Meeting transcript
BOF Regular Meeting
April 22, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Let's go ahead and recite the Pledge of Allegiance or I know they're skipping it at some meetings, so we've been doing it here, so that's fine. We'll just, you know, pick a pick a corner if you will. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands nation divisible with liberty and justice for all.
Thank you. Okay I'm just going to take a quick note of attendance here it looks to me like we have Louise Goodwin Diane Choquette Kurt Dowling Rob England myself and I don't see David Hewitt, am I mistaken there? I think I can see him. Yeah, looks like David's absent at least for now he may join and also want to make a note that our board of selectman representative Adrian Mandeville will not be able to join us tonight however I know we have Jeff inquire on so we have people from the board of board of selectmen that could provide input if needed hopefully okay I guess we can go ahead and get started we have first thing is we have our public speaking section. I know this is obviously budget time. We have a lot of members of the public that are attending here. So I'd like to, this is a little unusual. We're doing this together. So the first time we're trying to change up our methods a little bit. So it's the first time we'll have a probably significant public speaking during the same. I would ask members of the public a couple of things. Just one, be aware if you're not already that there have been some revisions to the budgets that were published a couple of weeks ago. Significant revisions, including last night the Board of Education put some revisions downward in their expected budget too, so those will be items that will be discussed tonight,
so something to think about. In addition, if you have something to say that somebody else has already said, just, you know, it's just more succinct and quicker and more efficient to say, you know, I agree with Linda or I agree with Jack and just, you know, make your statement briefly, this week and move it along. We've also got a lot of feedback through the website. We appreciate everybody's input. It's important. We'll all read through that. We're not going to spend the time at the meeting to read through that, don't believe, but it is available. Amanda, is that posted anywhere? That probably should be something that we post as part of the meeting minutes or something.
The feedback is not yet posted, but I can post it anytime.
Yeah, I think that that's probably important just so people know that it's there, it's being read, it's part of the record.
Will do, and David Hewitt is on. Okay, good, thank you.
All right, I guess with that we'll go ahead and go into the public speaking portion of the meeting. So I think the thing to do would probably be if you have the app in front of you, there is an
opportunity to raise your hand if you click on the section that says participants.
I'm not sure exactly how it is on all the different apps people are using, phones and tablets, etcetera, But there's an opportunity to raise your hand, and so if we get a lot of people talking, we'll probably are going to have a hard time sorting this out. Maybe easier, actually, how many people do we have? 27, quite a few. Would you like me to go one by one and ask? Yeah, let's do that. It seemed to work pretty well with Board of Eds. Let's go ahead and do that, Amanda.
I can't unmute you. You have to unmute yourself. Hi. Lara, would you like to speak? I'm sorry? Would you like to speak?
Not necessarily right now. I did you want Okay. I mean, I I submitted a a comment, a feedback. So online. We read that. Yep. Thank you.
Elaine Bucard. I can't unmute you. You need to unmute yourself. Yourself. Hi. Nothing. Thanks. Miss Pelosi? Not time. At Jenny Morell, I can't cannot unmute you. Nothing for me. Thank you. Krista Carabani. Nothing for me. Thanks. Rochelle? No, thank you. Diane? Jamie Weber? No, thank you. Joanne Hebert? Joanne Hebert? No, thank you. Laura Bush? No, nothing now. Melissa Lateska? No, thank you.
Katie Marino? Nothing now. Laura Edwards? No, thank you. I think we're all set here, right?
Okay, went through everybody. Okay, thanks Amanda. And so that'll be the end of the public speaking section. I'll just point out that we also have an agenda item at the end of the meeting that will also allow for public speak. So we'll move on to item number three, which is additions and deletions in the agenda items. I think we do have an addition I'd like to take on. I'd like to add item 8A, I'm sorry, 8E would be a new business item and that would be consideration of a Board of Finance representative to the oversight committee. So can I have a motion to add that item? So moved. Kurt motioned
to add the item 8E which is the Board of Finance representative to the oversight committee. Do we have a second? I'll second it. Thank you, Rob. Okay. Okay, any discussion? Okay, Board of Finance members, all in favor of adding item 8E, Board of Finance representative to the Oversight Committee. I'm gonna go ahead and run down in order just because I think it's a little cleaner. Kurt Darling? Aye. Rob England? Aye.
Okay. Louise Goodwin? Aye. Okay. David Hewitt? Aye. All right. Diane Chiquette? Aye.
Okay and did I get everybody I think so right myself also I okay no nays or abstentions let's go ahead and note that is passed we'll add that to the agenda Okay any other additions and deletions to the agenda? Alright hearing none we'll move on to item number four this is the town administrators report. Eric, you have the floor. So to speak. You're muted. Eric, you're muted. I muted myself. Somebody remuted me. Bad. I blame Amanda. I will be your assistant. Anyway,
my name is Eric Anderson, I'm the administrator for the town of Andover, for those of you who don't know. So I want to talk you through real quick just what's kind of going on in town and what's impacting the budget. As of today, officially we have two cases of COVID-nineteen in Andover. However, the emergency management service here, the fire department has transported multiple additional people that likely have symptoms. So I would expect the number of people shown that are both hospitalized and or COVID positive to increase substantially in the next four or five days. So that's it directly on COVID. As far as grants go, the state bond commission finally approved Town Aid Road. So the town should get its allotment, which is approximately $190,000 pretty quickly. As most of you know, we should have gotten half of that last July
and the other half in January. So the town is, you know, close to a year behind on funding Town Aid Road. You have before you a revised budget that has been approved by the Board of Selectmen. And there have been two other things that have occurred since that was presented. The first is that AES has come back and with a different budget request, and we'll go over those numbers a little bit later when we get to the actual budget. And RAM has met and had a budget meeting. In fact, they're having a budget meeting right now also, but they're not expected to actually pass a budget until the twenty fifth. The best guidance I've gotten from the superintendent is that they are likely to come in with a level budget. And a level budget to Andover will result in about a $50,000
decrease in our expenses to RAM. As many of you know, our expense to RAM is going up roughly 7% now if it's a level budget, because we are adding approximately 12 students more to the high school than, we have currently going into the high school. And at the same time, the overall population of RAM is decreasing by about 90 students. So our fraction is going up. Even with a level budget, our costs for RAM are gonna go up significantly.
Derek, just clarify, so you said the cost was going down with this new level budget. What you mean is it's going down relative to what the budget is for Selectmen Pass. Just to make that clear, overall will go up as you just stated. Just wanna make sure everybody understands that. Yes. And we have zero control over that. Correct.
Okay. You also have before you've been given a resolution that was adopted by the board of selectmen. And what that resolution does is authorizes the board of finance to conduct a budget hearing, pass a budget, set a mill rate. And that is in keeping with the what is required by the executive order of the governor of the state of Connecticut. So that's not a, you you as a board are required to do that, you know, per the state guidance. The board of selectmen additionally gave some kind of milestone dates that they wish the Board of Finance to meet. The first of those dates is that you have a meeting on May 6, which would be an online budget meeting
to get additional feedback from the public and then allow two weeks, a full two weeks for comments. And we've additionally provided a series of different ways where the public can comment on the budget. And then on May, let's see, May 26, hold a final budget meeting and at the conclusion of which adopt the budget and set the mill rate. So that was the resolution by the Board of Selectmen. You also have before you a series of transfers. As we know, we're in the last fiscal quarter of the year, and that means per charter, we're allowed to move money both within department budgets and from department to department. Some of the transfers I'm requesting
are to move money into capital equipment so we can purchase two items. Both of those items were approved by CIP and they were scheduled for next year's budget. However, since we're truncating the capital equipment for next year's budget, and we're capable of transferring money from the rest of that department because we had frankly a very mild winter and we way under spent our snow removal budget. We're going to move both those purchases up to now. So it's out of next year's budget. And additionally, the board of selectmen already also approved, purchasing a the updated software package for the appraiser or correction, the what office am I thinking? Used by both the tax collector and the assessor called Vision. Basically the previous edition has been phased out and is no longer supported. And we're taking that money from the assessor's legal budget. Because at this point of the year, there are no pending lawsuits. There's nothing that should require spending that money. So that's also a fairly large transfer. There will be a lot more transfers in May, June, and July, but we're just getting some of the big ones out of the way now to go ahead and pay for things that, we need to pay for. So that's it for me, unless you all have questions for me.
Any questions for Eric? We will discuss this in more detail but.
You know, Mark, I have a quick question for Eric. Dave Hewitt here. You kind of alluded to the state requires that we have to do a budget and I'm just wondering if you could address that because I was reading through some of the email comments obviously some people are pretty upset about that holding a budget without a town meeting. Do you have any guidance on that from the state?
From the state, little to none. We actually asked the state directly for an interpretation of the governor's guidelines And their response to that was check with your town's attorney. So we have also gotten an official opinion from the town's attorney that is online on the town's website under the budget subcategory. So you can read the full text of that. But the basic thing is that the governor has compelled the governing body of the town, which in our case is the board of selectmen, to authorize or to require the board of finance to pass a budget and set a mill rate. So we had initially had some questions for our attorney. Is that mandatory? Is it kind of mandatory? Is there wiggle room? Can we hold the drive by vote? Can we do this? Can we do that? And the answer, and I've also consulted with the other town administrators
around us, and the answer is it was not optional. The executive order clearly said that it shall be done, not it may be done. And on that basis, our attorney's guidance is that that is the procedure that is required by the state. So that's kind of what we're operating under. It's not what we want, but it's what we're required. Okay, thank you. You're welcome.
Any other questions for Eric? Thanks for that question, Dave. I think that was an important one that needed to be brought up because there were a lot of concern over that on the comments and that was a good time to bring that up. All right, Eric, thank you. Let's go on to agenda item five, treasurer's report. Item A is the status of the town financial audit. So Barbara, can you update us on where we are? I sure can. We got the draft last week. The auditor and I, Thursday afternoon, went over and I had a few questions,
things that he ended up reincorporating, waiting for the final now. He had a couple of housekeeping things to do. Attorney letters weren't back this week. But I expect the final any day. And it's we already talked about the balance because I really had a lot of the numbers worked up before they did their on-site field work. So we're still comfortable with that half million excess into the fund balance. I want to ask you a question though about the audit report. Ordinarily when I would receive paper copies, I would bring them to the next meeting. I don't know if we need to have as many paper books as we usually get, and I will send everyone the forward the final after I receive it, put it on next month's agenda. It will be discussion of the of the audit. And I don't know if at some point as is customary, the auditor would come and
talk to you, you know, and just answer any questions you have. That's all pending, of course. But I will send you all copies. So if it's on the agenda next month, we can talk about that. So by copies, you mean electronic copies? Electronic copies. That's the way I receive it. Yeah, I
think that if in this case, if anybody wants a hard copy, which I may at some point just because sometimes it's easier to page through, they can contact you separately.
That's right. We usually usually give up to 20 hard copies. And I don't know if we're going to need that many. But I will definitely that they always bind it and send hard copies. But initially, we'll have the electronic. And so I'll forward that. So any questions about that? Any any surprises? Anything that No, we didn't
we had, you know, I he had given me a file with all of the schedules. And so I pretty much worked up the numbers. And so there wasn't anything that I didn't know about. He didn't, you know, we had an ongoing dialogue, you know, the whole time. I was working, they were working, so absolutely no surprises now. But I'm hoping the same thing will happen next year with same audit firm. Again, I'll get the schedules, I'll work them up before they even begin to do their field work. So I think I absolutely no idea what kind of a schedule we're looking at for next year. But when I find out, I'll let you know. I hope it's earlier.
And it should be earlier. But that's all pending right now. So any other questions about the audit? If not, I'm going to move on to town budget summary. That
summary that you received that I think it's a eight to 10 page document. Within the last few days, I took that document and I converted it to a Word document and then I separated, did page breaks. And I went through every single budget and highlighted everything where I thought we were really going to have a surplus of money. Eric and I discussed this a little bit on Monday. But as you can imagine, some of the budgets such as elections, I think we're going to end up with about $23,000 isn't going to be spent because they had training money in there. And obviously, no one's going anywhere now and we training. And with all of the elections canceled, there's going to be no activity, no spending out of that. So what I will do per charter is reach out to the department heads or the people who put those budgets together, Give them a copy and just say, hey, you know, where do you think you have money you want to release and then per charter, just get that that written okay, that yeah, I'm not going to need this money and it can be reallocated somewhere else. So elections as an example, and there are other ones, you know, just things that were in the budget that just aren't going to happen. So Eric and I will be kind of going through that page by page, I'll be reaching out to department heads and see what we come up with.
And along that same line, Eric is going to kind of consider where that might be reallocated. But I think at next month's meeting, maybe as we have kind of a sense of what kinds of dollar amounts we're dealing with. I don't know if you want to have talk about where that might be reallocated. So we don't have a huge amount flowing into fund balance. So we're working on it now. If you have questions, let me know. Any any feedback on that?
Probably not at this point. I'm curious as to what the magnitude of it it's gonna be, but maybe that's a little premature. Thousands. But I said thousands. It sounded like 10s of thousands maybe. Well,
you could be could be. Yeah. And that's why Eric and I, you know, as I say, I've got everything, you know, kind of like highlighted now and we'll go through and see, see who it's affecting. Okay, on revenue, the town side is doing fine. In terms of our revenue education cost sharing, we're getting, as I said last time, a little more than we had budgeted. No idea yet on what impact we're going to have on tax collections. This being a collection month right now, collection month. Maybe by next meeting, I'll be able to give you some sense perhaps if there's been any impact just on the third quarter collections. The Board of Selectmen opted not to offer a grace period for payment of taxes, that was an option that they could have adopted but at their meeting, and Jeff saw and if I'm, you know, speaking out of turn or just saying anything incorrectly, let me know. But the thing that they are going to allow is a reduction in interest rate for people who pay their taxes late.
As of now that would apply to April, April, May, June, and then through the first quarter of the new year. So people are still expected to pay on time. If they don't pay on time, they'll get a reduction in interest. And so that's where we are with that. And we'll keep tabs on what we're doing in terms of collections. Obviously, rest of this year is not going to be terribly impacted. But we'll see what happens first quarter of the new year. Tar spending, I just sent the usual report. And then as Eric said, we've expecting the grant money. We'll let you know when we have that. And the over expenditure report you have. Nothing on there that is new, nothing that we're not Eric isn't kind of have an idea of how it's going to be covered either something within a department or now that we can do the transfers between departments, we'll be shoring that up.
And that's it for me. Questions?
Any questions for Barbara Okay hearing none let's go ahead and move on to item six, budget transfers. We have budget six A, budget transfers, supplemental appropriations, and over expenditure requests.
Okay, no over expenditure request this round and Eric, you spoke you touched on the transfers you have them in front of you. I believe they were in packet. The big ones Eric's already talked about the reallocating and the assessor software legal, and snow removal. And then there were just a couple of minor ones housekeeping things that have been kind of carried forward on the overexpenditure report. So that is it for now what you have in front of you. And we as Eric said, we'll we'll have more as as the as the weeks progress.
Eric, do wanna talk a little bit about these, the capital expenditures, the snow removal transfers you have and exactly what that's covering and why it's actually needed?
Okay, sure. I'll talk you through. And actually we might as well start right with the top. The first is a transfer from the line item for the assessor's office legal counsel to the assessor's office software. That is a transfer of $5,000 That's the purchase cost of Vision eight appraisal software which the board of selectmen approved around December and has been installed on the computer. That was done simply because the old version of Vision was no longer supported by the company that originally wrote it and we had to switch versions. The second thing is appropriations within the Department of Public Works budgets. Basically, we had a pretty mild winter and so that means we had excess money in the categories that directly related to snow removal, which is both overtime wages and sand and salt. And also we had a little excess money in the meals budget because we are obligated by union contract to provide meals anytime we call the Public Works Department out on an emergency basis. So the money for the meals is going to shore up the snow plow budget or the plow blade budget. Those are the little carbide pieces that fit on the end of the plow blade that get worn off every year on our roads. Basically what we had budgeted wasn't enough for one complete set of blades for the town. So I authorized the over expenditure and now we're truing that up. In the remaining little bit of money, I just stuck in the public works vehicle maintenance account because that one's overdrawn also. The second one was under the sand and salt category.
As most of you know, this year we switched from using a sand salt mix to an all salt mix for treating the roads, which so far seems to have been very well regarded by the public. So basically, we made the decision early on that we would overexpend the salt budget, knowing that we weren't going to spend the sand budget. So now we've, you know, we authorized that over expenditure. We ran over about $2,700 in salt, but we didn't spend anything out of the sand budget. So now we're taking and we do still have some a stockpile of sand left, so there's no real need to top off our sand at the end of this year. So we're going to move enough money into the SALT budget to cover what we've spent so far and zero that one out. And the rest of the money we're going to put in the capital expenditure line item which is 11O1Dash702. That is a capital account which means it doesn't go away at the end of the year. Out of that $21,000 it is our intention to spend roughly $19,000 of that to purchase two pieces of equipment that CIP has already
given the blessing on. One is something that fits on the front of our wheeled loader, which allows you to pick up heavy things without having to put it in the bucket. That's called the material hoist. Currently, we're every time we need one, we drive our loader over to Coventry, we put the thing on, and we drive it back. And we do what we need to do, and then we drive the loader back there. So we are borrowing one now, but it's something that we should have. And we were originally gonna buy it with the machine, but we ended up not doing it.
What's the lifetime on a piece of equipment like that?
As long or longer than the loader. So a minimum of fifteen year lifespan on that. Okay. Because it's a pretty it's a very simple piece. Mean it's just a little hydraulically activated arm essentially. And the second piece is a material it's I'm having a hard time describing it. Basically it fits on the back of a big plow truck or a big truck, and you open up the little gate in the back of the truck. And when material comes out, which is loam or sand or asphalt, it falls in this little conveyor belt and the conveyor belt moves it off to the side. And the reason we're getting that is we spend the inordinate amount of time after a paving project backfilling behind the curb and smoothing everything out. And one of the real problems we have is we have no efficient way to get material from the truck onto the side of the road. What you do is you take the loader, you dump it from the truck onto the loader, some of it spills in the road, and then you back the loader up, you turn it 90 degrees to the road and you dump the material.
So what this does is allows it to be moved directly from the truck to the side of the road where it belongs. So it's really more just a time saver than anything else. And one of the things I've done is just watch public works as they work. And that was one of the things that just kind of made me crazy how long it was taking them to do that. So this is a response to that. The next item is overtime wages for snow removal. And as far as I know, we're done plowing for the year. Although if you asked me that last week, I would have said the same thing. And we went out and plowed on Saturday morning. So we're going to take that money, and we're going to split it between tree removal and the public works vehicle maintenance. So I asked Board of Selectmen for permission to overexpand the tree removal so we could get the four really large trees down by the recreational field taken care of because they were dead and large limbs were starting fall down and it was a safety hazard. So we removed that. And this week we also removed two trees, you know, that it was fairly inexpensive, but we had to remove another two trees that were weakened by the storm and were dramatically leaning over our roads. So by adding 3,000 to that budget, we should be right about equal to what we've spent so far within
400 or $500 Fuel additive is something we dump in our large exterior diesel tank that prevents it from gelling. We didn't use quite as much as we used if it had been a really cold winter and we used more fuel for plowing. So we're going to throw that money into the mobile phone. Ed, the public works director is not the most IT savvy guy in the world. And, for some reason he keeps just absolutely blowing through his data plan because I think he leaves the weather channel on all the time because he's paranoid about it snowing. So Amanda has helped him and we've gotten better, but that budget has gone over a little bit in part because I forced him to get a smartphone so we could actually do some of those things. And then the last thing is that the salary line item for myself, for the town administrator, was quite a bit higher than it needs to be for two reasons. One, I make less than my predecessor. And two, we had about a two month period where we didn't have an actual administrator or month and a half period where we didn't have an administrator. So between those two things, we have some excess money there. And Amanda has been working quite a bit of extra hours
since we've started in on the COVID-nineteen response because she's the person that makes all these online meetings happen. So we're running over her line item pretty considerably and I'm basically just taking that from my salary line item. So that's it for what I'm asking for for appropriation transfers out of this period. Questions?
Sounds like none, Okay. And we need to vote on these, correct? Correct is the dollar amounts involved. Okay. Does anybody want to make a motion relative to the transfer request?
You think we could just make a motion for all in one shot? I would think so. Yes. You can. Okay. Well, I guess I'll move then that we adopt the fund transfers as proposed by the town administrator. I'll second.
Okay, Rob proposes or motions and Diane seconds. Okay, we'll go ahead and take a vote again. We'll go ahead and order. Sandy discussion. Okay, now we can vote. Okay, Rob. I'm good. Yep. Aye. I'll say. Aye. Sorry. Kurt. Aye. Diane. Aye. David. Aye. Louise. Aye.
Okay and I'll vote aye also. No nays no abstentions. Okay you got that Amanda. Yes.
Okay. Okay, and I think that takes care of item six on our agenda. Item seven is old business. This is the governor's executive order. And I think this is just relative to the governor's order about the, you know, Board of Finance's position and requiring to the Board of Finance and the Board of Selectmen to appoint to require the Board of Finance to create a budget and set the mill rate. That's correct, right Eric, you remember? Correct. Yeah. And I don't think there's actually any action that we need to take at this point, but it is open for discussion. Eric's discussed it a little bit and brought it up, and we've discussed it at prior meetings. Anybody have any questions or comments on this? Okay. As Eric mentioned, the attorney's opinion is on the website. It was pretty clear, surprisingly, and nobody really wants us to be in this position, but unfortunately here we are so. So hearing no more discussion, we'll move on to item eight, which is discuss and act upon the
eight A, it's the budget schedule and timeline. So as I think it was Eric recounted, or Barbara, made it Barbara when she was giving her presentation, the Board of Selectmen and their resolution required meeting of the Board of Finance on May 6 to have public input into the budget. And then also a meeting on the May 26 to vote on the final budget and set the mill rate. So if I got those dates and things correct, believe. That is correct. I'm
a little confused by the twenty sixth. Mean Wednesdays are normal meeting day, but there may have been a reason for it.
So those were not the original dates I proposed. Those were the dates the board of selectmen decided to adopt. So you would have to bring that up with the board directly. I had planned on the process taking probably two more weeks to give you the thirty day extension that the board of selectmen had originally voted on, but they felt it was appropriate to shorten the timeline and motioned to that effect.
Okay. So we actually, we had both Jeff McQuire and Jeff Murray, I think on the call. Do either of you guys wanna make a comment as to the timing or whether that's hard and fast, did it just seem prudent to try to move the process along?
The thought was to move the process along, Mark. If you determine that you can't meet that, I'm sure that we'll be more than willing to work with you. But we wanted the timeline to move a little quicker than the thirty days.
Okay. Fair enough. So I guess I'd put it to the members of the Board of Finance out there for discussion. We don't have all the information we're going to need for our budget, but we have a fairly solid proposed budget. It's there from the town administrator obviously developed this and worked with the Board of Selectmen. It's been modified, it's been changed. We've talked about it on and off. We don't have the final budget from AES, although we do have the number that they're proposing. We don't have the final number from RAM, as Eric mentioned earlier, although we have a pretty good idea of what it probably will be. So given that May 6, is that realistic? Do we have any discussion on that matter from the Board of Finance attendees, members?
I mean the May 6 date for me seems reasonable provided everybody that we're waiting on finalizes what they're doing in advance of that. I don't have a problem with May 6. As you know that the second date is more of a problem for me in that it's a Tuesday night and Tuesdays are bad for me but that's just my own personal thing and worst comes to worst you know I'm sure we'll have a quorum without
Sorry, this is Jeff again. You have flexibility in those states. Please don't think that we're dictating exactly the day that you need to get this done by, if you take a day or extra, I'm sure Eric and I and the rest of the Board of Select members won't come back to you and start to complain. Mark, thanks, Jeff. I
concur with what Jeff had just said. We're already scheduled for a regular meeting on the twenty seventh. That's one day beyond the date that they set on Tuesday. Like in Rob's case, Tuesdays don't really work for him. And I already have I have the twenty seventh set aside already. I don't think that one day would matter on that part. Know, it'll be done the sixth and then, finalize everything on the twenty seventh is okay with me.
Yeah, would have to concur for myself that that would make the most sense for us or at least for me. I just ask
Jeff and Jeff, was there any particular reason for the Tuesday date before I throw a wrench in the works? No.
When it was being discussed by the other members of Board of Selectmen, it was just you know spreading out the weeks. It wasn't a specific final day that you guys So as long as it's that week. Have the meeting on Wednesday and we'll be good. Okay. Diane or Louise or Dave, any input?
I agree, problem to move it to Wednesday for me either. I think I'm fine, Mark. I'm good too.
I'm sorry, Luis, you kind of broke up there, missed that. I'm sorry, I'm good too, all set. All right. Well, it's a fairly aggressive schedule, but I don't disagree with trying to move this along. If something blows up or changes and we're uncomfortable with where it's going, I suppose we can always address it at the time. If people are in general agreement on the board, then I suggest we entertain a motion to set a special meeting on May 6 to establish a proposed budget and obtain public input. Anyone want to move? I'll make that motion. Okay. And I'll second it.
Thank you, Kurt. Motions, Rob seconds. Okay. Any discussion that we haven't already had? Okay, hearing none, let's go ahead and we'll vote. Rob. Aye. Kurt. Aye. Okay, Dave. Aye. Diane. Aye.
Louise. Aye. Okay, I will also vote aye. So that's unanimous. All right. Okay, very good. I think we have at least a preliminary timeline. We'll establish that special meeting. Amanda, you got that. So we're gonna need to set up that agenda. Good, thank you. Okay. All right, I think that's pretty much all we can really do at this point, the budget timeline and just hope it all goes well where we need it to go.
Mark, can I suggest that you guys discuss whether you want to have intermediate budget workshops?
I mean we Yeah, this would be the time probably to talk about that. As you and I kind of talked, I think we do need to do that. Well, if we're going to meet on May 6 and Wednesday's our day, can discuss having a meeting on twenty ninth? Twenty ninth. Jeez time really isn't It follows.
Worse for me if you guys can do it, I can do the twenty ninth. You're fine with May too, the twenty ninth. Kurt's checking his phone. Dave, Louise?
Louise you're on mute. That works for me too. Okay. I'm good Mark. Okay. Okay.
This is Dave. The twenty ninth is open as of now. Yep. Okay. The twenty ninth at seven Yep.
Okay, we're gonna have a motion to set a special meeting for the Board of Finance to review the budget and develop our proposed budget the April 29. I'll make that motion. Louise motions. I'll second.
Diane seconds. Okay any further discussion? Okay we'll go ahead around and vote Rob. Aye. Kurt. Aye. Dave. Aye. Aye. And Louise. Aye. I'll also vote aye. So we'll set up a special meeting. Getting the thumbs up from Amanda. Very good. 7PM next Wednesday at the twenty ninth. Okay. All right. Thank you, Eric. It's a good point. We're gonna need to do that and this is the point to bring that up. Okay, any other discussion on the budget schedule? Okay, we'll go to item 8B, which is the Board of Education fiscal year twenty twenty-twenty twenty one budget. We actually don't have this in front of us, the final budget. The budget was published in a preliminary form, and we did receive
some information from Laura Edwards that indicated where they had made some changes. It was a little hard for me initially to kind of figure out exactly where she was indicating those changes and where they went from. But it looks like they're, they're shifting expenses about 71 to the tune of $71,000 which means they were probably over budgeted for this year, either contingency or whatever they moved in. I'm not sure what those expenses are be curious to know that. There's a health insurance notation that it moved from 5.8% to 3.3%. And I think that was just a miscalculation in the original budget that got corrected. They've got a notation here of a retirement replacement they reduced by $10,000 Not sure what the origin of that was. I missed that part of the discussion at the Board of Ed meeting. Diesel fuel reduced by 6,000 I presume just because of the less need and less cost. Facility supplies $3,000 Custodial summer staffing 12,000. Again, no real explanation that you should probably be at the board of education when we were talking about these specifics, but they're adding an additional one half time paralegal. They've got an additional 13,245
on there.
Mark, excuse me on that. My understanding that was left in there by mistake and that could potentially be removed. The additional 0.5 para? Yeah so that's something I'd speak with Shannon about. Okay.
I was on that meeting when they were talking about that and it seemed like originally one of their reductions was was to reduce some classroom or teacher and then they wanted to add a half a para to help with that. And then they chose not to do that. So they didn't take that half para back out.
Okay, so the state said that that could potentially come out. It's probably just in there from their proposal.
And another thing that is not in there that they talked about at the meeting is the combination of the finance departments. There is nothing in their budget that has made any adjustments to any salary expense or cost savings on their side for that.
Yeah, I heard that as well. And we don't know what that's going to be,
but I think we We need think to get could a estimate. Didn't you think we could estimate what we anticipate? Yeah. And then there was talk, and this is one thing I'm confused about. There was a talk about accounting, and I don't know what the combination of the finance department, does that mean we will come under one accounting system and have like two cost centers, so to speak. So, they were talking about accounting software and maintenance and things like that. Yeah, Eric, you want to combine into ours, it would go away, on their side?
So I can speak to that. Currently, we use the same accounting package. The school and the town both use a software package called Phoenix, which is which is a municipal specific software package but that's no longer being supported. So what we have been talking about is what we have to switch to for software. And the so we have demoed several packages and we are hoping to be looking at QuickBooks also as a lower cost solution for both town and the school. So we would in fact be using essentially a single software package. And basically the school is just one of the cost centers of the town essentially if you can think of it that way. So that would be the what we would be looking at. And then you know, we're still essentially trying to figure out what would have to happen to adopt QuickBooks and whether that's a viable option or not. The town in its proposed budget has a line item for software adoption, because we anticipated that because we didn't have a budget in this year's budget, we would have to budget it for in the next fiscal year. The board of finance or correction, the Laura, the budget person, and actually she could probably speak to it herself because she's on this call, has indicated that they probably could pay for the transition out of their current budget, which would then save that amount of money from the town's budget, if we can get the coordination done and do it in time.
Does that answer your question? Yeah. So would we get revised figures on the AES budget with those costs all adjusted in there so we could see what total number we're looking at before we have to make a decision because I'd like to see where the numbers all fall. It's kind of hard just getting that little note saying we're reducing these things because there's other things that have to be fixed in the budget to get the right number. Understood.
I can tell you that this has been a hot topic of discussion at the Board of Selectmen. The guidance I've gotten from the Board of Selectmen is that what we're shooting for is essentially one part time finance director in one full time bookkeeper slash, you know, probably a very high level bookkeeper to take over all of those functions. Currently between the two departments, we have three full time people. So we would be basically cutting staff collectively in half between the two of them. But that's exactly how that happens. I don't think we've really nailed down yet.
So let me take that may take a little bit of work. We do have Laura on the call. I don't know if anybody has any specific questions for her. Could ask. I don't know we want to take up a whole lot of time, but you know she may have a sense of when when we'll get a copy deal to look at the budget in detail Laura do you have anything to add
I don't know where to start you caught me with a mouthful of food sorry It's okay. The part time para is definitely something they want in the budget. So the number that was presented per Shannon's letter was $3,000,009.16 and that includes the pair so that that's not going to change. Okay.
The funding software, we have the funds this year to move that forward. So our thought was let the Board of Ed do that. And that would be a possible reduction to the town's budget for next year. What else did you want my interest? The combining of the departments. I think there's still a lot of review that needs to happen. One of my primary concerns is the human resource function that Takes up a lot of my time is not really being addressed. I don't feel in the merger So there's you know, there's kind of a lot of details of you know what the board bed needs to understand what's being taken away that would either have to be covered by another staff person or you know the part time position you have in your plan becomes a full time position.
I don't know there's just there's just a lot of detail that still has to be flushed out for combining those offices. And I don't think we're there yet.
It doesn't sound like it. Do you know when we might be able to get a copy of the budget with the updated numbers? This is obviously a summary of the changes.
Probably I can try to have it to you by next week.
If we can have it in advance of our next meeting, that would obviously be the best. The
bottom line is the $3,000,009.60. There's a there was a lot of you know, for the presentation purposes last night, I condensed it down, but there's a there's a lot of detail behind that those changes. So I will do my best.
Okay, I would really like to see the detail. It would be helpful to figure out where we're at.
Okay. All right, yeah, if you can do that, that would be helpful. Thank you, Laura. Any other questions for Laura while we're we have her on?
Mark, this is Kurt. I don't have any more questions for Laura, but I was on the, I listened to the entire meeting last night too, and my takeaway from that was Dana Form from the Board of Education had discussed about getting the two parties or three parties together that need to discuss this new plan between the town and the school. There hasn't been hardly any movement on that. I think it's between the Board of Ed and the Board of Selectmen who come up with a plan for that. Bottom number, that I took away from the meeting last night was that they reduced their existing budget by $100,049 in vicinity. Yeah, 149,000. Right,
right. So, but that was my two takeaways from last night, in regards to both.
And they also made an addition to staff in that, so we'd have to look at that. Yeah,
I think the addition to staff, Diane, was the one that the superintendent had already cut. She'd cut a teaching position and a para position after receiving the letter from the Board of Selectmen to reduce to 200,000. I think my timing's correct on that. The numbers were worked so they could replace that position and not do away with that. Then that's when the half tariff came up. I'm still not sure about how that's going work either.
Yeah, I'm fuzzy about that because I didn't see that there was any cut anywhere. I thought that was proposed and then they took that back and they didn't take out the pair.
So, I'm confused on that, so I guess that's why we need to get to. Jerry, you're on you're on the call. Maybe Jerry can can shed some light on that or another board member, board of education member. Anybody want to talk? This Laura. So
we did not cut a teacher. We did add a pair. We have larger class sizes we're dealing with. And that was strongly felt that a halftime pair would be beneficial for the larger classes that we are starting to experience.
Alright, so I would you know my thinking here is there's obviously a lot of work to do between the school district, Board of Ed and the town and maybe the board of selectmen involved too to try to figure out how this is going to work but we've got to settle on a number two so and maybe I'm not sure if that's it's the town know, Eric working with the school or if it's the Board of Selectmen working with the Board of Ed, but then somebody's gonna have to kind of get this together and figure out what the impact on the budget really is gonna be. Eric, you have any thoughts on that?
So I mean, I can probably, you know, from my perspective, the human resources component is also one of my bigger concerns, because that's something we don't necessarily do a great job of right now. I've started to talk with CROG, Capital Regional Council of Government, because CROG has just signed a contract with a human resources staffing agency specifically for the small towns. But I haven't gotten to the point where we're exploring what it would really cost to provide those services to the town. That's going to be, I mean, we just signed the contract, Prague did this afternoon. So it's gonna be a little while before we understand what our costs would be. We can certainly approach them for that. We know that a, you know, we know we're looking at, per the Board of Selectmen, roughly one and a half positions. So presumably there will be some savings compared to what we have now. But I will also talk tell you that I've talked to, at least three other organizations that ended up combining school and towns and I've talked to the finance directors and all of the finance directors told me personally that the end result was not a lot of cost savings. What they ended up with was a much smoother organization that was a lot more functional, but it wasn't necessarily, you know, I wouldn't anticipate that combined,
you know, we're gonna be saving a $100,000 by combining those, you know. Part
of what I think I'm getting at is just it doesn't sound to me like there's a process to reach resolution right now between the town and the school district. Right, yeah. I mean I think we have to come up with one and figure it out, so.
Yep. Mark? Yeah, go ahead, Adrian. Yeah, this is Adrian. So Eric and I were gonna try to sit down next week and break out all the job descriptions and try to put together a plan so that we can come back to you as quickly as possible with a plan to move forward. And we will send a copy of that over to the school and see if if they have some input on it as well. Yeah, would think that you need to have it on there and it sounds like there was some concerns. Absolutely. We know it needs to be but unfortunately we've been waiting for them to actually to move forward. They just did that last night so now we feel like we can move forward. Okay. Sorry. So have a question. Go ahead, Louise.
I need a little clarification of that 2% that they're looking to set aside. Is that 2% of the 149,000 that they wanna set aside for that possible special outplacement? And if there's a is there a deadline that they need to know that information by? Is there questions?
I'm trying to look at what is the money they're supposed to be sending back to us? So I could dollar amount is. So I can partially answer that and maybe Laura can further answer that.
The first is that, by state law, school boards are allowed to hold back with the permission of the board of finance 2% of their budget and put it into basically a for lack of a better term, a emergency account similar to what the town has with contingency. That fund currently has about $180,000 in it, something in that range. I believe the board of education is concerned that they have a student currently that is likely to be out placed, is either already out placed now or is likely to be out placed in the future, in the short term, and that that's likely to cost the district, you know, a $100,000 a year or so, and that's not an expense they budgeted up to this point. So is that coming out of the 149,000?
No, that is coming out of the current budget that we're operating under indicating that they will they will underspend their budget by more than 2%. And therefore they're asking for permission to put 2% of that into their essentially contingency
fund. Luis, you may remember a few meetings ago, we had a request to do that for last year's budget, which we declined to act on. I think there's about 82,000 that should be coming back to the town based on that. This would be the analog for this fiscal year. And I don't know that there is any kind of deadline for that. Mean, well, there is a deadline, but I don't think it's until the fall
or or the bid year or something like that. That's correct, Mark. The the the year has to close out in July. We'll then do final closeouts through the month of August, and then the they would then submit that they wanna try to keep the funds at that point. Yeah. But I I'm a little surprised that they're asking for the well, they've got $1.14 $9.09 13 excess. They're asking for 2% of that which would be 81,300, but it doesn't make sense given that they already have a 180,000 in that account.
Yeah and I'll say that my view of this request is that it's just a heads up. You know, we don't have to act on it tonight. We don't have to make any decisions. This is just something that they're giving us, you know, basically a heads up that this is going to occur. I'm sure they'd like a commitment on it. I think that would be premature and unwise on the part of the Board of Finance to go down that road when we don't really know what the future holds in the next three months, much less six or eight, but that's kind of my position. I do not think we need to make any determination on that right now. Any other questions or comments on that? All right. So it seems to me that, I'll say that until we really have better information, there's not much more that we can really do in terms of the school budget. It's just a component of our overall budget. I think we've got an idea of where they've gone. They did make an effort and they reduced almost 150,000 from their last budget. It's just gonna be a roll up component and topic of discussion I'm sure for next week assuming we get the details in time.
Anybody have any other questions or comments on that? Okay, hearing none. I guess we can move to item 8c which is the revised fiscal year twenty twenty one proposed budget from the board of selectmen. This is the one that we had distributed few days ago electronically. It's also in your so I need to pick up the, Eric's been working on it. He and I discussed, my personal opinion is that it probably makes sense for him to talk about the highlights, talk about the impact, talk about any material variances from this year and what the impacts of those are gonna be. As most of you are aware, the original proposed budget came in at about 11% higher than the current budget this year, which would have meant a substantial mill increase. Obviously, that was deemed excessive by both the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance. We were looking for something significantly less. And now with the pandemic upon us, we are obviously looking for a lot less. And Eric, you've kind of summarized it in your document, but do you want to kind of give us your overview on that?
Sure. I'll give you the overview. First of all, this is a budget that was largely presented to the Board of Selectmen at their April 13 meeting. And the board made some changes to it and recommended that it be moved on to the Board of Finance. The Board of Selectmen had recommended that the elementary school budget be reduced by $200,000 The board of education has proposed $149,000 reduction from their current budget. We do not have the final numbers from RAM yet. RAM is meeting even as we speak, but they have pushed back their adoption date. They were originally gonna pass their budget tonight. They have pushed that back to the twenty fifth. So they're going to adopt a budget in about three days. The best guess I have from the superintendent is that they are going to end up with a level budget. And a level budget from our perspective will mean about a $50,000 reduction from the number that is in the budget before you. So AES is proposing $50,000 less of a cut than what's in the budget, RAM will likely come out with a 52 to $53,000 reduction if what their proposal is
ends up. And so the net budget would be basically what's presented to you in this calculation, than slightly less from the elementary school, more from RAM. So just so that we know this budget is proposed as for lack of a better term, a crisis budget, and that we're trying to address the biggest of the town's issues and letting in underfunding the capital funds. So with this budget, we are deliberately underfunding the Public Works Capital Fund, the Fire Department Capital Fund, and the Town's Building Maintenance Fund. And we're doing that just simply because that's basically what we have to do. So we are setting aside money enough to get us through the design and engineering for the bridge over the Hop River on Bunker Hill. We are starting that process or we have started that process already. We've applied for and got the matching federal funds. So we know that we're gonna pay for about 80% of that with federal money, but our take as a town is gonna be in the $450,000 category of which we're putting aside about 160 now to start the the process. We're also putting some money in the bridge and culvert fund because we know we have six to seven medium sized culverts that are in disrepair. Most of them are 50 to 70
years old and they're having problems. We have hired a professional engineer who specializes in that and specifically in drainage and drainage structures to give a more complete evaluation so we can kind of prioritize what we need to do. But we know there are at least two that are you know in some way down the failure mode path. In both cases, the head walls have fallen off and there's significant erosion under the metal pipes. So we're not putting aside enough money to actually do anything other than we could do some emergency shoring if we have to. We're just putting enough money to get through the design and engineering work on at least one of the critical culverts in town. So we I also want to say that one of the long term problems this town has is we spend on the municipal budget side, in other words, non education, about 30% less per capita than our peers. And that overall little funding level has really caused an infrastructure deteriorate and we're going to have to address it this year. So right now what I'm trying to do is this budget is essentially a maintenance budget. In other words, the roads and the buildings will not get any worse, hopefully, but we're not really chipping away at the backlog of work that we need to do. So we have some really good things going for us. The first is we have very little bond obligation. We have a little bit of a bond note for RAM, our portion of the RAM. There's still a bond for that. And there is a bond for AES that will be cleared in either one more year or two more years. We don't have a lot of debt
and we have a reasonable capital reserve and we probably have enough capital reserve that we're not going to need to worry about short term borrowing if we have a significant delay in people paying their taxes either, definitely not with the April quarter, but even the first quarter of the year, which we take in a significant fraction of our yearly budget. If that's delayed, we have enough of a cushion that we should be able to get through that without having to take out any kind of tax anticipation note. So that's really good. Not all towns are in that position. So the other thing is that we are repurposing every fund that we're not actively planning on using. So that includes the Public Works Building Improvement Fund, the new library fund, the AES expansion fund, and the money that is still
in the Times Farm Bridge Capital Project Fund minus the money we still owe for retainage for the contractor as we try to finish closing that out. So basically what we're doing, we can do things a little differently this year just simply because of the governor's directives. And what I'm suggesting is just take all those unexpended funds as well as the 500, well not 500,000, the $415,000 from the unexpended fund balance and transfer all of that to the general fund in next year's budget and then just break out our spending priorities directly. Instead of trying to say, well, some of this fund will go to this fund, some of this fund will go here. We're just dumping everything into the general fund and then funding the most important things out of that. So one of the implications of this budget, and I want you all to be aware of it because this is a departure from what we've done in the past is that we are
using some of fund balance for what is really operating expenses. And what I would call operating expenses is the money we spend the roadwork money because the reality is the town year in year out needs to spend about $400,000 just in paving and pavement preservation. And we're going, at least for this year, we're going to be funding that from the unexpended fund balance essentially. So we are, realistically we are using some fund balance money for operating expenses. And I wanna be clear upfront that that's what's happening. This budget does anticipate a series of personnel changes. Probably the most important is the fourth full time public works employee. As many know, at one point, the town of Andover had a five person full time staff and two more full time summer staff during the paving and construction season. We've trimmed that number down to less than half the numbers of man hours that the town used to have available for the public crew. And we've cut it down to the point where our backlog of drainage and projects has gotten really long. Looking at it conservatively, right now we have a seven to ten year backlog of drainage projects that need to get done. So adding a fourth person
will help us bring that backlog down over time. It's not going be an instant fix, but it's something the towns really needed to do for quite a while. We are anticipating adding a part time senior services coordinator. We currently have a senior services coordinator, but that responsibility is given to another town employee, but we really don't have the time allotted to do a reasonable job of that. And our overall funding for senior services in general is roughly what we fund for one and a half elementary school students is what we provide to all senior services collectively. So it's a pretty small budget overall. We're talking about increasing that, but it's still a pretty reasonable expense. We're having a real hard time keeping up
at both the zoning enforcement officer and the inland wetlands officer positions. We're way understaffed time wise. What happened was our longtime person at that position had been just putting in however many hours it took, even though he wasn't getting paid for it. And so we've been understaffing that position for many years and we desperately need to address it because we're A, getting an awful lot of complaints about that. And B, we're not getting enough through to, we need their services for town projects also. And right now that's being problematic. So the next thing is increasing the compensation for my administrative assistant. Is woefully underpaid based on her job description and what she actually does for the town. And I would also like to bump her up right up to nineteen hours which is the maximum, you know, we can do as a part time person, without benefits. Let's see, at the same time we are decreasing the hours for the tax collector back to a part time position, which it was historically. That is still going to require a union negotiation as soon as you actually approve that, presuming you do approve that. And
as we've talked about before, we are planning on combining the budget departments for the town hall and the elementary schools. Other things, this budget includes a 2.5% raise for town employees, which was voted on and passed by the board of selectmen. And they are the body that determines that. And that doesn't take into account the union employees whose raises are per contract. So the other thing that's gone up a fair bit is the benefits. Although the health care costs premiums did not go up that much, MRF, which is the retirement program, did go up somewhat, not a great deal but somewhat. But the major expense for that is the cost of adding a fourth public works employee. And one of our real unknowns is that we will be replacing the, the person who, the foreman for public works, Ed, will retire. He's slated to retire in November. And so we're going to have two positions for which we don't know what our benefit exposure is going to be because there'll be full time positions and depending on whether they're single or they have families or they're married, our costs, the variability in that cost line is 30 plus thousand dollars based on depending on whether they're single or whether they're married with dependents. So we chose kind of an intermediate value for that.
So we could be high or low, 10 plus thousand dollars on that. So again, this budget is designed to stop the bleeding in the sense that we're funding enough of the maintenance to get the things we absolutely have to do, but we're not really knocking down much of our backlog. And I want to be honest, in that a lot of these things we're deferring spending on, we are going to end up spending that money. We're just not spending it this year. So, you know, we took a bunch out of the capital, which is appropriate in this time of crisis. But, you know, I hate to say it, but we are going to spend a lot of that at some point in the future. The senior center, we took out all the additional funding for the senior center. There is money in the account right now. So we have enough money that the committee can explore design options and get through basically the engineering architecture and design for a new senior center. But we certainly don't have enough money in it to actually fully build one.
That's what we didn't add anything to that this year. The other big one is roadwork. If you're all curious, you can see the roadwork plan on the town website. I put that on about ten days ago or so. Basically, the goal with the roadwork plan at this point is to fund what we can to prevent any deterioration. So we have shifted our budget priorities to be majority pavement preservation. In other words, do everything we can to keep the good pavement good, but we're accepting the fact that we're probably not going to be chipping away at much of our backlog of bad sections of roads in the upcoming budget. The other limiting factor right now is our ability to do the drainage work that has to be done prior to paving some of the bad areas. Because the reality is most of the bad sections are bad because the underlying substrate stays excessively wet and we're getting failure from.
Part of what we're doing is trying to address by adding, by prioritizing adding the fourth public works person, we're hoping to start addressing the drainage issues to the extent we can now. So when we finally have the budget to start repaving, we have that, you know, we're further along with that. As far as permanent funds go, one of the things I did last year was I looked at the fire department. Well, actually they had a budget, so I didn't really have to do much for them, but the public works equipment, and then building maintenance. And what I did was put together basically based on standard equipment profiles for the town and for the fire department, how much the town needed to budget per year for those funds. And so what we've done in this budget is we funded them essentially at half of what we should fund them, which is more than we funded them in the past. So it's an improvement, but it's acknowledging that it's not really what we should be putting aside this year for capital equipment. But at least it gets us somewhere and it's a reasonable, it's a compromise. So that's from like 50,000 foot view. I wish I had better news for you. I will say we're doing a lot better than a lot of towns.
We have very little debt. We have always run this town pretty frugally. So we're just basically continuing down that path, but we are putting off some capital spending that will I guess what I would say is I'm trying not put off any capital spending if it will cost us significantly more to put it off than to do it now, and kind of prioritizing it that way. That's it from the overview, unless you have specific questions for me.
Before anyone else jumps in here, I just wanna point out a couple other things. The board of selectmen had much debate on the budget as a whole. The biggest thing that we were looking for Eric to do and made adjustments to was to not be artificially lowering the tax rate by funding ongoing operations with reserves. So we tweaked to the budget that he'd originally given us to to make sure that was taken into account. So the operating budget that we'll be working off of is funded by taxation, not reserves. So if something changes next year, it means we won't be able to fund capital funds or we won't be able to do any capital projects, but the functional part of the budget that includes staffing and services provided is funded via the current mill rate taxation that we're asking for. So it's basically flat across the board, but it is encompassed in there. So we're not looking at like a fake number. Do you know what I mean?
Adrian, just to jump in for a second. I mean, there's a little bit of a semantic issue there because to an extent the town roadwork, which is under capital, I mean, I think this is what Eric was getting at before. It's under capital. So in a sense you're right we're not actually taking fund balance and funding day to day operations off of that which is a bad move. I think we all agree on that but at the same time if the projection is we need to spend X every year on the roads and it just happens to flow through capital and we take that money from the fund balance, it
kind of is. So it's really kind of how you look at it. Eric, I had a question for you just to get back to the slash and burn that we've done on the capital budget. To the extent that there was one item, just listening to your rundown and the presentations you've given us before, it seems to me the one item that is probably the most critical that if we wanted to look at more closely is the culvert work. Would you agree with that? The drainage and culverts? In terms of what? In terms of In
terms of trying not to kick the can too much?
So here so we ran into one snag this year And our first snag was the engineer that we hired to do this broke his neck this spring and that's delayed. I had anticipated by this time I would have a full blown culvert replacement plan to present to you. I do not. That's delayed at least three months. Fortunately, he is back in operation and he is actively working on that, but we were not where we need to be. My guess is that just looking at the smaller culvert work we're going to do this year and the drainage work we're going to end up doing this year, we're real in looking at permitting realistically, we're probably not doing it this year anyway. So I'm fairly comfortable that what I wanted to make sure is that we have enough money to get completely through the design and engineering for our biggest priority small, you know, medium sized culvert, you know, by next year with the intention of funding one every year or every other year. So I think we're actually okay. I mean would I like more money in that budget? Sure. But I think I can live with it.
Okay so it's really almost a timing thing. Is this something we're really going to have to look at next budget cycle? Correct. Okay. Yeah.
To your point, Rob, yeah, it is a semantic issue. You're you're correct. We do so we do need to do that. But I I think part of our concern is we also don't wanna be in a position where we jump the gun, we get a bunch out the gate, and then we stall out. So we're trying to look at a bunch of different possibilities. Once this audit comes in and we're done and that's settled, we're gonna sit down and try to look at bonding options that we have, whether it's, you know, internal bonding where we actually borrow against our reserves or outside notes and come up with a long term plan
that would encompass both culverts and roads and basically try to do everything at once. We need to get a little more detail on that and and put together a package with everything going on. We felt it was most appropriate to sort of you know, we weren't ready quite ready for that either given the fact that we don't have a culvert plan in place, but once we have that back and we have our bonding answers, our plan is to basically come back to you next year with either a long term plan and a payment schedule that we would need from a tax base or a bond situation and options so that we can address that. But the key to making that happen is to have that fourth person in public works so that we can pass on the knowledge that Ed has gained all of this time to another person and then when he retires to replace him obviously, but having those four guys in place because that allows us to have a dedicated crew of two guys just doing road work that don't get pulled to go down a transfer station and crush stuff, that don't get pulled to go down to the soccer or the long hill field, that don't get pulled into town hall to move furniture.
They're just going to be dedicated public works doing road stuff. So doing side reinforcements after paving, doing skimming, doing sweeping before road projects, doing culvert works, doing basin work like we had to do that emergency repair on the Wells Road. Diane, we got another participant over there. Yeah,
so Rob's like staring at the cat. Could tell him. The cat's killing me. I'm sorry, I lost you completely.
All he sees is a cat in a window. Fairly more interesting than your rage. I knew I lost him when I saw the cat hop up. But no, I guess our point is that that fourth guy is so important to making this plan come together so that way we can dedicate. The more we can bring in house on the road work, better off we're going to be. But we're not in a position to bring in a paver and a paving crew and all that. It's just not practical. But we are in a position to start doing a lot of the prep work, the basin work, the drainage work, so that way we're just paying for paving and we're just paying for resealing and chip sealing and microceiling and all the pavement preservation program that we need to do. So that's why we're a little behind on the total package Rob and we'd like to be a little further along but we're trying to tackle as much as we can without that we can actually accomplish. Understood, thanks Adrian. Okay. Any other questions or comments?
For Eric? Eric, it's Kurt. Correct me if I'm wrong. Are we looking at on the town budget a 2.5 mil increase in the budget? No. You guys? Looks like two.
So we are looking at a 2.0% mill rate increase. The estimated mill rate currently will increase by 0.7 mills.
Keep in mind, Kurt, that one one point five of those mills is Ram. That's that's actually not town. That's Ram.
And and just to clarify, the town budget is a $55,000 decrease from last year. The AES budget is $149,000 decrease from last year. The RAM budget is currently a $394,000 increase. So the net increase is $280,000 which that number is not quite right. It's 61.
I mean, the mill is $2.65, so it's got to be less than that. Right. Yeah. It's definitely less than that.
It's $3.94, so that's 200. It's just under 200. I'm off 100,000 somewhere. But the no, I'm not actually off 100,000. But the bottom line is that the and a mil is worth $2.64, not $2.61. So ultimately that ends up to to be about a 0.7 mil increase.
Mark, are we in discussion regarding this budget right now? Sure, absolutely Kurt. I'm sorry. Okay.
I'd just like to say a few things. Number one, let's all not forget what's happening right now around us. We're all in a situation that's unprecedented throughout the country, throughout the world. Our original request as a board of finance to the AES was $100,000 after their first cut of 55,000 if I'm correct. It exceeded our request by 49 rounded off to $50,000. I know the board of selectmen asked for 200 but myself, and I'm speaking for myself, I'm personally very satisfied with the reduction in the AES budget. Being a lifelong member of the town, there's two major important things in this town, especially for a townie like I am. It's not in any particular order, but it's the kids and their education and it's the seniors. I personally think that this budget here, the school has already took it upon themselves to take care of the kids with no reduction in staff. Myself personally, I don't want to see us reduce anybody in these times. There's enough people losing their jobs, don't know if they're ever going to go back to their jobs, so on and so forth. I'm not comfortable with anything over a zero increase in our budget personally. However we have to get there, and still keeping in mind, I know Scott would probably kiss me or hug me if I said this, but the seniors, we need to keep moving forward
with the community slash senior center. Right now, it's it's it's not gonna, you know, we don't have the funds available, but they can still start the planning. There is money in the fund. I'd like to see maybe a little bit more going into that fund for this year, but that should continue moving forward. The roads, yep, they're a mess. They've been a mess probably the last two administrations in this town and this present board of selectmen have inherited the entire mess of about twenty years of neglect. Here we are in the COVID-nineteen pandemic and we're looking to fix our roads. I don't think we can. I personally don't think we can right now.
Kurt, just to be clear, this does not fix roads. All we're trying to do is preserve roads. I understand. I
may not say the exact right thing, the way you want me to, but I've looked at the different items. Eric's doing a fantastic job putting this together. I'm still for an overall town plan, seeing we have no debt, having been involved in the fire station complex, the school addition renovation complex, all of that debt's been paid off. Any mill increase to the people, especially this year, and who knows what's coming next year, I don't even wanna think about it. But I think it's not
something that I'd like to be part of. We agree with you, Kurt, but we don't control RAM. It's up for the arrangement
of the RAM. In the last two weeks, I've reached out to our two representatives from RAM, Stephanie Bancroft, Dave Gustanian. I reached out to Andy Tierney, town manager of Hebron. Joe Asclar, the new second selectman in Marlborough, and all three towns are having the same issue that Andover is, Abrams having it. No,
it's a little different. Our issue is much different than theirs because our share of the kids up there has gone up dramatically. I understand that, Adrian. Please don't interrupt me.
Just Don't interrupt me, Adrian. All I'm saying is that when you discuss the work that's gone into the RAM budget this year, like Eric had said, he's talking to the superintendent. Stephanie told me she's never been contacted by anybody from the town, whether it be the town administration department, the board of finance department, the selectman. They're on top of it, and she's very sure that the RAM budget, and so isn't Eddie Tierney, the town manager in Hebron, will come in at either zero or a slightly above zero increase. That's the overall budget. That's not Andover's shares, I understand that. We have 12 to 14 kids going there. I think we should be looking at a zero increase budget. No, because it's unprecedented what we have to do even making the decision with no town meeting or anything. I don't know. Good luck.
I'll end it with that, Mark. Well, Kurt Okay. Thanks, Kurt. You don't want to be interrupted. So let me just clarify then. All right. I'll give you a few seconds here, Adrian. Let's talk Unlike other towns, we're going from a 12% to a 17% share of the budget. So our share of the budget is going up almost 5% irregardless of an increase over there. So that's the first issue. And then the second issue is when you talk about roadwork, we're not talking about actually repaving roads. We're talking about just preserving them so they don't get worse. This is not about actually I mean, if people are expecting us to go out and pave roads, we're not. We're talking about literally putting sealers on the roads so they do not deteriorate any worse. But I don't think this is the You asked me not to interrupt you, so please don't interrupt me. So the the issue becomes the issue becomes if we don't do this, it will cost us more down the road. And my example to you would be Townsend Road. We we put it off three years from the time it was bid to the time we did it and it doubled in price. So we can't afford to do that on these other roads. We cannot. That's all I got.
Can I jump in for a sec? You got the floor. Yep. Thanks. So my take on this and this is again just me. You know, we started this budget see that season out in a very different place. We got an eye popping number. We started talking about chipping away at it. Putting aside all that's happened between now and then we've this budget is dramatically less than what was originally brought to us and I understand it's still an increase but I mean just looking at it going through before even Eric went through it just when I looked at the spreadsheet it was very clear to me that this is a treading water budget. This is to keep the lights on budget. Given that the town itself historically is about 20% of the budget, I don't know exactly the figure for this year but it's roughly, it's usually one fifth of the budget is the actual town. And then that the rest of the 80% is education. You know, I don't know where the rest of the cuts would even come from to get us to zero. It's not that I want to bring a tax increase to the town but 2% is a very very different number than 10. I was worried about 10, I didn't like 10.
Two however is a wildly different thing and you know to Adrian's point, to Eric's points that he's made many times, I would hate to see us hack and slash and get to zero only to hurt ourselves for next year for two years from now for you know for five years from now. I don't want to do that you know if we put off you know say we don't fund the equipment funds you know we don't put money away to buy a fire truck or whatever and even now we're reducing but if we don't then we just have to bond more when it comes time to do it and then we pay interest. So it's six one way half a dozen the other, it's not easy choices but I personally I don't know how we get to zero here. I really don't, this is pretty bare bones, that's my take. Yeah,
say just one quick thing to the other differences last year when I was chair of the board of finance, took the time with our board, Rob included, Jeff Murray, myself, Hewitt, we all went through this budget line by line and took out 10% last year. We took a $100 out of that budget last year off the operating budget so that way we could reevaluate and see what it looked like getting through so that we would have room to make these adjustments in staffing that we needed. We took it out to see if we could function. We're able to function but now we have someone in there that can actually evaluate it. Eric's gone through and evaluated and said this is where we need staff because we're not meeting our duties to the town residents. This is where we are having issues with keeping up. So what we took out last year, the adjustments that are coming this year are a
whole full year evaluation of that. So I'd like that to be taken into consideration too. We dropped the town budget by 10% last year, just for perspective.
Just to clarify, the town ops budget, the actual town town. Yes. Exactly. Obviously, we have control of the education. Exactly. But my take on when Eric came back to us this year with the original budget request was that some of the some of the hacking and slashing we did last year, Adrian, you know, it was too much. Absolutely. But we don't we went as far as we could last year. Right. We got some resistance and some pushback, but we went through it anyway and we did it. And then the evaluation of that was you went a little too far on some of this stuff. Well, in some places we hit the nail on the head, the transfer station, we took $25
out and that turned out to be a good decision. We took money out of some of the positions and that turned out to be a bad decision. Some were winners and some were losers. I don't think it was all bad, but it allowed us to make a much clearer budget this year. Agreed.
All right. Well, good input. I think we need to kind of get everybody's initial take on that if anybody has anything else to offer. Diane or Louise, Dave.
My take is I'm still just fuzzy with the numbers on the AES because they still have that addition to staff and I don't even know if it's needed or not. So, and I just want to make sure we're not double counting, you know, software licensing for accounting or anything like that between the two towns if we're going to bring it all into the town budget and just clean that up so we have a good number. I
kind of agree to I think we need to look more into like the workshops that we're going to be doing till we get more information because I hear both sides and I don't wanna see an increase as well. But I think it's gonna be really kinda tough to get it down to zero. But, again, we don't know everything that they're cutting. So I think we need to look at what they actually cut in budget and see if there's anything more. And I know there's someone on let's see. I forgot her name, but she did give a very nice email. Joanne, Joanne Hebert. You have a very nice email kind of showing some of the items that could possibly be looked at. And I was wondering if anyone's gonna kind of look at that as well, what suggestions were.
But I think the board of ed, you know, has, I presume, I mean, it's part of their duties, right, is to dig into that. It's gonna be a little difficult for us, I think, to second guess them line by line by line without a lot of research and diligence, and that's going to be tough for us to do. There are probably some places we can look at. Yeah.
Know, it's open for months. They were able to come up with $150 and I'm sure that took work to do but there's you know, it's I have to say that some of the reports and stuff I've seen, it's not always very clear to me where the money's going and how it's going, but you know, that's I haven't spent a ton of time doing it either. I think that that could be potentially improved upon, but anyway okay good but Eric you have your hand up or you can yeah so I just want to say just the one thing to remember is that you as a board of finance
while you're allowed to change the bottom line number for AES, you know, you really, I mean, you can't be telling them to, you can't be telling them how to spend it. The only obligation you really have is to give them, to either agree with their bottom line number or to give them a bottom line number that you feel is appropriate.
Okay, good point. Thank you for bringing that up Eric. Any other general observations or questions?
The only thing I'd have to say Mark is the basically is a one and a half percent we can't touch because that's RAM. So we're dealing with about a half a percent. And you know I just I kind of agree with Kurt. We need to try as hard as we can to try and cut as much as possible there. I'm just concerned looking forward business wise. You know, I've had to cut 40% of my staff and it's just it's it looks very ugly.
Yeah, and I don't disagree with you. What I would say to keep in mind is that one, if you look at Andover, if you look at the general budget and you compare those to other municipalities, we're underfunded by about 30% in general to start with. And also the general budget took a fairly significant decrease last year. And if you really want to get to a zero budget, and you want to do it just with the town's portion, because that's all you're talking about now, you're looking at somewhere around another 10%, eight to 10% reduction in the town budget. And that's going to be, you know, anything's possible, but you're going to be seriously cutting into the town's ability to function. And if that's where you think we need to go, I would certainly give you recommendations where I thought that effect would be the least deleterious, but it's, you know, a lot of that's gonna hurt, you know.
I'm just concerned. I mean, this is my personal opinion. I think we just need to take a hard look at it. I'm concerned about down the road to tax collections. Know, there's some people that are not going to bounce back from this. I'm worried about foreclosures and just trying to get the tax collections on the other side. And I'm not afraid of taking a hard line position. I'll take the heat in another year when we bounce back and advocate for more spending. I don't have a problem with that. I'm just I'm talking about with what's going on. I think as a board we just need to consider that and try and look at it take a really hard look at it what we can do to try and keep it as minimal as possible. That's all.
Okay, thanks Dave. I personally had a couple of detailed comments and you know I know we're going to go into this later and all but I just want to make an observation and this is probably for Eric and if you guys don't mind me talking to just get into the weeds a little bit. The auditor services, you have a note that that's not yet contracted. Didn't we accept the contract offer from from the auditor so that ought to be locked in right? We did. Okay. So that's just a memo that needs to be updated. Right. Yeah. Okay. It probably won't change the number greatly, unfortunately. Diane, I think we're getting an echo from your phone. Okay, we're good.
So cost of software, the conversion, that's probably something that we ought to talk about when we get into the detail stuff. Guess that's not, we don't really need to talk about it now. Yeah. Tax collector, already changed, you already just explained. Go ahead.
So I was gonna say the software we budgeted based on the packages we looked at, including QuickBooks. And we were looking at a transition cost that was a maximum of $30,000 for the software acquisition, the changeover of the chart of accounts, and going through the process for both us and AES. That number, if we did the transition now and we did it off of the Board of Ed's budget or threw in a little bit from the town side, you could potentially knock that down to zero but you know it the problem is we still don't really know for sure what software package we're adopting So that's a big unknown from my perspective. Okay.
Telephone we're actually budgeting an increase. I thought we were hoping it to go down with the VoIP system we're putting in. So it
wasn't up. It was even at least I thought it was.
Now you had 10.6 in 2019, 2020. We've got 12.6 in 2021. I'll review that. That may Yeah, it's something to take a look at. Sure.
Again, there's to get in the weeds a little bit. Those are really the only questions I have a couple of little things that curious about.
Okay. I'll review both of those prior to the next meeting.
I just think with this condensed schedule is as clean as we can have the next run. It would be to all of our advantages to do that. Sure.
Anything else from the board members on the talk to Eric about the?
'm just gonna ask a quick question. What what were you just talking about? I didn't think that the software was in this budget.
There's a $30,000 line item for conversion to new software. What line are you looking at? Down in capital No, it's under treasurer slash financial.
Oh, you put it in treasurer. Okay. Okay. Yeah, it's your office. Yeah, I
Yeah, Adrian had doesn't have account number associated with it. Yeah, was going to come out of try to get that out of this year's budget using residual from this year's budget. I think Laura mentioned something similar. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. That's
an unknown, I understand it. Just wanted to. Any other questions from the board about specific items or just comments in general? Hearing none for now, I know we'll have to be talking about this again in a week. I guess we'll go on to the next agenda item, which is 8D feedback from the town budgets Google site. My initial take on this is that we probably did not need to read through all of the feedback items in the meeting. Does anybody feel differently? I would characterize them as basically being of a couple of different natures. There's some people that ask very specific questions. There's a lot of concern over the educational budget, lot of concern over the RAM budget, frankly we have very little or no control over, especially this year. It's going to be kind of what it ends up landing on with the Board of Ed. A A lot of people were concerned about that very, very high significant increase we were talking about with the initial budget with the 11%. And obviously we were going to take that way down and we've taken it down tremendously since then. Not quite as applicable. But certainly some concern over the ES budgeting, a lot of concern over the process. Not going to town meeting, was there a way we can delay this? That does not seem feasible. And given the town attorney's opinion, I don't think we have any choice. Believe me, I'd much rather go to town meeting with something than act as a board and make this decision. It's not a fun job. There are some very specific questions. A lot of them have to do again with the educational budget, which really ends up as Eric pointed out needs to be addressed at the Board of Education. We can't control
exactly where they spend their money, but we can set the dollar amount that we think is appropriate.
I think it's fair to point out that we have asked them for help and they've given it. I think it's fair to point that out too. Even though we can't go line item by line item and strip money out of their budget we can go to them and we have gone to them and said, look guys we need some more from you.
Mark, Yeah. I just have a quick comment. One of my reasons of trying to have a minimalist budget is the fact that we can't have a town meeting. I just think that adds to the reason why we need to attempt to do that for the town.
I think that's a fair point, Dave. It would make me more inclined. Know, it's one thing to go to town meeting and advocate for significant increase. It's another thing to do it unilaterally and I get that. Then again, you know, things have changed. You know, it's not like we're going to the town and trying to sell a 5% increase, a 6% increase or something like that. We're down to two. And I don't disagree that we can look at this next week and see if we can get to one, one and a half or something. My only thought is that just understanding what the town budget is as a component of the total budget to get to zero, you know, as Eric pointed out involves real, you know stripping a lot out of the town budget like if
we're gonna do that we're gonna lose the public works guy like that has to I don't know how you do it. No I agree I just say we need to I just want to take a good look at it and it may be unreasonable
I hear you. Yeah, no philosophically I understand what you're saying. I agree.
Dave. I agree with you too Dave and I think one of the things that you know if we were going to town meeting honestly I even given this situation I'd be pushing probably to be more aggressive to right the past wrongs and, you know, and to put us back on a track where we're doing the right things by town and the long term planning for the town. But that obviously without the town meeting and I'm more willing to go to as close to zero as we can. I don't know whether we can get there reasonably, I do agree that we've taken a lot out, I think we have some concerns over the school budget still, know that they've done a pretty, put a lot of effort into trying to reduce it, but you know I'd be trying to talk people into probably a little higher if we were going to town meetings. I think Dave makes a good point. We've got to be as responsible as we can given this situation.
Well, be fair and to Dave's point and Rob's point and yours as well, you're absolutely right. The fact that we're not going to town meeting is definitely an issue. And we've tried to take that into consideration by going across the board as much as we can. But I will also point out that if we were not going to town meeting, the RAM budget is separately voted on from the town budget. So asking the town to completely absorb the RAM increase is not fair because they would if they wanted to have a separate budget, they could. We could even decide to have a budget vote on the town side if let's say we could somehow swing an approval and not get blasted by the state on it. We could do a town budget vote but we still can't force them to do a RAM budget vote. That's their own prerogative. Asking us to absorb it completely I don't think is fair considering they are voted on separately.
Okay any further comments? So I have one further comment and that is internally we've heard a lot of people complaining about the increased costs at RAM and I agree with those complaints. I would have been much happier seeing RAM come in at a three or 4% decrease given the number of students that they lost. But I also listened to the RAM budget meeting and I did not hear a single, a single resident from Andover other than Andover's representative on the RAM Board of Education make a comment asking them to cut the budget, not a single one. So I mean, we as a town have failed in our fiduciary responsibility to give the RAM board guidance. And frankly, we, you know, that's boggling to me, but that's reality. You know, here we are, we're complaining about it, but we haven't actually done anything about it.
So, I mean, the reality is we're gonna live with it.
Eric, can I ask you a question? Sure. The survey that was put out there, I only went halfway through the the meeting last night. All the people that commented on the survey, they went directly to the RAM budget. Were they did they bring those up? Because I know there were people that responded from Andover regarding that.
You know, not well. I only stayed on till like 09:30 and they were still going at it strong then, but they hadn't really read through those comments at that point. I mean, I think they got them to their individual members, but they hadn't never, they hadn't actually. And honestly, Susan, the chair of their board of finance, I had a discussion with her and she basically said, look, we went around all the town. We gave budget presentations. We put all this out there. We got almost no feedback. We're going for it. You know, and that's what she I was pleasantly surprised that they came back agreeing to a 0% budget because the grumblings that I heard were that they were gonna try to be increasing the budget from the, you know, their last published budget because a bunch of them wanted to get some of their pet projects done. So, you know, that's just that's where we're at with that.
If memory serves Eric, correct me if I'm wrong, but their original budget proposal that we originally got was a 4% increase.
It was, but the majority of cuts between that budget and the 1.5% or so budget 1.7% budget that they showed was a math error on their part in calculating benefits. They were off like 3% because they were double counting benefits for basically their entire staff or a significant fraction of their staff. 140.
Yeah. So to really think about it for realistically, they went from 1.7 to zero. Correct.
Correct. Kurt, do you know you were on the call later for the did they ever bring that stuff up on the on the Ram call yesterday?
The the in regards to the people that emailed in or whatever? Yeah. The feedback? No. No. They I don't think they felt they had time to do that.
I mean, I know when you guys had Doctor. Law give the presentation to your board, I gave her quite a few questions both on the current budget and the upcoming stuff, and I had had conversations with her. I can't say that I reached out to the chair over there. I felt that talking to doctor Law was probably the best direction. Having been to a couple of meetings over there and saw the way that board functioned at least. But yeah, unfortunately, I don't think as a town, I've heard the same feedback even from her that in those meetings over the course of the year, except for our representatives, they've only seen three or four residents to anything.
Know I was the only Andover resident that went to the field presentation that was up in Marlborough when they did that.
You know I reached out to Stephanie and Dave, and I received a wealth of information from Stephanie. Stephanie Bancroft, our rep, is the secretary for the RAM board, so she has everything in front of her, and even she couldn't understand of what we were talking about with the large increase that we were showing we were having. But they're more than willing to chime in on any our meetings to listen in. I think it may even take just an invite for that either for the Board of Selectmen or for the Board of Finance. But her and Dave are more than willing to come into the call, now that we're virtual.
Yeah. The the the explanation that I was given was simply that it was the percentage increase that the other towns percentage of students is going down and ours went up because those bigger classes are finally up there and that that will then stabilize over the next couple of years. But this is the first year that that increase is really going to hit us. We questioned her a little bit too on a lot of the fixed costs and why they were looking at a
lot of the contracts they had and could they find ways to reduce it? She And basically pushed back and said, well, I have the same facilities, I have the same fields, the fields are becoming the safety issue. So we kind of heard all that. And I think, Eric, you make a good point. I was on that meeting for at least part of it and didn't feel like maybe I should have chimed in, you know, kind of missed that piece of it, and not being knowledgeable enough about where they were going, honestly, I didn't feel as comfortable doing that as I might have been, but Yeah, when we had that presentation by Patricia Law, it was this COVID problem was not the problem it is now. So it's the other piece of it. But I think we're getting maybe a little bit off topic. You know, it's it's. You know, we're wailing and gnashing teeth a little bit about things we really can't change at this point, so, you know, as much as I think we were all exasperated by this RAM budget and the situation, and maybe, we need to find a way to do that different. I think that was a good point that maybe we have our reps that maybe attend the Board of Finance or whatever meeting and try to ask them, well, how can we impact this more than we are now? Maybe there's ways that they can suggest. Maybe it's just showing up that has can have a big impact. So something to think about. I'm I'm I'm sure they will, Mark. And,
was anybody on a call when they mentioned the that you on there, Eric, when Andy Tierney dropped the the what they call the bomb on them in regards to that DOT project for the the traffic lane through the high school. It was an extra 100 to $200,000 that they didn't expect. Can you shed some light? What's your question?
Yeah. Can you shed some light on exactly what that was about? I didn't catch the whole thing, but Stephanie said it was dumped on him that day.
Yeah so my understanding is they applied for a specific type of funding and it's for a project that directly impacts the school although maybe it has some benefits to the town also. Thought it was the revamping of the traffic flow for the parking lot is self responding to that, the teacher that was killed a couple of years And basically the funding source they applied for was not a funding source that was available to an education system. It was available only to a municipality. Right. So Hebron applied on behalf of RAM, you know, and then basically their initial fund allocation, what they were gotten once they did the, got the actual project cost estimates wasn't enough to complete the work. And so on that basis, the question becomes, what do you do? You know, your two options are either to not do the grant and just refuse the funding and say we can't do it, or you have to come up with, RAM had to absorb the additional cost. And the other thing that was important there is there was zero, what the contractor gave them was an absolute cost with zero contingency built in. So, and I don't know about you, but there aren't that many large municipal projects that make it through without spending any of the contingency.
So the, they also had to put some money into, you know, into a contingency fund if they were going to actually do that project. But
again, that's not something, I mean, I looked at it a couple of years ago. I have not looked at it in-depth.
Well, it sounded to me that they're they're going they're going to spend the extra money, I think, to complete the project because they were committed to that after that fatalities. Okay. Mark, you're on mute.
Thank you. Yep. David, we heard something from you and I'm not sure if there was just background noise or not. Background. Okay, thanks. All right. Well, agenda item here is feedback from the town's website. So we've asked Amanda to maybe have that posted and available. Hopefully you've all had a chance to read it. Does anybody think we need to go further into it? I mean, there's some good points in there. There's some important feedback. I think a lot of it as I said was really before we cut this budget back the way we did. So I feel comfortable with some of what we've done. But anybody have any other comments on it? Rob? I just had a quick question.
Are we gonna let that run between now and our next meeting?
I think until until we vote. Continue to gain deep feedback. Good.
Sorry, I was just gonna say in light of the fact of the change of process. I think it's Yeah, well, it's important. And actually the governor's directive,
you know, states that we should do everything we can, I think to get public input in light of the change of process? So it's even more important now, I think it's good.
Do we think that we have to respond back to anybody specifically for specific questions that they had, or just maybe do a general statement out on the website, thank you for your feedback and give them some kind of, we heard you, but here's the deal kind of thing.
Mark, would the Board of Finance have any objection to us just putting a note that the that, you know, hearing the concerns with COVID or something like that, that the budget's been revised and then the the current budget is as of, our previous meeting that we've now forwarded to you. Would that be okay? Putting it out on the website, you mean? Yeah. So we've made the change, but we haven't actually clarified that that budget that up that's up there is the new budget. The revised budget. I think it's appropriate.
It is on the website currently and on the Google Docs site and it's clear because of the date of the budget there's two budgets the original budgets up there and the revised budgets up there. Yeah. That said, I don't think it's bad to have a little note like at the top,
alerting people to that even though I agree like the file is gonna save the date but I think Adrian's getting at is to flag it for people.
Exactly. Thank you. Fair enough to say, due to concerns of the Board of Selectmen, the Board of Finance and input from the town residents that this is the revised budget and just point it out that way. Sure.
As long as you guys are okay with us putting that up, that'd be great. I have no objection.
Amanda here. I also wanted to point out that I did upload the feedback to the website. I did it anonymously. If you think it should be posted differently, please just let me know.
Can I ask just question in terms of the feedback or the questions that might have been offered? Can we get some sort of a response to that, a best response in terms of, for example, like the RAM budget? Normally, maybe people won't go out and go to every meeting, but they have the opportunity to vote or up and down on the budget. They save it for that point. But as far as all the other questions that we have about the budget, since we don't have the opportunity to vote up and down on the town budget. If, if you would kindly just give us your best answer instead of a thank you for, for, for asking or whatever else, but just try to respond as best you can. That might help, you know, because again, remember we always had the opportunity to vote up and down a budget.
And yeah and without that opportunity if we raise questions to try to answer them fully
to the best of your ability? It's a good question. I appreciate the input. Actually, I think that brings up an opportunity here. Maybe the way we do that is we take the specific questions from the input forms and we could kind of put it in a little bit of a Q and A document. These are the questions that have been asked, and we do our best to kind of answer them. Exactly. Maybe that's the kind of thing, you know, or somebody, and I hate to put more on Eric, but maybe he could summarize answers based on the questions.
And for ease of use, my thought would be maybe to try to categorize them. You know, if you have multiple questions about AES, multiple questions about RAM. Exactly. And we can kind of try to block them.
Right. Yeah. I don't think you need to have You're answering six.
Yeah. Exactly. No. I think because it probably is gonna fall into three or four main categories and they can just have a kind of an all inclusive, here are the four questions regarding the AES budget, and then you kind of bullet point answer them as best we can below that. Right. I
don't think we can get into answering questions about Ram's budget, though.
No. But we can explain the process and kind of what what, you know, what
what the limitations are and kind of what the what the impacts or why it's having an impact. For instance, the things that we've explained on these in in our meetings, the people that have been here tonight have heard about the student ratio issue. Do we know that everybody understands that? That's something we can explain. It's not us digging into Ram's budget and telling them what to do or anything like that or trying to explain why Ram is spending X on Y, you know specific line item. Can't justify the sports fields but yeah. You know right we can't do that but what we can do is explain look Ram brings in his flat budget That means plus X to us because of the student ratio issue.
Yeah, exactly, Rob. That's a paradigm. I just don't want to get us into justifying their budget. That's all. Yeah, and I think I think the same is going to be true with the elementary school budget, honestly. I think that those questions are, you know, we can provide some basic information, but really have to direct them back to the Board of Education. Unfortunately, it's not our purview.
Right, but we can just kind of do an overview and I think that's fair to ask. That's a good input. I think it's fair enough. I will work on that. Thank you, Eric. Thanks, Eric. Okay.
Do you have any other comments on the budget or on the feedback process?
Mark, I had offered before from the town side at least to be available like on a Saturday, whether it's a Zoom call or something if people wanna try to reach out and ask us to answer questions if they do want more detailed feedback. I don't know based on the response that we got on the surveys, if you still feel we want to do that, but I'll still offer that up if we get through this process next week. Once you guys are done with it to then be available to answer residents questions regarding anything that's in the budget.
I'm still well-to-do that if that'll Okay. And that would still that would be a public meeting, right? We would have to announce it.
We we would just if you guys decide that that's what you would like to do, I'll be available for a meeting or we can do it on a Saturday morning or something so maybe more people participate. I know sometimes the night meetings are tough. Yeah. And just be available to answer questions. People can chime in and we'll answer them and we can always record it and put them back out there as well on the YouTube channel we started.
Okay. We'll leave it on the table. Think it's good. Thanks for offering. Okay. Any other comments or questions about the budget input or the feedback process, which is really our agenda item? Okay, hearing none, I'm going to ask that we go ahead and move to the next agenda item, which actually is the addition of an agenda item under eight, new business, that's 8E. That's the appointment of a Board of Finance representative to the Oversight Committee. Melinda Fisch isn't present today, but she actually offered her services. She was interested in that, So it would probably be prudent for us to go ahead and move to appoint her in that to that as the board of finance representative to the oversight
committee. Does anybody so move? I move to sacrifice Linda I mean, to nominate Linda to be liaison for Who
is the second? Was that you, Kurt? Okay. Very good. Any discussion? Since she's not here to defend herself, she did. She did offer. She's okay. I believe you. Yeah, I thought maybe she copied you guys on it, but maybe she just copied the process so I might have missed an email. Alright, maybe not. Okay we'll go ahead and vote then. Kurt. Aye. Rob. Aye. Diane. Aye. Louise? Aye.
David? Aye. Okay, I'll also vote aye. The motion passes unanimously. Okay, we can move on to our next agenda item which is 9A approval of the meeting minutes from our meeting 03/25/2020 regular meeting minutes any discussion on those we have a motion to approve them. I'll make a motion.
Second. The motion to approve Diane seconds let's go ahead and take a vote any further discussion on the motions okay Kurt aye Rob aye Louise aye David. Aye. Diane. Aye.
I'll also vote aye. That passes unanimously also. Thank you. Okay, getting the thumbs up from Amanda. Okay, we'll move on to the next agenda item. That's number 10, liaison reports. I don't believe we have any liaison reports for this meeting. Committees have the meeting. Next item is eleven, board open discussion. I think we've had a fair amount of discussion already, but that is a standing agenda item. Does anybody have anything else they'd like to address? Okay hearing none I guess we can move on to item number 12 which is our public speak. Amanda do you want to go down through the list again and offer the opportunity for the public who's still attending to speak? Yes.
And again I would ask people to kind of keep it concise if you would just out of courtesy and keep it efficient. We do want to get your input but I would like to just keep it as concise and to the point as we can.
Liz? No I'm good. Okay now we're all set thank you. Thank you. Melissa? Lateshka? Michelle? No. Thank you. Helena
I just wanted to say you're all doing a great job. Like you said, we do have to keep an eye on RAM and make sure our comments get to them. How they treat them in their meetings is another thing. Know, we can't tell them to go ahead and we can't tell them in their meetings they should be discussing all the emails that they're getting. But hopefully, the information is making it to them to make a good decision. That's it thank you thank you
Jamie Weber no I'm all set thanks thank you Joann Hebert
I'll try to keep it quick. I just wanted to reiterate that I agree with with you with that in this year you have to be mindful of other people. Probably most of us hopefully that are here are working. Luckily I am working from home but just keep that in mind. Know you've all done a good job. The other thing is I've made myself really really invested in this process this year. I have reached out to Ram. I think all of you know because I copied you and all of this so you won't be getting any more of that and I have been on every single meeting this year talking about them and they didn't unmute me. I was commenting and they kept in I don't know if it was doctor Long that had the mute button that night but I was trying to get my comment in there mister Anderson I will be there for you in that and oh I think my name was brought up about bringing up specific cuts. Just wanted, you know, being invested means I'm investigating other times budgets. I'm searing through them. I'm looking at them. I'm comparing per pupil, you know, that's what I do at work. So I'm really, really,
you know, when I speak of the education budgets, I'm doing that on behalf of trying to help the town this year. I feel like I, you know, from the time I've been here for fifteen years, the town part is always giving back, and we never do ask, you know, in other years, we haven't, you know, kind of asked a lot for our education. We all value it. I value it. This is a year when enrollment is down. Truly feel you can you know, they did great last night. I'm very proud of them. I was not expecting cuts and I'll make this quick, but they have we
are having a hard time hearing you. Oh, no. Okay. A little bit more clear or closer to your microphone. Thank you. Can you hear me now? Not
really. Yeah, it's about the same. We can hear you, but it's pretty faint. Oh, let me turn up my microphone. That sounds better.
Yeah. When we're asking for these cuts, it is interesting that they come back with money from this year's budget. So clearly you know there's money left and you know we're not asking them to be pinpoint but again I am just trying to support the town side this year feeling that the enrollment numbers are down so it's okay to go to them a little bit and ask you know without sacrificing the good education that they get. I'll make more comments along the way I know everyone's tired but there are people out there that are trying to support it. All right thank you Joanne. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. Okay we have Jenny Morell. Nothing from me thank you. Laura Edwards? I'm all set, thanks.
Laura Bush? I cannot unmute you. Please unmute yourself if you'd like to speak up. There you go. I'm good. Thank you. Diane? I'm all set here thank you I think that's all
I for one appreciate the fact that so many members showed up and participated and listened to what the board of finance discussed. It's great to see that participation.
Yeah I appreciate that also thank you Eric and it is good to see I mean we need the input we need to not work in a vacuum and this is the best way for us to figure that out and make sure that paying attention and we're doing the right thing. All right, thank you. Hearing no more public speak, next item would be adjournment on our agenda. Do I have a motion for adjournment? I so move.
Rob's motioned. I'll second that. Louise is second. Any discussion? Okay, let's vote. Rob? Aye. Louise. Aye. David. Aye. Kurt. Aye. And Diane. Aye. Okay, and I'll also vote aye. The motion passes. The meeting is adjourned. I want to thank you everybody and we'll
do it again next week. Thanks as usual, Mark. You. Bye. Take care. Have a good night.