[Milva McDonald]: Welcome everyone to the Medford Chartered Study final report subcommittee meeting, June 26, 2024. We have two members absent, but hopefully one might show up and we'll, but our task today is basically just sort of make a plan for the final report. So I don't know if you all have. Okay.
[Maury Carroll]: So she'll be here shortly.
[Milva McDonald]: Oh, great. That's awesome. Okay, so I don't know if anybody has had a chance to look at the final reports. I mean, part of our final report is going to actually be the charter. So, you know, the one that was mentioned at our last meeting was Somerville. Somerville is not really comparable to us because they're so much bigger. But their final report, they did create a new charter from scratch the way we are. So it's similar in that way, where a lot of the other final reports just involved edits to the charter. So basically, just looking at a possible structure. The beginning is members. That's pretty easy. I mean, we can just list our members. Some of them included bios. I don't really necessarily think we need to do that. Then there's an introductory letter which just sort of gives acknowledgements and explains our process. I mean, there's different ways to do it. Some of the reports have the next section would be called at a glance. where you know you're sort of given sort of a summary but then the next section oh here's gene could be recommendations which um i think is maybe uh maybe slightly similar but and then The way Somerville did it, they had a community engagement summary next. But, and then they had the charter text and then an appendix. I feel like, you know, we have things, we're going to have hygiene. We're just talking, we're just getting started talking about like what kind, how do we want to structure this report? And I was just giving the example of the way Somerville did it. One thing I saw, I don't know, I mean, how, let's see, I did find, I, we don't have to do this kind of thing. Framing Sam Framingham's wasn't as long, but they did. They did this kind of thing where they had a, I don't know how visual we want to get, you know? Um, they had this chart where they talked about some of the changes that they did and why kind of in a chart. Um, I feel like it's nice to have the visual, but it's also a little bit You know, we could probably get into a deeper explanation with text. Any thoughts? I'd say, sorry.
[Jean Zotter]: Go ahead, Jean. When was the email when you sent out all the sample charters? It was a while ago. And I looked at all of them, but I can't find them.
[Milva McDonald]: It was, yeah, I could look it up. I mean, that, and I just randomly picked those. There's probably other final reports, too. Like, for instance, I just looked at Framingham's this morning, and that wasn't in that bunch. But Somerville's, you know, because Somerville wrote their, wrote a you know a whole charter like ours did some of the some of the charters as I was saying just had edits whereas Somerville's had the entire charter so obviously the charter the draft charter that we that the call center is working on and that we're going to finalize um soon is going to be in Yeah. See, they have, I mean, this is a long report, but basically, it's about 35 pages, and then they have the charter text, which is going to be several pages. And then whatever we choose to put in the appendix.
[Jean Zotter]: So. I liked that one, I think.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah. So the part then we would be responsible for writing and structuring is, you know, the beginning. The members is pretty straightforward. They wrote a whole thing about their process. I mean, we can do that to a certain extent. They had actually a pretty complex process in a way that they voted and whatnot. So, and then, you know, so we can, we can, and then they have this at a glance section.
[Jean Zotter]: I liked that summary. I felt like it gives people don't want to read the whole charter. They can exactly have summary.
[Milva McDonald]: And then they have recommendations. So they, I guess they save the sort of explanation part, you know, to explain what their decisions were based on for the recommendation section. And this part, hmm. Oh, this was just sort of, this is actually more saying what.
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah, I mean, but that that could be helpful. And one of the ones we looked at had like an executive summary of the highlights of the changes, which I thought. Yes. Good to include. This one maybe doesn't have it, but.
[Milva McDonald]: Well, I think it has it sort of in the recommendations.
[Jean Zotter]: Okay.
[Milva McDonald]: You know, where they talked about, so, you know, the kind of their major decisions and how they, what they considered and. Yeah. So, I mean, so a lot of it is semantics, like what are you going to call what, you know? So I think that to open with members, you know, just say who the members are. In our case, there's going to be like a few former members, et cetera. And then the sort of introductory letter, which will sort of acknowledgements like, you know, I'd like to acknowledge all the people who answered our survey, the, you know, the elected officials and city officials who took their time to be interviewed, et cetera.
[David Zabner]: A call-in center.
[Milva McDonald]: Exactly. So that would be, so that's, I guess, what I'm proposing is that we just list the members, and we have this introductory letter. And then from there, we have options. We can do this at a glance, which is, as we just noticed, is kind of a, it's almost like an educational page of, I mean, we could, you know, we could include that. What do people think?
[David Zabner]: I think the at-a-glance is a really good idea, but that we should probably do it last.
[Milva McDonald]: OK. You mean put it at the end of the report?
[David Zabner]: No, no, no, just write it last. After we've written everything else, kind of go back and say, OK, these are the things that we spent a lot of time thinking and writing about and that stand out as important.
[Milva McDonald]: OK. And then the big question is, how do we want to structure We want to sort of write out our major decisions and why we made them and what materials we used. The materials themselves, then how much of that do we include in the appendix, et cetera? Because I don't think we would include those in the recommendations, but we might want to include them in the appendix. Do we want to call that section major recommendations or, I don't know, what else? Let's see. What did they call them? They just, they just, no, they just made this chart. I mean, I'm comfortable with recommendations. I don't know how you guys feel about it.
[David Zabner]: Yeah, I'm comfortable with that as well.
[Milva McDonald]: Okay.
[David Zabner]: So we would.
[Milva McDonald]: Okay, so we would open with just members and intro letter. At a glance, which will fill in later. And recommendations, I think, then our major question is, what are we going to include? Because the charter is long, right? Um, and We can't include every single thing in the charter in that, because a lot of it is standard language. But we want to highlight what our system is.
[Maury Carroll]: I think some of our recommendations, like going to a ward alderman type government that we did, I think that's one of the major points of this charter that's going to affect.
[Milva McDonald]: Definitely.
[Maury Carroll]: Yeah, go ahead.
[Milva McDonald]: No, I agree with you. Ward representation for council. I was just, I noticed that in Somerville's, they actually put as their first recommendation, which I think we could consider because we did the same thing. Where did it go? Oh, I had Somerville. Write a new and modernized charter to just. Yeah, because we could have chosen to just take the existing charter make modifications, which would have been hard in our case because it was just a very nutshell plan A charter. Somerville's, I believe, was from the late 1800s, and I guess that's another reason they put modernized there.
[Maury Carroll]: But what do we think? The term years that we decided for the different forms of government, whether it be the mayor, I think we recommended four years. and school committee state too. I think a lot of the important stuff that we handled, the different articles and so forth, doesn't tickle them like these things do. Of course.
[Milva McDonald]: In terms of putting this in as a recommendation, maintain the mayor council form of government. I mean, that was a big decision that we undertook, but I don't think there was much, there wasn't much controversy about it in the city. I mean, there seemed to be just a general feeling that, you know, nobody wanted to switch from purchasing manager, but we could still include it in our recommendations or,
[David Zabner]: I mean, I think I think in large part, this document should also be driven by the actual. Minutes from all of our meetings, right? Because I think those will really illuminate what it was that we were interested in what we discussed what we were worried about. And. Yeah, I mean, like, if maintaining the mayor council system doesn't show up in the minutes, like, clearly, as a group, we didn't think it was even worth talking about. Because we're happy with the way it works now.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah, I'm sure it's going to show up in the minutes. So let's leave that could be a possibility. So I guess, David, what I'm hearing you saying is, Maybe the best way to approach this is to review the minutes and pull up, maybe, I mean, I would maybe even just sort of look at what we voted on.
[David Zabner]: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it also, those things that we voted on, especially where we were split, it's, I think, really good there to put kind of what was the reasoning behind Certainly behind the folks who won the vote, we can decide whether or not we also want to put something from kind of the folks who didn't win the vote. But I think anywhere where we voted and it wasn't nearly unanimous, we should say, like, this was clearly a place where we were split. These are the reasonings behind we made the choice we made. Because I think it's fair to assume that the things we're split on are the same things that other people are going to have questions about.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah. Okay, so that could be an approach that would make sense.
[Maury Carroll]: Yeah, I gotta tell you, I gotta agree with Dabita. I think that's a great point, a great way of handling it. You know, it shows people that we just weren't rubber stamping things and that we are just going through the motions here that there was, you know, good, positive discussion, which ended up the vote one way or the other, you know? So I think that's important for the public to see that, the effort that went into this.
[Jean Zotter]: Awesome. I was just thinking, I think that's good. I wouldn't. It'd be nice to keep this short and sweet and not too lengthy because so maybe it's just this was a split vote, but you don't have to say like, who they were, or, you know, certainly not who they were.
[David Zabner]: I think it's anything. The thing I was going to say is we should speak with one voice. And so the places where the vote was split are the places, like, I think that's going to point towards things we should probably include in our recommendations, right? This is a thing we thought about. Here's the reasoning behind what we ended up doing. There's a piece of me always that feels like the folks who didn't win the vote should also get a voice in there. But I think it's probably better to speak with one voice as a committee and say, like, here was the thinking. But I'm going to guess the place where we are unanimous, it's unlikely that like city councilors or random citizens or the mayor are going to be like, why would they ever have decided to do this? Yeah. That makes sense.
[Milva McDonald]: But part of our thinking, when we outline it, will, I think, inevitably include what we considered. And, you know, like, well, we weighed this, but ultimately, you know, because it's not like these issues are black and white, some of them. It's not like, oh, everything we looked at said to do this. Like, there could be, you know, there would be ups and downs to certain decisions. So we wanted to show that we considered it all.
[Jean Zotter]: Well, I was thinking maybe keep it to the big policy decisions. We had a lot of many votes on, you know, things that weren't always. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, would be more high level, I think, then the recommendation section.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah. Yeah. So and then the other thing I was, you know, so, so I guess so we have a couple of ideas before us, we have, well, we go through the minutes, we look at our votes, we decide what the recommendations are. Or we go through now because all of us know kind of what the big things are. And we make a list of what we want to include in the recommendations. And then we review the minutes anyway and see if there's anything we want to add. And the other piece I was just thinking is because the other question we're going to have to answer is, well, OK, how are we going to write this? We have some people who are willing to write. But if we want to, you know, I mean, we can. I mean, we want it to be consistent. We can do that in the editing, but maybe we should consider what's the format we want for these sections so that somebody doesn't just write two pages of text, and then somebody uses bullet points. I don't know. Does that make any sense?
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah. If we like Somerville, we could try to follow them with edits or something, or if we had some kind of guide.
[Milva McDonald]: We could, I mean, you know, they sort of, for every recommendation, they did policy considerations and community feedback, that's what they included. You know, they named the recommendation and then... I like that. Yeah. I mean, we don't... Yeah, so... You know, and then things like, for instance, for the ward representation for city council, we looked at so much data, right? We looked at, you know, the historical level of representation from the different wards and things like that. I feel that it would be important to include that, but then how do we include that in We have to try to keep it concise in this section and then maybe, I don't know. Yeah, that's the other thing we're going to have to decide. There's going to be a huge appendix if we're going to include, well, we're going to include this survey report, I thought, I think. We'll include your listening sessions wrap up. But so then the question is, do we want to include, some of the materials that we created for the word, you know, all those charts and graphs. Yeah. And, you know, I'm thinking we might also have like a, I don't know if we should footnote it. For instance, we looked at some studies, right? So if we're saying, well, we looked at these studies on word representation, like I, you know, and then footnote them. So I don't know how people, I don't see any of these final reports footnoted, but do you think that's a little over the top? What do you think?
[Jean Zotter]: I don't think it is for this city council.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Okay.
[Jean Zotter]: I think they might track those footnotes down and look at them.
[Milva McDonald]: Okay. Okay. So we can propose right now to make a list of recommendations that we know we want to include in the final report and then review the minutes and the votes and see if we want to add anything. Does that make sense? So, so far we have the, just the recommendation for a new, that we decided to write a new charter as opposed to, I don't, I mean, how do we feel about that? Is that kind of like an obvious for Medford? So obvious that we don't have, I mean, it was our first decision that we had to make.
[Jean Zotter]: I don't think it is just, we did have to vote on it. And yeah, we voted to follow the new model charter or the as a yeah, there's a it's an opportunity to educate people that have good point. We don't have to do the plan A, B, C, that we could take pieces from. We're not required to pick a plan.
[Milva McDonald]: That's a good point. Then the other one we talked about that might come next would be to keep mayor council. Then there was the ward representation for city council. Is there any other, in terms of just that section of the charter that outlines the city council, did we make any other major changes in that? We didn't change the term. We may have made, we didn't change how they elect president and vice president. We may have ended up, We may have ended up putting in some details about certain authorities that the council president has, right? But maybe that doesn't need to be like in these recommendations in the nutshell, what do you think?
[Jean Zotter]: Is the appointments, is that in article two or is that somewhere else? Yeah, I'm trying to remember.
[David Zabner]: Yeah, so I just pulled up my notes from from the article 2 and 3 subcommittee. And we definitely spent a fair amount of time. Just kind of making sure we were happy with appointment powers and we spent a lot of time talking about. When the city council could override the mayor. And I think a lot of that kind of came from. We kept on talking to people who said that they wanted the city council to have a little bit more power. And so we, I think, strengthened in some small ways the city council's ability to override the mayor. And in other ways, we were like, we decided, for example, that the city council, I think, can't, like, block mayoral appointments, if I remember correctly.
[Milva McDonald]: Well, no, we said that they would have confirmation power from multi-member boards.
[David Zabner]: Not not for department. Yeah, right. And so, like, that's the thing I think we could explain kind of just our. Even though I didn't agree with that, right? Our thinking was that with the department heads, they are direct employees of the mayor. And so, like, the city council being inserted in there was inappropriate. Because it kind of confuses the issue of who do they work for. Okay.
[Milva McDonald]: So if we under, like we could maybe do, the third recommendation could be just about the city council. So then we would have board representation, confirmation power from multi-member boards or confirmation power in general, and then we can discuss. And then I also think the other thing that we did that I think is significant is include align allowing the city council to hire staffs to appropriation. Right.
[David Zabner]: So, um, and also I think to call the mayor and staff, uh, we can, they can compel mayoral attendance and city employee attendance of city council meetings. That was another big power we gave them. Um, I mean, I just, in general, I really liked the way Somerville is doing it, where we can kind of put multiple recommendations on there.
[Milva McDonald]: Well, yeah, they did it by article. Yeah, so we could do that. So although they started with their first recommendation for, oh, they did it by article. Oh, that's why their number, so general. Okay. Writing the noon chart and maintain. So those are under general. And then they go into the articles. OK, yeah. OK, so that so that's what we so that's for legislative and I have asked a question about.
[Jean Zotter]: The vacancy stuff that we did is that new or is that existing? Do we need to highlight that just like we spent some time talking about? You know, maybe more on the mayor side. Maybe it was less on City Council, Someone leaves, how they're replaced. Do we need to highlight that?
[David Zabner]: I think it's new and we've made it more specific, but I don't know that it's the kind of thing. I know we discussed it, but I don't know that anybody would find our final answer controversial, if that makes sense.
[Milva McDonald]: I think so too, but we didn't change the city council. I think the vacancy procedure for filling a city council, it's the same. I think we might have added something in case that layer didn't produce anyone, basically.
[Jean Zotter]: Right. It could be appointed by the chair. I forget.
[David Zabner]: We just said that the city council can appoint someone if If everything else fails, they can choose somebody. Yeah, right.
[Milva McDonald]: Okay, so after the legislative branch would be the mayor, the executive branch, and obviously the mayor, that was the four-year term, is probably the biggest change, right? And the term limit. And the term limit, exactly. Four-year term and four-term limit. We liked the fours there. We didn't do that on purpose. It's four terms, right? Four times four, 16. That's what we, I think that's what we decided.
[David Zabner]: Technically, if, if some, like, we said that the mayor can only be elected four times. So if they are appointed, they could like technically do 17 and a half years or something like that. But yeah. Okay.
[Milva McDonald]: So is there anything else major in the executive section that we remember? I can't recall.
[Jean Zotter]: The absent vacancy stuff that we did we spend some time on that, but was it just wordsmithing? Well, I think maybe there wasn't.
[Milva McDonald]: Did we talk about what the process is now for filling a mayoral vacancy? We did do stuff, we did sort of say if the mayor's incapacitated, we did stuff like that.
[Jean Zotter]: Right, okay. That's a different section.
[Milva McDonald]: Maybe that was in the executive branch section. But I don't know how much we want to get into the vacancy thing.
[Jean Zotter]: Okay. Yeah, I'm just trying to be thorough, but.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. No, we can always, it's better to put everything on and we can always decide, okay, we won't include that in the recommendations. See, they.
[David Zabner]: Decided that the mayor can call special meetings of the city council. I don't know if that's new or different than it previously was. I think that's really the only change we made to the mayor.
[Milva McDonald]: I'm going to put down vacancy process question marks. Yeah. That could be. Okay, then school committee. School committee. This was a big one because we had the ward representation, but then with the combined wards. But we'll just call it, I mean, it's a change to ward representation. That's just the process for implementing it.
[Jean Zotter]: Right.
[Milva McDonald]: So that's probably the biggest change, right?
[Jean Zotter]: I think we have to address the mayor's chair, since that was the last feedback we got, even though we voted to keep it. The group voted.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah, see, they didn't switch to ward or they didn't recommend switching to ward. No, wait a minute. They must have had a ward base. That's why they kept it. OK, got it. Sorry. I was just reading this. Yeah, we have to address the chair issue, definitely. Other than changing the composition and addressing the chair issue, were there any other big changes in that section? I mean, maybe we should, like, for instance, talk about the terms, because we've talked about why we kept them at two years, maybe for both city council and So maybe that term should be under both of them. Yeah.
[Jean Zotter]: Under general, do we want to do compensation? Did we?
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah, we've got to bring that because we did make that.
[Jean Zotter]: And I know there's everyone.
[Milva McDonald]: And it's, yeah. Unless we end up putting it under the article that it's going to go under, which I, Not exactly sure what it is yet, because the call-in center is working in wherever it's supposed to go. It might be later in the charter.
[Jean Zotter]: In the model charter, it's under each article.
[Milva McDonald]: Oh, well, each article does say, you mean for how the people are, how they're compensated?
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah, there's a compensation section under two.
[Milva McDonald]: We have that too, because the compensation will still be decided by ordinance. However, we also made that recommendation to put in the charter that there would be an advisory committee formed to research the compensation.
[Jean Zotter]: And that part comes late. That's what I meant comes late. Oh, OK. That's in Article 6, maybe, the budget. Yeah. OK.
[Milva McDonald]: But we, but maybe we, maybe, yeah, we'll have to figure out where to put compensation just as a, because it is a general topic and it was a hot topic that came up. So maybe that goes under general. That's a good point. Okay. So there wasn't, I don't think there was any other big thing that I can recall on the school committee. Article five was we were letting, Collins interdrafted, but interesting. The article six, that was a big one, right? Yeah. So, I mean, honestly, I don't know how much of the things that we put in Article 6 were changes to the process because we didn't really have, we didn't, there wasn't, the only timeline that's been used is kind of the state law timeline, right? I don't think it's been in the charter.
[Jean Zotter]: I feel like my brain is, but didn't we recommend adopting the timeline that they're currently working under or no? The timeline that's been negotiated between city council.
[Milva McDonald]: I mean, we wanted to make sure that nothing we put in the charter conflicted with that because that's important. But we did add an annual budget meeting. We did that.
[Jean Zotter]: We that this is probably where we put that sentence that we voted on about the next charter review shouldn't include a more thorough.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah, that could go under the under this particular section of the final report, yes. And. Just seeing how. So I get, I feel like for this one, for this particular section of the final report, we just, we sort of have to use the draft of article six that we created and basically just pull out the major parts of the timeline and put it in. Sure. Timeline. Article seven was elections and sort of, I feel like one of the main things we did there was the ballot position. Right?
[Jean Zotter]: Does that go? I don't think that's there. It was an article. That's article eight is the citizen. You mean citizen initiative measures?
[Milva McDonald]: No, no. For elections, we decided that the ballot position. Oh, OK.
[Adam Hurtubise]: Yeah.
[Milva McDonald]: All right. Would no longer be automatically alphabetical order, basically, right? So ballot position was a big thing. And Maury, do you remember, because you were on this, did we make any other major decisions?
[Maury Carroll]: It's funny, I was just trying to think the same thing on this one here, because they all kind of played together with me. I don't think so.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah, I don't think we did either. I mean, we didn't change any eligibility requirements to run for office. Did we change any signature requirements?
[Maury Carroll]: Not that I know of.
[Milva McDonald]: We'll just write maybe signature requirements because that was a big issue in it. I mean, we didn't put any big thing in here about changing who can vote or anything like that. Like Somerville tried to do. I don't actually know what status of this chart, this
[Maury Carroll]: But they try to do rank choice voting, right?
[Milva McDonald]: They did, yeah. And I don't know if it's still with the city council. I don't know. I think it got very, I think it got stalled once they submitted this. Article 8, the big one is regular charter review. And we can talk about... No, that's...
[Jean Zotter]: That's article nine. Article eight is the free petition.
[Milva McDonald]: Thank you. Maybe they didn't put that in the Somerville Charter. You're right. Thank you. Article eight was citizen participation mechanisms. We did a lot of stuff in that.
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah. There's a recall.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah. That one, again, we probably have to use the actual text. I mean, the recall is going to be a big one to explain. Yeah.
[Jean Zotter]: What do you mean by use the actual text?
[Milva McDonald]: Just look at the text and pull out the main parts of it that we think we should highlight in this. Because it was a lot in it. That's what I'm saying.
[Milva McDonald]: I mean, recalls for sure.
[Maury Carroll]: Was there a residency requirement or something like that? Did that even go through?
[Milva McDonald]: That was for multi-member boards.
[Maury Carroll]: Right. That's right. OK.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah. I mean, because we did the initiative petition. I mean, there was a lot in there.
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah. Maybe one heading could be like citizen initiative petitions, because that's the two, the get it on the agenda, and the ballot, and then there could be And would a referendum come under that? Because that's where you try to recall an ordinance, right?
[Maury Carroll]: I figure a council or mayor can initiate a petition too and vote on it and send it to the legislature body or the House of Reps. I think so. Am I right, Melva? Councils initiate their own petition and not put it in front of the voters.
[Milva McDonald]: Well, this particular section, Article 8, was mostly about the voters, right? Yeah.
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah, it was about citizen-led initiatives. Yeah, yeah. Right. So there's recall, referendum, and ballot initiatives.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Recall, referendums, ballot positions. OK. And then Article 9, we ended up doing a lot in Article 9. Which I think was general, now we're in general provisions. So periodic charter review we did. Well. I don't think we, I think we didn't have a periodic ordinance review. So that's, that was another thing that we decided on. We did not establish a periodic review of multiple member bodies, but we did put some other stuff in article nine. So maybe we have to just look that over in the minutes, look over minutes. And then, you know, this article, this transition provisions are pretty letter, boilerplate, and the Collins Center is going to do that for us. So, look, they, this is sort of what, similar to what we did, but they put it in just later. We actually, I think, we're going to put it in our charter, not just recommend. I don't know, I can't remember if we voted to put it in the charter or just recommend that the city council create an ordinance. That's something we'll have to look for minutes for. Yeah. Okay. So let's say we do the sections we talked about and then later we can decide what goes in the appendix and that will probably become more clear as we actually write the report so now the question is the actual drafting of it i mean we have go ahead we're putting in a community engagement section right i think yeah so in the if we do this introductory letter it will sort of talk about all the elements i mean we'll definitely include in the appendix You know, the survey report, the listening sessions, do we want to actually put, devote like a page or a certain section of the final report to community engagement? I think we should. Okay.
[David Zabner]: I think it's like a way of showing we did our thing. Yeah. I think we should also, like, that's something that should also definitely show up on the whatever the like one or two pages with the most important points that we should put probably at the front as like marketing material practically you know a lot of times people call like an executive summary we should put that in there as well right like the we want people to know that we really did reach out we really did listen to a lot of opinions from a lot of people um i think that's important to let people know
[Milva McDonald]: Okay, so just let's just go, let's just review the actual structure of what we're talking about now. First, we have, we're going to have members, then an introductory letter with, you know, just kind of acknowledge people or whatever, and etc. And we talked about at a glance, which is more like sort of informational, right, but that will And then we talked about the recommendations. And then we would have the draft charter and then the appendix. So where would we put the community engagement or the other section you were just talking about?
[Jean Zotter]: I would put it before the policy recommendations or the maybe it's the letter. like a summary of our process or something, just like how many meetings we had. And I feel like you want to kind of summarize the process we had, and part of it would be community engagement.
[Milva McDonald]: I was thinking about that. I was thinking about doing that in the introductory letter. But if we want to highlight community engagement, we could also do that. Because we did, we did, we did. I mean, it was pretty impressive. You know, the listening sessions were impressive. And so So it could be talked about and then we can have a sort of a... So if we put that after the introductory letter, then we would have members, introductory letter, community engagement, at a glance, which I feel should probably go before the recommendations because it's pretty much describing all the different sections of the charter. Then the recommendations by article. then the charter, then the appendix. And this is obviously not set in stone. If as we're working, something else makes more sense, we could do it. But does that sound reasonable? Yeah. Okay.
[Jean Zotter]: So the drafting. Well, I can write the community engagement. Okay. And I was thinking maybe do we divvy up the I was wondering, Milva, if you wanted to write the letter. Yeah, I'll do that. As the chair. And then do we divvy up the recommendation sections by article, and people take an article, and we all take, like we just say which articles we, maybe the ones that you were on.
[Milva McDonald]: Or people who want to, you know, I mean, assuming that, who's interested in drafting?
[Jean Zotter]: I can help draft.
[Milva McDonald]: OK. And Phyllis, I think I got the impression that Phyllis would. Did you? From the email when she said she couldn't come, but she said to give her a task. I guess it's not necessarily writing. I don't know.
[David Zabner]: I'm happy to help or draft or edit either. I'm probably better at editing than I am at drafting. OK.
[Maury Carroll]: I'm with you, Daveed. Drafting is not my strength. I mean, I'm good at one.
[Milva McDonald]: Well, that if you, maybe you, I mean, I don't know. I'm going to throw out an idea. Maybe this is crazy. And I don't know if Gene is going to go for this. I say, what if me and Gene split the drafting and Maury, Phyllis, and Daveed edit? Unless you want to draft a section. Maybe you want to do a short one, Daveed. I don't know. It's up to you. You're good with that. How do you feel about that, Gene? Is that too much?
[Jean Zotter]: Well, we're trying to keep it short and sweet, because people need something that long. So yeah, we have July, right?
[Adam Hurtubise]: OK.
[Jean Zotter]: But that's our timeline. I'm on vacation next week, so I could start the week after. OK.
[Milva McDonald]: So I'll propose that I will do articles two and three Article four, article five, I don't even know what we're gonna say about it. We'll just leave that in question right now.
[Jean Zotter]: I'll do the citizens petition one. Okay. So that's eight. Yeah, I'll do eight. I can help with the war if you want, because I did all the demographic stuff.
[Milva McDonald]: Okay, that would be under two and three, so.
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah, if you want, you can, if you want help with that.
[Milva McDonald]: So that leaves the school committee, the budget, financial procedures, elections, and then the general provisions, which sort of had a lot of stuff in it, but maybe not all stuff that we would highlight heavily in the recommendations.
[Jean Zotter]: I wasn't at the meeting for some of the votes on the school committee. I'll do that one too. Okay. So wait, which ones are you're doing two and three, Melva? And four. And four. Five, we're leaving open. I did six because I was on the budget. Yeah. I didn't, I wasn't on this article seven.
[Milva McDonald]: I'll do that one too. That one's going to be short because it's, you know, it's mostly about the ballot position and Maybe signatures, we'll have to look at. Okay, so that actually gets us started. Article 9 will just sort of hold. Does that make sense? You've got the budget, Article 6 and 8. 8. So what about just the other thing, David, would you be interested in doing the minutes and slash votes review?
[David Zabner]: Yeah, I'm happy to go through that.
[Milva McDonald]: Okay, and I'm pretty sure I'll have them all in a folder. You know, I'm going to have to look. I probably do. Every time they're approved, do they get posted on the website? Yeah, I send them to Emma, and I actually have never looked to see where she posts them, but they're posted somewhere on our website. So I don't know what kind of order they're in, you know, like if they're chronological or if they're just thrown into a folder, but let me just look right now. manfordmad.org slash charter study. And come on computer. If you scroll down, you see meeting minutes. And there are, there's a folder. Yeah. So yeah, they're not necessarily in, they're just in.
[David Zabner]: I'll run through them all. I'll, you know, try and compile kind of important bits.
[Milva McDonald]: And they only get posted once they're approved. So like the last meeting we had won't be there. But if you see anything missing, I can send you whatever didn't get posted.
[David Zabner]: Well, and I have all of the meetings. Since I joined the committee, I have them in my email as well. So it's really for the ones in 2023 before I joined that I was interested. And they're all there. So this seems perfect.
[Milva McDonald]: Thanks. So I guess the question is, when do we want to reconvene?
[Jean Zotter]: What's our drafting? When do we want to have the final draft done with everybody reviewed?
[Milva McDonald]: I mean, the Collins Center, hopefully as we speak, is working on the draft charter that they're going to get to us, and everyone's going to read that. But the final report, So in August, we're supposed to get together to just sort of finalize the draft charter. I feel like it would be good if we had the final report ready by, I would like to say September 1st. Does that seem unreasonable?
[Jean Zotter]: Oh, no, I thought it was end of July.
[Milva McDonald]: Oh, no, I don't think we, I mean, because I'm thinking August 3rd, we're going to meet to talk, providing that we have it, which I think we will, we're going to meet to talk about the actual draft of the charter, right? And there's going to be questions on that. And, you know, maybe things that we have to tighten up or whatever. And the Collins Center will be with us for that. So, assuming that might take a couple of me, I mean, maybe September meeting. Hopefully we'll have enough time to finalize. The draft charter and then look at this final report. I mean, the ideal actually. You know what? Let's because I would, yeah, let let's say August. August. 12th. How about that?
[Jean Zotter]: Is that August 12th is for you and me to finish our writing for you to review?
[Milva McDonald]: Or no, I'm looking I'm saying I'm talking about August 12th as a deadline for the final report, because then we could give it to the committee. Because they're they're gonna have to vote on it. And the ideal situation is that we finish in October. I mean, that's, that's our That's Steve's date that I'm trying to get everybody towards. If we finish by August 12th, then that will give people a couple of weeks to read it for the September meeting. But you know what? If it's a week later than that, whatever.
[Jean Zotter]: Maybe we should have our, Maury and Debbie, do you need a week, two weeks to review?
[Maury Carroll]: I think I could do it in a week, you know.
[Milva McDonald]: So, and the other question, so yeah, so I would like to have these, let's see. It's right now, it's June 25th. June is July 15th, an unreasonable deadline to just finish those two, to finish those things.
[Jean Zotter]: Let's see. And that's so that we can read each other's stuff before we send it to Maury.
[Milva McDonald]: No, that would be. Well, I guess I'm trying to connect this in my mind with the next time we're going to meet where hopefully then we would have like actual material that we that maybe David and Maury will have read and edited and fill us and. And then maybe at our next meeting, after everybody's read the drafts and we. can go through whatever edits we need, then we sort of can put it together and see what's left to do. And then we'll have about a month to do whatever's left to do. Does that make sense?
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah. It'd be better if we could have it do the 22nd. OK. Just because I'm away all next week, so.
[Milva McDonald]: Yeah, that's fine. And as I finish things, I'll create a folder like a Google, a folder. I mean, eventually this will all go into one document, but I'll create a folder and just create separate documents for like the different introductory letter or articles two and three, et cetera. And then we can do that so that they'll be available for people to read as they get finished.
[Jean Zotter]: So I create a lot of like legislative reports for the state. So I can format it. Like if you give me the pieces, I know how to use, I have Microsoft Word and I can create headings that are all consistent and stuff like that. I mean, that can maybe be at the end. We can have the drafts of the pieces, but. Yeah.
[Milva McDonald]: So if we use Google Docs to work on it, would that interact with whatever you're going to be using to format it at the end?
[Jean Zotter]: I think that's fine. I don't like Google Docs. I don't like its formatting. I work in Google Docs, but what I would do is just download it all into Microsoft.
[Milva McDonald]: I mean, I only suggested that because it just seemed it's the only way I know of really, other than Dropbox. Yeah.
[Jean Zotter]: Yeah. Then sharing. I have a Teams account. We could use my Teams account, which is, but well, maybe we shouldn't do that.
[David Zabner]: So yeah. I think Google Docs is probably better for while we're working on it. And then again, I mean, you can format it. I also, I regularly use a typesetting software that's really pretty called LaTeX. So either one of those works. I mean, people are much more used to seeing how Microsoft Word things look, but we can do... Yeah, whatever. Formatting doesn't take a long time.
[Milva McDonald]: Okay, so this is awesome. We have a plan for putting together this, and I'll create the folder. We can put everything in it. I guess the next question is, do we want to have another meeting? I mean, if we're making July 22nd the deadline for getting everything written, should we look at the calendar in front of me? Let's see.
[David Zabner]: Let's maybe meet around that week to see if there's anything else that needs to happen, anything else that needs to get written, anything surprising that we need to argue about.
[Maury Carroll]: Maybe the 15th, just to have a discussion or something like that or some day.
[Milva McDonald]: Or talk about sort of how things are going. Is this plan even working?
[Maury Carroll]: We have to push it out of the week or whatever.
[Milva McDonald]: What day of the week? Do you have a calendar? What day of the week? This is so weird.
[Maury Carroll]: 15th is a Monday.
[Milva McDonald]: 15th is a Monday. Can people meet on a Monday?
[Maury Carroll]: 22nd is Monday also that we established already.
[Milva McDonald]: How about that week? Week of the 15th, what works for people?
[David Zabner]: I'm free from July 10th to September 1st, so you all just let me know. Nice.
[Jean Zotter]: Are you saying evenings? Days are a little easier for me. Whatever works. Days are easier.
[Maury Carroll]: Monday. I like the days. I just like to see it start a little bit later, if you don't mind. Maybe start at 3.30 or somewhere around there.
[Milva McDonald]: Is Monday at 3.30, July 15th?
[Maury Carroll]: Monday I'm off. I can do any time you want.
[Milva McDonald]: Gene, does that work for you?
[Maury Carroll]: Yep.
[Milva McDonald]: All right, July 15th, 3.30 is our next meeting. I'll send out minutes. I just want to see if any members of the public have any comments or questions or anything. No, okay. Thank you for being here. Hi, Marie. Okay, that's awesome. Well, we have work to do, but thank you, everybody, and we'll see you soon.
[Maury Carroll]: Thanks, everyone.
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