Rockport Board of Health, Oct. 15, 2026

Okay, Madam Chair, the waiting room is empty. Meeting is being recorded. You have a quorum

present. Clear to proceed. Great. Thank you very much. I'm sorry we're a little delayed this evening. We have a couple of folks that haven't joined us. One that's joining late and one is unable to join us so we really needed um adam and ron and myself to be a quorum uh for us this evening so thanks everybody for your patience so today is calling the meeting to order it is the 15th of october if you can stand it and it's the board of health meeting um and it's 5 30 5 38. okay so the first

thing is public comment do we have anybody that wishes to have public comment please raise your hand and we will hear you anything that's not on our agenda this evening if anybody wishes to speak please use the hand raise function or raise your hand in your video

If we now move on to what percentage of that is market, it's very difficult to say how many of the people that need help in Rockport are benefiting.

Is that a big number? Is that a small number? And so as a proxy for that, as an exercise for us to look into year three, we pulled some metrics from BSAS dashboards that talk about the number of, you know, events that might be correlated to an individual who has opioid use disorder or might be suffering from the disease in another way.

And so you can see here the metrics that are available on these dashboards. This is from 225. I believe the data, it lags out a bit, but it's what we have to work with. And so what we did for this to just give you a sense of demand, I suppose, as a proxy, we counted how many from Gloucester, Rockport, and Ipswich fall into these categories from the dashboard. We looked at Rockport as a percentage of those events. And Rockport comes out, if I say demand, it sounds terrible, but Rockport has about 8% of the events across the three communities. And so, you know, 12% of volume of services, 8% of demand. And then we move from there into how we're looking. And if you look at year two

spend, where Rockport has made about 10% of the investment, you know, against 30,000 against 300,000 all in, not 10% of the investments of the communities, but the total pool of dollars that we have. Just another metric for you to consider. And here's where we stand with the

status of spend for year two. So a program manager is the effort that we put in to, you know, work

with all of our partners to make sure that they have what they need to be successful, reporting delivered, et cetera. And so we have about, we have 34,000 allocated. 8,000 of that has been deployed, but we plan on spending the full amount by the end of the time period because that's for an employee. For supportive housing, as we said, we've deployed 71,645, but we still have another 71 to go that's encumbered and planned on being delivered when the first 71 is expended.

We have that $12,000 that is unallocated, and we're reviewing that to figure out where it can best be spent. And I'm sure we'll update you as soon as we have that answer. Transportation,

10,000 has been encumbered and it is now also shipped as of today. It's an update on my part that I need to provide. We have recovery coaching, the extra $46,000 still outstanding, which we would hopefully contract with our next provider. Community connections, providing corporate recovery with programming services that is in play and hopefully will be encumbered shortly once it's out of legal. And then we have marketing and iris. And that's an area where you're not seeing encumbered, but there's been a great deal of work done on that. And on that, you know, what we're planning on doing is building a suite of reels which have been built and promoting those reels on social media and on Instagram, on Facebook, and leverage paid media in those

environments to target industries, demographics, and locations of people that, you know, could have

a need for services. The reels that we're promoting are, there's many of them, and the idea is that the more person clicks, the more they're going to see reinforcement of the messaging that we're here, that it's okay to step up and ask for help, and that they're not alone. And I don't, Ray, I don't know if you've shared any of those visuals with the board before, but they're getting close to being finished, and we'll be happy to share them with you as time goes on. The majority of the creative for that effort was done in last year's spend. The reason we haven't spent this year so far is because we've been working through with Meta how to allow our reels to run, as I've just described without having to do a lot of certification if we were a services provider.

So that took a great deal of time and effort to finally get to the answer of how exactly we'll be deploying these. And happy to say we have that answer now, and we are planning to roll out that media very shortly. And the final thing I'll call out is IRIS, a platform that we have to support all of the give and take of referrals and reporting that's required across partners. And IRIS is not yet renewed for this second year as we wait and work with our partners on how best they want to leverage that platform. We want to be sure we're delivering the right kind of service for them. And so I want to wrap this up with a success story that actually made it into our mid-year

reporting to the state. And this is a case that was shared with us by Essex County Outreach. It's about a Rockport resident. So I'll just read it. A mother from Rockport had received extensive support through her recovery journey, while also navigating mental health and the legal system. Her dedicated support team, provided by the funding that you all have contributed, as well as the other communities, included a coach from Essex County Outreach, another community resource. and they provided guidance, transportation support, which is another service, support during inpatient stays, residences in a sober home, which was our service as well.

And she's currently in a CSS program at the Recovery Center of America and plans to take advantage of Twin Lakes and Gloucester again before returning home to reunite with her family. So that's an example of how one person can have many services be supported. by them and I just wanted to share that with you. And that's the I don't have anything else to add. I'm happy to take any questions. Great. That was great, Dominique. Thank you very much. So questions from the board before we move on to David. Ron. Dominique, thank you for that presentation. Can you clarify for me the is it a three year grant? It's a single-year grant that you reapply for every year.

And we have reapplied twice, and we're now coming upon the decision set, do we apply for the third year? And if we are going to be applying, that application is due in November. And then we typically find out in January, and the monies are typically deployed in February. We would like them to work a little faster, but that's how the current path is. And the $300,000 covers what period of time? How many years? The $300,000 is a per year. So Rockport puts in 30, Ipswich puts in 20, and Gloucester puts in $100,000 for a total of $150,000.

And then the state matches that with the Rise Mosaic Grant so that we have a total of $300,000 every year to work with. And so we now have a total of $600,000 across the course of the two years that we have been working with. And we are in the stages of considering applying for the third year, which would be another $300,000 that we would go for.

Thank you. And you said that years one and two overlapped. So how much calendar time did those two years really cover? Was it 24 months? Ray, help me out here. But I believe we had an extension until the end of July for year one, because setup of these services took a great deal of time. And so we didn't really start rolling until November. And we were not alone in that, by the way. Many municipalities had that same challenge in figuring out how to set up services and operate. And so we ended in July and this grant

for year two started um in march um but as i said we're not we're still burning by july we're still burning year one dollars so um with the exception of of housing we're so we you know we'll really be spending the three hundred thousand dollars between um you know july august 1st through

i believe it's the end of january okay other questions. Thanks for sharing that and particularly the story at the end there. I think it's really important to have that sort of human element which is great.

Just had a question about at the end of the day how are you going to measure success?

Excellent question. Success takes a lot of different shapes for us, right? So, success is

that we can help people and we're delivering services to the community and we engage with the community and we talk with them. And we are, you know, as you know, from prior presentations to this board, we were very data-driven and needs-based in creating the services. And so, So success is that the community feels that we're providing the value and that we are helping more and more individuals. However, success is also that we are sure that and can verify and be audited to show that the money is being spent appropriately and that we are fully compliant.

So that's a success that we also have to have, you know. And then what I would love to see happen is that we have an improved fabric of collaboration across our community organizations that's predictable and equitable.

So we have organizations of large and small sizes. You know, Action Inc. is a very large organization. You know, Radical Love is a very small two-person nonprofit, you know, helping immediate needs of people that are facing tough spots. how do we make sure that those organizations all benefit when clients present? Because we want to be where the client is presenting, not just where the money is being spent. So that fabric of collaboration is really important. And that's candidly been a lot of work for us to try and get to. It's not natural for community organizations to collaborate as one. And that's what we're working on very hard right now, trying to make that happen as

meaningfully as possible and as measurably as possible. And I could add one little thing to that as well, you know, and remember Dominique,

in terms of measuring success, but in terms of accolades and focus on this work, you know, It was last year that Secretary Mahania, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, DPH Commissioner, Robbie Goldstein, and Deirdre Calvert, a director of Bureau of Substance Addiction Services in Massachusetts, all came and wanted to meet with our group and we all met at Core Peer Recovery, just in terms of their level of, the impression they got this build out, the way that we had established this program and we're working kind of across all these partners in the community they thought was an excellent example of how these dollars

can be spent by and through municipal efforts. So again, that's not necessarily quantifiable, but I think that really for us really highlighted

the efforts are in the right place. Yeah, we are pretty proud of that. And also we are the only municipality combination, you know, alliance that got another grant of 150 match. There was no other group that got that money. So that was another testament to the work that we're doing being viewed as valuable to our state leadership.

More work to do. I mean, absolutely more work to do to be sure that we're promoting well, that we have everybody aware of what's possible and what's out there for them.

I think our releases of our social media campaigns and getting our community engagement committee in the business of promoting these services via word of mouth is going to be very important to amp up some of the volumes that we're seeing. Great. And, you know, thank you, Dominique. I appreciate you giving us the numbers. Okay, that's what we've needed you know we've contributed at this point sixty thousand dollars um into the two years we want to make sure that we're getting um value for that sixty thousand dollars and the time that ray is putting into this um as well um and um so the numbers are important um as well as

any sort of publicity i'm not sure how much publicity we've actually seen um you know i mean I mean, I know there's a lot of banners here and there and some of those sorts of things. So, Ray, keep us in touch with some of that because I think that's important because the numbers are small in Rockport. I kind of expected those to be a little bit higher, I will, to be honest with you. So, we do want to keep track of that to make sure we're getting value for the money that we're putting in, if you can understand that.

100%. Yeah, we have been tabletopping. At Mote of One Day, we tabletopped. We tabletop whenever we have event opportunities at the YMCA. We are tabletopping and several other places. We have bus wraps. You know, the challenge with promotion is that it costs money. And I think we all agree that the money has to go to support the people, but at the, you know, the services. But at the same time, if they don't know about it, you know, how do we, we're not doing a service. So your point is well taken, Barbara. And we agree. We need to absolutely get the promotions out there. We didn't anticipate the challenges that we would have launching social media. Great. Well, thank you. I appreciate you presenting to us.

This was helpful, very helpful. Thank you. And I'm going to leave. So have a lovely evening. And, David, thank you very much for taking the time to brief them more fully. Have a great day. Great. Thank you. All right, David, you're on deck. do you have a slide share as well i do thank you guys yeah sorry i was having some camera trouble at first i got it down lickety split so we're all good to go now all right great and we've got probably about 10 minutes i'm not sure how long your presentation is but um you know we've got other business on our agenda so i just want to give you some some

I am the regional youth program manager. So I specialize in youth and around youth as well as

parents and honestly every age in between just kind of specialty is the youth um i'm part of the

regional youth prevention network that is under the gloucester health department um we have a core

mission of reducing substance use and promoting mental health access and we are currently serving Rockport, Ipswich, Danvers, Manchester, Essex, Beverly and Gloucester. If you hear me refer to the seven communities during this presentation, that is them. Now, PN, it's again a group that

is watched and under the Gloucester Health Department so that we can receive funding from our funders, which is state, federal, and private funders. We have a bunch of local

youth groups. We are still currently working on the promotion of our Rockport youth group. We're working closely with Emily Souza, the youth librarian at the Rockport library to get more youth involved. However, as of current, we have other youth groups in those seven communities. Gloucester being close, we do have a very good variety of Rockport and Gloucester youth. When we did get the Rockport group up again, we gave the youth the option to go to the Rockport group or stick with the kind of Gloucester-centric group.

And since it was such an easy transition, it being at the YMCA, they chose to stay. So we're still working on developing and getting younger youth in. Our main thing is upstream early intervention. We focus on early intervention strategies to mitigate the risk and prevention or prevent costly serious health issues as residents age across the community clusters.

community training and impact now 13 seems like a crazy number it seems so low but the training

that is being held with these 13 community members is humongous i don't know if you've heard of youth and teen um first aid program it is not just on scratches on your knee it's more

about the mental health challenges that youth are dealing with these days. It's to equip residents and educators and leaders across the North Shore with actionable skill to identify, understand, and respond to signs of mental health challenges in youth. We actually have a training tomorrow, I believe, at the Rockport Library with about 10 or 15 more Rockport community members, but I I wanted to give you the true data that I have as of current. If they say they're from Rockport, I am able to put it down in a spreadsheet. An upstream prevention impact. We're fostering the early intervention support network to build community resilience and mitigate risk before critical health issues emerge.

All right, trusted adult campaign. I don't know how connected you all are to the schools, but me having my connection to Rockport,

I was once the teen director at the teen center in Rockport when it was open. That was probably the best job I ever had. That was awesome. Don't tell my colleagues. But yeah, we made a huge impact at the Rockport Teen Center. I'm so sad that that's closed, but my connections with the youth have stuck. and I could probably tell you almost every Rockport youth's name, which is awesome. So we were able to go to the schools, which we are regularly at Rockport High School and Middle School, and ask youth who their trusted adults are. Because studies show that youth who have a trusted adult are much more likely to have positive mental health outcomes, as well as have a huge decrease in substance use.

and there was well over 25 youth that actually nominated people and there were five adults,

which really shows that there are some five awesome teachers in your school system that's really getting targeted. Again, the interactions we have at the schools are even bigger than that, 25. It's just the kids who actually scan the QR code. Not many of them have their phones at lunch. mental health and physical well-being, strong relationships, support directly drives

improved mental health outcomes and long-term physical wellness for youth throughout our regional network. This is something we do regional-wide, but that's a rock board number. Community impact. We have 15-plus youth currently participating in our youth groups. One being the Gloucester Youth Leadership Council that I had told you about, the other being Rockport Youth Leadership Council. And our regional group that is filled with the seven communities is our North Shore Youth Leaders Group. We work on mental health and wellness through our huge event that happens at the end of the year that you guys were awesome to let us have, I believe, two years ago at the Rockport Teen Center.

It is called Teen Summer Send-Off. We give youth resources to get through the summer without their trusted adults or teachers. This is a huge, fun, free event. And they also work on campaigns such as the Trusted Adult Campaign and the prevention and vaping, drinking, and tobacco.

Our community partners. We have six Rockport members involved, or community members. The Rockport Public Library we work very closely with, especially Emily Souza, as previously stated. the Rockport Public Schools, the Rockport Police Department, the Rockport Health Department, and Board of Health. And then here are some Youth Prevention Network community partners that we work the closest with. Emily Souza, Jesse Palm, Ray Cahill, Ruth Price, Amy Rose, and Becca Macy.

This is our regional grant funding. So this is funding that covers Rockport itself. We have $125,000 for the Tower Grant. That is based on mental health promotion, really just getting youth the resources they need and finding healthier alternatives that youth can do instead of using substances and to help promote healthier mental health.

Mass Call 3B. This is our youth substance use prevention grant. This is A to D, any substance we want to prevent youth from ever having the chance to use. And again, giving them civic duties that they can do or perform volunteering or fun events so that way they don't have to go to using substances.

This is a nice little graphic of our intervening variables, how we use the work we do.

Ivy's intervening variables are community, belonging, adult education, youth mental health, and SEL, and healthy opportunities for youth. I can share this slide out if you guys would like it. um there's a lot of other great stuff we do and to finish up the past three years we've gave funding so that the fourth grade class can go to project adventure for seo um

another four years we've been working with um the rockport public schools for yrbs data which is data that helps get rockport public schools funding to support them um um and we continue to want to work more closely with rockport um so not only do we want to present we want to ask what do you guys need so i'll give you my contact in the chat if you guys want to reach out i would love to work more closely with you guys and figure out any needs that you have thank you guys any questions great thank you david so any questions from the board

No, that was really well done. We appreciate it. Are you working with the wellness committee at the Rockport school system? Yes, we are. Okay, good. Yeah, it's awesome. I personally

love Rockport. I would love one day to get that teen center open and get that going again. Absolutely. Go Evans Field. All right. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But thank you so much, guys. And again,

I'll put my uh info in the chat great and just share your slides with us so we have that data yeah definitely more data to come great and we're working with the school committee also Trish is our liaison with the school committee uh to work with them because they should be sharing fairly soon the results of the youth risk behavior survey yep okay so um and we're hoping to get a little bit of data on some of the vape of course we've spent some money on as well so i'm not sure we'll get detail on that but we at least need some sort of again you know we're investing in it we've invested in it and and we need some data back so so a huge thing that i didn't want to put in the slide because it's not necessarily metrics but we did work with rockport public schools and our youth

group to do um qr codes that youth could stand to get help with substance use or mental health

crises and a lot of you have scanned it for um vaping resources which is crazy because it's an addiction that youth can't just put down they need so much help to get it to be to a point where they can put it down wow thanks for sharing that with us we appreciate all right any other questions from the board thank you very much guys great thanks take care dave take care go vikings

vikings okay brockport vikings all right so um thank you those were great reports um and it's

good that they were very rockport based i was happy to see that as well the next thing on our agenda is the septic titanic regulation. And I think that we've got our sort of, we had our hearing, we've had a couple of revisions to the new regulation. And Ray, I think you wanna take it from here so that we can maybe get over the finish line with the vote. Yeah, that'd be great. Got to make sure I'm gonna screen share. that was the plan hold on okay so are you all seeing you're just staring at me that's no good um

let me um

what am I missing here hold on

I apologize I'm not seeing where I'm supposed to click to show there is that's the share button yeah okay here we go all right so if I do this one

okay what are you all seeing right now a slide that says classic septic system components yep okay excellent sorry about that see it was hidden right in front of me the all right so very good so um so

first just I just want to put together a bunch of slides just to give some context around this proposed tight tank regulation that the board has been considering so with this slide in front of you just a quick review of a standard septic system design. The sewer line runs from the dwelling to a septic tank where materials settle and separate into layers, leaving a liquid wastewater effluent as the middle layer, that effluent that exits the septic tank through an outlet and goes to the distribution box or it's labeled as the D-box. And then traditionally relying on gravity, the effluent leaves the D-box and the D-Box ensures equal distribution of that fluid into the multiple pipes in the drain field,

also known as the leaching field. Once the effluent is in those pipes, it exits through holes in the bottom of those pipes, and the effluent is subsequently filtered through the underlying soil where it gets purified by naturally occurring bacteria and microorganisms. Now some properties don't have traditional septic systems and instead may have a holding tank, what we refer to as a tight tank. Tight tanks have no partition walls, they are straight up holding tanks. They have no outlet the way a septic tank does. Older tight tanks were designed of a top and bottom half joined by a mid seam. Newer tanks

are designed to be what they call monolithic chambers, meaning that they have no mid-seam. They are instead a combination of a single seamless receptacle with a lid placed on top. Tight tanks typically have only one access port and that's what they use for pumping when you're pumping out the tank. These tanks are also designed with an alarm to notify you when they're reaching capacity and need to be emptied in short order. In terms of construction material. Ray, can I stop you for just a minute? Could we move on just a little bit

faster? Because I think we've been through a lot of this before. We were kind of looking, we're almost at the point of taking a vote. So some of the high marks from each of your slides would be great if you appreciate. Thank you. 100%. So the fact that older tanks were made of concrete, whereas these days they're more made of more durable synthetic materials, that's a critical takeaway point. Title V State Environmental Code prohibits tight tanks for new construction

or for any increases in design flow. There are very, very strict situations where a tight tank

can even legally be considered as an option. So they are highly discouraged by the state. And the takeaway message from this is simply that it's the volume of the wastewater generated that dictates how often these things have to be pumped out.

I know that the board previously also had concerned about cost. This slide simply represents the $300 to $450 flat fee per pumping for a household.

and again, the frequency of pumping really depends on usage. So number of bedrooms and

whether it's a seasonal versus a year round residence. Structural breakdown of tight tanks is considered inevitable, especially the concrete tanks in our acidic New England soil.

The main problem here becomes as a board of health, how do we monitor that? How do we regulate that. How do we protect the environment? How do we protect the groundwater? So Title V doesn't address that. Rockport also has no regulation addressing fitness of tight tanks, and hence the proposed regulation in front of you. We broke down the list of 18 tight tanks here in town.

There was close to a 50-50 split between which ones are seasonal versus not, and one takeaway here is that there's only one property where the tank was installed in 1987 where if if this particular regulation were to pass only one of the 18 properties would be up against having to comply with the regulation right away but there's certainly a time lag between when those other properties would need to comply I know that we've talked the board had raised a number of previous

discussions, sorry, a number of questions during the previous discussions. We do keep a list of pumpers on our website for homeowners to access to try to make that search easier when they're up against needing to get the tank emptied. I remember, I believe it was Adam had asked what

other communities are doing regarding monitoring tight tank fitness. The short answer is just a little bit. Most other municipalities don't have specific regulations. Most other

municipalities simply rely on any notes that are reported by the pumper on the pumping slips that get submitted. Oftentimes pumping slips aren't submitted. We have to chase them down. It's not unusual for us to have to chase them down. A lot of times there are no notes about the integrity or the fitness of the tanks on those. And then also up against the reality that the pumpers who might be making notes in terms of the fitness on those pumping reports, they're not Title V system inspectors. So that raises the question about, can we be doing anything better to try to ensure the integrity of these tight tanks and protect our environment and our groundwater? So the updated recommendations to the proposed regulation

since the last meeting, one of the sticking points was what kind of inspection would take

place and how readily a homeowner would be able to access that service. How quickly would they be able to find a company that could come in and perform that particular inspectional service? The reality is that the vast majority of pumping companies out there aren't sending a Title V system inspector to do the pumping. They're sending a pumping technician. And so if they were going to send somebody qualified to truly evaluate the fitness of a tight tank, they would send a Title V system inspector and they would charge for a Title V system inspection.

So the current version of the regulation that is in tonight's packet, it pivoted away from a visual fitness inspection to a full title five inspection every three years so yes that means

that the homeowner would need to have the tank pumped and at the same time contract with the company hopefully the same company to be sending an individual who is a certified title five system inspector to actually do that inspection. We took a look at the cost of that and

Title V system inspections right now, the average price in our region, Kristen did a lot of work drilling down on this, is about $517. So if you broke that down to once every three years,

once the tank has been in the ground for 30 or more years, that's a $172 a year financial burden that would be placed on the homeowner. And it's not unusual where a two-bedroom year-round dwelling

with a tight tank of average size between 1,000 and 1,500 gallons probably needs a pumping about every seven weeks at about $500 of pumping. So if you're taking an annual expense for pumping of $3,700,

dollars, you're increasing the annual maintenance cost of your tight tank by 4.65%. So I know that

that was a question, you know, what kind of financial burden would the homeowner be up against? And so on average, with the data that we've collected, for your average year-round household, it would increase their annual maintenance cost for their tight tanks by 4.65%. percent. And I don't necessarily have to get into the details of bringing the system into compliance.

Title V covers most of that. There are specific notes about, I know that Title V, whenever a septic system is in failure, Title V can grant up to two years to get it repaired or replaced. Obviously,

that's a very long time to wait if your tight tank is leaking into the environment. So the proposal before you does summarize that this particular regulation would, you know, by default

give no more than a one-year runway to get that work done. However, if the tight tank is within an environmentally sensitive zone that the Board of Health could meet and decide on an even shorter

interval to require the homeowner to comply to get that taken care of. And that's that was the slide deck before you. Great, thank you. All right, so any further

questions? I know that when we had set up the draft agenda, wanted folks to really get back to Ray with individual questions and have those resolved so that we would be able to take a vote tonight on where we're at with this new regulation. Can I have you not screen share? Yeah, I'm looking

for the stop screen sharing button. All right, great. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so questions from the board. Any outstanding questions that Ray hasn't answered over the past couple of months?

I did field a lot of questions from board members. They were excellent and they were very informative in helping with the current draft. Hey, Ron. Yeah, Ray, thank you for doing that work and making the revisions. A question, more procedural one, do we need to have another hearing? I saw something on one of the slides where that question was raised. But does the public need the opportunity to evaluate the changes that we made?

I don't know the answer to that. I hope we don't. No, Barb and I talked about that. And the fact that your board went through the process of having a public hearing satisfied that requirement.

The other piece, too, is that one of the main concerns is always if a draft is updated and if it drastically changed the penalties, then the right optic is to maybe consider another regulation.

And that wasn't the case here. So the only thing that changed here was the type of inspection and even the three-year interval stayed the same.

So there were minor enough changes that this shouldn't require another public hearing. All right. Thank you. Thank you. I think, Ray, you addressed in that presentation very clearly any of the concerns that were raised at that time. And I think you've addressed them all very well. So thank you. Great. Thanks, Ray. You've spent a lot of time on this, I know. So are there any further questions from the board? All right. Could I, um, I'd like to entertain a motion to approve this new regulation regarding

tight tank, um, uh, for the town of Rockport. Move. Second. Second. Ron second. Any further discussion? Okay, let's vote. Ron? Yes. Adam? Yes. Trish? Yes. And myself, yes. So we have unanimous vote to approve this. I know that Ray has, thank you everybody, and thanks Ray for doing a lot of the work and answering all of our questions.

I know that we had sent an individual letter to all of those 18, 19 folks who have tight tags. We'll want to probably send another one logistically and attach the current new regulation.

Sure. And let them know that the proposal was for it to become effective immediately, but the enforcement would begin June 1st. And then that gives them this spring season when things are thawed and the seasonal high water table is at an appropriate level to to have those inspections conducted.

And again, this only pertains to one property at this point. Sure. Do we know if that property owner attended the public meeting? I'm not sure. Kristen, do you remember? I don't know. No, they were not. They were not the individuals. no they're not there okay no okay and right one quick thing uh it struck me that the oldest

tank we have on record is from 1987. that seems pretty recent yeah i wonder if there are tight

tanks lurking out there that are older that we just don't have access to because what happened before 1987. i i don't know so just a question i raised i'm with you you know i've been wondering

if any we're going to rear their head but um yeah that that's the current list so um others very well might pop up over time as systems start to fail or for other reasons coming to our attention thanks great good question okay great job everyone um i know dawn's very upset that we probably

going to take this off for our november agenda you know it's his favorite item for us to talk about but um we'll once we once we get to uh implementation um and uh have discussion with that single owner uh to make sure that they understand that they're you know they're first and only on the list uh for the upcoming year for uh you know they're the demo case let's put it that way okay but thanks everybody appreciate this was a while getting to and i'm glad we did this because we never we just weren't getting good data um all along so the other person will be thrilled to hear this is sid wedmore okay so i might have to give him a buzz okay so it was his favorite thing to talk about and um you know he put a lot of time and effort into it when he was

chair as well so i might give him a buzz so thanks right i appreciate all right so now we're down to goals um our eds plan so to let you know that we still have a couple of vendors that i'm waiting

to hear back from one is walgreens and beth calimo is the is the pharmacist in charge there and she's working with walgreens um corporate to make sure that that gets done but i don't think there's really going to be any changes to that um the other is saint joecom's church as an eds site and I've pinged Father Jim a few times without getting any feedback. So once more, I might have to bring this to mass with me. And he gives me communion and I give him the MOU to sign off on at some point. Okay. But I think that that will be fine as well. So those are the things that we're waiting on. And then we have the vet hospital as well. So we have three MOUs for the EDS plan. And Mitch, do you want to share with us for a minute?

I know you had discussion with town council about where they're at with liability for each of these MOUs.

Yes, they're working their way through. They've done their review on it. They're going to get a word version from Barb and offer, I'm sure, a couple of comments they'll have. But nothing came through as a major red flag. I had that follow-up discussion this afternoon and no major red flags on it. Great. Thank you. And then the other big thing is to make sure that we have job action sheets for each and every one of the roles in our plan.

And so I have copies from everywhere. And thank you to Dave Lockallade from the hospital. He sent me 100% of all the job action sheets for all the different roles in the hospital's plan as well. So I've got those to cut and paste when I get back from the DR. are and hopefully by the time we get to our our next meeting which will be our SWOT analysis meeting I'll I'll be able to have those to show to folks because the goal is to have them be one page it can't be 12 pages they've got to be this is what you do pre this is what you do enter and this is what you do post so that those job action sheets are very easy you know quick look one page for each of the roles so that's my goal is to have that done by then so anyway so those are

three big things and then we'll be able to talk to BME strategies make sure they plug all of our changes and all the things into the plan that we've still got outdated with you know outstanding with them Mitch can then be with work with Ray and be able to send out a sort of a group message

to folks that are identified in each of those roles so that the job action sheet so that they're where their role in our plan and include the job action sheet and then we can begin to look at a um at a drill sometime probably quarter two of next year so we're getting there god willing okay

it's one thing that will be done by the end of the year all right please okay all right so any any other questions on our eds All right. Next is our NFG logistics. So, Ray, I think you've been working on this. Do you want to go through some of the things that have been done so far? Because I think we're almost ready to, you know, we've been working on some of it. There's some that are scheduled to come up so that we'll be ready for a 1-1 start date.

Yeah, the big ones were that, right, so our department has drafted a reminder letter for the two retailers to let them know that the 1-1 start date for NFG is coming up.

The we've also those retailers are also going to be required to post very specific signage in their businesses.

That signage has been drafted and is ready to get deployed to the two businesses as well. Our October monthly motif contribution included the reminder to the public about NFG.

And I do know that I got confirmation. It was, I think it was just this morning that through the school email distribution, not sorry, email distribution, but through the school newsletter, that NFG one pager is also going to be going out to all the families through the school network. Yes. And I think there was a handout at town meeting as well. I think Chassie and Sam did tabling on that. And I don't know about farmers markets and other sort of tabling events as well, whether NFG was was part of that. But anyway, I think we've done a pretty good job getting the word out.

And we also did talk about putting something in the Gloucester times as well as we get closer somewhere around December.

If that makes sense. Anything else to get us ready for NFJ?

I don't believe so. I mean, I think those are the primary target audiences, you know. Okay. All right. Good job, everyone. Another great heavy lift. Excellent. External communication. We're going to start off discussing the senior survey. I know that folks in this room on this call have done a lot of work on that. And maybe Adam, you could talk a couple of minutes about the action plan on the senior survey and maybe where we're at and what next steps are. Yeah, I'm sorry. I haven't done a lot of that. I was chatting with my two friends behind

me for a while since our last meeting. So I'm back. I'm not going anywhere. And so I don't know,

Bob, if we can move that to next month, but I haven't actually done any heavy lifting on that since our last meeting. Okay. I do know that one of the things that did come up was toenail service.

And we did sort of talk about that not being something that the town should take on liability wise, even with a contracted service.

So we might be better off helping to support transportation to a podiatrist or something like that.

And to add in, Barb, you're correct. That is not proceeding. okay um the other thing is that um i did hear through ray and i don't know is chassie on the call i don't see chassie on our call tonight does anyone she's not okay all right so ray do you want

to talk for a second about the you know this new something that i heard yesterday about blood pressure monitors through the library system absolutely so um a lot of municipalities offer

blood pressure monitors, automated ones, through programming that is developed by the American

Heart Association. And so I know that Chassie has been in contact. Well, we spoke with her about potentially developing a program through the library. She then connected with Cindy Grove, the director at the library, and Cindy was very excited about this. So they're going to move forward. Cindy's been put in touch with the regional representative and longtime colleague of Chassis at the American Heart Association to start down the path of adopting that programming so that individuals can come into the library and literally loan out those take-home monitors

for periods of time. And they are monitors that particular brands like Omron is one of them that that are approved by the American Heart Association. So there is a good scaffolding around that program. It's well established. And so we're looking forward to having that in our community as well. Yeah, that's great. I just learned that yesterday. So we don't have to create our own. American Heart Association has already done that with libraries. We just need to sort of make sure we adopt it here. So that's very cool. That was good to learn. Thank you very much. sure and i think the other thing was to work with cada on some transportation issues so ron

i know i see that you have your hand up yeah yeah i heard at the last council on aging um meeting that there a grant has been received that's going to significantly improve access uh transportation

access to a number of events i think kate is making available or has obtained through this grant a small bus which will be able to bring people to events at the community house and also

to bring people elsewhere you know in the community and out of the community um it's sort of a good you know mental health kind of boost for the seniors who take part in those activities so they were very excited about that that's great awesome thank you now anything else from the council on aging since that's come up this uh yeah a couple of things um um jesse presented the

senior mental health program i think september 30th and october 1st and um i didn't attend but

i heard at the board meeting that i did it was really very successful did you attend i did it was it was really really well done great teachers great materials um great approach it was really

really well done it's well worth any of us um taking it yeah it uh i was told that there were 19 attendees and that was felt to be you know a good turnout um it was discussed at that meeting

how beneficial that program could be to others including and especially perhaps employees of the town anybody who's you know um you know facing the public especially police members of the board of

health you know you know committees etc so um i don't know who to address that to or if our board wants to advocate for that i mean i suppose that mitch is somebody we should advocate to if we decide to do that but um it must have been a very impressive presentation that jesse drew it was it was it was really well done and i agree i you know and with our opioid funds we are able

to buy those materials okay um so um it's so all well worth it for sure for sure

okay let's see what else do we have on our external communication list here monthly motifs

um ray i think we did uh the community health equity survey and nfg just recently in october

and then november and december i think we've got targeted for uh for opioids right that's correct

or addiction let's call it yeah november we're going to focus on our regional efforts um regarding substance use and then december um our local efforts right okay that's great and then uh ron

i think that um you have a bit of an update on lily lutz as well yeah just a little bit um as

I've discussed here before, the Lust Foundation promotes health education and other

programs on the North Shore, especially in the Beverly Hospital and I had St. Gilbert catchment areas. And I had spoken with the treasurer there and they have money, and they're particularly interested in providing money to appropriate programs for seniors. So

It seems to me that Jessie would be the first person I should talk with to get a sense from

her since doing this through our collaboration with the other three towns. You know, would make this potentially a larger ask. We could create a larger request for money. And I think it'd be more likely to be successful with the LUTs program. So I'll start with Jessie, get a sense from her. Barb, talk with you about a consortium, and we'll take it from there and see what kind of programs we could develop. Perhaps over the year, have a number of different presentations. We'd have money to bring in speakers, again, educational, maybe directed towards seniors, but we could expand that to address younger populations as well.

Yeah, I agree. Good. That's great. Just a sort of, when I was at the hospital, Trish Goodwin, who worked with me for years, her and I did what we used to call, and I think I might have mentioned it at the last meeting, we used to call risk management summer lecture series.

okay and we literally throughout the year we put together four four sessions over this over the summer months okay held at the same time we invited the same kind of groups of people but we wouldn't have to do it that way we brought in one external speaker that was you know fairly well known so that it wasn't just us talking to people you know it was it was somebody from outside as well. It was extremely well received. It was well supported by leadership and folks that

did attend, and they gave us ideas. You know, they were the ones who gave us ideas and say, you know what, next year's lecture series, could we do something on XYZ? So we really got the buy-in from lots of folks. So, you know, when we do our November and December meetings, we could talk a little bit more about it but i think this is a great way for us to approach what does the public need to hear from us about what we do you know that external communication piece is really important it was a great goal and it's not just a single year goal so uh be thinking about how we could develop this into you know sort of a standardized program that we would do through our health department so great thanks ron i appreciate you thinking

about lily lusts that was that's a great idea for sure okay anything else

all right i know that um sam at least sam's on the phone i'm not sure sophia is still but i know

that they did some tabling events as well that we might want to make sure we get into our external communication piece all right okay anything else before we move on to reports

okay ray health director report hello again um so i'll start with beach water testing there

were no bacterial exceedances at any of our swimming beaches through the final two weeks of the extended summer testing window. That was lovely. One question that has recently bubbled up with respect to beach water testing is whether Rockport should consider adding Loblolly Cove to our summer monitoring program. It's used by locals. It is a beach where dog access is

is tolerated, which, you know, does that open it up to the potential for canine fecal contamination?

I think more strictly through an environmental health lens, you know, could it be argued that monitoring the swimming water at Loblolly Cove, could that help indirectly get a sense through the summer of how the septic systems in that area are holding up? So I just throw that out there that maybe that's something for the board to ponder on and to tackle over the winter before the next, you know, as we're approaching beach season in 2027.

But I wanted to at least get that on the radar. Okay. Okay. One thing that was important, I wanted to give you just a brief update on the opioid work group.

This is with respect to the use of how to use our local opioid settlement funds. So the workgroup has met three times, and they will have a fourth session on the 23rd of this month.

The group has gotten together, reviewed the full background, including the funding framework of the opioid settlement funds.

And they've looked at recommendations and actions previously undertaken by the town. and then also took a look at the regional level regarding opioid use and overdose prevention. They worked on identifying Rockport's root barriers to achieving better outcomes. The categories they discussed included looking at the healthcare system, town systems, local knowledge of opioid use disorder, and awareness, and also at both individual and community attitudes toward opioid use and individuals impacted by it. The group began exploring potential mitigation

strategies. They've generated a priority matrix, a draft of a priority matrix to help classify actions based on perceived impact, also based on degree of effort, cost, timing. The solution categories that they did explore included awareness, education, programming, local policy and also leveraging and strengthening both local resources and local partnerships.

Their current collection of recommendations, their next step is that they're going to be bringing in some outside vetting from other local contributors to help inform which of their final recommendations to bring forward for me to present to the board. And the plan for that is going to be at your November Board of Health meeting. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. And you did some review of our PPE supplies. Did you not? I did indeed. So, Carolyn and I, the, you know, health departments are not required to routinely stock PPE or a lot of other consumable emergency medical supplies.

The protocol is that we're supposed to order those through our Web Emergency Ops Center as needed at the time of an incident. Carolyn and I recently conducted yet another emergency dispensing site inventory count, and we cleared out everything else that had since expired, which was pretty much all the consumable items.

We've taken what we still have, primarily items that are mostly hardware items through our Region 3 emergency prep coalition.

We now are going to be housing them specifically at the health department. they're no longer going to be commingled into the town's emergency supply in the basement of the police department. And, you know, and in terms of the consumables, I'm not worried about the fact that those consumables have expired. You know, we were recently reminded by our regional public health coalition that, you know, that we're not supposed to use expired PPE that's only allowable under emergency order from the DPH. So the, you know, we have the mechanisms in place to order what we need when we need it and um it's also nice to have a lot of that closet space back so

that was the update there yeah thank you sure thank you you know all those outdated supplies of the police department were making me a little nervous my old infection control hat came on you know um so i'm glad that we'll uh be able to use and and get um sort of current in you know

current supplies as we need them. Thank you, Ray. Thanks, Carolyn. Are we confident that we'd be able to get masks and things, you know, promptly in the

eventual emergency? I'm just thinking back to the pandemic, where everybody wanted masks at the same time, and we were all washing these cloth masks. It was crazy. So what makes us

confident. I mean, is the state stockpiling them or somebody stockpiling them for us? Yeah. So we have regional stockpiling. I love the question. I've asked those same questions to the coalition and to the state. And so the expectation is a 24-hour turnaround. That's the current promise. They access regional stockpiles. MEMA, it would be overseeing that. And then if they

needed to move even into federal stockpiles, that would take a little bit longer. But um but there are layers of access and and the the initial question about initial turnaround time is within 24 hours i think i think they learned their lesson uh from covet yeah you know uh but it's

better than using an n95 that's outdated so you know even if we don't get a hundred percent of stuff you know um at least we have pretty good mechanisms moving up moving up the chain to the feds not including the feds so it's good question ron for sure yeah and then and barb the only other piece of my update was animal inspector um this is that time of year that the the barn and flock inspections um begin i've completed 25 of those they just need to get completed by the end of the year and again the purpose of those that's through the mass department of agricultural resources the The whole goal is to assess welfare of those animals and to be prepared for a response in the event of an epidemiologic emergency.

So a census of all those barn and flock animals is essential in case there's any sort of a pandemic that is jumping species.

So that's the main purpose for these barn inspections in Q4. Great. Thank you. And we can say here that the local pig that we had, may that pig rest in peace.

Oh, sorry. I know. The poor thing was the size of a Volkswagen. But lived a very, very good life. Okay? So, but yes. So anyway, sorry, Ray. You know, not on your list for this year. That's okay. Maybe I'll stop by and give her a hug anyway. I know. I know. Inspectional services. Any food inspections, housing inspections? those sorts of things where are we at I didn't have anything in particular to

to report we haven't had a real status change we've still got a couple of food establishments under development that are looking to set up shop and things have been knock on wood quite quiet on the housing front so fingers crossed Great. Anything for you, John? Anything to add? Nope. All right. Awesome. Thank you.

All right. And Chassie isn't here. So, held a couple of flu clinics. I'm not sure how many

people were at those two. Do we have any numbers, Ray? I'm trying to pull those up now. So,

I believe yes yeah at the first one we had 24 and the second one I think we had 11 or no 21

something around there yeah all right that's about equal to what we had last year yeah I recall yeah the first one was definitely a lot busier um and the second one I kind of

petered off towards the end, but overall, it was a good time. Thank you for helping, Sam. I appreciate it. For sure. Okay. Shared services. I know Sam chaired our meeting the other day. She, you know, along with me, because Sophia was at a class. So any specific work plan updates that you want to mention today?

I know we're working on a couple of things, radon and yada yada. So feel free to share a couple of things if you want to. Oh, I think she's still muted, Mitch. There we go. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so overall, it's been a lot slower after all of the flu clinics. We have another flu clinic in Hamilton, but the two flu clinics in Rockport are now over. We did do some tabling at the Rockport Farmers Market on October 3rd. And I think that got some people to actually take the CHEI survey because we are now, or Rockport is actually leading the pack amongst the four communities in CHEI respondents at 19, which is really great because last month Rockport was at, I want to say, less than five.

than five. So great job to you guys. And if you haven't taken it yet, I recommend taking it just

to get some more numbers and we can get some more data from the CHEI survey. And the state will hopefully send us a report sometime in the spring with that CHEI data. And I don't know if we don't

have enough, they might just do something Essex County based, but I'm not entirely sure yet. But the tabling was really great. We got a lot of really interested people. It was a lot nicer of a day. So people were stopping by and taking some flu kits that we had. We also had first aid kits as well. So that was really great.

And then yeah, in terms of other projects, I'm currently working on a resource map on GIS. So I'm trying to pull some resources that are available in the area. So if anybody has any that they know about, definitely let me know. I have a decent amount mostly in like the Beverly Gloucester areas. I'm trying to find some more things more targeted, like some more food resources, which I have like a cord food pantry and the three sisters farm and things like that.

But if there's anything else, any mobile clinics that come to Rockport that I might not know about, definitely let me know. Also any healthcare services that are in Rockport that might not

be super well known in the area. I know that a lot of people have to go to Gloucester for their health services or Beverly. So yeah, I'm just trying to pull as many resources as possible to make a brighter visual on GIS so people can actually see what's available to them. And that's

pretty much it for the most part. I know Sophia sent me some more. Yeah, I think that's pretty

much it we talked about um the mental health first aid and the first class that jesse did had 20 people and it was really successful and then she's also doing youth mental health first aid today and tomorrow in rockport great thank you we're also looking to get some information out about radon as well um we talked about radon kits and we decided before we even do kits that we really need to make sure people understand what is radon you know what are we testing for why are we doing that why should people care so that's something i think the regional group was interested in doing all four towns doing as well yeah definitely there's been talk of hosting our own community forum a lot of the times we've kind of been poaching other events to table at to get

the word out we are hoping to put on something of our own um hopefully something in rockport

um possibly at the community house or something in hamilton at the community house and then something else in Rockport, possibly at the COA. So we have been talking about getting some sort

of indoor air quality forum happening to get the community to come and listen and maybe try to make

it like interactive in some way so people can get a little bit more involved instead of just sitting and listening to slides about radon. So trying to figure out some ways to make it a little bit more interactive great thanks sam appreciate it awesome thank you update from board members

so i can go first i unfortunately missed i was traveling three of the last four weeks and unfortunately there was a school committee meeting last week they didn't post it until they didn't receive it until monday at 3 15 and i was on a plane bursting on tuesday morning so i looked monday morning i promised barb so i'll just keep a lot an eye out it was only three weeks from the previous meeting so i was anticipating it to be this week um so i just have it on my calendar to check every monday and maybe i'll do it in the later in the day rather than the morning. Okay. All right. It was a quick turnaround. I think Melanie Waddell got it at like 3.05 and it was Wednesday night. Wow. Okay. Yeah. All right. Okay. Adam and Ron.

I can just update. Yeah, I can just update a little bit other than also traveling for a number of weeks since the last meeting. I did reach out to a number of the mass departments, coastal zone

management, water quality management and the DPH around an initiative to improve or change the way

that we do our beach water testing. This would be a collaboration with GMGI to basically switch from

the current culturing method to a pcr based system and much to my surprise and delight

the dph got back to me while i was traveling and said hey how about a meeting uh so we had that meeting yesterday uh with them as half an hour discussion um i had worked with gmgi to put

together a presentation which included a budget for working out the um the the initial phases

of uh transitioning to a pcr based system which is currently used in san diego and

parts of the midwest as well and it's very well received they certainly understood that the

current culturing method taking 24 hours before you get a readout was was not necessarily satisfactory they didn't have any money but they did commit to looking into how best to get any

regulation for changing from a colony forming unit to a pcr based test looked into with the with the

mass epa so i think it was a good start the feedback was very positive there's more work to do certainly we worked out it was probably going to be about two hundred thousand dollars worth of effort to to get to the first phase where we could test in a lab in massachusetts so we're looking

for that money anywhere we can at the minute to see what we can do great thank you and it was received positively we um ray and i and carolyn spent a minute um sort of chatting about it at our regional meeting uh the other day and uh folks are interested in as well and i think also the fact that the you know we're talking about um sort of um you know more than just beach testing okay

so um it doesn't necessarily have to be salt water it can be other you know ponds and lakes and those sorts of things which helps our neighbors and the folks in our region that aren't necessarily on the coast so and i think the other the other point there that we were trying to push was this idea that this would also give you uh the source of the contamination yes so you could you could tell straight away whether that was human whether it was ruminant whether it was avian um which then would would save the dpw searching through the woods and and trying to find Yeah, septic lines if it's actually just a flock of geese around the corner. Right. So that was, that was part of the message that we put out there. Great. Thank you. And I did get a chance

to take a look at your slides. That was very well done as well. Okay. And like you said, eventually you could put it, you could put something, you know, in the hands of the lifeguard, test the water, gets the result, finds out if it's yes or no, and gets people out of the water sooner than 24 48 hours which is kind of where we're at now so um there is you know that technology piece as well that could end up uh really sort of changing the whole trajectory of how the state does that so nice job thank you very much and appreciate and i'm sorry you know i mean gmji it's right in our backyard so it's great that we're working with them um anybody else ron i think we've heard your update for the most part unless there's other things okay all right the

only other thing i wanted to mention um had to do with regional we're in year three of our regional um collaborative um so i know that sophia will be attending a meeting to talk about what goes forward in the next year or next three years of funding she's going to a meeting in november on that so we'll know more but um it is a discussion about you know what are next steps because before we know what june 30th we'll we'll come right around the corner and we want to make sure that we're in advance of that and we understand the impact of where we need to go with our regional initiative with essex and hamilton and wentham so just know that um i'm working on that um with sophia with jama uh john amelowitz as well as with mitch as well so

more to follow and i think we need to keep that kind of on our radar as we go forward anything else

go ahead yes um just an observation about our meeting today um we heard three different

presentations about related to opioid prevention, treatment, etc. One is from the RISE group where we

collaborate with two other towns. The youth presentation where we collaborate with six other towns and then our consortium approach which is three other towns and they don't overlap necessarily.

Exactly. I mean maybe this is the best we can do but it just seems to me to be hard to coordinate um you know given that situation so i don't i don't i'm not suggesting any changes but

going forward um it's it's just sort of strange situation yeah you know what um you're not the

first person to speak that and that is absolutely true um and if i was the state looking at our small corner of the world i'd say what's wrong with them you know they've got three or four different groups working on three or four different subjects. And also then let's add the Chenna, let's add the hospital and the way they collect data. They're not collecting data from every single person, you know, of those communities that we're talking about and the other collaborative there on the North Shore, they're not collecting Chenna data, community health needs assessment data from all those folks either. So there's a lot of discrepancy in how we do that and how we work together and you know we spend a lot of time sort of at arm's length distance making sure

we're not stepping on each other toes uh but you know would we be best served uh working together in a full force so uh for sure you were the question yeah and the gaps don't get identified quickly you're right absolutely thanks ron for saying that out loud you're right absolutely All right. So now we, Mitch, anything from your point of view that we didn't bring up?

No, I believe you covered it. One note on an earlier comment, though, about the mental health first aid. That is something that we intend to offer to the staff in the next few months. Good. Thank you very much. That's really good. Yeah, extremely well done. um let's see public comment number two no takers madam chair all staff present okay i want to talk for a minute about our new business

so new business is what we're going to do over our next two meetings so november and december are really going to be our pulling it all together for the year. We used to do what we called our SWOT analysis or our plus delta, whatever you want to call it, goods and bads, uglies, and what are we going to do for goals? We used to do that at the beginning, at the end of the fiscal year, which was approaching July 1st. We decided last year that that was crazy because We had goals that were, you know, sort of on both sides of that fiscal year that we were trying to do our annual report, which is a calendar year report.

So we decided that this year that we would do our plus deltas and our SWOT analysis in November.

And I think thanks to all of you, we said, let's make it two meetings. Let's do our initial SWOT analysis in November and then, you know, make sure that we refine it, we look at it, we think about it, we finalize it in December and then share our goals for the upcoming year, which would be for 2027.

So I put a couple of different documents in your packet for this month and we will forward those on to November if you need them.

And just a quick, for those who've not done a SWOT analysis, there's four quadrants.

The top two are strengths and weaknesses. The bottom two are opportunities and threats. And I think I gave some examples. The strengths and weaknesses are internal. How do we run our meetings? How do we do our goals? How do we, you know, what are the things that we do really well? The makeup of our board. Do we have the right people? Is everybody in the right place? You know, all those sorts of things, our strengths and our weaknesses, you know, were the things that lagged quite a bit? Do we think that we need to speed up? Those sorts, do we pick the right goals for the year? Those are all internal. Okay. Now, the opportunities and the threats are external.

Okay. What are our opportunities? Our opportunity, just to speak on, you know, the GMGI, that's an opportunity. It's external to us. It's working with external partners to really think about a potential change in how we do our beach water testing. So that would be an opportunity for us on the board. So they're external to us, per se. And then our threat is, what are those things that may be getting in our way or that will be sort of that gray rhino, that thing we keep kicking down the, you know, we kick it down the road and it's really a threat to us that we need to be careful of, okay?

And that we need to make sure that there's, maybe there's an emerging public health risk out there that we've not even talked about.

So it requires a little bit of external resource and external research on our part to making sure we're understanding what's going on in the bigger world outside of Rockport, outside of our local board of health.

so i ask all of you to come prepared it's in-person meeting so we can look each other in the eye and

we can have you know um white boards and we can have flip charts and we can cross things out and add things all that sort of stuff that you can't do uh when you're zooming uh please come with your with your strengths and weaknesses okay and then that you know it goes to you know you know listen Barb, you know what? I know we voted you in as chair for this other year, but please do XYZ. We'd appreciate if you do this for the rest of the year. Nothing is off limits in the stuff that we talk about in our strengths and weaknesses, okay? Then also come prepared. What are some of the opportunities that maybe we haven't capitalized on yet? Or it might be a strength that we want to

scale up some more. Maybe we have a strength that we've not capitalized and we've not used it as much as we could, or we have a weakness that keeps coming up and coming up and coming up. That would be an opportunity for us in a goal for next year. So please come prepared with your four lists. I think we did this last year, but we don't want to get there and all of us have sort of, we're making up lists in our head sitting there without something in front of us. We should be thinking about those strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats between now and our November meeting so that we can use our meeting productively.

There may be a couple of things on old business that we need to talk about before we get to the SWOT, but that should be the majority of the time we spend is not talking about things like we did today. Okay, that we're really spending our time with magic markers and doing flip charts and really putting together something about where we want to go for next year.

Questions about how to do that? Has anyone done them before? Some are called plus delta. I call them SWOT. I'm used to it being a SWOT because there are internal issues as well as external. Is it a good use of our time? yeah i think it's great i think what's the only pitfall that i've had sometimes with them is that is that the threat or the weakness is simply the opposite of the strength and opportunity

yeah so i think if we can just yeah making sure that that they are distinct and in the right bucket then that would be great yep you're absolutely right yep for sure or to take all your weaknesses and put them into opportunities we don't want to see that either okay so yeah make sure that distinct is the right word for distinct sort of buckets any other comments about swat all right so and it's also open meeting all right so that that's the other thing is when we

advertise it we're going to advertise it as in person but it is an open meeting so there will be chairs there where folks can come and when we have public comment okay we'll have public comment at the beginning like we always do we'll do our swat out in the open okay with the public there and then we will have public comment number two because there may be something from the public that arrives at our meeting where oh my goodness we never even thought of that that we would want to add to our swot in some one of those uh quadrants so we want to make sure that people are involved in this this is a as much a community event as it is for our committee okay barb is this the reason why we're doing it in person yes okay i was wondering why yes it's a good good