Meeting transcript
Board of Finance Regular Meeting
January 25, 2023 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Whenever you're ready. This meeting is being recorded.
Okay, very good. Thank you, everybody. This is the Town of Andover Board of Finance regular meeting on Wednesday, 01/25/2023. I'll call this meeting to order and will cite the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. The first agenda item is the public speak. Actually, we probably should have had an agenda item. Sorry, missed it to any alterations or additions to the agenda. It's actually not on there, but I think we could technically do it. I don't know if we have any.
We don't have any additions, but what I would like to do is I would like to the move the discussion for the FY twenty twenty one audit up to the next line item so we can hear from Cheryl who is on the call, to so she doesn't have to wait till the end of the meeting to present that. Okay, I think that's probably fine. Yep. Joanne comment.
I'm gonna shut the camera down again. Is, do we have under number four draft budget the RAM Board of Ed presentation? That's not this evening, correct? Correct. No. It's not. I was going to give you
the quickie cliff notes version of it because I did sit down with Eric, Shivshenko yesterday and went over the very first draft that was presented, but he kinda asked me not to share it yet because Ram hasn't actually, like, released it. So even though we've talked about it and I can give you some indication of the bottom line, you know, I don't wanna they don't want that released yet. So we can Okay.
Yeah. I thought I had gone to one of their meetings to listen to something. They started talking about things, but I think it's way early. Like you said, I don't think they had even finalized anything, but Okay, thank you.
Alright, if we have no other agenda items, think we can easily do that. It's not really a change to our agenda, it's just a change in the order. Eric, it looks like Cheryl is the only member of the public we have. Yep.
Cheryl, are you on? Can you hear us? I am. I can hear you. Can you hear me? We certainly can. Lovely. Hello, everyone. Good evening. Hi, Cheryl. Thanks for joining. Hello. Hi. Hello.
Nothing to add as a member of the public, I take it.
I'm the consultant for the twenty one-twenty two audit and setting up your QuickBooks for the future years. Okay,
so very good. Okay. We'll go on to, I guess, Eric, you're saying just go ahead and move Cheryl's presentation right up to the beginning in lieu of your town administrators report at number three? Correct. Okay, we'll go ahead and do that then. So I don't know, Eric, if you need an introduction or just wanna let Cheryl go?
No. Cheryl's our our treasurer. So she's gonna talk about where we are on the audit and budget and bring bring you all up to date.
Good evening, everyone. As an update for you for the current twenty one-twenty two audit. I have received all of the lead sheets from the auditors. What a lead sheet is, is basically their Excel workbook where they like the financial statements to be inputted. Then I will up when I'm finished, I will upload them to the portal, and they will also get copies of the detailed general ledger from Edmunds because that is the financial software that you used to prepare all your bills and things of that nature for the 2122 year. I have taken all of that information in from Edmond and inputted it already into the new QuickBooks Enterprise version, that I was requested, to set up for you. I've also imported or inputted the twenty two-twenty three budget, and through the end of November, all of those expenditures are in there also. One of the things that we need to address, and whether it's tonight or or another night, but I wanna bring it to your attention. In the 2122 fiscal year currently under audit. Previously, you did your budget,
you broke down Social Security and Medicare, health and dental benefits and retirement benefits per each department. So each department has that listed. But when the information from Edmunds was entered into Edmunds, it all went to employee benefits within your admins. So, right now, you guys are showing that you're 337,000 overspent. So, I cannot give that to the auditors in that fashion. So, our two potential options for me to be able to correct that would be A, find out each person's finish up and find out who gets the dental, who gets the pension, make journal entries, remove it from the employee benefits line items, and reclass them to these separate department line items. Or we make a motion to close each department's line item for social med, health and dental, and retirement, and transfer those budgeted amounts to the employee benefits to then clear the overage. Again, it doesn't have to be something necessarily that you decide today, but that's certainly something that's going to have to be determined and decided and voted on prior to my finalizing the financial statements and transferring them to the auditors. You also have several other lines that are overspent also. So, how it works is a line within a department can be overspent as long as the total department
is not overspent. Okay? So, we do have some departments that are overspent in total. And I certainly can do up a report, send that over to Eric with some suggestions on how we can fix that. You have many departments that are under budget. You can certainly utilize funds from the under budget departments. Again, make a line item transfer within the budget to move budgeted amounts from one department to another.
A lot to take in, isn't it? Well, so, Cheryl, we thought at the end of the year we had we had gone through and made all the adjustments to make all budgets either zero or slightly positive. But obviously, we didn't do a we missed a bunch.
Well, necessarily. Just if you if the Board of Finance had a meeting and made those motions, they didn't get inputted into admins. So if someone can provide me with the official document from the Board of Finance, outlining the transfers that were authorized by the Board of Finance. I certainly can update the current QuickBooks file, and then we can certainly revisit it again. But at this point, I don't have any authorized transfers between line items. Not that you didn't do it. I just don't have it.
Okay. Okay. I thought Okay. So, offline, you know, we should You and I should definitely research that and I can, I should be able to get you that information? The other thing I wanted to say is we've gone back and forth as a town about whether we wanted to include the benefits in each department, which is the line for MRF and then the line for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, in health. That was done because the first selectman was insisting he needed to see the kind of true cost of the department. Then, you know, partway through the year, not last year, I think the year before the finance department said, you know, we just can't deal with this. It's too many individual journal entries that get made every single two weeks when we do payroll, you know, you're now adding another X number of journal entries and it's just not working. So, what we kind of agreed to is that we would budget by department, but then once we got into
Edmonds in the actual year, you know, we would budget that way so the powers that be could see what the true costs are by department. But then it was supposed to get into Edmonds all in one lump, so it could be accounted for en masse. So that's actually what we were trying to do. We've clearly failed to do it correctly, Cheryl, I would say. And I guess my question is ultimately, if more than anything else, it's your choice as the Board of Finance, not the Board of Selectmen, how you want to see that presented going forward. I mean, I'm comfortable kind of presenting it two different ways, either presenting like we've done in the past, a separate Excel spreadsheet that has the itemized cost for all the employees, you know, and even let you see it department by department, but then roll everything up into the budget. Right. And the reason you want to see that is you want you also want to, you know, one of the things the Board of Selectmen has to do is they've got to make a decision for all the employees that don't have a contract in our union,
you know, what the raises are each year. And then you as a Board of Finance have to decide what raises or what salary you're going to provide for the elected officials because that by charters your responsibility, not the board of select men's responsibility. So, just, it really depends on how you want to see the data. And I don't care because I'm not the person doing all the bloody journal entries. But I think from a financial standpoint and a management standpoint, it kind of makes more sense to lump all the benefits together in one, you know, one spot in the budget. Cheryl, do you have any? No,
would agree. I mean, while we're working on the budget, excuse me, the twenty three-twenty four budget, it shouldn't be too difficult to set up another tab within the spreadsheet listing out each department, the salaries for the department, and the benefits for each department since that seems to be certainly something that the first selectman or the selectman need to see, including salaries, wages, hourly wages. And then the Board of Finance would have it in order to make their decisions, prior to presenting at the town meeting. But we can link them to the main budget sheet, which is what would be presented to the citizens for a vote.
I just have a question just on this whole thing because I thought Is it okay, Mark? Am I able to ask a Yeah, go ahead, Joanne. Thank you. I was trying to just not interfere with decisions or Eric's view in that. So I thought we had discussed this at length. So Cheryl, I just want to understand our problem. I mean, clearly you said there's overages. Thought that we represented it somewhere, the benefits. And I know Eric's right, and we had talked about the way that both boards would want to see the benefits, like saying knowing what the retirement costs would be to the town for the year. That's why we had it together like the Murph line. And then like even today I had a little time because we got out early because of snow. So I was reviewing everything. So I saw the big lump sums on one of the reports of like the group health benefits or something to that nature. So that's good to see. But you're saying that, can I just understand what wasn't done? The journal entries weren't done or were I glossed right over that. I mean, you're just looking to see how we want it reported. And I know this is on the audit that you were talking, but I guess I just need a little more follow-up to that. Well, it certainly is pertaining to the audit, then we have to make some decisions going forward.
Certainly twenty two-twenty three year, we've already got a past budget. Again, everything is broken out. Each department's benefits are listed within the department, but when the entries are currently being made in Edmunds and now in QuickBooks, they're going to a specific employee benefit line all on its own. It's not being broken down by department. So, that's part of the issue. It's all grouped into one spot and not separately stated in each department. Which is not consistent with the budget. That's correct. Correct. Thank
you for that. You know, it just kind of I know we've discussed it many times in different meetings and just trying to understand what we're right. I know that we have one budget that's operating right now. We're behind, you're fixing our audit that or preparing that. So now we're into the twenty two-twenty three versus getting ready to enter budget season for twenty three-twenty four. So no, I appreciate. Thank you. I'm happy to answer any question that you may have that I can answer.
Eric, can you see any reason why if we decided to continue, it is a lump sum type thing with the breakout on a spreadsheet that conflicts with the budget that was passed by the town? I'm sorry, was that question to me, sir? It was really more of a question for Eric, but if you have any it's kind of a legalistic thing because I think the bottom line ends up being the same, and the intent of the budget is the same. It's just that if we are reporting a different line items, you know, I don't personally guess that there's any issue there, but don't know if Eric or Cheryl, you have a concern about that. We would since the budget for
'twenty one, 'twenty two, and 'twenty two, 'twenty three is stated the same way, each of those employee benefits are currently listed in the department, we will run into the same problem we're having for the twenty one-twenty two and twenty two-twenty three unless we make a motion early or a decision early, and that would be a Board of Finance decision to either transfer the budgeted amounts per department to that one new benefit line. That should take care of it by closing those budgeted amounts per the department and transfer them to the employee benefit lines where the expenditures are currently being reported, that would correct that issue. That would fix that issue. It would no longer be a department reporting. It would be under employee benefits, which lists all the benefits currently that the town pays for employees.
Yeah, so that makes sense. We just treat it as a budget transfer. Yes, budget transfer. Okay. I think Louise had her hand up. Louise, did you have a question?
Yeah, I was just kind of curious if we did it that way. Is there any way to attach to the budget just a little addendum just showing the itemized amounts per department just in case we needed it? Or is it all or one? I think that would be an Eric answer. Offense, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, Eric.
No, I mean, think we could. So, the last year's budgeting, we gave you a separate Excel spreadsheet, which broke out by individual, what the costs were. What we would have to do is we would have to go back and figure out for each of those individuals in prime pay, what we actually changed. And the reason is that, you know, employees come and go, you know, so in some cases where we're making assumptions because we don't actually have the employee yet, what their healthcare status is gonna be. So I think it would be possible to figure out, but I bet it would chew up an awful lot of man hours to do. So, I mean, if it's worth it as an exercise, I would say the town would do it. But I think we're gonna, we're gonna pay for that by not doing some other stuff would be how I would put it. Do you think people will ask about it if it's not there?
I'm just thinking, you know, just ahead, just in case there's questions. If you have to have a total amount in order to do the full transfer into that particular line item, so don't you have to have everything decided upon ahead of time? So,
what we have, Louise, is we have the totals for healthcare that we've paid out and the totals for Murph that we've paid out and the totals for FICA, which is social security plus Medicare. We have all those numbers. So we know what the town has spent total because we can get that very easily from PrimePay. So that's relatively simple. And what we do is every month we put that in the system. So hopefully that's correct. But what unfortunately is not correct is we're not assigning them to each department because to do that, you have to figure out, okay, individual by individual who's in the department, then you have to go into the individual person's prime pay and you have to pull out, you know, basically month by month, how much they made in, know, what did we pay into FICA? What did we pay into Medicare?
What did we pay for that individual in healthcare? So, it's just, it's a lot more work doing it individually. And we tried it, And what happened is the finance department basically said, hey, you know, you're committing us to like an extra 60 or 70 journal entries every month, and we just don't have the bandwidth to do it. So that's why we did it the way we did it. We went back to the town, the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance and said, hey, this just isn't proving practical. Do you mind if we don't actually account for this in, you know, in each department, but we, you know, we essentially treat it as a lump and we do it in mass. And then at the end of the, or at the beginning of each budget, we'll still give you the full employee cost broken down always. So you can see for every employee that gets benefits, exactly what the benefits are, the cost of healthcare, the cost of, you know, MRF, the cost of FICA, the cost of our contribution to their deductible, you know, basically every cost associated with an individual employee,
you know, so you still have that information. We generally don't ever share that information with the public. Usually I email that straight to the board.
Eric, excuse me real quick, because this is jumping on what Louise said too. Obviously, we're going have the lines that show the salaries. We're just talking strictly the benefits here, correct? We're going to have it broken down department by department, the lines that you had, whether it's in supplies, whatever. We're just talking simply benefits, which I'm okay with, but I'd want it by department with salaries because we easily could figure out percentage wise if we needed to as a board or do our own homework to figure out, you know, if I knew the salary amount for the Public Works Department in a lump sum like we presented in the past, I could do the calculation myself and figure out what department wise we're spending? Yes.
Okay, so just so that Louise knows too. Right. And she probably does, but it's just the benefits we're only talking about, which I kind of liked it both ways. But from what Cheryl said tonight, I would go for, you know, we don't want to make more work for that department on a month to month basis. We're just coming out and because I have opinions on the hiring thing too, after listening to some things, I know that's not what we're discussing. But I'm okay with the lump sum of the benefits and keeping it, you know, keeping it easier for the finance person. And then eventually, if we need that on our own, we can do some calculations.
But each department will know how much they're spending on benefits at the end of the year, right? Because don't they have to? Well, it's a salary,
Louise, a total salary and then there's. Sorry, I guess like Eric said, it's on the health benefits, it's an individual thing, whether they have a family plan or, but like to figure out social security or MRF or something like that, we should be able to figure that out. I mean, we
It's a town expense, right, an overall town expense, Eric?
Right. I mean, most of our departments are so small, you can figure out the individual people's salaries from our budget. But I mean, don't go out and tell the public explicitly that a maintainer one makes X number of dollars per year or per hour, generally. If they ask, we provide that because that's a FOIA of all thing. Just like if somebody asks, we provide them the union contracts because again, that those are public documents, but we don't go out of our way to like, we don't generally publish the salary data for all the employees, not that you can't figure out a lot of them from the budget. We usually give those directly to the board of selectmen and board of finance. You know, again, if somebody requests that and it has, they have in the past, then, you know, we supply that. But believe it or not, as soon as you do that, there's a bunch of legal requirements that says you have to notify explicitly every employee that that has taken place. You know, and once you do that, you know, you have to tell them exactly who asked for the information. So, it's kind of a pain in the butt legally. We supply it to the boards, but we don't supply it to the general public is my general statement on that. Okay, thanks.
Okay, any other questions for Cheryl or more that we need to discuss?
Cheryl, are you going to be on the call? Are you on the discussion of the finance person that we're hiring?
Are we just talking audit right now? Are we open? Yes, I was just talking audit, but I'm aware that you have started to advertise. I haven't seen any of the resumes or anything of that nature, but I'm certainly happy to review them if ERIC wants to send them to me. I'm happy to do that, but I have not been asked to provide that service yet. I would be happy to do that and have you review and weigh in on that, Cheryl. I just had a question for Cheryl if I was allowed. That's why I Yeah.
Is that okay, Mark? Yeah, go ahead. So Cheryl, thank you for the info you provided. And it's great that you've got everything to this point. And we're so lucky that you did that hopefully going forward. But I was having a conversation with someone just generally speaking, and I know that the Board of Selectmen, Select talked about at their meeting and they're advertising for a person, a thirty hour per week person, full time person to be this accountant, you know, associate working in the finance office. I'm fine with that. I mean, was on that meeting and, you know, they were because we need to have everything kind of work well this time. But I've had people talk to me on the side, and I've actually had jobs like this myself, that they thought that was a lot of hours for what real, once you get it under control for what needs to be done. And I understand we need to entice people to work that are going to be, you know, good people, get the job going. What would your hourly? What would you think for what you see going forward? I mean, is something like in the vicinity of less hours than that acceptable to you to get what's going to need to be done for that associate?
Well, in essence, you're going to be having and please correct me, Eric, if I'm incorrect here. You're going to have someone who will be providing the day to day activities within the financial system. By that I mean accounts payable, entering in payroll, entering in potentially deposits, things, the town clerk deposit, the tax collector deposits. This person will be doing the day to day bookkeeping entries. Then your treasurer should certainly be the person then that goes in and reconciles all of the bank accounts. Should be a totally separate person from who is providing the day to day bookkeeping, which is why you have a bookkeeper that you're advertising now for, and a treasurer. That treasurer should be the one, in my opinion, reconciling the bank accounts, you're having another higher step, higher qualifications, hopefully, of who can review that work, make any adjustments that are necessary on a monthly basis, not months in advance or months in delay, on a monthly basis, then that person should be able to prepare the financial statements for the auditors. The treasurer,
right? Right. But I can't say at this particular time whether thirty hours is too much or too little. I don't know until you see what that person is capable of. And I don't have an answer. I'm sorry that I find very difficult to
say. Thank you. No, I just wanted your opinion while we had you. Like I'm all for getting the right person. I hope they get a person that just comes in and can give it their all, and that's their job. I've had similar jobs. That's why I asked. I feel like I have a little experience where I did payroll for 800 people. It would be every other Monday. And then you know did accounting and and have various things so. We just want someone I I'm not opposed to the thirty hours and getting the right person. I don't think it should go any higher than thirty hours with a four day week, but no, thank you. That's reason and I know you're going to have a higher level person to come in and do the bank reconciliation at all. Thank you for that. I know that until you people need to be trained, they need to come in and hopefully you know move forward. Thanks.
Absolutely. I'm happy to answer whatever I can and give any guidance that I can.
Sure. One of the things that we've had unsaid at this point, and we got to make a decision fairly quickly, is what do you think a reasonable hourly rate for somebody that's qualified to do a good job of overall bookkeeping for the town? You know responsible for payroll responsible for day to day operations of the department, and then also probably some HR functionality.
Well I had sent you previously the, up the $20.23 Robert Half guide for salaries depending on the qualifications. I'm not quite I don't know what you're asking for, meaning for qualifications for this person. So maybe we can, when we're reviewing the resumes and those other items, we could, kind of go back to that salary guide and see what we feel might be acceptable. I'm assuming thirty hours is not deemed full time. So would this person be getting benefits also?
Thirty hours in Andover is full time. It is full time. Okay. Medical, dental retirement.
Gotcha. So then that means potentially you're gonna have to add in benefits, dental, if they so choose. Does the town compensate employees that do not take the health and dental? We do. Towns do a side pay? We do actually.
Okay. We'll have to, I mean, that would have to be brought into the different scenarios depending on the qualifications of the person and maybe what benefits. You may give them a little bit more an hourly if they're not going to take the benefits, and I'm not trying to say that somebody shouldn't take benefits, but if they have higher qualifications than someone else, it's potentially someplace where you might be able to give them more hourly wage in place of that, depending on your chosen candidate. Yep.
They are union positions too, Eric, right? So I think they they do get compensated quite well if they waive the insurance. I had looked into that. And I just want to make one correction. This is Joanne. Not 800 employees, 150 employees I did payroll for. Sorry, I don't like to say the wrong thing. Thank you. That was good to hear about the wages too. It depends how much responsibility, I guess, the person's gonna have. And I do like the idea too, Eric, because I know how your office runs as far as like that. I think if you did have a thirty hour person putting in a little bit of the HR
for me, you know, for 20 employees or less to take care of those things like filing paperwork, that's a great plan if you can get that to happen. Can I ask a question? Yep, go ahead, though.
So I'm just wondering, obviously this isn't a new position, and I'm sorry for my ignorance, but what do we how many hours does the last person have to work to do the job?
So that's complicated. If you go back Give me a sip, I don't know. No, it's background to have, Bill. So maybe, I'm sure Eric can summarize it for you. If you go back, say three years, what the town had was the town had one employee as a bookkeeper that worked thirty hours a week, and they had one other employee that was acting as the treasurer that also worked about thirty hours a week. And then we attempted to combine and then the school separately had a full time school business manager. And then the town made the decision that they could condense all those positions and end up with basically a 80% finance director and one full time employee doing bookkeeping payroll accounts payable for both the school and the town. And for a whole series of reasons that wasn't successful. But partly it was because we picked the wrong finance director. And so the majority of the work for both positions was kind of ending up on one employee that didn't really necessarily have the training,
probably the capability, but not the training to do a lot of the things she ended up doing. So that was kind of disastrous. And then we split the departments back. We ended up with essentially early on one full time person working forty hours, with no real backup at all, who subsequently quit. And then we convinced that person to come back part time in the evenings and just get us limping along and at least getting, you know, payroll done and accounts, you know, accounts payable done. But unfortunately, there's a lot of things right now that aren't necessarily getting done. Because we're, you know, right now we're staffed at the town level basically at like six hours a week. And we're, you know, we're kind of, yeah, it's a problem. It
sounds like from what you just said, and I'm still ignorant about a lot, a thirty hour a week would definitely be a higher qualified thirty hour work person is what we really not, what we really want, not someone who's under qualified, underpaid, all that good stuff. That could be very costly, would seem like if we got the wrong person again. Going back three years, we paid our bookkeeper about $17
an hour. It was not a particularly competitive salary and we didn't necessarily have a particularly competent person doing that. So we've always struggled to get the salaries high enough to pick off a desirable candidate. You know, that's always the, but small municipalities, you know, have that issue. Thank you.
I just wanted to say, Eric, to be fair in the assessment and you gave like a great overview, two years of the town's time was spent because I went to all the meetings with trying to combine the finance department. I mean, gave a good overview. I mean, so much time and effort and committees and decisions were made because the Board of Selectmen and everyone involved wanted the combined finance And department like you said, I would agree that probably the right person was not chosen. We're not going to talk about personnel. I think there was a whole bunch of time that some efforts could have been made to maybe police that for lack of a better term. You know, like you said, you tend to go to the negative and I just know I see that. So I just kind of want to say that I think there were times we could have caught it and maybe some things could have been talked about with the personnel there. Was all, you know, and so to answer Bill's question because I want him to have a fair assessment too. In my opinion, from what I've seen and all the time I've dedicated to this town in the last three years to go to almost every single meeting, think with the right person, like you said, someone that's highly qualified to do accounting and gets in there every day and does their job because I think the last associate was hired before the finance director who was supposed to do a lot of the work as well. So getting the right person is very key, but I think that thirty hours for our small town and in an office that's open four days
would hopefully get the job done. I don't want to monopolize. I just put a lot of time and effort into this and I have a background in this, but any of the other committee can weigh know, Robert knows the history. There was just a lot of time to combine it to watch it all unfold. You know, it was kind of sad, but we're moving forward, so hopefully we do get the right person.
So Joanne, not to belabor it, thirty hours does seem reasonable to you then or?
I really think, you know, because our town hall is open four days, that would be a full time job, for them. And I recently, I sent all of you the email. Know that the school has hired their own person who also is going to be like a four day week employee, thirty two hours or something like that. Think, yes, I do. I think it's really reasonable with the right person and getting them the accurate training and whatever they need that way. Thank you.
And I would also say on the record, I mean, I was not overly excited when we combined the department. And my problem wasn't the fact that I thought a combined department wouldn't work. It was in large part that I thought we tried to do too much at once. We basically fired all three employees that the town had and the school had hired two new people, changed software, changed card charter accounts, and combined two departments all at the same time. And we totally botched it. And, you know, I think if we'd done it correctly, we'd still be a combined department. And, you know, I take a lot of the blame for that too. I mean, I was definitely part of the, you know, the team responsible for making that work. And clearly it didn't work. On the other hand, given how often towns and schools end up fighting overall manner of things, there's some logic in not having a combined department because a finance director that is beholden
to two organizations that are both feuding has a monumental task on their hands. So that's where we're at. Thanks. Thank you. So can I make a suggestion that the Board of Finance consider formally making a motion to allow Cheryl to take the budgeted amounts in each individual budget that are for retirement benefits and health care benefits and Medicare, Medicaid, FICA basically, and place them all in the 4,117 employee benefits category? In other words, transfer the totals from each of those individual departments into the one overall employee benefits department so that we can clean that up out of the budget.
That's a lot to recite back, but I would make that motion. It won't, if it's ready to make that motion, I would make that motion. Hey Mark, you're muted. Nope. No, can't hear you.
How about now? Yeah, we got you. Change back to my headset. You can hear me? Yeah. Okay. So I was just wondering if it's I couldn't hear you. Now I can hear you. Okay, good. That
I would make that motion along with the motion that Eric just made as far as taking all of the individual departments, employee benefits and combining them, whether it's FICA, MRF, whatever, into one budget. I think it was also mentioned, I think it was Joanne that said something about would there be availability to have a separate spreadsheet somewhere that just showed what those were. So I'm not sure if that's still part of this. Yeah, I think we could request that at any time and it should be available to us. And so I would make the motion that we do put them all in that line item budget, which was what number again, Eric? 4,117, which is titled employee benefits.
So it'd be under employee benefits instead of individual departments. I
will second that motion. Okay, Louise seconds. Thank you. Does anybody have any further comment on that? Okay, hearing none, we'll call for a vote. All those in favor, aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay, the motion passes. Thank you everybody. Thank you.
Very good. So, Eric, I don't think we need Cheryl for anything unless anybody has any other questions they'd like to ask. She can probably get on with her evening. Okay. Thank you very much, Cheryl. Appreciate your time.
I'll meet with Eric and get the other transfers that you, potentially have already made. I'll update the twenty one-twenty two financial statements. I'll make the transfers for the benefits to the, employee benefits line, update all those, and then I will have, new reports over for Eric to review. Great. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I hope you all have a lovely rest of your evening. Thank you. Thanks you all. Bye bye. Bye. Okay, Eric, should we go on to your report?
Sure. So I'm going to give kind of an abridged report. The first thing I put in the packet was the capital fund allocation. And I wanted to see that you guys all to see this early in the process so I could answer any questions you have about this. Gave the same document to the Board of Selectmen, but basically this is going back to 2021 for all the budgeted categories, what we asked for, we got, what we asked for, what we got, so on and so on each year. And then this year, what we're proposing. So none of it should be a real surprise. One of the only things that's going up is the public works capital equipment line. And I propose to put it up just because it seems like in the last three years, across the board, we're paying about 30% more per year than we were for equipment. So, what was $100,000 in the past funded fairly consistently, now has a lot less buying power. So, to keep that roughly similar, that one would have to go to 125,000. The next line item down is fire engine building fund. We've kind of consistently not funded that one the last four years. And part of it has been the requests that they're making right now have been less,
you know, than a $100,000 a year, but the goal had been to put a sock away a bunch of money because the fire department is about to ask for what's called a squad vehicle. And a squad vehicle is a vehicle that is designed to take the place of both a engine, which is a fire truck, which has the pumps on them and about a 700 gallon tank and a lot of hose. And it also has all the equipment that goes on the current heavy rescue vehicle. So, what the fire department long term is trying to do is they're trying to take two really large trucks and combine them into one and replace them with one. So, they are bringing back to CIP this spring or maybe the next CIP meeting for consideration. So, that's the fire engine building fund. There's not a lot of money in it right now.
I don't think I put down the exact actual balance for that. The building maintenance fund, individual buildings often will have their own small maintenance line for just routine maintenance and things of that nature. But when it comes to larger capital maintenance projects, what we've been doing is we've just been funding a certain amount every year. And then as a town, we accomplish as much, we knock off as much of the bigger maintenance problems that we have one at a time. So that fund balance right now is down to about $26,000 At the beginning of the year, after we put the $60,000 in, you know, we had about $100,000 So, we've spent this year closer to $75,000 on that. Now, we're going to get, we have not gotten a refund back for our electric car chargers. So, we're gonna get about $20,000 restored to that. But there are two RFPs that should go out sometime relatively quickly this spring for HVAC upgrades, one in the town hall, one in the fire department. So, we're going to chew up some of that money for that. The other really good news where we don't have to fund any money into the multi use building fund,
because given the budgets that have come back for the community center, we're gonna be able to do that project only spending our ARPA funds. So there's no need to add additional money to that budget. The only other thing we have on the docket right now is repair or correction replacement of the old firehouse with the new senior parking garage. So that will require about $75,000 from the multi use building fund, because we have a $275,000 steep grant, presuming the general public actually allows us, approves that grant at the next public hearing. As far as the Bunker Hill Bridge replacement, we are not going to fund that this year also at all,
and we will not need to fund bridge replacement now anytime probably for at least ten years. And the reason is that we were able to get the town into a place where instead of being 80 funded, both the Bunker Hill and the Long Hill Bridges are 100% funded between state and federal dollars. That overall is about a $1,200,000 savings to the town. So, you know, that's one of my better accomplishments this year by far.
Not to beweaver things, how did we get that? That's awesome news. Like how do we get that done? That's
So what happened is the there were rumors for a while that the state was going to spend some of the investment in Jobs Act money to pay the additional percentage for the federal bridge program. We already had one bridge in the what's called design managed by state program. And what putting it in design managed by state means is that the state picks up the 20% cost, 20% of the cost of the design stage. So, the town doesn't pay any money until actual construction. So I'd already signed one bridge up for that. And we went through the approval process for the second bridge. And we had it basically waiting, you know, already approved at the federal level, literally just sitting on my desk waiting for my signature. And the day they announced that they would open up applications for the 100% funding, You know, just signed my name and, and, you know, emailed it to them, you know, so we got kind of in the first tranche of that, which is good because like for instance, Enfield submitted seven bridges to the program, but we got in first because we'd already had them all federally approved.
So, that's really where we're at in there. Now, there is the next line item is the regular bridge and culvert fund. That funds replacement of smaller culverts. Basically anything that's under 20 feet wide falls under the state local bridge program, which is a 50% match. But you got to wait till they actually do a solicitation. Right now we're preparing solicitations for, or we're preparing applications for two bridges with the town's engineer who's, works for Nathan Jacobson. We have some money in the fund. I have also heard rumors from somebody else that's an engineer that works for that particular program that the state is considering a higher level funding for that program. So we basically have two applications that are pretty close to being ready to go. So if that takes place in the next six months and they announce it, we'll put both bridges in that program immediately. If not, we'll probably put them in during the next solicitation. We have enough money there right now to for our match for one of the bridges, but not both. So if we continue to fund that at $100,000
a year, hopefully, you know, within a couple of years, like if we applied to the for both of them for the solicitation and got both, you know, you can delay your project a couple of years, so we could start one immediately and delay the other one for a couple of years until we had it fully funded. So, that's what we're trying to do. But for the record, we have a total of about nine culverts that we are going to need to replace over the next fifteen years or so. So we're going to have some significant town dollars spent on that. In culvert replacements, you know, the size we're talking about range from probably a low of $250,000 to there are some that will be in 6 to $800,000 range. So our our half shares still a lot of pound dollars. So that's that tree fund you know it's just simply a matter of how much we get done
We've done a really good job the last couple years of bulk tree removal of dead ash, dead oak trees. And it's really paid off in that we're not getting anywhere near the level of storm damage that we got even three years ago before we started kind of really aggressively, you know, cutting trees. I would prefer to fund it at $75,000 but that seems to be something that has gotten cut fairly regularly. Now, the other thing I would say is we have been very successful in partnering with Eversource. And the reason we've gotten so much done is basically we've spent a lot of Everforce's money.
Like the last time we did this last fall, our tree cutting efforts, the town essentially put $50,000 into the pot and Eversource put about $90,000 into the pot. So we actually spent, you know, around $140,000 on tree trimming in Andover with distinctive tree care. And, but we talked to the utility company into doing that. And that was a lot of effort in my part to get that set up. We were the first town they ever tried that with. And the contractor convinced him it would be a great idea. And it would be a lot cheaper for them in the long run. And we talked it up. We got Eversource to agree to it. We did a couple of newscasts on it. So we got them a bunch of good publicity. You know, we make made the CEO, you know, even the CEO of Eversource at the time send me a letter saying basically, this is really cool. And we've been able to do it consistent. So that's another case where we're kind of leveraging our dollars to kind of get a lot done. Roadwork fund is going to be a tough one this year. And I'll tell you why. And the reason is we spent an enormous amount of money last year. And for two things, one, we wanted to reclaim a couple roads, and two, the costs of doing work last year were astronomically high because of the cost of energy. So, what normally what we do is we spend about, between half and two thirds of our budget,
you know, that fall, and we leave half of it for the spring. Because a lot of towns are out of money in spring until their new budget year. So, can usually get a lot done early if we have cash in the bank. But we basically spent down every dime of cash we had, know, with all our funds. And we also to get done what we did, we also held back on a bunch of things we really should do every year. One of them is crack sealing. Another is we've got a lot of priority guardrail replacement we needed to do and line striping and a lot of other things. So with that $330,000 this year, what I'm proposing is that unless we increase that a lot, we're going to tail back on how much actual roadwork we do this year because we know we're going to have a lot of drainage work that we're going to have to pay for and guardrail work and some striping and catch basin cleaning and a lot of the things we put off last year to be able to really push hard on growth. So, you know, we'll get into that a little bit more when we get into budget season, like what our priorities are and why. But I just want to give you a kind of a heads up on that. The town aid road,
those are state dollars given to the town. We got our January allotment. So, have that money. And then ReBAL and POC, the implementation fund. The plan of conservation and development is required to be done every ten years. So we put $5,000 per year into it. I can tell you that we just did an RFP for a consultant to do our next POCD. And the two bids that came in on that were like low 50s and around $70,000 So, putting in 5,000 a year is about right. We may need to add a little bit of extra money to that this year to pay for, you know, because we're gonna have to sign the contract for the POCD probably in the next four or five months, because it typically takes about a year and a half to complete. And we've got to, you know, by law, we've got to complete it by 2025 at some point. And then reval. Reval is done every five years. The last reval was about $80,000 So again, we set aside a little bit of money each year towards reval so that we don't go back to you, you know, every fifth year and say, up this year, we need an extra $80,000 that wasn't budgeted for.
So those are the kind of capital funds. And I just wanted to give that to you so you had a chance to kind of look at that. And I also listed on that form, like what we've done with each of those budgets, you know, in the last year, we've what we've paid for out of, know, kind of town aid road what we paid for out of the town's. Maintenance funds, you get an idea what we're using those you know those permanent funds for. So that's pretty much it on that unless you have I'll certainly answer any questions on that and any general questions if you have.
I have one if that's okay. So if I understood, and this because it's going back to quite some time ago, you were you had a lot to cover. But the multiuse building fund, if I understood you correctly, we're gonna have, like, 400 ish left in that fund once we're done with the old town hall project. Is that correct?
Probably a little bit less than that because the other thing I'm not telling you, well, I am telling you, but I don't really want to tell you. Something I don't want to tell you, I'm just, it irritates me, is that what we didn't anticipate when we went to do the old firehouse is that it is a historic building. Right. Yeah. Remember this. The historic office is gonna get their pound of flesh from us. And I think it's gonna cost us about an extra $35,000 but we're gonna spend it on fixing up the museum, which is also a historic structure to make them happen. So, yes, we're going to spend money, but it's also we're spending money on something we needed to spend money for.
So that will also more than likely come out of the multiuse building fund. So more like $3.65
at the end of the day will be left in that fund. Now that fund has been around a long time. It's been around as long as I've been on the board and was always kind of earmarked for the project that is now going be handled entirely by outside money. So are we thinking that we need to maintain that fund going forward or return that money to the general fund?
Well, that's gonna be a decision that should be made. And I I mean, I will tell you that I think in the back of their heads, what the board of selectman wants to do is use that money for a staff person for the Community Center. For a couple of years, so that doesn't hit the budget right up front once they managed to build it And some of that will probably be put to use furnishing the community center and buying stuff for it. Because what we're what we're going to get out of the ARPA funds is a building. And we're not probably even going to get a building with the downstairs fully furnished. I have no doubt we could spend that entire allotment of money. You know, just finishing off stuff for the community center if we so chose, or you could elect to return it to the general fund. It's really up to you guys.
Yeah. Just speaking out loud, I mean, I think of an employee is an ongoing expense, not a capital expense. And, you know, that's not how I would handle it if I had my druthers. As to furnishing it, okay, that's reasonable. Although I don't know how the heck you spent $350 on furniture for such a small structure. But no, just wanna bring that up as a potential thing that we we as a board should consider what we wanna do with that money. Because I when I was listening to your presentation, it it immediately dawned on me that, you know, hey, we've got a fair bit of change in that account, and it doesn't sound like we're gonna hit all of it. So we should think about that. That's all. Yep. That's a good one to put on the radar screen. Right. Thanks. Joanne?
You're muted. Oh, you got it. I got it and I'm shutting this off. I just wanted to add to Rob. I see Rob's point on that and I know that it's been a discussion that's had in the past. I only I'm not opposed to eventually spending some of that money, you know, or returning it or whatever has to be done. I just feel like we're in an infancy stage of even building the community slash senior center. So before we do any, you know, like like we said, maybe some of it. I hope we wouldn't spend all of it on furniture. I think we could learn to, you know, budget in that sense too. So that's my only thing. My only word of caution is we're just getting going on this project,
So to speak for somebody that's put aside for it for so long for the community to take it away. Know, I just kind of want to have that as a cushion for everything. I it's
probably premature to have too many discussions in general on this. Know, it's good to know and be aware of, but Right. It may be a long way to go before this thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At least. I agree with that. I just think a thing. Put to bed. Yeah.
Right. And the only other one thing I wanted to say, and I have mentioned it to you before is that we've got a grant called the trip grant that we're putting in for right now. That would give the town a pretty big shot of cash If we did get it, would be used for some very significant roadwork affecting Skinner and a little bit of Long Hill and Hendy, the worst parts of Hendy. You know, it's, I think we've got a reasonable shot at it, but I don't want to tell you that we're going to get it. If we did, that would definitely change our priorities for roadwork for the coming year. You know so so that's in the background to. I also wanted to say on the budget I'm I basically have the the budget portions that I have any say over. You know collated and there to Cheryl to Cheryl's going to put it in the full spreadsheet I mean it's in a spreadsheet now but but she had a different format she wanted to put it in. So, you know, we have some significant headwinds we have to deal with. You know, we have a lot of inflationary pressure that the town is facing.
You know, I think I know I have not really talked to Val about any school budgeting thing, but I know their special ed costs are going up very dramatically. I know they just, know, they're going to have an additional two or three special needs kids that that school system is going to deal with next year than they do currently. So that's going to be a big budget adder. Not a lot you can do about that. I don't know whether they have the capability to deal with that internally or whether they're going to be out placed. You know, that's not something I know. And obviously that would have a huge effect on their costs. I did get a preliminary budget report from RAM. RAM is forecasting an overall budget increase of about 4.75%. And remember, that's 4.5%, not on what we're paying this last year, because our budget last year went down because they returned their excess funds. So it's 4.75% on top of what it would have would have paid without that. So that could be, you know, worst case scenario, if our percentage of students remained even relative to the other two towns, that's somewhere around a $300,000 budget increase. So that's the bad news. Here's the good news. You know, we have a the class of seniors from Andover that's graduating from Ram was really is pretty big it's like 44 students in the incoming class that are sixth graders now that are going into the the elementary school is way less. We should actually net somewhere between twenty one and twenty six
less students from Andover going to ramp. And since our cost to Ram is based on the relative enrollment from Andover, presuming the Ram total number of students stays about the same, which is what Ram's predictions are, our share of the levy should go down significantly. So much so that theoretically, you know, we can see a 4 or $500,000 decrease in our total bill to RAM, which would be fantastic if it really came through. What would
that take place, Eric? That would be in the next, the budget we're budgeting for, we're starting to budget for now. So, if we really saw that, we have a reasonable shot at, you know, and it also depends on what the grand list is. If that really comes in where my calculation say it should be, you know we could just about have a. Know, we could conceivably have a zero mill increase, which would be nice because then we pass the budget without, you know, spending six months,
arguing over it. Do we know what the overall enrollment at RAM is gonna be? Because that's gonna be the piece that budget's calculated on the overall.
So from what I've seen that they're presented, they're predicting essentially a flat student population.
So then that would roll into your calculation of the savings for us. Right. We
could have, and if you remember going back like four years ago, I presented to the boards and I said, we're getting screwed this year, because even though Ram's budget went up, you know, 1.2%, you know, we just went from 15% of the levy to now we own 17.5% of the levy. So our costs are going through the roof. You know, basically what happened is the population Marlboro and Hebron started dropping the school age population two to three years before Andover's. So, had this period where our cost structure went through the roof and now that's coming back down. It was down a little bit last year and it looks like it's going to be down significantly this year and next year. So it looks to me like for the next two years, we should hopefully see declining costs for RAM, even though you know their overall costs are going to go up, our cost, our percentage of that cost goes down enough that it reverses. If that happens, you know, overall as a town, think we're going to be in pretty good shape.
It's just good for the town in general. It's a year to year thing with enrollment. They included about ten years of enrollment figures in their budget books So we could all open that up and take a look and they give really good projections there. But then I think with the pandemic, we had such a move to the suburbs and the rural areas that it started going the opposite way instead of decline, decline, decline. But you're right, it's going to depend on enrollment and then we still have to always be mindful of spending too.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm not I'm not saying it gives us carte blanche to spend everything we, you know, to make up for it at the town level.
That would be nice in a time of inflation to be able to hold pretty close to a flat budget. Absolutely. Or at least a flat mill rate. Yeah. Yes.
Because, I mean, we have a lot of things going for us as a town. I mean, the first thing we have going for us is we've been very reticent to take on debt. So, I mean, you know, like once a week, I get a call, a sales call from somebody trying to sell me, you know, software to manage all our bonding and debt. It's the big new thing in municipal you know, like separate bonding and debt management and I'm like we don't have it they're like no. Don't have not I said no, we have zero our debt is zero And they just, that's unheard of for a municipality. You know, we will take on a little bit of debt when we do the public works truck. But, you know, I mean, a town our size with our credit rating, could bond thirty or thirty five million dollars and they would happily give us the money. To put it in perspective, you know, so zero is a lot better than, you know, dollars 35,000,000. You know so that that's all I wanted to really say, I mean you know what what I'm not going to have for you. When we get so so that you know, in about a week less than a week I give the budget to the Board of Selectmen. They have about a month to chew through it and make big picture recommendations. And then it's in your hands for the month of March and the month of April before it goes to the public. So, you know, you ought to start thinking about scheduling for March and April when you want to have all your budget meetings
and how many you want to have. And then at the same time, you know, I kind of keep my eye on where the state budget goes, because the governor has not announced what his budget request is yet. And the, it's, we're in the every two year cycle. That, you know, basically the state every two years puts out a two year budget. And then, so the next year, you already know basically unless the legislature changes something midstream, what all your funding numbers are going to be. So, this point, none of those funding numbers are really declared. So, you know, we have basically 2 and a half million dollars in state funding in some form or another, we really have no idea what we're going to get. Now we can guess they're going to give us about the same as they gave us the year before, but we really have no idea. And we're probably not going to know till May anyway about the time we're trying to pass a budget in public. Because they go into deliberations now, they have an all the state budget and argue over for the next three months, and then hopefully they finally pass a state budget which affects us. So Joanne, do you have a question?
Eric brought up us thinking about the meetings that we want to have for the budget going forward. Can we all email you or think about it or you know? Yeah, Calendars and do it, you know, decide for February meeting
instead of tonight. I think that might be a good idea. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, it's a little bit premature. We had a fairly aggressive budget meeting schedule last year in the sense that we were setting up some meetings every week in some cases. And it seems like a lot, but frankly, we didn't hold all of them. But I think that it does benefit us to stay on top of it early. But it doesn't benefit us to do too much too early in the process because there's too many moving pieces. But I think we do want to start, as Eric said, planning for it and understanding kind of what cadence we want to meet at. I think absolutely people have preferences. I mean, we'll try to keep things off the weekends as much as possible. Wednesday seems to work well for people, so maybe we do some filler meetings and then we'll work that through. Unfortunately, it conflicts with some of the Board of Ed meetings and other things. But yeah, I think if people have thoughts or preferences, certainly email it and
file them. Yeah, if we could decide by next meeting. I know we did it fairly, like you said, I think starting in March, we had almost weekly meetings because then we had materials to really look Yeah, I felt like at the beginning I was ready to go, but really it was so many moving parts that we really couldn't. And Eric's already been previewing, giving us a lot of information. So we're almost ahead of the game with what he provided tonight. But no, thank you. Yeah, if we can make that decision next month, if we all see the calendars, that would be great. Yeah, think so. Give us a chance to look at it. Right. And and the other thing, you know, you gotta keep in mind is I'm gonna give the board of selectmen
a budget, you know, and but there's an awful lot of things where I'm just giving them what I think is my best guess because it's a shared service and like Bolton has their board of selectmen has to determine. You know what they're offering their employees and that affects because we use, we have a shared service for building official so then that trickles down into what we pay and like nee cog animal control services. None of those have determined their budgets yet. You know, a large fraction of our budget. Yeah. Using estimated numbers. Yeah. Right. Right. And I try to call them all and feel them out roughly where they're going. And some of them, you know, don't even want to give you a hedge number and other people will tell you, you know, like, for instance, I know from insurance
because oh. I'll talk about this in a sec. With insurance our insurance carrier based on our track record, sign essentially three year agreements with the towns and those agreements cap the rate increase that they could potentially offer the town. Like for instance, I know worst case scenario by contract, the most they can increase our insurance rates is about 5% for liability and 3% for workers comp. Now I think they're going to be considerably under that, but so in this case I budget for what the maximum is they can charge So, and there's a lot of things like that too. You know, when some things I've requested from the state again, what their estimation will be for the cost for the resident state trooper.
I almost don't know why I bother because it never bears any correlation to the bill we actually get. So it's kind of like this vague pencil exercise, you know, but I will supply that. So I guess my question to you also is when do you want to start getting all the ancillary notes. You know, on things that go into the budget, and do you want that do you not want any of that and told the board of select men formally hands you the budget or are there specific things you want to talk about and think about ahead of time. Like, for instance, you know, one of your tasks is you by by charter determine the salary for elected officials. Could certainly give you right now, all the current salaries for all the current elected officials are and what they've requested. So you could have that now. You know, or you could wait or, you know, so I guess you got to kind of tell me what you want to do with that. Joanne?
I just think Eric just from watching the process the last few years. I appreciate you being so forthcoming and helping us in any way that you can, but I think just January. I think it's a little premature. I think you should go one cycle because it's going to change. There's going to be a lot of debate back and forth and like the stuff you gave us tonight on your capital improvements and all of that, us being able to discuss a few things, because clearly it's going to come down when we get it all. We all know it's going to come down to your total, the percentage up and also in my opinion, and definitely Mark you all of your experience. Everyone else on the board. I just think it's a little premature because we're kind of thinking about things that we really don't have any control of right now. I mean, clearly it wasn't in last year. Things went up a lot in the town due to a lot of factors. Okay, this is my opinion based on the re now, then all of a sudden now properties are going down so people feel the pinch there. So you know a lot of things got passed last year or whatever. So again, to me it's just a little premature. Maybe next month we might feel differently, but that's just my Yeah, I
tend to agree with Joanne. I think that we're gonna have to jump right into it when we have the budget from the Board of Selectmen. We certainly have the option to review the Board of Selectmen's discussions during their meetings if we want to have some information and see that sausage being made, if you will. So we kind of, have that option as well. I, you know, I don't see a lot of value in having a lot of details or having much to us before we, we have the bigger picture. Anybody want to offer a different opinion or comment? Okay. All right. So hopefully that provides guidance, Eric.
Yep. Okay. And then the only other thing I wanted to talk about is where are we on the current year's budget? How are we doing on spending? And the answer is on spending, we're doing very well overall. So, I have no doubt that we are going to come in under what we budgeted for spending. We're also, I think, to come in under what we anticipated in the revenue. The two right now that are looking really light are the fees generated by the town clerk's office. And that is largely, the largest part of that is driven by essentially
home sales. And as the interest rates went up, that went off a cliff. We had predicted based on data we had this time last year that we would generate around $85,000 in town clerk's fees. And I think a better figure for this year is probably going to be somewhere around $55,000 to $60,000 So, I think we're going to be about $25,000 short in income based on what we predicted for clerk fees. The other thing we're going to be short on is rental income for two things. One, the board has kind of agreed that we're getting, the town was getting the money from the cool program rental of the school. But everybody pretty much said, wait, it's the school, and it's the school janitors that have to clean up for them. And they've got to deal with them. Why is the town getting the money? And the answer is because they kept sending us the check and, you know, we cashed it and budgeted for it. So, we're not going to get that. And FC North made a choice in the fall not to sign a contract for use of the Long Hill Ball Field. There's a pretty good chance they're going to sign a contract with us this spring. You know, basically the town wanted them to assume a higher fraction of the total maintenance cost of the field in exchange for using it. That negotiation is going on right now, but I'm guessing we're going to be somewhere, depending on whether we sign a contract or not, we're either going to be about $8,000
light on that account or we're going to be about $3,500 light on that account. So, you know, in building and land use fees, building has also slowed down a little bit. So, our land use and building department fees are down compared to the year before. That looks like it's going to be 6 or 7,000 under what we predicted. So, the long and the short of it is we're looking at probably a $40,000 between 40,050 thousand dollars and we're only halfway through the year, so it's hard to predict any closer than that, you know, in total revenues on the budget. So that's kind of where we're at right now.
Eric, I think, you know, I know that was one of Diane's keys last year. Mark will remember that she was really big on trying to get the revenue correct and I understand why it happened like you said. So that's gonna be another factor with the budget, Going forward because I don't think we're going to come out of this housing thing anytime soon with the way they keep raising the Feds keep raising the rates. So I don't think our sales are going to boom and I definitely don't think our bill, know. So that's just going to affect us in the budget as well.
Yeah, mean, we're definitely we're going to project and assume we're going to make about $40,000 between 40,000 and $50,000 less next year compared to this year. Sure. You know, that doesn't include anything from the state because that we just, we have no way of knowing at this Yeah. Thank you.
Other questions for Eric in his presentation? Okay. Hearing none, I guess we'll move on. I just want add one thing relative to the RAM Board of Ed presentation, which was one of the agenda items tonight. Joanne is aware of it, but the rest of you weren't copied. But the RAM superintendent will be making a presentation to the board on March 22, to our March meeting. So he'll discuss it at that time. For your information on that one. Eric, anything else to add? Current status of the staff search? I think we kind of covered that earlier, but I don't know if you have anything more to add to that. We've started to get a bunch of resumes in, I'm about to hopefully in the next day, either tomorrow or Friday collate, well, not Friday, annual conference.
I'm hoping to collate all those and get them out. Again, I do think we're probably looking at an interview panel that's probably only three people given what it is. If the Board of Finance wanted to designate somebody to be their rep, since this is a finance position, that would probably be appropriate. I'm sure the Board of Selectmen will want to have one person on the interviews and we will also send them all to Cheryl to review. I don't know at this point whether Cheryl will be here when, you know, the interviews take place. She's got some family issues and she's been kind of bouncing back and forth between Connecticut and Florida right now. So, but if she's around, I'd love to have her in on the interviews because,
you know. Maybe even a Zoom meeting or something, you know? Yep. Yep. Joanne, did you raise your hand?
Depending on how the committee goes and what's decided, would volunteer to sit on that. I would love to be a part of it with my background and knowledge and looking at the candidates, but totally up to how Eric chooses or whatever the committee consists of, but I would, I'd love to be a part of that. Yeah, think it would be my choice. If the board wants to nominate
somebody, you tell me who you want to be, And then, you know, I will make sure they're part of the process.
Yeah. Is anybody else interested in being on that, on that interview committee? Linda, are you raising your hand? No. Okay. Pet management, I get it. Okay. Well, I guess if nobody else is volunteering to be part of the interview committee, then Joanne, I guess you're going to be it by default if we could take a motion and vote on it. But I don't know that we really need to do that. I think we could always have another member of the board sit down on it if they also chose. I feel so supported. Thank you all. Yes. All this time. Yeah.
It reminds me of the old joke where everybody lines up and they said, okay, any volunteer step forward and everybody else steps back and you're the only one standing there. Thank you for volunteering. I do think it's important that we have somebody from the Board of Finance and certainly if you have the time and interest that's fantastic.
I'll make the time like I do. Time is definitely something that I'm always tight on, but I think it's brilliant. It's been a lot of years I'm happy to make the time for that. I'll take vacation time, whatever I need to do for work to be part of that. Okay, great.
Yep. And after the first week in April, would probably be a little more available, but not until then. I would tend to let you take the lead on that one. Okay. Anything else for Eric in terms of the budget or the finance department? Hearing Okay. Nothing. So I guess the next agenda item is six, this is new business. We don't actually have anything on here and we didn't have a thing to adjust the agenda, but I guess it'd just be an appropriate place to mention or discuss the open position on the Board of Finance with Kurt's resignation. I think we just talk about it at this point. We could decide how we want to proceed. So I had sent an email to all of you just kind of notifying you of that. And I think you all were copied originally from Carol Lee's
forwarding of his resignation letter. I did reach out to Ashley, who had been our other candidate when we brought Bill DeRoche's on to the board. She seemed very interested and I thought would have been a good candidate. I have not heard back from her. So I sent her an email a few days ago. I followed up with a phone call really just early evening to see if I might be able to catch her. Did find in one of her letters that she had left a phone number. I left a message, but I haven't heard back from her. So Eric and I had talked about this
upon learning that Kurt was going to resign. Eric felt that since we had just recently gone through the process of soliciting candidates through several weeks of advertising, etcetera, that we probably didn't need to do that. Again, I think I felt similarly, but if Ashley's not interested, then clearly we're going to have to solicit for another board member one way or the other. So does anybody have any comments or input on that? I'll just say I'll reach out to her too
because I was sort of somewhat involved in her original interests. So I'll check-in and see if I can get a response, Mark. I don't know if she's just traveling for business or whatever, but, you know, snowed under at work or what have you, but I'll just try and get a response because, yeah, she seemed quite interested and it wasn't that long ago. If she's a no go, then I agree. We kind of have to
start from scratch. Yeah. And we'll probably need to do it sooner rather than later. I mean, we've got a budget season coming up, so it'd be great to have somebody on board prior to the real work that should be done.
I agree with I was hoping that she would be an easy fit because we did just do this. You know, when and Bill and Ashley were very qualified. So I'd be in favor of just moving to bring her on if if she's so see, you know, she might have had a change of heart afterwards after listening. But, you know if I would hope it would go that way and if not, we'll have to reopen the process and I just want to say that. So sad, sorry that we're going to be missing Kurt and that you know I want to check myself here, but you know really appreciated serving on the board with him and all his knowledge and experience and and wisdom and a few phone calls that we shared. Know always a willing person to give to give information.
Yeah, he's given a lot to the town, you know, didn't involve It's, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. So definitely thank him for his service and, you know, hopefully we'll hear from him and get get updates and check-in and hopefully he'll be there for advice and stuff in the future. Do we have any other new business anybody would want to bring before the Board? Okay, I guess we'll move on to agenda item seven, which is approval of the meeting management 12/14/2022. I don't know if you've had a chance to review them. So Bill, this was the meeting when we brought you on board. You weren't technically a board member, so you probably should abstain from the vote on this one.
Anybody want to make the motion to adopt the meeting minutes or approve the meeting minutes from that meeting?
I'll go ahead and make the motion to approve the meeting minutes from our special meeting or our December 14 special meeting minutes as presented to us. Any
second? I'll second that. Louise seconds, thank you. Any discussion? Okay, looked correct to me. Okay, All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Bill, you're going to abstain? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Just want to make it official. Okay. So the meeting minutes are approved. Thank you. And we'll move on to agenda item eight, liaison reports. Is there anything that any of the other, from the other committees or, boards that anybody wants to report in?
Mark, before we get to that, did anybody have any questions on any of the financial stuff that was in the packet or any concerns with that?
Oh, I looked through it, but not in super detail.
Cheryl did suggest that in most of the towns she works with, it's a normal process to, give the bank statement every month to the board. So I included that this month. I saw that. Yeah. If you want to see that every month, we can certainly put it out. If it's not something you wanna necessarily see every month, you don't have to. So, that that's really your choice, but Cheryl suggested I share that.
You know to me it's just one more piece of data it's not a large thing we have to go through it's just another check and balance I'd be in favor of including it. Okay so noted. Anyone else? Sounds good. All
right. So I didn't hear any liaison reports. Do we have any other board open discussion items? I'm all set.
Okay. Hearing none, we'll go on to second to last item on the list, which is public speak. I don't see any members of the public on the call or on the meeting. Eric, confirm. That's correct. The only other non board member is myself and CBC. CBC. CBC is recording it. Yep. Okay. Very good. So we'll move on to item 11, which is the adjournment. Anybody like to make a motion to adjourn? Make Bill will make a motion to adjourn.
I think I saw your hand up first, Bill makes a motion to adjourn. Anyone want a second? I'll second. Linda seconds, thank you. Any discussion? Okay, all those in favor, aye. Aye. Any opposed? No abstentions? Thank you very much, everybody. This concludes our meeting. You all take care of yourselves.