Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Regular Meeting
August 24, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Okay. The first thing up is a pledge of allegiance. So I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under
God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Alright. Yay. Public speak. I don't see anybody from the public on there. I don't see anybody from the public, so we can skip that. Okay, so additions, deletions to the agenda items. Eric, is this where you're recommending we make the motion to change the agenda? Yep.
Okay. So, I guess I'm going to read this. I motion to revise and reorder the agenda as follows. Item one, call to order pledge of allegiance. Item two, public speak. Item three, addition deletions of agenda items. Item four, town administrators report. Item five, old business. Item six, new business, discuss and act on the following. Item seven, audit status. Item eight, finance department reports. Item nine, budget transfer. Item 10, approval of meeting minutes. 11, liaison reports. 12, board open discussion. And 13, public speak. 14, being adjournment. I did not read the sub titles under there. I don't know if it's necessary. If I can have a second on that. I'll second it. Seconds. Any discussion? Let's take a vote. All in favor? Aye. All right. All right. We were on to the town administrators report.
Okay. Give me just a second. So let me share my screen. Hopefully, I get the right one. Too many forms. Hopefully, that's the right one. Are you looking at something that says administrators report? Yes, I'm going to go through this fairly quickly. Just an update, the charging station installs are going on right now. And the board of selectmen still hasn't said one way or the other, whether we're going for another charger grant for the library. If we do, it will be out of the Volkswagen diesel gate settlement fund. It'll be a little different than the grant, the Eversource grant, but similar. The steep grants were submitted for both 15 Center Street parking garage and the AES Playground. If we get either of those, you know, we need to be talking pretty quickly about, know, revised purchasing policy, what the rules are for that. Town clerk's office hired a new town clerk as of about a week ago, the previous town clerk or assistant town clerk no longer worked for the town. We still haven't had any luck interviewing and hiring a treasurer and or assistant bookkeeper, but we definitely need to do that as soon as possible. The other thing I wanted to bring up in regard to the finance office is the auditor gave us a list of journal entry corrections that need to be made in Phoenix
the previous year. However, Jeff McGuire had originally said he wanted to quote off on doing that until he had finished doing some more research.
But I mean, guess we're kind of leaving it hanging. Marina's agreed to do the journal entries in Phoenix, but I don't think she wants to proceed until there's some kind of agreement that we should proceed. I don't know, Diane, whether you want to talk to Jeff about that directly and figure out where he is with that or how you want to approach that.
There is a significant number of journal entries. Would say well over a 100. That is Are any of them significant?
It's just getting Phoenix synced up to what our financial statements are gonna look like from the auditor. Okay. I think it's a good idea. I think the last time I talked to Jeff, his concern on it was he hasn't reconciled down to the same cash difference that the auditor has. Until he does a little bit further, he's thinking we may at some point may have to restate our financial statements. Doesn't know that yet until he looks at it a little bit more. So I will have that as a takeaway from me because I have to talk to Jeff anyways about things he wants to do in the finance department.
So I won't do that.
Okay. So next up the town engineer. I've got an agreement from the Board of Selectmen to hire the firm Nathan L. Jacobson to act as the town's engineer. We are going to have to have a serious discussion with the Board of Finance about what that contract looks like at some point. The Board of Selectmen did make a recommendation on what the threshold should be before when something else, when an engineering project requires an additional RFP, or when we go with the town engineer. But I think in large part, that's a Board of Finance decision, not a Board of Selective decision. The other thing I'm going to suggest is that we structure this as a three year contract with a three year extension, a possibility of a three year extension, and we build in an annual cost escalation right into the contract.
So we know for each of the next three years, you know, essentially what our hourly costs are. The other thing that we can consider, and it depends on what your comfort level is with doing this, is we could set a different threshold at which we would require them. So, is saying most of the work they're going to do for us, they're going to do just on a straight hourly rate, you know, time and materials, essentially. However, for larger projects and you could pick a different threshold, then we could consider structuring the contract so for those items, they would have they would be required to give us essentially a project cost before we approve it, so it just kind of depends. You know, on what the Board of Finance is comfortable with it, and how you all want to structure that I don't think that can be just my my decision in how that goes. So I don't know when we want to have that discussion. I mean, it's possible that would make sense to do in a special meeting because that sort of ties into potential changes in a purchasing policy. But that's up to the board. I'm not assuming I'm going to get a decision from you tonight. The other thing I want to say is that from public works, we're going to start seeing some really big project expenses. The next two big things up are chip ceiling, which will start hopefully it was delayed, but it should start this Friday.
So, two days from now. And the second thing is the reclaim and repave project Shawty Mill in Long Hill and has been delayed a little bit, but that's back on track probably starting next Monday. So, both of these are going to be some fairly large expenses coming forward. In fact, we're going to spend the majority of public works budget between those two items, you know, the roadwork, you know, our annual roadwork costs and our Town Aid Road Fund for those two items. The other thing I wanted to do is we did just wrap up a fairly large project of tree work with distinctive tree care. And again, we were able to leverage town funds by getting Eversource to agree to fund part of the work. So, we spent $40,000 out of the town capital pre approval fund. So, we have some money remaining in it that we'll use for onesies and twosies that need to come down. We also spent quite a bit of our labor because when we do this, we supply the manpower to do rope guards. Now, much as possible, we use temp labor because it's cheaper than using our own personnel, But we can't, you know, always do that because we really only have two people lined up that we can, you know, have temp on temp labor. So we spent roughly 40,000 out of the capital treat removal fund. And if you look at our total all up costs for employees, you know, we spent about another $17,000 labor and Benny's costs. And Eversource spent $75,000 So we got Eversource to contribute $75,000 towards the project. So we spent a total of $132,000 but only $57,000
came from town. For that, were able to take down five zero six trees, you know, and so it was successful in that sense.
Let me make sure I understand that. Can we go back to the tree thing? That $17,000 you have in, that's our existing employees, so that's already budgeted funds. So, we just diverted our people to do something else, to work on the trees instead of roadwork those days. Okay. Correct.
So, yeah. So, that's not additional expense. That's just money, that's just our time cost of labor that we put into the project. Okay, so I spoke to Adrian today a little bit about the RFP for the Community Center I guess he shopped it out for a couple design build firms, just to get their initial thoughts before he finalized it. And they had suggested he needed to be a lot more specific in a couple areas, you know, on materials choices, because the the design contractors all felt that it left too much. It was going to be too hard to get an apples to apples comparison. So, he is redoing that. He's hoping to have that back in a little over a week. So, that's the Community Senior Center. The Veterans Monument Park, I think we're going to end up needing to do some selective overseeding or slit seating on that property. As you know, last year was the first year of the grass for it. Most of the grass came in pretty well. But there's some areas where there's a lot of crabgrass and it didn't come in very well. So now that we're in August, it's time to crank up the weed eradication program and the fertilization program, because you really don't want to do that in that really hot dry period. So, now that we've gotten the rain, the weed eradication should go in this week. And then, you know, we're probably going to have to to come up with some money to do slit seating to repair some of the areas that didn't really come in.
I'm assuming we're going to take that from the building maintenance budget because we don't have funds available anywhere else that I know of to do that.
But we did budget for fertilization and wheat for regular maintenance of that grass, correct? We budgeted
some and we already signed a contract and paid for the fertilization weed eradication, but that didn't really include reseeding areas, you know, slit seeding and reseeding.
So are we going to be short on just for the receding or short for the maintenance prop stuff too? Well,
so we're definitely going to be short for the receding. At this point, it does not look like we're going to be short for the fertilization and weed eradication portion. Just the addition for the slit seed. And we don't have to do it. I mean, it'll look better if we do it, but, I mean, you know, so I'll bring that one to the board of selected and let them Yeah. I
them decide on that. I was down there the other day because I was walking on the rails and it didn't look too bad for being as dry as it was this year.
No, actually, you know, when it was, it's surprisingly good because we had, you know. Where where we have the problem is along the roads there's probably a five or six foot swath of along the roads that are predominantly came in as crabgrass. And those as soon as you do start the eradication, you're going to kill off the crabgrass, you know, so you need to split seed that to get regular grass seed started there. Or I guess live with the crabgrass. But you know, think given that it's the first year that that field has gone in, I think we had to. We should have anticipated some more. You know, costs. But again, you know, turf is not my strong suit, that's for sure. So, as far as the connectivity grant, the timber rail went in. Hopefully next week they're going to be paving and getting the majority or all of the final items in at Center Street. Shouldn't take them more than half the day to pave because it's just the final top course. And then they have to taper, you know, they have to bring in topsoil and taper all around it to blend it all in. And there's a couple benches, a kiosk and some signage going in. We are going to have some additional funding leftover in that budget. So, of the things I'm proposing is that we put in a trail side solar charger similar to the library, because I think that's actually probably a lot more effective there than it is at the library because it means anybody coming in on trail that stopping there for lunch, you know, can charge their phone and it also works as another emergency charging area that the town has.
This is the lot at the end of Central Street. Are you talking about? Yes, correct. Correct.
That's really kind of what we're envisioning. I had asked MassDEP: Mrs randazzo of randazzo design town resident to give me basically a design, you know a landscape design for that, so I think we're going to also ask the contractor to give us a estimate for some landscaping to just kind of finalize that project to make it look good. And then once we get that done, know, we can look at any residual money and figure out what other projects will potentially relate to this. That can be done with that. We're not there yet, though. We are we did go back to FPT, which is our our alarm company. We switched last year to cellular based modem alarm systems. We're having problems when the weather's really crappy because the antennas are all in the buildings and we're, you know, so we asked them for a corrective action plan for how we can eliminate that because honestly it's getting really annoying having my phone, you know go off at all hours of the day and night getting alerts that you know it lost signal with the building. So we're looking at that those are you know, they're proposing to charge us a lot of money, but I think it's kind of ridiculous. So, know, I don't think we're ready to pull the trigger on that. I'm just letting you know that that is an issue. As far as other things, we haven't got the American Recovery Act funding. The second allotment has not been received yet by the town,
although we do expect it fairly shortly. And the electric charger install is underway. Hopefully we'll have those up and running, probably not by September 1, but I'm betting by September 15. So, that's pretty much all I have in my report, unless you have questions, specific questions for me about any of those items.
Anybody have any questions for Eric? Everybody good? Okay, I'm good. Old business. We don't have any budget transfers. And Eric, I cannot remember for the life of me what we put for items that will not be reconciled prior to this meeting, what that was supposed to be.
I think you were trying to get a list of all the things for the last fiscal year that we still had to close out. I don't really have that from Marina at this point, so I don't have anything to give you there.
Can tell you. So, I ran a report when I was in the town hall on Monday for fiscal year end 06/30/2022. And I read a report to see what transfers have been made and what haven't been made. And right now that report is showing us at a surplus of $102,000 which is wrong. So, not all the transfers have been made correctly. So, we have a lot of transfers left to do. So, right now, as it sits, what's in the accounting system is not where it needs to be. So this is going to be one of our challenges going forward when we have no one to do these journal entries and to keep them up to date. And I'm going to try to do my best to get into the town hallways, run some reports and identify them so they can get prioritized and we can get them done so we can get the year closed out because we are far, far, far from being able to close the year out. So, there's going be a big delay on that. So,
prior to this meeting, I was working with Marina. Marina is in tonight working. You know, we were going over the recommendations for creating the grants, you know, and her concern was that Diane, you had had a real problem with the way Edmonds is suggesting that the grant set up be set up is that there'd be both a revenue line and then a revenue or a budget line, You know, for the grant and which is what was done with the connectivity grant when that was set up as a fund. But then there was a lot of pushback from the Board of Finance that that shows up on the revenue board.
But that's right. If we create those funds and those grant funds and we put the revenue line item in for them, you will see that on the budget at the bottom of the budget and it will affect the tolls.
But it's not a budgeted item. It's money coming from outside of our operating budget. So from the little bit that I've read on the grant accounting that Edmonds has, it has a way to deal with grant and it separates it out. Right. Gonna have to be its own separate reports. It's not a budget report. There'll be a separate grant report.
Right. But there still will be a revenue line item associated with that grant. And when you run a standard revenue report, you will see that. That's the issue. Just like you see the Connect when you run the report now, you see the Connectivity grants.
So, these are restricted funds. So, they really wouldn't be part of our revenue numbers because these funds are restricted for a specific committed purpose. So they don't go into the overall operating of the general government of the town in the fund accounting side. So we need to figure out. That's on my list to talk to Jeff about because it is also an audit item that we have to fix. So I wanted to talk to Jeff McGuire about that, and then we can figure out how to do it in Edmonds. But it's too premature to do it right now until we get more details, but it can't be part of the general government budget. It's gonna be its own separate reports. And from what I have poked around in Edmonds, and I am not an expert by any way, may or may they have different reports for grants versus budget and they're separate items. And they sent over the grant accounting stuff and it was kind of like reading Greek so you know.
Right, look know Marina and I were sitting down this afternoon going through that or this evening just before this meeting But if you read through their instructions on how you're supposed to set up, grant gets a revenue line and then gets essentially a budget and expense portion. So that's the problem we ran into with the connectivity grant when we set when that was set up as a grant, but it does show on the revenue report because there has to be revenue associated
somewhere with the grant. But the grants will be their own separate funds. So it shouldn't come into the because they're restricted funds. So you have the general fund, which is where all of our operating is, and then money that's set aside for a specific committed purpose goes in a separate fund and then your expense and revenue items are in those funds. And they shouldn't commingle with the town funds. We can't solve that today. We're gonna have to
So, just right here if you wanna ask her specific questions about it. No,
there's nothing we can talk about now on this. It's too complicated for this. Diane, can I make one point? Just
since this topic is, again, I don't pretend to have vast knowledge of anything, but just when I was the grants accountant for the Board of Ed in Manchester, we definitely had just grants accounts like you're talking about. If we got a state grant which are ED, you know, blah blah blah, whatever their line is, we got the grant narrative like, oh gosh, what's her name? What used to be discussed at meetings, Sherry, sorry. Sherry would talk about you get the narrative, then you would set up the grant. It would be its own separate thing, you know, so you would have just one, you know, small grant like connectivity grant, and then you would have a different account number for that because it wasn't money the townspeople were paying, like you said, so we would start them with fives. So they'd be like $5.04 0 blah blah blah still have the 111 still if we had people with benefits applied to it we would you know so we had our own little accounting of it and that's why I struggled even as I've been at board of ed meetings or these meetings trying to see where we have the grant money like you said to me it should be so easy just to have one little report because you report back to the state, they send you, I forgot it's been a few years since I did that but it was like 141s where you've had to then account for all the money you spent, like say we got $20,000 for an after school program, we hired five teachers, we paid them benefits, we bought materials and supplies for the program and it was all $20,000
We had one little fund I guess you know that we started with fives which connotated grants in our I realized Andover is so much smaller but that's what I've struggled with forever like trying to figure out what grant money the school gets or you know that's all that's my 2¢ like you said we can't solve it but I did operate in that capacity for a couple of years and I had to set them all up plus get audited, plus get the reporting done. That's it. And you can't put it in with the town money. It was definitely separate. So we had two separate batches we'd say okay the board of ed budget from the town is you know 10,000,000 and then we had 3,000,000 in grant funds and we had separate accounting for each one right yeah
Right. But all I'm saying is that if you look at the way admins, you know, their description of how the grants are set up, the grant has essentially two line items. It's got a grant revenue line item and it's got a grant expense line item. And as soon as you put in a revenue line item, you are going to see that on the revenue sheet. It will have a different number, but you are going to see that. So, I don't know how to to deal with that. I mean, is possible there's some report we can run which shows all revenues outside a certain range, you know, that would not include that, but. The grant gets tied to a fund.
So, by doing the fund accounting, that should separate it out from the general. So, as long as we understand what we wanna do as a town, we can say to Edmunds, this is how we wanna do it. And they can give us directions on how to do it. And that we're gonna get help from an accountant with to get it right. Because that rolls up into our financials, rolls up for state reporting and all that. And right now the auditor, his big beef with us is he does all that manually because we don't have that set up right.
And that's why his hours went way, way, way over.
Understood. Yeah. Oh, she's here. Does the board have other questions for Marina?
Well, we're not to the finance department. And when we get to the finance department report. So
if you wanna, if there's specific questions you have for, why don't we jump ahead to them now?
Does anybody have any questions that they want on the expenditure report? Because that's the only financial report you have in your packet. I will tell you the totals are off. I know what what they are and they need to be fixed in the accounting system.
I only questions are probably ones that Eric could easily answer the several accounts that you were pretty highly spent into and I'm assuming that these are one time payment type things. You know, but one that concerned me was the diesel, for example, that's not typically a one time payment, so I didn't know if that's some kind of contractual thing or we just had a you know
so. So that I can answer real quick. So we were over in our diesel budget last year, so we let the tank basically run dry as of July 1. And we were down in kind of emergency fuel territory at that point because we didn't want to be filling it at $5.25 a gallon. So as soon as the fiscal year started, we took on 3,500 gallons something like that which is a lot of money. So so we we spent like you know $14 yeah it's like 13 or $14 yeah Right, a lot of money upfront, yes.
So do we under budget for that? I mean, long is that gonna last us? So the pace that we don't know, this is on my list of items of looking at the finance department as a process improvement, because I don't know what the solution to this will be, But we have one diesel tank and it gets shared between the town, Ram, and the school. We then invoice Ram for the buses because we have a joint bus contract with them. So so we then invoice them and the fire department and we invoice them and then they pay us back and then they credit that account to reduce that expense item.
Ideally, I don't know if there's a better way to do it because it's kind of a convoluted way to do it. But it's out there as a very manual
labor intensive process that So there'll be some credits to that account as you go through the year.
Correct. And at the end of the year, the bottom number that should be in that account should only be what is the town's budgeted diesel because everything else should be in the other departments. Got it. So,
more than somewhere around two thirds of that money for that $14,000 we spent will be credited back from other departments.
I'm sorry, how much are they gonna air? Somewhere around two thirds. Okay, that's what I thought you said. Who is the biggest single user of diesel
and then public works and then you know a little bit for senior transportation and then some for the fire department. All right, thanks. I'm good. Anybody else have any other questions? Joy, did you have a question?
I need a new laptop. Yeah, just back on the other subject quickly, just because you're here and I don't know when we'll get you. Just board a bed and town, we have the money that, you know, is in our town budget or whatever. The grants are in addition to that. Correct? I mean, it makes sense. So what we see every year for the board of ed that we got passed, the grants are over and above. There's more. Right.
Right. But there's never been, so that's why I just would love the documentation to all fall together with that. It would just be so transparent if we saw the grants and could say, okay, they get this much, but they also get 40,000 or okay, no, that's great. That I've always been trying to get that info.
There was, I did talk to Val, Diane. She asked me to relay this to you. She said, if we need help with any type of brand setup or anything, It was a very long text she sent me and I don't have my phone but she said she'd be willing to talk
to Diane or see if we can get a better process in place to for it. All right
Thank you. Other questions for Marina? Twenty minutes later? Yeah. I'll have a happy evening. I emailed you a document which is a giant correction for additions and deletions.
All right. Okay, let's go back. So, are done with item five. Item six. While the interviews for the treasurer, we've gotten some more, we posted the job again, we've gotten some more resumes and we're just trying to get through those again. Not a lot of qualified candidates are coming our way, so it's really tough working through it. So we just gotta work on that. Do you have anything else to add to that, Eric, that you know of?
No, I reached out to all the town administrators that I have emails for and asked them if by any chance they had any recently retired finance directors. That would either be willing to consider taking us on as a short term project to get us straightened out. You know, and potentially stay on as a very part time treasurer. I haven't gotten any bites from that. Made the same request from Crogg. I spoke to Matt Hart, the director of the Capital Regional Council of Governments about that same thing, and I also put in a request to crags. We're not crags to CCM has a program for. Essentially municipal consultants and I asked them if they had you know a qualified CPA that could act as a municipal consultant for the town of Andover to help us get our, you know, our fund structures and our accounting up to snuff. I have not gotten a response back from that yet. I will jog them again in the next couple of days. You know, don't know what they're going to have available to offer. You know, when I talked to them briefly, sounded like they had less, you know, more capabilities and human resources and assisting public works departments and stuff like that. And they didn't really necessarily have a good line on the accounting end of things. So I don't know whether that will play out or not.
Anybody else have any other questions on that? Let's go to the letter from AES. It's on page 17 in your packet. So I just want to talk to you guys about this a little bit quickly. So this is their unexpected surplus items. I will tell you what I would like to do and we'll see how you guys feel about it. I think this letter is too premature right now because we haven't even closed out the year for the town. We've got a lot of accounting work to balance our checkbook for the entire 'twenty one, 'twenty two fiscal year before we have a better thing. Right now they say they have $6,500 I can tell you right now in our year end report that I ran, we're showing the school as being $69,000 over. So there's some journal entries that haven't been done to reconcile between the school and the town and getting all that tightened up. I would like to postpone this.
I don't think to make a decision now, we don't have all the information. I would just like to postpone this down a couple months until we get closer to getting all the journal entries done, all the encumbrances and the final bills in, So we have true numbers. So choices are postpone it, take no actions or vote on it now.
I would agree with taking no action at this time and just basically postponing it to a future time. Can just leave it out of the old business until we decide we're ready to go. It makes no sense to, you know, advance it. It's a small amount, I know, but let's get the book straightened out. This is just frustrating, and I know all of us like to see that happen before we make any real decisions. It's not going to impact the school really one way or the other. Mean if this is the amount you know I mean I'm inclined to grant it just a small number but let's let's not do that I would agree let's not take action until we feel comfortable that the books are in order a little more than they are now.
Well, like take no action on it now and we'll just hang it out here and we'll make sure as we get closer to winding things up.
Yeah, we can just take no action and just leave it on the old business. We'll just keep putting on the agenda. Anybody have any concerns with that? No. Good idea. All right. We'll do that.
Yeah. Someone could always make a motion to do something different, but Yeah.
Okay. I'll do the agreements. All right. We'll take no action on that item for now. We'll keep it on the agenda under old business. I'll do that. Right. Eric brought to my attention that we're gonna have miscellaneous rental revenue shortfall for this budgeted year because of the, it's called the Veterans Memorial Field. So the lease we had on that, which was $7,400 a year. Dollars 7,500
a year. Dollars 7,500 a year. It did not get renewed. So, they're not renting the lease from us. So, we're carrying the full load of maintaining that field now with no rental income. So, that's gonna affect us budget wise because we budget properly for the full expense and we put that money into the miscellaneous revenue category. Did they say why Eric?
Sure. So basically what happened is, as most of you know, we have a total expense for that field of right around $20,000 a year when we include lighting, electrical, sprinkler maintenance, you know, mowing and field maintenance and paying Clarko for the, know, for some of the the supervisory, you know, part of the maintenance for that field. We had a private organization called FC North, which is essentially a soccer, a travel soccer organization that was leasing the field for us. The Board of Selectmen decided to increase the rent payment for them to use the field because they were using, you know, basically 80 plus percent of the total field hours were being used by one private organization. And we were only charging them, you know, dollars 7,500 when our total costs were $20,000 So they made a decision that they were going to shoot for charging them three quarters of the cost of maintenance for the field because that was more in line with the hours that they were using. FC North bought and Coventry offered them a lower price
for the use of a field, so they went to Coventry. Thank you. Yeah, I was just wondering. Yep.
Okay, next up is the audit status. This is where I've, you can fill in the blanks, Eric. So the auditor has issued the draft report. We signed the management representation letter. We has the final draft has the final report come back to us?
No, I don't think it's come back to us. At least I haven't gotten it yet. And I don't think he's filed it. I know Samantha, his assistant was looking at filing it the other day because she needed the password from Sherry to access, not OPM because I have that password, but there's a specific financial data portal that they have to put it in. So, as far as I know, Sherry gave that to Samantha, so I would anticipate that they will upload that, if not already, you know, very shortly. But remember, that's still not final until we submit a corrective action plan. And that's what we really need to work on is, you know, what our corrective action plan is for dealing with the material weaknesses that we have.
So, the final report has to be filed. Then we have thirty days after that with which to submit a corrective action plan.
Correct. But as far as the state's concerned, the audit isn't actually filed until the corrective action, you know, they don't consider it fully done until you have a corrective action plan filed also.
Well, we have thirty days to do that. So, it's important for us to know when they file that report so we know when our clock starts ticking. So, we can get it done on time. Correct. Correct.
And of course, the audit is going to cost us. And so once he issues the final report, we need to have him come and do a presentation to the board. So, one of the things I did is I took the audit findings and I put them in an Excel spreadsheet with the findings, so we could keep track of these as a board of six items, I think there's six items that we need to correct. So, our corrective action plan has to address each one of those items. We have to make sure they get done. One is a repeat finding that didn't get done, which was supposed to be done. So, the other ones are new. So, that kind of sums up what our material weaknesses are in our controls
on that. I sent it to you in Excel, so it was kind of like tiny in the packet. You couldn't read it unless you had eagle eyes. Actually had a magnifying glass. So, I will keep that spreadsheet for us and keep the updates on that so we know the progress we're making on those items. So we don't lose track of them.
Yeah, think it's a good idea. We revisit it every couple of months and just kind of see where we are. Obviously, we're not going to make any progress until we get a treasurer and, you know, people in place to finance person to take but get things sorted and it's going to take time but it's a good idea to keep it in front of us. Can stay on task with that.
Yes, the other thing Diane I will forward to you is I went through all of the Connecticut Das. They're essentially audit requirement supplement and pulled out everything that related to the corrective action plan and copied and pasted into a separate shorter document because it's kind of spread throughout the document. So it's basically a summary of all the statements that the state has regarding what needs to be in a corrective action plan. And I'll forward that to you because I think that's helpful, puts it all in one place.
They do have, I was out on their site, they do have a sample corrective action plan template. Yep. It's gonna be a lot to write this corrective action plan. Yep.
Questions on that stuff? Everybody good? Hey. Hi. Hi. Was just wondering is this same firm are they going to do our audit for the year that just ended? Or have we asked or do we know who's going to do this audit? We would like them to. I would like them to. Right now we to, we owe them money and we have to and I don't know where we stand on that. There's a certain amount of money that they want and the board of selectman has to say, you know, yay, we're going to pay them. I think everybody is, I don't know the consensus is to pay them what they want. So we can with a commitment for them to do our next audit. So it's going to cost us significantly more than what we budgeted. That's where the chips lie. So, nothing we can do about that. And Eric, where was that left? Last I knew it was left for you to present that back to the auditor.
I mean, I asked Michael to essentially send us a bill for that. I have not told Michael specifically that the Board of Selectmen only authorized me to pay it if they agree in writing to. To take on the next year's audit. You know I guess I'll have to have that discussion with them at some point. But they haven't actually sent us a bill for it yet. Okay.
So, their estimated hours came up to a total of $77,000 And we've already paid them 34,000, 35,000, somewhere around there. Correct. And then they're looking to recover a percentage of the remaining amount, not 100%, some other number that's agreeable. So, that's where we're at on that. We talked about the expenditure report. There is no revenue report in here for you. I didn't include it because no revenue has been posted. So, it has nothing on it. There's only a handful of items. No tax dollars have been posted because that's one of the things on my list of writing procedures on how to post tax revenue. So, we need to get that done. That. So, Does anybody have any other questions on the finance department reports that they want to go over? Everybody good?
Diane? Yes? Sorry, I'm gonna get back on. Sorry, something was happening. I had to zoom off for a minute. I just wanted to ask the question. So with the audit, I know we moved on, but you're saying that there's a total charge that they want us to pay, which will be 77,000 because of all No, these it is. This year?
All For the number of hours they worked, their billable hours came up to $77,000 Okay. We budgeted, you know, that whatever we had for last year, 34 or five, I think somewhere We've around already paid them that. Yep. And they want the difference, you know, they want to settle on a number of difference. They're not asking for the full amount, but they're asking for some.
Some kind of compromise. Thank you. I just, I was listening the same time. Just wanted to hear. Thanks.
Yeah, that number is going to come somewhere around, you know, $60,000 $70,000 something like that. So it's not insignificant that's for sure. And
just a follow-up again I apologize it like Diane it's going to be hard for for someone to invest so much time that already understands what's been wrong in the past. I agree, we hope to have them moving forward or else, but yeah. Or else we're gonna be screwed. I know.
Need them to do our next audit. And we aren't even close to being able to give them the stuff to kick off an audit because we're far from getting year end closed out. There's some errors that have to be fixed. Do that. We don't have any budget transfers over expenditure requests, Eric? Correct.
We have next round to the approval of the meeting minutes. We have three in your packet. Anybody? I'm getting motions on that.
We have to do them separate. Oh, go ahead, Mark. Oh, you're on mute, Mark. Can't hear you.
Sorry. Yeah, we probably need to do them separate. I mean, we don't have to, but I can't vote on, I mean, I'm going to abstain on the twenty ninth because I wasn't at that one. But so I don't know I'll make a motion to approve the meeting minutes for Thursday 06/09/2022. I second that
discussion all in favor. Aye. Aye. Any nays? Any abstentions? Okay, that's passed. Okay, we're on to Wednesday, June 29. I'll make the motion to approve those meeting minutes. Do have a second? Second it. Your pick. Yeah, that was like both at the same time. All right, I'll say, Louise seconds. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay,
any, no nays, any abstentions, Mark? All abstain, I wasn't at that meeting. Mark abstention from And then the last one.
I'll make the motion to accept the minutes of the Wednesday, July 27 regular meeting.
I'll second it. We seconds. All in favor. Aye. Any abstentions? No. Any nays? Nope. Okay. Good. Liaison reports, we don't have Rob here for CIP. So I'm kind of there. We kind of got the update on the community center from Eric. We're doing that design build RFP. That's the next step for the community center. So, don't have anything new on that. Does anybody have anything else? Okay, we're done with that. Anybody have anything that they want to talk about discussion?
I just have one question. Is Marina agreeing to come back a little bit, Eric, to just help until people are hired.
Okay. Sure, yep she's working a few evenings a week dealing with payroll and get getting some of the the bills paid and some of the backlog journal entries. Thank goodness for them, I guess. Yeah. Okay.
What I'm doing is I'm going into the town hall and I'm looking into Edmonds, looking at the kind of reporting they have, what they have in the system, trying to run some reports, getting a feel for that. I would have to say Edmunds trained us a year ago, I guess. But I think the retention of a lot of the knowledge that we had from that training is gone. So, I know Eric has reached out to them for more training to get a quote on that. We need better training because we're just kind of guessing what to do in the system. And it's not good because we'll post something wrong and have to reverse it. Then it's harder to fix. Do know what I mean? So we definitely do need more training. Am as I come across things in the finance department, I'm keeping a master list of items and the things that I'm trying to track are things we have to fix to close out the year end, things we have to fix to get accurate reporting for this fiscal year,
things that are process improvement items, things that should be training items. And they're all being put on a spreadsheet and categorizing everything so we can sort through it and then set our priorities about what we wanna do. Cause we need a roadmap, we need a plan. We're just treading water. Do you know what I mean? And the key for us moving to the next step is getting that consulting CPA services to really just figure out is Edmond set up correctly? How do we set up these funds going forward and things like that. So that's the next step. And we haven't balanced our checkbook. So, I mean, we have to reconcile all the bank accounts for all of fiscal year twenty one-twenty two before we can close out the year, before we can go to an audit. So we've got a whole year to do. Whether that's something Jeff and I can do, I don't know. Got to talk to him on it.
You know, he did most of 2021 himself. I helped him a little bit on just some data entry stuff. So, I don't know where he wants to go on that. He can do it pretty quick because that's his business. You know. So I need to have some discussions with him on the next steps on that. But so that's kind of a big roadblock for us until we get all those accounts reconciled. We can't really move forward. And then we get the final journal entries done and things like that. Have we considered account temps any type of employment agencies just in the meanwhile? Adrian looked into account temps and the problem that we have is we need more of like a professional services consultant right now is what we need. They don't have that level that we need. Account temps is more hiring somebody to do payroll or hiring somebody to do a test. But also account temps is hiring a person who's working for somebody, a direction of somebody in the.
Right. Yeah. You need somebody to set them up and they tend to do discrete tasks like you said, payroll or Right. You know, reconciliations or something or tax reconciliations. So there, you set them up, you train them on that one thing and Right. They go, you know. Our problem, we have nobody to train anybody. Right.
And if you have solid systems or something, then sometimes that might work. But, yeah, we just we're not I don't think we're there. Right? So
I've used account temps to, you know, even out month end, quarter end workloads and things like that, but they're always working for somebody doing the simpler task, you know, and the grunt work kind of stuff. So I'm not an accountant so I'm not a CPA, I'm not even close. So I am a good process manager. I understand how to manage budgets. I can tell I can look at something and tell you what's wrong with it. But we're gonna need expertise on how to fix it properly. So we don't create Problem we have is we've never fixed anything permanently. So we keep recreating the same problem over. We just need to fix it and move on. And then once everything's fixed, it's gonna run like a charm. Because we're not a big town. It's not that, you know. So I'm optimistic. It's just getting over this hump. Anybody else have any comments? I don't see anybody from the public on here either. So now we're on the public speak. I don't see anything. Do I have a motion for adjournment? I'll make the motion to adjourn. Second it. Joanne seconds. All in favor?
Thank you, Joanne, for all your work too. Thank you, everybody. Absolutely. Summer's over. See you in September. Stay well everybody.