TranscriptSelect Board Meeting 4/05/22

ahead and call this meeting of the durham board of selectmen to order on april 5th please stand for the pledge of allegiance allegiance the pride of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all

here i want to um officially welcome our two new board members josh golden and joe tom here my far right um we will miss rob and mark but it's always good to have new people new energy new viewpoints come on to the board and welcome and looking forward to working with you i'll give you each the opportunity to say a little something if you want to introduce yourselves or or you can pass because i know i'm just going to drop that on you with no warning

glad to be here hoping uh it can help out with uh town business and help folks out so looking forward to the next few years thank you i'm josh golden thank you for putting me here and i hope to work with everybody and and keep this time moving in the right direction great great thank you guys all right uh any amendments to the agenda i do have one sir yes uh under consent for lack of better we have recently gone through a settlement with one of our buyer leaders and we're asking you to accept the settlement as it was advised by our cow's attorney you want that out of the consent agenda is that what you said or wherever you believe it's appropriate executive session is that if it's a settlement that's if so is it done this was settled according to the terms that the board approved right okay so no that wouldn't be executive session you've already gone through the legal there's better signatures and we want to be able

to deposit that into the appropriate account all right i'm going to make that um 7.2 before the consent all right so we uh the first at the first meeting after uh time meeting each year one of our first course of business is we need to elect chair and vice chair of the board so i would entertain nominations for board chair

board chair any other nominations okay the uh motion uh the nomination of the floor the only one is for myself to continue his chair uh we'll just call any discussion on that opposed okay four zero's a vote there i didn't vote on that one for record keeping purposes okay um nominations for vice chair or i'd like to nominate rich george lester i'll second that do you accept that nomination sure

as vice chair also rich abstain so 4-0 okay so the please very good all right public comment section um if anybody has something a comment they want to make about something it doesn't have to be on the agenda they're doing it please come on up to the table move the microphone over and identify yourself and have that

ben durham 21 years i just wanted to um say how well the town meeting went i thought um over the weekend i really appreciated everything but i'm a little shy so i don't really get to know much but i just want to mention that and also i know we're going to be talking about hiring at the town manager today and when i think about how do you incorporate community involvement in that i know we just can't have a bunch of people randomly on the hiring board but i was thinking that maybe um a good approach might be for those community members who are interested maybe we could answer a few key points that the board wants to know before you decide who would maybe be involved whatever those you have key experience whether your expertise is in leadership or project management or local government experience but anyway i do hope that we come through tonight hearing that the community members are able to be

involved in the process because you'll be talking about the town manager position um and currently we don't have a communications position i would just ask that you're part of your process and you look at how you'll be communicating to the community as the process goes on don't know what that looks like but i just want to make sure that you remember to do that thank you

we have already [Music] hired it on a kind of a trial basis somebody to do a lot of that communication stuff for us um kimberly garneau she's kind of got to figure out if she likes doing it and if we like her but i think we already know that we like her so hopefully she likes doing it and uh and so she's got some skills in that area so she uh she's stepped up and is gonna help us with a lot of that communication piece thank you

um so when i think about what a successful process looks like for hiring i really look to the school board i think they do an amazing job outlining the process um right from the beginning and what it looks like at the beginning all the way through what each step is they communicate at each step what's taking place and then after that stuff has been accomplished they communicate the outcome of that step so um i tried to print that off to be able to bring that here tonight just to give you a visual of what that looks like but i'd be happy to send that um along just so you have something you know to see i think that they do a really good job communicating the process i'd love to see um our interim town manager perhaps review citizen input or applications i know that when i was on the hiring committee the last time we had to you know write a paragraph about maybe what we would be able to bring to the table um if

citizens which i hope are going to be involved in the process um i know that debbie spoke at the meeting meet the candidates tonight um i'm trying to broadcast like oh last night so she uh and the things that she outlined about what her experience is um in her job i was immediately thinking that's a person who needs to sit on that committee she's you know really well versed in that so you know while i think i would like to sit on that committee when i'm listening to her talk i'm hearing that she has really great skills w i'm sure is not the only person in our community that does that in our professional career and we really have something valuable to bring to the table um michelle's another one that i think of um so i'm really happy to hear what you just said kevin about kim i think kim's attention to detail is phenomenal um she's been part of a lot of things at the school that had to do with all the tech stuff and i think she

does a fabulous job so i know this is something that i really beat the drama about and i think that kim would be really great in that role so that makes me really happy to hear that um and oh this is the last thing i'm gonna say so these are great i'm i'm excited to see all of this detail i know that when we do minutes and a gen while not agendas but when we do minutes it really represents the um the votes that are taken or what's happening i have seen recently that when the agendas are posted packets are also posted of what all the documents that the select board's gonna see that night or the planning board is gonna see that right because we don't take detailed minutes i think that those really serve a good purpose if we're trying to create any type of historical record so that if a resident is interested in looking back at something they can put a subject into the search bar of the website and even

if there aren't minutes if it catches a key word from any of those documents that are part of agenda packets you can at least get closer to what you're looking for to be able to go watch that meeting or review those documents so i would really appreciate if that continues where agenda packets are what are posted along with the meeting notice and not just the meeting date thank you

mitch as interim town manager i think this is the first meeting you've been able to attend so welcome and welcome to the new board numbers as well and thank you again also for attending canada at night it really allowed us to get it in sight so i appreciate that thank you um

public comment for town manager and i guess my first comment is it's really hard to comment on something that you don't even know what the thought process is so i felt like i was trying to make assumptions and second guess what you guys might be planning or what you guys might be thinking um which i think is a little inappropriate and disrespectful with you guys because you know i'm not trying to make assumptions or or you know second guess what you guys are planning i think no i think it's totally important i think the idea tonight is we're going to have a discussion about what that process should look like so this is an opportunity for you to kind of you know offer your views on what you think the process should look like and it might trigger a thought or discussion amongst the board and be included in the process so this is it's a kind of a preemptive opportunity for you to say well i know you're going to talk about the

process tonight and i would like it if the process included a b and c okay all right so then i guess to start with you guys have already been through this process so i think it would be very good for you to reflect on what went well and what didn't go well um

we're doing it round two to maybe not repeat what you might perceive as errors i know the town certainly has what they perceive as theirs but i really don't know what the process was specifically um i think it's important to try and find somebody who has some experience kathy did not have experience in a town manager select board combination and she did comment a few different times in meetings how she thought it would be similar to town council and it was completely different in her mind so i think it would definitely be important to try and find somebody who has some experience and knowledge of this format of government um i definitely want you to try and find somebody who's qualified and not feel like you're needing to settle or be on a timeline because mitch's deadline is coming up or you know we're just trying to bring about sap i'd much rather have it be filled with the proper person

um limit your executive sessions or at least let us know a little bit more what you're going in for whether it's round one of interviews or reviewing resumes instead of just saying personnel matters it's hard to kind of follow along and know where we're at in the process um i also had some comments about since we're talking about hiring people don't know if it's broken or not but the part-time town hall employee um

one of the thoughts that i think was a good one that people had was perhaps trying to find maybe a retired person who has the knowledge and can come in and also helped to train the staff or answer some questions that they may have as opposed to hiring also somebody with zero level of experience

just a trainer that comes in instead of necessarily filling a quote-unquote part-time long-term position i also think that it's important to consider maybe limiting window hours um we don't have to be amazon here where we're always open i think it's perfectly appropriate if they you know try and determine what their busiest times are and i know i spoke to the staff and they're like we tried to kind of make notches based on the hours and some hours you're just too busy i'm like yeah that's when you write tntc too numerous to count you know you were super busy then um to kind of get an idea of when you're busy and not busy um and i'm also super excited to hear that we do have a communications person um because definitely the minute notes don't tell you anything so we definitely need some sort of recording to be able to keep up especially busy families who are trying to bait their kids or get home from work

right now so thank you what thank you road i didn't intend to speak tonight a couple things one of the reasons why i'm here is to help you decide whether i want a campaign to repeal the tom and your former government because i've never been convinced nobody has convinced me that we should have changed our form of government in the first place uh i had a chance to talk with shannon floyd uh at the top meeting and asked her if uh she and pam are having trouble running the front desk or whatever you call the counter uh during the week and she said no and i asked her she gave me really any help she said well uh ruth the administrative assistant helped when needed of course and filled in the blanks and they had no problems we're in the town office so i would encourage you if you proceed with the town manager plan of government which i assume you will that you hire a tom manager that's going to do the basics of what the

administrative assistant did which is whatever it takes the people are cross-trained to do the job and which would probably abrogate the need to hire an assistant or whatever you want to call this person you're looking to hire

i didn't realize that we were gonna talk like this was when we i thought that residents were going to get an opportunity outside of this to talk about qualifications i thought today it was just process so it is so i just can i just say two quick things okay thank you i appreciate it so one of the things that was um suggested i don't remember where it was suggested but was to break out what the level of expertise looks like for that salary range i think gene said that at candidates night um so that people have a realistic expectation of what these are the skills that we can get for this price range of a salary right we all went into the conversation last time that you know eighty thousand dollars was going to get us what we were looking for and we know now that's not the case and so i think if residents have a realistic expectation of what the skills represent versus what that salary represents then it isn't

going to be so perceived so negatively when we do because i assume we will have to be paying more money for the skills that we really need um the other thing that you know i lost process oh this is the one thing i would just really love for you to consider when we are there is that if you look at the superintendent and you look at the school board the town the superintendent is the person who is educated experienced knowledgeable in all things related to that and she advises the board and then the board makes decisions off the recommendation and the advisement of the person that is the superintendent and i would really love if we were in a position where that is exactly what our town manager and board looks like you all have other jobs that are your full-time jobs and we've until now try to pull people that have qualifications in certain areas and you know but we all understand that you all don't do this

as a full-time job and so the person who does that that's educated there that has that knowledge and experience can now come in and advise the rest of you who are volunteering in these roles that i'm sure are wonderful at what you do but you don't do that right and so when we're really considering who we're going to hire please keep that in mind thank you i think we all want that

neil stole most of my thunder but i guess i would just reiterate get my place that borrowed guy i would just reiterate what neil said when i was on the board i wasn't really ever for town manager i still think we should have been staying where we was but one of my main concerns is i don't want to go the same path last time last time it failed miserably i don't want to go up that path again be where we were eight nine ten months ago again um i do agree and i think we should make sure whoever we hire if we're going to go up this town man is bad that we hire somebody that can run the front counter that's where we need the most we always have the intervals we shut down the town office on friday and it was only half a day because we had an election we never shut the top office down because we have an election maybe once for a real quick reason i understand we're going to shut down the town office again

to do the end of the books and stuff we never have to do that so all of a sudden we're shutting this down because we don't have the right people i don't want to go down that path again i don't want to make it so hard that people coming in have to go across town to register cars because we don't have anybody there to do it i think the girls that are here have been doing a good job i think they've been doing probably better than a good job because they have kind of learned on their own i think if we had somebody in there that could kind of help them along as was mentioned they wouldn't be in the position they're in maybe we wouldn't have been in the position of around with new people either so just keep that in mind let's not go down the same path

all right i'm gonna uh consider public element closed before i had to think of something else joking of course my last minute all right um next uh item five uh reports uh fire chief that but it will be brief what we brief i've met with the town manager already about uh sort of the positivity from the town meeting which i appreciate i'll be meeting with janet tomorrow to start punching in the budget numbers and when we go from here um you might have seen a new sign a wildland smoky bear sign for the firehouse it is and fire season we got called to one today it was sort of a good intent but uh we're following that the gear's ready to go i know the rain is coming this week so that'll help but the ground cover has been pretty dry we started looking over the contracts for the capital improvement for the scba that sort of stuff may first as a increase of course so we're trying to have that settled

before may 1st which i believe we can do that in-house we started talking about a committee for um updating our apparatus so some of that capital improvement plan will be a multi-year plan half of it passed this year we'll be looking for next year for a little bit more just for updates for like the quints and some of our older pieces that that's where we're headed currently so that everyone understands that also we've uh checked in more important the avian flu the bird flu still in three different counties i've been watching that to keep you guys abreast of the situation no pun intended um and i still get updates on influenza so the people flew and that's a little update but there's only 10 people across the state that's actually hospitalized so currently mild according to the main cdc other than that we're still doing budgets and new seasons any questions for me welcome john thank you as always you can email me call stop by

the station bring an iced coffee whatever you want you can do this that's just a bowling stone all right don't know if campbell's out here tonight right i'm prepared to provide two updates yeah please go ahead department head wanted me to remind you that he's still working with the state on both the swamp road and the quaker meeting house roads if you recall those were supposed to initially go through engineering and design and your engineer at that time has since passed away but that is the firm's still working and uh in in in this period of covet

they changed some of the standards and requirements so that what which was going to be a culvert is now probably going to be a bridge so we're talking about the two colors that we have grants towards the right okay and he wanted you to be aware that he's working through that and going back to the agencies so that they will even though there may have been a change in the labor versus pre-formed concrete put in place as opposed to concrete in place at the time there's a labor-saving issue but the cost of everything keeps escalating so we're attempting to lever those so the project will be split into two years they can only do one this summer and then they'll do the other one in the following summer any timing issues with the grant for that one of them gets delayed a year we're hoping that the lack of appropriation for the second one will uh be considered for arbor funds because you're at this point not displacing

monies that have been appropriated already and it and if it sounds a little fuzzy it's because even the agencies themselves have not been totally clear as to where this is going to end up but we don't think that both projects were going to get underway and be done this summer and it has been a change the second item that he's been tracking is he had a request for proposals for the public works vehicle and plow that is out there and they're really only two that we deal with and what's interesting is freightliner and

plow equipment for the front the other two provide the chassis the chassis both came in at the same price and they combined it with the plow and actually what came out was that uh freightliner flash viking seabase proposal for combined everything was two hundred and thirty one thousand fifteen dollars if we were looking at the second bid which was hp fairfield for the same truck and the same tile system that was 250 680

we need to have your nod like everything else on the supply chain we have been told that this will not hold very long and if we go out to another bid again you will likely get a good response at about a 10 to 15 higher rate

so i'm sorry to put you in the corner at the last minute but this is information that's important and i think that the board should acknowledge that the testing of the waters has proven that we can save some money if we act now and quite frankly the freightliner chassis which is 143 815 will have the biggest

price height if we delay and that was the same price regardless of who's supplying it and we'd be lucky to get it if we don't so i i i'm there we have checked we have checked the marketplace done our diligence and the tough part is what do you want to do

this to make this decision this rapidly for calvin to be present and he had made a commitment that he could not be here and i was willing to bear the consequences of that did all this information just transpire in the last 12. it actually transpired starting last thursday and then friday

and it was very little time involved here we did meet with all the proponents that came to the town offices and that's the outcome so the first bid just the totals of the two bids again one was 230 something the other was 250 something did a which includes the truck and the file for 231 thousand fifteen dollars delivered

was two hundred and fifty thousand six hundred and eighty dollars the trucks meet the specifications the file need the specifications again in this case the the pal is the same regardless question i mean not necessarily the one where i get the cost to ask myself but in terms of the two of them i mean if they're you're basically saying they're identical um what what is i believe that the chassis came in slightly less under a freightliner and that's what made up the difference and our recommendation is to go with and that includes by the way for both of them a trade-in of the old vehicle and it includes the trade-in so are you are you essentially looking for authorization to enter into the car proceed and award the bid and make the purchase order so that we can lock in that price and save our taxpayers some money but at the same time take advantage of the fact that if you don't do this it's going to come back to wallop you in

another year because they won't have something available is uh within the 242 000 um typically will always take capitalist benefits or things like this to town meeting but um and so we're authorized to raise 220 089 dollars i'm sorry 21 911

expensive bid we could still do that because because we're authorized to allocate money out of capital reserve funds as long as they're used for the purpose of the town voting to put them in for um but we wouldn't need to do that with the first big 231 because that would come in you know about ten thousand dollars with that this is the exact same equipment in both cases yeah yes and delivered and ironically this is for a november build date and we will have it just before snow and we we've done it this way in the past like we've typically authorized calvin to go ahead and begin the bid process even before we don't have authorization that's always worded you know subject to approval at town meeting which we got um so now he's ready to roll this is this is what he's looking for is authorization to enter into the purchase agreement and um so and uh vikings today is the one that built our last one

i think that's the most expensive one though right liking the survey oh was that that there was it's it's less oh okay what was the what's the more expensive world come from fairfield located on 95 north you have to go way up to get equipment in pieces whereas uh biking survey is freightless yeah much more local so that each turnaround time for repairs especially in the winter could be value to the citizens okay oh well did

thousand dollars very specific in written form and in kelvin's opinion is it worth trading in or is he wanting to keep it for a uh parts truck or whatever the heck he typically does okay the road into a commissioner for the freightliner for 231 thousand and 15 seconds todd seconds any further discussion on that

all right 5-0 thank you gentlemen all right thank you his new trucks commissioner report yes okay uh moving on uh i guess we're going to stay with you mitch update on the code enforcement officer search process first my understanding is that the team that was put together prior to my arrival included the town manager a gentleman from the audience and we also had calendar and in all fairness when i came on board and i reviewed the applications i also saw one that i'm very familiar with i asked the members what their thoughts were and to a t they were they wanted more follow up with one of the applicants the others had varying degrees of capabilities but what you had assigned for not you as a board but what the challenge assigned for was a person who knew land use codes who worked with the planning director and actually assist in the process in the field so there'd be a much tighter fit between land use ordinances that are

being developed or in this case executed and enforced and this individual actually has coordinated the planning board in another community including solar arrays and other items of the manufacturing nature if we ever get into that residential being the biggest and more frequent use so we're meeting with that person on thursday at 9 30 a.m and if in fact the team is satisfied with that i will take that authority and go forward and attempt to negotiate what that person is looking for and uh report back to you the end results of that the allocation is there flexibility and authority

and i'm anxious to get calvin out of that position although he would be training and coordinating and that would make a very strong team for land use and for the planning board all right thank you all right so we're going to move down into the discussion of the search process for town manager we have kind of three topics listed here we can take them in any particular order um maybe i'll take it to you mitch to me if you want to do kind of an overview of like how you've approached this at other places and how you your recommended approach whatever you do and you know by the way you compliment the members of the audience who felt there was a sequence to be followed because i think that's just as important in the previous communities that i've worked in what i generally have done is what we're doing tonight what are your expectations remember you've got statutory requirements of a town manager

and you go to mrsa 30 a you can look at those in detail in its most basic sense you were looking for a policy implementer since you were the policy makers you were looking for that person who understands a horizon of information in municipal government who can take leadership and if they don't understand the problem does the research with the appropriate staff members to get the solution to the problems and as such starting with your expectations is as important as looking at the standards or the statutes that say what is expected of a child manager and i just want to make sure that you give me that because i want to build that into not only whatever job description we have currently but also highlight that in the advertisement now there were some comments today that we've heard that there are expectations on the part of some citizenry that that person will fill in as needed if that's what you're

looking for then we need to know that but i caution you because in every one of your audit reports today by your auditor they have indicated segregation of duties between front office and back office purposely to assure that you don't get into a situation where mitch has been with you for 25 years we trust complicity only to find out that he's being served and noticed in connecticut because he's been embezzling all this time doing something different those are the things you never know until you know them so segregation of duties in my mind is something i feel obligated to report to you about because when you hired me i was very specific about some of that going forward what you do is your business but i'm just sharing with you that the segregation of duties is extremely important especially in a community that has got a lot of growth pressure to it and there's a lot of transactions going forward and

it isn't just the front counter it's in fact the person who is going to be your chief executive or administrative officer and you are the board of directors of this business and the business of local government is more than just tagging the numbers that are coming in and issuing registrations there's a host of many other things that are involved with that as you have experienced over the years i just want to make sure that i understand your expectations and are there aspects of the town manager job that you're not clear about or that you want to be very clear about so that i don't misrepresent in our advertisements or in how we get people coming in as applicants and are being reviewed for the strengths and weaknesses that you're willing to live with that's the first part of that and yes it should be an open and free dialogue and whatever your expectations are please put them on the table so you know about

it up front it's not good to have those expectations not say anything about it get to the point where we're offering candidate x the job and then someone said but we expected the following to have happen and that doesn't look very good to anybody in the process

thoughts they want to offer there and it's yeah basically jack of all trades decent nun problem solver compassionate strong-willed listens carefully and advises throw that plumber electrician you know forward in our first attempt at this um [Music] you know we were um we hired outside consultation but it doesn't that tells you maybe who to hire and what you're looking for for an individual but it doesn't necessarily tell you the details of the day-to-day of what the expectation of a talent manager actually is you don't really see that on board so i know there's concern about the administrative part or our not even the administrative part or the assistance from like a town administrator is that we have in the past i know you just addressed that um

that we should be looking for or is even a possibility to have somebody that's floating in between like a 40 tower administrator role versus a 60 facilitator role as far as policy from here and i say northern augusta north and in that area there are towns with smaller populations equal population and larger populations that do it both ways

there's one individual who's not only the town manager that is also the town treasurer the finance officer the tax collector and the town clerk all at once and they don't do animal control only at times effectively that's realistic for a small town because auditors also are if you will regurgitating what the standards are in the industry they recognize limitations in small towns the move towards fraud has become a big issue in government and how to protect from fraud is part and parcel of a fiduciary right you are elected in part as a fiduciary so to answer your question can a manager fill in the front office absolutely we can make that part and parcel of that and maybe the notation in the audit is not of a concern right now but you are under a great deal of pressure for growth and you will continue to be so as far as i can see even if it remains strictly residential the number of transactions will continue to grow

accordingly and one of the worst things in the world that i have experienced as just one person is when you have to tell a taxpayer why you're not open today for business and we have to do that tomorrow to catch up it's unfortunate but that's the reality and it's death by a thousand cuts you don't see it today when you don't open up but over a period of a year or two the audience at a town meeting can get very aggravated based on their experience well i got there four minutes after four where were you well we were trying to catch up so we closed a half hour early so we understand the communication part of that but the reality is you're moving towards a professional who effectively should be providing the oversight of what takes place in the front office as opposed to checking out that they themselves are doing their their work properly and valve validating the receipts coming in deposits and so

on no reflection on on the good staff you have and they have come a long way in a short period of time but they still have questions and they're building their confidence from my standpoint you already know how i feel about segregation of duties do you have to have that i've already told you that the auditors will dig you on that but it doesn't necessarily mean you fail right yeah i guess i'm just not you guys to consider us a small town so i don't know what that we're that we're that small town versus medium town versus small to medium town through large town really all right then i'll give you an example there is no definition of that because i work for a town of 860 people passed away and effectively their town manager full-time town management form of government they have a town clerk and a finance officer they have segregation of duties the town manager never goes to the front counters to do

anything because they have to certify and they go through and review weekly and monthly all of the payables and payroll sign off on them and they're signing their name to that and the auditors have picked up on the fact that there is a segregation of duties 860 people is the population of that community yet 4100 you are you were getting through the fact that you had a great administrator who could step up and do some of the counter work but that administrator is responsible for all of the other things as well and that's why i'm a

as well so can i ask one last follow-up as many as you want thank you so i don't want to mobilize this guy's time um but by that rationale you know there's no definition of a small town but you've been in our town for a little bit um and we've heard concern about the town manager role and so forth is is that the appropriate role as you see it in this town moving forward i mean i know we're under pressures etc etc um are we at that transition point are we making the right call and you're a professional thing because you have a lot more time on the phone than i do i don't mind sitting in that hot seat okay thank you i think that you are that right on the table that is balancing with the seesaw and i think that 4100 people is going to be history for your community over the next five to 10 years i think the numbers are going to go up your land use ordinances is very clear from what i heard on saturday among

other things says don't tell us where we can't and can live don't regulate where we can't and can live we want to be the town and that's going to still encourage some growth family members to family members and quite frankly people from out-of-state places buying up land and willing to do the taj mahal to get away from the cities and just work down there for the weekends or the weekdays so my professional opinion is you are tipping that almost on a weekly basis there are times of the year when it clearly tips against you year end when we have to wrap up the books and set and remember we've been operating for three months now by approval and that's normal but you have to go back and reset the budget for this year going forward and as time goes on the person you hire is going to be telling you a little bit of what i've been saying now thank you

breakdown of the duties that you're doing now in regards to i'll say public works fire department and then oversight of i'll say the front office or the office itself what what type of breakdown is that from a part-time perspective

when i come in in the morning and it's monday tuesday and then thursdays and i try to adjust thursdays to kind of a midday because you're open to late in the evening and i think that's great for the customers but i'm usually here by 9 30 10 o'clock in the morning and i worked about 2 30 in the afternoon 3 o'clock in the afternoon on mondays and tuesdays and i'll adjust accordingly as i did today started at 1 o'clock i think i'm just looking straight through but to answer your question i would say that my time is approximately

answering the questions or working with our finance and our talent clerk on how do we close out with trio and start again and this has been very intense last week it was had we and the town clerk was i hope i've got everything ready for the election on friday and then going into the town meeting on saturday and what i found is i've spent that much time building camaraderie and an atmosphere of success and support and i think that's something that is very critical when you're trying to be a team the other 40 to 50 depending on the week i get reports from our fire chief and i also get reports from calvin in both of his roles and now that he's starting spring

he's pulling him away from his public works and he's spending a lot more time with code enforcement and so i can see and as you all know calvin is very diligent in making sure his t's are crossed and his eyes have died so he doesn't miss anything he doesn't want to fail but when you overload that's when you potentially make mistakes and so to answer your question there are things that i could be doing in the office tonight after four weeks i finally got to look at some of the bank statements just as a double check but i do check weekly payroll and payables so there's that spot check going forward i hope i'm giving you some understanding

administrators regardless of their title over the last 10 years fully understand your roles but i think without for the periods of time when we haven't had a town manager that's what's missing is that kind of i would say cross-departmental organization and process management like what's happening in all the various places and without a town manager as somebody accurately pointed out earlier during the public comment section you know that's not what we do right that's we're not the experts at managing the town resources across departments and you know making sure that you know cip committee is getting together or that you know something else you know from especially from a human resources standpoint is happening your appraisals are getting done or whatever um you know with without a town manager or somebody who's overseeing all of that and it forces us to fill in those gaps and play that role and

it's it's not good for the employees and it's not good for the town and it's not good for how things work you know i mean i think we've done the best we can but it's not ideal and i think to your point that the town was at the tipping point where a part-time board that meets twice a month for a couple of hours you know cannot adequately oversee a town with a multi-million dollar budget and you know over a dozen employees and local state and federal regulations out the wazoo you know that you need to contend with so it really requires professional management um and so that's you know that's kind of where i am on this is where i think we've known our role i think we know what our role should be and we want to get to that point where we're acting as the board of directors as you put it and not not the chief executives actually running the more tactical day-to-day show that's a very important statement

mr chairman and i want to find out that all of you feel that way because it then allows us through the process of interviewing to determine the personality and the skill sets of that individual to meet today's requirements and do they have the capacity to grow with the community for tomorrow's needs and hopefully and i say this carefully to everyone whether they be here in the audience or out there in tv land if you get a person who is committed you will be very fortunate to keep them three to five years

nature of the beast is a supply chain problem here beings who are trained to some degree to do these jobs there are not many who are available and what we're seeing now quite frankly are people who are cross-trending town clerks are recognizing they have a lot of that administrative capability if they have the personality to be the ceo and they already have the inner workings of your community and you're going to see more and more town clerks leave their positions get the additional training they need and it's often on the job training at other small communities to start out so where does that leave your community the possibility is that you may get a well-trained and experienced applicant who was not a town manager but was a town clerk for many years and then you need to find out what was their sole responsibilities and authorities do they have a 360 degree perspective of the operation or it's a very tunnel

vision i mean i'm preparing you for a bad market a competitive market and a good market commitment to go back to the role statutory role that you believe the town manager should be doing along with what you folks are doing as policy makers and to me that's a team effort yeah i think i think you know for those of us that we hear when we had the initial discussions it was very much along those lines like we wanted the board to do what the board should be doing and a town manager to do what the top managers be doing and to get a lot of that town manager stuff which it's got to be done whether you've got somebody with a title doing it or not you know some of those more tactical things have to be done but having that town manager it's there's a strategic element and looking down the road pick your head up over the horizon versus get the weekly task list done and i think that's that's something we never really had with the

town administrator form of government was the you know pick your head up look over the horizon you know what's coming at you and what are the opportunities that maybe um you could take advantage of if you had somebody so i i don't see the town manager as a super tactical work the desk position i'd rather hire somebody at you know 20-ish dollars an hour and work the counter than have our town manager that we're paying 45-50 an hour working the counter and i know mr berry with all the respect that does not see that transition and he's questioning that that's a good thing that he's questioning that your comments are very well taken you want someone who can work with your planner and code enforcement you want a visionary because the reality is it's going to take a visionary to help control the growth in your community going forward right it doesn't take a great mathematician to recognize that you have a quality of life in

durham that you want to retain and anything that gets diluted may spoil that in the future yet at the same time and so asking for that not to change costs are going up over the same assessed value although assessed out it's a whole other issue yeah and the bottom line is that you're going to be facing the cost of doing business whether you have that strategic person in that corner or not the real question is are you preparing yourself for the future and i think that's what some of the things should be for your manager going forward so is there anything on that example that offends you i feel like you kind of raised my expectations of what we to get and then shot them right down and so i guess my question is i don't want to jump ahead too far with the salary we budgeted or the town has budgeted what expectation what level of expectations can we expect uh you know i'm not from what i'm hearing and coming in i'm

not expecting we're going to hire somebody with your level of experience at the rate where we're going to pay are we looking at someone who's going to have no experience who's going to be new or is there somewhere in between that we can find because i don't want to take this step and do all this work and come back disappointed in the end and so i want to go in with an expectation with a reasonable expectation of what we can expect good the answer to that is as follows

over the last 18 months and this has been a very unique history globally not just for your community i have watched managers leave their position and go to the smaller communities but their experience is what they were carrying with them the communities programmed what they thought was the market and in two communities that i'm thinking of within your locale region of androscoggin and cumberland they have budgeted 60 to 75 000 and found they were actually settling at 85 to 95 000 and being perfectly blunt

forward from saturday and it's only a one-time peak to your community's history is there's a lot of demand for quality in this community and people just don't want to fill the slot for the sake of filling the slot and if you cannot compete to get quality person

to go back to a vote and change the form of government but i'm afraid you're not going to get someone for 55 and 60 75 or 80 000 will be lucky and i will caution you if someone is from another state out of new england i'm not going to recommend them because they're going to use you as a move too at their at your expense they will stay two to three years and you may gone or some great idea maybe that's worthwhile but they'll be gone in three years time for something bigger in the state or new england it's very competitive i don't want to disappoint you but i want to be realistic it's going to be a tough haul if we can get 12 to 15 good candidates and out of that top candidate yeah that's what you want and you may have to pay a little bit more and explain to the public at your next town meeting that it cost us more in the marketplace today and the marketplace is driving all positions not just private positions

there are three town clerks that have left their position as town clerks in the last month and a half i don't know where they're going but i'm sure we may see their names leave you negative but i want to be realistic well that was the answer i was expecting but i just wanted to hear it i appreciate it so is there anything on the list that you want me to scratch has an expectation of your responsibility because i'll work with that going forward then we can talk about the timeline and then we can go from the timeline to the what might be there a current job description

if there is i haven't done it yet but i'm sure there may be i'm sending it to you okay thank you the chair's position on if he's represented what the cost would be to get a manager but the reality is it's a supply chain issue and we've seen it in trucks among other places so what's what's in the budget for 22 is basically carrying forward what the previous town manager was in there and that's 85 000 in their plus benefits

what i hope to do is on thursday when i come back in working with the ceo position i hope to take your ideas and then over the weekend i will try to pull that together based on the rest of our discussion i will start placing the ads but i want to make sure you see

experience is that i'm worried that would be too a big filter for for some maybe attractive candidates you're right the bottom line is you're gonna have to be flexible you're not gonna get a jack of all trades an ace of none you're going to get someone who's got some willingness and quite frankly under strength to be able to pull up here yeah i mean that's a that's a good point you know just for the new board members just to give a little context on you know our previous time here you know we knew you know we had a lot of things that we wanted our top manager to be but like this just said you're it's rarely got to get somebody that checks all the boxes right so we knew that the person's strongest suit was not finance but when we hired the person we had the other town staff was had a lot of experience in that area and had worked for the town for a long time but shortly after the town manager came on board

the town clerk and the deputy treasurer left and not necessarily because of the new town manager but you know they left and so all of a sudden you've got a new town manager and two new people in the town office and absolutely zero institutional knowledge in the office so that's um and as mitch said you know say what you want about the previous town manager um she did a great job hiring people she hired two you know killer people in the um town office and she hired us an awesome fire chief so you know that we'll take that and and build on that and go forward and i don't want to sound like i was saying anything negative or not so you you caught my attention on something early that um with the grow growth of the existing employee base our clerks how can we wrap that into um they all say you know like you say we might get something for three four five years um in this process but it is i guess

something more for the board that as we maybe grow the clerks they they've definitely been a fast learning this this space we've been going at lately you know is there opportunity to grow them into rather than lose lose the knowledge base but to actually roll into somehow into a training plan for for the existing uh employees to be able to step up maybe a way a day you know no different than you would you know junior engineers to medium engineers to senior engineers you know um i just i'm just thinking out loud here just uh as a way to create our own little growth plan um at a from a personnel standpoint um you know i agree with all these skills these you know they they have to be a jack of all trades it's

else to think about as we move forward here um to keep that you in mind very interesting point people sharp as a whip and now we're building an environment of confidence and they need to know that they're doing the job right on a daily basis and if they have a question they should ask they shouldn't be afraid not to reveal that they don't know and we're going through that process now to your specific question the fact that you are allowing them to grow may allow them to take on additional responsibilities that you hadn't thought of tonight

right now job satisfaction is being surpassed by job compensation things may settle a little bit over the next five years where compensation and satisfaction are equally important but you also have two people who can see their jobs want to do their jobs and they are customer oriented sometimes they have to come into the office and they need to get their steam off the system but that's normal okay and what i can see you have very competent people and we want to continue to support that atmosphere getting the right manager who comes in and is not a dictator but as a team player and helps them see the future and the goals that they need to and your most recent experience with your town clerk coming through her first election in the town meeting she's right on time she asked the questions and she sometimes just needed to have someone else validate that she's heading in the right direction you need a team builder

and you need a person who can communicate to the community that their skin in the game is to do the job correctly as best as possible i'm not 100 and i'll falter a lot at my age i forget a lot too but i want to make sure that we're getting this off on the right foot i'm extremely pleased with what you've said so far about your town manager position but i want to move now to the timeline and at any point in time that questions come up about what you're looking for

final analysis [Music] tentative if in fact you finished agreeing with the position description tonight this weekend i get the papers ready for it with the advertisements which i want you to all read through carefully they're not going to be the biggest advertisers but they're not going to be a little one inch by one inch they're going to be reasonable and you're going to spend about 24 to 25 hundred dollars covering the new england area i don't go outside and it's not worth it

the 12th of april and then start receiving resumes after the 12th by then you'll have had i hope your committee established and that when you go through an orientation the general orientation will be in public but i want to talk a little bit more about the committee itself and its responsibilities and confidentiality a little bit later on in my conversation with each other we effectively would look at top candidates the first week of may possibly even schedule interviews for the first interviews from the 10th to the 14th of may this is aggressive yeah and it can slide but if we don't start now they're going to be others out there fishing as well the second interviews could be as early as the third week of may through memorial weekend and if we do get that person who fills the slot you could very well find that this is ideal time because if they're family the kids are coming out of school shortly thereafter

they don't disrupt their school they finish up the school they get to move sell their house or whatever they're doing find a place here and come in and by labor day they're back in the saddle so the timing is very good and i think the market will treat you better this time of year as opposed to starting in september if you agree with that the interview process i'll simply point out that i'm extremely pleased to have had experience working with elected bodies that have also put on their

staff and citizens the ultimate responsibility however lies with you five members my job is to try to get the best we can do the research and make sure that they cut the mustard and that they are capable of doing the job that you expect whether you have one three or five citizens you have to make that decision i would recommend that in my experience when the board is faced with pulling together an interview team they put a notice out to the public and not some place where they can't see it but out there that says we invite you to apply and we will have an application what makes you special what are you bringing to the table to this interview process versus i just know what i know and i know nothing else you know you want to get something from that person sitting at the table you should also have anywhere from one to three staff members it could be one echelon level of department head it could be two

at the rank and file level or vice versa but you want some of that input because they have to work with that person and they want to give you some feedback as well the problem is when you have 11 13 and 15 people herding them into a room with candidates can be a interesting challenge to say the least so the numbers have to be with you but i would recommend put a quick application out let people apply interview them have a workshop even a saturday let's interview the people that want to be on the ground that's right and give them a chance to understand the process and give you an understanding of their capabilities of what they're bringing together i don't care about the hard question but i want to make sure that we have people who are involved and engaged so that the end results at least was fair equitable and serves the community

if you agree with all of that i'll work on an application for the citizenry let them fill it out and i'll give you the questions that you should be asking the person that i would put that right on their application and let them answer it and call them in interview then it may only be a 10 or 15 minute interview but from that you'll be able to then say here you go and by the way you can decide but i would pose this to you any individual who applies to be on the committee to assist with select work understands the confidentiality and that starts with the fact that they're being interviewed in an executive session because it deals with personnel yeah they may be a volunteer but at this point they're working on behalf of the taxpayer yeah we've actually started that advice of counsel um when we appoint whether it's planning board members or whatever we or any committee member we do that executive session

give me your feedback if you decide you're running for activation what am i hitting the targets the way you fully believe but the longer you wait you get in the that the name of durham name is out there in the minds of people before june you've got to do that so that you said you were thinking get the advertisements published essentially a week from today is that what you were saying the advertising for the resumes of citizens staff members who want to be on this hiring committee oh okay that would be a week yes when and when did you envision the advertisement for the actual position going out

12th uh the 28th of uh april oh okay all right i missed that part so by the end of april the posting those out right certainly by then we should be start receiving them my goal is to get the advertisement for one your citizen committee out there right away that's easy to do with the form they have to fill out secondly to create the advertisement for the manager position and i'm going to ask you to have a workshop because otherwise we have to wait to the next meeting which is what three weeks from now great so yeah i think one thing mitch and i did talk about is that probably your standard um two meetings a month is probably not going to get it done through this process so probably i think that we're actually this is an early meeting for us um our normal meeting night would have been the 12th so um i think well when we get to the end but i'm going to probably propose to still meet the 12. um

if we can move forward um or do we need to at this point talk about committee composition and how many of these how many of those or does that come after we see what kind of response we get or what are your thoughts there

the following that you as a board agree that a citizen input and staff input is important that's a statement that needs to be made so does anybody not think that way that's fine no i think that should be the way it goes okay i think we have consent on that okay step by step the second part will be that at a minimum you want at least one but are looking to have three citizens on the board and a minimum of one if not three staff members on the board that would give you 11 plus your intro manager which i only conduct the meeting yeah i was i had myself a little world chat here i was thinking yeah public works fire department and somebody from the office and yourself right and i have no voting whatsoever three two or three citizens depending on what we find from people that are interested in doing that yeah i was i was kind of along those lines this is kind of where i was odd numbers are easier to break ties with

11 is a lot and chances are you may have to meet in a different surrounding this may not be big enough i don't know or i'm also thinking you know the zoom thing too because you may get candidates from afar that may not travel at least for the first round if this is going to be in new england if it's going to be first of all if they can't take the time to drive over here and that that's fine i just i'm just thinking we did do that last time did you do that last time yeah but we have a different environment yeah a very different fire but that's fine the full in person works too at a minimum and then you can go to three on each and that way you're not just picking one person you may decide two or three from the citizen group and for the others and if we can get the citizen applications back

that's a lot yeah but let's assume you get a dozen then i would recommend a saturday morning starting at nine and every 15 minutes at the end of the first half we'll go through and interview the citizens i will create for you the basic questions although the application itself will probably be the key point and you want to see the individual how they respond to that and then you can decide from there and it will be done i recommend an executive session it's a personal matter no one likes to be told that they're not going to be appointed but at least we're going to give them that opportunity that we're not going to advertise they're not chosen so are you saying that we interview everybody that submits an application no pre-screening at all no get every citizen in here who makes an application and if you get an overwhelming amount then yes

them the opportunity to sell themselves no we're talking about the board not all the candidates the committee yeah the committee different issue whether you find that committee i i will ask the chair to cast them with take the numbers of qualified capable applicants and pair them down further i will make a recommendation too but i want you to look at every application unfortunately you're going to get the applicant who says i used to be a teacher or i used to be a carpenter or i used to be a police officer or i used to do this and i think i have the administrative skills to take on that task in some cases those are pre-screened out by the committee right away they never even make it to the internet and understandably they don't meet the basic elements right we're talking about the top manager job now right yes

sorry the teachers weren't qualified down that we should make every effort to interview everybody i think that's important and so i think that's a good point you mean and i'm happy you said that okay i have never experienced and this comes from our discussions i've never experienced a committee of 18 and 24.

i was being told about was a school board committee that represented three towns i understand why they had to have a large number but i think if at after 11 it gets to be an unwieldy issue and process for committee members but that's my recommendation you tell me what you want i was just curious if um

kind of how we did the fire chief and so forth where there's maybe in the initial stages couple members of the select board the town the interim town manager some employees in the rest of the panel consist of the towns folks and totally narrowing down we had to not have the full board involved up front yeah that's i mean my experience in this type of hiring is somewhat limited to executive directors of non-profit agencies and that's how we did it

and i think i think it helped uh and and in our case you know there were some of the the less vocal and i don't um but but i think it helped get different views maybe out there and heard uh i don't know if that's necessarily the best would there only be five of them there were nine of those but do you have any thoughts on that suggestion let me give clarification we're talking now about the review committee for the first i was thinking like the first round of interviews yeah so the review committee would um it would essentially be that it would be a review committee made up of maybe a few members from this panel members of the town members of the town staff they would do all the for locker better words initial legwork and interviewing get it down to the finals and then um take it from our side of the house and and a few of the uh selected from the um original panel i just wanted to be clear

my short exposure to your community yep let me separate this so that we're clear the applications to be on the committee should all be reviewed and interviewed anyone who took the time to write out the application should be here in front of you that's that's my opinion once you've selected the three citizenry and the three staff members and yourselves i have been experienced in both cases where the committee has said if someone is a trades person and wants to now be a town manager they really don't have that experience put them in this pile all right hold on are you talking for the committee members or are you talking for somebody who's applying for the planning for the job you're applying for the job of the town manager right right that would be up to the committee to to to okay to um we need to make the distinction because my understanding is if we all agree that any person who applies to be

on the interview committee yes gets an interview here then that's half the battle we're done anybody not agree with that i think as long as the numbers are i mean if you're talking you get 80 80 people then i might i might disagree but if you're talking about there's something that can be done in a day that i would wholeheartedly agree i think i want to go back to rich's question though because i think rich's question was whether all five board members should be involved in the round one interviews or perhaps just two or three is that why you're asking that's exactly what i'm asking because i think i think the more input out of that initial panel that we get from the outside you know outside of this board is more crucial than the input from this board at upfront so let more of the citizens do a lot of the legwork and have some of their questions um and answers in the interviewing process so they feel more

comfortable and then they can make a recommendation to the board of who they want to move forward into the next round so did you have a better words two separate citizen panels essentially one doing initial that way you get more so i think our initial board would make the recommendation moving forward and i think that's correct me if i'm wrong but i think that's more of how you see maybe the school board operates where there's individuals more so in the town it's not the whole legislative body of the school board conducting all yeah from what i understand because i talked to uh the school board chair at length about their process to learn about it and you know there's they have a lot of people involved up front in that initial screening in first round and then i don't care exactly how the process works but eventually and it's not the whole school board right up front eventually it then gets

you know once some sort of a cut or is made and then it's the i think it's i think it was like three three five let's whatever that's that then goes to the school board and only the school board the citizen involvement stops after the first round so the citizens are involved in kind of like the screening and first-round interviews they provide some input the board members that we're on that part of that first process they're providing the input to and that committee is kind of the call it the finalist selection committee because that's what they'll put on the finals that's what comes out of it and then the finalists interview with the school board let me pose a legal question unless you have a quorum two of you could do that and it's not an official meeting and it's not an official meeting and you have the citizenry doing the initial screening i think there could be an argument that it's not official group it wasn't an

official meeting yet you went in and screened 10 applications out of the 20 application pool i'm concerned because i've never had that happen before where unless you have a majority three which allows which requires under the freedom of access the official meeting i think we need that authority to make the final decision that's why this board should be in the final decision the initial screening of the candidates can be pushed forward to the board and there can be a separate committee and i don't think that requires uh at least it has in the past i don't think that requires i think it's i think it's in the um i think it's an appointment of a committee by the police okay would the chair and the board entertain any public comment on this because i'm curious i've never come across this before this is new to me and i want to i'm trying to balance your authority with the wishes of the townspeople who

want to be interactive classes can we get some input okay i know i got a question because we went around a couple times here so i just want to make sure i got together so we're saying initial committee made up of folks from town and a couple board members to go through the initial round of myself with myself and and possibly some of the department heads through the initial round of um interview process and then move that to a board-only um finalist board and citizen or just well that's what i was that's what that you know that's where i was kind of well there's no the decision is the boards there's there's no scenario right exactly well that's that's why i was you know that's why i think it's more you go and have more of them up front but is it a three-stage process is what i'm getting at or is it just a two-stage product oh yeah so that that would be citizen with the board to talk about the finalists

as a citizen might be plural um but just and then you go to the final what the board has down to say three people at the end okay which one do you want and that would be the worst decision and we've done similar things like this with fire chief in the past two fire chiefs at least on my tenure um yeah and other things we we've used a panel and then ultimately that panel would make the best recommendations and then it was just to the selected board and the select four would be interview the finalist and we would we would basically elect in a sense of what this panel put forward to us yeah that consisted of the town's folks employees and and maybe one or two of us and we'd only be looking at the ones that we'll put forward we wouldn't be reviewing anything no because they're charged with bringing us the best case yeah that's three two at least two of the members of the board would have right would have been right no i get

that part yeah they'd be quote unquote citizens or just guiding daddy white through that yeah and realistically the more interviews we have the longer it's going to take the longer it takes the more interviews you have the more likely people are just going to say i'm not interested in this i mean is what's the right number in your experience well i think the initial just not to cut you off sorry i think the initial work by that board weeding out let's say you have 120 applicants getting down to that final 10 and then expediting those interviews and only right if we have

applications and not all of them not even close to all of them were viable or even so there it is whether you call it three-stage or two-stage there's kind of like an initial screening like are we even gonna get to a first interview right right with this person yeah and then and then um so i could see and i i think this is the input from the public on the school process i think they're involved in the screening or but anyway they um they're determining okay who's going to be in first interviews and they do that and then there's a there's like a system they use to provide input and rank on a rubric and it's a pretty it's a pretty spelled out like formalized process they have a consultant that's managing all that for them

interview cycle for uh uh time management as far as applications well applications it was uh like it was over 40. i want to say 45 and um we only we only interviewed what six i was gonna say first interview six or seven seven we identified seven one of them said no by the time we called them yeah i thought it was and then out of that there was there was only one that was that [Music]

to a second interview we would have like gone back to the well and started it was over it was rewriting the started talking about the end process it's they may be involved as citizens at the end they may not be involved in veto that was why i was asking about how many applicants we got that you know how many of these rounds do you do and if you only end up with three to begin with you know

them through that panel entire board for being considered to hire and so be it if that three fails at that committee level then nobody goes through and we're back to square one as far as i'm concerned yeah that's i i mean we've got five people here i mean five minutes we can cap it because obviously we have more stuff on the agenda does anybody object to reopening public comment okay we'll reopen it um three minutes max per person i won't even take that off so i've been on the hiring committee process for this and i've also been on the hiring committee process for school um and they're they use two board members um i sincerely appreciate doing this in the reverse order i'm completely fine with that end result being delegated to just the board and that second round of interviews i think that more that the residents can have input in the beginning stages to narrow the pool i'm completely on board with that thank you

i sincerely appreciate that um just talking about the numbers that mitch was throwing out there if we needed a quorum three board members three employees and three residents is nine so that we're not in an even number scenario um thank you i appreciate it thank you good speed comment

quorum is three so we are worried about it being official every step of the way then if we have three select board members then that's a great idea um i guess i should disclose i'm a durham resident but a mechanic falls business owner so we won't hold that against you right well we don't have much businesses

they do pretty well here so i saw the process that mitch did with mechanic falls um and so a couple of thoughts just kind of breaking off of that is um mitch had if i understood correctly two sets of questions one set for the initial interview a second set of questions for the second interview that he labeled as more difficult um so i think there is benefit to having somebody from the town and from the employees being in that second interview not necessarily the max like we're talking about a minimum representation of the select board in the initial round perhaps it's a minimum representation of the employees and the citizens in the second round for two reasons one they get that insight of the tougher questions and they may have insight how they compared to the first round of interviews secondly everybody acts differently in each round of interview so they may you know point out a personality

characteristic that they noticed in the first interview that they're not seeing in the second interview that may point to either a character flaw or a character benefit i also wanted to recommend get to um you know what's what's the plan if people fall off because they took a job someplace else during our interview process because it gets to the final stage and there's only one person at the final stage only two people at the final stage is it still the plan just to hire the one because at least we like the one or are we still going to have a set of standards that they must meet or we all agree that we're just starting the process again and my thought is if you only get three qualified applicants because the last time around people fell off the wagon so to speak because they took jobs what about if you do have just a minimum pool of qualified interviewees instead of having two interviews you do just

have one that was all thank you thanks i think you know i think our sense would be that at least i would offer that we're we're going to hire somebody that we think is is qualified and can do the job and meets what we're looking for and hopefully we find that person whether it's out of a pool of three or a pool of 30. and but if we don't find that person we keep going yeah they'll never make it out of the first round right in first round if they don't they don't meet the requirements out of the panels of the first round then all right we got to start from scratch we got to keep searching we got to keep searching you're probably going to fed her out yeah it doesn't matter yeah at that point you'll know if you've got viable candidates after yeah you know it's you might i mean sometimes you know you might just have one one gold nugget and a big pan of dirt you know but there's so much we've seen you might

have some more bikes there these committees you actually perform the quorum so it's an official meeting so to speak so i'm cautioned about that maybe two seconds works fine for those particular first meetings i've only been on one committee uh and it wasn't necessarily higher than something else but they had 16 or more members it was slightly different than higher end it worked very well because it was a different set of rules but i think if you got to that many people this type of thing from my experience and i've been on i don't know half a dozen to a dozen over the years from different companies and things i've done i think those numbers that you passed now are much more reasonable and and more number i i actually agree and maybe i'm misunderstood but i actually think it's right only to have two so you're not actually forming an actual medium there's nothing that combined if there's only two there

yeah yeah i mean you can go say something it could be awesome anyway so uh before i i'm just looking at the perception you know if people in the club that's a quorum they should be doing that oh you know what i'm saying perception is reality around here something like that the truth um no i won't let debbie yeah i would just like to say i think the fact that you're going to open it up to the community and possibly interview everybody who is interested in being on the committee is really good and i think people at the town meeting will recognize that's one of the boxes we're checking as far as getting community input so i think that's awesome i also i think it's uh fine with the suggestion where the community is involved up front but even if it's just the select board at the end without community or

the first round to just experience the second time not even just uh because they have a vote which they don't have a vote at the tail end but just understanding the process hearing the discussion the how you guys come up with the decision yeah i mean it might be informative yeah yeah i don't know i mean there's different lots of different ways to handle you could invite you could invite people that participated in um call let's just call it round one round two right now but um people that participated in round one that our board members to um almost look just observe right round two interviews and then afterwards you know offer any thoughts or feedback or whatever i mean that's i love that that's what i was saying and observation let me add something to that because i think you're all coming to a pretty good place the reason why i suggested three slack board members is to legitimize the role and

responsibility of the action that's going through the process but more importantly there are many people who would apply but if they found out it was not considered a confidential or personnel matter officially and word got back to their existing employer you jeopardize their existing work if in fact there were three members three three and three as was recommended you've got your nine plus a facilitator you're all bound by the executive session requirements that's a protection yeah and if they don't want to lose their job because they didn't get another job we won't be jeopardizing that your second idea of a format once the screening has gone through and i say screening because even though the person may not be in front of you oh mitch over in gray i didn't realize he's interested in the word gets out that's the problem so the second round interview will be the first official round of just the

select board if that's your recommendation but it came to us only after the citizen committee and the folk committee did it and it was still an official action and that's the only reason why yeah that makes a lot of sense i i have to think of those things to protect the people who are yet to apply but i think you've come out with a hybrid that is very workable you just have to fight amongst yourselves who's going to be

the person you've chosen i can't meet those things i know one of the things and i don't know if we can put the dates out ahead of time one of the things that rsu did is like we're planning on interviewing on these dates right and if you're not available on these dates no i'm sorry but these are the dates what we what i don't think one learning from last time that i think we would try to avoid is there's no way we can coordinate interview schedules across like 11 people right 11 different people's schedules but at the same time we kind of have to have the requirement that if you're on that committee you got to be there for all of the interviews you can't be there for six but not for two right you know absent of an emergency right well yeah and that's why i was saying if you have even it's tough like you said but if you have some dates you know then that you know like you throughout may and a lot of days

depending on what those dates were if i was chosen for the committee this state said i know i couldn't make it so you know so i would say well i appreciate you putting me on it but i can't because yeah yeah i'm not cheating we'll have to think about that like kind of and that's kind of how rsu did it and that's right that's what i only noticed my wife was part of their last hiring process with the new superintendent and it's essentially these are going to be the dates are you available right now i think we can build that because if we say because we're going to have a deadline for what applications are due and then you can build off that when the interviews will be scheduled realistically i'm assuming that saturdays are the only real day that everyone probably has off and it doesn't interfere with their work schedule otherwise

the best opportunity if you want to be a citizen considered for this community do you have saturdays in the month that may open that makes sense to me so that well no we're going out of town well what i would what i would get is we've done this in the past and most citizens if you select the date and a lot of the candidates that we've had in the past it was typically in the evening hours if you want to do evening hours that's fine too you're doing a lot of day program really no yeah so i'm flexible enough to go whatever you design uh because these interviews that are being screened by citizens with the other members no i just don't want to create that it might be it might be that we say you need to keep wednesday and thursday and evenings in may open yeah that's fine too i think you make it so restrictive like hey you gotta have tuesday and wednesday all day for this particular time then then the impact from the community is

much less you bring up a good point because i know we've done interviews of a large amount of people in a single day like an eight-hour session and the interviewers were exhausted yeah so one whole round of say 40 people coming through in one day is just kind of crazy you might if you do with the multiple nights in a week then you're banging you know the ones that whatever

45 do you think it'd be a good idea for um mitch to do the initial call um that's a good point mma did that was part of what they did last time we still they still sent them all right then we got them but they said you know this is what we think you know you're even and they were very conservative like even remotely viable you know they really only filtered out the like yeah no right not even close yeah yeah somebody that just made up the app because you look like you got something to say i'm just thinking you know there was a lot of talk of citizen input and by doing that you're taking out one level of citizen input and so i agree that that i i personally uh whether on the board or not would not have a problem with that and and would be okay with that my my concern is one of the things we heard at canada's night at the town meeting was citizen input and i think that is one level of this input that you're taking

away um right yeah i i would i would agree but i would also disagree so if you have somebody that you kind of like we did with mma and similar to what we're doing currently with our interim town manager that is that has essentially been tasked to find us our next manager yes they will it down to the 15 or whatever viable candidates that may be as long as the citizens get a crack at everybody that we're interviewing i don't i don't think we're really shortchanging them in any shape or form because a citizen a lay person even myself who's been on this i don't know how long they're sitting here but you know i don't know the things that he knows and most citizens don't know the red flags that's why we incorporated mma in the last time and that's why we're trying to incorporate mitch this time because there's just there's just so much minutia that could come in that it's just you know you could spend that panels you could

they could spend two nights reviewing applications that mitch could have been basically um got out of the mix before they even got there it doesn't now the confusion is just set in yeah i know i'm i'm there already let's break this down i'm not confused i just i have another one go ahead

the select board is more than pleased to have three of their members along with three of our employees employees and three of our citizens and they may be conduct an initial interview process willing to go through the application process for those citizens who want to be on this review and let those citizens

call out the good ones from the bad ones if you will i hate to use that turn out very interesting so that you've got whether you have 18 or 25 or 30 yeah the three citizens or four citizens whatever you decide and the manager call it effectively calls they become the initial call now here's the group right here it's in the file you can look at it anytime you want but here's the group that they're now working with and then we go ahead with three to pull the 15 down to the top six and that's when you all get involved at that point after the top six is that something that you're looking at yeah and i was gonna throw something else out there that even though that initial call might throw some out that even the larger committee when it gets together and walk at them one more time if there's an extra person you want to bring in out of the pile almost almost like a save let's see

i haven't had a question about the objective not that that initial phase won't be accurate i'm just saying but it gives [Music] determine the list of people to bring in for a first interview or is the objective to screen out the people that are not even remotely what he considered for her first interview and then the larger committee reviews after the initials to determine the first round interviews the latter okay that i'm okay with the former at this point what i'm hearing and and let me try to give it to you in real time select board of the county dorm looking for applicants who would like to be on the initial screening committee of application for the tab manager position if you are interested and have available on wednesday and thursday nights please fill out the application trinity we get 25 applications for citizens who want to be on that committee let's just deal with that right now

how do you call those down to a number that you want to work with the interim manager when we finally get the real applications for the town manager position i'm very distinct how do you call down 25 citizen applications to get to a number that you want to act as a screening committee with the manager we put some you said we were going to interview all of them right okay so you want so that means on a wednesday and thursday night or saturday whatever you choose that's when we interview i'm sorry mitch you can't make the meeting we will have to make the decision without your corruption okay so we understand how many do you want on that ultimately you're looking for three four five six or seven citizens oh wait wait wait i don't know three i don't envision i don't envision citizens being on the committee that picks the citizens to be on the committee that's my mistake so i think i think the

um the first thing so i think the first step is we send out we uh solicit applications the board reviews applications for the committee from the citizens and i don't know are we going to have staff do an application too or are we going to like just ask just

interview them all and then then to me it's an executive session board conversation on who are the three out of all the people we just interviewed that are going to get appointed to the committee anybody yeah no that's right yeah yeah sonic three so now you you've made two that was the only [Music] well i mean sometimes we have a lot of interest in this stuff sometimes we have minimal interest in this um i can't remember last time but you know i don't want to cap it at three and five people apply five people apply let's just put the five people on oh i disagree because we don't we want to keep the we don't we want to we kind of want to keep the overall committee i think we said like maximum like 11 ish or so because if we just i don't want to just throw two on just just to throw two more on if we're gonna throw two on i think we should be employees we already have the employees i think we need to be a little bit

disciplined about you know we've kind of identified that you know three board members three from the uh from staff three from the community and and much you know we we pick from what we are gonna pick from and that's that's what we end up with okay so the numbers three is that well that's that's i think that's what we've been talking about that's what that's kind of where we've been yeah so three citizens will be selected out of the application pool by you the board and once that happens they're sworn to secrecy and they're acting on behalf of the board they become part of the 369 who will then go through the applications for the town manager position right got it clear and they will make their recommendations accordingly and we're talking evenings as opposed to a weekend and that we need to be specific about their recommendation the output of that is a list of potential first interview candidates

it's not the actual list of first-round interviews it's the to be considered by the larger committee including staff of the board for potential first-round interviews no see that's i think what he's saying is that the the initial screening like the because at first we talked about let's just have mitch do the initial screening and you raise the point about citizen involvement then so rich throughout mitch throughout the idea of well let's have just mitch and just the three citizens so before them do the initial screen the output of that would be the pool of potential first round interviews that the larger committee would review i'm with you now okay

phase one is to get citizen involvement that's what we're talking about yeah make your applications out there'll be a few questions on there you as a group are going to take all those applications you're going to actually interview all of those people whether it be 5 10 20 or 30 citizens whatever the case may be if it's that many then you've got an interested party but you're only going to select three from that to be the representative citizen group once those three have been selected you're then amongst yourselves going to look at all of the applications for the town manager position am i correct the three million three questions and we're going to put a million to two groups right yeah yep no yep maybe in yes once those have been called out then it goes maybe in the yes to whatever goes to the three three and three yeah yes three three and three we'll look at those and call them down to

the top whatever and at that point the citizens are done or you want to keep them straight through to the end well wait well at that point we've at that point we've only identified the first round interviews and then the larger committee would participate in the first round interviews so they would be present and even ask questions in there although it should be noted though i think we're talking about people aren't going to be able to bring their own questions we need to ask the same questions of all the candidates and that you will you will scratch that's synchronized if you watched it everyone's name was on the question and they had to go around in the same order so that so then um coming out of that um first round will be that committee will after going through the interviews that larger committee will then pass on to

the board the list of whatever it is ideally we want to get it down to two to three probably ideally three finalists um and then the board would interview the three finalists potentially with the citizens that were part of round one in the room to observe and then once the interviews are over offer any like new insights or things they change their mind about or you know whatever whatever so the citizens really get to monitor soup to nuts yes

thing the citizens are not present for is the executive session discussion with the board on who to actually make the offer today procedure up i don't know if you guys have time i think he's doing that but why don't you write it up i mean we should have an official hiring strategy document that we're going to follow and that way you'll have it on file for the next time thank you very much hopefully it will gather a lot of dust before we need it please

so i think we got just first round of interview no no no the the very first time you look at all the applications right it's yes no me yeah right and so the first stage with just mitch and the three citizens is they're getting the nose like they get calling out the nose and then the yes the yes and maybe goes forward to the larger you know nine person committee and that that committee then goes through the yeses and maybes and determines who's going to get an interview right it might be all of them you know and then after those first-round interviews that committee will select the finalists that then gets passed on to this board that we and we will do the second round interview um but any of the citizens that were involved in around or staff people for that matter that were involved in round one can be in the room to observe we should talk about is that an optional thing or a required thing like would we be concerned that

like for instance if we made it optional is it an issue that maybe some of the people that were there for round one observed but others didn't like does it have to be an all-or-none thing i'm trying to put myself in the position of the applicant who finally you've met you like the applicant's portfolio and then you're sitting in here with you the executive board and all of a sudden you start discussing compensation and things of that interest flowing right away you've got to be very cautious there with all due respect to the citizenry right that whole negotiation process has to be without citizen president yes your final responsibility you've got to make sure there's a firewall there and what you're saying is in the first round interview you're giving the citizens who've really bought into this process an opportunity to observe your q a with that applicant right i understand it that's okay thank you

mitch thank you joan thank you gene uh we will get back to you at the end and our review process they have witnessed the effort of their work has come to that point you want to bring them back for a second interview that's the first question i have for you are the citizens now done because now you're in the second interview well i think i think we were saying second interview that they'd be allowed to observe but after what you just said i'm kind of rethinking that um i think could it be a thing where we leave when you get to the con the negotiation part could it be a thing where they're here for the questions to be able to offer sometimes it pops up by mistake yeah that's the thing is when you're in a finalist

this is a new hybrid so i have not as much comfort but i agree that in round one interviews with the top three candidates just for the parameters you should be witnessing that that's not a problem not just witnessing but participating right yeah then from that they all go out the door the citizens are saying you know mitch you know folks

catfish yeah yeah and that's only here citizens yeah opinions yeah yeah and then you continue your executive session with the responsibilities that you have by statute who are you calling back for a second interview because by the time you're calling someone back for a second interview either there are two who are that close together yeah or you've already made up your mind and you're just proving that that's the person you want and it trips very quickly into you don't want them to leave without knowing that you're putting an offer on the table so the larger committee you know they participate in all the first-round interviews they provide their feedback um and hopefully at that point it becomes like it's obvious but then it's up to the board to determine the finalists that they come in for a second yeah i like the idea when the public comment is not open right now okay this is more deliberate

what it does give you as a board and the citizens who are sitting here in that first round interview the ability to say to the citizens after the candidates do we have a shiner or do we have a problem we need to go back and start over again well that's certainly part of the process is for them not just to participate but then offer their feedback so by the end of round one with citizen input they've given you some guidance that said you know what candidate number two should be called back for a second interview as far as we're concerned the other two right just a lot of hot air just didn't show us anything yeah and at that point their job is done so they offer their you know my dv it i don't know it might be by official document or scorecard or something but they offer like this is who you know they can offer individually who they think what are the finalists or whatever and then that's just part of what we

consider when we're um when we when we decide who the finalists are to bring in for a second my my intent behind this was to i you know prepared me from wrong captain or talk you guys were there but in the past especially for this particular position because we kind of um subbed out the initial leg work and so forth it was more we met and then we pushed him to the panel and then the panel came back to us with the final i'd rather reverse yeah that's yeah no i think that's one of the learnings from last night and that's what we're doing so we're having somebody be involved right up front versus on the back tell us who you like and then we'll go over the negotiators and there's no guarantee that the citizens recommendation is the one that you finally make you may see something about the other candidate that you prefer over what the citizens have talked about that's the fight that i can't resolve yeah it's always there's

been participation up to that point and i think you want um i think you want all five board members involved in who the finalists are yeah absolutely yes because quite frankly any one of you goes home and says i wasn't there they went ahead and made a choice and that person is the worst thing in the world and you don't want that the process now has is basically you're in the fishbowl the citizens are in the same fishbowl with you and everyone else is watching what's going on up to the point where the final recommendation comes in negotiations and that's your job yeah right yeah that's the final highlight

citizens they may not agree with the final decision and i'm sorry but the final decision well this the citizens i mean won't even know who the three finalists are because that happens in executive session right the only the only thing the citizens or anybody will know what once once the first round of interviews are over and that committee has provided their feedback to the board the next thing anybody's got to know is who is hired right right the announcement that's not the way the conversation was going before am i allowed to ask a clarifying question just because i think we're not all understanding that in between step the same way okay all right so my what i was understanding when we were going through it before was that the panel of nine was going to decide who was going into the second round of interviews and then i'm okay with all of us being out of the second round interview if the panel of nine decides who goes into

the second round yeah and i think that's that was the change as we were talking through it was because you're right that's where it was but as we heard more from mitch and as we talked through it um landed on that it's actually up to the board to determine who the finalists are with the you would be yeah that would that was a big complaint um that i heard from the first round of hiring a town manager is that the recommendation from the employees and the citizens got they felt got ignored for the last round of interviews there wasn't well there wasn't any recommendations at that point because the citizens didn't get involved until the second round last time okay then the third round of interviews but the last the the last step they felt like their recommendation was ignored for who to to go on to the last step of the board to decide who is higher yeah that that wasn't part of the process last night

the way i envisioned this happening and correct me if i'm wrong is is that the either the by citizens i assume we're talking about citizens and employees yeah yeah is a poor deliberation and we've been very open with the public comment aspect of it but we're the ones that ultimately have to make this decision and so then the the six we'll call them non-board members of that initial panel would then come to us in an executive session and say and make recommendations well anything anything any discussion about

there's it is under some umbrella of confidentiality and it probably would be executive session because there'd be three board members present and the voice is being heard and i guess if i'm not a member of that that nine-person committee would i be hearing recommendations coming from the three board members who are and only hearing their perspective or what was what was said at the meeting or would i be hearing from all nine members before we make that final recommendation well i think my assumption is it would be all nine you'll have to hear from the committee on you know we did the interviews and this is who we you know are recommending for you know final you know as finalists and that's that to me takes care of the issue of not being hurt yes yes the actual but the actual decision of who to call the finals now it's very likely the larger board would simply like go yeah that sounds you know that sounds right especially

since three of the board members will have been on that committee in participating in that but from a pure um you know process authority to make the decision aspect that it probably as mitch was saying it does need to come from the board oh and and i agree i'm just trying to take into consideration the the the voices being heard and i think i think that plan yeah to me again from the outside if i were on the outside looking in that would take care of that concern yeah the only the only real difference between the two scenarios as i understand it is that is where the actual like vote if you will on who the finalists are is taking place so it's like you know the committee still has the same role and they're putting forward we think a b and c should be the finalists the only difference is that that's not a binding vote conceivably it could come back to the larger board and the board could make a different decision you know

i think that's highly unlikely or the board could say you know what we feel like we only really need to interview two of these people because we don't think the third one is you know viable or whatever is going to probably call this down pretty good you're not going to end up with 50 people into the second round you're going to end up with no no because i think the margin owners will give us the top three right exactly that's exactly here

and then you're gonna still have uh the yeah yeah and you'll so you you're so you're really you're really at one person at that last about one or two people at that last interview cycle or when you get to the end all right after this after after the second right right yeah mr chairman have now reached that point in time of course where scrambled eggs are looking pretty good yeah i want to be very crystal clear so that when we all walk out of the room we're all the same and i think it's been a heck of a great discussion so

with the select board and staff citizen applications have to be turned in if they want to be considered and all citizen applications will be interviewed that's what you've all said [Music] application rules quite frankly it's a 5 or 10 minute deal and let's assume they're 25 people all right let's assume they're 25 and we deal with it over two nights at the extend for a third if we have it but that gives you three citizens that gives you three staff members and amongst yourselves you have three selectors so that's phase one we all agree with that great that's important because it starts getting murky after that that group of nine is going to take this whole basket full of applications for a town management no no no i think it would be a group of six women

to the top doesn't no no it's the no it's the no no the yeses are babies yes yes and babies right okay and then that number is these are the s's and the maybe there's no number on it at that point right and these are the no's thank you

and who's sitting here at the table the the committee of nine three three three and they they will determine of the yeses and maybes who to bring in for a first interview those first interviews just to clear when you say the committee of nine plus match yes yes yes thank you i have no votes

how many does the select board want for a group when i'm down to them we meet on two and three nights again or a weekend whatever we do we knit how many do you want turned over to you as a recommendation you want the yeses you no longer want the babies and how many of the yeses do you want assuming we uh

i i would have a hard time putting a specific number yeah so you want the committee to do the best they can say here are the top ones that we think you should the objective of the first round interviews like so i see when the yes's and maybes go to the committee i i see an additional screening that they do say okay of the yeses and maybes they you know there's probably going to be as usual like some sort of like you know what let's say there's 24 you know what we really think that there's really like nine here worth interviewing okay and so they bring in the nine they do the first interview with nine so that's so there's the second cut right we've gone from the big bucket with the yes nose babies we've gone from the yes maybe bucket and then that committee goes through that and they say you know what there's nine in here that we want to bring into our first team then after the first interview

i think what we've been saying is that ideally what would come out of that is who are the three finalists yeah who makes that decision at that step for the three well that's that's what we've just been talking about it they make their recommendation nine plus one for the three you know we think after interviewing nine candidates out of this pool that you know our recommendation is that these three be considered finalists the formalization of that and is really is up to the board but you know it's going to be a heavy consult from the okay let me stop you there because that that's a friction point that i'm picking up no no friction we're all done

you may say the top four but you pick the top candidates at that point thank you citizens yes yes and we go to the fifth step interviews yeah yeah finalists and that's the final interviews i say final it's the second interview really it is the second interview for those people interview finalists

job offer or start over yeah and yeah that may not be it could be a start over or it could be broad in the pool of you know what we asked this goes back into three but they really had five that they liked so maybe we then we go down to the next two you know right you may not always have to go all the way back to the beginning right depends on the number four decent ones behind and getting into three right hopefully they'll have that feeling thanks for the crib notes please write them up and send them up again i have five maybe three is not the maybe three is not the number right i have five two we could say we could say maximum i'm i'm comfortable saying maximum five that's it that's right it gotta go for the final yes so the committee should recommend a maximum of five right yeah might only be per second it might only be three like don't feel like you have to do five just to do five right right if it

you know it could be it might only be two that's worth going to a final interview you know i don't want to interview just one again even if it's because you know if perception for no other these five steps i believe bring your taxpayer citizens into the process but still leave you the statutory requirements for the final two years yeah i would agree no question all right thank you yes thank you thank you well you said that like we didn't want to do it back and forth and i know that this doesn't usually happen and it is not setting a precedent this is a really big deal no this is a really big deal so we genuinely appreciate it

you have [Music] all are working the same sheet going forward and then in the meantime you've given me the get-go to prepare the advertisements share that information and also to prepare an application process for citizen participation and do you give me the authority to deal solely with the chair who may want one-on-one to make sure that it's the way you think of you because i'm gonna the citizen application will have one or two situational questions we want to know what you're bringing to the table and typically oftentimes and this is perfectly permissible under boa is like if i if there's a statement that's coming out from the board or something like that oftentimes i draft a statement or if there's a document needs to be reviewed i send it out to the board and i say let me know what you think if you have any feedback and you do that individually so that's not a big group email um then that that's how we you

know stay you know above board with the forward stuff because even though it doesn't it what it does it doesn't make it an illegal meeting via email but all that stuff is still public and subject to foa and all that so it's but it just makes it so that we can um do logistical stuff like that without having to actually call a physical meeting here at the town office mitch could you uh present your question again

okay thank you that in fact once i have prepared all the necessary not to exclude anything i want to then pass it on to our chair to have it sanitized and what i think i can do is send it out to all of you and to avoid a foyer application problem unless you have an objection just say received okay nothing else all right okay no yeah otherwise we're conducting a meeting i have to keep going back forth closing right now i i was content with your initial one where i thought you were asking to authorize as you set it up and get the approval from the chair if that's what you want that's even more efficient because it's going to take some time to put this exactly yeah and i may do phone call because it's sometimes quicker yeah and yeah be prepared to have some more meetings in the month of may uh in april and may as needed yeah because i also wanted to give you all some uh hints on how to be elected officials

we'll go through the rsas so what you're saying is my first meeting you've been convinced my kid's first school concert and then you're going to try to make a mess of my kids college graduation first two months i can guarantee it's the first of many and if you need someone to blame me

[Music] upset you can fire me i would never make you that happy hey always keep in mind there's a reason why there's five of us right involved all right all right thanks i told kim uh kimberly yeah no way we're going to 9 15 tonight but we're actually we're we're in danger we're going to run out our block on our recording all right so 7.2 on the agenda was that the judgment what do you need from the board legal settlement between mr dean smith and the town for any violations that were recorded in the uh county and this was the settlement where and this was uh coming out of executive session last time the board voted to assess the fine of twenty five thousand dollars plus the church excuse me uh we wanna cash that check in yeah make a run for it let him get his permits underway that he should all right so the motion you need again is to authorize the town manager to execute and complete

settlement agreement mr dean smith all right so the board of invitations entertained a motion to authorize the town manager to uh execute uh the judgment agreement that the board approved last week against mr dean smith i'm so moved so moved by rich seconded by todd in the discussion i just asked if it's appropriate for us not having been there at the meeting the prior meeting and not knowing i'm a little uncomfortable voting well um the answer to your question is yes it's appropriate but you don't have to vote um we can pass it with the three of us um that's that's fine but basically we're basically were it's a formality to allow the um the signing of the agreement that the board and the subject of the judgment

case um no is there any objection three or two of stage sorry all in favor all right we have five of them okay all right i'm going to entertain the motion on the consent agenda motion to accept the consensus as written second second taunt seconds all in favor and i'll abstain okay so we have three three in favor new board members have stained on that one all right upcoming meetings um i am going to um suggest that we still meet next tuesday the 12th on our regular night because we're going to have some business to do to keep this process moving forward tell me under search any objection to that okay all right so we'll be here next tuesday um do we need an executive session tonight i know we put that on the agenda just because it's all often times something

yeah we do okay no no i said yeah no i don't think we did yeah no i didn't i thought it was for the agreement but that has to be done in public section exactly right this is personnel matters then i'll entertain a motion to adjourn so moved which moves second thank you that's all i seconded it all in favor okay we are