Charter Review Committee - Regular Meeting

Okay, good evening everybody. This is the second meeting of the charter review committee February 12th, 2026. Uh begin with a roll call since we have several members on Zoom. Uh, Don Anderson, Nate Bodwin here, Mike Brunie here, Angelina Korea here, Skip Courier here, Bob Doma here, Dan Fitzgerald here, Mark Haydad here, Jeff Hess here. Andy Jefferson here. John Kelly here. Jim Mallaloy, Greg Maher

here, Angela Ramen here, and I guess David Robbins is here, I think. [laughter]

So, we have 13 out of 15 members present. That does constitute a quorum. Let's dig right into our agenda here. Uh, we have town council with us. We will get to town council in just a moment. I wanted to begin the meeting with just an update on the status of the current charter which several of us were discussing at the previous meeting. Uh I have worked with Amy Barry the town clerk to uh post a basically guaranteed vetted up-to-date version of the charter uh on the website. Uh it's a bit accessible from the charter committee's web page as well as the town clerk and the town administrator. Um, I'd gone through that detailed history of the charter and and compared all the actions that have been taken since the beginning with the current version of the charter. And so, as best as I can tell, it is absolutely positively up to date. Uh I am in possession of a word a word version of the current charter document um which can be shared among amongst the committee as necessary which we can use as the basis for doing our edits. Any questions on that?

Thank you for doing that.

So here the the most important part of our evening uh with us is Chris Brown, our town council. uh we've invited him here for a discussion with the charter committee basically on any and all topics of interest to this committee that council might be able to answer for us. I've listed a few uh think some of us may have questions or like some clarification on how the conflict of interest law applies to the committee. We were designated as special town employees and that has a particular meaning. It's of interest to many of us because if I counted right, nine of us have positions as elected or elected officials or appointed to various other boards and committees. So that that's where the special designation of special employee comes into play. So if we can start with with that you tell tell us what you think you know could be helpful and of course any questions that anybody has do feel free to speak up and ask.

Sure. So I'll start. Can everyone hear me? Can people online hear me too? Yes. I'm get I'm getting nods on Okay. the Zoom.

Just want to make it's all make sure it's all live. Um, so I I'll start with the special municipal employee issue since you brought that up. Um, so you're all, you know, but whether you're a volunteer or whether you're elected, appointed, whether you get paid or not, um, when you provide service to the town in whatever capacity you're in, um, you're considered a municipal employee for purposes of the conflict of interest law. Um, now some positions can be designated what's called a special employee. They have special employees at the state level, county level, and municipal level. Um, that designation applies to this position. So, as a charter review committee member, that position is a special municipal employee. But if you're on another board, it matters also what that position is.

Yeah. Sorry, can I interrupt for just a moment? I I meant to have everybody go around and introduce themselves to you. So, let's Sure. Why don't get that out of the way? Not first. Start starting with Bob. Bob Dtoma. I work for Graphen TV. I'm the chair of the Veterans Advisory Committee of Trustees of Soldiers and Sailors. Nice to meet you. Hi, Mark Hatad. I'm on the finance committee as well. Heather Curry. I'm on the finance committee and one of the members of the Nelson Trust. Nice to meet you. Dan Fitzgerald Pwacker. Uh Greg Mar, finance committee, CIPC and election warden.

Dave Robbins, elected member of the planning board, serve also on the housing authority as a state appointee and [snorts] this committee of course and information technology committee. Hello, my name is Nate Bodwin. This is my first endeavor into town affairs. So, this is what's on my resume for Grafton Town. You're in the right room. So, okay. Jack Kelly, uh, elected the housing authority, chairman of the housing authority and delegate on the community preservation commission. Um, yeah. So, let's get get those on Zoom, too, Jeff.

Oh, sorry. That's right. We have to remember Jeff S. just here on the charter review committee. Angela, [snorts] Angela Ramen. Uh, like Nate and Jeff, this is my first involvement in Grafton government. Angelina, uh, Angelina Ka. I'm on the finance committee. Mike, uh, Mike Bernie, former wreck recreation commission, uh, member and also several years as a youth coach in town uh, for lacrosse. Thank you. Nice to meet you. Sorry. Okay, now let's get back to Okay, I was so rudely interrupted, Chris.

Yeah, so as I was saying, um whether you knew it or not for today, you're all considered municipal employees for purposes of the conflict of interest law. Um typically, uh every municipal employee, you know, when you, you know, you get sworn in on a board, um you get various things from the town clerk, right? You'll get usually a copy of the open meeting law, some information about that, uh, a summary of the conflict of interest law. Um, and you're usually expected to complete some online training within a certain amount of time. Um, does any of that not sound like something you've heard before?

That better sound familiar to us. Most those of us who have served in other positions obviously have been have been through and and have periodically refreshed the training. For those who are new to this committee, they will have received from the town clerk some information about that and I don't know what the deadline is for them to actually have taken the training.

Yeah, usually it's within 30 days of when you get appointed. Um, I don't think that there's, you know, a police force coming out and rounding up people that are not in compliance with that, but, you know, it's a good idea to take that because, um, you know, it comes into it comes into what you do in a variety of different ways that you wouldn't think of. Um, it's not really intuitive all the time. So, um, anyway, so we all have to take this training. Um, I take the training. I'm municipal employee as a as a contracted, you know, basically I'm a I'm a contracted vendor for the town, right? I have a contract with the town, so I have to do that. Um, the attorneys that work with me, that work for you, they all take that training, too. So, um, yeah, so the conflict of interest law, obviously, you know, it's it's designed to, uh, prevent situations in which your duties as a municipal employee might conflict with your interests as a privacy, right? Um the where the special municipal employee designation comes into play is that there's some positions where you know this isn't your day job. You know you don't get compensated or you don't work full-time in the position. Um and those are the types of positions that uh in a town a select board can vote to designate those positions as special municipal employees. What does that mean? It means that for those positions that are designated as that um some provisions of the conflict of interest law apply less uh strictly to you. Okay. There's two specific se sections of 268A which is the general law that is the conflict of interest law. Um one of them deals with uh appearing on behalf of people other than the town before town board. um you know whether you know the example might be if you are an architect by

trade during the day and you're you have a client that has an application before the planning board for example. Um ordinarily section 17 would prevent you uh if you're serving um on a board as a municipal employee from doing that. um for special municipal employees, you might be able to um the the the the requirements under section 17 are a little bit different. Okay. Um what I would suggest if that sounds like something that might be something that applies to you, right? Like if you in your day job appear before town boards of Grafton. Okay, this isn't doesn't impact your ability to appear before other town boards. This is just the the municipality in which you're serving as a municipal employee. Um my suggestion would be to either contact me um which the town administrator can put you in contact with me um the chair can put you in contact with me. Um or there's always um the uh state ethics commission has a free uh confidential hotline you can contact I think I think you can contact them by phone email they have a form you can fill out they usually will get back to you within a day um not always but um I will usually get back to you within a day uh most of the time. So, um, but yeah, I mean, I guess the my main point is, um, I can help you before you break the law, but I can't help you after you break the law. So, it's worth it, uh, to look before you jump. Okay. Um, the other section of the conflict of interest law that changes if you're a special municipal employee is

section 20 and that deals with having a financial interest in a contract with the municipality in which you're serving. Okay. Um, normally this means that for example, if you um if you're employed in one position for the town, you can't work in a second position for the town that's compensated unless there's an exception that applies in that section, section 20. If you're a special municipal employee, there's several different exceptions that might apply to you that would allow you to have a financial interest in a contract with the town of Okay. So again, if that sounds like a situation that might apply to you, call me, call the state ethics commission, talk talk through the facts with them with me so that you can get a good opinion and be safe and be and follow the law. Okay? Um any questions on that particular issue before we move on?

Any questions? I think so. Just one comment that uh that if you have a compensated position, there is a form you need to fill out if you're appointed to an uncompensated position.

Right? So there's again I don't want to get into individual people's situations. Um, we're all responsible for our own compliance with the law. Okay. Um, so hopefully, you know, you are reviewing the information that you get from the town clerk, you know, in this position. Um, you're completing the training and if you have questions and if you think you need to make disclosures or fill out forms and that type of thing, um, you can, like I said, contact me, contact the ethics commission. There's lots of information on their website. Um I just encourage you to to take that step for your own protection.

I think me one question that might come up for those of us who also serve on other boards or committees in our role as charter committee member is [snorts] there with respect to the work that the charter revisionists might touch on. For example, as a planning board member, the previous charter review committee discussed and proposed having the planning board be appointed rather than elected. That's that's not likely to come up this time. Uh that's because Dave's the chair. You can rule it out. [laughter]

And for the several members who are on the finance committee, there's a section of the sections of the charter that deal with the finance committee. is would there be any reason for any of us to recuse ourselves some discussion on matters that charter matters that touch on the other bodies we may be involved in

I mean I think the the one thing that comes to mind for me would be if you're if you get a stipen or you're compensated at all for that position you know there could be a financial interest and anything changes about it um typically um you know when the question comes up about someone serving on multiple boards you know you have to, you know, we assume that when you're acting on your capacity in whatever board that you're acting in the town's best interest. So, serving on two boards is not in and of itself a conflict. Um, you know, if you want to disclose that, you know, so that there's not an appearance of a conflict of interest, there's a section in the conflict of interest law called 23B3. Um, it's a very popular disclosure that people make out of an abundance of caution um, just to dispel the appearance of a conflict of interest. I don't think you have to in that situation, but there's nothing that stops you from doing it anyway.

So, if we want to change the uh, the budget process and have the finance committee play a different role in the budget process as a member of finance committee, I have no problem making that proposal as a member. Correct. That's correct. compensation. Yeah. All putting $10,000 of all the grief you could eat. So, and we'll talk about that, but I don't, you know, compensation of the chart of, you know, that's probably not something that's going to go into the charter anyway, but

no, you shouldn't act on those types of If we were to propose that finance committee members be compensated, say $5,000 a year for all their hard work, the the pincom members of the charter committee might be advised to not touch that conversation. Exactly. Yeah. I would Yeah. If that comes up, um that's the type of situation where where you want to, you know, if it I'm always say if it if it sounds funny to you or it smells funny like it's probably good good thing not to eat it, right? Um, so something I looked at was called selfdealing. Selfdeing. Yes.

And so would that would would that designation apply in this board piece we're talking about? Whether it's no because selfdeing is, you know, in the concept of your own private interest. So that's the section that applies there is called section 19. Um, and usually it would prevent you from participating in a matter in which you or your family member or your business, if you're a business owner, um, that they have a financial interest in whatever that matter is. So, still goes back to financial interest. Correct. Thank you.

Correct. Any other questions for Chris? Anybody on Zoom? If not, thank you for that, Chris. And just a reminder to everybody, if you have any questions that about your particular situation, like Chris said, contact Chris, [snorts] contact the ethics commission and for specific questions that relate to your particular situation. Okay. All right. So the next the next topic I had on my list and again we're we're going to end up with ask Chris anything you you know you can think of asking but you know the next specific topic I as suggested Chris could ident

and there's a variation of one. It's still my presentation. But I'll but but I I'll let you I mean I think I know them pretty well and I I'd be happy to talk about it myself, but I think it's it's better coming from someone who is an actual lawyer and knows this stuff.

Oh, okay. [laughter] Um so, first thing I want to say is I I appreciate all of you for what you're doing. I I did this in my town, too. Um it's a lot of work. has hopefully hopefully you don't know yet but um for those of you who have done it before I mean you know it's a lot of work um but it's very uh it's a very important thing um charters you know if you think of um you know everything kind of on the local level being analogous to state and federal charter is your constitution okay it's that kind of durable document that is really hard to change because it's really important um And as Dave said, there's um there's only a couple ways to change it. Um now, Grafton enacted the charter by uh home rule charter commission process back in the 80s, the current version, right? Um so once you enact that type of charter, um there's two ways that you can amend it uh at a later point. Um the first one is the home rule charter amendment procedure. uh under that you so the the basically there's a proposed amendment to the charter that gets brought to town meeting. Okay. And then town meeting has to approve that and then uh assuming that uh town meeting approves it by a twothirds vote. Okay. Um that becomes a proposed charter amendment by the town. Um it then has to be filed with two different um offices at the state level. Uh the executive office of housing and livable communities um which used to be DHC. Don't ask me why they review charters, but they've been doing it since the home rule amendment was passed in the 60s. Okay. Um the other uh agency that gets

involved is the attorney general, which um shouldn't be a surprise. they review all of our bylaws before they actually become effective. Um why wouldn't they also review charter amendments too, right? So those those agencies have um a um job to basically opine on whether your amendments are consistent with the constitution and the laws of the state. Okay. They have a certain amount of time. I think the AG has four weeks um to render an opinion. um and the amendment then uh becomes finalized. That doesn't mean that it's effective yet though because at that point the proposed amendment then has to go to the voters. So there's a ballot question vote, you know, shall the charter be amended in the manner, you know, and you would have a bunch of stuff published with it. Um there's a statutory question that's that's um the form is prescribed by law. Um there's things the select board has to do in terms of distributing um that proposed amendment to the voters. Um the town clerk has to post copies have additional copies uh available. Um and if it's approved, if that question gets approved by a majority of the voters, um it becomes effective on the date provided in the amendment. Um and then after it's adopted, uh you And the town clerk would have to do this. They'd send a certified copy of the amendment uh to the state archives, the attorney general, and the secretary of housing livable communities, who is the cabinet position that runs the EOHLC, that executive office of housing livable communities.

DHCD rolled off the tongue much better than EOHLC does. Um and then, uh you'd be surprised, but this is actually statuto requirement at least every 10 years the select board is supposed to make a copy of the charter available at the office of the town clerk um for a cost for a fee um that's actually a statutory uh thing um does any town ever do that uh [snorts] I don't know good question I've never had that that one come up to me before that's a new I'm sure the town clerk would be happy to print you a copy if yeah I mean I think in this day and age with a lot of websites have there. So,

you probably don't get the people coming in saying, "Can I have a buy a copy of the charter?" But I suppose if they did, you know, um that that should be there.

Okay. So, that's that's the first way um that you can amend a home rule charter like yours. Okay. Um the second way is what's called the special act uh amendment procedure. This is pretty commonly followed and I'll explain why as I go through it. Okay. So, This amendment procedure has fewer steps um and it doesn't contain the same restrictions which I didn't talk about before. So you have a home rule charter and if you propose an amendment to town meeting and you were going to do the charter amendment procedure that I just described, there's some amendments to the charter that you can't use that process to change. Um and I'm going to look at this. I'm going to read you what the statute says because it's important um to have it exact. Okay. So, any amendment that relates in any way to the composition, mode of election or appointment or the terms of office of the legislative body, meaning town meeting, um the board of selectman or select board or the town manager or town administrator, whatever you have. So, and then there's provisions that are restricted in a section of the law, which um I'd have to I could I could send that to you, but I don't have it here. But um but the important thing is you can't fundamentally change kind of the the the organization of the town government through this process. That doesn't mean you can't. It just means that if you're going to do that, those types of changes, those have to go through what's called this special act charter procedure

or or an elected charter commission, right? Which I'll get to that too. Yeah. [laughter] You don't got you guys don't have to worry about that though because you have a charter review committee. Okay. Yeah.

But the so the special act charter me procedure. Okay. It's got fewer steps. It doesn't contain those restrictions on the content. Um, [clears throat] basically, um, if you've ever been in town meeting and you've seen the town petition to file, uh, legislation with this with the general court, that's a home rule petition. Essentially, what you're doing in this type of procedure is you're voting on a petition to the general court to amend your charter by and they'll pass a special act and it'll say, you know, the craft charter is amended in the following ways. Um so that amendment um has to be authorized by town meeting. Okay, just like any other home petition. But unlike the the other one that I talked about, it's only a majority vote that you need, not twothirds. Um once town meeting votes on it, the petition and the special legislation, like whatever the actual amendments are, they get sent to the local legislative delegation for filing. Um, and then it follows the same process as any other bill on Beacon Hill. Um, which need to be approved by the House and the Senate and then it's signed by the governor. Sometimes, but not all the time, those types of special acts might have to be accepted by the voters after. Um, I think that would be that's not required, but it would be policy judgment on your end. You know, if you thought that that with changes being proposed, you would want to have the voters approve it. that

you would put that in the town meeting vote, right? Requiring the vote from the electors afterwards, right? It would be in the in the text of whatever the article was at meeting, you know, essentially what here's the petition we want you to file and and we want these amendments and we want the amendments to be approved by the voters at at an election. Um, and so that special act would provide that. So what happens if the legislature approves amendment, comes back and it doesn't pass at the vote doesn't pass. It doesn't pass. charter not amended. Nothing. [clears throat] Correct. So, is it true that the legislature can require that vote even if we don't say that in the petition?

I think they can. Um, usually the your local legislature will will work with the town in terms of what you want and don't want. Um, you know, because obviously the legislator is not trying to substitute its judgment for yours. You guys will have spent um probably a year or more on this by the time that it's done. Um it's a lot of work and I I don't think they want to uh second guessess you know what you decided would be the best procedure you know assuming town meeting would agree with you right I mean the town meeting could also amend something uh on the floor that you know or you know through that process like any article the vote on any article get amended right so they could add a vote requirement at town meeting but you don't have to have it under this process um like I said fewer steps because this doesn't actually go to the AG and EOHLC for review. Um, I mean, it's going to get reviewed by the legislature for consistency with state law and the constitution. So, you know, if you try to put something funky in there, you know, the legislative council is going to pick up on it, too, and probably, you know, talk want to talk to me about that.

Yeah, I do believe the petition to the legis legislature. Uh, we did have one that did get reviewed by the AG. I think they all do that, but they got reviewed by the AG, but there was one where the AG struck out one provision of it because it was inconsistent with state law. Okay. Yeah. It's not in the statute that that happens, but um you know, maybe they maybe the if the legislature submits it to the AG for an opinion, that's that's out of our control, but it's not part of the process for Yeah, we I think we we submitted to the AG the same way we submitted all the other bylaw amendments from town meeting. Okay. Because because I know it look looking through

Yeah. all the history. Yeah, it may not be a requirement, but uh I think we've submitted every one of our charter amendments and we've done them both ways, but we've submitted them all to the AH for review.

Yeah. I mean, it's not like I said, it's not required by this process. Um what you whether you want to do it or not, you know, even bylaws, like when I'm working with a town on a proposed bylaw, for example, um it's not uncommon for us to things by the municipal law unit, like the unit that's eventually going to review that bylaw at the end of the process, just to see if they spot anything that we can catch before it goes to town meeting, right? We don't want to waste that whole process, pass a bylaw, have it get reviewed, and have have it not be approved in the way that we wanted it to, right? So, um, if that's if that's the process that you follow, we can we can support that. Mr. Chair, just so I can understand, if I may, if I can understand the differences when you're talking about the attorney general ballot versus the

the uh special act, you said you can't touch the composition. So, if we wanted to say, and I'm not recommending this, shrink the select board from five members to three members. We would have to do that through a special act. We couldn't do that through the vote. That's correct. And and it's I just want to understand that it's the home rule charter amendment process versus the special act charter because remember both both of them might eventually go to the voters. Correct. So that's not what sets them apart. It's whether it's town meeting proposing it and then just the voters approving it or town meeting approving it and the legislature. So the legislature would have to approve that type of change. Correct. If we wanted to limit the town administrator to a one year at a time contract, that would also have to go to the

correct through the special. Right. I just want to understand what you're talking about composition. Yep. If we made a change one way, we cannot unchange it the other way. Can you So, meaning if we made a change as a special act, we can't change it with a home charter amendment. Pretty sure we can. Well, that that's what I'm asking is we have several times in the past we have done things either way. Yeah, I mean we can't go back and change one back say with the other option or

you can as long as it's not restricted in that process that you're intending to use, right? So if you for example you increase the size of the board of selectman to from three to five members, right? I assume that happened at some point here because that's with our original charter. Um like you can't go back and change that now by home rule charter amendment. You'd have to do a special act to change that. Um but if you made some other form of change like you know how your budget cycle works or something. Yeah. Right. You can change that by home rule charter amendment even if it was.

Yeah. I think the I think [clears throat] the point there is that setting aside those changes that are restricted that can't that cannot be made by the review amendment process we would be dealing with on our committee. Setting that aside, a charter amendment made by the home rule process through town meeting. Twothirds vote at town meeting and then vote of the voters or the special legislation, the special act. Those have equal weight, you know, and they both they change the charter. Oh, yeah.

And so the next time the next time you change the charter, it doesn't you if you're proposing to change something in the charter, it doesn't matter how that something got there. Yeah. It then it's it's there. So, you're changing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Right. Depending on what you're trying to change, right? It may Yeah. Right.

And I've also seen uh towns that emerge out of this charter review process that have two different paths, right? Where they have there's some things that they want to change about the composition. So they do a home petition for those things and the other things don't involve that and they just do a ballot vote and get that approved by the voters. Now that's caution there, right? Because if some of the envisioned changes you had in the other parts of the charter that you're sending to the voters, you had envisioned the composition changing in in in relation to those. You know, you may end up with a system of government that you didn't intend. for I mean the legislature if town meeting approves a petition the legislature is not going to vote down the the petition right the most likely thing that might jinx that up would be legislator passes it it's got a local vote requirement and the voters voted down for some reason

what do you recommend as as as the attorney for the if we wanted to do something we're not going to make any composition changes so either either way what would you recommen as a process. I think the special act is um a much smoother uh easier process to use. Um you know, it does kind of take the timeline out of your hands a little bit because the legislature has to act. But I also think if you have a good working relationship with your local legislative delegation, things can happen,

you know, and I think a lot of towns go that way. I mean, you think about if you're not going to have local voters approve it, right? It saves the costs of having to publish, you know, the changes. It's It saves the cost of having to conduct an election to count, you know, there's costs that go with all of that, right? So, so how do we year before it gets before the ballot? Yeah. Yeah. How do you square that though with the atmosphere that's now in town that's no, no, the people have a right to vote. They should vote. How do I as a member of this board who then when they come back to me and say, "Why did you go that way with a special act that was out of the voters's hands? Why didn't you go with the home rule petition?" Right. I mean, to think about

it's in the voters's hands, right? Yes. But town meeting is 100 people. You know what I mean? Like I I think an argument can come to it. I understand. But traditionally, it's very poorly attended. Right. That's why I mean I can I can tell you what the law is, but that ultimate decision is up to you. That's a policy question. Like I can tell you what I think, but that's absolut you don't have to I was just curious what your opinion was.

Yeah. I mean I I think pragmatically from a cost standpoint, you know, because I know all towns are concerned about costs and budgets and stuff. I mean um for me that's an important thing. you know, the smoothness of the process and the likelihood to get it um in the version that you want, I think is the special act is the way to go for that.

Just as a couple of points of interest relative to this, uh our last batch of special act charter changes. It was 19 months from the time the first one of those one of those was was passed by to meeting in May and some others passed it that October of the same year. This was in 2023. It was January of 2025 before those were signed into law. So that's that's that's one point. A second point is that we have done of all the changes that we've made to the charter since it was initially approved by the voters in May of 1987, five batches of changes were made with a town meeting two-thirds town meeting vote followed by a ballot vote. Three were made by petition to the legislators and that those have all been since 2020. And one, curiously enough, the very first amendment to the charter was made by the legislature on a bill filed by the governor rather than the than the town meeting. There was a reason for that. It it it's a change that had to be made before our next town meeting opportunity. So, we worked with Governor Ducas Dukakus' office to get that in there. So that's it's I'm sure that comes up rarely. I think it was Andrew from your office. We were talking home rule at the last uh citizen planner training collaborative we talked about by then. You know he said I've never heard of that but yeah we you know we've seen it.

The governor can always file bills. Yes. So we wouldn't right. We would if you needed something changed quickly like that's Yeah. That's an avenue. And then uh just one other point, I think it was November of 2020, we had two charter changes in town meeting. One of them was a legislative petition for special act. The other was submitted to the voters. So we we we did it both ways in one town meeting once.

Yes. And I I have seen that. I think it's, you know, to me it's if you can completely segregate the two so that you know that the success or failure of one or the other isn't going to impact the the rest of it, it's perfectly fine to take that approach. Yeah. But you don't have to like unless you're trying to change composite, you know, if you're trying to do one of those restricted things, you know, you've got to do a special act for those changes. So just keep that in mind. So we don't have to decide that for quite some time, right? We can decide that all of our child changes if we don't touch composition. We can decide what process we want to move forward. Absolutely. Until basically until you're at the point where you know an article is getting

drafted for the warrant. It's completely you know up in the air in terms of what process you and we can also decide which how we split up whether we do it as a single article which requires a single vote or if we split it up like when we did the bylaw we had 41 sections. So we had 41 uh warrant articles in a consent agenda. So we only think in this case twice I think in this case depends on what changes you make. If you make one change then you're going one or two changes then you might want to split it up. If we're going to make significant changes throughout the child, you may want to have an up and down.

Coordination issues you're talking about is if people start hunting, pecking and changing their mind halfway through, then okay, well now we've changed this, but that had an effect of changing something else that we didn't envision or something like that during the town meeting. Exactly. Then what do you do?

Yeah. So it's I think it's care you have to carefully craft like if you're going to have you know different articles for different changes I think you got to be careful about how you package those right you don't want to create inconsistencies because one thing gets voted down the other doesn't you know so if you're going to change for example your budgetary process like dates or something like that like I would put that all in one all the amendments that are that to do with that put them all in one article um but you you know, that's uh you know, it's just uh something you'll figure out, I think, as you go forward.

I think I want to go back to Dan's Dan's point for a moment. If if a charter change that we want to propose, if that is something that we determine that this this is something that really should be voted on by all the voters. than you and and we we could say that most of the changes we're asking for or proposing aren't of such significance that we need the voters to vote on them. You we could just hypothetically we could root all those through the special act process. If we had one change that we felt really needed to have the approval of the voters, we could arrange for it to be done that way because you don't have to do all of them. you just said. I think we don't we don't have to do all of them the same way. We can kind of Yeah. We want to make sure that we don't split them up in a way that would produce a conflict if one of them failed.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, and I think generally if the if the special act amendment is going to affect one of those restricted areas, you're probably going to want to have a local vote on it. You know, I I think that's just, you know, for from your point like for transparency and voter input. I mean, you're essentially changing something fundamental about the government, right? So, if for example, um, some towns would change from a open town meeting to a representative town meeting. You could do that through the special act process, but you probably want to have that accepted by the voters once the legislature passes. That's an example.

Yes. And one thing you really haven't talked about yet is amending the charter via an elected chart elected charter commission which is how we created the initial charter.

Right. It's kind of it's not really important to your work. Um but the other type of charter process that comes up is that um there is a process in the home rule act where a elected charter commission can be formed and that charter commission basically has it's it's a similar process to both right they have the ability to propose whatever they you know, my town. I'm from Framingham and a charter commission was used to change from a town to a city. Okay, that's the type of that's the type of reason why you have a charter commission. Um, or if there's like, you know, you want to basically rewrite the whole charter, you know, you could adopt a new charter. You don't have to amend what you have. um you know if you want to change uh you know from a town meeting to town council you know like um Franklin has a town council right it's like essentially like a city council but it it has the function of like a town meeting too so you know there's different things you can play with um it's home rule so it's kind of the you know the experiment democratic experiment right you can come up with whatever works for graphing So, but that's not what you are.

That's not what we are. Um, yeah, absolutely right. And those charters also get reviewed by the AG and EOHLC before they're finalized, you know, but and and they go to the voters. Um, you know, so Framingham's charter, for example, 2018 or the vote was 2017. Um, it passed by about a 100 votes, you know, and then once the charter that charter passed, there's, you know, if you're doing something fundamental like that, there's usually like a transition period that happens where you still have the existing government and then there's a new government that takes office. So, don't think that's what you're [laughter] you're looking towards. So, Andy, you're not going to be the mayor at the end of this. Oh, come on.

Yeah. And the and the I think and the difference um another difference between charter commissioners and your charter review committee members is that charter commission members are actually specifically exempted from the conflict of interest law. They're not municipal employees. Yeah, they're they're [snorts] completely exempt from the conflict of interest. Same thing as like town meeting members, you know, they're not they're not part of they're not considered municipal employees for the conflict. If I remember right, those are the two municipal exemptions from the conflict of interest law. Yeah. Any other anything else, Chris?

Yeah. So, I just just so I So, at the end of the day, like what can you do, right? I would say you can do anything. You can recommend anything, right? You're recommending changes to the charter that town meeting is going to act on. You can make whatever recommendations you want. Okay? It's just depending on what those recommendations are. There might be a different process as the [snorts] good part. So if you take it that's what you take away from this like that's what you have to understand, right? There's certain things that if you're going to change them will need to get adopted by a special act and other things that you don't need to go that way that you can do the you know basically what I'd call the the just the town process right town meeting's going to vote on it and then it's going to go to the voters and

I think as you pointed out Mark that we don't I think we once we have a set of recommendations that we're pretty comfortable with we can then decide how how we want each of those to be handled via the town meeting and you do we go the special act route or do we go the local the local route I agree until we know what we're going to be recommending that's why I asked that's why we don't have to make the decision now but it's good for us to keep in mind to to to know what the and that's why I asked Chris to speak to that is that I think it's good for us to be aware of what the processes are

right Um, the other thing that commonly comes up, you know, when you're doing a charter review is what should be in the charter and what shouldn't be in the charter. And go back to what I started off with. Your charter is your constitution, right? Just like you have uh bylaws which are like state statutes at the at the state level, right? Or then boards might have regulations or policies. Those are like regulations at the state level, at the federal level, right? Those different types of laws, they're all laws. They all do different things, right? Your constitution usually sets forward how your government's going to be organized and some basic things about how it's going to operate. Like it might um organize the town into different departments, for example. It might provide for a certain fiscal cycle like how the budget process works. Um the you know it might provide some basic things about the function of town meeting like what uh when the town meeting is going to be um how many you know if you if you have a quorum they usually say set the quorum by bylaw because it's easier to change but some charters have quorum in there too. Um, you know, but it's kind of those basic things that you would, you know, you think about the Constitution of the United States, you think about the Commonwealth's Constitution, you know, you're going to have those things types of things about the function and organization of the government. You're not going to have like, you know, shovel your sidewalk if it snows. You know, that's a bylaw. Okay. So, you're going to get lots of suggestions from the community, I'm sure, as you go through to get the public input. Um, and just, you know, kind of keep those buckets in mind. Just because you get an idea from the public that isn't right for the charter doesn't mean you can't

bring it forward somewhere in your final report. when we did our chart tri charter review committee in Framingham for example you know we said we heard input from the public that they wanted an ordinance that would do this [snorts] you know we had no ability to I mean again we're just making a recommendation right so we actually don't nothing we do necessarily is going to get done but um you still have that ability to make recommendations on other things so when people ask you know what can we do you know it's you can propose amendments to the charter and you can share, you know, public input about other things that you've got. And, you know, if um if a board that has the ability to act on something at town meeting or in a regulation or whatever wants to move forward with that type of stuff that you got from the public input, they can do that. Um, so I would just keep that in mind. You know, it's you're trying to figure out what goes in your bucket and then what else you get and how what you do with that is really up to you. Um what else can I can I talk about?

I have a question. If you just give us some advice on uh specificity of certain things and I have example here uh when it talks about the composition of the housing authority and talks about how it has five members, three of which shall be elected by voters, two of which shall be appointed in the manner provided by the general laws. So could you give us an idea of when we should be specific because I know exactly how those two members are appointed and what the specificity is, but could you give us uh just some guidance on when we should be specific in the charter and when we should just refer to general law?

Yeah, I mean I think it's when you're when you're trying to vary something, you know, you want to be very specific about that. um you know if you're just trying to parrot general law or you want to rely upon the general law that's exactly what you do. I mean I you know it's I hate to give you the lawyer answer but it depends right because I'm just thinking about and this isn't the purpose of the charter as you mentioned is like clarity when reading it because if you wanted to know how in this example how those two members are appointed you then have to find the general law but again the purpose of the charter is necessarily to read it's to govern

right and I think that's a that's a common tension you have when you're reviewing a charter it's like how can make this easier for the public to understand. Um, yeah, I I like I said, I've been in your shoes. I just did it in Framingham, so I uh can really appreciate that. Yeah. One of the things you have to watch in not being super specific with that is if the general laws change, right? Put in say mass general law chapter 138 D6 and 12 and the legislature in its infinite wisdom takes and changes the numbering system or puts it somewhere else.

Yes, that can happen. Yeah. Think about everybody that might have had the open meeting law site in Yes. their charter. The open meeting law ch the site completely changed like 16 17 years ago.

Yes. I remember running across that in our bylaw review a few years ago that the uh the open meeting law moved from one chapter of the general laws to another. You know, in the case that Jack mentioned, housing authorities currently governed by chapter 121b of the general laws. Once upon a time, they were governed by a different chapter. And I was there that was a way I I I noticed somewhere along the line that had changed in some other research I was doing. I couldn't tell you what the chapter used to be. Yeah. In the manner of electing the members in the general laws changed too. Yes. And not every town picked up on that. Yeah. We

which led to some issues. One thing not not not to diverge too much in this particular topic but that's one thing we noticed on the bylaw review committee that we we we in in our in what the bylaw review committee proposed to town meeting we included um a small number of charter changes one of them was to align with the the state law update to that right exactly so that's I mean you know just because by review companies are reviewing the bylaw doesn't mean they can't make some suggestions and now now that you guys are doing the charter review you can take those and say well here's what

here's some ideas that the bylaw review committee had what do you do you want to do you want to do those or not that's still up to you but you know so there's some work that maybe done so I think you can answer this if we are going to refer to the mass general laws we should just state in the manner provided by general law, however we're wording it, rather than being specific to which law it is. I think that's probably the best thing to do. Um, you know, keep in mind this, you want to this is intended to be a document that's not easy to change,

right? But you want to have some flexibility because we're not in a static society. laws change, you know, um, and you don't want to have things worded so specifically where, um, your charter comes into conflict with state law because in that instance, I mean, once your charter comes into conflict with state law, state law supersedes your charter.

Yeah. I think closely related to this was a situation that we did ran into a few years ago. We enacted a charter change that changed [clears throat] the method of appointment of the finance committee. It was appointed by the moderator only. We changed it to be appointed by a committee of three. And in the charter change that implemented that, we named the three positions specifically. A year or two later, we updated the charter to to delegate the composition of that committee to bylaw. Again, that's with the that that's kind of goes along with the idea of don't make the charter more specific than it needs to be. So, we fix we we fix that by and I think that was entirely appropriate to delegate to bylaw the details,

especially since we had also put it in the bylaw. [laughter] Fortunately, they were they were consistent. Yeah. And I think there are other communities that do that too where they'll put just wholesale pieces of the charter into the bylaws. That's all well and good, but just keep in mind if you amend the bylaw, it doesn't really matter if it's the charter. Yep. Again,

so you want to have some sort of like usually like um I don't think you guys are on e-code, but like e-code will have a cross reference to the charter and this this was taken from the charter. So if you don't use e-code, I would usually I would if you put charter provisions in your bylaws, I would footnote this is the charter, you know, so there's no confusion that town meeting doesn't think it can amend those types of things without following a charter amendment process.

That touches on another thing we did is the four of the five bylaw review committee members are here in this committee too. One of the things we did was we went through the bylaws and tried to eliminate redundancies between the charter and the by if the charter says it, we don't need the bylaw to say it. I think we did a pretty good job of taking care of it. It's always something to keep in mind and works the other way too in whatever we propose for the charter. We might we might propose something in the charter that will require a change in the bylaw.

Correct. And but we you know we need to be kind of pay attention to that sort of keep them as as separate as possible right but also keep I mean so just like the constitution supersedes statutes and statutes supersede regulations so your charter supersedes conflicting bylaws. Okay. And bylaws would supersede conflicting regulations. Um, so as you propose the changes, yeah, just be be sure you know about if that's creating any types of internal conflict in [clears throat] your um your legal your laws.

Any other questions in this topic?

I have a I don't know if I have a question, but a comment there. It feels like there's something that needs to connect back to the people because as I'm listening and I've had some experience with this with bylaws in the charter and one was different and something was in the middle of being changed. People need somewhere to go. I'm trying to think through that process and it may be um just something that points to people to where to go as they're reading something I if anything changes just like who's their who's their point of contact who who um who would always have the latest piece of information. Um I don't think I'm articulating it well but it sounds like the it's a high level document. So if I go as a as a regular citizen to read it, I don't understand something where it says go to the go to the uh general law, who do I reach out to from that point, you know? So there's just something connecting it back to to practical use for for the people as as needed that that's floating around for me. Yeah, that's that's probably something something for us to keep in mind. Uh, which may not touch directly on the content of the charter itself, but it it does suggest a need for some some sort of a document or some source of information. that may not be the the official charter or the official bylaws but some some kind of reference material that can kind of connect them. I think you know Chris mentioned ecode which is something I understand we are working on and to the extent that that can provide some cross references particularly cross references between charter and bylaws

and maybe an index of topics or something like that you know that's that's that's I if nothing else that could end up being a recommendation from this committee for some action to be taken in addition to the charter revisions, a recommendation for some other work that could be done to facilitate uh reading and comprehension. Again, a bit of it goes back to, you know, the the point that Jack raised about for for to take just to take that example as something as as specified in the general laws. Well, what what general how do I find the general law that regulates the housing authority? So, it's it's good to be not overly specific in the charter referencing the general law, but it would be it's helpful for people to have to find to have the ability to find what that general law is,

especially in that specific instance because it's actually referencing two separate general laws in that answer. I think uh obviously Mike raises a great point and I think for the purposes of right now people can reach out here at these meetings. I I don't know if we had I'm sure we have [snorts] we don't have public comment on here, but if you have a question, you know, we are available at the same time every month conceivably. So for now, that can be the answer and then we can continue to develop it as we go further. I just have a question about this phrase that's been used. E is it e-code? What what exactly is that?

It's a company that organizes your bylaws for you. Okay. You post it on your website. It's pretty good. Okay. You're basically you're putting them online in a way that's more easily searchable. Okay. And and linkable. Great. Okay. We have we have an activity and process to do that. Glad to see that. That's good. We haven't finished it yet, but this is really helpful. Thank you so much for for being here tonight. Thank you very much. You have any other questions? Any other questions, Skip?

I I do. I have one. In our current chart, knowing the people that put together. I envision they talk about an administrative code that the town administrator is to set before the select wants to make a change from the organization of the town at the time the charter was passed to then go to town meeting to be approved it's either thumbs up or thumbs down. So for example, say there was we have seven cemeteries in town. They will run by three separate cemetery commissions. They will all run different taking and making them all work with one cemetery commission and have instead of three cemetery superintendent having one changing it to a working for and then having them all report up through a town of public works. Our records show that it was before the kind of contest based on the minutes and it went to town meeting and it said we're adopted in the administrative code posted at the town parks office for everybody to read this administrative code when they created the department of public works out of the highway department the parks department, you know, whoever was taking care of all those to put them under one group instead of having everybody else do their own thing. Be that voted me. We have not been able to find it.

So that's our first crack at the administrative code. That's an appendex to our charter. That was a change from the way our town did it those functions and we've added to it over time. At times we got like we never had a deputy chief of police and there's some other changes and nuances that have happened that there are things that are kind of like modified some as you flush things out. Should that even be in the charter that that administrative code supposed there's a process laid out to adopt it and for the town meeting you know for the selection to say yes or no and then for town meeting and it becomes an appendix to the charter but does that really belong there? Um I mean I think the charters typically will have how the government's organized when you first pass the charter right and they'll have a procedure by which you know in wrapped the town administrator can submit a reorganization plan right to either form a new department consolidate eliminate you know whatever whatever it is they're proposing um and there's a process on how that plan gets approved or not. The plan itself doesn't necessarily have to be part of the charter. You know, it could be

ours says it's an appendix to it, but but like in this case, but it's we're going to try and find it, but Right. And the and the the problem with saying it's a it's an appendix to the charter is that you don't have to amend the charter to change that. So that's it's problematic, I think, to call it an appendix to the charter when it's not it's not part of the charter because if it was part of the charter, you'd have to follow the charter charter amendment procedure to to change that and you don't I mean you have like a procedure to do that.

Yeah. And in in that section of the charter, it's very charter change like where it has to go to the selectment for approval, then has to go to the town meeting for approval. um before connected um and I'm sorry I'm saying selected because being involved in town policy since 1977 for the vast majority of my time that's what they just says for the convenience of the public the administrative code shall be printed as an appendex 2 but not an integral part of the bylaws bylaws we just saw that yeah which is that makes sense that's where I would I would put it so I take it out.

He does it under the charter, but it's partend to the bylaw. Yeah. The modification process in the charter, but it's not a charter change.

That makes sense. You understand? Go ahead. Any other charter questions? Uh, one second.

This is very helpful. I think one one non-charter but town council question may come up. We touched on it a little bit of our at our last meeting. It's an open meeting law question about specifically the question had to do with suppose in between meetings a member comes up with a proposal for a charter change say a draft draft charter change. Um, one would like to be able to communicate that to the members of the committee prior to the meeting so that when we are in the meeting we can and and deliberate upon it. We've already had a chance to review that. Arguably that could constitute a if it if we if we emailed that proposal out to everybody prior to the meeting, arguably under the meeting law, that could constitute a deliberation even if even if no one responds to it. Just just the fact of communicating a member's opinion to the committee prior to the meeting that it's probably an open meeting law violation. No, it's definitely an open meeting law violation. I can speak from

Mark Mark ran into that in his other town.

Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, the problem is that a proposed amendment is essentially that's stating the opinion of that person that's coming up with that proposal. And whenever an opinion [snorts] of one of your members is expressed by either email, text, posting it to like a Google document, which is very popular, but would advise staying away from as a public body, um, anytime that's communicated to a quorum of this body, whether that happens in one email or whether, you know, it goes serially, you know, like the soup can u, Right. Um, that is a deliberation under the ML and a deliberation can only occur at a properly not noticed meeting that's open to the public. So I I

would would it be valid for a subcommittee to have a properly posted meeting in public to discuss the amendment and then once the amendment has been discussed in public it could then be shared with the rest of the committee for deliberation at the next meeting. Right. And so if subcommittee basically adopts a recommendation that they're going to bring to bring forth to the committee, then that recommendation could be distributed with the background material for the the meeting. Okay. Because that's essentially the school that's essentially the school committee policy subcommittee. I like that.

Oh, I didn't know you could do that. That's good. Yeah. Because you're right because getting something for the first time, you got to wait till the next meeting before you can talk about it because it's the first time you see it, you really can't make a decision or or you could discuss it, I guess, but you need another meeting. So, so rel related to that is let's say we have a a proposal from one member, we distribute the proposal at the meeting, discuss it at the meeting as a document that was discussed at the meeting. Can we then circulate electronic copies of that to members after the meeting?

Basically the results of the deliberation. Yes, I think that's permissible. Um um pardon my ignorance. I have a question I have a question about quorum because I hear subcommittees and I hear quorum tends sounds like the challenge. So what's the number if we had a subcommittee that only spoke to each other that is below quorum for this for this bigger committee? If we establish a subcommittee it's a committee, right? Yeah. And any subcommittees are also subl. So it's it doesn't any group of two or more people. Yeah.

Two or more. Okay. Because we use the word quorum. So I wanted to get an operational definition for what is our quorum. But two or more is is the challenge. Right. Right. So the sub say say we have a subcommittee of three which is arguably the smallest subcommittee you can have since you should have an odd number of members. Let's say you have a subcommittee of three. A quorum of that subcommittee is any two members. Correct? Which has nothing to do with a quorum of this committee as a whole. Uh the charter review committee has 15 members. A quorum is eight. But if we establish a subcommittee of whatever number that still has to be posted under the open meeting law. Oh yeah.

Yes. A subcommittee is I think that's what I think that's what Mike was asking. Yeah. A subcommittee is to the open meeting law. But the the quorum for a subcommittee has nothing to do with the quorum for this body. Yeah. My my point was working off of the larger quorum, not knowing the information that I know now and seeing, hey, if there was in this case where we were using the number three, if that little group got together and only spoke to each other and then came back to the larger meeting and shared information because I'm just thinking about how you divide and and get work done. Would that be permissible if that if our subcommittee of three, we would still have to post and we'd have to have our meetings live and everyone could be a part of it?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Subject to the OML too. I mean the only Thank you. The only way you could um you know accomplish something without having to meet and discuss it publicly would be if you assigned something to a individual person and then they had to bring it back you know at the next committee meeting. Thank you. Y right.

So if you did that, so say I decided I was going to take section five of the chart and come back and circulate my kind of report back to the committee with my suggested changes with a packet of information about why I suggest them for people to look at and save the time at the next meeting. You can't do that. But you can do that in the committee form, right? Because the committee that was a public deliberation based on what came out of their committee. Makes sense. It's different. Opposed to needing the subcommittee, right?

So if me and Skip if me you and Bob were a committee looking at section five, we come up with a proposal that can go to the chair and it can go out the next packet because it was done in public. Right. But I well I couldn't have a meeting I couldn't post a meeting for myself and then and then sit there and talk to myself. No. So, we can't do that. But if you came up with the idea, you'd have to bring it to the meeting. You'd have to bring it to the meeting. Absolutely. Should we can look at it until the meeting say we should think about adding a skip committee. [laughter] Let's just skip that. Just um

any other questions for council here. Um so there was a recent question about results of votes when large numbers of people abstain. Uh so it was deter that I found differing opinions over whether the passing something requires a majority of those present or a majority of those present and voting. Uh there there is a description of majority vote in the charter of present and voting but it seems very limited in its applicability. Would it be sufficient to us under our multiple member body procedures section of the charter to reference that definition and say something like all votes shall be by majority vote as defined in whatever section there is that unless there's a conflict unless specified otherwise in some other law or would is that something that would be sensible? I would be very careful with that because I think that that definition that's in the charter right now

is creating some problems interpretive interpretive dilemmas. I will if if the definition were to be updated to eliminate those problems or is it better to just not touch it and let state law leave it alone? I think that the charter you you probably want to look at that at changing that and I I you know there's probably a lot of ideas that I I have that I can give you. I think I think we should ask council for a recommendation on how to clean up that section because that is an important section that needs to be addressed. Yeah.

So do we do we need to make a motion to ask town council to give us a proposal because if we do I'll make that motion right now. Is it sufficient for me to take that as a consensus of the committee? Somebody objects. Without objection, consider yourself asked. Well, yeah. And and you know, keep in mind like I I can recommend ways to change it, but there's more than one option. So, um, you know, without knowing like what you want, it's kind of hard for me to tell you what I think you should do. I don't ever want to hear about a meeting in which two members vote in favor of something and three members abstain and we don't know the outcome of the vote. Use that as the guide to give us a proposal.

Yes. And I I we could certainly discuss which which result we want out of that. We just want to know how to codify that result. That's a good way to put Yeah. If if there are well I think how you define president voting or how you define majority vote determines what that result of that vote is.

Yeah. I just want to know how how do we make that effective where it's not it's very it's effective in very limited sense because of how it's worded. Right. And I think in the particular example that maybe you're talking about um the requirement for the majority vote was by general law. Like you can't change the definition of majority vote in general laws through your charter. Yeah. You can change it to applications in the charter and the bylaws, but in that particular example, it didn't change what the what the meaning of majority vote was in the general law.

Right. the the a a definition of majority vote in the charter, whatever we end up with, is always going to be qualified by saying unless otherwise specified by the general laws or or by statute or some equivalent language.

Right. Another kind of similar one was uh there is language in the charter about bodies being able to make their own rules and procedures. Is it generally something done to define a default for like a parliamentary procedure reference if boards haven't specified their own such as Robert's rules? the relaxed or something else.

I don't know if Robert's rules would be my my default, but yeah, I mean, you can certainly have you can provide for some uniform rules of procedure like in your charter. Um, I know in Framingham it does include that. Um, but you can also leave the board some flexibility, too, because, you know, it's it's going to be really hard to come up with like a one-sizefits-all approach because different boards in town have different functions and yeah, you want to be careful about that.

Anything else? Um if not, uh just remind everybody that we will likely be calling on council from time to time with with additional questions anytime questions come up during our deliberations. Ultimately, when we have some, you know, some fairly concrete proposals, uh, I think we will want to we will ex want want to have council review those and again drawing them on recent experience with the bylaw committee. We 41 bylaw articles, we asked town council at the time to review every one of them and she did.

Okay. What what provided useful feedback. One final question uh related to open meeting law. Uh at our last meeting we attempted to open the meeting. Uh we had technical issues. Uh that fact was recorded in the minutes. We eventually open like almost 20 minutes late. Um, does is that something that would need to be recorded in the minutes or can we just say it was opened at this time and we don't need to mention any of the issues that happened that would cause it to be late? So, you had you had members that were attending remotely.

Yes. And there was there was a technical issue where they could not we couldn't hear each other. Right. I do think you need to have that in the minutes. Does have to be in the minutes. Yeah. I I might and I were having a discussion. I might it might clean it up some. But if it if you were all meeting in person and you were just live streaming, you know, for the public, I think it's different, you know, but the the the the idea of the meeting is that everybody that's attending that's a member should be able to hear and speak to each other, right? And I think if you're not if you have an issue with that, like that should be noted in your minutes. Interested. Okay. That's all. Anything else? Well,

glad you asked. Thank you very much, Chris, for taking the time to meet with us. I think Yeah, thanks for having me out and I I wish you the best of luck. Um, I said, I've been through this process, so any other questions you have, like, please send them my way. I'm happy to share my experiences with you all because it was a it was a fun ride. [laughter] But I was very believe when it was done. So, as I'm sure you will all be. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'd say feel free to stay if you want to, but I'm [laughter] I rather suspect you would be really interested in getting home. This is my third night meeting at [laughter]

Excellent. All right. So, the next item on my agenda here is outreach. We discussed it sort of briefly and abstractly at the last meeting, but I think I think we uh our intention has been from the beginning to to reach out to the public, reach out to uh town boards and committees and departments and officers soliciting feedback. What would you uh what would you like to see in the changed in the charter? So the question is how do we how do we want to reach out? What not so much how but what do we want to ask? Should the ask be as simple as give us your suggestions for charter changes or do we want to be more detailed in the ask?

I I think what we should the best thing to do is a three-step process. I think we should reach out to all boards and committees with a memo saying we're in the process of amending the charter. Do you have any recommendations you'd like us to consider? So all the boards and committees should really be contacted. Yes. I think we should also set up on the website uh a way for people to submit proposed charter changes outside of our meeting so that we can get them to talk about it. And then the third way I think is we should have a public hearing at least one public hearing at the beginning of the end of the process to to receive public as well. So, I think it it has to be three ways. We definitely should reach out to all the boards. Yeah, that's like at the top of my list.

Yeah, I think we need to do that and and setting up a way for people either an email address or something, charter review, whatever you call it so that people can submit proposed charter changes to us and we can debate those at each meeting, talk about them, and then we definitely should have a public. I think those are the three ways for the public outreach. I at least if I CL I think the question was more of in that first method how do we want to phrase the question to the boards and to the agencies board do you we're in the process of amending the charter or reviewing the charter do you have any proposed changes period it has to be too specific yeah my my

yeah my question was kind of that that's sort of the obvious way to phrase it do we want to be more specific I can't think of a reason to be more specific I think in the last one for the bylaw. There were certain agencies that were responsible for certain sections of the bylaws. So, we sent them we sent them a different letter saying, "We think you are responsible for this section of the bylaw. Please provide us your feedback on this particular section. I don't think there is as much of that right with the charter."

Yeah. when I was when I was reviewing what we did for the bylaw, you same thought as in my mind that that we don't need to be, you know, there's nothing really agency specific in much of the charter. It's just a more general question. Um because al partly because the bylaw is touched more closely in various agencies responsibilities. So they would you would expect them to have more to say about it. But yeah, keep it keep it simple. Yeah, this this is big [snorts] government. nothing specific about anybody. So, just you know what we did before and cross out charter I mean bylaws and put in charter pretty much. Yeah, I can have Amber send that out like tomorrow.

Yeah, we should get that out as soon as possible. And yeah, she's going to New York Dave. That's right. I heard her say she was going to be in New York tomorrow. Well, okay. And Monday's out, too. Monday's kind of a holiday or something when she can get it out. Yes. as soon as practicable, we'll have Amber get that out to uh basically all the town departments, boards, and committees. Uh outreach to the public. You know, you mentioned having having something on our website of, you know, sort of setting up a something that there's we have a we have a general contact form, but we might want to have something more specific set up for suggestions.

Do we want to put something, you know, what we did in in uh in Graten is we did a couple of things. We put out on our Facebook page and we said the charter review committee is meeting. If you have any suggestions, please submit them and we have an email address for them to submit the uh the recommendation. So maybe we want to do something on Facebook. Do we have a local newspaper? Maybe we want to I'm just asking maybe we want to put an ad in the paper as well because some people do get their moves that way saying the chart same message we're accepting you know recommendations.

Yep. One of the things that the last charter review committee Amber had a copy of it when I was talking they actually put out a survey and I don't remember it was like three questions in survey. Yeah I glanced at it. The only one I remember is, and this is clearly not applicable to our work this time around, was would you be in favor of a representative town meeting? But I think whatever questions of that nature that might come up out of our work is more likely to arise out of some of the suggestions that we make. So I think our first outreach is simply

here's and and and particularly for the particularly for the public but I would probably include this in the email to all the departments etc is

here's here's what the charter is here's here's where you can go to find out more about because a lot of people reading that may may not be particularly familiar with the charter. You want you want to basically, you know, give them enough so they can see, well, this is what the charter is. And then then do you have any suggestions? Nothing more complicated than that at the outset. And following up on what you mentioned about having a public hearing, again, reflecting on the work the bylaw committee did, we basically had two public meetings. one fairly early in the process to solicit input, one later on in the process to review the proposed changes. So, and that's kind of

Do we want to do the public hearing at our next meeting in March? We could do that. Yeah, we could do it at the start. One of the other things we did before though was as we developed wording that we were going to use for proposed bylaw changes, we posted them. Yeah. Yeah, I want to I want to I want to get back to that in just a moment. Uh Angela has her hand up on Zoom. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify. Um I'm looking at the agenda. So are we saying that the and are we would we be doing a public survey or we're saying as the survey we would just ask for public comment and kind of leave it general? Is that what we're saying? Versus a

right. I think I think we've all kind of agreed that now now is not time for something that really resembles the survey. What do you think of this? What do you think of that? We might get there at some point. If we have some charter changes that or some proposed charter changes that we we think we'd like to get the public's opinion on specifically these, we could do a survey. But uh yeah, I'd have I'd have to I think agree with what everybody else is pretty much thinking that. Yeah,

I think my only point I was thinking of there was I had Mike's voice in my head too and being like a newer resident was just thinking um it may be intimidating I think sometimes for people that aren't familiar with the charter to just sort of imple like offer up a solution without any sort of maybe rubric or just sort of I guess to your point of like not needing specific survey questions but giving um just sort of general like education in terms of which areas to look at or or something like that. I don't know. I think as someone who hasn't seen it, if if someone is looking at this for the first time without sort of like knowing where to even kind of go. Um that's my only piece that I was thinking. I think that that that's why my thinking is particularly on the survey to particularly on the public outreach is to include some enough information in there about what the charter is and what it isn't. uh enough information so that if you have no idea what the charter is, you know, we we'll give you enough information so that you can uh you can go dig in a little bit and uh you you can figure out you know you can get a get a sense at least of what the charter is.

Okay,

Mike say for that process will we be able to see the messaging? I I'm just thinking about in terms of a lay person and just making sure that it's um friend friendly to them because what's what the picture that's being painted in my picture and what I'm learning even from tonight is really holding up what do people already know and saying this is our constitution like comparing it to things that people already know. So then that way it's not as intimidating even though we tell them what it is looking at uh I think about uh 31 pages and not really being clear. So just I don't know if we'll have a chance to look at [laughter] and now I'm thinking open law but who gets to look at the messaging who has the marketing chops to look at the messaging to make sure that it can actually resonate with the people that it's going to.

Okay. That's kind of the question. That's a good question because if nothing else, we could bring that, you know, we could bring that messaging, the proposed messaging to our next meeting and have, you know, have have the committee basically re review that and and work on it enough to where we're we think we're we're happy with what we're going to send out. That's the messaging to the public, but we can reach out to the boards and committees now. Hopefully they know what a child is. Mhm. Right. Yeah, I'd imagine. Yeah.

Yeah. But yes, if you know if if the if the committee would like to be able to review and comment on and revise proposed messaging to the public at our very next meeting. Yeah, I think that I think Angela might raise good points. Yeah. And unless anybody objects, I think we'll uh we'll plan on that.

And I I do want to just speak for a moment on the good points they just made. I think that the community outreach should be two-phased. First one should be what do you guys think with the inclusion the website right now actually has some pretty good information including a summary of recent charter histories. So if we give those examples these are some of the things that we have changed in the charter. These are some of the things we try to change but failed. Now knowing these examples what changes do you think we should make? And then a second phase saying here are the list of things the board has come up with so far in this cycle. seeing that list, what else do you think? Because that would be even more. And we could even at that point ask, like you were saying, Dave, which of these already suggested amendments do you support? You can gather more information that way.

That's a good point. I like that. And then I also want to say Angela uh saying that people might be intimidated. That is a good reason to include information, but also there will be a lot of people who will be suggesting uh changes not knowing what it is. So that is also very good to use because of like the town council said we can get recommendations that we might not be able to do anything with but they could still be useful pieces.

Y kind of connected to that again going back to our bylaw committee not all of the suggestions the bylaw committee received from public were included in the bylaw update. You know, we had several suggestions which in the bylaw committee's final report, we said, you know, here's some suggestions we got. We didn't act on them and here's why we didn't act on them. And so, yeah. Yeah, perfectly. It's perfectly plausible that that particularly with the charter and just the nature of the charter, we may very well get suggestions that are really more appropriately handled as bylaw revisions or as policies, select board policies, whatever. So yeah, we'll take all suggestions and we'll consider all suggestions. We won't necess necessarily act on all of them, but yes, I think more than one certainly more than one our initial public outreach is simply to solicit suggestions. Another outreach would be here's here's what we've got so far. What do you think of that? Do you have any other ideas? and kind of take it from there. Greg,

so just for those that didn't follow that committee, uh an example of a suggestion that we received multiple times from the public and we did not and we decided not to pursue it at the time was a noise ordinance. Uh we it what we did it wasn't that we felt it wasn't uh appropriate or something we we we felt that we couldn't do it justice. uh that needed more involved review uh and more stakeholders than we were able to do in our given time frame. So, we put that forward as something that someone else in the town might want to do at some point in the future.

All righty. So, I just have a question. Um, is one month enough time to set up that public meeting if we're thinking of putting ads and local papers or just throwing that out there as a concern for those of you that have done that before? Yeah, I think generally speaking, one one month is sufficiently have to advertise two weeks before public. Okay. It's also part of the ongoing outreach. So, one component of Okay. So I think at the moment it sounds like what we're what we're looking towards is probably at our next meeting we will review and approve

we're not going to do it the public outreach message and it will be the following meeting at the at at the earliest where we'll have we'll hold a public meeting or the public hearing. Great. I think calling it a public hearing probably it raises a different thought. It's just a public meeting. I wanted to do an advertised public hearing. We'll advertise it. Whether we call it a hearing or a meeting is I want to call it a public hearing. I think we should hold a public hearing because there's there's there's some um that's what I'm looking for importance, but it puts a little bit more weight.

Thank you. Put more weight to the process. If you call it a public hearing, you advertise it. You open the public hearing. input to close a public hearing. It just it's you don't gave it on a planning board. We need to do a public hearing has more significance than a regular meeting and I think that's what we need to do with this. Although it's invitation it's like an invitation. It's not just public meeting people can come. So we're we're asking you some some of the planning board hearings are technically public meetings and not hearings. I mean it's six of one half the other in terms of the procedures involved. So when you're doing a site plan review, you do a public hearing on the site plan, right?

Not I I think maybe a site plan is technically called in the zoning. It's called a public hear meeting. A special permit is called a public hearing. That's what I meant to say. Anyway, okay. We don't Yeah, we we can work those details as we get closer to the time we need to set it up. Um, and as far as, you know, well, we can work out between now and next week, we can figure out how many different outlets we can advertise in. Facebook, the the newspaper, cable, the cable announcements. Some people actually pay attention to those news item on the town website.

Town website, of course. Anyway, so we'll that's also multimedium, right? I don't I'm not that familiar. We use multimedium, not just text. Do we use audio, video, like those type of things? I don't know. I just think about how people receive information and how they kind of learn and ask questions. So, that's a problem we uh a problem we encounter very frequently is we we we try to try to find the the best ways, the most efficient ways to get information to the public. And there's always it's always more than one way. Andy, maybe we could ask the uh town administrator and the assistant town administrator to highlight it on their upcoming podcast so that people are aware. There you go.

Let's let's Yes. Or maybe the chair of the select board could announce it. I think we can arrange. [laughter] What about like like all things that a lot of there's a lot of residents that that are on there. Yeah, there are several several notable Grafton Facebook pages that we can I mean the town of Grafton official page and then you know v various you know there are various ways of getting announcements from the official page copied into some of these other the town to post it first and then share it into those groups. Yeah. Okay. I want I Angela has her hand. Angela. Yeah. Thank you.

I just wanted to make one quick point after that. I know you said we could talk about it as we go, but if we're also sending the message out in these different channels, also being clear on where we expect people to make the official comment. So like if we're posting this on Facebook, then we're not getting like a bunch of Facebook comments that people are putting their opinions on. So making sure that no matter where we publicize this that we then direct them where we want them to submit the um comment. Yes, that was saying an email address or something like that where people come.

Yeah, we've we've done that. In fact, I think my most recent exper comparable experience is with the uh master plan update where we uh you know we publicized that as through as many channels as we could find. that in all cases we directed we directed comments back to the planning department. I think in our case here we have a web page which we've talked about before of of you we we have a contact form on the web page which would work. We might want to set up something special email address for people to go to instead of filling out a contact form. I think in this particular

instance email addresses would be helpful. If we made a just a Gmail, we could use Google forms. That way, we could ask questions as well as saying, "Here's a text box." We got to be very careful. We shouldn't be responding. Yeah. Outside of a committee meeting for the public trouble. That that'd be more like the survey. Yeah. This is this is a situation where we want comments to flow from the public to us to us and then we deal with them at our meetings. So, let people know that we will not be. So, a Google form, you're not going back and forth. It's just an actual It's like the contact info. Okay.

You can ask a question, but it's just like a yes or no. They select their answer and then that form gets sent. Then we could look at them here. I get I'm sorry. I misunderstood. So, well, we'll work those details and I think I'll I'll I'll work with the town administrator's office with Amber and uh and we'll see what we can set up for that. Don has her hand up. Don, hi. Can you guys hear me? Okay. Yes.

Okay. Um, I know that we use on the town side, uh, Microsoft, so they don't have the same forms as Google, but they do have the ability to do surveys and things like that that I've used in my professional life. So if Amber hasn't set one up before, I can stop in and help her do that once we know what we want to ask cuz they are really helpful and they give you analytics and it can give us a display if we set up three or five questions can make them multiple choice. You can make them yes, no, and you can really get a sense of where people are falling on different things.

Yeah. Amber Amber did mention to me a few day a few weeks ago, however long when I last time I talked to her about this committee stuff, Amber did mention [clears throat] to me that she can set up surveys. So So that that might turn out a a may maybe not what we traditionally think of as a survey, but as a means of collecting the kind of input we're looking for, that might actually turn out to be a good way to do it. So, we'll explore that topic further. I think I think we have a good public outreach.

Yep. Um, somewhat related, one of one of my items here was publicizing the work in progress on the town website. Skip mentioned this and I said I'd get back to it, so I'm getting back to it. Um, there's sort of two parts to that in my mind. Um, one is just keeping track of all the suggestions we've received and that may or may not be something we want to publicize on the website. Certainly, we need to do that for our own purposes. Now, keeping track of all the suggestions we received, um, who's going to be responsible for an individual or subcommittee, what the current status of it is, um, basically information along that lines of tracking all the suggestions that we've made ourselves or received.

I'd like to volunte I don't mind taking that responsibility. One one thing I would recommend is that the list of suggestions posted on the website be curated by a person and not automatic. Yes. Yes. I think right now the like charter review committee portion of the town website is actually pretty good. It has a lot of good information. And so if we just added another bullet point here of like suggested amendments and then categorized just based off of ideas we've received and it would be manual ideas we've received, ideas we've discussed and ideas we've decided on and then we could yeah discern that

and and a second part of that is this I think this is skip is what you were referring to from what we did on the bylaw committee is that and it what we did in the bylaw committee was for every bylaw article articles 1 through 41. We had a we had a sub a subpage above our web page and that said this is the article. Here's the latest draft revision of that article. So that you know that that made the the the bylaw revisions that we were proposing you once the committee the committee basically said yeah this is this is okay as our our first draft and we revised those drafts as we worked on it. But that was accessible via the website. You know the date of last revision. Here's a link to the actual document. We actually we posted the document so that people could see

a good spreadsheet that we tracked all this stuff off. Did you have it or I think it was the member of that committee that is not here. [laughter] Brian had that. Yeah, that's okay. Maybe for certain compensation we could reach out to him, have him flush everything that's on there except the headings and keep everything else and we could expand if he still has it. I could also do that. It's just kind of why reinvent the wheel. However, it took a while to get that going. But

yeah, so what we want basically what we want is the exact mechanics of it to be defined, but [snorts] it's the suggestion. Every suggestion we've received, we could we could say where that se suggestion originated. We want to say who's who's on the committee is going to follow up on it and what the status of it is. You know, you know, do we have a a proposed document with it? And thing with the charter is it's not the the suggestions are not going to be neatly organized by charter section. So unlike what we did for the bylaws, I think our the the the text of the charter revision proposals, it's kind of each proposal any one proposal might be a mix of changes to different sections of the charter. So we kind of I think we still maybe may need to work out exactly how that's how best to present that to the public. Oh yeah, it it's when they send this in depending on the content of what comes in and the form that comes in, we may be able to readily find a section of the charter to which it applies.

Yeah. Right. So I guess there's a difference between the suggestion itself which may be change this section of the charter to make make these changes in these different charter sections. That's the suggestion which itself could be subject to revision. And then there's the final the final charter document which is a whole another the only note on the list of suggestions and where they came from is that we list things like this committee, this department, general public. Don't put names.

Yeah, I was think I was thinking the same thing. I don't want to necessarily identify specific people that uh made the suggestions. Also, the idea that we're not going to do engage in a Q&A with people by email and responding is, you know, you're going to submit your thoughts and ideas to us and we're going to consider them. And it's imperative that you take part in all of these conversations that you can see and hear to find out what may or may not have happened with your thing. Yeah. I I was think we should there should be something in the announcement that says due to OML restrictions. The review committee will not be responding individually to comments. If you want to know how you have to watch the meetings.

Yeah, that's that's the only place we can talk about them. Yeah. Yeah. I have a question for you and I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself here. But as we segue into I put the hat on so that no one would notice me on the way up. But then you made eye contact. I I was trying to be polite. You put your head up just high enough that I could see it. So [laughter] go ahead. Yeah. I mean we're I think we're getting close. It's it's 10 minutes of nine already and I don't know how much longer we want to go tonight. Probably 10 minutes two hours meeting.

Yeah. But the question for you and one of the recommendations we're getting is to and we have some proposed charter language to to consider with that is to change the job title the position title from town administrator to town manager from the proposed changes as I read them. It's not proposing any notable changes in the powers and duties and responsibilities, but it's proposing a change in the job title. Do you have an initial reaction to that?

Um, yeah, I would be I would be in favor of that as the person in the position. I don't really want to lobby for it. I don't think that's the right move. Um, but I do think if you remove me from the equation, um, you know, I think that when I'm no longer in this position and you're advertising for the next town administrator, town manager, you're going to select, you're going to attract a better group of candidates because there is a specific amount of or a specific subset of us that are looking for manager positions and not administrators. Um, I agree by charter there's not a lot of uh difference between ana a manager and an administrator uh in the town of Grafton. The administrator is too strong,

but um yeah, I I wouldn't be opposed to it, but I'm also not going to lobby for it. Yeah, I did I I wasn't ex I wasn't asking you to lobby for it, but No, I know making that clear for everybody. Getting your opinion, which is consistent with other opinions we've heard. Yeah, there is a cost associated with that. Okay. Changing name tags, changing the stationery, and we'll wait to make the change until after he leaves. Yeah, that's fine, too. [laughter] Um, I don't I wouldn't I don't think I would let that dissuade me from proposing the change. Yeah. And I don't think there's a heck of a lot. [laughter]

I don't think there's a heck of a lot that we have that most everything's electronic. I mean, I have probably 450 of the original 500 business cards I got when I got here because they don't use them anymore. Um, [clears throat] but most everything else is we're printing it ourselves. So, it's it's a easy change. Yeah, I understand that. I've had my business cards almost 12 years. I still have most of I I really and it was outdated by the time I got I go to put them in for the rat to win something.

Yes, that's pretty much it. There was one time, speaking of business cards, and I shouldn't waste too much of the committee's time on it, but when one one time, I think this was back in the 80s, a company changed its name three times within the space of about a year and a day. So, we got to thinking maybe maybe we need business cards with electronic display on them for the company name of the day. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Okay. Well, thanks for that, Evan. Sure. Uh I I do plan on being available for your meetings if if possible. um so that if anything comes up that interacts either with my office or u you know any other office I can can help facilitate that. Okay. Okay. So with with that thank you Evan. All right. Have a good one.

Bye Evan. We will allow you to leave now. All right. Thank you. Have a great night. Late Evan. Good night. Okay. Um again in the interest of time I don't want to spend much time on this. My agenda included charter revisions to be considered u new suggestions and discussion of suggestions we've already received. Um I do have two very brief suggestions. Yeah. want to discuss

and actually back on the sort of on the outreach in terms of presenting the [snorts] proposed charter changes. Um I'm going to pass around and I'll I'll send this out after the meeting too. But uh this is the format in which we the bylaw committee. You have enough over there. Need one more. Yeah, we set an excellent precedent with this.

Just put this out by fat. So right without spending a lot you can look at it consider it further at the next meeting but this this is how we presented the bylaw changes. If you do something similar with a charter, basically this is not doesn't exactly correspond to how we would put it in a warrant article, but in terms of being able to read the changes, re see what has changed in context. You want me to change the way I submitted the way I submitted them

as it happens. We'll get back to this in a moment, but but I I I spent time on your on a couple of yours to do just to see just to see kind of see for myself what it looked like. Okay. Uh but yeah, and again, this is if if we're all if for the say you're going to share your screen, [laughter] digital copy

for the benefit of those on Zoom. Let me bring up a copy of that if I can find it here. So, while he's doing that, just some technical information. Uh, we chose red and striketh through. Uh, so that even when they're published with non-color, they can still be seen. And the green and the underline. And the specific shades of red and green that we chose came from a uh website that says what color should we use for those who are color blind. So hope those two colors are supposed to be visually distinct even for people that are red green color blind. So that you may see why wonder why they're kind of pink and the light green. So that there is a technical reason for that.

They're very muted on this print out too compared to the

Yeah. Good job. Yeah. And you I think the I don't know how exactly it compares. It's maybe the the pink and green look a little more muted, particularly the pink on the print out, but for readability to the color color blind, the the the trade of red had to be fairly pale, but this, you know, you kind of see how and we put at the top of it an explanation of the changes that were being proposed. So, we might we might end up doing like one of these for every uh charter article or or I haven't I haven't totally worked out how how I might do this where you have say the uh the rec the proposed change for town administrator overlaps with some other changes. So, I'm I'm still I'm still scratching my head thinking how best that might end up being presented as as a general format. Highlighting the changes in this particular way seems like it worked well for us for the bylaw committee. If we're if we're at least tentatively comfortable with doing things that way for the charter, I hear no objection. will sort of move move forward with this adapting it to whatever extent we need to to the specifics of the charter changes. Okay. So

approve the minutes before we Yeah. So I will I was going to hand out Mark's suggested changes. Uh seeing how it's kind of difficult to send a paper through Zoom. I also plan to electronically email these to everybody. So if you want to anybody at at this point we don't we don't really have time to discuss these and no in any detail. So you should say if you're going to hand them out what they are so that it's discussed in public so you can share it with the committee.

Yes. So we've got three proposals from Mark. One is to provide appointment authority for the fire chief to the town manager. You know, this is assuming [clears throat] that the town manager change is approved. We've got I think I sent them in order. I sent change it to town manager and then I said to have the town manager put

I'm not I'm not mentioning it here in order, but you know, this is sort of the key one. an administrator, an amendment to replace town administrator with town manager. And one thing you don't get a really good sense of from these is what's changing. You know, Mark has written these more as a something close to what a a warrant article or a petition to the legislature would be. The third one is budget development schedule and submission deadlines. And as I mentioned or alluded to earlier, I've I've taken the change from town administrator to town manager and I've produced, let me just quickly put that up on the board here. If I can find it. Where did I put that? Oh, here we go. Forgive me everyone, but I'm on bedtime duty. I I have to get running. I don't know if there's an official thing I'm supposed to say before I leave or anything.

Thank you for letting me know so I can put it in the minutes. Bye, Mike. Bye. All right. Good. [laughter] See you all next time. I'll look for the next meeting um time. Thank you. Thank you. Good night, Mike. Good night. It's almost past my bedtime. I was going to say if it's that easy, I have to go to bed. So, this is just a little bit. No, that's not the one I wanted to display. Sorry about that. Well, you'll get out those three amendments to everybody.

Yes. All right. Yeah, I'm not going to take the time. I thought I had it set up here. I make a motion we approve the minutes from the last meeting as presented. May I? Oh, sorry, Mr. Chair. I believe Nate's name is spelled wrong in the minutes. Bob, so is yours. Bob is spelled wrong. What? Yeah. spelled wrong. Oh, my name's spelled wrong as well. No, my name is spel my name is spelled correctly. And then no, look at page two. Oh, okay. Then on page two,

2016 Mark, dad and Bob Toma and they left off Skip's name. That's fine. if those were the uh I didn't catch I so I started this with a uh ask asking AI to give me a a set of minutes and it gave a bunch of it and then I had to go and fix a bunch of the names and then fill in all the stuff it didn't handle I must have some of the and there's one more my name is spelled wrong on there as well it's on there is re y and it should be e r y

okay that one I probably didn't even know. So, can you say that again, please? Yeah, it's uh Jeffrey J E F E R Y. Okay. Thank you. And Amy Barry, the town clerk's name is spelled the first time is B A R Y. That's that's one of those. I didn't catch that one. Can I ask a question? Can I ask a question? Under the open meeting law,

is it permissible to submit? No. Is it is it permissible to submit changes to the drafter of the minutes, spelling errors and stuff like that outside of the open meeting law so that we're not sitting here making, you know, saying his name is spelled wrong, my name was spelled wrong. Correcting scripts errors. Yeah. Is there a way to so that we could just say, "Hey, Greg, I noticed these changes when you read it." I I would say that those are not matters of opinion. Thank you. I think for for save a lot of time. It would save a lot of time and for safety sake I think that that should be oneon-one between the clerk and the person not as No, don't send it to everybody. Just contact Greg directly

because it's my is K E L L E Y my last name. Okay. All right. So there was a motion. Did I hear a second? Was there was never a second? I seconded [laughter] it. Oh, did you? So the the question I have is I as I did not look at them in detail aka did not look at them because they're just reflections of the recorded thingamajiggy anyways but you said did you include a part about uh we didn't start for the first 20 minutes because of technical difficulties and I saw Greg you guys were saying I said I saw Greg today earlier and I said do we really need to put that in the minutes? It just doesn't as but I'm glad you asked Tom. Yeah, I guess we do have to put it.

I will stop that as technical difficulties. Thank you. So, moderator Don Anderson attempted to call the meeting to order at 7 p.m. but was unable to do so due to technical difficulties. Perfect. So, I would I would say that I will make that amendment. If anyone else has any other typographical errors, send them to me and just to make sure I get them all and then I will publish a new version to the town clerk. All right. So I I gather that we have a motion on the floor and it's been seconded to approve the minutes as drafted

with the corrections noted in [snorts] in with corrections as noted both here and need to be communicated outside of the meeting to the clerk. Angela, my question is separate from that. So I'm good with that. Okay. No f no further discussion on the motion. Take a roll call. Dawn Anderson I. Nate I Mike has left the meeting. Angelina I Skip. Hi Bob. Hi Dan. Hi Mark. Hi [snorts] Jeff. Hi Andy. Hi Jack. Hi

Greg. I and I vote I. Motion carried unanimously. Greg will take care of the details. Has a question. Angela, you had a question. I just had a quick question about the bylaws. Um, when I go on the website, like it I can't find the information. So, from the like bylaw review committee and I'm just wondering if there's any other info to kind of like educate myself on that committee and that process. I know you you handed out a paper and you said you would send it out, but is there Yeah, I guess anything else that we were able to like access to be able to just kind of see what was done there. I got taken down. I

think most of the bylaw committee the bylaw committee's web page has been removed from the town website. I I don't know what remnants exist. If you go to the town meeting information for October of 2023, the report of the bylaw uh the bylaw study committee is linked from that page. Yeah. So you Okay. Right. That the the bylaw committee report will tell you quite a bit about the bylaw committee and its work. And if you want to see those meetings, they should all be up on Grafton television on YouTube. Yes. If you can't sleep at night, that on Yeah. The owl. [laughter]

Yes. Again, I will send out by email to all the members the documents that we have discussed this evening that I think the only one we distributed ahead of the meeting was the minutes. So all the other documents I will send out the meeting. I'm glad Tom Council came very educational to second. Moved and seconded that the meeting be adjourned. Motion is not debatable. Dawn I Nate I Angelina I Skip. Hi Bob. Hi Dan. Hi Mark. Hi Jeff. Hi Andy. Hi Jack. I Greg I Angela I

and Dave both eye motion carried unanimously. We are adjourned. Thank you very much for bearing with us as late as we ran but I think certainly our time with town council was worthwhile. Excellent. can read a room. Good night everyone. Good night. Good night. Thanks all. If