Meeting transcript
Town Budget Meeting
May 4, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Good evening. Can we get everybody's attention, please? If you're not seated, if you can find a seat, that'd be great. We finally caught up at the table. We apologize for for starting a little late. We wanted to try to get everybody in the door so people weren't kinda coming in late. So I'm gonna call to order the town of Andover twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three annual budget meeting. I have to read you the notice. The electors and citizens qualified to vote in town meetings in the town of Andover hereby notified that the annual budget meeting for the town of Andover will be held on this day in the elementary school gymnasium. We are at 35 School Road, and it is Wednesday. We're starting a little late,
so it's 07:10, and it's for the following purposes. We're gonna start by choosing a moderator. Do we have any nominations for moderator? Yes ma'am. Wally Barton,
second. Wally Barton. Second. Should we have her nominated, seconded by Katherine Clawsey? Wally, you good with that? Okay, we're gonna hold a vote on Wally. He does not disagree. Everyone that's in favor of having Wally as a moderator, please. Anyone against having Wally as moderator? It passes. Wally, you have the floor.
I think most of you have been on this type of meeting before, but just a couple of points to give you before we start. The board of finance is going to present the budget to you.
Welcome everybody and thank you for attending this important function for our town. What I'm gonna do is go through the highlights of the budget. For those of you that are kind of tuned in, or most of them probably aware that there have been many boards and groups and meetings and discussions attaching out a lot of these details over a lot of time, but we've had time to follow at least some of that. So we're not going to hit a lot of details in this presentation, but as Wally said, there will be a question and answer period afterwards and we'll do our best to do that. Okay. This is the agenda. At least we're gonna roll through this tonight. We're gonna talk about the budget process just to familiarize any of you that aren't familiar with it and make sure that that's clear. We're gonna roll over the expenditures of the town which are primarily educational and then the town budget. And then we're gonna talk about where we get our revenue. It's not just taxation, there's a lot of other sources as well.
We'll provide a brief summary, we'll move into our question and answer period, and then we will entertain motions and amendments to the current pledging. Hopefully you can represents about a 4% increase. The Board of Finance received the budget and began reviewing it. We had many meetings and workshops talking about it just as the Board of Ed did. The of finance presented the budget to public hearing, which we held over the last week or so. We then finalized the recommended budget for the town budget meeting, which we are holding tonight. Another pertinent piece of the budget is the RAM budget. That went to vote yesterday,
the recommended budget, and that budget did pass, so that is locked in. There's no change or any way we can affect that right now. It is what it is. So it's presented in here at the correct amount. And then you go to May 4, which is the annual town budget meeting, which is why we're here tonight. This is a kind of a boring slide in a way, but this is what our budget is. It's just it's an easy way to look at it. We're about thirty percent thirty one third, roughly one third, Andover Elementary School, about 40% RAM, and then about a lot less than 30% for the town budget. So it's split up pretty evenly between those three, expenditures. Our proposed budget for this year is $1,200,000,941,223 dollars. Okay? This is a spending increase, as you can see, $516,768, or 4.12% more than the current budget. The breakout is like this. For the Andover Board of Ed, we have a 5.13 increase proposed. I'm not gonna talk in detail about that, there's been many many workshops and stuff held on that. A lot of that is contractual stuff, and I'm sure that the superintendents here and board of the Fed members, I'm sure they can answer questions better than we can.
We also have the RAM budget. That is actually reduced this year for a couple of reasons. The overall RAM spending went down slightly and handover's percentage went down slightly. We'll talk more about that later. So it's about a 1.18% decrease. And then there's a town budget for the town operations. And the budget there, recommended budget is 3,811,499. It's about an increase of $409,000 or about 12%. Talk a little more about the detail about the education budgets, where that comes from. This is the RAM budget levy. The budget passed the referendum yesterday as I said. I don't know if that's beneficial or not, but that looked like it was a pretty solid pass, so there's not likely to be any recounts or anything that would affect that. Their operating budget is 29,771,000, actually it's almost 2% decrease. The capital budget saw a significant increase but as a percentage of the overall budget it's not really that much. It's only $504,000. Andover's percentage of levy decreased decreased
also, as we mentioned, from 17.13 to 16.63, having to do with the mix, relative mix of Andover students in Ram versus the other two towns. So our total levy for Ram this fiscal year is going to be $5,026,937, so it's a decrease of 92,000 and change from last year. Andover Elementary School, they requested a final budget for the Board of of $4,122,787, to cover their operational and capital expenditures, in addition to renegotiating contracts. So if you follow some of the Board of Ed stuff, a lot of what's in here is simple contract negotiations that we, you know, contractual salary increases, etcetera, that we knew were gonna come into play this year. Board of Finance ended up voting to reduce this budget requested by the Board of Ed by $20,000 and that took it down to 4,102,787. It's a 5.13 increase from last year. Talk a little bit about the town budget. This is just the town budget excluding all of the educational expenses. There are two components. There's the operational budget. This is just the day to day expenses that we incur for making the roads, staffing the town, and doing all the daily governmental functions.
There's also the capital budget. This is the budget where we make investments in the town. There's significant large capital expenditures. It could be equipment, it could be road work, it could be bridges, etcetera. So the overall increase in the town budget is $216,816 so it takes up $200,000,689,999 dollars So it's a pretty significant increase. So these are the major factors and why we think this is important. Some of you are gonna know this right off the bat, it's the same stuff we've been talking about for several years. Public works. We need to, feel like we need to improve the public works staffing.
We proposed the addition of one full time public works employee. Okay? There's also increased cost for the public works operations, just, you know, general operation from maintenance to oh, Eric will probably go into the details more if you wanna hear that again. We see foreseeing or experiencing a significant increase in utility and energy costs. If you're paying an oil bill or get put gas in your car, you know exactly what we're talking about here. It's not insignificant. We're also looking at increased staffing in building and land use office. That's been a problem. And increased usage of the senior transportation, versus our population ages, we can get more and more use out of that. We need to make sure we're taking care of that piece of it. There's also the top capital budget. We have an overall increase to from 879,115 to 1,016,500. It's a $137,000 increase roughly. This fully funds our capital plans as they've been laid out. We have significant plans to capital, significant capital investment. This provides us a pretty strong commitment to repairing and replacing the town's infrastructure.
This is a common theme. If you've been in the meetings or listened in over the last few years, you know what a problem the infrastructure has been. Mostly road and bridge work related. I think most, if not all of you, know about the issues we've had over the Bunker Hill Bridge, closures, it's not getting any better. This is just a pie chart breakout of where the capital funds are going. You can see here that 33% of one third of the capital funds go to road improvement, okay, and just separately, there's 16% are for the Bunker Hill Bridge. Other significant items, we have public works equipment in there, tree removal, that's been another common theme, or bridging culverts, sorry, is 10%. Tree removal is pretty close to execute for 8%. We all remember all of the storms we've had a couple years ago and the outages of power hail followed from that. Some of us were out for several days. Gotta keep up on that to make sure we don't get unnecessary repeats of value. This is just a table that has the major funds, the amount allocated to that. So roughly totaling a million dollars. Again, we don't list them all here, but that's that's the breakout. Okay. Now we'll move to the town revenue. This is the other side. Alright. This is how we pay for all of this investment and expense expenditures. Our revenue revenue comes from a few different sources that are important here. State funding, primarily, the educational cost sharing, or ECS, you'll often hear that in aviation and meetings. That's the state allocation that helps us pay for our education, our schools. Also with revenues, money from previous budgets that was not expended, that rolls over into our revenue for this year.
We have an unexpended fund balance. It's primarily our reserve for emergencies. And we're about where we need to be as a town in our unexpended fund balance, but we felt that we could use about $100,000 of that fund balance to offset our expenses for this year. Reduces the overall tax tax payers. This is our revenue chart. Memorize it quickly, I'm not gonna spend much time on this. It's it's tough to see, apologies, but it is in your handout. You wanna see where all of the different revenue items come through. There's a lot of grants. There's, you know, various relief grants, municipal grants, aids, etcetera. An awful lot of grants and things that you roll into revenue. So this is our summer. This kind of puts together all the information that we just kind of skimmed through.
Again, the Andover Elementary at about 4,100,000 at about a 5.1% increase. The RAM budget at about 5,000,000. Max 1.8 I talked about. The town budget at about 3,800,000 at a 12% increase. And then the use of the fund balance is subtracted from the taxation basically to support the expenditures. It's a reduction. We mentioned this last year is that this is not something that we'll see ongoing necessarily. It may or may not be able to be repeated depending on how things go with the tax, but it's not something we can rely on. And hence you can see it's reduced from last year. Last year we used 150,000. Years before that we used even more. That leaves a total budgetary requirement for taxation at $10,267,552 or roughly a 5.4% increase. So this brings us to the bill rate. So what does this mean to each of us as taxpayers of the town? Just to kind of go over it, the, there's a lot of data here and I'm not gonna necessarily go over that.
What we do is we take the total taxation and then you have to divide it by the grand list and you have to figure out your mill rate based on the grand list in other than taxable property of the Tau. So our mill rate actually calculates to a lower number, it's about 8% lower than it was last year. That doesn't mean your taxes will be lower. As most of us know, our personal property has gained value, most of it, over the last year. Property taxes or property values rather have gone up, and that includes personal properties such as auto, the vehicles. So as those values rise, your percentage of taxation per value or per that particular unit will go down, but your taxes won't change. We still need to raise that 10,000,000 plus in taxes.
I'll just make a note here, there is a cap on motor vehicle taxes. This is a new law. We're still understanding kind of what all the implications are, but it doesn't really change a whole lot here. Okay, so quick summary. Our total taxation is affected by the total town budget, offset by revenue, including grants, educational costs here, etcetera, and then the money allocated from the unexpended fund balance, which as we said, we're taking a $100,000 basically out of our savings to help offset the taxation. That leaves us with a recommended town budget here of 12,941,000. We just talked about that. The overall increase is 4.16%. Calculated bill rate we just talked about is 32.97. It's about 3.03 bills less than it was last year. What does it mean to you as a property owner? Should you own property? This is just one example. But a property that's valued, kind of fair market value or appraised value at about $250,000 we assess that at 70%.
That's how the assessment works for tax purposes. And you multiply that by the mill rating, you would pay about 5,770 in town taxes. This is just a section from the town charter. It talks about the process. Wally already outlined basically what our our goal is here. We do wanna answer any specific questions that you may have about the budget, But ultimately, what we're here to do is to make amendments, if any, to the proposed budget, provided again that the combination will only have the power to reduce or modify, but not increase the budget for any portion thereof. There's some other stipulations, but that's really what we're here for. Hopefully we'll arrive at the budget that we all agree should be passed to the town for vote. Just a reminder that this is not the final say on the budget, this is just to pass it on to the vote.
So that's our presentation for tonight. Kept a little shorter this year because we had a lot of detail last year. Looked like we had some highs blazing over in some of it, but we'd be happy to answer any specific questions. You if you have a question, please raise your hand while we will ask your questions. Wait for him to call on you. Just please use the microphone. We'll set it up at the at the stand there, and if you would state your name and address,
Okay. If you're called on, and if you please come up to the podium here in the front
Just wanna we wanna bring something to your attention. We apologize. In looking at the budget as it rolled through, we realized that there was one fund that was still being funded that actually does not need to be, and that is the Community Center Fund. So there is $50,000 currently in this budget that we'd like to reduce it by because the Community Center is being funded by the funds. And the money that we currently have in there will cover any extras or over. So unfortunately, we we missed that. So we're gonna own up to that mistake. We'd like to fix it for you. I do need a motion to reduce that. So Paul King makes a motion to reduce the community center fund by $50,000. Scott seconds it. And discussion? Okay. There's no discussion, so we're gonna take a vote. We're gonna do a vote of hands. Everyone that is in favor of reducing the budget by $50,000, please raise your hand. Anyone that is opposed? Motion passed. Abstention. We're good.
Hi, I'm Marcy Minor, West Street. One question I had was What what do they do for us? It looks like we spend probably up to a $100,000, and it's something I can never ask.
So actually does a bunch of different things for us. So there are state statutes that require us as a community to do outreach, and that outreach can be psychological, it can be emotional, it can be a variety of different things. And so AHM provides a lot of those services for us. It actually The town was actually needing a lot of those services, and it kinda got wrapped up in the school side of that. We've decided to do that separately now. The school has a different program. Is taking over and being correctly shown in the talent level now. So, but they literally are helping us meet our requirements for the state for so many It's not one thing, it's all inclusive. They're a nonprofit, and if you haven't interacted with them, they
really do so many good things for the community. Okay. So I just wanna make sure that, you know, something we thought about and we're just, you know, continually putting the lines.
No. And they've actually been really, really good. We have a a fantastic group representation on the on the board. Fish, who used to be was locked in here in town, is actually one of our reps and gets back to us on a regular basis. They really have done a lot to try to reduce their expenses but also provide more for the community.
Cool. Alright. I just wanna applaud the town for the budget presentation. I was able to look at it online and felt like it was very thorough and it was easy to see. There's all the columns with, you know, expenditures and all that stuff, so good job. I am a little disappointed that we have a budget anybody saw it. But I couldn't see it, and I just feel like the school has been spending more and more money
every year, and it's just over spending. So just wanna I don't mean to cut you off. It's really questions, not commentary.
So Okay. Alright. I just wanna recommend that you do not pass this budget as is.
You know, just just so you just so you understand that the reason that it's in there is that we require our foreign marshal to go and take a peek at those piles before you light them up. And so we have to we have to pay him, and so we we have to cover that cost with that. So I know it's we we debated this ad nauseam. This took us almost three months to finally make a decision that this was the way we're gonna go. I hear you, but we didn't have this problem for many years and a half. I I totally understand. Unfortunately, some landowners are maybe not as responsible as you. I understand that when across me, I understand how diligent you are, but not everyone is like that, unfortunately, nowadays. So we have to be a little more aware. That's all. And so unfortunately, we have to have someone go out and check on those things. Adrian, it's the burning official, not the fire marshal.
Questions? Additional questions. The third and final time. Additional questions. Seeing none, I need a motion
In case anyone has any questions, we just need the top one. And then we're gonna cross our fingers that we don't need the bottom one. Thank you, and have a good evening.