Attendance

One of the things that I pride myself on is missing village meetings only when absolutely necessary. While I did not analyze my committee attendance record, I did look closely at the 38 village board meetings that have occured so far during my curent term. I was present at 35 of them - and therefore absent for exactly 3 of them (that's less than 8% - for reference, someone who receives 4 weeks of vacation per year will miss roughly 8% of their work days). Two of my missed meetings were the result of family vacations (with the village president and village staff being notified months in advance to facilitate scheduling), and one was the result of an on-call issue with my full-time job (further discussion below). My preference and goal is to be present at every single meeting, but as we all know, work-life balance is important, even when part of that equation is an elected office.

In the situation of my on-call absence, a system outage had occurred at approximately 3pm. By the time the village board meeting occurred at 6pm, my level of engagement in the outage was essentially waiting for the all-clear from a vendor, completing some basic verification, and communicating the resolution. But being the on-call person for that system, I had to remain committed to that resolution - even when the reality is that I was sitting in front of my computer screen, just waiting for an email from the vendor. That pending responsibility prevented me from physically heading to village hall, but there was no reason that I could not have fully engaged and participated in the meeting remotely (granted, with the potential to have to leave the meeting IF the outage resolution happened during the meeting) - except for the previously adopted policy preventing remote participation by board members. In fact, I even pulled up and watched the meeting live on YouTube, even though I couldn't participate.

This last scenario is the reason that I voted for the option of remote participation. Participating remotely should not be the standard, and certain activites (chairing a meeting) just aren't very functional in a hybrid scenario, so probably shouldn't be allowed (and aren't based on the new policy). But there are times when the logistics of physically attending a meeting would otherwise require making a choice. In my case, the choice had to be for my on-call responsibility to my full-time job.  The remote participation option would have allowed both items to occur.  And with the recent passing of the updated remote participation policy, if a similar scenario occurs in the future, the flexibility is now available.

With all of that being said, there is a meeting that is scheduled to occur during my next term that I already know I will be unable to attend.  Of course, this assumes a successful re-election bid, and continued appointment to the same committees.  In the interest of transparency, that meeting is:

• May Utilities Commission (currently scheduled for Tuesday, 5/28/24)

My committment to represent the residents of Waunakee remains strong.  I hope that the voters require a similar committment from each of their elected officials, and cast their votes accordingly.