AI-generated transcript of Medford Charter Study Commmittee 02-08-23

[Milva McDonald]: Okay, well, welcome everyone. We're gonna get started. Recording in progress.

[Contreas]: This meeting is being recorded.

[Milva McDonald]: We're gonna get started with our agenda. Our first agenda item is to accept the minutes. Did everyone have a chance? Did committee members, did you all have a chance to look at the minutes? Does anybody have anything to bring up about that? Okay, so we just need a motion to accept the minutes then.

[Jean Zotter]: I move to have the minutes accepted.

[Unidentified]: I'll second that.

[Milva McDonald]: Great. All in favor? Aye.

[Unidentified]: Aye. Aye. Aye.

[Milva McDonald]: Aye. Great. I think we have a unanimous ayes. Okay. With that, we're going to get right to our call-in center presentation. So I'm going to hand things over to Anthony Wilson and he's going to get us going.

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: Good evening, everyone. I know we all remember each other from last time, but Anthony Wilson with the Collins Center. I'm joined by a new face tonight, Frank Wright. Frank, can you say hi to the group?

[Wright]: Yes, hello. I'm Frank Wright, as Anthony indicated. I am new to the Collins Center. Prior to that, I was 23 years in the city of Somerville Law Department. the last 13 as city solicitor. And during that period, I was also for 14 years a city councillor, alderman in the city of Melrose. So now I'm happy to be a member of the call center team and once again, back in municipal government, so to speak.

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: And I believe Marilyn Contreras is on the call. Marilyn, are you here?

[Contreas]: Anthony, I'm here.

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: And I won't have Marilyn introduce herself. She did that at the previous meeting. So what I'm gonna do right now is, as I understand the agenda of the meeting is, we're gonna go through the document, the memo that we sent to the committee. Did everyone receive a copy of that memo? I think there were two documents that were sent to everyone. We're gonna go through that briefly, and then we're going to open it up to questions or comments from the committee. I'm gonna share my screen. So before I get into the memo, I just wanted to sort of briefly, I'm sure you've all seen this, but this is the city's current charter as it exists on the website. And as you all probably know, it is really just the small section of the Massachusetts general laws that is called plan A form of government. And it's really, A very small set of sections, especially as compared to the memo. And it really is just a small portion of this overall section of Massachusetts general general laws that talks about the various plan charters on the city. One thing that I think we addressed in our previous memo was. One reason for updating a community's charter is to make it more readable, more understandable. One of the real sort of issues with the current Somerville charter is that there are several sections about the city's operation that this charter, as it appears on the website, doesn't seem to cover. The most glaring one is the school committee. Obviously, the city has a school committee. Obviously, it runs pursuant to state law. However, a person would have to go into, you know, a layman would have to go to Mass General Law and would have to figure out where in these sections that is. So in terms of clarity, your existing charter really isn't that clear on really a number of topics because it really just pulled those sort of snippets that were at that time defined as Plan A. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to pull up the memo.

[Andreottola]: Excuse me, you'd mentioned Somerville, you mean Medford, correct?

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Medford.

[Andreottola]: I was in another- I just wanted to make sure that we weren't looking at Somerville. Okay.

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: No, you're looking at Medford. You are. Okay. Let me share the memo. So I'm gonna go through this quickly. I'm sure you all have read through this, but this is what we call the generic modern charter. There are a number, there are about 10 articles here in a number of sections, obviously longer than Medford's existing charter. The city and your committee doesn't have to adopt all of these articles. Number one, and number two, you can have, there are other things that you could potentially cover if you want to talk about that could be added into these. But these are sort of the most common article sections that the Collins Center has sort of suggested or recommended that communities adopt as it move into a sort of a more modern framework. I'm gonna jump down from the slides. Now, so one of the first things that we recommend is a preamble. A preamble is not required. It doesn't necessarily have any sort of legal weight on the operation of the city, but it can be a good place for a community to share its collective vision for what it wants the city to be, what it wants to explain to the community how it wants to operate. So again, it doesn't have to be very long. It can be a point of contention, but it really is just a value statement for the community moving forward. I don't know if there's a suggestion from the committee. Would you like to ask questions as we go section by section, or do you want me to go through the whole memo first before I open it up to the floor?

[Unidentified]: I'd be fine with just getting through everything. Segue.

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: We'll go through these quickly. Sounds good. Really, and I just want to point out that the existing charter does not have that again, it's just the language pulled from the state law. So, the next section fairly self explanatory. really a section about the incorporation, the powers of the city, how the city's powers are divided, particularly between the executive and the legislative branch, and as well as what actually often tends to be very important is definitions for terms used throughout the charter. This is often an important, can be an important sticking point as cities sort of wrestle with some of these issues, particularly the executive's authority with regard to the city council, the legislative body. So going into Article 2, the legislative branch, again, the existing charter is very short with regard to the existence and the operation of the city council. So there's no discussion of compensation in the existing city charter. There's no discussion of the council rules of the appointment power, if any, of the city council. You'll see that there's a section here on prohibitions, things that the city council should not or cannot act on. There's a discussion here or things that we recommend as council president, vice president, terms, things of that nature. And again, this is very broad as these are sort of an example, is the scope of authority of your legislative body. So we're gonna go down here. And again, as I said earlier, this is a discussion of the powers and authority of the executive branch. The existing charter does have a discussion about compensation, but again, that's very limited. And it also has a discussion about the mayor's appointing power. However, there's no discussion about what to do in terms of the absence of an executive and things of that nature. And Medford is a, is a mayor's city council form of government, there's not really a discussion about the mayor's authority to veto ordinances. So again, this is totally absent from the existing Medford City Charter, the discussion of the school committee, composition, compensation, structure, you know, chair, vice chair, things of that nature. So, again, if the city were to move forward with a newer modern charter, this would be an important thing to add. Administrative organization. The existing charter does not cover this. This is something that a person would have to go into the Massachusetts General to figure out how the city is structured. This is the section where you would define your city agencies and how they are, who they report to within the city government. Financial procedures, this is definitely part of a more modern city charter. This discusses how the city forms its operating budget and what's something that's becoming more and more important, you know, as government has become more complex over time, the city's capital improvement programs, how it spends money on its buildings, operations, land, things of that nature. There's a section here on, there's not a section of the current charter on elections. There's limited language on elections. And so this would sort of flesh this out, you know, more thoroughly. The current charter does not discuss citizen participation, particularly how citizens may be able to put items before the city council for vote and other measures of that nature. Another interesting one, again, that's not covered in existing charter is recall. Now this can be a contentious item. This is a committee formed by the mayor, but there are a lot, there are a number of communities that have a explanation of how citizens may move forward with a recall of elected officials if the community wants to sort of create those mechanisms. So these are general provisions. They cover things like how do we move forward with making charges, changes to the charter? And that charter balance of the record recommends on any charter is a periodic review of the charter. Is this particular structure keeping up to date with the best practices that we understand in public government? And again, because Medford is charter so limited, this is a provision, this is a section on transition. And essentially, you don't want to make a wholesale change to their charter and have to sort of automatically sort of implement those, those things, because there could be issues with that so the transition section is where the community determines what processes need to continue for how long, and how they transition to their new operation under the the new chart. It covers things like records, personnel, there can be some financial and administrative provisions, and things of that nature. And that really covers the memo, again, really briefly. One of the things that I did want to sort of highlight for the body is that one of the things that makes the sort of this exemplar model charter so helpful is the structure. You can keep all of the things that you currently have, again, they're very limited, but you could structure them in a way that's more readable, more understandable for your average citizen. In addition to sort of digging into some of these more substantive issues regarding actual municipal operation. So with that, I'll turn it back over to the committee. And I know that was very brief, but we'll open up to questions on any specific section.

[Milva McDonald]: Great. Thank you, Anthony. So does anybody have any questions?

[Unidentified]: I do.

[Milva McDonald]: OK, I'm sorry. Jean, go ahead, and then we'll go.

[Jean Zotter]: Sure. Thank you, Anthony. for the review. If it's not covered by our charter, then what is, how do we know what the law is? Like I think you mentioned there's nothing about the mayor vetoing city council ordinances. So, I mean, we're going ahead with a process. So is that covered by state law or what, if it's missing, is it, is the default state law?

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: I'm not going to share my screen again, but at the sort of beginning of the presentation I showed sort of the website that has the state law. And so, plan a starts at under state law section I think it's 4045 44. And there's a whole. provision, there are several sections above that that cover all the forms of government. That sort of include things like the mayor signing off on certain things, forms of government, like Plan A. There's a whole section of state law about elections, about the operations of schools. So again, And communities have certain control over how those things operate specifically in their own community. But Medford has not chosen to sort of, under the charter at least, it has not chosen to exercise that authority. Therefore, the default is to the rather limited regulations in state law. I don't know if Marilyn or Frank want to chime in a little bit on this point.

[Wright]: I'll jump in. Just kind of jumping on where Anthony left off. It may depend on what the issue is. You'd look to the statutes, case law perhaps, and your ordinances may address some of the issues depending on what the topic is or the question is. The ordinances obviously are much easier to change and can come and go, whereas the charter is a much firmer foundation upon which your local government is established and maintained. OK.

[Jean Zotter]: All right, thank you.

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: I'd only just add is that just in Massachusetts, In many ways, the municipalities are sort of an outgrowth of, it's sort of what the state has permitted communities to do. So a lot of things are covered by the state law. But I think as Marilyn explained, there had been that really push to empower communities starting in the end of the last half of the last century. So there are a lot of things that you could decide to do in a sort of, for lack of a better term, a Medford way, if so inclined.

[Milva McDonald]: Okay, Anthony, you had a question, and then we'll go to Matt.

[Andreottola]: Hi, Anthony Antriotol. I guess my first question is, what is the difference between modifying the charter? How would that differ from kind of making amendments to it? Do we have to like recreate the wheel? can any of these sections kind of be filled in and what would that process look like? And can you walk us through that?

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: So I think the short answer is that amendments to certain, well, first of all, you don't have to, what you've got in front of you is an example of sort of things that we would recommend a community put into its charter. And again, I think part of it, especially in Medford's case, is in terms of readability or things for your regular citizen to look at and say, I know how my local government operates. You don't necessarily have to adopt any of the things or even structure your charter in the way that is suggested or at least put forth in that particular memo. Having said that, any change, let's say you wanted to just add one of those sections from the charter or from the memo and sort of fill that out, or at least take your existing charter and structure it in the way so suggested. Whether it's a wholesale change or a change to an individual section, it'll have to go through the same process of being submitted to the city council, voted on, sent to the state house for approval, and then back to the city for back to the voters.

[Andreottola]: Okay, thank you. Got it.

[Contreas]: I would I would also add that a lot of what is in chapter 43 where the plans reside has since been overtaken by state law. So some of the provisions are of no longer of any effect because state law has been since changed, and it's state law that would govern. So that's, that's another reason to move forward with something that's referred to here as as modern, but, but does capture in one document, you know the fundamental features of the government.

[Milva McDonald]: Great, thank you.

[Matt Leming]: Just so with article 10, the transitions, is that strictly going to be applicable for a limited period of time following any changes to the charter? So I just want to have some clarification about that section in particular. Would it be not relevant 20 years after the charter changes are all passed?

[Unidentified]: Or am I misunderstanding that?

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: So Marilyn, you can fill this out for us, but the short answer is yes. The transition section would really be filled out based upon the things that you do or don't decide to change or how you decide to make the modifications. And then the transition section would just focus on the things through your discussion as a committee and the things that you learn from your hearings. You may need some time for the organization to adjust to the new structure. And they would only last until the transition period is over, however you determine, whenever you determine to put that sunset time to be, or the city, really the city council ultimately.

[Unidentified]: What's an instance of like something that's needed to go into a transition section previously?

[Contreas]: Well, one example is the budget process. say that you adopt this provision for an annual budget meeting that you don't have now. And the charter passes, but the budget, the charter is adopted by the voters in November, but the charter process, the budget process is already underway. So the transition provision might provide that that would take effect in the budget in the following fiscal year. If you decide to enlarge the council or change the composition of the council, the transition provision would say this provision will take effect at the next municipal election following adoption of the charter. If you adopted it in 2024, it would take effect in the election of 2025. That's the kind of thing that you find.

[Unidentified]: Got it, thank you. Yep, yep, yep.

[Milva McDonald]: Great, thanks. Okay, Ron, you had a question?

[Ron Giovino]: I did. Anthony, as I go through this and do the reading, the thing that just hits me is the broad spectrum of things that need to be addressed. from extreme changes to, for lack of a better word, clerical changes in some of the items. So my question is that with the importance, and I hope we all stress the importance of public participation in this, is there going to be a game plan of being able to separate these issues so that we're not just dealing with the mayor tonight, we have a meeting, and then next time we'll go to the next article. I'm trying to look at this charter and say, these are the extreme issues. Let's isolate them and come up with a plan for them. Let's see what we can do to give the, you know, the mission statement is very crucial, but it doesn't, it's not as involved as whether the, there's two additional members to the city council or things like that. So I just, I guess I'm, I'm looking for some thought process on how we break this up so that we're more efficient in the months ahead so that we're not having these public meetings and not addressing a large group of important items. And I think that's done by labeling each item as you know, on a scale of one to 10, this is mission critical, are the ones, whether there's, you know, I don't know, ice cream after a city council meeting would be item, you know, a 10. Is that part of the process that we're gonna go through with you and emulating other cities and how they go through this process?

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: Yeah, so one of the things that we recommend is that there should be a lot of community outreach to, you know, your regular voters, but as well as your elected officials, some of these changes may affect them. Now, in terms of what is important, what sort of rates on the scale you created, sort of one to 10, that really is a discussion for you guys to have about sort of what you think is most important. I think one of the things that can be helpful is sort of to identify the low-hanging fruit and to sort of start some of those discussions. So maybe discussions about just the structure, you know, even if we keep everything the same, here's how it would look if we sort of rearranged it. Maybe discussion about the values, discussion about definitions. Again, that's for you guys to decide, but sometimes that can be an entry point for people to join the conversation, that's not a great hurdle, if you know what I'm trying to say, both for yourselves as committee members, as well as your constituents and your elected officials.

[Unidentified]: Thank you. OK, Mike.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Thanks, Melva, and thanks for the presentation, Anthony. While you were going through, uh that that whole that whole list i was thinking really about how do we know it sounds like you said a lot of uh pieces of medford's charter kind of default to state law because we don't we don't have a position we don't have part of it as part of part of our ordinance um so you know if we decide whether or not to make changes to medford's charter we're either proposing new changes or accepting the status quo Some of which we can read Medford Charter, but still not know. I guess anything that we decide not to do is a tacit agreement that whatever is in state law is what we choose. I was wondering, my question is if there's an easy or straightforward way to understand what's in state law, whether that's Chapter 43 or elsewhere, so that we know what not making an action not making a decision ends up looking like?

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: That's kind of a tough question. I sort of would love to get Marilyn's input on that. I think one of the things sort of I wouldn't say is the expectation of, but everyone on this committee is a member of the community of Medford. just in many ways this exemplar of you know quote-unquote modern charter is really just to give you guys a starting point to think about what a charter could look like what could be in there and really just to think about what are some of the things that you got that you may think of the community needs there's it's not really it isn't put before you just in a sense to say that this is what a great charter looks like this is really what it should be it's really sort of a starting point for conversation I think that's really all I can sort of say on that point. Maryland, is there anything you could add or Frank?

[Contreas]: Thank you. I think one of the. I think we've stressed that, you know, we want more modern language, we want an accessible document, we want it readable. But the other point of a charter is to give a resident a good sense of how the government is structured by picking up one document. And if you default to what's in state law, which could be posted on the city's website, I guess, we're not creating that sort of one stop document for a resident to understand what the structure of the government is and what its most important features are. And the state, this is a little long, but the state, when they enacted the Home Rule Amendment, and they created Chapter 43B, you know, to sort of provide the procedures for a charter commission, chose not to provide model charters. And so what you have before you in this document that Anthony has created is basically how charters have evolved over the 50 plus years since the Home Rule Amendment. These are the features that most communities have determined are essential for the understanding of how the government works. And that's kind of where we are with this. If you, once again, the issue being, what is it that you want to establish? issues and concerns do you want to be elevated in the charter so that they're top of mind for folks? And what procedures do you want to go forward, no matter who is mayor, no matter who is on the council, so that these protocols are in place and become standardized? That's the goal here.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: That makes sense. It sounds like what you're saying is, whether or not we decide to change anything, there's value in just writing a clear, understandable charter. So thank you for that.

[Milva McDonald]: Thank you.

[Eunice Browne]: Eunice. Yeah, thank you very much. And thank you for the presentation. I printed out our charter, our current charter, which I think came out to about five pages or so. And then I printed out the document that Anthony has provided us with, which is an outline for us without any sort of meat of what would apply to Medford or what we would want. And it came out to 21 pages, I think. I was absolutely stunned at the difference. We have our work cut out for us, I think. Are there other communities charters out there that we could take a look at. I'm, I wonder if you know maybe we don't know what we don't know. not knowing maybe another community might have X, Y, Z in their charter, we didn't really know that we needed X, Y, Z, but wow, it makes perfect sense for us. I was listening to a council meeting last night, committee of the whole subcommittee on rules subcommittee, and they had a whole discussion about the budget process. And there was a whole lot of that I took a bunch of notes, thinking that, you know, maybe some of that would eventually apply to what we're trying to do here. So, you know, wondering, are there other communities charters that we could take a look at and and see what what we might want to consider here.

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: I think that could definitely be appropriate. We can put a packet together for you of some other community charters. The only thing I would sort of request from the committee is sort of what are the criteria you'd be looking at? I would be assuming things like also a mayor, council form of government, perhaps similar in population, maybe physical size. Those would just be sort of a, you know, whatever limiting criteria you'd have for what you're looking for.

[Eunice Browne]: Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think I would probably defer to you folks, maybe, or we could talk it over as a group as to what communities make the most sense for us to, I don't really want to say compare ourselves to, but maybe that is what I'm saying. I suppose population would probably make a whole lot of sense. plan A or maybe we don't want plan A anymore, I don't know. But somebody that we could take a look, other communities that we could take a look at that might have pieces of their charter that might work for us.

[Unidentified]: Thank you. Okay, Jean?

[Jean Zotter]: Do you have another question? I had a comment, or I guess a question. It may be obvious, but what is our mandate? And the reason I'm asking this, I thought at the last meeting we weren't sure whether we're actually charged with writing the new charter or whether we're charged with making, say, a memo with recommendations for what should be considered for a new charter. And so I'm just not clear whether we're supposed to be writing a draft charter or whether we're supposed to be making recommendations to the mayor. And so, cause I feel like those are very different activities and one is a lot more labor intensive. So do we have a sense of that, Milva or Laurel?

[Milva McDonald]: I think that it's up to us. That's my, that what we choose to put forth in our recommendations could include just a set of recommendations or reworking and written sections. That's my understanding. Laurel, do you agree?

[Laurel Siegel]: Yeah, I generally agree. I mean, you know, and perhaps it's a question we can go back to the mayor with to get some clarity on exactly what the expectation is. But I've certainly anticipated that this group would be proposing language, not just recommendations. We can certainly circle back and verify that.

[Jean Zotter]: And because if we're writing the charter, I'm assuming the city solicitor, we don't have one, but wouldn't we want right now, but we would, or would that be, anyways, I don't want to get too in the weeds, but I was just, and then thinking through if we have about a year, the process to write a whole charter and what you sent us, Anthony, is pretty lengthy. Like what would our process be? We should really map out each month so we can accomplish having a full charter at the end of it, because I'm a little nervous that a year with monthly meetings might not be enough. And so just some things to think about as we're talking about it.

[Milva McDonald]: Yeah, thanks, Jean. I think if we can increase the number of meetings if we feel a need, and we also aren't bound by a year. That's my understanding.

[Ron Giovino]: Just a point of information, if I may. I don't know if, Milva, you have the document, the charge from the mayor's office for this committee, where it talks about an 18-month process that we have to report to the mayor and the city council every six months. And the process is we make amendments as we see fit to the current charter. We submit them to the mayor and the city council. And, you know, it goes from there. That's why, and I agree with Jean, it's a massive undertaking that we will have to have more than monthly meetings, in my opinion. But the most important part as someone who's been involved in some of these advisory committees before is The public input is crucial because we can't leave it up to, you know, decision makers who are there now who won't be there when the charter is still in effect. I mean, we're three decades under this charter, so who's in there now doesn't really matter. What matters is what the people want, and we need to record that and make recommendations. But we're just an advisory group. But I do think, and Anthony, correct me if I'm wrong, we have the potential to rewrite the entire charter, make amendments as we see fit, and then it gets tossed into the mix and they decide what is going on. But hopefully our opinion reflects what the citizens of Medford want, not necessarily those in office right now. But it is definitely, it says in the mayor's office that, it says 18 months is what the expectation is, and every six months we need to go in front of them to report.

[Laurel Siegel]: So Ron, just to that point, in terms of the timeline, that is in the document that the mayor's office put out, but in our consultation with the mayor, it's been clear that the timeline is whatever we as a group feel is necessary. Obviously we wanna be as expeditious as possible in the process, but if we needed two years or longer than that time period, certainly there's no impediment for us. And of course, later in our agenda tonight is exactly what you were referring to is talking about some public engagement strategies, because we definitely, I believe, all agree on the importance of getting as much input as possible from the community.

[Unidentified]: Thank you.

[Milva McDonald]: Definitely. Danielle.

[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I guess we've been talking about it like that. So, when you are presenting that, um, the memo, it sounded like articles, like, 4 through 10. Aren't in our current charter, but there are some pieces of that that we default to because of state law. So, I'm wondering, like, I think this is maybe what I was understanding that Mike was asking about too. Like, if we could just like, get the language of what that law is, or how we. How that how we are operating, even without this in our charter, like, I would, if that's a good starting point for understanding some of this, but also I'm wondering if there are any of those articles that. Maybe I know we probably have procedure around this, but that aren't that don't default to state law that maybe we would be coming up with the language. Altogether for those articles, if they're like, so when you're talking about low hanging fruit, are there somewhere where that we're able to kind of look at what the state law says and make amendments to that? And are there others where we would just be kind of coming up with all the language ourselves?

[Contreas]: Anthony.

[Unidentified]: Yes, I was trying to unmute.

[Contreas]: Did you want to say can I can I speak to that a little bit? The usual practice of the call center is to provide you with language based on what you're telling us that you are most interested in and providing you with the charter provisions that have already been approved by either the state legislature or the attorney general in a home rule charter so that you're working with something that has has an imprimatur. And some of these can be changed, and some of them won't need to be changed. But that's the usual process. We'll bring you an article or two articles and explain to you why those features are in those articles and how they came to be. And then you all get to be our favorite thing, the editors. But that's the usual process. You're not going to start from scratch.

[Unidentified]: Great.

[Milva McDonald]: Thank you. Matt, did you have another question?

[Matt Leming]: Yeah, well, this was just a comment on Jean's point in that discussion. I think that, and also this was actually partially just addressed by Marilyn too, but I think that the, in my opinion, there are a couple of obvious areas where we could be looking into writing our own language, like the preamble and whatnot, but I think that the more core focus of this committee ought to be just coming up with decisions with public input on a few very key issues that tend to come up again and again when talking about the charter, you know, just very important things like Ward-based versus at-large representation, election procedures, the nature of the school committee, so things like that. And when it comes to the language and writing this whole thing ourselves, I think once we actually have made some of the decisions on those issues, actually getting drafts of those won't be all won't be like all that much of a task, like as Marilyn was just saying, it could be provided for us. So that but that that's that was that was kind of my view on this is just making those decisions on very critical parts that have come up again and again on this charter review discussion.

[Milva McDonald]: Thanks, Matt. Ron, do you have another question? Or Okay, john.

[Moreshi]: Thank you. I just have a brief suggestion that may be helpful. I know a few communities, Framingham, Weymouth, have recently adopted new charters. I think the center's outline is very helpful in sort of what to think about, but maybe looking at those charters and a few others would be helpful for people to understand sort of the mechanics that we're talking about. So it's just a suggestion. I don't know if the center has any recommendations. I believe you did in Framingham, so I assume you would recommend that one, but Maybe you could share sort of particularly thorough or well done charters that could help people get a feel for what we're talking about.

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: So, yes, I guess I would just caution in terms of saying that, you know, one charter is better than another, but in terms of those communities you'd like to look at, we can definitely provide those examples for review by the committee.

[Moreshi]: I would never want to assign value to a community, of course, but I just think newer ones in particular might capture more issues and maybe be more thorough or modern.

[Unidentified]: Just a thought.

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: So I heard, pardon me, chairs, I heard Framingham and was it Weymouth that you expressed some interest in saying?

[Moreshi]: I know there are two of the newer ones. Obviously, Somerville has a charter, but they also have a ton of special acts. So I'm not sure how helpful a model is.

[Contreas]: You might want to look at Pittsfield. That was 2013. Thank you. Great. Any other?

[Unidentified]: Somerville was, we had an 1899 charter that we did a thorough review on.

[Wright]: uh, 2010, um, there were a number of amendments in it and the decision was made to amend the existing charter as opposed to present, uh, a totally rewritten charter to the public, which could have included 90% of the existing language. Um, and because they chose just to make amendments throughout and there were so many special acts. It took about two years for it to get through the legislature because House Council and Senate Council had to go back and review every amendment that had been made and look at the legislative history. And it became a very lengthy process. That said, if you look at the charter, it is It is a relatively new document going back just about 11 years at this point. Some amendments have been made since, very active city council and mayor, but you could still get a sense of what one of your neighbors has. Melrose as well was changed in 2010 by the voters. That was a complete overhaul of the document. A new charter was presented to the voters. And my last year on the city council, 2016, 2017, we did a review. Our charter required the charter be reviewed every 10 years. And we were a little tardy in getting that review done, but we did get it done and we made some minor changes as well. So, Those are a couple of your neighbors anyway that you could also look at. From my perspective, that's a great idea because you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. There was, to Anthony's point, Marilyn's point, there are plenty of models and existing charters that you can look to for examples. You don't have to adopt all the language, but it at least can be a starting point for a thoughtful discussion about where you want to go.

[Milva McDonald]: Thanks. I have a question. Frank, what you were just talking about with amendments, do amendments have to go as separate home rule petitions? Yes.

[Wright]: To amend your charter, there has to be a home rule amendment. petition would go, you know, the way, you know, we presented was the whoever sponsored it, it could come out of the mayor's office. It could be a city council matter, but in any event, it had to pass through the city council and the mayor. And then from there, it went on to the legislature. And then it's out of your hands at that point. It's under the control of the legislature. They control the time.

[Milva McDonald]: Can we just get some clarity on what would qualify as an amendment versus a revision so that we understand that?

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: So really any change would have to go through this process that we've described. Yes. I don't know, Frank or Marilyn, if there's anything, I think maybe renumbering might not have to.

[Wright]: No, I just think revision is kind of layman's language, whereas an amendment is a legal term.

[Milva McDonald]: Okay, so we're just talking semantics, pretty much.

[Wright]: Generally, yes.

[Milva McDonald]: I also just want to know, in Medford, there's a big awareness that we have a plan A form of government. So when we're looking at the charter, there's discussion of, well, do we keep plan A or do we switch to another plan? So I just want to maybe get a little bit on the plans and the concept of going outside the plans. Because my understanding is we don't have to have a plan. And even if we decide, and if we don't keep plan A as it's written, it doesn't mean that we would change our entire form of government. Is that correct?

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: Yeah, I'm going to. to get Marilyn or Frank to chime in, but when you hear the words planned form of government, it just harkens back to these things that are written in the state law. But really, if the question is substantive, you're really just talking about the different divisions of power, mainly between the various branches of government. And you could go to a non-planned form of government, but keep your governmental structure, separations of power, things like that, pretty much the same.

[Milva McDonald]: Great, thanks. And it would just mean that we would have written a different charter, our own charter, as opposed to sort of borrowing it from Chapter 43.

[Contreas]: Yes, yes, you would, you would, it would be a charter specific to the city of Medford. The plans are, there's, I think, 14 communities operating under plans. And there's 54, you know, city forms of government. So the plans were never all that popular. Medford was the last community to adopt a plan. And so that tells you something. No one's looked at the plans as an option for 30 plus years. The plans have real limitations to them. As I mentioned before, you're governed by these provisions that have since been replaced by other state laws. State laws have been updated. They've been amended. Some of the language in the plans is of no effect at this point. And there are other considerations. There's a provision in at least one of the plans that if a mayor wants to remove a department head, the department head can appeal to the council. And none of this works anymore in terms of personnel laws, federal laws. It's just privacy laws. You could never use that.

[Unidentified]: Okay, thanks.

[Milva McDonald]: Anybody have any other questions or thoughts? All right, well, I thank you. You gave us a lot of information and a lot to think about and talk about. And I'm going to hand it over to Laurel now so we can discuss one of the issues that has already come up in this discussion.

[Laurel Siegel]: Thanks, Melba, and thank you again, Anthony, Frank, and Marilyn for all of your help here. So, yes, the next topic is starting to talk about public engagement strategies, because, you know, obviously it's a priority for us to engage with the whole community or as much of the community as possible throughout this process. We included on the agenda. a couple of my initial ideas, but we wanted this to be an open discussion of different strategies that we can try to implement. So certainly, we've talked about holding one or multiple, probably multiple public forums, even though these meetings are all public, but holding public forums specifically to gather input as opposed to our having internal discussion. having one or more surveys in our conversations with the folks from the Collins Center. We talked about the possibility of having multiple levels of surveys, sort of a preliminary survey. It's more, what are key issues or what are key concerns in very general terms? And we could identify some possibilities and also have people offer their ideas And then a subsequent survey or even subsequent surveys that we get into more of the details where we're talking about term limits or number of Councilors or whatever the case may be at that point. And then other ways of distributing public meeting info. I think some of you probably saw Milva and I put announcements on a number of the community pages for this meeting. We do wanna go ahead and keep doing that. But what are other strategies? Certainly not everybody's on Facebook, not everybody's online. So distributing information at key locations around the city, and also potentially having tables or a presence at some of the large community events. We've got things like Circle the Square and Flippership Day and other events coming up this year. And so whether that's an opportunity, not only to distribute information, but also to gather some public input, whether we have surveys or various strategies. And also it was mentioned, it wasn't on our list, but a very good point. It was mentioned in this conversation also about reaching out to our elected officials and having conversations with them as well to get their take, their input on this process and on what potential charter could look like. So with that said, I really do want to open this up to conversation. So, any, any thoughts on particular items or other ideas for how we can disseminate information.

[Matt Leming]: And now, I personally think that. You know, distributing everything on Facebook groups and email lists is great and that should be done. But I think that it's absolutely something that will be absolutely critical for reaching people that usually aren't interested or aren't as engaged in City, like just city related matters is literally just printing out physical flyers that, you know, explain what we're doing and posting them and like cafes, barber shops, just outdoors, things like that. when, if we're going to be making a survey, and I think that's an excellent idea, one of the goals of the surveys should be reaching people in Medford that are not normally plugged into city issues.

[Unidentified]: That's my thoughts. Eunice.

[Eunice Browne]: I think we need to sort of take a step back here a little bit. I was just thinking of this when I saw the post that Laurel and Milva made regarding tonight's meeting. There are 40,000 registered voters in this city. There are probably three or four regular citizens on this Zoom with us. I know we're on TV too. I wonder if how many are watching there, but how many people in this city really even know this is happening? Do they know what's happening? Do they know what a charter is? Do they know what the Charter Study Commission does? I think we need to start from the beginning and either have a few public forums, Zoom, hybrid, in-person, maybe going down to the senior center, doing something at the library. South Medford Fire Station has a community room and begin to educate people that we're here, that we're doing this work and why it's, what a charter is and why all of this is important. And I think as meeting alerts go out every month for our meetings, I think it would be a good idea to, as you're stating that the Charter Review Commission is going to meet on March 1st at 6.30 on Zoom, and the agenda is A, B, and C, But as a boilerplate language in each meeting notice that goes out, and it needs to go out in other places besides Facebook, is have some boilerplate language of this is what a charter is, this is what we are doing, and this is what our commission is all about. So that somebody, people who are paying attention may see these meeting alerts, you know, every month and say, oh good, I'll tune into that at, you know, Thursday night at 6.30. But some people may see it for the first time and wonder, hmm, wonder what's this all about? So I think starting with that and having some, you know, boilerplate language in each, every bit of information that goes out about what we are doing, I think would be helpful. And secondly, echoing what Matt was saying about printed material and things, do we have a budget for any of that? Can we get a line item through the mayor's office, I suppose? And we're coming up on, if our work is going to take maybe a year plus, We're coming up on budget season with the city council in a few months. And I know other boards and commissions have some small line items for their work. Is there a way for us to get some sort of a budget to get some of these printed materials and mailings, which will be quite costly as well. with my initial thoughts.

[Laurel Siegel]: Great, thank you. And certainly some of that is we can, Melva and I can look into. I mean, I know that we have support from the city. Frances, I don't know if you're able to speak to those questions about our ability to use city resources to print or mail materials.

[Frances Nwajei]: I just put a notation down to discuss the possibility of a line item. But I don't think that there will be a problem using things like the copy machines to make copies and to mail out. But I do have it down as a discussion point for the mayor.

[Unidentified]: Thank you.

[Frances Nwajei]: Thank you.

[Unidentified]: Mike.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Thank you. That was actually my primary question is, yeah, I think I'm currently working on a participatory budgeting project in Somerville and You know, in in in much the same way as our charter reform project. There there's a huge barrier to entry, right? Um, and I think, you know. Both previous speakers mentioned, um. You know, reaching out to to underrepresented groups, right? And we've been we've been kind of wrestling with that. In our PB process I think I want to mention, two things, three things really, really briefly. The first is budget right because we will, I think it's really really important to be able to translate items for folks in the community who don't speak English. That goes with. But what Eunice said about, I wrote it down, really answering the question, what is charter reform? Like, what are we doing here? I think an average resident has no idea what that is. And I think the second thing is being able to drive people to the charter study committee website, trying to build that out with some really basic information to draw people in, I think, is a really, really critical piece. And just always having a place to send people, whether it has its own, you know, the link I'm looking at, the URL I'm looking at right now is really long, but maybe the webmaster can get us, you know, MedfordMA.org. Charter study or something like that. So we always have a place. We have a consistent message to get to get people to what we think is the best information. And I'm just looking, I'm looking through a presentation we just did to the Somerville City Council about spreading the word because we are also on a limited budget and participate in In Somerville PB but you know we're planning on mailers to residential addresses right blanketing the city in the way that other folks said, but the really key one I think that has worked well for us is partnering with nonprofits city. Groups who have connections to nonprofits or community organizations, churches, things like that. Has been shared with us as a best practice for. Immigrant communities, people of color within within Medford and Somerville in the areas that's that's. A really important way to meet people where they already are, so we can't expect people to come to us right? As many events as we go to, it's still going to be people who already. receive information from the city, we need to, we need to go to places and interact with folks who, you know, otherwise wouldn't, wouldn't be hearing this information. So I'll leave it at that. But yeah, I think this is the most important, the biggest barrier we have is getting the word out.

[Unidentified]: Thank you, Mike. Danielle.

[Danielle Balocca]: Um, I had a similar question about the budget and I also thought, you know, in our earlier conversation about. Kind of prioritizing, which parts of the charter we discuss and when being able to advertise, like, tonight, we're going to talk about, you know, whatever it is and draw people in that might be like, most interested in those topics. I think that in connection with bringing in some of our city council or school committee members. Could, you know, I think they could be really good at kind of creating an interest in some of these topics and getting people in. Um, I also. This is maybe a little bit out of the box, but wonder about involving like, uh, students and young people around maybe like a civics class last year. We had a group of. eighth grade students that helped change the dress code. So like things like that, which might like, I think, just bring a different energy or bring some different ideas, and maybe involvement of their parents a little bit. And as future voters could be some could be an interesting group to hear from.

[Maury Carroll]: I'm sorry, I'm kind of sitting around, it's kind of loud in the background. It's very busy here. But, um, Yeah, I was thinking, you know, obviously community involvement is imperative to this and to get the word out just like I don't want to sound repetitive to what everybody has said, but yeah, I'd suggest that we put an outline together of what we think the main target points are here. go to the different sections of the city, whether it be the West Bedford Community Center or the South Bedford Fire Station, somewhere on Haines Square and for the heights and try to get the individual groups involved. And maybe that might be a good way of getting the message out, you know? And instead of just saying, okay, we're gonna have a meeting at the council chambers, let's move it to the people, instead of the people coming to us. So that's just all I can say for one point, but I'm going to go back on you. Like I said, I'm sorry, folks. It's so loud here tonight.

[Laurel Siegel]: Thank you, Maury. Ron, you had a comment?

[Ron Giovino]: Yeah, just quickly. I mentioned that the public piece is very important, but I think we also have to develop the rules similar to what the council and the school committee have for participation. Who can, how long, you know, how to keep it focused, because right now we're not, you know, we're not killing the ratings here, but once we start talking about some of the things we're going to be talking about, there's going to be a lot of people on this call, in the forums, you know, so, you know, people who are on this call as well should have an ability to know when they can make a comment, when they can say something. I mean, these are all public meetings, even though they're on Zoom. So I would think we should really work towards what the rules of engagement are going to be in this participation and just decide what that is, because you can see from the council meetings and from the school committee meetings and Zoom meetings, there just has to be some order or else it just gets totally out of control. That's my thought. Thanks.

[Laurel Siegel]: To that point, Ron, at our first meeting, we did establish some guidelines and voted to have public participation at the end of the meeting, and each person can speak for up to three minutes twice. Were you thinking beyond that? I just want to make sure I understand.

[Ron Giovino]: I'm thinking more of the public forums when we go into, you know, when we gather in public with everybody. But just, you know, just to let everybody know that I think at some point in these discussions, there's gonna be 30, 40 people on these Zoom calls who wanna have a turn to do it. So we'll need timekeepers and things to enforce that. But I'm more concerned about when we go into chambers and where, you know, we do that. I just think we have to maybe work with the council and the mayor to start doing more PR about this, because it shouldn't be a hidden secret. We should not be doing this without everybody who knows. And then, you know, although I know how the city works sometimes, but very important public place. I agree with everything everybody said, so.

[Jean Zotter]: Absolutely. Jean. I just wanna second, third or fourth, whatever, the community engagement being central to the work we're doing. I would feel more comfortable when we go out into the public and have public forums if we had it mapped out a little bit. Maybe it was Danielle that we have certain topics or, because I'm a little worried if we just open it up to the charter, people may not even know what the charter is or what it says. It just seems like we might wanna think this, you know, have some, topics maybe that we do, we could identify the big topics such as, are we strong mayor continuing? Are we going to ward government? Like just maybe map some of the questions out. I don't know if, I'm a little worried if we just open end, have open-ended meetings, we might not get as much information as we want. And that's not what you're suggesting potentially. I'm just throwing that out there.

[Laurel Siegel]: No, I would imagine that, you know, meetings would have a particular mission to them while at the same time, trying to ensure that we are geographically and otherwise reaching everybody from the city. So, you know, having detailed conversation, yes, about locations and formats and topics for each forum to make sure that we're maximizing the use of meetings and really reaching as many people as possible. Eunice.

[Eunice Browne]: Yeah, just a few things that pop into my head. Unfortunately, we really don't have a viable newspaper, but we do have patch. Could an article Go into that sooner rather than later. You know, sort of an overview, introducing ourselves, introducing, you know, what we've been doing to this point and what we will be doing in the future. And then, you know, at whatever schedule seems to make sense, maybe as we go section by section or topic by topic, Additional articles, you know, upcoming, we will be discussing, you know, X or whatever. And then along with that, could we do, and maybe this is kind of like what Maury might've been alluding to, you know, there are different areas of the city and maybe doing small groups you know, like the politicians when they go out and they do, you know, a living room, you know, presentation of their platform or whatever, or, you know, backyard garden party. Could we do something along those lines where maybe a few of us, it doesn't have to be all 11 of us each time, but, you know, a few of us, you know, do South Medford and then next week, another few of us go up to the Heights and do some sort of a small gathering either in a public spot or somebody willing to host us or whatever, something like that. And then my, go ahead, Laura.

[Laurel Siegel]: If I may, just to that, of course, we always have to be cognizant of the public meeting laws. And so we would not be able to do something in a private residence. Um, because all meetings have to be open to the entire public. Um, so we just, we would, you know, be under that limitation of, and ensuring that it is a space sufficient to be able to accommodate people who might want to return.

[Eunice Browne]: Okay. And then, um, you know, and I think I may have mentioned this a while back, but you know, when we were the sort of citizen led group that a bunch of us were a part of, um, back a few months ago, I think we had a website and a Facebook page, either both, I can't remember, that had a lot of really good information on it. You know, could we use that or migrate it over to something with the city and pluck out information that was very valuable to, and then generate people over to that, drive people over to that. And maybe, I don't know, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, you know, people are using these days. And then on the flip side, getting, you know, maybe, you know, the crowd that's not tech savvy as well, and finding a way to get out to them.

[Unidentified]: So. Danielle, you have another comment?

[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah, I think it's sort of similar to what maybe Eunice is suggesting, like, an educational component, like, I know Jean used the word representation. I wonder if some of the lack of engagement is just lack of understanding about what we even are talking about and what the things are on the table. and so like I wonder if there are creative ways like thinking about like going to the farmers market and having like a trivia station about what all these things mean just sort of like getting people engaged around like what it even is that we're talking about and what the different components are might be a way to because I don't think I knew I was interested in charter review until I really understood what it meant so um just something you know I think that is a piece to kind of disseminate some kind of information to get people more interested. Well Matt

[Laurel Siegel]: And then.

[Matt Leming]: Okay, I was about to point out Anthony seemed to be raising his hand as well. Um, yeah, just in my opinion, there's kind of two. One, one thing is I think it is like Mike was saying it's very critical to do active outreach to community groups. And that list should be as big as possible so like Danielle was saying like you've been thinking outside of the box like reaching out to like the. student government groups in high schools to get some of that feedback going. A couple of the places that Maury suggested as well, churches just around the community, I think would be excellent places. But I think that just trying to come up with lists of people that are community leaders and really thinking outside the box is critical for getting the word out for this kind of thing. And then really trying to annoy them to, you know, make this a priority. And also, and another component of this, and this kind of, I think, gets into what Ron was saying about trying to make this a little bit more specific, is actually mapping out the steps that we want these public engagement forums to be in. So I think the initial ones will just be literally what on earth is charter review, but later forums, hopefully once the word gets out, will just be on trying to gather should just try to gather feedback on much more specific aspects of charter review that are more that are important to people like representation one could focus on budget and so i think that really hammering out those specific aspects we want to focus on is going to be important for the future um anthony hi uh i don't know if

[Andreottola]: kind of backing up a tree that's unavailable is that, you know, this is an election year, and I'm sure that our committee is going to be, you know, part of some people's campaigns this upcoming season. And I don't know if it's always possible to actually get maybe a non-binding referendum on the ballot, you know, asking the community about some of, you know, some of the things that we might look at in a charter. Do they want, you know, do they want to have a school committee that's nominated by the city council or the mayor rather than an elected one or, you know, term limits or, you know, is there any chance of getting that, you know, on a ballot? So we really would get, you know, real community input. really kind of bring our work up a notch, would really kind of make our presence more known in the community.

[Laurel Siegel]: Would the folks from the Collins Center have any input on whether something like that is even feasible?

[Anthony Ivan Wilson]: I'm not sure if I've ever seen that done. Marilyn or Frank, you can chime in. I guess The only, I wouldn't say the only, but I guess the thing that jumps out to me the most is there's a, I guess the, my concern would be putting something, I'm assuming we're talking about just a municipal election. So the elections probably control the ballot. Putting something on, getting, this body having time to formulate something on the ballot that would create a meaningful response. Because that is, it may feel like the election's far away, but it's really not, especially for the times that where it has to be submitted to the election commissioner, whatever the process is in Medford to get it there. That would be my concern is that, you know, you're really at the beginning of the process. You've we presented sort of, you know, we consider the draft model charter. We're going to give this body some examples from other communities of what their charters look like. They're more modern charters. And hopefully between now and whenever the election is, you'll be you will be talking to the community. You'll be hearing from the various stakeholders and hearing about what their concerns or interests are. But still, to formulate a question, a non-binding referendum to go on the ballot. There are a number of things in your chart that could be sort of parsed out into specific questions. You're definitely not going to put 100 questions on the ballot. And then what would be key questions to get valuable feedback? That would really be where my concern would be.

[Unidentified]: OK.

[Laurel Siegel]: John.

[Moreshi]: I'm trying to find the answer and I can't find it. So, um, we'd have to play a player, but my memory is we can put non-initiative, um, non-binding initiatives on the ballot under the general laws, but I don't think we could, because we're a municipal entity. I'm not sure we could use state funds to work on that.

[Unidentified]: All right.

[Laurel Siegel]: Um, any other, any other comments or suggestions and then otherwise maybe we can, um, can talk a little bit about prioritizing. I mean, I think that it seems probably our first priority would be creating some sort of flyer or brochure that can let people know about our existence, why we exist and what a charter is fundamentally. And that then could be distributed both physically through all of the different channels that people discussed, as well as online. Um, is, is everybody pretty much in agreement in making that priority number one here? Okay. Um, and then I think sooner rather than later, we'll want to talk about planning for our first public forum. Um, when the when and where of it, but then also the content of that. Uh, we don't necessarily want to do that tonight, just being aware of the time, um, and allowing for time for, uh, any public participation. Um, but maybe we can, uh, include that on our agenda for March.

[Unidentified]: Does that make sense to everybody?

[Laurel Siegel]: And then at the same time, you know, we can certainly start talking about engaging in conversation with public officials, as well as starting to formulate an initial survey that could go pretty much hand in hand with having a public forum. So unless somebody else is eager to do it, I'm happy to take on putting together an initial draft of something. It won't necessarily look pretty. It'd be more about content than we could talk about formatting. But I'm happy to put together an initial draft for us to discuss at our next meeting. Again, unless somebody else here is eager to do it themselves.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: Are you talking about for materials to share?

[Laurel Siegel]: I'm talking about a flyer brochure that would have basic information about what we are doing here.

[Mike Mastrobuoni]: I'd be happy to do some graphics if it's Okay. Is it okay for you to share with me. Some text I can include that. And then we could review them a couple options for our next meeting. Is that, is that reasonable? I'm happy to do that.

[Laurel Siegel]: Yeah, I think that's fine. That's fine.

[Eunice Browne]: Cool. Don't we already. The stuff that we had prepared when we were. the citizen-led group that we had going there for a while, and I think it was Matt at the time, who put together quite a lot of good information on a flyer. Could we use some of that so that we are not reinventing the wheel?

[Laurel Siegel]: Absolutely. We can't use the materials from that resident group because that is separate from our work. But certainly, some of us, including myself, have access to those materials. And it had a particular bent to it, and this is more, you know, maintaining the neutrality of this committee. But certainly, it would be similar in some ways, too.

[Eunice Browne]: I mean, what is a charter, why it's important, things like that, I think are pretty typical.

[Laurel Siegel]: Yeah, exactly. All right. Any other thoughts on this topic? Otherwise, we can open this up for public participation. So do we have any members of the public who are interested in participating at this point?

[Matt Leming]: Just as a reminder, three minute talking limit per person, followed by an optional follow up if everybody else

[Unidentified]: All right, I'm not seeing anybody, so unless they're, oh, I'm sorry, yes.

[Chelli Keshavan]: Can I jump in? Sorry, I was looking, trying to figure out how to raise my hand, but I think this is a problem.

[Laurel Siegel]: Can we just get your name and address for the record, please?

[Chelli Keshavan]: My name is Chelly Cation, and I'm the HRC chair. I'm not sharing my address here. Okay, that's fine, go ahead. There's been a lot of discussion about community engagement and I just wanted to encourage this committee to design a mechanism by which the capital that community members share with you hold weight when you sort of move forward in designing the choices that get made here. We declared racism a public health crisis in 2020 and having a bunch of white people move into marginalized communities just because they got elected to a committee that means nothing to folks is really propagating the problem. And folks are not unengaged because they just want to be, they're unengaged because the city has never answered to their needs. So remembering that people want to be part of the conversation, they really don't see a way to navigate um, and outcome that matters to them. Um, and remembering that consistency and time and money is the way to pursue that conversation. So I just wanted to add that. Thank you.

[Unidentified]: Did we have anybody else from the public who wanted to participate at this time? All right.

[Laurel Siegel]: I'm not seeing anybody unless I'm missing a hand raise. Um, but, um, So starting in March, we will start our regular meeting schedule, which will be on the first Thursday of the month at 6.30 PM. So that next meeting will be on March 2nd. And thank you to everybody. And again, thank you to the folks from the Collins Center for joining us.

[Milva McDonald]: Thank you.

[Contreas]: Thank you. Thank you all. Good night.

[Unidentified]: Thank you.

[Contreas]: Recording stopped. The recording has stopped.

[Maury Carroll]: Good night, everyone. Thank you.