Committee submission to the Corporation Board

Early on in the life of the committee, Brad Greeley asked what, if any, interim updates the committee could provide to the Board of Trustees. We were reluctant to committ to "interim" findings, but realized that a work plan and time-line of events relevant to the closure would be useful. We agreed to provide these for the Board's August 28th meeting.

Here's what we submitted to the Board as a narrative (slightly edited for clarity); the astute reader will recognize the "organization" piece from our August 7th post Work Plan for the IOL Committee:

The IOL committee has met once by phone and twice in person and has been working via e-mail. Our current approach to understanding why the island opened late examines events and processes from seven points of view:

• Regulatory issues
  
• Budgetary issues
  
• Communications issues with
  • Public
    
  • Staff
    
  • Community
• Board oversight of managers and staff
  
• Facilities committee
  
• Human Relations
  • Management by staff of front-line workers
    
  • Who we manage / how we hire
    
  • Why we need the staff we need
• Culture / "Island Mind" (by which we mean the 200+ year history of difficult relationships between the island and the mainland, and how that must change in the 21st century).
  

We have reviewed the documents provided to us by Amy (both paper and electronic); our not-yet-complete document inventory runs to 195 documents.

Our work is now focusing on the personal interviews needed to round out the picture provided by the documents. Our decision to interview specific people is driven by three factors: can they provide information about the process that was not in the documents; Can we help the future course of events by demonstrating to regulators the serious and dispassionate look we are taking at how to improve our processes; and were people significant actors in the Star Island process such that not interviewing them would make the report seem incomplete. It is very possible we will add people to our interview list, particularly regarding this last criterion.

LOAS I held a “town meeting” regarding their own governance. We were invited to attend but it ended up be scheduled directly in conflict with our second in-person meeting. Brad Greeley, Dave Boynton, and Joe Watts did attend, and our committee sent along an update (largely the same information as is on the blog) that was shared with the meeting. The feedback Jordan got from being on the island later in the week was that the transparency was appreciated. Martha Copithorne is on the island this week and has agreed to take input from anyone interested on the island.

We also submitted a time-line to the board; more about that in the next post.