Consent Calendars

Hi, this is Damien. And I’m going to show you a demonstration on how to use NCMS with consent calendars.

A consent calendar is very valuable for boards to help move meetings along quickly by doing multiple things at once. Things that you don’t expect anybody to object to it, you can just get them all done in one quick vote.

The first thing you want to do is you want to add the consent calendar item to the agenda.

We’re looking at the June Lake Wobegon board agenda. So we add a new agenda item. We’ll call it consent calendar.

For the description we’ll put the things that we’re going to put on the consent calendar. In this case that’s approve the minutes and approve the MER. You can put anything you want on the consent calendar, but the idea is that there are things that nobody’s going to object to.

For the anticipated motion, we’ll just say, we’re going to approve both of these things and that’s the motion we anticipate being made.

So we create the agenda item like that, and then you can see it’s on the agenda. When we generate an agenda PDF, it’ll be on there too: consent calendar, approve the minutes, approve the MER.

During the meeting, when you’re taking the minutes, the chair will usually assume the motion since it’s an uncontroversial motion.

Since we anticipated that motion happening, we go here and create the motion: approve the minutes of the May 20th board meeting and the monthly expenditure report for May, 2021. And we’ll create the main motion.

If nobody objects, we’ll go ahead and vote on it. Same question, great. Create the vote event.

Since this is the sort of thing where everybody just says, yeah, it was just a yes for everybody. That means it passed. And there it is. It’s recorded in the minutes. And when you create a minutes PDF, you can see it there: the motion was approve the minutes and approve the expense report.

Now you have it in the agenda, you have a minutes, and now you can create a board action certification from it.

The same motion that was passed during the meeting and showed up in the minutes, shows up in the board action certification form. It does both things and you can see that everybody voted for it.

That’s how to use NCMS with a consent calendar. Thank you very much.