Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Regular Meeting
November 18, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
And get started. I'll call the meeting to order at seven. Thank you, everybody. We'll state the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States
Of America and to the republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice all.
Thank you. All right, referring to our agenda for tonight. First item is public speak, do we have any public speak. Hearing none, I guess let's move on to item three, which is additions and deletions of the agenda items. Anybody have any additions or deletions to the agenda? Okay, hearing none, we'll move on to item number four, which is the town administrator's report. Eric, the floor is yours. Okay, Amanda, can I share my screen here? Can you give me the power and the glory? You've got the power! Okay.
Glory is up to you Eric. Let's see if I can figure out which one it is. Yes. Okay, apologize to not getting you this, at a reasonable time. Are you seeing a Word document? Yep. Yeah with the graph. Yep. Okay.
So first things first of the things that are going to affect us, as you probably are well aware, the state is, spiking pretty dramatically on COVID. I've been plotting day by day what our infection rate is the fourteen day rolling average of infection and that's what this graph is. We had a spike in mid October. We actually broke the red, you know, fifteen cases, you know, per day per 100,000 population back in October, but just barely and then we immediately went back down. We had a kind of, you know, temporary spike over about a week and a half.
Then it went down to baseline and since about the November 9, it's been accelerating pretty dramatically. We're a small town so our data is always going to look really choppy because a few people here, a few people there cause big spikes in our data. But the bottom line is we're about double the threshold for a town to be in the red zone as far as the state goes. They consider anything over 15 you know to to be their trigger and we're at about 29 as of today. So that's pretty much where we're at. Don't know where we're going but you know it's not particularly promising. So we are going to do some changes at the town level. Immediately after this Thursday, we're going to close the town hall to the public. Instead of being appointment only, it will be closed, it will be town hall employees only. If people need to meet with somebody, it will be in the, you know, the all purpose, the community room. As most of you know, the governor has reverted the state back to phase 2.1. And then there were a bunch of other executive orders and DPH guidelines. So the thing that has made life difficult is that now if you are going to do in person meetings you also have to provide basically remote access even if you're scheduling an in person meeting because anybody can request that. So it's making in person meetings much more difficult because you have to have the capability
to do a hybrid meeting. So that's kind of annoying. There is a public town meeting that will be scheduled in January, it got pushed back from December to accept a donation of actually three parcels not two parcels but it's essentially revenue neutral to the town and they're being donated they're not being you know we're not paying for them so it's not something the Board of Finance has to really weigh in on I'm just letting you know and they're all basically orphaned open space parcels so the tax implications on one of them is like $92 a year in revenue and the other one's in a non profit so we're not getting anything from it anyway. There's no real issue with us. Obviously, we held an election. The election went really well. The turnout in Andover was fantastic.
We had an 87% turnout of eligible voters, so that was pretty cool, and we had no issues. We did have to employ a hell of a lot more poll workers than we normally do, because the state requirements had kind of gone through the roof and we actually also chewed up a fair bit of money doing the prep work dealing with all the absentee ballots because those are a super time intensive thing you know based on the state guidelines for what you have to do. So we're okay budget wise now but if we get into budget season in the spring and we have municipal elections too, I suspect we're going to be over in that line item. Wally was very he's told me you know almost since July that he thought he anticipated that there was no way they were going to stay within that budget. So but you know it depends on how many issues we have, how many town meetings we have, what do we actually have coming up because that budget tends to fluctuate a fair bit and what the absentee ballot situation is for the town elections in the spring. That's still an unknown. So public works, the road crew foreman Ed has officially retired as of December 1, we did agree to meet him and pay him out an additional portion of his sick leave to kind of make that happen in an orderly way. So which you know is not ideal, but on the other hand, Ed maxed out his three hundred days of sick leave many years ago
and has been giving all the excess days back. So from a financial standpoint, yes, it's definitely a hit to the town, but you know to make the transition to a true public works supervisor, you know, that's what we ended up having to do. We have a position open for both the maintainer one and the public work supervisor. We're kind of negotiating a little bit now around that. So we'll see. I mean, I will be honest in that what we were paying Ed compared to what the job responsibilities were asking for are very different. So there's going to be some increase. We're going to have to increase that. Exactly how much, I don't know. That's gonna be a discussion,
you know, going forward. But it's definitely it's gonna cost us some money that's for sure. We're still doing road work. We still got some driveway aprons to complete after the paving operations we've done in the last month, and we're still continuing to fill potholes from time to time. We're talking about instituting a weather service that's tailored just to public works departments. We're looking at one. There's one other we may consider also. The costs are fairly reasonable given, you know, if it makes you make better judgment and you can use public works more efficiently by having a more accurate weather forecasting, it's probably financially worth it. You know, the plans run from about a thousand bucks to about $1,500 depending on exactly how much info and what bells and whistles you want. Eric?
Yes. Quick quick question. This is some private service that supposedly gives us better weather forecasting than we can get for free?
Yes. Yes. Because you want kind of different things than the average person. You know, one of the things you want is you want to forecast what the road temperatures are gonna be, because that's critical to how much salt you put down and when your weather snow is gonna stick, whether it's not gonna stick, you know, and you want much more accurate. You know, there's a bunch of things that you want tailored specifically to a location. You know I've dealt with professional weather services in the sailing you know we use them for weather forecasting for you know picking locations of events and accurately forecasting snowfall and things of that nature. So you know I've seen it be a huge advantage to me in the planning stage. It's almost more a question of which service you use whether as opposed to whether you should do it or not at least in my book. And we'd probably just pay for it out of town Aid Road so you wouldn't see it in the actual budget anyway.
Okay. It's not all, still tax dollars. We're still up in the air over the closing out the Times Farm Bridge project. As most of you know, that was the bridge project from hell. It was initially started about 2000, design and then dropped because the town didn't really want to pay for it to actually do it and then eventually the DOT basically said either you start building it, rebuilding it or we're going to condemn it and you know nobody's going to be driving over it. So then they started again it got completed in about 2017, but there was never a final clearance and it's chewed up an enormous amount of my time, but basically what's happened is the both staff members that were our registered professionals on the job at CME Engineering left the company to pursue other opportunities. They basically just about closed out the project, but not quite. We got all the final approvals from the state, but they're still arguing about one change order that occurred in like the summer of twenty seventeen. And it's about a $17,000 discrepancy between the contractor and the engineering firm that has to certify the expenses. So we would be on the hook for just 20% of that $17,000 and we have the money sitting in that account,
but I actually couldn't even pay the extra money right now just to close it out because then the state wouldn't reimburse me for any of it. So, we're just sitting on it, you know, hopefully we'll resolve that in the next couple of months, but I know I've been saying that since I took over as the administrator and I heard Joe say that for two years his entire time in office so maybe it really will be in a couple of months but you know who knows. We did get a steep grant, we were notified on the ninth just before the Board of Selection meeting that we had gotten the steep grant for paving and reclaiming a section of Long Hill Road as well as a section of Shawty Mill Road. So that's about $128,000 added to the paving budget that we didn't have. So that's good news. The connectivity grant is I'm still struggling trying to get the state to give me a document, which is really annoying. It is just a letter saying that at some time in the future they will give me an encroachment permit. An encroachment permit is necessary anytime you do construction within the right of way of a state road. Basically because there's another construction project going on there at the same time, which is the upgrade of the actual signal lights,
they didn't want to issue it because the encroachment permit and the work that was being done at the intersection at the time were coming out of two different divisions in DOT and the connectivity grant is being run by a whole different division so you have basically three divisions of DOT which aren't really communicating very well with each other. It's kind of annoying. Here's the bottom line and the unfortunate part. We've got until December 31 to sign a contract with the contractor that we picked to do the actual construction because we're using a basically an accelerated construction program called EZIQC that is run by the Capital Regional Council of Governments did the initial bid, you know, package for it. So the good news from us is the DOT really likes those projects run through EZ IQC because it makes their lives easier. And since it's not tax dollars, it's the DOT's dollars anyway, if they like the program, I'm happy to use it. The downside is if we don't have an agreement in place by December 31, then they're renegotiating the contracts for next year and depending on who the contractor that's chosen, I may have to start over with a lot of the design bidding, which would really annoy me. But you know, still no reason why that shouldn't be done starting early spring, early to mid spring next year. It's just a question of whether I have to work really hard in spring or whether I just have to sign it by December 31. But there's two things that have to be released before then and I don't know whether that'll happen.
Questions on that? Sorry, I know that's mostly irrelevant. Town hall, we're still in the planning stages for figuring what would have to happen if we did have to shut down the town hall again and send employees home. I'm hoping we don't do that, but we're spending a small amount of money that's in our IT budget to equip us with a few new laptops to kind of make that process a little smoother. You know, as you know, the COVID count is rising pretty rapidly. So it may be something we have to deal with at some point. We are also implementing a program called Security Mentor, which is basically an online training program in information security, which and cyber security, which I think as you all know is kind of important for the town given some of the things we've experienced in the last few months. So we're in the process of implementing that. I think it's a relatively low cost program.
It's you know about $9 a year per employee that participates. So we're doing that and we are also we've you know essentially hired the assistant finance officer her name is Marina Bandolfi and we're just about square with the union for negotiating the change in scope of work, scope of hours, work location, that kind of thing. So we should be in pretty good shape with that. As I told you I think at the last meeting, Barbara Griffin is leaving effective November 28, so not too long from now and there's not going to be a lot of overlap between those positions which is going to make things a little interesting. Laura Edwards who's the business manager at the elementary school. I have talked to her a bit about taking some of the slack and just making sure we have somebody at least available that really understands the Phoenix system.
So at least if the wheels really come off, we can do the basics. We can, you know, write checks and make payroll. So that's in place. We're gathering. We don't have a lot of applicants so far for the finance director spot. There do seem to be a number of finance director slots open right now across the state. So that's going to be a little bit,
you know, we'll see how that goes. How are we recruiting for that one, Eric?
So we've advertised it through CCM. I mean we put a little thing in the paper and we're advertising it through the CCM equivalent for schools. I forget what they call that but they have a group for the finance directors and then I think Laura Edwards said she was going to post it on there's one other basically listserv which is all the the both business managers and municipal finance professionals. So that one I don't know. I wonder whether we should be looking at other options you know to gather know to get more qualified candidates,
know so we at least have a bigger pool to deal with. Yeah sometimes it pays to cast a wide net but it's more work and you got to filter a lot of garbage sometimes, but it might be worth it.
Yeah, if you've got suggestions about where you would I I got the two avenues I thought were probably most appropriate.
Yeah, they both make sense given the targeted audience for that. And this is kind of a specialty thing. I mean, the only other thing I would think about is just going on one of the broad employment boards like Indeed or something like that. Typically, it's like what my company does, but that's I don't know how well that works for this kind of position when you're looking for somebody with municipal accounting experience.
Yeah. So that's that. Most of you are probably aware that we finally updated the town's, personnel policy. The policy we were working under dated back to 2007, and the 2007 version was a very minor rewrite of one from like 1996. So to say it was out of date was kind of an understatement. So we took on last year a complete rewrite of the personnel policy, know, and it took a while. We used our labor attorney as the final review of it. And one of the things that came up was something that I've been aware of since I took over, I just haven't really had a good solution. And that is that our the head librarian, the person who actually runs the day to day operations of the library, Amy, has been a twenty six hour a week employee
for a long time, however she's always been given the benefits vacation, sick time, etc of a full time employee. So which I mean considering she's the library director and she probably works considerably more than twenty six hours a week, that's probably not unreasonable. I approached the library board and I said some way or other you've got to correct this because we can't go running with a town employee and a personnel policy and a town employee with no contract that is getting benefits and stuff that's clearly contradictory to the personnel policy. So that's going to be gonna have to be negotiated I think on the next budget. There's really only two options. The first is write a standalone employment contract which just locks that in for Amy at the hours that she's at or you know transition her to a thirty hour a week employee so she's technically a full time employee. I don't have a a preference either way. We that's going to be a board of selectmen and board of finance decision
going forward as to what you actually want to do. I'm just making you aware that the library board knows they have to address that in some way. You know that we've begun the revaluation process. I don't know whether any of you have had visits to your own house, but we publicized the heck out of it, put it in the paper, sent a flyer to everybody, and used social media to push it. So far, we've actually had a really good response, and we haven't encountered any problems whatsoever, which is encouraging. And we still have not locked in for oil and diesel,
but I think we probably will in the next week or so. I know not too long or at the last meeting you guys were all pretty much in agreement with doing it. We're still just trying to I'm trying to do a better job of forecasting what our actual use is, But there's a lot of variability in it just because we don't know whether the school is going to end up at three or four school buses and there's a big difference in fuel usage for three versus four, since the buses account for about half our total diesel bill. So that's going on. We're still waiting for federal reimbursement for COVID expenses. And let's see. We already talked about potentially the registrar's budget going over. And that's basically what I have, unless you have questions about this from me.
I have a question. Sure. Just curious whether you plan, is it in the plan to have lines drawn on the roads? Or is that part or like part two or part three down the road?
So we are doing line striping. We will we actually if we hadn't had that windstorm the other day, the line striping would have already been done, but it was not. So I think it's back on the schedule for this Friday, part in the day, part in the evening. Probably the stop bars and the sharrows will be done during the day because those can just be painted and then put cones up so people don't run over it. And the actual lines typically are done, you know, late at night so it doesn't interfere with traffic flow and people don't drive all over them and get yellow paint everywhere.
Does that matter whether the roads, how the roads were actually completed? Because some had different top
No, no. We're using a water based formula that's it doesn't really matter whether you're going over chip seal or micro or standard pavement. Okay. Thanks. Sure. I'm good. Mark, you're muted.
Easier to hear me when I'm not muted. Once again, I'm having eight meetings today at my regular day job. You'd think I'd learn a lot already. Alright. No other questions for Eric, we'll move on to our next item, is the treasurer's report. Barbara could not attend tonight. Eric, do you have anything specific to address in there?
No, nothing really other than what we've already discussed. I think you've got to we talked about last meeting the two things that we know are going to be over, which is probably the registrar's office and also the chipping of the brush pile at the transfer station, which has been completed at this point. The only other thing is we're, you know, again, we had a big windstorm and we ended up, you know, busting some over time with Public Works dealing with that again. So we've been just we've been going fairly considerably over on overtime. But that's just I feel like we're going to be stuck with that for several years until we get a lot more roadside trees down. Because every time it's windy, trees are coming down on the lines and coming down in the roads. We had like maybe three of them that last windstorm. So that's going to be an ongoing issue.
But hopefully we'll address it as we get farther along to trimming
trees along the roadway. So it seems to me the appropriate thing to be sorry would be the budget for it then. Yeah yeah it was exactly where I was going. Mean this is relevant to the tree budget year to year. I was one of the people who lost power the other day, you know, it wasn't bad, but I didn't have to fire up my generator, but it was, you know, it happened and we were out for, I don't know what it was five six hours and you know I didn't even know that was coming so
and put it in perspective there were I think nine separate outages in the town There were two big ones that wiped out most of everything, but there were nine individual smaller outages that affected specific areas. So that shows you the kind of level of damage one windstorm can cause with this many dead trees and dead limbs coming down. And not for nothing. That was not the craziest windstorm we've ever seen. I mean, that was not even that bad. Well, how
how damage it ended up causing. Agreed. I did not expect to lose power that night. I had no inclination that was coming and zap everything went out. So
Well obviously you're not looking at the town's Facebook page or you would have seen
I am not on Facebook. I'm a Facebook curmudgeon. I rejected it from the first from the get go. Yes.
It was actually pretty funny because you can look on Eversource's utility outage map and they superimposed like the storm front and you could just see like right as the storm front just the outage map just explode behind the storm front as it moved all the way across? My gripe was by the time my power went out, when I used my phone to try to access the Eversource
outage thing, it was so jammed up, I couldn't even get a response. I was so irritated, but that was just my own personal travail, whatever. Yeah. Point is bringing it back to the town.
Their computers weren't working very well. Their site was and they didn't even have a lot of outages for numbers.
Yeah and their website was completely shot when I tried to access it. Yeah. But whatever that's Eversource's that's an Eversource issue. Our town issue obviously is trying to stay ahead of the tree stuff and where we put our money. And it's just relevant to me to to think about what the practical consequences of this are if we are being penny wise and pound foolish when we put a certain amount in the tree budget and say, wait, we got to make the budget balance. We got to make it so that we can't increase taxes so much. And then we end up spending it on the back end of the overtime anyway. Just my take.
There is that, still put it in perspective. We have still spent this year six times what we budgeted in previous years. So we did ramp up our spending a lot For tree work. For tree work. It's just it's a huge pro problem to wrap your you know your kind of hands around. The other thing with the OT budget is just simply you know so public works employees you know they work eight hour days and anytime you're working more than eight hour days you know, you're stuck paying them overtime. And the problem is most of the roadwork contractors that we hire work long days, you know, so so the reality is, you know, there's been
consistently a couple hours at the end of the day we're repairing OT for the guys doing the, you know, monitoring, you know the the road safety people that are there with the contractors or are monitoring the contractors and I don't know that you know part of it is we've just done a lot of road work this year compared to in years past, we did one or two really big projects. And by doing kind of preservation and really doing lots of different projects at different times, we're chewing up a lot more hours in some OT doing that. So that was again something I honestly didn't really anticipate because it's not something we occurred. I mean, last year, in the last two weeks, two weeks before the end of last fiscal year, we had spent $0 in our regular overtime budget because we just we didn't need it last year for whatever reason or not zero but we had we spent very little of it. So you know that's a year to year difference.
So you're just saying basically, Eric, if somebody works, if the three people come and they work a ten hour day. Right. We're just eating up two hours overtime every day.
Right. Because because the deal is is that it's it's always cheaper for us to provide even when you take an overhead and benefits and all that crap, it's still much cheaper for us to use a town employee to do the traffic control, than to hire a service or use the contractors to do it. So we end up using our guys an awful lot just basically standing there doing the traffic control The size, yeah. Contractors, right? You know and yeah. Yeah okay I got it. Yep.
Okay any further questions for Eric? Any further comments or questions on the town treasure report? I looked through it. I didn't see anything unusual. I didn't look at it in super deep, close detail.
I know Barbara is not on but I just wanted to thank her for her time and energy over the past few years and we're wishing her the best.
I'm gonna miss her, that's for sure. She was great.
Yeah. She's actually done at the end of the month here then. Her contract ran to the end of the year, but she's done at the end of the month. Right? Ten days. Right?
Okay. And I mean most Yep. Some of those days are holiday days. So basically she's done. She's done. Yeah. Yeah. There'll be a little overlap, but not a lot. And
we're gonna end up relying on Laura, and basically hiring the town is going to end up hiring Laura to fill in some of the gaps in the training of
the new assistant finance officer. Yeah and I saw that you put in there the expected contract rate is about 75 an hour. Agree that that is not an all unreasonable rate for somebody with the prosecutor's skills and knowledge for this job that well of a match. You're not gonna do much better than that. So that's completely reasonable in my view.
Yeah, and our other option was to use CPA Cheryl that we were dealing with a little bit, but she's $150 an hour. And I'd much rather pay Laura half that than plus Laura already knows the Phoenix system. She has some familiarity. We use the same payroll service. So there's a lot of things. She doesn't necessarily know what we pay people and the ins and outs of our system, I can do that portion. She at least knows how to do all the paperwork for it. So I think as a stopgap, that will work. Not ideal, but it will work. We'll make it work.
All right. Well, I guess we'll have to. All right, should we move on to agenda item number six, which is budget transfers? I don't see anything listed here for budget transfers or over expenditure requests. We have any Yeah, there's nothing at this point. Okay. Move on to item seven, which is old business. Just kind of covering ground on a couple of things we still need to close out. 2021 meeting scheduled, that's actually closed. We voted on it last meeting had some motions to amend the original proposal. I think Amanda's published that and she's included it in this packet. So I think we're all set there and this can be removed from future agenda items. COVID-nineteen update I think you kind of gave that already Eric do you have any other input or anybody have any other questions
okay Go
Eric, go. No I'm just saying be safe. You know it's you can think about right now the underlying rate in the community is, at the beginning when there wasn't a lot of testing the best guess was the underlying rate of infection was about 10 times the actual number of actual positives. Because of the increased testing they think that a better number today to use is about five times, but since we've had either ten or 11 positives in the last week, you can assume that there's somewhere around one hundred residents running around right now with COVID-nineteen.
Most of them have been tested. So I would just mention as somebody who has kids in the school system school just recently held a poll and as the results of that poll came in, we are gonna go virtual for a week after Thanksgiving. Oh. Yes. Interesting.
Yeah. As a way of just saying, okay, look, a lot of people, myself included, are gonna go to grandma's for Thanksgiving. Yep. And for a variety of reasons you can argue it either way or a lot of people are gonna do it. So they're gonna just say, all right, let's take a week and go virtual for that week and try to cut off the possibility of everybody bringing COVID back to the school. That to me is a wise thing. Voted yay and it carried the day. So we're gonna do that and hopefully that'll get AES through without a big outbreak because they've been doing so well with in person you know even despite the pandemic.
Right so the school system has officially had two cases within the school system as of today.
I'm not sure I even knew that Eric that's news to me.
Yes the reason that there's a couple reasons that wasn't really publicized and part of it was both the individuals were not actually at school because they were close contacts of somebody so they were quarantining when they came down. So although they are part of the school system, they weren't physically present during any infection period, which is why there has not been any notification. Okay, that seems But
what I'm saying is that if we make it to Thanksgiving,
and don't shut down early, I would consider that probably an accomplishment. A win, right? So we're gonna have the week after Thanksgiving for sure. And then my take is we'll see where the numbers are going and who knows? They're gonna send all the kids home with the Chromebooks. That's already in progress. They're prepping. You know, we had the para teacher conferences recently and they were already thinking about it. It wasn't done yet. And then last week we got the poll, poll results came in, everybody kind of agreed it was the idea or at least two thirds, one third and that's the way they're going. It strikes me as a reasonable approach.
Yeah, we'll see what it goes from there. Yeah, mean, can tell you that on the town's perspective, what I'm trying to do, which does not look like I'm going to be successful pulling off, but what I wanted to do was say the Monday after Thanksgiving, the town hall is closed, but all employees get paid, but their job for the day is to go get a COVID test. And then they're allowed back in the building after clear negative. I like that. Which is great in theory but you know there's been such a spike in testing right now. I was trying to get an outfit to guarantee us you know slots and reasonable wait times for it and I don't know that I can do that and I'm not sure I want to make employees wait you know four or five hours in line to get a COVID test Cause I'm not sure I would, I'm not sure most of them would do it.
So that's kind of where Well, if it's anything I've got the COVID test at CVS right in Hebron there and you go online and you make an appointment and you go through the drive through I got the results back in two days that was like three weeks ago
so I don't know how it is now. Diana it was already going up three weeks ago so that's great so love to hear that because when I had the last time we had to have someone in my family tested this was July 4 or just before July 4 was July 2 it took ten days for the test results come back it was such a disaster.
Getting a little longer now my wife just had to have a test last week and it took about four or five days for the test. The fact that Diane got
a two day test result that's fantastic, good to know CBS in Hebron. You
can go to most any CVS that has a drive through and get a COVID test online and they only book three days out, you can only get a window for three days out, I don't know if it's changed.
Yeah, the problem is, last, when I've been checking, there are no, like Coventry, there are no three day slots. I mean, you log on at like midnight. Right they're filling up real quick. Well about 1AM you might be able to get a slot you know three days out but.
Good to know for the night owls amongst us. Exactly, exactly.
That's what I did when I had to order groceries back when you couldn't get anything. Oh God. Yeah. They
were backed up for a month. I remember that. I remember looking at it and going, oh to hell with it. Let's go get on food air again. They actually set up a thing at Travelers for, and I think I want to say in April at one point we could order a certain number of particular staples and you could go to the company garage in Hartford and get it delivered to your car. Interesting. To the company. That's a long time ago, but it feels like ten years ago, but it was only like six months ago. Anyway, we're a little off topic.
Let's roll back in guys. If we don't have anything with regard to the town's COVID update, let's move on to the next item, fiscal year twenty nineteen-twenty twenty annual report. That's the job of your chairman, yours truly, I'm still working on that, so I don't have anything to really report there. Will continue working on it. I hope to get it done by the end of next week. Item 7D is the Board of Education request for unexpected funds. If you remember, we had talked about that and we opted, I think it was in the September meeting that we would, you know, I think Barbara informed us, Laura told us there really weren't any leftover unexpended funds as they had planned. You know, I did write a letter and I think that MENTA is included in the packet. So sent that on to the school just to let them know that we took no action based on that information and if it was incorrect, let us know. So we'll see if anything comes back from that, don't expect it. Item 7E is the RAM Board of Education contract negotiations. I did have a meeting with the let me pull that up here I think it was the Hebron Board of Finance chair and the representative from the RAM Board of Education as well as the acting superintendent. And basically, you know, I'll summarize real quick. They just kind of wanted to let us know where this went. It was a little bit surprising to them, but apparently the,
you know, they thought that they were gonna have a normal contract negotiations, but the union came back to them with a proposal that they thought was made a lot of sense. I guess the union's approach was that they decided that it just wasn't the year to really be pushing for a more equitable contract. And so they made some changes. They've made a proposal. What they ended up doing is, let's see, they ended up going to a 0% increase, but what they did is they allowed teachers all to move up a step in the in the contract rates, and what that is, it ended up roughly providing about a 3.5% increase, which is is not necessarily that off topic but it's only a one year contract. They didn't do the normal three year contract decided it would be better to kind of delay the negotiations until next next cycle. The general feeling and they had some data to support this is that the RAM teachers are generally paid lower than similar districts throughout the state. And they felt that they need to be a little more competitive in their pay to retain teachers. But again, feeling like if this contract ended up going to arbitration, they the superintendent and the Board of Ed felt that they would not be able to do any better and probably would end up worse than what the union had offered them for this year. So they felt that it was in the best interest of the
towns to to go ahead and the school district to go ahead and ratify that contract. Now they had a they had a meeting on November 16 and I would hope to attend but I just couldn't do it And I went to look for the meeting minutes and I did not see that they were not posted yet on the RAM website. Eric, are you aware of where that vote went? I am not. No. Okay.
I'm gonna guess that it I didn't look to find the recording I didn't have time to go through it to find out what the end result was, but I'm gonna guess you know based on what I was hearing that it probably got approved. So that basically settles the RAM teachers contract for the next year. You know, about a three and a half percent increase in the overall salary for the teachers who won't necessarily have that kind of increase on the budget, but that is a component of the budget. So the way the process works now is that the contract goes to the towns in theory for thirty days of review and possible objection if if we were to raise an objection. If there's no formal objection, the agreement basically becomes law, ratified. So I think it's a done deal at that point. The superintendent did say that they hope to be in a very low or zero increase in their overall budget for next year. They're still seeing a decrease in enrollment. Attrition itself may reduce some of the actual staff positions. So he did think that they probably would come in basically flat on the budget or with a small increase. You know, knowing that they've got decreasing enrollment, obviously they still have fixed costs. That was kind of where what the landscape looks like at this point. That was it was an interesting presentation, you know, learned a lot about things I didn't know much about in terms of the school budgets, how it's managed at the RAM, but that was about it.
All right, does anybody have any questions? Okay, well, I guess let's roll on to our next agenda item eight, new business. Discuss and act upon the following hiring of the assistant finance officer. Eric, you already touched on this a little bit. Do you have anything more to add?
Nope. Nope. We're, we're pretty much already hired the assistant finance officer. Yep.
So that was just more notification than anything else. Yeah. And she starts? She starts this coming Monday.
Okay. You just got to get that stuff ironed out. Okay. Yep. The next item is the finance director position. You've already touched on that as well, difficulties recruiting for that. Any additional comment?
No. Amanda, how many applications do we have so far? Do you remember?
I believe we have five, so I'm not sure if that's a sufficient amount to start scheduling interviews.
Not guess I hadn't seen the five. Last I heard we only had three. Okay.
I just want to make a comment on hiring. You mentioned advertising. We use Indeed at work. There's some pretty cool features, people can actually do voice responses to questions so you can get a feel, you know how they speak and how they answer things. We also, instead of pulling people in for interviews, we do phone interviews to kind of weed out some people just to maximize our time. I know you're kind of busy, Eric. So just kind of, that's how we do it.
Yeah, that's not a bad. I mean, one of the things I'm not sure it's necessarily applicable for a finance director position because you're looking for a pretty exact set of criteria but you know I've been really surprised that you know there have been a number of people that I probably would have well there were definitely a couple people I didn't really want to interview based on their resume and then having interviewed them I had a very different you know feeling for them. So yeah, I think you should at least talk to everybody who applies, but you're right, bringing them in for an interview isn't always the best use of time.
I think there are some costs to some of those features with Indeed, but I really don't know much about how that's structured. So they
bait you with some free stuff to get you to use the service. It's not ridiculously expensive. I just like because you cast a wide net.
Yeah. Well, I mean, this is, you know, one of two or three really critical positions in the town. So, you know, it's worth it to take the time to get it right.
I agree. Think you don't want to rush to hire the wrong person that's a night I think we kind of learned that in the position we had not too long ago.
So concur. Okay, any other questions on that suggestions? Okay, item HC is the software transition.
Honestly, we haven't really made any progress since the last meeting. We had a couple initial scoping meetings. They're supposed to get back to us with some stuff. They haven't done that so far. We need to get that back rolling. I got to spend a little time on that. You know the big thing on the town's perspective is just establishing what we do end up wanting for a chart of accounts. And while I've got a basic structure for that, I sort of feel like we really want some guidance from you know whoever's going to end up as the finance director for that. So I'm almost wondering whether you know that's the kind of thing where we almost have to wait until we have the finance director in the door and then drop that in their lap also along with all the rest of the stuff. I don't know that's as far as I've really thought about it. I have spoke to Mahoney Sable and Michael our auditor said they would he said he really didn't want to have anything to do with exactly how we set up our chart of accounts because he said that's pretty highly personal and that's really how we want it. They just map from whatever we do to whatever reporting format they want. Where he said he would like to be involved is when we start setting up
what funds we actually want and all our bank accounts. Because we have the ability to use pooled cash and get rid of an enormous number of bank accounts that we have and it's probably worthwhile doing that as part of the transition. So and he said he would assist us in that and in coming up with what ones really had to stay standalone accounts and funds and what one could all be considered pooled cash and just put in one big fund. So that's where I am with that.
Okay makes sense to me. Okay, if no other questions or comments, we're on to 8D, which is the audit. They've
requested information from both us and the board of fine not the the board of ed so we've provided them quite a bit of information at this point they haven't really said when they're going to want to come and do work on-site but certainly earlier than they did last year. Probably not getting the audit in by December 31, but hopefully working on it prior to that so we're not as delayed as we have been in the last you know series of years. Let's hope not. Let's hope not.
Okay any questions for Eric overall on the new business items we talked about or that audit status? Okay, hearing none, we'll move on to item nine, which is the approval of the meeting minutes from Wednesday, 10/28/2020. Regular meeting minutes. I don't if anybody has any questions or comments on that, any discussion? Anybody want to make a motion to approve the meeting minutes? I'll make a motion to approve minutes. Okay, do you have a second? I'll second it.
Okay, Diane has motion to approve the meeting minutes from Wednesday, 10/28/2020 regular meeting. Luis is seconded. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay, hearing none, it passes unanimously. Thank you. Move on to item 10, liaison reports. Don't know that we have any active liaison committees with the possible exception of the CIP. Louise, do you have anything on that?
No, we're having our next meeting tomorrow. Okay. Tomorrow night. So
stay tuned. Okay, and can I mention the library? Library and I'm HAB When amy librarian was hired the library had their own personnel policy. Then when we got the charter, the things changed. So, but I do want to say that Amy does work closer or more than thirty hours and she gets paid for twenty six and she's got her master's in library science. The other thing is had a oversight committee meeting last week and This year. There's well there's a couple of things. First of all, Let me just say that according to the state statute every town has to have a youth service agency and is ours. Second of all, because it's nonprofit. We only pay 37% of their total budget comes from the three towns. But they're right now the budget, the way they divide it is based on the RAM formula. And years ago, they were based on the town census and they'd like to go back to the town census because they think it's a more reasonable number and there wouldn't be the dramatic changes that we have now. If you do think of it, there's kids that go to magnet schools. There's kids that go to private schools. So the town census is probably a better way to go. And it was done that way in the past.
Linda? Yeah. You have an idea of what that would do? Like how would that change things?
They said it's not going to change that much. But every once in a while you have a town that has a, I don't know if they consider it a big hike. It all has to do with the census of the school if it's a census of the town. There's less variance. Okay. And
so is it the oversight committee that's going to make that decision or who is there a board that there's going to make that decision on changing that formula.
The overs. It's in the new oversight. The oversight committee meeting hasn't met yet for everybody to approve it. Okay. But this is what they're revising it proposing proposing it so that's what's in it. I guess I guess that's all I have in my notes
yeah Linda I apologize for not sitting in on that one I was triple booked in that time slot. And in the end, lost out. So for that, I apologize. Well, that's okay. Amanda stuck her head in. That's so I was gonna say what I did was I asked Amanda to go in my seat so at least you know we had a town that is and
right now when we see the AHM their requested amount in our budget, we have a line item that says Yep. But in reality, there's a portion that goes to Ram. There's a portion that goes to the Andover Elementary School. Right. And they're contemplating taking that part out and just dealing with the towns. It's the it'll be the same amount, but it'll just be one line item, instead of being divided into well for our town, it would be three and As far as a bookkeeping go it's easier for And if you think about it, the schools aren't even part of the oversight committee agreeing on this. So it's been difficult. Years ago, it was just the towns, and then they included the schools, but they're thinking if you wanted to, I don't know if the bills, a total of 100,100 thousand dollars and you want to have Andover elementary chip in 30,000 then that would be for the town to decide. So that's what they're leaning towards right now.
Do you know when the next meeting will be so Eric can pencil it in? I don't know at this point in time.
Okay, would this change how would this change affect what we do as a board if anything, would they just be a different line item? We
have an line item, but I'm just saying if it's split in thirds of ours is going to be $33,000 then it's going to look like $100,000 so everybody's going to think that it tripled. If if the town in Asia, if the town pays third and a third is in the elementary school budget and the third is in RAM budget only 33,000 is showing up on our line item. Okay. And then gonna look like a 100,000 and people are gonna think our
So our spreadsheet is gonna show this big uptick and we're gonna have to explain to people that look, no, this isn't actually, this is actually status quo. Just changing the bookkeeping. Right.
Okay. I can do that. I think that people Okay. Will believe me is another thing.
Know, but then we have to convince them that we're getting a real deal if you stop and think like I said before, less than 50%. And if the town had to go out and support and their own youth service, it would cost an arm and a leg.
Oh, agreed. My both my kids went to Ahf. It was good stuff.
Okay, thank you, Linda. Good to have that update. Else? Okay, let's move on to item 11 in the agenda, board open discussions. Anybody have any general discussion on items bring for the board Eric.
I would like one general discussion with the board of finance we're getting ready to go into budget season. But what I want to know is how you all envision this year going. And by that I mean, last year we put off a number of priorities and we made some hard decisions and that's okay. And I guess what I want to know is do you all anticipate that we're going to be in a more minimalist budget because of COVID or are you looking at you know really funding the priorities of the town? Where does the board kind of fit in that? How do you think the townspeople would react and you know where do you see this going?
I mean I'd say it depends on what the numbers are. You know we've always as a board tried to keep any tax increase relatively low. I would be surprised if this board as a group okayed something that resulted in a significant significant is subjective, a significant jump in one year, Right? I like the idea when you came to us with like a ten year plan and we can plan based off that. Maybe we can chip away at stuff, but just speaking personally, I don't know if we're going to suddenly shift gears and just, go full bore if we're looking, if it results in a say you came to us and said, okay, gotta do all these things. And if you fully fund everything, it's a 5% tax increase. I can't remember the last time we okayed something like that. And I think we'd probably get killed if we took that to referendum. So it sort of depends on how the numbers look, Eric. I mean, are we saving some money in other places during COVID that we can
realistically reallocate?
There's some yes, not a lot. COVID doesn't make much cheaper. Unfortunately. No. You'd wish that was true. You know you can think that we went down to three buses I mean that was a definite you know we saved money on diesel. Are we going to end up at three buses next year or are we going to be back to four? You know there are a lot of little things that are you know they're Dollar 50 gallon gas? That's got to help. Inexpensive gas is good.
Yeah. But anyway, that's that's just my general take. I'm gonna shut up now let everybody else talk. Sure.
My two cents is I think with what we're seeing with COVID it's kind of premature to make that kind of guess there. Will say it's not looking good as a business owner. I can't imagine making a big large capital expenditure, huge investments right now is just too much uncertainty.
I don't think we're gonna know much until we get through this winter and see what the spring starts to show. I think we're gonna be down to the wire again and kind of trying to figure it all out because if COVID is not going away until that vaccine gets out there and gets accepted and gets adopted. So, I mean, and that's a long, that's a long timeline for people to get through the population, get everybody to do that. So, because the, really the service industry still has not come back. So there's just still so many people out of work and stuff so. Right yeah
yeah I mean my problem is unfortunately you know I need to be you know presenting a set of plans and options to CIP sooner rather than later really tomorrow and a little understanding of what you know I don't want to put together an elaborate plan if I know it's not fundable you know
Yeah. I mean, Eric, I mean, together your plan and my take would be try to aim for something that isn't wildly higher than what we're spending now. Yep. Even though I understand that this year was kind of a how do you wanna treading water, keeping the lights on, that kind of a budget. You know, you can take that and kind of take your optimistic case and crank it up a bit but I wouldn't go crazy on it because yeah, where there's a lot of uncertainty and as everybody else has said, look the vaccines hopefully are coming. There are multiple vaccine trials that apparently have reported a really great results but that's like six months out from the point where we can just say, okay, great, we're good. And that's the best case scenario. So, know, I hate to say it because I know we got a backlog. Right. I know we got stuff to do. Yep. Any input from go ahead, Linda.
My question is we don't know how it's hitting individual families. I mean, my family's fine. My kids live out of state, but they're all working. So I don't know how many families in town this is really hurting. So that would have something to do with what we do with our budget.
Sure. Financially. There's a huge divide as far as I can tell. Know, those of us who do professional jobs that, you know, we might have done in a cubicle before, but we can do from home, have been almost unaffected financially unaffected. You know, I certainly haven't been, right. I have my same exact job that I had done for twenty some odd years now at Travelers. Nothing's changed. Mean, the workflow has changed, but no interruption, no nothing. I have other people I know who their job just vanished and they've up and had to do something completely different. I don't know, I don't know how you can track that.
The other piece of it too and Eric and I have to talk about this today I didn't go to the town hall about. Take care of some personal stuff but the. There's a couple of factors here, obviously, I mean you know the Glenda brought that up, and it was important, know we we don't know how it's affecting people individually. Know, we do know a few things, I mean we know that the real estate market stayed hot right that didn't that didn't tank. There is a disparate, it's just very disparate in the way that this pandemic has affected people, as Rob pointed out. The other thing that's gonna really use kind of the unknown and just throwing this out there, there's, is there gonna be additional stimulus and support packages coming from the federal government? That's just unknown. If those kinds of things remain in place, then I would feel more comfortable, you know, being a little more aggressive with the budget. I do not think that we should try to do what we did last year, which is basically stick with a flat budget to our own detriment in the town. Just put off too many important things that need to be done. Put you know we kick the can down the road for so long that has to be remedied at some point. You know, but I also agree we can't go we can't go overboard. We're gonna have to be somewhat restrained in how we approach this because as people pointed out, there is a lot of uncertainty.
My general feeling is that things are gonna be on the upturn, but there is a lot of uncertainty. That's a good point. And there's some lag.
And as pointed out Mark, question of what the federal government does. I mean, it's fairly clear that nothing's gonna get done in the lame duck. So the first time that anything might happen would be January and then it takes a while for that to kick in. Meanwhile, we're trying to work up our budget at the same time.
Yeah. Right. And so that's what makes it so hard. Yeah, checks got mailed pretty quick last time and I would like to think that that may happen. Sure pandemic it continues on this in this.
We get cares act two point zero and they're just sending people money yeah I agree that can be done quickly, and we can hope for that, but.
Will see on some of that Right. But I think it would be a mistake and we would not be doing our constituents. You know adequately you know just doing them justice by just you know ignoring you know the safe route which is just saying oh we're not going to try to raise taxes again. You know the reality is I think that we're going to have to at some point we know we're going to have to we avoided it for a long time it's not comfortable nobody wants to pay it like God knows I don't. We were fortunate to keep our jobs although I had to take a pay cut for a while, it happens, we'll, I think we'll get through it. Think a measured response but I think we have to get back on track sooner rather than later. That's kind of my personal take on it.
I agree with that. I don't think we can kick the can too much longer without causing ourselves bigger problems in the long run. And we, again, we have to think about it in the long run. We have to think about the next five to ten years, not just tomorrow. Right. And so if it's a, know, Eric, if you'd crunch your numbers and you come out with something at CIP that would all things being equal result in a 3% increase okay I'm interested in hearing about that. If you come up come at us with a 10% increase I just have to think that's just dead in the water. That's what you know just to throw make up numbers but Sure. No understood and that's
that's exactly the feedback I want from you you know for my due diligence in my planning like you know where we're going with this and and you know how we can all kind of make this work.
Are we looking to do to build a senior center next year? Is that I mean I know we're exploring it now we have draft plans do I mean?
Do I think we're likely to start construction next year? No. No. Not a chance in hell. Okay. You know, I think the committee is going to chew on it for a while and then eventually they're going to have to hire an architect. That'll take a while and come back with full set of renderings and you know a real layout and mechanicals and you know all that and that's going to that's going to chew up a bunch of time it's going to have to go there's going to have to be a series of meetings we're going to have to accept it as a town and then we're going to have to start begging for money basically you know and and push some legislative buttons and see what else is out there in the kind of grant landscape to help us pay for that. Because what they're proposing is pretty modest in scale. It's probably only
roughly a million dollars to construct. But when you think that our municipal budget is really only about $3,000,000 a million bucks is not something to sneeze about. That's our total budget, like 13? Yeah. Something like that. And and it's 80% schools. Yeah.
That's a that's a big number. A million bucks per hour. It is. It is.
And the other thing is that at some point we're going to have to have a serious conversation about whether we bond for building and bond for roadwork and bridge and culvert repair. And I don't think we're there yet, but I think it's something we're gonna that's a discussion that's gonna have to be had at some point. Know. Can I say something? Certainly can. With
the last budget, I think everyone kind of understood last time as far as why we did what we did last time. And I think it was kind of accepted. So I think maybe people are kind of thinking that things might raise a little bit more this coming year, even though COVID is out there. So I think we need to maybe tread water a little bit, but hit our priorities. And I think it will be accepted because we've already gone through that last year.
Yeah, I mean, certainly tried to lay the groundwork for the idea that we were gonna need to make some investments in the town and in the infrastructure in the future. How much of that'll carry over probably really depends on how much people are feeling it and what their risk or level of uncertainty is. Yeah and I mean. Go on sorry mark I thought you would. Say I was I just said, I think Louise is correct.
You get to the point where you know if the if the bridge, know if some culvert gets the point where you can't drive over it. We have to do something. Right. Yes. You're gonna wanna know why we didn't. Yeah.
Well, well, yeah. Right. You guys have been hearing this report for ten years and you didn't fund it. Well, yeah, because we didn't wanna raise your taxes. That's not a good answer so correct we had to So balance Eric I'd say try your medium case man try you know thread that I know that process.
We'll let you know if that's really our medium case or not but that'd be a good place to start. Okay fair enough I appreciate the guidance on that. All right. Do we have any other discussion before the board general discussion? Hearing none, let's move on to item 12, which public speak. Any public speak requests? All right. Hearing none, that will take us to Item 13, which is adjournment. Anybody have any discussion or did I hear a motion to adjourn? I move to adjourn.
Okay, Rob moves to adjourn the meeting. Do I have a second? I'll second. Linda seconds. Any discussion? Okay, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay, the meeting is so adjourned. Thank you everybody. You have a safe and happy Thanksgiving. Be careful out there and we'll be talking next month, not sooner. Thanks Mark as usual. Thanks Eric. Take care enjoy.