and we're reviewing the proposals for the town administrator selection process and we're joined by richard white because we've gotten you know you're fine package and it's been reviewed by the selection committee which is why you're here also we have we have at least forty five minutes to talk to you all about  your proposal you obviously know the town from your research on the town so i we've been provided very professionally of questions know one thing we do have to ask is because we are this we are broadcasting this meeting so you you actually we asked people to identify themselves perhaps not every time you speak today i don't think that's necessary but at least  people who are in the consulting business that's briefly who i am and who grew so shits became grew white when i encouraged rick to retire so they could work more fully with me then he had been doing which was a fair amount of back room kind of work as he was a manager at the time so with that i'm going to let the record spawn genoese happy i think that's a good idea because you as i said we have your resume the public needs to know who you are my name is richard white people call me rec personally and professionally i've surrounded all my life i grew up in east darlington interacted with belmont people all my life professionally i had been joined at the hip with tom since one nine hundred eighty s as assistant and winchester from there i worked in bedford got recruited to be tell manager in lexington served there for seventeen years was the first manager and winthrop and spent the last eight years in tennis before i retired both tom and i are very familiar with  belmont it's history and a lot of similarities but differences between your constituency and those in lexington where i still reside but i think we're  fairly connected to what belmont's all about what its values are what it's looking for but the two of us are terribly committed to making sure and we have three more general questions and then we're going to open it to the board to talk to you about your proposal specifically the second one is and again the public is interested approximately how many town administrator time managers searches have you conducted in massachusetts which we understand from your proposal but if you could just briefly summarize that i'd put a number roughly thirty in the twenty nine to thirty was trying to recall that last night in some cases that involved a couple of searches or separate contracts in towns for sometime fighting now eight years later i did a second search for themselves do you play golf i played off so you remember the whole the great holes that you played right actually give us give us five great searches that you can't just you know i recruited someone who ended up stabilizing the situation and stayed there for eight years and the the town for me to come back to it again lexington i did the search to resources or people who would respond to advertisements it's very much different than it was twenty years ago pool is a lot smaller than it was in terms of canada in terms of candidates yet we were able to recruit fifty four really good applications and we are now working with the screening committee reviewing thirteen of them all of the qualified and all of them capable of being the next town administrator at least and this comes after a terrible political hiccup that the community had in which they lost their last long serving town administrator  easton has always been like belmont a progressive community that's invested in public participation but also in professional management and what happened last year was a little bit of an anomaly for its personality and despite that we've been able to recruit some very good candidates and i think they're very pleased so far i have to look that story up number three is please review for us your general approach to the town of belmont's town administrator recruitment process which again you've described in detail in your proposal but for a few minutes for the public if you don't mind  bill we try to provide you with some extensive description of what we do and how we go about doing it but it it largely is a prescription for us because we sit down with you as our customer and redesign the whole process so what we submitted to you was basically our outline of how we would go about approaching the recruitment but in essence we will define that with you because every community is different every board is different their needs are completely different but we generally started by interviewing extensively with every single member of the  describe a description of what expectations are for the position and for the person in that position and what special attributes the the board would like the next candidate to have  then we interview staff members and also designated citizens in the community that have an impact on the position or who have  considerable influence in the community from there we develop a position profile and we bring it back to you and have you approve it from there we print a  specially scripted letters to individual applicants with a copy of the profile and that begins our recruitment and our involvement with all of the candidates tom and i  take very seriously the relationships that we have with the professional people but we also know that we represent you so we try very hard to make it personal and to have direct interaction with the candidates committees members individually before we meet with them as a whole so that they understand our approach and what we're looking for and how we're going about doing it and then with  over a period of weeks we collect resumes and when we have enough we sit down for our first meeting we review the charge that the the selectmen of give given the screening committee we review the position profile and we make some preliminary recommendations to the screening committee as to who they should consider for further exploration generally the first meeting is  a little overwhelming and the committees generally impressed with our work but always wants at least a week to review the applicants and verify the recommendations when you say overwhelming overwhelming for who for this screening committee over this because there we give them probably about three hundred pages of of cover letters and resume is coupled with  grid with our recommendations on it so they'll take the week and you know most times still agree with us but they'll have a one or two people that they might want to pursue further that we didn't identify or they don't see the beauty in the recommendation of one or two people that we recommended for further evaluation and we support that we set up all the meetings to all of the evaluation with the screening committee set up on a structure for them to evaluate each of the candidates and coordinate all of the logistics between the candidates and then the  from there we help facilitate the the the meetings with the screening committee and help them recommend anywhere between three and five final candidates to you we try  to encourage the screening committee to keep an open mind to identify as many potential finalists for the board of selectmen because generally we see some candidates that will bow out after the initial screening comm so we try to get them to identify maybe five to seven candidates so that we can finally get four at least to the board of selectmen once it gets to the board of selectmen we get a commitment from each of the finalists to pursue it and then we do some fairly extensive background information and reference checks i provided you with an example of some of the information that we provided we we asked  the applicants to provide us and we pursue all of those references diligently from the labor council to the legal council to the to the the financial advisor for the community we try to get a a a good picture of each candidate and provided to the board of selectmen as background we do extensive background checks we asked the police chief to help us with the cory but we also provided to you as background we have a series of anywhere be between sixty and seventy five selected questions for the screen committee and for you to consider asking but generally  every community we work with takes half of what we recommend takes compiles questions and half of them are ours and half of them are specific community into their concern from there we guide and provide you with staff support for the final recruitment are available to help you with the final negotiations play any role you want we provide  a salary survey to help you with negotiations and we'll provide you with any any background information and any follow up with the candidates that you'd like us to pursue after the interview i am a trained facilitator so i do a lot of the work with the screening committees and the community as to the  and help the board with their decisions we try very hard to be a resource and support both the screening committing on the board of selectmen but we also guarantee much i think in your response you answered question for which was how would you engage department heads and other staffs in this recruitment process i have just two questions and then we're going to go to the specific questions  n allow my colleagues to participate as well but with as i understood the proposal your estimation of the total time once and gauged is eighteen weeks and also as i understand it you think that it will take about two hundred hours of your time to do this over that eighteen weeks and then how much of that two hundred hours will you be on the job and how much will the assistant to separate herself she's not here and she's in the other room but she's not here for that reason and treat her just like every other candidate ok except we've always sat down with the system twice once in the beginning and just to describe the process of what we're going to do so that he or she knows as paper comes in to avoid dealing with it  t and then right before the screening committee and give them a sense for what the process is going to be what the competition is like and give them a sense for the recruit i mean one of the things that you know understanding this in terms of your connections are relationships and you were telling me that your lexington even relationships well you know just advertise you reach out to your contacts in sort of the broader community to see if they have an interest i does well reach out to what you did reach out pretty aggressively ok as a matter of fact the very fact that we may be engaged by a community produces resumes from people who we dealt with in the past who m to the specific questions because i think the public has a good sense of your approach and your firm and your involvement in the how long you think the process would take out i'm sure i've seen a question what whether you were in vision some sort of a digital outreach as well looking for candidates rather than simply sending paper letters get broaden the pool perhaps most of our market either resides and watch us advertisements in the i c m a newsletter which is the international city county editors association newsletter or the beacon from him and we also advertise in the local newspaper as a courtesy and a requirement usually by most communities that engage us we found that that works with ethan i also advertised on linked in on several occasions but i didn't get any response believe website we're which we post the position profile on as well and we have two news one is online in the paper for me and you're talking about involving out you know others in the community how would you go about doing that we would rely on you you know my background in lexington is not dissimilar to what you have here and i can remember my first down meeting where i proposed a fifty thousand  reduction dollar reduction in the insurance budget and someone in town meeting asked me why and i said well i really i probably stood up and and said i i recognize we're paying fifty thousand dollars a year for earthquake insurance and we haven't had an interesting i want to find out your thoughts on candidates who have had the same position from town to town to town and cycled through versus new candidates looking to move up into that role from something like an assistant to a lower level role or outside of the town government entirely what you think would be a better fit for our current position position of the town the position of the job if i think belmont really w require someone who's familiar with it's not just a form of government and the role but as worked it community said have high citizen involvement participation you know this isn't  training position your system is position he's is here to train people for for this position so if someone is an assistant under a quality manager somewhere moving up in his but experience there we look at them but for a manager ministre to in a smaller title after a few years you may well be ready but this is not an on the job training position i think you're right and  regarding i'm so the attributes of the town i'm in straight or whether for our particular situation whether some you would prioritize more vision or sort of nuts and bolts budgetary knowledge how you would envision that in your rankings having experience belmont to lexington and being in bedford for four years before they recruited me to work there i can tell you that it requires both you have to have a good candle on nuts and bolts but people in lexington expected me to be risk adverse and to help the board identify a vision for the community and to facilitate in the various disagreements that happen in the community either the school town conflict or the various interest groups i that exist in town i don't know if you have neighborhood associations but we had nine in lexington and again i had the great idea of trying to narrow down my meeting time by encouraging the neighborhood groups to do a neighborhood council and actually i made them more powerful because they met and started collaborating and coordinating and although my meetings went down from nine to one i sort of created a larger organization so i mean i think you need someone who is very sophisticated and who's done it before but also has a good handle on the nuts and bolts of the work because their credibility and your credibility is going to be based on how well they manage that and if the community perceives them as not being good managers they're never going to listen to whatever vision they have and i will more if which would be i was familiar the we've talked over the years with town meeting about the role of town i'm in a straight and what powers time in history would have and there was a movement about five years ago to give so i had a great deal of authority but that authority was really as good as i could work with committees and people to absolutely to accept their ideas and say oh great idea let's try it if it's a bad idea then not to say it's a bad belmont you know what is it all about the best line i've heard is that it's a community of over achievers over achieving and so exactly you know when people come to the microphone that you could easily end up with a size mythologists commenting on create a position for the town administrator that more is day to day operational control rather than the board being involved in that although we sometimes we slip back into that it's a natural thing for us to to do that and become more of a policy ward  it's good to hear that it wouldn't depress the types of kid it's we see applicants from and it's curious that one of the thoughts i had is do we have a point in time i understand the need to have miscible finance experience to have kind of ministre or perhaps time manager experience to understand how you work within respective to you know community like belmont which is very similar to lexington and i think the challenge that lexington has maybe somewhat different or your thoughts on us we need someone different nontraditional and perhaps that would fit for bill maher and someone that's really can work within an understanding useful fine us law which is so important right we continue to have challenges within the council budget you know even though we had a successful over a couple years ago that cash and so we have to figure out ways to doing business differently and i was thinking that we're at a sort of a a good solid practitioner who is able to work with a myriad of constituencies but you know from a personal perspective although i was personally recruited to come to lexington from bedford and i had great support when i got there i realized that the job was much bigger than i thought it was and i spent a considerable amount of my own time getting some training around facilitation and conflict resolution because all work very strong constituencies that are there and the budget it was just as big of a temp in lexington as it probably is here between the various groups absolutely use every year and was able to convince the community to embrace strategic planning which is called lexington twenty twenty that we started in the mid that's still going on today which was a vehicle for engaging the community and in planning and breaking down some of the disagreements and conflict that existed there so i do think you need someone who's capable of it but i think we also need someone who showed a track record of making adjustments and learning on the job because you're never going to be able to find someone who's perfect for the job what you want to do is find someone who is committed to learning and growing and isn't coming into the job thinking that they already know and have a formula for from dell it's interesting you want someone who's going to assimilate into the community and develop skills that serve you well i think that candidates out there rick i mean i you know someone there probably has the experience knowledge background hasn't been a role for twenty years and think they know what all of you will look into com grow within the position that we have here in belmont but also someone that's a vision can create extra teaching vision for the town so i really think we're at that point having served the art now for seven years i mean we did want david to what levy has left and he really did a lot of wonderful things for us but i think right we need to take it to the next level frankly and that point what can you it's my understanding that he was able to bridge the school one of the things  to i was very much in favor of hiring david because the background that he had was he was the finest director for only three public schools were two to three or four years that was one point that i like to lock so we understood school  issues which was critical in because we were very i think in the way we approached our budget we were very divisive and we joined want to join the board in two thousand and ten you know we started to create this sort of idea that you know it's one budget one belmont you know kind of thing hard to do right you understand the net make the challenges us and them in your one town by it doesn't matter we all need to do what we need to deliver services in the board has that responsibility to oversee all of that work with collaboratively with the school committee which we did so they would have that background he also has extensive budget your experience he was the budget director in cambridge so i knew that we can elevate our game on the financial side which was what we accomplished what i'm saying though is i think now that we've gotten a process in place look we haven't solved the problems you know in two we'll have to budget deficit again perhaps it's really thinking about it we had some nontraditional candidates that applied back in two thousand and ten twenty eleven someone there perhaps has less experience on can and we will the point is we can't continue to sure deliver the same level of services as my colleague the chair has said we can't live from all right all right just impossible with all the capital infrastructure needs we have as well i think we need again aided that can command in create a plea and help us create a plan for for the future in terms of how we deal with some of these large challenges and i don't know whether that maybe there's a candidate that's in municipal government today that has that ability i wonder where the we need to go outside of the municipal spear and what nontraditional candidates could that work before you answer that because it's a great question i'm currently reading a book called culture eats strategy for breakfast you know this book it's by kurt kaufman and kathy sorensen and it's it's based on a quote from peter drucker who's one of my favorite guys  his the book that i like that he writes or that he's written has a book called managing one's self but that's a great book but this culture eats strategy to your point what that says is that you you can't really do a touchdown change you have to start with the cultures you know in the organization and in the community and what richard was saying about his neighborhood associations one of the solutions is to understand these pockets of culture and of course we have lots of pockets of culture right and then you build a bridge of cultures which according to this theory that's what you did when you took your how many  within the one you built the bridge culture and so you know in terms of managing change which is another one of my favorite books is who moved my cheese i know you guys know that right so i think you know it's as i you're saying you know this is what we want to do going forward because i think we have to i mean i think that we we have a budget process down we have a very collaborative working relationship thankfully with the school committees for the apartment it's straight at times especially have to figure out are we deliver services differently more innovative without cutting services because the community really doesn't want to cut services i don't know whether that town administrator is out there that can help us do that i guess that's the question i'm asking in having served in your respect a role within your town to have extensive experience you know the inner workings of the better than we do is that possible to do that in one number two is there a candidate out there do you think we can bring to the town that  need is that person out there i don't know that to be the case and if that person is out there to me it's probably a nontraditional perk you know candidate can they work with in this environment in sort of what it what it was but the point i was people not necessary with government experience but with good business experience to do but one of the downsides to that i think is you have more of a risk of failure if that if that person comes in and isn't able to transfer his business skills or is thinking outside the box skills to fit your community so my recommendation is you try to encourage us to recruit people well qualified experience in this business i know when i moved from new jersey and can i recent new york connecticut new jersey before i came here it was a culture shock to me to work in local government in massachusetts mostly because of the sort of heavy citizen involvement fran i used to say that if my wife as it wasn't from massachusetts and i get married  here and all family i would not have say it was a crazy crazy form of government state but after thirty years as a manager in massachusetts i can't think of anything more enjoyable traditional candidate i don't know what the answer is all i do know is that we can't continue to do business the way we're doing it and expect to deliver the same level of services with the same amount of money we raise every year let me just add one thing i the framingham church i think one of our strongest candidates that i was really hoping the board would go for happened to be have a high ranking position that school system in cambridge interesting and he really saw his advancement to the superintendent see or even to the city manager's position cambridge block because of the people who were there were well qualified and happy where they were and had just had renewed contracts of five years each and that person i think would have brought a lot of new ideas and methods of operating to framingham interest unfortunately i couldn't get him accepted by i mean it's a challenging the only way out there is it's not impossible but there are consequences to every requirement and you have to be prepared for it as a board and you babe sickly have to develop a relationship with the can a very idiosyncratic place and not that the skills in business are transferable but it's less likely that they are for that and then they are for someone who has some background so you know i hate to put somebody in that position and i think you know you responded to the r p but you know anything anything else that we should be thinking about along these lines obviously you know what you're doing  i think i have a good feel for for the board and i think one of the things we would like to do when when and if we are engaged is to meet each of you separately for a few moments get some dissolute for the viewers and what you see that needs to tell you we don't in the past it's been important that the board is unanimous and we're not always unanimous i'm not troubled by that my colleagues are either so you know i think we we work pretty well together and mark and i have been together for two years so i think you know that will be a good look when you know if we end up working together g a proposal for a consulting services to assist in the recruitment and appointment of a town administrator we're joined by for municipal resources inc and  their principles and i would ask you gentleman we've just met but i would ask you to introduce yourself we're going to need the microphone cameras up here you don't have to look at the camera but just introduce yourself so the public knows who you are sure i'm alan gold has organized a series of questions for us we have about forty five minutes marc has a hard stop because if he doesn't walk out the door at ten thirty he's going to misses like we all know what that's what i know what that's all so you can wave goodbye to mark at ten  thirty but we we had another candidate in this morning in the forty five minutes seems to be enough to for us to get to know each other and obviously you have done your research on the town so we do have four general questions so we'll start with those  i wonder if you could provide us to in the public because we've read the proposal a summary of the consulting services that your firm provides not just in this in this regard but more broadly sure has been in business for more than twenty five years we have offices in new hampshire maine massachusetts we serve predominantly at new england following i tell people we just completed a project in south carolina and we go all the way to pres so anything in between we do full range of services so we have about fifteen full time people in new hampshire maine we do a lot of assessing we do we function as the assessors for towns and on the consulting side we do a lot recruitment every year whether it's side of town manager city manager we did one main that would be one that everybody would would recall we do police chief fire chief recruitments d p w we do organizational studies so basically week provide any a community needs if a community is in need of an interim manager we're able to provide that if they need a higher level of oversight on their finances then the bookkeeper that they have were able to provide that as well so we're really a full ranging service firm i've been with the firm for nine years my background is in public safety so i have a retired police chief in new hampshire and then town administrator and i place that i've been running the company for nine years and now it's you'll see that many of those are a repeat so for instance manchester by the sea we did a town administrator recruitment about five years ago we've just finished a police captain recruitment i'm sorry manchester via c police services we provide the i didn't know that you were opposable said that it would be that you expect it would take about twelve weeks to make the placement could speak to that sure so there's a part of there's a thirty day window that the advertisement tends to run and during that time we're collecting more information getting to learn more about the town we're screening the resumes so that that's thirty days right there is the advertisement and then after that we go into the screening process we send out the essays we review and score the essays we like to do phone interviews we keep making cuts along the way and that all takes about a month to five weeks and then we would do your onsite interviews and that is that is scheduled is somewhat set to you folks when you're all available and whatnot and that at the end is takes about two weeks to do a conference a background investigation on the candidate that you select and then of course there's that whole how long do they have the how much notice they have to get so a lot of process so the time that you can make a final conditional offers about sixty to ninety days  we usually say ninety days before somebody actually makes it here if they have to have like a thirty day notice then you're looking at maybe one hundred twenty days the number of hours or also  indicated in your in your report so as i added them up i thought it added up to maybe one hundred fifty hours sixty hours of your time so you're you're obviously going to be actively involved in the visit it's bob yeah you know you also will be involved in forty hours so that's one hundred hours between the two of you and then  that we bring that sort of management skill set to talk directly to over those semifinalists are about more technical matters then the fit matter that you meet you folks may be looking for that individuals so that when you would be the four of us would come to town on that day and interview what we call the semifinalists maybe we got it on a half dozen or so and that they would also facilitate interviews that you were you folks were doing on site as well so i have a panel of three we call study the essays and they'll also be years brought a process to check the network so one of the things with us is we have so many people in so many places not a lot happens that we don't know about so if somebody ran into a problem someplace we'd like to know about that sooner area how do you engage the department heads and other staff at the town in the process you talked about the panel the professional panel which is for the candidates what about the town we spend time here so we'd like to set we can have general focus groups sessions where any employees will come in and talk to us so we can do it by the parliament or we can do it we really prefer you know more of a group setting where employees can come in and say yes we also provide an email address that would be specific to your father so be you know belmont town administrator at that and i write g o v dot com and anybody can contact us through that email the information we get remains anonymous but we will group like thoughts or like ideas and we can provide those back to the town again and we read every one of those we respond to every one and again it's just all helping us kind of fine tune what it is we think you are looking for what it is we think you need from anybody that wants to provide input ok to follow up questions one is as you know we have an interim town administrator how do you incorporate and she's applying for the the town administrative position as well how do you incorporate in corporate that situation into how do you incorporate that situation into your process just lost is not the right word but our town administrator of five years moved to cambridge david cale and mark will tell you the story and it was very successful here so do you normally interview the past administrators i'm sure david would make time for you to tell you what you know what his thinking is he has a senior position in cambridge  i'm sorry and so owned by adam dash to ask your question thank you mr chairman i notice obviously there's a lot of new hampshire experience in the in the application and how do you approach it how would you approach the so it just happens that i reside in new hampshire and the company was founded in new hampshire twenty five years ago by the by the by you are so you know we don't very any we understand we thoroughly understand the commonwealth laws were your processes down here and that's why we surround ourselves in really team these things up with really good people that are experts in the field and you find you have enough massachusetts contact to have a sort to suss out the appropriate candidates tha other any other state you know what is your feeling toward zion see it in your materials about you talk about talking to outside folks outside of us about bringing in other outside voices into the process of that's a good thing or a bad thing and how would you go about that i like it i don't think that you have too much information one of the things seniors are a great asset to any community you know i often ask you know can i go and meet with the seniors at a senior line sure whatever they're having typically they meet on a weekly basis so seniors can be a really good resource we can establish in that e mail address is really helpful as everybody is invited to participate they all have to make my phone number public so people have my phone number my e mail address as well as the e mail address that we generate specifically for you folks we can do we can meet with chambers of commerce all information is good information to do sort of digital outreach looking for candidates as well enough so  then sometimes the quality of candidates has not been great that way when you do the boston globe it gets you also i want to say it's government jobs dot com and most dot com and we have this this network throughout new england then we know who's out there who might be willing to make a move who's interested about time to move and we'll contact those people we also because we do so many of these thank you very much because we do so many of these you know we always have lists of people there's only one number one in any community that we that we work in so there's a very good number twos and it might not be it was just that they just weren't the right fit for that particular community that might actually be a better fit for you folks would be hard to challenge you know you that this is just one of those fantastic communities and to me this is a destination this is where a manager said what i recall is so you know this isn't going to be somebody that's just kind of skimming along we want people that want to be here because of what elmore has to offer and i can't say that every community that we're in so you folks clearly what attract an extremely high caliber level of applicants and david has helped that you know the stability and what he brought and as a former manager similar to buzz we know communities pretty well and provide any guarantees that the person would stay for a particular time that we hire we do twelve months so if the person pats company within twelve months we do it again for free and we have a selection committee in either you're describing the process or you mention working with the selection committee that we've got so i give you describe how that would work your most places have a selection committee screening committee search maybe whatever you want to call it that day or so it's a matter of us understanding what their charge is and how you'd like us to work with them so time charge is something i'd want to see that charge then we work with the screening committee to accomplish that chad and what are your thoughts on candidates being recycled from another position from tandem in a straight or in another community to somebody maybe new or looking to move up as something yeah we think anybody here would want to see just running to something they want to be in belmont so we we don't like to get the people who are on the way down certainly treading we were very careful of so we really like to find the people that are on their way up and would hope that  would be that place that they want to be and that they would stay here for for all quite a while and as far as our car situation what do you think about a candidate more on the side providing vision and leadership versus providing more just nuts and bolts strategic plan so they can't be but if they do if they're just a planner and they're just that strategic person they may not be that great on the nuts and bolts and if any plate anything's going to get you in trouble it's going to be finances in h r you have a staff the h r department so that's really helpful i don't know enough about your finance department but you need to have somebody that has a handle on those no skill sets because that's what's going to church trouble the fastest so you you have enough staffing that you want a generalist  and then through our research with you folks we want to find out what i was here is that you have really well covered now and we may want to find somebody who has strengths in an area where you may have a little bit of weakness but certainly the strategic planning   you think that will impact or suppress the pool of qualified candidates that we would be looking to see i've been both i was manager on the work i was an administrator in burlington  my sense of that i had a very strong charter which laid out all of the powers and duties burlington was more of a special act of the legislature and ultimately incorporated into the town bylaws but it was a position that had a lot of authority allowed by the board of selectmen the selectmen over time just simply got more and more comfortable with not only me but the town administrative position and relegated some of their responsibilities to the town ministry the so you know i've been in both i don't think it's a deterrent to be a ton of ministry to versus a time manager but to potential qualified candidates coming here because you have a reciprocally i think what you said is what his responsibility where we we call the chief of ministry to officer position and we you know and that worked well for us in the board you know really move towards mean more of a policy board untouched and this is in his questioning or i think we're at a crossroads i mean we it was able to command and stabilize i think you know the team here had great relationships w collaborative working relationship with the school committee school department on budget construction which was great so we really worked hard to create a process run budgeting that's more collaborative in nature of the it hasn't solved the problems very different than what you do business perhaps in a business environment yes my question is is that candidate out there that has a mix of both mean i love the point you made on which you said leadership really creates strategic vision because i think the next county minis their member you know he or she maybe has to have an ability to work with this ford and other sort of folks stakeholders in town it's great a strategic plan moving forward we can't continue to do business the way we've done it unless we you know the residents are willing to just continue to be taxed in the in the war you know we have to we have to build significant buildings in town to be facing deficits in the future on the operating side can expect the state the bil itself we need to figure out a way to live or services differently an innovative way and maybe that's asking too much is that candidate out there number one number two if we thought if you thought that's what we wanted how would you go about and he was the colonel there and i suspect that when the resumes when the resumes came in that a lot of people in other processes were cut would cut these military candidates liking you know i was out relevant but you know we kept them in the process and you get to the essays and they really able to produce really good essays then you get on the phone and it turns out that running for space is very much like running a town or city civilian sort of works fire police all of that stuff treaty to get these people in there and so when he when he said that it made me understand it that's exact you know that's exactly what we do in local government it's communicating part of communicating is listening and i think that's kind of what you're talking about about you know say leadership integrity and communication and you mentioned earlier talking about people that nontraditional i like to tell potential clients that we really do look at the not traditional candidates and we have you know i just cited two examples of that but you know it's it's really you know important that people know what they don't know so when you take somebody from a private sector job or from the military they have to acknowledge that they don't know certain facts and then we want to find out how are they going to fill that gap what are they going to do when they land boots on the ground here what are they going to do to come up to speed in those areas where they may not have the knowledge some people fall flat on their face because they don't have that experience  military people change assignments very often they're thrown into a new assignment and they have to just immerse themselves in it learn everything they need to know and then move forward right and the same is true for people that have really good business because business constantly changes right and they were  bridge that gap and understand that we're going one town at a mass or a trend that we're seeing i know that that was a real issue inside barry when we were doing our recruitment process that whole town got a relationship is just so important right now and again that a lot of that comes back hoped what was the reason for that was just not fair was it that i can't think of one where the final person in the chair wasn't the right fit and we tend to have a really good tenure probably one of the  more troublesome ones we did bob was actually the interim manager of whaling when we were doing a whale and recruitment yeah and when we got to the the end of that process we had two really good candidates and because of you know something so we just you know we'll i tell people we don't hurry the process but we move deliberately through it you know and show me that's important because some of these people particularly the folks that we wanted to come to belmont these are some of the top out that maybe the talk is interviewing someplace else we've gone back to the screening committee or to the hiring body and said can we move this interview a lot of by three days because we want to get an opportunity make this person offer before the other company does and that's that i know a lot of managers around i know some of them have retirement plans but they haven't done anything yet so there's a there's an opening now for a premier community like belmont and there's not a lot  somebody wants to move out of state and go up to the new hampshire where it happens to be but so you're in a house at this point that could change tomorrow if my friends and around decide they want to retire and announce it but you're in a pretty good spot right now in the other than to prioritize diversity and bringing in somebody to provide a different view point before from our side where would you put that in the process how would you outreach to other communities of color bring another  well most people are professional a field of probably members and you know that that has no regard for color or race ethnicity nothing so and we don't so we don't look at any of the names we don't look at any we have no we don't actively celestion minorities we are soliciting the top management the top attentional management folks and we don't look at that through any lens at we're just going to do i drive and try to find you the best period and we have you know probably i would run the stat but probably fifty percent of the deployments are female read a of folks from the jews thank you my career was in banking in new york and we always had there was no lens in that industry it with regard to the essays in the assessment how does that work because that was one thing that we took out of the first story because we only got one response and so we wanted a broader marketplace i was on challenges that you may have you know you've talked about infrastructure you've talked about schools you've talked about maybe some of the parks collaboration with other communities i think i heard that morning so you know we're looking at essays would focus on those things that are directly important to you folks because the best predictor of future success is past excess so we want to see what have they done in this area this specific topic so that's predominantly what the essays focus down to the list the candidates we think should be moved forward to the essay round we want them to do some homework on them so that's why we tailor the questions to issues in belmar it's not general issues because we think by the time they get to be semifinalists they probably could do the job but we want to know we want to know what they're doing in terms of preparing themselves to come to belmore different fact they're lucky enough to move to that direction so we want them to do some homework in answering the questions specifically  different one of those greeters that you know everybody loved him but he sometimes he'd show up at eight fifteen sometimes thirty sometimes forty five so finally his manager you know he had to do something he said you know we love you you're a great guy you do a good job for us but you know we don't understand why you come in a different you know within half an hour and you know how did it work out in your last job and he said well you know that was my last job i didn't have to buy coffee when i expertise that we have i always tell people you know if you have a question tell the candidates you know that gets picked if you have a question or you need help with some i think i have to do is call me because behind me there's a whole team of people that can support us i don't care  police chief fire chief if i don't know the answer then i'll make sure that one of our stars you know saw it just for me to shoot on a simple e mail to a bunch of those people you saw listed in there the buses the carrolls the barge it's a question about this you know from canada or from from salt on belmont and we'll have the answer i hope you feel you've had enough time with us to discuss the proposal because i think we've had a good experience and we