Okay, welcome everybody. This is the town of Andover Board of Finance meeting, the regular meeting, Wednesday, April 23rd, 2025. we'll call the meeting to order and recite the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of United States, United States of America to the stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty, liberty and justice for all. Okay, thank you. first order of business is public speak. I do not see any members of the public present. So, I guess we will move on to item three, which is changes and additions to the agenda. does anybody have any proposed changes or additions to the agenda? I don't this time. I'm all set. Okay. All right. Well, hearing none, we'll move on to the town administrators report. So, Eric, I see you included quite a bit of stuff in the packet. you also had Kate forward some things this morning about the legislative activity which I'm sure we'll talk about under that topic. I haven't had a chance to read through all some of it.
do you want to give us a summary? Sure. so you all have it in your packet. the the biggest thing we've had to deal with lately is the fact that the town did get a full-blown OSHA inspection of town buildings. they've inspected public works before, but they've never inspected any of the other public buildings. So, our initial bill for corrective actions is around $26,000 which is a big chunk of the building maintenance fund, but ultimately we don't really have any choice. no idea what our initial rounds of fines are going to be for this. the per violation fine right now for pretty much all violations is up to $16,500 each. So absolute worst case scenario, you know, we'd be at around $300,000 in fines. Seems highly unlikely we're going to be anywhere near that. but I would expect that they're going to come back with an initial fine proposal of, you know, 50 to $70,000. of which we will be able to demonstrate that we have corrected every single issue that they've identified prior to our follow-on meeting. and judging by what other towns have done, my guess is we're going to get the total fine violations for the town down to somewhere around a $15,000 fine. which we'll handle from contingency. but I could be wildly off high or low on that number. so questions on that. Yeah. What what kind of what kind of violations did we end up with? Sounds like a lot. So, no, that that's actually not a lot. crazy as it sounds. So, in the town hall in the library, the majority of the violations were for overusing extension cords because frankly we Yeah,
that'll do it. Yeah. in a lot of offices. fortunately, we didn't have any heaters, but we did have several things like microwaves plugged into power strips. you know, and basically some of those I don't know whether they're going to be violations or not because they actually take the name plates of everything plugged into the power strip and go back and see whether we're over the load rating of that particular power strip. so we're we're clearly going to get some they did identify one of our emergency exit lights that was not functional. so that one's a a definite violation. and we got a violation for the town clerk's office being too cluttered. and that is considered an OSHA violation. in addition to one of the closets, also in town clerk's office. Eric, if I could ask a question. I know that in the town that I work with, we
have a walkth through by our fire department and our fire marshall that will point out those exact things. I mean, it's it's interesting to me that in such a small town like this and how our fire department people are right there that we don't have someone walk through in a preliminary way because we have an inspection every year at the school that I work in. And there are those certain things like that like too many plugs, you know, too many things plugged into a, you know, the cord like you said. So, we're preemptive on that all the time. It's kind of shocking to me that we would let it get to the point that OSHA comes in so that the town's going to get fined. It sounds like OSHA's gonna anytime OSHA walks into a workplace, you're going to get some fines because they're going to keep going till they find something wrong. They have to justify their salary, right? Is is OSHA once a year? I I'm just trying to see how this would happen because those are whenever we hear we're going to have an ex, you know, an inspection right away. I would look around my office and say, is it cluttered? Do I have, you know, we know not to plug things in? So, yeah. Just trying to see. It's just freezing constantly. I can't even hear what's going on. As far as I know, the only production the town's ever done and I don't know what town, we can hear
you. Can you have our town the fire department going on? You're not muted. Can you mute yourself? You're having a second conversation. Okay. Thanks. So, I'm sorry. So, Eric, I didn't hear what you had. So, public works was well prepared for an inspection because that's the only thing that they've ever really inspected in the past. the town hall and the library were less prepared. so it's not a once a year thing or something like that that you're, you know, you're going to be, it just could be whenever. As far as I know, the municipal buildings up to now have not ever gotten inspected. Oh, okay. so, you know, public works is is we've spent an enormous amount of money in public works over the last five years walking working off all the problems they have. and public works was not cited for anything physical. they, you know, I think we're going to end up getting cited on a couple of procedures that, you know, they think probably we're at the threshold where we need to do. and I think we're going to get cited because our eyewash station doesn't have enough capacity to meet new federal OSHA rules. the one that Thank you. No, I mean, sorry. I I guess it sounds like you didn't We never know when it's going to happen. It hasn't happened in the town hall very often, so they're not prepared for that. Yeah. No, we're not on any kind of regular OSHA inspection schedule. Yeah. I didn't think anyone was right. I thought it was more like a fire thing first and then No, thank you for explaining the process. Eric, can I just ask you a quick
question about it? Do you have your full report back? We do not. Okay. All right. Well, I mean, I went through one that was very minor when I was operating cool and you know, I got the inspection back and I just very bluntly answered each and every question, told them how I was going to identify how to fix it and they were fine. So, it is a pain, but it's going to be okay. I'm sure it's nothing, you know, that anybody did. you're just going to randomly have them. Yeah. The the problem is if you have a lot of you have a lot of violations, they'll tend to make return visits. So, be ready. I you know, I I did have that question for the inspector about where we stacked up and he actually said we were one of the best towns he had inspected. We were way on, you know, we got almost nothing on the areas that they normally, you know, ding towns. I mean, the transfer station, had one, one lower railing on one dumpster wasn't there. but the upper railing was. We said he wouldn't cite us for that. You know, he's like, you know, you could maybe make the argument that we have too much clutter in our oil collection area. but we're we're we actually got through the areas where most towns get hammered pretty close to unscathed. Yeah. The only thing where we were very fortunate in that when they because the one thing they always do with public works is say, "Okay, show us all your SDS sheets." and they go randomly find whatever chemicals they can, you know, and they go back and look at the book and say, "Do you have the SDS sheets?"
Yes. Yeah. Where they failed was or where they they weren't, you know, fully compliant is they didn't have they hadn't formalized training for all employees on how to read SDS sheets, which is a requirement. That was, you know, that was definitely an issue on our part. And they will probably get cited for a trip hazard in the old animal control facility because the old animal control facility was built with a gutter in it so dog urine and water can run out to the drain. you know and because they're not using it as an animal control facility now they have an abrupt change of plane in a room even though it's up against a fence. So I think we're going to get hit with that one. so overall I'm not super concerned. I mean, my goal is to be really proactive and, you know, when we get to the So, we should have the formal report back sometime either late this week or early next week with the intention of setting up a follow-on appointment in a week or so. And then the only real question is I want to be able to document to him
that everything that was pointed out on the walkth through and either myself or Jay was with them all of the two days you know of the inspection that we've addressed every single thing that he identified both as a violation and as a you know you ought to consider this. So that's kind of been my approach. Right. Right. You learn from it. Yep. Louise, you had your hand up earlier. Was curious, did they go to the community center? They did not. okay. Don't know why. I think it's a new enough building. It's not on their list of buildings, which is why they didn't you know. Do you think they do you think they would have found anything? No, actually I think the community center is is and I you know we walked through it afterward, you know, and looked at everything they identified as violations in our regular buildings and those just aren't really present there. yeah, you know, so that's that. Too new. Yep. Okay. Any other questions on that topic or or did you have more? No, I just wanted to follow up. I thought this was a yearly thing. I didn't understand that Andover wasn't used to this kind of thing. So, that's where my line of questioning came
from. We're we have them all the time. So, we're not OSHA maybe per se, but like safety inspections. Yeah. So, I think it's old hat. So when he said there might be up if everything got cited it could be $300,000 worth of fines or and like Kim had mentioned I really feel like you can just what I've seen from experience is that as long as you have a corrective action to address it usually if this was like the first time Andover's been subjected to it. yeah, that's all I wanted to say. That's where my line of question. I didn't realize it's something very new. You know, 25 years running manufacturing plants. I'm going to knock on wood real hard. I've never had an ocean
inspection. Yeah, it's not very common. I mean, we do try to address things, but So, yeah. And what what I didn't realize is that Khan OSHA which is the one that inspected us subcontracts OSHA subcontracts with Khan OSHA to inspect municipal buildings and state buildings. But was what was interesting is I asked him if they needed to get into the resident state troopers office because that was a separate key which I don't have and his comment was no the resident state trooper is a state is considered that room is considered a an agency of the state not the town
and if we inspected that it would be some other time when we're doing for instance all the resident state troopers. So, I thought that was interesting. does that have any impact at all on the insurance of the buildings like liability insurance or anything like that? I don't think so. Probably not. It's probably driven more by claim history. Although the gut insurance people want to think better, but I mean I have been my through this, you know, they wouldn't love it if they found out about it, but it's, you know, fines aren't a covered loss. Like you're testifying for violations, not for an accident. So an insurance company would probably not care too much. But I assume if there were egregious violations found that an insurance company was really on the ball, you know, anything they thought that would create a hazard. Not great. But I don't know. I'm not on the underwriting side. Right. And and we certainly didn't have anything that falls in the category of a willful violation. which is certainly the most serious and carries with it. Yeah. Recurring. so I I worked for a company actually that got an OSHA inspection and got a willful violation. I wasn't there during the inspection. but unfortunately what happened is in front of we changed over
the main electrical service in the building. and because of that, we had a essentially a 48 inch clearance requirement in front of the main service panels. and I taped it off on the floor and I posted right on the panels. Nothing goes in this spot. Nothing within 42 in. And the pressman had piled it full of paper. and OSHA walked in. And that was a willful violation. that was a 32 grand fine that they did not were not able to bargain down. so we didn't have anything egregious. you know, so, and I just want to say too, real quick, Eric, when you get your report and you get out through all this and everything, let your everybody know in the town who works with you what the violations were and what they can't do so that they don't do this stuff and get us in trouble again. No, no, I I I I have already done that with all the employees based on the preliminary results and talked about what could and couldn't happen. you know, clutter has been one of my pet peeves for a while. and frankly
been kind of ignored. but you know, they'll listen to OSHA, so that's good. anyway, that's all I got for that. the Bunker Hill project is, had about a 3-w weekek hiccup because our, unfortunately the, four utility companies, which is Frontier, Eversource, the cable company, and the fiber provider, the backbone provider. really delayed in in sw switching out the service to the new polls on the new side. So I was eventually it was mostly the fault of Frontier. and eventually I used Steve Weir, our legislator, as well as filing a direct claim with with PURA to get them to actually comply. But it did delay things about 3 weeks. shouldn't have any cost implications to the town. It's more an annoyance. what I want to let you know, and we'll talk about it later, kind of at the end of my report, I threw a little spreadsheet in there of what we've paid them so far for that project, and I just want to keep you up to date on that. the board of selectmen finally oh I am resubmitting a request for congressional funding that was not through the US Senate. it was not approved last year even though it made it through the Senate Appropriations Commission and it was a highly ranked project. So in an ordinary year it would have been funded but last year the Congress didn't approve any appropriations and the government is moving under a continuous resolution not a budget. So hopefully collectively they get their act together and it will get funded this coming year. Unfortunately, they
only gave me seven days to resubmit. So, I'm not real happy about that. because I got my my butt to the wall trying to get all the contractors to requote given that a year's gone by and copper prices have gone through the roof. So, that's chewing up a bit of my time right now. Liz, did you have a question? Okay. No, no. I was just muting because I hear little children crying in the background. So, no good. Got it. so the destratification fans that were going in the gym, those were finally installed last week when school was out of session. so that was money that was already budgeted in the building maintenance fund. I do have a question about that. I do have a question about that. How are they? I had heard that they're wicked loud. Are they are people happy about them? Do you know? I don't know. Oh, you don't know? I talked to the school. Okay. I don't know who's on I mean, these are designed for a warehouse, so they're not designed for a gymnasium. you know, but, you know, it also depends on they have nine levels, so it's not like you don't have to run them at max either. if you run them at
max, I think they're they're going to be pretty loud. Okay. I was just curious if you had experienced it at all. Yeah. No, I mean, I was in there when we ran them all up to Max. you know, I'm pretty deaf, so it didn't bother me. but maybe if you had a gym class in there and you were trying to give instruction, it would be a problem. okay. Probably quieter than 48 year olds. quieter than one 8-year-old. so the last thing is the board of selectmen approved expending up to $20,000 out of the building maintenance fund for the fire department cabinet and countertop upgrade. So, yeah, that will be coming fairly soon. we also submitted a grant for the replacement for the senior transportation van. generally it takes about a year before we even know whether we got the grant or not. if we do it, yeah, it's kind of a state grant, but it's also passed through federal money. So, it's anybody's guess right now. and the other thing I find very curious is that the state still on the books is saying that all state vehicles and they want all municipal vehicles including school buses converted to electric but but the grant funding doesn't list an electric vehicle as an option. So it's like on the one hand they're telling us we're still supposed to be on track to do this. on another hand, you can't grant fund for it. So anyway, that's just a a weirdness in town or state government. that would require a 20% match from the town. I did get the board of selectmen to authorize me to submit the grant because I'm not authorized to submit any grant that
requires a town match. like I said, we will know sometime next spring. if we get it and probably we would get it in the next budget cycle, not you know so we would have to figure out where that 20% would come and it would have to go to town meeting under the current charter rules to approve anyway. not for me to apply for the grant but for the town to actually accept it. So that's the thing on that. the other thing that threw me for a little bit of a loop is we had a meeting for the Longill Road bridge replacement. so you know, we had an the initial public hearing, initial design meeting. the states finally signed off on the 30% design phase. the the designer for the bridge is Michael Baker International, which is a really good bridge designing firm. that's been done a couple months ago. they announced they would have permit plan sets by April 30 and a 70% design miday. And the DOT is now starting to push us to move the construction date up to the summer of 2026. And I think the reason they're doing that is because they're paranoid the federal government is going to cut the fed local bridge program. And the sooner they get to you know final acceptance, even though the federal
government has already agreed to fund the project, that doesn't mean they won't do like with so many other federal grants and just say, "No, we were just kidding. We're not going to fund it." So why is that a problem? Well, that's a problem because next summer we were supposed to be going to construction on a state local bridge program that we delayed one year because the design wasn't through Army Corps of Engineers permitting. so there's no way we have the bandwidth to deal with two one state local and one Fed local bridge program at the same time. So one of them is going to have to get bunked. I also think it's highly unlikely that given past history that the federal local bridge will be ready to go to construction next summer. I mean, the stars and everything would have to align for that to do. So, but I don't want them both because in both those grants, we are responsible to pay the contractor and then get reimbursed. and when you've got a $3 million bridge and then a $350,000 construction management and instruction contract, at the same time, you have a $2 million covert project
going. We don't have the cash to float both of those waiting for reimbursement. So, one of those is going to have to go. I'm just letting you know because that's something I'm certainly quite concerned with that, you know, we're going to get hit with. so that is that. I listed out on my report the various contractors that we've already identified, lined up contractors for the the work to come into compliance. so most of the electrical upgrades are already done. the eyewash station, the contractor is just waiting. We were scheduled for install tomorrow, but the the contractor the the company says it shipped it, but we actually don't have it yet. So, until we get it, they're not going to schedule installation, but that should be pretty quick. Chimney is plumbed or something, Erica. Seems like a lot of money for an eyewash station. Yeah. So the the problem is the the smart way
to do it is just hard plum in an eyewash station for the building and be done with it because it's your lowest overall maintenance. Yeah. And you don't have to keep rebying everything every year. And the standard now is you have to be able to supply like it's like one liter of water per minute for 15 minutes. So you're talking about like a fivegallon pressurized system now to meet the OSHA standard. so at that point, you know, and then you got to replace the chemicals every year or every other year. And I just felt like it would be in the long run smarter to just hard plum one and do it. So all I don't disagree with that. I just it that clarifies why the cost is there. Yeah, it's a big chunk. And I was actually thinking that if we were going to do it,
it would be smart to put in one of the shower eyewash combo units, but that gets stupidly expensive because a shower unit has to supply 20 gallons a minute for 30 minutes, like 30 minutes continuously. you know and that that's beyond any normal well pump to deliver. So now you got to buy the unit, you got to buy a new well pump, you got to repipe everything. So so that was out. but buying the eyewash station makes sense. Yeah. Ju just for reference for the board probably you guys are following along in the packet, but that's on page four. The costs to mitigate these these various things. Yep. So $6,000 for an eyewash station seemed high. satisfy this question, right? And it's come up multiple times where the town thought they got the money to hire the assistant for the community center. that money was available straight out of the line item to hire the community center director for a couple reasons. One, we spent
about $5,000 less on that person that would be budgeted. and two, we didn't hire them at the beginning of the year. So, we had three pay periods missing. And those two things combined with when we hired the assistant were enough that we had the money in that line item to pay the assistant and the board of which is part of the reason why the board of selectment went along with it originally. the second thing was the consideration about fee in lie of healthcare. I know that's really unpopular with some people on the board of selectmen. I can tell you that I was not the original proponent of that. that that originally came from one board of selectman member. but I've certainly used it to my advantage in hiring employees. And you know, we have six less people on the town's health insurance than we did in 2021. So, it has been very effective at getting people to not take health insurance and go on their spouses or whatever insurance. so, overall, I think it's a good deal. Sure. I didn't know. Did we move on from your report onto because I know you have that under new business as well. Sorry, I don't have your report up. Yeah. No, it's still in the report. He just addressed some of the questions that had been raised. Okay. It's in both places. So, there's there's a fair amount of detail there. He's not going through it all, but yeah. So, yeah. So, I'm not going through all of it. we also got had questions about our current year's healthc care budget, but Eric, can I can I intervene? Just Thank you. I I just didn't know when we were going to have
this discussion before he I mean just to clarify with the I appreciate you giving your side and your version of why you like the fee in lie of health insurance. I mean, it's been widely talked about, you know, in meetings that Sure., you know, just since we're discussing it here, that this isn't something that a lot of towns offer anymore. And I I do appreciate, and I want to say this out loud, like I know that people look at it differently. In my world, people either need health insurance or they don't. So, I know in one part of your package, and I apologize if it's not here, you said that you use it in recruiting people or things of that nature. it's just it's costing the taxpayers a lot of money, you know. people that need health insurance will take it if they need it and then they do have to pay 14% of the premium. So it's not something that's going to be abused or taken just simply to take it or not. So I would say the one thing I would say and I generally I I I I certainly sympathize with what you're saying
Joanna and I think norm in most cases that's probably true but in some cases employers will offer three rates for to an employee. One is a single person, two if you have two people. Oh and three for a family. Yeah. Right. And sometimes it's only two rates. Yes. Yeah. And sometimes only two rates. It's one It's one single person and then a family. And when that's the case, the cost between having a single person and a family, which could be anywhere from two to 12 people is huge. So some so like there was a situation for example when my wife and I were you know it would it was cheaper to be on each just insure ourselves through our insurance. and so we did that versus you know now damn it but if a company and they
have a twoperson thing so it makes more sense right but there are some scenarios where it you know somebody could weigh that and it would work one work in their favor to not take it and to have their spouse go to go to two people instead of you know family. My point is I I agree Mark. I think I I love that the companies offer that twoerson thing now because like you said a family where you're let's just use it. It could be say just generalizations 10,000 for a single person all the way to 35,000 as a charge for a family policy which can cover up to if you have 12 kids or you know a twoerson thing which is probably in the 20s or something like that. yeah. I just I just feel like it's always going to be an individual decision whether people need insurance or not. Kids stay on their family's policy until they're 26 generally if families get along good and
the parents don't mind keeping their kids on the policy. Again, it's just the reason it's brought up and a lot of people feel the way that I do. Who knows who feels this way anymore? it's just it's costing the town a lot of money, you know, to pay people not to take insurance. So, it'll come down to what the board of selectmen brings up and you know, we'll talk more on the health thing. I know Eric has more in the you know, I have a couple points I want to make. I don't want to overtake his report. It I think it's an individualized thing. whether people think, okay, we're keeping them from taking the the policy. My point is I've never met a person unless there's some strange situation that you either need it or not because you're going to pay to take it too is what I'm saying. You're going to have to pay a percentage of the policy. It's not free. But if if it ends up the town ends up voting, you know, it'll be in the board of selectman hands to talk about it. if they end up keeping it on, it just is a charge to the taxpayers for not taking insurance. But all right, I have more to add later, but I'll wait till you get to that. What? Those are the cheapest employees the town has. What kills the town are people with families. That's what kills the town on cost. Yeah, but it doesn't We understand if you if you will hire a
great person that works and they happen to have a family, that's fine. Then that's what it is. I understand it's a big cost. I don't think you recruit based on whether someone has a family or not. It's kind of a roll of the dice. People either need insurance or don't is what I'm saying. I'd rather it be a zero or a we pay the insurance whatever portion rather than paying someone 6,600 especially part-time employee you know to not take insurance. But I did have one question that popped in Eric. I had thought this I get that the way the policy stands now it's a one-time thing that's the way I've seen it work when you elect when you join your job the first time you either sign up for I know you can change getting insurance later
you either sign up for insurance or you take the fee in lie of if you're not taking insurance the way your report read to us it sounds like people are jumping back and forth so the fee in lie of I thought was a onetime opportunity, but you're saying if someone doesn't need insurance anymore, even though they've worked for the town for five years, they start getting the fee in lie of later down the road. Yeah. And every time they do that, it saves the town seven grand. I know you're looking at it that way. I'm looking at it. It's costing the town. Well, but think about this way. If you're at the age where you can go on Medicare, okay, let's take one example. There's a lot of downsides with Medicare. Like for me, given the number of prescriptions I have, Medicare would be a more costly approach than the town's insurance. just simply when you look at how much I would end up paying for medication without going on plan B depending on what I was able to get that for in my case if there was no incentive and I was 65 I would absolutely stay on the town's insurance a 100 days out of a 100 there's two employees that both came to work for the town and elected Medicaid instead of the town's insurance because of the incentive. So both of those cases that was a $7,000 savings. We had another employee in the last month just elected that was taking the health insurance and was able to finagle getting insured through another family member because it was cheaper for her to do that given the incentive. I mean that to me is a win. every day. That saves us money. So
from my perspective, you know, we went from 20 people taking health care to the town to 14, you know, in exchange for an additional four people or five people that are not that are getting fee in lie of with the same headcount. And to me, that's a great thing. That's a I respect your opinion and I do I like to listen to various sides. I never have a problem with someone that opposes what I think about or people speaking their mind that they should speak their mind for themselves. But and I so thank you for that. I see it a whole different way. I just think it's costing the town money and I don't think it's a necessity. But I thank you for your version. you were going to wrap up into are we talking about the health care thing now just to get it all out there? Not for the next budget year. So, Eric had a note here about the current budget year, the cost where they're tracking. Well, you know that I've been
all over that'll be under new business. So, and Okay. So, I should wait for the new business to Yeah, I think for that. Thank you. So, you also brought up that you felt that we were way over last year. So, what I did is I gave you a one-year snapshot in the town for what we've spent to date on healthcare. you know, at the 75% budget portion and then what are all the contributing factors because right now we're about $17,000 under spent on health care. but when you look at the factors that involved that involved multiple employees electing to take fee in lie of and every time you do that that's a $7,000 savings to the town as well as so I listed out all of the things that have changed in that and the reason I did that is because in any given year it is easy to have a 30 to $40,000 swing you know, when you have as much turnover as we have and not knowing necessarily what the the status is of people you're hiring. So, what I would say is that as far as last year's budget goes, what we budgeted appeared to be correct at the starting point of the year. a lot has changed. We're going to be under budget overall on that. No question. But not compared to what our starting assumptions. This year's a whole different story. We can talk about that and I can tell you that we were we were definitely wrong. you know, in what we had on there for this year. I just want Thank you, Eric. I I appreciate it. Again, I like to hear
explanations. I like to hear I'm just such a literal person. when we receive the spreadsheet that we're supposed to, you know, look at and make sense of. And I understand the fluctuation of people changing, people dropping. Maybe this one needs single, maybe this one not, but it scared, you know, I didn't like the point. I was afraid this mistake had been happening for a lot of years. I understand there's going to be fluctuations like you said, and most of the time there there will be a surplus there. So, I just wanted to make sure that whoever's crafting and putting the spreadsheet together because we receive it like I kind of said in an email today, we don't check it, put the formulas together, all of that. We do a lot of I mean, some of us do a lot of
work with it in our, you know, figuring things. I don't want to speak for anyone but myself ever again, but I do a lot of work with this as far as checking, recalculating. So I knew that night when I walked into the town meeting that we were overcharging at that point. Yes. Will it fluctuate during the year, but we have to start somewhere. So yeah, let's let's Yeah. So I think we'll he is addressing me, Mark, and I've spent a lot of time on this waiting for the answer. So I do appreciate Eric addressing it tonight because I've waited a couple weeks. I think the town meeting was a couple weeks ago. And that's okay. And Cheryl did respond today, too, with something, Eric. So I appreciate that. But that's all. But I I understand it's going to fluctuate. It just made me nervous that when I found a mistake this year that it probably had been going back several years. I'll move
on from that. Thank you. All right. Next agenda item is the check register. I don't know if anybody's very short in the packet today. I don't know if anybody has any questions on that. Okay. Okay. Well, hearing none, we'll go on to new business. So, the first one is the next topic. We just tucking segueed into the new review of the healthc care costs. Actually, we should have budget to actual. Oh, I'm sorry. It's not listed in the in the Yeah. Yeah. Review of Okay, I jumped it. Oh, they were flipped in the packet. So, I thought maybe it wasn't in there. Okay. so this is we're about threequarters of the way through the year as you pointed out, Eric. Any place we have a Oh, I All right. Okay. My mistake. I was misreading once. What? Sure. So, I wanted to do a more thorough review now because we normally do that, you know, we're about threearters of the way through the budget. So, we know kind of where we are overall. presuming we have time to do that. I think that's certainly appropriate. do you want me to share
or do you want me to just talk through kind of what the big things are that are going to be affecting it? Well, if sharing is hard to read on these screens, so I don't know if it'll add that much value. but certainly I think if you could notate which specific lines you're talking about as we go through it, it might be helpful. That's my thought. If anybody wants to share the screen, we can do that, too. This just starts on page eight of your packet. If there's a lot, I would appreciate it being shared. I'm more visual to see it if we could, but if there's one or two that we're going to mention, then I'm okay with not seeing it on the screen. No, I got a whole bunch. So, let me Yeah, I would appreciate I'll go close. I'll shut my camera off and go close to the screen. Thank you. Okay. So, hang on a second. Share. Okay. So, first up, let's talk about revenue overall because that's one of the the you know, that's essentially half the battle. so right now the bottom line is on paper we're about a million and a half dollars short on revenue. but what I can tell you is that we're already, you know, we know in April, end of April, beginning of May, we're going to get the last million dollars of ECS funding. so, you know, a million of that is basically guaranteed by the state at this point. and if you look at the
collections so far for April, we're up to around $570,000, which means, you know, regardless of anything else, revenues are going to come in somewhat over expectations. and we're still going to get a lot of transfer station passes in and we're coming into the busy part of the building season. So, you know, our revenues from the building department are going to be up. So, I can't give you a a a guesstimate at this point how far we're going to be over revenues, but we've already accounted for all the revenues that we expect. So, we know we're going to be over for the year on revenues. Questions on that? You can see down in the bottom says total income to this point 11 million2 versus 12 million7. if you go up you'll see the ECS funding right here. that's a million dollars worth of that. The rest is the fact that this is the last collection quarter for the tax collector. So we know we're going to be in good shape. Part of the reason is Kate has been much more proactive about collecting back taxes. So that's definitely boosting us. so so we're going to be in good shape overall on revenue. So one of we didn't have anything anything for supplemental motor vehicle taxes, but there's $250,000 to the positive there. Is that really budgeted? Yes. So, I'll tell you why. Because every year we
budget that we will collect 100% of property tax in a given year, but we all know we don't. On average, we collect about 97 thou 97%. But that varies from year to year. almost always in an average year that pretty closely balances out the supplemental. and a year out you can't really guess what your supplemental is going to be because there's too many things that go into it. The economy goes bad. People don't buy new cars. So most years those balance out, but the variability from year to year is like 70 or $80,000. So you have to be aware that that guess of the combined property tax plus supplemental tax is going to vary, you know, solidly up or down, you know, $75,000. So that's always one of my scares in a budget going in is not knowing exactly what I have for revenues. And we've talked about separating out and trying to estimate the the supplemental and not just motor vehicle, it's supplemental motor vehicle plus supplemental tax bills on personal property and supplemental on real estate. and we just we just haven't done it because if you look at it over a long period of time those two the supplementals typically run to be around 3% but it does vary and there is a fair bit of variability both in how much we collect and what the supplemental is. So that's
that's the reason why it's the way it is. I know that's probably unsatisfying for a lot of people. Kim. Eric, could you just scroll down a little bit to the education section, please? I just want to make sure that what I'm seeing is correct. And could you just scroll over a little bit to Well, it's my right. Just want to make sure that I'm not missing any of the columns. I appreciate that. Just give me a second. I just want to take a look here. So, the left column is the current current amount. The center is the budget and the right is difference. All right. Thanks, Eric. I appreciate that. Okay. Can I ask how AC can I ask how accurate these numbers are? These education numbers. I mean, those accurate like AES's board of ed, they've only spent $870,000 thus far. So that to some extent is the lack of data transfer between the school and the town. Cheryl did get a whole big bunch of back bake bank statements. So I suspect that the accuracy of that will be much closer next month. But okay. Yeah. Thank you, Eric. Okay, so the first one I want to talk about is the town clerk's office. Obviously, we don't have we are running at this point with just an assistant town clerk. So that 21,2 plus the 2,000 that will go unspent. So, the bottom line is we're going to have about a $23,000 surplus in the town clerk's office. just by virtue of the board of selectment does not seem to want to appoint. They want to wait for the next election cycle and let that person be
voted on as opposed to appointing them now and then having them go to the end of what would have been Carol's term. So, I'm suspecting we're going to have a $23,000 surplus there. So, next, Eric, can I ask a question on that? I don't know if it's appropriate. I don't want to ask anything personal, but I know that we're retaining our former town clerk for training and everything. Wouldn't that line be used to pay that person? So, we might not have a surplus there. I I have no idea what the contract is or what you've done, but would that line the one where the funds are being expended from? We do not have a contract. Oh, okay. I proposed a contract to the board of selectmen or gave them what I thought was appropriate. does not appear from what I can tell that they have any interest in signing a contract. therefore that will go unexpected. So I believe Oh no, thank you. I didn't know if you know I've been to the board of selectman meetings where
they've talked about it. So we have no knowledge of anything having happened but I thought maybe some funds would be coming from that line. Okay. Correct. So I don't believe they will but Okay. Who knows? Maybe they sign a contract and back pay in June. I mean that that's on them. because that is not a because I have no responsibility for that office. Although I gave them a proposal, they they may accept it or not. That that's on them. the next one I want to talk about a little bit are really is elections. if you go down to the elections line, you can see where we still have a pretty good surplus in elections, you know, kind of all the way through. part of that is the fact that the state did after saying they wouldn't last year did have supplemental funding for early elections. and the second is we're, you know, the registars, you know, are still working through what they really need for staffing levels and and all of that. so we're going to have, you know, at least 12,000 back in that line item. So that's going to account for a fairly good chunk. the next one down, Eric, on the elections, is is that a is that a running total or is that the total for the year? I mean, we still have an election coming up. So, just curious like the 22,000 budget for election salaries. Is that is that the amount for the year or is that a three three? I just wonder how it's accured in the budget. Do you know? election salaries, no, it's budgeted once. That's
what's been expended on election salaries. Okay. Yeah, I mean we're still we still have a surplus clearly. I just was curious. Yeah, we have a pretty good surplus. That's why I said 12,000 because we're going to spend at least a thousand on the referendum, but that doesn't have early voting implications. Now, if we go to six referendums like we had in the past, we could chew up a bunch of that money. But failing that, we're going to have a pretty good surplus. building department, we're going to be over spent by somewhere around $12,000 that we're going to make need to make up. And that is because we ended up hiring a zoning agent that had zero experience. so with the board of selectman's permission, I established a pretty long overlap between the two individuals. so we had about four months where we were paying them both at the same time as one was training the other as they assumed the responsibilities. And frankly, there's a huge shortage of you know, zoning agents. So I think that's you know, that's an unfortunate reality. The good news is that we conditioned the pay on the new employee on getting certified and fully trained. And since that's a multi-year process, we're going to see lower costs in the future up until the point where he gets fully trained and and Casio certified. So, we'll have a period of lower expenses, but right now in this budget, that one's definitely going to be over. We're not over yet, but we have a whole quarter to go through and we've already blown through that whole budget. So, I'm giving you a heads up that that's going to happen. so duh civil preparedness I am going to recommend to
the planning and zoning commission that we give the EMC or emergency management communication person for the town who also heads the town of Andover's C, which is civilian emergency response team, a onetime bonus. And the reason is is that she is the primary person that had to produce the update to, you know, the every four-year update to the town's emergency management plan overall, which was a lot of work on her part. And because she did that and we got it certified, we were able to get a grant for $5,000. So, I would like to take a portion of that grant and give her a bonus for getting it in on time and then applying for the grant because she got it in on time. So, she did all the work. She should get some benefit, but that's still got to go through the board of selectmen. Don't know whether they'll agree with it or not. We're certainly going to be fine on that line item overall. community center, we're going to be okay. even with the the assistant, which was not an originally budgeted item. you can see the assistant has up to this point spent
$4,400. but combining those two, we're still going to be under. So, not a lot to worry about there, at least as far as I am concerned on town expenses overall. we're closer than I would like. we did get a lot more website fees than we anticipated. that's one of the things we're quite a bit over. not a huge deal. but part of the issue is that the company we use, Civic Plus, and our communication platform, which is Civic Ready, I mean, they won't you can't ask them this year what the contract is going to be for next year. and they they don't run on a town's fiscal cycle. They run on a January to January cycle. So, we got hit with a fairly large increase there. that put us way over what we anticipated. also if you see the line for propane was overexpended. there was two reasons for that. The first is that because we put in two brand new tanks. we started the year with zero propane in there. and we'll finish the year with with fairly full tanks. So, even though we've overexpent $2,000, you know, we've still got, you know, probably $3,000 worth of propane sitting in the tank that we didn't have at the beginning of this budget cycle. the other thing is since we are playing off electrical usage versus propane usage in the winter because the town hall now has dual heating sources. We can heat completely with propane or completely with electricity. I want
one full budget cycle and then to be able to look at all our usage and compare it to heating degree days, figure out where we are and then make recommendations for next year how we balance electrical usage versus propane usage. just not there yet. advertising, as you well know, we had a board of selectman position open for six or seven months. That was an awful lot of extra adverts. in the River East, we use River East primarily because they are the cheapest [Music] cheapest spot we can post official notices on legally because they do have a townwide circulation. insurance overall, we're okay at the moment. it's going to depend to some extent on I think we're going to stay okay. What I don't know yet is when we're actually getting the fire truck and as soon as we get the fire truck, we're about to add a million dollars to our ESIP policy. which will boost that. So, presuming that doesn't hit before the end of the year, we're going to be fine on insurance. employee benefits. If you look at everything together, social security and med scroll down so we can follow. Oh, sorry. Yeah. If you look at employee benefits in total,
we're going to be okay. we're definitely going to be under on health and dental, but that was simply because of personnel changes. We're going to be over a little bit on social security and med, but not a lot. so, and on MURF, we're going to be okay. So, we haven't paid our admin fees yet. We haven't paid our amortization fees yet. So, those things are going to be coming in. Overall, we look like we're going to be okay on employee benefits overall by somewhere around 15K, but all of that is going to be in the health and dental insurance. We should be pretty close to being on on the other items. town garage overall we look okay. I'm not seeing any real issues with that. Our expenditure is pretty well in line with where we are in the budget series. I know we've been looking at a bunch of building maintenance tasks that we would like to do. presuming we're not going to go over on the other, we'll schedule that for the last quarter of this year. we usually try not to spend much out of building maintenance just in case we have any oopses during the year in the building. I don't necessarily think we're going to do it at all. one of the things we're starting to pick away at is is, you know, it it's a 150 year old building. We're having a lot of problems with some of the doors and we're also having a lot of problems with bricks falling. But that's a big that's a CIP conversation because the fix to that building is a couple
hundred,000. you know when we have a leaky roof in the cold storage area, both our cold storage areas, which is we're going to have to address at some point, but that's not not happening in this budget. let me scroll down. The old firehouse is where is that? Old firehouse is going to be definitely over budget. That is just the service fees for three-phase power which we have to maintain until we tear that building down. I had anticipated we'd have already torn it down this year, but we just haven't gotten to that. So, that we're going to be over. the next big one we're going to be over quite a bit is the town engineer line. and but and part of that is we're going to end up cleaning up. A lot of those fees are related to the construction of the athletic fields and we should be able to use most of that as the town's
contribution towards the the project the the pickle ball and playground and the the what's called the phase two you know improvements at the wreck field. so we should be able to use that money we're spending as in the town engineer as part of the town's contribution, which means we will not have to spend that money out of the multi-use building fund. So, we are over, but ultimately, you know, the town is on the hook for 20% of the cost of the steep grant project. This counts towards those costs. So, in the end, that will we're definitely over, but we're over for a specific reason, and we should be able to not spend that same amount of money out of the multi-use building fund by spending it here, and we'll be able to cover it from somewhere else in the budget. none of those are too significant. public works overall looks like it's okay. you know, we were it looks like unless we get another snowstorm, which I hope not, that we're going to be okay on public works labor for snow removal. we are going to be pretty much fully expent on the both sand and salt. for this year. I know it doesn't show it this year, but we just had to we've blown through our entire supply and we're doing what we do in a normal year, which is pre pack the shed. So, at the beginning of the year, we have a fair amount to work with. So, we did use more salt this year than we have in years past. and we did use more sand than than kind of we were anticipating, but overall public works is okay. I'm pretty sure that budget overall will come out fairly well.
even we are going to be in the transfer station definitely under on tipping fees and if you notice from this year's budget we've reduced that to account. This is really our first full year on the new contract. and so it's it's somewhat unclear what [Music] you know, until we got into it, it was pretty hard to predict. and frankly, the amount of polls we get per year is a fairly v variable number. So, it's not like we have the same amount of trash every year. That's variable within five or 10%. So there's always a fair bit of uncertainty in that number. the one thing that I'll bring your attention to which has been one of my real bugaboos is what's called the environ energy and environmental fee. this is kind of a slush fee that Cassella builds into all their contracts and it essentially accounts for the cost of fuel and it accounts for all the things that affect their business prop, you know, profitability. and it's really annoying because there's no good way to figure out in advance what that fee is going to be. and it's really hard to
even get a straight answer on what that what it contains. I've read through the corporate literature, but it's it's quite vague. but there's also doesn't seem to be any way we can get out of dealing with it. the other thing we're going to be a fair bit over is the compactor lease. as you remember, we talked about it. Cassella some point this year figured out that hey they actually have two that are being leased, not one. and so they started charging us for both of their contractors, not just one. I've known that for the last five years that they've been undercharging me, but I wasn't going to tell them. but now they found out, so now we're paying. overall we should be okay. In public
works, recycling, we're in good shape. Overall, we're going to have some expenses due to mid nerok that we haven't gotten yet because their expenses, their their hazardous waste collection is like a late summer and fall thing and then it starts up again in April. So, we're going to have some extra, you know, budgets to that, but overall we're in pretty good shape. Not a huge number, but it's good that good that we're under. ground care, we're quite a bit under right now. but frankly, we haven't gotten a bill from Hebrin. They're kind of famous for giving us one big bill very late in the year. So, I think we're going to be safely under, but you know, there's a lot of billing and a lot of work that's gone into this that we haven't been build for yet. So, don't know exactly where that's going to come
out. The custodian we're going to be well under. last year, we budgeted when wi when Willie took over the responsibility for cleaning the community center. and we really had no idea how many how many hours a week that was going to take. He's been pretty efficient for that. So, we just haven't been spending that money. So, we're going to have a pretty good chunk back in the custodian budget. I'm guessing we're going to be around 5,000 under for the year on that one. so pretty much everything else is okay until we go down to the planning and zoning commission. And this is where I'll find it. Hang on. Planning and zoning commission. so we are way the heck over on legal fees. the reason why I wasn't bringing this to your attention before is it looked like we were going to have a final settle settlement in this fiscal year. and so the the bottom line is the town is suing a person over the gravel pit operation on Route Six. So, they're definitely in violation. We will definitely get our legal fees back out of this. So, ultimately, this is going to go away. and I was pretty sure it was going to go away in this budget year because it looked like they had a buyer for the property and they
would have had to settle with that before they sold. But it looks like the buyer for that portion just in the last week or so is maybe not going through. So it may be past this fiscal year when we actually settle. So we're going to get that money back, but we may not get that money back in this fiscal year. So we're obviously, you know, almost $15,000 over budget on that, which is why I'm bringing it to your attention. So, I guess what I would say is overall when you take away all the things we're over and all the things we're under, we're going to be under budget on expense. There's going to be a few
things that were quite a bit over. and I kind of explained why and there's a bunch of things that are going to be quite a bit under. and I kind of explained why those particular items are under. any questions to this point? So, I mean, the takeaway really is that we're going to be over on revenue. I can't tell you how much at this point. And unless something really bad happens and we really get whacked by OSHA, you know, we're going to bring the town budget overall under. so we look like we're in pretty good shape. and I'm more than happy to take any questions on this. So, I know it's a lot to throw at you. It was helpful. I think it was a good overview. questions for Eric? Any any of these line items? No, thank you for the information, Eric. Thank you, Eric. That excellent explanation of all those things. Appreciate that. It is timely. It's a good time to have it. So, I appreciate that we did it. Yeah. Thank you. I just had a question. yeah, thank you as well from me. We will have a session probably with Cheryl, you know, the overages versus you know, we'll have a session one of our meetings with the transfers, I imagine, after the fiscal year ends or whatever. Correct. Yeah. Before because we have to approve them before the year ends, right? Yeah. I do know. Yeah. per
the auditor. in years past, we have made up the department by department line items and evened all of them out. And the auditor basically last year said, you know, you're kind of crazy to do that. All you really have to do is level, you know, you've got to make you've got to be even at the department level. So that's what we did last year, which means there's a lot less corrections we have. And the ones I gave you are basically the ones that are going to be the corrections unless something else happens that are catastrophic. That's what I thought. Yep. Thank you. I've got a question. is there any wiggle room at all between like the under and the over? Can you take something from the under and bring it to the over in another line item? Well, that's what we do with the transfers. Within a budget, we generally just can make the change, right? But otherwise, we have to approve the transfers before the end of the year. But we can you remember kind of we got away from doing that on the fly. We kind of set a policy where major major transfers we would end up, you know, reconciling at in a batch mode basically. But can you do that with things that are really not kind of the same? Yeah. Yeah, we can. I mean, it's either if you're if you're under budget, you got to move some money in from a fund to pay for it in some some way, some either contingency fund or some other fund. And if you're over, you're going to be moving it into a fund. So, it's kind of a wash. Okay. It's a good question, but
yeah, that's how that would generally work. Other questions for Eric? All right, then I will stop sharing. Okay. All right. Then then the the real check register of is actually following this. So there's the normal normal listed makes more sense. Yep. I don't know if anybody has any questions on the check register. hit. Okay. Well, nobody has any questions. We can move on to 6A, which is new business. and this is the review of the healthcare costs. So, we already talked about this a little bit and Cheryl did send an email responding to Joannne's query. you know, I just skimmed over it. I don't know if everyone's had a chance to read it. I'm still kind of catching up from being away, but it it does indicate as Joanne had strongly s suggested that there was an error in the spreadsheet. So, we did overbudget by the amount. Of course, as we know things
can change because of personnel shifts or whatever, but Eric, do you have anything more to add? Nope. Today was the first time Cheryl, myself, and Chris have sat in a room for since you went to Florida a long time ago. So that was kind of today's major topic was to review that. and I also think that at some point, you know, and and so I asked, you know, it's been an ask of mine for a while that we sit down and review it. and and I do agree with Joanne, but I'm not going to say that's over unless I get an official opinion from the treasurer. And so that's why you got the response from her, not me. Yeah. I have a followup if I could. Yep. Go ahead, Jordan. So, I know in our process, in our budget process, one part we had noticed, and I do appreciate Cheryl getting back, you know, and I know everybody's main concern was we can't change it. We can't change it. And I get that because we had already moved it along. I tried my best to, you know, get it taken care of in the town meeting. And I understand that it couldn't, you know, people weren't just going to go solely on my thought, you know, even though I was pretty sure, but during our process, Eric, and this is just so that it doesn't happen again, we knew that supposedly the part that was budgeted was an 8% amount and at one point we had already asked that it get changed to the seven 7% not 7 o'clock, 7% amount. So, whatever that will be, that will be. I know that the whole thing everybody's trying to tell us is,
hey, we can't change. I I get that. I just want to make sure going forward and that's all I reiterate in things is, you know, not playing a blame game, whatever, just what whatever there was a mistake. We want to make sure that whatever we're handed in the future is just correct. So, now I have this feeling of worry in my mind that there could be other mistakes in other places. that was just such a big figure that I was able to just try to compute it real quick, you know. So, yeah, I I I have a thought on that. So, I I think it might make sense to convene and and maybe this is the wrong word, but a committee,
maybe a group of two or three people to sit there and just go through page by page, formula by formula. Anything that's should be a formula should be a locked cell. It's a nuisance doing all that, but you can and then you know that way we we protect you know protect the the integrity of the data and the formulas a little better. And Mark, that's my whole thing and I appreciate what you're saying because I'm on the same wavelength like I tried to we're volunteers, we're elected, we're appointed, you know, we're taking it in but we did not put this spreadsheet together so we can't know every single little ins and out of it. So, right. Yeah. I And even if it was perfect at one time, it got overwritten. And you guys saw me change numbers on the fly during the meeting trying to keep track. You got to be very careful. And now that we're here, we would hope, you know, whoever's going to be responsible for putting the data in the
first spreadsheet or, you know, we can we can convene before this happens. I mean, we were in a definitely changed, rushed year and this is what came of it. You know, I'm personally glad we found mistakes and of if we did, we're going to bring them up and we can see what happens in the future. And just to since we're on this topic of this thing, I believe every year, Eric, the thought is to put the actuals in there. I understand that it's going to vary. It could change. You know, someone could leave, someone could not need health insurance, and and I get all of that. To me, I'm such a, again, I always go back to the literal. I just wanted to know there was a mistake. I feel like there was a lot of, you know, fluffing on the side. Oh, that's and it was it it's it's all okay. We're all here. You know, we we understand there's going to be overages and undergrades or under whatever the word is. But just want to make sure in the future that we're we're basing that on what we have actual employees at the time because we're funding a line. That's your best gift. So, moving forward trying to come up with a plan that something that like
this doesn't happen again. Yeah, you're you know, no question. And I will tell you that every budget since I've been here has had errors in it. I don't think there's any question. you know, and there's errors a bunch of different ways, you know. I I mean I can tell you that based on what was released today by the consensus you know state appropriations group probably we will get our rec funding back. you know, when I talked to legislators a couple weeks ago, they were like, "No, the governor's adamant we're moving towards the revised ECS for and he's not going to accept that." Now, maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. I mean, if I were making that guess today, I would probably gamble that that money got put back in there. next year will be much easier because it's a bianial budget. but last year, you know, we got $79,000 in revenue from the state we weren't anticipating because the state surplus was higher than it was and a certain fraction of that comes back to the state. Well, 80 grand is an awful lot of money. You know, that's not something we budgeted for. but I think we can all agree that there's a difference in kind between an, you know, something that changes due to external factors and just making sure that the the spreadsheet is correct, you know. Sure. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Anybody have any other comments or questions on that? No. Thank you for the in-depth discussion and for Cheryl and and everybody addressing it. yeah, and we'll have a plan moving forward. Yep. Okay, I guess we can move on to 6B, which is legislative updates. Eric, you
did send some stuff out the last hour this afternoon. yeah, I apologize for that, but they just put it out this afternoon. I did skim through all 250 pages of documentation. I don't expect you to because I knew the things that I was concerned with. So, of the things I was concerned with, it does look like they reversed the governor's recommendation to zero out all the early election support and funding. So, potentially we'll have $5,000 more 5 to 7,000 more state revenue to go towards early voting than we were anticipating. because up to this point we haven't
seen any indication that anybody was considering it. but the appropriations commission appears to have restored that funding. the appropriations commission at least has held the town harmless on the ECS funding. So that's plus $89,000 to the town. they agreed with the governor on the pilot the payment in lie of so that should stay the same as our estimates. the negative is that the legislature has been actively considering a change to the state local bridge program. myself and and a bunch of the other small town administrators have been lobbying very hard for them to increase the state share of that fund to 75%. and increase the amount of the annual bond because that's paid for through bond funding that they bond fund because as as most of you know our biggest liabilities in terms of infrastructure are failed culverts. you know, and if if we got bit hard by a storm, I could easily see us with a 10 plus million dollar, you know, emergency
appropriation to fix all that. So, it really is that serious. but given our budget constraints, you know, we're budgeting for it as fast as we can. If we could get the state to up their contribution to 75% or even 66% that would increase the rate at which we could address our problems. But they don't appear to do it and they do not. There was a pretty bipartisan push to increase funds for the state rail trail. As you know, our public works spends not a lot of money, but definitely labor on maintaining the trail because the state D flat out does not have the money or the manpower to do it. I was hoping that would change with this budget cycle, but that doesn't appear to it. So, that's pretty much all I have on the legislative update. There's still some things I'm hoping come out of the legislature and I'm hoping we don't get stuck with too many more unfunded mandates because there about 60 or 70 things that have time or cost implications to towns that are still actively up for bills in the legislature. So that's all I got for that. Can I say question? Sure. I heard you talking at the board of selection meeting about the state replacing our our signs like speed signs and stuff. Did that already start? Not the speed signs project. What you're seeing is something which I've been getting a lot of flack for the last couple days is the state has been installing new curvature warning signs. Yes. right near my house. Only a bunch of them seem to
be really bizarre. we signed up for that program in like 2019 and it took the state six years to pull the trigger on it. I had totally forgot about it. you know, until we got a notification earlier this year that, yeah, it's probably going to happen this year. And then, and then they just came and started putting signs in. So, yeah, gotten a bunch of complaints about them. the public works foreman and I have talked about it and we're going to start there's some of them that we can move to areas that are less obnoxious so they're not right in the faces of the homeowners who have them in their front yards. I was just going to say I I'm not sure so much as I heard from a couple people today about one put on Bear Swap. I know that's It doesn't bother me, but I think the person that talked to me said, "Are we really paying for these new signs? What is that sign for?" And I didn't know that that was one of the signs that fell over into the safe program. I said, "Geez, I I'll ask Eric about it." So, it's nice to know that we didn't pay for that sign. Yeah. No, we didn't pay. It's not our labor, but it's probably going to be our labor moving
them. at least some of them. What they were supposed to have put up on the sharp curbs is the horizontal chevrons indicating that you're going around a curve and you have to pay attention before you drive off the road and kill yourself. some of the signage they put up seemed just really bizarre to me. so, yeah. Yep. Eric. so very selfishly, I I was wonder if I could go back to the conversation, and I say selfishly because I live on Baris Swamp Road and I live on the other side of what has been identified as a failing culvert. Sure. And you know, if you
said, like you said, if we had a really bad storm, this road could be washed out and there's no way out the other end of the Bear Swamp. It's it's a dead end. So, I mean, what would happen? You'd always be able to walk. you could borrow one of the town ebikes. I'm sure it would be fine. But I just want I mean is there any way that the state, you know, would look at something like that and say, you know, this is, you know, this is a a dead-end road. It's a covert that's been identified as failing. And you know, if you had a storm, we could be stranded up here on Bear Swamp Road. So, here's the here's the basic problem is that the last funding cycle when we got approved and we got one culvert through the appropriation for a 50% reimbursement. you can't submit one unless it's rated less. Culverts are rated on a scale of basically one to nine. It's got to be a three or lower to really even be eligible to come up on the program. yours is a two. so it's definitely eligible, but only about one culvert in three that applies for the
funding actually gets the funding in any given year because there just is not enough funding to go around. we were very lucky to get funded and that is one of the reasons why we hired Nathan Jacobson as our town engineer is because they have a really good success rate of getting culverts through the local bridge program. so yeah, it's a concern. You're certainly not the only person in that and there's a potential I mean there's definitely a potential in a in a catastrophic rainstorm that we could suffer a lot of damage. you know but I can only fund it at the rate where we're putting money into the the bridge and covert fund and things that I can get applied. So that's yeah, I I recognize it's a vulnerability. we've got a number of them. and a number that are safety concerns. I mean, you know, our town engineer five years ago told us we probably should consider not driving over Lake Road at POA. that was his recommendation. it's in the program,
you know. but that's where we're at. Thank you. Mark, can I go ahead with a question? Not on the coverts. just quick question, Eric. By chance, if the budget does fail at referendum, we're able I know we're not able to make any of these corrections like adding in the ECS funding or anything because everything's set in stone. But if it does fail, we're allowed to add those back in. Correct. I mean any if the budget fails, you basically get a fresh start, right? you can adjust anything in any line item. The budget automatically gets bifurcated and goes to both the budget meeting and the referendum as a bifurcated budget. basically what happens is I'm going to recommend to you as a board that you schedule a special meeting for the day after the referendum because the referendum is on May 6th. May 7th would be a Wednesday. You schedule a Wednesday special meeting. If you don't need it and the referendum passes, you're free. If you don't, then you have to get a a budget back to the public. essentially ASAP. So because the following Tuesday so six days later would be the next budget meeting and then that would be followed two weeks later by the referendum if it passes the budget meeting. Okay. So, but yes, if it fails,
you can very definitely I mean if it fails, you're going to end up having to cut line items because it only fails because people are unhappy that spending is too high and your only solution to that is you know is cutting. Certainly in previous times when boards of finance tried to brazen it out and put the same budget back to the public, it was not well received. Well, I I would argue that in this case, the challenge might be the school budget and the intention. We have a new charter, so the you know, people are unhappy with the school budget. Town budget might hold hold on its own, right? Clearly, we have a large increase and there's some concern about that. So,
yep. And you know, that's a decision with the board of finance where you go with it. no, thank you for the answer to my question. Yeah. Okay. Any other questions about the legislative actions? Okay. Well, I guess then we the next one we have is the impact of the ocean inspection. Do you have anything to add? We haven't already talked about No, I think I beat that to death already. just to tell you that that's going to whack the building maintenance fund for around 26 grand. and we're going to take some money out of the contingency to cover. Do we know if those fine will we'll we'll know the amount of the fines and the and the real costs of remediation before the end of this budget year? Yeah. Yeah. apparently kind of implied that but I don't know we really stated it right as far as I understand it you know it's a quick because you're only unless there's some real serious reason why it has to take more than 30 days. Your final correction plan has to be in and submitted and adjudicated 30 days essentially after you get the you have the the meeting with them. Okay. So, within 45 days, we should have a final resolution of that as I understand it. Further questions from Eric on the OSHA? Yeah. Actually, going back to the the election, I mean the
referendum, will the referendum be passing both budges at the same time or is that actually going to be separated now? For the first time, it is not separated per the charter. But it's only bifurcated if it fails once. Okay. So once it fails, it gets bifurcated. There will be two votes though. There will be a vote on the RAM budget and there will be a vote on the town overall budget. but if the town budget passes and the RAM budget passes, you still don't have an opportunity to set the mill rate because although we put the RAM budget in our budget as a placeholder, that's it's just like any revenue source or expense source that you can't control because you're saying if the RAM budget does not pass. Correct. Okay. Sound like you said if they both pass. Oh, if they both pass, you're home free. Yeah. Okay. You know,
and then the only thing you have to do is we have to talk about when you want to set the mill rate because it might be, you know, you might be able to hold off setting the mill rate until we know one way or the other what the revenues are going to be. You can't push it off too long because then you back up the the tax collector's office, but you may be able to wait long enough to do that so that you can account for the $89,000 if we're going to get that back. Can you just remind me real quick when the RAM referendum vote is? May 6. Same as same day. Okay. Same day. That's why we sped up the whole So we That's why we need that May 7th special meeting set. Correct. Correct. Unless of course you're positive it's going to pass a referendum, but always cancel the meeting. Yeah, exactly. Why don't we do we need a motion on that, Mark? Just you want me to move and Well, I mean, we're kind of out of our Let's wait till we get the board open discussion, I would say, just so we follow the agenda. Yeah. Yeah, sure. Any other questions on the OSHA impact or legislative stuff? Okay. Well, I'll move on to the next
item in the agenda, which is the approval of the meeting minutes. so before we start on that, if anybody wants to make motions to approve these minutes, there's an error. The first item there 7A says trio board meeting minutes, but the meeting minutes that are included are actually the December regular meeting. Yeah. so that one is is probably off the table for tonight. it's a December 18th regular meeting minutes instead of the tri board meeting minutes. So that we'll still have to revisit tribard meeting minutes at another time. however, the others are there. If anybody wants to make a motion to approve any of the any of the meeting minutes there, 7A, 7B, etc. I don't know if everybody sees these, but the 7B is the January 22 regular meeting. And I'm going to make a motion to approve those minutes. Mark, are we going to do Oh, go ahead. I was going to say I had a couple notes on
Well, so on a couple of the meetings, I had a couple notes that I had written down. which one? So, December 18th was actually not Let's see. There was there was a December 4th meeting and there was a December 18th meeting. Which one did you say was incorrect? The Well, it's just the agenda was wrong. So, the agenda says the list December 4th tri board meeting as the agenda item. It does not list the Wednesday, December 18th meeting. And technically, we shouldn't take action on anything that's not on the agenda on this. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. So, so in my view, we should probably postpone discussion of the December meetings. Okay. So, we start with January 22nd. You could just add it to the agenda. Well, yeah, we could. Or just doing board open discussion, I guess. But, yeah, I mean, we're kind of late. We have not We can't just vote to change it and correct it right now. And Well, corrections as noted. Okay. Okay. Hold on a second. So, at the January meeting, we already approved the December 18th regular meeting minutes, so we do not need to take action on that. What we do not have in our packet is the tri board meeting minutes. Now,
you we've had them in front of us several times. If if somebody wants to make a motion to approve it, we could. I wasn't there, so I won't, you know, I won't vote all the same. So, the tri board meeting minutes was in last month's packet and the month before that and the month. Okay. So, I did read it. I did read it and there was a couple of things in it that need addressing clarification or change. Okay. I would say that we let that go and then you probably want to make a note of those. yeah, I have them noted. Would it be best just to send it in an email or that that's what I would suggest. Send it to the email and copy the whole board and then we can look at it and anybody who you know if everyone's in agreement we can we can make the it's an administrative thing so we're not voting on it or taking action outside of a public meeting it's not an issue. yeah. I mean, again, I was there, but so I wouldn't I wouldn't know either way, but I think it would make sense to have everybody to have the paper in front of them, the the minutes plus the your suggested edits. Yeah. And and I'm not trying to be flippant, but it was a tri board meeting. Only one board technically has to approve it. So,
has anyone thought the board of selectmen had already approved the tri board meeting minutes? they did. It doesn't mean you can't. I thought they did. I could be wrong. I mean, you know, there's so many minutes that go through my, you know, my eyes that I I think it would still behoove the board of finance to take a close look at the make sure the meeting minutes and we agree with them. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not saying you can't. I'm just saying if you decided to punt on that and never do it, it probably wouldn't be a foul. Yeah, got it. So, I I think the gist of it is that we probably want to see Liz's notes and anybody else who has any comments on the tri board meeting minutes in front of us and then those of you that were there can you know hopefully we'd kind of agree that and any changes that we want to make and then we can we can go from there. but I I think we should probably postpone that till next meeting if we get a chance to review it. Are there any minutes that we can approve tonight? I know I would say January January 22nd. The meeting minutes are there. I did I took a quick skim, but I didn't see any issues there. Liz, you're raising your hand. Same. yeah. So on number five, old business
on C second paragraph my notes discussed including 2% non-lapsing account for AES and AES capital fund in the stiff account. Board of Education can also move funds to these accounts into a money market account to also earn interest. Okay. What was my note? oh, should this say the board of ed would like to move funds to a money market? No, I think that was something we suggested that they could consider doing if I remember correctly. you know, they wanted to set it put it in the stiff account and we said we weren't sure they'd be able to do it. but one of they had other options. Maybe I think Bill Bill might suggested I can't really remember off the top of my head,
but right, but the sentence says Board of Education can also move funds for these two accounts into a money market account. And I'm wondering if it would be more appropriate to say the board of ed would like to know would like to move funds because it hasn't been determined that they can actually do that, right? So I think I think it was more like they would like to. Yeah. The sentence says I feel like that was on my I I'd have to look back at the minutes and I don't have them open but I think I reported on it and I thought that I was quoting something from Cheryl. Oh, could be. Maybe maybe maybe we could
wait on that one and do a little digging and find out then. Yeah, I can find the passage from Cheryl. I thought that we reported on the stiff account that Cheryl didn't feel comfortable opening another stiff account on the top. I think we can't. Yeah. Yeah. And Right. I don't see in front of me, but from my memory, from what Liz is referencing, it could have been it probably is documented wrong in the minutes, but yeah. What I'm Yeah, my point is I think I think it should say that the board of ed would like to be able to move funds to a money market or whatever. Here it says board of education can also move funds. Okay. So maybe we we should postpone action on that those minutes. Postpone those. Yeah. All right. And then people can review them and we can you know I don't know if it's really a substantive change but we better to get it accurate. Thanks for looking at that, Liz. Yep. Yep. I also reviewed February 12th and February 19th and I didn't see anything odd. Clearly, you're reading this a lot closer than I am, so I feel confident. So, do you want to make a motion, Liz, that we approve the February minutes? Yeah, I'll make a motion to approve February 12th and February 19th joint board of finance board of selectman
meeting minutes. I'll second that. Okay. Do we have any further discussion? Okay. all those in favor say I. I. I. Any opposed? Any abstensions? Okay. The meeting minutes for February 12th and February 19th are approved. the next one would be February 26 regular meeting. Anybody have any concerns of those or I did read through the minutes tonight too just overview, not you know line by line. I thought that most of them looked pretty good. You know I know we've had them on for a couple sessions. so I'll go ahead and make a motion to approve the February 26th meeting minutes. Okay. Do we have a
second? Okay. Liz Liz seconds. Sorry. In a first. Any discussion? All those in favor say I. I. I. I. Any opposed? Any abstensions? Okay. The meeting minutes for the meeting of February 26 are approved. Next, we have the special budget meeting minutes for V Wednesday, March 5th. And was the 19th a budget meeting as well? I think, right, we had the Yeah, there was the 5th, the 19th, and then the regular meeting on the 26th. I'm going to go ahead and make a motion to accept both of those special budget meeting minutes from February, I mean, sorry, March 5th and March 19th. Oops. Scroll too far. We have a second. I'll second. Sorry, I was had the thing. Bill. Okay, Bill did. I'm trying to flip back and forth between the minutes and the screen. So, any discussion? Okay. All those in favor say I. I. I. Any
opposed? Okay. and no abstensions. Okay, those two are passed and that was the 5th and the 19th. And then the last one we have is the regular meeting minutes for March 26th. I'm going to go ahead and make a motion to approve those minutes from March 26th regular board finance meeting. That's Joanne, right? Okay. Yes. Second, Bill Rob. Okay. Thanks, Rob. Any discussion on those? Okay, hearing none. All those in favor? I I opposed. Any abstensions? Looks like it's unanimous. Thank you very much. Okay, very good. Knock those out. That's important. And you know, just I think we've said this before. Eric's brought it up, but you know, if we were to find an error or something we didn't like, there's no reason we could not revisit it. We're just passing it for the purposes of of the record and to have it posted and available. So, thank you. Yeah, I do I do have one thing to say on this. Yeah. and and Mark, this
is for you as the chairman. When you come out of executive session, can you state and you start the recording? Can you state on the record when you came out of ex executive session, when you restarted the recording? Because the person just has a blank in the file and doesn't know. And you're supposed to state when you go in and when you come out. That's good. You're right. Good. Thanks for the reminder. Everybody help us remember that. It'd be good. Okay. Okay. Well, that takes us to our next agenda item, which is our agenda item eight, which is board open discussion. This would be a time we would make a motion to set a special meeting for I believe it's Wednesday, March 8th, May 7th. May 7th, too many days. And I so move. So, you move to special meeting May 7th. at 7 pm. 7 a.m. Second and on Zoom or in person? I Well, this is just board of finance meeting to set the agenda, right? So, I prefer Zoom in because it's not really it's just us. Yeah, I I would agree. That's fine with me. Fine. Okay. So, just to clarify the motion, it's a virtual meeting. Any further discussion? Just note that the meeting will be cancelled if the if the budget passes a referendum. We should know that evening. and I'll send out a notice if that's the case. Otherwise, u we'll have an agenda. Okay. All those in favor? I I
opposed. Any abstensions? Okay. It's unanimous. Thank you very much. Any other board open discussion? I'm just going to mention one thing if I could, Mark. Very brief. I know the meeting's getting long. No, I sent just I'm sure some of you saw it or I sent an email today just documenting that we did hold an executive session or we had asked and appeared on the agenda as an executive session at the last board of selectmen meeting on April 14th. So, that did take place. the members that were present were Kim Personan, Liz Lochek, Bill D. Rogers, myself, Louise, I believe. were all the board of selectman there? I didn't see correct. Yes, the board of selectmen were all there, I think. And that's the meeting where the new board of selectmen was present as well. So,
you can read the overview. I don't I just wanted to document we held it and have something in our email referencing you know that's our official communication. So I thought it was important to just kind of document that for ourselves that we had requested it for the most part. the select men had wanted us to do it in public. So we did you know we gave them the the the what do I want to say? I'm tired. I'm thinking the respect of just requesting to appear at one of their meetings and bring up a few items. So, we thought we'd do it in executive session, but they asked that most of it be done in the public. We did. We said our piece, had the discussions, and
that's it. So, I just wanted to mention that I sent everyone an email today just documented that we did that for the Yeah, I saw that. It was helpful for me not having been there. So, Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. That's all. gonna be more more coming on some of those things, but we set our piece. Okay, hearing none, the next item is correspondence. I haven't received any external correspondence. I do have one and I'll give it real quick. I did talk to get kind of a snapshot from last year from the auditor. he he has a very preliminary draft financial statement. but it's still subject to change because frankly we're waiting on what's called OPED, which is our actuarial analysis of our healthc care liabilities and a few other things. so hopefully that will be taken care of. That issue is more the holdup is more on the school side than the town side for that. Although the the actuary has been a little bit of a pain to work with this year. We got a new actuary. so the total difference between revenues and
expenditures on the town side alone was $46,000. $227,000 of that was our revenues were over projection of that over projection. So, we we brought in more revenue than we anticipated. the major piece of that was the change to the stiff account. the stiff accounted for $127,000 more revenue than we anticipated for the year. the second big one was because the state did pretty well that year, we ended up with a municipal revenue sharing grant of just about $80,000 which we did not anticipate. So that was the majority of the difference in revenues. overall taxation combining grand list supplemental grand list back tax collection and fees. we had $31,000 more than we anticipated. our tax collection between the grand list and supplemental list was short $85,000. But our back co tax collection was way above average. and that's due frankly to Kate has been a lot more aggressive with going after delinquent tax collectors. Can I just inter I appreciate this. I feel like this is such important information. I hate just hearing it. You know, you are giving it to us. It's it's good for us to know and I really, you know, for us to digest it at the end of a meeting. we will but I'd love to see this like in writing or you know and I'll still continue to listen but this piece is very important you know so absolutely and that that's why I wanted to give it to you long before Mike is willing to release the
because did this just happen today like you got a preliminary call on the audit like today so we couldn't make like a little memo yeah so I I'm reading off of the memo and the notes that I took. Okay. Thank you, Erica. Then I know forward that to the board. I have no problem with that. But realize this is not a finalized audit. Oh, we understand. I just I wanted to make sure I understood what I was hearing because it's so many figures and I'm all into that, but I'm not I'm not retaining them. No, thank you. I'll let you continue as long as we see it in writing at some point and I know it's not final. Yeah, you definitely will. At this stage, usually what happens is now the the town treasurer will go back to the audit firm and we'll give them a big list of questions and say, "Hey, this doesn't seem right. Why did you categorize this? Why is this here not there? Why did you p pull that forward from a previous year?" and then they'll go back and forth and make sure they both agree on sure what's actually there. so for instance, the the treasurer gave me like a $365,000 number for the total difference between revenue and expenditure. So they're gonna So they don't totally agree. but that's normal. that happens every year. so the good news is revenue is up. We know why revenue is up. and the year before the supplemental list plus the grand list collection was more than anticipated and this year it was less than anticipated,
but we did a much better job of getting back taxes. So overall taxation was more than anticipated. so our revenue forecast, we were over by 1.8% on total revenue, which as far as I'm concerned is a pretty good number. If you back out the stiff account, that's 08%. so pretty close agreement between those two of them. on the expenditure side, total expenditure on the town side was $180,000 less than anticipated, but remember 50,000 of that is contingency. And when you don't spend contingency, it just runs back the fund balance. So really, the number you want to be
thinking about is $130,000 less than anticipated. of that 33,000 was the whole employee benefits category including health care you know for that year $17,000 was the fact that I did not hire a replacement admin assistant when Kate got promoted to be the tax collector I simply assigned that responsibility to her as a stipen So, that saved the town considerable money in that. $21,000 was our final bill for the resident trooper was way under our initial allocation. and honestly, the difference between their projected bill for us and what we actually got, they've been over $25,000 and they've been under $40,000 on their estimate of what they're going to charge because they don't make their final ratio of indirect cost to salary until some point later in the year. So that's the basic variability of that number. So even if they know the pay rate of the trooper, it there's a variable there that applying the overhead that is not known. Oh, that that makes sense to me. I was troubled by the fact that we Okay, I know our favor like I'm throwing a dart at the wall. yeah, you know, but I'm starting with their projection for what the cost is going to be. okay, it's just often not correct. 10,000 of that was elections. we got a state grant that covered last year. They did the same thing that looks like they might do this year as at the last minute they gave towns a grant to pay for
the cost of some of the early elections. So I think like $7,500 of that$10,000 over was that 10,000 was the clerk's budget overall was under and part of that was we were without an assistant town clerk for a period of time. So that was part of it. but it it was cumulative among the whole town clerk's budget. 10,000 of that was snow removal. As you know, last year was not a snowy year. we had quite a bit back. and 10,000 of that was the rest of public works budget, but they were way under on their overtime. and that's partly that correlates with a low snow year. So that was the majority of the reasons why the expenses were under last year. so the if you use the $130,000 number and and ignore contingency, that means the town's total budget was about 3.4% under what we budgeted. So that's the that's the highlevel view of where we are with last year's final. Eric, I understand what you mean, but we still budget the 50,000 for contingency, right? I mean, so it's still part of our budget. Yeah. And if if Right. I understand it's going to flow back in, but we're still overbudgeted, you know, by that amount. So, it's unless unless one of these years you as a board decide to make that a permanent fund and then fund it and then as long as nothing gets expended
from that, you don't have to fund it again because it's sitting out there. but I will say that my closest year on expenditures, we used all but like $9,000 of contingency to keep the town's budget in the black. So, the closest I've been was off about 9,000. Wow. you know, so that's the variability from year to year. Usually part of the reason why I take a hard look at this time of year because with one quarter remaining, a couple of years I've had to really shrink expenses and not approve stuff for the last quarter to make sure we stayed under. So, but you know that's just this year you know we are in pretty good shape and last year at this point you know we knew we were in the clear also.
And so to summarize, you're saying that from the auditor it was about 406 406,000 over and according to Cheryl it could be 365,000. Well, yeah. So Cheryl felt it was So what they're going to argue about is in some cases the auditor pulls expenses forward from a following year you know or from a previous year or says you know that's not really an expense that's applicable in this year it's on next year's budget. So there's always some of that in any given budget of them deciding which cate how to categorize various expenses. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, that was a long correspondence piece but it's good information. So look forward to having that finalized. Anybody have anything else correspondence related? Okay, next item is public speak. I do not see any members of the public in the meeting now. So I guess we can move on from that. And the next item is adjournment. Anybody motion to adjourn? Didn't give me a chance to even say it. I'm sorry. Who seconded? I I did unless someone Liz and Jo were like tied, but whatever. Yeah. Okay. Joannne's was first on my I saw. So we'll Joanne second. Anybody any discussion? Are we sure? Okay. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed? Any abstensions? Hearing none. Motion's passed. Thank you very much everybody.