Littleton Charter Committee - Regular Meeting

All right. Good evening, everyone. This is the May 18th meeting of the Charter Committee. Littleton, tonight we're going to continue going through our document, pretty much get to the point of finalizing it. And then we're going to talk about some, maybe the report content a little bit and go through minutes. And that should do it. So Karen's going to queue up the document for us here. We'll go through the changes that we talked about last time. Thank you for the minutes, Charlotte, because that's really what I use now to make sure, because they're so accurate, to get the changes in there. Although sometimes I go through it and I'm like, oh, we need to talk about that again. There's a couple of those in there too. All right, so we're on the air. We'll say congratulations to Kyle and Rob. Yeah, great job. Yeah, nice one. Geography in action. You like to see it? Tested elections are good.

All right, I'm ready when you are.

OK, so let's start scrolling through and finding the things in yellow so we know what we want to discuss. Running to mind, the first one would be 34E. Oh, yeah, you still have the old, yeah, I forget you. You see everything.

It's pretty good. Three, four, B. Oh, E. Here we go.

Town accountant. So we added town accountant into the list of appointments for the select board as discussed. And that was a good suggestion, Mark. Thank you. So as we said, that way the... would be a direct line to the select board for that accountant but still it would go through the normal hiring process and so on and even the reporting relationship would stay the same but there would be a direct line there so i think that's great um okay and next one i have is That's nice. We don't have as many anymore as we used to have, huh?

That's the good news. That's the good news.

All right. Then I have on, let's see, page number's not going to help you. So our beloved 6-2-Q. So this is talking about the jurisdiction of the properties and so on. And what we did, we added, we took out the and other boards and put instead in the Park and Rec Commission.

So this is the town manager.

Right. The town manager has jurisdiction over leasing rental of the facilities and all those except for school, light and water commission, library, and park and rec. OK, everybody OK with that?

Yeah, the only comment I'll say is when I read it this time, I started to think about repair of property as opposed to maintaining the grounds. So I'm looking at this as not dealing with maintaining the grounds.

Right, this is property. Well, this part, this sentence is use of town facilities, including land and buildings.

Yeah, I was just making the point that it, because I started to really look in greater detail if I'd seen it this language before. I just want to, for me, it's not ground maintenance because I think that... Right.

yeah but we know this whole section there's so many there are you know it's very very nuanced yeah okay so are we sure that who who who does um responsible for maintenance and repair of all town property except school library so the town maintenance department doesn't help out over at the library

Well, again, these are all nuance, so no. If it's like a plumbing issue or something, they have a budget. I think they have their own budget line item for these things, and then they get... No, the town staff does it. But so the library... That surprised me.

I think the library... Sorry, maybe I missed it from last time. I thought this last part, maintenance and repair, we were only excluding school and electric, as in the school department has their own services, and the electric and light Water has, but I didn't think that library would be in there. I think I misread that last time.

The library is responsible for some things, so what's the differentiation?

The library contributes some funds for the maintenance, but not everything for the maintenance. Some of it comes out of the general facilities budget. So the general facilities budget pays for the maintenance. electric and gas and everything else. So it's a weird line on that. And the Park and Rec Commission is even harder, I think, because I don't know that they actually have control of any land or facilities.

No, but that's what it's responsible for, so that doesn't say what that means. Does that mean... so i think that you have to just view it that way kind of responsible for so they still the overall town so exactly who's paying for it and so on but somebody's responsible for making sure things get done and things get fixed and some of it gets filling up and some of it doesn't i mean we've gone through this over and over and over again and that the answer is there is no straight line answer on these things so i don't know so then back on the first section where that's leasing rental and use right

So the town manager has no say over the park and rec facilities?

Well, what's a park and rec facility? That's the problem.

Oh, yeah, this is where we said we were going to do the inventory. Didn't we have that?

Well, it's on the list of what the town manager is supposed to do.

Right. That's right. Now I remember. The only possible facility the park and rec actually has control over is the beach. Everything else is by agreement.

That's in general law.

I think, to me, it depends on how we're seeing the sort of, what we, like you said, Betsy, responsible. When things go wrong and there is a question, there is a concern, who's supposed to pay for that broken window? Who's supposed to fix the fact that there's a fallen tree on one of the properties? That the town manager is ultimately responsible for finding out what the solution is. It might be that the solution is that's actually your job or that's that budget or that that's that department or whatever, but you have a centralized coordination of someone who, the buck stops there. That's, if it was worded like, if that's the interpretation of it, I think that makes sense that if we're having this kind of COO type of function for the town, that they should be responsible for finding the solution. Not that they are, you know, trying to do it all themselves, if that makes sense.

I think that's where we've come down to on this. So I like that, but then do we need to specifically say park and rec then? If we're saying you've got overall responsibility except for...

I think we did that specifically because of...

Including under that definition?

The reason we did that I think was specifically because we had also taken them from being elected to appointed.

And it does say under the control of, so we're not saying that any property that parks and rec or anybody uses, but the ones that are solidly under the control of park and rec, stay with park and rec. Whereas, because, you know what I mean? It doesn't say, and except those town facilities that are ever used by, it's a, No, there's certain properties that fall under the jurisdiction of the commission. Maybe that refers to Long Lake, I don't know. But the rest of them, the town manager would.

I mean, even, you know, the fields are scheduled by park and rec, even though they're owned by the school, so. You pretty much just have to leave it.

It's a free-for-all.

At some point we discussed having a document to pass along our deliberations, that sort of thing. We could just identify this and say, if you can figure out exact language that you think serves better.

Right. Yeah. Can I light it? Okay. That's a good point. We could put that in the report things. Yeah. 6-2-Q.

6-2-Q. Okay.

All right. So for our night now, everybody good with leaving Park and Rec in there? Yeah. It's going to get re-reviewed anyway, right? All right. And then we're down to... One thing I just want to mention, we did speak to Anthony this week, and we had the discussion at the end about possibility of adding the CFO and what would that mean for a charter standpoint. That's what administrative organization is all about. That's what that Article 9 is for. To say you can change things, you can reorganize and you can do it. It is covered is the bottom line. We don't need to talk about it any more than that, but I just wanted to mention that. The next highlight I have is 11.2, recall petition, and we changed the, I think it was 21 days, and now it's 30 days. Anybody okay with that? Article 12, general provisions. So we have this item. that we moved, and I honestly didn't do any research to see if other towns have something like this in there. We had moved this from elsewhere. This was in the boiler plate rob someplace. We moved it. Yeah. You okay just to let it go? Yes. Okay. All right. And then 12-9, procedures governing multiple member bodies. So I think this was the updated wording that we got from Kyle. Take a minute and look at it. So my question is, just to talk about this things being posted on the town website, whether that's a requirement or not. We specifically say here, we talked about it last one, that failure to post it there should now validate actions being taken. I thought about that a lot. Because, I mean, you really want to be on the website, because that's where most people go to get, most people aren't coming out here to look at this bulletin board to see what meetings are happening. The other side of that is, if there was some catastrophic thing going on and we couldn't post things on the website, you still want to be able to have the meetings, right? And since the posting is done by, then I was, you know, and then the conspiracy theory gets in, well, what if somebody did something, you know, they didn't really want people to know, so they posted, but then the town clerk's office is the one that controls that. So if it's possible to go on the website, it will be out there, so you won't have something malicious going on there unless they're in cahoots, and that never happens. So I'm okay with saying it's not there, but I did want to make sure we kind of talked that through and see if other people thought on that or not. Because, I mean, the website is really where people go, let's be honest, right? That should be the primary. What's that? That should be the primary. It kind of is, but yeah. Right.

Unless you don't want to be legally bound.

You could have a technical issue and you still have to do town business. I mean, there could just be.

We don't. The way our website is hosted, we don't own the hosting. Civic Plus owns it. So if Civic Plus has an issue, there's nothing we can do about it. We wouldn't want to be bound legally to have both before we could have a meeting.

Yeah. I like the way this is framed. I think it's pretty straightforward. It says we want it, but we don't need to be legally bound by it.

In the first sentence, it says... Or by one third of the members thereof, by suitable written notice delivered to the residence or place of business of each member.

I saw that in the old one. I didn't catch it here. That's right. I was going to take that out, too. So how do we notify? So this is the, again, meetings of any multiple member body shall be held at the call of the respective chairperson or by one-third of the members thereof. And then how would they get notified?

What, do the board members get notified? They set the meeting, typically, you set your meeting up tonight for your next meeting. And then the chairman typically sets the agenda for the next meeting, the 48 to 72 hours prior to the meeting, and that gets sent out once the agenda is set. Is that what you're asking?

The question is if the chair doesn't set a meeting, the members can call a meeting, and that's how that can be.

They could if they needed a meeting, if the chairman isn't available or the vice chairman isn't available, if you have a quorum of your board.

For some reason, this boilerplate, and we saw it a couple different places, it comes through and says, by suitable written notice delivered to the residence or place of business of each member. That's the...

It just seems very old-fashioned.

Can we just take it out? Or by one-third of the members and then just leave it at that?

Consistent with other... I would just say one-third of the members and then just leave it at that.

We wouldn't deliver to... So, in the past... The meetings were called and the packets for Select Board were delivered to their homes. By who? Paul Regeer. No, it was delivered by the town administration's office. Wow. Really? Yes, to every household, to every Select Board member. Wow.

i feel like if we if we try to win pages every other day it's not necessary it's really just not necessary i don't think okay all right the last sentence in that paragraph says failure to post notice on the town website shall not invalidate so if a meeting is not posted on the town website the meeting can still take place and be legitimate is that is that right as long as it's posted on the town bulletin board is the required

So, and again, this is what we just kind of talked through. Because it all goes through the town clerk's office, there's not like something nefarious. Like a board could say, well, we're going to post it on the paper, but we're not going to put it on the website because we don't really know anybody to know about it. Because that just, it goes through the town clerk's site, not by the board. So I think we're okay with that. But because of technology issues.

Does it say anywhere that posting on the website is even?

Yes.

Where does it say that it will be part of the?

The town clerk shall also cause notice of all meetings to be posted on the official town website. So it's said that this is what should happen, but what we're essentially saying is in the instance of, like, hacking or solar flares or what have you, AI bots taking over the world, that we can still have our meetings.

So failure to post, probably more importantly, will not... prevent the meeting from taking place and will so that's so I don't know if you want to failure to post a notice on the website shall not prevent a meeting from taking place nor invalidate actions taken for which I don't know If you're going to say that the meeting can go on without... Well, we can't tell people not to meet.

I mean, they can meet, but it just doesn't count, basically, is what this is saying, right?

No, can I say, failure to post notice on the town website shall not prevent a meeting from taking place, nor invalidate actions taken at any meeting. But the prevent bit's not in here right now, yeah.

Okay.

It just would be more specific, saying, like, it will not prevent you from meeting.

Oh, I see. All right, so shall not prevent meeting from taking place.

Yeah, a legit meeting that has gone through the town clerk office, not someone.

Well, if it's been posted on the other board, that's legit.

Overarching requirement, right, is to post. That has to happen. But if the website is not a requirement, and if it doesn't happen, it doesn't prevent the meeting from happening, and it does not interfere with the validity of the actions taken at the meeting.

Okay, good catch. Before we leave this, this is one of those ad hoc notes that goes in the list when we were talking about notifying the board people. I think at one point we had a discussion about town emails being available to all committee members, and it was kind of quieted because of the cost. I would suggest or I'd like to see that revisited. as part of that, because I think it's crazy that people are using Gmail for town business. Some of it's pretty official town business, yes.

Okay.

Yeah. How do you get a public records request to somebody's Gmail?

Request it.

Put it in a FOIA request, and you've got to turn it over.

FOIA request comes to my office, and then I request of each and every person that is on the board, if they're requesting e-mails, That's why I say to anybody when they come to take their oath, what is the official email that you're going to be using while you're in the specific office because anything that you use on that specific email is now able to be foiled.

Yeah, I was thinking from more of like a technical perspective. LittletonMA.org, our internal IT has access to everyone's email. If I use my Gmail, it's just on good faith that I'm providing you, unless you subpoena Google.

Right. And I didn't mean to reopen it. I just wanted to flag it as something to go on those things, other things for the select board to consider.

It's worse than that, Kyle, because if you deleted your emails, long from Littleton and May, they're not really deleted, they're still online. If you delete them from Gmail, there's no way the town can... That's kind of what I'm driving at.

I appreciate that there's a process, but the person that you're requesting the records, they have to be doing it in good faith.

Correct, but we also know that if you are included in an email... you can't say I didn't get that because clearly your name is in that email group that clearly has that gmail address in it so if you say I never responded or I never got that we already know that your email was in that group text or group email so for you to say nope I wasn't included in that email well we know from that group email that Gmail was included in there. So, no, we can't get to your Gmail, but that's why.

If there was some one-off, if somebody's doing stuff off the side, you would know that. Correct. You could be doing that anyway. You could have an account email, still be doing stuff on the side of your personal emails.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Minutes will pick that up. Thanks, Karen.

Okay. No, two. third of the members or a quorum of the members.

So they held on the call of the chairperson or one third. So if there are three people on the committee, one person could call a meeting.

So there's rules like the chair gets to set the agenda of the meetings, but the members can override that if there's enough of them to say, I want this on the agenda, even if the chair doesn't. I believe it's a quorum, not a third. This is just the boilerplate we got, so I'm just trying to...

Wait, what does this make sense of? So then it's a quorum of all the members, even the chair, if they're not responding or they're not interested in having a meeting or whatever, right? That's a quorum. I'm fine. I think it makes more sense.

Okay, anything else?

All right, then under 12.9 , We talked about having something more meaty than saying that rules and minutes shall be public records and shall be kept available, because we know that's an issue with some people not posting them. And looking through different charters and using AI to look at different charters and what's in there. I said, in general, the charters don't go into the specifics on that. Because Mass General Law says they have to be posted within the next three meetings or within 30 days, whichever occurs later. So it's just a matter of whether you want to reiterate it here. I mean, I'm okay with that. And they actually don't have to be approved and posted. I think they have to be. Is that true? Because there's a different rule if they're not approved, right?

They do not have to be approved. I can have draft minutes up there. They just do draft.

I can't hurt to have it stated, considering that it is an issue.

But there's no teeth. You have to go to the Attorney General.

No. I was thinking more from just a transparency, like if the Charter is going to be this one-stop shop for understanding key things. I don't think I have a great argument for why it should be in there other than it seems to be a problem, so it's like another place to keep it.

And that's why I'm saying with the lack of teeth and it's a known problem, so it's not doing anything by stating it's law because we all know it's not being complied with.

Some people might not know.

But this has the appearance as if it's happening. I'm more for removing it because it exists in general law, but I don't need to continue the conversation. I'm fine with it if all of you want to keep it.

I agree with your point. is going to make people suddenly do minutes on time. But then I think Charlotte just helped me understand, like you said, for clarity. So as a citizen reading this, if you didn't know this was part of general law, is that what you're getting at? Yeah. Citizens would be aware that this is a requirement.

Otherwise, I mean, my argument was that you're not going to go and read all the general laws and be familiar with that so some of these pieces could be helpful to be in here you could make that argument with many of the other times we've said as per general law like and we don't spell those ones out so i i realize it's not a particularly like watertight argument but that's kind of what i was getting at yeah but even if somebody that's on one of these boards would read it and say hey how come we're not doing this you know at least no there's something behind them it's not really just a nice to have it's a

If it stays, it's not a problem.

Oh, go ahead. No, I'm just saying if it stays, it's not a problem. No, I think there might be a positive in it in that if more citizens read this, they might hold their boards accountable or at least try to hold their boards accountable. and put more pressure on boards that aren't doing the minutes. That's my hope. I don't know that it, like to your point, I don't know that it's going to make the existing problem go away. Okay.

I'll take out the be approved by and just say they must be posted. All right. And then under fiscal, I'm sorry, 1210, we change the calendar year to fiscal year. um and we change select board to appointing authority because some of the boards like fincom and others aren't appointed by select boards so it makes more sense okay uh yes for 1210 loss of office excessive absence the word absence is misspelled i think it could help these days

Oh, yeah.

Oh, that's because I had to retype it to make it in capital letters, to make it consistent. That's why. Yeah. Okay. Good catch.

That's the type of thing you read right by.

Yeah, I didn't even look at the title again. Yeah, that's good. I like it, though.

Except for Kevin picks it up. That's good.

We all have our role. All right. 13, transition provisions. So this was, I think, pretty much taken from Groton's just as a template. And I think Anthony sent something out late this afternoon. I didn't even look at it yet to tell you the truth. He was going to send me some more boilerplate. So this is what we talked about, just some basic. basically continuation of government so people that are in elected or appointed positions they stay in those positions till their terms up and then when the next time they're either appointed or elected whatever we've decided they would be and pretty much the same with the administrative personnel although I would appreciate people could read it in detail basically it's the same idea it's just things keep going and you're still doing what you're doing Wait a minute, what's this? Oh, one of these. What is this? I see there's something going on here that wasn't intended. Provided for this section shall provide.

Are you talking about the C24 thing? Yeah, what is that? It's probably just like a copy-paste artifact, maybe.

Yeah, yeah.

And if it's from Groton, it might be from their May 2022 Grotoner charter.

Yeah, it seems like the heading of their charter.

So we could just strike that.

On the effective date. Yeah, that's odd. Okay.

So if you move back to when you actually are no longer in office, it's not when someone's new as a

On the top one. These duties until they are reappointed or re-elected.

It's not at the election. It's not at the results of the election that you're no longer on the board is when your new person is sworn in.

Okay. So if that new person were not to be sworn in for some reason, you would continue to serve, right? Correct. Okay.

And we do say that elsewhere up here. There's elsewhere. We talk about just in general for all these boards. I mean, not even in this case where you're changing something, but just in general, you're in a position until the next person is sworn in. I think it's, where is that? Elected officers in general. Okay. So the elected officer shall serve until the successor has been sworn. So that's correct.

This is an additional position. It's not a replacement. I was thinking about something else about 13-1 that I'll bring up in a minute. So what are we inserting? Well, OK, so let's. Because right now, we need people on the personnel committee also, by the way. If anybody knows anybody with a German background. So if we could, that person wouldn't be replacing anyone. So does the language cover that?

I don't know, but can we just follow through with what we were doing first, though? Because right now it says until they're sworn in, but if you're appointed, well, I guess if you're appointed, you're still sworn in. It's okay. I was thinking in terms of being an employee, but that's not really the issue. You're appointed, you're still sworn in. If you're elected, you're sworn in. So either way, that's okay.

Sometimes what happens is that, you know, you're told to be sworn in, take the oath of office, and sometimes it's, again, a nudge to get the person to take the oath of office so that other person... Remains. Right.

Because that person can't vote or anything until they do it. They're not official. Right. Okay. All right. So I'm sorry. So I wanted to make sure that was right. Okay. So now you're talking about, Kevin, somebody new. But this is specifically about transition now. Right?

Mm-hmm. so what's what's the I don't know what the language is no but what's what's the situation though if it's if we're talking about transition somebody knew I was not I was thinking about the point I want to bring up about 13 one and half listening to what was going on and I heard the recommendation to go to sworn versus appointed yeah I think And there was talk about a presumption that one would be, I believe, embedded in that discussion, that one would be replacing another person so that they would not stop serving until their replacement was served. Sometimes there's not a replacement.

So until they are reappointed or reelected or successors have been sworn in. So from our charter, we haven't recommended any positions be removed, be eliminated so far, right?

So that's what the sentence would say. Until they are reappointed or reelected, successors to their respective positions are duly appointed.

Now we're going to say sworn in. Okay.

So this is just specifically related to the transition in the charter? Yes. Okay. That's helpful.

This is specifically about the transition.

Got it.

So I think Kevin's question is if someone resigns effectively, right?

That is my unstated question, actually, that I was thinking about.

Yeah. So until they are appointed to reelected or resign?

As per section something or other.

Yeah, but I mean, that's always the case. I don't know why that would have to be here, right?

Well, you don't want to imply that they can't resign.

Or that they have to be replaced, or that their successor has to be appointed. Somebody can come up ill, and they can submit their resignation according to paragraph whatever.

But then that's not, to me, that's true, but that may not have anything to do with the transition. That's just covered elsewhere in the charter.

I think what it means is, though, that if you had... If you had an elected person who resigned their position, that would also trigger transition.

But that's not the purpose of transition provisions in charter. English language, what you said, is absolutely correct. But that's not what the paragraph means in charters.

Even if there was a position that was an elected position, they were expecting to transition to appointed. And if that elected person, the way that it goes from elected to appointed is either they serve out their term and then it goes to appointed, but if they also resign, it goes to appointed.

Okay, so that's the issue.

See, now I think you're into... a new issue of sorts that I don't think this language addresses. And we do have two Board of Health members that said one's going to leave the town and the other's going to resign. If the town meeting approves and if select board continues our recommendation as it stands right now for Board of Health, that's what the two Kevins each said. And I don't think that's addressed in this. To me, all of these words and the town clerk, Ware's got a much simpler, tighter set of stuff pertaining to town clerk. But I don't even think that's worth time because I don't think that's going to last very long. So I'm not certain. about the need for transition provisions. I mean, I just, I don't understand. Well, it does accept the specifics are what's going to matter as it comes out of select board headed towards town meeting, in my opinion.

To me, this is very general, really. It just says that everybody continues to do, they continue to be appointed or elected, and they continue to do so and then until they essentially get, it doesn't sort of, I don't know, it's vague enough that it suits the purpose of handing this over to the select board for their discussion, to me. I agree with you, I don't know if you'd want to get into the nitty gritty of every single piece of the transition, because we know it's going to change quite dramatically, so.

Okay, if you think it's broad enough, I'm not certain that I understand the elected board of health in terms of 13.1.

it flips to appointed unless so that means if they're currently elected they continue to perform all their duties until they're reappointed really so their term ends and then they would be appointed if they're interested and if they don't the board and if they resign then their successors have been sworn in

But those successors go through an earlier paragraph with regard to that you've got vacancies to fill. It's not going to be a simultaneous. So that's where I think I'm more, if we're really going to deal with this We're applying general language to just two or three or four very specific situations that I've seen in other charters. They dealt with those very specific situations with regard to the individuals involved in order to be exact with regard to if this charge is approved, the town administrator becomes the town manager. continues the contract if But but that's what the that is a legal document what's the you know once I don't understand all the procedures and no doing day and could give us the exact nature as to the timing of Legislator acts and so forth. I'm just saying There's just a handful of exact ones as opposed to the general language, but I'm fine if you think the general language adequately covers

It's more, I think, given putting our intent to the select board and then they, you know, what they can do with it. That's how I would view it anyway and everybody else's. I think it's big enough that it covers everything. Well, if they want to choose, or unless they choose to do something specific, then they can. But again, this is just putting our intent is that things don't change overnight. It's gradual.

I would have like a paragraph at least that goes with the report that says what this section is supposed to be or what it could be and say... right now there's some boilerplate stuff in transition provisions as it this our official report whatever goes to the select board but this is where you would put after all the decisions have been made this is where you would say this is the the timeline for this this is the timeline for that this is the contract that would extend this is where we would expect this to happen this is like yeah i completely agree that should be in the version that goes If it does go to the state legislature, it should be very specific. I just think we'd be tying ourselves in not trying to do that.

It's not worthy.

But I think it also reassures people that things aren't just going to turn upside down and be all chaotic.

These people are all gone.

We're putting our people in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's all done. Okay.

All right. So we'll work on the wording on that one.

And you're going to move the C24, right?

Yes, and that's going to get done. Go on. And that's what I have for that. We've got a couple things to work on for next time in terms of the wording. People are OK. We'll do that. And then if you want to spend some time, we can.

Go ahead. In 13.2, about administrative person holding a town office.

Let's see. Where was the beginning of it?

Person holding a town office or a position in the administrative service of the town or a person holding full-time employment. Why only full-time is my first question. Why would this not be equally relevant for a part-time person? And I'm worried that this doesn't mention the town's ability to terminate one's employment, the last paragraph speaks to vaguely, nothing in this paragraph, so what this paragraph says is that the payroll clerk shall continue to be the payroll clerk, period. It currently doesn't speak to the ability of that clerk, that person to resign and or the town to fire them for cause. There is something. So I'm worried about the absence of that ability by the employer to terminate one's employment. It does say in the last sentence, nothing in this paragraph shall impair the rights of any person under an individual employment contract. I don't think the payroll clerk has a contract unless you regard their... offer letter a contract, which you could, or a collective bargaining agreement. So I presume the payroll clerk is not covered by a collective bargaining agreement. So I am just worried about the general nature of that paragraph. and the fact that it doesn't reserve the right of the town to end employment for any number of reasons, lack of work, budgetary concerns, performance, et cetera.

But again, it's just under the transition section. This isn't in general. This is specifically talking about transition.

Yeah, we talked about that.

I mean, the town always has the right to. I mean, those things are there under just general how we do things. But this is specifically, just like the last conversation, this is just about transition.

I don't see that anywhere. I don't see that saying that anywhere. If I work here and you fire me,

I'm going to bring that paragraph to my attorney because it simply says, I don't care what bucket it's in, that paragraph says that a person holding a town office or a position in the administrative service of the town, they're good to go. Shall continue to perform the duties of that person's office under provisions shall be made however that that person shall not I'm worried about

Just saying upon adoption of the Charter comma a person, right? Does that's the same because I think I think that was what the stuff at the bottom with a May that weird date weird number and everything that I think was what that was saying. Mm-hmm It just got kind of long and does that one that lead in?

Clause apply equal into thirteen point one. Should we put that in thirteen one as well? I

upon adoption.

No, because what's in 13.1 is always true whether you have a charter or not.

So this is not about the, 13 is not about the charter coming into existence.

It is. Yes, it is.

Right. So if we're going to say in 13.2 that upon ratification of the charter, isn't that equally true of 13.1?

Okay, so if 13.1 only applies to the adoption of the charter, then you don't have to say things about being sworn in, because that should be covered in the section where people are elected, and then this is fine. You can just clear this up by having something between 13.0 that says this will do the provisions for when the charter, you know, as the charter is adopted.

Maybe some explanatory language.

Other than the title, which is transition provisions? No, I don't know.

Should I read this three years from now? I don't know what transition provisions means as it's written right now. I don't know what transition provisions mean, but I do know what 12.2 says. And it says that without question, I shall continue to perform the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think that a little preamble between 13 and 13.1 to say, or call 13, charter transition provisions.

Okay, that looks easy. I can do that.

And full-time, I don't know why we're limiting people. Do we have part-time employees here in the town?

Whoever that a person in the permanent full-time shall not forfeit their pay grade or time in the service of the town. I don't know why we would specify just permanent full-time people either. I don't know.

I believe there are part-time employees.

Is that right? What a country. There's probably part-time people at this

As long as the town doesn't have some policy that we treat them differently otherwise, right?

This is just a transition thing.

It's just transition anyway, so it doesn't matter.

Maybe this is also one that gets flagged for town council.

Well, they're going to read everything. Yeah. They're going to flag everything. No, I know.

But again, it's a concern. Someone's going to interpret this as, I permanently have my job.

In the transition section, the lawyers will know what that is, I think. But anyway, yeah. Okay. So you're good now, Kevin? Still going through it?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So in 13.3, it's the same. That paragraph is about moving forward with the charter.

Yep.

Yep. Good.

Okay. All right, then. Let's do minutes next, actually. Never mind. A motion?

Yeah, motion to approve the minutes of May 4th.

Second. Okay, any discussion? Any questions? Okay, all in favor? Aye. All right, so moved. All right, now the other thing I'd like to talk about then is... Potential, you know, this we've talked about again, this report content, kind of a cover letter, go with the charter document, go into the select board with some items. Maybe we just want to call out them. These are just our thoughts or expectations or whatever. I sent you an email with some of mine. Maybe you want to bring that up here if you can, if you have it. But those are just thoughts. Again, I've been thinking about this, and Mullen and I said, I'm just going to put it down on paper and send it out to people. I don't know if there's other things we could, you don't want to put too much in it, don't want to make it too long, but this is our chance to put it in writing, especially if things sit for a little while before they move forward so it doesn't all get lost. All right, you want me to share this email? Yeah, I think so. That makes sense for everybody, right? We can just talk about it. All right.

Betsy, while that's coming up, one initial thought I had. I don't know whether we all agree on this as a committee, but I think it could be helpful if we do agree to share sort of prioritization as well. So not just here in any no particular order our recommendations, but like These are the things that we feel like are critical. These are strongly recommend, but not mission critical. And then the other bits. And I think it mentions even at one point in the charter language, but in more lay terms, which pieces would be hoped for the select board to move forward with? even without the other pieces. These are not dependencies. One could have recommendations A, B, and C and not D, E, F, and that would be fine. One doesn't undermine the other. I think, to me, that seems like the most likely path forward for getting some of this at least like well documented and adopted, even if there may be several other pieces that don't, which personally I'd rather see 60% of this go forward and maybe 40% not versus nothing, right? And there's some like very sensible, operational, non-controversial things that would be nice to kind of Move forward regardless. Yep.

No, that's part of what I tried to put some of my thoughts in here. But again, that was just me. So what we need to do is get the committee to think about where are you on these things.

Thank you for doing that. I read your email and I don't think there was a thing in it that I disagreed with. I think you captured a lot of rationales for recommendations that we will be making. So I think your points are great. But your email got me thinking about doing this handoff to the select board and the talent. And I wondered whether our report ought to be a bit of a story, a little bit of how did we get here. I wonder if we would, I don't know, I just wonder, for example, would we want to provide the charge to this committee, and I remind the select board of our charge, would we want to go into the DLS and pull some quotes out, like, By establishing a charter, the town can succinctly and clearly define its government structure, establishing the distribution of powers, delineate lines of authority, and codify annual strategic planning, budgeting, and capital protocols. So would we want to weave that challenge, that suggestion, that recommendation as background that would precede our recommendations? And hopefully our recommendations link back to this stuff, the charge that we were given here, these bullet points. So I just wonder if there's not a bit of a story we tell, this is what we were asked to do, here's a little bit of background about what the state said. Yeah, and that was our charge, and we went. And we had 68 natives. We held meetings with 32 entities, peoples, et cetera, and then saw a little bit of a story.

That's a great idea. I think the way that my brain is processing that, it's almost like if you're writing a publication, right? You want, here is the context, here is the methodology. Discussion results like a sort of a little bit of a systematic way to go through it and also I like that Kevin because in 10 years time someone might read that report and not have the context and say why did they do what they did and what was the process and And then also packaging that together perhaps with all of the meeting minutes as an annex, right? We want to make sure that like this there's the report and then there's like the packet Mm-hmm, right? Yeah

That's good. And even just those letters about why we were doing this, the turnover and the other issues. To remind people that there was a reason. This wasn't just an exercise.

Right. I just went through my folder in the early, the back end of my folder to find these little bits of, you know, why are we doing this? And there was a PowerPoint here from Collins. Why adopt governance changes by special act? Flexibility allows for diversion from state law. Stability, special, blah, blah, blah, transparency. So there's some, this is not something we dreamed up. We're really, you know, yeah. And then, Betsy, I freethought for a minute. I read your note, and then I thought, wait a minute. Do I have other things than you spoke to? Maybe they don't rise to mentioning, but select board as policymaking only is one of our probably top 10 recommendations, I would think. We say it very often.

They're already there. The thing is, and so the other boards need to be modeling after that. That's the follow-on, too. But yeah, right.

Who's already there? Signing payroll registers? signing payroll registries. They're already, I think. And that's, anyways, I'll move on from that.

I do think that's kind of why we got there, though, right? One of the reasons, I think, was maybe it's more in the context section, like select board wanting to be less day-to-day and more policy executive governance. I would take that, but I'd put it more in the context background section.

In our charter, in our draft charter, we say very... I don't know that it's ever been said in writing. The select board should be policymaking only and shall not involve themselves in the day-to-day operations of the... Where do you say that?

I mean, you do have a policy now where you're not allowed to go talk to the day-to-day people, so...

I think we're doing a fairly good job of staying out of the day-to-day operations.

But that's based on your code of conduct?

I think by putting in the code of conduct... enforce that on ourselves. I mean, for the past four years, so it's kind of become the culture of the select board now.

But that could change. So, I mean, Kevin's point is well taken. I mean, if it's not written someplace, then it needs to be written. Yeah, and knowing

So I thought about select board and other boards and committees as policy only. So I'm town manager. I don't know if we're using that term or not, but you've already... Oh, yeah, that's our recommendation. Yep. Elected versus appointed. Some town meeting. I think that's down here already, right?

Yeah, in case we talk about that here some.

Early days, we looked at representative form of government versus whatever it's town. And we recommend we're staying the course, right? I don't know if we list that or not.

I don't think we have any reason to do that personally.

I'm concerned about the handoff. So all good points, but from a timeline perspective, Give me, Diane, give me the, when the November town meeting closes, because if we don't get this to select board quickly, as we've previously discussed, I think they've got so little time to do anything with it.

I don't think Gary's intention is to do anything for a fall town meeting anyway, but I can't speak for him personally.

That's how I have felt, but previously when I brought that up, I've been told no. That's not necessarily true.

Okay, that's good.

Correct. So I'm just trying to say, if in fact there is no plan to take, I think just a town meeting, it was just discussed as the expectation that it's coming in November. I was very concerned several months ago. I continue to be concerned. That's why I'm raising, because the points are very valid, but that takes time. And Select Board, I don't think has time for us to continue to hold on to this.

I don't think we're holding on to it. This is just writing the report and sending it on. To me, this is still going to get done in the next two weeks.

Agreed. In terms of things like at least acknowledging some of those more minor decision points like it's in one of those existing briefing documents that we reviewed representative town meeting and we decided it wasn't necessary I mean like some of this stuff is already kind of documented so if we're done in the next meeting but I'm I was believing we weren't going to get done I'm not spending six weeks on this report we're going to get what we get you know we'll put it I just have to decide what money in it and then do it and move on I really, I think, at least... With most of what we have, I think. I'm going to say I can probably, based on just this feedback of, like, the shape of the report, with, I will say, very much with AI help. But because, again, inputs, the, you know, rubbish in, rubbish out, we've got good in so we can get good out. So I think documenting the preamble, the context, documenting the process, taking all of our substantive inputs and just essentially reformatting what we have.

I was going to say, I'm a huge fan of what you've done before with the decisions and the rationale. I forget exactly what document that was in, but that was just a nice one-page summary of everything. I don't know.

might need to be revised now but yeah I'll update those we can have like executive summary essentially like the one page executive summary of this followed by everything everybody's just mentioned an annex on the non-charter recommendations like again like annex one like things that won't go in the charter but things that we've talked about kind of independent annex I was mentioning before the meeting I did a sort of comparison of like all Littleton's existing bylaws and where they may come into conflict with the Charter and so just like flagging that matrix just where might you want to like have eyes on those as far as I got I'm not going to do it but you know here's a sort of almost like a little signpost to those things which again could be an annex right just part of the package but I'm very happy to sort of take on the draft one as long as we have the right prompt for it. Is there anything else we want to see in that document?

People who disagree with it that I put in email or other things you want to make sure are included. Okay. So I'll put you on the spot, Charlotte, but time frame in terms of turn this around so people can see it and review it. If we really want to finalize this at the next meeting, we should have some time to see it and give not group input because that doesn't work for town meeting, but you can reply to Charlotte what you agree or disagree with so she can further update the document. Is that good, Diane?

Do you have time to do this?

So I'll just take a moment to plug the fact that we have the Climate Action Plan public forum on Thursday. Good to know. So I won't be doing this on Thursday night.

No opportunity shall go unnoticed.

Shamelessly plugged that.

Shamelessly plugged it.

I could probably get a draft of this out, I would say, I'll give myself until like, I'll probably work on it Friday or Saturday. Okay. evenings but if we think that's fine to then have it by this weekend and then we got a full week to look at it next time around are you doing this within a project in Claude yeah if you share it with me I will help you fabulous okay yeah I've got that's how I do everything on this it's like a fully baked in project brilliant I'll share it with you thanks

Okay. Awesome. So the only other thing on my agenda is, well, we can do that off camera. I can just talk about some kind of a year-end gathering if you choose to do that. So anything else anybody want to talk about tonight? No?

When's our next meeting? June 1st. June 1st.

Okay. Anybody want to make a motion?

Motion to adjourn. Second.

All those in favor?

Aye. Okay.