Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Special Meeting Budget Workshop
March 2, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Call this meeting order. Looks like we have the the quorum.
Okay. Before you got on, I said I might leave for about five minutes. We have a friend who's from out of the country and called and said he's stopping by this evening. So at least want to say hi.
That's why we record these, Linda. Very good. Okay, we'll go ahead and call this meeting to order this is the Board of Finance special budget workshop meeting on Wednesday February, I'm sorry March 2. We'll go ahead and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, liberty and justice. Okay, thank you. Moving on to our next agenda item we have agenda item for public speaking. Anybody would care to speak profits to the meeting tonight. Looks like Liz, you're the only member of the public. If you're interested in speaking, this would be great. Can you hear me? Yep.
I really just I have kind of two questions, but one is more, I think, for the AES budget, but the meetings are happening at the same time. But maybe, I could ask that question here and you could maybe let me know what you think about it. I was noticing on on their eight on the AES budget that they give the year,
the budget for the year, the budget for last year, and then the percent increase or decrease. But I don't see any columns for actuals. Why don't we see actuals so we can see what they spent last year and how, how under or over they were on a certain line item. You know, because we hear that they're gonna be asking for another 5.6% in the paper above last year and it would just help to see, you know, understand the contractual stuff and everything, but how much do they really need to spend for other items, I guess is up to question because we don't see the actuals.
Yeah, I think, you know, again, is really q amp a section but I think your, your concern is noted. You know, think it's probably more question for the school but part of the reason is they're not done with the year yet and I think that would probably be part of their answer but I think it's a fair, fair question to talk about. Do we ever see that though?
I don't remember. So my other question We haven't really been happy with the way it's been laid out sometimes in the past.
We hope to see- used be there, the actuals for the previous fiscal year. I do believe there is some guidance in the charter of how the budget items have to be presented so I think once the budget comes to us we can look at it and see what it looks like and go from there. And when, when is that slated to happen, you know, if they approve it tonight, then I would assume would be coming to us in the next few days. Okay.
Okay. And my next question is, what is the status of the, financial that financial, software package that is supposed to be helping with some insight as to how the money is being spent and where it's coming from, etc.
I guess the short answer is that it's in place and being used. It's it's, I understand a little more cumbersome than we would like or hope, but, you know, I don't know how much it's going to facilitate the information availability as much as it is providing some kind of commonality between the school district and the town. But we can it's probably a question for the finance department too.
Sure. We are using Edmunds. We went over to Edmunds officially last July 1 with the new fiscal year. It is a work in progress. The Board of Selectmen made some suggestions for changes they wanted to see in how the budget and the chart of accounts was laid out at the last meeting, which will accommodate. But it is up and functioning. It does have some limitations, but remember this was the lowest cost actual financial software package that was available that would cover the school. The yearly costs were a third to a quarter of what, say, the RAM School District uses. We definitely have some compromises we're living with with the software, but, you know, within reason, it's able to produce what we need. Okay. Alright. Well, thank you. You're very
welcome. Okay. Any other public speak? I see an EB. I don't know if that's up. Okay. Well, I guess we'll go ahead and move on Our agenda. So the agenda item number three is our main focus for tonight and for the next several meetings is the budget workshop for the fiscal year twenty twenty two-twenty twenty three proposed town budget. Eric, you put together a budget summary which you're going to be presenting. Correct. Amanda, can I share screen? Here we go.
So hopefully you can all see this. I'm going to make it a little bit larger. I'm going to hit just the highlights. You guys can do it however you want. You can hold your questions to the end or you can interrupt me as I go and I'll answer things on the fly. Whatever you're comfortable with. All right. So the bottom line is this budget represents an overall one year budget increase of a little over 4% or roughly a half million dollars. Total budget as presented is 12,939,003 and $92 in total spending. So, just kind of back up and say, what are the trends where we've been over the last four years? Over the last four budgets, which starting in twenty nineteen-twenty budget
through this one we're presenting, the total budget has increased from $12,370,000 to $12,940,000 as presented. The total town taxation, which is the portion that Andover taxpayers feel directly, has gone from 9,160,000 to 10,240,000 in that same four year period. So actual spending has increased 5%. Taxation has increased 12%. Okay. So where's the difference? That difference is largely due to the amount of money we're adding to the budget from the unexpended fund balance to offset taxation. As of four years ago, we still had quite a bit of surplus, and we burned that surplus down over four years to keep the taxation lower, not the overall budget lower, but the amount of actual taxation. So in that same timeframe, inflation has ranged from low 1.4% to a high of 7% over those four years. It's been a little over 13% total. So if you look, the actual budget increase has been half of what inflation has been. However, the taxation, what taxpayers actually feel has been essentially the same as inflation. So, if you take the overall budget and you say, what are the biggest parts of the budget? Number one, the town budget is proposed to increase about 10.5%, which equates to about $363,000
to a total of $3,770,000 The Andover Elementary School budget increases 5.65% or $220,000 to $4,120,000 That's presuming that the budget that is being presented tonight is the one that passes, the AES school board. And the RAM budget decreases 1.4% or $71,800 And that total budget is $5,050,000 The reason the RAM budget is decreasing, it's not their operating budget that's decreasing, it's the fact that they are coming off of We are a long way through paying off the bond for RAM. So they're actually going up about $160,000 something like that in operating. But because we're taking a pretty significant bond payment away, the net is a 1.4% decrease. Any questions on that? So town spending, as usual, we break it down into a capital budget and an operational budget. The capital spending increases 22% or $195,000 There's kind of two main cost drivers. The first is that the past four years, the recommended capital budget has ended up getting cut by both the Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance every year. So what we've actually asked for hasn't increased very much. It's just that it hasn't actually been funded up to this point. This year, there are two things that are increasing. The first is the public works equipment fund and the second is in the roadwork fund. So, the public works equipment fund, that's due to the fact that the bids in the numbers we're getting back right now for purchasing capital equipment have gone up really dramatically. It's most obvious in comparing plow trucks. The last plow truck we got in 2019, we paid around $193,000 That plow truck today is two sixty five out the door
built identically to that first one. So, you know, we're seeing things when you can even get them considerably more expensive. And we're getting that both for spare parts and for acquisitions. What's really interesting to me is that when I'm getting quotes back from contractors, it's none of these good for thirty days or ninety days. I've gotten ones where the contractor is willing to guarantee prices for five days. And that's across the board from fertilizer through building supplies. The second thing is that we're recognizing that while we've stemmed the bleeding with roadwork, in other words, we're making a positive impact in the overall road network quality, we're not making progress very fast and we've had to make a lot of compromises to do it. We're also faced with an increase in price of asphalt, and that was before the giant spike in fuel. So I suspect that's going to make the situation either even worse because one of our biggest single expenses is actually the cost of liquid asphalt. And that tracks to some extent with petroleum.
So depending on what happens right now, it may even be a lot worse than what we're forecasting. But it's also six months to a year and a half away, so it's kind of hard to tell where that's going. Those are the big increases in capital spending. So in the operational side of things, we're projecting about $170,000 increase in total spending. However, it's actually kind of more than that, but it's moderated by two things. One, we are retiring the AES school bond. And the second thing is we are just about to make our last payment in this fiscal year for the public works loader. So, those things together are about $120,000 So, without those two items coming off the books this year, spending would be up almost $300,000 in the operational portion of the budget. So, why? So, the first thing is the major expenses, the major increase is in public works. The board of selectmen would very much like to hire another full time public works member that would be hired on as a maintainer one. That cost is somewhere between 70,000 and $80,000 depending on whether the guy is single, married, or married with children based on the contributions to healthcare costs. And the second thing they would like to do is a full time summer helper for public works to handle some of the grunt work and get that away from the higher paid union positions. There's also fairly large increases for both vehicle and building maintenance costs, just because we're having trouble keeping up with both of those right now. Again, because our costs are going up pretty dramatically for parts and supplies. So all total, the public works operating budget increases about $145,000
So that's a pretty huge increase. We can talk about specifics later and justification if you guys would like. The other changes are mainly related to staffing levels. As you know, for the last two and a half years, the Board of Selectmen has been in the mode of trying to reduce headcount and transition employees from full time to part time. Unfortunately, they've really started to feel the backlash for doing that from the public because frankly, we just haven't been able to provide the level of service that people in town actually want. So the Board of Selectmen this year asked me, when I presented my budget, to also present what I would consider the biggest priorities are for staffing. I provided them with that and then they made decisions about what they would and wouldn't consider for staffing for this year. Last year we had attempted to combine the position of the assistant town clerk and the building department admin. Frankly, that was disaster, and we ended up changing course this fall and re splitting those positions,
which has gone a long way towards calming things down in the town hall. So this also represents a series of changes that some that we've made already and some that we would anticipate making in the next budget. The first thing is our animal control officer quit. Actually, what he did is he came back to the town and he said he wanted his pay to be, oh, two or three times higher than it was. So we looked around and in our case, given the cost increase we would have had to retain the existing personnel, we elected to use NECOG, which is one of our neighboring Capital Regional Council of Governments, their shared service for the animal control officer in Kennel. Good and bad to that. The good part of that is that they have professionally run kennels and it's a fully staffed 20 fourseven operation and it's seamless from the town's perspective. The downside is the closest kennel is a fairways away from Andover. So if a dog is or an animal is captured and kenalized, people have to go a ways to get their pets back. So that's kind of a downer. The second thing we did is our mid year this year, our cleaning service quit basically because they got a little bit of a kerfuffle with the town clerk. And as a result, we went out to bid for both a cleaning service,
and then I also looked around and said, Could we do a custodian instead? And we ended up switching from a company, a shared service, to actually hiring a part time custodian. The costs for the cleaning portion are roughly the same as they were. But what we've also gotten is somebody that can do an awful lot of the light maintenance tasks that we formerly were having to use public works or go out to vendors to do. So that has worked out really well, both keeping the library and the town hall clean. So we would like to keep that going. I think everybody's extremely happy with the individual we have. And we've been able to get a lot of the projects in the backlogs of things like painting at town hall,
just a lot of the little things. We've had some drywall repair that needed in the restrooms and things of that nature. So that's worked out pretty well. The second thing is we kind of recognize that the person that was working as the CEO, the zoning enforcement officer in the town, was working way more than ten hours a week for the town. Now, he was kind of willing to do that because he was a town resident, but we also realized we have a lot more need for that position than we had funding. So the Board of Selectmen asked to increase the hours for that position from ten to fifteen a week, which we've done so. Item And number four is we use
a building official as a shared service from the town of Bolton. They actually cover four towns as the building official, official, and then they do supplemental help to a couple other towns. When we first took it on, because we had a fairly limited budget for that in our previous building official only worked about five hours a week. We kind of looked at the size of Andover and the number of permits pulled compared to the other towns they covered. Bolton initially came back and said, Well, this is probably about seven hours of work a week. I just said flat out at this point we have funding for five. So we tried it out at five and we've done that for about a year and a half. But the reality is we're taking up a lot more of their time than we're paying for them. So if we're going to keep them on as a building official, we're going to end up increasing that to five to seven, but that will also allow us to give some regular hours in the building office from the building officials. It'll be a good thing on our end also. And number five, one of the biggest complaints I've gotten from employees the last year and a half has been just a lack of IT support in general. And I can tell you that the last time I got a new computer, I waited six weeks before I had enough time from David, our IT guy, to actually install it and switch computers.
And so what's happening is employees are waiting a long time to get their problems addressed. And it's not that South Windsor is doing a bad job. It's simply that we've only contracted for eight hours a month of total IT time. So basically, we have one person in the building four hours every two weeks. And so, we're asking to increase that by about 50%. So, in terms of personnel changes, those are the major personnel changes. Like everybody, we're looking at really significantly higher costs for heating fuel, diesel, and electricity. Heating fuel and diesel fuel, we're very fortunate in that we have an arrangement where we can lock in our costs considerably ahead of time. And we have locked in for next year already. We did that almost two months ago. Obviously compared to what costs are today, we're locked in at way lower than what our current costs would be if we were just on the market. But if you compare last year's lock in to this year's lock in, it's up almost 25%. So it's pretty significant. I think, yeah, right about 25%. And we know electrical costs have gone up pretty considerably. So we're just flat out dealing with inflation and facing higher costs in a lot of the commodities that we utilize. Okay. So on the revenue side, we did something we hadn't done in a couple of years, which was spend quite a bit of time going through all the revenue streams that we have and kind of updating the numbers. So the flip side of that is, and part of the reason we did that is we've noticed the last couple of years,
we have underestimated how much revenue we're going to take in. So the total revenue that we're expected to take in has gone up about $155,000 and that is due to a couple of things. One, we're taking in more to the building department because we've restructured the fees there. And the second thing is we took in a lot more money in the town clerk's office because there's been a lot more home selling and we do get a kickback basically every time a house gets sold in town. So those two things are hard to predict. They're kind of volatile. So, what we did is we basically looked at last year's revenues, projected revenues from both those things, or basically the last twelve months, and then projected that forward. The next thing on the revenue side is the kind of additional funding we get that we don't normally account for in the budget. The first is the ARP funds. The town last year received just about a half $1,000,000 from the federal ARP fund, we're going to get another half million this spring. The Board of Selectmen voted at their last meeting essentially to allocate 100% of that towards the cost of building a community center with the intention of building this community center without affecting taxation in this budget or the next budget. So, other funding sources we have available, LOTSIP. For those of you who don't know,
that is one of the state standard funding mechanisms for the town. They add money to a fund every year for the town. And then when the town has larger projects they want to tap, they can use that money to pay for it. Currently, the balance in the LOCIP fund is about $141,000 so it's fairly significant at this point. The last time we tapped it was two years ago. We tapped it for the work that was done to reconstruct some of the transfer station.
Isn't that supposed to be targeted mostly towards capital for transportation stuff? Isn't that by the definition? A little more fluid than that flexible.
No. You know what? That's a misprint on my part. It's LOSIP, not LOTSIP. LOTSIP is a transportation fund. LOTSIP is a more flexible fund. So that's my error. I just put a D there when I shouldn't have. The last thing is that we still have a steep grant that we should be spending this year to help pay for road construction of part of Long Hill and then part of Shawty Mill Road. So those are kind of the major funding sources. We did have another grant in with the DEEP to fund a trail design study along Route 316. Just got word last week that did not get funded. So that's kind of unfortunate. We did also this year get a transportation grant that will purchase for the town a new senior handicapped accessible 12 passenger bus. So that's good. That was about a $75,000 grant that we got for that. And that's because of the additional funding from the federal government, that's 100% grant this time around so the town doesn't have to match 20% like it has in the past. So that's been good. Okay. So let's talk about the mill rate a little bit and how this propagates down to the mill rate. So as we all know, the grand list is up significantly
because this was a revaluation year. And as most of you are aware, when you look at the Case Shiller Index in Connecticut, the average home price has gone up somewhere around 30%. Overall, Andover is a little bit lower than that on average. But obviously, some properties, especially in the Lake area, gone up in costs significantly. So, the total grand list went from $271,000,100 last year to $310,000,000. So, given that $310,000,000 and the increase in the budgeted amount, The mill rate for the budget that's presented here would be a 33 rate, which is a decrease of 8% from last year because last year it was 36. Percent. However, the other thing to remember is that the final budget last year that we approved, because the Board of Selectmen had to approve it to get the tax bills out on time before the public actually approved the budget, was higher than the actual one approved and was higher than taxation. So customers will get what on last year would have been a 0.13 mil lower
rate this year. So, actual mil rate this year with this budget would be 32.89 because the taxpayers would be getting the 0.11 rebate essentially. Anybody have any questions about that? Okay.
So if we look at where the big changes come, a lot of it comes from the capital fund allocation. And so, what I did is I put basically the last three years' worth of what was proposed, what was funded, and then what we're proposing now. And then the last column is the current balance, although that's a month or two out of date at this point. So, I'll just go through it. Basically, what we're doing is we're recommending that we spend $115,000 on the Public Works Capital Equipment Fund, dollars 100,000 on the Fire Engine Fund, dollars 60,000 townwide for building maintenance, and $120,000 for the Bunker Hill Bridge replacement. This actually may end up being too low, but it's looking at this point like the design is taking long enough. The bridge actual replacement will get put off one more year. So, we actually have two more budget years to pay for the Bunker Hill Bridge. For those of you who didn't go to that presentation, the latest cost estimate puts that about $3,000,000 just for construction of that bridge. Dollars 100,000 for the bridge and culvert fund. Dollars 75,000 for tree work increased the roadwork fund to $330,000 Town Aid Road, Reval, and POCD implementation fund stayed the same. Reval, you can see we haven't quite finished. I think we have one more bill remaining for the reval, but we're probably going to have 7,000 or $8,000 left over. We have a start for funding for the next reval, which will be in five years. And POCD implementation fund, I don't know why I don't have the total there, but the next plan of conservation and development is due in 2025. So we're going to need to start spending that money,
probably not in this budget year, but in the twenty twenty three-twenty four budget, we will be spending some of that money. We do also have one thing that's due for the plan of conservation and development this year, which is an affordable housing plan, which the state is now requiring us to have. We did have a separate standalone grant that we got that's paying for writing that. That is due in June, so the zoning commission is hustling to get that complete with the planner, Bill Warner. Okay. So one of the things we still plan on doing this year, once we've got the permanent fund set up correctly, is combining basically putting the money we get each year from the town aid road fund from the state directly into the town's roadwork fund. Instead of spending out of two funds, which basically have the same rules attached to them, we're just going to combine the two funds and spend out of one.
Okay? So that is kind of the big picture of where the budget is relative to last year. What questions do you have related to anything I've presented so far, and where do you want to go from here?
Hi, I just have a What's quick the difference between the LOCIP funds and the STEEP grant? What's the difference as far as usage?
Okay, so STEEP grant is Small Town Economic Assistance grant. You apply for those, they're competitive grants, and you have to state upfront very specifically what you want to do with the grant. So, we actually applied for that and got that about a year and a half ago. But we had to complete a bunch of other things before we could We applied for a grant specifically to try to reclaim a couple of roads that were in rough shape and didn't have sufficient pavement thickness to use less expensive money or measures to repair them. So in this case, what we had to do is we had to get the drainage finished on Shoddy Mill, and we had to get the connectivity grant sidewalks and other things completed before we could do that, which kind of pushed that back to this year.
LOSIP is a state fund that the state The money builds up regardless of what you do. So in other words, the state puts a certain amount of money into that fund every year for the town, and it's around $28,000 a year. It's usually put in on March 1. In fact, I just got the notice yesterday. I think that it was officially in, and that number you see represented, if you'd seen an earlier draft, you would have noticed that I had approximately 140 something thousand, and now I give you an exact number. So, what has to happen to spend that money is, first of all, it has to be something that is in the capital improvement plan for the town and it has to be voted on. And then it's got to be voted on by the Board of Selectmen. And then you propose that and it's got to meet a whole series of characteristics. It can be used for most things that the town would like to spend money on. Can't be used for maintenance, but it could be used for, let's say, a heating and ventilation upgrade of the town hall, for instance, or a major electrical upgrade or a paving project or a sidewalk project. But it has to be in the capital plan first, and then the Board of Selectmen has to vote to authorize spending the money for that. And then you apply and fill out the paperwork and you spend the money and then LOSIP reimburses you for expenses that you've had. Does that answer that question? Yep. Thank you.
Yep. In other words, the money for the Steep grant has already been allocated to a specific project. The low SIP money, we haven't made any official determination on what or if we're going to spend that money. Diane?
I would request for budget purposes, I think it's really important. We have a lot of grant funds that we do a lot of different things with. I would love to see a spreadsheet set out with the name of the grant, the amount of the award, what the eligibility criteria is for that grant. And what we spent out of that in this current fiscal year and what we plan on spending out of that in the next fiscal year. Cause I know some will cross the budget year. But I think it's important for people to understand where some of this money is being spent and on what. It would help us keep track because, you know, I I do know when I look at the revenue report that we have a connectivity grant that came in at $297,000, but I have no idea what that's for. Okay.
What we plan on doing with that money. So if we could get all that information in one place, so we have a handy reference chart so we know what's going on. And then And then the current balances in those funds. And when we put a balance in there, we have the date as of date so we know what we're talking about? And that would help me understand where things are moving around to.
Okay. What's the lower limit on grant size you want to account for? I mean, we got a grant last year for a couple $100 to buy trash bags.
I'm not planning on putting that in the spreadsheet. I think things we actually have to apply for that we have purpose for our project for. Do know what I mean? So I would say to me, I would like to see anything 5 or $10,000 and up. I don't know. Okay.
The reason I'm asking is the town ends up with a lot of little grants. For instance, there's four or five grants every year that the town gets for the town clerk's office, for information storage, for lots of little things. I mean, do you want to account for all those? Do you want to just tend to be $1,002 $3,000 grants? Or do you want to just account for the big dollar stuff?
When I look at getting money for an expense and if we get this grant on a fairly regular basis, I want to make sure we're accounting for it in our taxation calculation and that we're not raising taxes for expenses we're funding with a grant.
You follow what I'm saying? Would those be included as the revenue on the revenue side or no?
Well, that revenue report doesn't include everything that I'm sure we'll get. It's just hard to, that's why I kind of want to list an all inclusive list so we can at least get an inventory of what we have. And so we can kind of, when we get to the revenue side of the budget, we'll have something to look at and figure out, do we have everything we need in there? We may, we may not, I don't know until we get the information. You know, and if we get a lot of little ones, if a lot of little ones add up to $50,000 well, that's still a good chunk of change. So, I guess I don't know how many little ones have. It's a piece I'm missing.
Yeah. Okay. Okay. That'll take a bit of time to put together, but we can definitely put that together. Any specific questions for Eric? Yes. Yep. Joanne?
Just looking, I mean, obviously, just on a broad view, because I've gone to a couple other meetings, so heard a little bit more. But is this this is probably the biggest spending increase that's been asked for in a long time I would think because there are spending increases everywhere across the board and I know we're going to be dissecting it so maybe you know in coupling that with the bonds coming off like you said so now Eric because you know Andover elementary will no longer have that you know almost a $100 and then I know ram ram spending you know there's a slight decrease but spending is up I mean I just think that all of us are really it's gonna take a lot of work to really get into this after listening to some of the workshops and stuff so I guess I don't have any specific questions yet because I think we'll handle it as a board but is this the biggest spend in and since I've been paying attention I think this is the biggest the town side
and not even I don't even want to say the town but it's a big you know the biggest that I've seen am I wrong? Would it be in 500,000
overall? That's the largest increase I've seen. I don't know. No, you're not wrong. But remember,
last year, by the time it was all said and done, you know, you got the town down to less than a 0% increase. So
Oh no, I mean, I can fight either side. Mean, I'm just saying, know, when I've gotten to every single meeting, so I don't know, you don't have to, know, write, we start at a certain point. It's just, it's gonna be interesting to see, we're just gonna have to go thing by thing, know and I'm glad we have this big overview because know Diane and I and a few of us have been present at some of the other meetings so every single thing that's asked for there's good reasons behind it I don't doubt it what I'm saying maybe I'm not communicating correctly it's just gonna be tough you know deciding where and when and you know everybody makes valid arguments for what they need and it's you know it's gonna be an interesting season because when you take the mill rate as you've summed up here right it looks like it's coming down a few points but the overall grand list is more you know take an individual bill like even if you look at you know we definitely need to advance the town I get that but I don't even looking at and this is just throwing it out there and I just did little calculations I mean mine would be over 10%. I'm not saying it's not needed, know between ten and fifteen, I'm sure everyone across the town, so on top of a revalue, it's not the little increase to get to what we need. I don't know if I'm making sense, but probably because, yeah, so it's just a big overall
increase in spending dollars.
Sure. And one the problems you always have is revals always create, in a sense, winners and losers. That's tough because the whole reason you do reval is to equalize individual assessments to what the market is for a particular property. Whenever you do that, some things go up more than other things. But overall, I mean, what we control is we control an overall budget. To some extent, we have a little control over revenue, but not a lot because the portions of revenue that are really discretionary on the town are only two things, really. The first is how much we charge to go to the transfer station,
which total is, you know, at $40 a pop nets the town around 35,000 a year. And the second is what fees do we charge for the building and land use? We have zero control over any fees and any revenue stream that comes through the tax collectors or not the tax collector. Well, the tax collector's office and the town clerk's office, because those are all completely set by the state we can't make any decisions. So for practical purposes, our revenues are what they are and we're not going to make much of a change. The only thing we really have control over is our fiscal spending, how much we budget. And that's going to be a hard thing over the next six or seven weeks. And you guys are going to have a hard time figuring out, you know, a hard task figuring out what's acceptable and what's not to you. You're right. Is something that's going to be tough to get through the town. There's no question.
I understand where all the questions are coming from. Everybody's made good points with why they want things, why they want additional employees, know, and all of that. So I guess, you know, we will dive into it I mean I'm going to step back and let my senior people here you know lead the way but since they were asking questions I just I wanted to ask that I knew that it was the biggest one I've seen you know the biggest move to try to come So let me ask one additional question because it was talked about tonight. With the staffing needs, and I know that this will be a big thing going forward, we might even have a night on it, with the whole public works and adding staff.
Sure. I just the plan so I know that you're gonna have they want almost a six month person so that's another guy that's gonna come on as a the summer help at a at a decent wage I mean I've listened to the back and forth so hopefully that's going to alleviate. Is there a plan if a whole another guy besides the summer help comes on that they're going to be out there every day there's really that need for that worker I'm not saying there is or not I just want to be convinced on that end I mean there's a plan I know you have Jay at the top as a supervisor right four guys I believe besides him and a summer helper for six months. Right.
So let's step back and say, I mean, if you go back in time, the town crew was five personnel, plus a supervisor, plus typically two summer helpers. Over the years, we methodically chopped that down to the point where we had five or correction, three employees total, including the supervisor, because Ed Kasich was essentially made the supervisor in public works when they fired the previous public works director and chose not to replace them. Then a couple years later, they cut one more position from public works. And frankly, they've cut it back so far that there is an enormous backlog of work. I mean, realistically, have a ten year backlog of drainage projects to do right now. Can you Roadside drainage.
Sorry, Eric. Can you do all that like in the winter months? I get it in the, you know, like today, like today was warmer, but like what would today's work look like? And, I get it. I understand buildings and grounds and all that.
So the last week or two, the Public Works crew has been building a new bus turnaround on Basola Road. Basically, what happened is the bus had always used the last driveway on the road and they got new owners. That owner put four or five cars there and there was no longer a way for the bus or the plows to turn around. So we got an agreement in place with both landowners there. They gave us permission to develop a turnaround and public works. Basically, we cleared the trees, got rid of all the stumps, ripped out all the topsoil, built up and compacted the base and sub base. And now we have a gravel turnaround for the town. So there's some things we can do. There's actually quite a bit of stuff we can do in the offseason. A lot of what we do in the offseason, for instance, is maintenance like this year, the two or this week, the Public Works has been replacing
the main bushings on the backhoe. The backhoe that we have is like fifteen, sixteen years old. And basically the main control arm has gotten really sloppy just because the bushings wear out. So we've been doing a bushing replacement and that takes quite a few guys because it's a heavy thing, you know, and you know, it's a fair bit of time to do. So they're definitely busy in the winter. We normally don't do drainage projects when the ground is frozen because then you're likely not to get it compacted correctly after you've done it. The plan is basically to start back up on Shoddy Mill Road as soon as the ground is thawed. That's somewhat problematic in the spring because it's the wet time of year. So it's harder to work then And you have more issues with inland wetlands and water courts approvals for projects. There are some things we can specifically do only in the driest part of the year. But you can look at it and say in the summer, we typically have a three month block
where we do the majority of our drainage work and drainage projects. But if you look at on a yearly basis, all the tasks that Public Works needs to complete, I mean, we've got somewhere around five fifty catch basins. Each one of those has to be cleaned out every year. We have a whole series of waterways, which is where the catch basins and the water and the piping lead to that have to be addressed, not every year, but you have to do a certain fraction of them every year. The roads all have to be swept. We have to push back any organic matter that's accumulated on the sides of the roads. So, there's an enormous amount of background stuff that public works needs to get done. I mean, if you take one thing, if you take roadside mowing, the town of Andover basically has one guy working full time from the first week of May to sometime in October, just roadside mowing. And that gets us basically two full mows of all the roads in the town, plus the rail trail and the ability to push back a little bit on the last pass.
It seems crazy that it takes that long, but roadside mowing is one of the things that the town is just constantly doing all summer long. And we don't keep up. I you know, we're, we still have problems with sight lines on intersections, even with one guy mowing full time. So,
yeah, I really appreciate. I just wanted to understand a little more. I don't doubt there's reasons, you know, and needs and that just explains a little more. Definitely always could think of the summer and then on and the tree trim, you know, I just didn't know clearly maintenance, vehicle maintenance and everything, but I know, I don't think you have I know you have guys that are mechanically inclined like you said I've heard that in meetings so I know you have to keep up all that equipment you have to you know get your parts do whatever I so I just needed a little bit of backup on It seemed like a lot, but if you've had that number in the past, so thank you for that. Yeah.
We do not have a full time mechanic anymore. We haven't in about ten years, But Zach, who's a maintainer too, is functioning as our mechanic or as our lead mechanic anyway. He is a trained diesel and frame mechanic. So we are lucky to have somebody that can do both the roadwork side of things and is a good diesel mechanic. We do have limitations because we're so small. We can't afford to buy the diagnostic equipment. For Peterbilt trucks, it's like 5 or $6 a year to pay the subscription fees to be able to use, even if we buy their diagnostic equipment, their electronic testers, you know, they still charge you something like $6 a year just for the privilege of, so, you know, there's a lot of things we can't do, but we try to do as much as we can in house. And we're fortunate that we have between the whole crew, we have Tommy, who's a really good welder, Zach, who's a really good mechanic, and Rich is really good at repairing all the small engine stuff. So like weed whackers and lawnmowers and all that stuff he can completely repair. So we do do a lot more stuff in house rather than pay to ship it out. But the more you do in house, the more man hours you chew up doing it.
Right. Yeah. Thank you for that. Can, since we're on, can I ask one more question, Marcia? Yeah, course. Since we're on the public works situation, I mean, know we're going have different, I know you guys were talking about that piece of equipment, the skid steerer, is that what it is? Yeah. We talked about that at one of our meetings. Someone brought it up to me when I was asking about it because I work with people that do this stuff too. Is there a reason why, because from what I understand, the one that you want to get doesn't have tires or wheels, right? It is a wheeled unit. It's not a tracked unit. Oh, it is the wheeled unit. It's not the- Correct, Correct. You can drive it a little from job to job if you want to. I know you talked about transporting it and right
for smaller. Yeah. Mean, don't want to get crazy. You're not going to drive the thing all over town, but you know, you can drive it short distances certainly.
Right. The main use for that again was what would I know that it can pick up things. It has attachments. It's got a bucket loader and all of that. Just so I don't know. Meeting but yeah, so
it's it's it's a pretty multifunctional machine and what's important is it's just it's much faster to operate than either a backhoe or a loader. So it's in it's smaller in scale. So it gets in a lot of places that the loader and the loaders too big to get into. Sorry. We have the ability to We're also intending to use that for snow removal because it's got some real advantages just being Specifically small and for sidewalks. That's part of the reason why we got a narrower one because we're anticipating we're going to end up doing some clearing of sidewalks potentially with that. Also have an awful lot of wood posts in town that the town is going to be stuck maintaining both for the ball field and potentially for the rail trail. And one of the things we've needed for a long, long time is a post hole digger. And so the easiest way to do it is to kind of do that as a skid steer attachment. So it's a fairly multifunctional little unit. The unfortunate thing is I don't think we're actually going to be able to get it this year. I think we may order it this year, but in talking to them, there's because we're not going to have potentially the funds until July. If we wait till July to order it, we're not going to get it for about a year because there's so few build stop bots left. If we ordered it right now today, we could get it built this year.
But if we wait, we're not to get it. I know I was talking to Ron Bisson today he's also got a bobcat on order. And he said they've told him he's not I mean, he's already put the deposit on it and he knows he's not getting it for a year or eighteen months. So that's one of the problems facing public works right now is just the ability to actually get equipment is getting really tough. Thank you. Yep. Others? Diane?
I have another request for information. I just want to get this out there in case it takes a while to put it together. Since we have a lot of money tied up in salary expense, I have seen in the past that we had a salary worksheet. I would love to see a spreadsheet of the position, the current hourly salary for this fiscal year, what the proposed hourly salary is for the upcoming budget year that we're doing. So we can look at some historical trends here and include the new positions in that as well. We can kinda I'd like to see that on a spreadsheet so I can kinda And I've seen you do a spreadsheet of all the positions and the hourly wage and what their yearly
Right. And for me, it would be very helpful on the positions to know whether that position is union or not.
I have already started that scaled down spreadsheet. So I do have it, Eric. Am working Yeah, on
I was going to say Sherry can probably supply that to you. The latest copy I have doesn't have all the decisions that the Board of Selectmen made. So it needs a little work to go to you, but it's basically done. And that's what we present to the Board of Selectmen. We can certainly give that to the Board of Finance. Yes. You can identify
on that spreadsheet for me on the union positions, what the required contractual increase is. So I know that it's required versus optional.
Okay. And I just want to follow-up that to Joanna
let me Louise has had her hand up. I'm gonna give her a chance. Louise, do you have a question?
Yeah, I'm looking for her real hand like this. It's a virtual hand. Sorry. I just wanted to know if Andover has received all any type of eligible COVID related economic relief, all the monies that we're entitled to, and if there's anything out there that we may end up getting later on that might impact the budget?
So the one thing that might impact the budget, and it's an unknown at this point because the state has not released the rules for it yet. And it's not COVID related, it's infrastructure related. So there's a pretty large pool of money for dealing with bridges in culverts that's trickled down from the federal government to the state. What we don't know is what the rules are. I am working right now to get a couple projects into the design stage to kind of maximize our ability to take advantage of that funding. In a perfect world, it will be retroactively apply to bridges that are in the federal local bridge program, but are not yet actually in construction. That has the potential to save us quite a bit of money
for bridge funding. Same thing with culvert funding, but it's just the rules aren't out there yet. I have no idea what the rules are going to be. So, I'm trying to position ourselves to take advantage of it. But until such time as they actually say how it's going to be spent, I don't know how that's going to come out. Okay. That's some good news. Thank
you. Joanne, did you want to ask something Just a quick follow-up on the salary question. I noticed on some of the spreadsheets, did everyone there was no unsettled contracts last year so everyone got their raise correct like I believe whatever was voted for the non unionized people they got a raise I know I remember and I think all of the unions still got a raise, correct? For you know, for whatever they were going to get. Correct.
Okay, I wasn't sure if I saw on the spreadsheet, Sherry maybe could say some of them say it just wasn't figured in the spreadsheet. So I saw some places that showed 6%
for people that I know didn't get 6% or something. Okay. So I can, I can explain that Last year, because we were going into budget negotiations, I had recommended to the board that they consider a 3% kind of across the board pay increase? They made the decision specifically for the union members that were in MEIU to not budget for any salary increase because there was no contract in place for whatever reason. Now, that wasn't what I wanted to do, but that's what the board voted to do and that made it all the way through the budget process. But because the board agreed on a framework for a contract with the union and agreed to a 3% raise for those union employees and the union agreed with it, it went into effect July 1, even though there's no official contract yet with that union because the town didn't want to have to pay it back retroactively. We had already indicated as our bargaining position what we were looking for in terms of yearly raises for that union. So based on that, the fact of the matter is in the current budget, we budgeted for a certain amount,
but the board knew full well that they were going to end up paying more than that amount, but they didn't want to budget for it. So that's kind of where we're at. They've there was saved the money already, though. Right. So they did get a salary increase, and then presumably next year they will get a salary increase, although that's still obviously somewhat indeterminate. So it totals 6% over what was budgeted, but it's 6% over. That's two years worth of increase, not one year.
Let me ask a question a different way to make sure I kind of get this. Sure. So currently in our current fiscal year, what we have as a adopted budget item is less than what we're currently paying everybody. That's what I'm thinking. But we are going to be over expended on those positions. Yes. And two or three months ago,
in one of the things I sent you, was explicit with that, that that was going to be Well, that's why I want a spreadsheet that has all this stuff in it so we have it all in one place. Yeah, we'll give you the personnel cost spreadsheets.
Yeah. Thank you so much, Sherry, for putting that together. You're welcome.
Yeah. We put that together every year for the board anyway,
the board of select. The contract still isn't settled quite yet?
Well, it is and it's not. We formerly agreed on the terms of the contract, so we have the thing hammered out. What we don't have is the final language yet, which the union was supposed to have back last month, but they have not actually physically produced it. But we've come to an agreement on all basically the points. The union has the changes they wanted. We have the changes we wanted within reason. We both agreed where we're at.
Okay, anybody have any other specific questions for Eric? I've got a couple, Eric, and these actually tie back to the actual budget and spreadsheet. There seems to be kind of a discrepancy in the rate increases you are that are set for like electricity, for example, it's like 83% for the the old town hall, and it seems like we're almost under budgeted for a couple of things. I don't know if we're just trying to reflect reality.
Yeah, in cases like the old town hall, for instance. So we were anticipating, well, yeah. Increase we're projecting for that basically lines us up with what our actual spending is on a yearly basis. You know, I think we've been anticipating, we keep anticipating that we're going to get rid of that building, you know, entirely. And it seems a shame to be paying for electricity when all we do is provide minimal heat to the basement and have functioning overhead doors. But the reality is the drivers can't get the vehicles in and out without overhead doors. So you have to keep electricity in the building. You have to keep minimal heat in there because it at least knocks the mold down a little bit in the building. What we really need to do is just get rid of that freaking building and get the vehicles elsewhere.
Are you talking about the old firehouse or the old town hall? I'm talking about the old firehouse. Okay. All right. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, it's budgeted currently at $900 We've already spent $1,200 this year, so it looked kind of odd. We're clearly under budgeted last year, and so I get that part of it. For spending $1,200 a year, you've only got $900 for next year. Maybe that's that's for which one? That's for
Let's see the electricity for the old firehouse. It's line 383. Just something to look at. I mean, at this point, it's been passed. Right? So
it's just some of the question is when we're budgeting for like utilities, are we looking at our current usage rate and applying the new charges to that. Looks
like it. For example, if you look at, know, you look at, for example, electricity for the total town garage, you know, we were budgeted, you know, this year at $3,000 but the actuals like 40 to 46. So clearly we were, You know, we were under budgeted for for that I think probably and so and there's a big increase there's an 83% increase in the budget, but it seems to line up pretty well with the actual expenditures this year for So, some of these lines, it seems to make sense, but on others, it just didn't seem to line up. It just wasn't, you know, it wasn't across the board 25% increase, that's what made me start looking at it, and that's why I was asking the question. Nothing is egregious, I just was curious about some of the processes. The one for the old
town hall or the old fire station didn't quite seem like it was adequate, frankly.
Yeah, okay. We can certainly revisit that. Yeah. But as much as possible, what we're trying to do is line them up based on the utility increases we've seen this year and then projecting that. But I mean, I'll be honest, there's so much uncertainty in that. I could easily see us off 25% or 30%, even when we're trying to guess well, frankly.
But we could really go back and look at our usage, our meter readings for that period of time and apply the new rate to it. I just wanna make sure we're not trying to annualize figures that are based on the highest use months like the winter months, because you don't have the same electrical use in the summer as you do in the winter.
Just want to make sure we get our annual usage and then applying the new rates to it. Yeah, no, we're generally trying to look at one year's data for that. And the same thing when we're trying to calculate what we actually use for fuel, we go back in and usually what I do is I pull, for heating oil, I look every year and say, Okay, how many heating degree days was there last year? How does that compare to an average year? What was our fuel usage last year? Are there any contributing changes that are likely to increase and decrease and then forecast? But, know, I mean, it's always a guess, frankly, and there's a fair bit of uncertainty in it no matter how carefully you do.
Another question. We have a lot of accounts we're not using currently, things like fuel additives and stuff. Are those going to continue to appear in the budget? Can we get those cleaned up?
So the reason they're in this year is because we're changing chart of accounts. Next year's chart of accounts is truncated quite a bit, but because we're comparing year over year last year to this year, those kind of have to be in there because in some of those cases they were in last year's budget, but not this year's budget. So that's really why. I think we can get rid of an enormous amount of unused line items next year. I don't think we can this year. Okay. It
just makes it cleaner and some of them didn't seem to have values neither one. Yeah, there's some that I agree with you, Mark, there's some that don't have values in last year or this year so those could go. I think everyone's in agreement across the way we should reduce the rows in the spreadsheet and yeah, it makes it easier for everybody I'm sure Sherry and
Eric agree 100% last specific question I have, at least at this point is the brush power removal under the total transfers under the transfer station expenses this is row five eighty five if you happen to be looking at the spreadsheet. So I'm a little confused by the note there because the note says consider this making an accruing fund we only grind every other year and it's about $14,000 Right, but we spent $14,000 this year. So do we need to budget for this next year?
Or that's you why selling $7,000 So we didn't grind this year. We, I don't think. How come the expenses No. There We had an overage
for that brush pile in last fiscal year. Oh, okay.
All right. I see. Yes. So this year to date we have not expended. Right. Yes. Okay. Correct.
That the brush pile is one of those stupid things. I mean, that's one I would think that honestly we it's the cheapest way to do it is to spend about $14 every other year, because the mobilization fee for the equipment is high enough. You know, we either spend around $10,000 every year or we spend $14,000 every two years. Actually, it's like $9,000 if we do one year's worth of brush pile. So, that's one where you're right. We could have potentially taken it out of this year's budget and put it in the next fiscal year's budget because we're probably not going to grind this spring. We're not going to grind until the next fiscal year. But by then, we will have gone two years and we're going to spend the $14 again. So, I've kind of suggested we would be smarter doing a permanent fund and just fund the damn thing at $7 a year so it's consistent from budget to budget and then just spend what we have in it. That's been my take on it. The Board of Selectmen did not agree with me, though.
So basically, in absence of that, assuming the future is reflective of the past, then we're going to end up having a swing of $14,000 every other year. Right.
Or literally every year, one year it'll be up, then it'll be down, it'll be up, it'll be down. Correct.
All right, understood. Okay, I don't have anything more specific now on these accounts. Anybody else have any specific questions for Eric?
I do have there are some accounts on this spreadsheet that don't have complete account numbers. So they have little x x x's for the last three numbers. So just you know, that's just one thing to get cleaned up if those are active accounts.
That's if they pass. I will be assigning account numbers to them. Okay. And so if they don't pass, then it's a mute point. I can certainly do that now, but wanted to see how far along in the process we get and whether some of these accounts stay or they go. So I'm willing to do that. If you want me to do that, that's fine.
Mark them on my spreadsheet, of course, but I'm not going find it. Oh, so I'll just give you an example. It's in the public works department three zero one, and it is the salary temp public works and salary overtime public works. They don't have account numbers on there. So we had those accounts last year, didn't we? So why wouldn't there be account numbers there? They have numbers in there for last year for actuals. So yeah so it's line 433 and 434 on the spreadsheet. Look at the line numbers on the side. Okay. There are specific questions for Eric or Sherry.
Any suggestions? Typo. Let me ask this question. No. Same public works. Account number 435, vehicle maintenance. So it's line four thirty nine on the spreadsheet. It says department request $62,000 Is that supposed to be 32,000? Column g. No. It's not, actually. And I can get you board but it says board of Slack and approved request 32. Then Well, that's because they knocked it down.
They have it down? Okay. They knocked it down. Okay. So that is correct.
And if you knock it down in your column, that'll be last two. So Okay. That's how it flows.
I didn't think they adjusted any of the department requests. That's why I'm asking. I didn't see them make any adjustments. And I went to virtually all of the meetings.
Can I ask a question? Are we in the middle of waiting? Just air We with
can certainly look at that and try to get to the bottom of that.
Okay. I know the problem we have this year with vehicle maintenance because of that expense that we had in there. And we're we have an overage this year, but this is for next year. Correct. So
I think I'm pretty sure the 62,000 covered two things that are big ticket items for vehicle maintenance. The first is that the main belt on the sweeper needs replacement. And that's around a $6,000 item. Because if you remember, we opted to buy a used sweeper instead of paying
I thought we were paying that out of this fiscal year as part of, we knew that when we bought the sweeper, I thought we were bringing the sweeper in and doing that repair.
Well, we did everything but that. We did do a bunch of repairs. We did not repair the main belt. That was one. The second was, know, still have an issue with the mower head for the sidearm boom flail mower. Jay wanted us to consider the cost of replacing that in this budget. And that was, I think it's about a $15,000 mower head.
Would be capital, not maintenance then. Correct? Well, but you guys have tended to
call that maintenance, not capital. I mean, so, I mean, I guess technically it could go either. Because it's not a new piece of equipment? It's Calling it maintenance. I I don't know what we just thought.
A piece to a mower, essentially. Right. I get it. Yeah. I can supply you the breakdown for the vehicle maintenance because Jay did a good job of putting all his budgets together. So I can just get you that information about what he As had put down
we go through this budget, there's going to be things that are going to pop up that we're going to want detail over on the column in the notes section of what's included in that item. Do you know what I mean? For reference, because some of these numbers are self explanatory unto themselves. We're gonna need some little notes.
Yeah. Understood. Understood. And I would suggest that since public works is one of the biggest line items in your total, When we go through this, when you want to review that, we'll just bring in Jay Tuttle. Jay Tuttle can be the primary guy that reviews it with you because he knows it. I have a fairly good idea of what they're asking for and why, but he can give you the details better than I can. Certainly.
I just have one other quick question. It's just going back to a note I saw on the spreadsheet and it was about capital expenses in public works. And I think it had to do with the building and you have a little note over there based on the list of things that Jay wants to do. And I can't remember where that list is. So when we get to that section, I guess as long as we.
Yeah. And I mean, here's another one. I mean, Jay requested it and the board went along with it. But I mean, part of the reason that I had put in, I had switched from individual capital fund, not capital funds, but capital expenditures for each individual building to one common building maintenance fund was to do a better job of allocating resources. So, we can certainly revisit how much of this really should remain in there You know, and have that discussion because that's not necessarily an area where I agree totally with Jay either.
I mean, conceptually having one building maintenance fund that covers all the town buildings, as long as we have itemized postings in there that says for what building it's for, we can always get the detail when we need it. Sure. Yep.
It doesn't have to be within each department, so to speak, if they have a building. Correct.
Yeah, I mean that building will be a money hog. There's no question you could spend an enormous amount of money bringing that up completely to a more modern standard,
but you know, there's just only so much money to go around, you know. We'll find a grant for that. It's a historical building. It's a 100 years old. We gotta find some money to bring
back to its glory days. See, I don't think you, I think you want to keep that one kind of on the down low because you have a public works department,
you know, in salt storage in a floodplain. So, I mean, I think you want to limit the state oversight of that building, frankly.
I have a question. Under advertising 01/2027, is that basically just advertising in the River East or what else comprises of that?
No, that's majority advertising in River East. We have an enormous number of legal notices that we're obligated to put out every year. And they're not inexpensive. Now, you know, and it's part of it is the way we account for things. But remember a lot of that, even though it shows up here as an expense, it's really paid for by other people. And I'll give you an example. There's a public hearing coming up for the Dollar General that's trying to build in town. That has to be noticed twice because there will be a public hearing with that. And then afterward, we're going to have to publish a notice of the Commission's decisions. So we're going to end up spending money for three legal notices and we're going to pay for all of them, except we're not actually paying for them because we're charging the applicant for it. But that shows up in building department fees under revenue. It's not directly correlated to what we pay in advertising. So, that's one of the issues that we have is understanding that although some of these things show up as expenses, they're expenses we pass
in large part to other people or entities. So
wouldn't that show as like a plus and a minus? The revenue side should have it in the building department fees. And then we have the actual expense. Right. Nothing wrong with that. Right. Yep. So That's what we do. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. That's fund accounting. Find out.
Joanne, you had another question or you had Two hand
quick questions. Wasn't there a year or maybe last year the assessor didn't take an increase so that the assistant assessor could get an increase. And I'm just noticing on here that it looks like we're adding something back in. That's it's small and it can be looked into. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong.
Yes, the assessor for about three years running, actually one whole contract's worth, gave up his salary increase if the town agreed to increase more than the standard, the salary of his assistant. But that did not take place this last. The increases in July, he did get an increase in July, but I think it was his first increase in about four years.
Okay. All right. Thank you. And then can you remind me what is the cutoff with the hours now? I heard Sherry mention it in one meeting for getting benefits. Is it twenty hours or thirty?
It depends what benefits you're talking about. As of the new union agreement will make the cutoff for single person healthcare twenty six hours for MEIU. That's the only one that's been actively negotiated. So, it'll be interesting to see how we do with the other union. MRF, by state law, cuts in for anybody that's employed more than twenty hours. We don't have the option to change that.
Right. And I think I saw somewhere the MRF rate for this coming year. 18%. 18%?
In this budget it's figured at 18%. We also don't have a say on that either, unfortunately.
Oh, right. I understand. And so that's 20 anybody twenty hours or above will get the MRF and the retirement plan. Correct.
Okay. So then so the benefits you said, those contracts, it's not written out yet. They're currently active contracts, but it's not really specified? So,
right now there's a difference between, currently in both union contracts, states twenty hours is the kick in for healthcare. The town is intending to move to 26 for that cut in, looking forward. Because trying to do it retroactively to union employees is probably going to be a nonstarter. But will be the goal is to push that out to 26 per what the Board of Selectmen want to do. So we've got MEIU to agree to that. It remains to be seen whether we get that through with AFSME or what we have to give up to do that. But that will be what the town will be attempting to do. And then kind of do that for non union employees. Currently, there are no non union employees in that twenty to twenty six hour window. So there's nobody that that would apply to other than union employees at this point.
Did you say there was a certain amount of hours when sorry and I'm sorry if I'm a little tired and you just said this. It any kind of like the health insurance there's no cut off or you're offered single coverage and then once you hit thirty hours or something you can get the family did I remove? Correct from thirty and up you're eligible for
single or single plus spouse or single plus family. Below thirty hours, currently between twenty and thirty hours, you're eligible for basically employee only. So no spouse, no kids. Thank you. Yep.
Which brings up the other interesting thing is that you know, each time you jump, like there's a big cost difference between a twenty nine hour a week employee and a thirty hour a week employee, a huge cost difference between a nineteen hour a week employee and a twenty hour a week employee currently. So,
you know, but the other thing is, is that, especially with MRF too, Eric, if, if everyone gets, and I don't want to say anyone isn't entitled but if that's a big consideration we're it's almost like 20%. It is. There's no question. So when we you know gets back to that cost conversation that we have a lot with you know, and I think you've done a good job or the town as a whole has done a good job about getting some of the salaries where they should be from what I see posted. But when we always talk about some of the salaries being less, the benefits are very good, You know, some of them. So, I don't know.
Yeah. I mean, the one real advantage to MRF is that there's so many towns in Connecticut on MRF and it gives municipal employees the ability to work in multiple jurisdictions. So there's some definite advantages from the employee's standpoint, not so much from the town's standpoint. It's a pretty expensive package from the town's standpoint. But the problem is that being in MRF and trying to get out of MRF is extremely difficult. I've been having conversations with our labor attorney about that and what would happen if we try. There's multiple towns attempting to do it right now. Basically, Murph and the state has sued all of them.
So his advice is to hold fast the next couple of years. Let's see how all these court cases propagate through and what happens to the towns that are trying to actually get out of MRF and what conditions get applied to them before you even consider it. So that's kind of where we're in a kind of a holding pattern for that.
It's definitely an all or nothing because we've talked about that last year. I get it. Yep. Thanks.
Any other questions for Eric? Any general discussion? It's a lot to digest here. It's going to be an interesting schedule. I think everyone is aware, or if you're not, you may, Amanda sent around some things. It looks like, we have an opportunity to have, here from the Ram superintendent on the ninth and the AES superintendent and Board of Education chair on the sixteenth. So the next two budget meetings are going to have very specific focuses on the school and the RAM budget. So of course, we can continue to talk about the specifics of the town budget as well if we choose. Keep the agenda for those open. Anybody have anything else? Yep. Eric?
I just wanted to say I did get a note from Val, that the budgeted amount that we have in that budget is what passed tonight by the AES board, which I assume Sherry could have probably the same thing.
Oh, I would love tell them that, but Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to steal you. That's okay. That was where I was coming from, that meeting. Yeah, that figure in your spreadsheet is definitely correct as of this point.
Okay, all right, good. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, Diane?
When we get to the revenue tab of the spreadsheet, I kind of really want to know where the twenty twenty one fiscal year actual revenue numbers are because there's not a column for it. So I think maybe some of the column headers may not be labeled correctly. Do we have that data.
Yeah, because that that year has been audited and done and put to bed. It's not audited, but we should have unaudited numbers that we can have in there. And it says right there. That's audited. But it says proposed revenue.
Oh, twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty one. Okay, right 2021. Yes, not 2021 but twenty twenty twenty.
Yeah. Okay. And that's 2122 with '20 '21. Okay. So column F. Yes. Yeah, it does say proposed should that maybe the actual or no? It looks like round numbers, so it's probably not actual. Right. So we need the actual numbers in here. I'll add another column. I would just be hold by with the last spreadsheet,
last year's spreadsheet. So yeah, was right. I mean, we can do it, but just understand that they're not audited numbers. Right. That's fine. We feel better than the proposed revenue probably doesn't really add any value, but yeah.
One of the things that I'm going to want to dig in on the revenue sheet now is how we come up with these proposed revenue numbers and having a little bit of more detail around that. I think it's important for us to understand how we came to that conclusion. You know, based on our actual collections, you know. Okay. I mean, ones specifically?
For example, let's look at prior year. I think this is uncollected taxes. 01/2008. Well, the last revenue report I have shows no year to date collections. So I have no idea why even a $100,000 is a good number. I want to understand the logic behind coming up with that number.
So all three of those were based on taking the last twelve months of data we had and saying what was actually collected in those twelve months for
me. Why do have twelve months for 2021? I don't know what we've collected for 2021
fiscal year. So you'd probably run a rolling twelve month, though, wouldn't you, Diane?
Right. I mean Well, we have the year before $71,000 on here. So what was last year? Then we'd have the two years to look at. Because it's only $71,000 I wanna know how do we make that leap to a 100? Where are you seeing a 100? Not audited proposed revenue, 100,000. I don't know. What what row? Row nine. Prior year. Prior year. Oh,
okay. See. So we have audited number of $71,000 So that should be a real number. The next year, I would assume would be the numbers we're missing, the actuals for year ending 2021. And then going forward, we want we put 155,000. I don't know how we even got to that number. I wanna see how we got to that number.
So give me the data. Well, some of them have to be projections because there's not
Somebody has to come up with some logical thought process for that number. That's a $5,555,000 dollars Well,
if you look at what I put in the notes, it's because I took the last twelve months of collection data I had and summed it up from the tax collector's office. Then Robert We were the insurance. So that's saying in a twelve month period, we took in those three values for interest, for liens, and for prior year taxes.
So, Eric, I think what would help with Diane's looking for is again, would like to see the data. It's just a data point going forward if in the notes for row nine, it said that the last twelve months collections was $154.09 21, then the rationale would be clear for you know where that 155 comes from. Round number it doesn't look like an actual value that I think if you provided it with what you're basing on that I think that would make it clear it hurts that makes sense Diane.
Yeah, if I had the actuals, you know, even though they're unaudited for 2021 fiscal year 2021, then it would make more sense to me, because I don't have a number to look at. And I don't have a revenue report that the Board of Finance got that shows any collected. Last revenue report I have is from December. It says zero. So So just give me a revenue report that shows me what we've collected. I'd be perfectly happy with that and get some actual numbers in there. So that's all I'm saying is just getting, I think putting the actuals in for the last fiscal year, even though they're unaudited, would clarify a lot of these numbers. Yes,
I agree. I'll put it in. And I'll also get you in a revenue report. I was working on that yesterday.
And I can get you. I just have to get into the office to do it. It's in my budget files, all the information from the tax collector for what I based those three line items on.
And we have tracking when we get to building permit revenue, number of permits we issued every year, right? So, have that data.
We do and we don't. We have a period where we don't have very accurate data. We have good data from we have really good data from the time we started with Permit Link. So in this case, what I did is I took four and a half months of data from Permit Link and just extrapolated it to twelve months for the building department.
Do you have any idea what we did last fiscal year? We have a dollar amount, right? But we don't know how many permits that equates to. I know we raised the fees last year, right?
Well, we changed the fees a couple of times. So, of it is that, again, we chose Permit Link because it's cost neutral to the town. The problem with Permit Link is it doesn't have it's not as tailored necessarily as we would like. And some of the things that we had originally changed our fee schedules to just weren't workable with that system. So, you can say that the fees that we're charging now through Permit Link, that's why I chose to do it that way, because I think that represents what's most likely to be next year's. But what I don't know and what's a completely variable number is how much building is actually going to take place next year. I mean, that's a total crapshoot. I mean, interest rates go up 2% or 3% from where they are now.
I mean, we could collect a quarter of what we collect. That's like a trend line on the number of permits would be helpful if we had it year over year, but we don't have it. So Yeah. We
run about 400 permits a year for the building department.
Other questions, suggestions? One thing I'll just point out, it's again a housekeeping thing, it's minor, but on the revenue tab and sell G55 and H55, there's two comments in that. Those comments that I put in the last budget files. Take these out.
You don't you don't apply to this budget, they want to delete those. Other questions or comments? Where are the fees or the burning permits going?
I don't know, but you know what? That's such a little amount of money. I wouldn't even bother it personally. But we show an expense. Right? Yes. We do.
I wouldn't care if we didn't show an expense. I mean, I know it's not a lot, but created a lot of activity in town over that kind of over the burning permits.
When you say expense, are you talking about the fire marshal? Or is there a We pay an official a fee for doing the inspections above and beyond their
We don't pay them anything, to be honest. All we do is we basically turn over however much we collect in fees to that person. So, if we charge $30 for a burning permit, we give Scott $30 basically. Mean, I thought it would be easier to just tell them, you know, you work for free, you collect however much money you want from the person. Let it not touch the town so we don't have to account for it, but we can't do That sounds a little bit like extortion. Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure if that would What could possibly go wrong? But basically, that's just a complete pass through Yeah. To the individual.
But you're still cutting him money, so it's gonna show up on the thing with an unbudgeted item. So if we don't budget for what we're gonna pay him, it's gonna show us a variance all the time. I thought we were budgeting now for
I don't know. I didn't see it in this budget. So I could have missed it. There's a lot of roads. Let me look for burning official. Okay.
I thought we actually added the burning official to that. What's the number? I don't know. I'd have to find it.
Yeah. We'd have to look. Possible we didn't add it. Right.
For some reason, I thought I put them under the fire marshal thing, even though it's not exactly a fire marshal thing. Fire department.
Fire Marshall. Yeah. Fire. It says burning official comp. Is that what we're talking about? Yeah. What line item is that? Line item is 405150. And it says fire burning official comp. $95
I'm sitting here talking and saying that and I'm muted. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and the note there says burning official pay per permit used to be part of the road crew form of responsibility. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So we are charging. It does show up in terms as an expense. Right. But you're right. We're not showing it as a revenue.
Someday if everybody wants to burn the town down, you know, we're gonna have a lot of revenue off of this.
Other questions? There will be more at some point. Do you have any general discussion? We have a lot of work to do here, obviously. We have a lot to hear from the schools, talk about their budget, and then we have to get down to the nitty gritty line by line.
Just gonna ask if that was our plan to kind of go section by section, listen to both school presentations the next coming couple weeks. And then will we break it down or are we just not even at that point yet that we want to decide those things?
I mean, I think so. We're going to have the know, obviously we'll have the presentation, the RAM is kind of a courtesy thing, right? Yeah. But, you know, clearly the AES presentation is important. You know, and then I think it is incumbent upon all of us to look at the budget detail fairly closely. We've had a lot of specific questions tonight. It's a little tricky because so many things have moved around, right, compared to the last budget season, just because of the restructuring of some of the accounting and etc. But a lot of the explanation is there. We've talked a lot about other explanations tonight. The question is just, do we have concerns about the level of spending in any one area? And if we do, then we need to have a discussion about those areas and make some decisions. I think that that follows the present, you know, will probably follow the presentations from the school, but it gives us a couple of weeks to digest it, look through it, you know, we can certainly submit questions to Eric and Sherry in advance of any meeting so they can be prepared and know what we're
going to ask. So I think that that makes sense. And then we follow from there. Does that make sense?
A chart of accounts cross referencing the ones that got consolidated. Is that done yet?
Working on that as well. Okay. That was today. So as soon as I have that finished, I will email that to the full board.
I just went through here today and I just had a hard time figuring out without taking out my calculator and adding them all up, which ones got collapsed into this new number. There's no, sometimes there's notes on the side, sometimes there's not. I think it's good if we're showing account numbers that collapse that we have a reference on there because if the public looks at the spreadsheet, they need to know that too. You know, in the notes section. Yeah, these four accounts are now all rolled up into this one account going forward. Okay. If we have specific
questions, Eric, you were going to say something. I was going to say in some cases in the budget and the notes column, did put specifically in public works notes about what rolled up into what. But you're right. It's, we do need that, that crossover that shows exactly what it is. Correct. Anybody want to guess where gas and fuel prices are going at the moment? The magic is can a
give directional prediction. Yeah. At least in the short term. I'm not a betting man.
So, and if, if any of you have any reviews or comments about the budget book, I realized the thing is long, it's going to take you a while to go through. But if you have comments or corrections or things that you think we got wrong in there, please let me know because unfortunately some of that I wrote long before some of the decisions that were made and I tried to go back and make it current, but there's no question I'm sure I missed some things in there.
I just want to say I think you did a good job on that. I mean, I think it's going be helpful for people that aren't involved in a lot of the meetings, know, hopefully if they take the time to read it, it really, it came out good. Mean, I hear a lot of the things but you did a good explanation so hopefully it'll help the townspeople. Yeah, so nice job on that. Sure, thank you.
If you don't have anything more specific, I'm going to propose that we move on to the next agenda item, which is correspondence. I don't think we've received any other than the unofficial word of the AES budget passing, we'll look forward to that. I guess you could say we did receive the budget from the Board of Selectmen. Any other correspondence or anything? I think this is a placeholder primarily in case we receive input from the public about the budget process or the budget. Okay, it looks like no correspondence. We will move on to Item five, which is public speak, and I don't think we have any more members of the public present. Item six in the agenda is adjourned. Anybody want to make a motion to adjourn? Linda, you're muted. Make a motion to adjourn.
Okay, I made a motion to adjourn anybody want to second that. I'll second.
Linda seconds any discussion. Okay, we'll call for a vote all those in favor of German say aye. Aye. The opposed? Any abstentions? Okay, passes. This meeting is adjourned. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Good night. Thank
you, Eric. Thank you, Sherri. Have a good one. Have Take care.