Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Regular Meeting
December 16, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
If we could recite the Pledge of Allegiance, please. I pledge allegiance to the flag. The
United States Of America and to the Republic for stands. Which One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Okay, thank you. Our first agenda item is public speaking. Do we have any public speak? Looks like done, thank you, we have any additions or deletions of the agenda. Also hearing none I guess we'll move on Town administrators report. We're get Eric back.
Is there something we can bounce forward to and come back to Eric?
Yeah, I think we can just take our agenda items out of order. Although technically we need a motion maybe to do that. Oh, here's Eric. You're on mute. Buddy. You're muted.
Sorry about that. Just trying to get some last minute stuff done before the meeting. Yeah.
Well, we're, we're at item agenda item number four, which is town administrators report.
Okay. Let me, share my screen here. Alright. Are you guys all seeing that? Yep. Okay first off I just wanted to say unfortunately last week one of the Andover firefighters passed away of a heart attack his name was Gary Calvi or Calvo sorry. If any of you want to contribute, there is a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for his funeral expenses. You can find the link at the Andover support group. If you don't have it and you want it, you can also get me offline. The other really good news, actually this is a day out of date, is that the first delivery of vaccine in the state of Connecticut was yesterday. So hopefully we are slowly starting to see the tail end of what we've been going through for the past eight to ten months. That's the good news. Here's the bad news. As of today, we've had sixty three positive COVID cases, in one death in the town. When I talked to you at the November meeting, we had had 29. So we've gone from 29 to sixty three in a month. I know we've talked a lot in town about the positivity rate. This is our fourteen day or correction, our infectivity rate. If you could look at it, the last time we met was back around the seventeenth or eighteenth, and we were at 24 and as of today, we're about seventy one. So we're obviously not progressing in a good direction at the moment. We're pretty much right now at about the national and Connecticut average for COVID infections. We had been lagging behind for a long time, but in the first fifteen days of this month, we've had thirty new infections in town, which is a bummer, obviously. So I'm not going to show you these graphs.
The other thing that's been of concern is, know, we've gone from in basically two months from one hundred and ten to twelve hundred people hospitalized in the state of Connecticut. So far over the last week and a half or so, that's really leveled off, which is good. Nobody knows exactly why. There's no expectation that it's continued to be leveled off because the number of infections keep increasing and the number of people hospitalized tracks almost perfectly, but delayed about a week or two from that number. So anticipate that number to go up. The governor has announced just recently that they're going to open the Hartford Convention Center as a COVID overflow treatment center. So if you were planning on going to any conventions in the next couple of months, I would say that's probably not a starter. We did get a rebate from the state for our COVID related expenses up to this point, and it was right around $7,000 So basically what I'm going to do is refund the library their share of the COVID related expenses and utilize the rest at the town level. Now in addition to that, we just got announced in fact, I was just on a conference call just before that when they were giving out the details. There will be an initial allotment of COVID rebate money for the towns.
Andover's allotment will be about $24,650 which is pretty cool. I've got about a day to jump through the hoops and fill out all the paperwork. And we have to have earmarked the money by December 31, which is somewhat unrealistic. So what the state has said is they've given towns the option of putting that money towards public safety. They said you can put the money in the general fund, but allocated to offset the costs for public safety and then spend the money you had allocated for public safety on other things. So it's a little bit of a paper trail but the good news is we're gonna get an infusion of cash of about $25,000, in the next, two weeks. So that's kinda cool. Always a good thing to get free money.
Is that just an allocation based on population or how is that governed, or determined,
Eric? So there's this wacky three part formula. It's partly population, it's partly population density, and it's partly the grand list divided by the population. So they use three different factors and they weighed it and they have this really complex formula. So basically relatively speaking, smaller more affluent towns such as Andover get a disproportionately small amount of the total funding based on our population, but it's still $24,000 or $25,000. So it's still a good shot in the arm. And this is federal money that was given to the state. And basically what happened is many months ago, the state asked the towns to tell them roughly what their COVID related expenses were, but they did it without telling the towns what they could actually credit. So towns credited everything, gave them a number, the money got allocated from the federal government and then the state came back and said, oh, well you can't claim that, that, that, that, that, you can only claim this and this and this,
which added up to a much smaller number than they had money for. So that was the $7,000 even though we originally said we were going to have expenses of around, you know, dollars 18,000. So now they've gone back and taken all that extra money because they got to do something with it and they're just basically giving it to the towns but the towns have to certify they're putting it into certain specific categories. So we're going be able to do that it's going to be some paperwork a little bit of running around by myself and the Assistant Finance Director but not too big a deal
either way. So that is going on. So what else? The second thing is that we are going to have to deal with some expenses related to public works. As a lot of you know Ed Kasich retired as the road crew foreman. He was the road crew foreman for thirty three years, so which is a long time. I'm happy that he was able you know to retire and was in good health. His replacement Jay Tuttle starts officially on the twenty first but he's actually in the garage right now prepping for the storm. So he agreed to come in today because I kind of told him I expected him to. And, he said, okay. So we are switching that position from, Ed was a union member and we are replacing that with a non union but working supervisor position. So we're changing the job title, we're changing the job, you know, description to make it more in line with what we really need to to, you know, kind of get in and accomplish at the town.
So there's two issues with that. The first is because Ed had maxed out his sick days at over 300 and in keeping with the agreement that we had with him that if he would retire, we would give him, you know, we would credit him with more of his sick days than he ordinarily would be allowed by union contract. We depleted the severance fund pretty significantly. Plus knowing he was going to retire, he didn't take any real vacation this year. So per union contract, we owe him out for his unused vacation as well as a significant fraction of his unused sick days. So that will have an impact that we will have to deal with in the next budget cycle. The good news is that there's really only one other employee out there that the town would have any kind of significant exposure if they retired in terms of severance. And that is Tim, Tim Higley, who's one of the other public works employees. So if Tim Higley retired, we would owe somewhere in the $8,000 range for severance on Ed or on Tim. So the second thing is because we hired Jay Tuttle as a salaried employee, as opposed to an hourly employee, that's going to do two things. One, it does not affect the overtime
or the overtime snow removal budget, but it does increase the amount that will be spent out of the public works general salary line item. So we're going to be somewhat under budgeted on that. As of today, we are overspent in OT for public works and we're overspent in the part time help category. The part time help category was because we I employed Richard Bagan for much longer than we had funding for, but I did it because I basically plugged him into the fourth public works employee category instead of because the board of selectmen was not going to allow me to hire a fourth person until we actually had a retirement date for Eddie. So I used him essentially as that
fourth employee. So we're not overspent, we're just that money got allocated to a different bucket. The other thing we faced this year is that the $2,000 that we overspent in public works, that equates to about 120. The total overtime budget for public works equates to about one hundred and twenty hours of labor. We used quite a bit of that on storm Aisa doing cleanup because we were, you know, we had them in all weekend essentially, two days during the weekend, and then over time several nights. We've also had a total of five events I needed to call the crew in because right now every time it's windy we got so many dead trees that we're ending up with road closures almost every time it's windy, which has been a lot this fall as many of you know. Again, the salary line item overall for Public Works is not overspent by any means. In fact we're under budget overall, so we're in good shape right now, but later in the year we are going to go over budget because Jay Tuttle has a, you know, a quite a bit higher salary than Eddie, but no overtime. So anyway, we'll be able to make it work. It's not going to be a huge deal in this budget, but it is something we're going to have to think about. I talked about the storm call outs.
So again, the public work salary line item right now is 39% expended. That's the salary plus temp salary plus overtime. And we're already almost 50% of the way through the budget cycle. So overall we're good, but two of those three categories are over, one is considerably under. So we have a significant snow event tonight. And just so you all know, to put it in perspective, I would anticipate this storm is going to cost the town a total of around sixty hours of overtime by the time we're all done with that, and probably another ten to twelve hours of help by one of our temps, Mark Williams. So we could expect a total storm cost for this of about $3,000 not including salt, just to give you a ballpark of where we are. So finance department the town of Andover has hired the assistant finance office officer, sorry. Her name is Marina Pandolfi and she's working out really well. I've had her training pretty extensively with Laura who's the business manager for AES and also somewhat with Barbara. She does make considerably more than the previous assistant treasurer, but where she is in salary is kind of at the low end of the comparable compensation scale for somebody in her job position. That department, you know, total we're going to end up decreasing it from three people to two over between the last budget cycle and this budget cycle.
So in the end, we're going to end up roughly the same amount of money, probably a little bit less total spending, but you know spending it on two higher level people rather than three people that were not paid as much. Probably a lot of you remember last year, we had a mix up with my salary. Basically when I first took the job, the old assistant treasurer, not realizing it was already almost September, took my yearly salary and divided it by the number of months remaining, not divided it by 12. I didn't catch it. We caught it basically at the end of last year because it seemed I was making more money than I should. And that really was the case. So what I did was I took the first three pay periods of this fiscal year off completely
and just didn't get a salary. And then I've taken the rest of the money out of just basically cut my salary by that percentage for the remaining months of this year. So I'm basically back to neutral, but out of this budget cycle, I will have underspent the town administrator's budget by around $12,000 So we'll be able to put that in either the finance officer or the public works supervisor line item. So I guess what I'm saying is overall we're fine on salary. We're going to be over in a few spots and under in a few spots. Additionally, last year I approached the board and the board agreed to hire a senior coordinator. I have held off on filling that position because frankly with COVID, we have such little capability to provide programming. It just didn't seem like now was the time to hire somebody into that position.
I do feel strongly that that position is one we will want to fill, but I don't really want to think about filling it until such time as we're in a place where we can actually hold functions and actually program stuff for the seniors. So I'm letting you know we're going to be considerably under budget on that position going forward. So the town hall is open. We are what I would call semi staffed. We're not open to the public. And at this point, we have one employee that's tested positive for COVID-nineteen, and there's several others that are sick that are awaiting test results that could very well be COVID positive also. So we are moving some offices to remote staffing. We're keeping the staffing levels that we can, but we definitely have some people out, and we're going be working remote in some offices. As many of you remember, we had an IT security issue related to the our audit and our audit payment. One of the things that I implemented as a result of that was an IT security training program. So we started that for all the staff members. And it's something called Security Mentor. And it's basically just a series of online trainings in data security, office security, information security, everything to do with electronic transfer of information to hopefully
prevent that from occurring again. And I did give a gift certificate to the first person to complete all the trainings. The other thing that's a very recent change is the building official has resigned. We're looking at our options. We have a couple different well we have three possibilities for where we want to go with the building official. And part of it is going to be a decision on our part whether we want to do it as a shared service provided by the town of Bolton. Bolton currently is themselves in three other towns, so they already provide building official or building department services for multiple towns. So that's one option. The other option would be just hiring a salaried position as a building official, a part time building official. We have two other individuals that are interested in doing that. So that is going to be more expensive than our existing arrangement with the old building official. However, the old building official has been resisting very heavily the last four to five years, bringing our fee structure in line with that of other towns.
And we've gotten to the point where now building departments typically are basically self supporting. And we've gotten to the point where our building department was only taking in somewhere around 50%, 55% of their costs in fees, because frankly, we were charging a lot less than surrounding towns. So we've undergone a review of all our building department fees, and we're probably over the next month or month and a half going to roll out a new fee schedule and a new way of calculating the fees. So in the end, I think we're going to get the building department to capture a much greater fraction of their total fees.
Certainly our goal is to capture more than 80% of the fees or the expenses of the department in fees, which I think is completely realistic. So although we're going to end up paying more for a building official, the department overall will be less expensive to the town than it is now. Right now, I think frankly, we're subsidizing the cost of a lot of building and builders in town because we're not really passing through the costs of all the inspections and the services we provide. Any questions up to this point?
Modernization going to include a building permit application that doesn't look like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy that got skewed in the copier? We're going to Have change gone through the process recently myself building the shed in my property?
Yeah, so I think we need to look at all the forms we have. Honestly, that's been a struggle that I tried to take on about a year and a half ago when I first came in, but the building official was fighting me pretty aggressively on that. So yes, we are looking at our fee schedule, we're looking at the way we give information to the public. And the one thing I think we will consider in the next year to two years is consider going to an online permitting system. They are not inexpensive. Most of the towns around us have gone to online permitting systems, not all of them, but most. So I think we can capture enough fees to make it fairly cost neutral to the town.
It will be more expense on the part of builders. But when you think about it, what we're only talking about is for a normal town, a normal town, roughly 1.5% of the cost of a renovation or a new building is the permitting fees. So, you know, we're not talking about a radical increase to, I mean, permit fees are going to go way up, but in terms of actual project costs for developers it's not that much of a jump and it's relatively in line with what other towns are doing. Senior social
shoot your question. Yeah, Eric, I just, you know, do we have any concern here where if we jack up the costs of doing these sorts of things that we might depress the amount of construction going on in town?
I think if people are being honest, we're talking about a change from basically 1% of the construction costs to about 1.5% of the construction costs. So the actual percentage difference cost in the job should be fairly miniscule if builders were being honest with us in the past. Okay. Which some are and some are not. Senior social services, we're still running under budget because right now we're still just providing kind of the bare essential services. We have had a couple emergency requests this month. We do have a small fuel reserve account. We've spent some money out of that but not much. And social services has provided a couple of small items for residents. We also have many of you know a land acquisition coming up to town meeting in January. It got delayed from December, basically based on bad logistics. So this is going to be pretty cost neutral to the town because one of the properties is owned by a land trust and the other one is landlocked, we're talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of $90 to $120 difference in taxable income to the town. So we're not talking about anything that's going to affect the Grand Vista in any significant way. The library vandal murals, their court docket is coming up. We have when I say we, I mean the royal we as in Amanda, filed the paperwork with the court for restitution on the town. So hopefully we will get refunded for that.
And we will have to in turn partially refund our insurance company who's given us some money for that already. The town got a grant for about $8,000 for two new speed radar signs. Most of you know we approved and funded one last year, and we're getting two more for free for the state. And it was just kind of a weird grant program that I heard about like six months ago and I shot him off a quick email and said, Hey, don't forget Andover, we'd like one of those too. And, they called me kind of out of the blue last week and said, You're not getting one, you're getting two. I'm like, Okay. So, we're getting two of them. Actually we already have them. They're in public works but we haven't put them up yet. So that's kind of cool. It's we're going to use them on some of the roads that have had we've had crash data indicating excessive speeds. So the first one will probably go up on Bunker Hill for a period of time and the second one will go up on Gilead. And then after that we'll move them around every couple of months. These are kind of cooler because they have their own solar power system so we won't have to the Stryker unit we have now, we got to replace the battery like every five days which kind of sucks. So these are intended to be temporarily located and portable?
Yep, exactly. Although they're not that portable. If you know the size of the one we have, this one that's a 15 inches one. The ones the two we got are 30 inches ones. So they're basically twice as big well four times twice as long twice as wide as the existing one. And they come with three of the same size batteries that the last one had one battery in. So it's quite a bit beefier than what we have. So we're going get those in and hopefully use them. And the great thing is like the one we have now, they're also good for data collection. So we can actually keep the display off and we can just run them for a couple weeks in each location and just collect all the binned speed data of how fast people are going and when. We're kind of doing that now with the unit we have and then I'm working with the resident state trooper on enforcing at the times where we're getting the worst, we're having the worst speeding program and trying to kind of tailor our response to knock down some of the really aggressive speeds that we're seeing. Good. Okay. We're probably going to use some town aid road money to use a weather forecasting service that's specific to Public Works. Right now we're trialing one, and, we're looking at another one called Weather Works. We'll probably do Weather Works, The person that's taking over at Public Works prefers WeatherWorks to so I've been demoing one and he's had the other for a bunch of years. And we kind of looked at them head to head and said, this one does this, this one does that. So I think we're going to end up going to other works.
But we'll pay for that out of town aid road money, so it won't really affect the town budget per se. At the last meeting, I asked for a additional allocation for the brush tile chipping. We chipped that in, got that all out of the way, so that was great. And we were able to drop about 15 loads of chips at the Andover Sportsman's Club because they wanted to use it for keeping down weeds. And so I used Public Works to just drop them as much as as they could handle. So that was good. We worked with the town engineer on developing the detention basin at the transfer station so that project the transfer station is basically fully wrapped up. Other than I think at some point we should still replace the door to the blue building because the door right now is propped open. It takes the backhoe to open the door and the bottom of it's so rotted you know either got to we either got to remove the door or we got to replace the door and I think think we're it's probably worth looking at replacing that door at some time sooner rather than later. The Bunker Hill Bridge project, as most of you know, structurally the Bunker Hill Bridge is down to it's like a four, either a four or three. It's pretty bad. So we have started working on replacement close Jensen and Miller, who's the engineering firm that's been hired to do that. The survey has been completed and they're in January they're going to be doing test borings in the area to try to understand what the soil bearing capability is for the final design.
It looks like we should hopefully still be on track for a spring twenty twenty start date for the replacement of that bridge, which would be good because I don't think we'd get much farther than that before weight limits or closure got put on that culvert based on its structural rating currently. Hutchinson Road culvert. We have a fairly large sized culvert on Hutchinson Road where the end walls fell off and the metal hoop is around 55 years old and is really badly degraded. That's one per our engineer is one of the two that are kind of most in need of immediate replacement. We've actually shrunk that that part of Hutchinson Road up so it's only one lane because where one of the lanes is kind of not really safe anymore. So we need to get that one done. We are starting the survey and wetlands analysis of that. The hydrology calculations are done, so we need a survey and the wetlands delineation before we come up with a preliminary design. So I'm hoping to have that done by the end of January. We don't have enough money in the Bridge and Culver Fund to pay for the bridge replacement, But there are some possibilities. One, I think we should continue to fund that and then we should make a decision kind of going forward and that will be done in part with CIP, whether we try to fund it in this upcoming budget or whether we try to do a different you know funding source
like I mean we do have some low SIP funds that we could potentially apply to that. We have around $50,000 in the bridge and culvert funds. We have enough to get us completely through the design phase, but we certainly don't have enough to actually build it. Construction costs on that are going to be somewhere in the $150,000 to $200,000 category to replace that. And that is just because the regulatory environment has changed from when that culvert was put in. I mean that was basically put in you know fifty five years ago and somebody stood back with their thumb and said you know, that river takes about a, you know, this culvert and they went and buried a couple culverts and put a road over the top. And you know, the regulations required in culvert replacement are a lot stricter than they were then. And because of the drainage basin that drains that area
is over one square mile, you basically have to start with the Corps of Engineers and kind of work backwards as to what's required. So that's Hutchinson. Times Farm Bridge, we're I've said this a million times. So I don't want to say we're getting close to wrapping up that bridge project. For those of you know, that bridge was finished and opened in 2017, but was never closed out. What's happened is that the company who did the design and construction management on it, The two individuals involved on the Andover part of the project have both left the company and gone somewhere else. So we have had to submit paperwork to the DOT reassigning two other people to that job for the final closeout, but DOT has to certify those individuals and has to certify their pay rates before they're allowed to do the final closeout. So we are so close. Mean there's literally like six or seven hours of work remaining on CME's part. There's only one discrepancy that they have to work out with the contractor. But we're just right now we're waiting on DOT to actually say, yeah, those two people are Okay. We sent them resumes, I had to send them a letter saying they're acceptable from the town, so we're waiting on that. Annoying. I told you last month we did get the STEEP grant that will help pay for the paving
of the first section of Long Hill Road, as well as the first section of Shawty Mill Road. So got a bunch more paperwork to do with the state, which shouldn't surprise any of you. The connectivity grant is kind of stalled right now because Division one of DOT still won't issue us a letter saying that they will later give us an encroachment permit. And that's because the contractor that is doing the upgrade of the pedestrian signals still has not finished the project. They were supposed to be done in September, but it's clearly not September. And they're clearly not done. So the good news is we had bid that project out through something called EZIQC, which is a procurement program run by the Capital Regional Council of Governance. As of January 1, so they rebid that every two years and the new bid is out January 1. And fortunately, at the meeting today they awarded the contract to the same contractor we already had.
So the good news is there's we're not starting over but there will be a new price schedule so the fees will change slightly but it won't take any more work on our part. Again we're not doing anything until the DOT actually, gets the first part of the project finished and then issues us our letter. So revaluation, the reval process is underway. I talked to the contractor. The contractor said as of last Friday, they were 27% of the way through all the field work for revaluation. We still have not locked in prices for oil and diesel. They've been kind of fluctuating. I think they'll still go down a little bit because I think more and more towns and areas are going to end up in lockdown. And I think that's going to knock down the price again. So we're holding off but we're going to do it sometime in the next fifteen days because I don't want to go into the next fiscal year without understanding what our prices are for the next budget season. I just wanted to give you a quick look at the expenses I'm considering out of the the building and maintenance fund. We talked about the overhead door at the transfer station. We are planning on putting in a personnel door at the rear of the Public Works Building. Right now there's the two large or there's the large overhead door but there's no human door and it seems kind of stupid that every time somebody has to walk out the back of the building you got to hit the whole overhead door, raise the overhead door up, walk up, go to the one of the vehicles, close the door again. So we're going to put in just a personnel access door.
I've asked the electrician to give us a quote on upgrading the electrical system at Veterans Memorial Park, you know, because that's in bad shape every time we have any kind of electrical storm. The lights go off down there, it trips all the breakers. It's an old system, it wasn't put in very well. And we're talking about potentially in the future installing a new well and some other stuff there. So we're going to need to upgrade the electrical to do it. I asked Lenco for a quote to do that. We're also looking at electrical upgrades to the town hall. I realize that we're talking about adding a standalone seniorcommunity center right behind the building. So we're all the things we're looking at, we're looking at doing so that it will complement that and we won't have to do any rework if we do build that building there. But we have a couple things we have to deal with. The first is that we kept blowing
circuit breakers or fuses every time we use the air conditioner in the registrar's room. Wally's been complaining about that now for about eight months. But what I wanted to do is I didn't want to do it as a standalone. I wanted to do it when we updated the main one of the main electrical panels we have, which was the original one for the building. It's made by a company called Stablock and Stablock panels have been not allowed for about thirty years because they were a fire hazard. I know the company I worked with we were not allowed to touch or connect anything to a stab lock panel. The only time we would touch a house with a stab lock panel is if we built in the cost of a new main service panel when we did it. We also have a problem in that the things that are backed up on the emergency generator aren't really logical and there's a bunch of things that aren't backed up that needs to be backed up, one of them being our new server. So it's kind of annoying that we have a server
with this giant uninterrupted dual uninterrupted power source but still two hours after the power goes out you know we lose our server because we don't have any plugs in that room that are backed up. So you know we've kind of gone room to room and looked at what needs to be backed up and what's not needed to be backed up And it's not a question of power availability. It's just a question of it wasn't, they just backed up a single panel and the other panel has no backup circuits. And there's a lot of swapping around that needs to be done. So that we desperately need just to be able to function during an extended outage because we have some real stupid things like in my room for instance my computer works because the plugs work but none of the lighting in my room works. So you know I can use my computer but I sit in the dark. So there's a lot of little things like that that need to be corrected. I've got a proposal out with one code to do that And again, that would be taken out of our existing capital fund for building maintenance. So that's basically it for my report, unless you guys have specific questions about any of that stuff from me. Or are you sick of hearing me by now? Good overview. Anybody have any questions for Eric?
Yeah. I I do, Eric. You mentioned in your beginning of your report about the you have the salary public work salaries all in one fund. Is the is the new supervisor in that same same fund?
He is currently because public works is just the way our account structure is. There's just there's a salary line item for public works and there's an overtime line item and there is a temp help line item. So yes he's included in that overall pool of employee for public works.
Okay. So but are the, the temp and the, those other you know, the temporary employees, are they they're listed in that same that same category? They're yeah. They're one line item below it. They're all part of that same basic budget, though. Wouldn't you think that the, I mean, the union members of the, public works, which we're gonna have three now Yep. One nonunion, supervisor who's, you're you're saying he's got a sizable, larger salary than Eddie had. Should he be listed, like like most other town employees are that have, you know, that they're not, have a you're working through a union contract?
So basically given our existing financial account structure, that is something we're looking at as we change our chart of accounts as we adopt a new software, financial software for the town. That may change with that but right now there's no other line item for salary other than the ones we have. But you're right, it would not be a bad idea to break out the supervisory
aspect of that from the rest I the just think for transparency reasons, you know, for townspeople when they're when they're wondering, you know, like myself, maybe they should be they should be listed like that.
Sure. Yep. Okay. So Yeah. And and I mean, his his contract's a public document. If you would like me to forward you all a copy of this contract, I'd be more than happy to do that. I'd I'd like one, please. Okay. Let me just write a note. Okay.
I have a question. A couple months ago when we went into executive session about the fraud. Did Town lose any money or did we get everything was resolved?
It has not been resolved. So the way it stands right now is we finally got back from our bank, the one after Regions Bank that the money is unrecoverable. So we have made a claim through Kerma for our insurance company and they will cover a portion of that, probably not the whole thing but our auditor they've admitted that they're partially liable for that and they have put in a claim with our own or with their insurance carrier also. So we are I'm sure going to be out our deductible which is a thousand dollars. My guess is and I can't guarantee this but my guess is that that's going to be basically the limit of our liability because we're going to accept our insurance company settlement. We're going to pay that to the auditor and then the auditor is going to go after their cyber liability policy for the remainder of the month. So that's basically how it looks like it's going to shake out at this point. Thank you.
Yep. Yeah, it's really kind of, I mean, what's been interesting to me and the other thing I would like to say is that we are going to, I am working with Kerma on purchasing a standalone cyber liability policy to better cover the town. I don't know whether we're going to opt for that just simply because the cost basis of that is likely to be fairly high and we may not want to, we may roll the dice instead of being willing to spend the money, but I want to put together the package for you and have the Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance review it and say is this worth adopting or not. Basically the cyber liability claims overall have been absolutely going through the roof so the deductible has gone up considerably. The deductible initially for us was around $1,000 The deductible right now in the next year's policy will be $100,000 So there's pretty considerable difference. They're apparently talking to our KIRMA rep that's kind of changing on a daily basis because there have been so many claims by municipalities, so many municipalities have gotten whacked that the insurance is getting incredibly expensive. So I got, you know, we're probably looking you know in the $15,000 to $17,000 range or more for a policy for the town of Andover. But you know I don't want to tell you I want to put together have them come back to me with an actual policy you know and then I'll present it to the board and say this is what the actual cost would be to do this.
But that part's a little scary you know. Does that answer your question Linda?
Okay. Any other questions for Eric? Okay, well, let's, I guess, move on to our next agenda item, which is the treasurer's report. Eric, if you can address that. I I've looked over the summary. Don't really have any comments other than that I trust that you'll be procuring a PDF generation software so that we don't have this annoying badge there on our printouts.
Yeah, this is a little ridiculous. I'm not sure why that appeared all of a sudden. Yeah, I don't quite understand why that has occurred. But yeah, that's clearly not acceptable because it cuts off a significant fraction the lines. But we can certainly do better in the future and have a fully readable document. So for that I apologize. Are there any specific line items that you want me to address or you have questions about? I didn't see anything from my part.
That you It looked like it was a little bit of an anomaly you've already addressed in your presentation. Okay. But if anybody else has any questions, should entertain them. Anyone? Hearing none, I guess we can go on to our agenda item number six, which is budget transfers.
I don't have any transfers, appropriations or over expenditure requests at this time. I probably should have done two for the public works department but I sort of felt like I wanted it to shake out a little farther and be able to forecast what it would take to cover the whole year to only do it once and I'm not really there yet certainly.
Okay. I think we've talked about that before. Mean that makes sense to do some consolidation as long as it's not something unusual or egregious. Yep. Okay.
Anybody have any other questions for Eric on those? Agenda item number seven, talking about old business. The COVID-nineteen update, you've already given us kind of a rundown, Eric, on where we are as a town. Office status.
Yeah unless you have specific questions I'll leave it with what I put in my administrator's report. I wish I had a better feel for how the pandemic is really going to affect us overall budget wise. I can tell you that our tax collections in the amount we're bringing in has been in line or maybe even a little better than previous years. So so far we're not being affected financially. The other thing I would say on that and and I've only known about it for like an hour, is the governor signed another executive order today that allows towns to either defer payment on taxes offer the low interest rate for a period of time again for the January payments. The timing is a little unfortunate because it requires the board of selectmen to make a decision which approach they want to take and since there really isn't a meeting scheduled before January 1 we're going to have to kind of figure that out. It's unfortunate because they just signed the executive order like an hour ago so
you know didn't leave much time in the end of the month to work it out. But either way, the last one didn't really affect the town financially. Our collections still basically came in at the same time. So I wouldn't anticipate this being a major if we do the same thing we did the last time I don't think it's going to really affect town finances much. Essentially what we opted for the last time is just allow people relief on the interest accrued excuse me on late payments if that makes sense as opposed to just deferring collections for a couple of months.
Anybody have any other questions on those on that? Interesting. Okay, we'll move on to agenda item eight new business. 8A is the finance director position. You've already touched on that a little bit, Eric. Do you want to talk a little more about the process and where we are?
Sure. Last Friday, we interviewed three people for the finance director position. There was one no show. We're interviewing we have more interviews lined up starting noon on Friday. So with the goal of by the end of Friday calling back for a second interview the following week you know one or two of the top candidates we've identified. Know maybe in person maybe virtual kind of depending on what our stance is at that point. Be nice to do it in person, but given the fact that we have had some COVID positives in the town hall, we'll have to make a decision as a committee whether we're willing to do that. It would be nice to do it sooner rather than later.
Yeah, Laura's retired as of the January 7. Is that right? Pretty
much, pretty much. Although she's said she would stay on and help out for a period of time after that. Eric what is the salary for that position?
It kind of depends on the candidate. I would say a typical finance director, if you do direct salary comparisons, is somewhere a low of about 90,000 and a high of about 110,000 for the small to medium sized communities. So it's going to be somewhere on the lower end of that scale would be my guess. Okay thanks.
But remember too we're also as we do this we're going down from three people, with benefits to two people and if you take the cost of health care and everything else as you decrease one person you know so I don't think the salary is going to be a great deal less but I think when you take into account the salary plus benefits, it's going to be somewhat cheaper than what we're paying now.
Any additional questions for Eric on that? Okay, item 8B is the software transition.
So we've gone back and forth this last week answering a bunch of questions for Edmunds about the transition. And they had a bunch of questions. They asked for our last audit, our existing chart of accounts, a bunch of other information, which we provided them. I still feel like we should have the new whoever the the finance director is going to be in before we make any permanent decisions on what we're going for for the chart of accounts going forward. I feel like it's a little premature to finalize the chart of accounts before we have a finance director that would ultimately be responsible for that chart of accounts. So but you know we are we are working towards it right now and we're providing them the information that they need. But I don't think since they have forgetting how many municipalities they told me like 20 municipalities that are going online January 1 you know transitioning to Edmonds
they're kind of they're not really they're not too focused on Andover at the moment until they get all those ones that are January 1 transitions done. So but hopefully in January we start we start working a little hopefully we have a finance director in place that can give us some good guidance on what exactly we want. And we will I think at the same time probably end up doing some account consolidation because we have way too many separate checking accounts and we really don't need. We can use pooled cash and have a lot less total number of accounts. So I think in in the auditor is working with us a little bit on you know that's the one thing the auditor Michael said was that he you know he really wanted to clean up that aspect as we went through and he would work with us on on what accounts. I think there's a few areas where we need to make decisions things that were that we're currently running as balance sheet accounts should probably end up getting reclassified as standalone funds so that we can better account for their revenue and expenses. And I think we also
we need to get the chart of accounts set up so that the information needed on our financial statements flows directly from the chart of accounts as opposed to spending months and months of time manipulating it. So I think that that's really kind of one of our big goals with the updated chart of accounts is have everything flow to the audit a lot more simply than what is what is being done today.
Any questions for Eric on that? Okay item HC is the audit status. That's a good segue.
All right so this gets tricky. So I've been in contact with Michael we filed for an audit extension because obviously we will not have completed the audit by January 1, surprising no one. They would like to get started in January. So the problem is that we are probably not going to have completed financial statements. And I don't know how to get around that other than assigning that task to the new finance director. We've got a significant portion of it done. But Barbara has I mean she's been working for us a day or two here in a day or two there but clearly she has not finished it and she has no real intention of staying and finishing it which I hope we get a lot farther on the financial statements than we're clearly going to get. So I don't have a good resolution for that. It seems like January 1 start date for starting in with the auditor is probably unrealistic at this point but I can't tell you what that date's going to actually be.
I wish I had better news for you but I don't. Any questions for Eric?
Are there any penalties associated with that if you don't have any time?
No, not really. I mean, you know at one point we were about three years behind on the audit. You know worst case scenario we're going to be a few months behind on the audit. So we're nowhere near even where we were in the bad old days but I don't want it to slip any farther than I absolutely have to. If you remember last year we didn't really even the auditing firm didn't really even start looking at them till like last March April. So we're not really that far off of where we were last year.
I would imagine that one of the impacts would be, and we're not in this situation right now, but were we to go to some type of financing or bonding issue, then not having audited financials will have an impact there.
Yes. And the other thing that I think to me is an issue is that without having audited financials, it's really difficult to say how much how much of a surplus we've had and how much we can use from that to offset next year's expenses. That to me is almost the bigger issue is understanding where we are. I mean you know we know we came in, we know we brought in more money than we budgeted for last year. So we know we have a surplus and we know we ran less total expenses even with the money that got approved through the Board of Finance and transferred into permanent funds.
Even with that we still had a surplus. So it's not a question of whether we have a surplus or not we clearly do it's just a question of what is that exact dollar value and I'm not sure at this point we really I would be comfortable saying you know we have x number of dollars to apply to the upcoming budget. So that to me is almost the bigger you know know we're certainly a lot closer than we were in years past Let's put it that way. We don't have the big surpluses that we've had in years past to deal with.
We're having some transition in our financial personnel. It would be good just to have final statements and everybody comfortable and it is what it is and we know what it is. Yep. Any other questions for Eric on that? Hearing none, let's move on to agenda item nine, which is the approval of the meeting minutes from the regular meeting of Wednesday, November 18. Anybody care to make a motion to approve those meeting minutes? I so move.
Okay. Rob's moved to approve the meeting minutes from Wednesday, 11/18/2020 regular meeting minutes. Do I have a second? I'll second.
Linda's second. Thank you. Any discussion? Hearing none, let's call for a vote. All in favor, can say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Kurt's abstaining. He wasn't at the meeting. Thank you. Motion passes. Thank you. Move on to agenda item 10, which is our liaison reports. I think the only active liaison we may have now is the CIP committee. Louise, do you have anything for that? Yeah.
At the last meeting, there was some preliminary type of proposals made to have some possible improvements over at the Veterans Memorial Field and also the community center. They were very, very preliminary, and we needed additional information as far as cost and just more details. And that's I think Shannon was gonna bring some more information at the next meeting. And it looks like our next meeting most likely will be Monday. It's gonna be a special meeting because tomorrow night's gonna be probably canceled because of the snow. That was it. Okay.
Any questions for Louise? Okay, we have anything else anybody wants to bring yeah Linda. Hi
I'm yeah I guess the twenty second. The oversight committee meeting is going to meet They're going to approve the revision of the actual town agreement, which I'm going to read this, which acts as a foundation for the collaboration between and the three towns. Meetings have been taken place for the past three months and have included town representatives as well as input from and town attorneys. Plan to vote on the revised agreement on 12/22 at 11AM via zoom and step two is the second part of this process green: is to look into the funding formula, which will be defined in the oversight agreement addendum.
Meetings with the three towns will be scheduled in the new year and act as an opportunity for the towns to look at a possible revised funding formula maureenlally: would like to propose taking three data sources into account and averaging them together to in order to create a formula that is representative the population and demographics. That are serving and looks forward to meeting with the three towns that are that are that's
it. I have a quick question for you. Do you have a sense for what that formula change would do?
It's, it's really not going to change anybody's by much.
It's such a small figure anyway so I get you.
So what it will do is it will smooth things out because right now basically based on your relative population at RAM, which is kind of an arbitrary and they're trying to switch at least make it proportional to the total population as opposed to just the school age population. The advantage of tying it directly to the school age population is it aligns the fees with the population that uses the fees more carefully but there's a lot more year to year variability and the number goes up goes down goes up goes down and by population based it's a much more smooth.
Frankly if you're using ram as a proxy that's completely off like it does that doesn't is
dealing with little kids. Well that's what I was going to say is pre k and now they're going through young adults, which is through age 26 and they actually have the chores program which helps senior citizens. Oh, so it definitely reaches I didn't know that Linda. Okay. Yeah. So it definitely reaches a far larger group than Ram.
Right. So I guess using Ram as a proxy is kind of a quick and dirty way of doing it. And they're gonna look at doing something a little bit more precise and sounds fine to me. I mean, it's not, but I think as you say, think you're probably right that regardless it's not gonna do a heck of a lot for our budget.
No, but like I said last time, instead of right now, sends up, I don't know if you want to call it, not a bill, the assignment of the fees to the two schools, the Graham High School, the elementary school in the town, the schools don't have any say in the agreement. So it's just going to all go to the town. And if the town wants to get some money from the schools, it's up to the town to offset it.
So that okay so that'll matter because right now it's under the AES budget and
right we would move it. So partially under AES budget partially under the town's budget and part of it's buried in Ram's budget I think Right. It is and you don't even see just
a question of accounting for it properly right? Right. But that's going to be a change. So it's just a change we have to understand because in the event we have to explain it. Right because it's gonna look like this huge If
you look at the spreadsheet, it's gonna be like, woah, what happened to and it's not actually a change. Right.
But yeah we'll have to net that all out and be able to explain it to people. Right. Okay that's it.
Thanks Linda. Okay as we talk about liaison reports I'm going to cover two. The first is the Eastern Highlands Health District. We had the preliminary budget meeting and preliminary budget forecast for next year for Eastern Highlands Health District and the overall budget increase they're projecting is about three 3.3% but it's a little higher when it comes to Andover because Andover several of the towns are actually losing population and Andover right now is increasing population because we have had a bunch of building in the last year and a half which is good for us but it does increase our costs a little bit. The biggest driver of their costs are obviously salary and benefits. They're you know the it's too early for anybody to have really solid numbers for what the healthcare costs are going to be. So there I think Mansfield is using a placeholder of around 5% increase in healthcare costs. Maybe that it may be a little lower. Their salary is their you know their general salary increase is like 2.2% for this year. But there's one employee that has attained a much higher level of certification than they had in the past. So they had hired him
inexpensively until he was fully certified and now that he's fully certified he is going up pretty considerably in salary. They've also presented like a health district salary comparison and Eastern Highlands Health District is still at the low end of the scale across the board but it's in a reasonable ballpark. And the reason that's important now is roughly two years ago a whole bunch of the members in Eastern Highlands health districts got poached by other health districts who paid more. And about two years ago they had to bring everybody's salary up because they had three positions that were open that they couldn't fill frankly. And until they came up with a competitive salary they were really understaffed and it was getting pretty problematic. So that's Eastern Highlands Health District it's a fairly low overall expense for the town. Know so the the actual impact of the increase in funds is like on the order of $1,000 a year for Andover so it's not a big impact but I'm just letting you know. We are in the second year of a or correction the third year of essentially a lock
by the insurance company KIRMA. So our insurance rates this year are going to be basically the same. They basically guarantee and lock for three years at a time that the rates are not going to go up or down more than a little bit. I mean overall the liability policy has actually been going down slightly year over year and our workers comp policy has been going up slightly year over year. You know they're not going to be exactly the same because as you buy new pieces of equipment and as people pieces of equipment depreciate you know your total valuation goes up and down a little bit and that affects your total costs. And work comp is going to track salary. Yeah, so it tracks salary, but it tracks salary within very narrow categories. Yeah. Obviously, interestingly enough, changing from Eddie to a non union supervisor
probably decreases our workers comp costs for that position, even though the salary goes up. So it's not 100%, it's by category. Obviously a public works employee costs you an awful lot more than an office worker who might get carpal tunnel but it's probably not going to get much more than that. You're certainly not going to get run over with the backhoe. So that's that and the other thing I want to just give you a very broad heads up on is that we we are also part of MidNEROC which is basically a recycling consortium and they are the group and Midnirach is basically just a group that's composed of a series of member towns. It's not really technically even a standalone organization. It's really just a subcommittee with membership on a bunch of towns, about 15 towns. And they're the ones that do all the negotiation for everything related to the transfer station. And they organize the hazardous waste facility in Wilmington that we use. We were notified by the state of Georgia, Us and about 45 other entities, that there's an investigation going on and we might be liable for some hazardous waste disposal. Basically we contracted with a contractor to manage a hazardous waste facility and then dispose of the waste. And apparently some of it was stored in a warehouse in Georgia and it was discovered by the state of Georgia basically because the company defaulted on their rental of the storage facility and when the landlord went in to inspect he found it full of lots of 55 gallon drums of stuff. So far there's no indication that they can tie any of the contents of that to us. It's just a bunch of random barrels but there was also an office in the warehouse that
apparently had a bunch of invoices and a bunch of bills of lading and some of the bills of lading were for us. So there's no guarantee that it's our waste, none of it's spilled, so worst case scenario we're on the hook for disposal of some stuff that we already paid to dispose of. Our insurance company is involved the company's insurance company is involved I mean it's basically a cluster but it shouldn't have it's not going to cost us much it's not going to cost us money as far as I can tell. It may chew up quite a bit of time and lead to a little bit of uncertainty for a while.
Probably a bunch of attorneys are going to make money. Eric just a sec this is kind of what I do for my job. So putting aside whether my company will ultimately be involved in this cluster, If there's no actual contamination, you're probably right. It's not gonna cost a lot of money. It'll probably be at some non negligible fee where those all those 55 gallon drums have to be disposed of as a proper facility facility that was being used. Obviously they went out of business, they defaulted yada yada. So there has to be a removal action either by the state of Georgia or by USCPA. And then what they'll do is they'll take whatever that costs and they'll do what's called a volumetric ranking usually where, okay, there was a 100,000 gallons of junk and you sent 10,000 of them, whatever it is and ergo your percentages X and you pay that. Given what you're describing, it doesn't sound like a huge problem. Great. But this is the sort of thing I see all the time. It's standard operating procedure for
a super fund site or a removal action where they have contamination discovered or leaky drums or whatever it is when the state has to come in or the federal government has to come in and do something. They do it based on how much you sent versus what the total was. It's usually just whacked up like that.
But the problem is that there's no, I mean to me from my layman's perspective before we can be liable you've got to prove that our drums are actually in that facility.
That's true. You're not wrong. If they have us on a manifest though that's probably good enough. Depends on what the manifest says exactly. But if they have a manifest that says waste in from Andover, that's easy. If it's waste in from hauler X that Andover used, okay, that's a little more complicated. Well, it depends. I'm just saying in my experience, you know, this is, there's a non negligible look at the end of the day, if what you're telling me is correct, none of this stuff actually leaked and there's not actually a contamination problem. Right. It's not gonna be a significant amount of money. When they leak and it has to be actual remediation, that's another story. But even in those situations when you have towns and I've seen this before, towns are usually de minimis parties which is like de minimis meaning like you contributed a wee bit and they get cash out settlements of like $10,000 or something like that. So I'm probably jumping at shadows
on just based on my experience. I hear these things that you're saying and I'm like, wow, okay. I see this every day and you know these are you know I'm dealing with million dollar claims on these sorts of things but because there's no contamination I think you're right it's just something to kind of keep an eye on.
Yeah yeah and it's it's confusing so we had a contract with a company to run it so it's like no none of our employees none of us had any we never touched it. That doesn't matter. No, and it's old stuff the manifest the newest manifest they have is from 2014.
Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. None of that, literally none of that matters. Although the contractor we used is more reliable than we are, But none of that matters. The age of it doesn't matter how it got there, when it got there, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is we contributed. The way the environmental laws are written, There's actually a federal legislation that was passed in 1980 that governs this stuff that every state has mimicked called Circla and the way Circla works, you didn't have to do anything wrong. That's not the point. The point is, there's a problem, you contributed to it, even if you did everything on the up and up.
The thing is we don't even know whether we contributed. Just separate facts.
And like I said, I may be jumping at shadows here, Eric. I'm just trying to explain to you that this is not I'd love to nail down that part Whether any of our stuff is actually even there. I hear 55 gallon drums, I hear removal action. Those can actually cost money. It's not as much money as a cleanup but it's gonna come take those transport them to a proper hazardous waste disposal facility and so on and so forth and then there's a bill for that. So anyway just keep an eye on it. I'm not, I'm gonna shut up now. I'm probably going way too far into the weeds on this right now. Hey. You know more about this than I do or apparently anybody. Unfortunately,
this is what I do. This is what I do from the insurance company standpoint. Right? This is I'm a, you know, this is what I handle. These are the claims I hear. And I would have to immediately recruit myself if Travelers was involved at all. But if they're not, then I can at least you know, you got my ear if you need it. Just Then you become the expert Rob.
Yeah I mean I basically just volunteered myself right but keep an eye on it and let me know what's going on. Sure. Okay.
Thank you. I appreciate that. That's it for me. I know I said that once already. You're muted Mark.
Thanks. Thanks, Eric and Rob. It's actually interesting information, but anything else from a liaison standpoint? I know we only have not always formal, but this is good informal reviews as well. Okay, I guess hearing none, our next agenda item is board open discussion. Do we have any open discussion for the board? Do you have any questions or topics?
Eric, could you update the community senior center facility where that committee is at this point?
Not really. They haven't met any time anywhere near recently. You got to get directly with the people on the committee because I don't set agendas or pick meeting dates for that.
Just didn't know if you had any information or something. No,
I don't. I mean, the last Adrian and I reviewed a set of very preliminary feasibility sketches for how you could build a low cost, very versatile building and what the size and cost impacts of that were but the group as a whole hasn't reviewed it and made any kind of decisions on what the next steps are.
Any other questions or open discussion? Hearing none, our next agenda item is 12, open speak I'm sorry, public speak. Do you have any members of the public that would care to speak? I hear none or see none on our attendee list. Okay. Our next item would be adjournment. Anybody want to make a motion to adjourn? I move to adjourn. Robin, pretty reliable that way. Thank you. I'll second. We have a motion to adjourn Thank and Kurt seconds the you. All in favor, raise your hand. Aye. Aye.
Any opposed? Any care to abstain? Okay, then that motion passes. We will adjourn the meeting and just like to wish you all a very happy and safe holiday season. Happy New Year. We probably won't be speaking directly before 2021. I hope 2021 brings us a little more clarity, smoothness and togetherness than we've had in 2020. Let's put it that way.
Thanks Mark. Agree. You as well. Eric, by the way, thanks for all the info tonight. That was a lot.
Yeah, it's good to have those updates and keeping us posted. It's appreciated.
Yeah, no problem. Anything else you want to hear, just let me know. I'll provide what I can.
All right, thank you everybody. Appreciate it. Thank you, Amanda. Thank you. Happy holidays, everyone. Happy holidays.