TranscriptSelect Board Meeting ~ November 12, 2024

order the select board meeting on November 12th at 6:30 p.m. Devin can you hear us check we're going to make sure we're live in and Living Color before I continue yep I just making sure you can hear us call the order yep and now it's Pledge of Allegiance Pledge of Allegiance America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all all righty we have a quorum meetings called the order at 6:30 everyone is in attendance before we even get into uh real quick amendment to agenda I just want to bring um the special town meeting to uh to fruition here and uh

get this done right away so um we are going to hold a special town meeting on November 19th at 6:45 and we need to make a motion to hold that meeting so we can put out the notice that's the cross is correct yeah um so I would accept a motion to uh state that town meeting start starts November 19th at 6:45 p.m. at the Eureka Center so moov and do I have a second second oh uh we'll give it to Joe

because I heard him first Perfect all right any discussion on the motion should we included the motion what the meeting is about yeah that's a good point um battery energy storage system warrant article for a special town meeting um and it is uh to

uh um consider putting a a moratorium on battery storage uh for six months so any other questions on the motion it'll be ran by the planning board uh no we will run that and then we choose a moderator to preside at the meeting uh and then we only have that's the first article the second article is just to uh open the discussion we'll open the discussion article two uh to see if the town will vote to adopt the main moderators manual rules of procedure if we vote Yes then we move to the uh moratorium uh and then we can go and vote on the uh moratorium and to enact it

article three says to elect a yeah is Chris Kristen's gonna be yeah yeah that's how she said to do the Articles I'm not sure exactly why we can get some clarification to establish a moratorium and then article four would be that the ordinance or is entitled moratorium ordinance battery energy storage system we V to enact

but not sure why yeah well I mean we have it separated yeah I'm not sure either it was prepared by Town Council and so my thought process was to just uh operate under their recommendations did they say anything to you Jerry about that he sent it to her like that she said okay she said it was fine cool well works for me we can just clarify with her yep when she gets here but I want to get this done before 6:45 tonight so we have the meet the 7day deadline so any other questions all right um all in favor any

opposition all right seeing none want enact it and Jessica can put the notice up right now do you just need the one copy sign three okay there there another one righty next we're going to open up the or do I have any more amendments the

into public comment which we're going to limit to 3 minutes per person and uh this is a time period for anyone who wants to uh give us any feedback on anything or any comments state your name and the street you live on and then you get your public comment and we'll mark it all down so de lar Royal Road there and my question is I have two concern forms in that are going on 90 days so this we don't do questions during the public comment period it's just it's just public comment well that that's what I'm commenting on okay is to let you know I have two concerns that are almost 90 days old with no response and I just need more information at some point how those work because if you're going to um file them in to the board and then not get any response what good are they

so I'm just waiting on that and then I'm also waiting on a cemetery response for the Durham soya Cemetery it hasn't been on the agenda since October 8th and I'm wondering when that would um be brought up and if I'm still here and not gone to Florida I'd like to attend okay well thank you for the public comment okay much appreciated thank you do we have any other public

into uh old business the only thing we have on Old business is um to uh uh vote on Jerry's um review and and compensation adjustment we we did uh we had an executive session last meeting where we discussed what we felt would be the appropriate compensation uh for Jerry in light of his um annual review and we conducted his annual review in public in uh in the executive session but any sort of uh changes to that compensation would uh have to be done in public a public uh session and so we're just going to have that uh vote on that this evening um based off of the Stellar review that Jerry received from from from all of us my recommendation would be to um adjust Jerry's salary to take

his um vehicle stien and roll it into his regular wage and then give him a 6.4% annual increase um for this year back dated to uh the August period where we uh were intending to originally do the review so we had to move it due to

uh scheduling issues does anyone want to uh make a motion so move all right do we have a second I'll second yep so do we have any um questions on that on the motion no question but a comment yeah I Jerry I just want to publicly say people that I've spoken to have really talked about what a great job you're doing uh you know you came in this was years ago now it seems like but you came in you started finding ways to save money um you're still working on finding ways to save money coming up with ideas getting grants doing things you know that likely will never come to fruition but give us talking points and ideas and discussions about things uh and um you

know I know we can't compete with some of the bigger towns and cities salary-wise um and uh as so I know there's always greener pastures out there U but I just want to say for me from what I've seen from our discussions um I think you're doing a great job and uh thank you thank you appreciate that yeah Josh stole my thunder there Jerry um going to kind of publicly say the same thing I think that one thing we've been impressed by is your initiative to go uh find Solutions like you know with the uh moving of our funds to you know generate 150% more interest this year that alone is is huge and finding new service providers to save us money and increase um user efficiency on some of the software for the town not only you know saves money and makes the job go smoother but also makes staff happier in that in that regard too which is just hugely impactful so I can speak for myself but I think the rest of

the board when I say we generally genuinely appreciate everything you've done for for for Durham and continue to do so we're happy to still to keep to keep you here so thank you so much does anybody else have any questions or comments all right seeing none I will take a vote on the motion all in favor any opposition seeing

business we've already move the signing of the special meeting warrant into uh above the new business line or old business line so we are need to discuss uh the town office generator Jerry yes so last meeting I gave you some quotes did you get them in your packet y yes okay so we have two quotes and this is if you're even ready to do it at this time but at least you have the information so Milton cat uh put in a quote to replace the generator for uh 59,000 250 and our electrical systems put in an estimate to replace the generator for

22,800 I don't know if you've had a chance to look at these Jerry could we just for the record summarize what the issue is with the generator over there just yeah yeah it's just it's old um you can't get parts for it it hasn't worked for a couple years um it went through the CIP process but didn't make the cut um a couple years ago um and since then we've probably lost power I don't know three or four times and they kind of dead in the water when it happens yeah especially last year with that long multi-day power outage so you know it's you know it's up

to you folks but I think it's important to have a generator that works at the town office um during business hours um electrical systems you just can't they're gone in that particular machine um it's been looked at it's been diagnosed can't can't get the parts MH so it really is going after uh a new one

okay and we went out to a bed we've called and this is this is what we've got I mean I'm sure you I know this from your line of work but you only need uh you know manufacturers only need to maintain replacement parts for 10 years and the generator is over 20 years old and so you know they're we it's the the fix off option isn't isn't an option anymore and so I think our only options are replace it or or go without so we've gotten a grant from MMA for three grand um it's their risk reduction Grant so we did get 3,000 that we can put towards us it's a reimbursement Grant so we'd have to you know you know fully pay for it up front and then they would reimburse us

refresh my memory where we're talking about having this come out of was it the buildings capital is that what you yes um and you have your sheet right with the fund balances in them so you have uh buildings Capital uh right now with $

comment or I just joke you as well there was a differential in both cost and then power consumption so they yeah yeah we talked about that last meeting about um The Mill and cat is a larger generator but uh would be more

than with the town town office needs so the smaller generator would meet the same would meet the the needs so with the milon cat it would be kind of overbuilt for the space which is an option we can we can discuss or something that's more purpose purpose built to cover the energy needs and uh any other

committed funds and where the potential to pay for these types of things what lines and the only other line that I'm looking at that I think would apply would be telecoms but I don't know I don't think Tel would apply of that fund is right no okay we don't have to talk about it no okay thank you at some point though can we get a like explanation of what telecoms has to be spent on telecoms was part of your like franchise fees sort of thing in the way you used to do it was you you would use that tool specific like your it yeah we don't do that anymore we still get those franchise fees but revenue is revenue it doesn't really much matter what pocket you put it in okay let's put a pin in this talk about yeah it's a time sorry different scope of conversation um well

does so before anyone makes a motion does anyone have a question on the specs of either one of these for Jerry or or how he got the information or or anything like um you know I had the same in my mind the same thing that I think is going through your mind Joe is when you see two different prices it's like oh why is this one so much lower and this one so much more expensive we talked about that a little bit so I think that that's um our discussion last week has saged my concerns on that and I would be comfortable with either one of these meeting our needs so that being oh yeah sorry I what's the maintenance schedule and plan it do do does electrical systems include any type of maintenance plan or warranty or anything like that in this number is that something that we can purchase separately to make sure that we're on a maintenance plan um I'd have to um has a free seven-year extended warranty electrical systems I'd have to

go down through this and um I think maintenance would have to be something that we are held responsible for much like the Gen the generator here in the the fire station so I think we need we would need to get it installed first and then handle our maintenance whether we schedule regular maintenance or sign a contract to have regular maintenance come out but I don't think that either one of these quotes install inst I think this is just the price for the the generator to install price and then they come with the you know manufacturer warranty cheap trip is the LA back yeah after these as well MH these and electrical system main did the one here and did the one at public works yeah and so with that being said um I take I move that we go with electrical systems of Main's uh generator to uh provide our needs for the town office I have a

second second sure all right discussion on the motion I I would if we could just include that the money would come out of the yeah that's the only the only way we can pay for it is out of the U Reserve funds and so I we guess we can clarify that here that's due to the fact that um we have Capital reserves now and that the uh town has allowed the S board to make expenditures out of those for for Capital needs like what this is right here and so this uh became an emerging issue after the last town meeting and since we've been losing power and stuff like that so and it'll all be obviously documented and then reflected in this year's uh update when we do our update on the capital reserves and and we expended all the Opera funds already uh those all yeah last week last week we we vote meeting we voted to expend the remaining arpa funds on um the doors at the indri center just wanted to make sure that was used

up yeah and um so any other discussion on the motion of purchasing a generator from electrical systems of Maine my only other comment is finding a grant to help offset the cost of it's really awesome so and when it's a generator that's $222,000 a grant covers over 10% of it that's pretty nice so when that gets reimbursed does it go back into the capital reserve we can you can direct it there we'll just go into Revenue at first but we can redirect it if you yeah which I think would be wise yeah all right any other questions on the motion all in favor any opposition all right seeing none um going to get this going right away Winner's coming okay I say that as I stoke the wood stove and I went without generator last winter and I think my wife might be making a similar proposal to the to the House's Capital get rebate H funds yeah

so batteries um all righty the next is just I put on here discussing the straw pole for adding law enforcement coverage um you know we had really good voter turnout and that was at the is the so we have a really good reflection you know I can't help but notice we had 2856 people vote on this which is pretty awesome uh we usually get 200 or less at a town meeting so it's really I feel like this is really getting the pulse of what people are thinking to me when we have 57% say no they don't want us to um pursue it any further I think that that gives up in my mind gives us our answer um you know I would be a little bit personally more concerned if we had received received a different message from the uh Sheriff but when the sheriff was here said I think that you are all not in a position where it's an immediate need it's something that's something to think about in the long term that in conjunction with um this

survey response saying not right now we don't want it I think that we can kind of button this up and say uh not to not to put any more time or effort at this time into pursuing pursuing that what what do you folks think he yeah I M message was clear I like receiving uh direct feedback and letting us know how to best spend our time so do we um if I can ask a question do we have some kind of reporting structure that tells the town I think this would be good news how many calls what are the response times at least so we're keeping up on it on that information at all is that something that we want to think about um so in the past uh in Chief's reports he has included the call volume in for for the town for the town and indicated to us if that is a increase or decrease from the same time the previous year and then has also um let us know the trend so for certain medical calls like he said you know we might have been

up 10% from last year which was up 5% from the year before and so Chief is keeping track of that and it's in his um his reports to us um so we could just call that out during during a meeting if you thought it was valuable for people to to hear it now the any sort of police calls that are responded to by the sheriff I think we'd have to get ask them to provide us with with that information quarterly but it's something we could definitely you know ask about or even if it was at the in the annual report or something that's a good idea keep people informed and will we file this stuff J do you think um like the results of this poll plus the paperwork and the me the whole the whole topic somewhere that we can get to later or is it just within the records of the select board no we can keep the records up yeah maybe just of that topic right yeah just have AB because I think that'd be really helpful because I know that when this

conversation came up some folks said oh this was talked about XYZ years ago and I'm pretty sure that this was what was offered people didn't want it then but it was kind of like a off the cuff off the cuff like no no they they offered us eight hours a day it's like the what was vocalized to me was something that they weren't offering now and so I think it's a good idea to have kind of that in there and helps us Trend to where our discussions are going it's um under the select board maybe special topics or something and then the data can be filed right in there yeah just a thought

be um I do think it would be valuable because we did show the stroll pole pa stroll stroll pole straw pole thank you it's been a long week and I had yesterday off so um it's what happens when you go hunting every single morning but that's my own fault um the straw pole results I think we should have we've already posted but I think what we can say is maybe in a news blast or something just a memo from us as a board and I can write something up to say we appreciate the public feedback and at this time we're going to stop any uh continued discussion to pursue Services I think it' just be a good idea to put that out so people know I mean we're going to talk about in tonight's meeting but this meeting was going to go on for another hour whether people are watching it or not so I think this is a really good opportunity to say we asked for public input because we wanted public input and we got it and now we're we're

going with you all we have data to drive our decision so um I can write a memo up just real brief um to send to Jerry and then uh we can get that maybe put in the news blast or on the town's social media page or or whatever um so I think it's just good communication yeah sure and probably an official response to the Sheriff's Office and officer MC yeah I think that would be that would be nice um we can let them know we're appreciate their time but at this point we're going to

off sh all righty any other question about the straw poll for adding law enforcement the back page of the agenda that's pretty good don't blow it keep going all right um discussion on the budget schedule did did you have anything you wanted here to add Jerry before I well no I'll you just go and then have

later um I'd like for us this is going to be a confus I shouldn't say confusing it's going to be a different budget this year because we're doing an 18 month budget and so numbers are just going to there's it's going to be there's not going to be a lot of comparing apples to Apple's budget line from last year to this year uh and so I would really like for us to um get a hand on that sooner than later and so um

Jerry and I had just briefly discussed looking at getting um a lot of our other issues or not issues a lot of our other tasks here buttoned up in December and so we can just focus on the budget budget after that and get early uh work early on it um did you have anything you want to add there Jerry ideally it would be nice to get the budget to the budget commit by February mhm first first week of February so we could do our due diligence the month of January that would be super um the department heads and myself have been working on the budget um we're pretty close you know to where we the budget we still got some fine-tuning to do M but we want to see where the actuals come in and those really won't um be in until the end of Jan the middle of January when we close the books so we'll actually be able to fine-tune it as we're working on it but we should get started on it sooner than that and enjoy the actuals because after

this you we won't have actuals to work with at all because we'll be putting together a budget in March M town meeting is going to be in June and we're still working on that budget before it pass so it's going to be a little different what time means in April H oh it will be new right once right once we once we get this budget complete and we start working on the next one it'll be like in the months of March and April to pass in June and we're still working on that same budget but either way we figured that you know they're already working on it if we can you know have you have something ready so when those actuals start coming in you can kind of just plug and play there we then we can have a quick turnaround in um mid January to get something in front of the uh the budget committee for February the beginning of February and give them time and we'll we can alert the um chair or the budget Committee of that as well

we're almost going to want to schedule a workshop because I'm going to have a bunch of questions for for the board to to weigh in on would you want ahead of your budget to us before January I'd like to have a maybe like a budget Workshop sometime at the end of December at the very latest the beginning of January rather than going very latest um why don't we uh so I'm assuming we're

not going to meet December 24th right um really no I got a I got a slate AR ride but you know um maybe we could look at doing that with um do you want to do that the first meeting of December jry or the second meeting I mean we could do we're going to need to talk about our December meeting schedule anyways right right um but if we did a December 3rd meeting and a December 17th meeting or a December 10th meeting December 17th meeting either way there that g i mean that gives you a a half week in December before the holiday week and then the half week I like the December 17th yeah meeting and you can keep your December 10th meeting at your regular scheduled meeting and then because it's the week for holiday season we could just say December 17th is just a budget work shop between the select board and the the the town manager and department heads and the department and department heads

short meeting but it's not it's not so either way and then that just sets you up for turn around in January and then if we can then be looking at the January um 28th meeting as our lock the budget in on our side cuz if you you can come back to us on the January 14th meeting we make those adjustments January 28th meeting budget you give it to us and the budgets then the select boards okay so January 14th is what do

you that would be when we get your first the first present first look at it y um because hopefully actuals will be be pretty pretty close by then yep I know like last year we always have like hey maybe adjust this maybe adjust that and then January 28th we can take

it and accept it as the final and then hand it off for the just so that I understand the timeline so select board January budget committee February finalized well first sorry sorry let me December 6 17th Workshop January 14th will be our first review of the the town manager uh recommendations and the department heads January 28th would be you know we'll probably have recommendations for the 14th January 28th will be our all right this is you know all things barring any un unforeseen circumstance January 28th we're adopting that as our budget and then giving it to the budget commit in February and then they'll send it back to us when they're done we get one more review of it that would be March that's that's how it's gone in the past March we got to get it posted and and then town meeting will still be April this year yes and the budget the budget that we're working on is an 18mon budget that

will cover from January 2025 to June 30th 30 days have September April June 30 June 30th 2026 okay thank you on the 17th is that at 6:30 can we do it earlier yeah yeah yeah do we want to do we want to have that chat right now cuz we I'm just looking at our um schedule and obviously we would normally be the 10th and the 24th so um the 17th we could do a budget we could do our meeting earlier if you'd like or if other people would like doesn't matter on the 17th it'll get dark at you know 2:15 in the afternoon anyway so like does 5:30 work for for folks make it work is that too early we could do six I just thought you want to go early 5:30

um can I get a motion to move the December 24th select board meeting to December 6 17th at 5:30 p.m so moved all right any do I have a second I'll second perfect any discussion all right all in favor all right see no opposition we've moved that meeting and that is going to be a budget Focus um so and by Workshop what I mean is is

an opportunity for the select board to work with Jerry and the department heads to ask them questions uh on their budget and make recommendations to to them so we will um like we'll have to figure out the framework of that before if it's just a workshop we might not even do a public comment it'll just be a workshop but uh if if there is if it's like a regular meeting where we do public comment that'll be before and then it there won't be questions from anyone else besides us to to you all so is um question yeah any how do the

budget needs come up for committees if there's anything that's a great question uh like the Z get into what we're doing what we just like the um like any any of the Town committees yeah they usually submit um a budget correct the only one that's really submitted a budget has been the uh historic district yeah and the Conservation Commission used to submit a small budget when they were for things like you know tools and and on um lumber for maintaining trails and stuff like that but that all kind of went by the wayside I think we should send each committee head some form or something that's and have them officially come back and say they don't need anything or they do anticipate yeah um I I could do that ahead um you know December 17th Jes it's already a month out we have to do it yeah um next week let's Cherry let's you and I work on a if I don't if you have any sort of like draft thing that you

send to the department heads about any special needs or anything like that they might have all right well I can just pull together something that we can send as a board to the Committees and just say you know if you have any budget needs please submit them before December 17th to the select board and we can bring those up a lot of those used to go to CIP uh beforehand right so we would have already had like th those committees submit anything through CIP which we not doing so those would probably just go just to you Jerry and then you roll them into whatever C it should go to Jerry not to us not to us I thought for the um oh yeah for the Committees it would go yes sorry puts as a budget it would go to Jerry yeah um so do you want to just pull together a very brief email that just says if you have budget needs or requests please submit them to yeah just to clarify what would they what would the committee's

requesting Capital instead of off I mean that's how we were doing it is through Capital right so CIP had their low we had our form that we'd send out to the Committees and if they had any Capital CH because really I mean they most of their expenses would be Capital if they going to do a project so you know I don't care what it is build a new Band Stand whatever historical district wants to paint a building whatever it is it would be a capital project that would go on through the Committees more than them needing office supplies or something like that you know so the capital group has a form that we they they had a form that we would make all the Departments even fill out um for their Capital expenditures for the year whether it be a truck or ambulance or whatever and then it would get ranked and then but even the historic district commission would would submit a a form for say the church at

the time so it would all be a capital driven request from those committees more than a like I say like a operating budget per se right it's not really an operating budget Heather I think um a the lines of what Jerry might be asking and what Debbie might be saying is that let's say a committee like the solid waste committee wants to do a public Outreach type of thing they may need money to be able to pull materials together to be able to do that type of stuff and that to me is not a capital expense so I don't think we should pigeon hole it there I think you should just maybe reach out and ask committees if they have any budgetary requirements and then you are the one who vets where what Lane they're going in yeah well that I was just going to say is I think that the nature of their budget request would dictate where it would go so if someone's like you know the Conservation Commission wants to

build a new bike rack at a park that's a different conversation than we need a budget for printing materials or or um you know just basic functions of the committee so I think that that's where people would give you their their needs wishes and wants and then you would determine where those would fall and then that comes to us and we make the determination there you know just look at the CIP form it would cover you in all inst it's is that something that works for you Jerry yeah and and I think that it doesn't need to be a big back and forth or anything like that just to hey submit your request for our consideration so

it's you know it's feels crazy that we're already at this part of the the year um but any other questions on the budget on here topics to discuss for upcoming select board meetings um oh cool yeah ISR only here for f on the agenda I think that we should do an amendment to the agenda so that she is she staying for anything else no because this feels like this could be a long discussion sure um let's move discussion SL training with the town attorney uh above the discussion of the budget schedule and I mean the topics for upcoming Sight board meeting so you don't have to watch us go through all that thanks for catching that Heather that work for for folks I didn't hear what you guys were talking U we're going to move our discussion SLT tring with the town attorney to before topic uh discussions for upcoming select board meetings to be respectful of our time on the back page moving no on the

agenda just here no okay did you say you take a motion sure so moved or you want me to say it make a motion i' like like to make a motion to move five f f ahead of 5e out of respect for the town attorney's time second any discussion on the motion all in favor any opposition seeing none all right perfect it's all

you now then Jared you want to kick this off a little bit with the the objectives here um I had asked Kristen if she come in and kind of do a little bit of training on the board I I know Debbie's new to the select board and it's always good to kind of get a a refresher on rules and responsibilities and relationships between your role my role boards and committees and and that sort of thing f um I think krist's going to do a little Fuller exercise with us so just so uh

I'm not sure how many of you have taken your phone you're going to get a condensed version of that right now today um so just to kind of get you up to speed it's always a good idea to get a refresher these sort things certainly to kind of get attorney perspective and

expertise on government well I think one thing too really they can we can all learn from is you know municipal government government in general municipal government is just so different than the private sector yes and the business and um I think it's easy for us all to kind of be like why does this take so long why does it have to go like this and there this is this is we're going to learn the why you know um and I think a lot of the why are associated with Lessons Learned for when people didn't follow the why so and it gives you an opportunity too to ask questions you know from a legal yeah

perfect okay yeah take it away hi everybody I hope we're we're less intimidating than your normal audience is right you know at a town meeting until you know you get through it um okay so first off um this was sort of designed to be really focused on form of

government interaction with um different town boards the manager staff things like that um and I'm trying to make this sort of Durham specific um I think this should be a compliment to the MMA Municipal Officers Training which I really encourage you all to do uh Jerry and I were looking at the schedule for that and it looks like the next one was the 19th right so there's already a select board meeting that night and then after that we didn't see any until the new year um so if you want to talk about

anything more generally um great just throw a question at me um but my agenda predominantly is let's talk about roles and responsibilities and then I'll finish up with just enough FAA training so you can sign your certificates and be done with that without having to go do something separate um okay so start off

with select board town meeting Town manager form of government which Durham is and that's a relatively new thing for you all which I had not realized until recently um so there can tend to be be some Growing Pains um or changing pains with that that um I think can make things a little bit more complicated in a town where you're used to the select board kind of doing everything um so it's good for the select board in the sense that you don't have to do everything because you have Jerry sometimes it can be frustrating um like Joe sort of alluded to of you know I just want to get my hands dirty and get something done but there are protocols and expectations that kind of make that difficult sometimes so um to start off with you know think of it as a legislative administrative executive kind of a system and you've got town meeting which is your legislative body

that the select board granted is the threshold about what goes to town meeting vote unless there are citizens petitions but you know the legislation is coming from town meeting and town meeting only that means everything that is the execution of a long-term contract

the appropriation of money um the full budget ordinances um pretty much everything under the sun start with the presumption that town meeting has the authority unless it's delegated to the select board or the town manager um I've recently had a case where a town board

was threatened with a lawsuit from a neighbor saying you you know we think we own this piece of property and the select board being afraid of a lawsuit um just signed a deed to release the property so they could avoid the lawsuit that was illegal because only a town meeting can make grants or gifts or convey property unless town meeting has given some sort of an authorization in these kind of situations to the select board um so legislative body executive

body now this is where it gets a little bit trickier sometimes um think of your town manager in most respects as the CEO of the company the company being the town of Durham so it is expected that on a dayto day and week to week basis most of the decisions of running this place um do come down to the town manager all of the administration of the Departments all of the administration of personnel staff um roles responsibilities assignments that is all coming through Jerry to all of the individuals that work for and are appointed for uh this town so on a day-to-day basis the select board unlike in a town where you don't have a town manager select board should not have to be doing anything um except listening to your constituents conveying issues to Jerry um asking questions of Jerry if they have bearing on your your meetings and what you intend to to work on and decide in your meetings but for the most part your

town manager is the place where everything kind of filters through and it's his job to make assignments of Duties go out and find your your bids for contracts um evaluate you know decisions administer decisions um and again the select board's job really is to be the conduit of policy and

information so you take select board you take the town meeting um authorizations and any other new ideas and Concepts that you want to bring and you filter them through the town manager it's a town manager's job to get everything done um so areas where there

can be pinch points I would say um number one personnel and in a couple of different ways so one way where there can be stress is if you have um Town employees who come to you with complaints either about their day-to-day work their uh managers their supervisors or the town manager himself it is generally speaking not appropriate for the select board to be having individual discussions with individual Town employees about their roles responsibilities objections concerns any of that stuff um up to a point okay so um I'm

going to use I decided to to frame all of my hypotheticals around codes for no reason at all not to say that there's any stress it's just um a way we can be kind of um narrow focused here so let's say um your code enforcement officer is frustrated because he feels he doesn't have um enough support you know he needs some sort of administrative assistant or assistant code enforcement officer and he's overloaded with work and Jerry won't listen to him and he wants to come to one of the select board members to complain about that the appropriate response in that case is you have to bring these concerns to Jerry I cannot help you I am just one select board member I am not your boss and it is only when you as a an

individual board member start to see that Jerry is not responding to that employees concerns and that things are breaking down in the code office that you now have to think about okay what do I do next with this the remedy doesn't lie with kind of trying to work things out directly with the staff member what you would want to do is put it on an agenda item um usually for an executive session in that case because now we're not talking about the Code Enforcement Officers roles or responsibilities we're talking about Jerry's roles and responsibilities so if you had a concern that he's not properly managing the department then that's a little bit different now we're talking about the town manager and because you are the boss of the Town manager it's completely appropriate for you to have a conversation in executive session or if it's sort of a more benign topic um you know we're concerned about workflow and

um are we giving codes the right tools they need to get things done quickly you know those kind of conversations don't need to be an executive session if it's more of a process thing if it's more of a management style and accountability kind of thing then it's an executive session issue okay so definitely um be

wary of these kinds of conversations with staff I have seen um you know usually it's the select board member who wants to be helpful wants to be the listening ear they're around the town office a lot people know them well um that get themselves into trouble because it's just like a random conversation you have in the hall that develops into complaints now you're the recipient of those complaints and what do you do with them can I ask a processed question about this if we have a question directly about what you're speaking about right now do we do do we ask it now or do we wait for finished B right in okay so this is about the thing where if we were going to have an executive session to talk with Jerry about maybe a breakdown in an department or something like that it's been my understanding that the board acts as a whole and so if we were if I let's just say I was to ask for an agenda item but I haven't talked

to my board yet to make sure that we're all on the same page about that before we would call in go into an executive session to have that I might be the only one who's feeling that way and if we're supposed to act as a whole how how do you navigate that yeah I would say rely heavily on the chair in those situations so if you have a concern you have and this isn't just for this issue for any issue that you want brought to the board um I would suggest talking to the chair saying I have this concern I would like to call an agenda item to talk about it in executive session or otherwise um when when it comes to matters about you know what should be on the agenda I have no problem with Joe than calling the other select board members and saying Heather wanted to talk about this issue um is there consensus that we should at least have an agenda item about it or he also has the latitude as the chair to

just put it on the agenda yeah what so I just want to make sure I understand because like obviously there might be times where like someone might want I'm not saying there example but let's say Heather call says I want to put something on the agenda because this employee is problematic and or something like that and someone like myself goes I don't think it's a concern or I say sure I'll put that on that but I do want to call individual board members and say hey is this a we Heather wants to put this on the agenda it's an executive session and Josh says it's not a big deal don't put it on there Deb says it's not a big deal don't put it on there Joe says oh yeah it's a huge deal don't put it on there I how do you go about making that determination because at that point there's like a deliberation and it's in a discussion outside of a meeting as to whether it should even be put on I don't I I don't anticipate this happening if

someone says I really think this needs to go on Pronto my inclination is always going to be sure get it on if it's that important but I like to think about scenarios that I hope don't happen and know how to react there so I I think the way that gets resolved is through you and your Authority is to set the agenda okay so you're not really pulling the audience to more just saying hey this is going to be on so come prepared yeah you're not looking for a majority vote to put it on necessarily but you're just kind of informing your own judgment about whether it should be on okay and if if one board member you know really wants this agenda item and the rest are like oh you know this is this would be harmful to talk about we're we're not ready to talk about it whatever it is then I would think you and your discretion would say you know to the person raising the issue it's just there's not board interest in discussing

this right now and hopefully they would understand okay um no that's that's a really good point um and then let's also so you know in general if you are the person who ends up being the subject of an employee complaint not the subject but you know the person who receives it uh what I would want you to do is to encourage the employee to go

straight to Jerry you know give your apologies and just say that it's you know it's not my role as a select board member um to work with you on this you really do need to go to Jerry that's step one um the other thing that you

could and should probably do is just let Jerry know that you've had that conversation that that person came to you now sometimes they may come to you and say this is confidential I don't want anybody to know about this but that's what I say stop right there exactly I don't want to hear yep stop at the butt preferably um but you you can't always respect an employees request for confidentiality you know we have protocols here and unfortunately if they engage the wrong protocol by coming straight to you um that may break the

chain there where you need you have a responsibility just within the structure of the government to take it to the town manager um what about about in scenarios where someone has again I hate using hypothetical like because we don't have this issue but a scenario where someone is saying the town manager is discriminating against me or treating me poorly in the workplace or harassing me or whatever or they're like that is an issue that I'm not going to go to tell manager about and they come to an individual board member is that when we just say all right we're going to have an executive session with them absolutely um I was just about to touch on that issue too CU I've had it happen like two or three times in the last year with different clients where an employ some employee comes to a member of a select board or a council and wanting to make some sort of complaint about discrimination or harassment if it is

about um my department my department head people I work with all of that should be reported to Jerry Jerry will work with me to handle it in the very unlikely event that were about Jerry himself then I think you can't involve him directly and that's why you have me MH so I would hope that whoever it is

that's received the complaint um would let Joe know and probably the two of you would come to me together and then we figure out what we do next and usually what we end up doing next is there's some sort of an investigation um and that's the case whether it's a complaint that ends up going to Jerry to work with me to investigate or it's a complaint about Jerry that the board's coming to me to investigate um usually we have somebody else not me from my firm do that investigation if it involves the town manager um sometimes if it's just you know employee on employee situation Jerry might ask the questions with my guidance and that's the investigation okay um in any situation

where it comes back to the town manager in terms of there being some performance perance issue discrimination whatever the allegation is um it's really important that the board function as a board and not kind of break into factions and that from the very moment an issue is raised we start talking about it as a board in executive session and the town manager does not always have to be in those executive sessions so we'll talk about that um in a little bit with the FAA stuff but um unless there's a specific charge or complaint or an accusation against the town manager um the board is free to have executive session discussions without him present so that would be from run-of-the-mill performance questions to um raises and reviews and all of that stuff you are able to conduct that as a board um and feel like you have you know confidentiality amongst yourselves and they're really only responsibilities to

bring bring the affected employee here Jerry in if it is a charge or an accusation so does that mean like if let's say Josh has an issue with something that I'm doing and he needs wants to it his complaint could uh negatively impact my character and how it's viewed in the town but he doesn't want Jerry to be part of an internal discussion the board's having about a person a me board members Behavior or whatever he could say I'd like to have an executive session to talk about board member Behavior but I do not want the manager to be there is that a time when the manager you're yeah so the town manager attends your select board meetings by custom and that usually involves executive sessions too because there's no reason to leave them out there might be a case where you just need to Hash some stuff out and it just will work best just among the board and those cases yeah sure you could have an

executive session of the the board okay um and the the hook there it is you know if it's talking about a particular member of the board and the discussion has the risk of harming that person's reputation um or revealing personal information those kinds of things can be done in executive session and the same goes for any discussions the board might have about the town manager so if it's about confidential Personnel stuff if there's anything that might be harmful to his reputation or um just generally you know more of a private matter okay Heather you had a question um I just wanted to make sure that I understood correctly that if the board wanted to have a discussion and we're talking about because you said about performance we're only discussing anything that would have to do with Jerry's performance we're not having an executive session without Jerry to talk about any other Town employees

performance okay abely the select board should not be having an executive session to talk about any person's performance other than the town manager okay thank you clarify if we did get the complaint from a town employee but there was a department head level between I mean would we say you need to talk to your department head L your department head it depends if the complaint is about the department head then I would encourage that employee to go to the town manager okay if if it's more like the employees just grumbling about something that's going on in their Department um then then you would encourage them to go to the department head and are we obligated at any time if we hear a complaint from a town employee to bring it to Joe so he so the select board knows or not I wouldn't bring it to Joe because again I don't think it's select board business but I do think it's fair to let Jerry know that I was

cornered in the hallway by a town employee in public works and they were complaining about whatever unsafe equipment supervisor but just in case that doesn't happen I wanted to let you know okay and is it best for those to sorts of conversations to be done in writing so like if a someone comes and complains to me about a safety concern that they don't feel is being addressed at the fire department and I say well

you should go talk to Chief and then I send J an email say hey someone so came to me and said there was an issue and I just sent them to Chief is it better to do that written so it establish some sort of record yeah I I mean I like that when there's any risk of liability if it's something about discrimination and harassment I don't need you to put the entire substance of what somebody told you in writing but to little summary and pass it on so that there's the chain of communication would be good like in the event of the unsafe equipment and you refer them to their supervisor and that conversation never happens nothing ever comes of it at least you've done your part by memorializing that you took the next step and the to role at a meeting is is to answer

questions if they have Town manager's role at the meeting I would say is um well let let's I I'll skip ahead in my own agenda to talk about agendas and then we'll get into how the meeting goes so I think that the town manager's job in terms of preparing for the meeting is to obviously think about the things that require board action within the next period of time um

or board discussion because you need feedback or Direction and I believe you two have agenda setting meetings is that right yeah yep yep um which is pretty standard and appropriate and the select board chair may have additional things that he brings to the table that he's heard from the board on and wants to discuss kind of like we just alluded to and um the two of you form the agenda together it's the town manager's job I think to bring to the table for that meeting anything that needs to be discussed any you know make sure you have all of your packets and all of the information you need to rely on to make your decisions at the meeting and at the meeting itself um the agenda should already have been set so the town manager really should be here to help the chair facilitate the meeting in the sense of providing all the right information at the right time answering any questions um taking any action items

for the town manager and making sure that you know he knows what he's supposed to do and he's got clarity about what he's supposed to follow up on that makes sense but it it would be unusual and inappropriate of course to expect the town manager to run the

interactions with staff any other questions or issues there I want to clarify like to I especially when it was my first year on the board I wanted to understand a lot of I wanted information and so there was a lot of back and forth about whether or not it was appropriate for me to be asking Town staff questions information

to gain understanding I was never directing their work at all but I wanted to be able to access information from them and so where in my mind we landed with that was that we're allowed to ask like questions like that to get information but that if the town employee feels like we're utilizing too much of their time um that that direction needs to come from the board to to be researching something or to be getting information for us or that that request needs to be brought to Jerry for Jerry to be because we also don't want to eat up their van hours right when they have other stuff to work on and so people hours sorry

um so I just want to make sure that I have like a legal understanding of not crossing a line of where it's directing a town inloes work versus getting information that we're allowed to get I want to make sure I understand that clearly you summarized that perfectly so take it back to the the codes example um

let's say a constituent asks you what's going on with that property over there I'm concerned that I haven't seen anything on the agenda about it okay you have two options I think option one which is probably the the best option is to tell the person just contact code's office they'll give you information um option two is is you can ask the question of codes hey was there a permit recently issued for this property what for or can you send me the application all of that stuff I think is fine um because it's the kind of thing that the code enforcement officer would expect from John Q public when they walk through the door asking a question and just because you're a select board member I don't think you have to take that hat off um and those simple questions where it's just like a a oneoff yep here's the answer here's the document um I think that's fine but

then let's say he gives you that application and you look at it and it feels like whoa this is inadequate to get what they got in terms of a permit how come you didn't ask this question and this question and this question yeah JN Q public might might ask those questions too but when you start asking leading questions that are sort of in the vein of criticism now you're acting a little bit more in a supervisory role and that's where it gets really comfortable for the staff and then amplify that multiply that times five people who could be doing the same thing and I've absolutely seen staff members quit because they're getting too much pressure even just from one select board member or counselor um much less a culture where that's just the way everybody functions and people are always asking questions of staff and um it it does get too much to handle and you can't have five bosses it just doesn't work so um

yes simple questions you know simple requests for information let's say your request is I'm just curious it seems like it's been really busy in Code office could you you know give me a report of how many permits were issued for this this and this in the last year as compared to the prior year you absolutely can't do that of the CEO directly if you're concerned about this as a select board policy type issue the right thing to do would be to I think send an email to Joe and Jerry and say I'd like to have a discussion about this as an upcoming meeting something that I think would be helpful to have as background would be and then you would ask Jerry if he could work with codes to provide that For an upcoming meeting but that's I think too where like someone could just say hey I've gotten a lot of requests about a and C maybe a solution could be X Y and Z but rather than going directly to a member or something you could just

go to the say let's bring it up as a topic for discussion as a board yes that's kind of in that way it relieves the pressure from someone feeling like oh SL board's asking me all this stuff and so the option you gave the two options of like say just send the person the codes or option two just go ask codes how do we make sure that we never feel like we're putting too much pressure because if all of a sudden I know we're using codes for a million examples here but if all of a sudden our code enforcement officer says yeah I got seven emails this week and it said Joe Roy told me to ask you if I have this question and now he's going it's not Joe harassing me but he's sending everybody to me you know how how do we make sure it doesn't turn into like yeah I spent the whole day just answering emails that came from Joe or from people Joe sent my way you know cuz especially when I see instances in I see this in my personal

life my professional life as well it's like all Su someone gets inundated with for 150 form emails that are all copi and pasted by the same thing and now they're inbox just full of that stuff like how do we make sure we're preventing those sorts of yeah remaining appropriate in those sorts of things there's there's one scenario there where it's like the select board member as activist is out there drumming up opposition or support about a particular topic and so they're like you know I'm concerned about this if you're concerned about this write the planning board or write the the code's office and let them know you oppos that I think that type of politicking um when it has that bad impact on staff is problematic it's not like it's illegal to do it but it's just stressful concerning yeah I'm not saying we are but I just want yeah I mean but it could happen um so that's one thing but then the other thing is sort of the

incidental I've just I've been preed with questions from people this week and I don't want to do the work and try to answer them so I'm just going to send them all to so and so yeah and you know you're never GNA know for sure when a staff member is inundated I think you always just start from the premise that they probably are because they're busy and um so so maybe a policy we could

have is like if if you're getting a bunch of the same a bunch of constituents are keep if five constituents this week come up and say what's going on with this or has have we ever thought about this or maybe it's five different topics but it all falls on one M of the public maybe that's just when hey I've heard a lot Joe maybe we should put this on a agenda item because I'm getting tons and tons of questions about you know what I mean yeah that's one option or the other option is I'm getting complaint after complaint after complaint about that junkyard over on Smith Street and um you know then you're you're not going to the code enforcement officer I don't think necessarily with that information you're letting the town manager know that this is something that should be discussed with codes M um because this is a priority issue now people are asking a lot of questions can you just figure out what's going on this

place and see if U you know Allen's been out to take a look at it but in that example that question of can you go figure that out that has to come from the whole board to the to the town manager or does that have to be one person I think if if you're the conduit of complaints or concerns that are coming in through you from the public I think it's fine as an individual to go to the Town manager because at the end of the day that's an administrative um you know Department issue that he manages would that be rather than saying me as an individual hey Jerry I've gotten a bunch of complaints about loud noises at night on this street can you go figure it out or is it just hey I want to alert you that I've getting 17 complaints this week about this I don't know what's going on there but I want you to know like I just don't yeah see that would not be the appropriate thing to bring to a select board meeting because the select board

doesn't have jurisdiction over that right but it would be a thing that you would bring to Jerry so that he can instruct codes appropriately okay um now take it a little bit bigger picture and say you know gez I've been getting complaints about that junkyard and that junkyard and that junkyard um is has this this seems like it hasn't been a priority in this town to address these things and we're worried about this from a policy standpoint that are we putting resources and legal budget to getting these things wrapped up um that now is more of a policy discussion and the type of thing that I think should go to a select board agenda that's great clarity on that thank you it's good example yeah yeah y um or you know like the old dangerous

building or whatever it is you know I I feel like this has been in process for a very long time and we're not seeing could we just get an update on what's going on with this thing that's also totally okay but again that would be a an issue that you would bring to the chair to put on the agenda and then you have a discussion about it it would not be for the purposes of directing codes to do something it's just for getting information and being able to discuss it in public so people can hear what's going on okay um so those are the two staff things there's the information into staff and then the information you might get out of staff so I think we've covered those um let's talk about interaction with other boards so generally speaking again you don't take your citizen hat off when you become a select board member but you do have to remember that everybody still sees you as a select board member and

may take you know the things you say as being the position of the select board or of you being some position of authority where they've got to do what you say so um let's use use a planning board example again you are completely

able to have points of view about something that might be in front of the planning board um whether you're in a butter or whether you're just a concern is there something we need to oh it's cold oh okay I know I put my code on I was cold too sorry go I think our options are cold and quiet or loud and warm when we turn that thing on so all sorry about that I just want to make sure it wasn't about this yeah yeah um so you know you can definitely go and talk at the planning board I think you should always give a disclaimer that says you know while I am on the select board I'm here because I'm a neighbor of the subdivision um assume that if you don't get that disclaimer in there everybody's going to think you're speaking for the selectboard and um that would be the case even if it's clear that you're there you know if it's extremely clear to you that you're not there representing the select board everybody

still might take it that way so always give that disclaimer um let's say you have concerns about how the chair is running a planning board meeting and you know you appointed that chair and you don't like the way these meetings are going and you want to discuss it what's the right thing to do there couple ways to handle it I think I think um my preferred way would be to find a conduit to speak with the board chair directly you're not speaking to them necessarily as their boss or the person who appointed them or a member of the board that appointed them but just again as a concerned citizen this is what I'm seeing um you could raise that issue sorry y so

if as an individual not as a board we have an issue with a board chair the way that they're handling as an individual and then you're saying as an individual have that conversation as an indiv caveat okay but I I wouldn't necessarily have the conversation directly with the board chair okay um because again I think the perception might be that you're speaking on behalf of the board or that you're telling the person what to do um I think it's best to bring that concern to the town manager's attention and see if the town manager has the interest or the appetite to speak to the board chair and say just like he might if any other member of the public raised the issue you know somebody raised a concern to me that at last week's meeting um there were 15 people left to speak and you didn't let them speak and you know tell me what was going on what's the rationale do we need to go to the town attorney and talk about how we manage

public comment better um that could be an option if you're if it's really to the point where somebody on a board needs to be talked to because they're your appointee and their conduct has risen to the level where you feel like there should be some consideration about whether they should still be on the board that's a totally different story to me um you know usually there would be some informal conversation first whether it's the board chair to that board member whether it's the town manager to that board member there's no real legal protocol about how to do this stuff but it's always good to raise the issue to somebody first so they're not blindsided um if it really is to the point where you're considering removing somebody from a board they have a due process right to a

hearing and the way that gets dealt with can be extremely complicated um again if it's like a charge or an accusation against somebody let's say a board member has been accused of routinely having exp parte Communications about an application and they're undermining the process in doing so or let's say they've been um you know they didn't disclose that they had all these conflict of interests and and um that's undermined the decisions the right thing to do would be to let that person know what the issue is let them know when there's going to be a hearing of the board and the board would actually conduct a hearing usually an executive session but in that case because it's sort of a charge or an allegation against the person they have the right to make that meeting public which is the worst case scenario in a lot of ways because now we're airing out dirty laundry in public and making it this adversarial process but it is their

right to do and do you have a third party facilitator for that yes sometimes um because the way I see it is like in that case the people casting judgment might also be the people filing the complaint so I know if I were to be in a public hearing where Josh is complaining about me and then Josh is also the jury and the Executioner I'd be like well I want another voice in the room here so is that where it gets like we we call you yeah I mean and I've seen these things um it's recently involved in a situation where a permit applic applicant made a complaint against a planning board member um two planning board members and

each of them wanted public hearings and then we had each of those members have their own attorney the complainant had their own attorney and the select board was left to decide all of this and this you know kind of ridiculous mock Court type proceeding

and determine whether there was some discipline warranted at the end of all of that it it is it's the worst but it is what's called for under the law in that situation if that's what um people choose to do to make it a meeting in public and you know what I would always prefer is that I stay above the fry because I'm not representing the complainant or the individual board member who's you know under investigation or challenge I can assist the board with how to deal with all of that I can help you figure out who might be conflicted because you might be the complainant or you might have been somehow involved in the in the issue um and sort of advise the board about what it's able to do the fact is you know when it comes to behavior of your own board members the only thing you really can do is censure so a censure would be a public shaming essentially you know we don't like what you did and we um strongly advise you

against doing that in the future but it doesn't stop the person from continuing to be on the board or from acting a certain way in the future you know the only way a select board member is ever punished is by the voters who then would want to vote them out of office for somebody like planning board member a board of appeals member a budget Committee Member um you know it kind of depends whether it's an appointed official or an elected official if it's an appointed official that was appointed by the select board and complaints are made about that person that might rise to the level of censure discipline removal from the board then that's where we go into this sort of hearing process um if it's another elected official the select board can do absolutely nothing you wouldn't even entertain the complaint there's nothing you can do um at least in terms of hearing the complaint you could certainly as a select board say

you know we think it was reprehensible what so and so did and we're going to make a public statement about that you could do that but you're you're not the adjudicating body in that case if it's something that an elected official did question yes um I have a few

questions about what you covered here so that last Point like Behavior board members um and censure and stuff like that is that subject only to uh behavior in meeting settings or as a board member or is that subject to behavior outside of meetings as as well yeah it's got to tie back to their role as a board member in some way so it it could be conduct outside of meetings like you have gone planning board member and you know poked

around 10 different application sites in the last year when you weren't supposed to do so and he brought that information to the board and it derailed the process um yeah it's conduct they did off site but it relates to what they did on the board um I recently in another town had somebody who was on a committee that awarded grants go to um the press and say this

grant process is a sham here's how you get a a grant in this town all you have to do is manufacture this this and this and the town will give you money he basically just provided a pathway um how people can kind of backd door their way into a grant um and he sort of undermined the the validity of the whole process in doing so again like it's something he did exercising his Free Speech outside of an official board meeting but it undermined the process it went to his um you know duties on the board let's say you had somebody you guys don't have a Personnel committee but let's say you did and um the Personnel committee hears issues you know related to employee discipline and things like that and let's say that person were making just crazy racist statements out there in the public you know we need our people to be acting impartially and not perpetuating discrimination or not causing discrimination in in employment we can't

have you on the board all of those things you know could very much have bearing on their ability to function in their pointed roles um totally fair game but if you've got you know a planning board member who was convicted of domestic violence you would not obviously want to do anything about that because while it might be you know hugely problematic it doesn't directly bear on their role what if what if a scenario we have two planning board members and they have a disagreement on how an application went but there's a ruling and then after the meeting in the parking lot one of them just cusses the other one out and they come to us as a board and say the chair came up to me after and when I told him I didn't agree with this that he just let or they just let into me and swore and call me names and things like that like is that something that's in the capacity as a board member or is that saying no anyone

can call you whatever they want you know it's a free country because it arose out of a board meeting and was about something that was in front of the board um it wouldn't have happened but for the fact these two people were both on the planning board um I think it is fair game that the the select board could take that up in a executive session okay my other questions here um so we're we're talking about um like board member Behavior whether it's uh planning board member Conservation Commission whatever and you said if we see that we're saying I've been watching those meetings that person is not managing meetings well or they're not um they're they're unkind or rude or whatever you said bring that to Jerry but I thought the boards s were kind of reporting to the selectboard not the town manager that is true I I think though it's always fair to give somebody before making a big public showcase

because there's no way the board can take up an issue without making a public showcase of it nature of our meetings yeah exactly exactly um so I think it's always um fair to have somebody and again it could be you as a designated person to have that conversation it could be Jerry um to just kind of give the person a heads up you know people are complaining about this is there anything that can be done then you kind of let let the person sit on that and see if they can fix it in the next meeting or two and if they don't then it's now worthy of making a bigger spectacle about it is appropriate though if somebody one of the board members comes up and says hey Jerry this board member this chair or this whomever has just been really doing X Y and Z and Jerry goes well maybe maybe the chair of the cect board should talk to them and they can outside of a meeting above all legal bar just say hey we've noticed

there's been some concern about how you've been running the meetings and lack of public input um and if that person says I've done nothing wrong I don't want to hear from you that's a one thing if they go oh yeah sorry worked a 12-hour shift and I totally just flub that meeting you know that's where there's some discretion there yes now what about when it comes to issues of the planning board operating in their quasi judicial capacity of like I as a board member and saying I think that this planning board is giving away permits that they shouldn't because they're not meeting criteria or I think that they are not they are not exercising the full um Suite of requirements and they should be you know because there's some discretion there how does that work because they're quasi judicial and we're supposed to kind of let them do that without our influence and I'm not suggesting we want to do this I just want to make sure I

understand yeah I I think that if it's if it's you as one member of the board who thinks that you again are a member of the public you could choose to write a letter um to speak to the chair directly you could do those things um but my preference would be to take it to a discussion of the select board if it's really to the level where you're worried that a board is shering its duties then this is the kind of thing where I now would say talk to Joe and Joe might be able to say actually you know what two or three people have mentioned that sort of thing to me um from the board over the last couple of months I guess now it's to the point where maybe we should have a conversation about it is that an executive session discussion I would see that you know if it's if it's not a discussion about a single person on the board so if it's not you know the chair is being rude and demeaning or cutting people off if it's more we're worried

that more systematically the board is shirking its responsibilities M um you are free as a board to make a statement on certain things and so I would see that as being like a public discussion about concerns about the planning board's roles and responsibilities you'd have a conversation out in the public and this is sort of nuclear option like you're not going to do this all the time right yeah it's not every thing that happens you say ah we need to discuss this and whatever but I mean this is to the level now where you're really worried about illegalities you're worried about exposure legal risk risk of appeal that kind of that's what I'm getting at is scenarios where and I'm not saying this is happening but I just want to make sure we understand scarios where it's like X criteria wasn't met and they said H we don't really care we'll let them go through ex and that to me that's where it's like their clausi

judicial and we need to stay out of it but then if all of a sudden we see you know someone saying you know you can't award a permit if your driveway is 50 ft wide and when they said No it's it's close enough we'll let them have it you know and that's where I'm like do we have a responsibility I've seen this come up um specifically with waivers so a planning board just got in the habit of just giving waivers if somebody ever asked for them give them um developers loved this town because all they had to do was ask and the planning board would let him do whatever and you know the select board started getting very concerned about that um and we did a couple of things we did a training kind of like this but with the planning board involved so we understood really what the parameters were um and there was

just some sort of discussion and guidance mhm from everybody body to the board about like this is this is a problem for these reasons but yeah you could in the scenario of there's just like an operations breakdown at a board you could discuss it in public you could ask for recommendations or you could maybe you know task um one member of the board to write a letter to the chair on behalf of the board to convey some sort of concern issue understanding whatever it is but again if it's just you know one appointed board member that's a point of concern that's a little bit different now we're in executive session territory but if it yeah okay and so

obviously in life you're not going to agree with everybody right and so I don't think that it's necessarily appropriate to say well some and so made this decision or some and so is running their meetings this way I just don't like the way they're doing that I want to bring it up um where do you draw the line of like you know this person just has a very direct personality that rubs some people the wrong way to this person is bordering harassing staff and you making people feel really stressed out and you know like they're on thin ice where do we like is that discretion to when you say board memb a board member on any board commission yeah yeah um I I

just generally don't think that the select board should have any role and telling somebody they could do their job differently or better unless it goes to that point of now we're worried about legal ramification on the town or things aren't getting done properly so yeah so someone runs a meeting and we just think that they're very tur or whatever that's that's not a concern but that same person uh or someone else is now you know emailing Town staff I need you to do this I need you to do that can you do this can you do that and they're not follow they're kind of now impacting Town staff is that where it's more appropriate for us to step in and say yeah and maybe just one board member say hey you're you're hitting up town staff a lot that's not really something you should do I'm just trying to understand yeah I think in that example specifically because it's impact on Town staff that to me is a

Jerry question mhm you know so and so on such and such board um is I understand bugging the hell out of a certain staff member you know Jerry I just wanted to let you know that like this is the perception I'm getting and can you follow up on that um and and I guess maybe we should

touch just a little bit on like do we need five people communicating things to Jerry in that nature no preferably you know it's not an official role of the chair to do this but it's always just so much more helpful to have one major point of contact contact between the board and Jerry so it would be helpful whenever possible to try to I hate to put more work on you but just to to keep from trying to h cats and kind of have more Direct Communications and you as a board have total latitude to figure out what works best there's nothing saying that you can't have five points of contact to Jerry um but for the same reason that I don't like to have six points of contact to me um when asking legal questions it just sometimes is a lot easier to kind of deal with I think of it kind one person who's checking in with me I think of it kind of like your analogy between like a CEO and a board of directors like

how often does an eight person Board of director each individually reach out to a company's CEO like I don't know I haven't been a board directors of a big company or CEO so I don't know but I wasn't sure yeah but the but by by contrast the board chair is often on the phone with the CEO communicating things that the other board members may have communicated yeah I think that's totally fair analogy um and again you know you're free to figure out what works best for you um what works best for for Jerry I know I have some Town managers where they have like office hours on Tuesday morning and whether it's by phone or people stop in that's their time to kind of check in with the board members for the week and kind of field whatever issues or complaints or concerns um or you just you know you schedule your 15 minutes with Jerry every week if you need them great if you don't great you know just keeping it

organized is really the key um so that your town manager who clearly has enough to do anyway is not also worried about his five bosses all times [Music] too all right those are my questions about what you covered so far so thank you cool so I think we've covered all the sort of relationship management stuff um I the next thing I wanted to talk about was meetings we talked about the agenda setting and how to handle that um let's talk about regular meetings versus workshops what's the difference uh regular meeting votes taken Workshop votes not taken that is

the very basic differentiator so a workshop is we're here to learn about an issue to discuss it there is by definition no action going to be taken um public comment is generally another differentiator although this isn't a hard and fast rule a workshop is again we're we're here to get work done we love you public but it might not be the most conducive to our getting work done to hear from you right now that doesn't mean you couldn't um in a particular meeting have a free conversation with people in the public um or allow some public comment but that's up to you and your discretion up to the chair um generally though the presumption is going to be in a workshop it's NOS to the grindstone we're going to discuss things um and get to work on this document or this Con concept or this budget and not a lot of feedback from the public um in a workshop though you may you know let's say we're talking

about some particular budget issue and we want to know what the school budget impact is our Municipal budget um and we have someone from the school here to report on that absolutely you can take that comment and go back and forth and have a free discussion with anybody you need to to sort of inform your Workshop work but that doesn't mean that you have to open it up to public comment and you know let's make it something even more free form just there are 20 people in the audience but one really knows what they're talking about in a workshop absolutely free to engage with that one person and not give everybody else the opportunity to speak should you ask that person to come up to the table Yeah you can sometimes that helps y um so per example between

regular meeting versus Workshop I can't remembera few stepped in by then or not but we were talking about our meeting schedule and how in December the 17th we want to have we we're saying maybe a workshop where Jerry brings it in and asks us questions about the budget process uh or or direction to take on XY and Z if we're going to vote to say pursue

an increase in this then that needs to be a meeting but if we're just there to discuss generally what the board thinks about certain things that can be a workshop and you can build consensus you know in in a workshop that's a problem yeah so something like that I want your feedback about what priorities are you know um do we want to add additional staff in this department um what's our capital budget going to be in public works um you know these are things that department heads are bringing to me and I just wanted to get your feel before I spend a lot of time working them into the budget you would talk you might look around and say I don't know I mean I I think we're all in agreement that it makes sense to do X Y and Z that's okay um because you're not voting on a budget right you're not taking any official action there you're just kind of informing him and giving him consensus totally fine okay yep um I had an

interim Town manager in another town uh tell me that anything that's on our agendas is something that should be voted on even if it was just to take no action and I just wanted your opinion on that no okay oh I'm not concerned about just having a discussion and then moving to the next item thank you but that might be where if there's issues coming up in that Workshop where where there's not a consensus as the chair I might say hey we're going to have to move this discussion to a meeting because we're going to need to have take action here and there's not a general consensus on which direction to head yeah I mean it kind of it's it's going to depend on what the top topic is you know it might be that there's no consensus and so Jerry ends up in the crummy position of then feeding you a budget document that half of you might hate and half of you might love um and and that's fine um you

wouldn't necessarily take that to a regular meeting and vote on what the priority is because that's just not the type of thing one votes on but if it's something like um I don't know question about whether to use a budget that you already have to buy some sort of software or to enter some sort of contract and maybe Jerry has the authority to you know enter the contract or the purchase the thing um but he really needs to know whether the board supports him or not then I do think that should go to a board agenda um to be voted on up or down okay all right um executive sessions so as part of the agenda setting process we always want to try to identify um when we anticipate there being an executive session because it would be great if we could always have that on the agenda where it's intended but it's not necessary agendas aren't necessary for that matter so freedom of access law does not require there be an

agenda if there is an agenda nothing requires you to stick to it that said we all know it's really bad practice to put an agenda up and have three things on it and then end up talking about five um you're talking about an General agenda not an executive s in general agenda you know so you Freedom access does not require does not so you can from the floor introduce new business you can bad practice but okay super bad practice and it's it's always surprised me that it's not a requirement of the freedom of access law cuz like what benefit is it to have the meeting in public if people don't know what you're going to be talking about generally so for example tonight we voted to move a meeting date wasn't on the agenda that's okay it is okay yeah it is um and you have to use your your sensibilities about like this is a topic people care about versus this is a topic that's sort of a proor of procedural type thing

um it's it's it's never going to be illegal that you talked about and voted something that wasn't on the agenda but it erods public trust MH if actions flow from it and people thought they you know had something they could say that would have changed your mind it's obviously never a good thing yeah I'd like to think things like you know no one's at home like if I would have known they were going to move the meeting date I would have gone and given public comment tonight but for the big I think that as a board we do a really good job about making sure that we don't vote on anything if people we like actually have said we need to put this on the next agenda because people deserve the right to make a public comment about this issue if they have one I think that we do that really well I just am happy to hear that like what we did tonight is okay like hey let's move uh discuss the a change in meeting or whatever some of

those minor things can come from the floor yeah I mean it would just it would be completely unworkable if you had to stick completely rigidly to an agenda but we always try and that goes to Executive sessions as well if we expect that something is going to be a legal discussion or Personnel discussion ideally we want to let people know that there's going to be an executive session in part because you know if you're going to do it before a meeting people might not want to show up right at the precise moment you go into the executive session um but more importantly anytime you're doing something in executive session there's an era of secrecy and then when you didn't even advertise that you're going to be having the executive session then it starts to look like you're doing back room stuff um that said a lot of times stuff comes up between setting the agenda and having the meeting and it is completely okay if we have an executive

session that gets added to the agenda um it's also completely okay if you're discussing a topic and we all thought it was going to be completely benign but now we're suddenly talking about somebody's you know duties or performance or whatever it is and now we're in territory where it doesn't feel right to talk about it in public my question about that though is I was under the impression like let's say we're talking about something and not again just an example Public Works we're talking talking about something and then all of a sudden one of us realized that this conversation is really going into a Personnel discussion about someone at Public Works my impression was always if you were going to discuss somebody that they need to know in advance that they were subject of discussion of an executive session so they could be present be present or ask for it to be well I'll do you one better and if it's going to

anybody who is not Jerry and their performance perod yeah I just yeah but but but if it's going to like hey I guess where if it's going into because I feel like we've had situations before where I think someone said like I think this is getting a little bit more towards an executive session type topic if it's talking about like the functionality of a of a department or something like that and it is kind of like about Jerry because you know he's the one who oversees that department and this a discussion is coming through and seems like we're now becoming critical of how that Department's functioning there's got to be some sort of alerting of the entities involved that that's a subject of discussion right yeah um but but those discussions if it's a discussion about a department that the select board can have legally it's probably a discussion the select board has to have in public okay yeah that's

because because you're I don't know whatever it is we're concerned that we must not have enough public Public Works staff because the roads are mess this year um or what's going on at Public Works we're getting complaints all the time my preference would be that you bring that up in a meeting kind of on a high level to Jerry we're getting complaints about this you know can you look into this and kind of report back um I sorry I guess a better example I misspoke when I said the department if it's a like a border Commission that reports to us and the discussion starts getting towards oh this is leaning a little bit more towards discussing that board's performance wouldn't they need to be alerted if if you said yeah because someone couldn't say well I'd rather we just go into executive session so we can continue this and my initial reaction is well they don't know we're going to talk about them in executive

session they would need to know in advance right so let's put it into a hypothetical let's take your your planning board um granting all the thing um you're getting complaints from the public and from Neighbors that they've been watching these meetings and things are way too LAX and and the board's skipping over its findings a fact and they're not doing its job and you start talking about this but then somebody says well you know what the problem is the problem is the chair is a developer chair is just helping out his buddies okay that's where now we're going to break and we're going to do an executive session if somebody's making allegations about somebody in particular about wrongdoing but you can do that executive session without reaching out to the this in this hypothetical situation reaching out to the chair and saying at least at least to take up the issue and figure out what to do next

yeah you're not going to have the full hearing and come up with what the resolution is going to be right then and there without letting the person know yeah but okay yeah let's let's say you know somebody wants to raise that point I think so and so is conflicted because they're a developer and they're just trying to help themselves and their buddies um then you're going to go into an executive session and say like look this is in the nature of a complaint do you really want to make that complaint yes what's going to happen next okay we're going to let the chair know or whoever it is that they're now the subject of a complaint that's coming from the select board we're going to hold a hearing about it right so basically that alludes to here's an individual member that's making that complaint and we go into an executive session to establish what the consensus of the board is and how to move for yeah basically what do we what

do we do next you know are you really saying this why are you saying that we're going to take this complaint then we're going to figure out what to do with those totally understand at some other meeting yeah um okay so your

executive sessions um first off you need a super majority vote to go into any executive session um so with you that's four out of five um I try to strive for consensus about getting into executive session always um so that should be your goal for the most part um you're going to be discussing one of three General topics in executive session these are the most common number one consultation with legal council so that can be I'm in the room I'm on Zoom I'm on the phone or even um let's say I can't be at the meeting or the board doesn't want to pay for me to be at the meeting but I did provide a letter to Jerry Jerry wants to to let you know what was in that letter or I've given Jerry a report about what's going on in some litigation and he's going to let you know what's going on based on my memo all of that's fine as long as it's sort of a conduit of information that I've given him um the other thing to

know um and this is not necessarily an executive session thing but just to know generally about legal counsel emails that you sent to me about legal stuff um um and emails that I send to you about legal stuff are not necessarily confidential even though you might think so because confidentiality is only to the extent there's Court confidentiality about our discussion so that would be if there's contemplated litigation or actual litigation um so if I'm advising about I

don't know the legality of an ordinance that's being discussed if I'm um advising about the rights and responsibilities of the board versus the town manager things like that that's all going to be public meaning if you write me because you're upset about something the town manager is doing um for instance then that is totally public record if somebody makes the request or if you write me about what a fellow board member is doing and you think like I can tell the lawyer because it's all you know confidential it's actually not so that said you know if it's a complaint about somebody harassing somebody else um if it's a complaint I mean if it's an issue that goes to liability things like that where we reasonably could suspect somebody's going to sue us then that's a little bit different story now we're in confidential territory but work under the presumption that anything you share with me is potentially subject to public

disclosure um and in executive session conversations with me are confidential it's a little bit different when it's a document versus a conversation but if you if we have a conversation in executive session and you go out and share that conversation with anyone else even the smallest part of it there's the risk that you've broken the confidentiality of that session and um

could be forced to testify about what we talked about so especially with legal executive sessions it's super important that we not share anything that's discussed um unless I tell you you can basically um we often hand out documents in an executive session that we aren't sure or confidential in themselves but we want to be able to discuss them so we may hand out a document so you can see it and collect it after um or I may just tell you about what's in a document you might say why aren't you giving me that document it's because just the fact that we're discussing it in an executive session doesn't make every document we discuss we share confidential we want to be very careful about you know creating things that are public record before they're ready so let's say we're contemplating a lawsuit against somebody um and there's a draft complaint I'm probably not going to give you all copies of the draft

complaint so that you can take them out you know potentially lose them or tell people what's in them um so that's legal number two is personnel and again I I think we've beaten that one to death but more or less only about the town manager um but you're also going to have a possibility it's about appointed board members if it rises to the level of you know a real complaint against the person or contemplated action like removing them from the board um and then the third one would be

I'll lump this all together Economic Development um and real estate when public disclosure of the board's position on something um may put you at a disadvantage so we're thinking about all the options of what we could do with this piece of town-owned property and here are the things that we think it would be good for and what we think it's worth and that kind of thing that can be done in uh executive session if you have a piece of property for sale obviously all the conversations about you know potential offers and all of that could be done in executive session you have a big company coming to town and they you know want to share their development plans with you and they're asking for assistance um and they've given you a big bunch of documents to show what their you know economic position is then those documents are all confidential the conversation you have about them is confidential as well okay um so those

are the three big ones there are lots of other little small things um you know Union negotiations if we ever get there um lots of things that fall under separate categories of executive session as you know you always have to cite the provision of law under which your executive session is being called if you have two or three different executive sessions stacked up let's say at the beginning or end of a meeting um I would want you to let's say you enter the legal one you have your legal discussion you only talk about the thing that you're there to talk about more or less um you come out and then you would go back into a different executive session let's say this time it's under Section 406a you're going to cite that you're going to vote you're going to go into that executive session um in terms of

votes that come out of an executive session this can be really tricky because you don't want to necessarily disclose everything that you just talked about in the executive session um but sometimes there is an action item that you have to take a vote on so you know we are going to file suit against a contractor who's in breach and you just had a long executive session with me talking about the pros and cons of doing so and what our position is you would probably for the vote distill that all down to uh motion to authorize the town attorney to file a lawsuit against ABC Corporation for breach of contract rising from the pl on contract um you wouldn't say anything else let's say it's a Personnel matter um you would have let's let's say we're talking about a raise for Jerry we're going have all the conversation about Jerry's performance um what his ask is what the market is what your concerns are in the executive session

and you can come to a consensus in that executive session about what you want to do um because we don't want to air out the dirty laundry and say all the pros and the cons in public but you're not going to take the vote in executive session you're going to get to the point where you're ready to take a vote vote and you're going to come out and you're going to say you know a motion to approve um a raise of 2% for the town manager for the 25 budget year and um again you know can leave all the the nitty-gritty in the executive session um yes um like hardship

abatements are you going to go there uh no but that's a really good um question so hardship abatements I'm trying to think if there's anything else are you guys the board of overseers of the poor you are yeah so Oh I thought that we did that in executive session yeah you do okay yeah so the the the concern is and this goes to the agenda too like you can't put we're considering a poverty abatement for sus Smith on the agenda so you're not going to do that it's consideration of a poverty abatement um you are going to go immediately into the executive session you're going to have the entire discussion and what you can't do is then come out and say we're a poverty batement to sue Smith because you know the poor woman is 3,000 in the whole every month um so what you would do in that case is say as much as you can without disclosing the confidential information so the motion would be to Grant the poverty

abatement requested and to authorize the um assessor to issue the abatement form so we would we would just say you know we move to Grant in a poverty abatement for $4,700 yep that's the entire motion we don't say who we don't say anything else correct okay yep um let's say we're talking about litigation and I've asked for you know what do you think about this you know do we want to move for damages um there might be ramifications for doing so um we might look like bad people you know when all we're trying to do is to get this dangerous building taken down and we can have that whole conversation in executive session generally speaking I'm not going to ask for any sort of a public vote in that case um because I don't really want to disclose what our legal strategy is about something I'm just looking for consensus um it's going to be the very rare case that on something where it's a legal question we need to come out of an

executive session and take a vote to direct the town attorney to do anything it's basically like to file suit to approve a settlement um things like that are really the only things I expect public votes on coming from Leal um yeah I think that covers executive sessions any questions there only question I have is do we have to um submit any notes we take during executive session as part of it try ju just try not to take notes during so the question I have is like we like I scratched some math down and I was like literally just calculating percentages does that then become so one of but if I type it on a calculator and then it doesn't you know like I I'm just yeah one of the annoying things about FAA is it does not say that notes taken or documents exchanged during an exe executive session are confidential so we could be talking about a confidential topic but if you take notes on it those notes might be

subject to so I don't I don't necessarily want you to turn them in but do know that at least it's a public record mhm even if we can make a claim that it's confidential for any sort of reason that doesn't give you the right to destroy them so someone can do a fo request and say I want all notes taken during last executive session yeah and and I may have some really good arguments why we shouldn't give them but it's going to be a document by document kind of question so the easier answer is to try not to take notes okay good to know use that calculator yeah press clear yeah um I mentioned not disclosing what we talk about in a legal executive session because the whole breaking the confidentiality thing but you should not be disclosing anything that's talked about in an executive session if we're talking about an executive session there's a reason why even if you let's use my example of XYZ Corporation has

come to town with some proposal and they're asking for Grants and tiffs and whatever they want from the town and you're super excited about the prospect of this company coming to town and you think oh well it's just the tiffs and the grants and the economic situation how many jobs and those details that are the problem um I'm not going to share those things but I'm going to be excited and tell everybody hey this company is coming to town and they're inquiring about you know this piece of of property over there because we talked about it in an executive session um and if we only talked about an executive session you have to keep every single piece of that information confidential so while some

of that conversation could have been had in public in theory we didn't have the conversation in public so that doesn't give you the right to disclose what we talked about so um just generally like the easy rule of thumb is if it's talked about in an executive session if it hasn't been talked about in public um don't talk about it because there are sometimes very important strategic reasons why we talk about things in executive session and um the board really needs to as a consensus you know determine when the right time is to bring things

that going into the budget process I just wanted to touch um in terms of the relationships between boards the budget committee select board relationship can be a bit fraught in budget time uh I know you have believe a nine member appointed I mean elected budget committee um one complicating Factor here is we don't have any sort of ordinance or Charter that details what the budget committee does when and how so I think that leaves it up to the board and budget committee to figure out a workable process um and what we want to try to avoid is giving the budget to the budget committee so late in the process that the only thing they can really do is say we hate it you know um that's not really constructive or helpful for anybody so um Jerry and Joey and I talked about maybe some practical ways to address in the future and my only suggestion was

involve them earlier you know um bring them in so they're seeing the initial budget presentation um find a way to give them some feedback earlier in the process they have a role you know it might not be a clearly defined role but they have a role under statute to make a recommendation up or down on each budget line item and because they have that

obligation we want to make sure sure that they're you know operating on all the same information that you guys are um and brought in early so that you don't get your budget recommended no no no no no other than that the only way to really clarify that role and to change you know

if there was something structural with the budget committee that can be improved all of that I mean now we really are I remember you asked me in my interview what what I thought about Charters and I said well sometimes I hate them but this is a situation where you know it's really only a charter that could address this budget committee thing or potentially an ordinance that changes the way they you know are they elected are they appointed are they nine members are they five or seven um we could talk about all of that when you for now you've got what you got when you say that the budget committee has doesn't really have a charter or any

function laid out are you saying in general or the one in Durham based off of our yeah in Durham because you have no Charter because you have no administrative ordinance that sort of sets out what the role is and and when it just complicates things a little bit leaves it a little up in the air but the beauty of it is too that gives you a lot of latitude to work with to figure out something that works for everybody there multiple I used to be on the budget committee before I was a s board member and multiple times you know like I was like why don't we as a committee talk about ways to generate re revenue and so some of the other budget committee members who are like super by the book and they're looking at what the bylaws are and what is written in the budget committee bylaws as responsibility is to [Music] only make recommendations on the select board budget and so I'm just wondering if since we don't have a charter and

it's not an ordinance is there a Latitude with that where we could like potentially have a conversation about assigning them tasks that are in addition to this type of thing yeah the board board bylaws are written by the own board and managed by the own board and that board can vary from their own bylaws at any point but in the budget committee's case that doesn't mean the select board has to you know listen to your recommendation or have whatever conversation the budget committee wants to have so it's just a bit tricky to figure out where everybody's lanes are and how you can be effective and helpful and where now you're just going to be seen as interfering or in general though the budget committee is an Advisory board so advice that's given in the nature of advice I think can be you know taken or left as the sled board wants and and if you guys want to you know recommend a a 25y year Capital um projects plan on the budget

committee you can do so the select board doesn't have to talk about it for a minute if you don't want to Sol your political discretion and potential Peril and do and if we ask them to do something like that do they have their like can they say no yeah of course okay I mean because their bylaws are written by themselves and there's nothing established in the town ordinances to have it exist let alone do certain tasks so it's just that we elect right I I think when we did our Workshop thing where we had all the other boards and committees come and have the conversation with us about what their goals were but we've always viewed the budget Committee in a very different way than all the other boards and committees and I'm I'm trying to get a sense of whether or not we could utilize them in that way the way that we do the other boards and committees and if we should be having those types of conversations with them too or not that

totally up to the board board okay think that's helpful too yeah I mean I think short of a charter you know the the reason I expressed some concern about Charters is just because you have no control over what a charter commission does once they're formed and they might go in a crazy Direction um for the better of the worst of the town but one thing you could think about is an administrative ordinance if you've ever looked at any other Town's administrative ordinances you could go do some Googling but that might cover the budget process and give a little bit more of a parameter about what the budget committee's role in it is um what the select board's role in it is um you know you could also sometimes

address things like bonding and um what that all looks like in an administrative ordinance and you know any bond question has to be submitted to a referendum for instance as opposed to a town meeting vote so um that's an idea some sort of a middle ground if we have some of these organizational structural things that we need to kind of put more guardrails on MH excuse me

me thank you and then the other thing is again this is sort of your relationship with the town manager and how to make life a little bit less burdensome for the town manager the budget process is you know can can be so fraught uh and your town manager is putting a lot of time and effort into that process and so the way you make all of that go a lot smoother is doing exactly what you're doing I think which is to have sort of priority setting meetings and big picture discussions before he starts putting numbers to paper so that you're not in a position of you know he provides you a budget and then now you have a whole bunch of policy discussions about making value judgments on this that and the other within the budget that your town manager is just like administering the government that he already has right it's not his job to come up with new way to do thing new ways to do things he's just telling you

what he's got what he needs what the department heads have given him for budgets and if you are wanting to change certain things in a bigger picture he's got to know early in the process um because I have seen it happen where you know manager enters the budget process thinking everything looks peachy and then everything gets blown up and there's not enough time to put it all back together but essentially what you're saying from a legal standpoint where we're at with our budget committee and the lack of a charter and it's just

use them however we want to we could say we want you to come to this Workshop meeting and we want you to hear everything that we're talking about we could say we want you to go interview each department head to get a idea of what their budget is or we could say we want you to just comment on the fiscal note you know yeah you could you could say you know hey budget committee um if you're interested in investigating whatever this segment of the budget discussion is and providing some specific recommendations if you're willing to take that on would you do that and bring it back to the next meeting you know they don't have to listen to you you don't have to listen to them but it's a way you could work together and divide labor a little

bit okay um you know and you might probably the ship has sailed this year but you know you might consider in the early fall having a budget committee select for a joint meeting and just kind of talk about the budget forecast for the coming year and priorities and things like that so you are free to involve them more involve them less um they're free to make requests and provide guidance that you don't take or they

interesting process they can do as much or as little as we ask and they can reject or accept as much or little as we ask there's no defined role well I think if you if you look at it backwards you're trying to get to an endpoint where you have a town meeting warrant that says budget committee recommends select board recommends on every single budget item and how do you work backwards to get to that goal and

you know involvement seems to me to be the answer um earlier rather than later giving giving people that investment in the process a little bit more and understanding the real reasons behind the numbers rather than just hating the end result I think that even goes to what we talked about earlier it's like we didn't talk about whether we were going to communicate that strategy plan ahead with the budget committee should we be well that's what I got I think we can just talk that talk about that in the upcoming meeting stuff because I had wanted to hear first from legal counsil and then talk about that for that so we all understand the scope you know but I think it's a good point I have a question about something we already talked about that I didn't ask can I ask it go for it it's really quick so we have had feedback regarding like Workshop meeting and the fact that we have public comment but there's no

back and forth and there are residents that want to ask us questions and would like an answer and I'm just wondering what your position is is or what how you would recommend best facilitating that it doesn't happen all the time but there are definitely times where you know there are residents that do want to be able to or boards or committees that want to be able to talk to us and ask us questions and our meetings are just not set up for that at all and so I don't know how to facilitate that type of discussion with residents or boards and committees yeah I mean just because somebody asked a question doesn't mean they're entitled to An Answer um you know you have to get through your meeting and if you spent all the time answering people's questions and letting them kind of set the discussion that's not necessarily productive all the time um so you know you try to do what you can but at some point you have to move on or

maybe we're here you know yes we appreciate your question but this is a workshop to discuss this and we really need to get our work done so we're not going to derail it with this question what will'll bring it up at a different meeting or you know whatever we're going to do um what how do you manage public comment now you have a period at the beginning of the meeting right and people can come and make their public comment but we don't back and forth we thank them for coming and then that's that yep um and there's no like procedure or protocol for any type of followup after the fact and those are some things that personally as a board member I'm taking issue with and I just don't know how what the right way to go about facil facilitating that is yeah okay I've seen it handled a couple different ways um again you are free to

just let questions hang in the air and not address them um some boards will do public comment select board comment and within that select board block before you get into the regular meeting anybody on the select board could say I just want to address the comment that was raised about this and this and you know here's my answer or here's my concern or you know the chair I would like to discuss this at a future meeting or whatever it is um short to the point not creating a whole separate agenda item within the the comment but yeah I think that's fine um what if somebody comments in public comment but it's on an agenda item are they encouraged to speak on the agenda item or do you keep people in their Lane of public comment only at the beginning of the meeting public comment only at the beginning of the meeting and we do have it in our bylaws that a the board board member can ask to reopen a public

comment session and the board all has to vote to agree to do that this we're talking about public comment and how you structure things like if people have questions when the best time is to address them if you need to address them I suggested maybe having public comment then select board comment so that that would be a block of time that if somebody wanted to address a public comment item they could briefly do so um I tend to prefer I mean I've been to you know a lot of meetings I tend to prefer a rule that says if somebody's here to speak on an agenda item that they speak during that agenda item as opposed to in a public comment at the beginning so public comment then gets reserved only for stuff that is not on the agenda and then you keep things in a more organized fashion with your agenda items we're going to have an introduction of this item select board

discussion then we're going to open it up to the public then we're going to go back into discussion and take any action that needs to be taken just feels a little bit more organized um prevents you from being bombed with 40 different comments that you then in the beginning of the meeting have to synthesize and F figure out does it you know relate to this that or nothing on the agenda at all um you're saying public comment on the agenda item before select board discussion um select board it it's going to get like introduced there's going to be some preliminary discussion yeah we might be saying we're talking about the doors at the um Eureka Center yeah y yep

and so we'll and then say is there any public comment before we begin our discussion on that yeah I mean normally you you'd have let's say it's the manager you know I've gotten three different quotes on this um you know this company a is this company B is that company C is this um the select board might ask some questions about those okay now we've gotten enough information on the table that people in the public can speak in an educated fashion about it so now we're going to open it up to public comment and it doesn't have to be a super rigid process but whatever works best on that agenda item so so the problem that when we went to GP card

lawyer there so that once we open it up for public coming on one of the items it has to be across the board for all of the items we couldn't just pick and choose what got opened and how we set that so I mean you set yourself up for a meeting that's going to go for three hours instead of one and a half hours at that point with public comment on something that you really weren't looking for public comment on so it's like an all and nothing deal is the way that the PP Cog La has explained to us last year is that still true or is that something we can adjust I think the process that I'm advocating for doesn't really it's not going to change the amount of public comment that you get it just organizes it better um if people are jazzed up

about something you guys are talking about they're either going to come and talk about it in public comment the beginning or they're going to wait it out and talk about it the agenda item but um within that you can still have controls so you people let let's start from the very basic premise unless it's a public hearing advertised as such people do not have the right to be heard at any select board meeting period so

anything outside of a public hearing that you're allowing the public to speak is at your discretion and subject to whatever you feel is helpful or not helpful to get your business done and there may be some things where you just don't frankly it's just not up for discussion it's not something that the public really is going to have an interest in you are free to not take public comment on that agenda item so you could have three issues on the agenda you are going to take public comment on and four issues that you know what we've already discussed this at three meetings now it's time to take action we're not going to take any public but so we are allowed so like what you're saying here is you know we could take have take said today we're going to take public comment on the discussion of the straw pole and uh the

you know discussion of budget schedule but not our discussion and training with attorney and that's okay to say that absolutely and then we are allowed to build in constraints because like right now we say public comments limited to three minutes per person I think in our our policy we said not to exceed 30 minutes cumulatively so we don't get into you know everyone reading Green Eggs and Ham over and over again at at the public comment just to slow things down um so that I just want to make sure that those constraints aren't infringement of like First Amendment rights and it sounds like you're saying there's not a right to be heard at a there's not a right to be heard um you do have equal protection concerns though and that's where they're getting at a little bit so that means if you're opening it up for public comment on a topic we're not going to say no we're not going to hear from you you and you

cuz we don't make your point of view um or we've heard from you enough you know we are going to try to give everybody equal opportunity to speak but again you are allowed to control for repetition yep we've already heard that point thank you um you can control for relevance okay that's what I was going to ask yep um you can control for just time MH and so you know what a good chair will do is um keep scanning the room make sure that the you before person a gets up and tries to speak again that person B has had full opportunity to be heard um setting the ground rules at the beginning is super helpful so if you have some exciting issue that you know people are you know the rooms packed um just be very clear at the very beginning we're going to take 30 minutes of public comment we've got a lot of business to get through tonight and you are free to make the 3 minutes 2 minutes or 1 minute if it's

the best way to fairly give everybody a chance we can say you can't yield your three minutes to somebody else so we have one person talk for 30 minutes so I pull that trick all the time you know I'm a lawyer and I represent five people and I would like you know 15 minutes instead of three and you know your chair has the discretion to say yeah that's fine MH but we're going to hold you to it yeah so yeah I I I wouldn't tie

yourselfself up in knots about making sure everybody has the right to be heard and it's all completely egalitarian hear a lot is I'm going to comment on something you're not going to talk about for an hour and a half and I don't even know what you're going to say about it you know yeah see that's might like what you're doing instead you know exactly or they're commenting based on the fear of something get introduced to it they hear information about it some of their questions get answered or some of their comment might become void to them yeah right because they've the question has been answered in the presentation but if we do it at the beginning you know they haven't even heard the information to be able to speak on the topic yet it seems anyways yeah I don't know I'm not trying to like go down a rabbit hole I just I don't know if you have some of these people but I feel like every town has

some of these people where like they're going to be at every meeting they're going to know what's on the agenda in advance and they're going to have like a pre-programmed 10-minute thing that they want to say about the whole agenda and um there's another town that I don't even represent but when I go to their meetings I love it there's this guy and the guy guy always always has like a monologue he wants to give about what they're talking about that night um I but it's not usually that informed you know at that point you can be more informed later in the discussion when you've heard a little bit more about the item if we move to this format that you're talking about like our planning board on their agenda it will say public comment not taken or public comment taken on whatever the item is are you suggesting spelling it out that way or are we going on the Fly no you're going to go on the Fly okay MH okay thank

you um and you might enter a discussion where I don't know maybe a new idea is raised and you see people in the audience wanting to comment on it it's fair you can you know if you want to hear from the person you can break and let somebody talk even if you weren't planning to but you do need to be cognizant of like that's just one person and now it might open it up the full group wanting to talk and we don't want to say okay you but not you and and I gave the example of the workshop totally fine if there's one person or two people who have particular relevance to the subject matter and can can actually contribute to the

yeah so my last item to talk about was FAA but I swear I think I've covered every single thing FAA related but within another topic um the only thing that I think I haven't talked about is um retention of documents which is not necessarily FAA but the sister of foa and a really easy way to get tripped up um just imagine you have to keep your documents forever because the retention rules are pretty crazy actually um even transitory correspondence can be six years that you have to retain and this stuff yeah um so

lesson deal with it all the time lesson number one is you know I know you have Town email accounts um definitely just use your town email accounts um for all Town business and um if it is a text message that could be an email make it an email MH uh if it's a social media message that could be an email make it an email the reason being now the town has it uh I don't I don't know about her um it's maybe not ideal but at least there is a server somewhere that has all of that traffic back and forth and it's a little less your concern to make sure you've properly stored and managed everything so foa if someone submits a foa request and they want to know everything every select board member has said and I know like in my agency when we get them we want to know everything that this person or this group of people has said about this topic and so um if it's a simple request our coordinator hand handles it if it's a big request

there's a fee Associated but they have to track everything down here with us having per our personal cell phones being our primary phones any conversation between individual board members can be forward yep any text message any social media message and and so then like social media posts and comments someone have to go through and find all the social media content and say potentially if even if they were saying this as an individual not as a board member if it relates to board business it would be fair game for a foer request okay so yep I I absolutely

if I were contemplating a lawsuit for somebody could make a for request for every um text message email message um social media message or post or or even communication between them and other boards and not on their Messengers or whatever and that's usually the kind of stuff that at least I as a lawyer trying to challenge something a town has done I want to see like I want to see what planning board members were saying to each other because I'm trying to disqualify a planning board member or trying to show that there was bias or I'm trying to show that the select board was colluding to do something um so it is important you know that because people do make these requests and it's it's that kind of stuff that you can easily lose track of like oh I just I'm done with social media I'm going to kill my Facebook but you're not thinking about the fact that your messenger was used for 3 years for you to talk to

other select board members of the public about stuff that was going on um if you have a social media page like um maybe you guys don't do this here but in my Council towns you know people run full candidacies and they have web pages and they have social media Pages um you know all of their posts and feedback very well may end up being public record um especially if they're an incumbent and now we have to worry about you know what happens to that Facebook page or that YouTube page or whatever it is um so just be mindful of all of that and getting rid of that yeah getting rid of that without um

archiving it could be destru like if I post something on social media where I have this long spiel about something and then I say I'm done with Facebook I'm off it I just destroyed public record correct okay yep same for you you know you kill a phone where you had dozens and dozens of text messages on we we do need to have a motion to extend our meeting um so I move that we extend our meeting 15 minutes do I have a second second uh any discussion all in favor any opposition seeing none okay sorry um okay so record retention often a problem when you get done on the board if you have your you know binders and binders of documents my preference would be that you just hand that over to the town to be archived or stored so that you don't have to worry about you know someone five years down the road having to try to find stuff uh the other reason to just try to use email like I said was at least that way it's word searchable

and there's a central point so we don't have to ask you each to do a word search across five different platforms to figure out what you talked about with whom and then we have that Collective time how does that work if this someone's saying well we want a foa and I come back and say well here's all my emails and they go well we want to see what your text messages and your social media and everything is and I say I didn't do anything there they'd say prove it yeah if you if you know that you don't have a record you know usually we can just say I know I don't have the record um the other alternative is you tell the person like I can search for eight hours I know I'm not going to find anything but I'm going to charge you know we're going to charge the staff time to go through eight hours of searching different word combinations to see if that we don't have this I've got one fun lawyer right now who keeps you

know trying to just make a point by doing faux searches to show there wasn't a thing and so my response to that is always okay we'll look to make sure there wasn't the thing but it's you know 10 hours and you have to pay us for eight of those hours at $25 an hour before we start and do is there a set document about retention requirements because I know like I have one for work but I don't know if that's my agency specific or if that's from like the the state state archives has schedules for different branches of government they have a local government um schedule but I will just say that that sometimes things that you would think would have been addressed aren't on there or they are addressed and they're addressed in a crazy way like you've got to retain the stuff for six years um you we have like paper retention versus electronic versus and the rules about electronic retention are onerous about what media you can

store it on and what counts is okay and what's not um you know we don't have a PD but a recent example was they actually there's no schedule that talks about how long you have to retain that video footage on on body cams for police and dash cams and that storage is crazy expensive and in theory the towns are supposed to be retaining those things for six years um so they they don't always keep up with the times is the point um so just when in doubt don't create the record if possible because that that's just putting a burden on yourself to but I think the big thing you shared with us here is that discussing any business on personal devices or personal things is subject to fer because that's what I've always learned at work it's like if I text a cooworker on my personal device and talk about work my personal device is not followable now let's let's say the person who's making the request is

quite sure that you engaged in those Communications and you're lying to your point in theory there could be a freedom of access lawsuit there could be an AG investigation at that point it's not just them asking you to give you you give them what you have that's a public document they may be looking for the absence of so that means they may be looking through all your personal Communications on that given day to see if you're lying um so it's just easier to to keep things sequestered whenever possible is it expose is it a better legal option for municipalities to I'm not saying necessarily do this now but consider issuing devices to board members and having that be there because like I we have to communicate to each other through our personal phones we don't have a work a town device you know our emails are on our personal computers we don't have a town device is is do from your legal perspective does it

expose us to less risk if we have Town devices and then just stick to that being the device that we do all Town business on or is it not worth it I don't mind the the device piece of things so much um it's the server piece of things okay so if there were you know like Google Docs is a great thing to use for instance because now it's in one central place on the cloud we don't have to worry about versions of things being on people's computers um and again you

know email with proper backup and proper server management is great because it doesn't matter what device you're working on you can still all get to the same place um so the I I'm not so concerned about the the only thing that's good about town issued devices when you are off the board and you turn in that device it's got all your stuff and you don't have to worry about going through that process of like finding all the folders where you stored the stuff and putting it on storage media and giving it to the town um so that's stely to be brought um just real quick just a two-minute warning about engaging in back and forth between the boards so part of FO is public meetings and any board business needs to be conducted in a public meeting which means that any back and forth that is shared among a quorum of the board um is certainly subject to being you know alleged as a violation of FAA um we always say that procedural

stuff is fine you know we're talking about who can meet when um do we want to talk about this agenda item at this meeting no I think we're not going to have enough time let's push it off to the next one that stuff is fine but what I don't want to get into is substantive communication about anything the other thing we want to try to avoid doing is a game of telephone where Joe is trying to avoid a meeting by pulling each of you about something to get a consensus and then kind of short changing the whole public discussion piece of things I don't mind if like you know you're trying to determine whether there's interest in pursuing a particular angle that's fine you know what do you think of this that or the other um but not to the exclusion of talking about it in public I think this is also one of the things that our board's very good at we're all very conscious and aware and if one of us needs to send out a thing

that has like to do with administrative whatever we say like don't reply all reply to Joe so he knows if it's going to go on the agenda or whatever yeah I think I think we are as a board doing their job with this good and you know there's nothing saying that one board member can't do an opinion piece about something and saying I just want to get my thoughts on this issue out on paper and send it to everybody that's okay but

if it's the kind of thing you would have normally talked about in a meeting I'd rather you talk about it in the Mee cool all right that's about what I thank you very much so your training OB a I would consider to be met based on all the stuff we talked about didn't get you that form but um it's it's like a self-certification form yeah all you need to do is say I certify that I reviewed the bo materials and on this state no the one other question I had for you is um we signed the um uh warrant for the special town meeting and uh we have four articles in here Jerry you said you sent this for riew and the first article is you know to choose who presides second is to agree by the main moderator's manual and then the Articles three is to elect a moratorium and then article four is shall an ordinance entitled moratorium battery energy storage system be enacted what's article three just to elect the Mortor what was

three I thought three was shall an ordinance entitled moratorium be enacted and there wasn't a four looked at do you know anything about that okay get rid of article three so the problem is we enacted we just went with that at 6 o' today 6:30 today so that's what's posted just reconsider oh it's already been posted I think I think Jessica it's posted because it's seven days okay from today and so she posted it because it had to be posted and it's posted this way okay um before we break

why don't you have a motion to reconsider mhm uh the adoption of the warrant and strike article 3 make Article 4 article 3 MH and to replace the warrant that's completely fine it's still okay I motion that we reconsider the article uh the warrant to strike article three and replace article three with article four second any addition questions on the motion here yeah pull the one sign the new one well I think I sign new ones and then exchange them okay yeah but don't pull don't pull them till we get the new one the new ones up correct tomorrow mhm I I would say that's in the nature of a scribner's error because it's not saying like to to enact a more on what and it says draft on it right the one that's poed not the one we sign anyways but so we vote I only had three we have to um do we have any other questions on the motion all right all in favor any opposition okay seeing none um yeah we just went with it because of time

constraint and we thought that it was looked weird but whatever yeah it is different than the one I saw earlier today but looks like a partial sentence on number three yeah scrier error I think it's fine to fix like that okay perfect thank you folks we have thank you thank you so much this so informative we appreciate you thank you for your time um so uh I want to stick to our five minute six minutes here so we real quick I just have a draft right here of what our next couple meetings look like um today's obviously the 12th discuss we discussed all these things the 26 we were talking about um do um Sherry what's this audit

line that's the uh audit 23 audit where she comes in and kind of goes over the audit yep okay so we'll keep that in there um I think we need to punt the junkyard hearing okay the doors are fine paid medical leave I think we can keep um well when does that when does that get enacted January 1st and I haven't let's punt that to December 10th as well then right um the doors do you need something for us on that date or I got to get some information I got to see see if one of you have the envelope the thing cuz seems grabbed what the manila

envelope from last meeting oh the only thing on here that I wanted input on that I didn't feel comfortable moving without uh input from the rest of you um was the Durham historic district commissions was it a manila envelope J or was it a blue envelope the um the Durham historic district commission's desire to do a um get a quote for an architectural survey uh they sent in a request um for

us to fill out a bunch of paperwork and we um would need to sit down and talk about that because there there's a lot of questions there and they are not in a position to fill that out so what we thought was something that they were going to be able to do is turning into something that requires a lot more effort on us and and do we want to take that up at our next meeting or the December 10th meeting our next meeting is already looking pretty busy um but I want to know you we move the December 10th meeting to no it's the December 10th is still December 10th December 17th is the budget yeah okay instead of the 24th so did folks have thoughts on that because I know that that was one of the priorities we issued to them to to me with all the other things that have popped up in town that becoming less of a priority for this year um to me but I

didn't know what your all's thoughts were what is it about the form that they can't fill out they said that they can't fill out any of it it has to do with do you want it to be a large survey or a small survey do you want it to be I have question about one second continue to me that's what we instructed them to do and so that's I mean that's a conversation I think we should be having so I think it should be fairly quick conversation this is something that's in your wheelhouse we're asking you minimum come with recommendation to do this I I feel like this is exactly what they're supposed to be doing yeah and so if they don't want to do it then it's not a priority so um Joe you had something too yeah no I I I second that is is you know that they're are experts if they're not going to be the experts then we'll get others to be our experts but we're not the experts either so you know that's why we have that committee to do that

kind of work so I am a little big question mark goes up in my mind my thought is that this is the the kind of thing where the Conservation Commission I might be speaking wrong I don't remember or maybe like the solid way there was confusion about what we had tasked them with and so we had them come back and we clarified their task right I feel like there's because this to me also feels very clear and cut that we we gave them their task to do and they don't feel like they have Direction on what the task is so what I would like to see happen is to have them come back clarify their task and then if they don't want to to do that work then okay but if if

their task is clarified then we clarify it and they I think the task is crystal clear that they need to they don't feel that way well no they just don't feel like they can answer the questions they say in order for us to proceed we need to answer all of these questions we don't know how to answer them and so that puts it into if they don't know how to answer them they need us to do it I don't think we have time to do it this year frankly um and can we put them on the 10th I get that there's a ton on the 26 can we put them on the 10th and we we can revisit that if we look at what that all that entails what I'm just trying to gather from folks do we want to do do it on the 10th or the 26th I would I would have preferred to do it sooner but I could care L okay that's fine if my thought process to me it's a two second conversation you not answer them because you can't answer them or you not answer

them because you don't know you want to answer them and that's where my thought the 26 won't be all right let's sit down and work through the worksheet with you the 26 is going to be what's the issue with the worksheet all right if you can't do it then we need to search somewhere else or put it on our schedule our schedule's for this year November if that's the intention y works for me okay um we need to extend just five minutes here to finish the meeting so I make a motion to extend our meeting five minutes all right second second um any questions seeing nothing all in favor any opposition seeing none all right so the only this is looks good we've got the December 10th December 17th in January budget figured out the last thing we do need to do is we do need to put on the calendar at some point the land use ordinance adjustment Workshop that we all need to go through regarding the Durham historic district

commission's and the lawyers recommendations on Article 5 section 12 and 14 um we're getting into budget season and we want to just put that on December 10th too because frankly I'd like to button up all of the discussion for this and just have it ready to go so we can pick it up after budget season and then do the hearings and be done with it that's of me so that would just be one that I would ask people do we can talk about it again on the 26th but people just do a little bit of prep work to review the lawyer recommendations and review the markup that they've already given us so you can come ready ready to go on that

an attachment of something uh Jerry you have a markup that the Durham historic District commission has sent us on what they had for proposed changes to the land use ordinance yep and then we have the lawyer's letter so if you can send that that to all of us those two things and what George's report was and George's report and so the intent and I want to be crystal clear on December 10th is not to sit down with the Durham historic district commission talk about this it's not to sit down with the town planner and talk about this it's not to sit down with the lawyer it's for us to work on what we how we wanted distill everyone's input and what actions we think need to be taken and then we're going to button that up it's not going to get picked back up again until after the budget is taken care of and then we have to do our mandatory public hearing for that um in the in the spring before the town meeting because it's warrant

language I just need to confirm if we got three minutes yeah I need to confirm if we are able to do this whole process or if we have to involve the planning board in this process so Jerry and I are going to figure that out later other than that I just wanted to get this on people's radar so we all are a little bit more on the same page as to what's going on I think on December 10th the um Solid Waste committee will have their Charter finalized to present for information for the select board so we can add that

cool all righty thank you for that de and do we need to add some where um we never finalized the goals for 2024 or for 2025 for for Jerry right I mean we we can we we we should do that let's put that on the 26 of November yeah because doors

should be quick I think there's some administrative stuff that could happen ahead of that like kind of last year how we all like did our input right and sent it to Joe and then Joe compiled it gave us all the opportunity to review send it to me if does that yeah so that we can kind of condense it instead of okay send it to me if you have goals and objectives you think for Jerry's work plan next year send that to me before uh the 26 and I can compile it into one concise form especially if there's a lot of overlap I'm happy to help you if you need some help appreciate that all right um manager report in the Le last 40 seconds yeah I don't have a I don't have a whole lot since last uh meeting I will say that uh Joe and I went to North yth and talked to them about their government structure and who they have for like employees and what they do and it was um it was a good it was a good meeting I'm

also working with MMA um to to get some job descriptions developed and I'm also working on a wage table that will come into play with the budget so I'm hoping that we can get this to you so you can kind of look at it bless it edit it do whatever you got to do so working on that

um other than that the only thing I had was the December 24th meeting I wanted to make sure that you folks had um that it was Christmas Eve needed to switch that um so that that's all I got for this week just kind of letting you know that I'm working on the structure at town office and a wage table that I think is important yeah for all the positions And So based off of similar things to like what we have at the state where you have your grade and in your steps Windom has Windam has all their stuff online and that's a great resource if you want to look at Windam site so Lisbon does too and North yth is very very close to to Durham and population the whole n you can't get more of an apples to app try of comparison so so any other thing from you J Cool are we good with skipping board member reports for the sake of time yes all right and then I will take a a motion to approve the consent agenda so Mo do I

have a second any discussion seeing none all in favor any opposition seeing none cool all righty uh upcoming meetings is going to be planning board meeting December 4th fire station that's 6:30 select board meeting the 26 and December 10th at the fire station at 6:30 special public meeting November 19th at 6:30 at the Eureka Community Center uh 645 sorry

um and then public information meeting on land use policies November 13th at 6:30 at the fire station no is any executive session needed no but I just did want to make a comment Jerry I don't know if someone's getting with you on the next uh Solid Waste meeting is December 9th I think but I don't know how that information gets to you does the board does the should probably like okay I'll send him a note thank you any executive session

needed all right do I have a motion to adjourn so moved all right do I have a second second any uh discussion all in favor all oppose see no opposition meeting Jo at 6 9 Jerry what are you