The Howard County Board of Appeals held an administrative meeting on March 5, 2026, from 9:00 AM to approximately 10:30 AM in a hybrid format. The primary purpose was to discuss and plan training objectives for the board's members. The meeting began with approval of the previous meeting's minutes and then focused on identifying training priorities and establishing a process to develop and implement the first training module.
Good morning. Today is March 5th, 2026, and this is a scheduled meeting of the Howard County Board of Appeals, and I'm the chairperson, Gene Ryan. Today we're convening an administrative meeting to discuss the training objectives for the coming calendar year for the Board of Appeals. But before we do that, board members, we have to uh review and approve the uh meeting minutes for uh January 8th, 2026. Those meetings were sent out to the board. Anybody have any questions, comments? Seeing none, can I get a motion to approve the meeting minutes for January 8th, 2026? So moved. I got a first by Ms. FearCog. Can I get a second? A second. A second by Miss Phillips. Uh Ms. Burke, please call the role. Chair Ryan. Approve. Miss Fearclub. Approve. Miss Harris. Approve. Miss Phillips. Approved. Miss McCartney. Approve. Meeting minutes carry and they're approved for uh January, 2026. Moving on to our main topic today. So just before we begin. So the board has had much discussion about this over uh you know, a prolonged period of time. And for whatever reason, it seems like we conflate some issues. We while we want to talk about training, we had to talk about money and who's gonna provide it, and then we end up ultimately accomplishing nothing. So what I wanted to do was I'd hope we could meet as a group and limit our conversations to discussing what our training priorities are once we uh and you know what our goals are and then rank them in in order of priority. And then once we agree upon that, we can then reach out to resources, the office of law and others to determine what's the best way to accomplish that goal. I think if we chunk it like that, maybe we'll make more progress that we've made historically uh on accomplishing our goals. Um does that make sense? Yeah, yep. So uh it's free discussion, I guess, but I just asked that we go one at a time. But um, so if anybody would like to begin with, you know, some ideas and and we can kind of keep track and funnel it down. I think we should probably uh does everybody agree maybe we should cut it down to like uh our top five for now and then we add upon that. I think that's that's baby steps, right? Okay. So anybody feel free, it's open floor, whoever would like to start the discussion on training topics. So I one thing that I would really like to um make sure it is included in our training is how we conduct a meeting, how we conduct to hearing, the process, the scripts. I know council has scripts that they read from when they begin a meeting or have processes they have to do through, and I would like to see uh an official script put out for us. And in the case that, for instance, you got sick and couldn't come. I would feel like completely um unprepared. So that's a biggie for me. Okay. You know, um, I I'm just gazing at what Robin gave, and that's actually really something I I thought that we needed. Um I was thinking that our council could provide us with this basically the case basics, the legal authority.