Town Council - Regular Meeting

All right, let's get started. This is the North Smithfield Charter Review Committee, Wednesday, May 27th, 2026 meeting. First item on the agenda, roll call. Mrs. Newberry? Here. Mrs. DeCristoforo? Here. Mr. Newton? Here. The chair is here. Public comment? Nobody's here. Next item on the agenda for discussion, consideration and action meeting minutes from March 25th, April 15th and April 28th. Give everybody a minute to review those and then I'll just look for a motion to either amend or approve and then we'll go from there. Anybody have anything? Pretty silly what you're doing, sorry.

I'm not reviewing them because I wrote them.

Does anybody have any comments? I do not.

Okay. I'll make a motion to approve the meeting minutes as presented. Do I have a second?

Second.

Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay. Next item on the agenda for discussion, consideration and action, the review of council presentation and comments and finalization of the report that we've presented. I thought when we presented to the council a couple weeks ago, we had a lot of good feedback. It was well received, so we really didn't get too much more into the weeds. Didn't sound like the council had much to offer up as far as any revisions and more accepting of all of our recommendations to date. Was there anything that anybody felt that we needed to tighten up or amend?

No comment. I think that perhaps the education piece, should we move forward with the staggered terms, needs to be that the four-year term is really a byproduct and not the goal, because I think that's sort of getting lost in the In translation, somehow we're not really focusing on shifting to four year, we're more focusing on shifting to staggered. So staggered term is byproduct, not correct? That's not the initial intent of the, okay.

I think based on the council's reaction to the staggered terms, we'll also need to provide education on recall. We've discussed that, but I think that was kind of their initial reaction. It was like, you know, it helps to like keep counselors in check. And I think the recall piece will be a good one too.

Yeah. Okay, yeah, and then for those who have been saying they like the two year terms and everything, I was reflecting on the past 10 years, past 15 years. And we've now just come 12 years later after the 2014 vote for the police station in the town hall, or this building. look how long it took us to get there. And if we had had a consistent, some level of consistency rather than a new council every two years, Would the police station already be completed? Would the town hall have been completed in a more timely manner? Yeah. So that's one of the things, as I heard the comments coming back at us at the council meeting, and then just further reflections like, okay, well, how more efficiently could we have worked these past 10, 15 years if we kept some level of consistency? Okay. Any other thoughts from the other night?

Is that something we could include in the education? Because that's kind of like anecdotal though, right?

No, learning from past experiences, yeah. Okay. Well, that's that.

I also say I got feedback from somebody in town who knew I was on the committee about it who said, well, the legislature is every two years. And I said, yeah, but there's no way that 75 people where 38 people are going to turn over that quickly, or all at the same time. That's just not going to happen. But there's a very strong likelihood that, especially with term limits, I think we need to add that piece in, that we've instituted these term limits. And so now it's even more likely that the whole council will turn over. Whereas it used to be that you wouldn't necessarily get the whole council turning over at once.

Yep.

And you're saying with staggered terms, the whole council would not be turning over loans? It can't. Right.

Yeah.

OK. That's all I got. OK. Hey, you know. Try to make these meetings easy sometimes. And clearly we have no torches and pitchforks that we've suggested to date, so we're good.

We didn't have next steps on here though.

Next steps.

Can we discuss a little bit of that?

Yeah, so for the final, the next steps would really be to take our report and say, okay, we presented the council with our draft. We'll basically take our draft and say, okay, now this is our final, we've heard the comments, this is our final report. Present that to the council and then at that point it goes to the council's hands and then they'll vote on whatever question. We had questions one through ten if they want to take them all together or separately. They can all take a roll call vote on those to then forward to the Board of Canvassers. Board of Canvassers then reviews it and then sends it off to the Secretary of State.

Did we need to have a public hearing? I think that's what said.

I don't remember.

I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Okay. But to the board of candidates, they would approve after we have a public hearing somewhere in there. Yeah. Cause we need their final approval. So I would say we need to meet with the town council again, then have the public hearing based on what the town council approved. And then with public hearing, well, once we have public hearings, we need to go back to the town council.

I don't think so. I think they could, you know, if there was strong objections to any of the questions that we're presenting, they could just say, all right, we're going to take this one out.

Why can't we have the public hearing during a town council meeting?

I would be surprised.

Like, I wonder if we can just have the charter review public hearing during a town council meeting. So then we can get the public's feedback and then the town council can vote based on whatever. That makes a lot of sense. Okay.

I don't see why not.

Let's try to do that. Thanks, CJ. Okay. Been here so long, and I haven't seen them since. And then, yeah, so we'll have to determine what the timeline is, because the Board of Canvassers needs, they need to approve, what did we say, by the end of July?

Yes.

But we also want the informational stuff going on with the tax bills, so we want to do it before then. Okay. If we can. Yeah, if we could. So why don't we try.

We're going to need a special meeting then. Yeah. Let's see. Unless we have the Board of Canvassers come to Latoka.

No, I think that, well, the next council meeting is on the 1st. So we've passed the deadline for that. And that would be on the 15th. And then you guys are like budget heavy the last week of June.

Yeah.

So if we could get something on for June 15th.

that would be tc approval and then we'd have to go back to the town council for public hearing no to the public i think at the same time yeah and the council review yep okay do you have to post a notice for the public hearing yeah in advance like um actually no how does that work we'll get noticed there's going to be a newspaper act uh okay all the questions in there um just to let you know uh july

budget meetings at the end of June?

Sure.

That's nice. Public hearing during June 15th meeting needs to be.

So I can, I'll. I'll email the questions over to the town clerk tomorrow and copy David and see if we can get that advertisement, because it might be a two week advertisement. So if that goes out Monday the first, we can get that work going.

Okay. Um, hold on. I want to just look at this really quick. Okay. So 15th ideally we'd like to have town council review and public hearing in the same meeting. So the town council would review and approve first, then the public would be able to provide their feedback and then we do final approval after public hearing.

If it's two weeks and we're talking about doing it in the breeze, it wouldn't come out until the, 5th. 4th. That Thursday.

But that gives us plenty of time for the 15th.

If it's a two-week notice.

If it's a two-week notice. It might be too tight. We'll check tomorrow.

Yeah, I'll email out.

We'll adjust if not.

Okay. Yeah, we might have to have a special meeting. Maybe we have a special meeting. That's annoying. And then we'll have to have a meeting with the Board of Canvassers end of June for July approval. And then when do the tax bills go out again?

I don't think we have to have a meeting with the Board of Canvassers.

Oh, no. It just goes to. OK.

So we'll need to work on the education in parallel. Mm-hmm. Regardless of like, we should probably start working on the education now. Right. Regardless of town council approval. So then we can just like have it ready to go. Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of it is already included in that report.

Yeah. Okay.

Okay, thanks for. Okay. Canvassers to approve post-TC hearing. And then lastly, education to be developed in parallel. Did we have a date for the tax bills?

It all depends on how quickly the town council sets the rate.

Yeah.

Usually they go out mid-July.

Okay. Include in July tax mailer.

And the mailer could just be like a QR code or web link that directs people to that.

And we could ask Denise to actually post it on our website.

What are you thinking, Beth? I'm a little nervous about doing a QR code for folks who are not tech savvy. I think that can be a barrier.

Web address it is.

Well, both.

Or a combination.

Both, yeah. So you would not want to send out a hard copy?

Well, our report is 42 pages long. Yeah, yeah. So it's going to be pretty- Yeah, yeah. There'll be a lot more postage incurred to go along with the tax bills. Right, yeah. Might give some people a heart attack if they feel- Every tax bill- The 42 pages is the report itself?

Yeah. I would say that we would want to give people access to the report itself and the education piece at the same time and make the education piece much more summarized. People are not going to read a fully completed one.

Yeah, so like have both.

Yeah.

Like a synopsis. Maybe a one pager.

Yeah. A one pager for each? No, one page back in front for the entire thing of just bullet points of like here's what we did. And if you want to read the whole report.

Because a 42-page report isn't digestible. I wouldn't read that if I had to read it.

i mean well maybe i would but yeah most people would not yes exactly okay like i know for the personnel board it can just be updated to you know it can be literally one sentence of updated to reflect actual duties of the personnel board yeah yeah yeah so it can be things like that okay um and why i think that the the cleaned up ones, we can just say cleaned up these. And then we can be a little bit more comprehensive with the other ones.

I think the biggest ones people are going to want education on are the staggered and extending in the four-year terms. Correct. And the facilities. Asset manager or asset management department.

Asset management. OK. Sounds good to me. OK.

But I think before we start doing all of the education, let's figure out which questions council's gonna accept too. Because there may be questions that I don't want us to spin our tires and they say, okay, well, we're gonna take out these three questions because we don't feel that there's gonna be enough engagement on them or we don't think it's appropriate because we've talked with other constituents. So let's, we can move, we can pivot pretty quickly to doing the education because I think all of our work is there. We just need to condense it. Okay then. anything else okay so then our next item on the agenda for discussion consideration and action recommendations to council so this will be the one um where we formally recommend to the town council our uh final report uh so i'll i'll make the motion that we recommend to council our final report as uh presented to this board and presented on the June 15th meeting or tentatively for the June 15th meeting. So that's my motion.

Say it one more time.

Motion to recommend to the council the report and I'll modify the report and ballot questions for their review and approval for the November ballot. Okay. second got a motion we have a second all in favor aye aye okay any other further recommendations we want to make to town council i think 42 pages is enough yeah i think so too All right, well if that's that, no further public comment from our packed house. Then we will adjourn at 7.20. Thank you very much.