ra who is with the you mass clean energy extension great um i just want to ask that we not spend public comment being repetitive of each other just uh comments that you feel would help the council maybe understand this better uh and or understand the depth of support so who would like to make public comment okay i see two people here and i may be there let's start over here please come forward to the mic yes thank you my name is adele franks and i am a resident of north hampton and a participant on the inter municipal cca task force and most of what i was going to say has already been said so i'm not going to repeat it um but i will add that um north hampton is very eager uh to move forward but we really don't want to move forward alone uh it's been a wonderful collaboration on the task force um we have been greatly benefiting from shared expertise and we share values and we share goals of greenhouse gas reduction and uh we would we would love to take the next steps together um with amherst and pelham and hopefully i think we all on the task force would very much like other communities to join eventually but we have come a long way together and we would like to take the next step together and i would also just like to add that the way i look at at this um program it's a way of keeping our money in our communities because we're going to spend about the same amount for electricity no matter what we do but if we're paying every source or national grid we're they're they're using that money for their administrative costs if we pay a broker then the brokers you know the the company the broker works for is is getting the profit but the money is not staying in our communities and what we're proposing is a way to basically charge people the same amount of money for their electricity but to benefit our communities by keeping our money here so that we can invest in distributed energy resources solar on parking lots etc and uh and and to our mutual benefit so we hope that we will be able to move forward and take these next steps together thank you thank you sir you had public comment you i want to clear out i guess i'm sam tidalman i'm a member of the amherst pelham north hampton intermeasurable aggregation task force i'm also an amherst resident district 4 25 green leaves drive i wanted to share some written remarks uh that i made as a resident and i think i'm going to try to annotate them briefly in real time to address some of the questions you've raised as well i'll maybe try to but still keep it short i'd like to urge the council to exercise its authority to take meaningful local action to address the challenges of climate change by authorizing the development of an aggregation program in participation with other communities with the primary goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions the language in front of you is simply to authorize development of a part a aggregation program part a under the statute it has nothing to do with the mass aid program or part b under the statutes a completely separate authorization and separate dpu approval as the language is currently drafted you would not have any further review over this process that would go to the town manager you could amend this language so that it came back to you as it was previously stated that you could have further approval say by doing so you would want to consider the fact that funding that's channeled into the development of the aggregation plan it that plan that gets paid for is now contingent upon further approval so it creates levels of uncertainty but by creating an aggregation program Amherst will be giving its residents and businesses more control over where our energy comes from and how it's produced and give us the option but not the requirement to purchase electricity from a program that offers local oversight and accountability to its customers there's an opt out period before the aggregation program begins supplying power and then it continues onward customers can opt out at any time well over 100 municipalities throughout massachusetts have adopted aggregation programs many of which are increasing the amount of renewable energy in their communities electricity supplies beyond the requirements of the common wells renewable portfolio standard primarily through the purchase of additional renewable energy credits designed to foster the development of additional renewable generation capacity those programs that are offering greener energy supply are doing it at rates that are competitive with their utilities basic service more often than not they're beating their basic service whether or not they're above or below the basic service rate on average it's by a margin of a few dollars a year not even a month you might be talking about a difference of five to ten dollars a year some of these programs offer greener supply than what's required in the renewable portfolio standard by default and others make that an option for their customers they can opt up to a greener supply but the default is the same as the basic service whatever is required that year under the rps and your aggregation program can make those decisions accordingly okay some aggregation programs are going further than that kplay compacts developed 20 and a half megawatts of solar pv capacity for the k cut and martha's vineyard municipalities uh very briefly cambridge has developed a solar or is developing a local solar pv program to provide a portion of its customers electricity needs and tucket provides a financial incentive for customers who install solar pv these communities are only scratching the surface of what cca's could potentially do but you're not authorizing an ambiguous or amorphous 3.0 right program right now you're authorizing a basic program that includes a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions thus the program becomes a platform for doing more than simply buying competitive power supply and what those additional steps will be there'll be financially feasible there'll be a lawful and they'll be according to what your community wants and needs and is capable of doing so it will be a progression over time i have to ask you to complete thank you thank you very much are there any other public comments hi andra rose i am speaking as um for the cac that um we voted to support um authorization of a cca program that has its primary purpose as reducing greenhouse gas um jointly with these other communities and that was in your packet so i won't read it to you but that's it thank you chris chris riddle 252 strong street just a plain citizen um not representing anybody but me um but i think this is something that we need to do i hope very much that this council uh will uh move ahead in uh to the next step this is a uh a very exciting thing what's a particular part of it that's exciting to me well the only thing that's exciting about it really is with greenhouse gas reductions um and and i'm interested in well um my my my interest is in buildings existing building stock and uh one and how do we address that problem and try to get to uh the uh net zero by 2040 or 2050 um when i heard about this at first i thought well this is this is great and that means that we're moving toward a time when when you plug something into the wall outcomes uh 100 renewable electricity and then so then all you have to do is to take that the building stock that's out there the existing buildings that are go on forever toward the horizon and uh and make them electrified and bingo you've got the building stock converted to being that zero um that is not that simple and i don't think my understanding is that this that the uh cca 3.0 program is uh at least not expiring to get to 100 renewable soon maybe by 2050 maybe by 25 i don't know i'm sort of curious about what actually a projected timeline might be but whatever it's if green agrees how greenhouse gas reductions is the goal and that's my goal and so i think uh this is a very exciting prospect that i hope the council will support thank you thank you are there any other comments at this time please come forward this is on yes elisa pierce in pelham when i was serving on the select board in pelham uh the cca came before us and what attracted me to it was the idea that we who use electricity are paying a kind of a mortgage every month out it pours and uh here's an opportunity to own what we want to keep in and local and electricity likes to stay local um as a select man uh we reviewed a cca where we would have used uh we would have purchased something that looked that was greener but uh what troubled me was that it was sort of green on paper these were um it was a sleight of hand it was uh texas wind so those electrons that i was going to be having in my house were not going to be green but i was benefiting from a sort of a a mechanism so this to me feels very real and very true and very local and i like i like the implication that with with that half a million dollars over three years and some very passionate people and your guidance sending the right person to that group um they would be thinking really hard about green electrons here and people building those and maintaining those in our communities uh not just some some paper somewhere so thank you thank you are there any other comments from the public at this time we're back to the council and i just would like to propose something okay um and you may decide this is not what you want um this is only our first reading if you will we usually require these for two and i would like to know from Stephanie and perhaps yourself is is anything dramatic going to happen between now and just January 6th that would by us waiting till then to vote no would not till January 6th okay so if we decide we would like to have a second shot at this on December 6th that would be January 6th 2020 we would not be stopping you dead in your tracks no okay what i would say is if we could um beyond that date might become problematic only in that then that slows down the next steps and moving towards development of a plan and because we have funding for a limited period of time we would hope that you would be able to make a decision on this thank you um the other thing that i personally would like to see is that the motion that we eventually vote on be broken into two and include something that allows us to have another shot at this such as Pellum required and rather than sit here tonight and wordsmith emotion at um you know going on 10 o'clock i'd suggest that we do that for our meeting on the 6th instead now that was my proposal that may not be what the council would like Mandy job so i would support that um i definitely want to see something that requires this town to approve that dpu plan or whatever plan it's called i think i don't know whether this language has gone through our town attorney or not but especially if we're adding provisions like that i would definitely want it through our town attorney to make sure it's you know legally binding and all on things because i know the statute itself doesn't require that and so i want to make sure we have the ability to andy right so i guess we need to just clarity of who would be approving the town manager or the town council we'd like it to come back i wouldn't come back to the council yep what i was thinking about was along similar lines and i think that it could be handled as a an amendment to the motion or worse so that we have a clean vote that we have the motion as it would be proposed and then somebody able to make an amendment and then debate them the amendment and i think it might be fairly simple i actually was working at a little bit if you knocked out the words and implement and then after the words municipal aggregation but in to be approved by the amherst town council that essentially does what we wanted to do i would want to have the opportunity to have others than me look at that but we can come back to the next meeting and have a very robust conversation on whether to pass it as it's been proposed originally or with some amendment like i just suggested other comments from the council dorthy i want to know if perhaps one of the eventual goal is to separate us from the the big grid which we know is in bad shape and goes out to self-sustained energy which is local and controlled is that where things might move that is a strategy that we are looking at and talked about it's all going to depend on resources and part of that is the ability to build micro grids and right now the state and the agility are hampering that effort so it'll get hopefully easier at because parts of the state are actually promoting it and parts are getting in the way someone who'd like to go off the grid thank you i'm sorry pat i was once in a play called what's her name in wonderland but that's another story i'm ready to vote now with a little wordsmithing i pretty sure i'm going to be outvoted on that but this is a this is something that i've been looking at for a long time and i see nothing but positives so i would like us to move forward tonight are there other comments yes elissa i was just gonna say that if we do end up making notes for the future as i'm sure someone wrote down on mr steinberg's behalf etc is that i don't like the change in wording that says to act in partnership with other municipalities and authorized that's not the wording i used for a reason we do not just tell the town manager to act in partnership with other municipalities go do it we for a purpose we direct for a purpose not to just say you have that authority now because to a large extent he has that authority already and so what we're trying to tell him is what we want him to do in working with the other powers and i would also like it to be re looked at the idea of incorporating the mgl part that talks about the separate energy plan that's later in the process associated with funding because i think that would be important i would have thought that that would be important to our community that that separate step that's after the fact would make us eligible for some funding and yet that's not addressed in here at all and so if we're throwing a whole bunch of things together i'm not sure why we wouldn't want to address that as a separate later step part i believe you're talking about part b of the statute that is an entirely separate process it actually requires another authorization and a whole another plan a much more detailed plan okay i'm i mean you it's not like this could kick that off by just putting it in here could would legally authorize that and so i'm saying we are in fact trying to give quite a bit of authority to the town manager to make things happen and to not slow things down we may have this separate step where things come back to us but this plan would also come back to us and so i grant you i understand completely they're two separate plans but just like it doesn't change from department to dpu in the middle of a paragraph we need to be really clear on what we're authorizing the motion we originally got didn't do that we're still not quite there and so i'm asking that please you work with the president to make sure we get these questions answered in whatever our final version of this thank you ever so i wasn't sure if i wanted to say this now or save it for agenda item 8e but i think given pat's comment i'll say it now so last meeting we agreed to vote to suspend rule 8.4 which requires us to consider in one meeting and vote in another meeting and i feel as though we sort of opened the floodgates with that because now we have a motion sheet that has three different motions voting to suspend 8.4 one of which we determined was unnecessary voting on this tonight would require suspending that rule um and so i guess my first thoughts on that are if we're going to just always be suspending rule 8.4 then we should just get rid of rule 8.4 but if we have 8.4 it seems like the value of that is one so that we as a council can listen to debate discussion and then take time to think before the next meeting but the other more important thing is that it gives the public an opportunity to see coverage of this that might appear in the paper and to know that they a decision wasn't made before it was on their radar and to weigh in we can decide that we don't agree with that and we can repeal rule 8.4 and if you want to do that you should tell our chair of go l you want to do that but as long as we have 8.4 in the books i am i am really hesitant to continuously vote to suspend it and especially to do so without cause and so my request going forward would be anytime i see a motion to suspend rule 8.4 i want an explanation about why why is it necessary that we we do it i don't see any real reason to suspend the rule in this case uh there's no emergency there's no time limit on the grant as with the last one and so given given that and given that we've got confirmation there's no harm in waiting till the 6th i don't see why we would vote to suspend a rule sort of just because all right at this point i need to get a sense of the council i propose that we have the vote on this on january 6 2020 which is our next meeting that between now and then we work on the motions which we may need to come back to you and also in a legitimate way consult with other counselors so that we're not breaking open meeting law and we come up with at least two motions maybe even a third one given this other mass general law that elissa was referring to and then there are others who would like to perhaps go ahead and vote tonight so i need a sense of whether you want to try to proceed or not so the best way to do that one way to do that which i really truly want to say i don't want to see is that we put the motion forward and we vote it down and i don't want that on the record so i would rather put forward the motion that we delay action on this to the 6th of january 2020 do i have a second second all those in favor raise your hand and say i i oh discussion it it what all that's true that's a very good question the default in our rules is we would wait tonight okay the other way to look at it is you could make a motion to suspend and then if the motions to suspend the rule okay fails you're where you were okay all right let's do this i move to suspend rule 8.4 is there a second okay all those in favor of suspending rule 8.4 raise your hand and say i all those opposed raise your hand and say no okay this is now moving to our next meeting which is january 6. Stephanie i look forward to working with you on the wording of those motions and so forth and thank you for all the hard work your group has done i have been following you and this does help us move forward in some many different ways okay thank you thank you and now our very patient bylaw review just to be very clear with the council this is a first reading and there will be no vote okay so we have before us oh bob richey bernie kubiak and they have been loyal members of the previous bylaw review committee and now this bylaw review committee which also includes evan ross pat de angeles and elissa brewer and i will only say they have learned more about our bylaws than we would ever hope but thank you for all your work shall we proceed yes and i expect and hope to be mercifully brief uh you have 10 to 20 pounds of material and i don't intend to cover any of that i'd like to use the limited time that i've assigned myself to just thank the members of the committee uh starting with k moran uh ken hardree's bernie pat evan and elissa uh and jeff cravitz for absolutely monumental work in producing the documents that you have uh we tried to steer this process from uh data of creation which was precisely one year to the day from the day we sent it to you last week mission was to get this done within a year and i think we accomplished that to the extent that we did zoning in july and we've we've given you the report with our recommendations for the general bylaws it is a fulfillment of the charge to review make recommendations and to uh come up with a plan for implementing it we have delivered you documents which i think cover the waterfront these documents will allow you to trace the trail that we we took there was an audit trail with a number of drafts and what you have before you represents a plateau and a mountain climb there's more to do what we've given to you was a draft set of bylaws is significantly less imperfect than what we started with and but there's work to do so we've given you a draft we've also given you a list of things that we think if we were council members would like to have another crack out so that's where you go on from where we leave off our job is done and by giving you the report i i think bernie has come up with a a a way of saying this we've built a platform on which you can stand going forward and we hope it serves the purposes for which we were created thank you and it is it's a start it's a start there's some recommendations and going forward i think overall what we'd like to see the council develop is sort of an operations manual for the town of amherst where well if citizens can go to a single place a single web page find the charter the bylaws the special acts and the except the accepted statutes and critically the policies procedures and regulations of the town all there all searchable all readable and at some point interlinked so if we can do that and this is a place to start uh i think um folks in amherst will be well served and the government will will reach a level of transparency that you don't often find finally the there was a cross document platform with some consistency among all of the documents that we looked at we've created a template for future changes so that the changes work with each other and integrate the zoning bylaws with the general bylaws to the extent that's necessary the document that we put together has both an alphabetic index so that anybody looking at it and digital format will have ease of navigating from place to place so i think that's we'd like to end there and expose ourselves to your questions if you have any on what we've done but we hope what we've given you is perspective enough to go forward thank you would members from the i'm checking on it just a fact right here um would members from the committee like to speak listen this was a fantastic committee to work on you should all be really jealous because even though it doesn't sound all that exciting it was really interesting to take what they've done and then take it a little further based on the kinds of conversations we've been having here at town council and the leadership provided by bob and jeff was amazing bernie was always there to tell us practically speaking how things worked other places you could have not have asked for a more amazing group to work with so you should definitely all be jealous evan uh so i also want to thank bob and bernie um i think the counselors on the committee were there in many ways to offer our input but also to to sort of provide the perspective of the council but the real work of this committee um were bob and bernie and also jeff who must be very happy to be done with this work um because we put him through a lot and i feel bad for that um but but one thing i do want to make sure i i stress that that bob said is is that this the document that you've received is not our bylaws are perfect and so you don't even have to worry it's it's it's an improvement um and there's still a lot of work to be done um and so i think that future considerations document that you received is going to be really useful going forward um and one of the things i want to say to the members of the council is that a lot of the things on that future considerations document aren't like the sexy things that you want to get headlines in the paper for working on but they're important things that that i hope people will pick up um going forward pat i just want to say thank you to bob and bernie and jeff and alissa and evan it's one of the best committees i've sat on um in terms of hard work and commitment and humor so i appreciated it very much i learned a lot thank you thank you let me i just want to state for the public record we discussed it and adopted a charge for this committee but we not appoint the committee until january 28th 2019 so we're still within the one-year limit for you reporting back i was afraid you'd say that yeah i just want to be very clear that we're within the charter and we've met that requirement so are there questions comments at this time mandy joe start with me um so i i'm going to put two hats on the first ones as a charter commissioner wow um i think when the charter commission put this into the transition section we were thinking oh we'll change all the select board to whatever and have we need a committee to do stuff like that and that's what they'll do and it'll get done you guys went above and beyond what i think anyone on the charter commission ever expected for this review at this time it's what we would have hoped for for the 10-year decennial review um so i i can't express from the charter commission point of view my appreciation too much um now i'm going to put my counselor hat on and i'm going to say you know i was one that sent you guys a ton of comments and last night i went through all of my comments that i sent you weeks ago and color coded them as to what was dealt with where and all of that and i ended up with just one that i'm not happy with how you dealt with which given how many i had and i'm sure some people can figure out which one it was um but um yeah you know you took our comments and you considered them and you gave us back a document that said yeah we heard you but we don't agree or yes that's a good one for future consideration or this and that and and as a counselor who wasn't involved in this process i want to say thank you for that too because it made me as an individual feel like i did have some say before we get to this point so you're going to talk about the one i mean i can mention it and i'll probably make a motion next week but um it it was the lawn mower one and it happens like i know that's what it is i i really i still don't like the fact that it's it's being added and and i will probably move next week to delete it from from the whole set of bylaws for future consideration at gol if you look if you move next week none of us will be here but that's okay at the next meeting i won't be here next week okay uh yes kathy okay i do want to thank you all for the mountain of work and the level of it meant that when i got my first chance to read all the changes i didn't read as carefully as i think mandi did particularly where things were completely deleted um so i have a question on one of them and i had to go back and read the original bylaw to figure out what was in it and it's the piece on condominiums and co-op conversions and i could see in reading that why you might want to do some substantial revisions um what i saw is that the rationale why the entire thing was deleted is that we haven't really needed it because it hasn't really happened in amherst you know so don't worry about it so then i went over to zoning and planning and put the word condominium in and it's kind of silent on it so there were several protections in that bylaw for what could happen and um and i understood why they were in and there are things of if if someone who owns a large apartment complex decides for whatever reasons that they would prefer to convert them into owner there were protections that they can't harass the tenants to try to get them out of there so they can argue you know look we have all these vacancies there was tenants first rights of of refusal of you know all buy in um some process kinds of things on how soon and how fast so by wholesale deleting it you we've removed some things that we might someday need even if we hadn't activated them and so i'm i'm just curious on why the total removal because i know how protective they've been in places that are worried about it and so we had that long prologue of what people were worried about and it's great it hasn't happened in amherst but what if um some of the big apartment buildings since we now have them said you know i'd rather get out of the rent of business and get into the ownership so so that was my question and having said that there were some changes in that section i would have made that i thought didn't make sense so it wouldn't have been keep it just as is it would have required a different discussion so just some rationale on why just get rid of it where you were more careful with dogs and cats and things and things let's keep this one we might not need it or you know you kept something on the books that may be a state law protected because there's nothing i don't think locally that's protective if this is gone back in the 80s this was a real hot topic uh and the fear but putting a law on the book to protect you in case something happens it's not a bad thing to do even if it never happens but the incidence probability kept descending and during the uh during our sessions we had input from people that predicted that its utility back then is absent today uh the other thing to take in mind that there are so many more appropriate and contemporary tools to deal with the problems that condominium conversion regulation sought to achieve that it became not the tool of choice in dealing with some of those issues uh condominium form of ownership is not uh is not a kind of title it's not something that zoning does uh so zoning has limited reach on the ownership of of real estate and so there were a whole bunch of reasons why we thought that in the interest of producing a a a concise set of laws that govern our our town of a non-zoning nature uh it was neater not to have this uh the council could easily put it back in if it chose and you could also you said there are other things that are excuse me please you could you could adopt it from whole cloths in the future if it chose to do so um it was just our thought that this was the better option at this stage and you said there are other laws that are protective the way this is that there are other tools that the town already has on its books somewhere well i didn't say necessarily that it was the town laws but there are uh land use uh options available uh in the in the private marketplace under state statute that allow the mischief that condominium conversion posed back in the 80s that is diminishing the the availability of affordable housing stock for example uh these things are addressed by more surgical instruments than condominium conversion uh the inputs that we got from the town staff uh back then uh indicated that this was the better course to follow and we sort of went along with that idea i don't believe in the town attorney has we bested for the town attorney's opinion on our work from time to time and she certainly didn't object to our removing this piece but bob's point's well taken i mean if the council feels this is a compelling topic then the right thing to do i think would be to have the uh the jol committee query town attorney for a more precise and workable uh by law that can be added back in okay are there other comments i'm sorry dorsi uh i also want to thank you so much for your mammoth amount of work that you put into this um i just have one one comment that's you know um the single use plastic bag prohibition this is the only thing that really stuck out to me um and i'm sorry that i didn't make my comment earlier um that um that the the committee recommended deletion of an aspirational section that encouraged customers to bring reusable bags and encourages to encourage establishments to provide reusable biodegradable compostable or recyclable paper bags and i i get that that you said the reason was it was aspirational but i think in this particular era that's okay we can be aspirational we just passed some pretty aspirational climate goals and this fits with that so i guess i would really like to put that back in there well i think you're absolutely right you can certainly put aspirational statements in the bylaws but the approach taken by the committee was to reduce the working parts to those that were essential uh if statements of purpose or statements of aspiration uh mistaken to be operative it could lead to litigation it could lead to other adverse consequences so looking at the bylaw we said what does the bylaw do let's keep the language that expresses what the bylaw does and how it works uh the purposes of the bylaw don't add anything to the functionality of the bylaw but they do offer as you point out an educational medium it communicates to the public what what it's about so it's entirely appropriate and the committee did leave in a number of statements of purposes and statements of aspiration where we thought it was appropriate and you raised one in which it may the council may wish to stick that back in again but we we we sought to reduce the volume we did it down to 95 pages where do you stop and i think we we just drew the line at that one we we did uh wherever there was because keep in mind these bylaws were created by a series of town meetings with different offers over an 80 year period so we did take a look at all of the preambles and the whereases and the other language and say does it serve a meaningful purpose now and if it doesn't serve a purpose let's move it aside again the council is free to you've got a process you're free to the council's free to put that language back but we what we tried to do and you'll notice when you look at the bylaws you notice the data block and you'll notice there's bulleted lists and you'll notice that there's layered ways we tried to make those bylaws readable and usable um so uh if we were a little bit too rigorous and knocking out some of the aspirational language then by all means the council can put it back but that what what we were trying to do is get people right to the heart of the bylaw and we kept only what we felt uh was explanative of the bylaw and it wasn't that the committee thought that these expressions weren't worth making but that the bylaws themselves were not the right vehicle uh there are places in which this aspirational language should be developed and advanced and promulgated but not within the four corners of a working regulatory document and so we were trying to draw the line at stuff that was part of the functionality of the regulation and uh move everything else to the side for treatment in some other venue Evan yeah just just to build on that I think one of the lenses that I consistently looked at the bylaws through when we were looking at language was is it enforceable or operational and and if you and so things that were sort of statements of uh intent or or aspirational you can't enforce them you can't operationalize them um and so the bylaws seemed like the in the in the proper place for that and so um I think that's a useful lens that I learned to look I mean I certainly grew a lot during this experience of going through these and that's sort of the lens I grew to look at these through is when I looked at language I go I agree with that and I go yeah but can you actually operationalize that and if you couldn't it wasn't appropriate in the bylaws so just sharing that learning experience with all of if the regulatory content is embedded within a chunk of dense text what people go to the bylaw to read they won't find as easily so we try to leave a residue of the stuff that mattered and not that the stuff that is aspirational doesn't matter it's just that it should matter elsewhere okay are there other comments our question is about the bylaws that you things that you've raised before that you've seen taken out or whatever and the reason I'm asking this is because I will send you an email I would like if you want to forward any motions regarding bylaws at our meeting on the 6th I'm going to ask that you provide those to me at least no later than like the Monday the Wednesday before so that we have a collection of what you want to consider and it needs to have all of the references and so forth to where it is okay so that if there's something like a lawnmower our condominium or whereas that you feel needs to go back in that's I do need that in advance but I'll be asking you for that I just want to let give you the heads up now because some of you will be celebrating different holidays and maybe not paying attention Alyssa I was going to ask a couple of things and building off of what you said I don't think anybody should bring us anything in January or submit it to you on the Wednesday before that they haven't brought up tonight because and you you read this a lot more before you got here tonight and you're going to read it again when you go home before the 6th so that's the purpose of a 1st and 2nd reading isn't so we all get surprised at the 2nd reading so I appreciate the specific on the lawnmower and I understand that that one we went out on a bit of a limb associated with I'm less comfortable with the condo thing because we know that that is not current state-of-the-art bylaw we know it's old we know it hasn't been used we know that there are other variations out there and so I would ask that for something like that rather than trying to stick it back in is that you say immediately I want the town council to ask gol to go talk to somebody about giving us a new condo bylaw that provides the protections that I agree are very important protections but I think rather than putting in putting things back in in kind of a onesie-toosie kind of way at this point the lawnmower being the exception feels like not a great way to deal with context let's start with it clean but again let's not for loose sight of any of this stuff I mean some of the things that are on the list of things to do might not be very important to some of you and the condo thing is is important to a lot of us and so let's make sure we get that referred and moved on but let's be able to accept the bylaw without saying let's relitigate the whole condo thing here amongst a group of 13 who have literally never discussed it before right that that seems really awkward whereas I think you could have a really effective conversation elsewhere with additional input from staff etc thank you so are there any other deletions additions changes yes Mandy Joe so I I mentioned the lawnmower but it means it doesn't it doesn't I didn't do it clearly because I realized that many people might not know what I'm talking about um so I'm going to clarify what that is I'm trying to find it in the actual bylaw here page 30 something 3.2 2 3.34 so in unlawful noise bylaw the 3.24 I will and I will definitely send you the motion it was on my list of things to do I will likely ask to delete section a for which is an added section that the bylaw review committee put into the current noise bylaw that is in the current bylaws that reads that makes the noise bylaw that includes the loud disturbing into the definition of loud disturbing injurious or unnecessary noise lawnmowers leaf blowers snow blowers and other similar mechanical devices and I don't think I need to get into a discussion tonight I'm not sure we want to get into why I want to do that but but this my initial comment to the committee was that that seemed to me to be a significant addition to what unlawful noise applies as unlawful noise that maybe goes slightly beyond what this committee was actually tasked with doing and probably deserves its own discussion instead of being part of a wholesale rescind replace yeah the other thing is that as these are raised and I think Alyssa made a good point here on for example the condominium thing that was struck it's struck because it was pretty outdated but maybe we do need something that is a condominium well this will now go to gol and changes that kind of thing where there's going to be more debate and maybe more research will happen within that committee and then come back to the council so that we're not sitting here trying to write bylaws okay yes maybe if the council simply exempts electric lawnmowers it'll encourage those of us who to either get goats or or to reduce our carbon footprint I mean just just just I don't need I don't want to even get into this one or not going to lawnmowers tonight uh Evan did you have another comment or someone over here had another comment okay yeah I just had I just had a clarification on uh and I I understand now on co-op and condo but are there other instances where it was a less than perfect by law wording and content that it was just wiped out because it wasn't great you know so it's that was what kind of startled me when I read content pieces I said so did that should I do a more careful reading on other things where it was just gone rather than fixed because my sense was throughout you you generally did great fixes you know you clarified you moved things to places um and this is the only one I saw where it completely went away and it wasn't like Tiff where you said maybe yes maybe no but we don't really need it but you left it in okay is there a comment we consciously and deliberately left in some pretty bad stuff stuff that we don't like okay it is way more of that than there is taking out something because we didn't like it and we never took it out for that reason they always had to be some other explanation for why it was a vestigial tail and didn't deserve to be continued into the current code okay we explain that in the report point by point by law by by law and but as I pointed out and Bernie and I both made this point clear that we started off with something that was really imperfect and what we are giving to you is something that's really imperfect but less imperfect than what we started with and would put most of our energy into fixing what was easy to fix and identifying things that were more difficult to fix that involve more policy considerations before action is taken which is a council prerogative and not a council committee prerogative so we we did a lot and we've given it to you to play around with its its clay in your hands you can change anything that we've recommended but this is our best thought on the topic are there any other comments from people at this time now that you've been doing this for two years on behalf of the town of Amherst thanks to both of you and to the rest of the committee as well for your work and we will continue our discussion on the sixth and hopefully not at this hour thank you thank you all right we're moving on to eight d the town manager goals this is the first reading um let me just mention that I don't think this group ever officially elected a chair I think I was the coordinator um which meant basically I kept the documents going um and then at one point um Kathy really took over and synthesized um what we had into a document I also want to say it does not particularly concern me that this is only the first reading even though we are now in the end of December or middle of December and that is because Mr Bachman has been part of many of our meetings and so everything that is in this document he's seen we've talked with him about we've talked about whether it's actionable whether it's measurable etc and so it's not like he's flying blind but we would like to have a conversation about it tonight there's no vote tonight it will come back on the second I mean on the sixth of at 2020 and with that Kathy I asked Kathy actually to manage this conversation do you have other comments you want to make um no I just you all have seen the draft and I just want to say a little bit of uh to add to what Lynn said about our thinking as we went into this um we wanted to think about the end point when we're doing an evaluation on how did we do and tried although we didn't succeed in making this a lot shorter um conceptually what we had in mind is around large bold or main headers would be where we would do come some kind of rating great job got half the way there you know and then some of the others could be it happened or it didn't happen you know just a much more simple so for example on roman numeral one of strong physical management ensuring that this happens a we would be rating we wouldn't necessarily be rating every item underneath it it would be more a guideline on how many of these things happened so do we think this was an over the top job so the at the end we would be more able to have a general sense of how we thought things went then the other um pieces just of note here are we elevated climate action to its own topic um so in big bold and you know we we mentioned the words climate action more than once and there was actually some discussion of mentioning it three or four times but it's it's there as as an overarching way of thinking about when we make the next purchase when we uh worry about a new building when we you know name whatever the one we have it have it be in people's minds that we we want to pay attention to this um so that's why it went to the higher level of rather than just embedding it in when you think about the budget when you think about this it was more so we we elevated that to its own topic although it permeates everything then on long-term planning as well as the beginning we tried to identify things that people have raised as concerns that we want to at least hear report back so on the first so let me not quite jump around on the first on financial and sustainable we want to be taking a hard look at are there opportunities to get more efficient more cooperative ways of working so that we can lower our operating costs but are there areas for example fire and emt which we should really be looking at are we staffed adequately and so we've we've raised it to the level of we want to have a look at that and come back to us with uh yes no what so we tried to pick up on things we've been hearing all year round and make it something that uh people wanted focus on so in long-term planning similarly I I mentioned earlier tonight on we've authorized the purchase of hickory ridge let's not delay forever the plan on what we're going to do with it you know be thinking about it so we put some pieces in long term that not necessarily it has been done in the next year but we've at least started to focus on it and we get a report back um on personnel management um you can see what's here the expanding community engagement we and I noticed our letter numbering fell off here Lynn so it should start with an ABC we can fix that underneath that but in each of these we tried to say it's it's community engagement and let's talk about how well we're doing what else we've done to bring the community in what's our relationship with the higher education institutions we tried to group things so that they went together so we used a lot of what had been in last year's evaluation and just move things into categories so they're not necessarily in the same place and uh we put the relationship to the town council last but not least because we think we're off to a really good start but the most important thing in our minds is that getting their town running well thinking about the future was what our aspirational goals are and we want the town manager and we then we want us we we want the way he's working with us to work well to make all of the above so I I think I'll just stop there but to give you a sense of that was we're thinking when we hit July and August and we're looking at these that we can come back to the high level and say how well did we do on these did was it a good start did we get a lot of the way and we can have our checklist of these things happened or didn't and tried to make them actionable as Lynn said you know would we know whether it happened or not so some things where we thought we we like the idea but we have no idea of you know our people happy campers everywhere is teamwork working well so we tried to get things that we could say we've got some baseline we have some way of knowing about it and and focused on those and I'll stop there okay comments yes Evan so thank you for this document I think that in many ways the way we organize things in this document is signaling to the town manager what we think his priority should be and in that way I think it's great that we pulled climate action out as something signal to the town manager that we want to make sure you're using a lens of climate action but I think there are other things that probably should also be singled out and one of the things that threw me in this is in all of these bullets and everything there is economic development appears in 3f in one little line that just says economic development and to me all of the things we want to do around climate action all of the things we want to have within strong fiscal management require some level of economic development and so to have just one little thing on it that just vaguely says identify strategies that build on this report is insufficient and so I would I I would like to see economic development actually be its own category and I'd like to see some actual objectives under that that pair with that I think some of these things could be moved there but I think that you know the words business commercial growth appear nowhere in this document and I think they're all really important for us to achieve what we want and and certainly the council didn't do much with economic development in its first year it did a whole lot on climate it did a decent amount on housing it did nothing on economic development it was my hope that we could try to emphasize that in the year ahead okay other comments Andy so I guess first thing I'm gonna say is thank you to the committee because I think it is really a good piece of work and obviously a monumental effort the one thing that concerns me always this goes back to my select board experience too is that we create a list of expectations that become so long that it's really impossible for anybody to imagine how anybody could do it now of course our town manager works with the large staff and not all of it is done by the town manager some of it is delegated and it's a question of making sure that somebody's following up on it but there always was it struck me and I think I probably said it a few times in select board over the years that we have to be careful we don't get a walk on water in there because you can really put anything in having said that there were several things that I thought about that I was curious why the committee didn't consider or maybe they didn't consider them and so it's sort of backwards from what I just said and my suggestion would be that since this is first reading that we set up a mechanism where we can send back to the committee what those are as opposed to trying to list them tonight because the answer may come back we thought about it and it was really stupid or thank you for your comment we think it's really stupid but at least it gives us a place to go without prolonging this meeting another half an hour or more I think that's a very approachable idea I think the challenge for the goals committee ad hoc committee is going to be meeting between now and the six but we'll do everything we can are there other comments that people want to make at this point or just wait and ask for solicitation yes Alyssa so I know that when you look at something for a really long time things don't always still scan the way you intend to and so since this is based on previous work it is not made up out of full cloth I'm concerned because I think something got lost in translation under item 1 b 2 conduct strategic departmental reviews as needed focus on staffing and systems this just sounds like generic business school 1981 or something I I'm not sure what you meant by that and so I would just ask you to go back and look in your notes and see what it is that you were trying to get across there because he could very easily say we didn't need any strategic departmental reviews and I always focus on staffing and systems so some of these are really concise and easy for us to figure out how we're going to use them in the evaluation instrument but maybe some of the others just slipped a little and so maybe take try and take another look thinking about what that instrument's going to look like at the end because it's not going to look like that Google form again because that was a disaster so but some kind of form where and be thinking about do you want people to rate just a and b or do you want them to rate one two three four five six or you know so but overall aside from missing the economic development thing and that one just jumped out at me as like I don't know where that came from I appreciate the trying to be more concise okay additional comments Evan just is there a particular reason why this has to be adopted on the 6th as opposed to the second no it's just that we're already halfway through the year other than that you know it's like hello we can I mean we'll do what we can and if we can't then it waits till the 27th and then we're five seven twelfths through the year yes Dorothy what I'd be interested in seeing from people is what do you think can be cut my concern besides trying to you know put together this document was to not be so micromanaging I just feel this is just on top of them like oh do this do that do this and I I think that's difficult and I think it'd be kind of hard to work under so I'm if you as any way to kind of get rid of some of the things I think would be good okay Mandy job so I did mine in a track changes document that I can forward to whoever's been facilitating documents but I did want to talk about to try and limit the amount of time I talk number three the long-term planning C and D was some of you know see the begin to develop a five-year plan I kind of want a five-year plan that's logical not just beginning to because beginning to means we might hit the end of this fiscal year and still not have that five-year plan that's logical for the capital investments and and D was also begin to develop a plan to improve downtown public infrastructure parks and spaces I read that and I said I thought we already had one in in sort of concept so I wasn't sure what would go on with that one in addition to what we already have with a Kendrick park and and a town North Common and there seem to be things already there but there was one I and then there were two others I wanted to mention in four B five the respond to health and safety concerns in a timely manner I just wasn't sure what that meant to meant in terms of improved customer services to residents and businesses so some explanation would be helpful on that one and then under five expand community engagement what would become a two it's now f2 report annually on community participation officers activities and recommendations so the charter section 3.3d little number six says that the community participation officers must regularly submit reports to the town manager and town council so I kind of see this one as setting forth something that's already required in the charter and and we're not doing that with any other required charter action so what is this one specifically but the charter says the cpo's do it not that the manager does it so is this something in addition to what the cpo's are doing is it not so I would ask you to look at that one and think more about that one with respect to what the charter actually requires okay and I trust that along with your track changes you also have comments thank you got it thank you okay are there any other questions at this point the people want to bring forward I'm sorry Pat I actually want to ask Paul what do you think of the document seriously not please Paul go ahead so um I was you know are there issues for yeah so I was grateful that the committee invited me to comment on it and we did a lot of the things that you've identified there were conversations in the committee about those items for me I wanted I thought it was important that the there are over 50 goals here it's a lot I thought the goal should be clear measure you know smart goals clear measurable and achievable some of the things that you're identifying I would not be able to commit in six months to be able to achieve them so I won't I would recommend or ask that the council not put those in or put in begin to type comments just looking at what else is on our plate for the next six months because that's the time frame that you're really going to be measuring I thought was important for these goals there's not be a document just for the town manager but it's really a document for the public typically you the council would set its goals and then those from your goals would flow my goals now we don't have time we didn't have time to do that so we're starting with this because there's a little more time urgency so by think this is going to be the document that's going to be out in the public so it should be communicating your values to the public so I think that that's having these big bold things they're highlighted I think they're also things that you should be able to say without a second thought you should be able to say what are the town manager's goals you'd be able to take them off you know the top three or four on top of your head you shouldn't have to look at a piece of paper to say here's what they are the public wants and I think wants to know what are your expectations of me and to be able to articulate that because if you can do it and I can do it and I can communicate that down in pretty straightforward language to the full staff that will be a powerful message throughout the organization so that's why I think having climate action called out is a special thing was an important thing because if that's the goal of the council that's going to be my goal and it will be the goal of the town staff as well as we move forward so I think the bottom line is they should be easy to understand and you should be able they should be pretty straightforward to know if it's been done or not that's really where you want to be in nine months when you're eight months whenever you start looking at the performance you say did he get it done or not and it should be obvious or you know within some shades of obvious so I think these are pretty solid I think you know obviously I would have things differently but it's really the council's document not mine thank you are there a yes just one more quick remark and again I'll try and look at this too in terms I think I mean we could probably all rewrite different sections and I'm sure it's fine it's fine I'm just thinking more about what the evaluation instrument's going to look like at the end in terms of us all having the same expectations we have a lot of conversation that'll be the exciting part yeah but I do just want to push back a little bit on something the town manager said which was that it's not up to us to have town council goals that's absolutely not true it's not been true in this town that was not true with the select board we have goals for the town manager because he is our one employee and we don't have executive authority to do basically anything so I can personally have a goal about economic development which is all really well and cool but unless I can convince all of you to tell the town manager to do something about it I can't do jack about economic development so it's not my goal it's our goal for him and that's why I really have talked about it the retreat before these goals are the important goals our own council goals that we might want to talk about some minor things that will help us function better awesome but these are the important ones and they are our goals for the community and he is our way of implementing those but we're not going to develop like a whole nother set of town council goals out of which these group these are our goals are there other comments all right then you'll be receiving an email I made the minor changes about the numbering and that's all I did not make comments on this but you'll be receiving an email and you will be asked not to respond to this group but to provide feedback just to me okay thank you all right it was Darcy was giving some suggestions about some pre pre pre items I might put on there okay given that um I said Darcy Darthy is doing it this time I'm sorry all right do you need a break at this point no just keep moving all right we are going to seven b which is if you need to okay we're going on to seven b which is the out oak is appointment process and I'm calling on Evan at this point to yes do we actually need a recess I'm not comfortable with starting this with anybody out of the room nope I'm not wait anybody else need to take a break we're taking a silent break all right it's g the 10 5h thing first reading f the rule is a procedure but the amendments to rule 10.5h regarding public comment first reading all right let's go with that George Evan so I'll start talking um so what we're going to start talking about I believe when Dorothy returns is the uh process adopted by Oka that Oka will be using to develop its recommendations to the town council regarding appointments to multiple member bodies appointed by the town council uh those of you who read uh the report will note that those uh that process now involves public interviews um those public interviews will of course be posted public meetings but there is an interest and I believe this is one of the areas where there is consensus within Oka that those public meetings should not include public comment we have real concerns about having public comment at interviews because the interviews will be the sole agenda item and so the only thing people would be able to comment on would be the interviews and we certainly don't want a situation where we have public commenters offering critiques or potentially disparaging comments about people who just interviewed um and so we we we are hoping to um prohibit public comment during those however the current language of rule 10.5h does not permit us to do that it just says committee meet I don't have in front of me but I believe it says committee meeting shall provide for a period of public comment um which means we don't necessarily have the option of not having public comment so Oka is seeking a rule change um to add the word regular in front of committee meetings to specify that regular committee meetings shall provide for a period of public comment what that allows us to do is to schedule the interviews as a special meeting and then we have the discretion as to whether or not we want to include public comment this is uh this language parallels the charter language as you'll note in the charter it says regular meetings of the town council shall provide for a period of public comment um that allows us to not have public comment at special meetings um and so this would just bring the language around public comment at committee meetings into conformity with the language of the charter around town council meetings and allow us to schedule interviews um without having to deal with public comment just just from a process thing I will say uh because of timing um Oka bringing this for the first reading today it has not been considered by GOL but it is on GOL's agenda for their meeting on on uh Wednesday and so with the hope that we could have uh GOL report a second reading and a vote at the January 6th meeting are there any questions um I just wondered if we should maybe refine the language more to say uh like a particular type of special meeting because do we want to exempt all special meetings from public comment um that seems overly broad I can see that I see the reason why we should do this but but to take public comment out of all special meetings might not be that might be in yeah if you write if you write it so that it says that public comment is required at all regular meetings that does not exclude it from special meetings it just doesn't require it at special meetings right the question is do we want to require it at special meetings except special meetings involving interviews or something like that okay yes Kathy I was going somewhat in that direction because we have had some meetings that have we've called as special meetings of the council that we've always we we assume we would do public comment so what I'm wondering is I understood I'm not disagreeing that it would be good to not have them can we do something either very surgical that you know during interviews we wouldn't take special comments or can we waive the special comment rule for these instances because we can waver a rule when we want to because it seems like it's being written too broadly um regular is an ad hoc meeting so my little percent for art we had public comment on it no no public ever came but we just routinely put it up put it as part of our agenda so I'm worried it's too broad if we just put the word regular Steve Steve yeah so I have a broader question so we don't know when the special meetings will be posted they might be posted the same that as a regular meeting so what prevents a person who wants to public comment about candidates to do it at a public comment period at a regular so in other words if the it's posted that there will be these interviews and the who these being interviewed is and people are gaming the system can't speak at the special meeting I'll speak at the meeting the regular meeting and try to influence I think the surgical approach and I'm sorry I've lost track of who said that that we should just say that we won't accept public comments on issues regarding the elections of our officers personnel and personal issues getting at my more surgical more surgical tug targeted here listen that's a super nice theory but it's illegal so good luck with that you can't control the content of public comment we've tried in the past we did not get taken to court for it and it made everybody's life much happier but there have been court cases done in the last couple of years so you can't have a thing that says you can't talk about candidates that that's just not a thing so the only way to prevent is not a public comment and let's remember that this idea of special and regular meetings is a totally made up thing by the Charter Commission and so if we call something reflecting first back to what Lynn said but if it's you know if it's a regular meeting and you're gonna have it if you call it a special meeting we don't call we don't call most things special meetings we try and regular doesn't just mean we publish the calendar six months ahead there's no rule that says what regular means that's just a concept we have so if we call if we say a special meeting doesn't require public comment then we know if we call the special meeting then we're safe from public comment that doesn't mean that we wouldn't want to have some special meeting sometime that for some reason we called it a special meeting but we were still going to have public comment I don't know why we'd call that meeting a special meeting but you know conceivably something could happen but regular doesn't have a real meaning in real life and neither does special so we're trying to make them mean these things in this case to track with what the Charter says about regular meetings it does not define what regular means but it talks about regular meanings when it comes to public comment can I suggest that it's unless there's any more comment that this now is going to go back to go well and they've been here hearing the comment today and see what you come back with yes okay we're going back to outreach this is under presentation in discussions there's no vote it's OKIS process for reviewing and recommending candidates for ZBA and planning board Evan thank you so as we all know part of focus charge is making recommendations on appointments to multiple member bodies appointed by the town council really that applies to just three bodies the planning board the ZBA and the non-voting resident members of the finance committee at current in less one of the people on ranked choice voting or participatory budgeting that was a council appointment resigns we're really just talking about three body so okas and part of okas charges is recommending those appointments and so okah has to figure out what is the process through our through which our committee comes to those recommendations to bring those recommendations to the full town council the appointment of course is by the council but the recommendation is by okah and so we needed to develop the process through which we come to that recommendation we developed the process last spring y'all probably remember that it was successful in that we got appointments to the planning board the ZBA and several other committees but it was also not without flaws and so okah has spent the past eight meetings I believe eight meetings discussing how to revise that process to respond to some of the critiques we heard from the council I'm not going to go into details about that process because you have I assume already read it we sent a preview of the process to the full town council on December 4th and asked for feedback several of you responded thank you to those of you who responded that feedback was very useful we had a meeting in which we discussed that feedback and then we adopted the process at our meeting on December 9th the process is in the report along with a very detailed discussion of the deliberations behind that process the responses to the feedback we received and so you know what I think we're looking for tonight is just to apprise you of what the process is and also to hear sort of any last-minute feedback as we move into the implementation phase of this process I do want to stress that the opinion of the majority of okah is that this is an internal okah process we worked very hard to make sure that everything within the process exists wholly within the realm of okah so there is nothing in the process that requires action by the town council there's nothing on the process that imposes any type of burden or restriction on the town council it is the process through which the committee develops its recommendation that it then brings to the council and so we even had removed sections of the of the process that were in there originally that sort of exceeded that scope and and touched on the actions of the town council to make sure that this was really a committee process and so we're not looking for a vote on this process it just in the way that we don't look for a vote on the internal workings of any of the committees of the council but we are interested in your feedback because we will be bringing to you at some point our recommendations for appointments and of course we want to make sure that you're confident in those recommendations and one of those part of that confidence relies on confidence in the process through which we came to those recommendations so i'd like to separate the feedback and conversation in the council to two things one is any comments about the general process the second one which will take up after we're done with the first is the issue that i know a couple councils have raised to me and that is is this exclusively an oko process or does the council need to vote on it so let's stick with the first one questions about the process kathy okay um it's a question comment concerns so in that category um uh if i'm reading correctly you're proposing to do a group interview of the entire group of applicants all at one time period so presumably let's assume all five oko people are there and there could be six applicants and they're all in the room number one i can understand that might be efficient in terms of councillor time but it is a very bizarre dynamic for applicants and i've been in my lifetime had to hire people or appoint people and people's styles vary so much that it um and we're we're talking about planning let me just focus on planning and zoning where you want there are going to be some people that are the thoughtful quieter people that you need them to give them a little bit of time to get their words out but they have so much to say if you can do that if they're side by side with someone who's glib and easy to present and that person said almost everything they were going to say they can say me too or ditto in a group thing which will be a very wet you wouldn't get any feeling of did that was that their idea if we give everyone the questions in advance and you're gonna put them all up there and ask the same questions on some level we could just send them the questionnaire had them write their paragraphs you know because there's no individualization at all going on there you know and a bit the way when we ran for council you know we got some good questionnaires and you could see what we thought and make some judgments so i think the notion of a group interview of a group is not basically not a good idea so that's number one because particularly it's this and i know there are some people that you have to say could you tell us a little bit more you just need to get them to open up they don't have a style that comes in chatting number two is that you're proposing that because it's one interview with everyone at the same time if someone can't make that date it just doesn't work they're gone they're not an applicant anymore so one of the criterias for applicants becomes you have to be available the day we're meeting which is a very bizarre criteria for someone for a planning or zoning board um suppose there's a death in the family or four months in advance i do think it's reasonable to ask any candidate can they meet at the time the committee's meeting you know will you generally be available Tuesday nights but to eliminate someone and that goes with the first that if you want to interview everyone at the same time you can't make an exception for one person and interview with them in a separate time so i don't think someone should be eliminated because they can't make your date my third concern is different um as i read it one person the chair would do every interview um i think styles vary tone varies body language varies and if you're going to have a group from opa i would rotate whoever's designated is the person to ask the questions because you actually learn from different people as they ask questions when i've been on interview teams with three or four of us we designated a lead for each of them and some people had a style that just brought more out of people and others didn't and i think you could if you're worried about five people having to do six interviews at six different times it's a lot of time you could say at least three oca people have to be there everyone is should be there for all of them but not everyone has to be there for all of them that would give you a way of rotating the chair so i'm i'm concerned with those three parts of the proposal i didn't mind it being a public interview i i liked this side solution that people came up with but i thought the group interview of a group uh was one of the more the bigger oddities i've seen for particularly for this kind of position where we're not picking someone who's just a show person who needs to perform on it's it's a thoughtful analytic kind of position that we'd be putting people in rather than respond i'm going to suggest that if others have comments they do that and then we collect response okay yes dorthy i find some of the things here a little bit schizophrenic the candidates are so delicate that their cafs cannot be made public although we're told that in north hampton they are public enlisted yet those same people will do well in a group interview um you know i'm an extrovert i can handle a group interview but we all know that a good committee has got people who are of different types and i can see some people saying i'm not going to do that i'm not going to sit there once they hear what it's like i also don't like the inability to do a follow-up question there's just no individuation um and if you happen to be the third person to be asked the same identical question and everybody else has said all the good stuff you're going to feel pretty left out so i i i just don't like the group interview and i think the cafs should be public additional comments on the process well point of order i just want to just to say that saying that something is schizophrenic is incredibly ableist and i realize that i just i don't think words like that should be used although i do understand to a certain point what you are trying to convey thank you thank you for your correction um are there additional comments on the process yes darcy um i uh i'm a member of oca as you all know uh i voted against disclosing the cafs only 48 hours before the interviews um because i believe we should make our application process totally transparent i i i when i when it became clear that we were going to have a public interview it i just kind of assumed that we were going to open up the the whole caf process and make it completely transparent um and i really do feel like we should do the same thing that northampton does instead of holding them until 48 hours before the interview allow them to be public go immediately on application be posted on the website like they are in northampton than anyone who wants to can go look see who's applied how many people have applied look at the cafs see what the qualifications are and make a determination about whether they want to apply you know they they can see from the pool whether they might be needed whether there's already people there that would have their same point of view so they don't feel like they are needed so maybe they won't apply but it definitely is a way for people to find out whether they should apply by having it available to the public immediately upon application so this is of course a problem that i've had all along and i um really hope that we can get to a point of finally doing that um i also think that we it doesn't matter that we have applicants that already have applied and they didn't check off the check off box because we could simply ask them directly and uh or we can provide them with forms that they can check off um so that does not seem to me to be a problem at all with this round of applications i had problems with a lot of other parts of the of the process but you saw that in the report so i'll just let you read about those steve yeah so i agree with everyone um but i so actually the thoughtful analytical part so the these are the zoning board and the the um planning board definitely requires the you know a range of personality types but these are also political positions so you also have to be able to operate in the you know the public realm you have to convince other people in an open meeting that you know that the position that you're advocating for is you know a worthy cause so so so that part of it's really important so i don't see a group interview any different or not that much different than the kinds of things that we went through i was trying to remember who sponsored the last debate of the counselors but in a sense that was a group interview we were all asked the same question we went right down the line and we answered in our own you know our particular styles and if we chose to defer to someone else or to repeat what somebody else had said that's fine but it was it was a form of group interview additional comments at me and andy as far as the group interview process my experience was back on the select board when there was a vacancy on an elected board it was a group interview with the select board and the remaining members of the board that had the vacancy and the process was virtually the same as what is being proposed here and it actually did work and i thought it had served a lot of good purposes because we did alternate who was getting the question first so that not everybody would have the benefit of going first you'd rotate the order we also took turns on so that everybody got an opportunity to ask a question but the i but the the whole feel of the group interview did not in my experience discourage anybody from applying for any of those positions and i thought that it enabled us to really contrast in one setting all of the people who is an efficient process which if we're going to be as counselors invited to observe the process to go to multiple meetings is probably going to discourage any of us from doing that so i based on my select board experience and having done those for numbers of different boards and committees where we were select electing a person i would support the basic concept additional comments shall we so i went in thinking that group interviews didn't make sense but as you'll by now probably know my default is to do research and i did find actually that there were benefits to doing group interviews where you get to see the dynamic of the people and how they are sort of you know vis-a-vis each other i understand there's not going to be a communication amongst the people but it still feels like you would be able to assess how they are so this seems to be a positive to that um and as far as introverts are concerned i think they're capable of answering in a group setting it's just that they may not if there was you know this seems like it's very structured if an introvert is asked a question in a group directly they will be able to answer it's just they may not if there's 100 people they may not raise their hand but i don't think it's going to be because i happen to be an introvert and i think it'll be fine um i still would like i don't know when we will get a response but i'm still not clear about the benefits of keeping our um stuff caps um private i'm still not i'm still on the fence about that and i'm not sure i've received enough information from oka convincing me that that's the best way to go okay in mind job so i just want to thank for actually soliciting advice from the counselors on a internal process i think that was very nice of you um i'll respond to shalini's question that also darcy brought up there are studies out there and and it's tangentially related that show that in a job application setting when you put requirements down men and if that requirement is must have this must have that men who don't have that are more likely to reply apply for that job but the women will read that and if they don't fit any of it they won't apply and so you get an applicant you know an applicant pool that has women who are overqualified and men who are underqualified so i i would worry that if you actually published caps we don't put out their qualifications per se but you could get someone that reads someone's calf that has already applied and said oh my gosh i don't have a shot at all and that person might actually be the person you want but they won't apply because they might see the qualifications and just assume that that's exactly what we're looking for and we might actually get less diverse applicants less um applicants from maybe tangentially related areas that we're actually looking to put on a finance committee a planning board or a zba and so i would worry that publishing them in advance of an interview or at while we're still actively accepting applications might actually harm our ability to get diverse candidates which is what our real goal is additional comments okay this has been comments on the process and actually it's also been on CAFs any other comments with regard to those okay and steve yeah so one thing i forgot to comment on is what if you can't make the group interview date so i wouldn't make it a fatal flaw if you can't make the interview in the same way that if you can't make the debate or whatever you're still a candidate but i would make maybe the interviews aren't mandatory maybe they're optional maybe there's a brain date you know if you simply can't make it sure all right bear with me because y'all y'all said some different things so i'm gonna start with the easiest one which is just a correction to one of kathy's comments so our language is okoh will ask the adopted interview questions of the group that was kept intentionally vague and so the committee could decide whether all of the committee members would alternate asking questions or whether just the chair would or maybe just one member would but it's not the chair i think i think that we wanted to keep it somewhat flexible and so it's not written anywhere in the policy of the chair is the one asking the questions it says okoh will ask the questions to keep it broad regarding the date you know that's certainly a tough one that we discussed where we came down on was the idea that it's not like we're at least under the current process we're not going to say all interviews are going to be held on january 25th and if you can't make january 25th you're out the idea would be that we would work with the applicants to find a date that works with all of them and you know i know in my experience being the person for ranked choice voting we were able to do that we interviewed everyone on on the same day it certainly takes some there's a logistical challenge there but the idea at least at current was never to just say here's the date and if you can't make it the idea would be to the date would come out of the availability of the people who applied whether or not we you know need whether or not you can still be in the pool if you don't do the interviews i think the question with that becomes that sort of an unfair advantage to either someone who didn't or did interview group interviews you know one thing i want to say about that is we had a very lengthy discussion about group versus individual and what we found was just in okka some people went oh my god a group interview that sounds awful i would never do that and some people said oh my god an individual interview where i'm sitting right there and the committee's here and the public there and i'm all by myself that sounds awful i would never do that and what we realized is that everyone is different and that there's no people-friendly solution that works for everyone as long as the interviews are public my preference would be individual interviews in private but we couldn't do that um and what where i i started with individual interviews being my preference and where i got to group interviews was the idea that they are public interviews and we want to make sure there's consistent experience of found candidates so what would make me feel uncomfortable is if someone came in and did their interview and there was an empty room and then all of a sudden six members of the public came in and the next person having to interview had to do it but there's members of the public behind them that that creates there's a different environment that seems unfair and so i think i ended up coming down um on the side of consistency more than anything um and and you know i think kathy noted that it was a very strange format but i think andy sort of got my response which is this isn't a new format this isn't something that we invented this is is is very heavily based on the process used to fill a vacancy and elected body and so this is something that the town is already used to because it's been done before um with regard to CAFS um i think that there is a much larger conversation to have around community activity forms i think that conversation should start in oak up but i think that's a conversation that should come to the full town council uh at some point in time um i am very rigid in my belief that we should not change our policy mid process i don't believe it's as simple as reaching out to the people who already submitted saying would you be okay with this being released publicly even though you submit it under the assumption that it wouldn't be um and then what do you do if someone says no are they now out of the pool if they don't want their calf released publicly or do we just keep theirs private the i think the simplest and cleanest solution is to maintain the policy and have a larger discussion about CAFS because i think one of the things we all realized from the last appointment process was that the CAFS aren't always all that useful and we should probably be having a bigger conversation about how to make CAFS useful and that's where that debate about whether their public or personal documents or personnel records logically falls not midway through a process when people have already submitted them under a different assumption uh the last thing i want to say because i think that i've addressed everything else was about releasing um sort of CAFS and numbers um and you know i think that there's there's reasons too but i think that a few people have hinted on some of the reasons not to release CAFS publicly release numbers or release names in advance um which is one of the goals one of my personal goals that i think is shared by many members of this council is to try to get people um involved in our government who haven't been before and i think that um releasing names releasing CAFS i think that can actually diminish those prospects and i think it actually um benefits people who have confidence um because they've been involved in these things before and i and i i shared a story with okah that i actually want to share uh with the full council which was when i was deciding whether or not to run for office i was someone who had no experience previously in town government um i thought maybe i had something contribute and i and i debated for a while and i went to see who had pulled papers and i and at first i saw the name steve schreiber on there and i said well i don't know who steve schreiber is so i looked him up and i go oh he's the chair of the planning board okay so he he's been in this community he has some authority and i saw the name neils lecor on there and so i looked up neils lecor's name and i because i didn't know him either because i don't know any people and i looked at neil lecor's name i went oh well he's he's been involved with the town he's at umath and i thought i can't win this race these are people with deep ties in the community they have experience in our local government there's no way that i would win the race over these people and i decided not to run and then i told my roommate and he said that's stupid i won't be friends with you anymore if you don't at least try and so i did it but i came very close to not running because i was intimidated by the names and the qualifications of the other people in the race and i think that you we have to think about if you release numbers if you release cafs if you release names in advance that that becomes a possibility and so the opposite of what dorothy said uh or darcy um about dorothy said it in a comment darcy said it tonight they both said it they both said it which is the possibility that someone might see people and say oh i have something to contribute the opposite is also true and to me if we're trying to break down barriers to entry we want to make sure that we're not accidentally erecting them all right thank you so there is a second part of this conversation and that is the issue of whether or not people believe that oka as a standing committee of the council has the right to develop an adoptive procedure that does not come to the council comments kathy um i see this as very different than just an internal process um i think it is uh we made a decision to delegate the interviews um but getting to a comfort level of the process i think we should be willing to vote on it and then we can be held accountable and we're responsible for it so it really makes us do it so i i would like you to come back with whatever revisions you're comfortable with and i went back to think what did we do in april when we had that incredibly long meeting and the plea at that point was because the process of figuring out a way to do an interview had taken so long and we were at april first and we needed a planning board and zoning said let us just try this don't bring this back to a vote right now let's see how this works because if you want us to change it and come back and get a vote we'll never be able to do these interviews so we said let's try it and it's being revised now because it was tried we gave you comments so i i think i don't see it why it's different than our rules or procedure by how we conduct things at a meeting um because this is us choosing particularly these two boards these are regulatory boards and we should be really really comfortable with the process um i think we're pretty close to saying go ahead with it but i i don't see it as purely an internal process and just go ahead because if i felt that someone didn't get interviewed or were excluded might worry about that it's a fatal flaw you didn't make the interview and i found out someone was ready they just couldn't do that date i would feel we hadn't been fair and i'm i'm responsible for not being fair then because i said okay to that process so i think we should get a comfort level with the process and the only way i see it is it comes back and we vote on it um we we were pretty unanimous on almost every rule of procedure there wasn't a lot of dissension but to be stepping away from something as important as our planning and zoning board way we work with the people who might want to serve what is a really difficult job um it's a volunteer physician but it's a lot of time thought and energy so that's my i think this is a policy not just a nice one off internal process that's similar to the finance committee hearing first on kendrick park we write minutes we bring it back to you it's not like we're doing anything other than listening to people we're not doing an interview process and screening people out so i i feel it's different pat i feel um that the what oka did originally was come to the council's sherrod's process solicit feedback um and there were several times and repetitions of that um so i feel like they're doing the same thing now which i respect they're saying this is what we've been working on these are the changes that we're making so i do think it's an internal process for them and i appreciate they're coming to solicit my opinion but i think that they need to determine what the final process is dorothy um we had you did mean me i said dorothy yeah okay no there was something that came before where somebody announced and it may have been elissa committees don't make decisions of this type the council makes these decisions but i can't remember what that issue was but i can tell you that as a council member people have talked to me about appointments they've talked to me about the rules they've talked to me about the process they've talked to me about public cafs they've talked to me about this almost as much as they've talked to me about sidewalks so i think it's a big issue and i do think that if the council should vote on the process now i if i were going to make a bet as to whether the committee's rules would pass i would assume that they they very well likely would but they would have been then put in place with the vote of the council so that when people ask about why did you do this or do that you say we had a vote and that's what it was decided garcy i think the the issue that you're talking about dorothy came up right after we considered the former oca process and that's when we came up with we formulated the rule 10.1 which says that we no committee will will take an action that will bind the council and i assumed that that rule meant applied to this type of situation so that when oca came back with a new process that would apply that we would that would need a recommendation i don't really understand why oca wants this to be an internal process um i i absolutely believe that it's a council policy it goes to council our our democracy our inclusiveness our transparency as a whole council and and um evan elicited input from the full council regarding the proposed process why would the whole council need to give input if it's an internal process um we also um one of our one of our members suggested that this policy once approved and adopted or whatever become an appendix to our rules well that means it's a town council policy um it's there's just no doubt in my mind that this is important enough to be a town council policy um and just because a chair of a committee decides something and states it emphatically does not make it so thus i i really hope that we're going to be able to send this back to oca with some proposed amendments or ideas that we've given to the committee um and request that they bring it back to us as a recommendation to the council so that we can have a full council vote on it are there additional comments mary chow so i agree with what pat said that this is an internal process it does not need the council's vote we created oca to make recommendations on who to appoint to these bodies not on how they make those recommendations i actually do liken this to some of the finance committee processes that we have not voted on as a council for example the finance committee reviews the entire budget the council has not decided how it makes that recommendation to us who it talks to when it talks to those those people whoever they might be the council gets a recommendation from the finance committee that says we recommend you pass or not pass the budget we don't get the process that says when we review the budget here's the 17 or 23 different things we're going to do and please tell me that that's an okay thing for this committee to do we didn't get to weigh in on that and i don't think we should that's what we assigned the finance committee to do and decide how best they can review that budget to make the recommendation we told them we want them to make we assigned oca to figure out how best they can come to figuring out who to recommend to appoint to planning board and zba and that's what we have committees for to figure out how to do those reviews to save this whole council time so i believe they've done their job to try and make this a completely internal process that will comply with their charge to bring us recommendations on who to appoint and that that's where i would leave it i appreciate that they did come to us and say what do you think about this i don't think they had to it was nice that they did though andy i just want to point out that the committee charge indicates under appointments make recommendations to the town council regarding all appointments by the town council i think that if there's dissatisfaction with this the then it ought to go back to gol which is reviewing the committee charges but we have a committee charge and i think that the committee the oca committee has been acting in consistent way with the charge are there any other comments on this issue shall we so i'm brain dead at this point and i can't make up but i just feel like i need to say something about this issue i feel we're a little divided here and rather than closing down on listening to each other i think we need to kind of it feels like to me also that i'm not totally i'm hearing what mandi joe is saying about this i sort of get it what you're saying but somehow this process of appointing planning board seems really important and critical versus some of the other things and and i'm not able to yet pinpoint what the difference is because what you're seeing sounds really logical well done and i can't i can't seem to come out with a counter argument is but it still is not satisfying me somehow this feels like a very important decision and at this point i'm not able to figure out what but i'm not able to accept that argument either elissa just as every literally everything we've talked about tonight was covered very well in the report that evan wrote for on our behalf thank you very much heaven um one of the other things that's mentioned in there is that while indeed these are very important appointments to the town council and the charter makes it clear that these are our appointments they didn't just put it to the president for example they didn't just put it to one person i would like to remind everyone that while we do have control as a town council over these appointments there are very many other very powerful bodies in this town that are appointed entirely by the town manager who we have no idea who applied for those positions and he gives us a small amount of information on those people and they make incredibly important decisions that are no less important than what the zba or the planning board does and so i think we do have to consider the larger context as well in terms of what we want people to be attracted to do for us because we want them to come to us to come to planning board and zba not just go to a very private process that the town manager has okay any other comments at this time chaneline is this oh it seems like it's a policy though it's not like an internal process it's like i mean like we're putting it in a rules of procedure and it seems they're not it's not see like how are we going to decide at this point it is not part of our rules of procedure okay darsie i think i think this particular uh process is a policy and that we i we all have an interest in it that how this turns out is important to all of us and to all of our constituents we are answerable to all of our constituents about how this turns out and these issues are especially important to amherst residents so i mean the fact that we solicited our input we are oka is inviting the full council to attend the interviews doesn't that tell you that this is a policy of the council ever no simply first of all i am taken aback by the suggestion that because i solicited feedback from my colleagues that all of a sudden you're morphing that into meaning this is a policy of the town council he a policy of the town council a rule of the town council is something that is enacted by the town council that is acted upon by the town council the appointment itself is acted upon by the town council the recommendation is holy oka nothing in this policy requires any action of the town council nothing of this policy goes beyond the scope of the operations of oka we it's all leading the end point of this process is a recommendation that's sent to the town council now yes planning board and zba is important as made a joseph so is the budget right so i know that crc has been going through the master plan i'm interested in that too darcy and i know my constituents are interested in the master plan that doesn't make that the process that crc is using to come up with suggested suggestions on updates to the master plan should be subject to town council review their recommendation is what we're going to vote on and so i don't want us to distort this into seeming like it's something everything that happens within that process happens within oka every single step every action happens within oka so there's no way you can call it a policy of the town council if no one who is not an oka has any contribution to it and so you know i think that we have to be we have to be sure that we're respecting the operations of our committees and i think that trying to vote on this is doing the opposite is there any other comment at this time comment so it's going to be short there are a couple of critical things for me that i really appreciate in the policy one that i would if i wish to attend the interviews i can do that with limits and that's okay it is also important to me and has been since we first started this whole schmuggie is that i be able to see who has applied and there is you know the select board got all the caps they looked at it whether they worked as really giving information or not i want that information i also appreciated when we got a report from paul about the caps when he makes appointments so there are things i need to know but i do not need to approve this as a policy because it is not a policy and if it becomes one then i i need to see that there we create a policy about how finance works because i don't always agree with their decisions and so therefore i want a policy or i at least want them to have the respect to come to the council and share how or why they make their recommendations and we've never asked that and i don't think it's necessary that's enough any other comment at this time okay uh then we're going to move on to eight e this is the draft council budget guidelines mr steinberg it's getting late at night and uh so i've been trying to be as brief as i can i don't think that we're going to get this done tonight and i um regret that in some ways but i'm okay with it too i regret it because as with the um count the the town manager goals um we've got a budget process that's underway and we're giving guidelines after the budget process is already commenced but on the other hand um because uh mr bachmann's here he's seen the draft of the document he knows what's in it there's no surprises he's assured me that uh the two key people who are named as getting copies of it mr morris and miss sherry have seen copies of uh are aware of the the key points that relate to the budgets that they're developing if we don't vote on it tonight it's okay um this is something that the way it was phrased um at the um financial indicator meeting that the finance committee would recommend a set of guidelines so that a draft could arise from someplace but as it was a select board guideline um in part in the past that it'd be a council guideline and so that's why it's labeled so prominently draft is because it is just that what we did was we tried to take the select board and finance committee guidelines in the past and the select board always was very careful to try and make its guidelines consistent with the town manager goals um and uh i was pleased to see that we came out the same direction this time anyway without having the benefit of having seen the proposed goals in advance um but then i think we probably were working from the same source documents and two different committees at the same time um the part of it that is um sort of the financial policy piece um was a little bit in both sets of guidelines and you've been given copies of both and uh what we were trying to do was to make sure that we covered the key financial policies and um but a lot of it as in the past was really adopted out of the recommendations that came out of what's now called the financial indicators meeting because um that it's really the the source of the financial piece that goes into the actual budget that's being developed and um the role of the council in the end will be as it develops guidelines to say yes we think those numbers made the most sense the budget piece that was in the financial indicators report so um i think i'm gonna pretty much leave it at that because uh if i go into more detail it's really getting into the minutiae of all aspects of it and i think it's better to come up with responding to questions as far as uh answering something that uh responding to something that haven't said many hours ago um and that is uh why did we put into the agenda the ability to um waive the second reading and proceed in one vote um it was mostly that if there was absolutely no discussion and we got to it at a reasonable hour um that it gave the ability to do that it didn't mean that the motion had to be made to do it but if you don't put it on the agenda you can't even consider the motion so um there's no uh it was it was a plan to make a judgment call at the time and uh see what kind of discussion comes forward so thank you so there's two options at this point one is we ask the council if they have brief comments on this the other option is i send it out and ask you to send your individual comments to andy and he come back with any changes at our meeting on the sixth i do need to note that the finance committee has only one meeting scheduled in between the two meetings and it's tomorrow except that it's going to start snowing at four o'clock this morning that's by two of my three weather sources um yeah we're going to be out by four i i promise you all right are there any council comments on this i have a comment it's a great document and thank you andy i second that comment is there anything else yes alissa i was going to say that despite having great sympathy for not suspending a rule over and over again i was actually going to be willing to vote for this tonight because i thought it was close enough to exactly the kinds of things we've been talking about and based on past practice so i'm good with it i'm not sure how much more refining is really going to make a difference in how useful it is and evans over here chomping at the bit because he doesn't want us to suspend rule 8.4 any other comments yeah i just do want to add actually one thing and that is if you're going to look at anything i would look in the bottom of page five and the top of page six because that's where we put in that if sort of the the suggestions of things to consider if additional funds are available to do that and that is an important piece and you know i think that it left the finance committee on that one without having the prior guidance of previous documents but to use our knowledge of issues that have arisen before this group and to make a good faith attempt to start but that's one section that i would want to make sure that people don't look like looking at are there any comments on that section elissa please i think that we can go ahead and vote for this because if we come back six months a month from now and the finance committee says you know what we totally should have said something else so we fix it right so we add to it it's fine and so would you like to make a motion do i have to move to you to make a motion to suspend rule 8.4 try not to throw anything at me so moved is there a second second all those in favor is there any further discussion evan so my notes for this are all yes i support this good job and so given and given the fact that all the comments would be yeah looks good and there's only one meeting before the next meeting and it's tomorrow and i want to go to bed i will actually support this motion all right all those in favor of suspending rule 8.4 raise your hand and say aye opposed abstain all right then we move on to adopt the draft council budget guidelines as presented in the document entitled f y 21 council budget guidelines draft is there a motion it could could we make that motion but take out the word draft and uh just simplify it a little that just says it's that document we're we're accepting the finance committee's policy guidelines so it would read to adopt the council budget guidelines as presented in the document entitled f y 21 council budget guidelines we're too tired to fix it at this point uh i'm just i see that this agenda item was added in late no it was because it was missed it wasn't meant to be added late it was posted but it it got in it there was because people kept sending things in early and we kept wanting to make sure people got stuff as early as possible this was in that group but then it didn't get posted somehow and i'm sorry about that right this is the first i know i copied a previous agenda so i didn't know this was on the agenda is there any further conversation questions okay the motion is to is to adopt the council budget guidelines as presented in the document entitled f y 21 council budget guidelines as amended is there a second any further discussion all those in favor raise your hand and say i i opposed abstain okay all right uh the liaisons amendments to rules procedure this is the second reading this is rules are procedure 10.1 we previously read this it's with regard to liaisons are there any is there any further discussion george um you have this actually has been um word smith the bit since you last saw it um in response to comments made at a meeting and now seems very very long time ago um and so hopefully everyone's had a chance to look at it it has the track changes in there um very briefly um comments that i made in my geo report at that meeting um were put into the first paragraph to further clarify the function and purpose of a liaison and a couple of minor changes f we added the comment and the phrase and or not to speak on behalf of the council that was i think in response to something and he had brought up um so there's some changes that you see in front of you um otherwise it's ready for prime time any questions dorsi i just want to say that this sounds much friendlier okay thank you all right um so the motion is to rescind the current rules of rule of procedure 10.8 counselors as non-voting liaisons and replace it with revised rule 10.8 as presented by gol in the document entitled rop 10.9 liaisons ryan revisions 11 19 2019 as amended at a meeting at meeting is there a motion i'll move that is there a second i will second can i just say next time we'll have a better wording i realized last night that we hadn't gotten the right version to you guys and so i just cut and paste it and that's what i labeled it at a meeting all right all those in favor raise your hand and say aye opposed abstain i know when to bring things to this group it's at 11 45 at night all right approval of minutes they're we're going to do these as two different minutes the first one is to amend minutes we've already approved and i am personally making this request and we have gone back and looked at the tape because in the tape we real we did say that president greasmer stated that per charter section 5.2 the town manager shall call a meeting of the budget coordinating group which shall consist of the town manager represented as the town council school committee regional school committee library board of trustees this meeting will be considered a meeting of the whole of the budget coordinating committee and that i stated that in an attempt to make sure that that satisfied the requirement of the charter that they have that meeting so the motion is to amend the minutes of november 7th 2019 to include that statement so moved is there a second okay is there further discussion okay then all those in favor please raise your hand and indicate your approval i opposed abstain okay and then we have two other sets of minutes november 18th we do have two other sets of minutes and december 4th i'm sorry are there any questions on either of those minutes okay to approve the minutes of the november 18th 2019 regular town council meeting and the december 4th 2019 special council meeting as presented is there a motion i so move is there second all those in favor raise your hand and say i i opposed abstain so it's nine in favor none against and four abstentions okay there are no appointments on committee reports audit nothing right pat audit the audit committee will be meeting at the end of january to work on an rfp thanks and sonia aldridge will be part of that meeting bylaw review committee already done committee resource community release and remind we need to dissolve that committee at our next meeting community resources committee i will just give a very quick verbal report which is we'll have a written report for the next meeting we are working on presenting a process to you as directed in the referral for the master plan review process that hopefully will come in front of you on january 6th we are also working on recommending back on the downtown parking working group priority recommendations that may be as early as the 6th but i'm guessing that's more likely the 27th and then we're going to be discussing some zoning process and hopefully some transportation things i will be at the request of the planning board presenting the draft process on wednesday of this week at their meeting around eight o'clock p.m i think they said is when they might get to me and so you guys all know when if the committee votes on wednesday morning i will try to get that memo out to you if it has been voted on before i go to the planning board meeting in the evening because they will have requested they have requested if we do vote in the morning a copy of the final memo that's coming to the council and so i feel like it should come to the council before it's handed to the planning board so i will try to make that happen so that's it for now written report next time okay town manager and council goals we've already done our work today finance committee andy anything else okay george anything on gol just draw the attention of the council to that the fact committee is currently considering it's currently reviewing town council committee structure and in your packet is a memorandum from the chair describes the goals that we are using to guide this review and gives you a little bit of a glimpse of what we're considering this is obviously just work in progress but our goal is to have a report to you for the next meeting with suggestions as to how we think the council committee structure might be refashioned to achieve the goals that are stated here in the memorandum and any comments thoughts or suggestions you might have you can send to me and i would incorporate them in our discussion or you're welcome to come on Wednesday at uh no i'm seeing it so much i won't you are certainly welcome to come on Wednesday um at 10 30 so is glm also looking at the issue of public way safety parking it is it's 10 to midnight but i could be happily talk about that um no no we never talk about parking after 11 o'clock never i all i did was ask if you were thank you that's all i want to know ok so real quick you might remember a long time ago you uh referred liaisons to us yes um that we kept putting on the back burner to get through this process now that that process has been adopted okah is meeting uh sort of at an off-cycle meeting this friday at 11 a.m and we are finally going to dig into liaisons so expect uh some report on liaisons from us at the january 6th meeting okay is that a special meeting it's always special percent for art percent for art kathy uh very quickly we did get to the point we reached full consensus unanimous on a revised version of the percent for art um and uh report on the major changes we made it has gone through lin to be sent out again to committees so the two committees that'll be reviewing that revision rc rc and finance and it's on the finance agenda for tomorrow so it's also posted if you original bylaw revised bylaw rationale for the changes okay paul what two words would you like to say i've got a number of things but i'm going to say them if you have more questions you can ask me state of the town first crack um open suggestions on how to do it better capital projects for listening sessions um went very well curious um follow up on that um four towns meeting was held uh no action was taken at the four towns meeting there's a smart growth workshop on thursday at 645 in this room um january 18th mlk breakfast please sign up for that and uh the school committee's meeting tomorrow night is canceled because there's no school they had already thought this through so they their meeting is now scheduled for wednesday at um 6 p.m at the high school library this is where they're gonna talk about universe uh expanding early childhood education and on the msba i have a number of things but i think uh i was going the school superintendent is going to make a presentation to the school committee now on wednesday um i think rather than i don't want to step on his toes because it's really a school project and so i'll make a similar presentation after after he makes his presentation thank you um just very quickly uh thank you for all for attending the uh listening sessions everyone came to at least once several people came to three or four of them the uh capital investment listening sessions additional comments are open until december 20th those comments will then be blended in to the comments that were received during the listening sessions by the consultants and that report will be available um and two other things at this point in time and and until further notice all standing and ad hoc committee appointments continue as they presently stand uh once we have reviewed the committee charges and voted on changes and voted on president and vice president we'll see what happens the next thing is that house 28 20 8 10 uh did was brought to our attention and it is my understanding that um a counselor has stepped forward and suggests said that they would be willing to sponsor a resolution okay is there any other question of me at this point yes the that's coming who is the counselor it's pat oh good you can do it together whatever you want to do so at a future meeting it would be a future meeting um i do think that um there is a time pressure for this particular request i'm gonna leave that up to you all to figure out so people can send in you know you can click on the link in the letter that was sent out so that you can send individual individually as municipal officials um and this is a bill that's supported by uh you know it's a top priority of the mass power forward coalition which is a coalition of like 200 organizations so it's one of it's one of their top three priorities so definitely worth supporting as a municipal official steve is there any word on the retreat that we are holding date for now we're going to have to go back and end um poll again because we don't seem to be able to come up with a very good date but i'll check back i i will check tomorrow with athena and get back to you on so don't give updates yet okay and mandy joe may know more about her dates because one of those was that the other thing is uh the um people from 132 north hampton road the valley cdc has offered to come to one of our meetings and so i've invited them to come to our meeting on the 6th and give us an update since many people have been asking including the residents of the area are there any other future agenda items yes yes future agenda item following up on what darcy said when people tell us to write and sign letters individually as town counselors that is something that i think we need to talk about as a group as to what our policy is because in the past i'm so shocked um in the past uh the select board did not do that we were a different kind of body but we were elected officials and we said if the select board had an opinion on something then yes we would sign off on it but we didn't say i'm a select board member and i think this because then everybody thinks your select board thought that just as they will think your town council thinks that and so we probably need to figure out if there are lines in there someplace maybe it's a referral to a committee um okay any other future agenda items counselor comments yes i just have a question for the town manager um i just wondered if you could update us on um resident capital requests if some came in and what they were about um i think one came in uh and that would be going to jcpc i don't have the list for you though we'll get more information for you okay is there a motion to adjourn so is there a second all those in favor raise your hand and say aye