Azusa Unified School District Board Meeting - October 12, 2021

001we can go ahead and start good evening everyone today is october 12 2021 and i want to welcome you guys all to our governance meeting that is taking place today and i would like to go ahead and start calling to order this government workshop of the asusa unified school district to order we're going to go ahead and get started with um our flag salute 1.2 do we have hunter fee from slauson i'm here yeah hi hunter how are you doing i'm good how are you great great long time no see yesterday we saw you at chick-fil-a uh yeah right right um thank you for coming out and supporting your schools uh yesterday um we got to see a lot of the students at the fundraiser with the asusa and gladstone fundraiser um kickoff that we

002had yesterday we'll go ahead and get started when when you are hunter or you're going to lead us in the flag salute all right please stand for the flexor put your right hand over your heart ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all you may be seated thank you so much for leading us in the flag split today and uh did you guys enjoy your chick-fil-a at home yeah it was good awesome awesome to hear well tell your mom thank you so much for allowing you to join us today and and with our flag salute for our governance workshop today on october 12 2021 and i will let you go

003because you probably have homework or things to attend and so thanks again and say hello to your parents from us thank you thank you bye bye go ahead and move on to 1.3 we have a row call we'll start with board member cruz gonzalez president board member here board member beau here board member rodriguez pena president and board member arianis myself i am here there's five of us thank you we'll go ahead and move on to 2.1 approval of agenda can i please get a motion to move 2.1 motion to approve 2.1 great we have a first motion by board member rodriguez pena and we have a second by board member rare if we can go ahead and do a roll call vote since um we will go ahead and start with board member cruz

004gonzalez yes board member greer yes board member beau yes and board member rodriguez pena yes and i myself board member ariana's yes it passes 5-0 and i want to go ahead and let the public know we we welcome your public comments on agenda or non-agenda items which moves us to our agenda item 3.1 do we have anyone in the audience that would like to go ahead and um leave a comment at this time i'm sorry what was that i apologize uh we do not have anybody online great thank you lika for checking on that and we'll go ahead and move on to our general functions and today we we we have um in our board governance workshop we have parliamentary process 4.1 and i'll go ahead and turn the time over we have our legal

005counsel mr carlos here today to to go ahead and lead us with with this um with this item thank you madam board president i'm going to move this little closer okay if i take my mask off while i'm presenting it'll make everything a little bit more clear and i'm tend to be a low talker but if the room fills up and everybody runs in to hear more about robert wilson i'll probably math a couple of things uh i think anybody closer to the mic and if i'm not mistaken i think our protocol indoors for education has to have a mask i appreciate that recalibration there superintendent ortega well he's putting on his mech i do want to remind um our cabinet and our our board that it's very important we speak into the mic as

006uh i went back and saw our board meeting uh this last board meeting there was a few times where i could not hear some of your comments um so we can kindly just speak into the mic so that way we are we are recorded um and i also tend to be a low talker i'm going to make sure that i kind of speak right directly into the mic i'm going to pull up my powerpoint presentation here that we can all follow along and i think at this point that means i'm going to have fear okay here we are well thank you everybody for giving me some time to kind of lead us in the governance training here focused on robert's rules of order and when we first scheduled the training i don't think we anticipated

007that the dodgers were going to be playing the giants in the playoff night that was not intentional we didn't do that to clear the room um usually robert's roles is a big draw and so everybody comes piling in for it actually it was one of the the first things that i ever did as an attorney was kind of lead a a big uh dac meeting and a bunch of angry parents through a robertsville border presentation and so it was kind of riveting but it also gave me some direction about how important robert's goals of order can be or governing bodies moving forward so just a little bit of background about robert jewels of order and what we're going to be doing today really what the purpose is my big picture look at robert schools of

008order is that it allows you to have a meeting and to get through all the different process and make sure that everybody's heard in a meeting and kind of make sure you stay away from certain stumbling blocks that can happen with meetings and i've matter of fact i'm on a board i've sat on non-profits as well when you don't have a process sometimes things can feel a little bit like a food fight and they can take two or three hours until really robert's pools of order are there to kind of give us the clear process and how to proceed now one thing i do want to focus on here is the interplay between robert schools of order and the brown app right and so and i think this is probably a good thing to lead

009with here i've looked at your board policies i looked at your board bylaws in no place have i seen that the board has formally adopted robert world of order but there was an exhibit that i believe now csba is no longer adopting and i believe the district will won't be having that exhibit in anymore even though it is technically on the website right now there is an exhibit that shows some parliamentary some parliamentary procedure some parts of robert's world but what that tells me and just in looking at the practice of the board is robertsville is established here to use and it should be a fool but when we're thinking you know and we're up all weekend and we're kind of worrying about what happened in the board reading i'll tell you as legal counsel

010the number one thing you want to be worried about is the brownie right the brown act is really there to make sure that all of the actions of the school district are happening in public and the rob robert schools will be there as a tool to get us through these different meetings and i want to make sure that as we go along we're not conflating the two and i have some hypotheticals for you at the end that will really help you see where it's not always clear where robert's role stop and where the brown act begins we can jump into a little bit of background i'm not gonna gonna belabor this but ultimately it was created by henry robert and the idea was to give local legislative bodies the ability to use congressional procedures and

011so we're not going to make it a four hour presentation but ultimately it's the idea that if you don't have a compass if you don't know how to have the process um it can be problematic and i've seen some some of the meetings and i think um the board really has tried i think to adhere to robert's rules across the board and just how you're conducting business i want to i want to emphasize that today ultimately the right of the majority to make those decisions and i've seen most of your votes tend to be 4-1 or unanimous so the idea is that even in a 4-1 vote or in a 3-2 vote the minority has that opportunity to be hurt in fact that's kind of like a basic tenet of democracy that the minority can

012be heard but it doesn't mean that the minority can stop the meeting in its track there has to be a process where they're heard and then you can still conduct the business of the district now again rights of individual board members to participate this isn't something i've seen um in my observation of the meetings i've been present i haven't seen any problems with that necessarily but i do think the way that board members participate is critical right it has to be in a in a productive way in a way that they're heard and then the districts the majority of the board's majority and still proceed now ultimately the board does have the right to create more rules and regulations but as i mentioned to you there's nothing in there that i see it really speaks

013to robert schools being adopted it's more of an informal practice here in the district all right now what i would normally do in a situation like this is i would walk around the room and i would try to get feedback from each one of you but i'll stay here at the podium and i want to encourage you though if you want to interrupt me and ask a question don't feel the need to wait go ahead and throw it at me and that's kind of what i'm expecting here tonight but also ultimately the brown act is really about making sure that all the board's actions are transparent and beyond just being transparent that the public had noticed of what was going to be on the agenda and had an opportunity to come and participate in that

014process so a lot of times things that you can do under robert's rules you may not be able to do under the brown act because of the strict adherence to agendizing matter we talked a little bit about robert's rules and the need for order and the efficiency and ultimately again i'm going to hammer this point brown act is the law robertsville's as a procedural guide and i do think that a certain amount of formality can help you through meetings um they can help make sure that the minorities voice the heard and it also helps the board to portray itself um in the best way possible to the public because i think ultimately that's what the public wants to see when they log in they want to be able to see the board adhering to certain

015types of formality and then the board taking care of it i think that's that's ultimately as a constituent which you want to see out of your local governing board now if there is a conflict and we'll talk about this later in one of the hypotheticals the brown act control and again the brown act is what's going to keep me up at night um the brown act is the thing that we have to make sure that there's no there's no problems or procedural problems with brown egg and if there are there are ways to cure those but it's really not a space that you want to be in so and i want to go back one second if there is a minor problem with the robert's rules of order that does not mean that there is

016a brownneck violate i just want to hammer that just just so that when everybody leaves we know there can be a slight issue in terms of the motion you know was it was it a main motion was it a secondary move was it a procedural motion um does the system only allow for one vote do we have to do a hand recording of the next vote all of those things can be worked out among the board the big the biggest thing though would be there's a brown act violation and then that becomes an issue and it could potentially invalidate the entire act all right but robert wool's problems by themselves will not invalidate the board action okay so i'm going to get into a few of these things and keep in mind the terminology i'm

017using is directly from robert's rules of order so if if i use the phrase and you don't recognize the phrase do not despair we can kind of unpack it and see if it matters what i wanted to do was pull as much of this terminology directly from robert's rules and also from the old exhibit that the district had just so that you can get a sense of what these things are so carlos please i'll be the first to interrupt just to go back to your hammering of the point just so that i'm processing it correctly um we post the agenda 12 hours before the meeting brown act violation there's problems absolutely and i would say no amount of robert's rules is going to fix that correct uh we're having a board meeting somebody makes a

018motion to approve something we forget to do a second and we go right into voting the voting takes place it passes five to zero later on somebody says ooh no that that's not that's not okay there was never a second that's not equivalent to i posted the agenda 12 hours before the meeting nope i'd say minor robert's rules issue but all five board members clearly recorded their vote and the public had an opportunity to participate i say we move forward and i think and i appreciate that superintendent ortega i think he was making a point of order so it's kind of fitting that you did that right now but ultimately a point of order would be to correct a breach in the rules and in my mind it's only used for major infraction so this

019is not um it's not the floor of the senate and so and all the meetings that i've seen i've never seen any of the board members make a point of order um i haven't seen that happen but ultimately let's say for example you had a main motion that was considering a contract so and i want to be as um completely hypothetical as possible let's say you have a contract with an outside vendor who's going to come clean the sidewalk in front of the school and there is a motion on the floor and then another board member says why move to have a different contract that's going to clean the driveway completely different contract different vendor at that point the second board member would be out of order that would be an infraction because there's currently

020a motion before the board and we're going to talk about this a little bit but whoever has the responsibility of chairing the meeting that person really needs to recognize the board member who wants to speak before that motion is even made um and that's it's not a fun fun job to have at these types of meetings i've shared meetings and it often um it's like you're having you will have you have extra work when you're at the meetings but a motion like that would be out of order that we would say point of order there's been an infraction please so what happens if they do a substitute motion well the point i was making is that we're doing a two main motion and so a point of order saying there's been an infraction that's out

021of order at this point in time that was the hypothetical i was trying to build but if we have a substitute motion and the way i've looked at it is motion to amend or supplant the original motion that would make sense it just would depend on i think normally our practice is too if somebody doesn't like that not not just a point of order but also like explain like what we could do so that people understand what went wrong that makes sense and i think what i'm trying to do is give you some tools from robert's rules of order and and again this doesn't mean that at your next board meeting there's going to be 20 points of order the idea is that there's actually a parliamentary process where we can say that particular motion

022is out of order at this point in time and so we need to take a pause and get back the original main motion um but as the board member suggested there are other exceptions to the exception and the robert's rule of order is only about four or 500 pages the one that i was reviewing and so there's a lot of different things that you can do in the context of these board meetings that may make a particular motion acceptable for the moment please so for example i have a question um when we have a uh board action right and um and one of the board members wants to split it up how do how do we move forward with that but that's a point is that a point of order that's an infraction no i

023think i think that would be permitted okay in my mind how do we move forward in in my mind it would look something like this there is a vendor who wants to come in and the vendor is going to clean the sidewalks and they are also going to clean the rooftop at some point after the motion and after the second there is a discussion about the cleaning of the sidewalks cleaning of the rooftop and um and i hope you don't mind board members i'm going to start not picking on you but using you instead of saying board member a doctor beau points out you know the rooftop cleanup really is a different conversation than the sidewalk cleanup so dr beau makes a procedural motion to split the two motions we're going to first vote on

024whether or not we're going to have the contract to do the sidewalks and then after that we can have a second motion that would entertain the cleaning of the rooftop so that that is an acceptable procedural motion that is not an infraction or a violation of and i i do think that as you start to get into really complicated areas that have multiple layers you may find yourself in a position where you say you know what we don't want to tackle all of this whatever this is we don't want to tackle it all of it in one motion we do want to break those things out that would be a procedural moment so just closing on the point of order i don't see this as something that you're going to be doing all the time

025please just going back before we come away from that the idea of splitting the two if you know so i know we have our computer systems that move us that move us right along and but but just because our computer systems allow or don't allow something like you said that's not necessarily a violation but if we were to be in a situation like that where something was split into two is it how how is it indicated that we're is it because it's it's indicated prior to that even though we've made a vote we're not moving now to you know 9.4 because 9.3 there's some unfinished business within 9.3 what what is the appropriate way to indicate a pause before moving forward to the next item in my first thought and i remember this issue came

026up at the last board meeting when we had an an amended motion which by the way is proper you can amend the motion and i think that was in response to dr bo had an amendment a proposed contract and that's a perfectly acceptable thing to do in robert's roles and it also does not violate brown act but my suggestion is when we go off-road like that i think we're going to have to do it in an analog type way if the system only allows for the recording of one electronic vote that means we would have to have a a written record as long as we have a clear record that shows how each board member voted then it allows us to get a little bit beyond what the system's capabilities can ask for clarification because

027i think the question was let's pretend we're on 9.3 and then there's a split to vote 9.3 is the one that takes both of those votes you're not doing a 9.3 and now we have a second vote so now we have to log a different number that's correct i think both vote would be under 9.3 now if you're sticklers and um you prefer a linear way to kind of think about these things technically you you could say first vote was 931 second vote was 932. for me i prefer to just keep it under 93 because that's the way you agendized it and i don't want it to look sloppy later but it does but you know the clerk who's recording all this is probably going to capture one vote electronically and the other vote will

028be in the board's minute all right but ultimately if you do get to a place where somebody says point of order i think there's been a breach in the rules it would be the chair who would kind of rule on whether or not that was uh an infraction and again this is reserved for only kind of the major okay so anyone can make a point of order but only the chair rule correct and it's not debatable and does not require so and the way i see this playing out would be i'll pick on um mr rongio here board member of romkio i'm going to elevate you for one hypothetical or board member rokio says you know point of order i think that motion is out of order the board president looks sees whether or not

029the motion is out of order determines no that motion is not out of order so there's no need for a point of one when then we move again not something i've seen come up in the meetings but we're going deep here please dr bro um can we just go back one second so um could you role play with us through the procedural motion to split the votes so if the original item was contract to clean the roof and clean the sidewalk and we say now we want to split it and vote on the contract for the roof then vote on the sidewalk can we spend a couple minutes to see exactly how what that would look like so i could say um i'd like to so would i say for example i make i'd like

030to make the procedural motion to approve vendor a to clean the roof and then so does that motion then need a second and then we vote so where are we how do we do that and i think the way we would do it is let's say and i'm going to use the example we had last time with the well i'll stick with the hypothetical but i think what we did last time was helpful right so first you have a motion and a second to approve the contract as print so in the example i use the cleaning sidewalks and cleaning rooftop so there's a motion there's a second now there's discussion on this contract do both of those services at that point during the discussion that's really the time to make that kind of procedural motion

031or really any amendment motion during that period of time a board member would say um i move that we separate these two issues because cleaning of the sidewalks loaded issue cleaning the rooftops totally diff that would come in during that discussion phase and then there would be a second on the procedural motion to split and the board would vote then the motions would be split and then you would have to kind of say all right now we're back to the main motion which is the issue first cleaning up the sidewalks and after that you all can consider the cleaning of the roof so it would look like three vote one is the is the first the second and the vote to split the motion and then it's a first the second in a vote for

032the sidewalk contract and then the first a second in a vote for the roof contract correct and and here's why because let's say your procedural motion to split the two topics fail then you default and you're back to the original and the original contract did both sidewalk and roof and in making that procedural motion um do i use any different language beyond i make a motion to i wouldn't and honestly i can come here and i can talk about point of order i can talk about calling the question i think all of that is going to muddle really the business of the board and what you came here to do i think if if all your board members understand your true intent which is i move that we separate these two issues and we consider

033one at a time to me that's more than sufficient to kind of have substantial compliance with the robert's rules so that you can make sure that you're really adhering to the brown i play devil's advocate so on board member ortega the contract comes to the board to do floors and roofs so i board member ortega say i make a motion to approve the contract my colleague here board member mitchell says i second that motion now there's discussion then someone's going to say another colleague of mine is going to say well i'd like to make a motion to split the contract why can't i say wait time out my motion is still on the floor why does she get to now bring another motion that all of a sudden we're going to vote on you forgot

034about mine i think you can i mean you can lobby against that procedural motion but ultimately that board members saying let's put the two issues into one that's an appropriate and it's not out of order so you can certainly as part of the discussion you can you know you can let your intent and your disagreement with splitting the mo the issues you can let that be known but ultimately if the majority of the board decides but the issues it's appropriate and you move forward so kind of picking back uh what mr oto is saying right so we have a a a motion to move uh to split both issues right and so isn't it so is it up to the chair to recognize that motion lord answer yes it's up to the chair to recognize

035every person whose feet can the chair deny the motion the chair is not denying the motion so much as the chair is not recognizing somebody and my caution there would be this is discussion it's been moved it's consecutive an emotion like that would be appropriate so the chair wouldn't really have any basis to not recognize the person who who's trying to make emotion now that's a that's a tougher call than say somebody who says out of the blue i want to make a motion right now to make october 12th dodger day in azusa unified school district you already have a motion in front of you now i see some heads in agreement i'm from san diego and so i don't know that i agree with that all the way but but ultimately you have a

036motion in front of you you clean sidewalks and rooftop a motion to make it dodger day on october 12th would be out of order so again i don't think that there would say i'm just going to ignore you in your dodger motion i think the chair would say that motion is out of order at this time and there may or may not be a discussion among the board members about whether or not it is out of order but if it's completely unrelated to the main motion chances are it's going to be out of order you have to deal with the mo the main motion first and here's not quite a bumper sticker but something that i think about is there really can only be one motion in front of the board at a time and

037the idea is one motion at a time you know you can deal with each things as they come it has to be very linear procedural motions are what they are like secondary motions they're not mean motion the motion to for example separate the contract that's a procedural mode board member grier could also say you know we haven't studied the sidewalk cleaning and the rooftop cleaning and nearly enough i'm going to make a motion to table this contract until a subsequent meeting i want to make a motion to send this particular issue to committee to be studied those would all be procedural motions that are acceptable in that main mode i apologize i'm going to keep playing devil's advocate here um but let's let's continue we said yes it's it's correct i made a motion to

038accept the contract i got a second um my colleague uh dr beau uh made an amendment to the motions and so now i'm out of luck so now dr bull says well i'd like to make a motion uh to split this vote i i believe that we should uh vote for just the sidewalks and then the rooftops uh later in a second vote right and she gets a second by board member greer what's to stop me and then then the board president would say okay any discussion i'd like to i'd like to amend the amendment um i'd like to amend the amendment to say uh we're gonna vote for we're gonna i agree let's split the boat uh but let's do the sidewalks but i make a motion to table the rooftops until next time

039like where does it stop like and i'm not saying that's going to happen i just want to know procedurally like can we just keep amending amending amending amending amending and keep spinning our wills in my mind all of these things require a majority of the board so i think that's where it stopped it stops at the necessity for getting a majority to agree that we actually need to separate this the third time and so ideally as part of your discussion and this is um this is i think a good reason for the chair whoever's sitting in that in that chair to really allow the discussion to take place so that all the all the pressure testing can be done before you even get close to the point where you're going to call the question and

040so i'm what i'm hoping in a situation like that superintendent ortega is that all the different nuances of why we can vote on the sidewalk cleaning and maybe not the rooftop cleaning all of that has been hashed out through the discussion so ideally and i'll give an example not a hypothetical to your hypothetical but if you're at the beginning of that discussion and there's already a procedural motion to separate the two issues it might be a little early on in the process it might be that we haven't really heard enough about what the issue is before we get to this point where we have to separate them because in a situation like that what i can see happening is you have a motion you vote on the sidewalk cleaning and then there's a motion to

041table the rooftop cleaning and then all of a sudden as you get later on everybody's thinking why didn't we just deal with the rooftop cleaning in front of us so i think to to your very serious hypothetical i think the answer you know kind of how do you end silly season and that's really in relying on the majority of the board and so that's why it's critical that each motion whether it's procedural or a main motion it really requires that majority and the majority has to say you know what this is a good use of our time or potentially it's not so so when somebody um they do they they they have a procedural motion then uh it's recognized by the chair and the chair opens it up for the majority of the board to

042move forward with that not necessarily just uh moving forward my understanding correctly well and let me let me make sure i'm i'm saying it back so i'm understanding in the scenario we all use dr beau comes in and says i'd like to make a motion to separate the issue um and i i think the way this this will play out in real time is dr beau may raise her hand we're all having a discussion about eyewall cleaning rooftop cleaning we're all having a discussion dr beau may raise your hand and say i'd like to make a motion at that point the chair would recognize dr beau and would hear dr beau's motion um and i'm and and this is the hard part for the chair whoever sitting in that in that role because the chair

043has to decide in the moment is this a proper procedural motion or is it something and in the hypothetical we played out it is a proper motion so dr bo says i'd like to make a motion to separate new issues and um the chair has recognized dr bo the motion is made it's not out of order is there a second and that's also another superintendent ortega that's another place um where you know whether or not the motion has legs it may be that the motion gets no second motion gets no second there is no second now now we're going back to the original main motion which was looking at both of these services being dealt with in one contract or at one time please and and just to be clear going back to something you

044said earlier in the meeting so so we go through this process and we move forward and wednesday morning we we reflect back on the meeting and we realized that well actually procedurally that was that was not or there was there was a more appropriate procedural way to go about even if there was a more appropriate procedural way to go about this it does not therefore then necessarily invalidate the vote absolutely 100 and and here's here's where i'm hanging my hat first unless i miss something there's no reference to robert's rules in the brown act itself right and the brown act is something that we have to adhere to that's the law but even beyond that board member career there aren't any board bylaws that show that the board has adopted robert's rule and so what

045that really means to me is that you are all adhering to robert's rules because it's a helpful form of organization and you had an exhibit for it at one point a matter of fact my guess is and if you look at csba resources and other resources for school boards throughout the state of california i guess there's going to be a lot of suggestions that robert tools are the way to govern and i know in the nonprofits i've been a part of robert schools are kind of everywhere but ultimately that that minor violation of robert rules does not invalidate last night's meeting so jumping into some of the motions we talked about some of these things but the chair must open for the motions and the chair is going to recognize any motion made um and

046if it's not germaine the motion is out of order and i think um board member yanez that gets to your question earlier is that you know what's the role of the chair and the bottom line is if if the motion is relevant you would recognize the motion but the tricky part may be that it may be a completely different motion it may be irrelevant but those are the things you have to wade through in the moment now in the meetings i've observed i haven't seen any irrelevant motions at all you know one or two one or two questions um or one or three questions about how do we proceed through this you know amendment but nothing that was kind of out of left field ultimately and this goes to superintendent ortega's point you have each

047motion has to be seconded you're going to get into discussion then ultimately the majority of the board has to prove that motion before we move on now i know that it doesn't always play out like this i'm just going from like robert's rules of order here typically the moving board member it's the first opportunity to be um in the board meetings that i've observed all the board members have an opportunity to speak and and often there was something that happened in one of the board meetings i was at where a board member said you know i'm i'd like to collect my thoughts and i'll come back to me in a few minutes i thought that that was um extremely helpful both for the board member but also for the board so that the board knows

048there's a placeholder here somebody else would like to kind of contribute and i haven't seen any issues with board members having an opportunity to speak um now the moving board member can also withdraw their emotion so it may be that somebody jumps the gun and moves to approve this contract there's a discussion and obviously your second first there's a discussion and at some point board member thinks you know what i've heard about this vendor that's going to be cleaning the sidewalk the rooftops this does not sound like somebody who we want to be in business with an azusa that board member can withdraw the remote and does the second become the motion or it now pauses for a motion and its technique if the board member withdraws her motion the main motion is no longer

049there now now here's a let's let's just get difficult right so um there is a motion by um board member grier to approve the sidewalks and rooftop cleaning there's a second by dr bo there's some discussion and in that discussion ultimately board member greer decides i'm no longer going to support this motion i want to withdraw my original motion at that point it may be that dr bo says well i'm the one that seconded this motion and i still think this is a good vendor i think we still need to clean the sidewalk at that point dr beau could move to prove um funky you know but sure these things could happen would they need a second absolutely because at that point at that point there is no the original motion has been withdrawn but

050we're starting from scratch and and there's one other thing about starting from scratch in all these different dueling motions and reconsideration this actually came up for the board a few meetings ago in the context i think of a public hearing and there's something that i've i've seen um multiple chairs here in in azusa do almost like a pot right so kind of in my line of work you know if somebody's asking a question you always give a pause just to see how other people are going to react if somebody else is going to have a comment to make i think you want a little bit of a pause before you jump to the next because once you start jumping to the next agenda item then now arguably you may not have a robert's rules issue

051you may have a brown act if you've already moved on to a completely different agenda item so and i think this came up in the context of somebody wanting to make an additional comment on a particular item and you hadn't moved forward to the next agenda item so in my mind it will proper to make a comment but that can be an issue now robert's rules doesn't really have that limitation robert's rules is a little bit more like you can make a motion for reconsideration at any point in the meeting i think if it could be problematic if you approve something at the beginning of the night all of a sudden you're trying to reconsider that same thing at the end that could be a brown act problem not a rubber schools issue can we

052role play that because i i think it's really important one thing that you're seeing as we are moving forward with the agenda right we're using robertson rules of order but the violation of a brown act is when we have first the first motion second motion we voted and one of us still wants to speak about the motion the the agenda item that's a violation well and and i'm stealing one of my hypotheticals here what i'm emphasizing here and there's two different issues and i don't want to mix these two issues up i think the the issue of somebody making a comment about something that you've already moved on further for from i think that's a truly minor issue right and so i think in a situation like that where let's say we had just got

053done with item 9.1 and okay any other comments but we're moving on to 10.1 and somebody says wait i have a comment about 9.1 in my mind that is not a brown act issue or anything that you really need to be concerned with um that's just somebody remembering that they had something they wanted to say that happens all the time so can we talk about that about public hearings because that was something that happened with me so i am i feel like we are when we have our meeting we're not having a public conversation with the public right so i i would feel uncomfortable for us to be participating during the public hearing conference because at any one point anybody could come up to our conversation and say i have a comment about this and

054then we would have to have them allow them to have that com have that so either we i mean from in my mind we either have our conversation before the public hearing or after the public hearing but i would not if we're having our conversation be in the public hearing then we are actually inviting the public to have a conversation with us about the item so i have a concern procedurally about doing things that that way and i see your point if the board members are making comments during the public hearing it takes on more of the optics that the board members are having a conversation with public which i'm sure in all of your governance training you're told not so not optics but it actually i mean it opens the opportunity right because somebody

055could stand up and say well i have a comment it's public hearing i'd like to speak so you're actually it's not it's not that we're in it's not optics we're actually doing it in a form that is allowing that conversation to happen well and i'm imagining a scenario where a member of the public makes the comment and the board member makes another comment it one comment may not be necessarily directly linked to the other um and to be honest with you i haven't seen anything in the cvra or the brown act that talks specifically about um when board members should make comments during public hearing i mean just uh just to put it out i think so but the the board of recruiting is all at this point it sounds like i make a comment

056and based off of what i say someone from the public says or you know we ask does anyone have anything people say no then after that since it's still public uh open you know open public meeting or hearing then we ask does anyone on the board have something so i say yeah actually i have i have something i want to say then after i say what i want to say someone from the public says based on what adrian just said now i have a comment so they come up make a comment and then based off of that i respond back we're now actually engaging in in dialogue not not not just optic it would it would actually be dialogue and in that hypothetical you are and and let me tell you the really easy way

057for board member grier to stop that exchange is to simply not respond to the member of the public but it may be that you had a comment the member of the public had a comment that's it um and let's just and so let's play this hypothetical wow um let's say that your comment was um i'm gonna run out of hypotheticals here was it was about that the sidewalk cleaning would be up to three inches of the curve right so that was that was your comment and then you get a board member who says you know when you go to three inches of the curb you're putting all kinds of pollutants down the gutters and that's going to be a problem downstream and um i don't think that's something that zuza wants to do instead of

058responding the member of the public i would say just like any issue before you you might direct um you know not to put you on the spot pretend or take it but you might direct that common state superintendent ortega is there something more that you can tell us about um you know pollutants getting into the gutters or something more that staff can tell us or it might be one of those issues where let's have staff look into that and come back um i think in in our situation with the cvra issue there were consultants here right there was an expert who was there to speak about that particular issue and i believe that person answered the question whatever it was so i do think there is a way to not necessarily directly engage with that

059member of the public in a way that's problematic but to also potentially get any answer that may be in the room um to kind of move along the conversation and i use your hypothetical because it actually is part of the counter argument right the counter argument is if you've ended the public hearing and then there's a comment then the member of the public doesn't have an opportunity to respond to that or and this kind of comes up with witness questioning all the time and there's something you know cross-examination and redirect right so if somebody asks you a question on cross-examination then you know you need a chance to redirect and kind of say oh board member crew just said something i hadn't even thought about what about those pollutants down so that could be something

060that kind of triggers a member of the public having an additional comment either way again let me go back to the main point i haven't seen anything specifically in the brown act or the cvr that governs how you do and so until i see anything that says you know there's a right or wrong way i would say the main thing i would try to do is make sure all of the comments are within that agenda item okay did you have so so if a board member would like to right make a comment um just understand this correctly we do if we we open up the hearing right we uh promotion now it's open hearing we have a couple people from uh the public come and speak and then the board members be i've seen it

061done both way so that way that you're right so that way for the or the last ones i just i i guess my my question is for example um say i wanted to to to go ahead and have a discussion before before half before the public hearing about the public hearing can we do that well if if we have an item on the agenda there's a question whether or not we can board members can have a discussion about an item on the agenda in its mark assume info and action and in my mind in an item like that yes there would be board that board discussion may fall before so it would have to be labeled and on the agenda info action for us to be able to do that typically yes that's when the

062discussion is going to happen now we can go home and we can all watch tons of board meetings hey dollars to donut you're going to find that sometimes when it says action there's still some discussion outside of the discussion but again this takes us back to robert rule the idea is whatever the motion is the discussion is going to happen once there's been a motion but but let me let me address i think a deeper point that gets to kind of the beginning if there is a minor faux pas like that if there is a comment that comes in by the way there's no rules saying it has to be this way or that i would say if somebody does something in a way that seems slightly out of border my point is it does

063not invalidate the board's action that's the critical thing um and the board can talk and i think this is probably the context right a governance training the board can talk about their own bylaws their own handbook how they would like to see things handle but i think in a situation like that as legal counsel i would not be losing sleep that there was comment after technically after the public hearing closed but before the next matter fall i would say well we're still within that batter so we can move forward this is split this might be splitting hairs so we're on 9.3 you know again we say you know anyone have anything to add no all right moving on to item 9.4 actually wait i do have something on nine point so it similarly correct me

064if i'm wrong you're all you are saying similar to um not losing a whole lot of sleep over which uh you know which side of public comment uh there's there's a comment from a board member if something like that were to happen you don't see you you see neither a brown egg violation nor any type of major procedural error that would invalidate or or where it would make it improper or for that comment to be made to revert back to 9.3 and then move on to 9.4 even if it's not most appropriate or preferred would you say that it's that it doesn't invalidate it and that board member can still be heard yes yes in that moment i would say haven't even if you had said i think we're on and i'm poor and somebody

065says wait wait i did have a comment in my mind that is not a brown violation that just kind of the decorum getting a little loose as somebody kind of remembered them i think that's probably the the best way to address them um how about if it keeps happening i'm just hypothetically speaking out that it has but it keeps happening at every like board meeting where somebody from the board will want to speak right um right before the motion or after we voted and it becomes like well i mean because it's not best practice but it it becomes a nuisance well we talked earlier about their being off right and so if this were something that were coming up and i if i were on the board i might be that person that always has

066their best thought after everybody's already gone and the issues moved on so i might be the person doing that but i think ultimately having that pause built in okay board anybody anybody else in the room would like to contribute to this topic before we move on hearing nothing i'm going to move forward i think we try to build in some things like that now i didn't spend a lot of time kind of preparing for their breaches breaches an etiquette among the board because what i've seen from the board there haven't been anything that's been liberated or anything like that but if but if you had a problem like that like if somebody was deliberately trying to intervene and upset the meeting there's there's a whole other i think you can look at in terms of

067kind of board member action but from my part and for boards healthy boards healthy boards don't really go down that road because ultimately it consumes a lot of time and ultimately it doesn't really change anything um but let me let me get back board member careers pathetic i want to make it a little bit harder public hearing is closed board member we've moved on to 9.4 board members oh you know what um i had something to say about 9.3 and board member makes the statement at that point a member of the public says you know what i forgot it was something i um and and so in that point in most of you are here because you have a background in education you've been on the board you're here you are empathetic people you want

068to you know improve the schools and have great public education in azusa in that point you probably will say okay we have one more public comment even though technically the public hearing has closed in a situation like that once you crack open the door for the board member just keep in mind you don't necessarily want to slam the door public and this is this weird place where have you violated robert's roles no but let's say you say board member grier um just to pick on you a little bit board member makes this statement then the member of the public says whoa i you know what that made me think of something and it really should be two inches from the curve and board member guru happens to be the chair and board member says no

069public hearing's over we're not going to hear that no that potentially gives that member of the public the right that you know what i was denied the right participate in this meeting and then it becomes a murky net kind of when the public hearing closed when it opened i think the to the board president's point earlier there is a reason why you want to have the meeting run efficiently why you want to have comments come in the appropriate time because once you do crack open the door i can present other issues but i'm yeah i haven't seen that but we're just we're throwing out a to z hypothetical dr bo um just one last clarifying question regarding the rules of engagement for public hearings so are um members of the public supposed to sign up

070for a speaker card the way they do during public comment on regular agenda items do they are we asking them to do that for public hearing and and i don't know what the practice theory is in azusa and whether or not you've asked those for those in this sound i'm getting some nods around the table and maybe i'm getting nose around the table my my thought is i'll just throw myself out there before i even practice it's a public hearing the whole point of a public hearing is to have public participation so if somebody were actually in the room or they were raising their hand um and saying i want to contribute to this public hearing in my mind we wouldn't say sorry we didn't get a speaker card from you therefore we can't please

071yeah but i do recall when we have a parent we'll say is there anyone in the attic but like they come to the point but so this time my thought was aligned with the procedure so i get a small victory for that please board member so it sounds like this is there there is the potential for [Music] any public hearing to create a bit of an interesting procedural map there is a potential there it would appear to me that what it what seems to be most clean in in this kind of situation is to ask for public comment and before closing the public comment asking board members to speak if they have something to say and then closing the you know and then closing the public thumb it would it would appear to me that

072it has every scenario has the potential to be to be messy but in so doing there is there are there's a clear open and close of public comment and it is incumbent upon us as board members do not engage in the dialogue i would agree with that i i would agree that there's not i've not seen any rules written down but i do think that as you make minor deviations that's what robert's rules is right it's decorum it's the etiquette having a clean meeting when you start making minor deviations it's a slippery slope it could lead to another situation or what happens more often than not board member grier or it doesn't turn into anything and um you live to fight another day so i just i mean again what you just pointed out as

073a scenario that i have concerns about because technically the public hearing is still open so somebody could come up and would be within their right that's why like i feel comfortable most comfortable giving any comments once the public hearing is done right the debate you know that public input is done and now we're having we're talking about it um but that's not what you just stayed up right and i'll say as as when you made your point initially i think i said you know makes makes sense and i'm on i'm on team that and then when carlos when you described yes but let's keep in mind if a board member makes a comment and then someone from the public says wait i have something that i i want to add then it is potentially that

074we it it is you know we have the potential of a brown act violation if if we restrict that person and not allow them to speak so so if if that's the case and if and if we were if we were going to need to be open to someone speaking after a board member spoke anyway then then there's no then there's hypothetically no way around that what you're describing i would i would i would just say i'm not sure that would be a brown act i just think think about just one of our regular action items right um we have public comment before the action item we have conversation about it if someone in the audience were to raise their hand and say oh i have a about that we would not stop and say

075oh please share your opinion with us because you forgot to mention that earlier i mean their time and space is during public comment their time and space is during the public hearing i mean we have the luxury as board members to have more time in space because where they elected for i think the the difference in those hypotheticals is the public hearing is kind of a weird thing within a public board meeting and um i think that's the slightly different scenario and you're absolutely right there are time and place restrictions for public comment and the rule under the brown act is you have to give the public the opportunity to speak before or during the time when the action's being considered and you you have bylaws once the time is elapsed the board will move

076on with this business um you're absolutely right the only weird thing is when it comes to these public hearings and and by the way um the public hearings are also required for the sunshining of the proposals for for collective bargaining so it just kind of it it makes it seem like it doesn't matter if you submitted a public comment card this is a free for all where the public can now kind of weigh it so are there time limits or guidelines i mean does that mean a member of the public can speak for an hour and the next person can speak for an hour and it goes on and the short answer is i would probably apply our normal public comment guidelines to that section and i'm guessing that's something we've never done or the

077district board has never done because it's never been an issue so i've actually seen the last few i think a couple in the cvra and then a couple on the sun shining and in the public hearing i don't think there was a single comment during that time but to your point if all sudden somebody comes loaded to bear and they got a stack of cards i might kind of lean in as the parents say just a reminder that we have limitations on public comment um but again i haven't haven't looked at that issue and then looked at it in the context of public hearing i think i think we may have to look at that more and say do our normal public comment period timelines apply to the public hearing but i've never had that

078question please so would the uh chair announce like like he or she does uh when public participation letting them know that they have a certain amount of time you know how you read that article this is you know you are allowed to speak three minutes so they know you know that's not an hour long and they know their time i think they can and then who who's keeping the time because we should put it up on the board you know during public participation so who who's keeping the time of the person that's going to speak my response it would be it'd be the same time and the same person who keeps time for normal that we would follow the same process the tricky part here is that it sounds like it's never been an issue

079so it's a great hypothetical dr beau um definitely puts me on my heels because i'm thinking about that is his public hearing is a public hearing different um substantively than public comment and i think there's an argument you public hearing lasts until it's over so i'm gonna have to come back to you on on that one but to the extent that you are going to apply time limits i think you do it in the same way that you apply time limits to public please since um since we're speaking about what uh our regular uh agenda so so for example we have um people that are coming in to our meetings now through zoom and they're having a dialogue and asking questions are we required to answer those questions it's they've already they did not come

080to public comment or maybe they did and they used that time but now they're having a dialogue because of what we are talking about right and they're asking questions so my question to you is are we required to answer back no and i am assuming that you mean in the context of a public hearing no no i think so i think regular board about zoom chat and zoom chat q a and but that's correct what are we doing now with that that's being disabled but i do think it's a it's a good point generally and you probably hear in all the governance training and i think um one of the board members was talking about this earlier that in your role you're not engaging directly with the public from the dive please so so now

081i'm going to bring it to to in person and um for example we're having you know a regular uh 9.3 and we're talking about reconfiguration and possible closures of x schools and we have audience and there's speaking up and standing up right and it's out of control then what then we would jump to a completely different section of your bylaw and there's some language in there about and actually have a hypothetical about this um i won't feel all my thunder but the idea is if somebody is actually interfering with the conduct of meeting that person can be removed and so this is something that's actually happening at board meetings throughout the state because you have different movements that are opposed to mandate from the state from local authorities and so this is happening you have

082bylaws about decorum and about interference please and also um the chair can also um take a break right we could take a break there could be a brief recess yes to kind of calm the audience and then return right but it's up to the terrorists yes right yes yeah and and i think um fortunately there's you know there's not a disruptive crowd for robert's rules but i'm hoping that this holds right yeah throughout the rest of your meetings um because because if you do get to that point now here's here's some parsing here you know i think we all gotta think about this my mom was teacher for over 40 years and she was a very dedicated cta member and so they used to come to board meetings and they used to all wear their

083red t-shirt and you know at the right moment they may all stand and turn their back or they may you know hold up a fist all of them in unis and so what you have to really weigh is as a board member you may be offended by that silent protest but that silent protest may not be interfering with the board's business but we do have to kind of keep a balance here that you know expression in a way that does not interfere with the board meeting is acceptable interfering with the board meeting is not which now leads me to um i don't know this is the right question to ask at this time but um i've only seen um one time where um the board chair at that time used the the gavel right to

084to go and teresa's when does this when is this you yeah i didn't see any i didn't see any bylaws on that either um but the idea of you know gaveling in and gaveling out has always made sense to me um so so i mean i've seen it like you know in legislation where they open up the meeting and they're doing that they're adjourning they're doing that so i mean is this something we adopt is this when do i get to or the chair gets to well i'll def i'll defer to the board on the appropriate gal will use but i'll tell you this i had a gavel once and i didn't use it um it just felt like you know it was kind of there it was um almost decorative you know but i

085do think the idea you gavel in you gavel out you know and you know what um and i'm i'm i'm being a little glib but the reality is let's go back to that scenario you were talking about where there's disruptive crowd right and so in in that moment there's a lot of people talking they're interfering and you may say something like you know the board is going to stand in recess for 10 minutes as orders restored and it may be the appropriate time to hit the gavel gonna get people's attention or then stands up you're in recess so um so it's it's funny to think about but there are situations where you may need to use the please so so the board walks out of the room or that we stay seated and stand or

086or what do we do in my mind it depends on the situation so if if we're looking at like there's a hostile crowd and there's some concern about safety in a situation like that i may say you know what the recess board members need to remove themselves and and i don't want to be i don't want to be an alarmist but you are going to have to make a lot of difficult choices and you're going to have to have a lot of very public discussions of hard things for the community and i'm thinking beyond just what's on your agendas for the next few months i'm thinking about the governor's mandates and things like that as well that are going to make life a lot more interesting for elected officials and so to me it depends

087if if there's any risk i'm sure superintendent ortega and staff are going to make sure to deal with that it's also not uncommon for law enforcement to have to be present at board meeting some board meetings have law enforcement at every meeting um and i'm not saying that that's the appropriate way to go it just it happens i've seen it um in some places it's a way of life okay but getting back to robert's rules i'm gonna move forward here we talked a little bit about amending motions and you know any board member can move to amend the motion you just state with the amendment and i thought um dr bo i kind of at the moment i really appreciated that you were doing that because it was a great kind of practical application of

088amending emotion when we went through that um that discussion last time so there was a motion to amend needed a second then the chair called for discussion of the amended motion ultimately the amended motion was passed and so that became the main motion um before the board now here's here's a little one too i think there was a question earlier in a little counter-intuitive just when we ran into trouble with the system the first motion is just whether or not the first vote is just whether or not you're going to admit that's the first quote because if dr bo says i want to amend the original motion to add a meal component to the nutrition contract and if that motion failed then you default with time and so that's why you have that first vote

089of whether or not the amended motion is going to be before the board once the amended motion if it passes is before the board then the board is going to vote on that motion at that point it is the main there is mud but the board did get through that last time can you repeat that probably using much different words but but that is right the idea would be something like i'm sorry board member well are you trying to say that we would do the procedural motions by this voice vote and then take the actual motion the action the final motion made motion with the computer we haven't had a chance to talk about the system's capabilities but i think that makes sense it only has the ability to do take well you can ask

090i hope can respond but yeah it only takes one and and i and i think your idea makes sense right have the procedural motions be recorded in the in kind of analog and then save system for the final main vote but i think i think in the last scenario though we actually had two motions that needed to be it wasn't it wasn't like procedural then then the the main motion it was like two main motions two different things on the same item and and i think that was the meeting i wasn't present at because the one i remember was the amended motion that dr beau had done and so then you had um but once that amendment came in it supplanted the original motion please so if i can go back there for a second

091um to that that evening when we we had that the admitted motion and some conversation around that and it got it got a little you know we lost our way a little bit but found our way and got back on track when when that took place i think that happened on the heels of us having the conversation on should we or should we not have legal counsel present at our at school board meeting and i want to say i think that you know especially hearing you share about the uh warning cautioning us not to complete a brown act violation anna and a robert's rules of order parliamentary you know procedural violation if you will um it seemed to me that no no no offense to you carlos it it seems to me that your presence

092being at the at the meeting it it actually invited more back and forth confusion around do we this or do we that and and when if there was a slight you know error in in in process but we knew where we were going and now we're trying to dance and backpack to get back on the proper procedural and it seemed to me that it took it would have taken more it took more time to try to right the wrong than it would have been to say that that was weird but i know what you meant let's move forward really noted so so like so i could thank you so i guess i i guess i i i bring that up to this day i mean as we as we're looking at at some of these

093pieces and um you know one of the things that you also mentioned is is understanding intent and understanding intent of of of uh our colleagues here i i i would hope you know that that as we are moving forward and are are certainly going to make you know slight errors here there that i i would love it if we still moved forward and didn't get overly caught up on on process complications all right so kind of circling back and i appreciate your comments for my career circling back just kind of close the conversation on the mending motions um once and i think you had asked me to kind of go through that process and so i want to use that example there was a motion on the floor to approve the nutrition contract there's a

094motion there's a second now there's discussion on the new nutrition contract at that point um and i'm not i'm not paraphrasing this exactly dr bill i'm sure it didn't didn't go exactly like this but at this point there is an amendment to the original contract which just had something in there about healthy choice or a menu option once once there is a motion and so the chair recognized there's a motion to amend the original motion at that point um dr bo got a second and then the board president called the question meaning they're all going to vote on the amended motion and that vote passed so when that vote passed it means it planted the original motion so the amendment process path but the vote itself the amendment right and so once that amendment process

095passes then the board had to vote a second time on the actual motion which included the amended from dr pope so there's mud but that's kind of how it happened so when um [Music] when the motion is amended and we have the recording secretary asking again like what was that motion again like who is repeating it back the chair or the person who motioned ideally to pick on the chair probably the chair in that point because all things go through the chair that's why it's not um not a it's not a great job in terms of having to kind of be a board member in the moment but also having to follow all the process and protocol of what's happened in my mind the chair is going to be the one who keeps everybody great

096and kind of says no no here's the motion i'm going to repeat it now in practice in practice i don't think it would be unusual for dr bo to respond and say you know when um hope is looking for clarification of what the motion was in practice i can see dr bo saying the motion was and kind of reading from whatever dr bo had written down and so i think that's probably to your point board member that's another example of robert's rules a strict reading would say that comes right back through the chair in practice it might get a little looser than that dr bill may have the amended motion right in front of her that she's written on the fly and then the important thing is that hope is able to report it in

097the minute and that everybody's clear what's being voted all right so and i thought we weren't going to have nearly enough to talk about but we're going to push the three hours here so uh quickly just on procedural motions we talked about a few of these i'm not going to spend a lot of time i think the important thing to remember is that these are mechanisms to deal with whatever the main motion is right you can postpone the consideration of that you can refer to a committee you can even limit discussion and create special rules for the motion um or you can divide it up talk subtopic now robert's rules you know a very long resource it has a lot of things in it so i'm not suggesting that we're going to go out there

098and read robert's rules and come back with the most convoluted complicated way to do business the bottom line is if things are working for you you know by all means don't change the way that you're considering an attendant again making sure that everything is properly agendized under the brown act that's my number one concern and making sure that all the board members get an opportunity to speak to a particular issue i think that's what's critical making sure that the public participation um so robert's rules can be convoluted now postponement we're just going to kind of break down a few of these i'm not going to spend too much time the bottom line is once it's postponed no further action is taken on the matter until real the board member grier this kind of goes to

099your point there are a minor thing that you can say well wait i didn't get a chance to say something on 9.3 there's other things here that like let's say for example the board has decided on a procedural motion by board member cruz gonzalez to delay or postpone the sidewalk cleaning and roof thinning contract and the board votes on that it's postponed later on in the meeting it'd be problematic for anybody to come and say you know what let's get back to that contract because um i wanna i think we should vote on it now and here's why this is when i think barbecues are deering potentially into drowning let's say i'm a member of the public and my passion is sidewalk cleaning and rooftop um and maybe my brother-in-law is the vendor maybe i

100just really really wanted to hear that conversation the moment the board postponed inspiration that particular item i packed up and you see this happening board me i packed up and said okay my issue won't be tonight i'm heading home so if that member of the public then hears well you know the board kind of rearranged things and they ended up voting on that very end the board member can say or remember the public can say i didn't have an opportunity i thought it was going one way and it ended up going so you see things in robert's rules like for example motions for reconsideration of an issue that in practice but because of the brown act might be problematic so again robert's rules as a guide brown act is something that we have to make

101sure we're adhering to carlos uh postponement is another way of saying table right absolutely and so and in practice i've heard them used you know it's anonymous um and do you want to elaborate board member cruz gonzales difference i don't want to move too quickly no i don't i personally don't know the difference but i know they are two separate motions yeah and they you thought they do you treat them differently but i don't like i think like carlos i mean i think the most the most important thing is that we run the meeting efficiency so sometimes that feels like that and carlos can we get as a follow-up um more generation between labeling and postponing so that when we are um moving an item that way we know or exactly the date the which

102or the time to which we're postponing our tabling sure we can look into that and i want to make a mental list here that it's the public hearing whether it's limitations on public comments and then maybe unpacking a little bit of the tabling versus postponing one one issue that i think can be problematic for a public school district board that's complying with the brown act is let's say you are an item 1.4 and for whatever reason maybe there's people in the public who should be at the meeting they're running late or for whatever reason there's initially some discussion and then you decide we're going to table that issue to the end of the meeting um that can get a little weird depending on whether or not somebody believes they didn't have a right to just

103so dr bo let me let me drill down on those concepts and get something back to the board okay now we go back to the motion for reconsideration because we did so one time we did have to do something like that um and so we actually ended up agendizing it at the next meeting and then it was officially reconsidered by somebody who had voted for it the first time so we have done that but it we don't do it the same day we we it only happened once in 20 years it's happened one right but then we voted on at the next meeting and and as i was thinking about that on the on the drive over here and just um what are the more most likely scenarios that would potentially come up and the

104motion for reconsideration was one that was kind of troubling me because ultimately if you have a motion for reconsideration kind of comes in at the end of the meeting let's say you decided an issue voted on it i think a member of the public could say hey i was there for the first vote i wasn't there second i didn't have a right to participate they could all say your agenda was all mixed up and things were being called when they should have been called so i i like that approach that emotion for reconsideration would happen at the at the next meeting and this actually goes board member career a little bit your point earlier which is it could be problematic this is the difference between roberts rosen browning we're on 9.3 there has been a

105vote on 9.3 that contract has been approved now we've moved on to 9.4 and we're now on to 9.5 and then somebody says boy i want to do a motion for reconsideration of 9.3 in my mind that would be problematic it'd be problematic for the brown act it would be um for hope and i just kind of think that the example that you use board member crews gonzales of having that motion at the next meeting that makes perfect sense and here's a here's a scenario we were actually working on um hypotheticals and i had somebody um grilling me about what to do in this situation which so as i i was role playing this in preparation for the mini we use this example of um what normally happens like let's say you approve the contract

106and all of a sudden after you approve the contract you get a ton of feedback from the community and the community says you know what um that's not a reputable vendor or a full three inches two inches from the curve thing you guys really need to study that and get that figured out so i could see a scenario and i don't know if this has happened for recent history but i could see a scenario where the board decided you know what maybe we need to rethink that particular contract that we approve now and um this is where we start getting a little bit into latasha's purview and we would have to look at well if the contract's already been accepted is there anything in there about changing the terms of the contract after the fact

107um and so those are kind of different downstream issues but i do see a motion for reconsideration i like it in most instances if you're going to be doing at the next board okay all right adjourning um i've seen you all adjourn i don't see any issues there but ultimately you have board must motion to adjourn and any board member can make a motion adjourn all right we talked a little bit about recon iteration motion to revisit a topic already voted on may occur in the current meeting or the two subsequent meetings and i'm really pulling from from robert's rules there um and only one motion for reconsideration perception again you are not strictly bound to robert's rule but when i have these pieces in here in your slides just know i'm either pulling them

108from your old debit or i'm pulling them for for rough rules i think the board member grier's point um as long as you're effectively doing the board's business that's the main goal you're complying with brown act public knows doing an opportunity those are the values that we need to get across okay decorum we talked a little bit about the quorum earlier and i have a couple hypotheticals if we have time to get to them i don't know if we'll need them but board members speak one at a time they don't interrupt each other and unless the board member who has the floor yields someone else now again i watch a lot of school district meetings you know i'm present for none of them and there isn't always that kind of forum where we say board

109member viegas steal the board member vote you don't really see that pomp and circumstance but the idea is that one person is speaking at a time and that the board chair has recognized that one i think you do need that basic form of etiquette otherwise it can be a little bit of a free um and i do think that at least keeping track of that who's speaking who has the floor i think it's a it's a good way to stay organized and efficient in your meeting i have a question on that so because um earlier he had said whoever um uh moves the first motion you know usually gets to speak first so then i mean theoretically the second person who who seconds the motion would be the second you know and so if there's

110a board member who um right that needs more uh has questions come up they didn't have a chance to to address it with cabinet before therefore a cabinet needs to do some more research and that board member decides well i'm not comfortable voting on this because i i don't have the appropriate um information right so then they they table it they asked it so they would uh amend it or they would motion to amend but the board doesn't agree motion table yes or or motion to postpone depending on what we find out after the research but they would make one of those motions yeah so emotion to table is not debatable though somebody said as soon as somebody says emotion to table there's not like i don't oh you can talk about the table what

111happens thank you yes so if somebody makes a motion to table what would and let's say there's discussion happening and someone says i move the table this item to the next in my mind that would be a procedural motion that would require a second and a majority of the vote and and so you know this kind of reminds me of a motion to adjourn so let's say that a meeting is not going the way somebody wants it to go and so there they move to during the meeting well the board the rest of the board may have business to do rest they may not get a second or a majority this goes back to the superintendent's question of where does it all end and the idea is unless you have a second unless you have

112a or the majority of the board you're not going to be tabling or postponing board member crews also you have something to share yeah so if you look in this book on page number 12 like if you open the book you can see like there's any kind of emotion that you could possibly take so look on the top on the right hand side it says lay on the table right so if you open that up you can like open up the 12 it's on the right the right hand side at the top here it says 12 open to that page and then you can see there's all the rules but you can see in the middle it says whether it's debatable no so it requires a second right but once there's a second there's no

113debate on the item we just have to vote on it immediately it requires a majority vote um and somebody if they let's say it fails they can try again after a while if they want and you can nobody can make any motions on nobody can like do a amendment or anything to that we have to vote just on that motion makes sense to me because it's strictly just an idea are we going to vote on this right now or are we going to vote enough that makes sense to me all right so there's there's other parts of this that don't necessarily make sense um and that's like only only board members talk staff can answer questions and ask in my practice that's that's not usually how it goes and usually the superintendent superintendent superintendent ortega

114or other superintendents will usually weigh in i have some information for the board let me help out or super nintendo ortega may say i think what we were considering was this so the way i've seen staff engage is far more collaborative than from a pure strict proper school's reading now ultimately we talked before about calling the question so as the chair the sharer would choose when you're going to hold and so and really all that means is can we have a vote on this particular and so i think in practice the way i've seen it done and most boards is as long as there is a productive conversation going on that discussion keeps going until you get to the point where everybody's like okay we're ready to vote i've all you know everybody has had

115a chance to contribute questions have been answered different points if you have been respected at that point you call for please so it would be good to talk about that right in terms of um because i think sometimes i feel like we sometimes um it feels like we get into like we we end up hearing a lot of the same comment right and so it would be good to to think about what's the best way to um end a discussion when it when it's obvious that um no new points are being made i mean i don't know i don't have any ideas i'm just saying i think it would be good to come to consensus on how to do that yeah and it's harder than it sounds it is because one thing i've observed about

116being boards in action is um board members feel like they want to give some context for where they are and where they may potentially vote and matter of fact thinking your board bylaws that something did effective if you're going to obtain you're going to offer some reason or if you're going to vote against them so that is a fine line right between you know explaining a little bit of why you vote for something um and explaining a little bit of why and well the general rule that i've seen is you know every board member potentially has an opportunity to speak on the issue and there may be some redundant i think that's the crowd who wanted to hear the robert school's presentation please i have a question on um board members signaling either outright stating

117how they're going to vote or signaling how they're going to vote and it and the appropriateness of that during the discussion prior to the vote and it's tricky it's tricky because there there's a natural moment when the motion is being discussed when you know i don't think any of us are professional poker players but there's a moment where it becomes fairly obvious the the observer where a board member may be voting but in my mind when you're in discussion that's when you're going to ask the tough question that's when you're going to speak to a particular issue and so it may be at that point you can glean how a board member may vote where i think you really need to worry about that dr bo is when you're outside of meeting when you're making

118comments on social media and things like that that's really where there's a danger potentially somebody can say you engaged in a serial meeting you had you know one idea here and then there was another board member on on social media and all that potentially could be a problem please so so then when when would be so our yeah our our board protocol says that if we were going to vote against something that we will articulate that why we're voting again so then when is is the appropriate time then during discussion or is it after the vote's been taken and then there's a time then for that person to say i voted against the speakers i've seen you all do it during discussion and it seemed organic for the moment and so and let's let's play

119it out right let's say that you have the vote and then each board member wants to explain it could get a little bit messy if the vote's already been taken that doesn't make a lot of sense um also i've noticed that because of your system the way it looks online and maybe it feels a little different in person the way it looks online is there's the discussion the question is called by the chair and then all sudden kind of you all go away and then there's like a survey says moment right when all sudden boom boom boom and you see all the different so i guess what i was trying to think about is could there be a moment where you're announcing i board member career i'm going to oppose this particular issue and i'm

120not going to vote because a b and c if you're using the electronic system you probably don't have that natural moment so to me during the discussion you know you're sharing this is how i'm going to vote on right here i think dr bo ultimately we're trying to focus on substantial compliance here and so as long as that that comments be made you know contemporaneously right at the moment where the votes happening i about it if people are are projecting and throwing out there in the public when they're gonna how they're gonna vote on something then i start getting a little nervous please i just wanted to go back what um board member bruce gonzalez was talking about when we're having a discussion either you know how while we're voting yes or no um it's

121true sometimes you know we just go round and round in a circle you know talking about the same thing so is there any like rule or there's a time limit or you know what i mean because you're just you know speaking or you know someone's talking about the same thing but we get the point like you said either you stress your point why or why not and there's your answer yeah you know i hope i'm explaining that right you are and i think the first question i hear is are there time limitations on individual board members yes and in my mind no there's not i mean a board member could you know have the floor if the board members recognized by the chair the board member could speak now is that an efficient way to

122do business probably not well probably definitely not right but ultimately in my experience each board member wants the opportunity to address the topic it doesn't mean that they're going to and so that's the slippery slope where we start if you start curtailing the ability of board members to participate in the discussion then it's going to create some feelings that hey my point of view is being disregarded and i think this goes back to board member's point about kind of adhering to robert's rules doing the best we can and then having some some common ground on intent and i think that that's 100 true you need to have that trust but but also i hear from communities sometimes like you know i'm kind of confused because you guys are like going everywhere you know i we're

123focusing on one thing then all of a sudden the discus the discussion gets lost in in the conversation and i've heard that from community members i i expect you you have and what i also know about elected officials is that they want to explain to their constituents directly in their own voice why they're voting for a particular issue and they're bound by the bylaws to explain why they're not voting for something so um if you're looking for limitations on board member speaking i'm probably not the person no no i don't know what i mean by not i understand your point but i'm just saying that you um you stress your points you know one two three four five or whatever and then we get it you know kind of a thing instead of just going

124around talking about the same thing i i don't know you know i just happen to hear that in the community so i just wanted to stress i appreciate that and i i tend to agree with you i go to a lot of meetings and so um i agree with you i'll just leave it at that please doc i mean something that i've been thinking about too about how to um have a robust this discussion while also being lean with time and um have you had any experience with other governing boards where maybe there are you know two rounds right so you go board member a b b and another round and if they're really and then we have to really think about if i don't have anything new to say then then i'm then i

125pass and not feel compelled to reiterate i mean do any of your boards or clients and adopt that procedure to help them make sure that we're going around so that every board member has the opportunity to speak i haven't seen anything adopted formally and what i can see happening in practice practices as it as an informal rule we get we each get one shot but what almost always happens is somebody remembers something and they're you're on the spot you are all on the spot in the moment the public is here and sometimes people are going to forget that main core critical point but but to your question i have not seen boards adopt kind of uh you get two rounds only but i do respect our board president because she'll say at the end does

126anyone have any more questions so so she is giving us the opportunity if we do well state no and but she does give us that opportunity and actually had a question so um since we're on this for example you said the two rounds right so say for example a board member had five six questions again um i mean these are the questions that this board member feels that they need to ask at that particular time therefore you know whoever's chair will will give this individual the time um to to go ahead and ask those questions correct yes i mean and we talked about this earlier the decorum is that the air needs to recognize whoever's speaking and i'll put myself in that point of view that i'm board member viegas and i want to ask

127another question and so i'm kind of like recognize me over here and my question is you know what time does mcdonald's close because i'm and i don't want to be here anymore and if those are my contributions over time i suspect that you know board members may be less likely to recognize me but again that is a really slippery slope right because ultimately you're here and you have to work together with trust there has to be stability and so if board members are having relevant questions to an issue that hasn't been voted on you want that question to be answered before the vote happens i mean that's the whole point so i mean i i guess just to clarify when i brought this up in my mind i wasn't talking about questions to staff right

128my mind i was talking about when we deliberate amongst ourselves then we're having a discussion about you know what how to vote on an item or what how to move forward that's what i was thinking okay so again kind of going through we have a general sense of decorum i've seen the decorum happen and it happened with multiple chairs in the room and i think the general rule is everybody has an opportunity to speak to an issue and i've seen that happen all right statement of the record you can request that written or oral statements included in a minute um i know that hope is you know kind of feverishly working today after everything that happens in in the meeting minute so my my thought is that you probably don't even need to say that

129um but i do i do know that it can be a dramatic flourish right you know can we make sure that this gets in the minute um and so that would kind of just be a point of making sure that a particular statement or something is kind of recorded before can the meeting you clarify for this so is this this is a brown act requirement or this is parliamentary procedure this is robert's rules the board to me this is um robert's rule because we so and i think we have we haven't discussed it as a board but i think when we went to an online system and started recording we as the board i think and half of you weren't even here wait we made a decision that we were going to move to action

130minute which just record the action then summary minute um and that if somebody wanted to have a full see the full transcript they could go watch the video um because because it is that is available so our practice has been not to if somebody like and it happens to have a comic sometimes somebody just brings their comments and say every question gets put in the record right i think our practice has been not to do that because that's not we made it clear that's not what the minutes are um but so how does that fit within what you're putting here well and let me let me give you an example and it may be that it it a difference without a distinction here it may be that i'm board member of viegas and it's being

131recorded for youtube and i say and you know get this in the minute i i'm gonna stay x y and z technically my statement is recorded in the minute it's recorded on the live now it may not be in the action summary that you mentioned but it is being captured and being recorded so at that point i would say i am on the on the youtube i have been captured my statement is there to your point it may be that statements of the record are irrelevant or the way the board does business in azusa you don't necessarily need that and this goes back to the question of you know when do we cut off comments and things amongst board members the reality is the board members want to make those mini statements of the record

132so you probably don't need the pomp and circumstance saying statement for the record and how about what one of the things that um uh board member chris allen mentioned where we have a public comment um right and we have somebody from the community come and say i i would like this recorded in a minute so what you're saying is is that it will not be recorded in a minute uh physically but they will have to they can go to but if we ask right the the member from the public asked i want these recorded i because i need those minutes for x y i know for whatever reason they wanted them because they can we do that yeah and it sounds like there may be a slight difference in what your practice is so let

133me let me just ask the question have you ever taken a members has it remember the focus asked you i'd like my comments to be recorded in the record yeah that happened okay and how was that handled was it just they were recorded via youtube nothing special was done currently our practice doesn't match our our policies are exactly what board member cruz gonzales said and we just stumbled upon this not too long ago as we were updating policies we were just doing what the practice was prior to us coming here and the practice right now is full transcript of minute but that is not our policy that is not what's written in our in our board policy our border policy matches up exactly to what board member cruz gonzalez says and actually that that was

134partly my point earlier so the practice is that hope is going to try to get as much of everything that's happening in real time so if that member of the public makes that statement it is automatically in the minute it's in it's on the right if you will and and i'll add another layer to that it's also recorded right via youtube so there's multiple records of this person making this comment but that might be something over time that you all look at in other governor's trainings and see if this is consistent with what the board wants to do okay calling for the question again um i only have about 45 more slides so i'll let you buy here really only about four or five so this results in the end of the board discussion puts

135the matter to vote we can call it call the question we can just say can we have a vote it's not critical to kind of get bogged down on what terminology is i've seen you all do this um and it worked it's it said must be just to be clear it says it must be seconded does that mean that and once it's seconded then it moves to the the vote or it needs to be seconded and then now there's a vote on whether the question is called um it must be seconded and then you're going to move towards the vote of the main motion of whatever emotions being considered right then are you sure you have to vote on a call if you have to vote on that and call vote on calling for the

136question or vote on the main motion yeah you can't just get a motion and second to call for the question and then you have then the vote is on the call for the question do you guys currently vote on having a vote no and so i i mean normally what we do is just by consensus then the terror would be like okay let's vote right right um but technically with parliamentary procedure there would be a vote on it yeah and it's kind of like um adjourning you know that there has to be an emotion a second before your journey because some people may want to journey and other people may not what it sounds like is the practice here is if there's a consensus if every board member has had an opportunity to speak there's

137no more comments can we proceed to the vote yes and that that's your practice right right and usually it's not somebody saying i call for the question it's usually like i think we need to vote now that's not very formal yeah and it sounds like there are there are some differences between your practice and what your exhibit on robert will say and what the actual robert will say that's not uncommon you guys never formally adopted robert's rules but i do know that there are going to be some some differences in the way these things are handled right i think what we practice is the chair whoever what i've seen as well is they'll ask again if there's any more discussion and the chair will call uh for the vote i'm kind of like a closing

138comment right you know like a little bit of closure to the process all right any more comments okay hearing none um can we have a vote and then if board member says no no i'm actually you know what i do have another comment then at that point there's going to be another comment trigger more around to come all right forum i think you are all familiar with quorum and just having kind of over 50 of total board members you have a five person board that would be three people per quorum um and you have to recess unless you have a form you can't really proceed with the actual meeting unless you have forum and if somebody's obtaining that still counts for purposes of quorum um now again i think this goes to your point board

139member cruz gonzalez they're gonna there's gonna be things in these slides that which aren't exactly you know apples to apples but the practice that you have right and so i think for example the roll call by the president sounds like the roll call all goes through the electronic system so you don't hear that kind of verbal roll call of how each person does it or do you guys announce it verbally i think it just pops up popped up um after after so whatever the result is then whoever is the chair will go ahead and you know five zero four one three two vote passes vote does not pass or however there is right after and is it the chair that announces that or hope do you say the motion has passed unanimous here okay and

140i think the what i've also noticed in watching the meetings via zoom is that it's also shown on the screen you clearly get to see how each board member voted and there was a clear record of how his board member voted in the minute those are the core pieces that we need to satisfy for the crown act um carlos can you speak to any differences or what you've seen in terms of voting simultaneously or electronically and simultaneously versus a roll call vote yes no yes no board member uh rogue is now the tiebreaker well the one thing i i noticed right away was last time when we had multiple votes the system presented kind of a little bit of a limitation but i remember at the moment i was thinking well if you guys had

141an opportunity to kind of just go through the vote and record them then that may not have come up but i don't want to throw out a perfectly good system just because you know we had a double vote um and i also understand your comment to be a little bit like if you do a verbal vote and we're going through and we've hit the first four board members and you've got a tie two-two that really puts a lot of pressure or power in that last board member to decide how it's gonna go either way um i think the short answer is there's not there's not necessarily a wrong way to do it sounds like you all have a system of voting and um and again this is a another example where while rules may say

142roll call is done by the chair you all have an electronic system there's nothing wrong with your system um was there a another point dr bo that i'm not getting at well i guess maybe i'm asking my veteran colleagues for their perspective on either at times when electronic school board wasn't working or you chose to do a roll call vote and then the last vote was by the president right because i could one could think that those outcomes could be different right two yeses who knows and then the tie breaking vote is with the board president and so i'm looking for have there been instances in the past where it's been um an important vote and it rolled out that way instead of voting simultaneously i have not thanks i have not seen it even

143when i've watched the meetings for the last 20. all right so i'll throw a different question and it may be i don't know maybe that's something you guys can all expand on in a governance meeting um to kind of talk about how that how that all works and maybe what was in place before that came about but i did want to throw one more kind of difficult situation at you and this is once you've called for the vote at that point when you're watching online you know you're all sudden the next thing you're going to see is all the vote broadcast so if that happens and you fall for the vote okay can we all vote people are in the process of voting then at that point it is too late kind of go back

144and say well wait can we open the discussion um i think i want to move to the men or do something in my mind you're all baked in like the voting is happening and that comes a little bit from the exhibit a little bit from robert schools that once you've called for the question was called for the vote no other business can be conducted until that roll call finished oscar a question same scenario already baked in uh it flashes up and i'm like what no no that's not what i meant to vote i pushed the wrong button and and you don't have to live with that wrong vote forever right because you can't have a vote change before the report out i think the point i'm making is we can't take a complete detour and

145say now we're going to have a more discussion then also you got three or four board members and their votes are kind of hanging out there in the balance other people haven't voted yet that would be problematic but if all sudden you're looking at it and i think come up or you're looking at it and so wait is it the wrong button then you want to change that before the report out means and what i when i'm talking about the report out here what i'm really focused on is before it's recorded in the final minute and so that might that might throw us for a loop where the electronic system is thinking and we have to make a correction um in the actual minute and i don't know if the system allows you to do

146that so maybe my mind goes to worst case scenario with that but um you're not saying i look at the vote and it was a no i meant to say yes so i wait and at the end of the meeting i go and say hey hope it wasn't a no it was a yes and now she changed you're saying in real time communicate the error so that it's so that it's on on the record in the meeting and even if the electronic system records it inaccurately just and it's most important that it's that it's accurately represented in the minute absolutely in real time and i like the idea of looking up and confirming that's the way you voted because if you approach hope later it would be i'll just say problem right and you're probably

147gonna hear it from your other board members um the public needs to have trust in the system and so if the public sitting there listening to it and that's another whole issue right they think it was a 3-2 in favor of the contract for the sidewalk cleaning all sudden they they wake up the next day and they say it's actually three to oppose somebody switched the vote later that's beyond problem and notice it says votes may be changed before the final report out in my mind that means the announcement of what the votes were and so i i would ask all the board members to be vigilant take a look at what's happening with your with your vote make sure it's an accurate vote and if it's not you know we yell over to hope

148and say please i hit the wrong button okay [Music] unless there's more questions i was going to get into hypotheticals but it seems like we did that on our own we are about two hours in please this is it it's a question but it's um i imagine i know what your answer would be carlos and so maybe it's more it could be just uh getting on the same page with colleagues here so as as things pertain to the consent calendar it would seem to me that following robert's rules of order for the consent calendar would unnecessarily come because if we if someone makes there needs to be a motion before and so someone moves to approve the consent calendar and then someone says i s substitute motion to approve this constant counter except for 10.1

149and someone says i substitute for but 10.2 as well so what so it would seem to me that you know this is a it's a parliamentary roberts rules of order thing versus a brown acting what what is the most appropriate way what is the most appropriate way to go about consent calendar items so that we are following the you know a procedure is it most appropriate let's just say who wants to pull what and people indicate out loud the items that they if any that they are intending to pull and and then there's a motion based off of you know including those items that have been communicated what what what seems to make the most sense and i think the question was originally for the board but if the board members don't have a suggestion

150i don't have a problem with the way you're doing it right now and the way it the way i've seen it roll out is that calendar there is a motion to approve the consent calendar is written second pulled out once it's pulled out i've seen almost seamlessly it drops down to the individual consideration from the consent calendar way way i thought it happened board member i was i was pleasantly surprised it was that move and so my thought is if not broke and yes and our work president just asked prior does anyone have an item to be pulled and then it is told in the number has changed you know and then we vote on this portion and then we just testify so i think the procedure worked pretty well um and the board president

151does walk us through it so we vote for the ones that have been pulled i agree it's just extreme clear sorry so is it most appropriate to stay we're on a consent count you know we're on 10.0 percent calendar are there any items to pull as on the front end or is it most appropriate to say 10.1 you know consent calendar someone makes the most it's moved then it's seconded and then in the discussion ask for items people if i was being a robertsville stickler i might say make that motion make that second have the discussion and pull the items out but i think in practice i think if you audit board meetings you're probably going to see it done both ways and i don't see any problem with a with before chair saying any

152items to be pulled and shorts are getting that processor the most critical part for me is does it drop down to the other consideration is there tracking of that motion is our agenda clean that's probably my number one and so say for example we have all five board members playing five different things right and it'd be two different things and it becomes like we just pull everything apart how does so so our secretary then moves them down to 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 and so forth and so forth right so we're voting on them separately having different discussions right and so one of the things that um do we vote annually is it the system allowed it changes the numbers up on the screen [Music] and does that give and actually i haven't asked does that

153give you plenty of time if we were to let's just say hi speaking we all are pulling that calendar apart sometimes it does sometimes you move a little quickly i have to switch screens it does move quickly if if i little time especially if it's a few i switch screens i have to hear the numbers i want to move 10.3 10.4 all the way down to 10.9 so i can hear all three of them i click them i can go up move them in one motion and that's how they move so fast but it's more about making sure i can hear what you're saying so i click the right one and then it moves quick okay thank you for that um if if there are no more questions about the quote-unquote training tonight we were

154also going to the board was wanted to discuss uh and board member greer kind of opened it up a little bit uh discuss um having our attorney at regular meetings during open session that was a request that that tonight this conversation continue that it was not an action item it was just a conversation and i guess i'll i'll just lead um and i'm viewing this as all part of your board governance workshop because you're looking at the best way to govern govern the board um and so and and to your point that there won't be any action taken here but i know that there was a question i think from either board member rodriguez or another board member about whether or not we could establish some other kind of lower rate for just the proper

155schools portion and so i've looked into that and um commit to having the paralegal rate to have council here um which would be 230 dollars per hour or we can work on different flat rate based on the 230 so whatever the board needs for us to do we're amenable to it i i would have um like to have that in front of me uh we had it in our pocket regarding the hours you know he had it all broken down if i would like to have known prior that we were going to discuss it so i could have that in front of me i apologize yeah like it's like these are four hours you get so didn't know that we're going to discuss it right now today yeah and i apologize i should have agenda

156should it have been agendas before we it's in the it's in the rationale um that um that we'll discuss having an attorney at every board meeting during open session um so it is part of the rationale but apologize for not but but it's not written it is if you go to the if you go to the actual item 4.1 right now we're just looking at the at the cover sheet oh oh i suit your state uh i'll i'll just add my thoughts um in the beginning i i think this conversation even even further put me in the in the camp of my thoughts around just the the you know how worth it it might be to have legal counsel present when what we are the challenge the challenges that we're having or that we have

157from time to time is around parliamentary robbers pools of order things and and i think that we're able to get by and even to the example that i said earlier even when there's legal council present they're still um pickuping and dancing around to you know get back on the right right in the right place and again i think that last time maybe even took more time trying to get there than than us um recognizing that maybe something is slightly out but we can but it's not it's not a violation it's not invalidating the votes that are taking place but maybe we forgot you know we didn't vote on the substitute motion we just voted on the original motion but technically we should have taken a moment to vote on the those those are those are

158process things that that theme that don't seem as significant if when we're looking at the amounts of monies that we're going to pay just to ensure that we're being sticklers on like process rule so so i think it does make sense as we kind of talk when we know that there are um highly contentious items or potentially controversial or you know how and what whatever we want to do maybe we just give discretion to the board president and and to look at that and make the final stay when we're looking at those things and and trust that they're seeing what those things are and inviting legal counsel here for for those but apart from that i i would say that that's the um that's that's quite a bit of that has the potential to be

159quite a bit of money just to make sure we're following processes that are relatively that have the potential to be relatively insignificant and i may say that i i agree with board member greer you know what when it's necessary and we do need him here yes we should call him um i don't feel like every single meeting since you you know you have served our meetings you even mentioned that you know we're doing okay i mean you you observe um and and and same thing as like last time you said we took more time trying to break down what we were trying to figure out because you were here you know helping us through so just it did take longer then we just would have fitted on our own just but yeah i agree um

160so i agree i agree with adrian i mean and i can think of like upcoming meetings where it would be important to have legal counsel right when we talk about we actually have maps to talk about redistricting when we talk about full code like the actual action items i think those make sense but not necessarily but not every day-to-day meet and i also agree uh and to add on um i think that this session was very valuable it allowed us some deep study to ask very specific questions and hypotheticals and walk through them and i would be in favor of having um additional workshops on this even if it's something like an annual refresher so that we continue the study and that's my opinion on it thank you so much um the majority has spoken

161i i do agree and this is uh why i i had asked legal counsel could be here till the end of the year because we are going through the reconfiguration and thank you guys for your comments um and so given that the majority feels that um with the reconfiguration and the redistricting is something major that we are going to be going through in the next several meetings which are only um i believe three three meetings left but then my question would be to to the board um is is that something that you guys would be okay with for council to be here for the next um three regular board meetings that we are going to have i'm sorry we have one on the 26th just for uh just for clarity we're um i i don't

162know that i i don't know what i'm i'm so i'm not saying necessarily that we have the legal counsel here for the next x number of meetings i'm instead saying that when we know that we're voting on items um then then we would invite council to those meetings so let's suppose at the next meeting we're voting on something a second meeting we're not voting on on something that we would consider you know hot topic item but then the third meeting out we do then we would invite council to the first and the third but not this day okay so um what does the rest of the board agree yeah okay then we'll go ahead and uh you and i will go ahead and sit down and just knock that out we have just a plug

163plug that in so thank you guys for for for your comments um thank you so much for your other comments and and uh saying that this meeting was very valuable um it is it is valuable and i appreciate all of your comments um and thank you for being here does anybody have anything else for legal counsel at this time thank you mr carlos viegas for coming out as we're moving on on our agenda for tonight we're moving on to 5.1 and that is our german so i am asking for emotion to move 5.1 motion to approve 5.1 second we have a first by board member rodriguez pena we have a second by board member greer we are adorned good night everyone have a great night we'll see you guys next week