Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Regular Meeting
March 23, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Let's call this meeting to order of the Board of Finance at 07:01PM. And let's do the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge allegiance to the flag, The United States Of America, and to the republic for which under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Let's see. I do not see anybody on here for public speak. Oh, here's Rob is just starting to collect. Hey there. Hi, Rob. Alright. We got Rob. Alright. Okay, let's go. Okay, so I don't see anybody for public speak. So we can get that. Does anybody have any additions or deletions to the agenda items? I don't have any so. So absence of that, I hear none. Hi, Anne. Yes?
One quick question. Do we have to add or mention if we received like an email from the public? I mean, I'll bring that up at some point, but I mean, just a small overview of it. Do I have to mention that now or?
We do not have anything on this agenda for receipt of correspondence. I guess we did not anticipate that. So
We could treat it as public speak, I guess, if you wanna mention what was in it. Right? I mean Right.
So we do at the beginning or the end? We have two public speaks, we can do it at I the
guess I can do it at the end. I mean, I just wanna make sure I follow the rules. You know, if I receive something, do I mention it out loud? I mean, it'll be brief and, yeah, I'm happy to mention it at the end. Okay. Alright. So we'll put that down into public speak at the end.
And then the only other thing, you know, I'm sure you guys all got the same email I got from Amanda. If that's still my take is that still the Board of Selectmen. That's a Board of Selectmen thing. They have a special meeting tomorrow where they're they call to deal with that. So Good. I just, you know, didn't wanna didn't wanna act like we weren't aware of it or we weren't dealing dealing with it if it was somehow in our court, but I didn't think it was.
Thank God, we got enough to do. I do think we have plenty. And Jo Anne,
I have a good question. Is that question, is that correspondence in regards to budget? Because should that be directed over to the website? So, it's recorded? Oh yeah. I
don't know how many people get individual emails from the public. I think if someone's emailing us directly, I would encourage people to go to the budget email that we have set up so we can get it all together. Some people don't wanna do that because they just wanna email one person because they don't want it public. It's a fine line. Don't know, but I think if you're getting information from the public, I think you should share it with the group. So we at least understand what people are thinking about.
Okay. Yeah, that's why I, Louise, that's why I thought I would bring it up and it's just general questions. I think there'll be time down the line for them to ask the questions, but I definitely wanted to mention it in case I'm supposed to being my first year on the board. I'm just doing the correct thing, thanks. Gotcha. Does that work for you, Louise? It does. Thank you.
All right. All right. We are on to item four, the town administrator's report.
So I have no report at this point. I don't think, I think everything I want to say we're going to cover within the budget discussion. Unless of course you have questions for me.
Does anybody have any questions for Eric on town administration stuff? Nope. Okay.
I do a very quick favor to ask and that is you all, if you make a motion, just make it slowly because I'm also doing the minutes for this meeting.
Okay. Hopefully, don't have to make any motions today. Make it easy. All right. Finance department report. Sherry, can you walk us through the finance reports and give us highlights of things we need to be concerned with, what we're looking at?
I gave you a copy of the revenue report in detail, 2022. And this one is for February, the month of February. Going through this, I just wanna point out the telephone access revenue for $5,000 That's telecommunication companies' personal property tax payments. We get a letter in from the connecticut.gov, Patrick Sullivan, saying that municipalities will be receiving property tax payments from SNET and AT and T. And they give us the amounts for each vendor and then a total amount that we'll receive from twenty one-twenty two. We had budgeted $5,000 We're slated to get $4,257.63 When does that come?
Any day now, actually, because let's see when the the email we received at the end of February. So I would assume that sometime before the end of March, we should be receiving that payment.
Sorry, did the email say what we would get for the next year?
Did not. It just said 2022. Okay. I can look up a little further. I know they had twenty one-twenty two, and then they had 2021. So I verified that we did in fact receive the payment for 2021, which was 5,096, I believe. Last fiscal year. Okay, last fiscal year. Yeah, last fiscal year. Just wanted to verify and make sure that we got in what we're supposed to. So we did, and then the only tab underneath was the twenty one-twenty two. So that's information, just so I know that we will be receiving that money. And then the historic documents present in grant. It's a land records preservation that is given to municipalities to preserve their records in the town clerk's office. We did receive $5,500 and municipalities get this every year to help preserve their historic records that is kept in the vault. Okay. And
then on the second page, under miscellaneous, I looked that up And there was a credit there, 420.48 that I need to reclassify into the tax account. Some reason it was put in that account. As miscellaneous taxes, it should not belong there. And I will be journalizing that in the month of March and putting it where it needs to be. And that will go under current grand list one zero one
account. So ECS, we did receive half the amount so far. We're scheduled to receive the other half over the next few months. And I don't think there's anything else out of the ordinary.
I just have one question. On the prior year's taxes, we don't have anything recorded under year to date revenue.
Understand. I took care of that research that problem today. Okay. And what happened was it was booked to an accounts receivable. When the money was received, it was automatically debited to an account receivable for different years, 2015, 2017. They had different accounts receivables for each year that they Right. Received Okay, so what I have to do is I have to take those receivables and ask to make a journal entry adjusting journal entry and pull those amounts and put them into prior year taxes, because they are in fact prior year taxes for 2021.
The prior year is that we received this year. They go in this year's numbers, but they could be from any of the previous years. Right. Exactly. That's what I mean. So
I talked to the auditor about it. He said, just pull, do an adjusting journal entry, give me the adjusting journal entry when we're doing the audit. He said, we'll make sure to record that in the records. So it did go appropriately to an accounts receivable. It's just that it wasn't booked to revenue. Okay. So what I have to do is pull it and reclassify to revenue. And
just make sure that our revenue tab on the spreadsheet is correct too. Right? Yes. I I am I did today. Okay.
And then the same thing with interest. When I came on board in March, I recorded the interest and the fees properly in the accounts that they should have gone to, which was revenue 103 for interest and revenue 104 for fees. Prior to that, it was recorded again to an accounts receivable earmarked for those two categories. So I will go back and I will do the same thing as reclassify that from those receivables to their respective accounts, one hundred three and one hundred four. I'll give all the documentation to the auditor so that he includes it in his audit, And I will reflect and it's already reflected on the the spreadsheet moving forward, the 2021.
When you have all those revenue accounts cleaned up, could you just run an updated revenue report and just shoot it out to all of us so we have Yeah.
Yes. I I didn't have it as of yet, but I will be making those Yeah. Entries tomorrow. So I can do that. I can rerun the revenue report for you. So I then when I finish doing that, I'm gonna recheck. I'm gonna check this year's on 2122, and make sure that that's appropriately recorded as well.
So the revenue sharing account, I know we budgeted $20,000 We've only gotten $3,000 Does that money come in later in the year? Is that something we should be looking at? Or do we have it and we just haven't found it yet? I was told that it does come later in the year. Okay. Right.
I'm going to pull a state report that gives us all our payments to double check. Okay. Make sure when in fact we if to make sure, first of all, that we didn't get it, and I know we didn't because I have not seen come in. But then the other thing is I'm going to look at previous report year to see when approximately it will come in. Okay. But I think it's going to be later on in the fiscal year that we'll receive that.
Sherry, can I make one suggestion? Sure. And that is we have 239, which is labeled telephone access. Every time I look at that, I never understand what I'm looking at. You didn't just did you just see here? What I said as far as what it is, right? But what I'm saying is, you change the name to reflect what it is? Because telephone access to me doesn't I don't really understand. You know, every time I look at that, I don't understand what that is. Sure. I can change it to telecommunications tax payments.
Perfect. Something like that. Is that okay with the Board of Finance? Just want wherever possible these things to make sense and to be easy to understand what they are. Right. So it's telecommunications personal property tax. Right? So Right.
Yeah. I I'm I'm in agreement with that. Let's let's make it make sense. Okay. Absolutely. Thank you. You're welcome.
Okay. Also in the packet, I did give you a detailed 2022 expenditure report. Again, it's for the month of February. And after that, I gave you a general ledger trial balance to just show all of our accounts that we have in there. And then a check listing as far as February goes. February 1 to February 28.
Can I go back to the expenditure report? Yeah, absolutely. I just want to Current get out of my expense, thank you, thank you. I love having that there. But yeah, that in, like
when we have transfers. I am going to put a transfer in and transfer out column in between so that we have like a amended budget column as well. So I'll be able to add those two as as you suggested. And then I'm going to put a notes column in at the end. I'm gonna add I didn't get a chance because I just came back from vacation on Monday, but I'm gonna add that notes column and all the notes that we have put forth in your spreadsheet Okay. With the detail. And then the other ones that I know about.
Okay. Other just quick question about format now. We lost our subtotals by department here. Like, the control totals have no percentage used now. Can we get those back put in back in there? Yeah. I'll put them in. Okay. And then also just for format, when we go to the next page, we have no column headers as we go to the pages.
Remember I put this in Excel so I what I have to do is I have to build it, and I have to add those things, and I didn't have time to do that today. Okay. Yeah, we just need that because it's hard to understand. You still want it in Excel, right? This is good in Excel?
I like it in Excel, but it comes over as a PDF. So when I say it's an Excel, I would like and I know if you wanna send one in PDF to be the official one that can't be modified and then give us one in Excel so we can then I can. I can do that. And then one in Excel so we can make our own notes in it. Right. Okay. Okay. Because this is now this isn't a PDF of an Excel. I I can't modify it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I gave it to Amanda in Excel, and she did it into PDF to send it. So
I will make sure that, you know, comes over in Excel next time, and I will send you the Excel version right now. You know, tomorrow morning, I'll send it to you so you'll have it. Going down here. Yes. On the different accounts. I want to point out the contracted software maintenance tax collector account. 438. 0111438. We did receive the refund. And we received it in March and deposited in our account. So in March's report that will reflect, it'll be, we will be whole in that account. And we received a total of 11,448 thousand 3. Some of that is to do with postage.
So that will go to the postage account and the balance will go to this account, I'm making up
what the tax culture and the assessor. Okay. Yeah. So it's fixing the tax collector line.
Right. With that, we're going to fix it and it'll be fixed in March. Okay. And that'll fix that. I just want to let you know, we did receive the total payment and we're going to be making that adjustment to that account. Perfect. The annual audit for the auditor is correct. We expect to get another invoice from him from him. Excuse me, dollars 11,000. He will be showing up tomorrow morning between 08:30 and nine, and I will be working with him and his account manager all day to finish up what he needs to finish up. Mostly he's focusing focusing on on the town. The bulk of the town is that he has to tie everything up. Into.
And I have to run some more reports for him. So I'll be working with him all day.
Okay. Just want to let you know. So we have one payment left for the $11,000. Yes.
Yes. So we're not going to pay that until he gives us the report. No, he doesn't bill us until he's all set. He gives us a draft and he sits down with us and goes over it and you know. Does he have an exit interview with you? With me and Eric. He's going to schedule one.
Can you let me I would like to attend that. Can you let me I'll make myself available. Tomorrow I will be talking to him.
I'll see when I'm assuming that's a conference call of some sort.
What's that? It's a conference call or a Zoom meeting or Yeah, something like that. I would assume. Yeah. So he's only coming out because there's a lot of things that he can't really do by scanning documents and things like that. He's got to come in person. And I'm glad he does because there's a lot of documents that he needs to review and that can't be scanned quickly. So I just wanted to bring you up to speed on that one. So what do we think? Maybe by what's? Because the extension is March 31.
Okay. So he's got to get it done by the end of the month, right? Yes. Yes. Before the end of the month, actually. So
and, you know, like I said, to him, working with him tomorrow and I'll work continue to work with him till he's he's done. And we get it wrapped up. Let's see. I'm trying to see of any other things. The Software Maintenance Town Office Building, It's 120 Nine-four 32. I'm sorry, 439. Software maintenance. Town office building?
All that. Town office building, the software maintenance count 439 it ends. Town office Okay. Software maintenance.
Is 7501Point60 in the hall. And that's due to point and pay software for the building apartment is also in there. We don't have a line item for that. We hope to
maybe take a look at that. We have a new piece of software that we did not budget for. Is that what we're saying?
We just recently got that point and pay that so they can pay online, the fees online in the building department. That recently came through. That was something I was working on.
And so, not in it. Permit link is that what we're talking about permit link so that was like the online.
So, It's the online payment service for permit link. Yeah, we can actually collect payments online. No, we did not anticipate that last year when, you know, when we were budgeting. It works conjunction with permit link.
I get that. But how come we didn't find out about it until we just got it? I mean, I was asked somebody authorized going out and getting it outside the budget. I mean,
that was something I was asked to look into and
get a cost on. I don't remember the history on this, Eric. I remember when we talked about permit link and how it was going to pay for itself and blah blah blah blah blah. But then right. And I so.
Okay, go ahead. So, Permit Link overall pays for itself. However, one of the problems we had is we have been stuck with just having people do everything online and then submit an actual check. And what we needed to do is we needed the ability to work with a vendor so we could pay directly. That vendor is already pre set up with Permit Link. Unfortunately, they charge a pretty hefty fee to connect into it, but it's fortunately a one time fee. So, every other fee from this point forward is paid for by the applicant for building permits. And if you look at the building permit line item in the budget, you'll see we've already collected, you know, some $15,000 more in building department fees this year than we anticipated. So we're easily covering that in the fees we've collected compared to what we budgeted.
Our budget is getting very tight. I'm getting very concerned towards the end of the year because I do not wanna hit a deficit anywhere. So this is a one time setup fee to get this piece installed. There is no annual subscription. There is no inflationary costs that they're going to change a fee. There's not going to be an access charge or a subscription fee going forward.
Well, is an access charge, but that charge is paid for every single person who pulls a permit has to pay the cost of the fund fee for using the online payment system.
So, of those costs are So, bought online by the a customer coming to the town to file for a permit building permit, if they want to pay online, they have an option, but they get disclosed online that there's an additional fee for doing that. Correct. Correct. They can opt to pay it or they can opt to bring you a check. Correct. I don't like how we do the taxes. No, I would never pay my taxes online because we charge too high for fees. I'm paying 3% to file my taxes.
But they bear the cost, not us. So. But they have an option, right? They don't have to pay online, right? Right. Yeah, right. They do have an option. But in towns that have converted, the vast majority of people
pay online, not directly. Fact, it's kind of holding up the permit, slowing down the permit process
by requiring that extra step. But what I'm asking for in that contract, there is no subscription charge to us or any annual maintenance fee or any other kind of subscription fee that the town has to pay to keep this active? If you don't know that, send me the contract. I'll read it. I can give you the cop a copy of the contract. I just wanna make sure we budget for it correctly. So Mhmm. Yeah. Understood. Understood. I'll
provide that. It's called again. What's the It's payment. What? Points of pay. Point and pay. Point and pay.
Wait. What was the cost on that for the point and pay? Was it, like, 3,500, did you say? That's That we weren't mean, I understand the whole concept. I think it's a good concept. I get it. I just what was the dollar amount that you said it was to get the ability to pay online?
I'd have to give you the contract copy of the contract. I don't know off the top of my head. No. I knew you said that it went over, and I have the line here. Okay. No problem. It's been a little while since I.
Yeah. Yeah. I'm over budget by 200%. So we're over $7,500 So it's got to be up there around that cost. Gotcha. Yep. Yeah. So we'll get the contract. We'll look at that. You figured it out
because I went silent during the budget of leases during the under god business. But other than that, I haven't had any Rob, we can hear you.
Annie's muted, so that's a new one. Somebody wasn't muted, so I thought it was muted.
Diane, is it can I ask her a question? This is very strange because I
can you hear me now? Now I can hear Yeah. Alright. That's odd because I was muted. Okay. Now you're showing that's unmuted.
Yeah. I know. I just clicked on mute to talk to you. Okay. But if I mute again right. You didn't hear any of that. Okay. So I don't know what that was. Okay.
On page five, if we go to health insurance town garage, It's 0309Dash215. I will be making journal entries to transfer those two amounts. One is $300 for drug testing, and the other is $110 for health insurance to one of our employees. So I have to reclassify that into our employee benefits line. Initially did not get moved. The 110 did not get moved. So I have to journalize that. Is this really supposed to be their physicals? Well,
drug testing is there's a fee for drug testing, which is that's in the seniors transportation driver.
For the town garage, they would have to do annual physicals for their CDLs and things like So, yeah.
So, that's not really health insurance then because I think in
No, it's not, but I'm putting it towards the physical line up, the 110.
And you have physicals and employee benefits. It's not an employee benefit. It's a cost to us.
It's a is it it's under the employee benefit line.
Yeah. I didn't know why. We put $750 in there. Yeah. Okay.
Don't know to Jay or Eric that it's not in public works, if it's for public works. Don't know the history on this. So
So that used to cover physicals for public works, potentially for senior transportation drivers and also for the fire department. That's why it was there and it was not within the public works budget. That was later the fire department physicals were then taken out of that because that was a constant complaint from the fire department is they never had enough money for their physicals. So we separated those two and that only accounts for physicals. But the town also pays, has a contract through CCM for a provider testing. And we do random drug testing of all our drivers. So public works, the public works foreman and the senior transportation drivers all are subject to random drug tests. And then we also have the ability to random drug test other employees if we need it through that program.
So is that line item that's that two eighty accounts supposed to be for CDL physicals and random drug testing for everybody, fire, senior, public works? Public works.
Fire. Not yeah. Not fire. Any Patient? It was fire at one time. Fire now in is
the own, in the fire department's In their own thing? Itself. Okay. So a fire department has it in their budget now.
Correct. We only budget for public works and for transportation out of that. There you go.
So let's not put employee benefits here because it's not an employee benefit. It's physicals and drug testing.
Okay. Where would you like to see it in the budget?
Well, mean, you can leave it in the employee benefits thing, but the label says physicals, employee benefits. I think of that as a benefit to the employee, just to know that it's for, it's really the CDL physicals, right? And the random drug testing, right? So you wanna reclassify that as
basically CDL physicals and random drug test. Or drug testing. Yeah. You don't have to have random. You have to say random because everybody gets a drug test. Right? So CDL and drug testing. Correct? CDL, physical, and drug testing. Okay. Yep.
That's fine. Then we know where it is. Okay. That's fine. And then it will come that account will come out of the public works then.
So you want me to move it and put it under public works?
You can leave it and employee benefits if it's covering two departments. I'm okay with that. Yeah. As long as you know, that's alright.
That's what I was gonna do is leave it there. Yeah.
And, you know, label it appropriately so Right. We'll know what it is. Alright. That's that one on page five. And then on page six, transfer station, Electricity 700-0161. That's probably going to be over at this point. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take a look at the electricity bills for everything and see what it's it's trending and what so we can get these electricity accounts under a better control as far as where the expenditures are. So I'm gonna take a look at that. I'll be starting that tomorrow. All those invoices.
Yeah, I mean, know this year our electrical costs have gone up significantly throughout the year. It's not a surprise that we're going to be over budget in a lot of our, you know, certainly street lights, some of the other lines will be over budget because of that. Right.
You know, we've got, and when we get to it, but keep in the back of mind, we've got to look at the the old firehouse and the old town hall. Yeah. Just to figure out that we've got those right in a way to reduce those expenses for empty buildings. We gotta, we can't keep letting them suck us dry. I don't know what the answer to that is, Eric, tearing
down the old firehouse, but. I mean, the only real answer is building a small standalone building to put the senior transportation vehicles in. You know, I think given all the problems all the surrounding communities had with storing buildings or vehicles outside, I'm very leery to store those outside, you know, and have to deal with replacing all the catalytic converters, you know. But it's definitely a crafty building. We know it needs to come down. At some point, we need to be planning for a standalone metal building somewhere where we can store those. You know, or potentially reworking the cold storage facility at Public Works to store them. But that's more of a long term. There would be an awful lot of things that would have to happen to make that work. Eric, quick question. The main concern here is security?
Security, Yeah. And and it's also obviously difficult to remove snow from vehicles that are that high,
especially I was just thinking about I was thinking about the possibility of just having, like, a shelter that keeps keeps the snow off, but doesn't necessarily have, you know, isn't fully enclosed, but that doesn't do anything for security. That's why I was just kicking that around in my head and, you know, oh, we could put a roof, you know, a a shelter to keep them, keep the snow off. But if it's open air, you have two problems. You have the security issue. And then, of course, if you've got diesel engines
and they're they they get really cold, I assume that would also be an issue. Yeah. That's gonna go away pretty shortly because we're about to get rid of our last diesel bus and have all gas buses, have all smaller gas buses. Okay. So the the requirement to plug them in or keep them warm, may be going away. The harder part is just, you know, keeping them, you know, keeping the snow off them and keeping them from getting broken into.
In my mind. Okay. So, it could be a pretty simple building then, yeah?
Yeah. Yeah. At that point, I mean, the only thing you would really want is you would, you know, you would want powered garage doors because a garage door big enough to get, know, a full height bus in is not an easy thing to put up and down by hand. Right. Especially when you're talking about drivers. I mean, recently, we had an 84 year old driver. So, know, expecting an 84 year old driver to climb up on a ladder and get snow off the top of a bus just wasn't wasn't. Yeah. That that makes sense. Did we lose hair? I'm
here. Oh, there you are. Sorry. I saw some people drop off video. I was just okay. So that makes sense to me. But for the time being, unfortunately, like, this is our best option right now. Right?
Using the I mean, I just don't instruction. Put money into those buildings that are into that old firehouse because it's really basically I mean, unless you just fall down.
Hear you unless we have a replacement teed up though. Right. What do we do? Yeah.
You know? Well, I guess I'm thinking about if if that's something that needs to be planned to me, that's one of those capital expenditures that's added to the list. Was just about to go there. Like, what do we have for capital funding for a new
vehicle shed, I guess you could call it. Right. You know, that's something we should maybe think about. Right.
Actually, have we talked about this at capital improvement? I don't think we have really. We've been talking about trying to fix up the buildings we have. It's probably something CIP should take up. Yeah. Sounds good.
I will try to remember that for the next CIP meeting. You know, we we were just talking about trying to help out, you know, trying to figure out the one of the public works buildings that needs a lot of help, needs a little love. Right. We were focused on that the last couple meetings, I feel like. Wow. And that's its own significant project. Sherry, can I ask you a question? Sure.
Okay. Under the health insurance and the dental, under the town positions, can you clarify why some have it and some don't? Is it something they choose not to for the health insurance? Then those that do, I see it's a negative, like minus 11. Why did it go down from the prior year for health insurance?
Are you talking about on the expenditure report, Louise? The yeah. Exactly. What? You're talking about the the personnel cost
sheet. Yes. The individual, like Which is separate. Oh, okay. Oh, that's a spreadsheet. That's the personnel Yeah. You're talking about the town personnel costs. Right. Yeah. And
I mean, those people, they get a salary, aren't they entitled to the health insurance and the retirement? Or is it based on union negotiations? Well,
each union has the details of the health insurance in there and what we have to go by for each individual.
So we do have employees that do not choose health and to us because they have them with a spouse or something. Right.
Yeah, that would be another variation of why, you know, you don't see that because it could be on somebody else's. They don't take health insurance, you know? Do
they get any type of rebate or anything for not taking it? They do. Yes, Okay. They the Go board of
ahead. That gets shown, it's not shown on the salary line worksheet, but it is shown on, it does get wrapped into the budget. And employees are allowed to take, if they opt out of health insurance, they can basically get a 50% credit for the cost of health insurance. And we have, I think currently two employees that are in that category, which is good because it cuts the town's cost in half from them insurance.
And that's showing up to the individual. That showed in their salary expense? Yeah. To the salary? It gets essentially
yes. Because it runs through payroll, because right? It runs through payroll. Correct. It runs through payroll.
It should be in salary. So it should be in salary numbers. Okay. Right.
Okay. Why are some of them, Why is most of it reduced from the prior year? Did the insurance go down? I never see insurance We going
took a insurance holiday this year in the consortium for health insurance. They did so well that they offered us in the group, which is Andover, Marlborough, and Hebron, a minus four reduction. So we got 0% rate increase and then a minus four reduction from there. Nice. And the health insurance. One time thing, it's not going to happen again likely, but that's what we were told to budget for. Okay, that makes sense. So there's
the differences in why we have what we have. And then I was told only one person takes dental, dental plans. So there's a variation there as well. Okay, thanks.
You're welcome. All right. Now, to continue on page six, If you look down below transfer station, you'll see recycling, and those three accounts are over. We do have contracts in place, I think. In looking at it, it has mostly to do with quantities for each of the categories. I'm not sure what it is that we can do about that. So I just wanted to point that out to you.
We just have to make sure we budget correctly going forward.
Yeah, they're not, they're not very big, you know, I mean, they're low dollar amount overs. But again, you know, I looked back last year I looked because the year before we had been way over in tire pickups. And in one year we almost we more than doubled the number of tires that got taken in by the transfer station. The first year of the pandemic when everybody was cleaning out their houses and their yards and you know we had this huge you know expense for that. You know the costs that are going up because we don't negotiate our own costs for recycling. We're part of a consortium called Midnearack, of which Andover is a member of Midnearack. And Midnearack goes out and competitively bids those on an annual basis. So we have the contracts back and what I've done is basically just taken the best estimate from previous years, how much actually used and then multiply that by the increase in the contract cost to come up with next year's values. But those are another thing that fluctuate
so much. You know, I feel like we could easily be off 20% over or under just based on, you know, if one guy shows up and brings an extra 15 tires to the transfer station because he's cleaning out his garage, you know, I mean, that's a
Isn't there a limit on how many tires a resident can bring? Then they have, don't they have to pay a fee if it goes above a certain amount?
No, we don't. You know, in part because that would require us tracking on an individual basis how much each person put in. And I think logistically, that's difficult. The only thing we have a cutoff is, you know, we only take residential tires. You know, from time to time, people try to bring us backhoe tires and stuff like that. We don't take those because those are really expensive per tire. I mean a regular car tire is like $3 and a backhoe tire is $75. So we're not going to take them. Although we have disposed of Public Works backhoe tires through that program because it's still cheaper than any other way of getting rid of them. Okay.
Page seven. Yep. The top of page seven, you will see wages under planning and zoning 803,100. That is over, and it's over because that's the board clerk. They added two hours per week to help out land use. So, is this a result of just increased demand?
So, that was a result of a couple of things. First of all, it was a result that since we had cut the hours initially back so far for the building department, land use was really getting shafted and they didn't have any support at all. So, we added back basically two hours a week and took the person who was doing the clerking anyway for the land use board and say, okay, can you come in two hours a week and then help out, both wetlands and zoning, making sure they have the meeting stuff ready to go and the announcements and getting the public notices out. So that's what that is for.
And we made those adjustments going forward in the new budget, right? Correct.
Their legal fees being over is really just based on circumstance?
Yeah, you know, again, that's part of the issue that legal fee covers all of the land use boards. So it covers zoning board appeals, the zoning commission, inland wetlands, you know, and occasionally something that comes up from the conservation commission or something like that. So, but the majority of that money has gotten spent dealing with the fact that we have changed, we have changed a bunch of regulations to conform to changes in state law that the legislature passed this year. It's one of these crazy things every year that the legislature does stuff that affects zoning law, and then all the towns have to go back and adjust their regulations, you know, and that takes a fair bit of legal advice. We rely on a separate zoning attorney named Mark France for that.
It was regulatory change driven, is what you're saying? A lot of that's regulatory change driven.
There's also, you know, anytime you have a essentially a dispute with an individual, you know, you might have to use the land use attorney to help out with that. So, anytime Wetlands is filing, you know, claims against somebody for doing something in the wetlands they're not supposed to, you would use the attorney for that. You know looking at it historically, you know we've generally been able to stay under $5,000 but I think you know given the changes that are coming through today, you know going forward we need to budget a little bit more for that. Okay, right, sharing onward.
And then on the bottom of page seven library dues and fees, $1,001,800. I need to make an adjustment here for $15.96 dollars And what that is, is the Kennedy, we paid Kennedy Exchange, which is for computersoftware. It should have gone into the ARPA grant that the library got. So I am going to transfer that money and take it out of the grant. I set up a segue to the grant piece. I set up fund number 201, which is what we had designated for any grants. And then I'm going to categorize them, one being the connectivity grant and the OPER library grant is also going to be under there, the 201. The adjustments will be made, and in March's report, I will give you an additional report that will have the revenue piece, to one. And then the expenditure piece to one, so that revenue and a corresponding expenditure.
So the expenses that are running through the library account now that are related to the grant will come out and go under that grant.
That grant, right. I remember I made adjustment to this particular $43,000
year to date isn't going to change. Okay, it's going to change. I And fees in our budget worksheet. It's called library operations. Can we just change the label on it because it's the, it's their operating account. Sure. Operations instead of dues and fees. Not dues and fees. Okay. Just say a library operations. Sure. I'll I'll change that. Yeah. Okay.
Alright. So once we take that grant out and fix the expenses, this account should come into line. Okay. Yes.
That's my plan. Yes. Perfect. Alright. I think that is it that I I noticed or was aware of. I went through all the accounts today. Took a look at them. Some are over, but they're not over by much.
I just noticed that we're starting to tip towards the top of the line here on some of these lines. So I'm just getting nervous about coming to the year end.
All right. Budget transfers are happening in April. So hopefully we can take a look at that and continue to monitor the
accounts. Yeah. I mean, so we should think about, you know, next meeting will be April. May is when we do our transfers usually. Is it May?
I thought it was April or something. We have to do it according to Charter.
Is it sixty days before fiscal year end? We can start doing them as of April 1. We can start doing budget transfers. Right. Yeah.
Yes. That's what I thought. That's what I have in my head. So Okay. We'll we'll get that going and Okay. Take some
more. Do you have any questions for sharing? I don't see our tar report in here.
No, I did not get a chance to do that. And I believe on that trial balance is the account. The 37 account, I believe. Tar account should be on there. But, Diane, we would not have expended anything in Tar. No. That's why I I said probably isn't. Right. It's very
little. I think it was like 400. Yeah. Was 70 degrees the other day, so we may have done something. Off the top of Oh, I see. Joanne Heavert, you have a question? I
don't know if Sherry's ready for me. Yeah, I'm ready. Okay. It's just a quick one, and I know we have Jay on this meeting waiting and I really wanna be able to get to his presentation. I don't wanna keep because I appreciate when people come on and I know they have to get up early. So Sherry, just a quick question. If I can ask a question on, and this is a school item I know we went over the town. Am I allowed to just ask if we budgeted or what, or I can email you this too. Just wonder if I you would just
prefer that you email me that. This meeting is not a school meeting. It's a board of honor. Okay. It was an extended meeting. So I appreciate it. You putting it in writing to me, and I will certainly respond to you.
No worries. So that we don't take up. I just want to follow through of why. Thank you. Yeah, I agree. It was a question that came up at a prior meeting and I had a follow-up. Since you're here, I was was gonna ask it. My email,
email either one town or school and I will respond. Yeah,
it's not even a big long question. It was pretty simple. Thank you. You're welcome.
Does anybody else have any other questions on the expenditure report for Sherry? Rob, Louise, Linda, nothing? Is that you, Kurt? Did you sneak in? Uh-oh. Yes. Yes. I did. I'm on. I'm on. And I'm sneaky.
I'm back for now. Hey, Kurt. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. How are doing?
I'm much better. Thank you. Oh, good. Home home recuperating. So Great. It's a time to join the fun.
Oh yeah. Thank you everyone for the well wishes too, by the way. Anybody
have any questions? We're good. All right, let's move on. Item six, we don't Do we have any budget transfers or over expenditures requests?
No. Okay. I don't at this point at this time. Okay. So, Diane, was that a little bit better? Yes.
Perfect. Okay. Perfect. I'm trying. All the things you hit all the things that I have questions on. So Oh, good. I I'm trying. You know what I'm saying? I'm I hear you. Saying it a lot. I appreciate it. No problem. Thank you.
All business. Community center, senior center building committee. So I'll give you a quick update on that. I just saw come across an email today, The final site plan that we have came over. Think Ed Srisley sent it up to Amanda to post up on the website. There will be a public information session on Saturday, April 9 from ten to 12PM for us to present the site plan, the proposed building renderings and cost proposals. Diane, isn't that 10AM?
10AM. I'm sorry. It's in the morning. Saturday morning, April ninth. 10AM to 12PM. Sorry. So if anybody has any, the architects will be there. They'll have their drawings, the big blown up drawings. So it's gonna be in the community room. So we'll do that. So we're almost done with the initial conceptual drawings. So that's that. New business. Eric?
Okay. I just wanna say a couple, one really quick thing. I had Amanda put in your packet the preliminary application for the federal local bridge program. And I gave it to you guys just for informational purposes. One, so you could see the numbers we're talking And two, just to tell you that if you looked at it and saw the timing listed there, is their standard timing. They never make that. Earliest we would be starting construction, you know, if we signed this now, and it's really a Board of Selectmen decision to sign it now or not. Are you gonna spell The earliest we would be You smelled exactly. About 2020 I know you're fresh. I'm mute, Kurt. Okay. Kurt, you're unmuted.
I muted him. Sorry, Kurt. So I'm just giving it to you because I thought it's worth the review. The two things I would point out is that we can't apply for the state design program until we have approval from the federal local bridge program. In other words, the first thing that has to happen is we say to the feds, okay, this is a bad bridge. You need to give us money to fix it. And then at some point they're going to come back to us and say, yeah, we'll do that. And then we turn around and we immediately apply to the state and we tell the state, we want you to manage the design and pay for the design of this bridge under this other state program. And they will say hopefully yes. And then that will further reduce our costs for design. That saves the town about $80,000 in design costs. And it also makes our lives a little easier. Now, the reason why we're applying for this now
is it looks like as part of the federal infrastructure, they are going to be, the federal government is going to be increasing the percentage of funding for these projects. So the reason why I want to get this thing in the pipeline is I want to make sure that, if they go to 90 or 95% funding that we have one that's already set up for that. So that's what I'm trying to do. I had a discussion with the, you know, the state person who runs this program and basically they will tell me that they are going to increase the federal percentage of coverage for these, but he said it's under consideration. There's no final state ruling on it. But I'm just trying to set us up that if we do have that ability that we get one of these things mostly paid for by the federal government that we're lined up to do it. And we're probably going to do the same thing. I'm working with the town's engineer on one of our major culvert replacement programs because it looks like some of that money will be designated
towards culvert replacement. So I'm starting the paperwork for the state local bridge program for one of the culvert replacements. That program is only a 50% match, not an 80% match which the state one. So it would help us out even more if the federal government's going to cover an increased percentage of that. Again, we don't know. Not at this point, it's not obligating us to anything to fill out the paperwork and get the state to approve it. We're only obligated when we go to the next step and sign and actually join the program. So I'm just giving you a heads up that we're in the process of doing that.
Is Bunker Hill going to be part of, I mean, I know we're in process with that now. If the federal goes to 100%, would Bunker Hill be eligible for that too? I don't know. Mean, hope so.
I mean, that would be huge if they did. Right.
But I don't know whether it's going to apply to things that are already partially through the process or if it's only going to apply to new things being applied for. That's why I'm heading my bets by starting the second. Right.
In a perfect world, we'd get them both under that, but I mean, it's probably not likely. Maybe we'll get lucky. Yep, and that's all I have for new business.
Okay. All right. The next thing we have is really just to focus on the budget and on public works. So, how do you guys want to go through this? Do you want to look at the spreadsheet for Public Works and go through the align items? Or do you want to look at what Jay has provided us? Any preference?
I don't know if Jay was going I mean, we've heard about it a couple times. Are you asking the committee?
Yeah, I'm asking the committee what do you to wanna review this? I mean, Jay put together us that whole cost for last year and anticipated cost for roadwork this year, but there's a lot of other things in the line items in public works. I don't know if you guys have any questions on them.
Yeah, I don't know if they were gonna do an overview. I know we've sat through, you know, we've listened to a couple of things. I don't know. I'm open to anything, whatever you think Diane or whatever the committee thinks. I've definitely taken a look through it.
Jay, if I might make a suggestion, you just go through and do a really quick recap of last year's roadwork. What you're planning on doing, rough overview of the costs. You've all got the details. Anybody has any questions on that, go over that. And then we transition the budget, and we look at the line items in the budget. Okay. That's that seems like that might go smoothly. Alright. Evening, everybody. Hi Jay. So do you all have the the Was in our packet too. Yeah. That
Amanda sent over. The Word document or PDF. So I was asked to give you guys kind of a breakdown of what we did last year in expenses and basically, you know, from the day that we were able to get out there and start doing our road maintenance and construction. So we start with our catch basin cleaning, which we try to do that every year. And the lake area by mandates has to be done every year. They want us to do it twice a year. But you know, we can't really afford to do it twice a year on catch basin right now. What's that? We do catch basin cleaning every year in the lake area. And what I'm gonna do is try to do all of the town again this year.
And then moving forward as we because. The debris that's in the catch basins and that's in the pipes and the buildup over sedimentation over the years as you clean these basins and clean inlets and outlets of pipes. The hope is that any debris that's left in the pipes tend to flush themselves out, so it takes a couple years for the pipes to clear. We have some areas that we got to we'll have to go back and try to do some jetting, but that's another process to clean pipes. So my hope moving forward is to split up the rest of the town
and then do it every other year. So the lake would always be done every year just to prevent the sedimentation into the lake. The other areas will split, you know, every so we'll we'll have some savings. We we won't hit all the areas every year. So hopefully those costs come down a little bit. So then we look at shimming of the roads right now. Now we're a preservation mode. We haven't really had the time or to put in a reconstruction. We're looking at some areas. We got Shotty and Long Hill that's been in the that's in the pipeline. But as far as other areas of town, we're not we're not there yet. Right now we're just trying to put shake back into the road, get the water and the drainage areas clear and try to get some travel ability back, get the road safe to travel on. Crack seal, we look to do some crack seal preservation, keep the water from getting underneath the asphalt, Hopefully help us a little bit out in the frost during the wintertime. Chip seal. Everybody saw the lake area where we chip sealed this year almost nine miles.
Yep.
Some areas will double chip, some of the worst areas where you're not going to do a lot of crack seal. Centerline striping, we try to do our main roads there, the throughways. And then the other thing that kind of we often forget about is we have to have a little money put aside for storm repairs. So for the unforeseen and most of that requires just ourselves and a little bit of overtime. It's put into the budget, but then, you know, the materials cost for that. Pothole patching, some equipment rental and then the purchases that we did last year, too, for equipment. Any questions on that overview as far as what you guys saw on that?
Anybody have any questions for Jay? And this is this $570,000 Now is that money we have spent so far or does this include the money we're gonna start to spend in the spring too?
No, this 570,000 was spent last year. Okay. So in. This was fiscal year ending 06/30/2021. Correct. Well,
no, no, So the roadwork season always spans two budgets. That's what's difficult.
Yeah, that's, I was gonna bleed into that. Yep. All right. I'll shut up. So that there was there was a balance when I came on board, of monies from the, previous year, which allowed us startup money so we could start our construction season early. And I don't remember or recall exactly what that amount was, but it was some somewhere around $200,000 a little over that. So basically it allowed us to do our catch basin cleaning right away, pay that vendor. We were able to bring in the paving contractor and start paving, pay for some asphalt. And that money coupled with what you put in for the budget allowed us to keep going and complete that.
Last year we put in $2.90 into the road improvement fund. Then we had tar then and that's all the money and so $5.70 was the money we spent and it came from all those sources and we have a balance that we're carrying forward to start the spring with. Right. Correct.
So going into this year my understanding is what I was told is combined balance and share. You'd have to confirm but between road improvements and tar, there's a combined balance right now is at $346,000 Is that correct?
We would have to look at that and get you that Jay. Okay. That sounds about right.
That money, the 346,000 will get us us started and whatever monies that the board approves will be added to that. And hopefully we'll have some ideas to how much the board, what the town passes as a budget for us to do road work.
This year we are asking for road improvement of three thirty and tar is what we get two payments a year in tar. Yes. That's around 98.
No I believe total we get like 187,000 a year in tar. Yeah, payments of 98,000 and change.
Okay. So going into the season we have what we're carrying forward plus what we put into the fund and what we get for TAR. Yeah.
So have estimates now for our road work. And you know, we're we have to continue on some rope, some work that we have have already started, which consists of Shotty Mill. We got to get the drainage done on that, you know, so we can get the full depth reclamation on that as long as the section of Long Hill from Route 6 to Bear Swamp.
Any Just a quick question. We got a grant for part of Schottie Mill, right? The cost isn't a 100% covered by the grant. So we have a grant plus the town's got to kick in some money, right? Correct. The grant, it covers roughly 50%
of the cost. It is ballpark about $260,000 $270,000 a mile to reclaim and repave a road. So in other words, we're tackling of our 34 miles of paved road, we're reclaiming one mile this year.
So that number you have on under current request, 130 ks, that is the town portion for the Correct. Correct. Shoddy Mill and Long Hill. Okay. Got it.
And then the other thing I found out today was my estimate for paving costs at $85,000. I figured roughly because it was a increase in fuel prices and oil prices. I upped it from last year from 78 to 85 and right now we're at 90 to 95. So those costs are going to go up. Hopefully, maybe by the time we start paving, they settle down and maybe they'll come down a bit. But, you know, we'll just have to make adjustments to what we do, you know, where we how much we actually are able to get done. And then depending on what you pass for a budget. Right.
So, Jay, what is the cost per ton right now for hot mix?
It's it's 90. It's 90 for class one and 95 for two. Shit.
And so that is directly fuel costs impact that inflation.
And and there's some, you know, Massachusetts, all, you know, we're not going to go to Massachusetts to get asphalt, but people that are closer to like Palmer Mass, it's a little bit less expensive. But right around here, we're at the 90, you know, $95 mark.
Jay, what was the number that you had for the Town Aid Road and Road Total. 346,148. Yep, that is correct. Okay. I
ran a trial balance as of March 22 and in the Town Aid Road, we have a balance of $179,494.84 And in the Road Improvement Fund, we have a balance in there of $166,654.10 So, the two of them combined is the total that you just said. 346,148.94.
Expect a TAR payment in the spring? Or have we gotten all of our money so far this year? Next one's what August.
Yeah, think I think that we got all the money. Yeah, we got the January payment. Okay. I think so it gets a little screwed up the this past year, the payments have come on time. Part of the reason why we had a surplus of money is because the state got an entire year behind on our payment. So two years ago, we did a lot less work than we wanted because we were $180,000 behind on our tower allotment. And then they paid us the previous tower allotment and the next one all at the same time. So we got this giant, you know, thing of cash, which we've been kind of carrying forward to help us do early spring work.
Yeah, and depending depending on what is approved, you know, we'll have to look at our proposed work and what, you know, what can we do, how much of it can we do? What I, you know, what what I don't want to see us is starting out with a zero balance at the end of the year because if we if we lose, you know, we got to do what we have to do. But if we lose the ability to have a balance or at least a strong balance to get started the following year, it's it's just that much easier for us to get contractors. Sometimes we'll I mean, it's not a lot, but sometimes we might get a better price if we get started early. You know, the early bird gets the worm. And then just getting the work done, most of your work done before summer starts and then you did the paving and the final stuff happens right when everything is hot. It's just you end up with a better product for the year and it has all summer long to cure with traffic and everything else and you you still have time to work other areas that you that wind up cropping up somewhere you got to do some work. Yeah. And Go I have
ahead, Eric. I was just going to say the obvious problem we run into is liquid asphalt is a petroleum product and it does largely track with energy costs. So, I mean, now we're coming into a period of pretty big uncertainty with the cost of that.
Yep, that makes sense. Can you remind me, Eric, what we need to spend in a given year to simply tread water? I know we have a ten year plan and then we've deviated from that plan because we haven't funded the capital properly, but to just keep the roads from deteriorating, what do we need to do?
So I looked at that on the cost basis from two years ago, and that number was about 3 and $50,000 But that was really maximizing pavement preservation. And that was also with considerably lower liquid asphalt costs than today. If I were to guess that number is closer to 400, between $404.50. And the other thing is that only is talking about what we need to pay for just the road surface. That's not talking about striping, that's not talking about guardrails, that's not talking about drainage, that's just, you know, maintaining the the Roads themselves.
That's just chip ceiling and that kind of stuff, crack ceiling and Yeah. That that's that
kind of thing. Yes. Okay. That's just, you know, trying to stave off entropy basically.
Right. It's there's there's so much deterioration of the roads in town that just just to get through the roads as we're going right now, you know, probably you might be able to get it done within four years. But then it at that five year mark, well, even in between some of the roads you did earlier. But, you know, you're looking to go back to where you started again and, you know, you may be just doing some crack seal or, you know, a fog seal. Maybe it needs another chip seal depending on what what goes on. But at some point you have to start incorporating
road reconstruction into some of these roads and putting a real plan together, well, takes more planning. You're incorporating road reconstruction and preservation at the same time. You know, some roads you you can do, you know, two, three times with preservation, but once you get to a certain point with the chip seal and depending on what other processes are done on those, they act differently. You know, you'll get a that material will move. So you'll start seeing running again and not because of the road movement, but because of the material that's on the road. So that'll that'll stretch out, you know, fifteen years, we'll say fifteen, eighteen years on a road if you if you do three chip seals. So that's where you got to start thinking about applying some road reconstruction. And as some of these other projects fall off the list in town, maybe those monies can start being dedicated to some road reconstruction.
Yeah, I mean, I bring this up because I know that we have shorted our capital budget somewhat over the last several budget cycles, and I know that we had a plan to try and get our roads in good shape. And we were focusing, I remember when Eric first presented the plan, gosh, it must be three or four years ago now, Eric, where maybe five, where you sat down and say, okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna go out and aggressively kind of defend the roads that are okay and then pick and choose spots where we some of the roads are the real expensive stuff is rebuilding a road bit And we're behind, we're not actually catching up if we're not funding this right. So I want to be clear on that because as we go forward, all of these budgets the last several years have very hard, very difficult budgets, but when we zero things out, when we cut the capital and whatever, what we're doing is we're creating more and more of a backlog of this roadwork and it worries me. So I just that's why I bring it up. That's why I asked the question.
Yeah, some of the some of the questions that are asked to me is why are we paving in some areas where we should be doing reconstruction right now? And, you know, the short answer is, you know, we don't have the budget for that. And in the mayors and Eric and I have discussed this in-depth, you know, in the manner in which we're doing some preservation now, the shimming process that that I'm doing, we're doing it's, you know, it's patch and it will hold up. It's not a lot of money to, to in the grand scheme of things to level things out, put shape into the roads. But it's a shimming process where, you know, you're just filling in those low spots. We're not filling in the low spots, doing a level and course and then doing a an overlay process, which, you know, makes the road look a little nicer, but it it uses up a lot of material real fast. So in doing the shimming the way we're doing in conjunction with chip seal and crack seal, because the crack seal will come after the shimming
and and then the chip seal. So those that works and it'll work for a while. But it, you know, it's like anything else, it's not going to last forever. And you just have to then then you have to go back and look at those roads. Some of them are at a point that we can't afford not to do that process. When it goes to a reclamation, that material that you put on the road will go right back into the road base without spending a lot of money, if that makes sense.
As far as labor goes on when we're doing these preservation type things. Most of that is done by a subcontractor and then the town is just filling in with drainage work maybe or the side kind of work and traffic control maybe if they need, But most of that is a third party, right, that we're hiring? Correct.
So we as far as we'll do the prep, you know, we got to shape the edges of the road, get the drainage ditches open, do scrape the edges. And like you said, do some repairs to drainage and whatnot. But we have our we have our own maintenance that we got to do. You know, once we bring the contractors in, we set them up and let them do their thing and just
oversee the process. There's ongoing work of just maintaining the town that never goes away and then we have these projects we're trying to layer on top of it and Yeah.
Can I add on to that, Jay? Just a quick question. So I finally was able to open this and follow along, is it's so much easier to be visual and then ask a question. So what Diane said, when you guys have the contractors in town, the 95 ks paving contractor for shimming of roads and the whole list that comprises the current request, are you guys do you have to keep a guy there, like, for the full day? Are you overseeing that? Is it just a check-in?
No, that's that's pretty much on me. The only thing that we're as far as the crew is concerned, if you know, we they the contractors do their own traffic control. If we got a supplement, maybe they need to have a pile of material picked up that they had to mill because speaking to the contractor, he also will mill areas out. So they have a small machine if there's some spots and the material might have to be picked up to get out of the way and we'll just send a truck over and pick it up and get it out of their way just to move things along for them. Because it's a A day racing
benefit, sorry, Jay, of bringing of you being in that supervisor role, which you are, but having your work crew, I mean, know another thing that we haven't even discussed is that extra person and that in public works. That would free up your crews to be doing the work and you kind of checking on contractors in town, you know, just everything that a supervisor Yeah, well, do that. I'm
with them pretty much, I'm with them every day. So landing and checking in with them when they're in the morning and, you know, a couple times during the day. Right. No, I knew it. But mostly our crude has nothing to do with this other than preparation before their work starts. Okay. Thank you.
So, Jay, you might want to just go over real quick because I think it would be good to talk to the board about what they because one of the things that's maybe not apparent is how much annual maintenance we do outside of just road preservation, you know, and kind of talk through the season and like, what are all the things you do, you know, as a crew, you know, and what is the time involved?
Okay. So, well, we'll just speak of where we are right now. So winter's ending. During the course of the during the course of the winter, we went through all our equipment, servicing it, making repairs. And we're, you know, we've been out doing odd jobs wherever we needed a little tree work here and there. We're actually cleaning up the yard out back, getting that done. We're prepping for to go over to Lake Road to do a parking lot over there near the rail trail, their parking lot, get that done. And we're gonna start sweeping here within the next week or so. So we'll get the road swept. So that's going to take a couple of guys, possibly three, depending if we're close to the where we need to dump our sweepings. You know, we can deal with just the sweeper and the truck. Two other guys can go off and do something else. Roadside mowing is going to start pretty soon. Again, we tried to this is a good time of year early in the season before everything turns green. We can do some of our beatbacks, pushbacks, those areas that tend to grow out fast and just keep that stuff at bay. I don't know if we're going to have time. We're going to try. We might have to go out and help out on the the rail trail. We will. I mean, we'll have to be out there at some point. And again, that's another area we want to send the roadside mower out to do some pushbacks along the trail. We try to get out of the trail a couple times a year to just mow the edges of the grass. It's at least twice.
Not very often, we'll probably get a third, but we'll see how that goes. And right around right around the corner first, you know, I'm hoping by mid April we'll be starting our drainage work over on Schottie. So we've got quite a bit of work on Schottie to get the drainage work done there in preparation for the full depth reclamation there. And we got plenty of other drainage problems around town that we need to do. While we're out roadside mowing, the mower is I'm having to mow around inlets and outlets of pipes so we can get to them easier. And
we service some of those areas of sedimentation starting to build up. We gotta we'll send the backhoe out in the truck. There's I mean, there's a lot. And working again, we got the catch basin cleaning. So catch basin cleaning that requires a man to go with that contractor. So the guy, our employee is marking down the basin location, taking a quick look at an inspection inside when it's clean, making notes if there's anything that needs to be done. Something that we trying to, I started this last year. So we making notes and we'll do it again this year. See what kind of changes if there's any changes. Some we can let go, but some we got to start making a list. We got to start doing catch basin repairs. If a great needs to be changed. Which happens every now and then you come around, come one and it's rusted to the point that you got to at least change the great and then put on the list to change the top. What else do we got? Pothole patching. We're constantly doing that, making lists and thank you to everybody that calls in and lets us know that they're out there as well. Another big one is our tree work. Depending on what we have allocated for trees, we, as you all know, there's a lot of dead trees out there and
we've been pretty successful about getting some areas done in town and would like to keep on doing that. We have a lot of column onesie twosies that are cropping up next to at the end of people's driveways near a mailbox. Those become priority. And it just it may be where it just got to bring in a bucket truck. But if we have a major stretch, major road, long road that's got a lot of work on it, hopefully we can bring in distinctive back in and and do some major work with that. And then it's just a constant process. Storm work, storm repairs. And it just brings us into our winter season and the whole process starts again. And then any and any projects that might come up, we try to see what we can do to help that and schedule things in a in a manner that we don't leave one job to come do another. But sometimes that happens.
Are we done with the veterans monument work that the town has to I know we provided some labor and help over there. Are we done with that now from the town perspective? Know Jerry always has his little projects he has going on. But yeah, I mean, for us right now, yes. The answer is the short
short answer is yes. Longer term answer is if there's something that comes up that we got to go and, you know, spend a day or a couple hours or whatever it that that's going to happen. But the the major stuff is done unless you know something else later on down the road they want to do something. I know there was talk about trying to do some kind of septic system someday, but that's down the road. That's that's plan. You know, it's the what what's difficult and not that things can't change, can't be done is when when the let's just do it kind of phase,
I guess, you know, and it happens. We try to deal with it as best we can. It's just right now we've got some work that we have to get done. And, you know, sometimes it's hard to say no, but we just we just got to concentrate on getting a few of these things done now. I
don't know if I'm allowed to ask this, but is attendance pretty good in your department? Is that, I mean, because I think having your crew around is very, don't even know if I can ask that. Mean so don't answer if you can't but having your guys and having that staff fully you know.
Also current vacations, how many people have a lot of vacation time versus? Right, right. Like taking time off or this amount?
Well, mean, it's not a question. That's not an unreasonable question. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm happy to say that, you know, we've got a real good crew and attendance is good. But, yep, they deserve their vacations, you know, everybody deserves their time off. And there has been times where, you know, they've dedicated themselves to the job and say, well, I'll change my schedule. And, you know, instead of a long weekend this weekend, I'll make it another weekend kind of thing. I don't like doing that, and I haven't, I haven't had to ask them to do that. They've just done it themselves. So
kudos to them. Well, that's that's something people don't realize. Just because you have a full time employee doesn't mean they're working forty hours a week. By the time you factor in, you know, paid time off vacations, you know, lunches, you know, whatever little breaks they need and everything, Somebody's probably really only working five and a half to six hours a day, but throughout a year, that's all you have them for. So you don't have them for forty hours or eight hours a day. Yeah, you have a small number of employees especially I mean, know the guys that work in our model you don't account for that. Know, you account for all that. It affects the whole dynamic of maybe the project.
We make adjust we make adjustments. We're pretty good at working on the fly. Yeah. And so Yeah.
The other thing is that I was been since I've been involved, you know, kind of overseeing, you know, one of the things I've been very appreciative of the crew is their understanding that if they are taking time off in the winter, they're still available, you know, if we need them to plow, you know, because that's obviously one of our big crunch times is plowing and storm response. And the other thing is they've been very good about once we set a schedule for when we're going to do major projects of not blocking time within those major, you know, and being flexible enough to put off whatever time they're taking, you know, and fit it in around that. So the crew has actually been excellent for that from my perspective.
Thank you. Yeah, I think that's an all works of like, I happen to work in a school, you know the busy times, so that's great. Yeah, you just have to go with it. You don't take time off at certain times or you cover for someone that's out like today and then you do your job late. There you go. Thank you. Yep.
All right. Does anybody else have any questions for Jay?
I guess I'm just going to ask Jay, yeah, one further question. With asking to bring on the seasonal guy as well, do I want to say? Are we still going to require the mowing or the expense of the mowing of the field on Long Hill? Does that help in any way or that's a whole separate project?
You're talking about the soccer fields? Yep. Yeah, the soccer field that's run by the recreation and that would not be something that we would be doing. Yeah, the mowing and striping and we're not equipped for that. Okay. So bringing on a summer help, basically that speaks to having somebody following the roadside mower, letting that person concentrate on mowing, get that stuff done. The guy would serve two purposes. One, a little bit of traffic control, a traffic guard, you know, with the vehicle, but trimming around the guide rails, the guard rails, signs, any low hanging branches that blocking signs. We can schedule in some sign replacements along the routes at that point in time as well. So and then if there if there's a point where they not need it with a roadside mower, we can have them come and help us with some construction projects. So, you know, it's a multi use person, but more dedicated to, you know, some of those. I don't want to have to take the guy off the roadside mower if I can help it and have them doing spending, you know, a week of,
trimming around guideposts and and those things where you could have somebody else doing that.
Jay, I have a question. Yes. Have you ever considered, and I'm not sure what the liability is of this, of utilizing summer help kids in high school?
Yeah, they gotta they have to be at least 18. To go to college?
Correct. And yeah, I mean, a college kid can can there's some we got to make sure they stay busy. Yeah, I know. So,
but it's yeah, that that's that's just a require we gotta they gotta be at least 18.
Have you ever tried that? Has the town ever tried that?
Here? We've done it. I've done it elsewhere. Other, you know, other towns we had college kids, know, Summerhill. And, you know, part of that, and when, when, when we look into that and go through the application process, we also have to consider what it is we're trying to accomplish. So as as a manager, I'm also looking at experience, you know, of that person. So if if they have construction experience, you know, I can. Yep, I'm going to put them with a roadside mower. They're going to do some trimming. But, you know, maybe I can have them work the ditch with the with the crew, help build a catch basin. You know, are they capable of driving the truck back to the shop and picking up some material, you know, without having to oversee them all the time. So there's a lot of little things that factor into that question.
Well, maybe that's something to consider. Yeah, just a thought. Yeah. No, it is considered. Okay. Yep. You mean the 16 year olds No, the high I mean,
early college. I mean, sometimes, or if they're in a training program, you know, something environmental, maybe that's something they can do for credit or for something. It's possible. 18 is really the cutoff.
Yeah, can understand that. 16 is a little bit too young. Yep, yep.
Hi, I just want to say my son Jason did work for the town two summers when he was in college, but he had worked in high school for the state of Connecticut helping in the parks with the mowing. And that was about twenty years ago, but he did do it a couple summers for the town of Andover.
Okay. And historically the town used more summer help back when things were done in a more labor intense manner. I mean, I remember talking to my father and he worked for the town as a kid cleaning catch basins when they were still doing it with an infringing tool. You know, so fortunately, we've mechanized a lot of the operations. But yeah, it is there. There is a valid point in and I do think depending on who applies, you know, we would look at, you know, a college kid, you know, for the summer help position if it was available.
Does everybody want to move on to like looking at the line items in the budget for public works. Real quick. I'm trying like 10 of nine.
Diana, look forward. I mean, I shook my head. I'm familiar with it. If everybody else didn't want to look at that today, that's fine with me. I didn't know what we were doing, so whatever.
We still have to go through. So what we really need to do is just look at the line items that we have proposed to budget, and are they good numbers? Are we all in agreement? Do know what I mean? So the things that I have questions on is more diesel gasoline, those kinds of things to make sure we got the right numbers in there based on current market. And then looking at where we are year to date, see if our overtime numbers okay and everything. Those we do not have to do tonight if everybody is done with it today that you got enough information on the roadwork to think about, you know, the request to fund road improvement fund is $330,000 for this proposed budget. I think you got plenty of information tonight to support that. Anybody has any questions on anything? It's really $8.54. So I mean Yeah. I mean, I think I'm good. I think it's just my Yeah. Whatever. Any question that I wanted to ask? Yeah. I I mean, I know we just got an updated spreadsheet from Sherry today. So I don't know if everybody wants to have a chance to look at that and then we can pick it up on next week.
I mean, if you want, I could share my screen now. If you wanted to do a quick review of it or not, it's basically whatever you wanna do.
How long you guys wanna work? Know someone else is testing.
Unless we look at it real quick and if anything stands out, I don't know, Diane, you decide. Either way, it doesn't matter. Linda, Louise, Kurt, any, Rob?
Well, don't mind doing a quick review now it's one less thing we'll have to worry about or we can just ask questions next week instead of going through it. Give me a second. Okay, do you all see that? Certainly do.
Okay, so that is the main public works line item. As you see the two big changes right off the bat are in the salary line and also the temp salary and a little bit less in the overtime salary for public works. You know, those represent kind of the, you know, the biggest single change in that budget. And the first one that is the, you know, the that is the cost of an additional employee for public works compared to today, the salary. And then there's also benefits costs associated with it. That would be for hiring one maintainer one. And yeah. And so that those two, you can see what those work out to be. Obviously, if we didn't add the extra maintainer one, that line item would go down considerably. The salary temp help, that's the cost basically of hiring a part time summer helper. There is some extra part time help. Are
you still on? Yes. That's budgeting. Racing at Stafford. Know. July 2. Hey, Yeah. Kurt. We can hear you. You had asked a question about full,
the diesel Hold one second. Can we go back to overtime for public works, the 112? I just wanna give everybody a point of reference. We're requesting $9,000 That's an increase year to date. There's the last expenditure report we've spent $8,190 So it seems like, you know, we wouldn't unless it's storm related, we wouldn't have any significant overtime between now and the fiscal year end. Well, hopefully.
But I So mean so I'm just trying to benchmark is $9,000 a good number when year to date we're at $8,190
So, I mean, I think part of the problem is we did have a lot of storm related stuff we had to deal with last year. I mean, it's you're kind of reading tea leaves to try to figure There, out how we I just want everybody to know because, yeah. Right, I mean, one of my first year here, we essentially spent $0 in overtime costs. You know, the last two years we've had quite a bit. It's been majority storm related. There are times when it makes sense to keep the crew longer on a project. You know, if you've got an hour to finish up a project, it's a lot more efficient to knock it out than bring everything back to the shop, lock it up, come back the next day, finish the last hour. So there are times,
you know, non storm related when it makes sense to just for the sake of efficiency to pay the differential cost for overtime. So there's always going to be some. Hopefully, we I'm can make it
just saying it's an increase and it seems like we're trending in that number anyway. So it's not like anything we can do with that. Yep. Yep.
Vehicle maintenance is like, this is the funny one, right? Because we have a big expense in there that we normally wouldn't have.
Okay. So, here's the thing with vehicle maintenance. The Jay originally requested 62,000, but that included two items and Jay if I recall that included the replacement for the main conveyor belt for the sweeper and then that was a replacement flail for our roadside mower. Am I correct in that?
Yeah, the mower head for the roadside mower and replacing the belts for the sweeper, the conveyor, the main conveyor to rebuild that.
Right. Now the board of Selectmen did not fund that $30,000 because they felt that was a capital. Those were expensive enough things. They were capital items. So that's why there's a difference between the original department request and what the board of selectmen approved. The reality is though, given what we've proposed to spend out of capital, there's not money in capital to spend it. So, I mean, I think there's a chance we could pull off buying the belt, but we're probably not going to replace the mower head, the flail mower, given that you know, vehicle maintenance budget. That's a $10,000 increase from last year. Basically, okay.
Yeah, maintenance, to be totally honest, maintenance has been, we've been working pretty hard to make sure this make sure our equipment is, is ready to go. And, you know, there was some things deferred, some things happened, and it just it took quite a bit to get things into shape. I can't really foresee that it's going go up more than that, but this is kind of where we're at right now.
Okay. I mean, year to date, we've spent $27,253 but that includes that large repair that got taken out of here that we didn't Yeah, the $7,000
and it was 7, like 78, we'll call it $7,800 for the rust repairs to the truck body. Right. And there was a few other big ticket items that came along. Yeah. Yeah, we had some brake repairs that we weren't really expecting, but it happens. So, yep.
I guess the other two items we should talk about is diesel and gasoline. Whether those are good numbers, right?
So I'll tackle gasoline. So I went back and pulled twelve months of data from public works from our wax fuel cards. And I supplied that to the board of finance. And the basic conclusion is that between the two vehicles plus ancillary stuff like mowers and stuff like that, We're consuming 2,350 gallons in a twelve month period. So since we have the same had the same vehicles for that twelve months, we've tracked That should stay fairly constant from year to year because we're not anticipating adding other gasoline vehicles to the fleet, at least at this point. So then the question becomes, what do we assume our per gallon cost for gasoline? I gave you a sheet which basically says what number we would budget if we assumed $3.50 a gallon, what number $4 a gallon, and what number $4.50 a gallon. And I arbitrarily picked $4 a gallon, you know, as the benchmark. And if you pick $4 a gallon for public works, works out to about $9,400
a year in gas. But I mean, I have no idea what gas prices are going to be. My guesses are going to come down and they're going to be less than 4, but I don't know.
Mean, they're not at So, I mean, so we know going into the summer, right? Gas isn't going down. Unless demand goes down. And it depends whether demand goes down. You know, are people gonna drive? I don't know. So I mean Well, mean, the cost of oil has already come way down.
I know. You know? Yet the cost of gas hasn't really dropped yet. And why is that? I mean People are greedy. I mean. I don't think it's so lower than 9,400.
I mean, anybody else have, I mean, Year to date, we've spent $7,149 on gas. And and we've only had the high prices what for the last two months, three months? Yep.
So it seems 9,400 will get us the increase whether that'll be a good number as the crystal ball factor. We don't know.
Right. We have to pick a number. Right. You know, we're we're throwing a dart at a board here. We don't know for sure. We should on this out of caution.
Right. Oh, my question to the board is, does anybody think it should be higher than $4 a gallon for the estimate? I think with bulk pricing,
I don't know. I think that's a reasonable estimate. Yeah, I'm fine with that. Don't think we're gonna, and it's not a huge, you know, ticket item. So I think we can afford to just use that as the, I mean, it's huge, but you know what I mean. Does
this fuel cost, it does not include senior transportation in there. They have their own line item for that, right?
And if you look at the budget, I adjusted senior transportation that same scheme. I used $4 a gallon. I figured out exactly how many gallons they've used in the last twelve months. And then I up to that by about 15% because if you look at senior transportation and the requests for medical transport, they've been going up, they've been trending up significantly for the last four years And I don't see any reason why that's going to change. So I think we're going to keep having and it's just straight due to the increase in our population in that 75 and older category that likely relies on senior transportation. You know for providing medical care and getting food shopping and stuff like that. So, that's what I did for senior transportation to develop that number, use that same guidelines. What about diesel?
So diesel, the good news is we've already locked in for the year. Sherry can probably give you the exact details on that. The
new fiscal year? Yeah, we're already locked in for next fiscal year for diesel prices. And we're locked in, I want to say around two, Carrie, do you remember exactly? Yeah, 02/29. 02/29 Yep. A Oh, this $14,000 is just for public works? Well,
in that number? Yes, and no. Make a day in public works at that. We've spent $12,800 approximately. That's on the last expenditure report we got tonight. All right.
Keep in mind that the diesel tank at the Public Works also supplies the firehouse and the buses.
I just don't know how many gallons. So go back and look.
I just wanna check because I I get it that we have one tank and then several department uses it, but we bill out the other departments. Right? So this cost should just reflect the cost for public works. Right? Correct. And if we have a price locked in, it should be easier to calculate what it should be. Right? Right.
And I don't know what last year's price is based on. I'll take a look at the
last year we budgeted $14,000 too. So I would have expected that our contract for this year would be higher than last year. But we had a lower price last year too.
The budget is the same numbers. Yeah. But last year, the price would be lower. Yeah. That's why I don't for this year is what I guess what I'm asking.
Diane? Yes. I don't I don't know if I can shed some light on that or not. But currently, our diesel prices of $1.82 a gallon. Yeah. And so when I do the when I do the reports, because the reports for each department are processed here, I calculate what the cost is for each department, and then pass it all pass it along for Sherry and Marina to fill out. So for public works, currently, here, we've spent a little less than $6,000 So in fuel for us, what the the process and then The process is $12,800 What's
that? Our current expenditure report that we reviewed tonight says diesel for public works year to date expense is $12,892
Right. And that's probably combined fire department senior transportation. And, and us, and then the buses have a cost to, but I'm not, I don't know if the buses come. The buses, the buses must go right to the school. Would that be right, Sherry? So they have their own diesel line item. So our total our total diesel cost is, is the fire department, senior center, our senior transportation and us combined. But just for this department, I've got it at like 50, like I said, a little over $5,500
Well, that's where I'm confused. So, our current expense of $12,892 in this account today is public works, senior transportation. And fire department. And fire department. Yep. Okay. Yes. Does
the fire department budget for their own? Why would we have fire department in there if they have a budget? Yes, do. So that's my question, how that works.
We have our own budget based on what the number is that's locked in. And then we just we pay for it as as used. We get we we get the bill from, you know, from town hall, and then they they pay the bill.
But we shouldn't put the fire department expense into public works if if public if the fire department pays their own. Correct. Right.
Is I'll I'll ask Maria. Research on that and figure that out. This is a Marina question because she handles this for diesel and with all the departments. I will ask that question and get more details for the next. This
is how it was set up since I came on board that the diesel was combined all in one into the public works and then how the department, this was in place before Marina.
It's just not the public's work because it's not all your expense.
Right. So Diane, my understanding is what happens is, you know, when we fill up, it's a big bill. It's many thousands of dollars. Right. Right. That all gets dumped into that expense, all gets dumped into public works, but then it gets transferred out later when we bill all the individual departments. That's how it used to work, you know, and I think it's partly because we don't bill, Gay, how often do we send out bills? How often do you break out the bill to the fire department?
You know, so on and so forth. I do it at least every couple of months. I try to do it. I try to get it over there every month, but this old computer doesn't cooperate sometimes and I got to finagle it that the system runs on. So it's been every couple of months that I get stuff over to Marina.
So we should look at figuring that out and making sure we're correctly assessing the costs.
I department, right? Yeah. I'll a look at it and I'll give you all that information. Alright. Next meeting. Okay? That's good.
Anybody else have any other questions? It's sticking out. Can I ask a question about under the snow removal budget? So I take it when we have a big snow event, we hire outside contractors. They're not employees, right? They're ten ninety nine, they're subcontractors. No, we don't have any outside contractors.
What about Mark Williams or the people that talk? He's an employee of the town? He's a temp part time employee, but he is an employee.
So there shouldn't be any numbers in contractor snow removal because we don't have any contractors that we pay. Right, not any, yeah,
So if we have an event where we have to hire these temp people to supplement our town employees, even though they're temporary employees, it shows up in the public work salary line item. Because the snow removal is only overtime, right?
Think it showed we put everything in the OT snow removal line item. That covers everything.
Right. So that would be the temp help plus regular town employees overtime for snow removal. Correct. They've never broken out separately
the cost of the temp help for snow removal. Okay. Right. Okay. That's all I wanted to know.
And remember that was one that got trimmed down to $15,000 from $25,000 last year. Right. Because for two years in a row, had been consistently under that. You know, we had pretty mild years. But again, you know, those numbers are all over the map depending on what they deal with.
Right. So now my other question is that supplies number 642 from last picture of year, that included salt, right? And now we're breaking salt out separately because that's how the board of selectmen wanted salt to be a separate line item, correct? Correct.
So I screwed up when I added the salt back in there. I did not subtract it from ending equipment line item. So that was my era. That should have been, I think 7700. So that's my screen. Let's highlight that. So we remember to change that. So so you messed it up. Screwed it up. Thank you. I just went through all that. Appreciate that. Well, you can't get good health these days.
Okay. I'll take a look at that and make sure that it's right.
All right. I don't have any other questions on public works. Does anybody else have any questions on the public works line end? Joanne?
I just had a follow-up to the temp employee question. Do we have many of those people? Right. For snow removal?
Well, I mean, just in general, because if we're considering other employees down the line, is there many, do you have many temp employees either for snow removal or for cutting grass or so I'm just asking the question. Yeah, no, we don't. So For this one person that she brought up?
Correct. There is another, there is, there was one other person that we used last year when Mark Williams wasn't available. That you know, somebody that lives in town and he was qualified and and we used him as well. Okay. But we didn't use him this year.
Thank you. But we have a pool of two people to draw on, but if most of the time, if it's a bad storm, it's only one person that's being called out, right? So. Correct. Right. And the guy we use, Mark Williams,
was a former town public works employee that eventually started his own business. And, you know, he's been tempting over for probably thirty years, something like that.
The thought that crossed my mind and why I asked was you never know who would want to be like a temp to a permanent person, but I'm seeing where you're going as far as people coming on board or being a seasonal person or something like that.
Sure, we did that because one of our current employees had been a summer helper for about five years running the roadside mower when we had money for it. And we eventually hired him.
And that's what I've seen happen a lot and that's where my mind was going. Okay, thanks.
All right, does anybody have any other questions before we wrap this up?
I have one last one. Go ahead. The scrap surplus money, is that something that you guys do here or is that a different another time? Did you see that? The request from us?
I saw that in the packet, but I didn't see it on the agenda. So I didn't know what we were doing on that. So
Oh, that wasn't okay. That wasn't part of the No. Public works presentation kind of thing.
So I get the concept. We sold scrap metal. We have money. We wanna spend it. My question is how we do it. Maybe Sherry's gonna have to do some research on this because it's so now we have this income item. We can't just offset the expense item with it. So we're so in essence, we're asking, is this and this is the supplies budget in public works that it's confined to? Tools. Tools. Yeah. What number is Equipment.
Right? What number is it that it was? The last three numbers, that's all I need. 730. 730. Okay. Equipment Public Works. We have a budget of $6,400 and we only have a year to date expense of eight fifty four dollars So technically we wouldn't be overspending that line item to buy that stuff that you want. So we would just take that scrap metal into a miscellaneous income account, Sherry? Well, technically
I'm forecasting to be As long as we earmark it. Unless you want to have a scrap metal
revenue. I think it's just a miscellaneous thing as long as we have notations to know what it was. Okay.
Because I don't think it's an ongoing thing. It's just like we had this little windfall, so to speak. Want to spend it on equipment, but their equipment is not overspent yet. We really Okay. We So may transfer money from that into their account at year end if it becomes overspent, right? Is that how we would do it? Yes.
Well, either that or we leave it in revenue to offset the expenditure, you know?
Right, but we wouldn't put it in the, we wouldn't offset the expense on the expense side we'd have revenue, and then that's what I'm saying, I've been on one side and expense on the approval to do it, it's just accounting for that revenue coming in Cherry's got to find a home for that. And then if that line item gets overexpended as we get closer to year end, we'll have to do balance transfers to fix it.
I guess what he's saying is he has a bunch of things and he's anticipating that given current trends, will overexpend that account. You know, and the question is, does he have permission to expend it by that difference?
Well, see, I can't tell you about because right now I don't see the overexpenditure in the account. As where we are right now. We know what's going to happen in the future, right? But we can't deal with a future event. And correct me if anybody disagrees. Think if we have this money, we put it in a revenue account somewhere miscellaneous revenue, we know it's there. You spend it out of this account. And when we over expend that line item, then we have to reconcile it at year end. Right. Use that money to offset it.
And that's an essence way the auditor wants us to start getting that mindset. And right, you know,
I don't think you need any approval from us to do that. Okay. Because you're not overexpended yet.
Jay, is there enough money in that steel account to that ramp belt you need for the sweeper? No. Okay. No. Just wanna
No. No. The just the the current items that I listed that we, you know, we'd like to get, you know, that's like we don't have a 24 volt battery charger, you know, we got equipment now that's got 24 volts. Our existing battery charger is pretty old. Works, sometimes it doesn't, you know, and there's there's a few things that few other items that would be make things a little safer, like the jack stands and that. So I I I was just trying to show that we had a way to spend the money that we brought in because of scrapping the stuff that's been sitting around here for some time.
Potentially, don't have a problem with that. I don't know if anybody else has a difference of opinion on the board because there it is. So you're talking about he's collected $3,421 So if we put that some kind of a revenue account, then as he spends the money and when his account becomes overexpanded, we will use that money to backfill it.
I agree. Mean, I'm listening. I was trying to interject. I agree. Just put it in the right account and then keep track. And like Sherry said, do things the proper way or whatever. It makes good sense. They collected the scrap metal. They should be able to spend it on the things that they need. Yep. I'm in agreement.
I don't think you need formal approval from us because you're not overexpanded yet anyways. Does anybody have a difference of opinion on the board that you say no you don't want them to spend that money that they dug out of the scrap pile. I'm okay It's with a great idea.
Yeah, I'm okay with it. I think that's just fine. That's fine.
I have further question on those three, the equipment, signs, and tools. Why are they broken out if they're all combined on the right hand side? Aren't they being shown separately for the finance part of it, the money part of it?
In 2021, that's the way the chart of accounts was. When I came on board in March, I was asked to please set up a uniform chart of accounts. So I've been trying to get to that point where I built a crosswalk and I provided that to the board where we just call everything the supplies that are supplies truly, and then equipment, the items that are equipment. And then we have like sanding equipment and we just have regular equipment. So we're trying to get to the point where we have this uniform chart of accounts that goes along with what the state has. And we were told to do that.
So In other words, last fiscal year, we were using a different piece of software when we converted to the new software. Right. Okay. We turned dense like items into a single account instead of having all these extra accounts a lot of little titty bit things in it. We're just trying to clean that up. So Sherry gave a cheat sheet to say, these three items are now all in this new account.
Okay. So eventually that's going to be just one line item? Right. Right. Okay. All right.
Yeah. And once we get to next year and we're comparing last year's numbers, The only reason those are still in there and on the spreadsheet is because in previous years, they were broken out. We left them in there. So next year, we're going to be able to get rid of a whole bunch of these line items because they're not going to match, you know, so we'll have last year's expenses budgeted in the plan. So you'll see a much more condensed spreadsheet next year when we get to this.
Okay. Any other questions anybody has? Going going going going move on to approval of meeting minutes.
Before we do that, I just want to say one thing real quick. And that you had asked me at the last meeting to show my methodology and figure out what the true cost for library payroll is. I had done that. In your packet, there is a Word doc that basically what I did, because some of the employees got more than a 3% increase. Because they're bringing them up to minimum wage. Right.
So, I backed out all the costs. The bottom line is it's about $1,000 more than was originally in the budget that the library put forward to me. So, I corrected that, and that's in your budget now. Okay.
Anybody have any questions on that for Eric? Just on that, Eric, did some of them now say 6% increases then? Yes. All right. Yeah, I did take a look at it since you got No, but a combination of bringing them up to minimum wage. Oh, of course. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. But we brought them to minimum and gave them the 3%?
Right. No. We just brought them up to minimum wage. So basically, anybody that was making more than minimum wage got a 3% raise. Anybody making less than minimum wage got brought up to minimum wage.
So we're legal, basically. Oh, legal is illegal. Be greater than a 3% increase. Yeah. Yeah, I gotta, I have to look at it again because I saw the six point sixes, but that's fine. Right. But that is because they were making around $13
an hour. And to bring them up to 14, which will be minimum wage in the next fiscal year, this comes out to 6.6%. Got it. So that's what accounts for that. Yep.
That's gonna break the budget folks right there. There it is. Yeah, I know. I'm disputing,
but I wanted to know the 6%. I'm just messing to it. Right. Thank
you. And by the way, that is part of the difference in the budget for the elections is the fact that a whole series of the election workers make, you know, essentially their rate needs to increase to $14 to make minimum wage next year also. That does affect a couple departments within town.
Right. And we did correct all that. So in that spreadsheet, it should be good.
Any other questions, guys? All right, moving on. Approval of meeting minutes. We have one, two, three, four meeting minutes to approve. Can I have a motion? So the motion would be, I'll say the motion so that someone can, motion would be approval of the meeting minutes for 02/23/2022, 03/02/2022, 03/09/2022, and 03/16/2022. I so move.
Rob England motions. Do I have a second? I'll second it. Second from Louise. Any discussion? No? All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Kurt, are you abstaining? I'm abstaining. Okay. All right.
Got that, Eric? So that should be motion carries five zero one with Kurt extending. Yep. Yep. All right. Liaison reports, do we have any?
There was no set, there was no CIP this month. Okay. So there's nothing to report there.
All right. We already talked about the community center. Linda, do you have anything? Yep. I'm all set. All right. Any open board discussion? Anything anybody wants to say, add,
Corinne? I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm fried.
Just one thing, Rob, I was gonna say, so next week we have another meeting, correct? Yes. Open for, so we have another budget meeting on Wednesday. Then I think we've heard from every big entity we needed to hear from. Right. So I guess we'll all just be reviewing, right? Yeah,
it's gonna be decision time soon and hopefully we'll get Mark back and we can hopefully get everybody involved. But yeah I think at this point our information gathering is basically done and now we have to do what we do.
Sounds good. That's all I wanted to set the stage for next week now that we've had those. Yeah, thanks.
So just real quick from the board, other than the information that we've talked about, which was basically diesel and there weren't that many other line items you really asked us to look at, what is it that you want us to look at between now and next week?
The only thing I have outstanding on my wish list of things that I want, but I don't think it affects our decision making. I just wanted an accounting of the funds from last fiscal year. We know what we put into them but what expenses did we pay out of those funds, because we never see the expense side of those funds we just see these transfers into these funds. And that's all that hits our budget, but we should be looking at the expenses on those funds as a board, but that shouldn't affect our decisions on anything. It's just information we need to have.
Eric, my general take would be going into our next meeting or two, maybe think about the areas where we have the biggest increases. Pick three or five, and let's let's talk about those. I know we probably already talked about them. Don't don't get me wrong. What I mean is that when the board sits down and goes through the budget and let's be honest, sits down to think about what we're gonna cut because we're probably going to do that. Know thinking about explaining why we need this that and the other you know these top five items that are the biggest jumps. Maybe one of them is just straight up, hey look diesel costs more or whatever, know number two heating oil costs more because that's where we're at now, but things like that, that's my gut reaction is from for our board discussion, when we sit down to try and work this budget up and produce something that is, as I always say responsible and passable. You know that's my take, like you know something that is $5,000 I don't you know whatever. Let's focus on the bigger ticket items. Okay.
Does that make sense to everybody? I hope so. Yeah, want
to add one thing too. I was making sure I could be heard. I like that document, Eric. I'm hoping it's updated. One you have, it's in the spreadsheet or Sherry, just the one that where the mill rate is computed and the increases just with if there's been any changes. I think you've got do you know which one I'm talking about? Shows the revenue tab and it's
we still haven't talked about the whole revenue side yet. That's fine. Yes. That's updated.
Yeah. Right. I have it. For my I just wanna make sure that whatever we have available before our meeting next week is the latest up to date. If it's already there, great. I look at it all the time. But if there's been any revenue that's changed or a couple of things you talked about tonight, Sherry, if that's been updated, that little piece, that's important to me. What I talked about tonight,
Joanne, it has been already updated in that spreadsheet. Thank you. That's my I just got to do the back in the internal
journal entries. Have to take care of that with the auditor tomorrow, but that's fine. Okay. The revenue itself is is been. And then we'll have an updated revenue report that will give us the actuals for this year, which we don't have in the spreadsheet, but we have She put in the unaudited items for last fiscal year.
And then my last thing was just kind of priorities. If, if we are going to get to the business of cutting or whenever that comes. I just want to hear from, you know, like we have a good overview from public works tonight, but what are the priorities? Is a person more important? Is, I'm not saying we're doing cutting, but is the road work is the main thing? I don't know, I guess I would just, the equipment and yeah that's my take.
Eric you gave us in your summary a capital expense right, thing for?
Yeah. A while back, I gave you a capital expense summary.
Is that still accurate? Yeah. I don't think there's anything that's right. There's a a worksheet that says 2122 proposed, 2122 funded, 2223 proposed, and current balances.
Okay. Right. The current balances are probably off because that's Okay. You know, probably three months out of date at this point.
Right. Why don't we bring that up to date for the next meeting? Yeah. That seems like a good call since we're gonna be looking at all of this. I
mean, capital to me is one of the big, big factors here. Right? Right. That we repeatedly shorted, you know, so. Right. Right. So we have the current balances on them. Okay.
Else guys? Do we have anybody for public speak? Let me see. Oh, did you wanna?
Yeah, I'll just give a quick. So we, I received an email from someone that you're all familiar with, Marcy Miner, who speaks out quite a bit at these meetings and will have questions down the road. So she had sent me an email, so I would just want to just disclose that, asking a few questions about the school's budget and, you know, things of that nature. She, like Louise mentioned, she will be present I'm sure she will, if that page on the website is open, I'll ask her to submit any you know questions there. But there were some very simple questions that I could just answer. Mean she could look back at the meetings and hear them as well but other than that she's just very interested and we'll have some questions about the educational budget down the line.
All right. Anybody else have anything else they wanna say? We have a motion to adjourn?
I'll motion to, do I say to adjourn the meeting, right? Yes.
And I will second it. Rob seconds. So Joanne's motion to adjourn. All done, yeah. Rob seconds. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Unanimous.
All right. Thank you for staying for our whole meeting.
Then Curt, I hope you feel better, man. Thank you. Recuperate well, sir. Sweet. Thank you, everybody. Bye bye. Tonight. Alright, folks. Bye. Bye.