Charter Review Committee - Regular Meeting

Call to order this June 11th meeting of the Charter Review Committee will begin with a roll call. Let me bring up my list here. Dawn Anderson.

Here.

Nate Bodwin. Here. Mike Bruni. He informed me that he wouldn't be able to make it. Angelina Correa. Skip Currier.

Here.

Bob DeToma.

Here.

Dan Fitzgerald.

Yeah.

Mark Haydad. Here. Jeff Hess. I think Jeff had informed me that he wasn't going to be able to make it. Andrew Jefferson. Here. John Kelly. Here. Jim Beloy. I think I remember Jim saying he wasn't going to be here for the meeting. He'd mentioned that. Where was it? Greg Marr. Here. Angela Raman.

Here.

Oh, and I guess David Robbins is here. All right. So we are almost all present and accounted for. First item on our agenda is public input. If anybody in the audience from the public or anybody on Zoom wishes to provide some input to us, like new suggestions for charter changes and all that, now would be the time. I don't see any hands raised in the room here. I don't see any hands raised on Zoom, which I guess means that we can move on to the next agenda item, which is outreach. And Dawn had a specific outreach item that she wanted to bring to the committee's attention.

So we got an email from Adam LaPointe, the recreation director, that they're planning a Grafton Day on Friday, August 21st from 4.30 to 8 over at the high school. And if we provide our own table, chairs, and marketing materials and have a fun activity, which I can totally brainstorm a fun activity, for the families to do when they come by. We can talk about what we're doing with the Charter Review Committee and let them know when public input can be provided. And I just want to throw that out there for us to talk about.

You know, I think similar to how we've been proposing these subcommittees for the individual subcommittees, pieces of the charter, I think it would be wise, as there are other events coming up like National Night Out, to maybe have a outreach subcommittee, people to get together and handle making pamphlets or whatever, coordinating all of those dates, figure out who's going to be able to do what.

Yep, I had forgotten, or... It's too early in the year for me to be remembering that National Night Out is early August. So we've got National Night Out as a possibility, Grafton Day at the high school later in August. They're two kind of similar venues that may or may not overlap to some extent in the audience there. But yeah, I would encourage it. If a couple of people on the committee think they can put something, would like to put something together, this isn't the most attention-grabbing thing going on in Graption, but I think we set out to try to do as much outreach as we could. And it's certainly not, August would not be too late for us to receive new suggestions for charter changes.

Mm-hmm. And the deadline for Adam to know if we want to participate is the 19th of June.

The 19th of June?

Yeah, so next week.

Yeah. That is just, yes, a week from tomorrow. So... Unless anybody in the committee objects, I'd say let's go for it and get a, if we can just get a couple, two or three volunteers to do the work of figuring out what it is all that we want to talk about, present. Yeah, I'm at a loss for a fun activity, but...

We'll have to remember to likely post an agenda just in case, because there will likely be more than... Actually, is it based on quorum for open meeting?

Yes. If less than a quorum of the committee is present, it is not an official meeting. You don't have to post it unless you anticipate the possibility of a quorum in If you don't have quorum, you can't discuss committee, deliberate on committee business. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about offering information to the public, soliciting suggestions to the public. So who's going to volunteer for this? Don, Andy, anybody else? I can volunteer. I've not done anything like it, but I will volunteer. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. I did take a few minutes to take what we had put as our kind of what was in the we want to hear from you and made a little flyer.

Cool.

That is that we could also use in our own. sharing out about I know we talked about in another meeting about sharing on our own social medias when we had meetings and information so like before the week before the meeting we could share out the the infographic and then the week after the day after the meeting I have a little script of what we could write to say like you missed our meeting watch the replay now here's what we talked about kind of thing to just to keep people engaged.

Building on the success of the outreach that resulted in an amazing attendance at town meeting, we probably won't get quite that same response. But if we don't do any outreach, we'll get no response at all. Yes. So, yeah.

I do like a good outreach.

I will take it as a consensus of the committee that we want to do this. I will consider this the direction of the committee without a formal vote. Okay. So, anything else on outreach? Any other ideas? Anything else we might want to do? If not, the next agenda item is to receive new proposed revisions, if any. And we didn't seem to get any proposed revisions from the public during the public input agenda item. Do any of the committee members have any?

Revisions they would like to propose that we have not previously put on the table I have one brief one that I don't believe was talked about yet in the definitions section towards the very back It is Section 75, subsection F, local newspaper. The words local newspaper shall mean a newspaper of general circulation in the town of Grafton and the official website of the town of Grafton. I would like to change the word A to any. We have a lot of public hearings that go out and I think somewhat ironically, the Grafton News is one of the least circulated when you compare it to the community advocate, which everyone gets, or at least theoretically everyone gets. So I've had multiple board meetings in the past month where it's been brought up, okay, we have to put this in the newspaper because of the charter of the bylaws, and saying, hey, what exactly, where exactly do we have to publicize that? Because when we put it in the graph to news, no one's really seen it. Can we do the advocate and the voice of telegram and saying, well, shouldn't that just be enough? And so I think we could maybe look at that and see how that.

Yeah. Just to top my head reaction, that is a newspaper is nonspecific as to which newspaper. So, but yeah, let's, I'll add that to our list of list of things to further consider whether, whether the word such as any newspaper, helps to clarify the intent. All right. So anything else? If not, let's see. What's our next agenda? I keep losing the agenda on my screen here. OK. Subcommittee assignments. set up subcommittee assignments from the people who were in attendance at the last meeting. And Jack compiled a list. It's also in the minutes. I sent it out in the meeting materials for tonight. But for those who were not here at the last meeting, you have an opportunity to volunteer to participate in any one of the subcommittees. If your name is on a subcommittee, you'd prefer it not to be. We can easily change that. Anybody want to join one of the subcommittees?

I have, from my own review, I have revisions for 2, 3, and 7 that I'd be interested in working on.

I also think... We should make it clear to some of the members who may have not been here last time looking at this. These are not the only people who will be able to speak on these, obviously. These are just the people who are going to do like the first go through and then present to the board as a whole.

So yeah, we will later in this meeting, we will go about putting those subcommittees to work. If you sign up for a subcommittee, you are expected to actually do something and not just have your name attached to it. So Greg is interested in Sections 2, 3, and 7. Did I get that right? Yes. Anybody else want to add their names to the subcommittees?

I think we put Skip on a couple last time when he wasn't here, so...

Skip is on administrative organization because we believe that that would have to do with the fire chief. I think that might be the only one. Oh, and finance and fiscal procedures. It should be six and seven.

Oh, seven.

Five and six. Five and six. Administrative organization and finance and fiscal procedures.

Yeah, if... Skip, do you want to be also on seven? Muted.

Yeah, I'm just trying to work with one screen and figuring out which screen is the agenda or which one is the minutes from the last meeting and which one is the meeting meeting. Yep, the last three, I guess, five, six, and seven.

Yeah, we've already got you in five, six. We can add you to seven.

We need some more volunteers for the first section, incorporation. I can certainly volunteer for art. I was going to say one, two, and perhaps seven.

I'm not sure how many we need. We're almost at quorum on seven. Okay, so you don't have to put me on seven. I'm okay with not being on seven.

Yeah, so far we have, what about four? One, two, and four.

Yep.

Yeah, that only has three right now. Yep. So far we... don't have any proposed revisions for Section 1 except possibly the spelling and grammar and that type of thing. But you never know. We're not done yet. And we did intend to have a subcommittee for every section of the charter.

And four is going to be good because it's just going to be watching Mark and Jim try to out-town administer one another so you can come up with the best section.

All right. So it might be interesting.

That's what I said.

Any other subcommittee additions or changes? I'm not volunteering for any subcommittees. But then... I'm quite comfortable letting everybody else do it. I've got enough work to do as it is.

Okay.

So if there's nothing more to do with subcommittee assignments, next agenda item was placeholder for any discussion we might want to engage in this evening regarding the proposed revisions that are on the table. I think for the most part, I would expect the subcommittees to be working on everything there. And off the top of my head, I don't think there's Does anybody have anything they want to discuss tonight as far as basically giving input to the subcommittees for various proposed revisions? I think I will mention, and I don't think this merits a lot of discussion at this point, but I will mention we talked At the last meeting we talked some about the terminology for references to state laws. We have these two definitions in Section 7, general laws, lowercase general laws, capitalized. And I think I distributed at the last meeting just a collection of all, every place in the charter where the term general laws in some variation appears. I will, I thought I'd mention tonight at least briefly that for the purpose of trying to figure out what really makes sense to have in our charter, I looked at about, Grafton of course, but I collected about 28 other town charters and looked at how they define and reference the general laws or terms similar to general law. The short answer is that, let me put this on the screen just to, all right. So this is, you know, it's kind of hard to read. I can distribute this to the group afterwards. But there's some charters that have a section. There's five towns that have a section in the charter that is separate from definitions. It's titled References to General Laws. And it has a very long paragraph. explaining references to general laws, et cetera, et cetera. There are six towns that have in their definition section just a simple definition of general laws or Massachusetts general laws or law. There are another eight towns that have definitions similar to Grafton. with general laws and capitalized general laws. And then there are 10 towns that have charters that talk about general laws but never define the term on the assumption that it's reasonably well understood what you mean when you talk about general laws. So there are all these variations. I think at our last meeting when we talked briefly about it, we said maybe we don't need those two definitions that look very much alike. And so I think at least my tentative conclusion from that was that we'd probably prefer to have, if we have a definition at all, just one fairly simple definition. And so this is just, like I say, I looked at a bunch of try to see whether maybe some of them maybe even use different words than general laws. And they're all pretty consistent in using the term general laws, generally understood to refer to mass general laws.

The only place that I found that we would want to actually spell out mass general law is because there is one place that we reference a specific section And it has to do with, I think, removal from office for recall petitions and everything else.

It's part of the ballot requirements for recall petition. So, yeah.

Just spell out Mass General Law, and I don't think we need a definition.

I don't think we need a definition for that. So I'm inclined to say, to suggest that We go with this, if we define the term at all, and it's probably not a bad idea, we go with one of the simplest forms of definitions like are in this list. Work out the details later. But that was sort of my follow-up. I had mentioned at the last meeting I was going to follow up on this topic. So this is what I came up with. What's that? So this represents somewhat less than half of all the towns in the Commonwealth that have a charter. A lot of towns don't even have charters. So I think that's the only thing that I had that I wanted to at least briefly follow up on what we talked about at the last meeting. We can work the details of exactly how we want that definition worded. My inclination is to make it as simple as we can. Any other discussion on the topics of the various provisions? Like I said, the subcommittees will get to work on these in more detail. But for now, I don't have anything else that I wanted to bring to the committee's attention in this meeting. We'll have a lot more time to talk about these as we go forward. So if there's nothing else, next agenda item is to discuss next steps. And I think next steps at this point are basically for the subcommittees to get to work. And the way I presume this is going to go is that the subcommittees will hold their meetings. I guess each subcommittee can decide when and how often they want to meet. And so we as a committee would just basically say, well, that's up to the subcommittees to decide how they want to go about their work. So I'm assuming that subcommittees will be meeting. And at each of our subsequent meetings, subcommittees will report their progress, such as it may be possible. It's possible between now and the second week of July. There may not be. I don't expect all the subcommittees to be able to meet. Whenever, whenever. So at every meeting from now on, I think the subcommittees will be reporting their progress. Subcommittees may come up with questions that they would like to get the full committee's opinion on or thoughts on. So kind of as part of reporting progress, that would include any topics that the subcommittee feels that the committee as a whole should be discussing. So... With that, any other thoughts about what we should be doing next? We've got the outreach as a next step as well. We've already discussed that.

So do you, Mark? Yeah, David, how do we go about posting the subcommittee meetings? Do we just go to the town clerk's office? Who's going to take care of that?

Yeah, so... Yes, I think, you know, when a subcommittee decides they want to schedule a meeting, you have to put together an agenda that can be as brief as it needs to be. Generally speaking, I wouldn't expect the subcommittee agendas to be more than just Discuss revisions to sections over the charter or whatever the topic of the subcommittee is. And then, yeah, submit the agenda. You can submit the agenda by email to the clerk's office, clerks at grafton-ma.gov, if you don't already know. And posting requirements, most of us are probably familiar with that, but for the sake of completeness, I'll say meetings have to be posted 48 hours in advance of the time scheduled for the meetings. You can hold your meetings by Zoom. If you want to reserve a conference room to meet in person, we generally do that through the town administrator's office. If you want to schedule the cable studio, I don't think the TA's office handles scheduling. Just call us and we'll set it up. Yes, same call. Call one of his compatriots at the cable operation to reserve that room. And that's basically about it as far as scheduling and managing meetings. Anything else we should make note of? Minutes. Someone needs to take minutes.

Someone needs to take minutes and produce minutes.

Yes, minutes. Subcommittee meetings do have to have minutes. And I think I would expect the subcommittee agendas to be posted in the same, under the Charter Review Committee agendas. I've never had to post a meeting in that manner as a subcommittee. I think when you send it to the town clerk, if it's identified as a subcommittee of the Charter Review Committee, they should know where to put it on the agenda's page.

You may want to just give Amy a heads up that that's what we're going to do and that's all that will be coming in.

Yeah. So my question is, are minutes are approved by the full committee? Because the subcommittee can't really act on itself.

Yeah. I believe subcommittee minutes would normally be approved by the subcommittee.

That's correct. We're the ones creating the minutes. How can the full committee vote on minutes that we're creating? The subcommittee would have to approve their minutes and file them with the town clerk.

We're going to be making more work for the town clerk's office.

I wasn't sure if they had the authority to approve without a quorum.

A subcommittee of three It's a quorum of that subcommittee, too. Okay.

Also, I'd suggest for whoever on these subcommittees is making the agendas, like you said, it could, if you just look at our agenda, it could just be call to order and then discuss whichever section is that subcommittee's purview and then approve minutes and then adjourn. Because everything that you do is going to fall under that. Okay.

Yeah, Skip has his hand up.

Okay.

You're muted, Skip. You're muted.

Can't hear you. I want to have an odd number of people on the subcommittees.

It's generally preferable, although that question crossed my mind a while back, and I noted that the school committee has subcommittees consisting of two members. And that's sort of of necessity because it's a five-member committee. A subcommittee of three would be a quorum of the full committee. So they're kind of constrained to have two. And I think for our purposes, No one's going to complain if we have a subcommittee of four members or six.

Also, I think, no, sorry.

To that point, your subcommittees aren't really going to be, I wouldn't anticipate a lot of disagreement on things. And if that's, if there is something contentious in a subcommittee, even one particular line item, then, you know, the full committee can act on that and take, you know, they're going to have their bite of the apple tubes.

I was just going to say that the only actionable thing that would be permanent that any of these subcommittees are going to be doing is voting on the minutes. And I don't see those being contentious whatsoever, because if something's wrong with it, then you just amend it and approve it then. But if there is a proposal, I want to change this, no, it shouldn't be changed, it can simply just be presented to the full board with that context. We didn't think that this should go through, but they thought that this should go through, so let's... communicated as a whole board.

Okay. Any other? One thing I'll briefly put up on the screen. Where did I? There it is. I had this list. last time, and I'm going to keep this list updated. I had made a couple of changes in this list of the list of all proposed revisions and generally the subcommittee to which they're assigned. Since the last meeting, I've assigned myself the question of does any of the Chapter 300, Section 3, that's the town clerk legislation, does any of that, does one section that's not reflected in the charter. Greg and I had a bit of a conversation about this the other day. I'm basically assigning that to myself. I think I've satisfied myself that the charter doesn't need to make any reference to that. I'm not quite 100% sure on that yet. So I assigned that to myself. And I had added subcommittees, names on subcommittees that I didn't catch last time. I will add the one here. that Jack suggested in Section 5. And that will be assigned to the Section 7, sorry. That will be assigned to the Section 7 subcommittee. At some point, and we're not there yet, so I'll update this list with the latest subcommittee assignments and send it out after the meeting. At some point, On this list, we'll have to include an indication of yes, we're going to include this or no, we're not. So a little bit of status tracking, but beyond that.

So then for in terms of like process, does each committee then sort of starting with this big spreadsheet and saying like yes or no we want to include or like are we also making changes on the charter like as a draft or?

Yeah, so the subcommittee I think is expected to take the various proposals here and start basically rewriting the charter section to include those proposals as the subcommittee sees fit to suggest. And it's all subject to final approval of the full committee. But I think the work of the subcommittee is going to be, we've got all these proposals here. How do we modify the text of the charter to incorporate these? In some cases, the subcommittee will be answering some policy questions, like the fire chief subcommittee has to figure out. There's a whole set of select board responsibilities that are assigned by state law. And the fire chief subcommittee is going to want to look at those and decide, well, which of those do we want to leave in the hands of the subcommittee? And which of those do we think are more appropriately the responsibility of the town administrator? And then some of it's just the details of what do we want the wording to look like? Way back in the dawn of this committee's history, Mark had submitted a fairly complete markup of Section 4 of the Charter for the purpose of changing town administrator to town manager. So that's the sort of result we'll want to see, at least something. It doesn't have to be exactly that format. Toward the end, we'll get everything put together IN A CONSISTENT FORMAT WITH ALL THE CHANGES HIGHLIGHTED AND EXPLANATIONS INCLUDED WHERE APPROPRIATE. BUT THAT'S BASICALLY THE WORK OF THE SUBCOMMITTEE HAS COME UP FOR THE SUBCOMMITTEE SECTION 3 OR SECTION 5 OR WHATEVER. ALL THE CHANGES THAT WE APPLY TO SECTION 3 We're going to put them all together. And this is what we think Section 3 should look like. Got it.

So when we come back to the full group, we can even start with just like we worked on the first quarter. And here's the changes. Yeah.

And, you know, as an interim, as a status report, it's like, no, you can sort of. It's really up to the subcommittee how they want to report interim status. You may have some, you may just be able to say, yeah, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, and here's some details about what we want to do. So it's, generally speaking, in my mind at least, you start out by taking all the proposals that fall within your bailiwick and deciding we agree with this, we don't think this is a good idea. Deciding what you want to incorporate. And then once you've made some progress on that, then you can start editing the actual charter. I'm going to try, at least from my point of view, I'm leaving it kind of loose because it's really up to the subcommittee to decide how best to do their work on the particular section or topic they're working on. Okay.

I know I have several thoughts that aren't fully fleshed out yet, so they haven't been proposed. So I think those would be things that I would be presenting to the subcommittee. And then once they're presented there, they can come back up Everybody can take a look at them. They're also certain. Yeah, because the rule is that you can't discuss something, you can't present it ahead of time in the packet. So it's bring it to the small group of people, have the small group of people discuss it, and then the full committee can look at it ahead of time later because it's already been presented publicly.

Yeah.

And there are also certain subcommittees that are going to need to before going section by section. There's really like in Article III for elected officials, we're going to have to go to these boards that have these elected officials and figure out what they think before we decide to just make changes, get some pertinent information, and also some town officials.

Yeah, there's maybe various ways to approach that. Eventually, if we are making a recommendation that touches on the responsibilities of a particular official or a particular board, I'm thinking fire chief is an example that the way we think maybe it should work, at some point, We may want to develop a slightly better idea, we being the particular subcommittee, unless the subcommittee wants to bring that back to the full committee for some discussion. This is kind of how we think it should work, but let's meet with the appropriate people.

Okay.

using fire chief as an example, meet with the fire chief, the select board, and the town administrator to talk about this. This is where we think we want to go with this. What are your thoughts on this and how would you suggest, if you have any suggestions for making it work well for everybody involved? Yeah, I don't want us to be doing our work in isolation. Kind of going back to the bylaw review committee that several of us participated in. That's kind of what we did. We did a fair amount of work sort of setting up this the way we think it should work. But we went to, we reviewed all the, pretty much I think all of the changes we reviewed with the department's offices or boards that were affected by it. It always works better when you get, you know, the victims, if you propose changes, if you get them to buy in on it, then they're not victims. Anything else? Are we good to go on the subcommittees for now? I'm sure as you get to work, you will have questions. If nothing else, we'll be meeting every month just to get an update on the work the subcommittees are doing. Eventually, of course, we will be putting it all together, but I'm not going to rush that. We've got time.

Yeah.

David, do we want to set a timeframe for the subcommittees to come back with at least formal proposals on the sections? Do we want to, like, so that we're not just dragging it on and on and on? Do we want to say that let's all plan on the October meeting to have all the reports in by then? Is that something that we want to consider?

Yeah. What do you think? I mean, yeah, I agree. We don't want this to drag out forever. And I'm thinking the subcommittees will... take only as long as they need to take to feel like they've done an adequate job of it. And, yeah, maybe an ultimate deadline.

You know, I'm sure the summer is going to be tough. I'm going to be gone for two or three weeks over the summer on vacation, so my availability isn't going to be that great. But I want to be able to at least, you know, so that we know that we have a goal to – to get stuff back to the full committee for real deliberations and maybe schedule another public hearing later in the year for that. Just a thought.

Is there any hard deadline to when we present a town meeting based in the... Not really.

It has generally been the practice and our committee basically set up on the assumption that we will be bringing any proposed charter changes to the October 27 town meeting.

So I think that if we were to set a deadline of by the last meeting of this calendar year, that would be enough to where we'd then have another 10 months to make sure we have everything in order, enough input to then go to the fall town meeting next year.

That sound reasonable to everybody? I don't see anybody saying no, no, no.

You know, if it's over the end of the year and it's getting tight, we can extend the deadline, too, and adjust from there.

I think that it's not a bad idea to have an expectation that the subcommittees, which are now going to set out to do their work, are going to be substantially done by the end of the year. At which point, probably the, you know, We'll work in cleaning up some details and, you know, going through and, yes, absolutely, Mark. We plan to, we have planned, we haven't scheduled it yet, but we have planned to have at least one public hearing. It could possibly be more depending, but certainly at least one for the public to get a, to have a chance to hear and discuss what we are proposing as charter changes and give us time to respond to that. Well, we thought this was a great idea. The public thought it was a really, really bad idea. So maybe we want to rethink it. Or the public thinks it's great. We think it's great. No more work is needed. We're done. And most likely, the reality is probably somewhere in between. I was going to say, it's funny that you think the public is going to weigh in on this, but I appreciate it. I'm being very optimistic. It is very optimistic. I can tell you that the public, several members of the public, I don't know how many, did take the opportunity to weigh in on the Charter Committee's proposals 10 years ago. Good. I know I attended at least one, I think maybe more than one.

We were a real controversial group. Bob DeToma really pushed us over the edge. Right, Bob?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Go hard or go home. It sparked a lot of meaningful discussion. Yes.

Yes. All right. Well, if... If at this point we're just sort of repeating ourselves on subcommittee stuff, I think we have one agenda item left, and that is to approve the draft minutes of the May meeting.

Move to approve the minutes as presented.

Second.

And we should note for the record that Greg finally spelled Jim's name correctly in all areas of the minutes. Yay. Great job, Greg.

And Jim is not here this evening to appreciate that.

He responded to the email that I sent out and said, thank you.

A public word of appreciation from Jim would have been... Okay, there is a motion on the floor. Is there any other discussion? Any changes that are necessary in the draft minutes? Which Greg will feel insulted if anybody proposes any changes. Hearing none, I have to get back to my roll call here. Dawn.

Aye.

Nate. Aye. Skip. Abstain. Bob. Aye. Dan. Aye. Mark. Aye. Andy. Aye. Jack. Aye. Greg. Aye. Angela. Aye. And Dave votes aye. Motion carried unanimous with one abstention. Ten in favor and one abstention to be precise. Move to adjourn. Second. Second. I heard a motion and a second to adjourn. Dawn.

Aye.

Need. Aye. Skip. Aye. Bob. Aye. Dan. Aye. Mark. Aye. Andy.

Aye.

Jack. Aye. Greg. Aye. Angela.

Aye.

Dave votes aye. We are adjourned and it's not even 8 o'clock.