Meeting transcript
Annual Town Budget Meeting
May 6, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Will be held at the Andover Elementary School in the Gymnasium, 35 School Road on Thursday, 05/06/2021 at 7PM for the following purpose, to choose a moderator for said meeting, to receive the budget for the fiscal year, 07/01/2021 to 06/30/2022 as prepared by the Board of Finance, to approve a budget for the fiscal year 07/01/2021 to 06/30/2022, the We're gonna to to we're are required for all attendees when not speaking, and six feet of social distancing per person except for those living together in a residential community. And before we get started with meeting, nominations?
You can go. I can't see you. Thank you. Kathy? What's happening, Wally Carter is moderator. Okay. Second. Second. Any further nominations?
Thank you, Walt. I'd like to welcome everybody here today. This has been a long and grueling process, and we have more to do, so thank you for your participation. I know this is a little unconventional, but I'd like to start this presentation with a little story. For many years, I've worked at the Marquesne House in Hartford as a tour guide. It was kind of a weekend thing and really enjoyed that. And one year when I was there, we had to get a new alarm system installed. And Charlie was our facilities guy. He's a great guy. He's had a sense of humor. But it was his job to get the alarm system installed and train everybody its use and make sure it's working properly. So right when you walked in the front door of the carriage house, this is where we had our offices and our the guides had a break room there, there was panic button installed, and that panic button was there in case of emergency, obviously. And Charlie dutifully labeled it a panic button, and it said, Warning, this panic button button goes directly to the Hartford Emergency Services to be used only in case of extreme emergency. For example, fire, flood, or budget development. So I always remember that when I think about this process. We have a lot of slides and a lot of ground to cover here. Thank you, Molly, for the reminder of what we can do here because that's part of the presentation. So I ask you to kind of stick with me, I'm gonna try to roll through these pretty quickly, but there's important information. I know a lot of you have been following this process as you go along, but I know all of you probably have, know, maybe not been able to see all of it, so there's gonna be lots of opportunities
to ask questions, make motions, etcetera. Okay, just this is basically what we're gonna roll through. We've got the budget process, I'm gonna just touch on that a little bit. It is here in the presentation, but most of you are probably aware of that. We're gonna go through the expenditures, including the education expenditures for RAM and Andover Elementary School, and then we'll talk about the is quite a multi step thing. In fact, I think Eric had three or four slides here. I'm a little down to one. Thank you. So but it's a it's a pretty involved process. Town departments develop their budget. Eric presents it to the board of select them. This is from the charter. Town charter explains pretty explicitly how we manage the budget process. Wally just kinda went through it, so I'm gonna go ahead and go through this a little bit. You made the important point that we cannot Andover's percentage of the levy decreases from 17.34 of that budget to 17.13%, and that's just because our number of students relative to other towns please, if it snows a lot, you know, be nice to us on Facebook. Alright? We'll take care of you. Okay. So some increases in the town operating budget. We did have some of those as well. First of all, this is kind of a paper increase, if you will. The Andover,
Hebron, Marlboro, Youth Services increased from forty six thousand five thirty six to eighty eight thousand six eighty four, but that wasn't really a And over culvert inspection reports, you're gonna hear the word culvert a lot. Talk about doing the work here. DOT inspection reports on the town bridges. That's Two bridges over the Hop River need replacement, Bunker Hill Road and Longbrook Hill Road. Two smaller bridges need significant repair. Three culverts. Large culverts are rated poor or failing and need replacement to prevent future road closures. I hope you guys wanna see that. And Andover has 750 to a thousand dead trees in the town right away. This is the area that the town is responsible for clearing a lot of roads. Required by the governor's orders that we just set the budget. So we did that. One of the things that we decided to do to help, you know, again, keep the funding for the roads and everything else and keep it in place was we dipped that the estimated bill rate is going from 35.61
to 36.97 in this pipeline. That's an increase of 3.83%. That's the presentation. There's a lot of data here. Thanks for staying with us. We have a hard job. We have to make budgets at this point, so never easy. So at this point, we'll go ahead and
So Georgette, you're talking about is the reval process because it doesn't actually go up until reval comes into effect, which will not be this year. So the increase in property values this year is not reflected in this budget or this mill rate and won't affect you. Next year, you know, in October when the new grand list is out, we all know property is going to increase. What has increased pretty dramatically this year is used car values have gone up a lot and that's because it's so hard to buy new cars right now that NADA values for those are up, and that does affect some people's taxes.
Next question. Valerie Valerie, I think you've done a great job. I drive by the school every day, going to work or doing what I'm doing, and I've seen our school has been open a lot. And I Eric said that, yeah, maybe 10, the school wasn't was not open. So in accordance with going on in many other towns, in many other states, I think you've done an awful great job doing the keeping our school open and keeping our kids. Teacher Laurie and Professor, kudos to you. That I've said that, I'm looking at your 4.5 spending increase and I see school enrollment down and I'm hearing different things about class sizes. Now how many classrooms do we actually have? We have two k through six classrooms? The
operating budget, I think a 2% spending increases is more than reasonable. The capital projects, question for Eric, how much money do we have put aside for the senior center, community center right now or with the board of finance chair on that? How much money do we have currently put aside for our Four fifty. Four fifty. $4.04 7.
Okay. And we're gonna put another 50. And we're gonna put another 50 in this year. Okay. Now for me, I've lived here twenty eight years. Most of the people who've lived here all this time have been very supportive of the school projects, everything like that. We've been waiting a long time to get our own building, and it certainly wasn't the old firehouse, which was an awful place. So I'd like to see a little bit more money allocated to that. I know we can't add to the budget, but that's kind of an important item to all us people who live here for a long time is to get that community center, senior center on board and up and running. The my other concern is is the every year tax increase we have and and like you say, the band aiding of some of the road projects and some of the bridge projects. And I mentioned I mentioned before, maybe it's time that we do have a bonding issue since we are well bonded and gives a couple of referendum questions and with the with the town decide how they wanna spend their money, whether it be on the community center or on the bridges or or what have you. Just just a thought. That's all I got. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks, Don. I'm just gonna I'd like to make a comment, and this is more coming from me. This is a member of the Board of Finance, not the Board of Finance as whole, but I I do have to agree that if we're gonna get the seniors that are done, we've gotta look at bonding packages. There's a couple of advantages to doing it right now. Interest rates are hit at historic lows, right? It's probably not gonna stay like this for long, you know? Most of us have been there where we've had interest rates a lot higher. The other thing is if we don't make some serious steps forward, if we don't just decide to do this thing, it's probably not gonna get done. Right? We've lived with that for several years, as Doug just explained. I've also heard people talk about bombing to the roads, and I do have to say that I think we have to consider that. I don't like it, and I'll tell you why. It's like borrowing home equity taking out a home equity loan to, you know, fix and patch your roof. If you ignore the maintenance for too long, the bonding really should be done, the borrowing should be done for projects that you cannot reasonably do in one year. They're just gonna get behind you, but you can't, you you gotta get it done, but you can't you can't necessarily just pony it all up at that time.
So I think that bonding has to be considered, and it may have to be considered for the roads because we have gotten so far behind, but I don't like that option. But I do think that probably with the board of selectmen, the board of finance, we have to get together again, maybe put together a committee for bonding and really talk about what it's gonna mean to this town, find out what the costs are, find out what the benefits are, and then bring that to the community. So I do agree with that. Just gonna say.
And so you guys have done a lot of work, so it's really good. Question I had was I saw that you said that the tax collector was went to part time, and, again, confused because I saw that the salary was increased quite a bit, so I was kinda confused about that.
Sure, I can take that. So in the last, in the budget last year, we had anticipated reducing the position to part time, and so we cut the budget in the last, in this current budget cycle. The problem is it took a lot longer to get, you know, union agreement, and what the employee did was the employee came back to us and said, if you agree to pay us what a kind of typical hourly wage for that position is, you would voluntarily give up health benefits. So it's an overall, bigger overall reduction to the town even though her salary has gone up, but her total cost has gone down. And we took that because that was a better deal than what we had worked out before. Gotcha, thank you. Won't happen again?
Yeah. So the the big thing that screwed us is we blew the well pump, and we had a lot of problems with that, and the well pump was basically the difference between the budget and what we spent. So that was it, just irrigation.
Okay. And I have no doubt in my mind that the school has been doing a great job. Our kids went here many years ago, and even though back then, class sizes were closer to, I'd say, in the high twenties, 26, 28, and I can't say things are perfect, perfect, but they did great. My son is amazing how much how well he's doing, and my daughter's doing just as well. So I do have some concerns about the fact that the numbers have dropped and the budget hasn't. So I feel like there's probably room to reduce the budget and, you know, we have, I don't know how many pages, 61 pages for the town budget and then Anover Elementary School is a $4,000,000 budget and there's one line. So it makes it hard to decipher whether there's any transparency and, you know, we as accounts people are asking to sign a blank check. I also noticed that you had said that the age AHN budget was 42,000 was taken from the school and added to the town. So that's more money that could actually be looked as an increase that's that the and or school is asking for. So I'm just asking for transparency, and, you know, there's I'm sure there's ways that we could reduce the school budget. That's it.
Action. Yes, sir. Name the street address, please. You would, please.
So moving forward to this year. In terms of class sizes, the difficulty is we're very small school. And so if you have one class worth bigger six that doesn't exceed 20, it's because we don't have 20 kids. So there are some classes that are not going to reach that 20 or 22 number. I do wanna say there's one word that I've heard a lot, that's transparency, and I'm glad that people are interested. Allow for there to be transparency between town and school. One of those is that we make sure that when I send checks out, they're residing them. He knows what's going out. I know what's going out. One of them is that we have budget hearing process that leads all the way up to referendum in a small town. So that along the way, there's four, five, six chances for people to see the budget. I I understand the original question was about class size, but the word transparency keeps coming up, and I welcome anybody at any time from here going forward. A few people called me in the last forty eight hours,
and I spent a great deal of time on the phone with them. I was happy to Because they had questions that they couldn't find an answer to because they went through some of these documents and said, I don't know how to read these. So the one thing I will tell you that I will make sure we do differently with those documents is I will make sure that when they print out, they print out and then I write a narrative. Because I'm finding that there are some questions that are being asked that are difficult for people to hear the answer because they're looking at the paper and they're saying, I I don't understand how it's printing out. So that's on us to do next year. But in terms of class size and then I'll get this back to you. In terms of class size, I do know that on social media, there's been a great deal of discussion on that. There isn't a lot that I can do about certain grades. However, the decision in January that was made with the kindergarten, which now, as I said, we have 36 kids, was made due to the fact that right now, in hand's over, yes, we've been open,
but in Andover, we're still not through the pandemic. We have students that have registered for next year that have had no preschool due to the pandemic. They were home. Had that. So I had to make a decision in January that although our children are better off than a lot of other talents, I had to make a decision not to cut a teacher, not not to add a teacher. That was never never on on the the table. Table. We We had had fourteen fourteen classrooms. Classrooms. It was that one teacher was retiring, and the question was, do we give up that spot? Do we hire one? What do we do? And so I said, we can't afford to cut a teacher. We can afford to cut apparel, but not a teacher. We were so grateful and lucky that we have a current professional in this building that is also certified to be a teacher. So we said, this is wonderful for our kids because we don't have to cut a staff member. We can move her right over. Additional questions, comments? Yes, ma'am.
Alright. It's not just about class sizes, but own. Do So ahead
I like to see things in lines. The budget, the way the town presented it was more clear. I did look at the town, the school budget, and it was wasn't very easy to understand as far as I'm concerned. It seemed like things were spelled out to you, like you're you know, here's the things that you need to know. You know? It just I just not I'm I'm sure a lot of people in this room are feeling differently, but well, I have a like, a specific question I have in my field is, you know, we were talking about the tick spray on the lawn. And I don't wanna go into a long thing about ticks, but you don't really need to spray the whole lawn. So I was just kinda wondering how much you spent on the tick spray, for example. I mean, maybe someone like me could help save money on that. I mean, there's all kinds of lines where people could help save help the school save, and it doesn't have to be, like, changing the class sizes. There's a lot of things that get I do do do
can is you know, if we picked away every little line, we could probably help save money instead of trying to take a guess and just trust you that you're doing the best you can. I'm sure you are, but I'm sure there's ways where we can help. And I just take offense to, you know, you saying that I should've come to you before. You know? I'm sorry that I'm I work a lot, and, you know, it's just been very concerning and I got involved because, you know, Jeff Murray was insulted during the meeting, so I decided, well, you know, some of these these selectmen are trying to do a really good job, and they're trying to save money, and they're spending, you know, their their budget looks like it's pretty bare bones, whereas the town handover, I thought, I mean, the school, all that's you know, I I hear it's bare bones, but nobody's actually really telling you what you're spending money on. That's it. Can I ask, please, that this not become So
I have I have two questions? One, is there a dialogue between the board of finance and the board of ed and our superintendent before we reduced their budget a little bit during conversation? In the four point fives, it seems a little high coming off the bureau we're at. I mean, has there been discussions as to whether if this budget were to be be defeated tonight or in in actual the budget process as to where reductions could take place. And my second question is, if the budget were to get defeated in either today or in a couple weeks, would the board of finance and the select one look at the possible bonding of one or more of these capital projects?
If I understood you, then you're asking if we had a kind of a We went back and forth quite a bit. I will say that it is the my belief is that the the view into the budget this year was more clear than it had been in the past, and my expectation is that it'll be even more clear in the future. We had a good dialogue with the with the superintendent, and I think with the board of Ed about some ways that we can, you know, we present the numbers so that they are a little more standardized in their presentation, I guess I would say. So I do agree that sometimes it's been difficult to kind of, to see exactly what's going on in each area. I voiced that opinion myself during that meeting. So I do think that that's a valid concern. I don't think that it's intentional or deceptive necessarily, it just is kind of the way that things have been done. And I think it was actually a lot of data in there, but it wasn't always easy to pull that out and figure out exactly what it applied to. And we had some good discussions, and I think now that we have the combined finance director here with Sherry, there's even
evening. I'm Shannon Lau, 1248 Bearstone Road. I am speaking in support of the Andover Town budget as approved and recommended by our Board of Finance. I thank the Board of Finance is the funds needed to educate our children, because there's been a tremendous amount of misinformation being spread about this town. Fact number one, on Tuesday, Andover voted in favor of a RAM budget for some 188 students. So we agreed on Tuesday to pay an additional $1,000,000 for just 35 more students going to Ram. I believe we can pass a budget that includes Andover Elementary School's budget this evening. Fact number three, student enrollment in Andover Elementary School has basically been stagnant
within 15 students up and down for the past four years. Yet we have incurred either a zero increase or a decrease in our budget each of the last six years. This is the first year in the last six years in which Andover Elementary School is asking for a budget increase, and the Board of Finance has recommended it. The precipitous decline in the student population occurred more than five years ago, personal budgets actually decreased in the last year? Fact number four, Andover Elementary School is one of only a very few schools in the entire state that didn't have to ask for more money from its town to address the significant expenses caused by the pandemic. And it's one of the very few schools in the entire state that has been open for in person learning five days a week for the past thirty six weeks other than a brief pre planned remote period of seven remote days around Thanksgiving. This has been possible because of the extraordinary efforts of our teachers, paraprofessionals, administrators, administrative staff, custodians, cafeteria workers, school nurse, and because of the tremendous efforts of the parents and the students themselves. Think about that. Our students have gone to school in this school for thirty six straight weeks without interruption. That is almost unheard of in the state of Connecticut in the last fifteen months.
That is what you are being asked to support tonight. You're being asked to support a budget increase because we haven't had an increase in six years, and we haven't passed for increase during fifteen months of the pandemic. That's what you've been asked to pay for. So please, I encourage you to vote in favor of the town's budget to move it to referendum. Thank you for your consideration. Additional comments, motions?