Meeting transcript
Regular Board of Selectmen Meeting
April 13, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
I am here. Okay. Let's get started. All right. We're gonna call to order. We're gonna skip the Pledge of Allegiance unless anyone has objections to that. Okay. Let's move to public speak. As I said earlier, residents who would like to participate should have emailed or chatted with Paula or Amanda. So, Paula, you can take control of public speak now.
Okay. So any residents that want to participate in public speak? I saw a lot of people putting in their name and their address for the record. But if you could also type in your name now if you want to say something and we'll unmute you. You're going to go down to the bottom of your screen and find the chat. If I unmute everyone, we'll get some really bad feedback. Or we can I can try and go through each person and ask them if the board's okay with that or I don't know what you think?
Well listen if they would like to speak we try to make this as easy as possible sometimes it's not easy so
I'm just not sure everybody who's on a phone has the ability to do the Zoom group chat.
We have we have 16 people that are non video. So I want
you to unmute them and see if anybody pipes up. Should we assume that everyone who typed into the chat wants to participate in public speak and start from the top?
Why don't I'm gonna make a suggestion. I'm just gonna go down the list and ask them if they want to say something. I'll unmute them and they can say yes or no. I think that's going to be the That's fine. Let's go. All right. Chief Mike, you are unmuted. Do you want to say anything?
No, I'm just listening in. If anybody has any questions regarding the fire department, am here for that reason.
Okay, thank you. Okay, next person on the list. I have 8602070092. You're unmuted.
Paula? I don't know that we should be reciting people's phone numbers out. Okay.
That's too late. That's okay. No, I'm just listening. Thank you. Well, they're also on the screen, but good point.
Paula, why you unmute everyone all at once? Let's deal with the feedback and see if someone wants to talk. Okay. Here we go. Everyone is unmuted. Does anyone want to participate in public speak?
Hi. This is Elaine Bookart, 874 E Street in Andover.
I just wanted to do a shout out that the CERT team has been doing a bang up job taking care of food pantry and then food share every other Wednesday and then making sure that things are delivered to people who can't get out of the house, who just don't have transportation or anybody to help them. We've also had a service where people can call and on Sunday through Tuesday and put in an order for Ted's Market and they would go ahead and fulfill the order on a certain on Saturday afternoon, we'd go ahead and deliver it to people. And that's where people are paying for the groceries but they're getting the service for free. But I just wanna say things seem to be going really well and keeping people not so stressed about getting the food that they need. That's it.
Well, we would like to thank CERT and all of the volunteers for all they do for the community. Thank you very much. Anyone else?
Can we just ask a link while we talk about the call? If there's anything that CERT needs?
No. At this point in time, CERT is doing pretty pretty well. You know, we're happy we didn't have a lot of power outages today so that we didn't have to jump in and take care of that too. But no. So we've got a lot of people on the CERT team from Andover, Hebron, and Marlboro. And we've had plenty of help and we also have worked with volunteers called Roberta to go ahead and volunteer on FoodShare. It's worked out really well. Great. Thanks.
Anyone else? Going once? Going twice? Sold. Paula, can you mute everyone again? All right. So having gone through public speaks, any additions and deletions from the members of the board? Jeff, do you have anything?
Maybe we I don't know if you want to discuss the field use policy during this situation. I know Eric said we should discuss it. On the agenda. Okay. Okay.
Actually it really isn't on the agenda. Not on the agenda. You had public gatherings on the agenda. Yes. No. Not really. No.
Okay. We'll put it on the agenda. Let's put that as, seven g.
Oh, you had prohibition of in person meetings. Sorry. My bad. Sorry. Jeff, anything else?
Nope. That's it. Anything you wanna add? No. So you wanna add it to the seven b? No. Seven g. Okay.
Paula, anything you'd like to add? No. Scott, anything you'd like to add? All set. Okay. So, we're gonna vote on, seven g adding. Jeff how do we want to word that use of a public
field use during COVID epidemic I don't know. That's fine.
Anybody, have objection to that? All in favor? Aye. Passes five-zero. We'll review that at seven gs. Okay.
So we're going to get started. Boards and commissions presentations and appointments, the Board of Education shared service, Educational Service Committee, shared Educational Services Committee.
Anyone want to talk to that topic? There have not been any meetings, so we really don't have much to update you on. Okay.
Four b, the Board of, Selectman Community Senior Center Building Committee. Jeff or Scott, would you guys like to communicate on that or talk about that? No meetings yet either.
Okay. Yeah, I can talk on that. I was supposed to send out an email this week and I haven't gotten to it yet. So I will do it this week. Okay. The website development committee, Amanda or Paula. Paula?
Hi, yes. I can provide the update. So for those who don't know, we are getting a new town website designed by Civic Plus and very exciting. A few updates on our committee. We have solidified the new homepage design as well as the department and commission pages. At our last meeting, we also sent a survey to the staff to receive their input. We are working hard to confirm the headers for the homepage as well as the how do I section for some quick links for residents to use and come in handy. My task is to update our current website so that when they transfer all the information, we have what we need, and the rest is left off if there's any, non useful information that's currently on our website. So we have we're trying to move things along so we can get it, set up sooner rather than later, and we have another special meeting set for this Thursday the sixteenth and anyone is welcome to hop on and provide suggestions to us for our new website. All right Paul anything to add?
Just adding that we're also talking about how we're going to get the word out with various channels Facebook website a mailing, maybe even a coming soon on some other mailings. So we're working on how to get that out there too.
Well once you guys get something together, consideration or do we have consideration of using the town communication list we already have? Yes. Just to send something out? Okay. Yep.
Yeah our next whatever whenever we're gonna send out our next communication we're gonna kind of put something in there like coming soon, stay tuned and, some sort of blurb, something short and sweet. Okay.
Okay, All right anything else? We're gonna move on to item five the town administrators report. Eric?
Okay good evening everybody. So you all have a copy of my report so I'll just go over some of the real highlights. We do have one reported case of COVID-nineteen currently in the town of Andover. Likely there are quite a few more but that's the only one that's actually been tested. So we had Easter, that's good, it's over. We also got a Easter present in that PURA the Public Utility Regulatory Agency gave the town a grant for about $17,000 for allowing us to live stream meetings once we move back into the meeting house. Basically the ability to get good quality mics
and to get our own camera set up for the town hall and then also some equipment for both the library and the school. We're still waiting to figure out exactly how we get and spend that money but we know we got the grant so that's kind of good news. Who put in for that Eric?
I did with help from Nick Levine and also Elaine Bucard helped me out with that one too. So
It'll be a good scooby for the town and the school and the library so that's kind of nice. And while it won't deal with the acoustics in the community room at least if we're all mic'd and the recording goes directly from the sound board the sound quality of the recording will be a lot better because that's one of the frequent complaints we've heard about taping meetings in there. Board and commission news there's a couple things. First many of you know Rick Osborne passed away. He was a long time wetlands commission member so there's obviously a well a vacancy you know in there and if you look at the meeting motions, the first of the motions is an appropriate response to Rick Osborne's passing. There's also currently a vacancy at the Andover Elementary School Board that hasn't been filled yet. And there is a vacancy on the planning and zoning commission also because Jerry Hardisty resigned from the commission. So we definitely have some land use board positions we need to fill. I won't go into any budget stuff because that's farther down in the meeting. And I gave you a list of all the things that the town hall is doing in response to the COVID-nineteen. Basically, we are trying to get the majority of the employees to work from home, but still stay functional.
Obviously not everybody can be home and the office is staffed during normal times just at a reduced staffing level. We've been fortunate in that as we were transitioning to vision software, vision has said you know temporarily will do the installation they did the change over to vision eight in the cloud which means we can access it from anywhere. Whereas it makes it easier than if we were running the server version of vision, we will probably go back to the server version. Once we've installed our new server, Tax collector has the information they need. We have the proper firewall set up on the town now so that everybody so that the town server and the town's data is safe with everybody remoting in and working remotely. So that was much appreciated from our IT guys. We are tracking all our expenses related to COVID-nineteen. It looks like at some point we should be able to get some of those reimbursed by the federal or state government. As far as roadwork goes, I gave you all a summary of the proposed roadwork. If we had time later on tonight, I have a full blown PowerPoint presentation. I would be happy to PowerPoint you all to death if we have time at the end of the day. And certainly I can answer any of your questions related to proposed roadwork
and obviously that's proposed on a couple things and that depends on what we put in the actual budget. The second thing related to roadwork is the state still has not the bond commission still has not actually approved town aid road. They keep saying they're going to. But at this point, we don't have that money. And we really don't know whether we'll get town aid road money next year. I mean, they're basically a year behind this year, the chances of us getting our normal allotment on time for next year, I would guess is fairly slim. So that's pretty much it from the administrator's report. I gave that pretty briefly. Do you have any specific questions for me on any of those topics?
Eric, have you gotten any positive or negative feedback as to how the staffing for the town has gone and the services provided?
I've we've gotten some feedback. You know, most of it hasn't has been okay. You know I think people understand that these are unusual times. There's been some frustration getting in touch with the land use department definitely and you know part of that is we're just still, we still don't have an awful lot of time allocated to the wetlands agent and the zoning agent. And, you know, so there's definitely a backlog that we have in the building department. We're at the point now where Susan can function successfully from home and remote in when she needs information. So so it's been going okay, but not you know it's definitely not as efficient as if everybody's working in the building let me put it that way so it's definitely more work having everybody at home than it is if they're in the office.
Okay, anyone else? Okay, hearing nothing else, we're gonna move into old business. 6a is the town personnel policies.
So we're keeping it on the agenda. I don't have any huge updates on that. Dennis and I have been talking and we're gonna have a set up a zoom meeting for next week to spend a couple hours going over is now fully reviewed the personnel policies that I originally drafted. And, so we're working on it, but we don't have any imminent progress. Okay. Information on the community connectivity grant?
So not a lot of progress on that, unfortunately. We need to get the application submitted to the state sooner rather than later. So I got to get back with the town engineer and figure out why we're we haven't submitted it already. Succeed the potential establishment of combined financial department?
I have not made any progress on that in a month or two. I don't, yeah, I haven't really put any time into that at all.
All right. And then 6D is the email provider Office 365.
So at our last regular scheduled meeting, was still a lot of reluctance on the Board of Selectmen, I felt, to adopt 365, O365 as the email provider. So it was we I've kind of tabled and not pursued that. I know Adrian had some questions about that and wanted to do a little research. I haven't so I don't know where that stands.
I did do some research. It seemed that the pricing that we were getting is about as good as can be had in the consumer marketplace that we're in. I'm a little frustrated that we can't do any better. Guess my initial thoughts were when we talked about Google email and that that it wasn't that that was going to be the solution but obviously that's not the case. You know, have no objections if we decide we want to move forward with that, you know, know, I'm not happy to spend the money but I don't know that we have a choice,
you know. Before you and well, well, I'll sit there and I'll get with Amanda and Eric. I I still believe that we need to we need to look at other options because that is expensive, Adrian, and it will continue to be expensive year after year. You will not get all of the members of the community on the email address that you would like to get on. So we do have to find a different solution.
Yeah. I just honestly, I looked at all the commercial options out there and unfortunately we fall into a commercial category. There is some argument as to because we're a nonprofit whether we should be in that category, but it's neither here nor there. I mean, in the end, we're gonna end up paying for it. I just if you have a better option, I'm certainly open to it. Okay. You wanna put it out for another month? Absolutely.
We can leave it on old business for next month. Right, Eric? We certainly can.
Eric, can you put a reminder in your calendar to bug Jeff about this next week so we can sort this by next month's meeting so that that could be integrated into the new website and not get pushed out again? Sure.
By the way, Scott, I I am eating non virtual chocolate.
Oh, wow. Okay. I'm doing this in front of me now. It's not right.
No. Have we have we looked into Eric, you might have already asked somebody else about this, but what are other towns using?
As far as I know, the towns that South Windsor takes care of run O three sixty five. You know, I have not done an extensive search of other towns as to what they're they're running. Okay.
Alright. Seven new business. We're gonna discuss and act upon the following. A is the Memorial Day Parade. So I won't make Eric do it. Based upon COVID nineteen, we've had discussions as to, canceling the Memorial Day parade. Obviously, with the situation with COVID nineteen, the question is going to be how far out is this going to go? None of us have a crystal ball. The question is do we cancel it now or do we wait till our next meeting?
Moe? How much notice, like how far out can we go before we cancel this? Yeah. What does the commit what does the committee need to know and
how yeah. I just don't wanna say we're doing it and then they're scrambling. It's nice. Just try to be thoughtful,
know. I'm with you. How long does it take for the committee to get ready?
I don't have the answer to that. I I mean, it never even occurred to me that you wouldn't cancel it, frankly. So I haven't pursued any other options.
You you haven't anticipate our ambivalence to cancel things, Raleigh?
What if we have a what if we have a plan a and a plan b? And you're all gonna think I'm crazy, but We know you're crazy. I know.
What they can do a parade like the teacher parade
with just I was Yeah. I was thinking plan A, we don't cancel it and then maybe we brainstorm how they can do it like the teacher parade or I don't know, a Zoom meeting. How crazy would that be? Probably a lot of work, but I don't know. Do a Zoom meeting for Memorial Day Parade? Yeah, I mean maybe not the parade part but no the nice part that we do at the cemetery and the speeches. I don't know come with me on my crazy train here.
Yeah. No. How about it's May 25. Why don't we push this off to the next meeting and make a decision then? I mean, it gives us a couple of weeks at least. It seems like the governor is moving towards a date. Right now we're what? May 20 for schools? That's correct. Yes. So the May 25 we may be in the clear. So I'm I'm in no rush to cancel this and I don't really believe that it would be appropriate to try to do it electronically.
But I think we should reach out to the committee in the meantime, right, and find out
Exactly. Yeah. I think that's a good idea but let's not let's not be hasty. I mean, that's the one thing we've learned in all of this is that patients will be our friend. Things may sort themselves out. Wow.
I disagree with you there. You always do. I think at our meeting in March, I think it was, I was willing to be more patient and you were not willing to be more patient and we canceled the senior trip to the St. Patrick's Day event and I think that was a wise move on your part, Adrian.
Well, and maybe I'm seeing the error of my ways, Jeff. Really? I'm learning from you. Okay,
So cut to the chase. You do not wanna make the resolution canceling the Memorial Day Parade. Is that That is correct.
And let's and let's find out from the committee, you know, what they what they would need to do and time frame and stuff and still
Can we get a rep from the committee to for their our next meeting? Would you like me to reach out to them? That would be appropriate. Well, John McCall. Okay. See if we can schedule in for our next meeting. Okay.
Okay. Seven b prohibition of in person meetings. So we have a timeline to extend in person meetings, to not have any additional in person meetings. And if we are going to have an in person meeting of greater than three people, it would need to be approved by the town administrator. I feel that that is very appropriate right now and I think we should sit there and pass the motion as it has been written. Anyone like to make that motion? I'll make the motion for discussion. Sure. Go ahead. You want me to read it out?
I don't necessarily know. I mean, is there a way Amanda or Paulie you can put that up on the screen so we don't have to read it? Yeah, it's quite long. Sure. Let me, I just gotta find it.
There you go. Can you see it Okay. Yeah. Yep. You got it. Okay.
So do we have a second. Scott will second it. Okay. Discussion.
What's the impetus for this exactly? Are we discussing that? Are we still having issues with somebody doing meetings?
No we just wanna make sure that people understand that these are the rules. Okay, and this applies to who? Everybody? All public meetings. Any in person meeting. Has nothing to do with a virtual meeting, Eric. If they schedule the virtual meeting, they don't have to go through you to for approval. It's only when they wanna get together with three or more people.
Right. Correct. What happens if they schedule a virtual meeting but they still have people getting together?
Do they live in the same household or not? No. They do not. So, again, there is certain you're you're asking a hypothetical and No. I'm not. Okay. Has someone in our town had a meeting where three or more people have gathered for a virtual meeting?
Yes. Thought the board of ed just did that. Board of Education just did it. So I am correct. That did happen Jeff. I had heard that but yes
it did. There was four to five people in the library.
So this will prevent that. Is that correct Jeff? I
think so but I would even just say any group meetings. Would even make it more than three, any group meetings.
So if the Board of Education did have a meeting and they did have three people or four people congregate at the library, then we absolutely need to pass this. Absolutely.
Then let's do that. I'm just concerned they're going to have three people. So I just think we should would we should outright ban any group meetings except for with Eric's approval. Any meeting should be on with Eric's approval.
Yeah. So we're going to or more three it doesn't matter. So we're going to group meetings. Okay. So we're going to take out the line where it says commission or agency of the town of Andover and we're going to just put a period at the end of that and get rid of including more than three people.
Okay. Is the town attorney still on the call? Can we do this? Yeah. Let me you want me to unmute him? Please. Please. Alright. Dennis, where are you? Hang on there. Can you hear me? Yes Dennis. Yes. Oh good.
Oh good. Actually I haven't met three of you before. Was on the last meeting but we've never met. That would be Paula Scott and Jeff Murray. So hi, I'm Dennis O'Brien. Hi Dennis. And I've been the town attorney here for, I don't know, more than fifteen years. Really nice to be here. The question is, can you amend this motion limit it to any meeting? Yes. Any group more than one. Yes. Yeah, you can do it. I mean you have the authority under the what did I say, the executive order of the declaration of emergency, a public health emergency in the town of Andover. That was signed by the first selectman and the town administrator several weeks ago and that gives you the authority to do it.
In addition to executive orders issued by the governor. Governor didn't go down that far. I think his his thing was five people and his order about five people doesn't apply to government. So this would be something that's authorized by your declaration of a local local public health emergency, which is authorized by a state statute. It's legal. K. Paula, your screen was public. Is is this back on the
Yeah. White You're all set. Okay. Yeah. You're blocking off the thing. We couldn't see the Sorry. So we'll just change that to one more than one. Here? Well, let's
let's discuss this for a second if we can. So is this preventing Eric from meeting with the public works foreman or any of those types of things?
If we do this? In his in his case, he he's a decision maker, so he would be able to do that. But that's that's just an example you gave that, you know. Okay. Yeah. But it's in in So so pretty much
Okay. So Eric will leave this that Eric can approve meetings.
Yeah. I'm not just say three or more because I mean, you know, you're not trying to prohibit two individual people for meeting. Three or more sounds three or more sounds acceptable.
Yeah, so just take out the so just take out the more than and I'll say including three people.
Alright, just say more than two. Okay, that's fine. Okay, that makes it simpler and just go with the language I wrote. It's good stuff. Okay, so more than two and otherwise as written. Is Eric updating this or who's updating this?
Eric will need to update it yes or maybe Yeah I will need I will update it and send it back too because Jeff will ultimately oh no never mind yeah I'll update it. Okay so
I would make an amendment to my motion to upend the language to say two or more and otherwise as written. I need a second. I'll second that. Okay further discussion. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay.
Unanimous. Okay, Paula. Let's move to 7c, the budget. Number one is process. Do we have any updates on the process that we're undertaking?
Not exactly. So if you look at the motion that was that Paula can share with you that Dennis wrote, you'll see that motion lays out the most necessary steps in that motion. So it includes both the authority to authorize the board of finance to do it and also the essentially the timeline for doing it. Everything else there's flexibility but those dates should be kind of set in.
Okay. Okay so let me so I'm sharing the motion is that what you want me to do? Correct. Okay. Requiring cancel no. That's the Memorial Day one.
This resolution requiring adoption of the town budget by the Board of Finance. Got it. Not the budget meeting. This one here? Yes. Correct.
Do you need me to scroll some more or am I good? No. Those are the only two paragraphs. Okay.
So this basically does two things. The first thing is it does what the governor of the state of Connecticut has told you in the executive order is that you as the board of selectmen shall empower the board of finance to adopt a budget and set a mill rate. So that's your job as far as the governor's concern. And that's obviously controversial because people are pretty unhappy that there's not going to be a referendum and a budget. And if you want to talk about the legalities of that, Dennis is here, he can do a lot better job explaining his opinion, his legal opinion on that then I can certainly. And then the second half of that is that it lists the dates, you know, that are critical, which is that it's no later than April 27, the board of selectmen basically adopts it and sends it to the board of finance and it gets published. And then the board of finance has to have a public access meeting on May 20. And then there's additional period for comments and then it gives them a drop dead date of June 8 to adopt to the budget and set the mill rate. So that's basically what that motion does. It lays out both the authority of the Board of Finance to do it, which flows from you as a Board of Selectmen,
and it also gives states the timeline that you want to maintain. So that would be my suggestion.
Does anyone wanna make a motion to put this on the table so that we can discuss it? I'll make the motion. Do want to second it? I'll second. Okay, further discussion on this issue?
How did we come up with the dates specifically because if we we go down this road and this that was my original concern with the whole putting it off thing if we go down this road and we end up with a June 8 meeting, are we too are we too far into the cycle? Like, don't know what the contract cutoffs are for the school. If there is a adjustment to the school's budget, is it gonna screw them up? Can they even institute a cut at that point contractually? Those are not answers I have.
I don't know the answer to that. Well, can you give us an answer as to how you come up with the dates?
Sure. You as a board of selectmen motion to extend the process thirty days. This takes us out to about that thirty day extension and still meets the legal requirements. So this pushes it out to what you said you wanted to push it out to originally. So this is the full thirty day extension because we went twenty seventh last year. Okay, I got it. It's not quite the full, but it's within
a week of the full. So if the board of finance really couldn't do it on the eighth, they have another five or six days legally, they can adopt the budget, and meet all the statutory requirements. But it pushes it out most of the way.
That's probably why we need to expedite this whole process. Need to move on it. We have a lot of meetings.
I mean, if you choose to to shorten the time frames, you can. I mean, you that's certainly you're right.
Listen, this is not gonna be an easy situation anyway. The question is, do we shorten the time frames? Because Adrian's point is probably pretty valid that the longer we push this out, the more we might run into contract issues if we try if the board has to make additional cuts.
Well, and the other part of it too is you get into the the contract year for the town is, you know, starts July 1, that's when we start, you know, rolling into these monies, right? So if Eric is gonna do Eric is gonna do pavement preservation, not necessarily paving, but even pavement preservation, the sooner he can contract, the more likely that we can get some of it done this year before going into winter and dealing with, further deterioration of the roads. Honestly, if we're talking about this we're having an honest discussion, you have to ask yourself if we're pushing it out this far and there there's a possibility that schools come back on May 20, know then are we are we just
at that point can we just have a normal budget? There may be a push at that point to have a normal budget meeting.
And if they allow public gatherings we should have. Mean Right, so are they going to allow public gatherings that's really the question right so so can and
I want to stop you there too I mean the last time in the executive order they pushed it out to May 20 but it from listening to some of those presentations it didn't sound like that was likely to be the end date like they're not really expecting
school to start back up on May 21. Not at all. They're expecting in three or four months. Right.
I don't understand why we're doing drip well, you guys don't know the answer. I just don't understand the whole drips and drabs thing if that's what we're doing.
Well, you just said dribs and drabs with Memorial Day when we could have made a decision too. So the state's doing the same thing we're doing. Don't they don't wanna go on the record as saying we're definitely not gonna have school this year if something changes.
Valid point. You're absolutely right. You're right. That's exactly what we Okay. That makes sense. Is attorney O'Brien still
muted or unmuted? Dennis, we pass this and the COVID-nineteen social distancing rules change and we can have a budget meeting, do we have any problem if we scrap this and then move back to our old policies and our old procedures?
Yeah, under this, the way I've written it, the very end of the first paragraph, it says subject only to the further order of the governor. It would take another executive order from the governor adjusting the order that set this up and that's order seven I paragraph 13. And that order so far has not been adjusted. Okay, you're talking about when you're talking about May 20, you're talking about the order on the schools. Now he's written about 25 orders now. It's up to 25, 26. And there's lots of them. But this one here, so far has not been adjusted. Okay? And I I check it every day. Right. So it can be if he changes it, you can you can have a special meeting and you can you can make another resolution modifying this one. You know, think it's unlikely. But, you know, what do I know? I'm not a I don't have a crystal ball. Okay, so so
an act of prudence, we should get this placed, I believe that we should pass this and knowing as a board we have the opportunity to make a subsequent resolution to make any changes to allow for a public meeting, allow for a public vote.
So Well, my only concern again is that we're pushing into June. So I'm okay with this if we would adjust the time frame. Alright. Then let's adjust the time frame. Does anyone else have any input on that?
Go ahead Dennis. Go ahead Dennis. Wanted to say that in fifteen or so years I've been town attorney, I think you've gone into June a few times And and this this, you know, this guarantee if if there's no change in the governor's order, this guarantees that you'll have a budget by June 15. I mean, you've gone into July. I'm so I'm sorry, several times. In which case you have to go with the previous year's budget.
Candidly, I I can tell you in the last fifteen years though, there's never been an adjustment on the town side to the school's budget. I don't know about the school. I I don't represent the school, but but I'm just I'm just telling letting you know there has not been an adjustment from the town to the school's budget in that time frame. They've always pretty much gotten whatever they put across. If I if I may, Adrian, I think the school has already come in with their budget for this year. Right? Based on what I've read and it's and it's it's it's a reduction from last year. Yes, but it it not nearly the reduction that was looked for by either board or the board of finance, unfortunately. Okay. Well, that's that's that's you're right. That's yet to be determined. So the the board of finance asked for additional reductions and it has not been addressed as of yet.
Well, they're gonna have the they're gonna have the final say.
Right. And so that's my concern is that this will be the if you're saying it's no big deal we've gone into July but we've never gone into July with an adjustment which again affects the school and their contracts.
Absolutely. It's very important for them to have a budget in place by the end of the fiscal year. Agree. Well before that because they signed contracts in June. Yep.
You know they have they have to get ready for next fall. Right. Then there there's a notification clause they have to give them so many days before the start of the next school year. Yep. Okay. So let's let's let's change the timeline.
Let's push it up. I I what are the date what are the days, Adrian,
that you believe need to be on this? I think it needs to be decided before June 1. So
let's start with the first part about it. When does the board of selectmen plan on presenting their budget to the Board of Finance? Let's start with that date then.
Well, we would have to schedule a meeting and you have here April 27.
That's in two weeks. You want to do it faster?
I don't see why we couldn't do it in in a week if we could get through the budget tonight.
Okay so today is the thirteenth. So why don't we say by April 20? We'll change that first date to April 20. The online budget meeting can obviously be pushed back. So Adrian, are we looking for a two week window? I mean, ideally, yeah. Okay. So push the May 20 date back to May 6. Push
the June 8 date back two weeks without impacting Memorial Day. Correct.
We're not gonna have Memorial Day, so don't worry about that. No Memorial Day this year. We're gonna have a Memorial Day.
So you want to set it for like the twenty sixth or May 27?
That's acceptable to me. Is it acceptable? I'm fine with that twenty sixth. So that's the day after Memorial Day? Yes. All right. Okay. So do we have any further discussion or further comments related to this resolution? So it's going to the new resolution is going to read Eric, can you provide the dates just so everybody is aware of what they are?
Sure. No later than so let me read the pertinent part. It shall be the duty of this Board of Selectmen to provide and publish its draft budget for the fiscal year beginning 07/01/2020 to the Board of Finance and by reasonable means including the town website no later than 04/20/2020 and the duty of the Board of Finance to then edit the draft budget in compliance with all procedural requirements of the above cited executive order followed by an online budget meeting with public access on May 6, and an additional two weeks for public comment by reasonable means including email, and finally an online publicly available meeting of the Board of Finance on 05/26/2020 at the conclusion of which a town budget must be adopted in the mill rate set by the board for the twenty twenty and twenty twenty one fiscal year.
Okay, thank you. Any further discussion on this? Alright. I believe Adrian made the motion. We had a second on that with the I can do. From Scott.
Okay. Alright. So I would agree with the motion as amended. Scott will you second again? Second it.
Okay. Any further discussion? Paula, Jeff, anybody? No. All those in favor, aye. Aye.
Did I hear Jeff back there? Did Jeff vote? Is Jeff still on?
He has no video and I can't unmute him. So I don't know if he's having some technical difficulties here. I'm back. Sorry. There you are. Jeff, we voted on this resolution.
We amended the dates. Did you catch any of that? We're not sure what Yeah. That's fine.
Okay. So you're in favor? I'm not gonna be a stickler for dates.
Okay. We just want to make sure you caught it. We weren't sure if you had technical difficulties or no I got caught. I just had a head emergency house thing I had to deal with. That's fine. All right.
So now we're on to C3, the review of the revised proposed budget. Eric, do you want to share that with us or who would like to share what pieces of information?
If you let me share the screen, I can certainly share that with you or Paula can share it, whatever you want to do. Yeah, I'm trying to see if I can allow you to share. It doesn't look like it's letting me. Can you make him a co host right now? Let me just try it. Yep, all right try now. There you go.
Okay does that show you the mill rate calculation page? Yes.
Okay so I'll cut to the chase and then we can talk about the actual budget. So the you can't see where my cursor is pointing to can you? Yes. Okay, so this one is what the original budget that the Board of Selectmen approved and sent to the Board of Finance with the adjustments based on what RAM revised their numbers and what AES revised their numbers. That ended up being an 11.9% raise, you know, in, you know, percent mill rate with a mill rate of 39. So the board at the last meeting asked me to go back and produce a
budget where the total percent increase was at a maximum of five and to get the town's budget down to what we could reasonably expend. So this budget does that. It nets out to a 2.18% mill rate increase. But if you look at the budget by entity, you'll see the elementary school budget is decreased. The town's budget has decreased slightly. I mean it's essentially flat and RAM budget is still up 8%. Eric
just for clarification the number that you have in there for the Andover Elementary is assuming they make the cuts that were requested originally by the Board of Finance correct? Correct. Okay, just wanna make sure we're on the same page. No, that's
a good point because what they that were the budget they submitted was some $45,000 greater than this number. So that's it in a nutshell in terms of what the bottom line is. So the bottom line is right now with this budget is the town budget's flat, the elementary school budget is negative and RAM is still going up 8%. As you know, we don't directly influence the RAM budget other than our own personal comments. Know to RAM their board will set their mill rate or their budget. So we don't have any direct influence over that. Now in terms of actual budget, I'm going to turn to the budget page. Okay and the majority of those reductions came from the permanent funds. So remember what we decided to do instead of, you know, allocating money every year, you know for specific projects we'd said let's look at our capital budgets and let's look at what we spend what we should be spending you know on maintenance on various different categories And then just going forward, let's expend that amount and put that in a, you know, a multi year fund. So the first thing we did is we trimmed those budgets pretty dramatically because that is where the the biggest changes in our budget from our previous budget
occurred. And the second thing is we, we when I say we I mean me proposed in this budget that we roll the unexpended fund balance, you know, into the budget and also that we take several of the permanent funds that we don't really need and that we're not likely to use, roll those all back into the budget. And then so we're rolling somewhat more money into the budget from you know essentially fund balance then we're putting in capital funds if that makes sense. So there's a net difference of about $80,000 that goes towards reducing the essentially the general budget. So but this will allow us to do a reasonable amount of roadwork and it will allow us to at least get up through the design stage for the Bunker Hill Bridge and it will get us through the design phase
for at least one of the Culverts and it will allow us a little bit of a cushion if we to do an emergency repair on Culvert On Hutchinson. Do you have specific questions for me? You've all had this for a week or so. Are there things you're still happy with, unhappy with? What feedback do you have?
So Eric, I was looking at your revenue situation and your revenue situation seems to lead us down the fact that we're going to be down on our ECS money additionally.
So interestingly enough, because last year was a tumultuous budget season and there were all kinds of threats from the state about not funding ECS. So we went into last year assuming that ECS was going to be dramatically slashed last year. So ECS funding this year is decreased, but it's still greater than what we were anticipating getting. So yes, we're getting less ECS money this year, but we're getting more ECS money than we budgeted for last year, if that makes sense.
Okay. And there's no other changes in that in the revenue stream that you see coming down for next year?
I mean, honestly, I can't tell you what our revenue stream is going to look like. I mean, the state perspective, it's going to be pretty scary because our, you know, state revenue is very heavily tied towards the extremely high earners. And at least in 2008, the extremely high earners got hammered in the last recession.
Well, Eric, it's also That's It's also sales tax. We're losing several months worth of sales tax on goods. Yeah. No. I I I mean, so
so could we end up with less revenue yet let next year? Yeah, possibly. But I I honestly don't know how to predict that.
Alright. So when you break down your expenditure decreases I mean, because, basically, you're you're saying that the town the town portion of this is totally flat, that AES reduction is estimated to be a $100,000, but in reality, they've only, at the last Board of Education meeting, Adrian or Jeff, what was the number that they were? They
didn't address it at their last meeting. So they didn't address the budget numbers at all. No they did not. So we're still at 45 right. Correct. Paul and I actually attended that virtual meeting.
All right. So listen, it's a question for us is do we we live with these numbers and or do we ask for additional cuts from both groups even if we don't get them? Because RAM, shouldn't we as a board put together a letter saying we want RAM to reduce the increase from 8.1% to 4%?
Well, Eric had put out a letter previously as a suggestion. I don't believe we had movement on that, did
necessarily for our board, but I'm willing to sit there and sign that and send that from our board. I mean, you can't continuously have increases when you have decreasing enrollment. It's not some business. You're losing customers. You're decreasing expenses. It's how it should be. To me, I think what Eric's doing on the town and how he's moved around some of the capital dollars does allow us to get some things accomplished, but it is only pushing off the inevitable. I mean, for us to do what we need to do in the future, we're going to have to either find more money or raise taxes because we're in a situation where we have pushed everything off for the last ten, fifteen years. And to do any basic maintenance, to do any basic roadwork, substantive roadwork, we're going to have to find the money. There's very few places to find the money in our community
other than taxing. Really, we have multiple things to deal with here. Do we ask AES and RAM to reduce their budgets? I believe we should. Do we sit there and try to keep what Eric is asking for this year where our current town budget is flat. I
get everything you're saying but there's a couple things I think we need to talk about. So first of all, I do have a concern when we start funding town day to day operations with fund balance. I agree with you 100% Adrian.
I'd like to see us try to trim a couple of things from this and whether we go back to the school and ask for those additional funds like we had talked about. I mean, we had a lot of discussion at our last meeting about whether we should be asking the school for an additional cut. I don't know if we go back to the school with that. I think that's up to the whole board. What I'd like to see us figure out it's right now we're at $75,830 from fund balance currently funding operations
and I don't think that's a good solution. Well actually it's a lot more than that because I mean 300,000 we're basically not putting any taxation into the roads. No. I I understand that. For many years. Unfortunately,
the roads have been proven to be, you know, the the, you know, the second class citizens of Andover. So but the reality is just from basic operations, even if we said we're doing no road work, you know, we're still over by 75,000. So, you know, I know you have I mean, I I can start a little bit. I I tried to reach out to, Roberta today and talk to her a little bit, about the senior position and what she's been doing. She genuinely feels that, with a minor amount of help she can pick up the slack Kathy, as Kathy steps away, she would like to try to do that and continue doing what she's been doing. The only thing she's kind of looking for is trying to figure out the scheduling for the bus drivers but she has some ideas about maybe reaching out to other towns and doing some other things to try to see if we can coordinate scheduling a little better. How they do their scheduling those types of things. It's not much but it's 15,000 towards that position that would get us closer to where we wanna be or where I'd like to be. Don't know if anyone else has any other ideas about things that we can look at in this budget. This budget is very lean on the town side. I get that. I mean, but look, even if we trimmed that position and then we asked the school for the additional 60 and then we just put out a zero budget at that point. You know?
We're still not putting out a zero budget because we're still not gonna be able to you know, the the town budget isn't big enough to increase to cover Ram's increase. So not without really draconian stuff.
Well, mean, but you're Yeah, so with that number, that number, you'd be less than 2%. You're right, it is not zero but it's also taking into account your road work. And we don't, we're hoping the road work will come down at some point, know, tree trimming, etc, etc.
When you say road work coming down, what do you mean? Well eventually we'll get caught up, in ten years.
Sorry, that was an evil chuckle, I apologize for that. That's all right. You're allowed to evil chuckle on my behalf.
Yeah, I mean, Adrian, I agree with you with the 100 with the the fund balance being used for drops. Can use it for one time expenses like the tree trimming and road projects that we need to get done. I have no problem with that. But just offsetting it to lower taxes is kind of a false sense of security. Yeah, that's my concern especially because next year that's if next year we'll get the double whammy next year. Both on board of finance, we understand the metrics how that works. Yeah. Well, I mean, let's be honest, you're putting off
a million dollars worth of capital expenses by trimming what we've trimmed. Okay. I'm gonna be blunt with you. Those expenses don't go away. We are just kicking the can down the road. Don't want there to be any illusions that we're saving the taxpayers money. All we're doing is charging the future taxpayers more money.
I agree with you. And all the voters need to realize that that this is not going away. These these these projects to happen. And they're good. They're going to have to happen eventually and eventually they're gonna have to fund it.
Right, right. I mean, but I also understand we are in unprecedented times. And if ever there was a time to be willing to spend fund balance, some fund balance on the general fund and keeping the mill rate low. Yeah. This is the year to do it. Eric, you're the one that pointed out
that the state's gonna be screwed. I mean, sorry, forgive my English. The state is gonna be in a poor situation next year given the lack of revenue that it's bringing in now. Understood, yeah.
And we're going to be in a tougher situation next budget season. Right,
yes. I'm not saying next year is gonna be roses. It's not. Gonna be great.
But if you wanna keep the mill rate down this year, and I think that's probably pretty important given how bad the economy is likely to get, you know, then this is one solution. I'm not saying we can't cut the town budget further, you know, to make some of that up, but the thing is, is that the town budget is only 23% or so of the total budget, and it's already about 30% less per capita than the surrounding towns. So the town budget has never been our problem. Right, I mean, our mill rates high because of education spending, not town spending. So yes, I think it's appropriate this year to do everything we can on the town side and suck it up and keep the mill rate low. But ultimately the money can't come from the town's budget.
But that's gonna bite us in the ass next year is our point. Yeah, it will definitely.
Why is no one speaking about reducing the AES budget? I did did Wait a second, Adrian. Nobody wants to talk about that. What what's the problem with that? Two months ago, we all agreed to a $400,000 decrease in their budget. No. It hadn't even been brought up. All we do is pick at the town employees or any kind of funding for town employees, and we don't look at the elephant in the room.
Right. Scott, I did bring that up though. That's not a fair statement. I asked I said specifically, you know, the school hadn't addressed the number that the finance board gave them but at our last meeting we also discussed additional funds and decided to kick it forward a little. So we have to address you know, if we make that adjustment, do we then go back to the school to cover that $80,000
difference or not? Do you know what I mean? I don't I don't think we need to talk about $80,000 Adrian. I think it's much more than that.
I I don't think you can. I don't think you can go past 200. I I really total. We all agreed on 400 before why?
Well, then we all sat through a bunch of meetings and I don't know what anyone else took for the meeting. I can't speak for anyone, I can't speak for the Board of Education, I can always say what I sat through. And look, they've cut teachers fairly well. It's not a teacher salary issue, it's a building, I personally believe it's a building contractual issue and some of their building costs have been going through the roof in the last five years or so versus they've actually been able to cut their teacher salaries down, overall salaries for the school. By cutting To me this seems very simple.
Well,
it's simple if you don't have a kid in the school. But the RAM, you can't do anything about it, Adrian. Even if they bring it down to 5%, they probably won't. That's that's all of our budget and we're and we're kicking the can just like Eric said again. Down the road doing the same thing over and over again Ram can't do anything AES doesn't get they're not told to do anything and we end up with the same thing we're worried about $15,000 for the seniors Again, this is unacceptable.
Well, even if we do that, even if we sit there and half our request in the 200,000, we're still not going to be able to increase the town spending to be really honest.
No, but if you do that, if you have to to 200, then the town budget would be offset.
So you're basically saying if we did that, then there would be no money, you wouldn't have to take that $75,000 out of reserves? No. Well,
listen, are we at this meeting going to I mean, we only have seven days to get this to the Board of Finance. So personally believe we should ask the Board of Education to make additional cuts.
Well, look, I can propose I can put forward two solutions if the board's willing to hear them. Sure, let's go. Okay. First solution is we the offset, we leave the budget as is, make the offset or ask for the offset to be made to the school, that decision would be have to ultimately be made by the board of finance because by charter, they would be the decision making authority on that. Or we reduce the amount of money. We don't put money into the fire engine fund. This is something that Kurt discussed previously at a CIP meeting that most towns now are actually looking at leasing equipment. And so if we don't fund it this year, we'll end up with a big lease number when the time comes, more we don't fund it, but it is an option. And the second thing I would do is take money out of the public works fund for capital given that, there there's two components to that. The first one is that although we do have equipment that we feel we need to purchase, we do have a lease that will be expiring in two years. And the other thing that may be able to help us in that department and maybe help the fire department fund in that department, which we could look for in two years is the school has a bond that'll be paid off. That's about $90,000
a year on average in interest. With between those two things, we would be able to open up some revenue in the budget in two years to start funding those accounts on a regular basis without affecting the mill rate. So we could pull the money from those two funds. If we did that, we pulled the money from those two funds and left the budget as is otherwise, you'd be looking at a decrease in the town spending rather than an increase. Would not be using any funds from the reserve.
I believe that Eric already reduced what we were requesting to go into those funds as a saving mechanism by 50%. Is that not accurate,
That that is accurate. I'm talking about taking the additional the the funds that are he's talking about putting in there now. And listen, my point of my point in that is this. In in this particular time that we're looking at, putting money into a savings account that we know we're not gonna spend in the next year or two, know, given the current situation, you know, seems like a bad idea. If I would I mean, if we're being if if we're being putting our money where it's most needed, if we're really willing to spend those funds, then take that money and put it into the roads. Because long term, if we're talking about saving house values and people being able to sell houses and people being able to wanting to move into the community, someone driving up one of these roads that's deteriorated to poop is not gonna wanna go buy a house on that road, you know?
Well, I understand what you're saying Adrian, but I also sit there and especially the public works money, you know, public works equipment has never been funded properly. I'm not
we're all aware So we Eric has already made a 50% reduction, and so now you want to take it to zero. So we're right back where we were under previous boards.
But we're not buying a tractor this year and realistically given the state situation, we're not buying one next year. So why put the money away if we know we're not gonna be able to buy that tractor anyways? Because next year, listen, we're gonna get hammered. There's no way we're not. They're losing three months worth of tax revenue. And if you look at the market, people's clocks got cleaned, which means those hedge fund managers down in Fairfield County are not gonna be paying it. Just a this is just a it's gonna be the fact of life. So somebody's gonna get hit and it ain't gonna be Bridgeport, it ain't gonna be Hartford, it's gonna be us like it always is. So it's just my take. You know, I'm I'm open to suggestions. I'm just putting those two. You can either take the money out or you can leave the money in or move the money to roads and then go to the school or you take the money out. But Scott makes a good point. We all said that we wanted to take the school back down to something that seemed more reasonable. I disagree with him on the number,
but I agree with him that there still needs to be more done there that wasn't And that unfortunately, it seems like the school board ran out of time, but They ran out of time?
They didn't run out of time because they didn't even talk about it the last meeting.
They had plenty of time. Yeah, look, have a son in that school and, you know, they we need to do some shared sacrifice here. Mean, the town is making significant cuts. And I hope that everybody that's listening on here is sending notes to Ram and actually telling them that they should be making cuts because if you're not, it's going up. But we need all as a town we need to we need to really look at making some significant cuts to get through this. I mean, it's not gonna be it's not gonna be forever but we can do it.
But Jeff, why why is it always you wanna cut the town side?
I don't want to. I'm paying this school. The school really needs to look at making some cuts. Is
there a number that you feel comfortable with for the school, Jeff? Mean, Scott's at 400, I'm saying I don't think more than two. What do you think is acceptable? I understand you have not been able to make the meetings because your wife goes and so you have to take care of your child. But have you had a chance at all to look at I mean, 2,200
is a 5% number. That's that's what we're looking at. 5% off of theirs. Yeah, roughly 4,000,000. Yes. Yeah, 5%.
I mean, it's not that's not a reasonable number given that given the that's declined over the years and the amount that they've actually gone down.
I think 200 is doable. It's still it's a stretch, but it's doable.
I think we need to challenge the end of our board education to try to meet that challenge. Honestly.
I don't think that they tried at all. Over the last four years or five years they've lost one third of their students at AES. I mean the numbers in AES in 2014 were two ninety nine students. I believe the numbers right now are around 189.
Right. Yeah they fluctuate depending upon which kids you're counting but yeah. Okay.
So even if you sit there and say we give them 199
they've dropped 100 students. 100 students and the price keeps going up every year. How can that happen? No, Scott that's not correct. That's not correct. Have
decreased. They just have decreased in line with the percentage of decrease in enrollment. So over the last couple of years, the Board of Education has decreased, but $50,000 decrease does not translate into the appropriate percentages that we're talking about. Nothing's easy. We all have to realize that nothing is easy. But I think Jeff Murray is accurate. There has to be shared sacrifice as to what we're doing. And I've been on this board for five years now, and our board in the past has never discussed this topic once as to what to do with the Board of Education and what to request from the Board of Education. I think this is an extremely healthy exercise. And I think we as a board should look at a number that is more in line with what our original request was and if we can't get there then we got to get somewhere.
So we cannot allow it to be another $50,000 decrease because that is not appropriate. So I would rather be at $400,000 if we don't believe that they can provide a level of education for the children in Andover that they need, that we want them to provide, then we need to make it something that they can live with. But $200,000 is like the low side of where I would want to be. I understand that but I'm trying to find some middle ground here. Okay. Well, I'll accept that number Adrian but I mean all we're doing is presenting this to the Board of Finance and saying this is our global vision for the community. So if we get if they make a reduction, it would be about $150,000 We would then use that money to offset any reserve monies that are going out into our operational budget for 2,000? Exactly.
Yes. Okay. I can live with that. I just don't want to be spending money from reserve to fund the town. You know, we we gotta find the middle ground there. And I think that's sort of listen, I'm I'm willing to put off other things that I'm willing to spend money from. I think we have to spend our look. Mean, the reality is if we had spent the money that ended up in reserve where it should have been spent on roads and stuff as as the time went on, we wouldn't be, you know, we wouldn't we wouldn't be in this situation with the roads. But, you know, in the end, that also doesn't resolve the school of the fact that they haven't addressed their budget. So I think the shared sacrifice is true but I also think that we do need to take into account the kids that are there and find the middle ground.
Okay. So what is the middle ground? Is the middle ground 200,000 because that's 50% of what we originally asked for. How about 300,000?
I can't support that, but I can't say what the rest of board can vote however they wish.
I think 5% is very reasonable. I mean, it's not like we're gutting the school. I think we still need to provide a quality education, but they really need to start looking at their contracts and other things because I think they go to Eastcott a lot for other things without going out to bid. So it would put a little bit of effort on their part actually to get better pricing on their services.
Jeff, so would you support Just so we can figure out where we need to be here, Would you support Scott's 300 number? No. I would not at this point. Paula? I would I would support 200. Would you support 300? No.
Okay. Jeff? I would support Scott, but I understand that I'm not gonna get it. So I'm going to support the 200,000. Okay. What about $2.50 then?
We can't go through that. Let's go. Dollars 200,000. Please someone make that motion so we can One
second, Adrian. Are we all willing to accept the budget as presented with this one change which is the $200,000 reduction to the Board of Education the AES?
The money to be put into the multiuse fund was taken out, right, Eric?
Correct. So Eric, where's the where's that library fund money going? Yeah.
So because of the way it's working right now with your authority in the Board of Finance Authority, what I would do is instead of taking very specific funds and saying we're going to transfer 50,000 from this fund to this fund, What I've said is we are going to return all the money available in the unexpended fund balance as well as those unused funds directly into the general budget. And then we are going to budget for all those things that we need to actually fund in permanent funds. Instead of saying this is going to here and this is going to here and part of this is going to here and this is going to pay for the trees, you know, in the Lorax. I just dumped everything into the general budget and then allocated the money where it needed to go based on priorities.
So you put it on the table and then put it in the appropriate envelopes. Correct. Okay.
So that money can be used if if we need money for the, multi use building?
Not anymore. Not if we adopt this budget, that money is is allocated. So there is still $450,000 in the multi use building fund. And if the town if the state ever actually does issue another round of steep grants we will certainly apply for a steep grant for the multi use building, which will be basically the senior center, but we would not be putting any more additional money into it in this budget cycle.
But that gives your committee Scott and Jeff, you know, once we get out of this mess time to put something together that we can then hopefully go and, pass the hat to the state to hopefully get some funding from them and then figure out where we are.
I'm not happy. It's like the pretty, but we're just facing the perfect storm. We've got a ram hitting us and we've got this crisis hitting us.
Yeah. And I was hoping honestly, I mean, talked to doctor Law on the board of finance call and asked, what's the plans down the road? Because they've got a $1,500,000 adjustment in their budget because they're gonna be caught up on the school bond and so the terms change and, you know, there wasn't it didn't sound great. Basically, they they it sounds like that board may have some ideas for that money already because I was hoping that would be a nice that would be a lot of help for the towns. You know, that would be a really 1,500,000 is a pretty big adjustment. So, you know, and over a share of that at this current under the new current rate would be 17%.
So, you know, that's a, you know, well over $200,000, you know, which would basically be, you know, it basically be 1 mil reduction in our RAM levy. If that had been re if that if that money could be returned to the towns. So, and that's about a year, one more budget cycle out. You know, and we probably need to get more active as a town and as a community with RAM to start putting more pressure on them, you know.
Okay. So Jeff Murray, Eric's answer acceptable to you as to where those fund balances have gone? Kind of
torn to be honest with you. Yeah, me too. I'll be perfectly honest. You know, it's not something I want to do and under ordinary circumstances I would fight it pretty vigorously But I think if there's ever an exception, you know, to when you agree to do that, this is probably the year.
I mean, fund balances for emergency situations and I think this is like, this is well,
hold on. We're not tapping we're not tapping the emergency reserve by any means. Oh, fun balance. So is what I'm saying is right. Another may have to tap the fund balance if some of the other proposals get adopted,
but as far as right now, no. Another thing I wanted to address too is I don't know if any of Chief Mike is still on the phone, but they may I know we're still on track. Are we still on track to buy a UTV this year? That's money they already have.
They already bought it. No, they have that money already in a fund so it shouldn't affect them. But what I'm telling what I'm telling you is the events this year that they would require that are canceled. So they may want to hold off another year for that UTV as well. So they won't impact their fund. So they're not if
they purchase it, it wouldn't be the money wouldn't be available to them till July. It'll take them probably six months by the time they get it and get it outfitted to be ready to. I'm just passing that information along. Yeah.
Do you have an objection to that being in the budget? Do you feel like we should pull that? I'm just telling them that they may wanna hold on to their money because I don't know if we're gonna be able to fund the fire truck fund the coming years. Okay. I mean, do they think about that?
Well, I mean, you know, ultimately maybe the question is we need to reevaluate what happens on town property, you know. Well, that's coming up soon. Well,
mean they felt pretty, they felt it was, it was pretty important for a variety reasons you know and and I'm not in the fire department so you know. I'm not trying to sidetrack I was just adding that information.
All right so are we prepared as a board to make a recommendation that the Andover Board of Education reduces its budget by a total of $200,000 off of the prior year number? Off of the current year's budget. Yes.
Current year's budget. So we're very clear this time. Yes. We don't need them confused as to off of what they're currently proposing off of the prior year or the current year. Twenty nineteen-twenty
twenty operating budget. Okay and just so that you know when you plug those numbers in, am I are you still sharing my screen? Yes. Okay
so I plugged those numbers in, in the AES category and that runs you down to a net mill rate increase of 1.1 if AES is cut $200,000 from last year's budget. Just so that you have the numbers and where that all ends up in the grand scheme of things.
And so Adrian, you were talking about keeping the budget increase at two, around two. Right?
Yeah. I mean, you know, we're we're at 1%. It's, you know, you're you're less than half a mil. So Right. I I mean, given what given that RAM, you know, and sort of part of this conversation is that as as RAM goes up, AES has to go down in some regards, you know, because the one of the reasons our share of RAM is going up so dramatically, the RAM budget's only really going up 1.5%, but as you can see, our share is going up almost 8%. And part of that is because our share of students is going up so dramatically over there. Right. So as the kids shift from AES to RAM, the money needs to fall them to some extent. So that sort of explains that a little bit, but
I can live with permanent either. What's that? It's not permanent either. No. No, it's not. It will sunset over time.
Yes. And hopefully that will be our help in the next couple of years. Mean, That puts it at under half a mil. Now Eric, my only concern is if we're talking about this and this is what we're looking at adopting, what are we doing to not then be using those fund dollars because I I didn't see the change on the screen show up yet.
So this gets your percent mill rate increase. If you want to use less fund dollars, we'll decrease this number right here, the reallocation by whatever thing you feel is appropriate.
What if we funded a multi use building this year, Eric? What would that do?
Well, how much do you want to put in it? Put some in it, see what happens.
It's going to go up, Scott. Well, I mean, 100,000
is basically well, if you put in 264,900 or $300, that would be a 1 mil rate increase. So if you put in half of that, it would be a half mil increase. Just depends what you wanna put in. Jeff, what do you have to say?
Well, I'm trying to I'm trying to work through your spreadsheet there, Eric, just so I can understand it. So if we're asking Andover Elementary for a $200,000 decrease. Right. Yeah.
So that number up top should be $200,000 Ram, we're not saying anything about Ram. Right. Not yet. So we're at a $295,000 decline in total taxation dollars. Is that accurate? Correct. Okay. Correct. If our revenue numbers are up, so the difference is really we're not using existing fund balance. Well, you really are. You're really getting right back to the same number you had last year. You had 970,000 last year, you're going be at 865,000 this year. Correct. Correct. And we're still increasing by one mil or 1%.
Not 1%, it's half a mil. 1% increase. Okay. Not even half a mil actually. It's 0.39 of a mil.
Correct. Well, upon how handovers always looked at this, the mill rate is really the issue that people concern themselves with, and that is not a significant enough increase as far as I'm concerned to have people be to look at what we're trying to do and be anti or negative toward it, even though I know there will be people who will be negative.
No. But, again, Eric, what are you doing on the spreadsheet to reflect not using the $80,000 towards funding the budget?
What do you want me to do with it? You want me to take it? You want me to add take $80,000 out of existing fund balance? That would just be, you know, $4.20 or $4.15, not 500,000.
If you want me to make that change and see how it looks, I can make that right now. You're oh, wait a minute. So you're saying wait a minute. Let me no. No. No. Don't do that. I I realize what you're saying now. Finally. I apologize. So But are we If you're using $500,000 in fund balance and we're off Originally, I wasn't thinking we were offsetting the school. So if we're using $500,000 in fund balance, have So
we're actually using more than that because what we're doing is we are using essentially 500,000 in fund balance. And we're also taking $365,000 which is, you know, money that exists in three funds that we are repurposing completely, and putting all that into one pool. And then separately, we are taking our, you know, our major funds that we need to do and allocating the money we need for it. So we're basically putting $785,000 into permanent funds, but we're putting say $860,000 from the unexpended fund balance and other funds we're not using into that pool to do it, which nets about $80,000
Okay but so now you've got an adjusted 80,000 that you need to reallocate. From where? Because you've offset the school too right?
Well but offsetting the school just brought the mill rate down So now you want to add that back to the town budget or you want to take away the, you want to transfer less money from the unexpended fund balance.
I wanna transfer less money from one expended fund because again, I don't wanna be funding. Don't wanna be funding and again, this is my own thing. I know Scott's, I don't wanna be funding our general budget with reserve money.
Okay, so that would get you about 415,000 of the unexpended fund balance which would get you basically just over 2% mill rate increase roughly. That's what that would look like basically a level.
So that's us actually still absorbing. We'd end up absorbing some of, so AES ends up absorbing some of the RAM adjustment because they have more of the kids now. Because on it What's
that? That's true, Adrian, because I mean, people can't look at we're cutting, cutting into our elementary or offsetting it. I mean, Ram is going up 400,000. We're having them go down 200,000. We're having to go up half of the increase of
what Ram is going up. Right. More than fair. Yes, because the reason our RAM numbers going up so dramatically is the number of kids is going up over there. So students are offsetting to middle and high school. And if you look at the town budget to town budget, we're actually spending less on the town budget with the adjusted numbers now. We actually have a one tenth of a percent decrease from last year.
Right, but remember too that last year's numbers were up because of basically capital spending.
And this year's numbers are up because of road spending. So it's a wash wash.
True. I mean, the parts of the town budget obviously are going up, parts of it are going down. Right. You know, it's netting out essentially, you know, just barely negative. Right.
Eric, can you go to your budget page, your budget tab? Sure.
Where in the budget tab? Where do you get to your number, the $12,558,537 of total expenditures? Budget totals.
So that's the number right there. Right. So the AES number has been decreased. Okay. Alright. So, Adrian, the issue ends up being on the on the other page. Now I'll go back to the revenue page tab, Eric. Yep. So that use of existing fund balance of $4.15 now nets out so that we're not using our fund balance for operational expenses. Yes. Okay. We are using existing funds correct.
We are but we're using existing funds essentially for capital funds. I mean in the end what we're doing is we're taking unexpended fund balance and we're transferring unexpended fund balance and other funds that we're not going to use into permanent funds for roadwork and tree work and all the things we need to do.
If it's like one fix it expenditures. I'm fine with that. I just don't want to use it off our budget. Adrian said if it's for tree work that we're going to recur once. Exactly.
I have no problem with that. It's just the using it to offset our increases. It's I couldn't support that.
Okay. So Eric, where in your spreadsheet does it show the use of basically $790,000 and how we can look at this and see that we're using it for one time capital expenditures. I know a good portion of this is going to Bunker Hill.
Mean, are not they are not all one time capital expenditures, because I mean in the sense you know these things are all funds they're basically they're not one time expenses they are ongoing expenses. We should every single year put a $100,000 into this because on average every fifteen years the fire department's going to spend about $1,500,000 in equipment. You know we should be putting $110,000 into this because on average if you look at the life expectancy of all their equipment and what it costs that number is about $110,000 a year. So those really aren't I mean we're kind of blurring the line between what is a one time expense and what is a you know ongoing expense. You know, roadwork, you know, it's we
are spending all the money out of roadwork out of the unexpended fund balance when in the previous budget we were spending $300,000 from direct taxation because we all understood that year in year out we need to put a minimum of $400,000 a year in the road work. So it's kind of you know, pulling out $80,000 and saying this is the part that we're not accounting for. I mean,
do you know what I mean? Correct. But if we were gonna do it exactly the way we wanted, we'd be raising taxes significantly, which I don't think this board has an appetite to do. We do not. So what we're looking at is we're looking at 785,000 of capital expenditures. Correct. And
we may fool ourselves, and Erica, I think that's what you're trying to tell us. We're going to fool ourselves that these are ongoing expenditures that need to be funded every year. We're going to have to find ways to fund this every year to really continue to do the capital improvements the town needs year over year over year. Correct. So I'm willing to sit there and live with this, The 785,000, Adrian, we reduced the number. If you go back to the revenue page now, Eric, and you click back there. All right. The mill rate is going from $34.99 to $35.70. Are we all acceptable that No. I wanna I wanna fund the multi use building. Scott, I think all of us would like to fund it.
But it's only going up point seven one there Jeff. Yeah but I think Adrian's
of the opinion that the taxpayers would be alright with 2%.
You're at 2%. You're at 2%. Two two mills I'm saying. I don't know that we'll get two mills. The the thing that's come across in the ever since COVID, everything has been zero budget, zero budget, zero budget.
People are scared. They don't know what they're going to have in the next year or two. I mean, think a lot of people are wondering if they're still going have their jobs right now. So I mean, I really don't want to hit people. I mean, I know we have things we have to do. I mean, if we can keep the town somewhat solvent and keep us going. Look, here's here's the We're gonna get a hit too. So I mean, it's just
a thought. Would you agree that you're not ready to spend that money for another year anyways?
Well, don't think we're gonna have it next year either because I think with the fall off for this is gonna be a couple of years. Would know,
you agree though that we're not ready to build that building. We're not ready to put that space into play for at least twelve months. Given the situation, correct. Scott, would you agree? You're at least twelve months out from even thinking about breaking ground anywhere.
Soon as we drop the ball on this, it's not gonna happen. Again, that's all I'm worried about.
Scott, I would sit there and tell you that in previous boards, I really would be with you on that, but I don't think with the makeup of this board that we wanna drop that project. I don't think we should fund it this year. I
think my problem is right now, look, we're we're funding a hypothetical, right? It's we don't have a building, we don't have a location, we don't have a number, we don't so to ask people to put money away for a hypothetical, it's sort of the same thing I was saying about, you know, the public works fund. We may not need that. We may need the mower now, but we're not gonna be ready to buy it for two years. So, you know, putting money in there to me is a little
Adrian, that's a different issue. I think Eric No, but I think it's the same principle. If you gave him that money for public works, he's gonna spend it this year. I mean, the building is a different issue. I'm agreeing I'm agreeing with you and Jeff related to the building. And I don't put Scott off easily because I do believe that we need to do that for our seniors. But I just think in this situation, Scott, in this environment, it's not practical. It's not financially prudent for us to use our money and tax our residents more money to put money into that type of fund. That's not something I'm willing to support. It's something I want to do. There's no doubt about
I just don't think right now in this budget cycle we should look to do that. Alright. And I and and I'll buy into that, but I figured if I'm the only one that's gonna say anything, for the senior center in this budget,
I needed to say it. That's fine. But but don't but don't think you're the only one. I know Jeff Murray wants to do it. I know AJ. I definitely want that building constructed.
I just and I think that most of the seniors will agree with it. With the circumstances that's going on, I think they're probably going to say, you know, may have to wait a year or two more. No, that's not what they said really. I mean, we've done we've done some improvements at the community center and we've done some things to try to do some transition. Mean, it's, it's tough. It's tough. I mean,
stuff. All right. So if we're if are we willing to sit there and take our numbers the way that Eric has them currently constructed with a 2% increase, a mill rate of 35.7, and present that to the Board of Finance? Somebody we wanna make a motion to sit there and move this forward. What do we wanna do?
I'll make a motion to move it forward as adjusted with a proposed mill rate of 35.7 which would be an increase of 0.71 mills. That includes the 8% increase that we are assuming from RAM which in and of itself is better than two and a half mils. Someone want to second that? I'll second that. Any further discussion?
What's gonna happen if AES comes back to us in the next month and says we can't cut 200,000? Well Well, the Board of Finance would make that
adjustment. We're just presenting this to the Board of Board of Finance if the Board of Finance chooses to accept less.
It's on the Board of Finance at that point. Okay. I mean, I don't mean it negatively. I was asking a question because I mean, we've been to them multiple times and we haven't really gotten an answer.
Well, I mean, first of all, the Board of Finance, to be perfectly blunt, if they wanted could just tell AES how much they were giving them. And that would be the end of it. Right. Now hopefully there'll be a little dialogue about how that can occur rather than just a blunt statement but that is legally that's what's possible. Cannot make the legal but any particular and they can't tell them how to allocate their money. No. But the Board of Finance can give them a bottom line number.
Exactly. If they so choose. The the board of finance has seemed willing at least to do that to the $100,000 cut. I don't know that they'll do it for this 200, but given the discussion, it seems fair.
Okay. So so we're just providing guidance to the board of finance as to where we would like them to you know, how how we would like them to go after our priorities. So these are our priorities. They're gonna try to fund them, and we're gonna try to get done what we can But
again, considering 1.5 mils is the increase from RAM alone, the fact that we are looking at a point, you know, half of that, only half of that would be to the town If we can do this, that seems really fair. We're not looking at a town budget increase at this point. We're looking at a ram increase really and not even a full ram increase. We're absorbing some of that through our own school.
Okay. So any further discussion? Okay. Let's call a vote. All those in favor? Aye. Paula, did you raise your hand? I can't see you. I did. Yep. Get on the stool, Paul. All right. She's tired.
Okay. So Eric, if you can stop sharing your screen so we can go back to the other view. Let's get to the next step, the tax collection proposals. There is a motion in front of us. The state has the governor has passed a executive order related to tax collection. We can sit there and push off receipt of taxes for ninety days related to hardships, or we can do it in in a a global sense. Those are two motions in front of us. We need to discuss which motion we're looking to move toward and get this get done what we wanna do. I personally believe that a ninety day extension should only be given for those who show or can show a hardship to the tax collector. That is the motion that I would like to see passed, but we need to have some discussion on it. So anyone?
I just have a question. How much of those payments are actually to the town and not through escrow?
It was in the do you have that pulled up, Eric? It was in the document, right? Yeah, I do. If you want you want me to share that again? Yeah, 40% or so. Can you pull it up? Yep. Hang on. Let me share. My question is how many are direct payments to the town? Yeah, there's She got a document to us later in the day. Yeah. I I probably didn't see it. I was busy all day. No. I I just saw it just before we came on.
Yeah. Unfortunately, we didn't get it. Barbara was madly working on it at the beginning of the day. So the the first thing is that the Can I unmute for a What?
Yep. Oh, okay. Yeah. I just this weekend, I was talking to the tax collector. So I just decided to put something together, not even, you know, because anyone asked for it. Well, wait. To be candid, just so we're clear, I asked for this from her three weeks ago. From the tax collector? Yes. Oh, no, I didn't know that. I I had a phone call with her and we were trying to discuss what the implications would be of our deferrals. Do you remember?
Okay. Well, what I put together was just from her information, and I didn't even think you'd wanna address it tonight or I would have sent it to the whole board. Yeah. But the to me was about 40% is escrow.
Yeah. The the reason this came up, Barbara, is we were if if we were looking at deferring the you know, allowing people to pay all electronically, the escrow ones do not do not come in at they wouldn't they wouldn't cost us. So the question is what comes out of escrow and what actually comes through the office by other means? Right. And That's why we asked her to pull it out. The email that I sent because that did a Well, I can just tell you for an example,
that escrow, according to the tax collector, is about 40%. That comes in in the first month of the quarter. That's why I've highlighted that red, you know, for example, quarter four. But if you look at quarter one July, I'm looking at, you know, the 02/1977. Eric, I don't know if you have that. Let me just grab my calculator. We have a spreadsheet in front of us.
So the the bottom line is the first quarter you know we you know, you look at what comes in, it's pretty substantial. So we're talking about putting off and remember that's only 60% of the or only 40% of what comes in, in terms of just mortgages that are escrowed. It doesn't come in into play with all the other personal property. Okay, the memo I had Eric was
about 40% of that 2,000,000 about 831,000. This is like if taxes were flat for the next year. That was, you know, an example of the last time we had a first quarter July. If taxpayers, if you did a blanket and the only thing you could count on coming in was the escrow and if the 40% number is correct then you'd be looking at if the tech every taxpayer who was eligible took advantage of it, you'd be looking at about a 2,500,000 deferred that would be pushed off for three months. In another, graph, I graphed the, cash flow from data I've had I have from over the last three years. Did you put that one up, Eric? I'll put that one up in a second. Okay. Okay, so this is just something I picked up from checkbook reconciliations I have just a chart that shows what the ending balance is each month. And then I just graphed it. And you can see that you haven't really dipped below about 3,000,000 for two years. You have a comfortable cash, you know, cash surplus. So, to you know, to play around with things more as you know, if you made that decision, you'd be making some assumptions about how many people would actually push off paying their taxes, you know, the ones that didn't have to, didn't fall into that, you know, they could but they wouldn't.
But, you know, just in the email that I wrote, you know, whether or not you would be looking at, you know, TANS, TANS anticipation notes would kind of depend on kind of some assumptions as you went into the year and you actually looked at say your July collections to see if you got the 40% escrow plus more. But my estimate was about like if everybody took advantage of it, it'd be like about a 2,500,000 shortfall. Does that make sense and does that help? It's great information. It is. Nice graph. Well, anyway,
the issue from my end is that a question of the way the motions are written, I don't believe we should make this a blanket not make this a blanket deferral of tax collection for ninety days because I don't care how many people take advantage of it. This should be These are trying times. There are going to be some people that really need help, and they have every right to go to the tax collector and to the town and sit there and say, Okay, hey, I'd like a deferral of my taxes to be paid. I totally understand that. I am not a believer in allowing this to be a blanket.
Do we know what the requirements are for some And what are they gonna require?
Just, they just say hardship. His, his executive order was hardship.
Right. And, and part of the, the concern on the tax collector's part is she was very nervous about ending up being the person that's the arbitrator of hardship and what the what the commission would want her to prove before something was hardship. I mean, you want their unemployment slips? Do you want their bank statements? You know what what in your mind as a commission demonstrates hardship or is it just that they ask for it or is it is there some specific metric that you want to apply?
Dennis, can you unmute Dennis please? He's raising his hand. Paula? Yes, I
attended the same webinar that I believe the tax collector sat in on. That was last week and had a two hour session with some attorneys and some other people who were working with the CCM on this and everybody seemed to recommend given the concerns about you know possible administrative nightmare. They recommended against what Jeff is suggesting and recommended that you just give it to everybody. Now you'd have to you have because you collect your taxes for four times quarterly, you're gonna have a ninety day deferral of the April 1 payment which is already underway and then a ninety day deferral of the payment due on July 1. So that could be complicated. Anyway, the guidelines that are going to be applied if you don't choose that option, you choose the option that Jeff Maguire is suggesting are going to be set by, I believe, by the Office of Policy and Management. And that's got to come down pretty soon. There aren't that many towns obviously in our situation because most towns collect only twice a year. But unfortunately the start date for all this was back in March retroactive.
My my issue is not to sit there and put any administrative burden on the tax collector at all. Yep. That if an individual comes in and sits there and says, need to defer my taxes, you defer their taxes. It's an honor system. I mean, but if you sit there and you put it out as a blanket deferral and you advertise it as a blanket deferral, more people will take advantage of it. Oh, everybody will. Or not everybody maybe, but most everybody.
Not Mr. Mandeville. Couldn't we just put something in there? He'll pay double. Could we just put something as simple as all they have to do is show a reduction in income or that they're on unemployment or something?
You could. I mean we don't have the office policy management guidelines but mean to me it would be just ask
and Well Darren Guidelines or requirements from the OPM? From OPM? Well, I think they're requirements.
Yeah. So I mean, we would have to follow. Yeah. I think so. Well, I'm trying to find the executive order. Hold on a second. That's a good point, Jeff. So I don't really want to go down that path because we could get I don't think we have I don't yeah, okay, that's a good question. I do not think that we have an option. I haven't seen any guidelines come up.
No, they haven't. But there is something in the, the, from the 7S, right? Yeah. No, seven. What did I say in the, in the- It's 7S.
Dennis, while you're looking, can we just ask Barbara a question? Sure. Barbara, you still on? No. Yep. Let me unmute her. Barbara, you there?
Yep. I'm gonna unmute her. All right Barbara I'm trying to unmute you try it from your end it's not working.
Sorry about that I misplaced my mouse go ahead. No. So the question I have is, you said that initially that
doing this you didn't think was a problem initially, but we would run into a problem when exactly if people took advantage of it? Well, I think if you got into July and you could see how many real how many people paid their real estate, how many people just decided not to even, you know, like they have the money and they're gonna go ahead and do it, they're they're not, out of work or or you know, for for what for whatever reason can't pay, you know, that they may just go ahead and make their payment. It would kind of depend on collections, I would say in in the early part of July, and then you would have to make a decision about, whether you would need some short term financing. Really? July of this year? Just what
okay. She just gave us a graph that said we have a $3,000,000 balance. If everyone took advantage of not paying their taxes, we would we would be down to zero Zero.
Very quickly. Point in time that they started paying on the second quarter, in the second cycle. Yeah. I'm not willing to risk that personally. No.
Yeah, as I I say, just based on my calculations, it would be a hit of about 2 and a half million dollars for the quarter that you'd be deferring. And so yes, if everyone took advantage of it with the 60% real estate and the personal property and motor vehicle, which all the motor vehicle comes in July. So that's not quarterly. So that's why that number is so much higher. If you look at the July number. So all of that would be anticipated in July, 60% real estate, you know, quarter personal property tax, but all your motor vehicle. So yeah, it could be up to a 2,500,000 decrease in revenue. The reality
is that not everyone is going to take advantage of it and the issue in front of the board is how do we sit there and try to implement to try to help the people that need it, truly need it?
Well let's, let's, if we go down this path and OPM has a guideline then we let OPM make the decision. That's fine.
Dennis go ahead. Okay I found, I found, found seven s. It's seven s paragraph six which is quite lengthy, but in response to your question Jeff Murray, the guidelines seem to be open to Okay, you can you can set your own guidelines. I, know, and Jeff, Jeff the first elect man is saying, we'll just say anybody who says they need it. But you can make it simple. Don't forget, are also eligible for this and landlords who have given some sort of an economic benefit or break to tenants. And now now since then, they've also he's also passed, Adrian you would know this, he's also passed an executive order giving
tenants a break on on rent, deferred payment of rent. Yeah. And he's actually allowing them to use their social security deposits as well. Exactly.
If the the deposit is for more than one month. That's right. So we're capable of setting our own guidelines.
Yes. Yes. You can, it says that OPM shall issue guidance as to which taxpayers, businesses, non profits and residents shall be considered eligible for a deferment program, but participating municipalities may, upon approval of its local legislative body, okay, or in any town which legislative body is town meeting like Andover, by a vote of the Board of Selectmen, extend eligibility for the deferment program to other categories of taxpayers, businesses, non profits and residents. I interpret that as meaning that you can set your own guidelines. But if you're going to do that, you gotta do it tonight or you gotta have a special meeting next week because the deadline for making your choice is April 25. Do
we have to, oh sorry Dennis, do we have to participate?
You have to participate in either this program or the low interest rate program. Okay. Separate program. And that program requires you if you participate in that, you have to choose one of the two. And if you choose that program, then what you do is you reduce the, you know, it's 18% a year for those who don't pay, you reduce the interest rate for a certain period of time, I believe ninety days. I look at that very carefully because we did, Eric suggested that we were going to choose the other program, the deferment program, but I said, yeah, it is for ninety days. You reduce the annual percentage interest for those ninety days you'd have to do two ninety day periods because you have quarterly, quarterly payment, to 3%, which it's now of course 18% per year. Now that that requires a calculation and again on the webinar everybody said oh nobody's gonna want to do that. That's too difficult. But Jeff Maguire you're an accountant so you tell me. Eric,
can you ask QDS if they factored this into their software?
So QDS, as of this moment, can't do it. They said they would there's no question they could have it up and implemented by July. There's some question about whether they can have it implemented for quarterly taxes that are due basically right now. But it is possible for them. It didn't sound like they had much like there were going to be many towns they would be doing it for. I don't know that they have any towns that they would be doing it for for quarterlies. So yes, it is possible with QDS, but QDS does not have that capability today. That has to be programmed into it. Okay.
So what does the board want to do? Do you want to make a blanket pass for all town residents for ninety days? Do you want to sit there and put in some type of guidelines? Do you want to do it tonight? Do you want to do it at a special meeting? What would you what's your pleasure? Can I ask a quick clarifying question? Sure.
Dennis, when you said the deadline was in April here, is that for this quarter for the fourth quarter of this fiscal year?
That's choosing which of the two programs you are going to become involved in. Either the tax deferment program or the low interest rate program.
To You make that decision in April. One or the other. That's right. It's And it will affect this last quarter, this fourth quarter and first quarter.
Just the fourth, just the first. Correct. We Well, the April taxation period is done. Okay. No,
this is this would affect the April taxation period. Yes. Because they backdated it to a date in March. So the six towns in Connecticut that do quarterlies get stuck with this for the for this one also.
Okay. So what does the board wanna do? Because now this is gonna impact us out through September.
What what what's the downside of doing the the the low interest one? Sounds like software.
Yeah. The the immediate downside is software. The longer term downside is trying to explain to people what their actual bill is. You know, it's hard enough to to get it through people what they're paying right now when you start talking about this much interest for this period and this much interest for that period.
How hard is it to say your interest was deferred for the for the ninety days or the what have you and then after that this is the percentage rate? It shows up on the bill. Yeah.
I mean, but listen, our bills were for April were already printed.
We have a fairly competent tax collector. I think she can handle this. Sorry. I mean, I just know I don't disagree. Well, you're very competent tax collector
very much does not want you to do the adjusted interest, option if she can help it.
Yeah, but she also doesn't want us to do the option where she is responsible for determining that they meet the guidelines or don't. So in essence, she doesn't want to do either one of them. So from my standpoint, the board is going to make a decision as to what we want to do and we're going to get it implemented. As I said, my guidelines would be if they ask for it, they get it. If you don't ask, don't get. I mean and does that mean that all 3,000 of our real estate residents are gonna come in and ask for it? No.
I think the only concern I have with what you're suggesting is you're gonna end up with people that missed the bill or whatever reason don't pay on time and then come in after it's late and say oh I want it I want it now. Okay then then do the interest rate because it's the cleanest way.
That's what I think. Then let's go. Ball off. You have to prove a hardship, right? Not on the interest rate.
The other one that Adrian was talking about, the people that missed their bill, They'd have to prove a hardship.
Well, Jeff is suggesting no, he'd give it to everybody. Yeah but they didn't ask for it.
So they're gonna I'm asking for it now. I'm three months late. I know. I don't care that you were late. You didn't ask for it. Here's the timeline. Here's the guideline. The guideline is come to us in the timeframe that you're supposed to pay your bill. Ask for it. If you don't ask for it, you'll miss it. Dennis jump in. You're sticking here. I mean, you know, you wanted to go with the Furman program as Jeff was suggesting before,
you could always vote to, delegate to me the responsibility to just draft a really simple affidavit saying, okay, I'm needy because of COVID-nineteen and I want the deferment. You know, something really simple as long as you're willing to set those kind of guidelines, general guidelines tonight. On the other hand, if you go with the low interest rate program, my thought just came to me is that, you know, most people pay their taxes on time and there's no you know the interest question doesn't come up. I mean I think the assumption is a lot of them won't because of you know loss of income due to COVID-nineteen.
I don't know but know it's one of the complicating factors with your situation is the quarterly tax payments. We tried changing that Dennis. I know you did. I wrote the proposal. I was I was disappointed when it was shut down. Right so as a matter right. Let's take course.
Can we hear from the other select persons that haven't said anything? Scott, Paula? Go ahead. Let's go. Paul? I'm in favor of, Jeff's suggestion. Which one? We got two Jeffs. Jeff McGuire's suggestion.
So you would you don't like the interest rate option? If nobody pays their taxes for
for ninety days we're gonna be in a hardship. The town's gonna be in one on their own. Well but but Jeff is suggesting we just give it to everybody. No he did not say that he said people that come in and ask for it. Yeah but they won't have to prove anything you just give it to them yeah I want it give it to me. Listen
if you ask me if you ask me which way I would I as long as QDS can do the interest rate transaction, calculation, I'm in favor of that because that's cleaner. It it really is. It's just cleaner. Either you decide you wanna pay your taxes on time and not incur any interest. I mean, because, Dennis O'Brien, the the interest rate is zero for the first ninety days?
No. It's 3% for the first ninety days. Okay. Let's do
the interest rate one because people won't want to pay interest. Most people won't want to pay interest if they can avoid I'm just it's just I'm just trying to find the simplest solution so we get our money.
I think you might be right. I mean, I I I think most people pay on time and will and some people won't be able to. But if they're not able to, having an option of paying 3% interest is a heck of a lot better than 18. Exactly. Dumb. Yeah, 18% interest is a real incentive to pay. Are you awake?
I am. And so when you put it that way, I guess that other way is better with the interest.
Okay. I I mean, then I guess we'll have to go back to QDS. I don't know when they can implement it. It's going to be a little bit of a cluster since we're already collecting but we'll work it out. Won't really affect America until we get somebody that's late.
No taxpayer knew that anything was going to happen on that quarter.
Oh no, don't think that. I fielded probably at least 10 calls from residents asking me whether we're going to defer their payments and I said I cannot give you any guidance that's a Board of Selectmen's decision they will make their decision tonight.
All right so tomorrow can you go to QDS and ask them what it would take to implement the interest rate program for the town of Andorra? I will certainly ask them that. Okay.
So the only hesitation I have for the board members is if we do this and QDS can't put this in place, we're back to square one anyway.
Let's deal with that next month when we've actually at that point, we'll have bills that are late. You can't because you have to have something signed by April 20 Yeah, we signed it but if QDS can't put it in, then we'll have to revise it. Right,
right. I think move forward with the interest idea and then see what happens.
Okay. We got to do something. I was going to suggest that we have a quick special meeting on it once Eric gets us an answer. That sounds reasonable. That's what I was I
did talk to the tax collector. She did say QDS said they could do it, but they don't have it at this point.
It wouldn't be implemented in the next couple of days, that's for sure. Again you're not gonna have any late bills till the end of the month. That's right. That's right. They're not doing it until the end of the month. Don't need it for the next couple days. We need it by the thirtieth or whatever. Correct but we just need to know that they're gonna do it and they're gonna make it available to us. We just approve it because we don't even have to do anything at that point in time. We're just totally following the state guidance. Right.
You wanna vote on it right now and say we're gonna do it, I'm in favor. I would make a motion then that we accept
the state offered, deferred interest or reduced interest program and we sign up along their lines for, tax collections.
Okay, anybody wanna second that? I'll second that. Okay, no further discussion, anybody? All those in favor? Aye. Aye.
Dennis, you threw your hand up. Yeah, I just wanted to say that it's for the record, it's called the low interest rate program. Okay, thank you. And it's the low interest rate program and it's authorized by executive order 71S of the the governor's executive orders paragraph six b.
Dennis we voted on the motion as you will write it. Is everybody in agreement there? Yes. Excellent. Dennis, you write it up and Amanda will have it and we'll get that done. As soon as this meeting is over, I'll do it, man. Thank you very much, sir. And and then Eric, you're going to sit there and just inform QDS and tell them whatever we need to do, we're gonna get that done. Yep. Great. Well I will have the tax collector do it but yes the town will do that. Thank you very much. Roadwork plan through 2021. Eric we need to do this. Does anyone want to do this on tonight's call, at tonight's meeting?
I only have 60 PowerPoint slides, shouldn't take more than an hour Jeff, I mean come on. No, we can certainly put that off. Okay, anybody have any problems with it? Adrian?
One question I have for you Eric is how much money are you gonna spend in this flat in this fiscal year on the road work? Well if
I actually get if Town Aid Road is actually passed by the state I'll spend the whole 75,000 or 175,000 I have. Yep.
Okay. And just so we know, where are you planning on spending that 175? Right. That's what was my next question.
So if you want to ask that question, that so I'm splitting it. We're going to spend some money crack sealing. We're going to spend some money, doing what's called cape sealing. We're going to do a bunch of chip sealing, and that's pretty much all we would get out of this year's budget and then we'll do a little bit of paving next year. My budget or my plan is predicated on probably about 65 percent of the money going to preservation and about 35%
going to paving and just shipping bad spots. And what roads are the that what roads are you going to work on? Just off the top of your head Eric, I'm not gonna pressure you into it. Oh,
School Road, Juravadi Road, Townsend will be worked on. You're fog seal that? Yep Townsend will be fog sealed. What what road do you live on Scott? I want your road to be done. Did it last year I got paved.
Gets no public services from Random. No I'm a state road. Yeah we're not spending town money on state roads that's for sure. But Paula got hers done didn't you Paula? I did. Scott is the easiest select person. He can't influence anything on his own personal road.
Question Eric, is there any way you can get that out there? It can we post on is it like a report or something you put together? Hey,
so I found in the packet Eric your road list by priority, is that would that be helpful? Yep, you could share that if you want to do Yeah. Hang on here.
I read that but it didn't say what you were gonna do this this year before July.
So here's road list by priority and he's got it listed out. So here's my problem Scott is that
you know we got three two and a half months left in the fiscal year and I actually don't have two thirds of what I was gonna spend this you know left I mean I've got 75,000 in the budget that can be spent and we'll definitely spend that. And if the state freaking passes Town Aid Road, I'll spend the other 100. But, you know, I mean, I wish I had more faith in the state that they were actually going to pass it but until the bond commission passes the bond and we actually have the money, I mean So you really got 75?
So I definitely have 75, You know? And then next year what we spend depends on what we, you know, what we do. You know? Depends on the budget and it depends to some extent on next year whether Town Aid Road, we get Town Aid Road again next year. It might not. Yeah. I mean, don't disagree with you.
Okay. Thank In this list, just so I understand it, the fog ceiling $40,000 Yep.
So you're saying Winrush East Street, Townsend Road, and Sunset Lane? Yeah. And the walking track. Yep. So you're gonna seal the walking track at at
And Eric, I just wanted to say thank you for putting that on there. Yeah no problem. So yeah so influenced by Scott Persson. He's my He's
the maintenance director at the That's my road down there Adrian okay so I did get something for myself.
Okay and so shimming shimming done you know Bear Swamp West, Shoddy Mill, Merritt Valley okay and then can you go down just a little more Paula? Mhmm.
How about I do this? Is this better? There you go. Thank you. Okay. So the priority list on the chip ceiling will be done next year as we move forward.
So actually, if I do have the whole 775,000, I'm gonna do a lot of the chip ceiling in this year's budget, presuming Comer can meet that deadline. Because what you know so with $175,000 I want to essentially spend some of the money on shimming Cause what happens is the roads you're going to chip seal all have some bad spots. They're mostly okay, but they have some bad spots. So that has to be shimmed first, and then you chip seal over. So the goal is to get the shimming done as soon as humanly possible, know, and then with the with the intention of shimming them, you know, this fiscal budget and then use a good chunk of next fiscal year's budget to go over the the chip seal with on the on the high priority roads high usage roads like School Street and micro seal over the top of that and on the lower priority roads just fog seal it because what it does is people get wound up when they see chip seal roads but if you fog seal over the top of it it kind of looks like it's paved and people don't you know get that negative impression of the road. You know what I mean? Yeah
and if you just shim and you don't put something over it you still have a you still have a permeation that the water can get under.
Okay. Yeah I mean you know shimming is best done prior to some other treatment. Yes. I mean really what you do is you you crack seal first and then you shim and then you chip seal and then maybe you do something else on top of that if you got the money.
Okay. All right. Well, let's hope we get the money from the state and we can get this stuff, started in this quarter.
Yep. Yep. And I'm also proposing that we mill and pave two roads. Shoddy because we have to do drainage on Shoddy and by the time we chunk up the road to do the drainage, Shottie's in pretty rough shape anyway, so it makes sense to do it all at once, do the drainage and then kind of finish the project off in the end by paving it. That because it's got a bunch of layers of asphalt and you can tell by if you look at where the curbs are, there's not much curb showing which means we've already paved over it at least a couple times since we've curved it. So that really needs to get milled first and then paved. And then Long Hill Road we probably should do the same thing. Those would kind of be the two I could we could fit in potentially you know with the money we have.
And how many dirt roads do we have remaining in the town of Andover? We have one. Okay. Is that on your schedule for anything? It is not. That is something that we should look at taking care of in the next three years. All right. Any other questions for Eric on this? Okay. All right. Thank you. You're very welcome. Let's go. So now we're on to the annual report twenty eighteen-twenty nineteen and before you get started, Amanda, I owe you something, right?
Well, I was going to share that the report is all done. Oh, good job. You got it done without me. Thank you. Still waiting for just one or two more things, but it's all done, and it is ready to go and be posted on the town website once we have the auditor report from Barbara. And she said it will be done at the end of the month. Okay. Shape. Thank you, Amanda. Okay. So let's sit there and go to,
number eight approval of meeting minutes, the approval of the Monday, March 9. We have we have to do g, the field. We have to talk about the field. What about the field? Sorry. We wanna You took out your ceiling. Access.
Go ahead. This was, Jeff Murray added in additions and deletions.
Just appears that we have, quite a few soccer players and people playing in large groups on the field. I just didn't know what Eric's take was on that with the with the current restrictions we have in place. So I know Sky you told you sent me an email the other day saying you saw minimal people but Saturday I saw some people there in close proximity. They're like high fiving each other and
I don't think they were cohabitating family. They looked like teenagers or college kids. Yes. They're kids. That doesn't mean anything that the Hearst farm they have nine children. They have a whole soccer team.
So it's just I just don't know if the town most towns have adopted a policy for their fields and I just didn't know if the town wanted adopt a similar policy. If not, we can move on.
For about three weeks, Jeff, there's been five kids playing down there every night. There's five.
And I'll take I'll take total responsibility as a bad parent. One of them is my child. Okay. Jeff, you didn't have to bring that up. I wasn't going to. No. That's alright. You know what? Yeah. We need to ban this then. Oh, go ahead. Jeff needs more. I'll
throw you guys down in here right now. If I vote no, he will go crazy.
Yeah. But it's not fair. Everyone else is doing with the children's stock at home and you're sending them out. They
are not playing. They are not playing a game. They're kicking the ball around. They're kicking the ball. Paula's
stuck locked in with her children. It's not fair that you send them out for society to babysit.
Oh, society. Long Hill Field is society babysitting my child. Boy. Jonathan Wendover should not Let's have your go. If we have to ban it, we have to ban it. I'm not saying
ban it. I'm just saying. You said ban it earlier, Jeff. You can't back down on this. I'll
tell you, I'll throw somebody else under the bus. There's another child down there whose mother is a commissioner. Here's my take on it, okay.
You wanna send your kids too? No, listen, we are very,
you know, we have a big backyard, right? I'm thankful for that. But for families that don't have, you know, that luxury or whatever, they need a place to bring their kids or whatever. So how do we keep it open, but we monitor it but not ban it because Are you offering your backyard?
I'm not saying ban either. I'm just saying we need to kind of be a little bit more proactive with this because many towns are closing their fields.
And I just want to have Andover be a meeting place for you know, groups to get together if we don't have policy in place. And Jeff, I've been very proactive about this because there was I've been watching it, there was, you know, five kids that Jeff sends down there every afternoon And there was a family, and there was a family down there, and it was a whole family. There was five kids. And they're all sharing Okay? They're all they're all from a family. So they're all playing soccer together. So if there were six, I could say something.
But it's always been five. So there's nothing I can say. Have five kids.
I'm just they just have to stay within the state regulations. That's it. I I only have two, but those other boys that they're they're my sons too. So I worry about them as well. I mean, listen. If you guys wanna know where there's people in traffic, come around and watch how many people are walking the lake Right. All the time. You get stuck over on the dam area, and and you're waiting for people to come by. I mean, listen, you have to use common sense. I get it. I mean but it's hard for me as a dad to sit there and say that I don't want my son down there kicking the soccer ball and I gather him in front of his computer playing video games. Right. I mean, listen, he's not down there playing soccer, he's fishing on the lovely riverbank that the town administrator and our other first selectmen made accessible for fishing. And by the way, when Scott Poisson stocked the Hop River so that people could go down there and do the outdoors, my son was down there immediately to try to catch fish in a barrel.
So And he caught seven. Thank you for doing that, by the way. He caught seven.
He caught Let's take a listen. We'll just monitor it then. That's fine. No. No. Jeff, if you make a motion, I will second it. I'm waiting for that motion. No. I just don't know what motion we would make at this point. No motions.
There's no motions. No. It's we can no motions. We're we're having there's there's similar listen. Listen. If you we want to we wanna make a motion to to put a sign down there and get a sign made for what type of activities that we we we approve. I mean, don't really even feel we should go there because then when we go there, we get ourselves we we allow common sense to take over and Common sense. You know, I mean, they're not down there. I will tell you, my son is not down there with, 11 kids having, you know, 11 on 11 soccer and beating on each other. It's it's not what's happening. Let's just let the trooper know what's going on if you patrol and he sees a bunch of, you know, a group big group down there. All you have to do is look look to to Scott Person because he is the trooper of that facility. Okay.
Scott, do you have like tear gas or something to break up these things? Scott,
if you text me, I will drive down and take care of it. Okay. If
anyone has a problem with those five teenage boys. It's not five kids. I'm just saying down in the future, I mean, four towns are closing their fields.
I totally understand. The end of the world then Just make the motion. We'll close it right now. I'm good for That's fine. That's fine. Not gonna
I'm not gonna kick any kids off a field. I just wanted to make it looking for the vote. Just here
you want me to bring my son in. He's sitting out here. I'll bring him in. I'll let him tell you what he did what he's doing. The soccer field is kind of the tip of the iceberg. We're having more problems with the rail trail right now and like
bolt notch than anything else. So it's just there's just people getting outside and they I mean, I don't wanna stop people from exercising.
I mean, heck, listen, Andover still has what? One confirmed case, Eric? Exactly. Correct. You're doing a fabulous job. That's right. I'm not sure I can take credit for that. Even you wanna vote to to take my children off of that deal, you did a phenomenal job stopping the the use of the Alright. Transportation for the scene. Alright. Alright. Good, Jeff. I
move to make no motion on this subject matter. I'll second.
We're done. Okay. Now we're on to eight approval of meeting minutes. Can we do this as a blanket March 9, March 18, April 3? And we did not have a special meeting. So those three. Somebody wanna make a motion to approve? So moved. Seconded. Great. All those in favor, aye. Aye. Okay. We are now on to the treasurer's report. Is the treasurer still with us? Does she want to give it? Yes. She's still here. Barbara, you Yeah. I'm still on.
No, I don't really have a lot to add other than what is in there. Revenue is still on track. As I said the last time, we are going to get more in ECS than we had originally budgeted. And just in a follow-up comment, what was mentioned earlier about revenue for next year. This is the second year of a two year budget. So the numbers are always readily available. And I don't, I just can't imagine what kind of changes they're going to be doing and I Dennis may know more about this but they're just not going into session that's been canceled for this spring. So I don't know if they're going to make any changes to budgets for next year. As far as those big numbers the ECS numbers. So that's about it. Expenditures. We've got a few overexpended there in the report that I've been submitting, Eric and I have been keeping track of everything that
has been overspent and he and I are going to start looking at turning those over expenditures into actual appropriation transfers. So we make sure we know where we're getting the money to shore up the budget. And that's about it unless there are any questions.
Barbara, have you sat down with Eric to look at what we can shift this year to pick up any road paving dollars out of this year's budget? We're not, instead of transferring money back into the fund, we're getting stuff done off that list. You know, we haven't, but that's
what we'll start to do is look at whether we can do our appropriation transfers from the operating budgets and not touch that 50,000 contingency. Leave that as a larger
go ahead. Well candidly, you know, when we start rolling into the end of June here or the end of May, the contingency and every other funds that we have left over, we should be appropriating to that paving line or tree or something. Understood.
Yeah. You know, we shouldn't be transferring back into the general fund. That's how we got into this problem in the first place. Well, was talking
about the over expenditures that we're doing now, moving those within budgets. And an example is that salt sand thing. One is really overspent because the other one isn't being used.
Right. So for the record, Ed and I sat down for about two hours today and went over the public works budget and what would and wouldn't get spent out of it. And I have an Excel spreadsheet of what transfers we're going to make or what we're proposing to make out of public works. Next, I got to sit down with Barbara and do it so we presented to the Board of Finance. It would be my intention to make most of those at this coming Board of Finance meetings, because we're not going to really fund all that much in public works equipment, Two of the lower cost pieces were the material handler for the loader, basically the boom on the front, and the second was the material spreader for the back of one of the trucks. We would buy that out of the public works budget this year, to get it done so we don't have that. Okay,
now that you're saying the is this a side tip bucket or is this a boom?
So we're not gonna do the side tip bucket because instead of doing a side tip bucket you know the the problem with the side tip bucket is you still got to go over to one of the trucks and you got to reach in the back and you got to scoop the material out and then dump it to the side. They make a material handler which basically you just tip the bucket back, it comes out the chute, it goes into another chute and that gets distributed where you want it. Okay. So we're talking about buying that as instead of the side tip bucket. And what so and that's for the loader? No, that would go directly on the back of one of the dump trucks. So what's the piece for the loader? The piece for the loader is basically a boom, you know, to lift heavy objects.
Okay. So it ties into the removable bucket assembly so you can have a clear outside line of sight? Yes.
Yes. And to be perfectly honest, right now public works whenever they need to pick up heavy stuff, they go borrow it. They basically drive the loader over to Coventry, attach their boom to the loader and drive it back, which, you know it's not that expensive a piece of equipment we should own one. How much is that Eric? About 7,000. Good. How much can that what's its capacity? I don't know. It's got to be over 10,000. I Yeah, mean think so.
Yeah, certainly picks up a lot. Whatever the loader will pick up.
Right? Which just has to be, you know, 10 or Yeah. Any further discussions on this or?
Is there anything else you're gonna try to go for as far as road paving or anything?
So the big question is still what there's kind of the two active projects we have going on right now which is finishing the ID for the building and I think that's going to chew up at least 5,000 out of the contingency fund by the time we're all set and done with that and the second thing is the transfer station and I don't think we actually so we have not gone to RFP on the electrical and that's on me. We were all set to do it and then COVID hit and I just kind of put that on the back burner. I need to get that back off the back burner but
We got a number from Lenco at least, right? So we know baseline?
Well, because I told Lenco we were, that was going to be expensive enough that we knew we were going to go out to RFP. He said he would give us a number when we go to RFP, but he said, you know, under the cuff that it was going to be 25 plus to do all the electrical work for that. So I think we're going to chew up a considerable portion of the contingency fund finishing off that and what I would like to do is I'd like to use you know and be able to pay for the you know repaving the portions doing the shimming at the transfer station also. So I think we're going to end up you know because that way we don't have to pay for it out of our regular paving budget. So I think I have designs on some of that money but I don't know exactly how much yet.
Okay. Are we looking at all the other budgets? I mean, I guarantee we like we have $5 sitting in, board of finances budget for attorney. We have a variety of other buckets that we can start pulling funds from even if we get you know half of our chip ceiling from somewhere. We should be looking at that. Sure. You know anything that we can do to get this down the road. So I'd like to see us have that list for our next our next meeting. Good.
Okay. So that basically covered 10. Do we have anything to talk about related to budget transfers, refunds over expenditure requests? We just discussed all that, correct? All right. Tax collectors report are there any refund requests right now? Anything? Nothing? Okay. Just as a question, Amanda, when you post the packet to the website, where does it go? It goes under Meeting Minutes and Agendas. Okay.
So the packet is right under the agenda. But let me know if it needs to be posted anywhere else. No. I just
the, the board of selectmen needs to be moved up higher than s, and that's a website item. It's in alphabetical order. I know. All right.
You got yourself the board of A plus Selectmen. Yeah. Therefore you'd be at the top of the list.
How about a board? Make life so much difficult. Select a board of selectmen. Okay. Alright. So let's finish this. So is there anything else that we need to do? The tax collector's report, the assessor's report. Is there anything you want to add Eric to any of this?
Not really I got the report laid in from the fire department I just got that a little bit ago I didn't send that to you since it was already late Basically, it's been very incredibly light at the fire department because I think everybody's too scared to go to the hospital right now. So, they've had a pretty light month and hopefully COVID-nineteen doesn't get really bad and they continue to have some light months. Okay. The report is in the packet.
Yes. Amanda, we are the Andover Board of Selection. Does that help? My god. Possibly. There you go. Good job Adrian. Adrian always thinking Adrian.
Let's go back and vote on that field thing. All right. So we're down to is there anything, Eric, you want to add under any of those department reports, library transfer station, senior transferation, registrars? I mean, it's very quiet anyway. Okay. So resignation Jerry Hardisty is a P and Z planning and zoning committee alternate member. Yep.
Do we need to make a motion to accept or we've already accepted it? He's resigned. So we're pretty good there. Yeah I mean it's just really notification at this point
and in the list of motions I gave you for the April 12 or for the meeting motions there was also a proclamation in the beginning for those of you who don't know Rick Osborne passed away and he was a long time inland wetlands member So I would just acknowledge all the effort that he put in on the Wetlands Commission over the years. And obviously it's not really a resignation. He didn't resign, he died. But that position will need to be filled also.
Okay so, will somebody make the motion to accept that proclamation? I'm making a motion to accept the proclamation. Seconded.
All those in favor? Aye. Okay. All right. And then, we are we are down now to correspondence, which I don't believe there's any, and then public speak. So anyone that would like to address the board, please reach out to Paula and Amanda, and we will get you on.
While we're doing that, do we wanna ask, do we wanna be part of the Board of Finance meeting? Do we wanna do a joint or are we just gonna have Eric present or what are we doing? Budget with them. Are you going? Adrian?
Yeah, I'm there. If you had Eric's permission. Yeah, he can't go.
It's illegal. We've cast a motion that says you can't be in a room with two other people. So, I think
all I think we should all participate. Think we should all be on and Adrian as the liaison and knowing that you're gonna want to speak at it, you're I don't have a problem with you speaking at it. So I know Eric needs to be our voice and he's the person that needs to, but if you wanna have a joint meeting, I I think we should all be there anyway because we are asking them to make a hard decision. Exactly.
Yeah. Mean, we're asking them to make an adjustment to the school, and we're asking them to try to leave the rest of the budget intact so that it works,
so. I have no problem being there to tell them why we're doing it if I have to speak as one member. So, I think we all should be at that meeting. Okay. Board of Education people should be there too. Especially It's on Wednesday, April 22. So
it looks like Joan Herbert is asking to speak in the comments. Yep. I'm gonna unmute you, Joanne. Are you ready?
Joanne, you're free to speak. Hey there, everyone. Thank you. It's Joanne Heber just for the record. Just a couple quick things. I had a lot of things that I was gonna speak about, but I know the meeting's long, I just wanted to get some important things. Right at the beginning of forum or the meeting, I'm sorry, you were asking how you thought the town was doing during this time. I'm sure they're doing well, whatever. I personally have I just don't know if people are able to get to their emails from home right now. I know that I work from home and I'm constantly on my emails. I'm a work from home town employee myself. I haven't gotten and I know you can't speak back so maybe that could be addressed at some time.
Can you can you just repeat that please that last part because unfortunately your volume is going in and out. So
I have sent several emails over the past couple weeks to town employees or different people that have a town email address and I haven't received anything back. Again, we're in a pandemic. It's not urgent, but I work from home as a town employee so I'm constantly on my email. So I don't know if that's something that's being done. Is there some So just for the record, so
you emailed me. I could give you the date I you responded within an hour and then I heard nothing. And then you emailed about six town employees trying to is get my confrontational. This is informational.
But what I'm saying is I keep trying to respond to you via email and I'm not getting Eric Eric Public speak.
That's all this is. You don't have to answer me. It's okay. It's all right. Again, I haven't received any. I'm on my email all the time. That's okay. Again, it's not confrontational. I'm just Joanne. Thank you so much for getting back to me. I didn't know that I'll check again. I'll go through with a fine tooth comb but I haven't seen any Eric.
Just one question. Check your spam email because sometimes our emails go to spam.
Thank you. Maybe it did. It is my name and it could have. So that's fine. I mean, I think they're all great people. I just had the question. That's all. There was nothing confrontational at all. That was really Thank you very much. But nope, I have another point. So, that was the little point. So, the other point was just, I don't wanna
I know. I'm fine. You're going to sleep. Who's here? Who's participating? Amanda or Paula? Wow.
Scott, can you hear me? Yeah. It's Roberta. The power just went out to zero six, and it's back now. But Amanda said her power went out too. Oh. So oh, no. I mean, my house, the power just went out. I don't know about everybody else. Right. So you're on your phone? Yeah. I'm on my phone. I've been on my phone the whole time. So Jeff McGuire's out, Jeff Murray, Adrian? I'm assuming. Who is anybody else? Wake Road is out of power. Lake is out?
No. Lake is out back it's just cut back on. Amanda
So I don't know how we handle the meeting now.
Right. Hopefully, try to get back on. I guess we could, Dennis is still there. Right? I am here. I'm here in Wilmington. Yes.
Dennis, what do we do? Because the power went out.
We're we're to the end of the meeting anyways. We can just adjourn, I guess. Right? I think you could probably adjourn by, you know. No. I I motion to adjourn, but that's we need people to, vote. Right? Yeah. I guess. Amanda
said her power actually is trying to connect back in. Trying to connect back in. You you could wait for a little while and see what happens. Alright.
I wouldn't worry about it too much, Scott. We had to, finish it up, but, you know, there may be a problem for the public who wanna speak, so Oh. You don't wanna cut the public out.
Scott, your power didn't blip at all? No. Mine blew, like, three times. Yeah.
Hi. It's Elaine on E Hi. It's Elaine on E Street. I didn't lose power either, but you really only have one board member left and that's you, Scott. But you wanna just adjourn the meeting?
I think Amanda's trying to get back on. I'm sure everybody else is if their power's back. Hello? Oh, he's on the phone. Mhmm. Every