Meeting transcript
Annual Town Budget Meeting
June 1, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
06/01/2021, 7PM. The electors and citizens qualified to vote in town meetings in the town of Andover are hereby notified that the annual budget meeting for the town of Andover will be held at the Andover Elementary School in the Gymnasium 35 School Road on Tuesday, 06/01/2021 at 7PM for the following purposes. One, to choose the moderator for said meeting, thirtieth twenty twenty two as prepared by the board of finance. Three, to to approve approve a a budget for the fiscal year July 07/01/2021 to 06/30/2022 for to adjourn. The Copies of the budget are available and voting by absentee ballot is not permitted for this meeting. Do I have a motion to choose a moderator? Do
I have a second? Second. Do I have any other nominations? Wally is the moderator for said meeting.
Thank you, I think. Again, anyone that hasn't been to the budget hearings before, motions can Again, if you wanna speak, your time is up, other people speak, you wanna speak again, you can always come back up and speak a second time. With that, I'll turn it over Mark to presentation.
Thank you, Wally. Okay. Welcome back. It started to become a weekly thing here, so hopefully, it won't continue too long. Thank you everybody for coming up tonight. I know this is a lot of time. It's time away. I don't wanna take any more time than we have to, but this is an important process, and this is part of the process. Okay? So thank you for participating tonight. Just real quick, because I did this last time and I thought it was illuminating, how many of you have not been to either of the two previous town meetings? Raise your hand. Okay. So it looks like most people have been here, so you kinda know what's what's going on. I am not gonna go over the budget in detail. Detail. Documents are on the town's website. The presentations from the past couple of meetings are on the town's website. If you do have any specific questions, you can, of course, ask them during the question and answer period. But as Wally pointed out, the primary goal here is to move this budget forward, take a vote, and then if it passes, we can go to referendum, and we'll decide again there. I am gonna talk a little bit about the process, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about the mill rates at the because that's something that seems to be generating a lot of confusion. It's a common confusion, so I think that might be a little helpful, but I'm not gonna tie up a lot of your time going over the details. There's a lot of documentation on the TOPS website.
Let's get started. Okay. This is the agenda. We're gonna talk maybe a little bit about the process. Really, while we did highlights the key thing is that the Board of Finance for the Charter makes a budget recommendation, presents it to the town at the town meeting, at which point we can make changes down. We can't increase the overall budget. Okay? So that's the key things. Okay? Primarily, I'm gonna be focusing on what changed in the last two meetings. Alright. Cover expenditures, the top general budget, the EDS budget. I'm just gonna touch on them. We're not gonna go into detail. Again, there's a lot. This has been a four or five month process. There's been a lot of meetings, from the Board of Selectmen, Board of Education, and the Board of Finance to get where we are today. We'll talk about revenue. That's the other side of the coin. That includes grants, etcetera, state aid, and of course, and then we'll do a summary of the question and answer. A little bit about the budget process. This list is getting longer and longer every time we hold a meeting. But as you all know, or probably realize, we went to the first town meeting, the budget passed at that meeting, it was then voted down to referendum. We came back for another town meeting. We did not pass the budget at that town meeting, so here we are again to try a third time.
This is just a section of the town charter that describes how the budget is developed, or part of it. So this is the important thing. What has changed from the last meeting? Only one thing changed from the last budget, and that's the Andover Elementary School District line item. Okay. But just as a reminder, for those of you who aren't aware, the town budget has one single line item for the Andover Elementary School, okay? We don't determine how much is spent on this or how much is spent on that, you know, so that's part of what the Board of Education does. But it is part of the overall town budget. We held a meeting on geez, what day is it now? Wednesday. The Board of Finance had another budget meeting, and we approved a revised recommended budget with the following change. We increased the AES budget from $3,940,008 in the previous calendar year to $3,978,008. This is an increase of $38,000 over our last recommendation, and an increase of $75,006.08 over the twenty twenty one twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty one, fiscal year budget. So it represents about a 1.94% increase over last year. Okay? This is not what the Board of Education wanted.
I'll just mention that you can go back and look at the video of the, Board of Finance meeting if you like. They were asking for they came back with a compromise figure slightly higher than this, which represented about a two and and a half percent increase, feeling they could still do what they needed to do by moving some expenditures, into this year, etcetera. That's all on the board of education, meetings, YouTube, and on the board of finance, YouTube if you care to go back and review how those determinations were made. So it takes us to a proposed budget for the town of $12,531,038. This actually is a spending decrease of $4,338 or point 03% less than last year. How did we get there? Well, board have added slight it's a 1.94% increase of 75,000. The debt service has gone down a little bit because we're almost done paying for the bonds from the ADS bond that was taken out years ago. And the RAM budget decreased significantly. And I said it before, I'll say it again, it's not that the RAM budget went down, it's the Andover's share of the student population that RAM went down. So So that's what's driving the decrease in the RAM budget for Andover. And that passed the referendum, earlier this month. I can't remember the exact date. And that is a fixed figure. That's a done deal, so there's no action to be taken on that line item today. And then the town budget. The town budget is $3,432,002.73,
which represents an increase of $228,108 or just less than 1% increase. Increase. Brand budget levy just talked about this. Don't need to go too much further, I don't think. However, no interest to school budget, the end of the board event, originally requested a final budget of $4,122,000 to cover operational capital components of the budget, and in addition to the renegotiated staff contracts. Renegotiated their contract last year, and that's driving the public's cost. The Board of Finance's recommended budget reduces this by a 143,992 from their original request to that $3,978,000 figure, about 2% increase. Town operating budget. The overall decrease in the town operations budget from $250,000,036,000 to 2,479,158, savings about 56,892. There were several things that affected the budget, you know, both up and down.
Most of the savings was from salary increases. I'll just point it out because it's important to know and it gets brought up. But the one of the things that increased is that the we combined the account finance department with AES. So the entire cost of the finance director's salary, full cost of her salary, is in the AES budget. The assistant finance director, can't remember, assistant finance person, her budget is in the town's budget, so there's a little bit of a cost shift. Some of the other things that affected is the town is now bearing the entire cost of the Andover Human Memorial Youth Services. That used to be something that was split between the school districts, both the RAM and the AES in the town, and that was combined just to make it a little more easy to understand where that line item was. So they happen to all of the towns that are serviced by age on youth services. So the town is bearing that cost, whereas RAM school, ADS school district, bore that cost in part before. Okay. Here's some other things. Okay. Just gonna go through the increase we talked about. So there's an overall increase in the account capital budget
from 869,115 to 954,115. Now the capital budget is that portion of the budget where you're applying the funds to major infrastructure projects, roads, bridges, culverts, etcetera. Three, two. So here it's mostly funded by bridge work funds. We increased a little bit due to the multi This is a breakdown of the budget for the capital projects that reaches that fund. Okay. Now here's the other side of the coin, account revenue. What do we have coming in to offset our cost? The town revenue comes from state funding, primarily the educational cost sharing grants and fees for services such as the building permit fees, the town transfer station fees, etcetera, cost of those costs. Also bundled with revenue is money from previous from previous budgets that was not spent. This is called the unexpected unexpended fund balance, And handover historically, as you probably heard me say before, various board members have said before, we run a very high unexpended fund balance, which we have used over the last three years in particular to pay down to pay for capital projects and avoid increasing taxes. We'll talk a little bit more about that. This is a breakdown of the revenue. A couple things are important here. Notice some negative numbers here. This is the educational cost sharing grant. The state reformulated the equations they used to develop the educational cost sharing numbers. That's the amount that they used to spread spread out to various towns,
in order to, help assist with your educational needs in the town. Andover is one of only a handful of towns in Connecticut that actually lost, funds during the educational cost sharing. You know, some of the other towns gained more, some stayed fairly flat. But we lost, $67,009.28 in this next fiscal year, and it's something we have control over. This is what the state did. It's how they formed a. And that's also gonna apply to an exterior to an even larger extent. We also have at the very bottom line, I wanna talk a little bit about this. This is the use of the fund balance. I talked about how we kinda dipped into the unexpended fund balance over the last three years to kinda offset tax increases and get done some of these projects and how that we felt that we needed to do.
Two years ago, we spent almost a million dollars on that. K? Last year, it was $2,780,400, and then this year, it's down to 250,000. But why the reduction? Well, it's important for us to have a non expended fund balance. We need that as a contingency fund source. So all of the towns basically have them. And there's a target percentage that most towns try to stay in, and that's at about 10% of your of your your budget and revenues expenditures. Right? And we were much higher. We were much higher. We've been put more into that savings bank, if you will, than is normally recommended. And in some cases, that can put I think if somebody put it, you can put a target on your back as far as the state's concerned, and you risk potentially some grants and other allocations. So it's important for us to maintain about a 10%. So this was a fiscally prudent thing to do, was to spend down this unexpended fund balance of last few years knowing that we have a lot of capital projects that we needed to take care of,
primarily the roads, bridges. If you've attended any of the town meetings or watched any of the presentations, you know that we have a lot of work to do in the next eight to ten years on our roads and bridges together in construction. So not only do you lose about $70,000 from the educational cost yard, but we're about $530,000 down from where we were from last year in terms of the use of the unexpected fund balance. And And the important thing to remember is that's about all we can do. There's no more we can really go to there that would be prudent. This takes us down to about that 10% level that we're targeting. Oops. We may see a couple of increases just to point on building department to kinda change their fee structure that will help offset the cost of the building department for permitting systems and some slight increases in transportation fees. So this is the budget summary. This takes us to kind of a major, item, a major departmental breakdown of where,
the expenditures are. K? We already talked about this. Andover Elementary, We're recommending a a budget for next year of $3,978,000. It's about a 1.94% increase. RAM is another big one. We're actually going down 108,000, as I mentioned, but again, it's mostly because the handover share of students is dropping over compared to the total at the RAM student population. Their actual costs are going up slightly. Tonabando operational budget going up a little less than a percent. Right? And then the fund balance use, as we and $30,000 less we have to spend out of our savings this year compared to last year. Where does this leave us? Well, if we take all our expenses and offset them by the revenues, we have a number of tax you know, total amount I that we have to raise in taxation, if you will. In this budget, that number is about $9,911,033. It's just about $500,000 more than last year,
or about 5.3% increase total in tax tax dollars that we need to raise for this budget to support it. So now we get to some of the nitty gritty stuff. We're gonna talk about how we're calculating bill rate. And I am gonna do something a little different in this budget meeting. I'm gonna spend a few minutes after this slide talking about how to calculate and how to see your mill rate because I think that's the point of confusion for many people. Know? Before I started helping out with the Board of Finance, I knew I knew what it was, but I don't know that I'd ever calculated. Well, I probably had once or twice, and then probably forgotten how. But it is it is a little confusing, so I'm gonna spend a little time talking about how you can figure that out for yourself. Okay? So the way the mill rate goes is all of us have property in town. All of us who have property in town, have an assessed value. If you have a house that's got a fair market value of $200,000, the assessed value is 70% of that fair market value, and that's when you tax that number multiplied by the mill rate. We'll talk a little bit I'll give you an example of this in a second. So our total expenditures are about 12,500,000
here. Total revenue, about 2,300,000. We're using the fund balance, about a quarter million dollars to offset that need for expenditures. Total to be raised from taxes, I got $99.02 $2.00 $3.03. Is that that number max out? Anyway. Taxable brand list. This is the value of all the property in town. Okay? This is an estimate. It's gone up this year significantly. Eric has mentioned that one of the main drivers of that is we've got a lot more vehicles registered this year than last year. Go figure. So what 1 mil is, if you take that number and you divide it by a thousand. It's just a factor that's used to calculate tax rates. If you divide those numbers, our total to be raised by taxes by the mill amount, we come up with 36.51. So 36.51 is our mill rate based on this recommended budget. Okay? Last year, was 35.61. Okay? So that's an increase in the bill rate of 2.53% in this recommended budget. So just a quick summary, and I'm gonna do a little example, and then I'm gonna show you how I calculate that mill rate that we talked about. Alright? So recommended town budget, 12,531,038. The calculated mill rate is three six point five one, which actually is going up above 90,000. Just as a quick example,
a house with a fair market value of $200,000 would pay $5,112 in annual property taxes based on this calculation. This is an increase of a $126 from last year. So this is just a formula for calculating the mill rate using your calculating the mill rate using your assessed value. Again, it's pretty simple. Alright? Your assessed value is 70% of your fair market value. You don't even really need to know what your fair market value is. What you really wanna know is what does the town think your assessed value is. That's what you need to know. You need to figure out your assessed value. You can see the town tax records to get your assessed value. This is online. It's on the town's website, and if you go to the government main tab, an assessor, then there's a a link to the assessors and over assessment data and property cards. You put in your address, and boom, it'll show you your assessed value. It'll also show you current market value, buildings property, some plotting data, but you're looking for your assessed value, and I think you'll be able to see it.
If you the take the bill rate that we proposed, 36.51, divided by a thousand, multiply it by the assessed value, which is 70% of your fair market value, and that's gonna your taxes. So hopefully, that'll help some of you. If you haven't seen that before, haven't done it, you're curious about it, that's how it works. I was gonna run through an example. If you if you follow that link and you go to the town's website, you can actually type in the address for the school or for the for the town town offices. It'll come up with the, you know, the assessed value and show you what a property tax cover is. But, you know, I think it's pretty straightforward. If everybody wants to see it later, I'd be happy to download it for you. So that's the presentation. K? I know most of you have seen this before. You've been following this. You may have questions. We are gonna go into a question and answer period. Please raise your hand and wait for the moderator to call on you. Use the microphone, and it just says there state your name and street address for the meeting fence. Okay.
At the board of board of finance meeting last Wednesday. The board of education asked the board of finance to give us an increase of $97,000, which was less than half of the budget that the Board of Education, based on the advice of our expert, our superintendent, had put forth in February. Here we are on June 1. We've been at this for four months, and we're all tired of this. I know. But I want you to know two more things. Every time we have a budget meeting, it costs you $800 just to do this meeting. So we can keep coming back to it if you would like. But the board of education asked for $97,000 increase and the board of finance Okay,
Yeah. To answer the question, the question was, you know, why was there an increase in the in the line item that the hours were were cut? In this budget, what we did is and the town and support us like we wanna see this way. I think we were all in agreement. The benefits were moved out of one big number into the various departments to more accurately reflect the cost of each department.
But this line on page So writing says tax collector salary.
I didn't answer that. So in the last year, what we did is the union, so we had reduced the hours of the tax collector, and the union came back to us and said, asked us whether we would be willing to agree to an increased hourly rate for her in exchange for her agreeing to give up her healthcare benefits through the town of Andover. And since that netted a total additional savings of around 5 or $6,000, the town agreed to that and agreed to a memorandum of understanding with the union for that position because it lowered our costs further from just simply reducing her hours, if that makes sense. So
if you look at the total for that office, the total cost for the tax collector has decreased from last year to this year. Okay? More so than what we so we predicated the budget last year on reducing her hours last year in the current budget. It took a lot longer than we expected to get the agreement from the union. In the end, we made the change about two months ago, and the ultimate change we made was to decrease her health benefits and decrease her hours, decrease her benefit package, but increase her hourly rate to roughly the average hourly rate for tax collectors in this regional area. And that's what we agreed upon with the union. Okay. Thank you. Next question. Way over there. Down.
Far far too small classes. The rest of the state is run that way, and surrounding towns are doing things for cheaper,
like, you know, the superintendent board of education is the rest of these towns to find out how they do it. But
We're open to discussion on this motion. If there is no discussion in your packet when you came in the front door, door, you were given a series of ballots. Go to ballot number two.
Amber is a small, peaceful, safe community, very little commercial industry so that comes with a cost. We have limited services, but we do provide quality education in water facilities. Class sizes are small, we spend more money per student than most of our adjoining towns. Another important factor in how is how a town treats its elders. Well, here in Andover, we seniors don't get much bang for our buck. We've been forced to huddle in the section of the community center, and before that, we're housed in the decrepit mold infested building. Our next door neighbor, Columbia, has a lovely new senior center. Then call your own fool. You
please keep quiet so that we can have him speak and get this done with. We
have supported education, but your group has not given us the same consideration, and it's about time we get it. Now the budget itself is okay. We'd like a 4%, four and a half percent reduced to two. That's acceptable. But 50,000
Good evening. Michael Greenhouse, Hebron Road. Wasn't able to attend the past couple of meetings, but I followed it closely. My wife was able to attend. Tonight, we're here with my kids. First thing I wanted to do is commend all of the kids who are here. I think I think it's fair to agree that their behavior has We came here, I think, approximately six years ago because we like the concept of this small school. It's similar to what I grew up with. I think it encourages other families to be drawn to this town. It helps all of our property values to have good schools. It's a it's a great thing to have a capitalist community. I don't think these kids really understands what the beef is between what the parents are doing on their behalf and how the seniors might feel slighted by the way that the town has been run to this point. So we don't need to fight in front of these kids at all. But my understanding is, is that the compromise that the Board of Ed came back with was only a $22,000 difference from what was proposed. So calculating that based was presented, it works out, you know, if the average home value blah blah blah, I calculated about $21
on the bill rate. I would spend that plus another $21 for a senior center annually.
Okay. The first ballot is to send this budget to referendum. That was what the question was called on and debate. So the first ballot, yes or no,