All right, I will call to order the rules committee meeting for um today, August nineteenth.

Um, for roll call.

Um, all commissioners are present.

Commissioner Morgan, Commissioner Fisher, myself, Commissioner Shea.

Um, also in attendance is Ashley Kent from the local government center and county attorney Matt Enruth.

Um, item on the agenda is communication 2026-270, Michelle Shea District 2 Commissioner requesting Council of Commissioners to request a professional outside review of the Council of Commissioners rules and order of business.

Um we will kind of pick up where we left off at the last meeting from the last meeting.

Or adjourn early and then hopefully move towards a red line version of the rules at the next meeting next month.

Okay, so I believe we ended at Rule 31 on page 11 of the PDF copy of the rules.

So I would turn the floor over to Ms.

Kent.

Thank you so much, Commissioner.

Um Rule 31, there's a couple of notes in this one, and it is related to majority vote and ex or abstention or excusable vote.

Um says majority vote of members of the council present.

Let me go back up.

Each member shall vote on every question submitted to the council unless excused by a majority vote of the members of the council present.

Um my note in here is that I would consider defining what the criteria are for a conflict of interest or a reason to abstain.

Well, I do appreciate the majority vote of the members, so we're not leaving that decision to an individual.

I think it's helpful to have a clear set of criteria that would qualify uh someone for not taking part in a vote.

So that's first piece.

Second piece, it well, let's do that one first.

They can be separate.

I agree.

They need to state why they are abstaining, because we we have ran into problems with this that people were using it just, you know, I know Michelle Shea, and so I'm not gonna vote on this one.

And it's like that's by definition of the MCA, that's not a reason.

So that's why that came into play.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

I know that it had come up.

Um, you know, it's a small town, so um we had a former member of the council whose company entered into contracts with the company.

This person was simply an employee, not an owner, or nor did they have any other interest in the in the company.

So uh in my mind that would that does not constitute necessarily something worth disclosing, but I also don't know that it's our job up here is to make decisions.

Um so anyway, we can defer to the county attorney when we get to adding criteria.

And a lot of that criteria is established in the statutes.

You know, you can look at what an actual conflict is with regards to a commission member owning a business, you know, voting on something that directly affects their business or a contract that's involved in that business.

I mean, that's clearly defined by statute, which is nice.

Um I do agree that I don't think you can go as far as well.

I'm uh an employee of that company.

You have no, if you have no authoritative power over the company, just like the statute states, you know, I don't think that you should be able to abstain from voting because you just don't want to vote.

Uh yeah, and we can we can parse that out.

I think that's a good thing to put in here that they have to put on the record why they're not voting.

And the next question would be though, is well, I guess that's why you would have a majority vote of the members say okay, you take a majority vote of all members based off of what they've presented as their conflict.

Yeah.

Uh thank you, Chairman Jay.

Thank you, County Attorney and Ruth.

I believe uh somewhere I read that it was just stated it has to be a direct benefit.

You know, the word benefit is the word, whether it'd be financial or you know, some type of benefit.

It's that's thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Fisher.

Um, I'm wondering if uh the committee would consider just adding reference to the statute in the rules.

Adding a reference to multiple statutes.

If I may, it might be worth just referencing.

Like it's in the the note there, Title 2, Chapter 2, Part 1 of the MCA, which is the Montana Club ethics, which would cover all of it.

Okay, yeah.

Okay, I think that's a great consideration.

Um second part of 31.

So this is maybe a thought exercise.

I don't know if it was the intention way it was written, but we can talk about it.

The vote of a member so excused or directly interested shall not be counted either in the affirmative nor in the negative.

However, um the next section 32 says uh an election appointment of any officer, majority of the whole number of the council must be voted, must vote by sign ballot.

So while they're not directly related, what I was getting at here is if we're not counting it as an affirmative or a negative, but we're referring to majority of the whole for any action, if we're not taking a into consideration that seat that is abstaining, then it is in effect a negative vote.