Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Regular Meeting
January 27, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Order order at 07:00. Thank you. We have a quorum and then some. So that's good. Looks like we have Louise, Linda, Kurt, David Zerts too. Okay. Good. I wasn't sure if that was David or not. Okay. And Diane and Robin others. Okay. Mark, Dave Shewitt here on the phone. Yeah. I I see you there now. He's didn't have your name first. Got you. Alright. Thank you. Yep. All right, everybody. Thanks for attending. We'll go ahead and get started. Agenda item number one, call the order of Pledge of Allegiance. Let's go ahead and say the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance
the pledge flag of The United States Of America America the republic
for which it stands, one nation, one nation, god Under god. Under god. Invisible. Indivisible. And justice fraud. Injustice. Alright. Thank you.
More important now than ever, I think. Agenda item number two is our public speak. Do we have anybody who would like to offer any public comments? All right, hearing none, we'll move on to item number three, which is additions and deletions of the agenda items.
I have one Mark. Go for it. And it could probably go under after Eric's CIP report. It's the CIP approval of the fire commission's requests. Okay, would this be under CIP recommendations or? Yes, yeah, yeah, you can put it there.
So it'd be item D4. Okay, do you want to make a motion that we amend the agenda that item D4? I will, yes. I'll second it. Okay, and the exact agenda item is? The capital improvements approval of the fire commission requests.
Okay. Any discussion on that agenda change? Okay. All in favor of the motion, raise your hand, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? I'll abstain.
In curvil abstain we have one abstention, thank you okay motion passes you got that amanda. Okay. Thank you all right any other additions or deletions changes to the agenda. Okay, I was going to propose it, maybe a discussion of the proposed school budget that occurred in the board of selecting the workshop. But I think I'm going to hold that off until we maybe get a full revised budget and see where that goes. Can discuss it briefly, maybe under Eric's summary if Eric wants to talk a little bit about that, but we'll see. Let's move on to item number four, which is the town administrators report. Eric, do want to go ahead and give us your report? Yep. Amanda, can I share my screen?
Okay. You can. All right. Got a lot of things open. Hopefully I choose the right one. You can do it. Alright. Hopefully, you should be seeing a word doc. Yep.
Okay. Real quick. Most of you probably know at this point, but Ed Kasich, the long time public works foreman died a few weeks ago. So that really sucked. We worked for the town for thirty three years, probably about the longest serving employee we've had, then he died shortly after he retired. So that was kind of a real bummer for the town. We
in turning to other news. Eric, just question, did the town do anything on his behalf?
So we have a plaque that we were going to give to him, but he died before we gave it to him. So we're thinking about, we need to come up with some kind of background to put it on and I was planning on putting it either in the Public Works Building or in the town hall. We haven't quite decided yet. So we are going to do something. It's just not quite sure exactly what yet. Okay. If that makes sense. Yeah.
So many of you know COVID is still obviously an issue in the state. We've been fortunate that a lot of our EMS first responders have been able to get their shots and people 75 and older they've been chunking away at getting all the shots. I know my father's shot is next week. We've already heard from a bunch of the seniors that they've been able to get their shots already. We're still being affected by this in Andover. We're up to one hundred and twenty four positive cases in town Andover as of this date, and a couple of deaths.
We had a really big spike, as you can see, and it's tailing off and we're averaging about fifty five cases per day per 100,000 population. So we're still up there. We really don't know what further impact that's going to have. At this point, the governor has extended the executive order through the middle of April. What we don't know is how this is going to affect the budget process. So as you know, the town hall is still open only by appointment. But so far that hasn't affected collections. And we had the town meeting and vote for land acquisition. And that was successfully done with a drive by vote. So that vote passed 62 to two. And we used it to kind of work out the kinks in anticipation that there's a good chance we would do a drive by referendum this summer, and we would do the referendum as a drive by. Not sure we'll be able to do that or we'll have to do that. But part of the reason why we wanted to do it for the land acquisition is for practice. So it did appear pretty successful. That worked a lot better than trying to do a strictly online meeting. We are still searching for a finance director. We got all the way up to the job offer
stage for one candidate and for one reason or another, it did not work out. We found out today we have gotten two pretty qualified applicants in that both have significant finance and school finance backgrounds. So we're hopefully going to try to put together interviews maybe as soon as next week if we can get everybody on board and interview a couple of people for that. Until then Marina Pandolfi is kind of holding down the fort and we've been getting some support with the previous business manager for AES has been coming in and helping us out occasionally. We did have some changes in the building department that will major change as far as the town's concerned is we have one less town employee, but we have we picked up that employee essentially as a shared service with the town of Bolton. It's a little more expensive, but it looks like we're going to get a lot better service out of the mix. And we adjusted the fee schedule for the building department to more than accommodate that because our fees really hadn't been updated in, you know, a lot of years because the old building official was adamant that they not be.
So should be relatively cost neutral, actually probably a little cost positive for the town, that particular change. Social services, we're still running social services. You know, we've had a couple emergency requests but nothing serious. We've had a couple we have we do have to fix the van for senior services that got flagged on one of the we have to get them safety checked every year and the Braun Ramp had some issues that we're having to address but that's within budget. Talked about land acquisition. The library vandal murals are going to court sometime in March. Not too big a deal. And in public works, Jay Tuttle has taken over as the public works supervisor. That seems to be going pretty well, as has Richard Bacon, who's the other employee that we hired. So far this year, we've had five plowable events. We really only had one big plowable event, but we've been out solving a bunch of times. So far we haven't had too many issues and I thought you guys would be interested to know when we kind of do the math. Every time we send the plow trucks out to do a pass on the roads after hours, it costs us about $1,100 And that's about $700 in salt and about $360 in labor. Just so you kind of get a feel for what it takes for something simple, like a simple pass of the roads. We have gone over to using a professional weather forecasting service
called WeatherWorks that seems to be kind of beneficial to the town. Costs about $1,500 for the year, but if it helps you make better decisions on, when to deploy the crew, it seems to be worth it. We experimented with a couple different services and demoed them both this fall and early winter. We are in the works. We're still in design phase for the Bunker Hill Road Bridge. They're going to be hopefully closing the road sometime in February for a couple of days and digging, doing test borings on both sides. So they've got to do like six or eight borings to determine how deep the footings for the replacement bridge need to go. We're still looking for a spring twenty twenty two start date for the bridge starting around April, and that's going to be good because it's actually going to span two fiscal years. So, know, we have some money in that fund already. We're going to put more money in it this year, and then we'll have one more budget cycle to accommodate the full cost of the bridge, which is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000.
But we can't really give you anything more definite than that until we get up to the design stage where we have a preliminary design.
Eric, quick question. That 400 is the 400 to us right? Yeah that's our take on it. Okay. Yeah,
so the basic deal is with this bridge is the federal government pays 80% of the cost and the state has agreed. We got in kind of a special design program that the state is trying out and so by being willing to participate in that program the state pays for the 20% of the engineering costs. So the first time we have to put out any money is you know when we put shovels in the ground and start digging holes. So it's a good thing for us. It also reduces our total cost to the town for this project, you know, around $80,000 because the design costs themselves for the bridge is going to be around $400,000 total by the time it's fully surveyed, fully designed, blah, blah, blah. So that's good anyway.
I mean, it's still $400,000 but it's better than $480,000 We're also right now doing the survey and wetlands work for the replacement for the Hutchinson Road culvert. That hopefully we're going to have back in the next month. We have the funding right now in the bridge and culvert permanent fund, and engineering and design work will be paid out of our existing town engineer budget. So we're in good shape with that right now. And then just depending on what we end up back for cost basis for actually repairing it, we'll decide whether we can do it with the following year's budget, the budget where we'll approve this spring, or whether we have to put that off one more year and accumulate some more money to do it. Times Farm Bridge is still on the hold. We're waiting on the state to approve the engineers that were in the inspectors that were reassigned to the project by CME Engineering. It's kind of ridiculous. The state's holding us up for no real good reason, but that's the state. The STEEP grant, we have all the paperwork. It's about half submitted. We have some more stuff to go. The Steep grant covers part of the costs of reconstructing a portion of Long Hill Road and a portion of Shawty Mill Road as part of our pavement. We're still stuck waiting for the state to issue us a letter for an encroachment permit. We reached out to them again last month and they keep assuring us they're working on it, but they've assured us of that every month for the last nine months at this point. So it's getting a little annoying.
I'm planning on sticking Brandon Hanfield on him and let him beat his head against him. Brandon's the guy that's acting as the town engineer. And the other thing I would say is we're obviously in reval. Reval has been going fairly smoothly. I think we're about two thirds done with the initial reval and data gathering for that. We have locked in a contract for next year for both heating oil and diesel. It's definitely not as low as last year, but it's pretty good in considering the uncertainty we have. We waited a long time and we actually waited a little too long. But I think we were both thinking that as the pandemic really was spiking again in The US, fuel prices would decrease dramatically. And frankly, they didn't. So that's what we're locked in as for next year. And we did get our second half of the reimbursement for our COVID related funds. We got an extra $24,000 from the state, of which we've agreed to spend about $4,000 for the new combined finance office buying basically two really good laptops and docking stations so that both those employees can work either in the town and the school and do it seamlessly.
So we've allocated a little bit of that money. The rest of it really isn't allocated at this point. The other thing is, I know I talked to the board last June, I think. So my salary got screwed up pretty dramatically. I got overpaid when I was first hired because the old assistant finance officer couldn't divide basically. So I paid that money back over this year. I'm happy to show you the payment schedule if you really want to see it, But I did it all in last fiscal all in the it'll all be in this fiscal year. So the budget line item for me will come out considerably under for this year as I repaid. And so that's the major part of the report. So what I also wanted to do is talk a little bit about where we are in the budget so you all know. And as you all know, our budget is basically you can think of it as four parts. It is the budget for the Andover Elementary School, the budget for the regional school district, the general town budget, and then the capital portion of the town budget. So we have preliminary numbers for all four of those. The number for the elementary school represents about an 8.8% increase over what they got last year. So it's a fairly significant year over year increase. The RAM budget came in at about a 4.1% increase, but the good news for the town of Andover is that our percentage, you know, we dropped in the number of students we had going to RAM at the same time the overall RAM population dropped. But ours dropped more than it dropped overall. So that means that if the RAM budget stayed level,
the town of Andover's share of that would go down by about 2%. So it looks like the net effect of the current budget is about a 2% increase in the RAM budget. On the town side, what we're I gave the Board of Selectmen a range of options. And on the general budget, that ranges from basically plus 1% to minus 1% in terms of a budget increase or decrease in the general budget, the real growth again is in the capital, which we discussed. And obviously last year we ended up trimming that capital pretty significantly. This year, the capital budget is put in as if it were fully funded. And when it comes to the Board of Finance, we can have a discussion about where that ends us up and whether we can actually afford to fully fund that. So that's it for me for the initial report, unless you all have questions for me.
Eric? I have one question and a couple of comments. First question is regarding the COVID reimbursement that the town received. Have you been in contact with either Chief Mike or Dave Gustanian, the president of the Indoor Fire Department Corporation in regards to any funds that we've already spent for the first responders? I know we we have a we have a room full of PPE, masks, you know, sheets, you name it. I'm not I'm not quite sure. I I don't think we've expended anything out of the fire commission budget, but I know they have, you know, been very, very diligent in, getting the supplies needed for responders that run that ambulance. And about every other call that we go out on is a COVID related call. Sure. So maybe you can reach out to either
Chief Mike or Dave Gustanian and see if there is any funds that they could use and maybe we could share a little bit.
Yeah, I mean, I haven't made any real recommendations on what we do with that funding up to this point. So yeah, I do. And actually, Amanda, I had asked to speak to both Ron, Mike, and the library and ask what their expenses, their COVID related expenses were. I know we rebated I think we rebated both out of the initial COVID allotment we got, but we have not rebated anybody anything out of the second one we got.
Okay, that's just a, know, bring it. Yeah. No. My first comment is, I I think kudos should go out to the, our new superintendent and the staff at AES. They're having face to face, school every day with the with the students and stuff and so far have remained COVID free up there. So they're doing something right. And I think they should be acknowledged for that. And also, your public works department, their roads have never been, been treated better than they are in the last, few storms so far this year, even better than last year. So that's just a couple of comments I would like to make.
I'll pass that on. Just a general comment about the school budget. Don't know what Diane, I think you were on the board of selectmen meeting last night too. So there's a lot of pointed questions to Valerie and about the school budget at an eight point plus percent increase. It's a pretty tough pill to swallow. And we've got a lot of capital expenditures of things that we've also got to face. And we're still of course in the middle of a pandemic and there's some economic effects there too. It's going to get interesting. I know the Board of Selectmen's got several additional budget workshops that they had scheduled at their meeting. Their plan at this point is to submit a budget to us on or before March 1.
Technically, they talked a little about maybe having something like by the sixteenth, I don't know if they will or not, I don't.
We'll see it's gonna it's gonna take some work right and sounds
like I think it is it. I think that like your comment that you made is we've got to get the detail. You know it's hard to make decisions without details
yeah we've had a you know year over year decreases for a while so I'm not surprised that they're pushing back but eight point something percent is a dramatic number.
Yeah, it's a big number. No question about it. Yeah and especially
you know we're looking at a ram increase and I get it finally apparently we're over the hump in terms of our ram percentage which is great. We've dealt with that the last few years, two, three years now running where we were increasing as a percent of the student body and now and we always knew that we get to a certain point we'd come back over that hump and it looks like we finally gotten there which is great. But in the past you know we've spent several budget cycles are haggling with ram trying to tell them they can't be coming in with these big increases when AES is coming in with decreases or flat budgets. Now the issue is on the other foot a little bit and that's something to talk to. I'll reach out, I have a contact on the
board of ed that I can talk to and try to get a sense for things too.
So in that you do bring up a good point, Rob, because I mean, one of my frustrations and I knew this was coming up. I expressed it last year. And I will admit to some extent that that's not really my business because I have no control over it. But RAM has declined by their total population is two thirds what it was eight years ago. And in that same period of time, their budget has never decreased. Last year, technically it decreased by like 0.01%, But they have consistently increased their budget, when their student population has gone down really dramatically. And so their cost per student, now I was just doing the numbers today, their cost per student, if you take all in costs, which is every bit of revenue they have divided by the number of students they have, their full up costs right now are about $27,900, which is crazy.
Crazy doc, if we're being honest. So something has to be done to address that because that is not that's not really kosher.
Did you do the math on AES by the way I haven't. What the all in per student cost is at AES?
I have not but only because the board specifically asked Valerie to do that And
I'll let her defend that number as. Very, very pointed question that came up in the meeting last night and frankly they got to have that answer and understand what the impact is, you know It's only one dimensional view, know, understand that cost per pupil, there's a lot of factors that roll into that. You can't control everything but it is at least something that you have to look at. And if you're that far out of line, need to understand and explain why.
Yeah, I perfectly understand that, you know, the facility is what it is, right? You have to keep that facility up regardless of your student population. That's fair and they can come back to us and explain that but, you know, that only goes so far and you know we this has been many years now where RAM seems to come in about a 4% increase ask every year. Like I don't know if you guys all remember but my memory is every year when we start this process 4% for Ram is standard no matter the year, no matter what's going on it's always 4%. So it leads to a question in my mind that's unsustainable basically. AES is a bit of a different issue and like I said, I'm gonna, I have somebody I'm gonna talk to and get it and try to get my arms around what eight point, what did you say eight point what percent? It's like 8.45 is what I remember. Basically eight and a half. Huge. Yeah it's a big jump for sure when it's 40% of your town budget give or take it's a big number and that's enough to kick the heck out of us from the standpoint of putting money into capital.
I guess the thing that I don't understand because there's a lot of talk at the meeting last night about COVID related expenses and how and I don't don't have a good handle on what has COVID cost us at AES, do you know what I mean as far as dollars?
I mean I see this stuff, pickups and drop offs, I have two kids in AES so I'm familiar with what some of their procedures and I get it you know they're doing they've changed up some things there's some stuff they're doing no question and they are to Curtis's point they really have done a fantastic job. My kids have been going full time to school and five days a week and it's been seamless. It's fantastic. Kudos for that for sure but what's the dollars and cents of that and as Eric probably can speak to on the town level you have things that cost more and then other places where it's actually cost us a little less and you net that out and you figure out what the impact is and so that's what we need to see and I suspect AES is probably trying to do a lot like what the town is trying to do with our capital budget which is that there's some pent up stuff that they've been wanting to do that we've been you know telling them year after year we've had budget crunches and saying no we need a flat budget and so they produced it but maybe there's some pent up stuff and they need to show us that what is it right I'm not against an increase per se but eight and a half is I don't know if that's doable I don't know if it's possible. Mean enrollment is flat so right yeah so what's it for yeah
And you know last year, last year we had the excess that money that we saved that we put into this year's budget for COVID expenses at the AES level so I just don't understand how that all comes out in the wash. Do you know what I mean? And why they think their budget needs to go up because of COVID. Because they shouldn't be spending more money next year for COVID because we've already spent that kind of money. We should have a good baseline of what it's costing us this year to go into next year. Fair point.
I don't know. Yeah, Valerie had a fairly Yeah, I guess that's what I'm saying. Yeah, involved presentation, but just don't know. It's not always clear line item by line item and I've seen this in other meetings too where what's going where and what it's really, things have shifted around sometimes in those budgets. And I think they just need to take a really hard look at it and try to understand it. Again, I'm a full support of the schools, absolutely. But I think we need to understand what's going in there and how do you justify any increase much less 8.5%? That's a tough one.
Are we at a disadvantage now because Laura's retired and is kind of out of the picture and we don't have a new finance director and
Laura had a pretty big hand in helping put this together.
But as far as we dig in, who's gonna answer all the questions? Do know what I mean? Mean, somebody there is gonna have to. Superintendent.
Somebody's gonna have to step No way they're getting that kind of increase or anything close to it. We don't, you know, if you don't have some very good answers. I think I think the end of the day, we're gonna end up in one of these meetings with our super. Yeah, explaining these things to us. Yeah. It's
probably gonna have to come to that get anywhere close. I mean, again,
I'm all for, like I said, had two kids in that school and it's fantastic. It's great. But we slashed our capital budget to the bone last year. And now we hopefully I was thinking maybe this year we loosen up a bit and put some money in capital and now it's like okay how do you do that and have an 8% AES increase. I don't know if that's I don't think the math can remotely work
on that. Yeah I mean the other thing too to keep in mind is that you know this early in the budget year there are an immense number of unknowns. I mean, don't have final numbers yet back from healthcare. We don't have an approved budget yet. Don't, well, we do have a health department budget, we passed that. So there's a lot of things that we don't at this point have firm numbers on. From the town's end, the things that we do have firm numbers on are coming in pretty well. I mean the number from the health department is running about around 3.5% increase but that's a pretty small percentage of our budget. Is looking like it's probably somewhat under 3% but again that hasn't been finalized yet. The only thing you will see is that actually you know what we'll talk about that when we get to report. The KIRMA, the insurance, we got the quote back from both our town general liability policy, as well as the workers' comp. Our workers' comp went down pretty significantly. Our general insurance went up a little bit. The net is about a $500 decrease in total insurance through Karma. And that's balanced with the fire departments, the standalone policy we have for their vehicles has gone up about 500. So insurance has basically come out completely flat. The only, yeah, so right now that looks pretty promising. Although we are still pursuing a standalone cyber risk policy going forward. As I think that's going to prove to be important. So the budgets have a lot of flux in them right now. Don't think none of the flux are big dollars. So I think at least at the town's level,
I could live with the budget that we have. But the biggest issue we face going forward is the fact that the last three years we have offset a considerable amount of our capital spending Unbalance. Unbalance. With fund balance and last year by repurposing other funds. So if you look at two years ago, we put about a million dollars back into the capital essentially by tapping the unexpended fund balance. Last year, we put 400 plus thousand in and we rearranged about $360,000 worth of funds. And then if you remember this, at the end of this fiscal year, we took the excess and plowed it right back into capital funds to bring them up closer to what we had originally wanted to budget. So the bottom line is we tapped that source completely. So even if all the budgets came out exactly the way they were last year, and we didn't ask for any increase anywhere, we would still be looking for $780,000 in increased taxation. So we have a really big hurdle to clear this year just so that you're all
aware. Because the whole idea was to get our unassigned fund balance down to about 10% of operating budget and where it should be there Whether it's 10 or 10 and a half or 11 or we're going to be in that ballpark. There's no more to we can't keep going to that well. And that was something we all saw coming. Now we're here.
Mark, Mark, do we know what the RAM increase is gonna be yet? I may have missed it.
Wasn't it 4% Eric you said and about our share drops and so it nets out to about two? Yeah, so our net is about a 2% increase as their budget stands right now.
Well, I'm just thinking that maybe Stephanie Bancroft, the chairwoman of RAM who does live here in Andover, and also our new superintendent AES along with Shannon Loudon should be prepared to discuss their budget and give us some answers that I'm sure we're all going to have. I'm going to talk to Shannon later tonight, by the way. Okay, good. And
if you want to look online the AES budget presentation is online. It's about an hour and ten minutes long. If you want to read through this superintendent's full budget presentation to the board of ed that is available and the ram budget preliminary budget document is just
was available as of yesterday Eric is that on the town website or AES?
Not on town is it must be on RAM but the RAM website or? Wait, wait. Did get on the town. So AES is on the school board website.
The presentation is also on the board of select when packing from yesterday too. So you can look at it there.
Yeah. So, and Amanda can get that to you, the links to you, so you can find that information easily if you want to go through those.
Now they also did reach an agreement with the Andover Teachers Association, right, with a new contract that was negotiated?
Yeah, I do have a new contract with the teachers. They have not been able to complete the contract with the non certs.
That's been going on for a long time. I'd like to have some information regarding that, both of them actually. Also.
Okay, well, think, know, like you said, the Board of Selectmen's looking at some budget workshops. Asked Valerie to come back with some information. Don't know if there's going to be any additional presentations planned, I think maybe as they get closer, we will absolutely going to need to have a close review of that and I'm sure there'll be a part of it.
I found it. Did you. In the special packet I see it. There's a huge presentation here yep I got it. Yeah okay. Odd to follow through, but it is all there. Yeah
okay anything else for Eric. All right. Let's go ahead and roll to number agenda item number 5A, which is the town budget summary. Eric, do you have any input on here?
Yeah, overall we're doing pretty well in on spending at the end of the budget summary. There are a series of requests to approve overages. The board of selectmen have approved them. And if you remember the things that are over 5,000 come back to you and the board of finance has to approve the overages. Right. Or I guess if you don't, then I come back to you with a shift from a different budget. So that's at the end of the packet. There's a couple areas where we're still going to be over, but the overall budget is well under control and should be coming in considerably under. We're basically because of COVID, there's a bunch of things that we really haven't, we haven't made some of the personnel changes. So overall we're in good condition.
Public works is still running pretty high. I mean, you expect to be able to cover that still with your transfers?
So I think, yes. I think one thing we're already basically at the end of January and we've done pretty well on the snow removal portion. So we're gonna, we should have some funds to backfill there. And right now we're, we've, for whatever reason, we've had a really light year on maintenance, we haven't broken a lot of stuff, which has been very nice. So our vehicle maintenance budget is way under spent. However, we have also decided that if we can do it, we're going to pay for the repairs to one of the plow trucks through that as opposed to seeking a capital. Basically we made the decision that instead of trying to re body one of the plow trucks that we're going to basically just re weld and then try to repaint the vehicle and get it through to the end of its life that way as opposed to re bodying which is what we typically do. And we are going to try to do that out of maintenance.
So by the time we get through with the year, we're going to spend the majority of the money in that budget, but I think we'll be okay.
All right. And we're a little proportionately a little high on insurance. Are you saying that's just timing on payments and stuff. Yeah yeah overall on insurance we're fine. Nothing unusual there okay. All right I don't have anything else on the budget summary myself.
The other one we may end up going over is in the town general legal retainer fund, which basically covers two things. That covers the cost of our general town attorney who's on retainer. So his costs are fixed. But the variable costs in that are the town's labor attorney. And since we've had a number of labor issues we've been working through, and we're going to be going into union negotiations sometime relatively soon this spring, I would anticipate we're going to be pushing the end of that budget. But we also haven't spent anything out of the assessor legal counsel budget. So I think we would end up taking it out of the general, that legal budget pool. So far it doesn't seem like there's anything that really affects the assessor's office in this year or with this grand list. Next year when we do reval is going to be a different story. I mean, we typically get sued at least three times
per reval year. So I think we can anticipate that budget going up next year. But that's basically where we're at.
Okay. Any questions for Eric on the budget summaries? Okay, I guess we can then move on to item. Guess it's six a budget transfer supplemental appropriations. Eric, you want to kind of run through these? Or the over expenditure requests, I guess, really don't have any supplementals, right? Sure. Yep.
Let me just see if I can blow this up and then share my screen. In
advance, I would just make a minor request that you're little more careful with your handwriting on these so we can actually read them or with well, that's that's why I gave you an Excel spreadsheet summary because I know my handwriting is atrocious. Okay.
Okay, so that is all of our overage requests to date that we've had. You already as a Board of Finance approved the overage for the brush pile. The mobile phone is small enough that you don't need to approve it. So the two you have to approve, or I would like you to approve, would be the temporary public works, temporary labor line for public works, and then the overtime for public works line items. Those are the only two that are big enough that trip review by the Board of Finance or likely will trip your review. So we've talked about the brush pile. The temp in public works was simply the fact that we made a decision to go to a four person public works crew, and the board of selectmen was not going to allow me to hire anybody until Eddie actually resigned. So what I did is I basically hired Richard Bagan
as temp help and ran over that line item, knowing that there was money, we were paying him less than we would be paying a full time employee and we wouldn't be paying him benefits. So it was much cheaper to the town to pay him as a temp employee until I had permission than it would be to employ him as a regular employee. So yes, we overexpent that, but we at the same time we underexpent the equivalent amount in the regular employee line item. The overtime in public works is mostly because we've had an enormous number of storm call outs this year, number one. That's the majority of the money that's different because, I mean, when you're sitting here cutting up trees on a Saturday or Sunday and you got the full crew out responding to storms, in fact that very first storm for IESA more than took out our entire annual overtime public works budget. So that's the majority of it. The other thing that I've been realizing is that a lot of the roadwork projects that we do, we use our public works employees as the road guards because it tends to be a lot cheaper, you know, paying them, you know, having them do it than hiring flaggers on the outside. So the problem is paving crews, they don't work a convenient eight hour day. They get there in the morning and they work till the job is done. And if that's an eleven hour day, that's an eleven hour day. But for us, it means we're paying OT on the end for whoever's there staying for the flagging. So those are the two major line items that really need approval
from the Board of of
Just a comment on the latter, that sounds like something that you can manage and anticipate for next year's budget.
Yeah, and I think we did adjust to that. The temp for public works, because we've now gone to a fourth person, I don't think we're going to use very often. But the overtime, I think we had an unrealistically small amount of overtime in our budget. But we also had an awful lot of storms this year. So we had an awful lot more events that required overtime than we did in a normal year. So it's somewhere in the middle.
Anybody have any questions for Eric and the budget transfer request supplemental appropriations. Does anybody want to make a motion to approve the over expenditure requests. I'll go ahead and make that motion.
Okay, just to clarify what we would be doing is raps making a motion to approve the over expenditure in the public works department budget there's $5,000 I'm sorry additional $11,000 for. TAB, Labor and public works an additional $4,000 requested for overtime in public works. Does anybody want to second that motion? I'll second it. Okay. Louise seconds.
Further discussion? Hearing none, let's take a vote. All in favor, aye. Raise your hand. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Hearing none, the motion is approved. Thank you, guys. All right, let's move on to Excuse me, our agenda. Agenda Item seven, we have all business seven a is the COVID-nineteen update. Eric, you pretty much covered that in your town manager's report. Do you have anything to add?
No, I think I pretty well covered that what I wanted to cover there.
Okay. Does anybody have any other questions on that before we move on? Do you want to conclude discussion?
Just to note, most of the firefighters are getting their second vaccine shot mostly this week. I myself are going Friday for my second. Things are looking good next door. Good to hear. That's good.
Thanks for that, Kurt. Anybody else? We'll move on to Item 7B, the and town agreement, which Eric has kindly brought forth on the screen here.
Hey, Mark. Yep, David. I'm sorry to interrupt. My unmute wasn't working. I just wanted to comment on the shots if anybody has any anxieties. I had both mine. I had zero issues and a lot of my staff has it out of all my staff we only had one that had some like flu like symptoms so Kurt or anybody else if they're worried about it
that that's kind of our result what we've had no good to hear. We've had both of them already yeah most of us have
thanks thanks Dave because my wife and I my wife been telling me that the second shot from what she's heard is
you know has all kinds of problems but I'm not worried about it. Yeah I've heard that sometimes the second one's a little tougher because the immune response kicks in a little there. The
only thing I would say is you might wanna pop a couple Motrin that night before you go to bed because your joints or your arm might hurt a little but I didn't have any issues.
Yeah and Dave you'll be happy to know that the tracking device that was injected with the shot is working perfectly. I can see all the fire department employees right up on my screen. Eric, Eric, Eric. Come on. Yeah.
Point of order. Mr. Anderson was making a sarcastic statement there. All right, let's move on if we could. Again, Item 7B, Ahm and Town Agreement. Eric, I believe that the Board of Selectmen has already approved this, correct?
Yeah, the Board of Selectmen has approved it, but I wanted to bring it to your attention also. There are two changes in this agreement that affect the town. The first is that they've again tweaked the formula by which they apportioned the cost for the service between the three towns. But I looked at it kind of like historically, and then I looked at it with our current budget and our current numbers. And what I concluded is it didn't make a damn a bit of difference. All three formulas that they used essentially came up with the same cost basis for the town of Andover. So the question was how you fairly determine what each town pays. And the end result is we settled on a formula that is 50% weighted by the population of each town as determined by the every ten year census. And factor is the school age population. So the population of all students K through 12, which seems to be as fair a formula as any. The original formula had an additional weighting factor for how many people were in the high school, but that meant they were essentially double counting all the kids in grade seven through 12. So I think the formula now is a little simpler. It does seem to accurately reflect each town's demographic and how much use they should get. So that's what we went with. The second thing is there was a request by several of the towns
to or at least one of the towns to bill, instead of billing the elementary school and then also the town and splitting the bill to only supply each municipality with one bill. And regardless of whether that number is in the school's budget or the town's budget, it's still taxpayer dollars and it doesn't change the bottom line. So those are really the two changes. Ultimately, if all three towns adopt this and it goes into effect, the town's budget will include 100% of the cost for as opposed to now when half the cost shows up in our budget and half the cost shows up in the school's budget. So that's pretty much it. Linda, do you have anything you want to add to that? No, I don't know why my picture didn't show up tonight.
Not really, but they are going to have their budget, I think by the end of February. So we'll know what it's going to be. Oh, there I am. No, but if anybody does have any questions about this document, they can get ahold of me and I'll get an answer for them.
So, clearly as we developed a school budget they're going to need to be aware of whether they need to budget for the, you know that half or not depending on where that ends up, it's a landing and vice versa for the town but. Okay. All right, good. Thank you, Linda. Eric, anything else on that?
No, unless you have other questions for me on that.
Anybody have any questions for Eric or Linda or anyone? Okay, hearing none. Let's go ahead and move down to our next agenda item, which is number eight, new business. Discuss and act upon the following item eight A is finance director position. Eric's already discussed this. A committee, we had extended an offer or Eric had extended an offer to, well, we as a town extended an offer to a candidate did not work out though that offer was withdrawn. We're back at square one. We have been soliciting applications. You said we had a couple today, Eric, that actually came in that looked like qualified candidates. That's
positive. There probably isn't a whole lot more to say about that. Personally, I think it was probably the right thing to do. It's painful to have to pull back and we saw we had a pretty good candidate, but it probably was the right thing to do. Anybody have any questions on that or comments? Okay, go on to item 8B, which is the software transition. Eric, do you have anything to talk about there? So we really haven't
made any progress. I think frankly, that is going to have to wait until we have a finance director in place, because I don't think certainly that's not enough. I don't have enough knowledge in that wheelhouse to shepherd the town through that. So we're basically we're hoping we get both for the software and for the audit, we're hoping we get a finance director in pretty quickly. As far as the auditor goes, and this is something a discussion I wanted to have a little bit with the Board of Finance. And I was supposed to call Mike back today, but I wanted to talk to you all first. And that is the possibility of hiring somebody outside to get us through this audit, which the town has done in the past. Just because I think if we wait, depending on how long it takes us to get a finance director on board, we may really be pushing it,
getting the audit completed.
Have By hiring somebody outside, is that a firm or is that like a contractor? What is that? Bob from account temps or what? Yeah. So I would look at two possibilities. One, I would look at the woman
that we discussed the software transition with, who's an accountant in Willington, who's done been basically the municipal accountant for multiple towns of our size anyway. Could could likely pull it off. And the second one would be potentially to reach out to Beth Bauer. She helped the town out about three years ago before Barbara came on board. I don't have any knowledge of her or any relationship with her. But I mean, maybe you all do and maybe you all think that's a good or bad suggestion. I don't know. Just putting feeler out there because I'm afraid we're going to end up pretty late in the year. And if we get too late in the fiscal year, they're gearing up for their next year's clients.
Then we'll end up in a situation like we were a couple of years ago where it took forever.
Yeah. I have kind of two thoughts on that. The first of which just an overarching comment is that I'd rather we get on top of it now and put ourselves on the eight ball again after so many years of us struggling to get an audit in. The second thing I think is I don't my memory is not great but if Beth Bauer is the person I'm thinking of who helped us as you said before Barbara she's been out of our systems for a while and I don't know if bringing her in, if her institutional knowledge, how valuable that is vis a vis somebody who was already into it versus bringing in the person you talked about, the other person you talked about who is familiar with towns of our size and has done it in other towns. Maybe they're comparable, I don't know. And I don't even know Beth would be available. Right. And I don't know either. I'm just okay. So, you know, she helped us in the past, even with her help, we struggled to get our audit in.
Sure. Yeah, it seems like it's there isn't a whole lot of risk or harm in starting to explore your options even if somebody just helps smooth the transition a little bit and make sure the files are in order, we land the finance director sooner than later. We're just that much farther ahead. And my hope would be that
Barbara did do a bunch of work and get our stuff in much better order than it had been. So somebody pinch hitting should be easier here in 2021 than it was in say 2018. Should be easier to bring someone in to just kind of get us over that hump. So but yeah, I think we should definitely explore that and figure out what the price tag is.
Sure, good. It could take you while to get somebody in and on board and especially if they don't have a lot of time to dedicate it to it and maybe piecemeal day here, day there you'd wanna get them earlier rather than later.
Yeah, I mean, the one thing I would say is that although we definitely didn't get the books audit ready this year, we got a lot of what needed to go into statements done, probably more than threefour of what needs to be done. But in part of my conversation with our auditor is exploring the possibility of what happens if we pay the auditor on the side to complete the financial statements. Because I think two years ago or three years ago, they did complete the financial statements for the town. But I don't know what Michael would or Mahoney Sable would charge us to do that also. I suspect they're going to be on the pricey end of things. Is that kind of a conflict? Maybe not. I don't know. That's a question because they're auditing the books, but towns often don't prepare their own financial statements.
So I don't know. It's a good question.
And optimally, you for not to have them do that and do the audit just. Sure, they have that separation of duties. But we'll see what it comes down to I guess. Yeah.
Any other questions for Eric on the finance director software transition or audit status? Hearing none, let's go on to item 8D, which is our CIP recommendations. We have four now, there are three on the packet agenda. The first is street sweeper and the second is the asphalt hot box. The third is the town hall electrical upgrade, and then Kurt requests we add the additional item for the fire commission. So Eric, you want to address the first three?
Sure. So the probably single most pressing need for public works is to procure a new street sweeper. Our existing street sweeper goes back to the mid-80s. And frankly, we just, we really struggled to keep it running and to keep stuff from falling off of it. You know, it's just, it's old, it's been used in a high salt environment for its whole life because it's in New England. So even though it doesn't get used a ton of hours every year, it's well past its normal life expectancy. So a new sweeper, we got a we've started looking at like what we would get ideally.
And what we would do is step back a little bit from where we are now to a three wheeled sweeper, a dedicated purpose built sweeper. And we priced them out using Sourcewell, which is one of the cooperative buying arrangements. And through Sourcewell, it's about 233,000 new plus shipping. We don't have the money. I mean, I'll be honest, there's no way we're swinging capital and doing that this year. And if you look at our capital plan, we frankly can't accommodate that, even though they last a long time. It's not realistic to do that. So what we've started doing is taking a real hard look at used equipment. The problem is that if you're going to buy a replacement sweeper, ideally you want to buy a replacement sweeper that comes out of a southern climate so it's not used in a heavy salt dominated, which makes it a little tougher because you're traveling. So we are looking at one machine. Actually, the Public Works Director has taken off about 03:00 in the morning with the town's mechanic Tim and driving down to Delaware to look at a used sweeper that's a potential purchase. That would be around $69,000 So, and it's about a ten year old sweeper, municipal sweeper. Reasonable miles came out of the South somewhere, not sure what state, but South Of DC. So we're gonna look at it. So one of the questions I had with the town's attorney is can we just buy it because we have a capital equipment fund and we have the money there and the money was allocated in the last budget, can we buy it without a town meeting?
So I put it in your packet, but the opinion from town's attorney is that since we budgeted for it, we put it in the budget, we can certainly acquire that without going to town meeting even though it's over the point 05% of the budget threshold. So we can definitely buy it if the Board of Finance agrees to it. So my question for you is partially your comfort level in buying a used piece of equipment. I'm somewhere on the fence, but I think the public work supervisors had some pretty good luck buying used equipment off auction if it's done smartly. And basically we're sending them down there for a day to drive the thing around and operate it and have the mechanic go through it and look at it. I have a question Eric.
So post after our meeting we're going to have that inspection done between now and our next scheduled meeting this thing is sitting on the market and could be purchased by someone else yes so one of my concerns is if we wait do is there a way to conditionally approve if our guys go down there and they check it out and they think, this is great. This is this is what we need. Can we approve it in it ahead of time if they, if it meets with their approval and are we as a board comfortable doing that? That's just discussion item for everybody really. Because my thought is if it is good, we don't wanna lose it.
Right. And that is a problem. It's not that more of them wouldn't come up. So what CIP has approved, the CIP made a recommendation that the town spend up to $100,000 on a used sweeper if a suitable unit could be determined. And that's their recommendation to the Board of Finance. So that is the question. Price tag on this thing right now is $69,000 It would be, we did some preliminary looking at shipping. It's somewhere around 3,000 to ship it. But I mean, we'll certainly try to get them to include the cost of shipping and maybe knock a little bit off if it's a suitable machine. What was the new machine cost again? 233,000. Right, so, okay. So almost exactly one fourth.
Yeah, and then based on the prior equipment, you've got about two thirds of its life left. Obviously maintenance just can increase sometimes exponentially throughout the last half of the life of a piece of equipment, but it's still when you're still looking at return on investment, it's hard to say this would not be a good value.
I mean, you're spending one quarter of the cost of the new machine for a ten year. Mean, it's not
a piece of critical equipment that if it breaks down you've got a problem on the road somewhere,
gonna continue to Not like we can't plow a road in the middle of a snowstorm. Right,
but you need to be, you need a functional sweeper too. We do, we do. If
it's fixed in a week, it's not gonna cause a The problem
is if there something goes wrong, right? I know what you're saying, Mark and I kind of agree along those same lines but 10 years old is not ancient. If our people go check it out and they think it's good. I mean, that's a huge savings. As you said, we cannot, we don't with everything else we're facing, there's no way we're going to spend $240,000 on a new machine Ain't gonna happen.
Right, yeah. I mean, I think considering our needs and the amount of use it will get, we definitely need replacement sweeper. You know, I'm comfortable rolling the dice on a used machine, you know, considering how much cheaper it is than buying a new one. We know there will be some increased maintenance costs. We do with this machine, we do have all the maintenance logs because, you know, we're basically, if we bought this thing, we would be buying it through the dealer that, you know, the equipment dealer down in Maryland. So we have a fair bit of information on it. I mean, basically what they're gonna have to do is just, you know, open it up and take a look at it and, you know, make sure there aren't any major wear items that we identify and make sure the engine's in good shape but it doesn't have a ton of hours on it.
Wouldn't we expect it to be lower maintenance than the one we have now that we can barely keep running? God, I would hope so.
I would think. One of our biggest problems right now is that we really struggle to get parts for the one we have. So like a couple of years ago, whole tank that holds the water rotted out completely. I mean, so the guys refabbed the tank. I mean, they basically welded it up and built it from scratch. But I mean, they chewed up an enormous amount of labor doing it. And that's what we can't afford right now. We can't afford the shop time it takes to keep it running.
Yeah. Also, keep keep in mind the, the town of Columbia, the town of Hebron, and I think the town of Coventry are all using used sweepers, to offset their, you know, their fleet, and doing the exact same thing that Eric wants to do here. So I highly recommend it. And and I I was around when when the sweeper we have was brand new. It was state of the art back then and they've been piecing it together, for the last probably fifteen to twenty years. So, this is this is a good investment and I and the and the guys going down to look at it know exactly what they're looking for.
Here's my question before I actually make a motion. Let's just chat about it. Should we make a motion to conditionally approve the purchase of this vehicle subject to the inspection? If the people we're sending down believe that is in our best interest to purchase it should we make a motion that says okay as long as they agree with that they are approved to go ahead and do it. I wouldn't have a problem with that personally. Same here.
I do have one question. Does Hi. The Yep. Okay. Does the company offer any type of warranty program for a used equipment that would We could ask, generally not. Not usually. Yeah. As opposed to a new piece of equipment, I
don't know how municipal equipment works. Is there a warranty? Typically, we get we end up with, you know, three or so year warranty on most pieces of equipment we buy when we buy them new.
There isn't too much over five out there. You'd bring it and you're talking about a piece of equipment you want to run for thirty years.
Right. Well, you may be able to get a warranty but you're gonna pay for it. Know, yeah, exactly like you go buy a used car.
What a warranty does on a new piece of equipment is these are all fairly complex and they often have teething pains when they're brand new. So it's not uncommon to have problems with them in the first six months, you know, on any of these specialty pieces of equipment because it's not like a car coming off the assembly line where they're making hundreds of thousands of them. So what the, what a warranty and a new piece of equipment does is get you through all the teething pains, you know.
All right well based on our discussion I guess I would make a motion then that the board of finance conditionally a purchase of this used street sweeper down in Delaware that if our inspection team sees the this piece of equipment and believes that it is in order and is in our interest to purchase that they should be authorized to do so. I'll second the motion. Do
we have to put a cap of a dollar amount in there or just?
So the purchase price is 69, the shipping cost is 3, that's 72. We want to get under 72. So do we, we could put in a cap of 72.
Well, there's obviously there's gotta be sales tax, I would think somewhere, right?
Yeah, I mean, if you said 70 I 5, would be think, I'm thinking 75. That's what I'm thinking.
Okay. That seems reasonable, Diane. Do you want to put in so we can amend the motion to say up to $75,000
This piece of equipment, pay sales tax, and have it shipped to us. Yep. Oh, I I had a question, Eric. Is is it beyond us going down with our, say the, the the newer Peterbilt, dump truck with the low bed to pick up the bells?
Yeah. It's too heavy. We don't have an equipment trailer we could haul it with, and we don't have the towing capacity on our, yeah, on our vehicle. Okay. Just a just a thought.
Hey, Eric. Did you look into any third party brokers that do inspections on machines or they do oil analysis and hydraulic inspections, things like that? Because my concern is, you know, it's noble of our staff to go down and try and look at it. But this is what they do day in and day out. And long ago, I mean, I'm a trained aircraft mechanic. And there's a lot that can go wrong with a piece of equipment. Absolutely. Feel it's an unfair burden to put on these guys if they give it the green light. This isn't what they do day in and day out. Without an oil analysis, you're not gonna know how good the engine is. You're not gonna know if the hydraulics are okay. You could you could have a time bomb. I just think that's unfair to put that on their shoulders.
Good. Good. Good. Good.
Nice service is pretty widely available. Right? So Yeah. There's third party services that will inspect the machine. They'll guarantee certain things. I know they're out there. I'm not in the heavy equipment business. But know they have.
Even just to send a sample of the oil out for analysis, you can do that as a separate service at a minimum. That's a good point. Seems to be no brainer. Don't know about the inspection piece.
I mean, you could also put pressure gauges to the hydraulic systems. There's a lot you can do, but these guys don't do this day in and day out. They may be a decent mechanic, that's, but you know, it's it's just asking a lot for, you know, for the town to go blow $70,000 on their opinion. It's just a lot.
Yeah. I don't I'm not at all opposed to conditioning this on a third party evaluation.
That seems perfectly reasonable to me. My question would be then if we're gonna if we were gonna have a third party evaluate, do we still wanna send our team down? Yep. That's gotta cost us some money and waste their time if we're gonna have somebody else check it out.
You know what? I would not be comfortable buying something until we put eyes on it, you know, when we actually take it out and test drive it. And I look at it two ways. One, the public works supervisor that we hired has driven this particular model and this is the one he specifically is choosing. So he's familiar with that unit. And Tim's been the guy that does most of the maintenance on our existing sweeper. So between the two of them, they've got a lot of an awful lot of hours dealing with the sweeper. So I certainly wouldn't want to buy the thing with just a third party certification. You know, I would definitely want our guys on it,
you know, and giving it a thumbs up. And if they give it a thumbs up, then we get a third party evaluation, and then we come to an agreement and write them a check if that's appropriate. Well, think if Dave's,
Dave's willing to make that amendment to the to, Rob's motion, and, I think with, you know, beside it, I'd agree to that. By the way, just quick question, Dave,
do you know what those sorts of services tend to cost?
It ends up being $5,000 It might be one of something we reconsider, probably isn't, but it might be, we might want to put some kind of tabulation on it if it's reasonable.
Eric, I don't know anything about street sweepers as far as where you find them, but is there a brokerage place that maybe has five of them available and we can look at multiple ones and maybe pick out, you know, it just sounds like this is the only one down there. Is that correct?
At this particular location, you know, we've looked at and gone after information on four of them so far and CN Wood who's a dealer is they probably will have two coming in in New Jersey two additional units. So, I mean, like what I'm telling you is that if we decide this one doesn't really meet our needs, we're not under the gun to pull the trigger on this particular unit. It just right now it seems to do compared to what the market is this one seems to be a good deal. New
Jersey models are going to be models that are exposed to salt which was your point. Exactly.
Yeah. Correct. I mean, are these something, I mean, I know there's huge equipment places down like in Georgia, Florida, stuff like that. No plane tickets only a couple $100. So I hope your radius search isn't just drive time.
No, it's not. In fact, were I was fully committed to send them down to like North Carolina to look at one. But we got an inspection report on that one and a bunch of pictures and there were some things that seemed a little questionable. So we decided not to even really go down and evaluate that one. Yeah, I would send them off. Have no problem with that. Yep.
I guess my point would be, I think our time would be better utilized if we could find a larger place that has multiple units and they could go down and you know just use their time efficiently. I agree.
Well, I think the motion still could apply. You know it's probably up to Eric to manage that and Dave's points well well taken it's kind of up to Eric to manage the process.
I think we need to amend that motion a bit. Yeah, that motion yeah if you want to withdraw it, Rob or yeah well let's withdraw it and we'll we I think at this point we should restate it, withdraw it and restate the motion So I don't know what the process for withdrawal is other than I would call my motion. And then we we put together something more generic where we approve up to x dollars to a inspect a machine, including a third party crew to check whatever they need to check and purchase and transport.
Do we wanna train it that much or do we wanna just make a very strong recommendation that they-
I I guess my point was I was gonna leave open the possibility of purchasing Yeah. This
Up to x amount to, you know, to I don't know that we wanna constrain them that much to say they have to do that, but you know, or that if it's a thousand dollars and it ends up being $2,500 for the service, they decide it's a value to do that, we might wanna leave that a little more open. I'm just throwing it out there. Yeah, hear you. Trying to think about how we construct this because I don't think we want to make this onerous but at the same time, they need to do their due diligence over the purchase.
Yeah. And Dave made a bunch of good points. So we wanna try to incorporate them. Sure. Just trying to think about how we do that and and leave some flexibility
if something comes up that they wanna grab that's just right. I mean, the other option, you know, which is perfectly reasonable if you're willing to do it is just let us inspect the thing, get a third party inspection, come back to you and say yay or nay. And if it's yay, you hold a special meeting and you approve. Yeah. It doesn't have to be super onerous. I mean, technically, you only need what? Three? Four. Four.
Yeah. Sorry. I'm fine with that. Actually, that's maybe maybe that is the right answer for this for this particular machine. Sure. And if this one falls through, maybe we go the other route and we think about the process a little more.
Or maybe we just keep that process open. I'm actually the more we learn, the more you're gonna be able to present and say, look, this look you know, this is this makes sense to us. That's that's not a ridiculous Actually, it's a pretty good approach. I kinda like that rather than trying to Right. So motion rates are not really knowing what the landscape looks like and
You you could find these third party inspectors in in about every state, you know, in the unions. They're willing to go and do do what they do for whatever the whatever cost they are.
Okay. Because I don't think it's extreme, personally. Alright. Eric, why don't we go that I I think I agree with these guys.
Let's do that. I have another question before you do that. Okay. Sure. Yeah. What happens to the old sweeper?
We'll auction it off, and hope somebody dolls it away. If not, we'll take it down for scrap metal. John's John's is scrap metal. It's we're we're we're getting scrap. That's what it's worth. Is there any trade in value to it? Not at all. Not not a unit of that age. No. I think you'd be hard pressed to find somebody to take that. Okay.
You know, we had we ran into that not too long ago. We scrapped a bulldozer. You know, it was a 48 year old bulldozer. And, you know, we didn't try to auction it off, but we ended up giving it back to the dealer for like, I don't know, he gave us about a $1,500 credit, which was essentially identical to what John's was gonna give us. That's what it was worth in scrapping John's sheet metal. Right. Okay.
All right. Any other questions on this purchase? As a point of procedure, what I would recommend that we do is still vote on Rob's motion. We just vote it down. And given the discussion that we have the option of voting it down. And then Eric can always bring this back to us. We call a special meeting if needed and we vote at that time on a separate issue. It's the same topic, just a separate motion, I guess it would be. All right.
Any other discussion? Give everybody a minute to turn their mute button off or not. Okay, let's go ahead and take a vote on Rob's motion. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye.
Okay, we have two ayes. All opposed say nay. Nay. Nay. Nay. Okay, so that's I think four to three. The motion is defeated. All right, thank you. We'll move on. Was that Louise and Linda? Yeah.
Correct. Okay. And I thought it was just, okay. Right. Next item is the item 8D2, the asphalt hot box, Eric?
So the asphalt hot box, the CIP approved spending up to $33,000 or made a recommendation to approve up to $33,000 to purchase an asphalt hot box. We have several quotes. There's really only two major manufacturers of these that have dealers anywhere near us. We're not ready to buy it yet certainly. And we would want to make a decision on the sweeper. If we really got a sweeper for $69,000 we could probably afford the hot box out of what's in the capital fund now and maybe supplement it with a little bit of down aid road money. But we're certain, I'm certainly not looking for a motion to purchase this yet. We would give you full specs, But this again would be purchased off the Sourcewell government contract if we did it. So basically what it is, is it's a device. It's exactly what it says, a box that you put asphalt in that keeps the asphalt hot. Because the problem with asphalt is it has to be delivered to the road and rolled
at a pretty hot temperature. If it cools down too much, it doesn't compact and it just doesn't last. So what ends up happening is we end up getting five or six tons in the back of one of our trucks And we actually end up using a couple of tons and the other four tons just provide the thermal mass to keep it from cooling down too fast. And it's kind of an inefficient use of product number one. And for filling potholes, you really need some method for keeping it hot. And probably the most cost effective is a hot box. And we also haven't ruled out purchasing a used one. By the time you get a used one in decent shape, it's probably more than $20,000 for what we're looking for. So it's not, by the time you get one in that range, they're pretty beat up. So, we looked at it, we haven't ruled out pursuing a used piece of equipment for that too. But in that case, it looks like it might be smarter to just own up and buy it new. But again, we're not looking to make a decision. We're just letting you know that
CIP has recommended that purchase. And depending on what we end up doing for a sweeper, we may look to do that in this fiscal year, or we may look to do it out of next year's capital appropriation.
Eric, I think the motion was up to 35,000. Did you say 32?
Was it 35? Oh, sorry. I wrote it down wrong.
Because they added in the shipping and something else. I can't remember what else they added in, but it totaled to 35.
Okay. Yeah. Unfortunately, Fred hasn't produced the minutes yet. Yeah. So I don't have the actual motions. Louise is correct on that. Okay. Thank you.
And the last item that CIP recommended was out of the town's capital building improvement fund, spending the money to redo some of the electrical work at the town hall. So this addresses kind of three things. It, first of all, addresses the fact that we have a really old, what's called the stab lock electrical panel, which you probably aren't familiar with because they really haven't made them since the late 60s, early 70s. And they're pretty much illegal today because they have a bad habit of shorting out and electrocuting people. So we really want to get rid of that panel just from a safety perspective. But that is also our backup. It's a sub panel that's also our backup
circuits for emergency power when we're working off the generator that's in the fire station. The problem is that they did a really lousy job of allocating the circuits for the backup. So there's a lot of crazy things like there are no plugs in the resident state troopers office that work during a power outage, which is a problem, especially since that's where our server is, because our server goes down every time we're on backup power, which is not good. My office, for instance, none of the lighting circuits work. Several of the outlets work. But the really unfortunate thing is like the last couple of times I was running my table lamp from home so I could see the work on my computer when we were out of power. So we have to address that. So it's one, a safety issue, and it's two, getting the backup circuits correct.
We've spent a lot of time with Rick Langley at LENCO figuring out and really detailing and coming up with a scope of work to address our needs. And the other big thing is we wanna make sure whatever we do is forwardly compatible if we change generation systems, because in the future we may, we may end up with an automatic transfer switch. You know, there's a lot of things we may do. You know, we may not always run off the generator from the fire station. If we put in a new community station or new community center, we may end up going with a combined generator. So we tried to do this in such a way that whatever we do is forwardly compatible with everything else. So the total bill for that is around $8,300. So it's not cheap. And I didn't go out and get multiple quotes on this. And the reason is there's an enormous amount of design work involved in figuring out exactly what we need. And in truth, I didn't want to go out and do that with multiple vendors. I trust Rick, and that's why I chose them. Although it is over the threshold at which we would normally operate without multiple bids. So my first question to you as a board is, are you willing to give me the authority to do that? Or do you want me to turn around and multi bid this?
Eric, when you talked about design considerations, what I mean, are you talking about a price tag for the town on that? Like in other words, every time we have some contractor come in, pay them to work up the specifications or is it just time and effort? It's just time and effort
Because I will tell you that Rick and his secondary electrician probably spent three and a half hours or four and a half hours in the town hall just figuring out how this could even be done, which is it's not a trivial process. And we're actually gonna have to build a wall in that room and finish essentially a small pony wall because we physically don't have the space for it where we are now. So that's kind of where I'm looking at. If you want me to pursue other options, I'm more than happy to. My concern with this is a complex enough project. I'm more concerned with getting it right than getting it
done really cheaply, if that makes sense.
If I could say, and I had I had a lot to do with the Fire Station Complex 28 plus almost twenty nine years ago. The this this is the past administration not thinking ahead for the future of our town, which we're at that crossroads right now. There's a 60 kw generator system at the fire station that was tied in basically to run town hall at the time. Now, like I said, I'm talking twenty twenty eight years ago when that when that was considered. So now looking at it at at at a stand alone generator system for town hall and whatever future additions may be added to that. What Eric is doing right now is basically
a patch to get the town hall up and running the way they should be with a new panel and what Langley Electric's going I mean, Lenco Electric's going to do for him. I've at it. I I know I know it, you know, firsthand of of of why we're at this this crossroads with that that system. I mean, you you can't even use utilize plugs in the resident trooper's office. You can't utilize plugs in the registrar's office. This is basically an upgrade to get everybody going in town hall for now. We're we're still looking at some long range upgrades to town off to to town office building, especially if they add on the, community center like they're talking about. So, I highly understand it's needed. And it's much, much needed.
I think it's needed. That only is the question. Question is whether we bid out.
Sure. I don't care if we bid it out because Lenco for us has been a known commodity. He does a good job for us. He's knows our history. He does a lot for us, and he's a town resident. Do know what I mean?
It it He's not a stranger to us. To go along with Diane saying, again, and I I think I've I've said before, all of the work that Lenco has done at the fire station is is at no cost to the Board of Fire Commissioners or the town of Andover. And he's done numerous upgrades in that building since it was built in 1989. So I don't have a problem with Rick Langley doing all the work for the town of Andover at this time. Like Diane says, he's a resident, he's a taxpayer, and he gives us a good deal. He's not going to screw us on anything, plain and simple. Go on Dave. Sorry.
My only comment is I don't know this gentleman. I trust you guys. But looking at this without emotion, if we get sued because we didn't send something out to bid, we open ourselves up to liability if it goes over that threshold. That's my only concern. And part of the contractors and part of consultations, I give free consultations. I don't get reimbursed form. And a lot of contractors do. It has no bearing on this gentleman for his quality or work ethic. All I'm looking at this is, how does this look at from the town if someone from the outside looks at it and has an axe to grind? That's all I'm concerned about. Also,
just to speak on top of that, know, the reason we have the policy in place that we have in place today vis a vis bidding out projects is that the way things were done in the past, which was that at the time the then first selectmen had a relationship with someone and trusted them and just hired them up and never even looked around anyone else. By the way, it sounds like this guy is fantastic. I'm not trying to rip him at all and I would be completely happy if we ended up using him. Concern is circumventing the process we've put in place that was put in place for a good reason. That's all I'm saying. Absolutely.
And that is why I said before, that's why essentially I'm dumping it back in your lap and saying, do you as a board of finance, are you willing to do that or not? And if the answer is not, we'll bid it out with multiple locations. I'm not opposed to doing that. I just, my concern is that the town has gotten burned a bunch of times by using low bidder electricians hasn't ended up with the result they wanted.
Are we are we actually obligated to take the lowest bid? No. No. We're not. No. We're not. No. Okay. So that was in my thought. And and I can I can honestly tell you, knowing Rick Rick Langley and his father who who started the business years ago, he won't have a problem with us bidding it out? He know he knows he he's given honest bid each time and will not have a problem with going to bid. And I agree. I
Sure. You're never obligated to take the lowest bid unless you really write some stupid RFP language that said, you know, would you're you know, you're obligated to act in the best interest of the town of Andover. I don't really see that as an issue. You know, one option, I'm looking at this quote in. This is a pretty fair quote. But he said he kind of worked on, know, we've been involved in some respects with the with my company, and, you know this is is extremely reasonable. You guys have vouched for the quality, so I don't have a problem there I do share the concern. The robberies and, to some extent Dave I you know I don't think being sued is necessarily a problem but there are reasons we put the procedures in place. Don't like the idea of us circumventing them just because it's convenient for us. I don't think that we need to have any long bid out process I think you could tighten this up real quick Eric, and do
it fairly expeditiously without tying up a lot of your time and a lot of the town employees time. You've got one bid, can contact, throw it out there. I'm not sure exactly what the language of the policy states,
Mark, I think the charter requires three bids. Three bids. And that's, we already got one with Lenco and it would be an issue. Yeah, mean, so
throw out the scope and you throw it out there, you can get to either two replies or two no bids, with as long as you're reasonable in your efforts to me, that's probably meeting the spirit of the intent of that policy.
Right. And I'm completely fine if we land on link based on everything you guys are saying it's probably the right answer. I know nothing about electrical. So I'm going with what everybody else is saying.
To put it in perspective Rick comped the town right around $30,000 in labor and materials last year when you look at what he did for the fire department and the town.
We can't act on that though. No, I know. Know. Not asking to. Right. But we know he's not trying to gouge us. We know that. But we have a policy and a procedure and I think we probably need to make a good faith effort to follow that. Yeah, not a problem. Not a problem. My thoughts. Agreed. Any further questions or comments on that? I don't know that we need to vote on that or make some resolution, it sounds like the general thinking though, Eric, is you probably need to go out and try to secure a couple more bids in a fairly expeditious manner. Sure. I think Eric
reports back in the next meeting and we get it done. I don't think we need a motion or anything because we're following procedure. I think the motion that would have been required is if we were gonna circumvent. If we were gonna so hop, but yeah, it's good point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay.
Okay. Okay. All right, I guess we can move on then to item eight d four, which is, the new agenda item that Kurt, asked be added to the agenda. Kurt, do you want to address that one? Yes, I will. At the at the last,
capital improvements, commission meeting, they, had made a request for one item from the Board of Fire Commissioners. We had a list of five that we we put down as as in priority sequence, you know, from one to five of large items other than fire apparatus that the fire department is looking at in the next, you know, few, few coming budgets, basically. And, the first the first priority was a battery operated, hearse well, we said hearse because that's what we have had since the early seventies, but a vehicle extrication system, battery operated vehicle extrication system. And that was our request for that. I had sent RFPs out to three of the major manufacturers equipment suppliers that we use, one being FireMatic Supply Co. Incorporated in Rocky Hill, Shipman's Fire Equipment in Waterford, and Fire Tech and Safety, which is a Massachusetts company.
The fire department deals with those three pretty much exclusively for different types of equipment. RFPs have gone out on, number one, the battery operated vehicle extrication system. The system we have right now, we have equipment dated back into the early '70s when we first started the vehicle extrication with the old Route 6. If a lot of the you know, some of you people remember, we used to live out there for bad crashes, you know, and cutting people out of cars. That particular system, we've basically added to throughout the years and tried to upgrade when possible, is now becoming obsolete because it's based on a hydraulic system, which takes up a lot of room on a on the vehicle. You have numerous components making up from a generator to a a power supply to hoses and things like that. That's all becoming obsolete now with the battery operated tools, which you could take anywhere right off the truck. So, that was the reason for the priority number one request. Upon further review of the capital improvements, they looked at all five requests, figuring what we have in the fire equipment fund presently. And the second request was a commercial washer dryer for our, the fire department's turnout equipment here. NFPA, the National Fire Protection Association, requires us to clean our turnout gear, which is quite expensive between the helmets, the coats, the boots, the pants, the gloves, the hoods, everything else that firefighters are required to wear to go into a a structure type fire, which we we don't have a whole lot of, but we do have a few and have had, have had a few in the last, last year in town and in out of town to, clean the gear and,
in a, in a, in a commercial type washer with a commercial type dryer based on the carcinogens, that that the gear receives in a house fire, which NFPA has proven, is a cause of cancer in firefighters, throughout the country. So that was our second request. And the third request was a replacement of our self contained breathing apparatus air compressor, which is stationed, it's mounted in the in the back room of our firehouse, and that fills the the, SCBA bottles used at our, air packs that the firefighters use to actually go into a a smoke filled environment, you know, in a in a house fire or or any anything else, a CO call, things like that. Alright. The present compressor was purchased from Shipman's Fire Equipment twenty six going on twenty seven years ago. We've kept it upgraded, but basically it's becoming antiquated. The newer compressors have some different features, the CIP thought it best that they grant the three requests in priority that the fire commission had to capital improvements. And basically, the funding would come out of the existing fire equipment fund. Eric and Adrian Mandeville had they kind of did a lot of figuring and basically, you know, what we have in the fund itself, it could all be taken out of there. So I went in asking for one request and they granted us three, which, you know, I thought it was Christmas time. But basically, those are the three that were requested and up to $100,000 total out of the fire equipment fund for all three, requests. I do have RFPs out to those three companies that I discussed,
and I'm still awaiting right now the request for proposals on each stating that the town, upon approval of the capital improvements, Board of Finance, Board of Selectmen, and town meeting, the pricing that they do submit has to reflect that up and where it can't be purchased till 07/01/2021. So that's basically what the capital improvements approved.
I have a budgetary question regarding the equipment fund. If you're talking about taking a 100 up to a $100,000 out of it. What's in there now? Does anybody know? And is that separate? Remind me, is that separate from the fund that we have set up to ultimately purchase new fire trucks?
I'll push that to Eric and because he just not on so.
So the answer is we, the fire department, we have a single fund. That fund currently as of today has $33,500 in it. I see. We're anticipating if we fully fund the capital allocation of adding $100,000 to it. And that is based on the long term plan that the fire department has submitted for capital equipment. Basically, if you take amortize that over each year and you say each year, the town needs to come up with roughly $100,000 towards that fund. That's what I remember.
The CIP basically looked at it and said, well, the reality is all three of those items, you know, are on the docket and are gonna need to be spent before the next time we purchase a large scale piece of equipment. So whether you purchase one of them now and two of them next year, it really doesn't matter and you're better off purchasing, you know, front loading that now because they are needed now. So that was CIP's decision right or wrong. Obviously the money won't be in there unless we fund that capital allocation and then it could be spent as of July. July. Okay, that answers my question.
And the other two large items that we had in our list of five are complete replacement of our SCBA air packs, the self contained breathing apparatus, which which the chief had proposed to the board of fire commissioners 20 packs and 20, spare bottles to go along with those packs. Estimated cost, I I don't have that right now, but that that was our our fourth request. That's that's that's coming, you know, to the town. And then last but not least was, 20 complete sets of turnout gear, which average anywhere from, 6 to $8,000 per firefighter to outfit them. And basically NFPA again recommends that every ten years the turnout gear be replaced. And that's based on 20 firefighters that we have certified firefighter ones or twos or firefighter threes, state of Connecticut certified people that we have. So right now we're looking at about 20 sets of turnout here also as a major capital request. Those are the total of the five items that we need to do within the next two to three years, basically, Based on the presently what we have so. That's like 140,000 Yeah, yeah, at least. Six to eight you said times 20.
Six to eight. We 20 firefighters that are certified, interior firefighters that would be getting the, be using the air packs and also getting the newer turnout gear, which has to be, you know,
turned over every ten years. And if the turnout gear costs six to eight, midpoint seven times 20. All of that. Yep. Dollars 140,000.
Yeah, those are those are the large items that we have other than fire apparatus in our our in our plan. And as you know, the Fire Commission does a five, a ten, and a twenty year replacement plan, both for equipment, major equipment, and fire apparatus.
Kurt, this is a little off topic and we'll talk about this some other time, but just to put it in your mind. Yep. Have you guys had any issues with what's called PFOA or PFAS claiming about the firefighting foam itself being a problem? Oh gosh yeah,
It was all based out of the Bradley Airport and the, the firefight, the state of Connecticut firefighters there that protect the airport. When they use that phone for that, gosh. What was it? That that that plane that that that older plane that crashed with everybody on it. And then the and the basically, the foam got into the Farmington River somehow and oh, it that that that's had major effects. And and we we've all had to basically get rid of the foam that we had that, is is not good, basically, and, and purchase new stuff. And, you know, chief Mike has has, stepped up and, basically got rid of the they actually had a collection point for the older foam and we had a bunch of it because we don't use it that often.
And he he interchanged it with, with with the newer stuff that's okay. That's really good to hear because that's a huge issue at my job right now. It's huge. Yeah, because I'm on the insurance side and we're getting absolutely slammed with those claims. Good to know.
Should be up to date. Thanks to thanks to chief Mike and, you know, and the fire commission because we did approve him the the funds to, to buy the replacement foam and basically get rid of the foam that we had. And we had a lot of it. Good. I'm good. That's basically it, Mark.
Sorry, mute button again. Any other questions for Kurt? It's a good overview.
Like I said, I do have RFPs out to those three manufacturers for the three items that CIP has approved. We still don't have approval from the Board of Finance, Board of Selectmen, according to, of course, the town meetings. That's once I get those, I will share them with the Fire Commission, the capital improvements, and everyone else.
Good. Thank you. It's good overview. It's good to know it's coming down the road and sounds like stuff we're going to need to do. All right. Okay. Our next agenda item is 8E, which is to schedule the budget workshop. So I think we have a couple of options here. One would be to go ahead and preliminarily schedule a few of these. In the packet, Amanda included a calendar. Thanks to wonders of remote meetings. We really aren't limited too much in terms of conflicts with other meetings as long as it's not like a CIP or something where we're going to lose potential attendance due to other committee meetings that people are on. I said we could schedule some or we could postpone it until we actually have a have a budget, which is probably not going to be until March 1 from what it sounds like, or we could just go ahead and put some on the calendar.
Just speaking for me, just speaking generally Mark, I've mentioned this in the past, it still continues to be the case that the front half of the week is bad for me. Just based on when I have my kids. I am generally available, you know, Wednesday and Thursday night. I now, unfortunately, Friday nights have not not that we ever do Fridays but Fridays are not bad for me too. So, I'm basically. Gonna propose Fridays now. Yeah, right? Wednesday, Thursday is best for me. I can potentially make other nights work but you know, I'll have kids in the background and it'll be a lot harder. I don't know on Friday. Yeah, so that's my take, my other take would be that unless and until we have something to act upon, something to look at, I don't know what a workshop does for us.
Yeah, I would agree with that. It probably doesn't make sense to schedule anything until we have really something in hand. I do think that it would behoove us individually as we get various report outs, etcetera, documents that we can start reviewing that we may wanna monitor the board of selectmen workshops just to kind of see where that's going. And I'll try to do that when possible and distribute the documents that come out of that to the board of finance. Everyone's kind of apprised of it. I would agree it doesn't make sense for us to meet until we actually have that. I guess the real question is do we want to go ahead and throw something on the calendar for March '3? Wednesdays when we did the poll last fall to establish our calendar for this year, Wednesday seemed to work well for everybody. I would propose we just stick with that unless somebody's got a conflict. I agree. Yeah. I'm good with Wednesday. Wednesday is So
it looks like in just looking at the calendar here, March 10 is a board of ed meeting. If there's a conflict there or we don't wanna double double up with that but the third and the seventeenth are open.
Yeah, mean, would almost propose that we schedule meetings for both of those dates. If we do not have a budget in hand before the first or second, we probably will want to cancel the third just because we're not well, potentially we may not really have a chance to digest it. I mean, it all depends. If it comes to us that day, know personally I'm going to want to go through it before we have any discussions over it so. But it can't hurt to put it on the calendar and at least establish that and then we can always add add meetings. Needed. That works for me.
The good thing about March is you know you got a bunch of cracks at it. We get five Wednesdays in a row. Good for us. Yeah.
That works for me. Like that plan tentatively scheduling the third, the seventeenth, and then we have a regular on the twenty fourth. And we can kind of go from there.
Seventeenth to St. Patrick's Day, if anybody has a strong feeling about that. But I would propose we at least set those two up and then we have our regular scheduled meeting on the twenty fourth. I don't see any personal conflicts for me. I'm okay with that. I'm good with that.
We may well need other meetings too, but we can schedule them as we go. Does anybody want to make a proposal or a motion rather?
Sure, I move that we schedule budget workshops at 7PM March 3 and March 17. Was that correct dates March 3 and March 17. Yeah, you compliment our normal meeting on the twenty fourth to work up our budget. But you want to second the motion. Second.
Linda. Yeah, it's Linda. Tie your hand first unless you're
better than a five hour marathon like we had last year. Oh my god, the one that we got off the we got off at like 11:59. Yeah. Yeah.
I still remember that. We all have scars, know? And and and let let's let's tell Ram and AES to be be prepared and available. Right. Yeah. It's a good point. To wear armor, whatever they got to do. Don't care.
I think they'll know after yesterday's Board of Select meeting. Yeah, don't think Val was too pleased about that. Well, you know, it's a learning experience, right? Yep. I mean, it's He's new. Yep. All right. Anybody, any further questions or discussion over that? Okay, let's take a vote on the motion to hold meetings on the third and the seventeenth. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Sounds like no. Motion passes. Thank you. Any other discussion on additional meetings? As needed, basically. Yeah.
Okay. All right, let's move on and our agenda. The next item is item 9A, the approval of the regular meeting minutes from Wednesday, 12/16/2020. Any discussion over those? So moved.
Kurt moves to approve the meeting. So I have a second. I'll second it. Okay, Louise seconds.
Any discussion? They looked right to me. Okay, let's take a vote. All in favor of the motion? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstention? No abstain.
Okay, David Baines. Motion passes. Thank you. Move on to item number 10 on the agenda, which is liaison reports. We already got a good overview of the CIP progress. That's good. Good to hear what things are moving along there. Anything else to report?
The senior center building committee. So that is getting back on track. Ed Srisley has stepped up to be the chair of that committee now. And we're having our next meeting February 11 to walk through the first draft drawings that I think Adrian did them. Adrian is going to walk us through them. And then from there, once we get that, then we'll probably put it out for architect to do some design work. That's kind of where we're at. Do
you guys have a plan budget, or are you just.
Don't have anything yet we're just really it's all concept right now.
Understand where it's gonna fall. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Alright. Hot topic in the town of Andover for good reason. Yeah. We don't need a budget.
Just wing it, Mark. Come on. Didn't we have a fund for that, though? Wasn't there some money put aside? We do. We do. We currently have $450,000 set aside for that bill. Okay. And we have a significant nest egg there. Okay.
A long way to go I'm sure. A lot of planning and then forward thinking I think needs to happen with that one. Right. Okay. Thank you, Diane. Anybody have any other questions for Diane or anything else to report?
I do wanna add one more thing with the CIP meeting. Yep, Louise, thanks. Carol Lee from the rec department was there And she and Shannon are working together, Shannon Loudon, in regards to a possible playscape idea. There's a Andover resident in town who would like to donate $10,000 to build, to have something going as a playscape for his wife. And right now there's a lot of unknowns. So there's a lot of questions that still have to be determined as like the area and possible grants and things like that. So they're still working on that, and it's gonna be a process.
Interesting. That's interesting update. Good. Look forward to hearing more about that. Okay.
I always like to hear about people giving us money.
Yeah. So, it's very, very generous. Yes, definitely. All right. Anything else from our liaison committees related items. Okay, we'll move on to item number 11 which is our board open discussions anybody else have anything else they want to bring before the board.
Yeah, I had one item, and it's mainly for Eric. On Monday, actually I contacted talent county mutual aid to see where everybody was going as far as fire alarm monitoring and I got I got some I got three different vendors that are doing you know monitoring for other towns that are in the same boat that we are based on Tallinn County, not pulling the plug, 07/01/2021. I talked to Wally about it and apprised him of the situation. On Monday, have Dubaldo Electric from Manchester coming in to look at the different alarm systems both in the public works, the school, the library, the firehouse, town hall, old town hall. And just hoping that you or maybe Jay would be available to work with this guy coming in. He's one of three different names that I received from, Doug Rasico at Town County Mutual Aid, based on, different towns that are using these new vendors. So hopefully And he is part of a monitoring service?
He he he does monitoring service and also does installs of new systems. So, we can get we can get one of our, one of our bids, you know, for both services, monitoring services, and maybe installation of a new system for public works and the Grange Hall at the same time. But just hoping that maybe you and Jay would be available to meet with myself and Mr. Gibaldo from Manchester.
I definitely will be. What we'll need to do is we will need to if you have more contact information for them,
I will clear it with the school because we'll need access to the school. Yes. I'm gonna tell them you know a little ahead of time we can't just barge in there. They get a little feisty about that stuff. Well as you know after after the last CIP meeting my job was to take care of the monitoring, and Adrian was gonna take care of the the new system installation. But I did did talk to Adrian and also talked to Wally Barton about it. So, they're both on board with, with each. I have two other vendors that Talent County Mutual Aid recommended, as far as monitoring services go so we can get some, get some good bids on it. Okay.
Great. Yeah I will be avail I will make sure I make myself available Monday for when they're gonna be here
we're gonna we're gonna start at public works supposed to meet me there around ten a. M. Monday. Okay thanks
Okay, thank you, Kurt. We have any other open discussion. Alright hearing none we can move on to agenda item 12 which is our public speak we have any public would like to speak. Probably nobody want to listen to us tonight.
That's one of the benefits of having a five hour meeting everyone's going to avoid the subsequent subsequent. It just outlast people. Is one strategy. Yeah.
All right hearing no public speak. We will move on to number 13 adjournment.
Do I have a motion to adjourn? I motion to adjourn. I move to adjourn rather. Rob moves to adjourn. Second that. Louise seconds.
Any discussion? Okay, let's take a vote. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? There's still time. No abstention? Hearing none, motion passes.
Thank you everybody. Thank you Amanda. Thanks Mark as usual. Thanks Amanda. Thanks Eric. Thanks Mike.
Have Have a good night. Rest. It's gonna be a mid season.
Alright. Everybody. Take care. Thank you. See you soon. Bye.