're gonna talk about the election, but we will give our own opinions.  You'll probably be able to figure out maybe how I would vote if I was voting in Portland. So we have framed tonight's discussion a little bit with some, basically to me the essential question would be, is rent control as it now exists in Portland enacted in two other referendum processes broken? Is it broken? Is it not working? And then if so, would question a fix that? And of course, people on the yes on a side feel that something is broken and they would like to fix it. And that would be being able to raise the rent without limits if someone voluntarily moves out, a tenant voluntarily moves out. And the people wanting to vote no on a saying to vote no on a are basically saying we did a good job. It's not perfect, the rent board needs a fix, but essentially it's not broken, so let's not change it. Does that seem like a fair summation? The campaigning has been hot and heavy. The yes on a people have raised $140,000, so she said. There are signs all over the city, I'm sure you've seen them. Some of them, I thought they had been vandalizing each other's signs and then I realized, wait a minute, that sign was created to be vandalized. There's a little bit of false flag type action going on. That's always interesting and exciting. And I saw one today that said yes on a, defeat DSA, which was interesting to me because DSA was behind most of the referendum items that did pass in November. They've campaigned heavily to vote no on a, so that was a new wrinkle too. Anyway, we would like to hear from the people that are right there on the ground floor with this, the first thing I'm going to ask you is, why did you change the name of the referendum item that was submitted, right? It was originally called an act to improve rent control. And the city council opted to change the name to better reflect the intentions according to this. And it's now called an act to amend rent control and tenant protections. What was the thinking on that? You want me to, yeah. Yeah, so when, I guess it's worth going over, when there's a citizens initiative or a question being put on the referendum, the council has to approve it. So we have to vote to have it actually end up on the ballot. And through that process, we have a couple of different options. We could, you can just adopt the policy as it's been written. You could put a competing measure on the ballot. And then you also have to have a discussion about the summary and the title. What's going to be presented on the ballot? And we had a discussion, I believe it was councilor Zaro presented an amendment to make this change. And it was, the discussion was pretty much the name, which is not indicative of what the policy impact was going to be. It's not improving it. It is going to have a change and whether it's going to be improved or be worse, to be determined. I think that's what the discussion that we're going to have today. But then the name of the ballot question, I think now better summarize or better explains what the question asked to do. At least it opened to interpretation for the voter to say, yeah, this is actually going to improve it. So I'm going to vote yes, or this is going to be incredibly detrimental. I'm going to vote no. Does that make sense? Yes, it does make sense. Yeah. And I think, well, even hearing you say that now, because we all unanimously supported the change, the name change. And I think it was a good idea to bring forward. At first I was kind of like, I don't know if I saw the distinction, but now even hearing you talk about it, I do now remember that it was an act to improve rent control. And that was the big word that we were all talking about because improving it is so subjective based on what you're looking at. If you're a supporter of rent control or you're not. And so to say like this is going to improve something, people would go to the ballot and say, well, this is going to make rent control better. So I'm going to support it. And I think just changing that wording was really important and significant for us to do because I do know that this conversation around rent control, people have a million different opinions of it. And the thing that we wanted the most was just to make sure that when they do get to the ballot to vote, they're very clear on what they're voting on and they're very clear on what would happen if that question does pass. So you clarified it for voters and improve is obviously a value judgment. And really it depends on your point of view. If you're a landlord or a rental housing provider as the current euphemism preferred to landlord, then it would be improving because you could charge a lot more rent than someone moved out. But from the point of view of tenants, of which I'm assuming there are vastly more renters in Portland than there are landlords. From the renter point of view, it would not likely improve the law. What are your thoughts? Do you want to tell us how you're going to vote? Do you want to take us through the arguments for a yes vote or a no vote? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'll go. I don't think it's a big shock to anybody that I am not in support. Yeah, drum roll, I am not supporting. Question A, I say this, I feel like at a lot of meetings is like I'm one of the only renters on the council. I have only ever rented. I will probably rent forever just based on how the universe is working. But yeah, I think it's, I think question A is really harmful and is really scary. And this is a city of renters. And I feel like that's something else that I say a lot where we have really limited rights, like period for us to advocate for ourselves, for us to feel safe.  And so if question A passes, it's gonna have a disproportionate impact on these demographics. And it's also just going to displace a ton of people who are living in Portland who are barely hanging on because it's very difficult to live here but it's very difficult to run here. And so that's always going to be my perspective as a renter. What I'm looking at this question is I'm concerned that if I voluntarily leave my apartment and maybe I know someone that's looking for an apartment, the landlord will be able to jack the rent up as much as they want an entire blank slate. So I don't understand how this would be good for tenants. I hear that a lot, like it's good for tenants and it's good for Portland. And I don't, I can't align with that because I feel like good for tenants is to have rental protections. And even what we have now for rent control, it's not that much. I think we have like the basic human rights of rent control which we should all have and we shouldn't have had to fight for. So now having this really looming over us where if we do leave the rent can be jacked up is terrifying for a lot of us who are already worried about being able to afford rent in this city which is getting increasingly unaffordable. We're being priced out by Airbnb's and short-term rentals and we just don't have a lot of footing. We don't have a lot of support. So I'm always advocating for tenants as a tenant. I also think it's really important for me to do so as the counselor of district two which has a high demographic of renters, a high demographic of people of color. And this is going to have really significant negative impacts on tenants in Portland and people who deserve to live and work here. And for that reason alone, I mean question A is scary for me and scary for a lot of other individuals who are gonna wonder what their living situation is gonna look like a year from now if this question does pass. I thought one of the phrases that really stood out to me was when a tenant voluntarily vacates. So in other cities that I've lived where there was rent control, the landlords often would not maintain the building for years, for decades they would not maintain the building. New York is like the San Francisco in order to try to force one of these voluntary, the tenants moving out because then they can, then they go in and do all the maintenance that should have been done while people were paying rent and then the rent goes up. I heard a statistic, I didn't look it up myself but Santa Monica removed the rental protection limiting how much rents can increase as this ordinance would do and their rents doubled in Santa Monica, California. Obviously that's not Portland but that's significant. Rents are already barely affordable for many other people that work and serve us and keep Portland running. And at our last show we discussed the homeless problem and so many people being unhoused and throwing people out of housing that they're in certainly isn't gonna help that problem. Yeah, I think, so first I guess we should say Tori and I are gonna agree on this and as you said at the beginning this isn't intended to be a debate or a forum, right? Like there's an opportunity for us to talk about our opinion and our experiences as counselors. So I think when Tori talks about her being a renter and bringing that perspective to the council I think that that's the value of this show and this setting. So I just wanna say I appreciate that. Also we're in our normal time slot now which is really cool because we've been just kinda skipping along for a while. And I think we have graphics today. So we're doing a lot of really cool things. So I think we should focus on that just for a moment. And then second, I guess when we have this conversation we should first center it on we're in the middle of a housing crisis. And again, like you said, this is a city of renters. So this question is gonna impact us severely, right? Like regardless of whether it passes or not this is an important question that everyone should be aware of. So having this opportunity to talk about it again is super important and I'm happy to take advantage of it. I'm also gonna support a no vote on it. I think that keeping rents down or controlling rents is something that we all need to be really acutely or rather keenly aware of because as these things get out of control it will just trickle down to all these other layers that impact our housing crisis. So that's key. Number two, I hear when landlords say that they've kept the tenant for a long time and they've not increased rents that they're being nice or they're playing good landlord roles and then they get stuck with having to increase it significantly when they have a new tenant. So I think most tenants don't mind a small gradual increase year over year but getting hit over the head with this massive increase just like if you were looking for an apartment right now that's not, no one can do that. And then on top of that you were talking about servers and workers in our city. I've heard already so many people who work downtown and just the cost of parking alone is unattainable. What they make in one day of work is usually at least 50% of what they have to pay is just to park outside to be at work. So you're already cutting, the margins are really, really short for renters in this city. You know, it's difficult to get by just the day of work like I explained. Let alone come home and find out that you can't afford your rent or that you have to look now and surely there isn't anything affordable here because of the way that landlords have set the plate that they can increase it without any like limits. So this doesn't seem to be a fair policy. I would like to see, you know, I wanna try to consider what is it that the landlords are thinking is important and why they think this is, you know, the rent control is an issue for them. I think that, you know, they're running a business, right? They're, what is it that you call them? They're house providers. They call themselves rental housing providers. I mean, to me, they're landlords. They're running a business, right? They have a house that they're renting and they're competing in the market, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, they have a cost, they have a profit and loss that they have to keep track of, but I also have it in my business and I kind of work around the environment that I'm around and I bring my prices up every year and my clients, they're okay with it. And, you know, they understand that it's just like inflation and all the other factors that play into their budget plays into mine. But I don't take advantage of my clients. I don't say, hey, this year, you know what? All the tomatoes, 100% increase. Why? Because I feel like it, you know? So that doesn't to me seem like it's a fair way to engage as a business owner, as a landlord, or as a housing provider, or a house service provider. I can tell you one thing that I heard a representative for the landlord say, and that is that developers were calling him and saying, we aren't going to build in Portland if this ordinance passes. We will not be building in Portland. I'm not sure that we would hear that the same as maybe a commercial real estate broker or a landlord that owns many, many units. We know we need more housing, but we need more affordable housing. We need housing that people, you know, can live in. And as we see, there's housing being built constantly in Portland. Not a lot of it is affordable, though. And sometimes developers recently have paid a fine rather than include any affordable housing in their unit, which seems to me to be a kind of a sneaky way. I don't know why that loophole was introduced. That's not in our discussion today. But if you pass a thing that says, if you're going to build in Portland, you've got to allocate a certain percentage to affordable housing. And then you say, I'm not even going to attempt to do that. I'll just pay the fine. That doesn't create any housing when you pay the fine. Well, we did take some, you both took some flack because we are not a debate and we're not a forum. And I mean, I could play devil's advocate and play the landlord role if you want. I was a landlord once in my life and it was the worst experience in my life. I will never do it again. When I moved in with my husband, I still had a house and rather than sell it right away, I rented it for a while. But is, I mean, our show is not about debating and getting people in to represent both sides. We hear from the two of you because, well, you used to be new, fresh counselors. Now you're kind of jaded and kind of tired. Seasoned, yeah. You're halfway through. I'm more tired than I did in my first episode. But I think like, that part is hard too because people, yeah, we received a note that was kind of like, be nice or something, I don't know, something like that. And talk about maybe the benefits of the question, but I don't see any benefits of the question and I can only give you my answer from my lived experience of being a renter. So it's almost like, I'm sorry that we don't see eye to eye on this from landlord to tenant, but I've only been a tenant. I understand like the lens that I have. I understand the friends that I have had to see move out of the city because they can't afford it. People who have had their building sold, who are priced out by Airbnb's, who have nowhere to live. We have a housing crisis. We have an entire demographic of unhoused individuals with no places to go, our shelters are full. So I'm seeing it through this lens. And I think there was frustration around like, I need to see it from the perspective of a landlord, but I'm not sure how I'm able to do that when I have always been a tenant and I am on the lower end of like the privilege power dynamic. Like there's a power dynamic between landlords and tenants. There always is. They dictate how much we pay, how long we can stay in our apartment, whether or not we can stay in our apartment and that's just the reality of it. And that's just how it is written in like this system of housing. And so, I get that people are frustrated if they feel like maybe on the show like Roberto and I are aligned in this, which like we have not been aligned in every show. We obviously have different opinions and perspectives, but yeah, I think I'm really worried and concerned for myself as a renter and for the community of Portland that are renters that deserve to be here and are hanging by a thread. And with this passing of the question we'll undoubtedly not be able to live here anymore.  Yeah. And we had a pretty good conversation. Like I said, this is a good opportunity for us to talk about our experiences and the way that we, certainly what we hear from our constituents. I'll do this though, you know, to be, not to be even, that was advocate, but what I understand is part of the landlord's plight is that, you know, which I think we've had conversations about citizen's initiatives. Once they get passed, you know, they cannot be amended by any other means other than by citizen's initiatives. So if they feel like they don't have any other avenue and they see something's wrong with it, you know, they're using the tools that are at their disposal. And if that's their grievance, you know, that they don't have any other tool, then yeah, okay, I see it and I'll give them that. And Tuesday, voters will have a chance to then have their opinion on what they think is the best policy for the city. So is that the explanation of why, you know, a political group that has been very anti-referendum and say you can't govern by these citizens' referendums, there's too many of them, it's too easy to get them on, they're always very much against them. Now they have a referendum. It's, I mean, it is, and it's really troubling because you start to, you know, we've talked, we've had some really good conversations and maybe in the next show we should probably dive into the citizens' initiative process in chapter nine because we've had some good conversations about that being a really important piece of democracy. And Tori speaks often, and I don't wanna speak for her, but about there's a reason that we've seen so many citizens' initiatives and is that there's a large segment of the community that does not feel that they're being engaged with their counselors and their elected officials and so they have to take on their own to put these ballot measures. And so I think that there's a lot, again, that we should discuss about that, but being unhappy about the way that voters have turned out is very different than being unhappy about the way that the council is working. You know, voters speak, and then even I as a council, I have to respect it. And we're having a conversation about how long the council has to wait to amend a citizens' initiative after it's passed. I'm comfortable with shortening that time, but I'm not comfortable with us making like substantive changes to policy. I think it'll be some of the operational pieces of some of the, how does this work into a specific department so that things are aligned? And I think some of that work happens much like we did with the language of the ballot question. It happens before it's even there. So the city clerk's office will work with the folks that are bringing whatever initiative to make sure that it's aligned with current policies. How is it gonna create a brand new department that then has to be put through a budget? And then now we're like, I don't know where the button is gonna come from. So these things I think could be improved so that that piece of, that important democratic process piece is maintained. But right now, which is a long, long way to get here. Like now it seems like it's being used as it's being weaponized, right? It's being used to attack the science that say, vote yes on A, defeat the essay. What does that tell me about rent control? That's two political ideologies going at it and putting it in a long sign. Like that's not helpful for dialogue. That's not constructive, in my opinion. Certainly not as constructive as we're being right now in this show. Sorry. How the reins of power do not give it up willingly or happily. And so when the democratic process is happening and the voters in Portland consistently for years now have voted in very progressive measures, right? Rank choice voting, rent control. And so you either like the democratic process or you don't like the democratic process. But you can't say, well, I like it when the outcome that I wanted happens. Exactly, yeah, that's been the top part. One and the other. I think that ultimately that's a really good way to frame, and even now as we're having this discussion, that's a really good way to frame it. Like even if you don't like the questions that are being put out there or the people that are putting out there, everyone is letting you know how they feel about it. So your community is sort of kind of letting you know, we're okay with this. Or we're strongly in support of this. So if we're then gonna pick and choose which ones we like, then we're picking and choosing whether we agree with our community or not. So let's be really careful about that. Anybody wanna make a prediction about the outcome of question A before we move on? There is one other thing on the ballot and we will talk about it. But it doesn't need as much attention. What do you think's gonna happen? Will it pass or not? I don't know. You know, I think it's tough. There's, they've raised over $140,000. That's a significant amount of money to put into getting a question to pass. I think it'll be really close. But again, we're a city of renters. And so I think if people go out and again, it's tough because this is the time where it's an off-election year. It's a June election. I think there's still a lot of people that are like, wait, there's an election on Tuesdays because people are thinking only in November. So as long as everybody gets out to vote and we have the demographic of renters that I know that we have that are passionate and care about this, you know, I could see it not passing, but I think it really just depends on the numbers that we have going through the polls that day. And I really have no idea. So it's all about getting out the vote. Yeah, definitely. I think my sense just from what I've heard from folks, there's, people are aware of the housing crisis. People are aware that number one, that this is a city of renters, right? Like these things are no longer kind of like hidden truths about Portland. They're like out there. And the idea of rents not being controlled scares people. So my sense is that a lot of folks, just by being cautious, are not going to support this because they think it's a really, they're starting to understand how delicate the housing crisis is and how policy can really be detrimental in the long term. So I think people are being more cautious. And my sense is that it's not gonna pass. You don't think so? I don't think so, no.  I'm gonna get off my wall. I didn't do that. So I, but that's my sense. Well, let's move on to the other item on the ballot, which is always a June election with low turnout and it's the school budget. It's kind of a good news year for the school budget because it came in lower than was originally predicted. My understanding is the state made an error originally in telling the school district how much money they would get. And then they came back and said, oh, we were wrong, you're getting more. And it passed as we discussed in the last show, the council passed it easily onto the voters. So reasons to vote yes on the school budget. You should always vote yes on the school budget. Schools are systematically underfunded across the board. Every penny that goes into a school either ends up in a teacher's salary or in a student getting services. There's no wasting money in schools, right? Like we know that they're scrapping for every last bit of change. So I'm always going to support it. Especially now, the influx of families that are requiring support for language, integration into the school system, language support, obviously all the new impersonal NFTs that are added to provide these services. The schools honestly, I don't want to say blank check, but whatever they say they need, I'm going to say that yes, take it. Because again, history of being underfunded and under-resourced, and that's, yeah, that's not happening. And again, the ballot box is not the place. Walking in to vote is not the place to express your displeasure about school budget. There's a lot of time along the process to express your displeasure about spending money on that or under, there is that whole process. When it comes down to, okay, now I'm in there and I can mark yes or no, I agree with you. I would always mark yes. Yeah, yeah, I agree with everything that was said. And I think the only thing I'll add is that schools are such a reflection of the community that you live in and the community is a reflection of the schools. And so we have a really wonderful city here. And I think that is because of the tone of the schools. And I think like it's always going to impact the people that live here. So I hear like, well, I don't have kids in the school system. Like is that, is the school budget still something that I should really care about? And it absolutely is. So yeah, I'm in full support of it. I hope that it passes. And I was really happy to see that it was easy for us this year and the council supported it unanimously. And so I'm hopeful that it will pass on Tuesday as well. Great. Well, absentee voting has already started. So when we say the election is on Tuesday, it really means it ends Tuesday. It's already underway. So people that don't wanna vote on Tuesday or can't can go down and do that. A family member of mine who recently moved to Portland tried to tell me that they weren't registered to vote yet. And I said, oh, it's me. It's same day registration. You can walk in, register to vote, and you know, vote right in that moment. So I know that Juneau is gonna make sure that her dad gets down to the polls to vote. It's a busy time moving and so forth. But there's so many benefits that my grandchildren who already lived in Portland and the ones that will be starting in the fall, I just love the school system here. I've been so impressed with it. It's warm and it's supportive and it's intelligent. I noticed that there's talk again about merging the two high schools or looking into creating one big modern high school. Both the high schools are like 100 years old. That's not on the school budget vote this time, but there are a lot of needs. There are a lot of physical plant needs in addition to human needs in schools. So... We should actually, since we have a few minutes, big shout out to all the graduates this year because graduation ceremonies just happened this week. So Portland High School just had, I think there was 202nd graduation ceremony during high school had theirs and Casco Bay had their 15th ceremony. And I think Portland Adult Ed had theirs as well. So yeah, big shout out, congratulations to all the seniors and all the graduates. And our producer here, yeah. Congratulations. We could not do the show. Graduated, yes, he's been in high school the whole time. That's right. And we were also helped by Shay on tech today. We could not have done it without you, Shay. Thank you so much. And viewers, we can't do it without you. Let us hear from you. When counselors Pelletier and Rodriguez hear from someone saying, well, are you gonna have the landlord point of view too? This isn't a debate show. It's not, you know, point counterpoint. That's not the format, but we love to hear from viewers and residents of Portland about what's on your mind. What would you like to hear us talk about? You can lob questions at us. And we're always happy to respond to the public. Thanks for watching the show. Without the audience, we wouldn't have a show. We are now a podcast. We're on two platforms. We're on Spotify and we're on Apple Podcast. This is our 11th show. Second season, 11th show. So the whole archive, you can see it on the Portland Media Center website, or you can go to their YouTube channel and see all the past shows. It's kind of fun watching the old shows, isn't it? Thinking, oh my gosh, we were out there. I didn't have any gray hairs, that was good. That's right, we were in the front window. Some people walking by. So, well, I know that you guys have grown into your roles quite a bit. And I really look forward to speaking with you each month. We have this time slot now. So the second Friday of every month will be Pathways to Progress going forward. And thank you so much for joining us this evening.