Meeting transcript
Annual Town Budget Meeting Part 1
May 25, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Twenty one, 7PM. The electors and citizens qualified to vote in town meeting to the town of Andover are hereby notified that the annual budget meeting for the town of Andover will be held at the Andover Elementary School in June 1835 School Road on Tuesday, 05/25/2021 at 7PM for the following purposes. One, to choose a moderator for said meeting, to receive the budget for the fiscal year 07/01/2021 to 06/30/2022 as prepared by the board of finance. Three, to approve budget for the fiscal year 07/01/2021 to 06/30/2022, and four to adjourn. Copies of the budget are available at the town clerk's office, voting by absentee ballot is not permitted for this meeting. We are ready to go. I would ask that to best possible
ability for them and the Board of Finance's job to do to control the finances of the town. So to get going, I'd like to go to item one, choose a moderator for said meeting. Kathy Palazzi. Do we have a second? Yep. Mr. Hansen? Yeah. Okay. Any other nominations? Okay. Wally, all yours.
John, could we dim the lights up front to maybe make it a little easier to see? Got it. Thank you, Okay. I guess the first thing I'd like is, can I have a show of hands to anybody who's here who was not at the last budget meeting? Wow. Okay. That's a lot. Okay. Yeah. Let's see. Well, you missed my story, but that's but you can see it on YouTube, so it's fine. Well, I'd like to welcome you all today. I know a lot of people were frustrated by the fact that we've gone through this already and and the budget was voted down, etcetera. But this is all part of the process, so I appreciate you being here and being involved. What I'm gonna do tonight is an abbreviated version of what I did last week. So I appreciate, you know, appreciate your your patience if you have questions. I'm not gonna go into the same level of detail that I did the last meeting. You know, the the presentation and the video are both up on the town's website.
We'd be happy to answer any specific questions you may have, but I'm not gonna go to the same level of detail as we did previously. Okay. This is our at least the agenda that I'm following in our presentation tonight. We're gonna talk a little bit about the budget process. I'm not gonna go into large detail. Wally already talked about the salient points, I think. What I am gonna focus on is what changed. Okay? What's different from last week or last the budget we voted on last week. Okay? We'll review the expenditures in a kinda high level format, and then we'll talk a little bit about how they've changed. And then we'll talk about revenue, which is the other side of the budget. It's not just about what we're spending, it's about what we're bringing in. We'll do a quick summary, and then we'll have our question and answer period. And then once that's all done, we have the opportunity, if anybody should choose, to make a motion to adjust the budget that we're presenting here tonight, you can make a motion to do so. Not required, and if there are no motions, then we'll go ahead and vote on the budget as it stands now. I'm not gonna read through all these bullet points. Like I said, Paul, I already covered the important things. A couple of things I do wanna point out, you know, we already know that we presented a, first budget in the basics six annual meeting. That budget was passed during that meeting and went to referendum and on the eighteenth it failed. By a significant margin, I think that's important to keep in mind. Okay. With a pretty good turnout. So, May 23 on Sunday, the Board of Finance met again and we revised this budget. So, this budget is different in a couple significant ways. Know, one that we voted on last week
And then, of course, tonight we have our second panel budget. And the way this works is that if we pass a budget here and it goes to vote, which would be in two weeks, I think, and it fails again, we continue this process. Okay? We repeat this until we get another budget. We don't default to anything. It's a the only thing we'll do is as a board of finance, if we can start to get into the next fiscal year, we can authorize expenditures up to this year's level. Okay? But we still have to we still have to find a budget in time. I'm not gonna read this while you already talked about the important point. Here, we can reduce line items, but we can't increase the overall budget. Okay. So this is the important part.
What changed from last meeting and what changed from the budget that you voted on Tuesday last week. The Board of Finance approved a revised recommended budget. You have that or should have gotten it when you came in. It's also on town website. These are the following the following changes are the ones we made. We reduced the AES budget from $4,078,008 to $3,940,008. That was a reduction of $138,000 from the budget that was voted on last week. We also reduced the Town Road capital spending from 300,000 to $275,000, which is a reduction of $25,000. Those are the only two changes that were made in this budget compared to what was voted on this week. Okay. Just to hit the highlights of the budget. For some of you this is gonna be review review, but, for others it may be new, so I'm gonna touch upon highlights without going into a lot of detail. K. The proposals, proposed budget is $12,493,038. Note that this is a decrease in our expenditures. We're actually reducing our town expenditures for this fiscal year. It's $43,338 less than last year for this fiscal year ending in June or reduction of point 34%. The main budget items are sorry. Eric, you're right. Just a little touchy on that. The annual report of education budget, as I stated, we have $3,940,008 in this budget. That's a change over last year of an additional $37,608
or point 96%, so less than a 1% increase. We have the, Hanover Elementary School, the debt service, loan the town took out a while back. That's no change really, but some reduction because there's a the interest dropped. This is the last year we're gonna have to make that payment. That's important. That's really good. It's gonna help us out next year when we have a tough year also. And then we have the RAM expenditures. I've italicized this. The important thing to know about the RAM budget is this is a done deal. We cannot change this. K? It was voted on a few weeks by the three counts to make the the region regional school up, and that passed. So those are our expenditures. Now you'll notice that that $5,119,007.57
It's our largest single line item in the budget. It is a reduction from this year. It's a $108,000 less. That's primarily what's driving us over the overall budget down negative. So it's a minus 2.07 from last year. It doesn't mean that Ram is spending less per pupil. They're actually spending more. The only reason that's going down is that the Andover's share of students at the RAM School is happens to be dropping this year. Okay? We just got it by virtue of the fact that our participation in the district has an overall share and is dropping. So that's our single biggest line item. I think this is some place we really have to pay attention to our spending for next year. There's a limited amount we can do as a town, but we can be vocal, and we can vote. Okay? So something to pay attention to, especially starting next year. And then we have the overall town budget of $3,432,002.73, which is an increase of $28,108 or about point 83%. Again, less than 1% increase overall. Okay. I already talked about the RAM budget levy. This has already been voted on by the voters of the three towns. It passed. It's a done deal. Andover Elementary School budget. So just a couple of points on this one. The Andover Board of Education initially requested a final budget of $4,122,000 to cover their operational and capital components of their budget year in addition to renegotiating contracts. That's an important piece as many of you know, some of you may know, some of you may not, and there's a renegotiated
contract. This happens, what, we in three years probably? Four years? Yeah, thank you. And those costs go up. So the increase actually doesn't even cost that increase in contractual increase cost that they're gonna bear this year. The board of finance voted to reduce this two different phases by a $181,992 to a final recommended budget figure of the $39,940,080. That's what's in this budget. Okay. Town operational budget. This is an overall decrease in the operations for the town. Hold on, please. It'll be very good. From 200 $2,000,005.36 $0.51 to $2,000,004.79 $1.58. So it's a reduction in the town's operational cost of about $56,008.92. Okay? So this doesn't include the capital spending, but only what it takes day to day rely on the cap.
Okay? And this is up for by a couple of factors. It's mostly driven by reduction in salary and benefits. The town combined finance department, the EES school district. Okay? Another thing the reason the town is Lower Island is because the school district is bearing the entire cost of the new financing. So other factors to keep in mind. I wanna be current and point that out. The tax collector was reduced to part time and we combined some these just to kinda clear from billing department administrative functions, senior boarder, and then the board of finance reduced the snow removal budget by $10,000 Sir,
you had a question? Well. New public works supervisor. Election election related expenses increased significantly due to COVID, and I'll also point out that these meetings and these elections aren't free either. So it's the benefit of all of us to try to put this budget and settle it up sooner rather than later. Multiple multiple elections cost a ton of money. Okay. And then they have the account capital budget. This is what we spend on infrastructure, the roads, the equipment, etcetera, long term long term, items. An overall increase in our capital expenditure from $869,001 $1.05 to $954,000.01 $1.09 $54.01 15. It's an increase of $85,000 from last year. Mostly due, as you you can can see here, to the increase of the road and bridge work funds. We all know that needs needs to be done if you've been following along. It's it's
well overdue in a lot of cases. We also increased a little bit to the multi use community center that's also often used, excuse me, referred to as the senior center. Fire department equipment and some public works equipment were part of that as well. And again, there's a lot of detail in the budget. There's more detail in the presentation I gave last time, so feel free to look that up or if you have questions you can ask. This is just a breakout of capital funds, where they're going this year, or this proposed budget, I should say. It's the, community centers funded at 50,000, fire department funded 75, public there's a lot of lot of planning, I think, a lot of thoughts about how we can track your debt. Okay. So here's the other side of the budget. First of all, we have expenditures, then we have revenue. And it's important to understand this because at the very first, I showed you how the actual town budget is going down. We're actually spending less next fiscal year. Well, if that's the case, then why are our taxes going up? Well it's because there's less revenue, so it's important to see why. Our town revenue comes from a couple different sources, state funding, primarily cost sharing grant, that's ECS, you'll sometimes hear people call out ECS in meetings, that's what they're talking about. That's the funds that the state gives us for our education. Fees for services such as the transfer station, building fees, building credit cards, things like that also play with revenue. We also have an unexpected fund balance. You can think about this as our savings bank, our contingency fund. This is our emergency fund.
Okay? Sometimes in the past, we've had what would generally be considered an excess in the unexpended fund balance. Because we, you know, in many people's people's opinions, we underspent, and we didn't put that money towards some of the infrastructure that could have been. But anyway, that causes some problems, potentially financially, puts a little bit of a target on your back from the perspective of the state. So it's important to keep that at a percentage about 10% of our overall growth. We'll talk a little bit how this affects the budget in a minute. Okay. I'm not gonna go into this detail too much. It is on the revenue tab part of your of the budget that you have most of this. But it's important things to notice the difference. So the difference this year versus last year is give negative number there about $68,000 of educational cost sharing. The state revised the formula that it uses to calculate what each town gets for educational cost sharing grant, and we're getting about $68.00 less next year than we got this year. And I think we're gonna take even more of it yet to follow. Okay? It just it is what it is unless the state legislature decides to make some changes. To what I want, three or four towns that actually got reduction. They get all that. Disappointing. There are a few increases to our revenue stream, slight increase in transfer station fees, and we changed the way we structured the building department fees to kinda be more in line with what a lot of the surrounding towns do. And that'll that'll result in some net increase of about 25,000
in our revenue next year. But this is the big difference down here. It's bottom line. The past two years, the board of selected the board of finance in town has decided to use some of that excess unexpended fund balance to offset tax increases. K? We dipped in our savings to the point where we thought it was responsible to do so. Two years ago, it was almost a million dollars. Last year, $780,000. This year, all we've got to use is about $250,000. So we've been dipping into our CNH, our contingency pot, to a prudent level in order to offset any tax increases and and do some of the work that we know we need to do in town, the tree work, the road work, etcetera. The important thing to remember is that's gone. We do not have excess funds that we can tap into next year. So that's gonna put a little bit more burden on us. So that difference is about $530,000 that we're not able to tap into our savings to use to operate the town. Okay. So this is the summary. It kinda gives you the overall picture of those book expenditures and the revenue side we just talked about.
Again, Hanover Elementary, increasing the cost from this last year by $37,006.00 8 for about 1% increase. Pet service goes down a little bit, not a big impact. The RAM budget also goes down. That is a big impact. Unfortunately, that's worked out for us this year. It may not work out for us so much in the past or in the future, but keep our eyes on that. The town of Andover overall, including capital expenditure increases, we had about $28,107 debt increase, which is a little less than 1% increase in our overall spending in the town. And then the fund balance, of course, we just talked about were 530,000 less than we're able to apply this year. So it's about a almost a 70% decrease. We're able to we're able to use that money to offset last year, not so much this year. Probably gonna be done. The total amount by taxation, when you take the expenditures and then you subtract the revenues, the total amount by taxation that we're gonna have to raise in this budget is $9,873,033.
That's an increase of about $463,000 or about a 4.9% overall increase. Okay. This is kind of where the rubber hits the road for most of us who own property in town and cars and whatnot. So what's the rate calculation? So the mill rate is based on your assessed value. Look up on how to calculate it. But just kinda going through it, get down to the point where I just talked about. The monthly duration of taxes is 9,773,000. The estimated taxable grand list, this is the estimated value of the property in town. It's 271,445,600. It went up this year, a good chunk. A lot of that is driven apparently by car purchases or cars in town. Right, Eric? A lot of it. Yep. Yep. Okay. So what you do is divide that to come up with your bill rate, 1,000. There's 271,446 with 1 mil for the town. So the estimated bill rate that we have to do when you divide that by the taxation, we have to assess based on property taxes, it's 36.37. Okay? Last year was 35.61. That's a 2.14% increase in the bill rate. Okay. So this is just a summary. Total taxation is affected by the total budget offset by revenue and money allocated from the unexpected fund balance, which we're still able to do this year, unfortunately. The recommended recommended comp budget is $12,483,038. Calculated mill rate is 36.37. Not sure I updated that. To to provide an example for those of you who own homes in Nando, a house with a fair market value of about $200,000, not the assessed value, but the fair market value, would pay about $5,092 in taxes. So this budget represents an increase
of about a $107 on that example for the current year. That kind of puts that in perspective. Okay. So that's the end of the presentation. Again, this is more abbreviated. Abbreviated. I didn't get to talk as much or as much as I did in the last meeting. But there is the opportunity to ask questions, make comments. I'm gonna hand the microphone back to Wally, and he'll continue with me. Before I give up the microphone though, I just wanna recognize David Hewitt, a member of the board of finance. This is his last part of the term. He's been on the board of finance for two
So the board of that's not my salary increase. The board of selectmen made a decision to be more transparent that they would instead of lumping all employees into one benefits pool, they would break out and put the cost of health care and insurance and retirement in each budget. So that represents for the administrator's account, which is myself and my admin assistant, the total cost of benefits for the two of us. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Anyone else wants to speak? John?
Hi. I'm Tom. First of all, kudos to our board of finance for bringing some more palatable budget. It was defeated obviously because more of its spending was a little more than we thought we could afford. I would also like to call out our first selectman for his claim that we are historically stingy. I've been in this town a long time. We've supported every major school project, multimillion dollar RAM project, and every project we've done here at the elementary school along with volunteer firemen. So I think in general, Amdolord has spent perhaps, freely, but we spend wisely. So my question to our board of finance chair is it capital projects. We have financed schools for many years. Why can't we continue to finance our community center and bring that to a vote? We have one more payment on our own after school. We talked about this a couple weeks ago.
And I was hoping that perhaps we can get a referendum question to to address that issue.
Yeah. So I think that what you're asking, Don, is have we looked at borrowing to finance the community center? And the answer is yes. We have looked at it, and we haven't looked at it closely on the board of finance. I know Adrian's been talking to some other just looking at some venues. Do you wanna address that real So quick?
Dom, we've been really thinking about this and not just the community center, but also the the amount of roadwork that we have is a little daunting. We have approached about four different banks and spoke with them. And the feedback that we're getting is, specifically to the community center and some of the other projects, is that we don't have enough to bond to offset the costs the way the state structures bonding. So in other words, we would have to borrow a lot of money, more than we actually need really, or can manage in the correct amount of time. Because once you borrow the money, you have a certain amount of time to spend and restart the projects.
Specifically with the community center, I'll address, we have a couple different ideas about how we may be able to do that. A lot of it depends on right now, we've worked up a set of drawings. We have it right now out with an engineer trying to get the site shot so we can take the plans and have them imposed on a site plan, and get that sent out to RFP so we can get some numbers back as to what it's going to cost to build them. If the numbers come back where we hope they're going be, where we think they're going to be, it'll be just under 1,000,000. We have, give or take, half of that put away, which would leave us, give or take, 500,000. At our current mill rate, we have a couple different options. We can come back to the town and say, we'd like 1 mil per year for two years, specifically separated out on your tax bill that says this is to pay for the community center, and then it would be paid for. The other option is to
we can actually spread that out a little longer if we needed to. We can actually borrow the money from ourselves according to an auditor, because it's 500,000, and we have enough money in reserve that we could do that, and then pay that back over a little longer period of time if we're in a financial position that we feel that a mill is not gonna be palatable for the townspeople at that point. So we have a couple different options. Does that answer your question? Sure. Sure.
The seniors have been housed for many years Understand. In a dilapidated, mold filled room. It should be just knocked down. They've been kicking kicking it down the street for years now. We don't we don't do that with school projects. They get front front row, and I'd like to see I listen. The senior center and the community center treated the same way. I totally understand the board selected to put together a group.
We put together a site options and we decided on a site. We're now trying to move that forward. Hopefully, we'll have all of our stuff back and ready for budget next year so that we can come to you and say, okay, it's ready. This is what it's gonna cost. Can we do this? And and I'd love to move it faster than that, but, you know The seniors
in this town, the people who've lived here for many years have been very supportive of the school projects. So we're hopeful that the parents and the people that haven't been here quite as long will treat us the same way. Thank you. Who else would like to speak? Yes, ma'am. Yes.
I I would like to see once an audit is completed that we know how much from that year's audit actually goes into the contingency fund. I think that would be very interesting for all of us to see how much money is put into that fund every year because we've already paid taxes on money that isn't being used. I'd be very interested in it. My question is, you mentioned that you decreased the Board of Education budget and I believe you said it was the Board of Finance that decreased the Board of Education budget by 180,000. Was there any input from the Board of Education
Okay, so two questions. So I think the first question, Sherry or something can correct me for a while, but over the last few years, there hasn't been any money put into the, into the, continue or to the unexpended fund balance. In fact, we've been taking it out. So for three years On
upon audits, once our our fiscal audits are done, we we haven't had overages. So we haven't. We haven't had returns to the We've had overages,
it is in the town. If you go and look at the town if if you look at the town audits,
it actually is listed in the town audit. Carol has them you still have them town clerk's office every year when they're done? Okay. So Deb, if you if you reach out to Carol when they're finished and they're signed off, I think we we just kinda got one getting close now. Right? Is that correct, Sherry? Yeah. So last year's will be coming up shortly. That'll be released. Mhmm. And now we have Cherry in place. We're hoping to have these done a little sooner. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to directly use them for budgets because we've had so much turnover in the finance department. So we're trying to address that so we get them sooner. But the two fifty that we used this year, some of that was perspective rollover from last year that we know we had a little bit left over. But like this year, with working with Sherry and Eric being on top of it, we really have been so tight on the town side. We're really not expecting anything. We we had to pay out a lot of money because we had a couple of people that retired,
and that completed some funds. And so there was a lot of shifting this year. But so this year, probably nothing.
But last year there was some, yes. That's what ended up going into the $2.50 this year. Well I just again wanna say that I thank you for using that money because we have already paid taxes on it. And you did mention that it doesn't look good to have more than 10% in reserve. Absolutely.
Yep. And and just see Carol, when that comes out she'll have a copy. Thank you.
So can you just answer the And regarding the second question, yeah, the well, the Board of Finance, you know, we held a lot of meetings. Is it a lot of fair numbers then? Yeah. You know, obviously during those meetings, I think Valerie attended every single one, you know, members of the Board of Education attended every single one, and there was a discussion discussion that went back and forth about, you know, why they felt that they needed to fund at the levels that they had requested, and you know, I think we had a pretty good understanding of what they were trying to accomplish. We did reduce their first request by a small amount, and frankly that failed. That failed the referendum by a pretty wide margin. So when we put the last budget to vote, in coming up with the number that we did here, we did not have a lot of guidance. We we knew that we had some I think it's fair to say we knew we had some ground to make up in terms of that budget in order to get the residents to support it. And so we we had a motion and and and passed to the board of finance. There wasn't a lot of data behind what the impact was there. We tried to find a number that we thought was a compromise between
what we need for the school district and
what the crowd was wanting. So it was just the Board of Finance that made the decision on the reduction? Yeah, by definition it's the Board of Finance. And I think you're right. I think it did fail because of the Board of
That's a really good that's a really good question. And in fact, in our last meeting on Sunday, they made a motion. I think it was a great idea. If we're gonna go to vote on the referendum, we will you ask the board of selection we're gonna ask the board of selection to include four different questions on the referendum. Mhmm. One about alright. I'm ready to deduct that. One about the state trooper. Okay. One about the funding for the schools. One about the town operational budget. And I think the town capital budget. Is that right? Okay. Yeah. Think that's a good idea. Yeah. So so there's four questions. And if it if it's, you know, basically, gaining people's comfort level with the current level of expenditures so we can understand if there is either it fails or even if it passes so we can understand kinda where most of the concern is. Do you know what it cost us to go to referendum
Kelly Allard, 53 Park Orchard Road.
I have a few things that I wanted to discuss.
First, when we talked about the RAM budget already being approved, so the RAM budget went up approximately 2%, and it was approved across the board, really no questions asked. When the discussions were had before that budget, there were discussions about cutting positions, and one specific position was an English teacher at the high school level that they wanted to reduce. And the department had spoke about the need to keep that position to give the students the support they need, and keep smaller classes to give them the critical feedback in order to be successful and to set them up for college. The moment that was heard, it was approved across the board, and that position was held. This past year, RAM has also added additional care support. They've added two full time building subs at the middle school alone. They've added another school psychologist psychologist in the year to help with the problems that are going on with students really struggling this past year through COVID. We have an increase in students with 504s and 90s, and these students are coming from Andover. So I think it's really important to
school
paying the full cost of the finance position at this moment?
Standpoint, it's I also want to point out that, again, it's kind of moving from one spot to the other, so just I made a point to point that out that the salary is currently in the school's budget. But remember, all of the AHM youth services also moved to the town's budget. So
there's actually, there's two positions in the finance office that are both being used by both entities. There's a full time union position that is staffed that goes back and forth, and there is a full time administrative level position that goes back and forth. And one is, by definition of how the contracts were worked out in agreement, one is an employee of the town and one is an employee of the school. So one works, give or take, two days at one and two days at the other, and the other one works three and then one. So that's something that was agreed to. That's how we couldn't have them work for both entities. So the school board took the higher level position because they needed that person more, and we took the lower cost position, but that person is again also working at the school. So like they're doing payroll, they're doing API, they're doing billing for kindergarten, all that other stuff, whereas the higher level person is doing budget work and grant work and that type of stuff. And so it's actually split. We actually took another look at the contract. And again, it was always agreed that if the person ends up working more for the town than was originally projected, then we'll end up paying more. If they end up working more for the school in either position, then we'll balance that out. Okay. So we're still sorting that. Know, we're lucky to have, you know, Sharon here tonight. She's actually the administrator position,
and Marina is is doing the the union position. So it's not if it's something that we need to address because of the split, then we'll do that. Okay.
A couple bare bones into investing and to get through each day with the limited supports that they have to provide to these students. And knowing this, there are families in town that are looking at magnet schools. What happens if we have three core students that August tell us that they're
Where is that money gonna come from? So these are things that I realized that looking at it is why we have, why we claim more, but these are things that really need to be looked at, not just
across the board, but I think people in the community need to be aware of these things as well.
Hi, my name is Kate Greenhouse, 155 Beaver Grove. So kind of going off of what Kelly said, I guess we've been here for six years and we haven't really seen a tax increase. I don't understand why it has to be such a fight to increase our taxes by a small amount. I personally don't understand why we haven't already built a community center. Like, I would pay another thousand dollars a year myself for that to be done. So I don't I feel like we're fighting over that doesn't really even affect them that much. So my question off of that is, would it be possible to have available to people when they come to vote on the referendum what their tax increase would actually be based on the budget that is being passed? Because I think people see dollar signs and they don't see actuality. So
I don't think we can put So the town can't provide that information at the referendum. We're happy to put it online. We're happy to allow people outside the 75 foot radius to lobby and to provide information.
But once you get in that I don't feel like providing that information is lobbying one side or Like that's merely making people aware. Yes. They can turn up.
People can come in charge. I mean, we can check with the secretary of state, but as far as I'm concerned, we can't be passing out information at vote. A Once you get to the referendum, once you're within 75 feet, the only thing you the only option you have is to register to vote and vote. You know? I I mean, you know, you can't like, we couldn't provide information on political candidates, for instance, and hand out information, bios on people at an event.
It's kind of the same thing. I don't think it's the same at all with all respect. But, so I guess my other question then is in terms of reducing the school budget, that $137,000 number, like is that for certain things or did you guys just like pick a number out of air and say, we're to bed, deal with this. Like where does that come I don't have an answer to that. My kid isn't in the class of 10. I've got the floor please, thanks. So
it was an estimate of what we thought was a reasonable reduction. And I'm asking where does that number, like what is the reasonable reduction
refer to? It has to be certain things. Look, we didn't get any input from the Board of Education despite a request to understand what various reductions, what it would impact. We requested that. We asked that hey, we take out what's the impact? If we take out a little more, what's the impact? And they didn't feel like they could, or whatever, chose not to give us input on that. So we didn't really have a whole lot to go on.
What we do know So then, so with this vote set referendum, like what what then happens to the Board of Ed? Like how does that change their budget? They just have to deal with it? Exactly. Okay. The charter prevents
the the charter prevents the Board of Finance from doing line item
Right. We don't have I know what what Adrian is saying is that it is not the purview of the Board of Finance to decide how the Board of Education spends its money. All we can do is approve or recommend a certain budget amount which then goes to the town for a vote. The town votes on it, the town then approves the budget, that becomes the budget for the board of education. So, you know, we can't say, you know, you need to move this teacher over here or you need to cut staff, you need to cut your supplies. That's not in the purview of any of the Board of Selection or the Board of Finance, it's solely in the purview of the Board of Education.
So
all we can do is do our best to come up with what we think is a reasonable number. So how is there such a decrease from the budget that tried to go already to get to now? How do you think that both of those are reasonable numbers? I guess that's kind of what I don't understand. Well, where we started
was unacceptable to the voters. And we had an awful lot of people asking for a zero increase button. Awful lot of people asking for a zero increase button. Because we don't know how or if we could spend it. We suspect that we may be able to suspend suspend it, but it's fairly proscribed in the projects that we could spend it on. I don't remember the details right now, but it's like broadband Internet, sewer, public water. It's it's very limited. We can't necessarily go and apply it to our bridges and cullets. We can't we can't build a community center. Okay. We can't offset taxes. That's very explicit. We can't play games. So you can't use the offset taxes either directly or indirectly. Now we think there may be some flexibility there. We're looking for some more guidance. I should probably let Eric address this. I don't know. Eric, do you have anything more to add that I have in a second?
But the long and short of it from the Board of Finance's perspective is that we did not feel it was prudent to include any of that relief money until we knew how, you know, and if we could even spend it. Okay. Well, that would explain why you didn't see it. That's all. Yeah. It's
a it's a good really good question. I think it should be addressed. Sure. That's come up in, you know, both myself and the finance director spent a bunch of time going through. The federal document sent to us is about 170 pages, so it's a lot to wade through. I'm prepared at the next board of selectman meeting to present to them a series of recommendations of possible spending that we can use that money for. So one of the obvious things is stormwater management, because the state defaults to the funding for the EPA Clean Water Act, and one of the things we can use that money for is stormwater, not water courses. So not big culverts, unfortunately, but basins, a lot of drainage work on roads, that is acceptable. Also, that can be applied to mental health that aren't already budgeted, that a possibility. Potentially the repair of the sewer or the septic system here, that's a qualified expense. We can consider the town can consider funding that, which affects the school. You know, there's the other thing we've been contemplating is we have a problem with senior transportation, not enough small vehicles, and keep ending up driving a fairly large bus to take one person to a medical appointment. So one of the things I would like to propose is we spend a portion of that money to purchase a small vehicle, so we're making trips with a small vehicle instead of a bus each time. You know, there are are a range of things we can spend the money on. You know, that's that's ultimately a board of select and board of finance decision, but they're not things that can really be used to off offset the town's budget, which is ultimately the problem.
And the second thing is, yes, it is $319,000, but that comes in at least two fiscal years. So this year, we will see probably half of that, and then probably the rest twelve months later, but possibly as much as twenty four months later depending on what the state decides to do. Because the state can hold on to the second allocation for that for up to twenty four months based on what they're doing. So I'm sorry. Does that answer your question? Absolutely. Absolutely. Sorry. I'm kinda rambling a bit. No. The and the follow-up to that is according to her current, there's 1,800,000,000
in education fee including 1,100,000,000 for k to 12, and I didn't see that ANNOVA got any of those dollars. Can we ask why?
So I think the superintendent is probably far better able to answer that than me.
Can I pull this off? Yep. Okay. Thank you. Actually, I had one other thing I wanted to have to get that done. Yes.
Unfortunately, when they came up with a formula for allocating that very large amount of money, it was based on title one funding, and the title one formula
is not a town formula. It's not even a state formula. It's a federal formula. And we have lost that money as well. So we lost about $16,000 in title one funding for this next year. And since the US Treasury used that formula to determine what people were gonna get, there were five Connecticut towns that got nothing. And trust me, I've been fighting and fighting and fighting. We're still working on that, but it was a formula, and it was a federal formula. So that's why we lost that. Next year then, we will lose title four because we lost title one this year. And the following year, we will lose people that say that there was a refusal
of the board of men and the superintendent to come up with scenarios. And the best example that I can give you is it wasn't a refusal. We answered
This week, I stopped you before you went to the grocery store, and I say, you don't have $200, you have a 150 now.
You look at your list, and I say to you, what are you taking off of it? And you say, well, I don't know. I have to go into the store first. What's on sale? What's buy one get one free? What do I have a coupon for?
And then you say, I don't know what I'm gonna take off, but I know what I can't take off. I can't take off diapers.
We all know we can't take off oily paper. There might not be any in there. We can't take off baby formula. So we know we can't take off, but we don't know until we get in the store what we will change. If we take off milk, we're gonna take off the cereal. I Because on a school budget, the line items are all connected. On a town budget, if you take away from the salt, it doesn't affect the trees. If you cut from the tree fund, it doesn't affect the salt. But all of ours, we did not refuse to give a scenario. We just couldn't. It's gonna take some figuring. It's like going in the grocery store. I figure an apple churn there. How are gonna do it? Maybe there's a gram. Maybe there isn't. We'll figure it out. But we need time
but again, the purpose of this meeting is if you wanna reduce or you don't wanna reduce, and again, to vote whether or not to send this to the right. Someone else have a question? Yes.
To send tonight's budget to referendum. No one, including me, wants to pay more in taxes. But if your personal expenses decreased in the past year? The board of education, after four budget workshops, approved a budget increase of 219,000. On Sunday, two days ago, the board of finances cut of another $138,000 left tonight's budget increase of $37,000, worth 17% of what the board of education approved. That's insulting. Our budget was after four budget workshops at which most of you were not present.
If you had concerns, if you had questions, we've been doing this for four months now.
And I'm not gonna insult you you by by saying saying what what I I said said to to Kelly Kelly Hagerty Hagerty many many years years ago. Ago,
but I will say democracy in action requires your participation. It is very frustrating after four months of work to come here and pass a budget and then have it fail and not have any explanation for why it failed. Our superintendent told us that she anticipated that at the end of our fiscal year on June 30, the board of education would have a surplus in this year's budget of guess what amount? Exactly $138,000. Now, that a $138,000 was not all taxpayer money. 25,000 of that was from grant money that the board and from revenues that the board had taken in unanticipatedly. K? A 113,000 of that was money 30,000 of that 113,000 savings is because of all of the parents in here who transported their kids to and from schools in September, allowing us to do away with one of our four school buses. So thank you, parents. And while tonight's budget has been explained to you as cutting $25,000 from the town's side, that really is not accurate. What in fact it is, is the town cutting $25,000 to reimburse the school for 50% of what the town owes to the school. So the board of finance was very sad. They said, wait a minute. If we're gonna cut the school budget by a 138,000,
we better have something to show on the town side by does not even allow the school to meet our contractual obligations to our teachers and non certified employees. Because as I've explained somewhat, in the last nine months, your board of education has negotiated two union contracts that last the next four years. And as anybody who's done a contract knows, when you do a contract, what happens? You either have to do a cost of living adjustment That's what we did. 75% of the school's budget goes to pay for our staff. Those are fixed costs. Finally, as far as class sizes,
I have reviewed the enrollment reports in Andover Elementary School since since 02/2008. '8. 02/2008. Everybody I've heard so so much of this information. Oh, when my kid went to school here, there were classes of 22, 25. There were. There still are. There still will be next year. However, the average class size in Andover Elementary School since 2008 has been anywhere from 14 to 16. That's it. So please don't get up here and talk about class sizes and when my kid went there. No. If your kid's going to school, I have the enrollment reports right here. Tell me when your kid went to school. I'll tell you exactly what the class size was in that year. I'm very glad you raised three
payer dollars, if did pay the taxes, then eventually are gonna come back to us. But that's $319,000 that the town receives, then it can use flexibly. Flexibility is in this document at least 10 times. And the only criteria as far as taxes is you cannot use the money, and let me quote right here, to offset a reduction in net tax revenue due to a change in law from 03/03/2021 through the last day of the fiscal year in which the funds provided have been spent. This is so a mayor of an elected official can't lower taxes in order to get reelected, for example. We're not facing any tax lowering whatsoever in this town. Therefore, that 03/19 is bulky. And as far as its use, half of it can be used right now. Then we have to reach out to a $159,500 that can be used potentially for the 88,000 thousand in in our our town current budget budget for for AHI, AHM, potentially potentially for for the the residents of a trooper, and even miraculously for your educational expenses. The town could give the school money from that $3.19. Now, we have to wait another twelve months to ask for the use of the other 50%. But if we applied a $159.05 now in May, we could use the other hundred and fifty nine five within the same fiscal year almost.
Right? So we apply for a hundred and fifty nine five now, we use it. And before the end of the next fiscal year, we can use a hundred and fifty nine five again. 181,000 and the town's budget has been cut 25. That's not right. Please vote no on tonight's budget to send a forward to that recommended to tell the board of finance that a $181,000 cut of the budget that was passed by the board of education after its scrutiny and four budget workshops is not accepted. Thank you.
The only thing that I wanna I would suggest that anybody, if you're interested in how the budget numbers would come to, you know, we arrive at these, to review online the former Board of Finance meetings, I think that's really where you see how this happens. You know, I'm not gonna talk about intentions or anything like that, but I think that that's illustrative. If anybody wants to see the documentation of the guidance of the
my house, but it looks a lot higher in in probably around 200. But I'm seeing a thousand dollar increase in my tax over a 107. I disagree with the transparency of the Andover Education Elementary School. I've always supported the fire department, the the roads, bridges, I realized it's time to pick a piper. I would like to propose a decrease of 5% in the Andover Elementary
they can do less or do the same amount with less money. So that's the crux of my question, and I support the motion to reduce the budget by 5%. Thanks.
That support decreasing the Board of Ed budget do it because I understand the parents probably need to hear that. We've been involved in this since January. You know, I sat in these meetings and to bring forward are things that I have said all along. Here we go. We're only speaking to this moment. To this matter. This goes with why they're trying to decrease it. Because there are schools that run for a million dollars less with an elephant in the room of taxes, which nobody wants to go up, but taxes and money continually rise in order to evaporate, especially in the state of Connecticut. To think otherwise is unfortunate, and I would encourage you to vote no for that years. I've only been here for eleven. It means yes to our fire department, our Townsend Bridges, which are in desperate repair, and it means our school. We have to come together and vote, and we have to start to be realistic in what
That is the purview of the board of education. All we have is the bottom line figure of the Ando Elementary School in the town's budget that can be addressed budget?
The board of ed has open meetings. Okay. When they discuss their budget, just like every other board and commission, the meetings are posted. People can attend these meetings and make comments.
More than anybody understands. The other piece of it is for our budget board of education, I would love to see every single one of the people in this room at our meetings providing input to our budget. Because you know what, that's what we want to hear. We want your input. We want you telling us what you like, what you don't like, and what you want us to do. And we also always have openings on Board of Ed. Anybody who wants to join, feel free to apply. I do not have schools in the board, or children in the board of educate, or in school,
but I'm a board member. I also happen to hold a doctoral degree in education, as does our superintendent. We know what's right for the kids, we're doing our best. We apologize if that caused some pain, but we are trying to do what's best for our future. Thank you.
This specific motion, please signify by saying I. I. Those opposed? Okay. You were handed three ballots when you came in the door. The one that's marked ballot number two is the one that's marked for this motion. Ballot number two. Either yes or no, and then your ballots will be picked up, and you're wearing recess till it picked up.