Meeting transcript
Board of Selectmen - Special Meeting Budget Workshop
February 23, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Budget workshop for Tuesday, February 23 at 07:03. So we're gonna start with the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag, The United States Of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Mark, how are you?
I'm well. Thank you, Jeff. How are you? Good. Good to see you.
We're going to start with public speak. We have Diane Choquette. Would you like to say anything before our meeting? No, I'm all set. Thanks.
Brian Briggs. No, other than did you guys happen to think about the ethics commission? I know it's of thought about that after we saw that $200,000 settlement. That might be a good idea going forward. Other than that, I don't know. All right, thank you. Joanne Ebert? All set, thank you. All right, and then there's a phone in the middle of our, I have no idea who that is. Okay, it's probably Adrian Haiden. And who's behind the logo? Amanda, right? Hello? That's me. Hello. It's Kathy Palazzi. Hey, Kathy. How are you?
I'm fine. Thank you. Mike has a laptop, so I'm on the phone tonight. You is it public speak now? Yes, ma'am. Okay. My only just a little question. I wanted to know if the and my two wanted to know if the Board of Selectmen have already looked over the budgets from the committees and commissions. Have those already been accepted as is?
Okay. Well, we'll answer that quick. I mean, we've reviewed them that we'll be submitting them to the Board of Finance, but I don't believe there were any significant changes to any of those commissions really. Okay. Thank you. All right.
Since we went through everybody and all the phones, Adrian, glad that you could join us. I don't believe we have any department presentations tonight, Eric. No? Okay. Let's get through and talk about the 2020 budget. Eric, one second, I got to shut the door. You can't be a problem.
My dog wants to join me tonight. I am sorry for the interruption. Eric, where would you like us to start with your information that you provided us or can we We can start anywhere you like. Okay.
Right. Anybody other members have anything that they want to specifically address tonight before we get to Eric? Can we put an executive session to address personnel
raises? Sure. It's really not a personnel. I'll make that motion actually because there was no add and delete on this. Okay.
It already covers an agenda item, but that's It why does.
Move that we go into executive session to discuss the employment of the town administrator as authorized by General Statute Section one-200C6 and that the town administrator be included for a portion of that session. I'll second. All right. Anybody else? All
right. Any other discussion on that? We'll vote. All those in favor, aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. Sorry about that. Passed over now part of it.
So I have an Amanda question, and that is, since we didn't set the Zoom meeting up with a waiting room, can we switch it to a waiting room and then put people in the waiting room?
Can we I'm checking on that right now. When would you like to host the executive session, at the end of the meeting? Absolutely. Will that be after public speak?
Yes. Can you do that if it's going to affect budget though?
Well, we can do the public speak before we go in because you know no one will be here when we're done and we'll let them talk and then we'll come out of that session and we'll deal with the one line item that we need to deal with.
As long as there's no objection from the public on that. Okay.
All right. Any of the members have an objection? We passed that five to nothing. No? Okay.
Unfortunately, I can't change it to a waiting room since the meeting has already started. Okay, so my suggestion is pass me the host and if anybody jumps in, well, I'll just say hold the conversation and I'll ask them to leave and I'll have them exit the meeting.
Just as a side question, is it possible to keep this meeting open and then have us log into another meeting? Yep. I mean, we're not gonna be recording it. We can do that. Can do You might have a problem with that alternative?
Why isn't Amanda just send us the meeting information and the password and then we'll log out of this one and log into the other one. Got it. Paula,
does that sound good? That's fine. Just put the info in the chat. Is that you you guys want it in the chat or you want it emailed to you? I'll just I can email it. Email is easier.
Eric had sent us some stuff that he wanted us to deal with. Does everybody have the town budget spreadsheet open or available to them?
Do you want me to just share that sheet so everybody can can share. Yeah, let's share it's better. That's why we're looking at the same thing together. Oh, we were all looking at the same thing. Yeah, no problem. Amanda, can you make me live so I can share the screen? Yep, you're all set. Go ahead. Okay, where would you like to start?
I think it actually would be helpful if let's get a little direction as to what we have left to address. Okay.
So let me switch to the first. It was all the items that were still in red were the ones that we should still consider. So I'll just scroll through real quick. The town administrators line item or town administrators budget, the decision on the budget for the tax collector, which in part you have to decide whether you're okay with the memorandum of understanding because that changes that category.
Yeah, you sent that over. Do you have any issues with it as it's written? I mean, that's our version of it, but is there anything that we don't think we that we didn't get in there that we want in there?
I'm okay with that version. I'm not absolutely sure there the union will be okay with it. But if they're okay with it, I'm okay with it. Is there something specific that we're worried is going to be a sticking point. The way it's worded about not reassigning the work to a member outside the union, what our attorney wrote was considerably more vague than the standard boilerplate that their union would like. Okay. Which I don't think would be acceptable to us. So we're gonna go back and forth on that I would suspect.
Okay, is there anywhere else that we need to find middle ground with them or?
I don't think so. I think everything else is reasonable as is. The only other question I had with the union to go back and forth just because we had that issue with the other union was whether we define everything in terms of vacation, personal, right up front in hours instead of in days, because that's how we account for it. And that makes it a lot less ambiguous. Still possibility of that change but that won't change any totals or anything expressed here.
Okay, but that still would need to be a change though?
It might. I mean, we're gonna have to see where the union is on it.
Okay. Well, I mean, is that something, I guess, worst case scenario, we have to address that in the upcoming contract, right?
Yeah, that's one way of doing it. The way that particular memorandum of understanding was written was that it sits on top of whatever the union contract is, but is specific to the existing tax collector, because that preserves your options going forward to structure whatever other contract you want.
So do we need to make those adjustments if did you already send it to him or?
I have not sent it to the union. I wanted to see whether the board was in agreement before I send it back to the union. There's no reason to give it to them until I know you're it's acceptable to you as a board. Okay.
So the total savings from this, Eric, is only $5,000 or thereabouts, 4,300? The savings between those two options is yes.
We're cutting her hours twelve hours or eleven point five hours a week for two months or for really eight months out of the year, and it's only a savings of $4,900
No, no, no, no, no. Compared to her working full time, it's more like a savings of around $14,000 This just simply compares what we sent the union originally, which is saying, we're not gonna negotiate on anything, we're just gonna reduce your hours, but we're stuck paying healthcare versus her agreeing to give up the healthcare and us negotiating with the union on the other items. That's really the difference. What we agreed to with the union would have been about $5,000 cheaper than what we can force them to do easily.
Okay, you should put into the memorandum of understanding clearer terms on vacation and sick and personal leave. I mean, that's just me looking at it quickly. I would do that Because if not, then you're going to end up getting grieved or some other issue will come up. You better have them agree to it and write it into the memorandum. Okay. Does anybody else have any issue on that memorandum of understanding?
No, I mean I'd like to make the clarification of hours instead of days, but. Fine. Before we send it to him, know. Good.
Anyone else? You already have that worked out Eric or? What? The number of hours. So yes I do. I do. Correct.
Would make a motion to accept that. That the mo you. The with the modification of out you know days to hours. And the understanding that we may need to find some middle ground on the assignment of work line.
Still muted. Does anyone want to second that? No? Okay, I'll second it. Any further discussion on the Memorandum of Understanding? Scott? You want to read it first?
Yeah, you want to read it? It was sent to us. Are you reading it now or you want to? Eric said he was going to finish it.
He's going to make a modification to the way the compensation is.
And clarify the hours. I mean, I'm not proposing on changing anything, any actual part of all I'm doing is that we in our payroll system, we account for vacation, personal, and sick time in terms of hours, because that's how the payroll system works. Yet in the union contracts, we account for that in days. Generally that hasn't been controversial, but we did get griefed by the other union over the interpretation of exactly you know, how many hours something translated to.
Well, did actually become a, it became an issue when, the previous admin was, was terminated or left, whatever. So, yeah, he, when he left, that became a sticking point. So I think it needs to be noted.
Right. And whether we do it in the MOU or whether we do it in the next union contract, you know, either one to me is acceptable.
Would like to note I'd like to note it in the MOU. Okay. That way, if they don't agree to to start negotiating now, it's it's in place. Or at least for this employee and then we'll move forward with the other two.
Okay. We can certainly do that. That's why I'm asking. Right. I'm all set with that as written
okay any other discussion Paul are you all set Jeff Murray are you all set yep I'm good
Oh, I gotta find a different way to look at this. Turn your screen sideways, it makes it bigger.
No, that doesn't work. I don't get to see Jeff Murray, but I'm guessing he's okay with it. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Did you call opposed?
Did Jeff Murray oppose it? No, he didn't. I can't see everybody. No, that's what I was saying. I can't. Eric is eating up my entire screen. Sorry.
There you go. Now I got Jeff Murray up there. Change your view. I try.
Okay, so that change is made. The next change on is the assessor's office. For budgetary purposes, I'm assuming because again, we're going into next year, we do not, we will not have contract with the assessor and assistant assessor. So I made the same assumption that I made with that you picked for town employees, which was 3%. Now you can decide that's reasonable or unreasonable, and we can go for something different in negotiation, but I need some sort of placeholder in there which is why I highlighted it in red. Do you want me to use a different placeholder? What do you want to do there? Can you explain that again, Eric, please? So,
if I'm going to you're telling me that you gave the assessor and the assistant to the assessor a 3% placeholder increase.
What I'm saying is their actual salary is determined via union contract. However, we do not have a union contract for the two of them. So we will have to negotiate that. So right now, all we're doing is putting in a placeholder because we're certainly not gonna have a contract negotiated by the time we hand this budget off to Board of Finance or the Board of Finance does most of their deliberations. So I'm suggesting that as a placeholder, but that's just my suggestion. If you want to send a different message, I suppose you can set a different placeholder or nothing or whatever, wherever you're going with it.
I would make it zero and we have to ask the Board of Finance for extra money because we negotiate a different number, that's fine. I mean, you're talking $1,800 Correct. Okay.
That's me. I'm one of five members. I would tend to agree with you. I was actually going in the same direction, so. It's actually 1,900.
I'm sorry, Jeff. I didn't add it all up. You got to round up, Jeff. I thought you were a money No
mistake. Now Jeff, if Pratt and Whitney was just that good with their engines, we wouldn't have had that news this week. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. They got to inspect their fan blades. Right. That's not Brad. So
elections I had had this highlighted initially you made the big decision, which was change the salaries for the elections to 16,000. Everything else I think lines up. I don't think there's, Wally asked for, I think, a little bigger allotment in meals, but nothing major. So I don't have any issues with that. Does anybody have any questions on the election stuff?
I'm good with that as well. I'm not having problems with that.
Okay. Next one up, total advertising. Carol asked for 5,000. I looked at the last series of budgets. We've never come close to 5,000. We've never really even broke 4. So, we've come close to 4 a few times. So I'm gonna, I arbitrarily cut that down to 4,000. Seems like we can live with it, but that's not what Carol asked for.
You don't I given what we're asking for in the budget and the fact that we may need to send out some mailers, flyers, whatever, I don't know that I would have cut that.
Why not? I mean, what what do we have coming up this year? That we didn't have this past year. I mean, of all the things we mailed this last year. You're assuming we're gonna have a budget passed by then. I I you know? He's thinking positive.
Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to be negative, Nelly. In that case, I love $4,000.
And and actually, to be really honest, any of the mailings that need to be made for this budget come out of last year's budget? Not if it's after July. All right. That's a Keep good
it 4,000 and if we need more money, we can do a funds transfer. Wow, we're thinking positive as a board. Is important. I'm saying 4,000 is a good number. Try to be proactive. Was it positive or negative? It was just proactive. Okay, proactive.
All right. Anybody that doesn't turn their camera on during a meeting.
It's because he's got to eat his dinner. Stuff in his face. On our time.
Okay and the next one to me is the one I had the most heartburn with. I know I came before the board last year and asked for a standalone position for the senior services coordinator. Honestly, I never hired somebody because we've been under such COVID restrictions. There wasn't going to be a lot for them to do right now. I'm actually fairly happy with the way things are working with Roberta. And I'm just not sure right now without an actual senior center, we can justify that bump to a standalone position, given how tough we are in a budget situation. But ultimately, I feel like that's a question for the board as much as a question for me.
That 4,000 is the funds that we're currently using to supplement Roberta for what she's been handling? Correct. Correct.
And we feel like she's got a handle on it with the hours that she's been allotted?
I mean, there are always some compromises. There are times of the year where there's gonna be conflicts between senior services.
I think I was asking generally, you know, I mean, obviously there's always gonna be some conflict somewhere, but in general we're handled okay? Yeah, generally we're okay right now, yes. Anyone else have an objection to that? I think that number is good. So you wanna change that number from fifteen point six to four? Correct. Yes. All right.
I don't have a problem with it. Anybody else? Nope. Nope.
Nope. So I did make a bunch of cuts in public works in areas where they haven't consistently spent the money.
Any specific because I know we put a bunch of money back in there a couple of years ago because I had kind of done a job on them the year before so.
Yeah, mean the spot where I cut a chunk out was vehicle maintenance. And part of that was we had plus that up last year to be able to sandblast and paint the vehicle. And I think we can live with 22,000 most years. Okay.
So that's why I said it to that. Nothing else was really all that critical, although I did knock the diesel down. And part of it is because we have an overall diesel budget, but we get refunded back for the school bus stuff. And we get refunded back for the one senior transportation vehicle that's on diesel. So when you pull out what's actually charged to the public works, that's a reasonable number and that accounts for an average snow year let's put it this way we can live with 14,000. Thousand. Are you cutting their broom budget? I am. I got yelled at for that. Can
I go back to diesel for a second? I'd like to go back to diesel myself because does that cover What does that cover in case like just in the price of fuel goes up exponentially? We're at $4 a gallon anymore. Are we gonna be able to cover ourselves with that? Already
locked in with a contract for diesel for next year. That's an increase on what we got locked in this year, but we're locked in, I wanna say we're locked in at 168 or $1.70, right around there. So we didn't quite get it at the trough of the market, but we did okay. Why is there only $1,800 expended year to date?
That is because there's We have a really big tank. Like it's 5,000 gallon tank and we've only done one fill and we subtract out all the stuff for the school buses. So our portion of that has been pretty low so far. But we're going to need a tank pretty soon. Yep. Okay. Sorry.
And then you do you'll probably have a refill just before budget too.
Yes. Usually we fill, we top the tanks off right at the end of the year.
So I have another question for you, Eric. Now I know Jay's been on back on board and has he identified any areas that we need to invest in in the garage or that we need to include or because it seems like a lot of this is cut out like as we were talking about a nut and bolt repository parts, common use parts. This gonna be able to cover that if we wanna start?
Well, it's already sitting in the money for this year and that was actually gonna be my question, Jeff is that. Okay. Are we doing that? Right. I
asked Jay to do that. Okay. Have I followed up with them? No.
Okay. I just want to make sure that the trips to Home Depot and NAPA are cut down. The guys are here.
I think Jay understands that we deliver at least. That's Yeah. Well, I would say I was down at Public Works for about forty five minutes. And in that forty five minutes, they got three different deliveries from different vendors. One of them A idea. Good, good, glad So to hear I was pleasantly surprised to see that too. Good. Good.
Yeah. I I would like to see that parts well implemented, and I'm glad to hear they're doing deliveries. Especially for our consumables.
Yeah. I I see sweeper supplies. Is there anything that we need to supplement the new machine?
Yes, but we should be able to take that out of the general maintenance for this year. Okay. We're gonna end up spending probably 6,000 or so this spring on all the parts needed to get the sweeper back in really good shape. But once we do that, we're back to just consumables.
Can I ask where we're spending $1,000 on radios every year? That just seems crazy to me.
You can ask, but I will admit that I can't tell you the answer to that question. I was thinking of putting a radio in my car though.
I think that's a fantastic idea. If you spend it on that, I'll be okay.
I'll drill a hole in your roof. You should actually
have a base station in the, no, in the in the office there. Roger that. Then we need to give him a handle.
Any other questions on public works? Eric, just because we're in the process of snow removal and everything you've had, where are you at this year with your snow removal budget?
Snow removal, we're okay. We've spent around 45,000 in salt so far, but we got a pretty big stockpile the last time. So we should be easily through the end of the winter. So we'll be okay on salt. Right now it looks like we're, and it's something I've got a note in the marina that we need to figure out why, but Jay and I have calculated because we know how many hours of OT and there hasn't been as much taken out of the OT snow removal budget as there should be. So somewhere or the other, we've got an accounting error, but I figure we're about $15,000 in on OT for snow removal at this point.
Why is our sand budget going up so dramatically? Or sorry, SALT?
It's not. It was at 60,000 and it's staying at 60,000. But you always went 42. So Yes. But last year it didn't snow.
And this year you already said you're gonna get to the end of the year with what you've got.
Part of Go that Started the year with somewhere around three fifty or 400 tons of salt.
Right, and you're gonna have 18,000 leftover from this budget that you could purchase going into next year. Yes. That's the year before.
Right, so what I'm saying this year is given the number of excess we've done already, this year we actually will put down on the road somewhere around $60,000 worth of salt. Okay, all right. Just looking for every penny. Yep, understood.
That was the best thing we ever did. Right. I don't have to sleep on my garage every week from all the sand stuck in there.
I would say as a cyclist, I certainly appreciate it. The roads are much nicer.
What else you got? Well, it's gonna make it long term, it'll make our maintenance easier too. So what else you got for Reds?
Let me go through. I cut the rec commission budget from what Carol wanted, mainly because I kind of feel like we're still gonna be partially under COVID conditions for a lot of the summer.
And I question whether we're really gonna be able to spend it, because we're obviously not spending it this year. And that's a judgment call and I may be wrong. That's my take on it. What is the outside facility rental? Porta potty. Yeah, mostly porta potties.
But if we're having like a concert at the town hall, we just open the bathrooms?
Yes, but we have a porta potty at the rec field and we maintain a porta potty at the old museum.
Understood. So I know this year I've been talking to Carol a lot about expanding our summer concerts. Does that money come out of programs? Yep.
I guess that's the thing. I don't know that I would have cut that because I mean, especially given today the numbers just came out for when we're gonna be able to start, some of us younger folks are gonna start being able to get vaccinated. And, I like myself, I can start, I think the week of the March 23. So, you know, I think we're gonna have more people kind of wanting to get out and feeling like, we've got a better handle on this going into this new budget year. And this obviously carries into next year too. You know.
Yeah, we're talking about having a concert every two weeks in the summer and those were well attended last year and we don't have a lot of things going on in town. No, and I think once things open up people are gonna wanna get out, man. They're gonna wanna get out and I think it's a very positive thing for the town.
I mean, look at Paul over there, she's biting her nails. She's dying to get out of here.
Right. So, mean, like I said, I don't have any heartburn with increasing it. I realized that's a questionable call. That's why I highlighted it because I wanted you to review it. So if you want to set it back to what they originally asked for, I'm happy to do that. If you want to split the difference, if you want to increase it, tell me what you want to do.
What if we just use the 2020 budget that was approved prior year because Yeah. We didn't even spend that. The 5,835 would be plenty. Yeah. Let's do that.
Let's go back to what the I don't think we need 6,800 but I think 58 would be plenty. Yeah,
I agree with Jeff. Paula, you seem to be going to get out. What do you think? Sounds good to me too. Definitely.
You say that again? Can you say that again, Adrian? You agree with Jeff?
I I do. Jeff Jeff Murray, not Jeff Maguire. Let's be clear. Okay. Okay I made that change.
Yeah you may have gone up a little bit too much. Go back down. No He's right. No. We're good. K. Sorry. I was looking at your lower box as you were scrolling. I saw it 8,000 something. I thought, wait. That's not the right number.
Alright. No worries. Okay. And and the last are are really again the capital. I don't know whether you want to keep you know keep a reviewer that the only thing I do want to bring to your attention which I've realized in the last couple of days is that we are separately accounting for the town garage lease, which is the loader, the payments on the loader separately from the $110,000 average that we're putting into public works equipment. You know, in the interest of being clear, I think that's probably a good idea But I want to be clear that that's in there.
Yeah, it's not an asset. So it should be as a it should be shown as a actually, don't know why it would be under capital. Wouldn't that be an expense? It was under capital because it because it was a capital
purchase. So we needed a separate fund in order to do it. And we also had to do that mid year. Okay, understood.
Yep. The other ones that are on here just so that we know, fortunately our school debt will be paid off after this next fiscal year, which is a good thing. And then transfers we've gone over. The only thing we didn't really talk about before was there is a line item in there for the insurance severance. As you remember, we pretty much ran that out of cash, paying off Eddie for his severance. So we're gonna need to refund that. I thought there was a separate severance fund.
There is, this is the transfer into severance fund because that severance fund has about $3,000 in it right now. Okay. All right.
That just seems an inordinate amount lower than what I had in my head. Can we get a list and a future meeting of what transactions have come out of that in the last three years, four years? Sure, in severance? You want three years of data on severance?
Well, I'm trying to think of what we've taken out of it. I mean, we took out Ed.
Ed was fairly substantial though. No, I realized it was substantial, but. Donna. Donna, Bob, Jay, no? No.
The only two I can realistically think of that should have come out of there were Jay or Donna and Ed.
We had that. To We do the negotiations with our previous admin as well. Yeah.
Eric, if you could just get the total numbers per person so we can understand it. Sure,
sure. Yeah, mean, I think Barbara was a little bit too because she had vacation time, but that wasn't, that's not a big number.
No, but those are all cumulative though, so. Right, yep.
Yep, I'll get you that information. Okay, so that's pretty much everything we had kind of open in the budget. So we know other than dealing with both myself and you conversation again about Amanda. So before we do that, let's go to revenue. So where we're at right now, because I did redo the form, you'll notice so that it all populates from one sheet to the other. Amazing. Big hand clap. Very excited.
Advantages and disadvantages to doing that, to be honest. Anyway, where we're at right now is a mill rate based on those calculations of 38.31. Now there's two other things I think we ought to consider. The first is if you remember last year, we actually had from Mike, the auditor, that we had basically right at $500,000 we could apply to the unexpended fund balance. And we chose to only put four twenty of that into the budget. So theoretically, we have a solid $80,000 plus we know we ended up with a little bit of a surplus this year. So theoretically, you could probably put about $100,000 of unexpended fund balance without worrying about it too much into the budget if you so chose.
That's gonna get us down to below 37. Just barely. Yep.
Or you can leave that to the Board of Finance to decide. Your call. So we'd be looking at 2.33.
I personally do not believe we should do that at this time.
I think we should let the buyer finance have their turn with the board of ed and some other departments and see what they can come up with.
I think if we get back together with the Board of Finance after this and we decide that that's something we choose to do, then we'll do it at that time.
Okay. I'm just putting it on the table that we know that's possible.
Well, mean, thankfully Mark's on the call. So he's hearing this conversation, in general, there a reason that we wouldn't make suggestion? Because even with that, we're still looking at 2.33 and we're still hoping, I mean, even if they make headway with the school, we're still gonna be looking for over, for two ish mills, so. Correct, which is an issue.
I personally think we should put it in there and if they choose to take it out, that's their choice. We know the funds are available. We know they're there. Anyone else?
I just thought I like last year we sugarcoated it with the fund balance. I just don't know if we should keep doing that practice. I agree with Jeff.
But next year you're gonna have adjustment actually 94 ish with the school note finally being paid off. So that really kind of offsets that number anyways for next year.
Next year is next year. Yeah, we don't know what next year is gonna bring it this time last year we never thought we'd be in this COVID. Well, don't talk about you guys gave me the old I'm being optimistic
and now that I'm being optimistic, you're being pessimistic. So I can't win on this conversation. No, I'm just like, we're going into an unknown. Had
a firm policy in this community that we didn't use fund balance to offset things. Really? And then we did it four years in a row.
Well Why do you think that This is the year I'm holding the line. I'm holding the line. Since when is a democrat ever hold the line on this board when it came to spending?
The the Jeff's the Jeff's stand agreeing I mean, why would you say that to Scott and I? Scott and I are the two most frugal guys you have on this board. Right Scott? Exactly. Yeah. Please, please.
I think we should try to get the budget to stand on us on two feet before we start trying to backfeed it with fund balance and then use that as a last resort. It's my opinion.
I think if you're gonna put it out to the, we always said that the fund balance the reason we were using it is because it was funds that should have been spent already. Anyways, it was excess, it was excessive what had been done with the fund balance and the auditor made that very clear. So I don't think it hurts to put the $100 in, it's certainly a lot less than last year. And I think in reality, we do need to get that number down below two somehow.
So we're at least darn close to it. Well, I thought that the auditor said that that's the total we had available. Correct? Eric?
So we're not far enough along in the audit to make any statements about this year. But we know as of the completed audit last year, that we had about $500,000 excess of which we only accounted for $420,000 in last year's budget. But I know just from what the transfers we did, because we had more revenue than we anticipated last year not a lot but a little bit. So we were slightly positive on revenue and we under spent the budget overall. So And to be clear,
when we talk about excess, we mean excess over and above our 10% margins. Correct. Correct. So it's not that we don't have other reserves for an emergency, or as we've talked about at nauseum, possibly loaning ourselves some money to cover us in to do some of these culvert or whatever type things as we move forward. But so just
when you go back to that page real quick, before we finish up on this, can you go back to what number do you have currently in that line? In what? Culverts?
Yeah. Culverts, I think we have $100,000 in culverts. I'll scroll down to that.
Now, it's really scary because, Adrian, that's what I went back to. Where are we with this 1% mill rate request for culverts and bridges?
Right now between culverts and bridges, right now we're asking for about $220,000 so that's less than 1 mil.
So, if you took that 120 and 100,000 out, well, you have to leave it there. It's just a question of how much- If you put a mil in, you'd be asking for 50,000 more. Well, actually, how do we do that on this budget that we're giving to the Board of Finance that we want to potentially do a separate line for 1 mil for bridges and culverts? Do we increase the bridges and culverts to get to 1 mil or
do we Trying get some information on that. I talked to Dennis about it briefly, a little late in the game unfortunately for both of us. He had his COVID shot and I had some stuff going on. So we we didn't get together till today, late in the day. So, but, you know, the town had done a levy previously when we had that, when we had the the unforeseen financial mismanagement issues back sixteen years ago. Some other towns have done it with a charter note. So there, We're still looking into the correct way to do it.
Okay. Is unfortunately the answer at this point. All right. We leave that there and then back to the revenue page now. Okay, back to revenue.
The question is, do we put in $100,000 in use of fund balance? I say no. Paula and Scott, you have to weigh in. No.
I say put it in. I'd like to see that number, that two go down and I wanna think positively.
I mean, even like I said, even if we get the school to adjust, even if they took out the the excess kindergarten teacher, know, and the and the 50 plus k they want to spend on air conditioning, it still doesn't get you to where we need to be. We're still a little shy. So k. So it was three to two no. Well, you didn't call vote yet. Nobody made a motion. We were just having a A hypothetical straw poll. A nice discussion.
So my whole comment with adding a $100,000 is I don't want the school to go back and really look at their budget. I don't wanna make it easier for them to not reduce their budget.
Well, I mean, given the fact that this is a public conversation, I would gather that somebody might mention that to this to them. And the board of finance ultimately is aware of what's there too. Yeah.
The other thing I wanted while we're talking about revenue, the other thing I wanted to talk about was one of the budget versions I gave you had federal EASR funds and the revenue column. I don't really know a whole hell of a lot about it. The governor's budget is proposing to give us 29,831, but ESER stands for like education secondary education so it's basically for elementary schools or primary education so it doesn't seem like that's any money we're gonna see that's really money going to the school which is why I didn't include it in the revenue column, but maybe that's incorrect.
Now that may make sense because Valerie had alluded to the fact that they were hoping to get some funds from the state to offset some of it like technology upgrades they were looking for, they thought maybe they could take those out of that. So maybe that's what she was alluding to. So that actually kind of makes sense.
Yeah, I'm just bringing it to your attention. I mean, and the other thing to realize is that the governor's budget is theoretical at this point anyway, it hasn't gone through the legislature.
It just Well, you never know what's gonna happen next year. We don't know what next year is gonna bring out here so. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Okay.
Did you already made that You already took that adjustment out though, Eric, correct? So Yeah. There. Correct. Okay. Correct.
Okay. So that's basically where we're at right now with the mill rate increase. And the last question the board has to deal with essentially budget wise, unless there's other things you want to review would be to review the part that pertains to my salary and then a decision on whether what to do with my admin assistant, Amanda. Those are the two kind of open questions at this point. Unless you have other things you want to discuss about the budget also. We covered all the reds. Covered all the reds.
All right. Do any of the members have any specific questions that they want to ask on any budget line items? Because if we don't, we could move to executive session now. Anybody? We're getting a message from Mark in the chat. Why is Mark in the chat? Because he's being polite and doesn't want to interrupt.
All right. Well, Eric, can you shrink this? There you go. And Mark, we would gladly take your input. What would you like to know?
It was just a comment in talking about the Easter funds. If you look at Valerie's presentation, she references that today, it looks like she's saying we've received 57 ks roughly in that Easter fund for this year. She called the COVID-nineteen relief money I'm not sure it's really what that was all about. But she said future funding is not guaranteed and not included in the proposed expenditures at the time of the Board of Education adoption of the budget. Andover was told it will qualify for Easter two funding at roughly $60,000
Now, Eric, I have a question and maybe somebody that goes along with what Mark is questioning. When those grant dollars come into the Board of Education, how do they get applied to our revenue line items? That
is a question I can't answer. I'll be perfectly honest with you. All of a sudden there's $60,000 more. So what happened?
What do you mean what happened? They spent it. I think that money comes to the school directly.
I don't think we see that they Because they have their own separate bank accounts for grants. That just comes into them as a grant. I don't think we see that.
So they then take extra grant dollars received and create additional expenditures that fall in under the grant and spend extra money. Well, I don't think they create additional expenditures. Think
what they'd be able to see. Asking in a hypothetical way. That's not an expenditure that members of the community see on their Exactly.
That is correct. Well, let's be clear. Obviously, I'm generally not the person that's going to defend the school, but I'm going to defend the school here. The school is using those funds to pay for things this past year that maybe were unexpected, and that they needed to address. They use some of that money for extra technology support and a variety of other things this year to get themselves up and running. And this coming year, I think they were thinking about using some of that money for the Wi Fi upgrades and some of the other things that they originally had in their budget. But after some prodding for us and going back and looking at it decided, maybe we'll take these things out of the budget with the hope that we will be getting this funding, these funding dollars that we can then apply to this.
Those are all valid, Adrian, and I agree with them. I'm just looking at what's the transparency of it all. There's no transparency.
Well, there's transparency in the sense that they They bring it up at school board meetings when the money comes in. And they do talk about where it's gonna go. I don't think there's a public announcement and certainly not shown in their general budget. No. Well,
I've let's just I'm gonna be positive and say that Val's new right so moving forward I'm gonna hope and and assume that Val's gonna let everybody know. Let's just put that out. And
I don't think they're not letting people know, Paula. They are they are discussing it. They are saying where they're using the dollars at their monthly meetings. You know, if you're not you know, if we're not catching that in the minutes, that's a different issue. But as long as I would have to go back and look, don't you know, I haven't been going back and looking at them on a regular basis, given our own workload at this point.
Well, why don't we use that question let's say you know let's ask that question moving forward how can we
or how how is it going to be handled well our new software be able to track that $60,000
Our current software Yes. $50,000 as long as it goes through a when they do a PL, they'll have to say where they're pulling the money from.
Paula, just so you understand that this has nothing to do it's not a direct A stack. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking in my mind where I'm looking at this going, If I look at it from a dollars and cents perspective and I receive grant funding of $300,000 or let's say $200,000 because it's just simpler, not math, I then have an extra $1,000 per child that I spent. If I can't see that, but we don't see that, then it becomes problematic to me.
I I don't disagree with you. I'm I think it I think it's gotta be it's gotta be out there. I'm not disagreeing with you. I I think the problem,
Jeff, is that, you know, there is there is some the way the state calculates those numbers and the way that we calculate those numbers are not the same. No. Totally different. I understand that. Yeah. And so My way is my way is more accurate.
No one's just gonna disagree that to the letter of of the to the letter of the number, yours is more accurate. But when we start comparing to other towns, we have to have a standard reference number. And for those purposes, we should be using the state numbers. Okay. That's what we've been using for all our analysis. Yeah. That's all I'm saying. We
have been using that number that is provided by Valerie to us. I'm not disagreeing that you have Jeff. I I
mister Murray, I think you have been. I'm just saying, as we start talking about accountability, and is this number been accounted for, blah, blah. It's been accounted for to the level that the state requires it to be accounted for. Beyond that it has not been because some towns get more money, some towns get less money for a variety of reasons. It could be because special education got a specific allotment of dollars because a town had more special ed needs, whereas some other town didn't. So you can't include all of that, because there's a different level of requirement, you know, so I agree with everyone, though, that we need to make sure those numbers are account those dollars are accounted for. That's that's not the issue. Okay.
It's right. The the issue, Adrian is that not transparent at all.
Well, you know, we do have a new budget person. But we have a new budget person coming in. Currently have a new superintendent who's finding her way through and I think, you know, I think we're it's getting better. It's not great, but it's getting better. So once we have, you know, a new budget person, maybe that maybe we'll be able to say it's it's much better.
So I just I know there's a lot of intimacy between our board and theirs. And I don't think we need to make it worse by using some hyperbolic language. That's all. No, no, Adrian, it's not it's not that at all. It's just that, know, when we were when we were making some comparisons with Marlboro and Hebron, I mean, their budgets are very detailed and and Andover's is not, and it's not, it's not being critical of the border or anything. It's just that we need detail.
I think that you might find though in their budgets as well that some of those grant dollars are also
not accounted for. Yeah, but for certain things they break down into minutiae.
Don't disagree with that at all. But we're talking about grant dollars and whether they're accounted for, I think you'll find the same thing in those budgets.
Well, hope is that we hire the new treasurer finance department person and the new software that we paid for gets implemented. We have a start date, Jeff. Hired. Eric, what's the start date? Good. I think March 8. March 8. Excellent. I must have missed that email.
Yeah. It will not be the first email that I've missed. We all missed that email because the board study was not included in those discussions. Unfortunately. Well, then who's paying for it?
Well, that's a different conversation, isn't it? I think what happened was we didn't we did not 100% rope them into the discussions about hiring Marina. And so they did not 100% rope us into the discussions for hiring. So it was a it was a tit for tat for lack of a better terminology. Really? Yes. Okay.
Alrighty then. So hopefully that working relationship moves forward in a better manner. So there was no input from the town side on this person? It was all the same? No, input on the person not on the contract.
No, that's not completely true. All right, clarify it. So the salary negotiation and compensation negotiation took place between myself, Valerie and the person we wanted to hire. Where we disagreed is I thought we negotiated basically the best agreement we were going to negotiate with that person. And given that, but to me, it wasn't a guarantee that the boards would accept it. So what my position at that time was that we would first send it to the hiring committee. And if the hiring committee was okay with it, then it goes to both boards and we send them a contract, which is not exactly what happened. What happened was they sent her the contract. She signed the contract, sent it back, Shannon signed the contract. No, it went to the school board for approval. As far as I understand, the school board did review it. So they follow protocol.
And in truth, she is a school board employee technically not a town employee.
There is not there has not been good protocol put in place, unfortunately, for these joint hirings, because it's sort of a new thing. So I, again, you know, we have new superintendent, we have a new new way of hiring because we had joint employees, we did it a certain way. And so they kind of did it back to us. I'm not happy about that at all. Well, and they're probably weren't happy about the way we did it either.
I wasn't involved with hiring the other finance person but to it without any input from our side is I call it irresponsible. And I would second that Jeff Murray. Not happy.
That's not what we wanted originally on this whole thing. Supposed to be taken care of by the board of selectmen, Adrian.
Don't wanna be hard to I'm not, listen, I'm not I'm not say we're not gonna discuss this right now because it will get. No, let's just be clear. I'm not defending that it happened. I'm simply pointing out that we did it to them. So it's a little it's a it's a little ridiculous for us to be standing on a soapbox saying, my god, they did this when we did the same thing. Adrian define we.
In this case, I think it was Eric, right? Because I, you know, it was the hiring committee and Eric's decision in that particular case.
I mean, don't be misunderstood. Val and I had series of conversations before Marinas got hired and Val and I were in agreement with ours salary compensation in general. And then I brought it to the board of selectmen. The board of selectmen agreed with the memorandum of understanding we signed with the union and that's what happened.
All right, let's go. We're going end this. Eric, I am just telling you from my perspective, I look at you and say, You had that contract, right? If that contract didn't get out to all the members of this board before it got signed, that's a problem. I agree with Jeff. It's a big problem. The contract was signed before I saw it.
That is a bigger problem. Yeah, that's an issue. And who sent that contract out?
This whole thing was started because the board of selectmen wanted oversight.
Eric, what you just said On the whole thing. What you just said there is the biggest problem. So you're telling me that our town attorney didn't review the contract?
Town's did not. Board of Ed's attorney. Ed's attorney did. This
goes into the whole problem that we're having currently, is that we are one town. Not a board of ed and a fiefdom that the board of ed lives with itself. Exactly. We are one community.
Yeah. That's why we did this. Exactly why we did it.
Just to get back to Michael, who sent the contract to the potential hire? Who was that person?
Val did in this case. But that person is also a Board of Ed employee.
So Val would have been the one that sent them the contract. Correct. But within all of our discussions that we've had, Eric, and when I was involved in that committee before the end of this, that it's a joint, you are her co boss. That's how we explain this. Val and her, each one we have different roles, different responsibilities, but two bosses Exactly. Now And really, I shouldn't even say that. She has one boss, the town of Andover. That's right. And that's why we were supposed The board be of education and
the board of select. It's the only reason we did this. So let's be clear though.
I mean, I knew what the terms of it were. I just hadn't seen the physical contract
before it got sent to her. I think we're beating a dead horse
Here, No, not Adrian. No, we're not. No, we need to make sure this does never happen again. No, I would say that I have a problem with this whole thing. I agree with Scott a 100%.
That this thing was done to have the town have oversight, the board of selectmen have oversight, you Eric to have oversight, and now it's completely out of our hands is what you're telling us. Listen,
I'll go this way, Scott. There's certain aspects of this that were out of our hands, yes, but there were members of the community and Eric was on the hiring committee. Eric and Val discussed, and it's the right person to hire. But the general sense that this board has to convey to the Board of Education and has to convey to the community is we put that position in there. The only reason that position got there is for transparency purposes. Exactly. So that transparent information is provided to the Board of Finance, and this is not giving me any comfort that we're going to have transparency across the major spending groups Me of neither.
None at all. It made it worse that all that work that we did is for naught as far as I see it right now. So much for optimism.
Well, we made a choice between software and a transparent position and the choice was made was like a transparent position. If this is how it's going to go, we're going to have problems. Yeah.
Great. Right off the get go. All right, so let's move on. We'll deal with that one later. We have to figure out a solution to that.
I want to make everybody clear where we're headed with this, that we're gonna go back to what we wanted originally. That's what I would say. It can't go on the way it is right now. Want everybody to be able to that that's our
way forward right now. The board of hired her and it's a Board of Ed employee. So at the end of the day,
they don't actually need your permission to hire a Board of Ed employee. Eric, that's the problem, Eric. It is. I get it. I get it. You're telling me that we have the right to fire the assistant, but we don't have the right to discipline or do I anything to that have a
grievance over the Because whole our town attorney didn't review the contract for us. It's not really hard to comprehend. This is a problem.
Dispaired services, both attorneys should have seen the contract. Right. And, and, and. Okay. And listen, if we have to rewrite those, we're gonna, we'll, we. Then we need to redo this whole Really start from scratch again. Let's It's
do this. Let's go back to the memorandum of understanding and see what was spelled out there and then we can address this again if we need to.
All right. Let's move on. Let's finish this because this is outside of our scope. So does anybody have any specific questions related to line items that we need to address before we go into executive session?
Do we have a couple more line items? The truck and Got to talk about the five fifty truck. The truck and then there's another item, I believe.
So I think at this point, there's no sense worrying about the combined agreement with the finance director since you all seem to have fundamental questions about the process. So obviously you're not gonna sign that. No. So the only thing you really probably should talk about is I sent you all the information on the F-five 50 pickup truck and what my proposal was. CIP approved the purchase of the pickup truck. Probably the question becomes, is the board of selectmen on board with doing that?
Or do you have further questions about it? How long of a wait was it to get a matched colored vehicle? Not happening. Six months at this point. And we need that vehicle now? Yep.
It would be nice. We only have one small pickup truck.
And we're going into the busy season for the small pickup truck too.
Yeah, and the reality is it's not gonna be less expensive to wait. The only thing it would do is get us the color we want instead of, I mean, now we're stuck with red because there's only one vehicle we can even find that we can buy unless we buy off of the commercial And then we pay more. Purchases. But we pay more. But that's like that adds about an extra $6 to our costs. So color is not important enough to me to spend $6 that's for sure.
I'm just used to seeing the green trucks running around town and I just. Well, maybe we can get it wrapped. How's that? Well, I'm just trying to say like just from residents and trucks, people doing work, people associate
the green color with the town. We could always put a different town's logo on it so they can sneak around.
We're way past the engine, changing the engine in there, Eric. What happened with that?
So we looked at changing the engine. Your two options are to purchase a used engine and swap it in, that's somewhere around $12 by the time you actually do that. Or putting in replacing the engine with an actual factory certified engine with a warranty and all that jazz. That's somewhere around $19,000 And to me, it is not worth replacing an engine you know, that costs a third the cost of a new vehicle, you know, for a vehicle that's already basically 14 years old or 13 years old. Yeah, mean,
in mind we were slated to replace this in another year. So this was queued up to be replaced in a year. Right. So how did it get to CIP?
Because the truck blew up, Eric came up with solutions, right into CIP per our town, right, or per the way CIP supposed to work. They looked at the numbers approved it and moved it forward to us. And then it goes from us to Board of Finance.
There's nothing in New England or the Northeast. It's a green No, there's nothing.
Trucks are very hard to get right now. Trust me, I tried to go buy one.
Yeah, so we were gonna buy a white one. They had one white one. And a town up in New Hampshire came down and bought the one. Out from under. Yeah,
because the government, the municipal purchase ones come through a different chain of command through Ford, and they're bought under a different program, which is why they're cheaper.
Well, they don't Yeah, they don't have there is a when you talk about factory invoice, there is a line item on factory invoicing that that encompasses what's called holdback. It's called co advertising dollars and advertising dollars for the region. And that so every vehicle gets an allotment of dollars for advertising for radio, television, whatever. And those those funds are different on this municipal program than they are in a commercially sold vehicle. So every time you see a commercial vehicle and they say, you know, truck the number Ford, the number one commercial truck, blah, blah, blah, buy a buy one get a plow kind of thing. That's something that's paid for by that vehicle when you go to buy it. If you're buying through the municipal program, you're not because that they weren't it was sold differently for municipal. So that's where the Just
a quick just a quick question is are we set I mean, is Ford the only game in town as far as municipal vehicles? Why don't we buy Rams or Chevys?
Well, that's a different conversation and we don't have time for that one. Well, I'm just asking the question because
is there anything available that we can buy like a ram truck or the Cummings in it that may be a better motor?
It's not a motor issue. It's a it's a weight issue. So the Ford Ford GVWs are consistently higher. The towing capacity plus GVW is consistently higher. And and just parts and reliability is out there is is also gonna be just far and away. You know, they they have 80% of the municipal market just so that we're on the same page. And we're talking about Ford that just blew up.
Right. Well, we don't know what was or was not done with that vehicle.
We don't, but what I'm just saying if we looked at all the alternatives, that's all am I asking?
Honestly, I have not looked at vehicles other than Ford in this case.
I can tell you that I did not recommend that he look at anything other than a Ford. And I'm pretty sure Jay probably said the same thing. Mean, I just from someone that works in the commercial market. It's just not even a conversation. Is other town next to us using Ford trucks every town? Pretty much.
That's not a question I can answer. I can do a survey, I guess. I'm just I'm just asking the question because if we can get something you know, right away that matches what we want then. Yeah, but if it
again, you're going to give one of the reasons that this $5.50 is so important is that it allows us to tow our heaviest trailer, you will not get that option on a Dodge office, awful, awful lot truck, it's not going to happen. They have a different that's a different suspension. They carry weight differently. You know, I mean, the Fords are built like like tanks generally, as far as the frame and you know, they're just they're the whole different setup, you know.
So Eric, is this the is this the truck that Jay wanted? You wanted? Adrian wanted?
Well, than it's I want a green one, but other than color, it's got what it should have on it. Yeah, we expect the way public works needs it. We looked
at gearing and everything. So the answer, yes. So, you know And where is this gonna be paid from?
Where's the money coming from, Eric? We gotta wait and see what the school board approves it first.
Okay, so it comes from three places. The first is we have a public works capital equipment fund that's got in and I sent all the board this, the details of all this so you should have you should have gotten an email with all that. I didn't get any emails about any trucks. Okay. Did the rest of the board get that?
Yeah, I saw it. Okay. I didn't see it. It says F five fifty truck I think.
Okay. So basically there's three pools of money we're tapping. One we had an old equipment fund that was buried in the budgets that we're going to clear out completely and spend the money for that. That's around $25,000 And then we have the Public Works Capital Equipment Fund, which has just over $23,000 in it, somewhere right around there. We're gonna clean that out and we're gonna take the difference out of Town Aid Road, which is not ideal, it's legal, but it's not ideal.
Was any of that money slated for anything this year?
We probably would have used that to the, to get buy a hot box if we hadn't had to do the pickup truck. But since the pickup truck, once it blew became a much bigger priority than a hot box.
But we have the hot box in the budget for you now, right?
We can probably buy the hot box out of next year's allotment.
Okay. I just wanna make sure we're still going because that's a big will buy a hot box next year, right?
There are bear swamp potholes that need to be filled. II thought Lake Road was an issue.
No, I got that taken care of. Oh okay. Alright. All right, so let's go. Do we Scott, I forward you over that information on
Paula, it's only snarky because your road got How much is the truck total anyways, Eric? $60,000 We're, it's basically off the lot it's 58,000
and some change. Oh gee, I know where we could get that kind of money. That's okay. You ready?
Hey Scott, I did try to sell him my truck, but he low balled me.
I did, actually. I'm gonna listen. I'm gonna just read Eric's motion. So I'm gonna make a motion to recommend the Board of Finance that the town of Andover purchase a 02/2020 Ford F550 pickup with a Rugby three yard dump body and Fisher five plow. Specs is outlined in the budget quote. Expenditure not to exceed $60,000 This will replace the 2008 F-five 50 dump truck that is not cost effective to repair. I'll second. All right, further discussions on this?
Did they spec a Fisher or do they is it coming with a Fisher? We spec ed a Fisher, yes. Okay.
If you can't get a fisher, you're gonna get it what you can?
Well, I like the westerns better now, but it was whatever they, you know, I guess whatever they're used to.
Well, I mean, I think right now the reason why we've done the fishers is because we can in a pinch, we can use either fisher plow on either small truck.
So you have a fisher on the other one, so the mounts are the same. Correct. And that is a valid reason. Okay, so any further discussion?
I'm just gonna tell everybody I'm gonna vote no because I don't think we've looked at available alternatives and we're just looking at single sourcing this and I'd like to see some other manufacturers listed. Well, we didn't single source it. I mean, we did call multiple manufacturers. Yeah, but you're just doing one brand. So I would like to look at alternatives just to be safe.
Just as a comment on that, Jeff, if we went to Sourcewell for this, right? And Eric, I do believe you went to Sourcewell. Yes, we got a Sourcewell. Aren't they a governmental Yes, voting entity for they are. So
the only thing that Jeff would be there that we didn't look at a Dodge or Chevy, a Toyota, a Nissan, a Mercedes. We didn't look at other vehicle types. Volkswagen. Okay. Honda. Hyundai.
I think if you bought them a Honda Pilot Snowplow, they would probably not be happy. Get them a minivan. It's
not really sound. Don't the little town own one of those minivans. It's gray, has little orange stripes crossed up.
We're going to vote on this. Anyways, Jeff, what were you saying with Sourcewell? Have you gone into Sourcewell? No, Sourcewell is a governmental contractor.
Again, you're not going to be able to compare apples to apples because the Dodges don't equip the same. Yeah. When you spec it out, you're specing it out to get a Ford, but Ford holds 80% of the municipal market. And they hold it for a reason. What's the payload on that five fifty?
I can't tell you exactly. I know it can tow 32,000 pounds, but I can't tell you what the actual payload is. Like
we're making a statement that nothing can haul it, but we can't even say what payload it can haul. So just Well,
Jeff, I'll tell you. I'm not trying to get a hard time just saying, Boy, it's not four. That's okay. But
we're not all experts in that and I'd sit there and I'd go, If Jay and I'll look at Adrian and our board, and Scott would be the the way that I would look at it. Adrian and Scott on our board probably have the most experience with trucks. Adrian probably more than Scott. I'd be fine. Drives a What do you drive, Scott? A Nissan? No, Toyota. Toyota. Come on, let's go. Us Three are going
to vote for this anyway. Jeff Murray, it doesn't sit really well with me that, you know, this was just brought on really quickly.
No, Scott, the one thing about this is Eric had this out there when it blew up.
Right. Soon as it blew up, I sent that to the board and we discussed it at an earlier board meeting. But at that point, we hadn't done enough due diligence to even understand what our options are. So now what I'm saying is we can get one at Columbia Ford. It's not the color we want, but it's in stock. We can order it from Sourcewell, but we're not gonna have the thing. They're basically ninety days out and then it goes to the upfitter for a dump body. So we're looking at at least three months but she told me more likely you're looking at in the five to six month range before you get it in the door. So that's one option. It's actually a little more expensive than Columbia Ford, which if you remember the last time we ordered the F-two 50 Columbia Ford beat Sourcewell's price too. It beat both, we looked at two of the national cooperative buying programs and Columbia Ford was cheaper than both of them.
Not a lot, but just a little bit cheaper. The only difference is if we wait, we're getting a 22 because they're actually completely sold out of 21s. So our only option is to get a holdover 20, which is on the lot but brand new or we wait and we get one built for us and then we get we pay you know another $1,500 more but we get the color we want and it's a 22 not a 20.
So I got one more question for you. If this truck was in running condition what would it sell for?
So if it were in it running would sell for the low 20s. Yeah, that's a stretch.
No, I looked at gov bid, in good condition, yeah, low 20s, because that one happens to be other than the fact that the motor is blown,
everything else was pretty good. So you're saying that you're gonna sell that truck probably for 4 or 5,000 whatever you can get for at a
no, he's hoping to get somewhere close to 8 or 9.
So we have, we know on the low end code two will give us a, write us a check for 6,500. But I think Jay's looking at a couple other options. He thinks we can get closer to 10 back for it, You know, because other than the fact that it's got a blown engine and not everybody really cares about doing an engine swap with the correct pollution control equipment and all the things that a government entity would care about. It's
a nice looking truck and it's clean. So my question was if we put, you said for putting a used one with no warranty and what were we looking at? Around 12,000.
12. So if we put that 12,000, let's just say for conversation sake, put that $12,000 into it and we sold the truck. When the new truck comes in for the 20s, we really wouldn't be losing that much money. You're hoping you're to solve for '20. I think he's guessing. Well, Eric's got proof that he said it was there in the twenties. I said there was ton
GovBid going for that and given the condition of it. Yeah, I think you probably could get in the twenties. Can I guarantee it? No. And Eric, I'm not trying to bust your stones, but I'm guessing that you didn't look up and check and see what rear end that thing had in it and those types of things. Government municipalities tend to have, we tend to spec our trucks really for local use, you know, that they're they're not gonna gear for the highway. We're running really high gear setups. Not everyone wants that. So it's it's, know, I think, you know, twenties is would be a rough number
to get to. My theory was just why don't we just replace the engine, run the truck till we get the new truck and then sell that truck. Well.
I'm just saying as an option then with that way we get the color we want, we get the truck we want. We're not settling.
We're getting the truck we want, we're just not getting the color we want.
Seems like we're spending a lot of money. That's all. Scott, you're gonna buy that truck next year.
I have no problem spending the money if we get what we want. We get the color we want, we get the truck we want. But to try to settle and spend that money to settle, just So it's a difference between red and green.
I thought I thought if we got the color we wanted we were spending more money
yeah that's 15 I think the source well quote was yeah because a little bit more but it's it's also a you know Yeah $20.20 Well
they're both brand new I mean the other one's sitting on the lot it's not like it's been driven.
The whole issue ends up being we're gonna wait six months. Oh my god we're beating this to death and we're hoping it's gonna come in we're hoping they're gonna get parts in time to start building. There's too many ifs on that table. Yeah. The the only thing is the color. I mean, if if we need the truck, why That's
That's the thing. You know, we're saying, oh, we're gonna wait and order this thing. Ford Ford still hasn't started back up production because they still don't have parts yet. We're hoping they start production up and we actually get this stuff. There's 39 container ships off of Long Beach right now with 336,000 containers.
We get it. I say get the red truck. I mean if it's what we need and we can't wait or we're
rolling the dice waiting for the green. Tell you what, I'll throw in 10 cans of paint to the order and we can have a painting party.
Mean, if that was really a deal breaker, Jeff, I would say we could get the thing wrapped. It just to me, it's not worth the money to, I mean,
you know. Listen, we already have a motion. It's already out there. Had to make the special vote. All those in favor of the motion on the table for the F550, aye. Aye. All those opposed? Three to two.
Okay, on the board of finance. Okay, that seems to be everything you're likely to deal with other than executive session if you choose to go into executive session.
Okay. So let's Item five is Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance Agreement with Shared Finance Director. We're going to table that because we're moving on. Item six is public speak. So we'll go through our list. Diane Choquette.
My only comment is for us to figure out this new director of finance and who they answer to and how much transparency we're going to have.
Right. I'm going have MOU on that already. We can all read it. That's all I have to say.
All right, thank you. Can I go now? Yes. Thanks for keeping the recreation commission money in there. That's going to be great because it's like Jeff was saying the concerts and other stuff. So, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Joanne Ebert.
I shared in the comments in the chat that I was just a little disappointed because I watched your whole process but I don't want to belabor it you're going to take care of it you're going to figure out your financial director but I think that the whole point that you are all making was that it was shared and I think Jeff Jeff McGuire you alluded to that the whole point or all of you really it's a shared thing that probably should have two supervisors clearly working together and you know so the transparency that you're all looking for will be there and just basically the budget in general you know I look forward to the board of finance because I think you know they're going to have a hard hard year it's going to I watched them last year they're very fair they go through everything I'm looking forward to it but the education budgets just have to be looked at I'm disappointed I thought maybe and I don't know Jeff Maguire or Eric if the super Mr. Leslie came back and gave you that figure you requested because that was big but I know you have other things that you're talking about tonight but you asked him the per pupil amount I didn't hear anything about that tonight I know you're not talking education but that's a biggie because I can't figure it out I don't know where the 17,000 comes from
yeah so 7% or whatever of the increase is very high for the town think, but I know you're all working on it. So thank you. Alright. Kathy Palazzi.
The only thing I'm gonna say is thank you very much all of you for doing such a hard job. I think it has to be the hardest job you do all year. So thank you.
All right. Mark Rinker, we'd like to talk. You're our last guest. Nothing more for me. Thank you for the diligence. Thank you, guys.
Okay. I make a motion that we go into executive session to discuss the employment of the town administrators authorized by general statute section one-200C6 and the town administrator be included in a portion of the session. Are we doing this via another login Yep.
You got an email with a new Zoom link. Then when we come back to this meeting, you got to jump back into this link. All right. Thank you very much everybody. Tuesday 02/23/2020 Are you recording now? You recording? Yes. Recording up in the corner, Adrian. Yeah. So somebody want to make a to that?
Second. All All those in favor of coming back in regular session? Aye. Aye. Okay. Last piece of business that we have to deal with is related to the budget. Eric, I believe all of those items were in the budget presentation as you gave us the numbers related to your compensation. Correct. All right. There's actually nothing else we need to do related to that. Do we need to make a motion? I think we had a motion on the agenda to move this to the Board of Finance. Is that accurate? We want to do that as a board. Are we okay with the budget as it exists?
So Eric is saying that the adjustments for his salary were already budgeted? They were, yes. Including time off that No, we're
the time off is part of a contractual obligation that we'd have to deal with.
Okay. And what about the adjustments if we make them to the budget line item for clerking and stuff? I believe all the clerking numbers were in there as Eric saw them. So there's no one there's okay. I didn't know if given the fact that they were commingled under that nineteen hours if that was an issue, that's all. No. Okay.
Is there anything else we want to discuss before we make the motion to send this to the Board of Finance? Okay. Does somebody want to make that motion?
You're sending through basically the approval line item J, correct? What's in line item J, which is what is transferred all the way out to the revenue shoot sheet and shows a final mill rate calculation of 38.31. Is that correct? That's correct for me. Anybody?
Is the what is the Board of Education's budget this year? That's not in our purview, Okay, but
Hang on, I'll tell you in two seconds. Do you want RAM or AES? One's at 170 or something? Change now?
Education at AES is 4,158,243, which is an increase of 255,843. And the RAM budget is 5,200,940, which is a decrease of $26,871
Say that RAM number again because that's not what I have in my sheet.
That's because he updated you download the newest one? The newest one had the changes.
No I know know they would change our numbers but they wouldn't change RAM numbers. Yeah there was a RAM change. There was a
RAM change they got their audit back and they applied their unexpended fund balance to their bottom line budget this year which reduced our cost, our levy by about $70,000 So that number has come down. It was That account for Now your interest
it's a budget decrease compared to last year. Okay, because it was a budget increase of 53,000. I had 5,281,000.
Correct. That accounts for your change? Correct. Jeff? Say that again? That accounts for your number difference. No, yes, I understand. And then Eric,
just because when we met with Scott, the last budget workshop, did he provide you any of the information that he said he was going to provide us?
He did and I forwarded that email to you. I forwarded it to the whole board. Yeah, there a problem with the initial attachment,
fixed it when you fixed it with Mark. So there should be there's a second string of emails addressing it. Okay, go ahead. It's there.
So Eric, the increase to the AES was how much this year? $2.55. Increase is 255,843. Pretty much one of our mills.
And all of us on this board are okay with that?
No, it's not whether we're okay with it or not. That doesn't affect what we're doing here tonight. I know, but are we okay?
No. I'm definitely not, but there's little we can do except for the meeting we had and suggestions that we made and We can voice
our disdain to the board of finance and ask them to address it.
Which I plan to do tomorrow during public speak as a citizen.
There you go. Are we doing a joint meeting with them, Mo? Yeah, I thought we were gonna do that. We're supposed to. Are we presenting? Eric? You on there?
President is presenting at the next meeting. You could certainly get on and present at the meeting, the board of finance meeting after that. And I'm assuming they're gonna start scheduling a whole bunch of budget workshops as soon as you turn the budget over to them. Cause up to this point, they haven't actually had a budget to work with. So the two things that will happen is this budget will go live, and will be publicly available and it will get turned over to board of finance. Who's presenting at the next meeting, Eric? I'm sorry. Andover AES's.
It's tomorrow night. Is there anything to get added to the agenda just so we can present this to the board? No, it's too late. Well, they're not taking any action on it. We're just presenting it, right? Still too late to be on the agenda though.
Hang on, let me look at what the actual agenda is before I run my mouth. It's AES tomorrow night. Yeah, AES is definitely on it.
I read that. It is a regularly scheduled meeting though so they could add you, isn't it? Yeah, that's what I thought. And then just answer any questions they have.
Item number 8B Town budget discussion. So if you want to present that's on you could present under item eight b under the current budget if you all want to go to tomorrow's board of finance meeting.
Why don't we What would we say? What were you thinking Jeff Murray if you wanna present?
Well just our thoughts. We could put our thoughts about the RAM budget. We could offer our thoughts about the AES budget and all the other numbers that we have.
I personally don't wanna muddle the waters of ours and theirs. I'd rather let them focus. That's gonna be a busy enough meeting I think for them. I'd to get on the I'd like to at least give our budget an overview of our budget and how we came up with it for the rest of the board that wasn't privy, although Mark Berkner and Diane have been. At least something. I don't I don't think we need to present the whole budget, but if we presented a statement or something as to our methodologies, that might be sufficient, I think.
So I did include in your packet a list of both a summary of budget summary as well as what I would have put out similar to what I put out last year as a press release you know as the administrator you know going over the town's budget. Now those obviously need to be updated again because we changed a bunch of things and then we updated the RAM numbers so a lot of things have changed since that was written but we can certainly I can certainly update those.
Did you I did not get a chance to read that Eric. I apologize. I appreciate that it's in there. I apologize for not reading it yet. Did you cover methodology and long term vision and those types of things at all? Or did you just go brass tacks?
In the letter to the editor, basically I laid out the case for why we needed to do rodent culvert work, which if you think about it, you know, in terms of increases on the town side that represents essentially the only increases because the town general budget is actually decreasing this year. The only thing that's going up is the capital. Yeah.
I won't get a chance to really take a look at that until Thursday. When did you plan on sending that in?
I'm not in any rush at this point. I mean, I think we're gonna need to put a budget. We'll need to do like we did last year and put the preliminary budget up now that the board of selectmen has approved it. That's a public document. It's no longer a working document. So that will go up and then we can put whatever budget message we want whenever we get it. Okay. So if you want to, I mean obviously it's still going to take me a couple hours to redo all the changes that we made today. You know, make sure it's correct. And then if you would like, I'll send it back to you. You guys can tweak whatever you want, and can put it out there. I'll try to come up with a working statement at least off the I don't want to get into the nuances that you're getting into, just more something
about our methodologies and our long term vision. So I'll try to get something that you can just integrate. You know? Okay. Sure. Yeah. No worries. Anyone else?
I cannot go to tomorrow's meeting. Jeff, I am sure that you will give appropriate board of selectmen welcome. It's
gonna depend what time I get done tomorrow. I've got a long day. I'm gonna try. I can't guarantee I'm gonna be able to attend, I'm gonna try. Scott, are you gonna go? I'll be there to listen to you, Jeff, certainly. You're not gonna speak, Scott?
No, think I'm a little frustrated right now and I don't think it would be. I'll
loan you some blood pressure medication if it'll help. Okay.
The information that Scott and Leslie did provide us is very helpful to understand how they do calculate. Number, the number. Which
is really interesting. What else you got, Jeff? It's getting late. No, I have nothing else. So we got to make a motion to approve to send the budget to the Board of Finance, excuse me.
Motion where did it go? I motion on behalf of the Board of Selectmen to send the budget as presented to the Board of Finance.
Who's seconding that? Come on. Scott? I'll second it. Right. Further discussion. Now all those in favor. I'm abstaining. Okay. Did Adrian say no?
Yeah, I'm voting no. I disagree with this budget. It's too low. We need more money. All right. Now call it. Call it, Jeff.
I did five nothing we're done. You didn't vote we all voted I was waiting for you to say yes. I didn't hear you call it. You were doing something else that's not my fault. Jeff, did Scott come up with $24,400 per pupil?
No, because he did not give us the current year. That's what they're doing. They're not giving us current year information. They're saying go back and look at our last year's info. Well, did because he told you there was, what was it, 1,302
pupils and there was, I can't remember the exact number for the his budget, but it was pretty simple. It was 24. No, no, no, no. He gave us this information he gave us in one of his.
Yeah, pull up the document that Eric sent over in the email thread, Scott. And it wasn't five nothing. I voted for it. I didn't hear you call it. That's fine. I knew you did. I asked. Yeah. We can calculate this now. Don't I Yeah,
Scott, there is a certain formula for it as well. It's not quite as simple as dividing it out. I know you'd love to do that, but you can't. They deduct transportation.
Yep. They're supposed to add in federal grants and state grants.
Depending upon what the grants are. Yeah. Some are some are not.
Does every town do the same thing? Yes. Yeah. The only problem
is the way that they calculated it combines RAM and AES. So what you have to do is kind of break them out separately and look at each one, which Actually,
on the state website, there is two different numbers. Two. Okay.
All right. Well, we're good. We voted five nothing to move that budget forward. Is there anything else you want to talk about? We're way over our allotted time. I apologize to all the members. And Eric and Amanda, I apologize to both of you. No, I just want to remind that we to
get a policy together for time clocks clocks as well as Hours. As well as hours and insurance. Okay. If we can address that at our next meeting as agenda items, that would be great.
Okay. All right. I'll make a motion. I need to adjourn. Anyway. Seconded.
All All those in favor, there's no discussion. Thank you. Right. Thanks a lot, guys. Thank you very much, Eric. You are welcome.