My Fellow Councillors, You will recall at our ICANN55 Council meeting, a small team (James, Carlos, Keith, myself) volunteered to formulate draft comments relating to ICANN's proposed Draft FY17 operating plan and budget. Attached you will find a starter draft of comments for the Council to consider. Track changes are enabled should any member of the Council wish to suggest edits. Please feel to do so and then send them back over the list. This small team with assistance from staff will maintain a master copy to ready for submission. The Public Comments are due by 30 April 2016, and thus we have just over two weeks to make edits and then determine if the Council wishes to submit them. This topic is currently on the GNSO Council agenda for tomorrow. The small team also recognizes that likely all SGs & Cs will be submitting their own comments. In that regard and because we are managers of the policy process, this draft of comments attempted to only focus at a higher level of how the proposed budget impacts the GNSO and its policy development activities. This process for submitting comments mimics what occurred last year for the FY16 draft budget. Once that draft was completed over the Council list, the comments were submitted without objection. As we will likely discuss tomorrow and based on this current experience, the Council should consider formalizing this process especially in the light of a future empowered community. In addition to thanking James, Carlos and Keith with whom it has been a pleasure to work with, special thanks go out from all of us to Berry and Marika for their exceptional input and dedicated effort on this comment. We are extraordinarily lucky to have such fine staff assigned to help us on Council. We looks forward to everyone's input. Kind Regards, Ed Morris