Meeting transcript
Board of Selectmen Special Meeting Budget Workshop
February 7, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Sorry Amanda, I did that to you again. We're going to call to order the Town of Andover Board of Selectmen meeting, a special meeting for our budget workshop dated February 7. We're going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America, All
right. Thank you very much. Before we get started, I want to welcome Eric Anderson to this meeting. I'm very happy to see you, Eric. Thank you for No problem. Happy to be here. And
members of the public, we are going to be short two members, so we're probably going to get limited work done, but we're gonna hear from Eric and Sherry and do a couple other issues. So we're gonna move to public speak, and, we're gonna start with, Marcy Miner.
Hi. Good to see you guys. I don't have anything to say. Thank you. Okay. Diane Choquette.
I'm all set. Thanks. Thank you. And then we have two phone numbers down here. (860) 478-5631.
That would be me, Jim Halsey. Just here in case there's any questions relative to an item on the agenda. All right. Thank you very much. And then
478561 sounds looks like the same number here on twice, Jim. Okay.
I dialed in twice. That's all right. I had a
Hey, public speak just goes faster this way. All right. We're going to move on to item three. It's on the agenda of the grant of covenant covenants and easements for the Latesta acres.
I know that Scott had put this on hold at one of our meetings. Know that this needs to be signed.
My question to Scott to begin with is planning and zoning and all of the necessary commissions approved this?
Right. We got that a letter today from Jim and Jed approving the easement covenant for you to sign.
Okay. And the pins that you were concerned about have been put into the ground and documented correctly?
Right. They they still have to get a red the tags from the town, the metal tags to be put in the trees, but the the pins and the stakes are in there now.
Okay. Alright. So this is a, you know, we we have to follow through on this and I have to get this signed by the tenth. Okay. I'm assuming someone wants to make a motion that we approve this, or do we have to approve it? Or Eric, do we have to approve this from the Board of Selectiveness standpoint?
So I think technically all that has to happen is you, the first selectman, have to sign it. The Board as a whole, I don't believe has to actually act. I brought it to the Board a couple months ago because I thought that was something that the board would want to be aware of rather than just have you sign it. Okay.
Jeff Murray, do you have a problem with signing that easement covenant? With you signing it? Speaker Yes.
Speaker No, no. Speaker You got it. I will get that done. I'll try to do it tomorrow. We'll get that done. All right.
Two: Thank you very much. Speaker Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Jim. Take care.
We're gonna move on to item four, which is our proposed budget. Eric, since you have been unable to join us in the last couple meetings, why don't we hear from you a little bit about what your priorities are and what we need to do for you?
So at the, let's see, the last meeting that I attended, you had asked me to put together a document that just said what would be all the personnel changes to really maximize the use of the town hall and town services. So I gave you that, you know, and then I guess if I were to list them in order of priority for me, would say probably, you know, we ought to strongly consider adding a part time seasonal employee for public parks. So I think that's a fairly low cost, high return item. You know, and it's a lot less expensive than hiring a full time employee. Now, I would prefer to have a full time employee, but I just recognize that that's an expensive proposition. Second thing, I think we should promote Richard Begin to Maintainer two as part of the next budget. Although he's only been a full time employee for about a year, he was a part time employee for six years or five years before that,
and he certainly has the skill set for what you would expect for a maintainer tube. So I think that would be a priority. And frankly, you know, the two other priorities that I would have would be one, I would make Amanda full time because I think that the town's emphasis on doing a really good job of communicating with the public is wonderful. And I wholeheartedly support it, but that chews up a pretty large fraction of my admin assistants' time. And I think we, given that the amount of time I have to work on things is often the limiting factor in what we get done, I think it would be money well spent to bring Amanda on full time.
And then the third thing is I think we should consider a town planner as a part time position. So those would really be the three bigger ones. The other things I think we're going to need to do, which we've kind of addressed a little bit in this budget, is we're going to need to keep increasing the funding for senior transportation. If you look in over a two and a half year period, the number of medical calls that senior transportation responds to has basically increased by a factor of four. So we're doing the same number of trips and fun stuff, but we're just doing an enormous number of more medical transports. And I think that's something that's, you know, it's definitely necessary. And so I think we're going to need to increase the cost basis for that. And I also think that, you know, Kathy Palazzi has volunteered an enormous amount of time for the town,
but she is starting to step back a little bit, and she's starting to transfer a lot of those extra responsibilities for Roberta. And I think her Roberta stipend should go up a little bit because I think her workload is definitely increasing dealing with that. I don't think we can put senior transportation on her plate because I think that's a giant time commitment in and of itself. And if Kathy ever steps back from that, you know, we're going to need to address that with the, you know, with the standalone hire. So that's really what I have in terms of priorities, which I think we should do going forward. And as I also said before, you know, in talking with Bolton, I think we need to increase the hours for the building official from five to seven, which is also a fairly, you know, it's a not insignificant cost increase, but I think that's a better estimate of how much work he's actually doing for the town right now.
Okay, Sherry, just as a secondary thing. At our last meeting, I do believe we requested that you put the seasonal employee in the spreadsheet. I believe
we requested to put the planner in the budget spreadsheet. We haven't talked about senior transportation. We haven't discussed Amanda's situation and the billing official, I believe, is new. Or did that get put in, Eric, before you left?
That was in the budget. So I baked that into the budget right from the beginning. So the budget document you have has the increased costs for the building official. Okay. Correct. Those
are all things that we will sit there and deal with. I know, you know, we had some questions that we were considering canceling this meeting because of other members that are unable to attend tonight. Is there anything that Scott you would like to tackle in their absence?
Did we add we added the senior seasonal employee. We added did we add promotion of the Richard Bagan to the budget? Yes. Yep.
So we have to talk about Amanda full time. And what do we do with the part time planner? We put that planner in. We put the planner in. We put it in, right? Yeah. I
mean, we haven't voted on any of these issues other than, you know, other than some of the compensation issues, I believe. I don't recall voting on anything other than that. We talked about putting the seasonal employee in public works, increasing public works. I actually think, Eric, and Jeff, correct me if I'm wrong, I thought we put in another employee for public works. We did. We did. Yeah, not only the seasonal employee, we put in another employee. Especially. Just to sit there and see how it works out. Sure. Obviously, those dollars are going to be, it's gonna have to be offset by other things, whether we have, you know, less debt, more revenue, whatever we need to do.
We'll sit there. But I Jeff, I think that anything that we we had Sherry put into the budget, we voted on. We said that we'd like to add those to the budget.
We'll have to check that one. I'm not sure about that, Scott. I think we, especially on the end of the seasonal employee well, we'll have to look back at the records. I mean, I can't remember. The budget official, I know we didn't talk about. I know we haven't talked about Amanda yet. We definitely haven't talked about senior transport. No, we didn't talk about them.
I have a couple small things for public works that we probably need to increase. Sure.
I did do a tour with Jay, the electrical work, and we looked at the oil storage area. And I think Scott's had these concerns too, that we have 55 gallon drums sitting on the ground right next to or nearby a storm drain. And we need to put some containment underneath those in case we ever have a barrel let go, so we do not have any oil or leakage into the nearby watercourse. So Jay estimates about $1,000 for that. And the electrical that we originally quoted at 5,000, because of supplies and other issues, is up to 6,400. So Okay. We probably need to amend those amounts and add in the containment because I think an ounce of prevention for $1,000 worth a pound of cure in this instance.
There's open manhills and you know that they're in the building and you know that they must probably go to the river and Oh, they definitely go to the river with no doubt.
All right, let's sit there and look at that. Sherry, just because I need to understand this, the updated spreadsheet gets transmitted and dispersed how often?
The last transmittal I gave you was Thursday, and I haven't touched it since. It's the same. I didn't make any changes or whatsoever.
Okay. All right. We don't have any scheduled departments come on. So last week, Eric, just for your knowledge, we had Jay come on. Sure. And one thing with Jay, just so everybody's aware, and I'd like to understand how this has to be dealt with. Jay texted me after the meeting and he informed me that we also need to have the funding related to the grant that is supposed to happen on Shawty Mill. So Eric, if I understood that right, what his request was, but what I would ask you is, do we have that already in last year's numbers? And did that get moved somewhere? Did that just go back to our general fund?
So we won't get the money for the STEEP grant until we're a lot farther along and we have an actual contractor picked out. We've gone through the RFP process. So, that basically $128,000 match is not there yet.
That your question? Yes. So the $130,000 in our portion was not in last year's budget?
It was in last year's budget. Remember, what we do basically is that we, because it's a permanent fund now, we have both Town Aid Road and the Road Improvement Fund. Last year we did ballpark numbers around $500,000 in roadwork, But we started with some extra money, so we front loaded and did a lot of that work before July 1. And then we spent about 300,000 of that money after July 1. So we actually have a couple $100,000 of that money left over that we have not yet spent that we will spend between now and July 1 doing early work before we have next year's budget. So, that's basically how we're doing it. We have to hold enough money back out of one year's budget for that spring roadwork. Understood.
Jay asked me and my question to you is the $130,000 which is our portion of the grant money to complete Shawty Mill in Long Hill, do we have that available or do we need to budget for that in addition this year?
I never had any intention of budgeting that as an additional line item for $130,000 That was always coming out of the roadwork budget. Jay doesn't like that because that's $130,000 less chip seal and other stuff he can do. But, you know, I don't know that we're going to get the town to just agree to add an extra $130,000 to the roadwork budget. I would like to increase the roadwork budget and I would like to get in the habit of increasing that a little every year so that at some point it comes up to a high enough value that we can start doing some actual paving and other things other than just shim and chip seal, if that makes sense.
That makes sense. That budget then, we're going to have to take a quick relook at it because I know what Jay was talking about. I believe Jay said somewhere around eight miles, if everybody remembers that number which is what he was thinking about doing for chip sealing. I believe it was $48,000 a mile. If that's the case, then he's going to basically only get about five miles done. Yeah, think that's probably realistic.
All right. We should look at that in total because he was sitting there saying to me that it needed to be added. What you're saying, Eric, is that that 130 needs to come out of what we appropriate for this coming year, plus what you have remaining. So if you have 200,000 in team, they sit there and go for that. Correct. Correct.
And he knows that. He just doesn't like it. I mean, he would spend more in every category, but I'm the same way. I will spend as much as you give me. I certainly get it. And I do realize that we're asking them to work with a fairly lean budget and it's got some restrictions.
Okay. All right. Jeff, do you have any other issues other than the electrical and water oil storage? Anything that you want to go over with all our friends, Mr. Mandeville and Ms. King?
No, I think that that was just something I wanted to capture and it was the discussion I had with Jay. I went down and toured the public works on Friday and just got a good overview of the electrical work that needs to be done. I agree it needs to be taken care of. So we should put it in this budget.
I think actually, so first of all, I mean, the whole reason we went to a general building maintenance fund was to, so we had a pool of money and as we established priorities for what we needed to do most, we could just fund them directly out of the main fund. And I think that philosophy still holds, and I think as long as you properly fund the building maintenance fund, you don't necessarily have to at this stage pick out all these little projects. You know, you just have to have a big enough pool overall that you can accomplish that. And I actually think we're going to be okay with doing the electrical work at Public Works this spring out of this budget, which what with what remains in the the building maintenance fund.
So you're to try to get that done this spring on our current year budget.
Yeah, it looks like that. I mean, I'm looking at how much is left in that budget, you know, and the things that we have outlined so far. And it looks like there's enough to accomplish that. So I don't see that as something that needs to be budgeted for separately. That's just my Eric,
have we earmarked that electrical work at the town hall and then the tank the tank piping as well? Is that I'm accounting for that with that. Yes. Okay.
Yes. I mean, we still have you know, the limiting factor right now has been getting contractors, you know, to give me hard numbers to be able to put together proposals to do all the work, not, you know, the funding right now. So, yeah, we could get that electrical work done. Yeah, I think we should. We should. Yeah, I do agree. I mean, I don't think it's the biggest priority we have, but I think it is a priority, yes. But remember, too, that in the last two years, I mean, has been an enormous amount of electrical work done at the town garage. I mean, that place has had a complete relamping. Most of the old wiring was stripped out. I mean, we've spent actually no, I take that back. We haven't actually spent much money. LENCO donated an enormous amount to rewiring of that building. So, I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that when I looked at it two years ago, I thought it was an unmitigated disaster. Now I think it just has some problems here and there. That's the difference in my mind. So, we need to do it, but no, it's not the crisis it was a couple of years ago.
Just concerned about the power. The AC lines, they're very low. They're down to about 108 volts. So we really need to tackle that just for the equipment. Because a garage door opener to go up and down for the, you know, to get the trucks in and out is on that circuit. Like I said, if we ever have a failure, I just think we just, especially this time of year, if Winkle can get in there, let's just do it, you know, in the winter, he wants to get inside and stay warm. The perfect opportunity for him to get that work done.
Eric, just so we allow you to brag a little bit. There's a new roof put on that building. There is. What else got accomplished at that building so we're all aware?
We did a bunch of work to the slab, to get the slab taken care of. There's a new kitchenette area that was one of the old storage rooms was cleared out and made into something of presentable and usable so they can at least store soups and stuff while they're there. The whole main office area has been painted and looks good. We've gotten rid of an enormous amount of junk and we've done a total relighting package of the garage. And we've stripped out a lot of the old nonfunctional wire and rewired quite a bit of the garage at this point. So, it's had an awful lot cosmetically and functionally done to it. So, you know, it's not perfect. I mean, let's face it. It's a 150 year old building. You know? But but I think it's it's
so the town The town will at least get another fifty, sixty years out of it? Yep. A couple 100 more. As you did the back door, Eric.
Yep. And Public Works is actually repairing some of the structural I beams in there. Heard that Zach Zito was actually, I saw some of his welding handiwork. It was very well done. So that's saving us a little bit of money there that they're taking on that work as well. So they've done a lot. In the last couple of years, it's a remarkable difference from when I was in there last. It is. Absolutely,
absolutely. Both in the cleanliness, the organization, and then also the functionality of the building has improved a lot. That's And been
they're talking about getting some hose I guess they bought some hose reels and some electric reels, and they want to be able to just make it more user friendly to work in. And I support that.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think Jay really wants to build out. So we have the existing offices, and then right outside the offices, there's another area that would, you know, work well as kind of like a small personnel area, so everybody's wall lockers and stuff like that. So, we are talking about framing off an additional little section in there just to keep it so it's not as dusty, you know, and doesn't get all the salt in it that it would get in from the shop. But that's relatively trivial. That's just a little bit of framing. And, you know, I mean, the big ticket items for public works that we really ought to consider at some point are the fact that the generator in that building was manufactured the same year I was born. And it still works, but it is a 52 year old diesel generator. That definitely has some issues, and the power coming off of it is far from perfect. In fact, we have to run the pumps in manual mode when we're on the generator because the computer can't handle basically the dirty power coming off the generator. So I think that's something we ought to look at long term.
And then we really do need to get a mason in there to investigate some of the repointing for the exterior brickwork for that building. So, both of those things will have to be addressed at some point. And a couple of the smaller roofs have problems, too. Both the cold storage areas, you know, those roofs are, you know, we did the really large main roof, but we have a couple of the smaller roofs that need to be addressed at some point. So, I mean, I think over the next five years, we're going to continue to put money into that building to modernize it. You know, and I think, you know, realistically, we could never afford to build a building of that size to replace its capabilities. So, such time as the DEP, you know, sends us all to jail for, you know, having a stalks dead in the floodplain or something of that nature, I would say we're going to continue to use it there.
Okay. As far as the generator goes, are there any state programs or state grants or federal grants that we could get for that building to sit there and try to replace that generator?
I mean, we should be looking at that. I looked at that a while back to see whether any of the Homeland Security Department of Emergency Management ones would cover that. And at the time, I didn't really see one that was applicable to that, but it's something I've kept in the back of my mind. One of these days, we're going to find a grant for that because that is critical infrastructure for the town. Because obviously, public works is a major part of your emergency response. Okay.
Are there any groups, Eric, that we should invite to our next meeting so that we actually have budget presentations? Is there anything that you or Sherri want us to have come before the board and present?
Not necessarily. I mean, I think you have the documentation. The budget you're looking at pretty much makes in the department's requests. So if you're okay with what's in the actual budget, then I don't think you necessarily need to talk to the individual departments. If you're talking about trimming things out of the budget, then you know, it might be worth. If there's areas of the budget that you think you want to trim, then it would make sense to bring those budget heads in to to discuss. You've already had the discussion regarding land use with Jed Larson, so I don't know what other information you want regarding that. So, yeah. Does that answer your question?
It does. Sherry, in this spreadsheet, are there any totals as to the, we have our approved budget for 2021, 'twenty two, and then you have department requests. But do we have the total department requests totaled anywhere so that we can see where it stands right now with the increase in expected expenses?
On the beginning of the spreadsheet is the department totals categorized by the account numbers if you follow down. So right now That's where they stand in each, for instance, let's see, example, hundred twenty one elections, there's a total one there.
That's okay. I wanted to look in row 69. The total town budget as presented is about $427,000 greater than what we had approved last year.
Correct. With the changes, with the stuff you added in the last couple of budget meetings, yes. Right. And if you want to look at and it's broken out for both the general budget and then general budget minus capital funds, which you can think of as the operating budget. So you can see those are, you know, roughly equal amounts. There's an increase to the capital funding and an increase to the general budget. And then if you click through to the revenue tab, you could look and see how that propagates and how that, you know, works out to an actual, you know, what effect that has on the mill rate, given the proposed budget for AES and the proposed budget for RAM.
Okay.
All right. Those are things we all are going to have to sit there and work toward and determine what our number can truly be.
I know one question that you did have and was brought up at the last meeting was about the cyber insurance. Do we, as a town, have cyber insurance with Karma? We do not.
Are running completely I wasn't sure. We're running completely blind at this point.
Okay. Alright. That was the question that came up. We weren't sure, and I wasn't sure.
I mean, that's an offer, you said. I did call
Carol with Kerma, and she hasn't got back to me yet, but I just wanted to make sure that I asked that question of you because I know you were working on that and decided. Yeah.
So the last quote we had for standalone cyber policy, I think, was around 32,000 a year. Something in that neighborhood. Okay. I have not we have not revisited that this year. Okay.
And the school, they have ransomware currently right now. So just to give you an update about that. What's the cost on that? $600
Okay. Well, at that price, it's probably something we should look at.
Yeah, because that was given to me by the superintendent. So I could do some more research if you want.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, part of the reason that, I mean, KIRMA dropped it because their claims, you know, went up like 4000% over two years. And the total number of the dollar value of claims far exceeded how much KIRMA was paying for their policies. So, you know, the carriers have basically all dropped. You know, they're not willing to give KIRMA an overall policy. Right. They will write them town by town, but, you know, what I heard was they went up a lot this year from last year because the actual claims are still going up pretty dramatically. Okay. And I think East Hampton right now, I know, has been struggling with that. They lost a whole tribe of data,
and they've been really struggling for like three months to try to get their systems all back up. Okay. Thank you. I'll look into the ransomware.
One of the things, Sherry, I think we really should do in the next three or four months, and I had posted it to our IT guys and said this is one of the things that I want to work on in the next increment is both the town and the school have on-site data storage backup systems. But because they're connected by fiber between the two buildings, there's no reason like we have essentially triply redundant data storage, as does the school. But there's nothing that says we can't put our third copy essentially at the school in your server rack and you put your third copy in the town's rack. And then, you know, because if an airplane hits the town hall, you know, what's the likelihood it hits the school too? You know? So, at least you physically separate the final backup. And that's something that I think we ought to try to get both our IT groups working on. Okay. Because it doesn't sound like it's a hard problem.
They just both have to, you know, agree to do it. Right. Okay. I can do that.
All right. Since we probably won't go on to any real detail in any of the other sections without our other members, Jeff, do you have anything that you want to bring up? Scott, anything that you want to bring up? No. Okay. Do either one of you mind if we move on to public speak? Or is there anything else that we need to deal with? Okay. Correspondence, there isn't any. Item six, public speak. Diane, since you turned your camera on, I'm going with you first. Right. I'm all set. Thanks. All right. Sorry about that. Varcy Binder.
Hi. The only question I have is the I was wondering about the software that and I know that Sherri's been working on. Are we able to get you know. The budget all laid out, you know, like a lot of places have the amounts that were spent to date. And. You know, so that's easily seen. Like most budget places have that pretty easily. I don't know if I'm explaining myself very well. But
No. What you're asking for is if the internal accounting system is being used 100% for that issue. I would believe, Sherri, the answer is no right now. We're moving that data over to Excel unless Sherry tells me that it can be done with the software. Well,
you can have custom reports that you generate, and it tells you year to date totals on a monthly basis, as well as monthly totals. And then if you want further columns or further analysis, you can kick it into Excel and elaborate on that data. Some of us want it kicked into Excel so we can have a note section or something like that and make individual notes per month at meetings and whatnot. We can do that. But is it running monthly reports and we are able to rely upon them. Yes, we are.
Question would be, are you going to be posting them online so we can? The reports themselves? Yes.
So Marci, I could answer that. Typically, what the town does is as soon as so the budget that gets presented to the Board of Finance is really the Board of Selectmen's budget. And it's considered a preliminary document, so we usually don't share the whole Excel spreadsheet up until that point. But that point is only about two weeks away or three weeks away when that gets shared with Florida Finance. And at that point, that's a public document. You'll have access to the whole Excel spreadsheet, which shows all the revenues, expenses to date, you know, and what the proposed budget is from the Board of Selectmen, as well as a budget book which offers more explanation.
And I was answering for the school side, and that our budget will be given to the Board of Education on Wednesday night in detail, and it will be talked about and discussed. There will be reports and a budget book of all the work that we have put into it, encompassing the six on the five budget workshops. So there'll be a lot of detail there as well. You. Joanne Ebert.
I'm pretty good. I just wanted to double check. I apologize. I joined a couple minutes later than the 07:00 start time. So a lot of discussion table till next week because members couldn't make it, right? Is that what I'm seeing? That makes sense. Okay. All right. Thank you.
Okay. All right. I don't think we have anybody else. Amanda, would you like to say anything? I'm all set. Thank you. All right.
I think we're good, Sherry. Thank you for joining us. Eric, it was very good to see you. You're welcome. It was great to see you, Eric. To be seen. Glad you're on the camera. Glad you're here. Looking okay. Yeah. I
must comment that you even put your Tommy Andover shirt on. I'm pretty impressed. Of course. It's the only shirt he's wearing, Jeff. Yep. So
One of you guys wanna make a motion to adjourn? Motion to adjourn.
Jeff, you want There to second you go. All All those in favor. Aye. All right. Eric, thank you for joining us. You're very welcome. Thank you. Have a happy evening. Thank you.