NPU-S General Meeting Improvements

We need to streamline the NPU-S General Meeting! Our previous two meetings both lasted three hours, which is clearly too long.

However, the biggest reason for the length of these meetings was that many community members had questions and comments for our speakers.  We don't want to cut people off without them having the chance to connect with the City - but we have official business that must be attended to.

Therefore, we're going to try a few changes that should hopefully allow us to get our official business done while still allowing a robust interaction between the community and the City.

First, we're going to reorder the agenda a bit. Currently, the agenda is:

• Housekeeping (approval of agenda, minutes, etc)
• City Department Reports
• Elected Officials
• Neighborhood Organization Reports
• Committee Reports
• Planner's Report
• Voting Items
• Presentations
• Old Business / New Business / Announcements

We're going to move the committee and neighborhood organization reports towards the bottom of the agenda:

• Housekeeping (approval of agenda, minutes, etc)
• City Department Reports
• Elected Officials
• Planner's Report
• Voting Items
• Presentations
• Committee Reports
• Neighborhood Organization Reports
• Old Business / New Business / Announcements

This should front-load bigger ticket items and put community-scale discussions together towards the back.

Second, we're going to commit to holding our votes no later than 8:30. If it's 8:30 and we haven't yet gotten to the Voting Items section of the agenda, we will pause our current activity, hold our votes, and then resume where we were.  This way, even if the meeting stretches beyond its two hour limit, our official business will be done in a timely manner.

Third, we're going to engage our voting members before the meeting. The NPU bylaws mandate that voting members attend at least three of the last 12 meetings. Thus, we know who the voting members are because we take attendance records to track who can and cannot vote. We plan to send information on voting items to our voting members before the meeting, along with supporting documentation and contact information, so voting members can be fully informed before votes. Hopefully this should lead to not just quicker votes but better outcomes.

While it's not great that our meetings have gone into extra innings, it's a testament to our community's engagement that we've grown to this size. Hopefully these changes will help us strike a proper balance between informing the community and involving the community .

Thanks, and hope to see you there!