New Britain Borough

Appointment Advisory Committee

Meeting Notes of 02/23/2017

Hello All

The following are notes from our recent meeting on February 23rd

The meeting opened at 7:30

In attendance were Frank Lombardo, Derek Macmillan, Jo Schuler and Halsey White

The Borough Solicitor's opinion on the applicability of the Sunshine Law on AAC deliberations was discussed.

• Because there is no allowance for confidential deliberation the decision matrix model will provide for rapid rating of each candidate if the AAC is prepared for interviews with appropriate questions pertaining to specific desirable attributes AND the Weighting of each of these attributes as to their importance in the work of the specific position.
• We recognized the need for advance preparation of questions for candidate interviews due to the{Sunshine Law} need for the committee to present a decision at the time of the interview -- using a decision matrix rather than open discussion.
• We recognized that the use of a decision matrix to arrive at a rational decision depends on the formulation of Weighted Attributes and Pertinent Questions which lend themselves to quantitative responses.

The result of this discussion was a consensus of the committee members attending that the AAC chair would work with the respective committee/Board/Council/etc chairs to determine attributes, weighting, and screening questions for the interviews.  There are resources available with lists of questions that can be tailored to the specific attributes for the position if composing questions is difficult.

The consensus of the attending members was that this system will allow faster turnaround for interviewing potential appointees; it will rely heavily on the expert input of the Committee / Board / Council / etc Leader to define the Screening Criteria; it will rely heavily on the communication between these Leaders and the AAC chair to complete the preparation for each interview.

And it will save the AAC members from a time burden by utilizing email or phone on the front end in distributing /clarifying/Designing questions rather than schedule additional AAC meetings for that purpose....the Sunshine Act will be complied with.

We spoke briefly about the likelihood of AAC action on candidates for the new Shade Tree Commission which we understand is like the Planning Commission and Zoning Board in that it is governed by Statute [?]

The meeting ended at 8:10

We will meet again on the fourth Thursday of the month following notification of required AAC action.

The following are my personal thoughts on the process as outlined at our meeting; hopefully I have captured the intentions expressed in our short discussion.  Please comment, thanks

So the preparation for interviews will be:

• The AAC chairperson will communicate directly with the Committee/Board/Commission/Council chair/ Manager [whose group has the vacancy] to develop a list of candidate attributes desirable in an acceptable appointee.
• Then Weight these attributes according to relative importance in the open job.
• Then compose [at least] one question for addressing each attribute.
• AAC chair will provide the list of attributes and questions to the AAC members at [or before] the screening interview.

The interviews:

• AAC members will use the composed questions at the interview and each question sheet  will include a space for the AAC members to indicate their scoring of the candidate on each question. One List/Score sheet for each candidate will be provided to each AAC member.
• Immediately following the interview AAC chair would collect the rating sheets from the AAC and using the previously determined Weighting to calculate the candidate's scores on a summary report sheet.
• After the completion of all interviews the candidate with the highest score [above minimum acceptable] will be reported as the AAC's non-binding recommendation for appointment. Halsey

P.S..   Apologies for the delayed Notes, I went over the working drafts several times in order to be clear and concise. Comments are welcome