All right, folks. So, this is the April 1st budget hearing, Board of Finance, Town of Andover. We'll go ahead and start the meeting. We'll start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under
God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
For all. Right. Then
Heather,
give me one moment. Oh, Heather's here, too. Good. Good.
I am. Yep. Hi, Heather.
Good. Good.
Is Kim with us or not?
I don't see her yet.
Liz, I don't know if you if you heard before you joined, Nick is traveling. I don't think we're going to get him tonight.
Okay. And I did not hear that. Is Louise on? Yes, I see her.
I am. Hi, Louise.
Hey, Louise.
Hi.
Hey, Louise.
Her pretty face.
All right, so we need to do public comment. I'm going to go through my I have a long list here. many of which is you folks, but I'm going to go in the order that it's on my screen. So the first on there that is not a member of our board is an creme select board member
and you're muted if you're trying to talk
if Yeah. Or I can come back to you. No big deal. All right. I'll come back to Ann. let's go with Jed Larson.
Hello. Just came to watch the presentation. Maybe I'll have a few questions after, but primarily here just to learn.
Very good. Thank you. Jen Mcoldendrick.
No comment. Thanks.
There's Kim.
Oh, great. Welcome, Kim. Joanne,
hi everyone. you are going to have comment again Rob after you do the presentation. Is that the way I'm understanding it?
You know it's it's looking at the agenda
nd it doesn't have it. So
the agenda does have it. The agenda says receive comments from the public
and then closer.
Number three. Right. It said budget presentation number two and then comments.
Oh, I'm looking at maybe I'm looking at a earlier version where before she fixed it. Okay.
Yeah. I've never seen it this way to be truthful. There's usually it's it's way different than this. This is a whole new process this year because usually you'll have a budget workshop involved in this as well after comments from the public. But you know, whatever you want. I'll Are we?
No, no. I I I want there to be public comment after. So, I'm I I I want it to be that way.
I just I'm going to double check right now, Joanne, because
when I got an email from Kate with the agenda.
Okay.
It was it was set up a little differently. So, hold on one moment.
Sure.
I'm just going to double check here. here's the packet. Yeah. Okay, great. So, actually, I'm doing it wrong. I apologize to everybody. We're going to actually stop the public comment because again, I had an older version of this agenda and I had the wrong agenda. So, it's actually straight into public the budget presentation and then we'll do comments. So, let's just do that then. Apologies. I guess it must have changed. So I what I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen and we're going to go through our budget presentation as it currently exists. So give me one moment.
So Rob, let me can I just say one thing?
Yeah, go right ahead.
Again, we don't have Eric, so we really this is kind of our first time kind of winging not winging but doing it without his his help. And in the packet, the packet is the actual budget. it's the actual spreadsheet, you know, all the pages of the budget. So, I guess I was kind of thinking I wasn't really sure what was going to happen tonight. but then I saw that packet and I was just wondering if if we were going to be going through this actual PowerPoint or what we were doing.
Oh, I I fully intend to go through the PowerPoint. it everybody should understand this is our best draft at at the current moment. We we reserve the right obviously to tweak it based on both both public comment what we do at our meeting tomorrow night and if we have our meeting next Wednesday night where we can make some other decisions and changes but this is
okay
how it is right now. I was going to run through it.
All right. So, okay. Here we go. All right. So this is well not so much tonight's agenda but this is we're going to talk about the budget process. We're going to talk about major expenditures. We have some summary documents. We have a calculation of taxation and miller rate and then we'll do questions at the end. As we know we have public comment coming up. So, as everybody probably knows, but in case you don't, we get preliminary budgets from the board of selectmen and or the various town departments and commissions and we kind of put them together with the help of the treasurer into a budget document. the board of education proposes their budget. We talk about it, they talk about it, we go back and forth. We we did a couple meetings ago I believe ask them if they could get down to a smaller increase 7.5 and their response the response from the board chair was no that's not workable. The board of finance then reviews and adjusts town ops and capital budgets. We do this hearing. We do a finalization and then we go to town meeting which is next Thursday the 9th in the gym and then we have the second the referendum coming up which is a combined I believe we changed it in the charter last time around we did the charter revision where you have a referendum that encompasses both RAM and our town budget. So, oops, sorry, scrolling too fast. So, this is what we're looking at right now. the BU board of education budget is asking for just a hair under a half a
million dollars increase. It's just about 11%. we'll get to why later. Ram, and this is a little complicated and we'll get into it later, but they're asking for about a 3% increase. although there's a there's an asterisk to that and we'll come back to it. And then the town budget is looking like I'm not sure this slide is actually right guys but it's looking like I thought it was about more of a 6% increase. So we have to look at this slide again but they are looking for an increase as well. And so we get to about a 6% tax increase. Again before going into this meeting I I thought we were about 6.8. So I have to double check that. This is our sort of pie chart of what we spend on various things. RAM, AAS, the town, and the town's capital funds. Bear
in mind with the with the education budget, obviously we also get from the state a fairly large chunk of money. It's about $2 million in education cost share grant money. That's not displayed here. This is just expenditure. so the budget drivers on the town and the town capital. we are increasing our legal retainer fees because we have some projects coming up that we think we need legal advice for. We have a number all throughout the budget of salary increases whether contracts obligated or not. Some employees are in the union, some are not. you'll see when we go through you know if you go through the
the budget detail and if we get to that later there are a lot of like 3% increases that is I would say most of the line items are that there it's not all of them but most of them we also need a we've decided or the board of selectman and the board of finance has agreed that we need a administrative assistant for the town administrator by the way. A note on that. My understanding is we have just agreed to hire one. finally, we have gone ahead and made that decision because we've been without a town administrator now for four months, 5 months. So the feeling was that the when we had Eric in that position that there wasn't enough support for him that there wasn't enough there to help him to free him up to oversee projects and whatnot and that an assistant was necessary. So there's some funding in this budget for that. Similarly at the community center we also put in money in this budget for an assistant to help Tess I believe is our director there who I think has been confirmed as that director now and we are we that's part of why this that line
item is up as well. We have some increased funding for more programs at the the community center. The idea being that we want to build out the use of that building, get more out of it, but that costs money.
And then we did
Yep.
Louise. for the town administrator, you didn't mention that we had an interim for a few months.
Yeah,
we did. We did. It's true. We had we I apologize to to you and to Jim who helped us out for a couple of months. We did have an intro,
but we haven't had a permanent position. So my understanding is we have now at on Monday night I believe the board of selectmen agreed to pick one and hire a permanent hopefully permanent position there. But yes, good point. And then finally, we decreased our capital expenditures a little bit, and we'll get to that later, but we made some small cuts, some actually some some increases as well, and it nets out to a small decrease about 3% 2.92%. So, let me move this because this is really annoying. Okay, so this is our revenue side. We have property tax revenue keying off our grand list. We have what's called intergovern intergovernmental revenues that is primarily I believe in this budget the ECS education cost share grant. we charge a little money for various
services. None of these are projected to increase and investment interest. This is our money where we have money saved up. We have it in what's called a stiff account. I don't remember the exact meaning of the acronym, but it's a state bank account that we could get decent interest in and we have in the last few years tried to move more and more of our money into it. 150,000 I think is roughly what we made last year out of it. So, we've left it there. That gives us a little bit of an increase in income. That's pretty small, but every little bit helps. So, this is a history just to give everybody context for where we are and where we're going. Right? So, this I did a 5-year look back as to what the town operating and capital budget combined has been costing us over the years. And if you look at this, there were some years where we increased, some years we were flat. Even a year where we were down, that was last year. And this year the proposed increase again it's coming out to about 4%. Again I when we get
through this I want to double check that number but the idea is that if we pass this budget over the course of six years that's the increase that you would see on the town side. Capital budget. This is the sort of the last decisions we made before coming into this meeting. We have some things that we do like clockwork like reval. This is us saving up every year. Every five years roughly we do a reval. Although this year's was pushed off one year to I believe the state actually requested to put it off. So we save up for the cost of that revaluation. It's for the assessor to go around and value all our houses. The contingency fund. This is something that we save up for in case we need it. We generally don't. So, we're going to put in the same amount and hope that that is sufficient this year as well. Last year's I hope we will use very little of and hopefully get some money back. The multi-use building fund we talked about at our meetings repeatedly. There's, I believe, over $400,000 in that fund. There are various possible uses for it. At the same time, we've gotten some grants for things like the generator that is going to hook up the fire department, the town hall, and the community center allin-one. We got a big
grant for that. So, that helps us out. And we talked to the board selectman about it and decided that this year we could go ahead and not load money into that fund. It doesn't mean that fund is zeroed out. It just means we're not adding to it this year. Similarly, the fire equipment fund. The fire department has received some new equipment of late. We know they've got some money left in there. We know we have a request coming this year, sorry, this budget year. So, the budget that we're talking about now for about $65,000 for a compressor unit that will help them fill up their air tanks. But even with that request and even with the lease payment on the firet truck that we now have, we felt it was okay to reduce this by a little bit, just a slight amount, but we're still loading $125,000 in there. So, most of these we
left alone. road road work for instance. last year we get actually cut this. We used to put in a little more. It used to be 410. We cut this down to 385 to get the budget passed. we left at this time. I think we're making very good progress on our roads personally and I think it's a good idea to keep trying to make those pro that progress. Same with the trees. I think we've done a really good job there. I don't know if you guys have noticed, but I certainly have that whenever we have a really big wind day. I don't lose trees aren't down everywhere. A few come down, but it's not like it used to be. So that is valuable. Bridge and culverts. Again, we didn't change it. We're still building this up and the reason for that is that we have a number of projects in town that need to be looked at and we have when we do a bridge and culvert project and it's for our town roads not a state road we only have the ability to do a 5050 grant. Okay. So, we would be on the hook for half the project cost. And my understanding based on discussions with public works and Eric before he left and
so forth is that this could be a situation where we could be out a million dollars at a shot. So, we're trying to keep up on that and that's why we left that alone.
The building maintenance fund, there's some work that needs to be done, I believe down at the public workshed and whatnot. and that we decid we agreed to leave a small increase in that was requested and oop sorry and then the open space fund. So this is the fund where we save up money in case a piece of property comes on the market and the town can purchase it potentially. We had a situation oh I don't know how many years ago it is probably at least at least five years ago now where a piece of property came on the came on the board and we simply did not have a fund
available we didn't have a mechanism to purchase it. So this fund exists so that we can build up money to take advantage of that. If it's say it's near the rail trail or near other town property, we could purchase it and utilize it. So that in the end at the end of the day, that all nets out to a small decrease of $30,000, about just under 3%. All right. So, the BOE request, they're asking for an 11% increase. They have a number of things, number of reasons why this I was going to delete, but anyway, they have two things going on that are before you even get to staffing, they have a huge increase coming in on their health care costs. This is affecting the town as well. I should mention this affects everybody. The town and the school and various other towns and their schools are all in a healthcare consortium and that consortium negotiates rates and unfortunately this year we're getting hit with a gigantic increase that is infecting both the town and the school but the school has many more employees that are on insurance. So it sort of from a dollar value standpoint affects them more. they also lost some grant money associated with their school psychologist. So that's affecting them. They have their negotiated union contract with roughly 3% raises. I forget the exact number but it's about 3%. And there's they believe they need to meet the needs of the kids of the school an extra sixth grade teacher for next year. So this is sorry I have options here I should have put it in but this is this is a more detailed version but it's the same basic idea the school psychologist which was funded by grant is no longer
and the rest of this Yep. I think you should point out there was a $45,000 grant that we used to get. So that psychologist used to cost us $45,000. Now it's cost $20,000 because we no longer have that grant.
That's right. That's it. It was a half grant. You're correct. So thank you, Bill. So this is basically the same idea. so that those are their big numbers. and it results in this. If we look at their history, this is again like we did with the town, the look back of five years. So this one is over time if you if all I don't know how many people remember the 2021 year, but this was a year where enrollment had dropped and so there was actually a decrease. We had a flat budget and it's been slowly increasing and kind of picking up steam ever since. and the enrollment has shifted. One
thing I did not do with this chart is put in the enrollment numbers. I felt it would make it a little more complicated, but you could do that. and basically, if you take this number here and you were to pass it, this is the percentage increase over six years. And if memory serves, if you do a very raw per pupil calculation, just take their total budget, divide by the number of students, 192 I believe we're at right now, you get back to roughly what the budget was per student here. So, it's a big increase. No question about it. it's almost 11%. Big deal. at the same time you know up until here and as you may remember last year the request was 8.8 8. The board of finance after the budget failed ultimately stepped in and cut it to five. And so this is the number that the board of board of education sorry believes that they need to meet the needs of the school. RAM. So they have a 3.3 increase coming at
RAM. One thing to remember about RAM is that RAM's costs start at a higher base. It's a middle high, not an elementary entry. And if you look at their pupil, per pupil expenditure, it starts out at a higher number. They also discovered a little problem. They had money built up in their savings account, if you will, and they're only allowed to have so much in there. And apparently the auditor and the superintendent and so forth missed for about 5 years now some overages where they owed us money back but haven't provided it. So they had sent us a memo on Friday indicating that the three towns would be receiving money back as what they called an offset for our levy. The exact details of that, how that's going to work are still somewhat up in the air, but this is our number 255 234. So if you do the offset, so what they're asking for for a budget, this is the real number in a sense of this is what it costs for them for their for their budget to pass. However, this one year, and this is a oneshot thing, it would do kind of the opposite where it decreases our levy. Now, we talked about this on the board a little bit, at least offline. I think the board's going to talk about this some more tomorrow night, but my my impression is we should
think about this number as the real RAM number and then understand that we're getting this money back as a as some kind of transfer or offset. Okay. The other thing that's affecting this is our student body at RAM. We they always do a calculation between the three towns who has this many students that many students. I think we have a tw 129 students down there right now and our levy percentage decreased. So even although their number goes up 3.3 that's why you see this number here 3.07. The reason these don't match is that our levy percentage went down. We have fewer relative to the other 10. So this is again this is the surplus. We talked about it already. I won't belabor it. this is the levy history over time. So we have gone down and this is again like we said without incorporating within this slide the change in enrollment. A lot of this is decreased enrollment for us and that's why you see a lot of negative numbers on here. Ram will increase their budget but our levy will drop because Hebrin and Marorrow have more students. So this is their actual budgets. This is their total budgets. I went back through I went on their website. I went on Hebrin's website. I pulled the numbers. And so in actual fact over 6 years if we pass this budget they're up about 12%. modest if you think about it 2% a year
roughly like that but it's not the same if you look at this versus this is our levy and this is affected by the number of students we have in there this is what they're actually spending so we have taxation in this town is based off of our grand list however something we haven't run into for if we exceed the bill rate of 32.46 our automobile levy can't go higher than that or or rather a mill rate can't go higher than that. So right now we're higher than that. So we would have to split the two and produce two different mill rates. One for the auto, one for personal property and real estate. So, this is I did a five-year look back because I sat there thinking one night I even though I've been on the board of finance for 10 years, didn't remember every single year that we changed our budget and what we did with taxation. This is Andover's tax history. What we raised by taxation, what we're actually taxing the town over a 5-year period. And then, by the way, this is the actual I want to point this out. We we have some errors up top. This is the actual tax increase request that I calculated, which is 6.8%. Which is a significant number. It's a higher number than we've seen in many, many years. As you can see here, if we were to pass it, we'd be looking at this over six years,
13.5 over six years, because we had some years where we were either just about flat. Even last year, I don't know if everybody remembers, we actually had a small decrease and we had some increases up here that were, I would say, moderate. So, you'd have a cumulative total of that if we were to pass this budget. This is just mill rate calculation. This is looking at our grand list. This is our grand list number. This is 1 mil. But again, if we are above that particular percentage, you end up with a split. for your so depending on what you have for auto versus your home, it's going to affect that. So that was that's sort of the end of the presentation and I apologize for everybody where we have some potential discrepancies in here. I believe this is the this is the number we need to talk about right here, but we need to go back through and double check some of this stuff. I I apologize for any confusion, but I'm going to stop the presentation there since that is what I have for now and I'm going to open it up a little bit before we get to public comment just for the board. If you guys have any little comments here and then I'll go to public speak. I'm going to go stop sharing for a moment. Okay. so guys, we had a couple slides there where the numbers aren't quite the same in terms of the u the town budget. I thought we were at 6%. But there were some slides where we had we were lower. Does anybody recall why that happened?
I do, Rob. It's because you took a $30,000 cut in capital and that town budget is a cumulative of the because I just did the calculation. It's a cumulative change of your town budget and your capital together. If you put those two together so 6.12 that's ops
that's just yes that doesn't include
okay
apologies everyone that's why I got mixed up fair
the actual increase really for is the lower number of three
3.9 I think it was
3.92 of the
I didn't think it was 6% but yeah
6.12 it's it's 6.12 from a ops perspective
But then we we cut a little bit of capital.
Capital would be a negative 2.92.
So a different Yeah. Yeah. Then the net of the two of them is 3.92 increase.
Okay.
Yeah.
Fair enough. I just don't want to mislead anybody. I wanted to make sure our slides were right. Thank you.
Yep. But the total by taxation though is up. Right. That so that one that number is correct.
I think the 6.8 is right.
6.8. Right. And everybody should think about it this way. Just the really quick and dirty way of thinking about it is that last year's amount to raise by taxation was almost exactly $10 million. It's a little bit higher. So every $100,000 is a percentage point if you think of it that way in terms of what we're right raising for taxation, right? So if you manage to find $100,000 in cuts, you get to 5.8. If you manage to find 200, 4.8. roughly. so that's that's a way an easy way to think about it. and again to the extent that we get low enough, you might have the ability to recombine that mill rate. Right now we're I believe we're above the mill rate threshold for the auto. So you have
that split. And whereas if we were to cut down and get down to 3 32 I believe 46 is the number then you then you just have 1 mil rate. Again, we've never run into this before. We've always been under the threshold. All right. So, here's what I'm going to do. if if nobody else at the board has commentary, I'm going to go ahead and go around the horn in terms of public comment and see where we end up. So, I'm going to go right on my list here. the first person I see is Scott Persan. Scott,
can you hear me?
Now I can hear you
a little bit in and out.
Tell you what, I'll come back to you, Scott. You just I think you just logged in. Ashley Hilton.
Oh, hi. I I I I was really here to listen. I don't have a public comment prepared. can you hear me? Okay. I guess I'd just like to thank the the board of finance and the board of education. That explanation was really clear and I appreciate it. there are some some big jumps in some places this year but I think it's very clear that that we need them particularly for the school to maintain the services with the school. So I guess I'm speaking in support of the budget how you currently have it written and thanking both of the boards for all of their detailed work this budget season.
Thank you Ashley Bata. Good evening. Thank you everyone on the boards for all your hard work in preparing this information. very educational, very informative. I don't really have any comments. Thank you again for your time.
Thank you. By brienne Lindier.
Yep. I'd just like to say as a parent of a child in the school district, I would urge everybody to pass this budget. you know making an investment in our children's future is important and making sure the school is well funded is part of that and I know that a lot of people you know expressed issues with you know being on a fixed income you know I want to remind everybody that we we all are on fixed incomes you know whether you are working for a private employer or or retired we're all capped at a certain amount so you know I think that to make sure that we are making an investment in our future. that's what we're doing. We're investing in the future. it's been proven that good schools bring in higher property values and protect the future. So
okay,
thank you.
hi. Can you hear me? Okay. Yes.
Okay. I just wanted to briefly say thank you so much for such a thorough review of both the town budget and the school budget. I hope that everyone on this meeting tonight understands that the school budget is bare bones the way that it is written. We don't have funds that we can put money into within the existing school budget. we do have money in our capital fund on the town side which is currently being used for a bathroom renovation project that's going to be done this summer. and I just I just hope that everyone understands like everything has been cut to the point that it can be currently. and I I really appreciate our town and what we've put into it in the past few years. I know a few years ago there was a town increase of 16%. and I think it was important. I think it's important that our town budget is where it is now. And you can see that when you look at our roads, when you see how we're plowed during the winter, and when you see the amount of tree removal and bridge repair that's been done. So, I just I think
it's important for us to do that for everyone. Thank you.
Kate,
hi. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay. Robert, I want to thank you from the board of finance. You put in hours upon hours of work into this. I think it's very thoughtful. It's well presented and I appreciate everything that went into it. I want to say thank you and tell you I support both the town and the school budget. I think that you can only go so far always saying no. You're going to eventually cause a a decrease in what your district is going to look like. and it won't be a a good a good decrease. It'll be I think Brienne kind of articulated very well that you
need to invest in this school as well as the town. Town has been taken care of and the school needs to be taken care of and I'm all for it. Thank you very much. Thanks, Jerry.
I'm gonna come back to Jed Larson. it didn't work before. Jed, you
Oh, wait. I'm sorry. Did you already
Well, I'm I I do have a couple of questions at this point if I could.
Yeah, go right ahead.
First, thanks for all the hard work putting this together. When I was looking through the the package on the spreadsheet there, it was talking about there was a significant drop in the cost of electricity and I didn't know if that had to do with the solar panel installation or what caused that.
I believe that's the answer. Yes. we are projecting some decreases. Well, I let me rephrase that. There's a couple different places I think in our in the budget where you're going to see some reduced expectation for electricity costs. I think with the school it's about the solar and maybe some insulation work whereas at the town I think it's more about the installation of a heat pump system at the town hall
and sorry go ahead Liz. Yeah, I was going to say I don't think this I don't think the school budget is in this packet. So I think the electricity that he's talking about is town related and there was some on the town
we were
and I don't think the solar panels are actually up and running yet last I heard.
I mean they're going in that but it's an expectation. I know in the in this this hoping for some savings, but
yeah.
off the top of my head with respect to the town,
I think I think it might be that at least a little bit the hybrid system that they put in at town hall. Instead of using older air conditioners, they have some mini splits in there now. and a hybrid. I believe it's a propane slash heat pump. You know, depending on the temp you could set it.
Okay. But, you know, my comment is it was good to see a significant drop in the electricity, however it got there. So, that was I thought that was good news to us. the with regard to the capital budget, you know, and I I thought we had had the comment from somebody last year that we should put how much are how much exists in the different funds and I know we kept the like the bridge and covert fund is the same and I know we're getting ready to do the work on the Bizola Road, Lake Road cover and I don't know from the presentation if we're in good shape with respect to that or not, but I know that's going to be a very expensive undertaking. I don't know what's in the fund.
Yeah, that's a really good that's a really good point. we did look at that. The part of the issue we had with our kind of brand new relatively brand new treasurer was sorting out what was in our capital funds versus you know since the last audit. We have an audit that's almost complete that would get us to June 30th of 2025. Right? We could look at the numbers in there and say those are basically right. Then the question is what's happened since then? And I asked our treasurer to look into that. And hold on one moment. Let me just see if I can share my screen here. All right. Can you see this?
Yes.
So this is this is some of our funds and bridgen culvert. I'm trying to find it. Bridgen culvert. I believe if we haven't spent anything, we're we're at 691,925. But there's a TBD here. So I I'm not 100% certain of this figure,
Rob. That was one of the ones that I could not I could not reconcile yet.
Right.
Yeah.
So, all right. Let's put it this way. We have at least half a million in there, right? Let's put it that way. we put in 175 last year. We're putting another 175 in. My understanding, however, from talking to folks is that, you know, we could spend a million dollars on one of these things.
Yeah. Well, that was the number that that I remembered being discussed is was it was going to be a million-dollar bill for the town.
Yeah. So, the idea here is if we're at 700 and we put in 350 two years in a row, we'll have a million bucks in there to to do something. That's the idea. But yeah, I mean, no question. The other thing, I'll just mention this briefly. This is called Bunker Hill. We obviously are done with Bunker Hill. We're moving on to Long Hill. that project is one of those 100% reimbured projects. We expect all the money back, but we have to have money in there so we can lay it out before we get it back. When this is done, then the question arises and we'll we'll get to it on on the board. I believe if that project completes and we don't have another project like it, one of those big reimbursement projects, you know, could we take this and add at least some of it into this? That's my other thing.
Rob, if I could just jump in.
Yeah, go ahead.
I mean, Eric always explained his road plan before he left was is exactly that. When the long hill is done, we'll have that money and we'll be able to address a number of coverts that can cost one to two million dollars. It's crazy to put a pipe in the ground, but that was the whole purpose or the thought. The plan was biz baza then you know bear swamp and there's a whole bunch of culverts that need to be replaced and I believe that's exactly what he planned to do once we get reversed move that into bridging culvert.
I mean I think we got like five, six, seven of them. So this yeah that was that's exactly what I would plan to do and then keep loading money in every year and try to chip away at that. That's our plan.
you know so we looked at this this is this was Lisa's document that again everybody should take with a with the understanding that Lisa's new and was sorting through a lot of things. and we were trying to get our arms around what we had in in various funds. what where are we now versus where we are going and we looked at this as a board and that's why we made the capital decisions that we made.
Okay. Yeah. I guess my next comment is on the the road fund if you will under capital again. And I remember back at the tri board meeting we had in February, I think it was Bob Hamburger made a you know a pretty decent remark at the end on how many miles of roads we had and it cost I think a million and a half dollars per mile to redo a road and all that kind of stuff. and his point was that we needed to significantly increase the amount of money going into the road fund and u you know we're seeing that not there so I just provide that to you as a comment you know you're looking for feedback
when when we went through on planning and zoning you know the survey of the town people you know roads and bridges was far and away the number one concern on the residents minds in terms of taking care of
that's that's fair and I would simply add to that that we do have some money built up in that fund now this at this point obviously it's just spring now we're going to start spending this money so I don't treat this as a real figure or what I would because we're going to spend some of it at least some of it maybe all of it the other thing everybody in town has to recognize is that in our budget one thing that you never Every year we get a grant from the state called Town A Road. I forget the exact amount, but what we show you in this budget is what we put in as a town from taxation, but the state sends us a bunch of money, too. We put those together and public works uses them to the best of their ability in a given year to do road work. So when you see 385, that's not what we're going to spend in road work next year. we're going to spend significantly more than that. whether that my impression the last time well we talked to the director of public works before he left the last director we talked about the road plan and where we were on it and my impression and the other board members can chime in on this was that we were making good headway.
the million some odd dollars per mile number that you referenced. I think that number if memory serves, bear with me, is for a failed road, like when you have to redo it.
It is. Yeah.
So, we have some of those failed roads. No question. So, we know how many miles we've got and how many years we expect to get out of a road before we get
We had we had a presentation last year on this and we were making good progress and we had a we had a pretty good plan for continuing to chip away basically at the roads that we could make get the best bang for the buck on. But it's an ongoing process. I mean, the original plan was a 10-year thing. we we're getting there. But I mean, look, you could give you could drop a million dollars on me right now and I'd throw it right in there and we'd spend it for sure. No question.
Understand. I guess. And so
you mentioned one of my next concerns that we don't have visibility with in the budget is the grant money that comes in. yeah. Which is a significant amount of what we're spending. And that would be somewhat helpful I think if we had better visibility on that so that we knew how much we got you know from a revenue source outside of that even if it was a look back because we don't know what we're going to get in the year but having some kind of visibility on because the town should be able to save some money because of all the grants coming in. more grants, we should be able to save more money and that would be a good thing for us there.
I agree with you, Jed. I honestly there are a couple of grants we get like clockwork that I think should ultimately and find their way into our revenue line. Things like Town Aid Road and there's another one called LOIP. The acronym escapes me, but there are ones we get every year. Then then there are different grants where they're contingent, right? We we put in for them, we might not get them. Those are harder to display because we don't know if we're going to get them. But things like Town A Road, it's very much like education cost share. We show you education cost share. We get it every year. 2 million bucks. Okay. Town Road, we get every year, but it's not in the budget. Why? Honestly, we've never done it that way. I've talked to Lisa a little bit about this, our new treasurer, and I think we probably should do it that way. So, I agree with you basically, and I I want going forward. But I I can't do it now, but I
would like to get that in there going forward. So you could see, okay, what Andover actually spends on its roads is a million dollars a year just to pick a number, not the 385 you see in this budget.
Yep. And that would be helpful when we understand with the big bills coming forward. I just wanted to add a comment that you know when we talked about in the capital the open space fund it shows a big increase you know it had been routinely you know coming in at 50,000 a year. Last year was a bad year for the budget. It was projected at zero. you folks you know decided to put in you know $10,000 but
going up to 25 it looks like a big increase when actually it's only half of what we should be doing on an
starting to restore it. Yeah, you're right.
It was it was we were trying to build it up more than that. You're correct. And I guess my last comment and and I agree that you know keeping the school good is so important for the town, but it was interesting that in the River East last Friday there was a from the the Marboro superintendent of schools talking about you know their school budget and and they're asking for you know one of the lowest increases in the state with the lowest funded school per pupil and They're ranked as number four, which I think is pretty good in the, you know, the standing there. But, I
think, you know, the people of town are going to have a hard time swallowing 11% school increase. And, and I know a portion of that is because we are growing. You know, we are adding a school a grade, had to get new teacher and all that, but that's still a pretty tough one. And and when you look back six years, you know, it just so happens that six years ago is when about when we bottomed out. And so I think the issue that we struggled with back then was that the budget for the school had kept going up even though the population of the school had gone down by about 50% at that time. So now we're, you know, coming back up. But it doesn't show the maintaining or increasing the funding that went on when the population went down by about 50% there.
Yeah, I think I I probably may maybe before between now and the budget hearing budget meeting rather maybe I'll put together another slide that shows the enrollment changes so everybody can see that. I do know just as a comment J I do know that there were years where I think if I remember correctly there was about five years where there was either a decrease or flat in those years where the enrollment was going down if you look back at that.
okay. Yep.
So, it wasn't it wasn't continuing to climb. It was going down. It was being cut and it was being
I think there was like five years where it was either cut or flat during those decreases.
I I think and I think Jed's correct that 2021 2020 2021 was roughly where we bottomed out in enrollment and that's where you see that negative four. the next year I think was flat and then we start to climb again. But yes, that's that's correct. We we we went from a higher number than we have now many many years ago. We dropped way down just when my kids were in there and then we were climbing back again. And I think m you know the more we talk about this the more I think it's there might be value in including another slide to talk about the the enrollment numbers.
And that's all I got for you. Thanks for listening. Thanks for the presentation and good luck.
Thank you Jed. I appreciate it. All right, let me see where I am now. Jody,
I'm just here to listen. Thank you. Nice presentation.
Thank you. let's see. Joanne, did I ask you before when I when I had the agenda messed up?
Rob, no. I'm the one that brought up that I thought it was going to go different. So, I'm ready to talk. thank you. Go ahead.
And I also want to say that I was ready to say that we had done this all different, but what a great way to do this. This is so much better. We've never So, I want to give you guys props for being prepared because I think the town and the people are going to actually see so much more. The presentation that you gave tonight usually was at the town meeting and tonight was usually our open discussion talking about budget lines ideas, but great for all of you guys because I think the town's going to get to see a lot more. and since, you know, I'd love to say that I support all I I definitely want everything to do well in town, as you guys know, and I do have the history of being on the board and attending these meetings for at least eight years. So, you know, I think it's a high taxation, you know, to get across. So, I hope that you guys can prioritize what you think is most important in this budget year and find some room to to cut. so again, the only things that I want to bring up having served on the board is just, you know, I look at all the things that I was comparing some of the budget numbers to last year. So hopefully all of you are privy to all of the salary lines like we did last year and you know
making sure they're all accurate and they add up to the 3%. I assume you're doing that. Couple things that, you know, I had questions on that maybe can just get answered quickly or you can look into is I was surprised to see, you know, just one the assistant what do we call the the assistant clerk, town clerk, and there was quite a big increase there. And I know there was, you know, some things done and and increased it to a livable wage that used to be the smallest one in town. So, good for that position. But I'm not sure what they're referring to with adjusting it that big with theou. I know when we didn't have a town clerk and Carol resigned or retired, you know, they had to do anou and up the salary based on the assistant being the acting town clerk. So, I'm not sure if you've looked into that. I don't want to talk about people's personal things in in public, but you know, I'm doing it appropriately by just saying I would question that because I know there was anou in place based on that person being the acting clerk, but maybe it would go to the union level. Now, that's all. Another thing, I
support the administrative assistant for the new town administrator coming in. I know it was talked about in plenty of the meetings that I've attended already. I just wonder with all of your discussions earlier putting a rate and capping it at what used to be there at the 19 hours and whoever fills it maybe they offer the person that's there those hours. I don't have any. I know it got to be a personal thing going back and forth in one of your meetings, but whoever takes on that role, I don't think you still need the stipend. So, I wish there would be a little house cleaning of just, you know, Jeff Magcguire had mentioned in one of his meetings, you know, once you put something in a salary line, it's hard to take it away. And I understand that having seen it. So, I would hope that would get looked at because even if they keep the position as is and they don't get to hire someone, they could still
pay the current person out of that big line that you've all approved just like the project manager has sat there, the 15,000 has sat there for several year, you know, a couple years. So, I think there would be money to pay that position. the other little thing, let's see. No, let me look at my notes. Yeah. Wait a minute. I guess Go ahead. Go on. Go on. Finish up.
Did you have an answer to any of my
finish up? Finish up. Go ahead.
No, I mean I forgot this can be a back and forth. So, if you have notes
No, no, no, no. I'm sorry. I was going to jump in while you were looking for something, but go ahead.
I mean, it's not it's not a lot. Again, whatever you all prioritize this year as being the priorities, I get that. And just because you go out there and you might have to cut a capital fund one year to make the tax increase a little more palatable for people that do live on fixed incomes and we do have a lot of aging population doesn't mean you can't put it back in next year. I mean what the town needs to know like you all said nicely is that there are accounts. Just because we put 185 in something doesn't mean that's it. There might be a million dollars in a fund. So when I talk about cutting a capital fund, particularly this year when we're getting a new town administrator, they've lost so many people at town hall. Everybody just needs to get up and running and back to, you know, status quo. It might be a good year to go for a couple decreases there to bring the taxation down. And then my other thought on when you touched on the RAM screen and that is a little strange that there's been five years that they forgot to return the money because they have returned some money each year. Don't want to call them out but thank you Bill for Yeah. I mean
they miscalculated it. It's it's true.
Yeah. I don't I mean, you know, I used to go to those meetings, too, and and and try to talk about rationalizing, you know, bringing that budget down, but it's it's hard. It's a hard nut to crack. So, you have to go where you can, but finding knowing that we got money back and auditors missing it is really it's really sad. But since you have it, that's a good thing. So, I'm hoping another thing I don't want you to offset the RAM budget. I think you need to keep literal lines visible for everyone, you know, because of turnover and boards and different things so that you'll all see it. But you could perhaps put it on some kind of deduction line that does help the tax increase this year,
right?
I'd be in favor of, hey, it's been taxed. The people have already done it. Let's decrease some taxation that way. So, one more quick look and then I will, again, I'm not in favor of a 6.8 taxation increase. I would work hard to find more. You know, that's just me. That's how I roll. But I understand. I have to respect what you all do. So, good luck with everything.
All right. So, a couple things I just want to mention real quick. First of all, Joan, I am leaning I think we chatted about this earlier today. I'm I'm leaning towards what we talked about with RAM where we show their levy. That is the sort of true number and then we do something else where we take out that 255. The other thing I did not mention in my presentation and I should have so everybody just hear this. I talked to the board chair or the board of finance of Hebrin about this and got his thoughts and one of the things he has asked the Ram folks and has not yet received an answer at least had not received an answer when I spoke to him Monday afternoon was what about interest? Is that inclusive of interest?
Should be. So, you know,
my question is it or is it 265? You know, so TBD on that, but yeah, I I view the 255 as a floor. Let's put it that way. I think there's a case to be made. I don't know for Andover, honestly, it's probably not a huge number, but it's something. And if they owed us that money and they kept it and it was sitting in an interest earning account, what did it earn? I don't know what account they had. I don't I honestly don't know. I I you know, we have that the town has access to a stiff account. I don't believe the school districts do. So it might not be much money, but we're asking the question that is a TBD.
Can I ask a quick question?
Yeah, go ahead, Louis. I'm just wondering whether there's an anything in the charter that mentions anything regarding this type of situation if we have to look into that as well.
by all means take a look. I I I can't recall off the top of my head that there's anything like this in there because well quite frankly this isn't supposed to happen.
Correct. But I'm thinking more like corrections u what do they call it? Missions or something like that. I'm just kind of wondering Yeah. Yeah. Oh, we we can check. We could check. I I hadn't thought of that. basically, this is a mistake and they're correcting their mistake,
right?
And it's a
the timing is sort of serendipitous. It's great and all that, but it's also,
you know, it's it for me, it's about how we display it
for the town. So you see kind of their true number and then how it and then how this comes in and affects your taxation. So that's what I'm looking to do. But yeah, there's a little bit of TBD here. It's the honest truth.
Yep.
and I'm looking for answers. I I did, just so everybody understands this, I emailed them. I got that email. I got home from work Friday night and I immediately replied and said, "So, what's your plan? Are you going to reduce the number you're taking to referendum by that amount?" You know, in the end of the day, I think that's the wrong answer. But I asked them that question. What What's your plan? What are you going to do? I don't think they should do it that way. I think they should take their real number to referendum, you know, their actual the the 4.2 2 million and then give us an offset later, but I don't have a response yet. We'll see. Okay. moving on with public comment. Jody,
you already asked, Jody.
I did. Okay. Sorry. I'm going out. I'm going. This thing sometimes moves. I apologize, Jody. let's see. Maybe Ron or
Oh, oh, oh. Oh. why am I blanking? I'm terrible. It'll come back. Ron, hi everyone. thank you for, calling on me and, I appreciate everything that the board of finance does. I know it's voluntary group and you work hard on this budget and everything. I'm just trying to understand stuff here. people are saying that there's no cut in the school budget and they're asking for 11%. And I'm just trying to understand it. This the $90,400 for the the psychologist, is that a a permanent position that they're looking to do or
That's a full-time that's a full-time position. I asked the superintendent
for more information on that. hold on one moment because I I asked her, you know, because the question had come up in board discussion earlier today.
Valerie's on the line if you wanted to ask her for
Yeah. And we can we can actually have Val speak to it, but I also have her email here that we could talk about. But so so all right, let me let me put it this way. Let why don't you finish your question to the extent that you haven't and then maybe we'll we'll bring in our subject matter matter expert and answer it.
Okay. Because yeah, we need to pay these people. I I agree the teachers need to get their their raise that they're contracted for and all of that. And I'm firmly, you know, I believe we should have a good education system, but not an overkill. You know, we're talking about the t the car taxes are out of rate right now and we got it separated where we we used to be always below it. You know, there's a lot of things that are out of whack. And I'm thinking, why don't we ar why why aren't we sharing another psychologist with another town? So, it'll cost us less because the increase in their benefits was substantial, right? So, we're going to have to pay this psychologist benefits if we're going to hire them full-time, I would think.
I think they're already there. But, again, I'm going to defer to Val. Valerie, would you like to speak to the psychologist issue? Let's see if we can get you on here.
I see you unmuted, Valley. But
you're muted, but I don't see you. Yeah, and I don't hear you.
Which we've had that issue before.
We've had this before. I don't know why.
Gallery.
That's okay. I just was asking a few questions.
No, no. Ron, I want to get you the answer. And the thing is the the person who's best able to answer your question is actually here tonight. So, I'd love
might be able to answer that question. cuz I I I think there are multiple people who ask
Can I jump in and just ask a quick question for clarification about the psychologist position while we're sorting this out? So, it seems like based on the email that we received today that the position is currently under a grant for a mental health specialist at 27.5 hours and we're looking to hire a full-time psychologist for probably 40 hours at 90,000 plus with benefits,
right?
Is that a fair comparison for me to make?
No.
Hold on one moment. I'm I'm trying to get because I I read the same email, but I read it very very quickly.
Okay,
Belle's logging back in to try and answer your questions. I I'd like her to address it directly. If she can't, I'll I'll read her email. But yeah, I mean, I know we had a partial grant for this position. I also know that we have some AHM services that
kind of factor in. but I'm hoping Val could get her login back in and we'll we'll address it because it's a good question and it's a valid question and multiple people have raised it. So,
thanks Rob.
No, fair enough.
And we lost the grant, right? A $40,000
45 I think $4,000 we lost.
So, we're kind of back to zero the way I
And did we know about this beforehand before this year came up that So, we could have kept that grant by I don't know. I'm just asking because now
I think the grant ran out.
The grant ran out federal grant and it was for three years and it expires on June 29th of 2026. So the grant is over and that's fair. That's fair.
Yeah, it's fair. Who applies for the grants? Is it the superintendent who applies for these grants or Yes. Is that
okay?
This is Joan. Val can't get on. I can speak to it. But I do think if she can get on, she should she could.
Rob, can you hear me? I guess.
Okay, great. All right.
All right, Val, go.
Okay.
So, a couple of things. I'll I'll address the psychologist first for you. So, a psychologist is a must for us. As I said to you guys, there is required support staff that's needed in every school. There are two psychologists in Hebrin. There are two psychologists in Marboro and a social worker. they I sent the board their required tasks. We've talked about this when we talked about the the AHM support that we receive that that that few hours a week that we receive. they are not qualified, certified or trained to perform the tasks that the experts within the school are required to. There is testing that needs to be done. It is not a position that can be reduced. it was reduced many years ago when there was less student population but the tasks that a school psychologist has to perform they have to perform the testing that needs to be done. I sent you the numbers of special education students, 504 students, the IEPs. Every single year annually there is an IEP meeting a PPT that takes place for students. Triannually there is testing that needs to be performed for those students. So I I sent you the hours. There's in direct service hours, meaning the IEPs that say someone needs to meet with that child for these goals. That was two full days right there just for those direct hours. That doesn't include the meetings. It doesn't include the testing. It doesn't
include the consultations. So, that definitely is a full-time position. And yes, we have funded part of that position throughout the last three and a half years with those other grants. We did talk about this last year that we would be losing grants this year. but at the time we also said adding in that fourth and fifth grade teacher that we would then this year have to make up for the loss of the grants as well as the sixth grade teacher this year. So unfortunately that is that that's the fact. any questions on that one before I
real quick, Mal, just because it was asked earlier, just so we clarify, this year, this budget year, the one we're in now,
correct?
Is that person full-time?
That person is there almost full-time. The only reason why they have about five hours a week less was because when that position required the extra hours from the students that that during the course of the year, some of the adjustments for students IEPs were made and that person had an hour a day that they had to leave early to pick up a child. So, we adjusted that hour for their schedule. But
hat's almost full time. they have one hour less per day because of a commitments to pick up.
So 35 was it 35 a week?
well no because we switched mid year from them when when the additional hours needed to be added the for student needs for their IEPs. We did switch that person because it was a savings to the town from their hourly wage to into the teachers union contract. And in doing that, we no longer it's FTEES now.
Okay.
So, are they at are they at one FTE or are they at 08 or
they're they're at one FTE
and that's that's current this year or
as of right now? Yes. It didn't start off the year that way. They had slightly shorter.
Okay.
So, that's that. So, Rob, can I take my turn now that I'm talking?
Yeah. Okay, good.
We may have more questions for you later, but I just check on that because Kim had asked that question.
Is Ron Oh,
is Ron still done? I mean, he might have had other questions. So,
well, that's all right.
Okay, then the other question, Valerie, is we have to hire another sixth grade teacher. Is that did we increase the the pupils or from fifth grade to sixth grade or does somebody move in that has sixth grade students or the need for another teacher or is it something that we can just you know put more kids in the classroom with another teacher? I'm just trying to save money for benefits and hiring another full-time person. So last year, Ron, I'm not sure if you were part of the process last year, but last year we actually at that time when we were looking at the numbers, we had grown and we knew last year that it was going to be four, five, and six because what happens is years ago there were multiple sections. In some grades, there were three sections and we had dropped even prior to my arriving, they had dropped in some cases to situations where there was even one section for each of the grades and then two. And when you get to a point where you have more than 22 students, 23, 26, 28, unfortunately, you wind up with a situation where you have to make an educational decision. And that educational decision is, and I I don't want to be rude, so I'm going to actually turn this on despite the fact that Okay. what happens is, let's say you get to 27 or 28 students in a grade.
The decision that you're looking at then, Ron, is do you keep 28 kids in a class and try to teach 28 kids or do you take the two sections and have 14 and 14? And that's an argument that people have had for years because they'll say, "Well, classes of 14 are ridiculous." I agree that classes should be bigger than 14 in an ideal situation. But if the alternative is 28 versus two classes of 14, you take the two classes of 14. 28 students is not ideal. Anything over 22 students in an elementary school such as ours is not ideal. I did include to the board today those numbers so that you can see the number of students that we have that are special education with IEPs. The number of students we have with 504s in SRBI intervention. So we have been growing. We've grown by 80
total students since my arrival. half of them are K through six and so it it is a necessary. What I will say is Rob and thank you for your presentation. You included a lot of things tonight that I don't think had been highlighted in the six years that I've been here. And one of them is that dedicated level of commitment from the town of Andover to increasing positions elsewhere in the town. Since I've been here, the town has done a fantastic job of making sure that if you had a dedication to public works, you guys added a public works director. Fantastic. They're doing a great job. A town planner tonight. You asked for an assistant to the town administrator, for a community director at the community center. We've added a lot of positions and I will say they're all good positions, but the double standard can't be there where we say the town of Andover needs to add these positions to the town side because it's important, because it helps with the roads, because it helps with the community center, but then not have that same dedicated level of commitment. If I was a parent, I would expect if I'm going to pay the
taxes to have the public works director and the assistant of the town administrator that we're also going to have that same level of commitments to adding the appropriate number of teachers. you mentioned Marboro, somebody mentioned Marorrow. Marorrow's decreased this year, by the way. Their enrollment has remained constant, but I will tell you, I know this because they used to have two principles and they're going back down to one principal. So that's a huge savings for them this year and that is one of the factors that's keeping that budget there. the other thing that I will add
can I just break in real quick?
Sorry. Sorry.
Barbara's in our consortium right for healthcare.
Yeah.
Okay. So they're looking at that same healthcare issue and it's that consolidation of the of the admin that's helping.
Yeah. So they had two co-principles for their one elementary school and they're now going to have go back to the one principal. So, that's going to help them.
Wow. Okay.
I know. They had two principles. so they tried it.
Let me just let me just go back to Jed real quick and make sure he's done.
Ron, they're on. Ron, not Jed. Sorry.
Can I just
There's so many lines here. My apologies, guys.
Rob, can I can I just circle back? I I don't feel like I got a clear answer on the hours for the psychologist. So, it's currently at 27 hours a week and it's it will go up to 40 hours a week. I I I just want to get a clear answer so that when I'm asked that question, which I've been asked many many times in the last two months, I can give them a clear, respectful answer. Valerie, I'm not questioning what you need for services for the school. I just want to be able to give them an answer. That's all.
Sure. Anybody who works in that position has direct service hours whether it's a speech pathologist, OTPT or a school psychologist. The direct service hours are the minimum required to fulfill the compliance. Then over and above that, there are the situations where they're called in to deescalate a student. There are the situations where they're responding to emails. There are the PPT meetings, the consultations, the testing. So when I sent you the email today, I gave you the minimum that's goes on their schedule every single week regardless. Then you have to add in the PPTs, the meetings, the consultations, the testing. There are probably some weeks, Kim, that she's going to have a schedule that's more than 40 hours and it's going to have to wait whatever can't wait till the following week.
What I so fair to say 30? No, it is a 40hour a week. It is a full-time job
currently.
Yes.
And and and if I'm could I just break in here for a second if I understood what what you said Val earlier was that this used to be an hourly position and if you moved to a salaried position.
Yes. And you know what Rob like
so when you are salaried you're you know I'm salaried technically I work 40 hours a week
and that is what it is whether I actually work you know 38 one week and 42 another.
Yep. Just like teachers the thing is is we don't move a position to a full-time position until we know that that is in fact a very full-time position. I don't have a full-time special ed director. I don't have a full-time OT. I don't have a full-time PT. I don't have a lot of positions. We have a lot of specials that are part-time still. we don't have full-time specials teachers in art in library in who else? Library art. there's two more. Oh, Spanish. We don't have them because they aren't full-time positions right now. So, this one is a full-time position. She is the
only one now that we're back up to that number of students.
So, she's been working 40 hours a week and part of that has been paid for by that mental health specialist grant that you let us know that it's a federal grant.
and the other part of her salary has been paid for through the general money that the taxpayer sent to you.
Okay. And during that time, she hasn't received any health benefits. And
we're not going to we've gone through this, Kim. We we don't
separate people out and ask tell us who has what, who has a family, who has this. We know that. just know that we have received a grant for, you know, the 43,000 for the three years, the 30,000 for the other ones.
Okay. and again, and again,
I think Ron still has some questions. Rob, if if you want to just let
I'm happy to to finish up with Ron if he if he has one more.
Just one a couple of quick ones and I'll go fast. So, Valerie, are we going to be applying for another grant to help out for like the budget for the next year and stuff like that? to be able
whenever there's grants, Ron, I apply for them. Everybody knows that. I've always applied for all the grants available. They're dried up a little bit with the current you know state of affairs. but I apply for all of them. people in this town have known me for six years to know that I've brought in a lot of grants for a lot of things in the past and and we're grateful every time.
Okay. yeah, and thank you for everything that you do, too. one other quick question is I've been hearing a lot of things back and forth. The bathroom renovation that's going to be done, is that coming out of the budget for this year?
No, absolutely not. Actually, it's coming out of the money that we put into the capital account that we created because we didn't have that. So, thank you.
Can I speak to that? So, I I will speak to that. So, we for a long time in this town, we had no capital account for the school. The capital the school does not have its own capital budget. Like if you go and you look at RAM and you look at the RAM referendum, you'll see a capital line item. you'll see things like that or or in the town side you'll see a capital budget for reasons that escape me. AAS has never had that. We've never done it that way. And so last year when there was a an o an
underspend two years back if you go to the 2023 2024 year we got an audit done and AAS had underexpended by a significant amount and we took that money and we plunked it down into a capital account. It was a $400ish,000 and the town had put in$100,000. So, we've got about a half a million dollars in that account or we started with it. we've spent some of it on design work, but there is a a capital account now for that money. So, my understanding, my best understanding of the bathroom project is it should easily be done within the parameters of the money we have already saved.
Okay. Do you know what the total cost of that bathroom is going to be?
We don't know yet. Doesn't open till Monday. We open them. We had a bid. We didn't like it all that much. There was a lot of push back. We've talked about it and my understanding is the board of ed went and looked at some additional quotes and that is a little bit TBD, but we should come in underneath. I hope
the original I think the original project cost was probably in the 400 range and we're hoping for lower than that.
Okay. Very good. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
You're welcome. Thank you, Rob.
So, I had written a couple notes so I could do this quickly. So, Rob, as you pointed out, yes, the savings for RAM is because they were down, in enrollment, they are actually seeing now what we had seen, you know, many years ago as those kids get older.
are there.
Yes. So, a few things. in terms of the town, you did you were able to tell us that although the overall increase to the town is roughly 3 something, 6.12 of it is operational. I just want to remind people that I don't have an operational and a capital as we just talked about. So, I don't have the ability to have those two separate numbers. So the 6.12 for operational for the town they they are offsetting their number with having a separation of capital and operational. We are
I don't have that I don't have that ability. I will also you know say thank you for mentioning that the town doesn't pay the full boatload of our budget. $2 million comes in in state funding. $2 million in ECS funding comes in and that money has to only be used for educational expenses. Rob, you had a great chart there that showed that the town's budget in the last 5 years has been about 28% increase if everything goes through and ours then would have been pretty close to that at 29. Thank you for including that chart. But I think it was Jed that brought up, you know, what had happened to the budget prior to that when the numbers were down and Bill I think said, "Oh, I believe that there was some flat funding." There was an
additional 5 years there where we lost $418,000. There was a huge loss there of an additional 4.89%. So, if Rob's chart had gone back four more years, it wouldn't have been 16%. we would have had an additional 4.89 lost. And that was prior to my arrival. And I do believe that, you know, the town's commitment at that time was, hey, if there's a loss of enrollment, we're going to rightsize the budget to reflect that. And I believe that to have been probably the best thing to do at that time. But I just believe that now it's time for us to rightsize it back up as we've grown up. you know in in enrollment. I also believe when I talk about that dedicated level of commitment from the town to all of the other positions that they have created in the past six years, I will say that I've gone through the plan of conservation and development and the town planner who's also a new position there. on page 94 even says we do absolutely as a town have to make sure that we have that same level of commitment to looking at enrollment to looking at seats within the school and to making sure that we pay attention to that as well. We got to rightsize our budget again for that as well. and I
think there was one other thing that someone had mentioned u that I wanted to make I sure I hit on but I can't remember what it is now. so
I can always come back to you, Val. If other questions come up here, let me know.
If other questions come up, I will let you know.
the other thing I would mention since we in during this discussion, we've been talking about past years and everything like that. Understand that the numbers presented in those slides are nominal figures, right? I did not adjust them in any way for inflation or anything like that. Those are nominal dollars. So just FYI.
So I'm gonna move on.
One more thing. I'm sorry.
The 200 one more thing. The 255,000. The other thing that I would
Yes. that I would ask the board of finance to look into is that for 5 years has been reported to the state as money that we've spent on education. So, the one thing that I would ask the board of finance to look into is making sure that since we've reported that like through to the state that's part of the MBR that there isn't any sort of caveat that says that that money should and this might be why RAM is saying we'll just give you an offset. It's money that was taxed and it was taxed for educational purposes be it RAM or not. I think we should probably
look and make sure that that's not the requirement that that's also still spent somehow on on education and that may be a factor. I know you said you were going to talk to the other towns about that.
Oh wow. Okay. I hadn't even thought about the M issue. You and I need to have another conversation about that. And when I get when I get, we'll talk again because that had not even occurred to me.
That was already told to the state that it was earmarked for the three towns that 1.7 as part of the spending on education. So I wonder if the state's going to say,
but if it was an error,
it's still money that was taxed for education. So,
I just worry that they say you can use it however you want to offset AES or RAM or whatever in the future. But I would double check and make sure that they aren't going to say if you now change your mind and you opt not to use it for somebody educationally, is that going to be a problem? So, I would just warn of that.
Yeah. I mean, okay. Thank you, Phil. okay.
I I have a I have a quick question. Go ahead. Quick quick question slash comment about that comment that schools are allowed to keep 2% of their budget. You know, underspent funds of their budget and anything above and beyond that. Any excess of that is supposed to be returned to the town which generally is the way it happens. So I I kind of look at it that way. It looks like they had excess funds and they never returned the money to the town. So,
so Liz, when that happens, when that happens, when the auditor does the audit, they adjust that money and where it goes.
So, if we had, let's say, $50,000 left at the end of the year, over and above our 2%. If you look at the new audit that we have, it already says, you know, for example, let's say the school has 50,000 left and they already move it to that 2%. anything over the 2% they move it back and say it is quote town money but since Ram was holding that money and not the town of Andover that money is technically sitting as educational dollars right now and all I'm saying is it would definitely behoove the board of finance before making any decisions to put it anywhere all three towns is to say if each of the three towns were to move it into an a different account and not offset any of the costs would we have to change our our our reporting as to what we did with that just so that it it doesn't wind up in trouble.
Do you think it's something we should talk about with our auditors?
Yeah.
I mean maybe it would make sense to off to to adjust the MBR in because they've been obviously overr. I'm not saying we I'm saying perhaps the calculation would I mean I know this is a side topic but whatever. Obviously the towns were getting overbuild so the MBR is inaccurate based on that.
No MBR
is how much you spend. They say you have X number of kids. So there's you know 250 kids and 129 kids. I think we have let's say 330 between our K12. They take what you reported that you spent on your budget for RAM plus what you reported you spent on AES in a year. They add them together. They do their magic. They say these are the number of kids you guys have K12. This is how much you spent. Here's our formula on what we say is the minimum you have to spend. And they look at the bottom and they say K12. They say yes, you met it. and so you met it based on what budget passed. So Liz, the number that the state uses is the reported budget number that you reported for that year. And so that's why I I I think all three towns are probably going to have to do this, but I think it's definitely an answer that we need. It's a question that I had right away. I'm like, I wonder, you know, if there's going to be, you know, guidelines for what what they do with that. I don't know if they could even just write a check back. So it's just a question that I would have. And I know you're trying to do this right, Rob, and thank you because you're doing a great job.
Is if there's if there's more board comments, let's go there. But otherwise, I want to get to Marcy, I think, is next on public speak. Anybody else? Liz, you have more. Are you good? Okay. Bill, anybody? Louise, we Okay, Marcy, I think you're up next.
Yes. Hi. yeah. I just The only thing I really wanted to say was I'm impressed by the presentation. It was very clear and concise. very appreciated. I did not surprised actually that the town budget is not as high as it is because it's not as high because we did add a building community center. We added some people. I completely expected more of an increase and kudos for the town for coming in where they did. So
thank you. I mean, yeah, some of the answer to that one is is just that some of those additional costs went in last year. but yeah. okay. So, Sharon sent Rock.
Hey, it's finally my turn. Thank you.
You know, it's your fault for having an S name, you know.
Yeah, I change that. so I I was primarily listening in tonight as a taxpayer, as a parent of school age children to support the education budget. And the more I listen and into your words too, Rob, I'm thankful for how we've been funding the tree fund and the roads. because I too also recall several years where we were without power for days on end and you couldn't get you couldn't exit your road in either direction because there were trees down. and so with the increases to public works, you know, if a tree goes down, I feel like it gets picked up real quick.
And so, you know, I'm not stuck at home. so I appreciate the the level of commitment that's been given to the town budget, but also the school budget is obviously important to me. the last thing I want to say is I just would like to urge the board to adhere to the town charter as it's written this time around and allow the voters of Andover that opportunity to decide whether or not they want to support adequate funding for our youngest residents. that's all I got tonight. Thanks. Thanks for all of you for for your hard work. I'm realizing how many hours particularly the board of finance puts in this time of year
because I've been trying to pay really close attention and so thank you and thank your families for for allowing you to put in all this time.
That's it.
Thanks Sharon. okay.
I see Leanne Hutchinson sitting there if you go in alphabetical order. I see. Yep. Hi, this is Han. Were you calling on me?
Yes, I believe we were. I'm I'm having trouble hearing you, but go ahead.
Is that any better? A
little bit. Thank you.
Okay. Yes. thank you for calling on me. yes, I don't have any comment at this time.
All right. Thank you. All right, folks. I think I hit everybody. If there's anybody in this meeting that I didn't get, you know, speak up. Just shout it out. I I think I got everybody, but I might have missed somebody.
Did Did you do Jen Mick Gold Rick?
I thought I did, but did I do her before?
I think so. Yeah.
Oh, you did. Okay.
You did me before. I'm all set.
Oh, you're good. Okay. My bad. It shouldn't have been before. That was my mistake. I see your hand up, Joan. Give me one moment. I I just want to make sure that we've gone through everybody. The phone number that's Leanne, right? So that's the same thing because there's a phone number here I see on my board.
Yeah. 7425475 I think.
And that is okay. So you're good. All right.
Yep. All right. before we move on, I guess Joanne, what do you have?
Very quick. I promise. Rob, I just my only point that I had written down that I wanted to say is just remember again, I don't want to be the only descender and hoping that you cut more. But whatever whatever you end up, you know, whatever you end up approving for this budget, it's so key because that becomes the new norm,
you know, whether it gets spent or not. And it's so hard to get away from the new norm, you know, and of course it's going to get spent. So that's all you know you're marrying the count to those new level of expenses wherever they are. So I do really appreciate cuz I've been at all your meetings. I'm still very involved and interested, you know, and and thank you for all your hard work. But it's really hard because when you see those numbers increasingly going up in the millions and millions and the mill rate what it's going to be, it's just, you know, wherever you could see for prioritizing this year would be appreciated for the town. Thank you. You're welcome. So, the other thing I would mention,
did you did you have a chance to talk after our presentation? I can't remember.
I did. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm I'm I didn't really have anything to add earlier because I was just kind of taking it all in. I had jumped in halfway through. But, you know, I think I need to echo the support of everybody saying that we need to invest not only into the infrastructure and the improvements in town and the positions in town to keep good people employed in town, to keep great people serving in volunteer positions in our town. but we we absolutely do need to invest in every generation in this town, not just the seniors in the community center, but the students in the school. And as a parent and as someone who's really become quite committed in this town, you know, I think it's great to try to see the even distribution of resources all across the board. So, I thank you all for your efforts that
you started it.
there a couple of things I'll mention just to the public before we move on a little bit is there's a couple other moving parts here. So, one of the things that the board of finance has not done this year with this budget at this time. Last year we pulled $190,000 from fund balance from our savings if you will to reduce taxation. We have right now the number on our budget is zero. We're not pulling from fund balance. That said, our fund balance is up a bit. It's about $2.1 million. Now we have up in savings. That's roughly if memory serves 15% of our budget. there is to the extent
that this tax increase is unpalatable to the town. One of the options that the board of finance has and has not yet availed ourselves of is to look at that. We haven't done it this year. We generally try to avoid it if we can. we've used it modestly in the past. This time we haven't used it at all as yet. So there just one point to make. Other than that, yeah, go ahead.
I said that there is a goal usually or a specified goal of 12%, right?
It's changed. the last time we talked to Eric about this, I don't know if you remember, it was about a year, maybe not a year ago, maybe six six, seven months ago, we had a meeting and Eric was talking to us about this. It used to be, let's rewind the clock, there was a time like 10 years ago where we had a huge percentage built up because our town budget was down. We weren't actually properly funding our town and we had a lot of savings. And so we were told basically you ought to spend that down. A because you need to invest in your town and B because if you have too high a savings in a tough budget year at the state
level, they might look at your town and say, "Oo, you've got plenty of money. You don't need our money." But then we did that and at the time the the goal was I want to say you're right, it was it was maybe like 12 or 13%. However, the last time we talked to Eric about this issue before he left, he mentioned that the new state guidelines were roughly to have 16th of your budget. So that's that's 16.67 in reserve. He then added a caveat and that caveat was well that's for a lot of towns in Connecticut that we don't have all of the risk factors that a town on the coast has. a town in a river valley has. We don't have the flood risk. We don't have this that the other. So it might be just fine for us to have say 15%. We're at 15%. We're at 15 something. We're right about there. So we're we're
more or less where we ought to be. Frankly, my point would be the difference between 2 million and 2.1 million is not a huge number. If we are attempting to close the gap and get to a passable budget, we could look at that issue. However, everybody should understand that when you take from a capital, sorry, a savings account like that and you put it into a budget to cover to help out with taxation or what have you, it's a oneshot kind of a situation. You're not it's not revenue, right? You you're pulling from your savings. So, we had chose not to do that. We chose to bring this budget before this hearing and I think we'll likely take this budget to town meeting without that. But that is an option that we can ultimately use if that makes sense. So I guess what I would say here is looking at the our agenda here you know we've had comments from the public we can close or continue. So I guess my thought is if we want to continue if there is anybody in the public who's already spoken that has thought of something else they want to raise I I would say you know I'd give it a little more time if you want to come back and double dip let us know otherwise the board can chat a bit and then honestly we're going to have another meeting tomorrow night where this board is going to sit down and kind of take the feedback we've gotten tonight and some of the questions we've gotten and think about it and make some decisions. Would anyone from the public like to speak again for speak now or forever
hold your peace? All right, board members. I think we have a couple things we could tighten up in our presentation. And I think we have you know, Bill and I talked earlier today about a line item that I'm not 100% sure about. This was the overtime budget. Bill, do you want to you want to bring that up a little bit? Well, I and maybe I don't know if Liz or Kim or Nick any or Heather, anybody remembers Lou Louise, we we talked about the overtime budget for snow and there was overtime budget just for public works. And we said I volunteered and said I'll call Eric tomorrow and find out what's the difference and why so much. He basically explained it to us saying that, you know, when a tree came down, like I I said, a tree came down last weekend, not this past weekend, but the weekend before on our road and two road crew guys came up on a Saturday and had to clean it up. They were there
for a couple hours. And he goes, "That kind of stuff happens a lot." Or if there's a construction project where, you know, we have out of town contractors working, they work usually to 4 or 5:00. And so instead of getting off on that short time our guys get done, they would have to stay on that road site while that project's being worked on. So there's a lot of overtime that goes beyond snow overtime. Anyways, I saw a decrease in the budget where it was cut down to 5,000 and I didn't think we voted on that. I thought we waited. We said we would wait until we got an explanation from Eric. So, does anybody remember whether or not we actually voted to cut that to 5% or were we going to wait until we got the answer that I
got from Eric? I don't know if anybody remembers that. I went back through some some past minutes and I didn't find it and some of the minutes aren't really like our last couple meetings aren't really there. So, but Kim, you have your hand up. Did you have a thought?
I not about this.
Oh, all right. We'll get to you.
I can look back through my notes about this. I I don't recall a vote because I do take good notes,
but I clearly on my spreadsheet anyway, this is my personal one that I have saved on my drive.
I clearly reduced it
and
I did also.
Yeah. So,
I don't think I would have done that without a vote, but I can't remember the vote.
I don't remember having a vote. I remember specifically saying we're going to wait till I got an answer.
Let's put it
just like
Just like I got the answer. I'm sorry,
but he was there in the meeting, right? So,
yeah. The question is, did we fully understand what he was telling us? Like, is this is are you is what you're telling us, Bill, is that this is potentially problematic.
I I think it could be problematic. And and again, I thought that and the other thing I called and I always forget her name from the town election committee. Does anybody remember I talked to is it Lynn?
Linda Derek. Thank you so much, Louise. I talked to Linda Derek and she said the reason for that increase, and again, we didn't vote on cutting that large increase in meals because we weren't sure why there was such a large increase. And we said we're going to hold off again until I talked to her and found out that they have so many more people that have to work because of the additional early voting, mail-in voting. we have two you know, the Democratic and the Republican primaries. it's going to be a big expensive year and they get paid because they work long days for dinner. So again, those were two items I thought we held off on doing anything to until we got an answer on those things. So that's why I was surprised when I saw the overtime cut for public works and I just I don't if anybody else remembers doing that vote. I don't remember the vote. I'll be I'll be honest. My brain is a little bit mush, so I don't recall the vote. However, I know I clearly I recorded it here and Lisa did, too. So, we must Yeah, I marked it in my notes. I crossed out the amount it was,
but I think we should maybe revisit tomorrow night. that's my take. We This is here. We should revisit that tomorrow night because this is a significant we cut it by a lot.
A lot
and you know and
I thought that was because look at the previous two years were spent. I thought
his was the issue. I think you're right
his year.
Yeah,
that's probably it.
Maybe that's what it is. It is still an increase. Yeah, if you think about it this way, if we spent if we're if we're on track to spend, you know, four grand.
Yeah.
And we put five, it's not so bad.
I don't have a problem with it. I just wasn't sure.
Yeah. And it was a large request. I guess this is the issue is, you know, that request right there.
You know, that's based on something. And we looked at this and said, "Nah, let's do that. Now that you Now that you guys are helping me jog my memory, it may be fine, but maybe we just talk about it one more time tomorrow night. I'm going to stop sharing just I just wanted to do that. All right, Kim, you had something you wanted to raise.
Yeah, I do. I I want to circle back to some comments that were made earlier and it's I think it's important that we talk a little bit about the funds that the school has. access to. So we know we understand that they get you know a a fairly decent amount of money each month about 10 payments. There's a 2% non-lapsing account that the school gets. They get a substantial amount of money on grants which I think is extremely important. State grants, federal grants, there's a Norton fund. I I just think that we need to keep that in mind when we talk about the budget and we're transparent with our taxpayers. These are fairly decent amounts of money sitting in these accounts and, you know, potentially the bathroom, the capital fund, which they should definitely have. They should fix their bathrooms. I'm totally for that. Maybe that'll come in a little bit
lower. But these are all funds that are sitting in addition to what the taxpayers spend each year to pay the bills at the school.
Y
that that's a question that I get a lot during the course of my day after these meetings during the course of my week. And it's important that I think that we make this known.
Okay. And and Sharon, I understand your your con Rob, let me finish. It's extremely important to me that you guys know that I care about kids. Sharon, I totally agree with you. Bata, I totally agree with you. It's very, very important that we do the best for our kids. But I think that we have to be sure that we make it clear that there is a substantial amount of money in other accounts that are in the control of the school. Some of them, the board of finance and the school can control, but they're there. That's all I have to say. Don't want to get into a big disagreement with everybody tonight. That's all I want to say. Okay. I I just want to say because you brought up the two 2% non-lapsing, my recollection from the audit numbers, and this is an audit that's not complete, but should be
complete pretty soon. I think we can take the numbers in there reasonably. I think what was in there at the end of 2425, so that gets you to June 30th, 2025, was about $250,000, like 248, something like that. Then that year, that is the last year the AS will have an underexpend. They will be able to put I think it's 87,000 into that account. So you get from you get to 355 max. I think after that my understanding is also that during this budget year the budget year we're in now 2526 that they plan to draw down from that such that it may more or less net out and so you might be left with something like 250 275 in there but I'm going to let Val speak to it because she's got her hand up but just that is absolutely true there is a 2% nlapsing account that the school has. The issue is the same for when we look at our capital or rather our unexpended fund balance and what we can draw from it or not draw from it is that it's a oneshot deal. So, let me let me ask you Val, go ahead. Why don't you talk to that?
So, you know, I didn't expect us to be talking about those tonight, but here we go. so when you look through the audit, the town does have 57 funds on the town's side. and there's only a couple of them that are ours. we did talk before about the fact that, you know, there's over a million dollars that gets put this year into or just about a million dollars to fund the townside funds. And it's a good thing. It's because you need that moving forward. The school only has a couple of funds available. We have the general fund that you guys fund us with our allowance every month. And then we have the 2% non-lapsing account. Yes, as Rob said, the 2% non-lapsing account has $250,000 in there right now. Keep in mind that that is the only one of the lifeline accounts for us. Last year when the school was cut $160,000, we knew going into this budget season that we would be in a deficit. On our agenda for this next week, Jod will be asking for, and we just talked about it today, $97,500 to be transferred. That is what our anticipated deficit this year will be. 97,500 because the 160,000 was cut last year. As Rob mentioned, it's a oneand done. That's the only chance we get from those
accounts because we're going to be at a deficit this year, which means we can't refund that 2% account. If we wind up having to empty that out next year because we get a reduction to the 11% ask, that's gone. That's it. If we get a student that needs to be outplaced, if we get an emergency situation in the school, we don't have all of those other funds with a million dollars in them. That's the one account that we have. The second account that you mentioned, Kim, so there's only two of them. The second account that we mentioned was a capital account. Board of Finance controls that account.
I understand that. I said that, Valerie.
Yep. And so that is a capital account. It cannot be used for operational expenditures. And so there is no other account for us to use. The Norton account is something that I had been working on for the past two years. the Norton account. I worked on it, you know, as as soon as two months ago. The Norton account, it has investments in it that the town is going to have to work with us on. It's probably going to take a year and a half or so to be able to do because the interest that was supposed to be earned on that had not been being put into our account on a monthly and quarterly basis. So, I don't want to call out Core Lisa and say, "Hey, Lisa, just remember this is something that's going to be on our radar." But at some point, yes, we are going to have to look at that account and see what we can turn in to make available, but it's actually right now mostly in the form of Bank of America stock and there's about 70,000 that'll be available in that account.
Okay. I was going to ask you that. I appreciate that information. Thank you, Valerie.
Before Before we move on, I just want to ask, is Norton earmarked? Is that is there specific stuff you can use it for and not use it for?
It so Norton is it started off with $1,000. I'll put the history out at some point. That's an interesting concept that Mr. Norton donated, but that is earmarked for non budgeted educational expenses that the school deems necessary. I have receipts for that account all the way back to like the 1970s. they bought a typewriter, they bought a computer back in the late 70s, early 80s, they bought archery equipment for the school, they bought the kiln years ago that were there. Just things that came up that the school and the board of education had on their wish list decades ago. and that was how they were able to fund those things on list. So yes.
So the issue basically is we don't fully understand right now how much is in there but we have kind of a minimum that we know is in there.
We do, but we have to go through the process because it was a little mismanaged over the decades on the town side and it was hard to even figure out. It's going to be a project, trust me. But there's about 14,000 I'll say the word cash in the account. Lisa can look that up. in the interest that was in there, but in terms of dividends and stuff, it's it's pretty messy right now because for years the town was not putting that in there. They were throwing it back into the general fund. So, it's going to be a project for us to figure out how much is owed to that and then to figure out the board would have to vote to approve to take the 1,310 shares of Bank of America stock and sell them.
Rob, I have been working on that.
I know, Lisa. I I didn't want to bring it up. of my poor. She's got so much going on.
Well, those are some of the funds that I could not get to. I got the capital balance, but I could not get to the funds.
Lisa, believe me when I tell you, I understand.
I see the dividends. They are there. So, it's just a matter of putting them in the right place
and I don't have all the answers yet. So,
you I think I think you may have answered this really quickly, but I want to circle back because you talk really fast, Valerie. do you anticipate a deposit going into your non-lapsing account this year from the 2425 audit that Yeah,
the one that just ended.
Yeah.
Yes, we do.
87,000ish, I think,
87,000. Okay.
I think it's 87,000 and change. I forget the exact dollar number. If you look at Actually, wait, hang on. Lisa, you had it on your chart. I think
86. Yeah, it's 86.
Yeah, you had you had it. you had it. I'm going to find it.
961.
And so the other the other question, and please don't shoot the messenger here, but this is asked of me a lot, and I want to be clear with everyone. The prek tuition that you take in, you've given us some numbers in the board of finance budget about that. Did that tuition goes back into your fund, correct? It doesn't go out into the general fund.
The preschool tuition is a separate account because that pays those aid salaries. I understand that, but I I I want you to be specific with your answer. The tuition goes back into your into your funds to pay your bills, etc., etc. It doesn't go back out into the town's funds. It was It didn't What does he mean back into? It didn't start off in the town funds. The tuition comes
at the start of a year. The tuition comes in and the grant funding comes in. We pay the eight salaries. We pay the supplies and that's it. You're you're not allowed to like have a savings account with that. Like you can't say, "Oh, there's an extra hundred thou." No, like it's the money.
I wasn't I wasn't implying that at all. I was just a wash.
At the end of the year, it's a wash and then it moves over to the next year.
Okay. Can you Do you have a rough guesstimate of what you bring in in the bottom of every single financial statement every month? It says 249,000. and it's always in our packet. $249,000 is this year's anticipated tuition. $123,000 is the anticipated money that comes in from the early start grant and $65,000 comes in from the Smart Start grant for a total of $4.99. You minus the eight salaries. There's just under $30,000 that is there for the rest of the supplies for prek and then it's a wash.
Okay. All right. I really appreciate you going through all these numbers with me tonight. Thank you very much.
since we since we're talking about it, just real quick, Val, I I am remember that the state of Connecticut is building out a universal prek system program
that is supposed to take effect what?
2728.
Yep.
So, not this coming school year, but the next one.
Correct.
Okay. Thanks. Just wanted to make that clear because I mean that's going to be a potential game changer. We're going to have to all adjust to that,
whatever that is.
Don't worry. I'm on so many meetings right now, Rob. And you know, I the trajectory I think
Oh,
yeah.
While I have you, one more question. Val, the the healthcare consortium, the 21% there's no there's there's no indication that there's any wiggler in that. There's no there's no hope.
No. As a matter of fact, Rob, if I'm being really honest, the difference from 15, we made our budget at 15.
So, we are already going to have to eat close to 68 to 72,000 in our budget someplace because it went up to 21 and it would have brought our budget to 12%.
I I was going to get to that one, but what I was going to ask is
and Heather was on one of those calls. Heather, thank you for for logging on on behalf of the town. but it is it's a steady I mean there's are we doing things in the consortium to try for next year we are bringing in East Hampton the consortium itself is going to try to do anything and everything but right now that's that's just the ins and outs. I mean, yeah. I mean, look, a lot of people are just, you know, the the thought is like, God, 21% is so bad. Isn't there anything we can do? And, I know you and I have talked about it, but
Heather was on that meeting. Go ahead, Heather.
I I was going to say I went to that meeting and they said the town of East Hampton is coming in, which is is helping because their claim experience is a little bit better and their large claims, but there's a few there's a few large claims that have come. I don't know what town or anything. and they could maybe go down to like 19, but they're going to keep it at 21 cuz they need to keep the reserve in there to pay the claims to hopefully help in future years. And then the stop loss, which is the large claim piece, might come down a little bit, but it's not going to bring it's not going to bring the 21 to 15 or anything. It's just a small piece of it. So,
this year it's open for next year, though.
I mean, that's just such a blow. So, that that's why I ask about it.
because that one's killing us. It's just a huge chunk of all this.
Yeah.
And it and there's no other way like
Okay. Okay.
It's they're self-funded. So, it's basically the claims come in and that's it is what it is.
Yeah. It I mean this is a part of insurance that I It's funny because I'm in insurance. This isn't my my ba wick
and this is all about estimated losses and everything like that, right? And and looking at your losses last year and this isn't something I do. I'm not an underwriter. So
I am. I am.
You are.
That's why I told Heather, Could you go to the meeting?
I am but a humble claims handler, Heather. I don't worry about all that wacky stuff you do. I read the policy.
anyway, so I just, you know, I see something like 21% and I want to pull my hair out. Like that's just
is there nothing we can do? And what you guys are telling me is unfortunately no. I don't love that answer, but I appreciate you trying. further board discussion or should we wrap this up, guys? Cuz we have a meeting tomorrow
night. So,
we have we have discussions to have tomorrow night. And by the way, I am going to try to get Nick on but he's traveling. I I don't know where he is exactly, but he's he's it's going to be difficult for him to join us. So, it may be just the six of us,
okay?
Which is, you know, is what it is.
okay. So, folks, I, you know, I want to thank everybody who came here tonight and listened to us go on and on about this stuff. Appreciate your involvement and your comments. Some of you had lengthy ones, some of you had short ones, but I appreciate them all. And we do have a meeting tomorrow night for those who want to watch us do our thing. And then the next one we do have right now at least we have a meeting set for Wednesday the the 8th rather. it's conditional. We we could decide not to hold it, but I I suspect we will. And then we have the 9th, which is the meeting, the big one in the gym in person to go through this again. I'll give my presentation again. It'll be tightened up. I won't have my little question marks and and that sort of thing and we will vote as a town as to
whether or not to send this thing to referendum. So, with that said, do we have on the board a motion to adjurnn?
I'll make a motion to adjourn.
I'll second.
Louise and Kim. Bill, you
all right? Louise to adjourn. Kim seconds. Bill's ignored. All right. Liz.
Yes. Okay. Louise.
Yes.
Bill.
Yes.
All right. Heather.
Yes.
Kim.
I'm a yes, too. Sorry.
I saw you. Thumbs up.
I saw your thumbs up.
Kim.
Yes. And myself. Yes. I want to thank everybody again. Have a good night. We will be back here. Same bad time, same bad place.
Tomorrow.
Okay.
Bye.
Don't forget to the recording.