Meeting transcript
Town Budget Meeting
May 24, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
And now it's recording. You can just leave it on. Okay. It says I think it's Oh, it gets a 100% battery. That's good. That's the wide angle and, you know, So this little button can stand. It goes forward. I usually do, but it you know, mostly this meeting, you can just keep it alive. Yep. Thank you. Good evening.
We'd like to get started. Thank you for all attending. I'm gonna read the information. The electors and citizens qualified to vote in town meetings in the town of Andover are hereby notified that the annual budget meeting for the town of Andover will be held at the end of our elementary K. Wally, all yours.
Good evening. Just so everyone remembers who may have not been to one of these meetings, tonight, we will be presented the budget. After the budget's been presented, there'll be a question and answer period. Budget may be reduced by motion from the floor. Motion is made, seconded, will be discussed and then voted on. Budget cannot be added to at this meeting. At the end of all the discussions, there will be a vote. If the budget is passed at this meeting,
Thank you all. Thank you all for being here. This is obviously an important process. Appreciate your participation. Just to start with, I'd like could I get a show of hands to everyone who was here last week or at least watch or last meeting or at least watched the presentation. Okay. So a fair amount of people who weren't, but most of you were. It's like, okay. Thanks. Just wanna get an idea of how much time I kinda go over some of the details again. So I don't wanna skim over or skip over things if somebody hasn't heard them and they have questions on them. So once again, welcome tonight on behalf of the Board of Finance. A couple of our members couldn't make it due to illness or other other things, but everyone is here in spirit. This is obviously a long and involved process, but it is the process, and this is the process by which we come together and decide as of how how we're gonna finance our operations for the next fiscal year is beyond. This is round two. I'm sure pretty much all of you are aware that the first town budget meeting we had, we passed the budget recommended by the Board of Finance at that time.
It was voted down in referendum. It's fairly close vote, but we also asked a couple So let's go start with round two. Okay? This is the agenda. We'll touch briefly on the budget process, and I'll spend a little more time on what changed because this is what's gonna be important for most of you who have seen this or have been following along with the budget process. We'll talk about the expenditures of the town. That comes out to the educational expenditures, which is AES and the RAM budget, as well as the town general budget. There's an operating budget, a capital budget, so investments from large capital equipment, etcetera. Then we'll talk about the revenue, where that comes from, and there's some changes there. And give a summary, do a question and answer period, and allow for motion to budget amendments.
This is the process. You know, it's I'm not gonna go through in detail here. We already talked about this a little bit. One thing to keep in mind, I think probably most of you are aware that the RAM budget passes referendum. It is not subject to discussion or activity here. We can't make any changes to it. So we want to comment on it, obviously. It's an open meeting, but that really is not why we're here. We cannot make changes to that. We passed in the three town vote. So after the budget referendum failed to gain approval on the seventeenth by a margin of about 25 votes, the Board of Finance met again the next day. We revised the recommended budget, basically reduced, excuse me, the expenditures, and added some revenue, which you'll see in a minute here. And here we are on May 24, which is our second calendar budget meeting.
Okay. So what changed? First of all, we reduced a lot of expenses. There were reductions in several areas, mostly in capital spending, so we'll see that. I'll show you the detail in a couple minutes. I'll get back to the slide. We also increased the revenue. About that. So we had heard a little bit about this, but we weren't sufficiently comfortable enough to add this in the budget the last time. But when the state government passed the budget, there was a $114,861 allocation to the town of Andover to cover shortages from a an increase in the they well, actually, the state legislature reduced the mill rate cap that we can have on motor vehicle taxes. So it was somewhere in the high mid fifties, something like that, 50 bill, and they reduced it to I think 32 or 34, I can't remember the exact number. But because of the funding calculation, the way they did it, the legislature and the governor signed this law that they are trying to bridge the towns for a year because this is an unexpected change, and they actually basically provided a grant to cover the shortage that would result if our bill rate was above cap. It turns out it's not gonna be above the cap, but this is a windfall to the town, It will take so that was a nice little thing to have happened there. We're in that number. The legislature's passed the budget. Everything seems to be a go. So that is a it is a one time event. We won't get this next year. Who knows what the legislature will do, but, it is a plus for the town. So these are the expense changes from the last budget.
So the first thing that the Board of Finance is, we reduced the AES budget another $50,000, to a total of $4,052,007.87. Now we had previously reduced the school budget request from the Board of Education. The primary rationale for that decrease of $20,000 was that there was a decision made on the part of the town to split again the finance department between the two entities, and therefore, know, it felt it was over budgeting for the salary, that that wouldn't be the difference there. So that was the rationale there. But we, again, because of the clear message we got from the vote that the school budget was too high, the town budget was too high, we felt the need to reduce both budgets. So that was the difference, $50,000
from the last budget from the AES line item. The other thing we did was we reduced or eliminated the part time DPW employee with the salary plus the social security and other taxes. That amounts to reductions of the town's expenditures of $18,839. We also reduced several fund allocations. Some were pretty routine, others a little more controversial, but this is where we ended up. So there was an insurance severance fund that was only funded at $5,000 for this year. The feeling on the part of the town administration was that we had adequate funding in there to cover any need for that. That has to do with employee leaving, and certainly, you have to fund out. So that's just to cover any cost for that to happen. So we zeroed out that that fund contribution for the next budget year. We reduced the contingency fund by $25,000. It doesn't leave us a lot of contingency funding in there. There's $50,000 remaining. So if something goes awry, we have big storms, there's a lot of trees down, who knows what it could be, we have another, you know, road failure,
there's not a lot to cover, but we felt it was an appropriate thing to do given the past history. But it's it doesn't leave us with much margin of comfort if something unexpected happens. We reduced the public works equipment fund by about $15,000. This means that there's probably gonna be some delays in some of the equipment that the public works department wanted to purchase. However, after discussions, they decided it was more important for them to delay equipment purchases than to lose the potential of the additional employee which was added. We reduced the fire equipment fund by $20,000. I think it was a 100,000. We took it out 80,000. Yeah. So and again, that could mean the potential delay in some purchase of some equipment for the fire department. We reduced the tree removal fund. We reduced that by about $25,000. Now the thinking there was that in the past couple of years, we spent about $50,000 to do tree removal, and so we really didn't need to bump that up as much as it was, to 75,000 this year. That's a little risky for a couple reasons. One of the reasons that we've been able to keep the tree removal cost down to about $50,000 a year is because we've had a very healthy, positive working relationship with the power company and crews doing the tree work in town so that when we when they were doing their tree work, we piggybacked on top of that and we're able to get a lot of work done for not a lot of money, relatively speaking. That may not be the opportunity the opportunity's probably not gonna be there
Pointer's not exactly here. Can you just replace that? And we reduced the building maintenance fund by $5,000. So there's some significant cuts to fund allocations. That's where most of the reduction of the expenditures in the town budget come from. This is just a graphical picture, we showed this last time and I ran the numbers, it really didn't change. So basically we're about, you know, 30% town, about 32% Andover Elementary School, and about 39% RAM in terms of overall contributions. So here's a quick shot at our proposed budget. It's $12,727,384. This is a spending increase of $302,929, or about 2.44% overall. You can see the breakdown here. The handover of elementary school, the recommended amount was 4 per 4,052,787. That's $150,000 more than last year. I mentioned it in the last meeting, as you've mentioned in many of the Board of Eddies, but there are some cost salary increases and things that are mostly driving that increases in budget, contractual increase increases in salary for the staff that were planned and aware of. It does drive an increase of 3.85 next year. The RAM budget, again, I said, is what it is. There's $5,026,009.37 that was voted referendum. That is a reduction to Andover residents for next year for a couple reasons. They retired from debt service there, and also the overall proportion of Andover students went down slightly. So fortunately it resulted in a decrease for us. And then the town budget is $3,647,661 with a positive change of $245,003.63. And that's a significant increase still. It's about 7.21%. We'll talk a little bit more about that. Andover Elementary School talked a little bit about this, probably this last meeting and all the Board of Ed meetings.
They requested an original budget of eight. Board of Education had a final request of 4,122,787, and we reduced this by the 20,000 in the first budget go round, as I mentioned, and then we voted again to reduce this by an additional 50,000, leaving a total number of $4,052,007.87. It's a 3.85% increase from last year. The RAM budget, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time talking about it, but again, just some of the things why it dropped. Our percentage of 11 decreased because the number of students decreased, so the annual risk fraction of the cost for RAM actually actually drops. Drops. Okay. So back to the town budgets. So this does not include any of the educational expenses. This is just the overall town budget. There are two components. One is the operational budget. In other words, just the expenditures we have day to day to keep the town running and provide the services. And there's also the capital budget. So that's the budget for large capital expenditures such as equipment, buildings, etcetera. So major investments that we make in our town infrastructure. The operating budget had an overall increase from up to it's about a $195,000 to $22,000,007 $22.06 61. Okay? So things that are driving this increase. Oops. The, addition, one time full time public works employee have been requested by the public works department, and approved by the board of selectmen. As I said, that was very important to the public works department to the point that they were willing to give up on some of their,
equipment request. There's also significant cost increase for public works operations. And part of that, as you can see in the next utility item, is there's waste disposal, some other things. There's also significant increase in utility and energy costs, and that's driving costs in in many of the department's budgets. We have some increased staffing in the building and land use office to take care of some of the needs there that have been been struggling to cover. And we also have some increased usage of the senior transportation. Okay, capital budget. So we did an increase here. The overall increase to about $925,000. This is an increase of 50,000 roughly over 5.71%. So again, this is where the Board of Finance in our last week's meeting made most of the cuts to the budget. Used to say that this fully funded our capital plans, now I changed this to mostly funded capital plans. We're not quite there anymore. It still leaves us with a pretty strong commitment to repairing and replacing the town's infrastructure. As I mentioned in the last meeting, and I know all of you know this, we've got a lot of problems with the roads in the town. We had the Bucker Hill Bridge failure. Unfortunately, was that able to be reopened. It could have gotten a lot worse. Those are the things that we've gotta take care of down the road.
No pun intended. I wish I had attempted that.
Can't go too far down the road. And again, mostly road and bridge work related This funds. We'll go through these in a second. Graph just shows the the breakout of the capital project funds. Again, you'll see a lot of it is in road improvement. That doesn't look quite right. I think those are the ones that are off. Now I tried to update the graph. Probably missed it. Let's look at the let's look at the this is so these are the major funds. We don't list all of them here just because there's a lot of smaller funds that aren't very material to the budget. Fire department equipment, again, we're contributing $80,000 into that equipment fund this year. It was at a 100. It's the last to road improvement funding, trying to find a source for reductions. Helped quite a bit. Again, we reduced the tree removal fund from 75,000
to $50,000. We left intact a $150,000 allocated to the Bunker Hill Bridge, and then a $100,000 designated for bridge and culvert repair in general. We got this isn't the only place. We've got plenty of culverts and bridges that are gonna need replacing over the next few years. They're they're bad shape and then designated in full quality by the engineers. So and then the building maintenance budget reduced by $5,000. This number did not total up the top. Think it looks like it didn't get updated, so it should be 925975. Okay. So those are all our expenditures. That's where we're spending our income taxes, from the taxpayers, and also from the state and grants. So how do we pay for that? It's the sources of revenue. So there's there's a lot of different sources of revenue. If you were here last week, there was a slide up here that you couldn't have seen any detail on, so I declined to include all the details here, but you can I was gonna say you can look at it in the in the budget you print out, but it's it's kinda tough to see? I think something that's kinda small. But a lot of it is, we have interest on overdue taxes and things, we have state and federal grants,
very, several line items from state and federal grants that we obtain. A large portion of the revenue comes from state educational cost sharing, the PCS, go to that term. So that's the funding that the state provides to towns to kinda equalize the revenue available, the money available to for school districts throughout the state. And so we have a significant funding coming from the educational cost structure. And then, of course, we have some permits and fees that go Okay. So we've covered most of this, but I'll just give you one additional summary. This shows some of the differences year to year, but again, Andover Elementary at 4,053,000 roughly, and about a 3.9% increase. These are rounded up a little bit with the slide issue earlier, but same basic numbers. Ram at about 5,027,000. That's a reduction of 1.8. Town budget, $3,647,006.62, increases a little over 7%. And then we're also using some of our fund balance. We have a contingency fund, we are fund balance that we have as a town provides us a cushion against unexpected occurrences. We don't like to spend out of it, but we have in the last few years.
One of the reasons is that it's just grown larger than you have. It looks like you're well funded towns, so we're trying to keep that at about a 10% rate level. So we we are using a $100,000 out of our fund balance to offset our expenditures for next year. That leaves the total by, from taxation required, at about 9,938,852. It's an increase of $202,000 or 2.1% over last year. You wanna know how it affects you? That's how it affects you. Okay, so where does that roll into the mill rate? Everyone talks about mill rate? And I know that everyone is probably aware that we had a revaluation of your properties over the last year, that's required by the state. That revaluation, just to be clear, does not increase your taxes. Okay? The taxes are what's required on that previous line. We we need to fund the the town by 900 $9,938,008.52. This is not why I do this budget. If your property values went up, the mill rate will go correspondingly down to still reach that number. So it's not like all of a sudden, the town's giving you extra money and you're paying more taxes. So it's a little confusing. Just I've pointed that out before previous meetings at different times. I just wanted to point that out, and and we'll be happy to talk more about that and explain more if you have questions about that. Okay. So just following back up here, the total expenditures for this budget here are 7 or $12,727,003.04. We've got a total estimated revenue incoming, which is detailed in the detail sheet that you have in the budget. If wanna you see where that comes from, of $2,653,005.32,
we're gonna use a $100,000 of a fund balance. We get certain abatement and exemptions of about $35,000 which leaves the amount raised to be taxed as slightly less than $10,000,000 as we just discussed. When you look at our grand list, which is the estimate of the property values in the town, you calculate that out to what the mill rate would be, and basically the mill rate would be at three point I'm sorry, 31.91 this year with this budget. That's actually a reduction of 11%. Again, that's just kind of what I was explaining a little bit. If property values go up in order to reach the same amount of tax revenue, the bill rate actually goes down. So it's just a simple formula. So again, Andover's total taxation is affected by the total budget, offset by revenue and money allocated from this time balance. There's the recommended expenditure. Expenditure. The overall increase is 2.44%, calculated bill rate of 31.91. Just, you know, for comparison's sake, we throw this number out there every year, but the house assessed at $200,000 was pay 6,383 in comp taxes for what that's worth. Again, that's an assessed value, which is only 70% of your appraised value. Okay. So just a section of the town charter that explains how we go through the budget process. I'm not gonna read it verbatim. It's on the town website.
But again, as Wally suggested, you know, at town meeting, can alter any of the we can make amendments to the proposed budget provided the town meeting should only have the power to reduce or modify, but but not increase any portion of the budget or any portion thereof. So if we were to entertain any motions to the audience, we would not be able to increase any line items that will need it to go down. Okay. So we'll come to our question and answer and motion period. If you want to ask your specific questions to the budget, then we'll go ahead and have Wally call on you. Please use the microphones, state your name and the street address for the meeting minutes.
That's it. Thank you. Thank you. Hello. Thank
you all for all I realize there's gonna be salaries and whatnot that obviously have to be paid for business stuff, whatever. But my question is, do you expect that you'll be spending all that total budgeted
to it. So I'll be happy to entertain any additional comments on the board of finance and the board of selectmen. But yes, we do expect the gentleman to be expended. So we expect those expenditures to take place.
I spent several time last year, last budget, going around getting a request for a 155 signatures to do a study on regionalization and never got a reply from from the the selectmen as to why they never considered it or whatever. I'm paying a thousand dollars more than last budget, and now I'm getting a thousand dollars more. Again, I'm a senior. I go to the senior lunches. I do not see a community room filled capacity ever on the senior outings. I wanna know I I have a question. Is with $25,000 plus per student per year, what where's the cutoff? I mean, isn't the state gonna gonna, at some point, say, okay, you're too expensive. Your class sizes are too small. You need to regionalize. Before we're forced into that, shouldn't we have a plan? And what happens if they do ask us to regionalize ize to another town? What is gonna happen to this building which could be used for community center and senior center and utilize that way? Is this building gonna end up like an old fire department
and just sit there and not get used? We are spending $950,000 plus on a community center, senior center, and it just doesn't make any fiscal sense to me that we should be spending that and not putting that million dollars into the road and infrastructure and trees and bridges. Thank you.
Well, that's very interesting comment, but I'm hoping that this school stays filled with kids for a long, long time. Can understand your question regarding regionalization, but that's not a question for the board of select. I mean, that's a question for the the board of education. They would sit there and lead the effort on that part. Listen, I can tell you I understand your pain and I understand from the board of select and my personal standpoint is the tax payer. I mean, I understand and I do believe that each group, the board of education and the board of selectmen have gotten better about being a little bit more transparent as to what they're doing. That does not mean that we can't do that, and we will. But I don't anticipate this building
being a community center any time soon.
Marcy Miner, Amy West Street. Last year, I was taken to task for not paying attention to the board meetings, and so this year I did. And I the budget workshops for school were not exactly I didn't consider them to be workshops so much, but what I was a specific question I had was last year after the ABS budget was cut 250,000, it seemed like there was a lot of spending that was happening even though the budget was considered bare bones. It was cut and then there were still things, the superintendent talked about hiring a teacher to teach Mandarin. Apparently didn't do that because he couldn't find anyone. My point, you purchased a system called Onboard. So I was looking through the minutes and trying to, you know, follow what was going on and apparently you purchased a system called Onboard. Now this was an added purchase after the budget was passed. So it was asked, you know, whether we could afford this and Valerie assured the board members that we could afford it. So I'm just saying that there's so many items that were added to the budget after it was cut. You know, books. You know, obviously you need books, but you didn't buy any. There was none expended as of February 2. So if there are no books bought before the school starts, when do you buy them?
Yeah, that is a question. Specific question related to the budget? The budget is, there's a lot Thank you. Sir.
Ed Winehart, 63 Burnett Road Burnett Brook Road. I also know how to use a microphone properly. My question is, I'm a little into this, I'm a young parent, but is there a point of the overall funding for the school budget, how much of that comes from the block grant from the state of Connecticut? And is there a point in that funding agreement
A $400,000 spending increase for town operations would be troubling in normal times. But given our situation this year, this kind of increase is irresponsible and unaffordable. For many of us, we've all our properties couldn't have come in a more inconvenient time. The worst inflation in years, forty years, and has put a serious dent in all family budgets. Now I do it now, is that the right number? A $120,000 has been reduced from the town operating budget? Is that the number? Okay. Well, I'm especially troubled by the public works salary. Line item 301100. This line item is recent as 2020, 2021 was 216,000 and now it's budgeted 311,000. I'm told that our foreman gets $90,000 a year plus the use of a tow vehicle and a gas car. Is is that accurate? I don't have the salary information. Just say yes.
That's accurate. It's quite generous for a small town. This line item also includes a new full time employee. Last year, this town went along with elevating a part time public works position to full time, so we can have two teams that work on different projects. I was okay with that. I'm not okay with a new fifth person, and I'm happy to hear that we eliminated line item three zero one one one one, which is the $20,000 part time helper. These two positions are just not affordable at this time. So I'd like to make a motion to reduce line item three zero one to one zero zero, public work salaries by $50,000.
There's a motion on the floor. Is there any discussion on said motion? Yes. I like it.
People understand. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Maguire. I don't know if you've noticed, but the town roads have improved significantly over the last one to four months. And it's disappointing to sit there and see that we cannot make increases for the benefit of the community. So
in addition to the motion that's on the floor, I think it was two years ago, I recommended to the Board of Finance to look at bonding for the bridges and the culverts to help the town get through that period because there's so much bridge work to be done. And I think that this is something you should consider in the future. I also would recommend we vote down the budget that mister Denley presents to us because we do need to fix these roads. I served on the board of selection for eight years, the board of finance for twenty. We never could get the money together to do this. We need to fix them now. You saw what happened on Bunker Hill, and nobody should have to live like that. So I commend this board of selection and the board of finance for putting this budget together Katelyn Greenhouse,
155 Hebron Road. I just have a question in terms of how much money does it cost our town every time we hold the town meeting referendum and then hold the town meeting and then like that whole cycle, how much money does it cost every time you do that?
Okay. I can tell you this is registrar. The referendums are between 3,000 and $3,500 for each referendum. I believe for the town meeting, we're paying for a mailer. There's probably a few $100 to get people to come out here at Okay. That So roughly, like, 3,500
week, and I have a great appreciation for what you guys do, and I really appreciate it. But I do have some questions. But let me first set this up. One of the there are people in Andover getting crushed by these costs. I've heard a person living on Lake Road who can't afford a lake pass. So how are they gonna be able to afford a tax increase? The senior citizens living on social security, and I brought this up at Zoom meeting. While their social security has increased 5.9%, and somebody took me to task about that, their Medicare Part B premiums have increased 14.5%. So there are actually some people who saw their net social security go down. How are they gonna afford this tax increase? These are parts, these are all parts of your talent. They are your neighbors. When I heard the word finance meaning was cuts to the fund balances, but not many ways. Changes to the way things are done. My question is this, what have we done to save money? And when was the last time a request was made to every employee in the cloud, including the school staff, for ideas on how quick things could be done differently to save money. The view from the top, which is what people are doing in terms of creating a budget, is very different from the view from the frontline workers. Let's ask them how things could get better.
And please don't hire and consult thousands of dollars to do this. This is not the time to intimidate employees or taxpayers, but to empower them. In today's world, your power is not in how much you can spend, but in how much you can save. How efficient efficient can you make your operation? So one of my questions is, is there some way we can rein in the cost of software as the town of Heaton did this year? As an outsider, I'm using the account titles to identify these costs. So if the account titles and technical support, 11,000. Town office website fees, 4,000, almost 5. Town office computer maintenance, 2,000. For a total of almost 57,000. On top of this is the AES budget items, the same cabinet. Maybe the titles titles are are not not there. Good. 33,000 for technology repair and maintenance. 18,000 software and license fees. 88,000 instructional technology salaries. 7,000 technical services personnel and 13,000 in computer media for a total across all the budgets of $215,000. I'm not saying we don't need technology, I'm just asking if anyone has looked into the possible savings that might be generated by combining some of these services. Thank you.
Additional comments? Questions? I don't wanna miss anybody again. Yes, sir.
Hello again. Ed Walker, 63 Burnham Brook Road. I hear a lot of concern about tax increase, and I certainly can understand that as well. I'm just curious if the town looks at our overall tax increase year over year over the past, let's say, five years, and comparing that increase to the general rate of inflation increase, especially this year where inflation has been really, really high, it seems to me that specifically the increase in the overall budget is lower than the overall inflation rate
problem, I guess an industry in coverage, zero based budget. What do we think we need and what's it gonna cost? So, you know, it's reasonable thing to say. You know, how would we compare to inflation? We have to account for some inflation. Fuel costs, fuel oil, some other contracting services that are gonna go up, right? Basic supply. That's we get in most of the inflation. I don't know if we look at it that way typically. I think it's a
With apologies, I just did this quick and dirty based on a spreadsheet I had on my laptop, but the total raised by taxation numbers we have for the last three past budget cycles, and then the one we're proposing tonight, I took the four years, I'm gonna tally it, and annualize it. It's about 2.14% per annum if we pass this budget as proposed. So, you know, whatever you wanna look at or if you wanna look at CPI or whatever, you can compare it to 2.144%. It should be roughly correct.