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Housing commission to acknowledge public emails on land‑use rewrite; staff to explore auto‑reply options
Summary
Commissioners directed staff to investigate how to handle many public emails about the land‑use code — including whether an acknowledgment or a fuller customized response is feasible — and tasked city liaisons (Daley/Owen) to report back on technical options.
The Manchester Housing Commission discussed how to handle an influx of public emails about the proposed land‑use code and directed staff Oct. 8 to explore options for acknowledging or responding to those messages.
Commissioners said many messages arrive through a third‑party distribution system (identified in the meeting as an everyaction address), which masks individual sender addresses and can make automated replies difficult. They debated whether to send a simple acknowledgement ("thank you for contacting us; we will take your input under advisement") or to prepare a more customized response for individually authored messages.
Commissioners asked the city liaisons (referred to in the meeting as Daley and Owen) to determine whether the commission’s email setup can issue automatic acknowledgements and what steps would be needed to produce a short, staff‑approved reply. Kate offered to email Daley to request options and to have the liaisons report back with a recommended approach. The commission discussed that some of the inbound messages had been "canned" (template messages) and that truly individualized email from residents should receive more attention.
No formal new policy was adopted during the meeting; the transcript records a direction to staff to report back and, separately, a prior motion to table the item briefly while technical feasibility was clarified. Commissioners agreed by consensus that either an acknowledgement or a short response would be preferable to no reply, provided staff could implement it without undue burden on the commission’s email access.
The commission asked staff to clarify who receives the distribution messages and whether the email server can support auto‑reply or batching, then to return with a recommended text and a proposed process for handling high volumes of public comments.
