What they don't put in the minutes

"What they don't put in the minutes."  I woke up this morning with a realization that the most valuable information you can take away from a Town Meeting is what they don't put in the minutes.   How people speak, where they sit in the room, their mannerisms, how they pay attention(or don't) when others are speaking, are important and you can only get that by attending meetings.   
Last nights meeting was called to address accounting irregularities with the cemetery funds.  Irregularities that I believe were discovered by a citizen.  Boiling it down to it's most basic explanation, fees the cemetery was supposed to be paying to the town where not being paid and instead were deposited into a cemetery account.  That was an error (unintentional, no malice involved as far as I can see).   
What's the remedy to this problem?  A subcommittee consisting of 7 members, 3 of which will be citizen/non-board members, will be formed to look into the books and figure out, as best they can, how much money was placed in the wrong accounts and then adjustments made to get the money in the correct place.   
Bill Belvin questioned the ability of 3 citizen non-board members (who have yet to be identified) to stay focused and not discuss the playing fields during the subcommittee process.   I was very surprised by this.  The playing fields were brought up, by my count, three times during last nights meeting. All three times by Bill Belvin. All three times when the cemetery trustees were being asked to explain or justify something.   All three times the audience responded with "we aren't here to talk about that".  The citizens in attendance never mentioned the playing fields and stayed focused on the topic of the meeting.  
Were the playing fields brought up to deflect attention?   Maybe.  
I can think of one citizen, being the party who discovered the accounting errors, who would be a good person for this subcommittee.  If you have accounting experience (or even better forensic accounting experience) please consider volunteering for this subcommittee. 
I also learned at the meeting that the cemetery trustees tend to talk amongst themselves while a citizen has the floor but the audience is not allowed to speak while a cemetery trustee has the floor.  I hope the cemetery trustees will correct this behavior in the future and realize they need to listen to what other people are saying.   You need to listen to learn.
And lastly, the importance of record keeping should not be lost as a lesson from all of this.   If it's not in writing, it's pretty difficult to figure out what happened 20+ years ago.