Meeting transcript
Board of Finance Meeting Part 1
September 28, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Okay, let's call the meeting of the Andover Board of Finance for September 28 to order at 07:02PM. First item on the agenda is Pledge of Allegiance. So, pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which stands one nation under God, indivisible, liberty and justice for all. All right. Nobody heard this before, but I have a massive headache. So I'm gonna try to move the meeting along really quickly. If I get off track, you can just put me back on track or if I talk gibberish, you can put me back on track because I can't think straight because my head is killing me. All right, public speak. We have Colin McNamara on and he wanted to say hello to us. He is the new superintendent for Ram.
Yeah, hey, you got it. Don't know if you saw my email that I sent earlier today. Absolutely. So good evening, everyone. My name is as the chair said my name is Colin McNamara. The new superintendent for RAM. The purpose for me attending this evening is to simply introduce myself. My goal in starting, I started in July 1, and my goal is to make sure that I can be out there and meet people and meet people who are associated with the district and certainly elected officials in the towns of Andover, Hebron and Marlboro are amongst that group. While I'm new to the district, I know there is a commitment in each of the three towns to support the middle school and high school students at RAM. And I look forward to working with you and members of the board, members of all the boards from the different towns. And I would just encourage any of you to reach out to me directly if you have any questions or concerns. I just felt it was important to say hi and for give you an opportunity to put a face and a voice even through the virtual environment to the name and just just wanted to pop in and say hello. That's that's it.
Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks, Colin. Nice to put a voice and a face together. Absolutely.
Yeah, so you know my contact information is available on our district website. If there's issues concerns questions that any of you might have with some of the stuff that's going on related to ram don't hesitate to reach out to me at any time. Thank you very admirable lazy to do
Pleasure meeting you all in a virtual environment. With that I'm gonna I'm gonna say my goodbyes it's actually my birthday today I'm not looking for soliciting things but I've got I've got my family upstairs and we're doing a little bit of a celebration, but I just wanted to again just say hello and look forward to working with you all in the future. Okay. Okay, happy 20. I love the twenty fifth wishful thinking but thanks guys have a great night take care, be well. Bye.
I don't see any other members of the public on there. See one iPhone trying to join. Don't know who that is. Does Kurt have an iPhone?
I don't know, but it's not showing. I have no idea. Just move on. Does anybody have any additions or deletions to the agenda items? We got a pretty packed agenda here already.
All right, we're good with that. Okay. Let's move to the town administrator's report. Eric?
Okay. I'm gonna go really brief. I'm not gonna really say much other than what's already in the report. We are working on installing the electric charging stations now. I'm hoping we get those in in the next week or so. We're just trying to fine tune the the Ethernet connection for it. I do have a new admin assistant, Kate Morrissey, that has started. So if you have questions, you can reach out to either me or her. Keeps the same admin assistant email as before. I had given all of you a copy of the proposed contract for Nathan Jacobson. If any of you do have feedback on that
for myself and the Board of Selectmen, let me know, and I'd be happy to incorporate that. You know, we are basically done for the year with paving and then shimming and chip sealing, other than we do have a little bit more sweeping to do, but our sweeper's broken at the moment. So, we're in the process of getting that fixed and back on the road, and then we'll finish sweeping the roads that need it. We were able to work again with Eversource this year, and put a breakdown back into what our costs were this year for tree work. And we listed both the money we paid out of the capital budget, the capital tree removal fee, and then just an estimate of what our salary costs are
for the project. Just so you can get a feel for it, because we end up doing traffic control to hold our contract costs down, we incur a bunch of salary and labor expense. So the RFP for the community center is really close. Adrian's gotten contributions from a bunch of people. We've reached back out to Rob, the civil engineer who was doing the site work. He's got to provide us some final documentation. And Adrian is just making the last of the corrections, but we've got a pretty good document that's basically ready to go to RFP for the design build. We are just about done with the majority of the connectivity grant project. Parking area at Center Street has been paid. Almost all of the signage is up, the kiosk is up, the fencing is up, so waiting for some grass to grow. And then we've got some little details. We got to paint the lines for the parking area. You know, redo the blinds for the parking area at the library, since we screwed them up doing the initial construction. Then that basically wraps up that that project we are planning on doing a like a ribbon cutting for that on October 15, which is a Saturday at 9AM. You're all cordially invited to that. There are going to be some things we're going to wrap up. We have a little bit of money leftover. So there's a couple of things that we're contemplating doing. One of them is making the walking track at the Andover Veterans Field actually handicapped accessible, because now it's hard for people to get to the track if they have limited mobility. But as soon as we do that, then we've got to provide handicap parking spots.
So we're still cost estimating that, but it looks like we have enough funding leftover from that grant. And since that's all in the same area and it's definitely a connectivity project, there shouldn't be a problem with spending, you know, that's in the realm of what that grant money was for. I sent a note to the board. We haven't got the full second allotment for the American Recovery Act funding. We got the initial $160,000 which was that initial second half of the initial allotment that was directly geared towards the town. The rest of the money would ordinarily have gone to the counties, but since Connecticut doesn't have counties, that money gets transferred directly to the state. Have been told that should get, we should get that first week of October. So that will get us back to our like, it's around $480,000 In the second allotment, we still have basically the full tranche. So we have just under $1,000,000 dedicated for the senior class senior slash community center. So that's that. And that's basically all I have, unless you guys have questions for me about projects or whatnot. Any questions you have here?
Zurich, couple of quick questions. I know that MyRoads is one of the roads that was ship sealed, guess it is, right? With the sweeper will be coming back eventually. I know that it's broken or whatever. Yep. What I'm just gonna say this. I I say this is something I don't know a lot about. When I've mentioned it to a couple of people in passing, what did you do to bear swamp before they put that dust on it you know I was okay with it then it felt like harsh it was partially paved in a lot of areas Which improved.
So the first thing we do to it is what's called shimming or scratch shimming. And that is you use a pavement, you use asphalt that does not have a really big aggregate in it, and you use it to reshape and re contour the road where you have dips and you have really bad sections of pavement that's alligator. And you feather it because you don't want a sharp bump. The only other way to do it is do what's called keying it, which means you actually cut a strip about four feet wide the width of the road down about two inches. So, pitch so you can pave without having a big bump. When you shim with pavement that thin, you have to cover it with something or it's not going to hold in a year or two it'll break off, then you'll be back to having a bumpy road with the problems you had before
so when chips I don't want to ask to I know Diana's a headache so I don't want to make this a big long but so thank you you know I do like to learn that so that was just that was part one of what you were gonna, because I was happy with that. I, you know, don't mind getting the fill in. It looked pretty good. You know, it didn't look perfect, but all right. So that was part one. I understand it seems like this will take a while to this is probably the first time I don't like our road, know, with all the roads talk that we've been in, this is like my worst. But I am told by people that understand it, it will get better.
Yeah, it will. And we play a balancing act between the quality of the aggregate we use and the cost. And believe it or not, if you use really high quality aggregate that's triple washed in its size so that all the particles are basically threeeight of an inch, it doesn't lay down as flat in the end as when you use a mix that is a cheaper stone mix that also has much smaller particles and dust in it. Because that gets down into the cracks, it works its way into the emulsion and you end up with a flatter surface in the end. But in the meantime, you deal with a lot more dust. And frankly, I get a lot more complaints from people than we use the, when we use the double washed. But in the long run, we get less complaints like six months out, we get less complaints because you have a smoother surface. And I don't get all the complaints about, you know, I can't walk my dog on it because it's too rough and my kids can't Yeah like
just going for a walk there's like your eyes are just full of dust and I get the dust part I even mean the surface part so I'll give it time I think I've seen the process before and it seemed to work a little bit better. No, thank you for that. You're always willing to give. And then just a quick one on the, you're always willing to give an explanation. I have to finish. I'm so quick. I don't finish thoughts a lot. The next is just you said so the track at Veterans Park you know also down the road is it and I'm all about handicap accessibility and all of that I understand that but for people that would want to use it that are handicapped, is it hard I'm not understanding, I feel like it's open and even if you wanted to push someone in a wheelchair or something, could you get in there? I didn't know.
Yeah. Problem is there's no easy access to the path because the gate goes the the the rail fence goes all the way around. There's a gate, but the gate is normally locked because it's a 10 foot wide gate and we don't want people driving cars on it. So we either have to unlock the gate and then risk, you know, doing donuts on the field, which has been a problem in the past. We we basically put in a second pedestrian and at entrance that's about four feet wide. We do have to change some of the split not split rail, but the heavy timber post, we have to add a couple of posts,
you know, dig them in and then put a, just pave a very short pathway. But the problem is, as soon as you claim something is handicap accessible, then you trigger the rules. And then you have to make it essentially ADA accessible. So, you have to, instead of using chip seal there or just the millings that's there, we do have to pay the little square that's essentially big enough for one or two handicapped vehicles to park. A big deal. We'll use the same contractor we use for shimming because he's, you know, he's a lot cheaper. And we probably would just have public works do the excavating because that's really fast. So, I don't see this as being a big project. We're probably talking about one day of labor for our paving contractor. That's about $3,500 and then the cost of asphalt.
And we'll only do it if we have the money in the grant to pay for it. Got it. Thanks.
Eric, if I could, you mentioned that you had sent around a copy of the contract for Nathan Jacobson. I don't see it in the packet. Did you email it? What did you do? Yeah. I emailed it to the board
a couple of weeks ago. Oh, okay. I thought I did. You did?
I'm pretty sure you did. This is the contract for services for to help our finance department?
No. Nathan Jacobs sound engineer. Is the contract for town engineer.
Oh, sorry, I had the wrong thing. So now I'm not sure.
The reason why I sent it, I thought I sent it to the Board of Finance was because I wanted you as you're debating the purchasing policy, you know, since that contract, if it gets signed, you know, has some stipulations and some cost thresholds on what we would have to go back out to RFP versus what we would just do as a matter of course. So I wanted you guys all to review it. I mean, it's the board of selectmen that signs it, but I wanted to give it to you guys to review. And I thought I I didn't find a copy of it. Maybe I misfiled it or something. I'm not seeing it either. Well, then maybe I screwed up and didn't send you a copy. It's entirely possible.
Anybody else got it? Because I don't see it either.
I think I got it, but I did not at that time spend a lot of time looking at it because I was writing the purchasing policy. And I really kind of think of that as a So we can provide feedback separately
at the board, if we have any issues, but it'd probably be good to see that.
Yeah. Okay. So, will make a note to myself to send you a copy. So, my apologies for not having sent you one already. I thought I had given all of you that. No worries. Okay.
Any other questions for Eric? Anybody else have anything else? Okey doke. Let's move on to finance department report. You guys have a budget expenditure report and a revenue report. Neither one of them is correct. So based on our current situation, but I don't know if anybody has any questions or anything you want to go over on those things.
Just a comment Diane, when you say, and I know you've been working closely with Jeff and Eric trying to get this sorted out, but when you say not correct, mean, you're not, there's no, is there any material discrepancies that we should be aware of?
The total amount on the expenditure report that says for our budget is not what our approved budget was, It's off by $133 which needs to be fixed. Yeah. Caused that? Thousands of dollars anywhere.
No, do have in the finance section, the software was not set up correctly in the budget. So the software maintenance item under the treasurer financing is saying it says zero for the adopted budget. It should be $2,200 Okay. The report. Got it.
I'm not spending a whole lot of time looking at this stuff now because.
Yeah, that's fine. Didn't want it to, I was just, as long as there's nothing that you guys are concerned about.
Right. Right. And if there's a flashing red emergency, you know, some massive discrepancy, I think that's what we're.
I'm pretty confident you guys would have alerted it, but I just wanted to ask the question when you say it's not right, not right, is it? Okay.
So put it this way, when we get to the discussion about the cure for all this, we will have answers for that for you. The revenue report is not right because there's no grand list. No revenue has been posted. The grand list item wasn't even set up in the budget right. So we'll see, I think the budgeted amount is blank, is zero on it. So that's a work in progress. That's kind of where we are. As far as the items that are being booked as expenses in the report, they're they're from what I have gone through the system and they're pretty much correct. There's some things that we have to fix. In essence, the accounts payable is getting posted and that's about the only thing. So there are some things we need to fix on that. So any other questions? Everybody good? All right. Item six on here, we do have a transfer that we wanna do in the packet, which will be our professional services that we want to put money aside for for hiring someone to help us fix the finance department. So in essence, I think the Board of Selectmen has already made a motion to in their meeting to move this money, but this meeting would be a formal meeting to do that. I think Eric would have put a motion in our packet. He did. He did. There's suggested motions in there for transfers from trooper fund and contingency.
Right? Right. So we wanna take the left the the money we have left in the trooper fund and the money we have in contingency for last year, transfer them into the audit services line to have that money set aside to do our fix.
So I guess the question I would have before entertaining this motion is audit services the right line to move this to? Is there outside consulting row that would be more appropriate?
Really isn't. We are actually, it is going to be audit services because we have to hire somebody to reconcile every one of our bank statements for last year. But that's accounting, right? Right. But we're hiring a CPA, kind of an external. It's
not that critical, but I wouldn't sort of call it audit. That would be able to skew it a little bit.
And a lot of this and logically, there was no other place to put it right now because there's no professional services line. Want to use money from last year's budget because really the impetus out of this is coming from the last audit report from the auditor. One of the findings was for us to do a major overhaul of our accounting system.
Yes, it's related. I get that, but the real findings, we all know that the books are not where they need to be. But okay, if we don't have a professional services line, yeah, probably that's the most reasonable place to put it, I think. It's not unreasonable. It's just something that is going to skew our audit line by a little bit. Just have to get that in mind for the future. And I've got to tell you in that audit line, part of reasons that we still owe the auditor probably another $17,000 for last year's audit.
That's going to pay that too. Seems a little dual purpose then. Yeah.
Okay. So do we is this the point at which you wanna make those motions? Or
I would like to do that now if anybody has any further questions about it or any concerns about the motion, we can address it. But if we could have a motion?
I I get yeah. I guess we can always have discussion once the motion is is under what they Yeah. Hang on. I just wanna get it right, and then I can make it. I'm just scrolling down to find the suggestion. On page 20 of the packet. The packet was
there's a bit of an info dump in the middle of it. Oh. For goodness sakes, sorry. 20, you said. It is. 20 on my PDF, so no. That would explain why I'm not.
No, it's page 20 on the PDF and meeting packet. Yeah. Distributed by the admin.
That's odd. All right. What I'm looking at, maybe I downloaded it strangely because I It's right after the financial statements, Rob. Yeah, I see that.
Okay. Anyway, if somebody else has it, just you guys do it because for some reason, what I'm looking at here is not
matching up. I'll make the motion. So I'll motion that we transfer $54,757.54 from budget line item 1075 resident state trooper to line item 120, which is audit services.
And I will second that motion. And for the record, I'm not a complete moron. I found it. It's on page 12 of 24 of what I opened. Okay. So
I didn't download it. You see, opened it. I just clicked on it. This is the same issue I think we were talking about before where you get a different format if you download it properly. Could be. Sorry. Anyway, yes, I second that motion. Any discussion on that motion?
I presume that that's the excess based on what we had, obviously. We ended up quite a bit lower in the state trooper file. It winds up. I have no concerns about it.
And you know, this plan that's been cooked up, I mean, it seems to have broad support. You know, the Board of Selectmen seems to be in. Diane, I think I'm guessing you think this is a good idea that this is the the fix? Yes. Yes. I've met with this woman many hours. So You know, I I have no expertise to bring to bear, really. So I'm gonna trust my subject matter experts. I've got nothing further.
Guess I'm just going to follow-up with this is the money that we anticipate using for the private consulting service, the woman to come in and right. That was my only question. Well,
some of these two transfers we're going to do are going to be used for professional services, know, for the audit findings. Yeah. Fixing our books and paying the auditor what we owe him the extra money we owe him because the audit was so labor intensive for them. We owe him another 17,000 above and beyond the 32 or 33,000 we budgeted for last year.
So in the end we're talking 50 ks for last year's audit.
Yep. Okay. All right. Let's take a vote all in favor. Aye. Aye.
Okay, that's unanimous. No abstentions, no nays. Okay, the second part of the motion is for the transferring the money from the contingency into the audit services line. I have a motion for that?
I'll go ahead and make that motion to. I motion to transfer 38,263.50 from budget line item number 1O99, contingency to line item 1And 20, audit services. Any questions on that? Need a second. I did a second. We had a little crosstalk. I talked over him.
No questions? I'm good. I mean, it's the same purpose. So Yeah. Same purpose. And I think at at this point, I guess the only issue is we don't believe we need contingency for anything else at this point. Right.
Right. Okay. And we need this money. Will we use all this money? Probably not. So what will happen, it'll just roll into the general fund because once we close out last year. So what we need to really kind of take these two pieces. These are the two pieces that had the biggest amount of money left over at the end of the year last year. We really lucked out with the trooper there. Yeah, it really. Yeah, we did. Unanticipated, Yep. Another windfall. All right. All in favor? Aye. Aye.
Okay. It's unanimous. No abstentions, no nays. All right, thank you everyone for that. Those are done. Let's go on to old business. Budget transfers over business. Audit status? Yeah.
Just so you know, the audit report has been issued. We had to do a corrective action plan and file it with the state. I, in conjunction with Eric, together the correction action plan and Eric sent it on to the state. So that has been filed. The corrective action plan that I put together is the typical, very brief, yes, we agree, yes, we're going to fix it, and we're going to fix it by such and such a date. There's no detail in there. There's no plan written out for anybody because I'm very used to responding to a formal audit that you only say, yep, we're going to do it. And this is when we're going to do it by it. And the details all to up to us behind the scenes to get it accomplished. So it's just very brief, short to the point. So we have nothing to come back and haunt us of what we said we were gonna do and we didn't do it. A lot of those dates got pushed out for the corrective action into December, January and February. I consciously couldn't put a date out farther than February because I thought I would like die if I did that. So to get these things accomplished. So that's done. So we now going forward, we will then I'll take these dates and the response that I put to the corrective action plan, And I'll drop it into that spreadsheet that we had for what the corrective action was from the
auditor. And we'll put in what our response was and the due dates. And we'll track that every month so we can make sure we're meeting our target dates. We'll just have oversight on that. And we'll make that a recurring thing to keep track of. Because we can't afford not to hit our mark this time because the state will come in and take us over. We'll be under their supervision because they really don't like what they see. So, so we'll do that. So that's that. Staff searches for the finance department and Eric, can chime in if you're there. You know, we've had to add a whole lot of luck with the treasurer thing, you know, not a lot of qualified Not at all. Not at all. I just found we're gonna advertise, I think, Marina's job. We probably should start that next week. We haven't done that yet because we were unsure about the roles and how to do that. Now that we're moving closer to hiring this professional person to come in and help us straighten things out, we're getting a lot more guidance about
what the roles and responsibilities of a treasurer should be and a worker bee in the office. So we'll get that going. But there's really no new news on that. So we're kind of so really all we do right now is have Marina coming in and she's just doing accounts payable and payroll. That's it. Nothing else is getting done. Any questions, anybody?
With respect to the search for a treasurer and the difficulties we're having, you know, if we're not getting up against what have you, do I mean, we're advertising the position at a particular pay level. Right?
Our time. So, you know, so you so really, our mark is a retired professional or somebody who's semi retired. You know what I mean? Or someone who has a business on the side. Right. I'm actually saying with another town department. That's that was an idea Eric came up with too, sharing a financial treasurer oversight with another town.
Yeah. I I mean, I've had that very preliminary conversation with a couple other town managers of the surrounding towns. I think if we have, if we're at the point where we've got the financial department running well, if we get to the point where, you know, we've made the conversion of QuickBooks, we're functioning normally, the person that's in there on the day to day basis can handle the majority of the things, and the treasurer does some journal entries and does the monthly reconciliation. That's a low enough time requirement that I think we can get another finance director to do that on the side. I think, I don't know, but that would be my approach to trying to track down somebody for that. Or, I mean, ideally would be somebody who was a retired finance director of a local town that wanted to do it for, know, a little bingo money. You know.
Okay. So your your your impression is that our hiring difficulties are as much about the scope of the job as they are about, you know, what we're willing to pay for it?
Well, number one. So the resumes that have come in that I looked at, there were virtually nobody qualified. Okay. There were kids who are just graduating with an accounting degree from UConn applying for the job. Do you know what I mean? And I think a lot of people who applied didn't realize it was a part time job Some people didn't have any experience, some are just getting accounting degrees, some people had unrelated
Do we need to rewrite the description to make it clearer? The reason I'm asking these questions is, you know, I know it's tough right now to find, you know, people were hiring at my work. We're interviewing people, you know, hand over fist. And, you know, some of our screening that we've been having from HR has been struggling a little bit. We're getting people, like, we're getting, like, Applebee's waitresses, you know, applying for a technical position. But that said, you know, I I just wanna throw it out there. You know, if we're having trouble attracting interest, there's I'm trying to get at what the problem might be. Is it because it's part time? Is it because the hourly rate or what we're willing to pay is too low? What's going on? Because we may if if we're not getting any nibbles, we gotta change something. Right?
It's not that we're not getting nibbles. It's just, you know, we're not catching applicants. Wanna catch. Qualified applicants. How's that? Right.
Yeah. And and I do think the problem is is that, you know, if if somebody is talented enough and qualified enough that they can do the job, The reality is they're already employed. So, the only, the only two, three would have with them for this type of position, which is very part time would be somebody that did it, but that is now retired, you know, and wants it as just like a side, you know, thing for a little supplemental income, or somebody that's actively doing the job for a similar or ideally larger municipality that's either number one or number two in a finance department of a bigger town that wants to try to do it on the side. It seems like that's really our talent pool that we're looking for, and that's not a big pool. So it's not going to be something that's easy to track down. Okay.
We have a plan, which we'll talk about in executive session, Joanne. Oh, okay.
Sorry, I hope you're gonna be able to, can you hear me? Yes. Computer issues. Yes. Oh, okay. I just, what about Catharine? I get that we've been at this for a while and trying to get someone employed in there that's going to take hold, figure out what we need to do. Know we kind of just went through two years of that. Should we wait? I know we have to get a treasurer, we have to get a finance person, you know, the marina position, but what about with this consultant coming in, looking at everything, and then I think from reading the contract or seeing it, they're actually going to maybe give us a plan
of Oh, I did send you guys a copy of her proposal. Okay?
My last thing, Diane, not to go on about this. Hopefully, that person could see the amount of work that's in an office like in Andover and just say, you know, I think you need a good person two days a week once everything's up and running you know that kind of thing. I think our problem throughout the years that I've watched and it's been since I've lived here truthfully but not all on this like you know, this regime, is just getting a person in there to get it running and it seems to be from the outside looking in. So kind of knowing what we need before we try to like let's get with another town, let's do this, let's do that. I feel like we really need this person to look at what happened. And that's what she's going to do. My director that was going to come in and just be like the savior and I feel like in my tenure, we're in worse shape now.
Realistically, the big scope plan is to hire a highly qualified professional person to come in, convert us to QuickBooks, straighten our accounting setting, put together all the processes, all the procedures, do all the training, and we just backfill with the people to keep it doing the job after that. So we're not looking so so we're going to pay somebody. We're gonna pay a lot of money for somebody to get us all on track. We don't have the the resources to recruit a town soon enough of part time treasurer to come in and fix our problems. So we're gonna hire this professional, fix our problems. The process will be set up. She will provide oversight services for a period of the next six months, maybe to a year to check back and make sure everything is staying on track. And then we can because realistically, the accounting person and a treasurer, if we, for our size budget, our size town, taking the school out of the mix, for us, neither one of those jobs are a full time job.
Once everything's set up correctly, because then you're just maintaining the system. The problem is we never got Admins is too complicated for us, too heavyweight of a piece of software and we're not even touching what we could use in it. And no one wants to learn it in order to help us. So that's kind of the quandary. So we have to hire a person to fix us, and then we would need to hire the people based on that person's input of what we need, what kind of resources. And we've had some preliminary discussions with this person to talk about the type of resources that should be in the accounting office and the treasurer. And this person will, you know, will bridge us from now until we hire a treasurer. Do you know what I mean? That person will perform some treasury functions for us until we can hire a permanent treasurer. There is kind of a plan in place. And I don't see any other way to get it done because we have to fix the problems first. And then train the people, new people to do the job and keep it afloat.
Does anybody have any other questions or comments? All right. Now we are on to new business. So, well, really I did half new business. So I told you we're hiring a consultant. When we go into an executive session, I'll give you some more details and we'll talk about that and some more details on there with her contract. Moving
on to the draft purchasing Quick question in executive session, is that required for just discussing a contract?
I wanted us just to have the time as a board to just talk it all through realistically and look at the proposal and get your feedback.
I think unless it's a personnel matter or a legal matter affecting the town, can get into some issues with FOIA, and open access meetings. Eric, any input on that? Don't remember the exact determination, but unless we're talking about a personal matter, a legal matter, or some highly sensitive confidential matter, then I think going into executive session may be problematic.
So that is why I listed the executive session specifically to discuss just the contract negotiation portion of it, so we stay out of trouble with FOIA. Okay.
So as long as the discussion doesn't get too tangential from there, I think it's it's a safe and legal conversation to have. It can't be a freewheeling, free ranging discussion of everything under the sun, but, you know, you are allowed to discuss pending contracts in executive session.
Okay, understood. Yeah, I would be in agreement with that. I think that makes sense. Where it's a competitive thing where you have competitive bid potentially or you have some financial breakdown.
Any other concerns? Okay, draft purchasing policy. Do you wanna share a screen on this and look at this together? How do you guys wanna approach it? I'm just
Well, I've read through it pretty closely and I don't have I have two issues with it and I just I have comments on it.
Email. Yeah, you emailed me some comments, so I wanted you to give
everybody your input. Yeah, so I have a couple of them are just small things, but I have two concerns. One is that if we're going to put a purchasing policy in place that's flexible enough for the town to do its business on a regular basis, I'm not sure that we should cede authority to the Board of Selectmen to allow them to approve deviations from that policy. Think that's the Board of Finance's purview. We set policy and financial policy for the town. So if we set policy and they have the authority and the sole authority to deviate from that policy and approve deviations to that policy, we're ceding our authority. And I don't think that that's a good precedent to set. And so that's my number one concern with this policy.
So you want to have exceptions to the policy being a joint approval by the Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance? I think the Board of Finance should approve
the deviations. And I think it's fine if you want to have the Board of Finance and the Board of Selectmen approve the deviations. I would not vote for this policy if it's only the Board of Selectmen approving deviations. My second concern is the preferred vendor clause because that's not defined anywhere where a preferred what makes a preferred vendor? I was going to ask the same I'm generally in favor of this kind of thing in order to streamline the process, and we have some preferred vendors that I think have rendered good service to the town. I use preferred small P, not large P, because there's not any list anywhere. They've rendered good service to the town. We've got a good working relationship, they trust the town, we trust the vendor, that's good. As somebody who's involved and responsible for millions of dollars of supply chain, I see the value in that. But nowhere in the policy is it defined what preferred vendor selection process is. So that leaves it wide open. So again, I think that it needs to be either part of the policy or we need to have a strong document following this policy that defines that process. We could say something like the preferred vendor select processes. It references a process, but we should say something like as determined by the Board of Finance.
So I was asking Eric to write a a preferred vendor policy about how how it would work, how long those contracts with those people would be, who to review them, and think to supplement this. I didn't want that policy inside this policy. I wanted it to be a stand alone document so it could be
very flexible as our needs change. Do know what mean? So I I would I'm okay with that as long as as long as it's as long as it's approved by the Board of Finance and it states that in this policy that the preferred vendor policy will be reviewed and approved by the Board of Finance. And we periodically
agree, you know, re up it, say there's a I don't know how you would do this, but maybe you have a spreadsheet or something with preferred vendors. Oh, we've had good experience, blah, blah, blah. And Eric would bring it to us periodically.
Yeah. And we would bless Diane mentioned a good thing. Like, how long would a preferred vendor status last? So if we put them in there for a year Two years. By year. End of the fiscal year So, like, every preferred vendor I envision having some kind of service contract with the town, just like we did with the professional services for the engineer. That's either a two or three year contract, fixed price, fixed caps, and that would rule that relationship.
And it would expire at a certain important time when you'd have to re up and re review them, add more people. Yeah, I think that may I'll be honest with you, I think that's a lot of work to put together agreements with each of those vendors because you don't necessarily know what electricals work you're going to need or what plumbing work you're going to need, but you may want a preferred electrician or a preferred plumber. But I think the spirit of what you're suggesting, Diane, is appropriate. You know, if we have somebody who's providing good service and yeah, I think we have to be a little careful with this one, obviously, because I'm raising an issue. Yeah, so anyway, I think it's a good policy. But as long as we review it and approve it and there's a time limit as you propose, that's a great idea. I think that it makes sense.
Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up because that was one of the things I flagged too. You know, in at my work, we do settlement agreements. And, you know, if it's not a defined term, I get hives. Right. You know? Because then you're you're almost asking for trouble down the road. So a defined term reference some other process or document, and then conceptually, I think it's a great idea. But the way it's drafted right now, it's it's missing that piece.
So Yeah. And it and this is really I was just trying to put out there a framework and then a framework for us to work with vendors that give the town great service, great pricing that we kinda have a relationship with. Yeah. And Conceptually, it's great. Defined is we need to do that. I mean, that's how you define that. And I would be looking to Eric
to put something together for us on that. Right. And then we can kind of play with that. And then my other my other thought was one of the thresholds. I was just so you were raising the threshold from 5 to 7 and a half thousand for, you know, things that would go underneath this policy. And I'm just wondering, you know, if we this is just I'm just kind of noodling around on this. Do we wanna go to 10 to buy ourselves you know, to give ourselves some cushion for future? Because as prices rise and and whatnot, you know, it's just a thought. I don't not weighted to it. I'm not actually even suggesting that. I'm just These commercials that I put in there was, like, my best guess. It was like a guess. And the only way 50% increase.
Had five and this is really the getting competitive quotes, getting three quotes. Right? Right. So this is allowing us We're looking for flexibility. We're we're we're we're
we're we're five and we have a problem getting things done at five. So I was going to seven and a half. Right. Is ten too much? I don't know. That's a thing that we can talk about and what we're covering. Let me ask this, Eric, you know,
in terms of, you know, functionally, what we've actually run into, the the times you've brought to us and asked us for exceptions to the program. I can't remember off the top of my head how many were in the 5 to 7 and a half and how many were above 7 and a half. But going forward with prices rising and whatnot, what do you think in terms of the flexibility that would really benefit the town? What do you think it would be a reasonable threshold?
Yeah, mean 7,500 for a lot of things is good. I mean, it's just I mean, I guess I look at it and I say we have a lot of little projects, you know in the 5 to $10,000 range, you know that come up. You know, both in the public works realm, you know, in here, I mean. To give you an example $7,500 probably does not buy you one day of paving by a paving contractor, for instance. You know, we were to do it, you know, we had to go out and replace some guardrail, that's likely to be over $7,500 So, an awful lot of things we do on a routine basis are in that range. I mean, even vehicle repairs can easily exceed that. You know, in so I guess it just depends on how strict you want to to make things. And that
you know, there's no right or wrong answer, obviously. No. That that's why I'm just sort of raising the issue of we're reupping a pause. We're five years down the road from the original policy. Right? So it was 2017 that we originally enacted. 2017 was the last date. Yep. You know what? Here, you know, I'm just wondering what the, if I just plugged into the inflation calculator, you know, CPI. About 7,000 to 10,000 though. In 2017 dollars.
Right. In 2022. Right? So I I'm just I'm just trying to give us flexibility so that two years from now, we're not already kinda out of date. That's why I'm raising it.
And it's a gut feel thing. I I don't really know. I'm I just thought I'd bring it up. I looked at a lot of those towns policies and Eric sent a lot of them. There's very few towns that are over $5,000 Oh, okay. That's interesting. Now
are they happy with that? I don't know. It's just what you can find on their websites and what they have published. You know what I mean? But a lot of towns seem to have some kind of preferential list or a proverb. I see, like, the bigger projects that would go over 7,500 to 10,000, say, if it was an electrical thing, if we had a poor HVAC thing or something, we had a preferred vendor that would solve that problem because we would have a go to person
for that. Right. And that's that's the key carve out, I guess. Yeah. And, you know, I plugged in an inflation calculator, and, yeah, it it's just shy of six k if you take $20.17 dollars. So you're you're increasing it beyond that. So maybe maybe ten's too much. Okay.
So, I mean, I mean, who's I mean, who's to say what the right number is? I mean, we could try 7,500. If we don't like it, we can always amend it in a year if it doesn't work for us or something. That's true.
I mean That's true. It's not like we can't come back to this. Fair enough.
Right? Working document. There you have to be a year. It could be six months or three months. It's like, Oh my God, why did we do that? We could rethink this and say, What were we thinking? It's a great starting point. Yeah. It's really well done in terms of the scope and comprehensive, so it's a great start.
The only other thing I'd mention, and this is super minor, is that when I downloaded the Word document and accepted all changes, there's some formatting stuff you're going to see when you do Some spacing and things, but that's So pretty
the questions I'm having is, okay, so. All right. So no one has any problems. So the big things is I agree with you, Mark. I think, if everybody feels strongly, I'll modify this to have exceptions be a joint approval of the board of selectmen. I agree with that too. Yes.
A minimum, actually, I think Mark's right. I mean, what Mark said was it should be us. And if we wanna include the board of finance selectman rather, that's good too. Fine.
But I I don't so this is my concern. I don't want people coming to the board of finance to approve something that the a project that the board of selectmen haven't bought into.
Then joint approval. Joint approval should take care of that. Right.
I think of them as the governing body as giving the directions for the projects in town work, we control the purse strings, but I don't wanna approve something that they're not in agreement that should be done. That I think joint approval is appropriate.
Think that's- That's how I'm thinking of it. I could be wrong. So I'm just, you know, that's I kind of how I'm thinking of think you're right about that. That's fair. I'll remember, yeah, I don't disagree, but we're approving
purchases. What we're doing here is approving deviations from the purchase for a reasonable cause. It's just Right. So a
But I'm assuming like, you know, any purchasing policy, you know, there's, it's gotta be approved by the board of selectmen to spend the money and we have to then be the second layer, right? I mean.
Right, I mean, we varied before, I'm pretty sure it was a joint. Both boards agreed and that's the way it should be. I think it should be both board. I really do.
Yeah, and again we can help change this if it ends up being too onerous because the part of the problem we have is you know if Eric needs to get something done and the Board of Selectmen just met yesterday and then you know we're meeting and we give our approval, but it's gonna be another month before the Board of Selectmen meets. It's just something we have to be careful about.
So the thought process on the preferred vendor, that was my caveat of providing some kind of exception in the policy for someone we know and that we work with all the time so we don't have to jump through hoops and get three quotes all the time when we know we're gonna give it to this guy anyways. And if everybody agrees that therapy is to write that policy, we need I to
still think we need to add a clause that says, the formal vendor process as approved by the Board of Finance. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense because any Approved by the Board of Finance, okay.
Because it's a subsidiary of the purchasing policy and this is your purchasing policy. Right. I'd
rather really have the process in here, but I understand if we don't want to muddy it up and take the time to do it right now. But I think we need to make sure that we have we state clearly that we have the approval authority over that process. Approved by the Board of Finance. Okay. Maybe
ideally, once we get this thing written, once we get this thing drafted up and we're happy with it, we put it as attachment one
to the purchasing policy. It's right there. Yeah. That's a good that's a good point. That's a good idea. Yeah.
Yeah. Could say exhibit A or, you know, but Yeah. Exhibit A. Exactly. So it's right there. You know, you're not referencing another thing that somebody has to go out and But yeah, I agree, you know, again, undefined terms give me hives.
What other significant change I made in this, the wording for getting bids was for any contracted services. It didn't have a dollar threshold, I made it contractors of $5,000 or greater to put a dollar to it because before it was anything.
Yeah. I think any would be too restrictive. Yeah. I think I agree with that change. So part of the purpose of this is to loosen this up a little bit to give Eric some flexibility. So I agree with Yeah. To define it. I actually have one.
Go ahead, Er. I was gonna say in the past, we've gone out and solicited multiple bids, you know, for service contracts that were $60 a month, you know, probably not something you want to be spending, you know, weeks, you know, tracking down multiple vendors, you know, and, you know, so, yeah, I agree that there should be some threshold on the capital purchase and the contracted services. And that's fine by me.
I did have one other concern that I think we really need to think about. So under Part three public bidding applicability, we have exceptions listed there in a bullet point such as those furnished by a monopoly utility. Yeah, we're going to use Eversource. Those requiring a single source of supply, if you've got to get a part from a dealer, you're going get a part from a dealer, right? But I think the fifth bullet point down says those providing professional consulting or technical services such as architectural engineering, planning, medical accounting, data processing, legal personnel or management services. I have some concern over not going to bid for things like engineering services. Maybe we could state So
that was in the existing policy, so that would be making it more restrictive. That was in the existing policy as it stood now.
Can I make a suggestion, Mark, that maybe could get around that? The reason why that's typically in policies like this is that a lot of professional organizations have prohibitions against RFPs. But in that case, what you would do is you would ask for request for qualifications for the firms and judge the firms on qualifications, not necessarily price for a specific project,
if that makes sense. This section, these exceptions carve out on this, it only applies to the public bidding process, the true formal submission of it, but it still would fall into requiring to get quotes if it met the dollar threshold. It's very complicated the way it's written. Do you know I mean? It just does not flow. Yeah. I I see the statement. Wanna start from scratch.
But, I mean, something like engineering services, you know, or architectural services. You know, you don't necessarily want to be bidding on cost. You want to be bidding on, you know, there's a lot of things that go into that is how I would put it. Absolutely, but that should be there. That should be the approach
to any purchase being made it's like what's the best in the best interest of the town you have to, you have to, you have to balance cost, you know, lead time, you know speed to completion and quality of the work right so yeah I just, it just seems like a seems like a pretty wide open loophole, so that any any basically if I'm reading this correctly.
Following supplies material services or construction, and I put do not require public bidding, meaning the seal bid process the true RFP, wait twenty one days, open the sealed envelopes, review. But they would still require quotes if it met the dollar thresholds for the quotes and a review of a qualified contractor and awarding of a, you know, the job to Perhaps
that last bit should be in the text. Just to clarify it so that it's clear that, because you were explaining it Yeah,
I think that there's a logic exclusion here though, because back up on the first page, I guess the second page, it says, A minimum three responsive quote bids shall be obtained for purchases in excess of 7,500 but less than 15,000 exceptions since the minimum three quotes can be made for a town approved vendor capital purchases value of 5,000 or greater require public bidding. But then you've accepted that segment, but there isn't a provision made for those for going out to quote because it only states that you're between 7,500 and 15,000 you have And to go out
this is, and Rob had a good point about defined terms because we don't have a lot of defined terms in here and that's where the confusion I think comes in here. Or maybe
you say that for these services, you say, you know, three quotes must be obtained.
I was going to ask, is that the above 15 ks, is that just subject to a blanket? Of course, we have to bid that.
Yes, above 15 ks to me is a CIP kind of deal. Okay, so when I read I read that para that opening paragraph,
like, three times and was and was confused, and and then I decided that I was it was my problem. But I'm now thinking that perhaps it's unclear the way it's written. It it almost seems like, you know, above 15 k, it's not clear. To me, maybe we should just clarify that paragraph a little bit and say that, you know, above 15,000,
there there these rules apply and there are no variances. Isn't that the point? That's that's the real So, again, you come to that. The only defined term we have in this doc document right now is a capital purchase. Right.
And a capital purchase, you know, requires public bidding period. Zero carve outs.
With the carve outs of those applicability things are things we were just talking about. Right. Right. Right. Sorry. But
then it doesn't, there's not an applicability for the three bids because it But then the three bids comes in somewhere else. Hold on. Where I'm just Yeah, but again, the problem is it said between 7,500 and 15,000, you need to get the three bids. Yeah. I
honestly think it's a little confusing the way it's It is confusing because we have two things. We have quotes and public bidding. Right. Do know I mean? So there's two parts of this policy. And when you throw yourself to the public bidding, you gotta do the full blown public bidding. And then we're trying to do a carve out. So that would be it's under it's in page two. Competitive public bidding and request for quotes. That's why I put request for quotes in there. So it's saying a minimum of three responsive quote bids shall be obtained for purchases in excess of $7,500 but less than 15,000 Exceptions to the minimum requirement for three quotes could be made for a service provider by a town preferred vendor. Then capital purchases and contract reserves of a value of five that require public bidding. So Maybe I need to find those terms best. Less than 15,000, you know? I don't know.
I'm a little confused. So if if if everything if everything over 15 k is considered capital, is is that It's considered a capital purchase by the definition. Then the line about capital purchase over 5 k is confusing. This is where I keep getting stuck.
Or contracted services. Contracted services with a value of 5,000 or greater. Right. So capital purchases is anything over $15,000
by definition. I can define these better. Okay. If you wanna have more definitions.
And I don't wanna make you do that while you have a raging headache. If I had my way,
I would rewrite this whole thing because we have two ways of getting bids. We have the true public thing and what should be the threshold, and then the quotes for the smaller stuff, and then a preferred vendor. We have three buckets that we're trying to address. I'm also Yeah, a little
go ahead. I'm also a little concerned about the use of the word capital because typically a capital expenditure is anything that's going to be turned into an asset, right? It doesn't necessarily mean just a large expenditure. It's not the accounting defined capital.
I think I'm using that definition as a town defined, what we consider, when I think capital purchases is purchases big enough that you have to have CIP involved in public bidding from us.
Well, we generally only have Eric, correct me if I'm wrong. CIP is really gonna look at capital assets like, you know, equipment, buildings,
etcetera. This policy has everything over 15 k going CIP. Do they? Okay. That's how the existing oh, before the existing policy was 5,000.
No. Was still 15. I didn't change to 15. That's how it was before. Alright. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that. We need to be internally consistent at least. I just I find it a little odd. Yeah, I respect your decision to not try to reinvent the wheel.
I guess. I'm gonna try and clean, I wanna clean this up for you because we can't, I want you guys to see a cleaned up version. So I wanna clean this up for you. Yeah, I think got a lot of input here, so maybe we take another run at it. And
again, I don't want to belabor this, especially when you're hurting. I think we've raised some points and
to add to it next time. I'm gonna recap. I'm gonna add this the Board of Finance and Board of Seco approval for exceptions. I'm gonna add Board of Finance approval for a preferred vendor. Yep. Do you want me to get into more detail about what's a quote versus a public bid?
Do some defining I can use to be made a little more clear on that.
To me, it wasn't You have a problem if I stick it in that definitions box?
To me, the main problem was that there's exceptions under the public bidding. It wasn't clear that they needed to roll back to the three bid process. Right. And this
is a hard policy. The way it was written, it has this introduction second and app of bookability, and then it goes into one thing and then it goes into the whole, if it's this, parts three, four, and five apply. If it's not, you don't.
No, I hear you. I I think adding definitions is good. I think anytime at one for just ease of reading, just a random suggestion I have is if we have a defined term, what may be bolded in the text or or otherwise denote it somehow so that we know that that's a defined term and do to look for it. That's just a minor issue. Yeah. I I'm trying to make the defined term a capital, but I can bold it as well. No. Either one. Whichever whatever you do, as long as it's it's, you consistent document. Put the
text in the definition so it sticks out? Yeah. So it pops a little bit. That's fine. Yeah. So it pops. That's fine.
But, yeah, I mean, like, why don't yeah. Those those are pretty much
what we change I wanna point out to you that I made was supervision of a project. It's on, I think, the last page. Applicability. Versions at this part to all purchase subjects upon her. Projects with a contracted value of more than 75,000, a qualified inspector must be hired or qualified volunteer must be appointed by a program. I changed from 50 to 75 because I thought 50 was low. I don't know how you guys That makes sense. Yeah. It's a similar it's it's proportionally
the same as the other change you made. Right? I I think that makes sense. I don't have a problem with that.
So while we're talking about that, can we insert the word after it says for a qualified volunteer, put for employee? Because I think in a lot of cases, the best person to be supervising these things is the public works Yep. Supervisor. Certainly, if we're doing an asphalt project, you know, he's gonna be sitting there. Now we may also be hiring, say, materials testing lab to do density testing, but, you know, the overall inspection is usually going to be the public work supervisor.
Yeah, I see. I think qualified volunteer qualified employee or volunteer or something like that. Have you got both?
You could just say qualified person, but I I don't know that. Maybe that's too broad.
I'm guessing that volunteer was used because that was in the original policy because we didn't wanna pay somebody to do it. We're already paying an employee.
I know. So, yeah, I can make that change. Alright. We'll tweak that. Just that we have to really make sure that that employee is truly appointed for that and that they know their name is on the hook for it. Because we're saying we're gonna have a project of a certain value, we're gonna have additional oversight. Do you know what I mean?
But I guess, is there a so if I'm not an employee and you tell me that there's this project and and you want me to opine them upon it as an expert, What is the what's the catch, I guess, is what what you're referring to here?
Well, we're asking that person to ensure the performance of the work conforms to the contract documents. So we're asking somebody to make sure that they're doing the job right correctly. Right. And
I just wanna make sure just yeah. You know? Especially, like, they're putting the pavement down. Yeah. They're doing a good job putting the pavement down the way we want it. I mean, I would hope that that would all work out. Like, that that would be all acceptable. I'm just wondering. I'll just give you an example for the for the community center. We're having Adrian and Scott Persson Yeah. Be two co people to manage that project because of both have bring things to the table.
Yep. Last time I ran into Adrian, you mentioned that. That's
why I'm thinking, I didn't know if it should be higher. So part of me was saying, should it be higher? I'm just thinking of something.
This threshold looks right. Okay. All right. I think it's right. And again, it's commensurate with your other increases. I think that makes sense. Right? Going five, seven, I just
want from my point of view, I just want that employee to know that it's more than just,
it's a little bit more than just doing their everyday job. They have to make sure it's right. Do know I mean? And if you ask them to do a little bit more than their every job, the reason I get I guess I'm bringing this up is these are union employees. Right?
So look. It's either gonna be a public works foreman or the public works supervisor. He's a salaried employee Yep. Or myself, or in all likelihood, we're gonna hire for some projects, some dire clerk of the works to oversee it. Okay. Okay. Unless It's gonna be
Go ahead. What I was gonna say is that it seems like it should be some kind of manager or supervisor because with the way it's written. That was my 2¢ in this whole thing. I've been listening to the thing, but that's that's a pretty big ask making sure something's correct for that much money. That's all. Seems like it should be a manager. So let me wordsmith that a little bit and come back to you. That's all. That's my I I I love it. Let's do that.
That. So so I got those changes. Anything else you guys wanna see that we should be addressing that? I know it's not the best flowing policy. It's hard to work with without scrapping the whole thing and starting over. I'm going to tell you, I found the Hebron's purchasing policy on their website and it is like a 50 page book and it is really good. 50 pages.
We could like plagiarize that. But that's a big rewrite. You know, we don't need 50 pages, but there's a lot of good tidbits of information in there.
Well, I mean, not for nothing, but I for one, I'm all for learning from others. Right.
It was a pretty well thought out comprehensive because they have like a preferred vendor program, but it's based on vendors located in their town and things like that. They have Oh, well, they're also encouraging, you know, support local business then. Right, right. So they had some interesting, interesting things in there when I was reading through it. I'm saying, that's a good idea. Oh, that's a good idea. But you know, that's a bigger rewrite. That could be a future thing to look at.
So, Diane, I sent you a copy of oh, sorry. Good. Okay, I sent you a copy of my suggestions. Don't know if you've
gone through those. I couple things I wanted to add in in the public bid document shall include just things that we've gotten tripped up in the last couple of years on bids we put out. I would specifically call out in the bid document that we've got to meet the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities official language, because we've had to put out an agenda twice now to over the last three years to correct bids where I didn't think we were responsible to the chro and they told us explicitly that we weren't. You know, and it just means setting out right in the rfp what our requirements are going to be in terms of percentage of the project that has to go to certified
small and minority owned businesses. And then certified minority women and disabled owned businesses, because that's something that you know, the contractor has to know upfront what his requirements are because that affects how they bid the job.
But that wouldn't be located in any one of these documents. It wouldn't be in our instructions to bidders or our sample service contract or anything like that?
I mean I'm just asking the question. Don't know the answer to that. Yeah, I think that's typically a separate I mean, want to put it in the policy just as a reminder to myself or whoever else is writing RFPs that they've got to make that explicit in the RFP so we don't cause ourselves problems later. And the other thing I think we have to do is we have to set out in the RFP each time whether it's a prevailing job, prevailing wage job or not. Because there's also been a couple of jobs where I've gotten that question partway through, you know, and some contractors assume they were having to bid it at prevailing wages and other contractors didn't. Now you're, you know, that's not really fair to the contractors and it may ultimately get the town in hot water if they don't do it, and if it's a grant funded or grant supported.
So, that's that. The other thing I thought that we have never done is we've never required them to put give us two separate envelopes, one with the technical components, with the cost components. It should all come in one envelope. And what we should require is one hard copy in one electronic copy, so we can make, so we can send it to people in PDF form. That's normally what we've been asking contractors the last year or two, especially on bigger projects. So, we don't get, you know, 50, you know, bound copies, novellas. Most people today read the things on their computers anyway. So, that's the cleanest way to do it. The other thing I would suggest is that the bid opening should be done by me, not the town clerk. And the reason is, in the past, a couple times it's been done by the town clerk, but the town clerk doesn't necessarily like if it's bids for a paving job. She's not necessarily even going to know what the important things to record on the bid sheet are for reading through them So, it's gotta be somebody more technically literate.
You know, so that would be my suggestion. I don't personally think you need two witnesses. I think if it's the administrator and a witness, that's fine. And you don't require three people at all the bid openings, but if you want to keep that in, know.
So you want the receipt and unsealing of bids to be received by the town administrator's office and be considered responsive and complete but since we opened. By the town administrator she want to change town clerk to town administrator.
Yeah, I want them to come to the town clerk's office because that's where they should all be stored in the vault until we're ready sign for and stored in the vault until we're ready to publish.
You have to publish a delivery location in time to unseal bids. Instructions anyway so that's going to be in there right. Correct.
So I would just change that from town clerk to town administrator or their designee for the bid opening. And again, as we talked about it, you know, I think most of the time when we're giving people stuff for bid evaluations, we're giving it to them in electronic form, not hard copy form. So, requiring seven. This calls out, you you got to basically have seven individually sealed bids that you give out to each person or all five people evaluating or whatever. The problem is, is that when you do that, how do you know that the company sealed the same exact bid package in each of the five packages?
It's much cleaner to do an electronic copy and distribute that. Are you talking about distribution of bids? Unsealed bids must be distributed each member, but it doesn't say how. It's it it leaves it wide open.
It says unskilled bids must be distributed to each member of the evaluating bot.
But silent, so it gives us an option to do either way.
Well, I mean, what you have listed there now says unsealed bids must be distributed to each member of the evaluating body. Right. Within seven calendar days of the bid opening. Right. That implies
That could be paper. That could be carrier pigeon. I mean, it's silent. So it's silent to the method of distributing. It doesn't say how distribute. It just says we have to distribute them. How can you seal an electronic?
It says unsealed must must be distributed to each member in the Valley Valley. Member source report indications of tampering with the bids. The town clerk's tampering could tamper with an electronic document. Somebody was crossing out and stuff. Do know what I mean? So I think you still have to tampering doesn't mean that the envelope's not sealed. Tampering could be anything to do with the document. I mean, something Like I said, that would be how I would You write know, I would prefer, yes, I'm assuming everybody does everything electronically with this stuff, you know? But I don't want to commit to one method. This leaves it wide open so we could adapt as we go. What if you had somebody on a committee who doesn't have a computer and they want paper? You'd have to give them paper, right? To review it. So I'm okay with that because it's silent to the method and then we could do whatever we want. It gives us more flexibility. Anything else, Eric, that you needed to add? I'll take all that and make all those changes. And so, the only other thing that you have,
there's a hard cutoff that says, only bids that are complete and responsive would be evaluated. It is very common to get a bid that is missing something.
Mean, You have to define what complete and responsive is then if you want to put it Right. So,
would insert language that says in the case that a bid is missing something that's required for compliance, but not technical specifications or cost, the committee may elect to evaluate. That way, you know, if they didn't send you their insurance documents, you don't reject a bid. Because I mean, I would reject most sealed bids, you know, with every single thing on our checklist, you know, mandatory before we'd even look at it. You know, those are the kinds of things you go back to the contractor and said, yeah, you know, this is the contractor we're gonna pick. And you say, hey, you know, you still haven't sent us this, this, and this. And then when they send it, then you go farther in the process. That would be my take up.
Alright, and you have that in your email that you sent to me, right? I remember. Right. And
then the only other thing I wanted to talk to you guys about is that you do have a thing in there that basically says, generally speaking, you're supposed to take the lowest bid. However, there's a procedure there if you're not gonna select the lowest bidder. And what I would say is that you put a caveat in there that says if the bids are within 5% of the total cost, the evaluating body shall consider other factors in the evaluation. You know, just that, you know, if you've got a widespread, like for instance, we did the paving, the large paving job, you know, we had bids come in from somewhere between about 400,000 to a high of 675,000. That's a huge spread, unless the lowest, you know, the lowest bidder was $120,000 lower than the next bid. I mean, as long as they're qualified, we're going to pick them every time. But if you've got some a bid that's $57,000 and another bid that's $58,000 I'm preferentially going to go with the vendor that I have the most confidence in. In. You know what I mean? Yeah,
I think that's appropriate. Usually, I've seen a lot of RFP language that I've had to actually respond to is, you know, it's like we reserve the right to select the vendor or the the project or the proposals in the best interest of the
of the governing body, you know? It's We have to put in a caveat what other that it's our sole discretion. We have to put some more legalese into that because you don't wanna get into a trap trap picking the wrong person and having somebody complain. Gotta make it clear. That's where I'm saying I saw that good language in Hebron's policy. So maybe I'll pick something from there. And I think Columbia had some good stuff in theirs too.
Then the only other thing is you have in your definition of evaluating body, it states a minimum of five town electors.
You know What page is that on? Can you Let's see. The
Board of shall establish an evaluating body for all public bids. Shall be within the discretion of the Board of Selectmen to designate a committee to evaluate everyone for the fiscal year or to designate individual committees for each of them. However, the committee responsible for it. Yeah. So that's only if they have to establish a committee.
Right? Right. But I guess one of the things I would say is you can't necessarily assume that the town administrator is always gonna be an elector, and you can't assume the public works foreman is going to be an elector. And for an awful lot of projects we do, you sure as heck are going to walk either myself or him on the evaluating committee. Like, wouldn't take five random electors, you know, and try to figure out and do a good job of choosing a vendor for a complex paving problem.
So, I guess I'm looking at this and maybe I'm reading this wrong. I'm thinking the board of selectmen has a way to choose it. They don't have to form a committee. They can give it to CIP or let's see, shall be the discretion of the board of select to designate a committee to evaluate a public a sophisticated or to designate individual committees for each public bid. However, the committee responsible for each public bid shall consist of minimum five electors. Okay.
Great. So anybody that's not an elector. So let's say,
for instance, we were looking That means you could vote in the town of Andover. Is that the definition of elector? Yeah. Right.
I'll give you an obvious example. If we were when we start bidding projects out for major culvert repair, our town engineer really is gonna needs to be on the board doing the selection, you know the project selection. He's unlikely to be a town elector the public works foreman is not or supervisors, not the town elector. So anytime we bring in an outside professional, you know, they're not unless they're already a town resident for this policy, they're not allowed to sit on any evaluation panel.
And that I think is Have done we this? Have we ever done this? What we said in this policy? No. We don't, frankly. Oh, it's a policy we don't follow. Okay. Well
because most of the big bids are reviewed by CIP or some group of people, right, That are qualified within the town?
Sometimes. I mean, a lot of times it's me and Jay sitting down and going over them, making a decision, and then going to the board of selectmen and saying, here's the decision we recommended, here's why. And, you know, they say, okay, you can go, you know, do this or hire them. Right. You know, from a practical standpoint, that's how it actually happens most of the time. They're not in paneling five people at all evaluating. Maybe we should be. And clearly we should have been for the policy. Just we've never really done. Other than maybe I think really the board of selectmen is acting as that body. Take it out of the
hands. Yes. Like, people like you and James should have input, but you shouldn't be the sole decision makers on a large project because they wanna keep that independence outside of the people with the vested interest in the project and giving bids to their favorite people, so to speak. Right? So so what should the number be? I mean, and they're saying maybe five electors is too many, but what is the right number? Obviously, they want town people on the committee because they're vested into the interests of the town. Right? Then you're gonna have have your cadres of professionals that you need to help guide you through some technical stuff.
I mean, the way this is written, what will probably happen is, you know, when the evaluation is being done, you know, then I guess you could have whoever your technical consultant is, you know, or the public works foreman there to give advice and make suggestions, but then he doesn't get a vote in the final outcome. That's the way you want to do it, you know, that that's how this would work, I would think.
I'm just trying to think how to craft this to make it work to get the input from large projects and independence. And then you do need the technical people, do need the people, do know I mean? So maybe the problem we have is saying a minimum of five electors. What if you put three lectors, at least three, and then the town would at least have a majority of the group of five?
You said a minimum of five individuals, at least three of That's them have the process the that I looked at. A lot of towns didn't
set out the minimum requirements for the evaluating body. I think they have very fluffy language around it saying that they're going to have qualified people evaluate blah blah blah but they don't commit to anything. I
agree five electors would be hard to get five electors on any committee. We can't get anybody to serve on any committees for anything anymore. So, I mean So let me do a takeaway on that and see what I can wordsmith on that and come back to you guys. Maybe like it is like Linda says it's three. Maybe say three electors and then member of the board of finance, member of the board of select and right? Or just at least three electors. Right. Don't have a minimum. But make sure there's a member from the board of finance in the book. And then you probably have their all your bases covered. Yeah. All right, let me just take a look at that. Anything else, Eric?
No, those were my kind of major comments on the process. Took me several weeks to do you guys.
Whether I had anything else. Yeah. Mean, it's a difficult, you know, and you're balancing the public interest with expediency, and that's a hard thing to do, you know, in trying to prevent abuse of the system, but not get in the way of progress. So, it's a fine line to walk. There's no question.
And you know what? This is a living, breathing policy. It's up to us to keep it updated as we, you know, it hasn't been looked at in a long time. So, you know, we may not get it right out the gate, but there's nothing to say, like you said, Mark, that we don't look at it six from now and say, what were we thinking? Yeah.
And maybe the next time next time is a it's a quick, you know, tighten up of two paragraphs rather than, you know, hitting all these points. Yeah. So let's definitely advance the ball. I really appreciate your work on it, Diane, by the way. You know, and apologies for not I didn't provide you with any redlining myself. I just kind of came out of this call and. No, I just, I wanted to get input from,
because the charter says we work in collaboration with the board of selectmen and CIP because the charter I specifies that wanted everybody, I didn't expect you guys to redline it because I think we are gonna be the final people to wordsmith it all and decide what we like based on everybody's input. Nobody from CIP other than you, Rob. And Eric Sarisley did respond to me and say he had nothing. So,
but that's it. Yeah. I pointed out, you know, in an email to the CIP members because there was a discussion about whether we were even having meetings month and I said, hey, you know, Diane's got this purchase policy revision, you know, so they they're aware of it. Anyway, thanks for your work. I agree. I think we've talked this out. I think it's time for a revision and then, you know, we can come back to it. This isn't, you know, Right? Until Yeah. We're getting there.
So, I will commit to getting this done so we can get it, you know, at a minimum into our next meeting to, you know, discuss. Awesome. And
hopefully we'll be happy with it. But you know what? Know, that's why I twenty seventeen. Month. I'll get that done.
The beauty of drafting a document in a group. I've been there. Yes. That's how you get good input. Everybody brings It's
it's, you know, this is good stuff and we needed to do it. So.
Okay. Anything else said on this? We're gonna move on. Alright. Next on the agenda is approval of the minutes for I wasn't there, so I'll recuse. August 24.
No. I just lost my package. Should be page 36 of the packet. I can have a motion for that.
I'll make a motion to approve the minutes from Wednesday, 08/24/2022. I'll second that.
Any discussion? Okay. All right, liaison reports. I don't have anything. I just kind of told you on the community center and Eric did. The RFP is gonna go out shortly for the build design phase. And the board of selectmen has appointed two people to be the project oversiders, co chairs on that. That's all I have.
I don't have anything. I don't think CIP met, so there's nothing to discuss. Eric, I'm not wrong about that. Right? Nope. I'm a little fuzzy and late. So yeah, there's nothing going on there. Anybody else?
All right, open for discussion. Does anybody have anything they wanna bring up? Public speak. The only thing I see on there is an iPhone and I don't know who that is. There's no phone number. There's no name. Well, I think you've given the opportunity.
Okay, hearing nothing. We'll move on. Let's move into executive session. So here's a point I want to know. Can we adjourn this meeting and then just do executive session?
No. Have to go into executive session and then come out of executive session, then make a motion to adjourn. That's how it has to be done technically.
However, you don't Technically, need we need a motion to move into executive session, so I'll make the motion to move into executive session to do the contract negotiation. I will second that motion.
Okay. And then the only other thing you have to put in that motion is if you're going to admit anybody other than board members, I. E. Myself, if you so choose,
you have to state that in the motion. All right. I'll yeah. So I move we go into executive session to discuss the contract negotiation for the accounting and financial assistance, and that we admit Eric Anderson, town administrator, to that executive session. And I second that amended motion. Diana couldn't hear you. All in favor. Aye. Aye.
Okay. Alright, Eric. Okay. Give me a couple seconds. Recording. Stop recording.