Meeting transcript
BOF Special Meeting
April 29, 2020 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Looks like we have most of the Board of Finance members, if not all. Think I see them all. Amanda, I'd like to call the meeting to order at 07:04PM. Okay. Just a quick note. It looks like going down through I see Linda, Rob, Kurt. Diane is here Louise. David. And I think we're all here. So we're good. Everyone's present. Okay. Okay, so I'm gonna just kind of make a couple of comments about today's meeting. We have a lot to cover. It's probably gonna get pretty detailed. I'd like to keep it fairly quick and simple, but I don't know that it's going to be. This is obviously a very unusual situation and we've had to diverge from our original path. Just I call your attention to the agenda, we have six items. We have first item is public speak. The second item technically. The third item is the budget workshop under which the
Board of Finance is going to review the current proposed budget. We're essentially, I think the plan is going to be that we're going to go through department by department, maybe not quite line by line. Some are going to be easier than others, we're but probably going to look at each one in turn and have some brief discussion, especially the outliers, and talk about where we are and what the opportunities might be to change them if needed. So it's probably gonna be fairly detailed, and I don't wanna bog things down in the details, but I do think we owe it to the town, especially under these circumstances, to go through each line essentially, and make sure that we're doing the right thing. The fourth item is board open discussion where we will go through the open discussion about the budget, talk about where we wanna go, if we wanna make some substantive or even minor changes. The fifth item is public speaking. Second item is public speaking. We'll have two different sessions of that. And the sixth item is adjournment. I'd like to point out that this is a special meeting. Therefore, we cannot make any changes to the agenda. We stick with this agenda. Any of the public, it looks like we have quite a few people join today. I want to thank you for joining us. It's important that we do get the input.
We are going to have a hopefully a well attended meeting next week that will actually discuss the results of this week's budget if we're they'd like to present one to the town. So that one's going to be the important one to gather final feedback, I think from from the public. But we do have opportunities for the public to speak here as well. For anybody who does choose to speak, would ask that you keep your remarks brief and to the point. We've got a lot of work to do today. And as we said during most of our meetings, if you are going to agree with somebody else who's already spoken, you know, can just say, you know, my name is Mark and I just want to agree with what Rob said or what Linda said and go on from there. Kind of keep it brief and things moving along. Okay, that being said, let's go ahead and open it up to public speaking.
Amanda, do you want to roll down through and see if you can who would like to speak? Yes, I will unmute and let us know if you would like to participate in public speak or not. So first up, we have Melissa Motesca. Let's see. Hi. I just have a question. Are you planning is the plan to vote on the budget for the next meeting? No.
No, like no, that's not the plan. Go ahead Eric. The official,
the budget will get adopted. I believe it's May 27. So the purpose of the next meeting is primarily to be the public budget, public participation component of the budget to present the budget and get get further feedback from the public.
Okay thank you. Thank you. Okay next we have Rochelle. Thank you. I don't have anything. Okay. Joanne Heber. Thank you. Thank you. Okay Jamie Weber. I'm all set thank you.
Okay. We have Kay Bednar. All set. Thank you. Is that Diane?
That would be me with two n's. I'm all set. Thank you.
Okay. And then we have a phone number, 916-6122, if you would like to speak. No, we're okay. It's Kathy and Mike. Okay, thank you. Amanda, think you missed the Goodwin family. Joseph, is that you?
Yes, sorry. It's a little bonkers in my house right now. So I'll spare you guys the background noise. Thank you. And we have Jason who just joined. That's Cindy and Jeff Murray. That's Jason's. Hi Jeff I think that is all
Mark, you got it. Thank you. Boy, done enough of these today. You think I'd know that one. Feel like I spent most of my time in conference calls today. There being no more public speak, we'll go ahead and move on to item number three in our agenda, which is the budget workshop. So my proposal, and I'll look for input on the other members of the Board of Finance, but my proposal is to go down through the budget as we have it presented in the last meeting we had last week. There are a couple of changes, updates that we've heard since then. We've now got the RAM budget, the revised AES budget, which I don't think was in there originally. There's also a minor discrepancy in the revenue which we were talking about right before we started the meeting so we'll clean it up a little bit. Does anybody have any input or suggestions about how to proceed other than that? Don't forget to unmute if you want to talk. Okay, guess that being said, we'll go ahead and roll right into it. So,
Eric, I think what we just like to do is we'll kind of look at these top numbers. Probably makes the most sense for me to share my screen if I can go ahead and do that Amanda. Yep, go ahead.
All right, this is a might be a little small for you to see depending on what you're you're looking on kind of device or whatever. There are we've already talked about several of these in different meetings, but I do think it's worth kind of going through each of the department line items and then maybe some of the hit outlier line items. Know Eric, you spoke about these ad nauseam through various boards and I appreciate your patience in doing this again. I think as we get more and more public versus patient, it's important for them to see that we are going through each of these lines and help people understand what they are generally. So going down through and again this information is available on the public website, the town's website if anybody wants to download this and take a look at it line by line. It's it's there. It's not always clear what some of these items are or what they cover but we'll talk about that here and in the future. Our next meeting, by the way, we plan on having a Q and A session. So one of the first items on the agenda will be a public speak with Q and A. So if there are specific line items or questions you have
about the process, or a particular department or particular expenditure, that would be your opportunity, I think the best opportunity in the public's behalf to actually ask specific questions and have them answered directly. Okay, we will try to go through this fairly expediently, but it is it is some work. So bear with us folks. We'll move on. I'd like to move down through the departments there and just go right into the detail. And again particularly any of the members of the Board of Finance or Eric or Amanda if you guys see something we missed or have something specific you want to talk about by all means do so.
Okay first item up is the Board of Selectmen this is the selectman salary the Board of Clerk the Board of Clerk for the Board of Selectmen's meetings we actually see a 0% differential here for the exception of the dues and memberships dropped out the overall expenditure for board of selectmen is $100 less. Does anybody have any questions or comments about that? Hearing none. I guess we can we can move along. I know there are some effort by the Board of Selectmen to reduce salary or give it back or talk back. I think there's some it just became more complicated than it was worth. Okay, the next item and this is where we start seeing some significant differentials. So I think we have to talk a little bit about this. The next is the town administrator department, town administration department. So we have the salary of the town administrator that's actually showing reduced from the budget this year. And Eric, I believe that what you said is basically your predecessor was making higher salary than you are now. That's Correct. Basis of this differential.
Correct. So it is possible for me to get that salary, but that salary in my case is predicated on getting being awarded a bonus by the board of selectmen. So that represents the most I can earn, which is less than what my predecessor was making.
All right. I think I have any questions on that. The next line item, I know Eric you've explained this also. This is an increase in the administrative assistance salary line item, wages technically and we are you've got notations here. The one of the reasons is we're increasing the number of hours available and also increasing the salary.
Sure. So I can say one of the things I did before I prepared this budget was I looked at the CCM, Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, municipal salary data, which is basically a data source with all the salaries position by position across all town halls. And the biggest discrepancy we had in a town, I mean, we pretty much across the board are on the very low end of the salary spectrum, but there were a couple of spots where we were really, really low. And one of them was the administrative assistant. And so what I'm trying to do is budget as many hours as we can. It's four more hours than I have now. And that still represents, you know, if you look at the average administrative assistant
or administrators assistant, the salary level today is about $55,000 plus benefits. So although this is an increase, this is still nowhere near what it should be.
Okay, thank you. Any members of the Board of Finance have any comments or input on that? Questions? I think most of us would probably agree this is warranted but that's my take and I won't speak for the board. Mobile phone costs conferences seminars leaving that in there, even though it does, I don't think that those actually get used this year.
Correct. The seminar is basically the cost of the Connecticut Council of Municipalities annual meeting. My predecessors attended that religiously. I decided not to this year because I didn't have time, but it's probably something I should be going to. And that's about $300. So that's why that is. Got it. Okay.
I'm just gonna move through these so again if the board members have input or questions just go ahead and speak up so we don't bog it down by waiting. Mobile phone I think that is what it is. Mileage is by contract. I think you have a note there. Correct.
Dues and memberships this is all primarily which is appropriate I think. So moving on to the next section this is the Board of Finance it's fairly simple we have an expense item for the clerk for the Board of Finance meetings they got to be held so it's like all the other commissions and boards that's going to be a requirement Office wise we just took that out. Everything's virtual now right now you have any paper so. Legal we do have a budget for legal If we were in the need of legal advice, separate from something we might request through the Board of Selectmen,
we do have a budget for that. It was set in last year's budget requested and set at $5,000 We reduced it to $2,500 I mean, haven't used this. I don't think this is under unreasonable reduction. Does anybody disagree? No, I mean,
if you ask one question, you're be up to $2,500
Yeah, that may well be the case. I know. Well, it's one of those things that I think, you know, it gives us a little bit of flexibility that if we really get some problematic thing we'll be working with the port of selectman hopefully to resolve that and have some appropriate fallback there. Okay, up, that kind of ends the Board of Finance. Auditor, actuary. So there are two line items here, actuarial services and the annual auditor. Now, as I pointed out during the last meeting, this 32,750 that is budgeted, I'm sorry, 2,000 is suggested here. We did sign a contract. Barbara, do you remember how much that was?
Well, I looked at that. And I think what actually is going to happen is that if the budgets way of the audits way delayed, again, they're going to end up I you could go up to I think $32.05 was for next year. But if the budget I mean, they're not done until after the first of the year, we'd probably be paying it with next know, the the money for the budget we're in. And you could go to $32.05 would cover. Need to go to thirty two five?
The way I was looking at that is not really because of the timing of when they're gonna bill us. So I thought that the 32 was adequate.
So unless any of the Board of Finance members disagrees, think we just continue on now. Agreed. Alright actuarial services. You guys want to explain what this is used for? Yeah, the it's
other post employment benefits and we contract with Hooker and Holcomb to do that analysis and then they bill us accordingly.
And this estimate is just based on historical data? Correct. So went up. And I have very little contact with them. Year to date we spent 5,000 so far.
Right. It's a one time billing after we've done the report. So hence you're you're budgeting 5,000 space experience? That's correct.
Any further questions? More expensive this year than it was the prior year. The actual billing, I mean.
And I'm I don't have a lot of contact with them because we don't have employees involved in that. It's the board of ed side where they have retirees who can stay in the town's health insurance plan and pay the premium. And so that's what the analysis is based on. So they don't really have a lot of contact with us except to gather the information, like how many people benefits are.
So this covers both the town and the board of ed? It does, yes. The report is inclusive. I
have a question. Yes, Okay. Louise. I was curious if anyone ever has gone to Hooker and Holcomb and asked them for some sort of a like a discount, a loyalty type of discount, or a discount based on the way the economy is going?
That's Certainly a thought. As I say, the only real contact I have with them is to pass along the Board of Education. They ask for a report. I've never even spoken to anyone. Everything is by email. So I don't even have a contact person except through email. But yeah, sure, I could inquire. Okay. Their activity might be lower too based on
participants and all that. Well, that's what I was wondering about the variability in fee if it has something to do with just the the amount of analysis that goes into it based on how many participants they have to analyze or if it's based on hours that they have to put into compiling the report. It's huge printed report that comes out again, not not a paper report. It's just something that's emailed, but I I can look into that.
Based on my experience, I've no participant count is looked at quite a bit for fees. So yeah, I think it's definitely something that should be looked into.
Well, here's another question. Is there a reason that it's on the town instead of on the school? If you're saying it's a school employee thing? Yeah, I would guess it's similar
to Kerma. We pay the whole thing because we pay it either through our budget or we give them money in their budget to pay for it. Think that And
from what I thought you said it could apply to either town or school employees. It's just that it tends to apply to school employees more?
That's correct. Yeah, we just don't have retirees who have stayed on the health insurance and paid premium.
Right, and what it's for is for the audit and the audit pick in the town picks up the cost of the audit. Okay, that helps.
It's mandated that it be done. It just happens to be that the auditors do incorporate the information, but it's a state mandate that towns analyze those costs.
Okay. Think you guys brought up some good points. It's worth asking to understand how they bill. Anybody have any other questions on that line item?
Oh, just whether or not do we know when the last time this was put out to bid?
You know, Adrian, I just don't know that much about it. I mean, the two years I've done this, it's it's been hooker and hold coming. I don't even know how many companies are out there that do that, quite honestly. It's a new concept for me. It wasn't around when I was in municipal finance in the past. I'm not seeing all of over the last time.
Okay. Yeah. I mean, I guess we should probably try to look into that as well.
I agree on that because I know there are a lot of companies out there now. Now they may be going under, but think a lot of competition.
Yeah, we can't, we should be able to, do we have a contact through CCM to Provide a list.
Yeah, to get a list. Eric, is there somebody else you there? I
mean, can certainly ask. We certainly have a contact at CCM that I can use to do research on, you know, get a list of companies that provide actuarial services to towns. Yeah that'd be helpful.
Hey Michael I think if you could mute your mic we're picking up some background. Mike Palazzi picking up some background noise from you guys. Amanda could probably do it for you. Okay. Alright, if there's nothing else we'll go ahead and move on to the next item. Good questions there. The town attorney. Eric, do want to just kind of run through this and basically So you just
the town has entered into a legal contract with a attorney. Basically, we have him on retainer and that has decreased our costs this year. We did that kind of as a cost savings measure. And additionally, this year is not a reval year. So we're likely to be on the low end of spectrum in terms of legal costs from the assessor. So I reduced that line item also. So this gives us a little bit of slack in our legal budget, but it certainly tightens it up. Okay. Somebody's not on mute. Doing this. Somebody's cleaning the kitchen. Yeah. Seriously.
Also, I just wanna let you know I'm having some sort of connectability issues. Things are intermittently freezing for me. So just FYI, if you
if I'm frozen, that's why. Okay. It look it looks like Dave Hewitt or Goodwin are the two that keep popping up as, as as the noise coming from. There we go. There we go.
All right, thank you guys. Okay, so if there aren't any questions on the budgeting for the attorney, again, that's going to be a variable just depending on what happens in town. Assessor, legal counsel for the assessor, I think your reasoning there in reduction is the same, isn't it?
I have a question. There's no year to date expense on that line item.
Yeah, it's totally variable. They haven't gotten sued this year. Yes. Okay.
So in typically when we get to revalue years, we have to jump our legal budget up for the assessor substantially because we tend to get a lot of a lot more legal requirements and a lot more lawsuits against the town. So I would presume not this coming year, but the year after that budget is going to need to go right back up probably the $8,000 or so. But this year it's not needed. Okay.
Okay, good question, Diane. All right, we'll move on down through there. Okay, so now we're in the tax collector section. I'm sorry, treasurer financial section.
Hang on one second. Yeah. Eric, you're saying it's not gonna be needed this coming year. Aren't we doing a full reval in October? We're starting a full reg reval in October,
but it takes a full calendar year to do. Also, they won't actually get those till the following year. Right.
Got it. Sorry. Was year that that things will get exciting again. Apologize. I was mistaken. I was thinking if we did it in October, we'd get adjustment, pushed back in February, but it's a year delayed. Got it. Sorry. Thank you.
Okay. So going on to the treasurer and financial department. We've got a decrease in the salary for the treasurer. I know they've got some movement here. Eric, you want to kind of explain briefly what's going on in this area?
Sure. So in discussions with Barbara earlier this year, she indicated that she could handle the job with less total hours and would like to go down to basically a three day work week. So this reflects a decrease in the number of hours on the part of the treasurer. Now, as you guys all know, we've already agreed to combine the financial department, with AES. And at some point, that's gonna maybe result in a further salary or further reduction in total costs. But I think at this point we just don't know what that is yet. So we're, you know, I'm suggesting we keep the budget basically where it's at.
And I know we're kind of behind on our discussions where we'd hope to be with our discussions of Andover Elementary to try to understand what this impact is going to be. I mean, I hate to leave anything on the table here if we really think there's going be a reduction. Can we not make any kind of ballpark estimates on what the further reductions might be or is it just way too premature? Know Adrian, you've been involved a little bit with this. Eric, you've had some conversations and discussion with this.
Yeah, so a lot of it is gonna be, it's a catch 22. A lot of it is gonna be, this year we probably won't see a real savings because we're gonna be dealing with the transitioning to new software and there's a lot of other things going on. There's sort of a lot of things in the wheelhouse. We are anticipating that we could see between a 10 and a $15,000 savings, but, it really is gonna depend on who applies and how it plays out. But we don't wanna anticipate that, and then if we come up with an issue with transition or whatever, that that's really the concern. And and the auditor said it it can really it varies. It just depends who's out there looking. It's gonna depend on software and what the workload is. The school and the town have some HR functions kind of rolled into those positions. That makes it a little more complicated, but there's a possibility Eric had an opportunity that I guess it looks like is it CCM, Eric, that signed a contract? Yeah. Correct. Yeah. So with with some HR opportunity, but that's, again, still brand new. So we don't know what the number looks like. So we may end up flat across the board but with better continuity. I mean, obviously, if we save money, it's great, but it's really hard to put a number on that until we've gone out. You know? And that's why we haven't messed with it. Like you, we'd like to get as much on the table as we can, but, we're just afraid that if we do that, that this this could be the one thing in the whole budget that could bite us because it's so
it's such a moving target right now. So
it's a lot of uncertainty around it. Is. Take it down. Okay. All right. Any other questions on that line item? Okay, so we have a flat budget on the wagers for the treasurer and clerk year to date expended about $15.07.
Sorry, Mark. Yeah, don't mean to interrupt. Okay, to Eric about this, the software cost of 30,000 if you decide to leave that in the fiscal year, that's going to go down to capital because that's where it's going to end up when the financial statements are done anyway, it's going to be something that capitalized and move to that part of the the budget in the in the financials. So just, I don't know, of highlight that. It'll it'll get out of treasurer department and it will either be in capital or you'll decide not to fund it next year but rather try to get it out of this year. So that's it.
Okay thank you. Yeah so the reason I put it in here originally was because I thought it was just for visualization purpose it makes it made sense to keep everything in the treasurer's department but she's right that that is a, you know,
that's not completely applicable for their. Yeah, it wouldn't skew your operating budget, you know, even if you left it there, you'd have an operating budget one year of x and an operating budget the next year of x squared or higher. So it's just the reporting of it would be more
applicable in your capital line. Right, understood. That makes sense. So that's really the cost of licensing. It's not the cost of training or other things which would be an expense.
Depends on the package. There was one company that was coming in, I believe just under 30, and they included a lot of training. And and we don't even know whether we're gonna go go with one of these software packages or the QuickBooks. So that was Yeah, understood.
So being on the committee, know there's a lot of uncertainty about how this is gonna roll. So one of the conversations
I've had How's that? With ADS is that they, if we could do it this year, they think they have the money in their current budget to do that, you know, which would allow us to take this out of this budget. But it kind of depends on how fast we move number one which isn't a given and it's riskier if we remove it from the budget.
Yeah I would agree with that. I'd be shocked if that's something we'd get in place in this fiscal year given the climate. I mean, we weren't under this, you know, done contact situation, maybe we could get together and do something and really push it. That really seems unlikely to me.
I have a question on that then. Let's say that that's all the case. So a you're saying AES thinks they have whatever $30,000 in play in their current the budget they're currently expending still. Correct. If they could so if they don't use it on this, they could use it on someone else? Kick it over to next year for some other purpose? I mean, theoretically, yes.
Yes. I mean so they do the same thing the town does is that it's the end of the year and in some cases their expenses have gone down considerably because school's not in session. So there are some things they save money on, not necessarily as much as you would think, but they're gonna be under budget this year, no question, because you know there's no students right now. Right,
Okay I just wanted to clarify that because it you know it's $30,000 it's it's not nothing and if we leave it in this in our budget you know I just don't know a situation where we're kind of double counting we definitely want to budget for it properly But if there's money in both budgets that could be used for the same thing, that seems a little silly. So You know, but They're probably gonna do something else with it.
I'm not actually looking at their budget right now, but I understand from talking to Laura because, I mean, we knew quite a while ago that Phoenix was going out of business. I think in part they were planning on that much quicker than the town was. And so they've kind of had money socked away for this for a while.
Good. But if the conversion doesn't happen in this fiscal year, it's kind of a moot point, correct? Correct. Then that money gets rolled back into the unencumbered or the, you know, the unencumbered fund balance. Right.
Yeah. At the same time though, and we've talked about this with some other items. If we if we get if we get started on it, even if it's not closed out until the end of July, you know, we're okay with that. So they're probably gonna bill us a certain amount upfront for software and everything, and then we'll have a completion amount based on how much transition help we need. So there's still a possibility this could move into this year's budget. We just and the other thing is too is we don't know exactly, again, what the transition cost is gonna be. It's gonna depend on how much we wanna try to keep in house and how much we wanna sub out. And these are conversations that we're we're still trying to to work through.
So I guess the pertinent question for the Board of Finance and we don't have to answer this here, but we're going to have to make a decision on whether this is an appropriate amount to budget for next year or not. I tend to think that if having been through software transitions several times in my career or business, I tend to think that this is a complicated thing that doesn't get resolved easily. We have two main entities that both have different needs. Know, in a perfect world, it'd be great to do it this year. I think that's a big risk personally, but I don't know if anybody else has any comments or wants to make any notations around that.
Mark, and this is a question for Eric. Has there been any movement? I know after the last AES Board of Ed meeting there, it was brought up that they need to sit down and set up some type of schedule in a meeting with the order selectman. Has there been any movement on that regarding the financial, treasurer financial position?
So I sent to the board of ed, well specifically to Shannon and Sally Doyen, as well as Adrian and Jeff Maguire, a copy of what I thought was a reasonable split in the duties between a top level finance director and a secondary person with the understanding that the top level person would be a say twenty six hour week position and the other one would be a full time position. You know, based on both the job descriptions from Laura and she does as the budget manager for AES as well as our finance office here. I haven't gotten any real comments back from anybody regarding that yet, but you know we've kind of done that and also looked at kind of what salary scales are for those people based on what all the other municipalities are paying. So we have kind of an idea where we're going to end up, but it's certainly not a final plan yet.
So looking at that, it would probably be reasonable to figure that it's not going to happen in this budget year going up. It
will happen at some point next year. I do, it's not, there's no way it's going to happen July 1, but I think there's a reasonable chance around December 1, we could make a switch. We could go to a combined unit December 1 if if we so chose.
Well, I to be clear, the the auditor felt that it's it's not that long of a transition. It's only gonna take give or take thirty days for the switch over once we pull the trigger. It's simply a matter of software and, and being ready for it. If we wait, we wait till we get into that timeframe, then we're going to be stuck because if we wait till December, we're gonna be in the end of everybody's audit season and we may not be able to get people. I still think the correct way to do this is to try to transition this over the course of the summer. You know, the school will have a lot less transactions going on. You know, we'll be closing out, but once we're closed out, then we could transfer everything over. Everybody will be in the books at that point. So
to answer your question, Kurt, it actually should happen over the course of the summer. The the realistic thing though is it's over it's the end of this budget cycle and the beginning of the next one. So, you know, probably September, October would be the the outside where we wanna be on this.
You know? I think we're talking about two different things, Adrian. I was talking about personnel. You're talking about software.
Well, you're gonna but yeah. But you're you're gonna want both happening at the same time.
You've probably you've gotta get the software in place before you can really do much with the personnel. So that I mean, that's that's the piece of it. Right? So Well, actually, from what he was suggesting was that we might we might wanna look at having our personnel happening at the same time for both setup and training purposes.
Let's not get too much in the weeds operationally and it's a good question, but I think relative to the budget, I'm not sure what the impact would be unless we want to think about scaling back something but
Yeah, I'm not sure what the I don't know what the premise of the question was, but I do know that I don't want us to be thinking that's going to be happening that late because that would actually make it problematic. So. Yeah yeah and then we could sort of question the budget numbers as they are it's a good Yeah exactly because that and that's my concern so. Yeah okay
that's a good point. Any further questions on this category? Treasurer financial? Okay, hearing none, I'm gonna roll up here a little bit. Talk about the tax collector section. So we've got a significant decrease here. Eric?
Mark, can I chime in for a second? Sure. I'm sorry. I was looking at the mileage, and I was just kind of curious why there's like a 33% increase when things are being done virtually, or is there something that I'm not understanding? Mileage for what?
Is line item on Row 42. This is five eighty mileage for the tax collector. Right, 142.
Yes, tax collectors mileage. So we had $400 in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen actual expenses, the budget cut or was down to 150. We expended about 76. So at least it's just asking why we're going from a budget of 150 to 200 for the tax collector mileage.
I don't know exactly. Mean, the tax collector, that's a budget from the tax collector. I can tell you that part of the reason we've underspent that is the normal cycle is in the spring, the training is in the spring, and all the stuff that the treasurer or the tax collector was supposed to be going through this year has either been canceled or moved online. So we haven't expended any of that this year.
I thought there was also, she was getting more involved in the tax collector like association stuff as well I thought, whereas our previous tax collector was not.
Yes, it's also getting more complicated to stay certified too I think and there is quite a bit more training a surprising amount of training that they're really required to go to. This year obviously it's different because right now we're virtual. Is that gonna stay? You know I don't know if you cut it back down to 150 and she goes over we'll figure out where to get the $50 from somewhere else. Okay,
but we're talking about something that's going happen up you know in spring of twenty twenty one.
I think the biggest impact here is the reduction in the salary for the tax collector. Eric, you want to comment on that? Sure. This budget anticipates
the tax collector going to part time twenty six hours a week average after I believe October. So basically that's we've kind of made an agreement with the tax collector that she will go to reduced hours as of October of this year. Now granted, remember this still is subject to a union negotiation, but right now without a budget, you know, there's not. So once a budget is actually passed, you know, we're going to start negotiating. We technically have to negotiate with the union over that because she is a union employee. But since she's pretty well agreed to it, I think that that should be doable.
Okay. DMV fees are taken right out of the budget.
Yeah, that's something that does we're not really we don't really have to pay anymore.
Well, that's not that looks good to me. Just want to make sure we're not missing anything. Right.
Conferences and seminars are staying flat. Spending about half of that this year equipment maintenance or slightly increases or some rationale to that increase
The equipment number is the software. That's her that's it's not vision appraisal. It's Oh, yes,
it's QDS QDS, she gets the estimates from the company. Okay.
And is that licensing or what? Yes, it's kind of an odd category of counting to put it into.
But as long as we know what it is, yeah, it's everything they do that qds does they they support the software, and then they produce the tax bills.
Okay, got it. Even started talking put himself on mute unless Amanda did that. Sorry. Yeah,
so that they also do our back QDS does its own backup for us as well.
Backs up the data. Okay. Well, that's good. Yeah. They they have a backup completely separate. We need a little more of that. Okay. Office supplies, you're dropping the budget. Looks like Dish is based on usage. It's dropped. Okay. Membership flat, nothing there. Equipment, looks like you just have no planned equipment expenses the Okay. Tax collector Correct. Okay, I personally don't have any more questions than tax collector section, anyone else? Kind of scrolling ahead, apologize for that, I'll try to keep it up all right salary for the assessor you're flat there
yep union contract for the assessor and the assessor's assistant so those are fixed numbers basically correct
got it There was slight increase in our training budget. Doesn't look excessive, $40. I'm gonna argue over that. Wouldn't anyway. Software, what encompasses the software? Is this the vision? That's the vision. Yeah,
that's primarily vision appraisal. And then there's also something they take out late in the year. I forget exactly what I got the rundown of it from the assessor. I forget exactly what it is but there's something they do in the spring also which is which accounts for you know 3 or $4,000 that's spent really late in the budget cycle.
Mileage you're flat although you're under spent on that quite a bit.
Yeah, I mean I honestly I think where the mileage is going to to, John Chipponos has not been charging us mileage, you know except when he goes to like conferences and stuff. Obviously everything in town he doesn't bill us for separately. I honestly don't know why he kept that in at 500. That was his that was the assessor's budget because we obviously haven't been spending it.
Yeah you didn't expend it twenty eighteen-twenty nineteen or not this year either so it's something to look at there.
Well, keep in mind though this if we are doing the full reval that he's going to end up going out with them several times. That probably wouldn't be a great place to be coming right now. Yeah, He may decide he's, he's not willing to donate any more of his, mileage for the town. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, in the past, we he they go and they do drive bys or whatever and and some sidewalks, but not full revals. In this particular case, they're literally supposed to do every single house in town. Right. Right. He needs That's true. I forgot about that. Yeah. Can I say green? He needs to do a percentage with them as part of the contract. It's not gonna be free this year. So
Got it. No, I'll tell you what I'm gonna highlight that then it's not it's kind of small potatoes anyway but need to look at everything. Office supplies here got a small increase. Book subscriptions, you got no expenditure there, but looks like we did spend $400 on the twenty eighteen-twenty nineteen. Is that some type of, membership dues? I honestly, that one I can't answer.
Okay. I mean, there may be manuals and things that he's supposed to obtain as part of his assessor, but I'm wondering. No expenditures this year but did expend $400 previous years. Might be worth a question just asking what that's all about. Sure. Any other questions on that section? Sorry to scroll ahead, Abbott. Okay, let's move on. Board of Assessment Appeals really just Board of Assessment Appeals salary. It's not a significant change there. The clerk, we have a significant increase. I assume that's just a clerk for their meetings.
Yeah, they've asked for the clerk to have a clerk for all their Board of Assessment appeals meetings, which I was initially not particularly in favor of. But because what they do requires, you know, proper legal notice and things of that It kind of makes sense to have a clerk. It's more insurance for the town that things are done correctly, and we don't get sued.
I have a hard time disagreeing with that one. Any other questions? Okay, moving down to the town clerk section. Okay, we've got a slight increase in the salaries. I assume this is also per contract.
The assistant town clerk is a union position. The town clerk is not a union position, that's an elected position. The salary for the town clerk salary technically gets that is a Board of Selectmen prerogative for the charter. So the Board of Selectmen and you could look at that but it would probably have to go back well actually in this budget year you have the authority to do it. In a normal budget year you wouldn't have the authority to modify that once the board of selectmen makes that determination, but this year I guess technically you probably do.
Can I just, quick clarifying question? I remember from, one of our prior meetings you mentioned, you know, kind of an across the board, two and a half percent raise was decided upon for non union employees and that's part of that. This is part of that, right? Correct. And just FYI, before the meeting, I went through the spreadsheet and tried to identify all of those and just for has to try and figure out what that really is. I went through and change it all to one and a half percent instead just to see what it did. And the answer is roughly nothing. About a thousand bucks unless I've miscalculated terribly. So if we're looking for savings there it's a fairly small number. I assume there's some benefits that are associated with that too so it's probably a little bit more of a multiple of that but it's still going to be low single digit thousand.
Yeah, after this, we go through all of this, if you wanna see that broken out as to all the employees and what the effect is of different, you know, levels of increase, I'd be happy to to show that to you. Okay. Broken out by what, you know, what ones aren't, you know, essentially contracted.
Yeah. The ones that we can actually adjust in any way. I mean, union contracts are what they are. They're they're done. Right. So yeah. Just just so we know what we're dealing with. And I'm not I'm not actually suggesting that we cut this. It's just more of what what is it even tally to. Right. It's a lot of there's there's two points I just wanna bring up when we start talking about And,
the first one is the more we talked about this last year, we ended up with two employees joining a union because of it. Actually three. Three. And then the other thing is we parsed around this and there's even been discussion about whether it's the right time to be giving people any raise at all, but keep in mind too because of the way we have structured, the employees are taking on more cost from their health insurance. So that raise, it, you know, even though it looks minuscule, it actually in some cases is not even covering the extra costs they're going to take on from their employee benefits changes.
That's the continuing transition to the healthcare savings Correct. Exactly Rob. So although
it may be a, it looked like low fruit, low hanging fruit, it's maybe not the best choice. Just full disclosure.
My, the reason I went through that exercise was more just to kind of confirm my assumption, which is that it was pocket change. Yeah. Yeah. I just I I know you've done that, but in case somebody else goes, hey, that's a great spot. I just wanted people to know what it's affecting. That's I I'm actually really not inclined to cut that. I just wanted to see what it was before we even because I thought it would be something that might come up and it would be useful to have the number to say, look, you know, the whole thing is is x.
I'm I'm sorry. Robert, I think that's I think you raise a good point. And what you found was all full time people with the exception of myself and Carol are in unions. And I'm taking a pay cut. And myself. Yeah, and Eric. So it's Eric and Carol, that's it. That's all it applies to in terms of full time people. What you're finding then is you saw it, the rest all applies to part time people who are earning very little money anyway. They're very, very part time, a lot of them. So it was a good exercise and I'm glad you did it.
Yeah, think it's a really good question. And I know this is true for me and my company, I'm sure it's true for many members of the public and residents is that people have taken pay cuts, you know, whether temporary or not. There have been a lot announced in the paper. It would be a very valid question to come from the residents. So I think it's absolutely good exercise to look at it, see what that meant.
And Adrian, that was great input as well. If it's only Eric and Barbara, rescind everything, cut it.
I already did, remember? I already took a pay cut. Barbara, you were ahead of your time. Thank you. Keep cutting, keep cutting. Okay,
So I'd like to ask another question here, Eric. You've got probably 3,000 or 4,000 of budgeted items for which there are no expenditures twenty nineteen-twenty twenty. So I'm looking at training equipment maintenance, mileage. Got a finicky mouse.
Yeah, I mean, so the first thing is that That's about $4,000 right there.
Right. I mean, the office supplies now we're definitely well over expended. That much I know. The land records, I think by the time we get to the end of the year, we're going to be about even. The in terms of training, I know I just signed I don't know what the actual bill was. Carol I've signed her training sheets for the year because she's no longer able physically go to a class she's got a bunch of online training she's got to do. Yeah and I think actually by the end of the year we're going to be overexpended in the training budget. Equipment maintenance, you know, I honestly don't know. You know, in terms of mileage, you know I honestly don't know what obviously in the past you know we trimmed that a little bit because she had been only running in the 300s for dollars for mileage. But obviously she hasn't as of you know January she hasn't hadn't expended any this year.
So the short answer is that some of those categories are simply not all the way up to date with the latest and greatest. You've gotten some billing in that isn't in the spreadsheet
for expenditure this budget cycle. Yeah, I know she and I have talked about the land records portion, know, and I know we got another big chunk of bills coming for that. You know some of the stuff honestly I don't know. I mean I know we spend a thousand dollars a year on restoration. Why we haven't spent it up to this point But I think they basically spend whatever's in the budget and they just restore whatever they have money for. That's basically Explain what that is restoration? So restoration is basically scanning in all the really old stuff in the budget or in the vault. So we have complete electronic or PDF records of everything.
Got it. So it's an effort to go paperless really? Well, it's an effort to for instance Provide backup for it.
Somebody threw a frag grenade in the vault, we wouldn't be completely screwed.
It's actually, Carol and I talked about this extensively when we're talking about service for the town and she actually as a We're at a point now where she has a service in there that actually backs up everything for her and they can basically recreate the vault at this point electronically. So we still have to keep a lot of stuff, they bill us I think, I can't remember if it's quarterly or twice a year or something, but we should be getting a bill for that as well. It's something that was an update that's happened in the last couple of years.
All right, so again, what Rob said is that it looks like we're gonna have some additional expenditures are just that's a red flag for me when I see that we haven't spent anything but we're budgeting for it. Anybody have any other questions on those top clerk expenses? Looks like net net the main increases remain differentials to salary increase. We obviously talked about what we might do there or not do. Okay, probate courts
By the probate court, we don't have any influence over what we get charged. Okay.
Moving along, so let's talk about elections. We've actually got a little more money here and there in supplies, salaries, elections, any particular rationale for increasing that? Sure,
that was increased because it's a presidential year those tend to be more expensive election cycles cost wise. That's why there's some increase in that line item. You know, we have to pay for absentee ballots, we have to pay for the machine ballots, know, so that's why. And we tend to get much higher turnout at those elections, So our fees are increased. We spend more on presidential years. Yeah. Yeah. Think you've explained that previously. Okay.
Any other By the way, we're going to have a lot of money left over in that category this year just because the primary appears to have, you know, we're not doing any of the town budget meetings, referendums. So, you know, we're going to be way under budget this year, but next year, you know, depending on COVID, we should be back to our normal expenses.
Makes sense. Okay, let's move along. Town Hall. No real differential there. You've got a building maintenance account that seems to be under spent compared to the budget requested. Any insight there?
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, a water heater would set you back $1,500 by the time you put the thing You know, it's still a pretty low maintenance budget. I don't have any, know, that would cover replacing a couple of the wall AC units. It certainly doesn't cover any of the big line items that the building needs, which is why we're talking about setting up a town wide building maintenance fund. You know, I didn't really ask for anything in the past. We've tended to spend you know 2 or $3,000 a year on general maintenance for the town building. Certainly needs a lot more than that but
And until we spend some real money and update some things we really don't wanna not have money there. So, you know, because we're we're just biding time on a bunch of things at this point, you know. Like one of the things we we probably need to do is get a tank monitoring system for the oil, you know, because we're at the point now I think Eric said we were getting a delivery every week in the winter because the tank is so small. We may end up spending some of that to look at a second tank to get us by in the meantime this year.
Any further questions? Okay, let's move on to the registrars. We're essentially flat. Is this a contractual salary increase?
That's the salaries for the two registrars. They get a stipend semi annual same with the assistant. And who sets that
Or to selectman, it's part of that list of non union people. Okay, yeah, and again, the impact is relatively small.
Yeah and that's two registrars. So that's basically $4,000 salary times two.
And you have to have one of each party, which is why there's two of them. Right, yeah. And I'd see we're kind of underspent on training mileage, etcetera, but that's probably in part due to the COVID situation and given the problems they've had in some other towns with some questions about whether the registrars are actually certified. I think this probably makes sense to leave this right along unless anybody has any objections.
Yeah, I mean the training budget does seem pretty high and I don't really, you know, again, because the individual departments produce their own drafts of it I mean I can't tell you for instance why the training budget for the assessor's office is what it is. I mean I wish I could but I don't have that off the top of my head.
It might be worth asking that question just yeah again I don't want to I don't want to stiff them out it if they need it It'll generally be a mistake.
In the in the past, you know, probably four years ago, we used to have every single town entity bring come through and defend their budget. We had reduced that in the last two years. We had gone to only bringing in entities that we had questions on. Yep. Obviously, with with COVID, you know, that was a little different for you guys this year. Certainly, it's your prerogative to, you know, give a list of questions to Eric and either ask that department to provide answers or to to actually, you know, get on a Zoom call and answer questions for you if you so choose. That certainly, again, has happened in the past. It just depends on how much you wanna scrutinize each line. You know, we were successful with that last year finding a lot of dollars, but it's up to you guys. I would say as a whole, we picked it pretty clean last year. We
found a $100, $500 at a time literally. So I don't know there's gonna be a lot left there when you start digging in, you're more than welcome to do it. I mean, I I'm not gonna tell someone else to do it when I did the same thing. So, you know. I mean, I I see the reason. You look at the actual expenditure last year and this year and the budget amount,
you know there's $3,000 there so almost so I mean it's worth
asking you know. Think so we ought to at least understand what the rationale is for it. If there isn't a good one, then it gets reduced.
Mark, are you highlighting department lines to give to Eric, like maybe a list at the end of the meeting or something or how are we? Yeah, that's generally what
I had done. I think this is the only one I ended up keeping so far. But I think I think bears explanation. We've gotten in my opinion. But I think board discussion we can open that back up. I can tell you on registrars
I only know from talking to them previously that, specifically for registrars, that they had some new registrars come in. And so, you know, previously the people they had were already trained. They had some turnover. They needed new people. And so now they've got to send everybody out to get trained again. So, unfortunately, it's it's almost like a volunteer position, they do get paid, but it's not a steady thing. It's not. So they have to go and get them certified through the state on how to do it. So Right. Understood. Yeah. That's why, I I believe it was Kathy I was talking to and Wally that were that were mentioning this that this was a frustration that they had all these people that had to get trained. I would explain it. I mean, that's fine. That would be a perfectly understandable answer if that's it. Honestly, I think if you if Mike Palazzi is still listening, maybe he can unmute and see if Kathy can answer that for you.
Yeah, I'd be happy to hear hear that if they have it off their head. Top of their head.
They may not be. It was worth a try. Okay.
Well, we can always come back to it. It's it's not a decision we have to make tonight. I think You're unmuted. Hi. We're unmuted
now. Go ahead, Kathy. What do you want to know? Kathy,
we have a question on the registrar training budget. Think it was you that was telling me that you had a bunch of new people come in that need to get trained and that's why the numbers had gone up a little Exactly. Correct. You are correct.
Okay. I just want to make sure that we were They have to be trained,
and this is by state regulation that they have to be trained. It's not that we say, oh, we want you to get trained. They have to be by state regulations.
No. But the question was in the past, you really hadn't spent that money. Did you have some new people come in this year that are gonna Yes. Need Do you do you remember how many?
No. I don't know off the top of my head. Do not know. Okay. Do you think that number is reflective of what you're really gonna need? I was just gonna say that it does sound very good because actually don't forget the registrars themselves have to go and be certified, you said they have to be certified. So every time every year they have to go and get certified and they keep adding classes and the classes are very expensive.
I think the question was that you hadn't really spent through that budget this year. That's why it was being brought up. Yeah, it's been about $500 $600
so $6.00 $5 on average over the last couple of years and it's up to $3,500 in the current budget. So that was where it raised a flag. Yeah,
I think that is why he put that in there because they are going to have to retrain for next year. They're gonna have to recertify next year.
Okay. Okay. All right. Anybody have any other questions on that? Thank you. Thank you, Kathy. Thanks. Hearing none, I guess we'll move along. Advertising. So you're you have slight reduction. I assume that's based on the fact that we just haven't used that much this year. Eric, anything particular?
Correct. Correct. I was basing that on and, you know, it that's what another one of those that's highly variable because Yeah. Legal ads cover the town and it covers all the land use agencies. So it really depends on how many public hearings people have, how many applications you have, how many regulation changes you know we choose to make. So that's one of those ones that's hard to wrap your hands around. Know in the past when I was chairman and we were pushing regulation changes you know we were closer to the 5,000 number than we are now.
Okay. We're also we're also keeping in mind too that we you know we know we have some projects coming down the pike that may hit us mid year you know. So if we if we get a situation where we have to spend money on one of the bridges or culvert or any of that, we have to get those resources. If the school, you know, cutting their budget back is a little closer than they'd like to be and they have an outplacement, again, that'll be something that'll actually have to go to to a meeting. We have a bunch of things maybe as the budgets get tighter and tighter that we could possibly have to advertise for. So, that's why we weren't really adjusting that number or looking to.
Sounds reasonable. Okay, we're to move on to town office building. We're generally flat. You've got some reductions built in the software maintenance is this kind of predicated on the change in the software what's that line? So that's predicated on the town changing to a legitimate email server
into using a subscription based Office three sixty five service software as well as email for town employees.
Okay. Well, just from an operational standpoint, moving to that Office three sixty five makes sense to me. It's a fairly big hit in terms of the cost, it's hard to argue that's not a good direction to go, I think, from a business perspective. My view. I
concur with that. I'm not the holdout at the moment. There's a fairly large increase in electricity.
That was based off our anticipated usage based on looking at our current billing, you know, and pushing it out. That was basically on looking at an actual twelve month cycle, what we were spending what we were likely to spend.
Okay, wonder wonder if the reduction in the oil prices are going to have an impact on that. It very well may.
You know, actually that was done pre COVID, you know and electricity is one of those ones that's pretty variable you know.
Yeah it's tough to tough to argue for a reduction that we don't know if something is going to happen but you do have an increase there.
I mean, if you're saying you need it, I understand. It popped out at me a little bit. That's all.
And we also had this one too in the telephone and that's the change over to VoIP, right? I think is your
Yeah. So so basically right now we have our phone bills are pretty ridiculous, but the this basically absorbs the phone costs for all the town entities. And you know we're going to transition the town to VoIP. There's going to be about a $3,000 upfront cost to do that And then our total costs should go down a little bit, but exactly how much they go down, you know, we've got, I've got one estimate, but I don't have a full estimate. My guess is that our costs next year are going to be roughly the same as they are this year. But that's one of those ones where I just don't really at this point have a good feel on what our expenses are going to be. We're going to be able to save some money on VOIP, but we still have to maintain an awful lot of copper lines because right now with unless we spend quite a bit of money upfront on changing our alarm systems for the buildings, we're stuck with two copper lines per building for the alarm systems. So it's, that's a real tough, you know, I could see that number coming in our total bill next year being $9,000 and I could see our total number being, you know, 12 or $14,000 next year, you know, by the time we get through the transition to that.
Okay. And what actually were you paying for? I mean, is there a server involved? Is there a service beyond that? Because typically if you have the local server, I mean, cost ends up being nil after you've implemented the system except for some basic support, at least in the implementations that I'm somewhat familiar with. Yeah, that's what we're talking about.
So a big part of our costs are going to be like for instance this building, you know, we should be able to get rid of probably four phone lines, but we're still going to need to retain at least three because we based on our copier we may end up needing to keep a copper fax line and we need two copper you know alarm lines. As far as VoIP goes, you're right. Once we pay for the equipment, it's basically what we're looking at is some form of software as a service. So we would be ending up paying some sort of monthly subscriber fee plus the initial hardware costs.
Going forward, it might make sense and I don't necessarily want to muddy the waters here with 2020, 2021, but maybe in 2021, 2022, you put the cost of the copper under the alarm system budgeting. We kind of understand where that's coming from. Okay. That's a thought. No, it makes good sense.
Postage, you're essentially flat. That's probably variable based on the elections and you know, you've got that coming up as you've explained in your notes. Yep exactly. Yeah electricity Rob already asked about office supplies you get a fairly significant increase. Yeah so
the big change we made this year is we went from one copier to two and to allowing, you know, having a full size copier that will do color copies. So we separated the bill into the monthly charge and then I added to the office supplies just what we're spending on a monthly click charge which is part of the reason why that one is going up. And you know honestly that's one if you look at it we it's a line item we tend to overspend no matter how much you put in it because we just you know we spend what we have essentially in that line item if that makes sense.
I'm not so sure about that but Okay, I'll take your word for it. Anybody have any other questions? Computer replacement service, this is just a replacement plan you've generally got in place? Yeah, so up to this point, we have not had any kind of
official replacement policy. And in speaking with our, so it was very ad hoc when departments had money in their own budgets to do it, they scavenged from somebody else and replaced their PCs. So what I'm trying to do is get the town on what South Windsor recommends, which is a plan for replacing PCs every five years and the monitors every seven years and just kind of keep a rolling one. So we keep the town, you know, we keep everybody with a reasonably modern PC.
Most businesses I've been involved with to do the same type of thing. It's just a way of controlling your costs and leveling amounts, you kind of know what you're doing. So to me, makes total sense. Seven years and long time on a monitor, but not that they fail, but they tend to be approved. Sounds reasonable. Anybody have any other questions on the town office building budget? Okay, hearing nothing. Administrative assistant salary wages that moved back into the town budgets or the administrators budgets, think. Correct. Dog damage, nothing there.
Yeah so I mean there's always a chance basically the town is liable if a dog eats somebody's livestock crazy as it sounds, the town is liable and might have to pay out for it. But it's not something that happens often enough that we're going to bother putting money in the budget every year.
Agreed. You're telling me so five years ago when my dog escaped and whacked three of my neighbor's chickens, could have had the town pay for them? Yep. Pretty much.
Of course, then we would have had to euthanize your dog, but Yeah. Well, I don't think that was warranted. Luckily, my neighbor was nice about it.
Funny. I saw that line item when I first started looking at the budget and I got involved and I just like, what the heck is that? That one definitely requires an explainer. Yeah, it does.
Probably again next year. Okay, civil preparedness. So you're basically flat but you're taking out the mobile phone budget?
Correct. So there's a possibility this will go up significantly in the salary line item. I'm trying to get a grant because it turns out we're eligible for a grant that would cover a reasonable salary for the person who, you know, who's our emergency management director or emergency management coordinator. And the problem is $500 a year doesn't really as you can probably guess right now with COVID-nineteen is not an excessive salary considering how hard that person happens to be working. So if we do get it, I will just pay them that salary, but it won't affect the actual budget because I would just pay them what we get paid by the state for it.
Okay. And the office supplies line, why is that going from 0 to $8.50?
So that's because it's not really office supplies. It's actual supplies for CERT, which is like today would be masks and gloves and all the stuff they have. So it's their basic supply line item for cert.
Okay, but we didn't haven't budgeted for that before or used it before. Yeah, well they yes, correct. They picked it up somewhere else probably.
They were using the training line as just kind of a catchall. And so it just got, I think separated out training and office supplies, supplies being distinct from from training. That's appropriate.
Yeah. And and I I think we're gonna go this year, we're definitely gonna end up bud over budget on the expenses related to the cert vehicle, you know, pretty considerably because we're using that vehicle regularly to deliver food. So we owe for both our share of the gas as opposed to wear and tear on the vehicle. We share that with Coventry or with Hebron and Marlborough where there's one vehicle for three towns that was originally provided by Hebron. You know, but we'll be able to absorb that in this year's budget. I mean, budget was pre COVID. I was looking at that going the other day thinking that if anything, you know, we might be thinking about increasing that. But if we do, we'd cover it from existing, you know, other line items. That sounds appropriate.
Eric, you may want to call that PPE. That would cover everything that they need for the gloves, the masks, even OSHA is requiring them to wear the fluorescent jackets and things like that. And as everybody knows, the CERT team has been very active in the last couple of years in all events in town and especially now during the COVID nineteen going on. So Sure. And still also receiving a lot of help, you know, from Hebron. And we do have, I guess they're able to get Marlboro involved now too. Yeah, So a three plus town operation, but you may want to just call that all PPE for the team members.
If the board wants to do that, we can just add a new line item
for emergency medical supplies or something of that. Yeah, I need to add any more line items to our accounting system. That was just a suggestion to roll it all into one. No, I think just a reasonable explanation is all that's really warranted. Sounds like that from what Kurt said, that's all PPE. Would make it very clear. But again, hate to add anything to the accounting structure.
Do you want me to add that line? Because when I this is done, I told Eric I just format it so it's ready to go back to the web. Back to the site. Do you want just next office supplies includes PPE? That what you're suggesting, Kurt? You mean in the description of the account Yes, in that far.
Yeah, I would think yeah, just supplies, PPE, PPE or office supplies, PPE would be Okay, I'll just put includes PPE. Good idea.
Just take care of any questions that come up. If there's no other questions about that, let's move on to insurance. So we got a 3% increase. Eric, tell us what this covers shouldn't Sure. Based on historical guesses data. Well,
no, we actually have. So here's insurance is the town and the school's bill through Kerma, which is basically a member owned, insuring, you know, self insuring organization. And what we know is that we know the risk category is basically flat lined and the property insurance was about a 3% increase. So this is actually probably as of today with the number of employees we have, this budget is high by like $1,500 something like that. However, if we add a fourth public works employee, that's going to bump it up. So this puts us right about where we should be plus or minus you know 3 or $400 for the year in what that budget is. We won't know until we actually add the employee and then they come back to us and tell us what our premium increase is.
Okay, thanks. Yep, basically, there are two pieces of it. It's workers' comp, liability, auto property. So it's two pieces rolled into one built quarterly.
Got it. Okay, thanks, Barbara. All right, if no other questions, let's move down. We'll look at employee benefits. Most of this is standard rate items. So I'm not sure how much we can really affect here.
Everything is calculated off of salary, social security, Medicare, unemployment, MRF, the retirement, it's all just calculated as a percentage of salary. The other ones working with the consortium, the health insurance dental, I've been going to the consortium meetings And that's how that was derived. And longevity is if we have a schedule, if anyone's due for longevity payment, we put it in. Trying to think what else might be there. Yeah, unemployment. I'm sorry, that's the unemployment is up salary. It's I mean, it's it's a due to the increase in the headcount.
Yes. So, if you look at the total increase in employee benefits, the majority, well, more than half of that is due to the fact that this budget anticipates a fourth member at public works. So you now have one more person on health insurance, you know, right on down the road.
Right. And the rest are just normal annual costs to these types of things?
Correct, correct. Like for instance, this year, the town's contribution to MRF has increased slightly so we have an increased, we owe more for that per, you know, per thousand dollars of income plus we're going to have one more employee so the the total number of people who are eligible for MRF goes up basically by one in this budget. The one we didn't do we talked about at the Board of Finance, but we haven't physically made the change is right now in the physicals line item, we account for both public works employees, as well as the fire department volunteers are covered under that. And we talked as a we talked about moving that part of that back into the fire department budget. And we certainly can if you wanted to split that off and put that, you know, assign that cost. Basically you would decrease this line item and you would increase the line item for the fire department if you chose to do that.
Was it wasn't it decided at our board of finance meeting that that's that's what would happen? I do know chief Mike, put in a request, for 5,000 So the that's that's covered that's covering the increase in in membership that have to have a physical every year. So was that I didn't see that put into the budget anywhere because the fire commission, I think, still showing a zero increase budget this year.
Correct. It was not put into the budget. Yeah. I think there was some discussion around kind of a a census and a a census and then kind of a rolling how much per year. And I don't know if the loop ever got closed on that. Now that I think about it. But it's definitely got discussed at another meeting.
I think are there. I don't know if we made a proclamation or anything like that. But it just makes sense to me to have that within the fire department budget. You know, it's it's just in a it's just a correct location, it's not really going to make any significant differential in our spend, obviously, but just something we probably ought to just correct. So it's right going forward.
Yeah, and honestly, I have asked Ronnie multiple times for justification for the extra $2,000 total budget. And in truth, I really have not gotten it. So I don't have a feel for that. The board of selectmen had asked for more documentation and passed it on to your board to make a decision, but I just don't have it. So I mean, if you're comfortable increasing that, you can increase that or I can put another request in to Chief Mike to do that or how whatever you would like to proceed.
Eric, I'll take care of that tomorrow. I will contact Ronnie and I'll have him generate a list of the added members. We increased our membership quite a bit and that's the reason for the increase in costs. I'll take care of that tomorrow. That'd be great. Thanks Kurt.
Any other question on employee benefits? Okay, I'm gonna leave that highlighted. We'll come back to that make sure we cover it. Senior transportation. So Eric, you got a pretty big increase in salaries. I know we've had some discussion over this before. Do want to go ahead and give us a rundown on this? Sure.
So this is predicated on two things. And the first is basically that year to year we have an increase in the requests for senior transportation because our population overall is aging but the population that's very old is increasing at a higher rate overall. So you know, we've had a very significant increase in the need for Andover senior transportation. You know, we moved some money around in the salary category last year, I think, because we went over, we were also realistically, one of my goals anyway, is to start getting all the drivers, you know, to have the correct, have a CDL license so that they can drive all the vehicles because our 22 passenger bus requires the essentially a higher level CDL license than a lot of our drivers carry. A lot of our drivers have a regular license with just an F endorsement,
which allows them to carry some passengers. So it's a combination of things. We need more total hours and some of the employees are going to need to be paid a higher salary than we're paying because we were very unsuccessful in trying to get CDL drivers without paying them more than what we were paying ordinarily. Vehicle maintenance, bumped up a little bit.
Yeah, like if you notice, even before COVID, we had already overspent the approved budget for last year. You can see, last year we budgeted $3,000 We exceeded it the year before. And as far as I know, this year, we've already exceeded that also. And, you know, we're probably not going to exceed it by much at all, but only because we will have parked the vehicles for three or four months. So we're if we were operating them the whole year, we would have definitely exceeded that budget. So that just reflects a realistic budget for what we need for those vehicles. We may if but I don't want to go into that.
Fair enough. I mean we show a fuel increase. We all know fuel costs have dropped a lot. That's just uncertain how long that'll last. And as you just explained, your demand for services is increasing. So I don't have a significant concern about that. Right. I will say long term, one of the issues we're facing,
and maybe at our next budget meeting, we'll have some kind of proposal for you to look at. We need to replace our big bus because it's old and because we have an increase in use. The first vehicle we send out for medical transport is our van. And then the second one is we send out our 15 passenger van. And then the third one is we send out our 22 passenger van or bus and it's really inefficient to be running one senior to a medical appointment with a 22 passenger vehicle. We are hoping to apply for and get a grant an eightytwenty grant to replace one of the vehicles, you know, this next year. The problem is, is that we just got the state just decided they were going to do it this year. It looked like they weren't going to do it at all. And now suddenly they're doing it. So we may have something for you by the next meeting. I apologize for how late it is in the budget cycle. I'm just kind of reacting to it myself. I only found out about it about four hours ago.
All right. Anybody have any further questions on the senior transportation? Okay, moving down. Senior citizens we have a significant increase in the senior citizens resident services coordinator. So a lot of that's just salary. You've explained that before a little bit Eric you want to kind of go into it briefly.
Sure, one of the things we would like to do is So we've had this kind of combo position which is municipal agent, senior services agent, all rolled into kind of one position. And a little backstory that the budget for that had been in the past had been quite a bit higher. It was cut two years ago and then it was cut again last year because the person who held that position really wasn't doing anything and therefore wasn't charging the town what her salary should have been because she was an hourly employee. When that person resigned, I assigned those tasks to Roberta, who is our What?
Oh assistant assessor? Is that what you're Yeah, looking sorry. Okay. Late at night having a brain fart. So having done that one of the things that we've looked at is one of the places where we're really short in services is for senior coordination and resident services in general. So this enables us to hire a fifteen hour a week person to take care of all of those services.
Okay. Got any questions for Eric on that? Okay. Hearing none, let's go ahead and move along. Next departmental is cleaning services, custodial. And you've got a slight decrease. Just presume that's based on expected contracts or? Yep, that basically matches the expenses in our contract. Okay. Don't expect to do any additional cleaning because of the COVID situation? Know,
Let's hope not. Should we be probably but we don't have the budget for it this year. Mean
A little bit is in the office so it's fine. Exactly.
Eric, is it possible to put that in towards the expenses for reimbursement?
Possibly, but you're, you know, you're, you know, in terms of adding, know, doing more cleaning and then trying to get reimbursed for it? Yes. It's possible. I just thought I'd ask.
I hadn't really thought about that but yeah that probably is probable as long as KT cleaning has the ability to clean more often but at the same time without many employees working in the building the building's relatively staying relatively clean right now. Any other questions on custodial?
Eric, if I could, I had a question or even a comment regarding the cleaning. Seeing how the, I don't know if you've been approached about it, is cleaning of the public works bathrooms, both his and hers. I do know the bus drivers use the the ladies room at the town garage quite often because they don't have, of course, anything out by the buses. So has there been any thought of maybe adding that to the list for our contractor who does a very nice job in all the facilities, including the fire station? But getting those cleaned up for our bus drivers.
Well, I mean I will tell you that public works employees have certainly requested that I add their building to the list of those buildings clean. And so far I have resisted that impulse. Okay. Just a thought there boss.
I mean they would very much like it. Mean they seem kind of offended that they have to clean their own space but you know doesn't offend me.
Well that'd probably get into a contract issue wouldn't you? Job descriptions things like that. Just the thought. He's got no comment there. So moving along. That's probably a more selective thing.
Okay. Building maintenance for the old firehouse, furnace maintenance, you've dropped off to your expenses here, you've reduced the electricity. It's really the only thing you have is you have the lights on there, I guess so. Yeah, mean,
right now we have to heat it just enough to keep the vehicles semi warm and to reduce some of the mold in there. But really what we need to do is tear that whole damn thing down. But until we have a reasonable place to park the vehicles, you know, there's going to be minimal expenses for that building.
Any questions on that? We're move back to dogs. Dog warden? Yeah. We got a slight increase in salary there.
Yeah, I mean part of it is I think the, you know, looking around, you know, that's one of those things where the guy is stuck on call basically 20 fourseven. And I think if you think about what $3,500 a year for a salary is, I know the salary just the salary used to be quite a bit higher and then it got cut down and I think it needs to go back up a little bit
to be reasonable. That might have been part of what we did last year when we went through and stripped some things out and I think we always knew there were gonna be spots where we were overzealous. Your 2018, 2019 expenses were $5,400.
Yeah. The the cut was actually happened for a couple different reasons. I don't know if everyone remembers or not, but Jay was our dog warden. So when Jay, when Jay the situation went away, we had, like, a half year with Jay and a half year with somebody else, and then the person came into the position but wasn't really sure what our volume was gonna be. And, we ended up funding supplies into the stuff last year to actually get them equipped correctly, And we knew there would be some adjustment coming forward, but we didn't know how much he wanted to kind of settle in first. So that's the background if that helps. The context there. Okay.
Yeah, realize he has no vehicle so he's using his own personal vehicle, you know, on all these calls. So one of the things I thought was that, you know his salary because he basically said look it's you know it's it's not worth it for me to record because most of the mileage even though he goes out fairly regularly it's all short distances and he just doesn't want to account for it. So what I said is basically let's drop the mileage down, we'll essentially roll part of that into the salary, you know, and when you have to go to physical training, you know, then you can charge us mileage for the training, but all the around down stuff, you know, you just get a flat salary and that's how we'll deal with it.
Okay, further questions or input? Okay, historical society looks like no expenditures there but that kind of lines up historically with what they've done. And what expenses we end up with there but
And I'm a little surprised there's no expenses showing because we bought them a hard drive and archiving system this year. So I gotta Barbara we gotta look into that either That doesn't ring a bell. So let's Yeah, either they bought it after 02/20, or it got stuck in the wrong line item. Okay. Because I think we've expended that We should have expended that already. Okay. Let me make a note.
Okay, it's probably not something we need to spend a lot of time on here. Okay, so your health officer, your health director has gone up slightly. We know kind of where this comes from. Don't know, Eric, if you have any comments. Sure.
That's Eastern Highlands Health District supplies all our health services. They're basically they had to do a salary increase last year for a number of employees just because they had a bunch of positions that were unfilled that they couldn't fill. So their total costs have gone up a little bit this year just to actually be able to hire the employees to fully staff. So that's just what it is. That's a contractual obligation. Their budgets already set.
Yeah I'm guessing they're not going to have that problem this year coming up but it is what it is. Visiting Nurse Association adding that in? No I mean Oh we're flat on that okay. You know
honestly I can't figure out what that does. We haven't seemed to pay for it in a while so I just took it out of the budget.
Done. Just once again note that this says mental health instead of mental but
thanks. I'll fix that. Small typo. Thank you. I didn't fix that on mine. That is something we get actually a letter on requesting it's a per capita. Okay. They calculate it. We get a letter every year. No request their stipend.
That's why the Advil budget number two thirty one to fairly precise. Yes.
Okay. Youth Services, Linda is our representative to and I know she's been involved with it. So Eric or Linda, if you want to kind of talk about what that's about.
I don't have anything in front of me, but is
the town agency for youth and service mental health, which by state statute, the town has to have. And it's been in existence for eighty no thirty five years. It's one of the few nonprofit mental health agencies and because of all the fundraising and endowments and what have you, we pay the towns pay about 40% of the actual cost of what it what it costs to run the organization, but they They have all kinds of programs at the school. They have this, the social workers at the schools. They do chores prep program for the senior citizens. They seem to be involved, just about everything so they are our youth service agency for the town of Andover.
All right and the budget number that came up here 46536 did that come from originally. Yes it did. Okay. And that's their estimate based on their current budget needs? Right.
And it's gone up a little. Their budget went up like 5% plus the number of students. It's based on number of students at the RAM. So it's gone up mostly
because of that. So the allocation differential is similar as we're experiencing with the RAM budget just going to go up due to additional add over students in the budget in the RAM school. Correct. Okay. All right. Does anybody have any questions for Linda on this one. It just pointing out that Linda has a meeting tomorrow with the oversight committee for youth services. And so she's if this looks like people are uncomfortable with this in any way she's going to want to have an idea of that. But we'll this is your opportunity to bring that up if you are. Personally, had no problem with it at all. Hearing nothing else, let's go on to public works. This bears a fair amount of explanation, Eric. Obviously, we're looking at adding an employee, you've got some rationale behind that. Sure. It's the kind of thing we do not want to do lightly, obviously, because it's not something you want to unwind if it turns out to be not needed or not a wise expenditure.
Sure absolutely. So what I would say is that the town has reduced the number of public works employees that we had multiple times. If you look at it historically, the town used to run a public works crew of five full time employees and two more full time employees during the summer paving and maintenance season. So in the past, say thirty years, we have dropped the number of hours available of manpower we have in half. And we frankly just, you know, some of that could be justified because some tasks are easier through mechanization, but we've put it past the point where we can maintain the infrastructure of the town. Know, and we don't have unlike a lot of other towns, know, we don't have a separate like building maintenance custodian or anything like that either. So the current three guys deal with everything from you know emergency stuff in town buildings to roads to you name it and it just we desperately need to go to a fourth person and in large part that is to to get rid of the backlog of drainage and other projects that we have. And we've looked at it and said you know wargaming is it smarter to just sub that stuff out and we have done that in the past a couple of times but in it's tended to be more expensive and the quality of the work we get has been somewhat mixed So I think long term, we really need to go back to a four person public works crew,
which enables us to have two two person crews working. And one of those those persons will be the replacement for Ed, public works, our current public works foreman who is retiring in November.
I know there's been a lot of discussion on this at different points. Anyone from the Board of Finance want to ask further question this? Mean, to me, it seems logical. I mean, we're not living on the ground with it every day, but we all clearly know there's a lot of infrastructure improvement and maintenance that just needs to happen in this town that we haven't been doing So
Eric, a couple of questions with the foreman Ed retiring. Yep. His salaries in this line item, correct? Correct. Okay.
So there's a potential he retires we got to try and replace them there could be a period of time where we don't have anybody.
So let me tell you what it's my intention to do if we pass this. My intention is to delay about a month and a half and plan on hiring a replacement for Eddie somewhere around September 1, between September 1 and September 15. And that way, we would for a month, basically a two month overlap portion, we would be carrying two more expensive employees on the books, much more expensive than an entry level maintainer one, but we would have not been paying salary essentially for July and August. So we get an overlap at the, you know, the road crew foreman position for a couple of months and then as soon as Eddie retires, hire the maintainer one. That's the way I'm looking at it because if Eddie had retired in this budget season, I would have asked for an additional allotment of money so I could have overlap between the two. But since it's occurring next year and it's going to be a much tighter, I'm thinking what I'm going to try to do is just delay hiring the maintainer one, hire Eddie's replacement first, and then hire the maintainer one directly after, if that makes sense.
It does. All right. So in the spirit of trying to have a zero budget increase, Barbara, it seems like this is the biggest line item. What does $50,000 do to the mill rate?
Oh, okay. Let's take a look. It's more than 50 though because it propagates into the into the balance too. Probably more like 80. Yeah. Yeah. Could work that. Yes, correct.
Salary and benefits is somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000 The reason it's a little nebulous is because you don't know whether the guy is gonna be single or whether he's gonna be married or whether he's gonna be married with kids. So the cost for healthcare, there's about $15,000
of variability into the healthcare costs. Should be about a third of a mil.
I did work up the numbers on that using the salary and the middle of health and I came up with 67,500.
So Eric, let me ask you also about the salary. I mean, there would the salary be the same for the for the replacement? Or is that an opportunity to hire at a lower or is that a contractual thing?
So, and it's one of the things that I'm not overly happy with, but all three employees or all our public works employees are union employees. A lot of places the foreman would be in a different union. But since, you know, we only have, it's only one person, it's hard to put him in some kind of supervisors union, separate union cause then we'd have another union of one person that we're negotiating with. So right now the salary and benefits are fixed as part of the union contract for and there's basically categories for maintainer one, maintainer two, maintainer three, what's called lead maintainer and then foreman. So we would be replacing a foreman with a foreman and then we would be bringing in a maintainer one and try to get as young a guy in as we can with a good strong back. Oh don't say that out loud.
Just, on what Eric's saying one of the reasons it's structured that way is because it is a working form and physician. So if you had it in a separate union on more of an administrative type situation, you would be limited as to what they could or could not do. And that's kind of why the structure is what it is as far as the contract. Yeah, I can see that happening too.
To answer the question, oh, I'm sorry. Bob, to answer your question about mill, just as I said, I took salary in the middle of insurance and added the other pennies and it's about 0.25 mil.
Yeah, quarter mil. So that would be that would be halfway getting to our say zero sum budget, right. Aren't we up a half mil on our end for the town. Point 6.7. So I have
one question though because I just ran some quick numbers with the new ram number and the reduced AES number based off this and I come up with a 35 mil. So we've come down in the mills. So that would be pretty flat. Which I the numbers just for ram and AES in this budget and just put plug the new numbers in leaving everything as is. The number that was in this budget, Diane,
I was looking at that earlier before the meeting. Yeah. I was getting confused because I thought I saw an email come around with AES at three point nine one six billion. Yes. And I thought was what was in this budget, at least in one of the columns was 3Point8 and change.
Right. So I can clarify that. Budget The RAM number came down. The budget you had in front of you was what was proposed by the board of selectmen. Right. Since that meeting, two things have happened. The elementary school had come back and redid their budget and passed a budget back to the board of finance of 3,916,000. And then also RAM has come back with a budget 5,227,811. So basically RAM came down, about $50,000 and AES increased about $50,000 which netted essentially the same thing as the budget you had presented other than a little bit of money got transferred essentially from RAM to the elementary school. Now you can still make a decision to further cut AES if you so choose, that's certainly your prerogative, but that's what they had come back to you with.
So it should have netted out to really no change at the bottom line.
Well, can we go back and look at the numbers again because I get a number to be raised by taxation now of $9,000,002.58 $8.43 versus what we had in the spreadsheet. So I'm going to make sure I've got the numbers right.
That's not the number I have in my, I have $9,000,428.08 43.
That's what I have and I just put in the RAM numbers today. This morning I took the RAM numbers from the budget you sent me Eric and the number that got kicked around last week. And that's precisely what I came up with too. So I added wrong then. Something went up something happened.
Yeah, if you have. We have ram at 5227811 a yes at 3916000 the town budget is 3,308,365. Do I have that number right? I get 3408. I don't know where you get thousand So that's 300 where I'm off, I thought.
Yeah, that's what we were showing up the $100,000 difference here. So three-four-zero-eight. It was incorrect in this tab originally, I think.
Right, so But elementary was in that tab at 100,000 too high. Because in the details 3,865.
Yeah, think that's a real old working section of Okay. Eric was working on when he was like, he was working over the weekend and we're kind of back and forth with it. And he just had that off to the side kind of informational, But those numbers have changed. And if you just plug in the
RAM number Well, let's go when we Yeah, go ahead. Sorry about that.
I'm sorry, the mill rate will calculate. Everything is linked to that revenue page and the formulas there to do the math, if that helps.
Well, again, let's focus on this department if we can, we still got a lot to go through. And then when we get down to the RAM and AES lines, we'll update those. And then we'll see where we are as a top line, bottom line as it were. Right, know, this made a good point if we're going to cut, obviously this is the big nut here. You've taken out the tree removal.
Well, so we did, but only because we shifted tree removal to a permanent fund. Right. Okay. So that's under capital now.
Correct. Look, I mean, I appreciate the idea that we wanna go to a zero budget, but I guess three things come to mind on this. One is that even if this was a voting year, Hebron's budget or the RAM budget would have passed simply because Hebron's went down, their share went down, ours and Marlboro's went up We went from a 12% population share to 17%. That 5% increase in population is what this driver is. As far as the town budget is concerned on its own, we've taken we've taken money from reserves to pay for one time expenses in order to make this happen and actually have a total decrease in spending. If we take this out of the budget, it's gonna cost us more down the road because those projects are gonna get worse, your deterioration, your roads is gonna get worse. We're playing Russian roulette here. Don't know about anyone else, but I plan on living in town for a while. I'd rather pay a little now than a lot later. We're getting to that point now. If we take this out, I mean, I'll say it plainly, we're screwing ourselves down the road. If we strip this out, it's not gonna be pretty later. We're at that point now. Not for nothing but we need to have someone come in to train with Eddie whether it's moving one of our guys up or something. Mean that guy has so much institutional knowledge that we're gonna be losing when he retires.
And I think last but not least when we talk about efficiency, right now we're wasting money in that department because we have one lone guy who for safety reasons can't do a lot of things by himself. So we have one guy running around who where as we could have two working crews of two, we're not just getting 25% more efficiency, we're getting 50% more efficiency because now you have a full working crew going. So the differences are gonna be extreme literally. Mean we've thought about this for a long time and this is really what we need as a town. This is a step in the right direction. It's gonna save us money. That's the only reason we even considered it and we've been fighting so hard for it. Just my 2¢.
So Barbara it's back to it's about a third of a mill. About a quarter. A quarter
of a mill. So quarter of a mill. Alright. So that's the information. That's the biggest item we could cut if we were gonna do it. So just kind of looking for a mathematical number where we're at.
I mean, it depends on just exactly which windmill you want to tilt at, but there is one other line item that's a larger cut that could be cut. You going back where we were? I don't think I have enough wine for this discussion, but having tilted at that windmill in the past, I'm just gonna note it's there and shut my mouth.
Mark, do you know what the elephant in the room is?
No, I feel like I should but as soon as you say it over and they'll know. It's the state trooper. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I was here when that
was up for the town vote. Don't want to be hung in effigy so.
Well look at the bright side nobody can hang you. We're still COVID restricted so you've got a couple months. I don't know people might make an exception for that. I think they'll find a way. Yeah.
They're gonna track me down. But anyway just in terms of I mean this is the problem we run into every time we go through the town side of the budget is that it's you know it's just little bits here and there it's such a small percentage of the overall expenditure it's hard to find the money.
Yeah there are very few single line items that you can really take a whack at. Well you guys whacked it pretty good last year I think that's what we're facing now right so. Yeah partly not just last year know about that.
Other thing to keep in mind is that if you look at Andover's budget compared to the surrounding municipalities, our per capita expense for the town budget is about 30% less than the surrounding communities. And
that explains a lot of our material deficits in the town and why we're so backwards on a lot of things because we have just been running an incredible relative to all our neighbors certainly an incredibly lean town portion of the budget. You know in part because we've spent a lot of money on education, But I think long term we have to accept the fact that the town share of the budget in well managed town should be somewhere between about 65% of the total budget and 70% of the total, correction. Education should be between 6570%. And according to our last audit, which basically agrees with what I had already presented to the boards, is that we're running about 78% of the town budget as education and the rest, everything else we do collectively in town, you know, we're trying to do on around 22% of our total budget, which is, you know, frankly tough. You know, I get that we're, you know, we're in a tough budget position,
but I think further trimming the town's budget, you know, is really it's a tough sell, at least to me.
I mean, again, back to Adrian's point, what we really don't want to do is hurt ourselves, you know, cut down penny wise pound foolish and end up two years from now scrambling because you know you get roads falling apart and a bridge about to fall down and all that good stuff. I for one was sold on this when you explained it all in detail to us the road situation, the tree situation, all of that and why the two crew situation you know expanding to two operable crews at public works would really help with that. I'm fine with it but you know the questions have to be asked Sure. Anyway,
shall we? Okay. Thank you, gentlemen. Vehicle maintenance, you've got an additional $18,000 Eric. You're talking about repainting the Peterbilt. Yeah, so last year,
can't be the only thing to ask for. That was one of those budgets that got whacked significantly. Like, so we've been spending about $25 a year on maintenance and last year you whacked the budget down to 12,000. Oops, there I guess.
So, but the reality is, you know, for instance, we had one transmission repair that was more than $8,000 last year. So public works is gonna end up running a maintenance budget considerably higher than what we budgeted for last year. So I think realistically we can get away with low 20s for a budget. However, the 2014 Peterbilt truck, which is one of our big plow trucks is getting pretty bad and we need to sandblast and paint that one. And part of the reason we're doing it is we're still running the trucks with a pretty long life expectancy
compared to most public works departments. And if we're going to stretch and keep running older vehicles, we got to put the maintenance into them as we do it. So that just prevents us from, you know, having to replace the body earlier than we have to. Because if we don't keep up with the maintenance, we end up eating through the body and having to replace the body. And that's about a $45,000 expense. You know, not the body, but the whole back, bed assembly.
So we can blame that one on Adrian also for cutting your budget. Absolutely. All right. Yeah, I mean, it's a that's kind of a tough one. I understand the maintenance and I'm kind of like what Rob said is it doesn't it doesn't make sense to put this stuff off and off and off and off and we just end up in a really bad situation. Just it's kind of tough to see that increase there. This is Kurt.
I didn't get to chime in earlier and I probably should have. First and foremost, I am all in favor of the extra personnel for the public works and always have been. I remember the large crew that we had years ago. A lot of things got done in this town and it's been whittled down to the three. And I highly agree with everyone. Can't do much with three people. That does leave one person alone by himself with two other guys working. So I'm all in favor of keeping that. And I'll direct this question to Barbara. What would a 105,000 decrease in the budget, where would that bring us? No rate.
Well, one mill is about $264,000 So that would be point four mills ballpark.
It would take it down to 0.87% increase down to 35.3.
The only reason I say that is originally, Eric, you had budgeted, I think, 110,000 for the dump trucks and $100,000 for the fire engines. As you know, and the Board of Selectmen know that the Board of Fire Commissioners are reworking our five, ten, and basically a twenty year plan for apparatus replacement. We have a new tanker truck that is under construction as we speak. It should be in town sometime between June and July. That's going to increase our capability next door. Fire engine fund is great. Dump truck fund is great, but in the last two years between the new tanker truck next door and a new large dump truck at public works, a new loader at public works, and a new pickup truck at public works. I think both departments, the fire department and the public works department,
right now can get by without putting a $105,000 into funds for future purchases. As as I've discussed both publicly at the Board of Selectmen's meetings and at these meetings, most towns that I deal with, and around us even, they're doing lease purchasing of equipment like that only because of the overall cost. Average fire engine, we have two, that's $650,000 each. That's a lot of money. That's why we try to make them last. Originally it was twenty years, right now we're pushing thirty years on a truck only because of good maintenance. We just discussed in the maintenance of public works, know, that that Peterbilt is the second newest truck we have, and that definitely needs work. You know, the salt has has got to it and stuff like that, but I would like to see the position taking left in the budget. But for this year and possibly next year,
let's just sit back on those funds right now. Well, here can I chime in with that because the issue with that is yeah I mean right now we may be in an okay place? The whole point of those funds is to save up so that when we do need it's there. Lease purchasing, I mean unless there's a cost savings associated with lease purchasing, I mean maybe it's different in the commercial world but generally speaking if you lease a car you end up paying more than if you buy a car. If that's different from municipality leasing a piece of equipment let me know but I thought the idea here was we put away whatever it is a $100,000 a year so that five, six, seven years down the road when we need $650 to buy a truck, we can do that.
But you know, Rob, in the most Short it now, then what do we do next year? No, no, I under I under I understand that, but because of the atmosphere we're in right now and the needs of the town, I really think that just those two funds for this year, we take a very close look at them for next year. I think when you see what the Fire Commission presents the town administrator selectmen and the board of finance for a new plan for next store, I think it'll work and we can just get by this year without those money into those funds. This is the first year we're gonna be putting money away. We found money that the funds were supposedly done away with years ago, and then they found some money in a town equipment fund, was the
and they found x amount of dollars in the fire engine fund. And, you know, I've been a commissioner and a and a member and for six sixty, you know, well, fifty fifty years next door, and they used to pay cash for everything. I mean, they they couldn't buy a truck unless we paid cash, but that's that can't happen this year. Back then, they were, you know, 30,000, maybe $40,000. You could do it, but not today. So just this is just a year that I had to to trim the budget down and and get us you know, I know we it's it's gonna be very tough to hit a zero. Okay? But it's you know, I think the school's done their part. RAM did did the probably the best part that they can. We still have that larger amount of kids going, you know, understand the increase there. But just just just my thoughts. Thank you.
That's good input. Good input Curtis and was thinking outside the box which I think is important for us you know whether we would adopt it or not it's kind of up to the board but we got to think about these things.
I think it's awesome that the fire department's looking at their stuff and trying to help the town out. The only thing I would point out is if you reduce the money going into those funds, it actually would not affect the mill rate unless you then shifted the money to artificially lower the mill rate because the money that's going into there is coming from other funds and surplus funds. It's not actually coming out of taxation. We did that specifically to try to address the idea that we were still putting some money away but didn't feel like we could do it from taxpayers directly. We're trying to get the funds down to a reasonable number so that down the road we can go to a bonding package or look at some other type of funding mechanisms to catch the roads up. In order to do that, we need to reduce the excess funds. But at the same time, we don't wanna go below the 10% number. And the the last part of it, I would just caution us as a town, we have in the past always said that we did not wanna artificially lower the tax rate. If you do that this year, you're gonna be looking for money to make up that difference next year.
I I thought the 110,000 and the $100,000 original request that was submitted, you know, by Eric and the board of selectmen for these funds was going to be paid for through taxation.
It it it absolutely was. You're Kurt. The original plan was to do that, but given the COVID situation, that got shifted away from a taxation number and instead it became a funding mechanism. We ended up trying to fund those to try to put some money away in them from the collapsing of the funds. That was something that Eric had redistributed. Because we felt like we needed to put something in there, but at the same time, we didn't feel like we could go to the taxpayers and and ask for those funds. But you're you're saying the 55,000
and the 50,000 are not taxation. They're they're coming from surplus funds? That is correct.
Oh, that's that's new to me tonight. Yeah. I apologize. I thought Eric had gone over that when he did his breakouts last time if it wasn't clear. That's coming from either preexisting funds or unexpended fund balance.
Correct. Because it's a capital expense and we can and that's the sort of thing that that's really what that's for. So that's a good point to remember. So if, yeah, if we did cut those, we would have more sort of in savings, but it wouldn't necessarily affect the the mill rate unless you wanna then do something we've always tried not to do, which is to yank money out of our fund balance to keep taxes down.
Again again, that's the board's purview. That's up to you guys. I just wanted to make sure you guys were aware of that in case it got missed. Yep.
Alright. Thanks, Adrian. Okay. All right, well, let's try to get back to the budgetary or the departmental reviews if we could. I'd like to try to get through these. Eric, you're up quite a bit on shop supplies.
Yes, but a big part of that is the upfront money to put a parts wall in public works to save on the amount of time it takes to actually get the little nuts and bolts and BS. I remember you saying that, yeah, okay. So I mean there's advantages and disadvantages to it. The town maintained a parts wall there for many years and then the previous first selectman got rid of it because it cost more money. But it cost more money because he wasn't accounting for the cost of labor.
So is that a vendor maintained parts wall or did we do that? Typically those are vendor maintained. Right. Okay. I reached
out to a couple of different vendors to get estimates for this so that we could budget for this. For instance, if we use the the NAPA and Willamantic does this for several municipalities, they will, we actually only pay for what we use. The initial cost is what we bring into the shop. They'll supply all the racking and everything. They do a big stock once a year, so they'll give us a pretty big discount as long as we tell them this is what we're gonna do. They'll order when they do their orders for the year to get the additional parts, then they get the vendors to throw in the racks.
It's basically, what they're gonna do is they're gonna go through the whole shop and say, okay. You've got this loader. It needs this wiper. You've got this truck. It needs this headlight. And they will only stock the things that we need on a regular basis and then we can adjust that accordingly. They come in once a month and they've they restock what we what we've used. So the initial cost is the expense then after that it's just like we were going to now that it will make and picking up parks except they bring them to us.
Yeah, I'm personally familiar with the concept so I kind of understand how that works and makes sense to me. Timing is not ideal. But again, as Eric pointed out, you've got hidden costs elsewhere if you don't do something to try to gain some efficiencies. Okay, GPS system. Eric, that's another pretty big add for this year.
Sure, that was kind of driven by the board of selectmen that were interested in basically accountability. I talked to several of the other town managers, who said that having the systems have been beneficial to town in the sense that, it has prevented in a couple cases liability claims because they were able to prove that public works couldn't have possibly done the damage they were accused of doing because the GPS track showing that there were no public works vehicles anywhere near the location. You know, again, it's an ongoing expense, you know, that would be, you know, the initial cost is that that's basically a one year cost.
But, know, your annual costs are, you know, somewhere around $1,800 to four GPS monitoring systems for the public works vehicles. So if we decide to do it, that's what the expense would be.
This was put in the board of selectmen. This is the number one complaint that we heard from residents about public works was why is public works here? Why is public works there? And whether that's legitimate or not, we don't know because it's hard to keep track of them basically. Especially if we're adding another person there, it was a way for us to say we're not just adding a person there and not paying attention that we are going to very much be paying attention to their productivity at this point. That was sort of grouped in there.
But it's basically a nice to have not a need to have. Correct. It's not something we have to do this year.
No. And, you know, there are other ways to accomplish this, whether it's through cell phones or things like that, but we do need to do something. And I will hesitate and not give my own personal experience with it but let's just say when you're watching someone they are more productive.
Let's leave it at that. Especially when they know they're being watched. Yeah, I mean, using a cell phone system is complicated. Also, I've got a little bit of experience with those and can be I'm not sure how effective they're end up being. But I think the point is made taken, it's probably not a have to have but Alright, so
I personally think it's a waste of money. What the public works never had that they have right now is somebody scheduling their work. Eric has something for those three guys, and I'm sure when he gets a fourth guy, has something for them to do every day. It's not hard to check up on them on what they're doing when they get an assigned job assignment. I lived through GPS at the power company, and it just did nothing but create a problem. Guys, of course, it's idea is is is good in a way, but I don't think it it's gonna increase the production whatsoever. Having a regular schedule and things to do is going to is going to help. And they have that now since Eric, took over.
That that that's actually a fair point point, Kurt. And I would I would say this. If you guys are willing to to leave in the parts wall, you know, losing the losing the losing because that's the biggest that's the biggest time suck is those guys running down to pick up parts and disappearing while they're looking for them. So
We could we could table this for a year. I mean
If you if you can leave us the parts wall, then I won't
Parts wall are fantastic. We have it at our shop in Rocky Hill, not only with parts, but we hit that fasten all with nuts and bolts and work gloves and things like that. Everything is accountable to whoever takes it because they have to have their own barcode to get into the machine to take out even every nut. So as far as inventory and what's needed and used, I think it's a fabulous idea, I really do. So I'm all for keeping that parts well in. And if you look in the history of our public works, we used to have that, there was a little auto parts, sort of truck parts place off of Valley Street in Willamantic. They used to deliver right to the town garage all the time. Dick Walton would call up and and say, I need this, this, and this for a for a tractor, for a truck, things like that. And they would come out and deliver it at no extra cost. But having them right there is
very efficient. Trust me. I've seen it. I've seen it work. So I'm all for that.
I was just going to highlight that item as a point to review. It sounds like there's some opportunity there that people are interested in doing. We already know about the salary item we talked about.
So if you wanted to make a motion to delete that, you could just make a motion and we'd delete it and move on. I mean, if that's what you're thinking about.
Well, in the interest of efficiency, what I would rather do is go through this, highlight the items, make one motion once we kind of line up some changes if we make, decide to do them, make one motion and see if the board agrees on that one. Sure.
And honestly, don't have that much, so it shouldn't be too over complicated. I agree, Mark. So snow removal.
Alright. Any other snow removal? Moving along. Eric you've got a significant increase here.
Yeah and this is this is kind of a an unintended consequence of adding a fourth public works employee And that is that currently we use a temp employee as our fourth person during snow removal operations. And unfortunately, we're going from a relatively inexpensive occasional employee who happens to be really good to in this case by union contract, as soon as we hire the fourth union employee, you know, we're stuck with calling that person out first by contract, you know, and now we're stuck paying overtime for what we were not paying overtime for with the other individual. So it's kind of an annoyance, but it is more expensive. It will increase our plow costs to go to a fourth public works employee.
So when we talk about the overall cost of that, you know, Barbara was throwing out figures before and came up with 67.5 salary plus benefits we could really think of it as $72.05 because of the increase here is really due to that. That is correct. Okay. Good to know.
Let's see not much change over here. You talked around about the need to get the additional plow blades and you've also got we've talked in several meetings about the switch over from a sand salt mix to an all salt mix and you've just switched the budget accordingly?
Correct. You know, again plowing is one of those really highly variable things. I mean there's more than a two to one difference between a bad snow year and a good snow year in terms of your total snow removal costs. So it's pretty hard to budget for something, you know, which is basically for lack of a better term plus or minus $40,000 you know. So this is this, this gets us basically at what our historical averages for numbers of days of plowing per year in Connecticut. You know, and that's what this budget basically comes out to. Last couple of years we've been low, but three years ago we were quite high. So, you know. Okay. That's fair.
All right. Anybody have any other questions on that or can we move along? Hearing none, street lighting, you've got a decrease. Correct. And your note is assuming the same electrical cost. Why would that go down if this cost is the same for electricity?
Because we switched to LED street lighting in large part. So our, this is based, we're just basing this off of our actual costs extrapolated forward.
Got it. Okay. Any questions on street lighting? Okay. Town garage. So medical and drug, that's with the drug testing, right? So yeah. Correct. No change there. Conference seminars are actually adding them whereas they weren't budgeted for last year. And we also haven't expended any.
Yeah, well, we hadn't we didn't expend any, but only because I sent two of the guys to one of the Roadmaster training courses in basically green snow removal. And I begged and pleaded and told them I didn't have any money in the budget and could they slide a couple of the employees in? And they did surprisingly enough. I never expected that to actually work. But we should be sending employees to training on a regular basis and we don't. And there's plenty of training available. We just haven't been historically, you know, we just haven't been taking advantage of that. And I would like to start. One of the things I think we have to do is we have to invest in the skill set of the guys doing the work.
Got an increase in building maintenance assuming brick repair and electrical done for major building line item rebuild doors. Is that anything we can be putting off or is that just required maintenance there?
I mean, you know, we could probably put that off. The two roller doors are squealing pretty badly. And we got a couple estimates from overhead door to fix them. We'd have to spend about $2,500 to rebuild the doors. So that was a big chunk of that cost. You know, it's an old building. We one of the things we were very fortunate is that our one of the electricians that works in town, Rick Langley, has provided us with an immense amount of free labor at public works, basically because he's keeping his guys employed right now and he's got kind of a lull in business. So he comped the town about one hundred and thirty hours of labor in the last couple of weeks,
and as well as an awful lot of parts. So we've been able to work off all the OSHA violations in the building, which is a huge relief to me. And also if you walk in there now, it's actually lit and you can see in the equipment bays. So we've swapped out to all LED lights. So frankly, some of the stuff I wanted to do with building maintenance, we've been able to push off this year, but it is an old building and there's definitely ongoing maintenance expenses that we should be putting into the building. I'm assuming that we are probably not going to be able to fund the brick repointing of the building this year because that alone would be probably a
roughly $50,000 expense. You know, it is 150 year old building, so it does need some significant maintenance. Did that answer your question?
Yeah, it was a big answer, but it does answer it. My personal feeling is that you have problems with overhead doors, take care of them. I've seen them create larger problems and I've seen them create safety hazards. I've got a warehouse that reports to me and it's just not something you mess around with, so I'm not inclined to take that out. Any other questions on the town garage expenses? Town engineer, mean, you've talked about this before, Eric, about the increase there.
Yeah, so basically what that is going to do is that's going to pay for a lot of the design and engineering costs for evaluating the culverts, depending on when we get the actual bills in from Yantic construction, whether that comes in in this budget cycle or next. Ultimately, this year, if they gotten done on time, I was going to do a lot. I was going to basically bust open our town aid road budget to pay for that. But realistically, you know, on an annual basis, we have not been using an engineer for very many things, and especially drainage projects and things of that nature. We really should be using a design engineer a lot more often. So that's why that's in there.
Anybody have any questions on that or concerns? I mean, we all know this infrastructure is a continuing problem in town, but just kind of sets us up for the future, I think to make sure these things try to happen even though they may not happen next year under this budget. Okay moving on to ground care. So you've got a pretty significant bump in the mowing.
Yeah so part of that is due to we planned this year to swap from we had a kind of an independent contractor mowing the ball field or the soccer fields and that person was getting paid for by the travel soccer team, the girls travel soccer team that used the field as basically a fee for service for using the field. However, we had some real issues with them wrecking sprinkler heads and other things. And what we're trying to do is basically sub out a 100% of the care of that field because it's a really expensive asset to Rich Clarco, who's the director of Hebron Parks and Recs. You know, and then ultimately what we were gonna do is then go back and charge the people, the users of the field, a portion of costs. You know, it's it would have been basically breakeven compared to this year's budget, except we don't know when people are going to be using the field. So right now we're maintaining the field but we're not bringing any money in for it. So I don't know how that's, you know, going to work out frankly, but that represents our costs to have
have Hebron that Parks and Recs do essentially completely maintain that. So
there could be some offsetting revenue you're saying for that? Well,
were anticipating there being some offsetting revenue to cover the difference in cost, but now that may not be the case because we may not be having the use on it that we had anticipated.
Got it. But even additional questions okay fire department commission
That's just we get a budget from the fire department. Now we may, if that's what you want to do, we may increase that to put their physicals budget back in their line item category and then reduce you know the town physicals line item if that's the way you want to go. Right. Okay, public safety. Just gonna take a break here.
Okay. That He is the out at the right time, right?
That is the cost for the resident state trooper as best we can project. We don't have there's some variability in that cost, but that should be basically what it costs us this year for the resident state trooper.
The year to date expended, did we get billed right at the end of the year or something? Exactly.
That's the thing that sucks about it. At the very end of the fiscal year, they give us a bill and they don't guarantee what that bill is going to be. So that's why there's Nothing.
It's probably kind of annoying. Yeah. It actually comes late in the summer. It's not even the end of the year. It's it's well into the summer before we get that number.
Well, it is what it is. Yep. Mean, that's out there in past years.
Rob, if you're well, if you're willing to wait for pitch pitchforks and torches on your lawn.
I've been down this road once already. I'm doing it again.
Yeah. I am not in favor of removing that. I think we need that. Yeah. Mean You need them. Need them. I've had the opportunity to have to need the resident state trooper, and there's no price you can put on that when you need them. So And the town clearly felt the same way when this was buried yeah. Upon before. So
And so one of the other things that's also interesting about the resident state trooper, which is kind of cool, is that because our resident state trooper has a fair amount of seniority, all resident state troopers are required to work a considerable amount of overtime. They have no way out of it. It's a requirement because the state police are considerably under their legal minimum mandate of officers, but about 90% of the overtime hours he pulls, he works in Andover. So the state is picking up the cost of all his overtime hours and Andover's getting all the benefit for it so that's good it's it's a better deal than it seems to be it's still a big big expense and a big nut no question. Yeah for the record I'm not proposing cutting it I'm just pointing it out as the single largest
thing basically in the budget and it illustrates it sort of illustrates the problem in a sense.
Yeah you know. Well, you know, barring differences in town opinion, that's a structural thing we just have to work with. I agree. I mean, that that was asked and answered. No question.
But, yeah, that's our single biggest thing and, you know, we're not gonna cut it. It's going stay. So we're left looking at everything else. Like Diane said, you can't put a price on
peace of mind, number one. And Daryl happens to be the busiest resident trooper we've ever had, and you can tell by the reports that are put in. I think the Board of Selectmen require reports every month from his lieutenant. It wouldn't hurt if you have a scanner to listen to state police. Andover for a little town has been very, very active.
Very happy to hear he's doing a good job. Yeah.
And actually, you can't put a price on it. It's $178,900 apparently.
You know how hard I was trying not to say that? I kind of It's all right, I went there.
Right, asked and answered, as Rob said. Let's move on. Fire marshal, not sure what we would need to look at here. Anybody has any input? He's underpaid. Right, keep it that way. Moving along, keep it that way. I'm just kidding. All right public welfare. So you've got a couple differentials here. I don't know it's not that significant. We were talking a little bit about this before. Do you have any input on this?
So yeah, I mean, I can tell you that they ask the town every year to fund them. For the most part, the town has never really funded them. It's one of the it's the access agency in Willamantic. And Andover residents derive an awful lot of services from the access agency, and the majority of their funding comes from the state, but they do ask the towns that in the communities that they serve to contribute something. So this year they asked us for a thousand dollars. You don't have to give it. It's not they can't force you to give it, but you know, it's also a very small fraction. They gave us a breakdown of how much what services were provided to Andover residents and how much state money was funneled to Andover residents through them. And it's a fairly large number.
I personally am not a client to question that kind of expenditure for $1,000 Anybody have any questions? Moving along. No real change. Memorial Day Commission, speak up if you have any concerns or questions. Recreation Commission, we're basically staying flat. Does those seem to be budgeted a little bit above expenditures? I don't know if you have any comment on that, Eric, or do have any idea why it's Spring not activities that may
not occur this year. Ah, okay. But normally you'd see an uptick in the expended year to date come June, July.
Yeah and to be honest they've asked to purchase a whole bunch of stuff this spring and I don't know I wasn't too excited about it. I'm making Carol go to the Board of Selectmen and ask because I think some of the things are probably you know to my way of thinking aren't necessarily reasonable expenses even though the Rec Commission has voted to support them.
Okay. Any questions or input on this? Okay, getting some more of the major town activities here. Station, we've got a couple additions, you've got some wages increases, but some reduction in maintenance, reduction in hauling fees, you've got addition of bulky waste. This is just, the tipping fees has gone down quite a bit. Just any general comments, is this just historically projected or what's the situation? Yeah, so
I mean it's kind of everything is predicated. We have a contract with Willie Waste so we know what our costs are like per ton and our cost per transport and really the variable is how much of it we actually use. So this was done based on essentially what twelve months of usage looked like and how much actual services we did and try to get it as close to that number as possible. There's a slight uptick in wages and part of that is because I think it's appropriate to pay Dominic for the time it takes him to do the paperwork at the transfer station because he's got to visit the town hall and drop off stuff and do do some of the accounting stuff that he's been kind of doing on his own time outside of the time he spends in the transfer station.
But that's relatively minor the you know that accounts for like a half percent of the salary line item you know. Aside from that, you know, the the only thing that's been a little difficult right now is that with COVID one of the things that's been interesting is that our bulky is up recently. Everyone's cleaning the air out of Everybody's the cleaning. And the second thing that's been interesting is we have an enormous increase in the amount of cardboard that we're getting at the transfer station because everybody and their brother is buying stuff on Amazon you know and all that stuff comes in a lot more packaging so so for the short term we've seen a couple of increases but I think we can live with the budget the way it is which is about a $10,000 decrease overall for the transfer station from last year.
Tell me about the contract for with this woolly waste is that something negotiated annually?
Think we have two more years to go on our contract with them. A three year contract or multi? Okay.
Wouldn't go at anything longer than a three year contract, I would hope. Competitively bid, that kind of thing.
Yeah, I think it is a three year contract. You know, some of the other stuff like recycling and hazardous waste, you know we're part of NEAROC which is like the Northeast recycling something something something and I'm supposed to be going to all their meetings too but I've been blowing them off just because I have too many other meetings but that's you know we they just they negotiate a lot of that stuff on our behalf. The only thing I would say out of all the stuff we see for the transfer station is the number of tires we've gotten has increased dramatically in the last year and nobody seems to know exactly why so many more tires are showing up. You know so that budget went up quite a bit.
Eric, the tipping fees, is that the carding costs? Yes, correct. Are they negotiable at all with waste?
They're per contract. Yearly? Yeah. So so yeah, they have yeah.
Well I think we're part of the consortium aren't we Eric?
No that part is done straight through Willie Waste. We have a contract directly with Willie Waste for that. Yeah, but I thought in general those rates are set by the consortium and so like
our tipping fees will go up or down based on the total consortium rate.
I mean I've read through the contract. I didn't know, I assumed we negotiated that contract directly with Willie Waste not with, you know, not through a consortium, but I'm not positive of that. Well, think that we
can negotiate the rates for like the pickup fees themselves, but the actual tip fees by the pound are set by our being tied into the municipal dumping through Hartford through the that. So Willy Way sorts it and then recycles it up to there. So our our fees are driven by that contract And that's actually something that's gonna come up here because the contract was locked in for a while, and they asked for a bump. They got bumped in their contract. I don't know if people remember, but when the Hartford trash plant went down, it was offline for, like, two months, two and a half months because they lost a grinder. That caused them to wanna put more money into the consortium contract, so for maintenance. And so that's why tipping fees went up in general across the board.
Basically where I'm going with this is, and I'm not sure if you know that, but the town of Hebron and the town of Marlborough have both purchased their own trucks to haul their own I think they own their own dumpsters also or compactors. So apparently, there was a fairly decent cost savings. I know the Hebron truck was a used truck, they're everywhere. And I even think Marlborough's was a used truck, that they, you know, got ahead of the game for a while and then they actually, you know, replaced them with some newer vehicles. But both towns I know locally are are called they're they're hauling their own compactors and dumping them like one day a week or two days a week depending on the needs. So I was wondering what the you know, what their cost savings actually were.
Are you thinking we could ask to them to take care of us or are you thinking? I'm
saying, you know, pick up a pick up a used vehicle and and make it part of the the public works like like those other towns did to have to do our own hauling.
Curt, you might have a great idea. You might offset the fourth guy's salary possibly or a good part of it. I don't know about this budget cycle, but that is a good thought. Even for the future, you know, just Yeah. Right. Working in Marlborough so for quite some time.
Yeah. I I think the the problem we run into is we're sort of we don't have an quite enough tips to make it worthwhile at this point compared to Marble and some of the other towns. We actually don't turn in that many dumpsters really. We've been since we believe it or not, actually, since we put in the the stickers, our our dump numbers went down considerably. It was almost a 25% reduction in tips. Of course they are, Bolton never stopped dumping their trash in our transfer station. Right. I think it's definitely something we should keep track of though, Kurt. I mean, it's a great idea.
It's definitely worth asking, exploring a little bit. I don't know if we have enough information to make any difference on this particular budget cycle. That was just a just a thought for future.
And that's something we need to plan out, you know, acquiring the truck, doing the math, all of that. We're not is this is for next year. Yeah. But it's good thought we should we should file that one away. Absolutely,
yeah. So moving along recycling. Not much difference there. You're going down at a couple of things. You're going down at permits to zero. Going up a little bit in the tire pickup, which you explained already. Nobody seems to know why. Maybe it's those golden guys again, I don't know. Used oil pickup. Any input or questions? Nobody's getting past Dominic, I will tell you that. Have you tried? Is that what you're saying, Kurt?
No, no. People have tried and they're, you know, town townspeople don't have a sticker tried and they couldn't dump.
Good. All right. So not hearing any questions, economic development committee. So you're keeping that flat seems like we're pretty even on the expenses. Adding a budget for training of $300 Again, this is just going along with your insisted request the committee.
Yeah, that was a request from the EDC, because there was a bunch of stuff that a bunch of stuff that's put on by the Dahlen Chamber of Commerce, and they haven't had a budget to to actually go and send anybody to it. It's
not outrageous. Anybody have any questions on that? Speak up. Okay planning and zoning looks like you're staying fairly flat although we're well over our year to date expenditures but again, training hasn't necessarily been able to do legal professionals probably fairly variable.
Yeah, it's highly variable. So basically five in that legal budget isn't just planning and zoning, it's planning and zoning. It's basically all the land use budgets get funded out of that. Typically, we've run, you know, as little as $1,500 a year in a legal budget, and we've exceeded the $5,000 When I was chairman, we exceeded it probably like three times, you know, in ten years. So $5,000 you know, that takes us through normal stuff. It doesn't take us through getting sued, which seems to happen about every three or four years but that's what it is.
Okay, do you have any questions there? ZVA, Zoning Board of Appeals, you just get money in there for the board clerk. You've already talked about the legal, assume the legal also covers that. Yeah. The PCC. Okay, see any real questions there. Building department, you got some minor increases in wages and salary, reduction in the clerk's wages, taking that out. Other than that, you're fairly flat.
Yeah, so what happened is we used to have coverage for late nights on Mondays. We had a building department, a separate building department clerk that would man the building for those late hours and also have a little bit of input into the boards and commissions and do some stuff for them. But basically the person that did that quit, and I waited around for a while and nobody there really wasn't that much traffic or people coming in and I said not a lot at point in having somebody there if you know we're not really if in other words it has not seemed to be an issue to not replace that person. I decided not to replace that person.
Fair enough. Sounds like a wise choice. Any other questions or comments? Okay, we're all up to the inland wetlands. So you've got a pretty significant jump in the wages. And I know you've kind of talked about this in a couple of the board meetings.
Yeah, so the board of selectmen weighed in on that this year. And both the chairman of the Planning and Zoning Commission and the Inland Wetlands asked for significant numbers of increases in the hours. And part of the reason is that the town had a long term employee that handled both the Wetlands Commission and the Zoning Commission. He was the agent for both, that had been with the town for roughly thirty years. And basically, he worked as many hours as he needed to work. And under Bob Burbank, Bob Burbank would never let him charge the town more than ten hours combined for those two positions. But the reality is he had been working more than twice that all along, just not getting paid for it. So since John has left, we have not succeeded in finding a low cost employee that was willing to work as many hours as the job needed without actually getting compensated for it. And realistically, to be perfectly honest, both board chairmen asked for more than ten hours. You know, the Wetlands Commission board chair thinks that position should be at least fifteen hours, but ten is more than it was
and that should be enough to get a reasonable amount of work done. We're still running with a temporary wetlands agent, you know, until we find a permanent replacement. But in truth, our salary schedule for that position is definitely low also, you know, and I don't know what to do about that. We're probably about 20% low in the salary for both those positions also. So, but this at least gets us in the ballpark where at least we have roughly the right number of hours allocated to it.
Any questions or input from the board on that? Okay, hearing none of this rolled out of the Conservation Commission. It's fairly minor stuff. Mean, you've got some additional I have one question.
Yeah. Shoot. Can we go back to water testing on that inland wetlands thing? Yeah, it doesn't seem like it was a budgeted item before. Yeah, it wasn't. That's a good point.
Now what is that for? Do we really need it?
So that's a good question. One which I would probably have to have the Wetlands Commission chairman weigh in on. I can't tell you. I mean, I know part of what they're trying to do is just be able to do a better job of monitoring actual activity in town. And one of their concerns was previously they had so few hours allotted to the wetlands agent. And the fact of the matter is every time a public works department does a drainage project, that also requires wetlands approval and the wetlands agent has to go out and monitor that. And she would very much like to not chew up their time just dealing with down projects. I think we could, my guess is we could probably deal with that by just the increase in number of hours, you know, for the agent. You know, I bet we could live without it.
Okay. I mean, we haven't had it before. So maybe this is not the time to add it.
Yeah, I think it's a good point. And the explanation is a consultant support. And anytime I see the word consultant without really understanding why a consultant's needed, it kind of raises the flag. It's a good question, Diane. I'd seen that and I forgot to ask it.
Eric, that's not the group that took care of the water testing, say at the fire station and town office building. Does that go through Eastern Highlands? Yeah.
No, that's something completely separate. Probably a health issue. Yeah, this is Yeah. Yeah, this is more than water quality. Ended up expensive.
Okay, any other questions or input here? Okay, we'll flag that one. Thank you, Diane. Conservation Commission is pretty minimal here. Slight increase for membership. Anybody have any questions?
I have one. Is there still an open space fund? Yes, very definitely. And how much money is in that open space fund? About $240,000 something like that.
How do we send that towards the senior center community center?
We do not. Can't touch it? Can't touch it. No. Reason? It's because that's a dedicated fund per state statute. And the money was put in there for open space purposes primarily through fees charged to developers who are doing subdivisions. And therefore that money has to stay because the reason we can charge the person fee in lieu of open space is that that money then gets used for open space. So that's one of those funds where legally we cannot raid.
So put the senior center in the middle of 50 acres somewhere.
Well, I mean, know, there's some stuff you could do. Mean, could, for instance, if you built a senior center and you wanted to do the outside grounds and an outside exercise facility and stuff like that that's a legitimate use of open space dollars to do public improvements but you couldn't just build the building with it for instance.
Eric wasn't that money put put in there though through taxation?
Some of it was, but the vast majority of it was put in there through fees, through land acquisition stuff.
Could the fund operate on $5 just to keep it open?
Well, it's not a question of that. It's a question of you legally can't spend that for anything other than open space. I mean, you know, you couldn't the numbers of things you can spend that money on are, you know pretty restricted like you could do an improvement at Andover the the ball fields, you could use that money for the new trailhead for the rail trail, something like that,
but you certainly couldn't just build a building with it. No, I'm not even saying you can build the building, but getting some property for the, for this community senior center.
Oh, no. Yeah, no question. And like for instance, if we had been able to acquire 12 Center Street, we would have bought that with open space money because the building wasn't going on that actual property, we would have been able to get away with it. I've had a bunch of conversations with our land use attorney about exactly what we can and can't spend that money from for. If you had something specific you wanted to spend it on, you would go to the Planning and Zoning Commission because they're kind of the person, the group in charge of that, explain it to them and then kind of go from there.
It's just just a thought and I think we need to do a little more research on it.
Sure. Thank you. All right. Okay. Let's probably something that would affect this year's budget, but it sounds like anyways, let's continue on zoning agent. You got a fairly significant increase here for salary, Eric. Correct.
That's same 2% raises everybody else to 2.5. But that just bumps the zoning agent up to ten hours a week. Which is probably a realistic number for the number of hours you should be putting in. And you added a budget line item for mileage.
Yeah, that was a request from the zoning commission. I don't know whether you need mileage. I mean, most of the stuff he's doing is in town. We do if we got an agent that was untrained, which is probably what we would have to do based on our salary, we would have to send them, you know, to the appropriate training. So, you know, we would end up stealing a little training money from somewhere to get them certified.
People are driving on behalf of the job. They need to be reimbursed mileage whether they claim it or not is kind of on them, my opinion. Anybody have any questions on zoning agent? All right, Capital Region COG. I mean, this is a membership fee that they set Eric. Correct. Yeah. COG, CCM, are and
all fairly low cost groups that the town belongs to. Yeah, It gets a lot out of, what is cost? Cost is Council of Small Towns. Okay.
They're really primarily a legislative and lobbyist group but they're actually pretty effective and they stick up for basically all the little towns in Connecticut.
Okay, that's good. I was not familiar with that one. Yeah.
You'll see them quoted in the paper when we're doing when the state's doing the budget.
They're Just where you want them, right? Yeah. For how little an organization with them and it's they're really like an executive director and a secretary is pretty much all of cost. You know, it's a pretty lean and mean little group.
Other questions on those? Hearing none, let's look at the big nuts here. So here's the RAM AES and this needs to be updated. Does anybody have the RAM budget they can just So shoot out to
RAM budget should be $5,227,811. Okay. And then AES, it depends on whether you wanna go with the Board of Selectmen's number or what AES has asked for. Let's do the Board of Education's numbers. Okay. So that number is 3,916,000.
Even? Correct. Okay. Oh. No. I really reduced that one. Yeah, that's a good number. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. And so as you see those two changes basically zero each other out within like $8,000 From before, yeah. From before.
Okay, so this is obviously we have have the RAM education budget, which is outside of our control. We have the final now, so there's really nothing to talk about with row six twenty five in the spreadsheet. AES, this is the one we have some direct control over. I think all of us are familiar with what kind of went on with this original board of selectmen requested the board of education was to reduce it from the current budget by about $400,000 Whereas the original superintendent estimate was that they were gonna go up about three point something percent, I think instead of going under the current budget. Board of Finance, we voted to ask them to reduce it at least a 100,000 from their current budget. They came back at 149,000 below their current budget, which is 50,000 less than a revised request from the Board of Select. So this is really the one where we probably have the most controversy and most opportunity here. And as Eric pointed out, it's a very large portion of our budget in there in education. So that's all preamble. And I guess I would, I don't know if anybody has any preliminary comments or discussion.
I guess depending on where this all shakes out when we make our adjustments where the mill rate comes in at, there's probably still opportunity for money in there because I think there's a lot of fluff in there. And what that number is, is whatever it needs to be, I guess. You know, they haven't reduced any classes or anything. They still have a very low student to teacher ratio. So if we really, if you really think about it with everything we've kind of reduced and went over tonight. It's not a whole lot of place to get money from. So
I guess it just depends with what we want to live with for a mill rate. And all the comments really the feedback. When I went and looked at what, what small amount of people have had a feedback versus everybody really kind of wanted a zero increase. And a lot of people made a lot of comments about the school budget.
Yeah, and a lot of it was about RAM over which we have zero control, unfortunately.
So I mean, you know, the counter argument is that this is a reduction of AES budget by, you know, a little over three and a half percent. The points taken about class sizes. I think what they did was they went through their budget with an eye toward reducing without actually cutting staff. And to be fair, you know, once you cut loose, you know, an experienced teacher, it's not necessarily the easiest thing to get them back if you need them. You know, I may be biased. I got two kids in that school who are benefiting from that low class size. But I don't know. Think, I think the AES board has done some pretty good work here. It's my take.
It'll be interesting to see what surplus they have in their numbers at the end of this year. That may tell the story. I don't know what their year to date spend is because we don't have that information.
Yeah, I mean with the school basically being shut down, you'd expect some savings. Question is how much? Right.
Yeah, Louise pointed out to an article earlier, I think it's South Windsor something that something like $3,000,000 in savings in their school district because of the shutdown of COVID. How that affects next year's budget? I'm not really sure you can't plan necessarily having that, but it was an interesting
number for sure. Yeah, I mean, have to figure it's non zero for sure, that they've saved something.
I'm sorry, based on the article, they actually had a 0% increase for next year. They used all those savings to go towards the budget, which is phenomenal. Right.
They look, I'm really thinking about what's going on now, as far as the remote teaching, all of that. Somehow, that has to fall into play, as to reducing what the school actually needs. I know it's going to be a lot of examination as far as what that actually is, but I think it's the way for the future. Not totally, but I think reduction is it's on its way because schools are getting along doing certain items with less teachers. I know there's gotta be supervision but it doesn't have to be the the traditional way it has been. I mean, I I got two kids doing it right now and it's
not school. I'm sorry. It's not. I know. I I see it. It's just not.
It's. It's very difficult. It's early. It's early in the process though. I mean, there's got to be structure involved. And that's, I think that's, I think that is coming and it's going to take a while, but I just really see that as an impact in future school budgets. That's just my point of view.
Hi Luis, this is Jeff Murray. I'm one of the selectmen. I would like to echo Robert's comments. It's not even close to being school. The parents are picking up a lot of the slack. We're a long way away from a little remote learning at this point. And I just wanted to I just want to mention that. Yeah, think I would agree. I mean, wife's a middle school teacher. And, you know, it's where you have involved parents, it's working, you know, it's probably working some degree for Robin, for Jeff and for others, but otherwise it's not. I mean, it's really obviously isn't something that's going to directly affect our budget discussion right now. But it's tough for a lot of people who are not involved for,
you know, parents are off working or having to be because they're essential employees. And so I don't know, tough thing, but it will make some changes. There's no doubt about it. And there are some, you know, Jen's already seen some ways that she can help students who otherwise had problems in school.
Yeah. See where that goes. So to refocus this on our budget discussion, you know, the standpoint I guess the real the issue is here. Yeah. What are they gonna have that they can carry over? We don't know. That's a black box right now to us. It's something. But what is it? I suppose there's an argument based on that for sticking with the Board of Selectmen number that was 50,000 less and just say find the money
from last from this year. And just a reference point, if you remember, they requested this year, unexpected fund balance, or the unexpected funds be rolled back to them. Think the number was about 82,000 and change. Kind I remember that. Of a reference point. We declined to roll that back into the school because there really wasn't what we felt adequate justification given for doing so. But that does kind of give us an understanding what the scope of such a surplus might end up being if things were one to one, which we know they're not gonna be. But then again, as Luis pointed out, and Rob acknowledged, there probably has got to be some reduction in costs based on the current situation with the schools closed.
Yep, and the low oil prices probably helped them a little bit too, just like it helped the town. Yeah. There's probably some money there. I think they've done a good job with their budget, but if we really are looking to try and scrounge up 50 more thousand bucks, that's one place we could go. It's to say, stick with the the the board of settlement number.
Mark? Yep. Hey. If I could, I'm trying not to sound like a broken record from last week. My take on the entire AES budget, number one, is what we asked of them. They met half of what the board of selectmen asked them for the $200,000 cut. Basically they met half of that, that was $149,000 decrease. Listening to that budget meeting where they came up with that number, they were discussing the savings of fuel oil, of labor with custodians, so on and so forth. From what I listened to, they use a lot of those numbers for their reduction in that 149,000. So, were looking at the savings of the school being closed during this Actually, they're gonna be quite, they gather closed for the rest of the year, at least this school year and who knows what about next school year from the fall. But anyways, I think they've met their due diligence in cutting the budget. They did mention that they did increase class sizes as part of that. And they were able to not they cut the two teachers and I think the two paraprofessionals they were going to hire to add and go to some two more smaller classes. Those were let go. And they were able to,
again, nobody wants to get laid off in these times and they were able to put back the teacher and that half paraprofessional's position. Personally am satisfied with what they did and they met our request for sure. And if you remember that, right, that was a $100,000 I think we asked them to do. Right. No. Those are my thoughts.
This is kind of a tough one. Mean, do you have any input on it?
I mean I just the class size to teacher ratio is just out of whack with the norm in the area. That's my concern. That's the biggest area that they could cut. Also have to be aware that there is a child in town. I forget the term where they have to send them out of the town. We have to pick up the payment for that. And that's going to be at about a tune of a $100. So keep in mind that may happen this year.
Yeah, that was their justification for asking for that we take this year's budget and return the 2% to them because they felt they had an additional cost an additional expenditure that they had not budgeted for that was going to be about 100 ks somewhere in that range.
Right So when we talk about money rolling over from this budget, it could be eaten by that.
Understand though that when you're not in schools not in session and this is one of the in the article that Louisa pointed out when school is not in session, the school district does not have the obligation to pay that tuition for those students that are sent to outside districts. So that actually should should not be an expense that's being incurred if I understand that and it's applicable as I
know whether it is. But like for next year, mean, If things are back to in session next for next school year, that could happen. Yeah. Right. Right. And say if they find money in their budget that they're saving right now. Right. We don't know how much. Right. But they're gonna they have a potential $100,000 expenditure coming. It could be eaten essentially by that.
Yeah. They may need that 2% in a big, big way. No, I think this is one that we are going to have to maybe vote on separately. To be honest with you, I said I'd like to line up all the changes and then maybe take one vote on the budget as a whole. But this may be one that if there's anyone on the board wants to make a motion to change this number, that we put that in our proposed number. This is probably where we need to do it. We can have some open discussion on it later. Can do it now. My preference is, unless somebody has more to say about it, it's probably an appropriate time for us to, if somebody so chooses to make a motion to change that number from 3,916,000 to some other number.
Is there any way for us to find out what is currently in their surplus fund plus what is going to be added in from this year so we can get a hand on how much actual cushion they have?
I think the surplus fund they have currently, I think is about $180,000 somewhere in that ballpark.
And then we don't know what's going to add to it from this year.
Correct. They well, what's going to add to it is what you decide to add to it. They're allowed to request up to 2% of their budget be placed into that special fund. But that's ultimately your decision as a Board of Finance to do it or not to do it. If not, the money just rolls back into the general fund.
But we have to give them the 2% or are you saying that's the optional?
No, you do not have to give them the 2%. Whatever money is in there, they're allowed to spend, but it's your, they have to request the Board of Finance set aside that 2% for them. If not, it just runs into the unexpended fund balance for the town.
So realistically, depending on how much surplus they'll have this year, we may have some savings there already that we don't know about.
Maybe, you know, I don't know. I mean, that's something, you know, that would be Doctor. Doyen question, not an Eric question. Right.
I mean, my, I'm thinking about if we ask them to reduce their number, can they make it up with surplus? Do you know what mean? Can they find the money? Do know I mean? And then just make everything. And they'll still come out where they need to be, but it'll help with the mill rate. Do you know follow me?
Yeah, and I think that that was one of the requests that they made. I'd have to go back and look at the letter from the Board of Education. They requested that actually as a part of this reduction of 149,000 from the current budget, that we allow them to take that any unexpended funds from this year and roll it into next year. So they're already in advance asking for us to do that. We talked a little bit about it at the meeting and I pointed out that that was just an advisory thing. We didn't need to take action. In fact, we couldn't take action really on that. I don't think reasonably since we don't even know what that number is. So they're already expecting that as part of this to kind of help cover this 149,000 reduction that they had proposed. I don't know if they know what that number is. I'm sure they don't. It's probably a little higher maybe than they had planned just because school looks like it's going to be closed through the end of the year. So there still needs to be some opportunity there, but I don't know that we're gonna be able to quantify it in any reasonable manner before this budget has to get approved.
Is there any board member on the meeting that can maybe shed some light on our discussion? Amanda, do you know if any board members on board of education AES? I didn't see any earlier. I don't believe so. No. Would be nice if there was a Assuming
they knew the details, I'm not sure that the status, the financial status is always that clear from the stuff that they have at their hands at any given moment.
You ever see the note that Joanne Hebert sent around? Yes, the chat might give us a little more clarity.
What's the question? I apologize I was out walking the dog and I kind of walked back into this. We're talking about what AES may have in surplus this year to close out this year's budget
because they have basically been shut down. They have to be coming in below some of their targets. And there was a discussion about what that figure might be. They
have 185 leftover approximately. They were gonna spend out about 70,000 of that by pulling items forward from next year's budget to prepay and like they're gonna preload the supply closet and try to produce some other items. Then it's of deceiving that the school being shut down was gonna save them money only in that like so for instance with the heating bill we all have a contract so whether we use it or not we still have to pay for it. In the past years for instance the town has I signed a check last year for $5,500 for oil that we couldn't take because all the oil tanks were full but we still had a contract that we had to pay for the oil. Also the way the executive orders were set up, they actually have to pay most of their contracts out. The PT is still doing their thing, OT, all the outreach contracts that they had that were, you know, even part timers or outsourced are still interacting with the students via, you know, teleconference. So those are still being paid. There was negotiations with the bus company, but again, it wasn't gonna be a dramatic number because by executive order, they still had to pay all the bus driver salaries and the cost, you know, they're building and payroll costs. So I don't think they're expecting any more than that. I think the 185 is really what they had played through. And then they were gonna take 70 of that and pull it forward. And they were gonna ask the town to you know give them
money back to possibly cover another outplay student next year. They were looking at returning I think I want to say it was $30.30 something to the town and the other 85 or 86 they wanted to get back. Does that answer the question?
It helps. Okay. We'd gotten some other numbers, so now I'm a little confused. What was the other numbers?
I was just looking at Joanne Hebert's chat there that she said they had said they had us unspent balance of $293,000
approximately and they were going to encumber 160,500 for supplies etc for next year which is you know you're saying 70 odd is that 149 yeah
and then 300 to the town maybe that matches up helping us with the financial software upgrade yeah it's a little puzzling, you know, I don't know, but that being said, so they would pay that's the reason why when I glanced at their budget earlier tonight,
the new budget, that's why their books and supplies and everything was practically zeroed out. I, yeah, I've got a screenshot. Let me see if I can pull it up on my phone real quick. Someone had sent me screenshots of the slides that Laura had presented. Okay. So expenses shifted to twenty nineteen-twenty twenty or you know twenty nineteen-twenty twenty was 71,000. Health insurance change was 5.8 dropped from 5.8 to 3.3, that was 7,000. Classroom reduction was 51,000, retirement replacement was 10,000, diesel fuel was 6, facility supplies was 3, custodial summer staffing was 12, additional 0.5 power was 13 that got them to the number we were looking for. They didn't do the classroom.
Exactly so then they pulled they ended up pulling out and deciding not to do the classroom. Right. So that was the difference. That was the difference. So their total number, their total reduction estimated their adjusted estimated unspent balance was $185,913 the savings were as follows substitute staff was 19,000, employee benefits was 15,000, transportation 9,000, heat and oil was 10,000, staff expenses not encumbered, support staff salaries, which was food service was 25,000, professional services was 66, repair and maintenance 18, communications 12, educational supplies was 20, Building supplies was 2,500. Diesel was 7,000. Technology plan was 10,000. That gave them a total savings of $16,500. 160,500, so their estimated unspent was gonna be $1.85 $9.13. They wanted to move expenses from 2021 into 2019 as follows. Union negotiations retainer to the attorney was 7,000, Repair and maintenance was 10,500. Postage was 5,000. Instructional supplies was 32,300. Facilities and cleaning supplies was 3,700. Technology plan was 12,500. That came to a total of $71,000 moved expenses. That gave them an excess of $1.14 $9.13. Their 2% set aside would be 81. Potential town give back if the town let them keep the 2% was 33613. So yeah. I'm not sure where where she's getting her numbers from. I No. Some of those match. Okay. Yeah. She was getting the slides. These are off the slides. So Okay. I don't know what the $16,500 of supplies is.
So at the end of the day, we're talking about potentially 33,000?
Yeah. Her $16,500 in supplies is not that actually is not supplies. That was savings that they were gonna have
by not spending this year. That it matches that number exactly. $1.65. Yeah. That's what I picked up on. It's not supply. So the amount that they either wanna either we get back or we roll over is like 33 did you say?
If you were there, they'll no matter what we'd get $33.06 13. Okay. And then if they're 2% set aside which they wanted back was $81.03 for the for a total of $1.14 $9.13. Okay. But that their their concern was that they wanted additional funds. The outplacement. For the outplacement possibility. Exactly. So they wanted to give 33, not the full $1.14. Okay. Does
anyone know if they were to go ahead and allow that money for the outplacement person, if that doesn't go through, because I would hate to see that child not be able to get what they need, if that person, that child doesn't end up using it, could that be reverted back to the town?
I think it functionally would. Mean, it's probably they're legally bound to do that outplacement. They don't really have a choice if it's determined that that's needed.
Yeah. So what they could do though is instead of doing that, they already have 180 put aside that they have discretion over. If they needed it, they could simply come back to the board of finance and say we have an outplacement, we'd like to tap those resources. So they already have $1.80 put aside. They're asking for an additional 81,000 on top of the 180 they already have. I don't even think they have to ask our permission. Just need to notify us if I Well, no. They have to It has because it's over. They have to come back to you guys to tap that This is technically a town fund. Oh, okay. But it's it's set aside for the school.
Got it. So there's a lot to digest. Guess I'll repeat my question. Does anybody at this point care to make a motion to make an adjustment to this proposed budgeted number?
Does I it mean we can't be willing to make a motion to say basically they're at a reduction of 3.67%. Let's ask for a total reduction of 4%, which means it's like another, that would be like 162,000 something, another 20 something thousand dollars. Yeah, the
board of selectmen had asked for 5%. Was our goal. You're suggesting a 4% reduction? Yeah. Let's see. That number would be sorry, about 1 and 62 0.6. Yeah.
What would the result of that be for, an increase in town? That's about $13,000
Almost nothing, but that's the thing is little bit here and a little bit there and you eventually get to something that starts to show up. But I mean, is a mil a mil is $2.60? $2.64 ish. Yeah. So you're talking about $13,000 here. So it's, you know, 5% of a mill. Am I doing my math right? Teacher, my brain is.
A little bit late for that. Little bit late in the day, not for
Okay. I'm glad I'm working from home. I can roll out of bed and fire up the laptop for 9AM. Commute. I wish it was 9AM. Yeah. Well,
lunchtime is a beautiful thing. Yeah. Right. Just know you guys you guys don't need to make that decision tonight. You know,
I mean, if we can make him, you know, when we're fresh, well, I'm not fresh, but when it's fresh in our minds.
Well, I will say this that the intention of our next meeting on May 6 is to present a proposed budget from the Board of Finance. So if we can come up with a proposed budget, which we don't now have to stick with, but would be our proposed budget for public input. Tonight would be the night to kind of put that together. And if we can't, we can't. I mean, we figure it out, but we need to come up with something I think for next week. So we can put together a reasonable presentation for the residents and move this forward.
So I have a question for the May 6 meeting, which would be the public meeting, so to speak. Will we have available to us to have people in the school side be able to present their budget and justify their numbers if people have questions? How does that work? I guess I just don't know who's going to be answering. I don't remember if Sally normally does that. No. So it didn't they already present to you guys? Yeah. But it was Yeah. They just not this budget.
Yeah. Yeah. But they don't normally come back. Yeah. You can ask them to. The May 6 meeting is for public. So I mean you could ask them that's your purview. May 6 is that is normally for the townsfolk to kind of come and kick everybody's brain. Generally the May 6, you know, that group meeting is usually sort of a joint board of selectmen, board of finance, you know, thing where, you know, everybody kind of picks everybody apart, you know.
Yeah, and I think that the opportunity to listen to the school budget process was probably at the Board of Education meeting. You know, we certainly could ask somebody to come in They and work
normally do present and the past we had asked them to come back. I mean, this is all kind of convoluted because of this COVID thing. So in the past they certainly have come back and tried to answer some questions. Unfortunately, didn't always get the answers we were looking for but they did come back. So Okay.
All right. If we could kind of circle back to Diane, you had offered to make a motion to change the Board of Finance's proposed number for the AES budget to reflect a reduction of 4% from the current budget. That an accurate statement? Does anybody want to second that? I'll second it. Okay, David seconds. Okay, any further discussion?
I think actually that's a good compromise. So I feel I would say I would third that. If you can do such You'll a you'll have an opportunity to vote for sure. Okay.
So so for the record, we're talking about an additional reduction of $13,600 so it will be 9,000,003 million 900,000. Where I've lost my train of thought. You know what I mean? It would be when we plug that in so we know exactly what the figure is. There you go. So we're taking a proposed budget to $3,753,400.
Wait, wait, wait. Is that is there additional? Wait a minute. Is that really the additional reduction I must have misunderstood. No it's not.
Minus thirteen six would give you 3,000,000 total reduction of 100 And that's 4%. And thank you, Diane.
Any so yes, so thank you, Rob. So that would that's the total amount there. I like the other number better, but this one will work. It was like magic. What's the number you actually are trying to cut? This is the AES budget total. What's the additional ask? $13,000. $13.06. $13.06.
To get to 4% from instead of 3.67. It's rounding basically. Any further discussion? Mark, are you able to zoom in a bit?
I am. These numbers aren't the right column, but this highlighted number would be the proposed Board of Finance budget for AES. Think you want to move that to column J.
Yeah, that's where it belongs. But this is just to do the calculation. Okay. So we have a motion, we have a second.
No further discussion. We have no further discussion. I guess we'll call for a vote. Okay, Louise? Yea. Okay, Rob? Abstain. Okay, Diane? Aye. Okay, Linda? Yes.
Okay, Kurt. No. Okay, David. Yes. Okay, I'm gonna vote no. The motion passes to put that number in as a proposed Board of Finance number. Okay, any more discussion over the ES budget? Okay, hearing none. Let's go ahead and we'll move on. Thank you folks. Know this is a tough one. A long meeting.
This one might break the record. I'm not sure what the record is. Five hours. We're breaking it. Five hours. Get out. Oh, we can do it. Can do it. Yeah, we did.
Was I involved in that? You fell asleep. Did I wake that out of my memory? No. There are some things one does not wish to remember. I don't remember it. It 11:44 so close.
Okay, moving on to the library. Library payroll, looks like we have slight increase there. Library operations basically flat. Does anybody have any input or questions about this? Hearing none. Okay, let's dial it down here. Let's talk a little bit. Eric, I don't know if you want to go through some of these numbers. Road improvement, paving, I know we're changing things around the way we're doing it. We're allocating it to funds, correct? Correct. So we're just,
we spent 200,000 last year from fund balance for roadwork. This year we're upping that to 300,000 but also taking that out of unexpended fund balance in this case as opposed to direct taxation. Okay.
Are we able to live with same as we spent last year 200,000?
I mean we can live with whatever you give us. The number the town has to work with is of maintaining our existing road condition. You know, the budget should be somewhere around 400 ks a year total to keep the average road condition where it is today. So anytime you fund less than that, you're decreasing the average quality of the road. Anytime you're putting more money into it, you're increasing the average quality of the town roads. 300 Sorry. And
Let me make sure I understand this because really this is coming from fund balances. So even if we reduce stuff here, it's not going to do anything unless we choose to spend fund balance to offset expense. Correct. Right. Okay.
And historically, we have not done that as a town, correct? Historically, correct.
Moving Okay. Down to his time garage lease no change there. You've got a couple other items that we're actually adding capital for revaluation.
Yeah, so basically It's a capital Every x number of years, we need to do a reval. And every second time we're supposed to do a full reval. So we've kind of cheated on that and we haven't done an actual full reval in about twenty years. So we went out to RFP for it this year with the assumption based on the Board of Selectmen's desire to do a full reval. Basically, every other cycle you're supposed to do a full reval, but there's ways you can kind of cheat and just kind of use the honor system and say, do you swear you didn't actually do anything? And we've done that several times in a row when it was time for a full reval. So we really need to, you know, just in the interest of fairness, do a complete reval. So we've gone to RFP, we have exact costs, we've already signed the contract for it. This is our yearly allotment. So basically we set aside money for five years. So every fifth year we spend, you know, the money on the reval. And the total budget for reval is about 85,000, 84,000,
something like that. All right, so this is basically an allocation towards a five year. Okay. And same
thing with the one below it, which is the plan of conservation and development. That is something that the town is required to do by law every ten years. And there are some pretty significant funding penalties if you haven't done it. Basically they can hold up steep grants and a whole bunch of funding if don't have a plan of conservation and development. Again, you know, it has a fixed cost, you know, even though you're doing it under every ten years, what we've been doing is we put a little money aside every year. We decided not to put the money aside, you know, last couple of years or at least last year. So we were going to do a little bit of catch up, but I think this is a bad enough year that we're not gonna try to catch up. We're just gonna put in, you know, a some contribution, but not all the contribution we really should be putting into it. That makes sense.
Yeah. Taken out of the transfer station shed F-two 50 plow truck not needed this year.
Yeah, those were capital line items we put in for specific projects. Anybody have any other questions on the capital?
Debt retirement that kind of is what it is. Yep, two more years to pay off all the school debt. That'll be nice.
Yeah. School interest that is what it is, right? Yeah. Okay, so for transfers, you've got a $50,000 contingency set for transfers. Basically staying flat, seems reasonable. I know this comes up.
Did we use how much of that did we use this year do we remember
right now I don't think we've actually officially tapped the contingency We've you've given me authorization to spend 5,000 out of contingency for the IT upgrades, but since South Windsor's town manager is still not letting his guys work remotely, We're having a hard time getting that project actually completed. But I we're going to end up where we're gonna go over is in the money that was allotted in this year's budget for doing, all the work at the transfer station. And where we're going to go over dramatically is on the electrical. I'll know better, you know, we've issued an RFP, we're having the contractor walk through tomorrow. But basically what happened is about ten years ago, we decided to half ass because our rotary phase converter died. And we decided instead of buying a new rotary phase converter, we buy a bunch of cheap,
non rotary little phase converters, one for each unit. The problem is they don't put out their rated power and we're having a problem running the compactors. In fact, one of our compactors is out of commission again, because of power issues. So we desperately need to do that because we're just not functional right now at the transfer station. If you noticed, if you went there today, you would notice we are dumping bulky or we are dumping recycling in an open topped container, which is illegal, but we're doing it because we're a compactor short at the moment. So that's where we're gonna really bust this year's contingency budget.
Just so that you know. Yeah, no, just as a general sense, because people that ask about that figure and it's good to explain that look, these things come up and it's important to have it there. Yeah.
And for the record, the general municipal guidelines is that you maintain between a 25% contingency for your overall budget. And if you think about what that number is, we maintain, you know, a $50,000 contingency on a total budget of 12,000,000. So we maintain a really low number to begin with.
All right, anybody have any other questions on the funding fund transfers? This is one of those areas Kurt brought it up earlier about possibly doing something different with the Fire Department Equipment Fund. As Eric pointed out, that it's really just kind of internally moving funds around. It isn't really taking from taxes per se. There is the alternative to reduce some of the funds to pay for our recurring expenses, which is we've talked about before is generally not a good practice. We're probably dipping a little deeper here this year than we would have otherwise, obviously, given the coronavirus situation.
I mean, we've already chopped that figure in half. Know, the fire department equipment fund, the original ask was 100. We've already got that to 50. That's a pretty minimal investment. I
mean, remember too, that those numbers were generated initially by looking at both the fire department's capital, you know, plan and also the public works department a fifteen year capital plan and say, okay, over a fifteen year period, we need to replace roughly $1.61700000 dollars worth of equipment every fifteen years. And saying, okay, if we do that, then the reality is we need to set aside about $110,000 a year. Now, historically, if you looked before I took over, historically, we were spending an average of around $25,000 but we had gotten the average age of the equipment of public works up to something like thirty years. And I mean, we're still rolling around with a forty year old sweeper, you know, that they've been spending three weeks re welding, you know, so we can sweep the roads today. So the money needs to go into capital. I get this is a bad year in that I'm not suggesting we put in 100% of what we need to put in, but we need to keep funding capital.
I have one question. Once we put money into these funds, can they only be used for what the fund is called, or can we then move the money around later if we wanted to?
So a combination of you and Board of Selectmen collectively can reallocate the money. Okay.
I mean, this may look good now, but may not look good six months from now. So, I mean.
Any other questions or discussions on the funds? Okay, well, I think if unless somebody has another suggestion, I'd like to go flip back up to the top, identify the couple two or three minor things that we talked about potentially changing. And we can have further discussion if needed, but maybe take a vote on whether we wanna implement those changes. And then if we're on agreement, then we can call that a potentially proposed budget. Somebody said, I think we just had questions on 30,000 for the software transition, just kind of flagged that that's big uncertain number. Note though that there was also some money in the school budget from this. So I'm a little wondering if we're double dipping a little bit on either side. Eric, are you aware of that or Adrian?
So their money is they were planning on doing it out of this year's Yeah. And we were planning on doing it out of next year's budget. So they didn't budget next year for it, and we didn't budget this year for it. Okay. So which year we actually spend the money out of, I wish I could tell you, but, I would prefer to spend the money out of this year and not spend the money next year. But I can't guarantee we're gonna get it done in time to put it in this fiscal year.
So Mark, Barbara and I were going back and forth with some private conversation on the chat. We're gonna try to get, something from the auditor because he was one of the ones that was if we decided to go QuickBooks, he would be that side of it. So we're gonna try to get something from him before your May 6 meeting. But worst case scenario, if if there is a chance to adjust this, we will make sure that you have that before you make a final decision on the twenty seventh. That sounds fair. We're
trying unfortunately we're just having a tough time getting information back.
As much as I hate that number just sitting there like that, my personal inclination would be to leave it alone until we get more information. Yeah, I think we table for now.
We can always go back and visit. So thank you, Adriana. It's a good point. We keep that in our back pocket. Just this is the fire department physical so this is really just an internal That's accounting. Which Yeah. Left the GPS system, which we talked about removing? I say take it out. Well, anybody wanna make a motion on that? I'll make the motion.
Okay. Kurt Kurt makes a motion to remove to zero out the proposed budget for the GPS system. Is there a second? I'll second. Okay, Linda second, I think. Yep.
Okay, any discussion? In addition to the discussion we already had? Hearing none, let's call for a vote. Just go on in order from the top of my screen. Linda? Yes. Rob? Aye. Diane? Aye. Kurt? Aye. Luis? Aye.
David? Aye. And I'll also vote aye. That passes unanimously. We're gonna zero out that number. Going down through, I think that
We have the water testing thing. We have the water testing, yeah. If we opt to take it out, we could always, if it was really needed, we could put it back in before we do the final approval.
Yeah, would agree with that. Anybody wanna make a motion on this one?
I'll make the motion to remove the water testing $2,000 Diane so moved. So I have a second. I'll second it.
Okay, Rob seconds. Okay, we'll go ahead and again, just take a roll call vote from the top of the screen, Rob. Sure, okay, yep. Diane. Aye. Kurt. Aye. Louise. Aye. Dave. Aye. And Linda. Aye.
I'll also vote aye. The motion passes. We'll zero out that item. And we've already made the motion on the school budget. Okay, well, I think we've addressed everything essentially top to bottom. We haven't really looked at revenue page, but that's nothing we can really I think we necessarily we need to address right now.
Can I make just one comment? Yes. In your budget for social service salary, it's the Department of five zero one. If you are funding the other position, the new position, this salary would go away because right now the way that the part time person was split over this budget o one four five and O501. So if you're going to do that one position, it would be in the other budget, the 0145 and then this just 800 would go away. It's minor. It's it's just cleaning up the budget for when it's actually inputted to the accounting system. Can you give me a row number on the offsetting item?
Yep. I'm sorry. 0145 is the department. Okay. O1 4 five. Yeah. Row 316. Yeah. If you were to fund that position for 15,600. This resident services coordinator? Correct. Yes. If you're leaving that in, social service goes away. You can see that amount that $2.02 $6.05 was the old wage from this budget and then money was taken from the other budget.
So Eric, you're in agreement with that? Yes, I am. Okay, so it sounds like it was kind of a double dip here in a way. All right, and then you go find back where we are. So this could effectively be zeroed? Correct. Correct. Anybody wanna make a motion to do so? I so move. Okay, Rob has made the motion to remove the $800 from account number 1Dash100Dash5Dash501Dash100 social service social worker salary welfare. Any second? I'll second it.
Okay Louise seconds. Go ahead and any discussion? Hearing none let's take a vote. Rob? Aye. Dave? Aye. Louise. Aye. Kurt. Aye. Okay, Linda. Aye. Okay.
And Diane. Aye. Okay, I'll also vote aye. The motion passes will zero out that line item. Okay. Thank you, Barbara for that. That was important, small but important note. Okay, does anybody have anything else? If not, I would suggest that probably what we have here is proposed Board of Finance budget to take to our meeting next Wednesday. We'll basically transfer the numbers over from column J except as noted for our changes made tonight. Is everybody in agreement with that or anybody disagree with that, I guess is a better way to put it.
Okay, just so that it looks like given the changes that you've implemented, you're looking at an estimated mill rate of 35.6 so it would be a 0.6 mil increase. All that work. We shaved off point we shaved off point
That's how it works. It's a good thing we don't get paid hourly otherwise this would be if we would have just blown that whole thing on this meeting. Think every little I think we did good.
Yeah, I mean, we have to make the effort, right? This is what they pay us for. Oh, wait. The residents. For the residents. Okay. Is there any further discussion on the budget?
Okay. Me ask one question. The only other option we would have to get the mill write down is to use fund money to offset expense. Well, yeah. I mean, right now of $4.15, right? Is that what we're
We're already using a bunch of funds to help fund the capital.
Okay, so use of fund balance at $4.15 on there under that second box down, is that what we're using to offset expenses?
Yes, so we're putting $4.15 from fund balance plus we're taking $365,400 from other non fund balance funds and reallocating that also. So in other words, we're also we're basically we're running about $780,000 of money we're putting into capital funds and we're taking it all from unexpended fund balance or reallocation of existing funds.
Basically, we're spending $700,000 on one time one time things not trying to fund those through taxation. Of those will have to be funded through taxation in future years. We probably need to be doing a mill and a half just for roads, but obviously this isn't the year to ask for that. Prior to this COVID thing, were looking for three mills. So whether that would have happened or not, it's a different conversation, but just to cover the basics of what we need to move the town forward, whether it's roadwork, culvert work, bridge work, we three mills short. So
this puts us one year closer to reval. And hopefully when that reval hits, from what we've seen and what we've heard, we'll probably be looking at our mill rate going down and we'll have room to be able to address some of these things without climbing so quickly.
Okay. Any other further budget discussion? All right. Hearing none, think we could move on to our next agenda item, which is the board open discussion. Does anybody have any other comments or input?
We just want to say we're sorry. It was a lot easier for the board of finance to cut when the board of selectmen wasn't paying attention. I will tell you that.
We took a moment to it before we gave it to you.
I'd like to say something too. Is a very difficult decision and I for one, I'm sure I'm speaking for the board, we're doing what we think is the right thing. And the way it's going now as far as the economy and all that, I hope the town residents will be grateful. And we all have to tighten our belts. And I think in the end, I think we'll come out okay. You're here.
Clear to that. Thanks. Any other comments or open discussion?
Kind of hearing Oh, have one, Mark, if I could. Kurt, go ahead. Yep. Voting. Did anyone see the JI the last two days and see what the town of Vernon just did with drive through voting on their budget? I saw the headline. Didn't didn't read the article. They they passed a 90 point something million dollar town budget through drive through voting at the the town hall in the town of Vernon. And it's an idea that they came up with. I don't know if they came up with the idea, but it's been used in other municipalities around the area. We're talking about us having to set a budget for the town and let the town live with it. By going to drive through voting, we can let the townspeople vote on on on our work. And I don't know if it goes to the selectmen to to call for that or us or or what, but I was I had a discussion with the fire chief in Vernon tonight, and he said it it was they they had more people do go go to the drive through voting than they have at a normal, budget budget meeting. So They goose turnout.
They did. It does actually fall to the select board and we actually, Paula and myself had a call with one of the council members over there. They they typically run somewhere between a hundred and three hundred people in a town of 30,000 that turn out and vote on their budget. So they did an hour and a half voting slot. You could drive or walk up. It's not that the state's gonna certify that vote, it's just that it makes the town feel better by doing it. So they still actually then have to pass their budget the same way we will. What the state will accept. Certainly in formal referendum.
Right, exactly. So I mean, it it we mold this back and forth and it's it's really, you know, it's hit or miss. It's it the reality is we get more people actually vote on our budget than you do on theirs and, you know, their town is 10 times the size of ours. So, you know, to have voting open for an hour and a half in the evening, it just, you know, I don't know. It It it just doesn't make sense to us. The reality is it's we'd be doing it for for token reasons not for actual it's, you know, you're not actually getting a a true turnout of the town if you do it for an hour and a half and, you know, you're doing it when parents are gonna have kids and, they're gonna drag them out at 09:00 at night to go vote. Are you gonna have our seniors stand out in the rain if it happens to rain that day?
Because they're most of the people that actually do the the registrar and everything. You know? In
his discussion with me today, Adrian, he said it was a, it's a binding vote.
Their vote bad. The state said they're not gonna we were told the state's not gonna certify them. Did talk to the town attorney about this. I mean, we didn't do this blindly. So Okay. Well, I just it was a thought to start when No. I listen. We we totally agree with looking into it. That's why we reached out to one of the council members there, to try to get some feedback as to what it really looked like. But, you know, I I don't ever wanna do anything in this town. I I personally, I can't speak for the rest of the board selectmen. I never wanna do something that's just token. If we're gonna do something, let's have it be a true statement and have it mean something and have it have all the town be able to participate. And I just feel like that is, you know, that's a feel good moment. It's it I don't I personally don't believe that it's fair to do that to any to anybody in town. Could we,
I mean, it depends, I suppose on if we did do something like this, it depends on when we scheduled it on it'd be as accessible as possible for people.
And I It would depend on what you do with the results too. I mean, we had a proposed budget and and the vote was negative,
you know, we could We could decide to bound by it or we can decide we're gonna throw it out technically.
But do you but do you do you ask our registers who are not exactly spring chickens because you have to pick a date. You've gotta then stick to the date because you have to, you know, put it out there and advertise and everything. And if it happens to be raining that day, are we gonna ask them to sit out in the rain all day and do this? You know? Because if we're gonna if you were to do that, you'd have to do it fairly so that the whole town could participate. I just it we felt that it created more problems than it was worth, and we were also we're told that this was not something the state wanted. The state does not want
municipalities that think they can skirt the system to do it because then it's gonna shame the ones that don't. And so there was a certain amount of if you do this, you will pay for it later. And personally, we don't get enough from the state as it is. I I really don't wanna be on the pay for it later list. So Based
on what the fire chief told me and based on what you've just said, I'm gonna go back and research it a little bit further. And he did mention that if you needed someone to talk to, talk to the
and maybe Eric could do this, is Mike Pacaro. He's the town administrator of Vernon. Yeah. I mean, to be candid with you, we've already discussed it. I I don't know that it's gonna come back up.
Okay. So it was a it was a thought. I know there's a there's a few of us on the board that, are not comfortable just, you know, setting the setting the budget, you know, and I'm You know what? Read the governor's executive order.
You know, we had the town's attorney view that. His his opinion lines up with that of pretty much everybody else who's looked at that, And that is the governor said very specifically that the budget making entity of the town shall pass a budget and set a mill rate without a vote of the people. So regardless of whether you like it or you don't like it and I would agree that this is not the way we want to do business. Right. But this is the way we've been told we are doing business. You know, and to me that's the,
you know, I mean if you're gonna defy that order do you tell all the town businesses they can open back up, You know, is one executive order something you can ignore and in another you don't? I don't know.
Yeah. I mean, listen, again, as Eric's basically pointing out that we did not do this lightly. Talked to it, the attorney, we, you know, we reached out to the state reps. We've kind of looked around and tried to see, you know, and if it's just didn't feel right to try to sort of half ass it for lack of a better word, you know, so yeah, that this is where we're at.
I think it's an important discussion to have actually, know, it's a problem. Thanks for bringing that up, Curt. I wasn't aware that that's what they've done. I guess my opinion would be would kind of depend on what we ended up doing with the information. But it does kind of open a can of worms too. It does. They actually this is the second time they did it. They did it back in March
for a fund transfer that they needed to do. That was their dry run. And then they revisited it for this. So
Right. But for the record, they got point 02% voter turnout the first time they did this. So if you think about it, seven members of the board of selectmen voting are way more than 0.2% of the electorate. So if the seven of you made a decision, that's probably more democratic than what they did. Right.
Any further comment or discussions coming up pretty close on that five hour mark at Eric, maybe you could do a song and dance routine for the next fifteen-twenty minutes to keep it going. Yeah, no.
Has anyone noticed that Kurt gets lower and lower in the screen as the meeting goes on? Thank was motion to adjourn, how's that? I was waiting for you to slide off your chair, Kurt. No, I'm good. Sorry, you're jumping
the agenda a little bit, All right. Okay, if there's no more board discussion, we'll go on to agenda item number five, which is public speak. Do we have any public comment input? We outlast everyone? It's, I don't know.
Sad, no comment. Well one quick thing, this is Joanne Hebert. I agree with everything you've all said as far as deciding on the budget and the Board of Finance setting the mill rate. It's just that I feel like such strong arguments are being made right now against people's opinions. So it just seems like there might be a little bit of a fear factor that if it did go to the people, might not pass. Again, I understand the process and maybe that's just after all these hours of listening to it, but there's such strong arguments against it that I'm just afraid that you might, it's coming across that you think the people might vote it down. Well,
yes. I mean, candidly, that that did come into our conversation about it and it was simply because the journal inquiries is running right now, but unfortunately the River East is not. Typically we would have that as an outlet to at least make sure that the residents in town that are not Facebook savvy or website savvy have an opportunity to get some information. Unfortunately, the mailings have not been great in the past. When the town has done mailings, the response rate, you know, is is pretty low. On average, somewhere around 5%
even when we put in a stamp and an envelope.
You know And this is that unique year, Adrianne. I mean, clearly I've been invested. I've been at every darn meeting. I mean, I'm exhausted. I mean, I'm sure people are sick of saying my name, but that's all I wanted to say. I mean, get your process and I understand it and it's a lot of hard work. It's been a lot of my time invested too. That's the only reason I spoke up with some figures that I thought I knew and you weren't there at the time. So they were asking for figures and no one had anything. So I had jotted down the notes, that's why I spoke up. That's all I was gonna say. It just seems so forceful that we don't want this to happen, but I get it.
Thanks for that, Julian. Thank you. That's perfectly understandable comment.
Yeah, appreciate it. And all your listening in hard work is appreciated. If more people were as active or invested or half as much, think we'd be better off.
Absolutely. River East is the thing that got me going in February with the 10 or 11% increase.
That's our strategy going forward. We ought to throw out a 20% increase next year. Able to get people involved. Throw out the Molotov cocktail and wait for everyone to come.
Honestly, we were prepared for a pretty huge budget turnout and having to do a lot of explaining and Eric had a song and dance number and everything.
Really And then you would have gotten the comments in the reveries both ways too, it's a different year. But I know it's late, but thank you. That's all I was gonna say. Thank you. Thanks for sticking Okay, in
so that's it for public comment. Sounds like it. Do I have a motion for adjournment? Motion. Okay, Kurt's made a motion for adjournment. I need a second. I'll second. I heard Louise strongest, so I'm gonna say Louise seconded. You for all of your efforts seconding that motion though. Go ahead and have a vote. Kurt. Aye. David. Aye. Louise. Aye. Linda. Aye. Rob. Aye.
Wake up Rob. Aye. And I'll vote aye. Okay. So the meeting is adjourned. Thank you very much. Don't think we quite hit that limit but good work. Thank you.