Meeting transcript
Annual Town Budget Meeting
June 8, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Excuse me, everyone. Alright. Let's go. Before I even read this, I'm gonna sit there and expectation is that you follow the rubble. It was Robert's rules order, but I'm just gonna explain it very clearly. You only speak when the moderator asks you, and you not expect the behavior that you saw last to the happen tonight. And Everyone just needs to understand that it is not us versus them, it is only us. We are the entire town. What happens to one person happens to us all. Alright? So please, only speak when the moderator speaks, and please be quiet when you're amazing because it's very difficult to hear what people are saying. Alright? And I appreciate it. Thank you. No. No. One other thing. Please do not clap. Do not cheer. It doesn't do anything for anyone. Alright? Let's try to do this and be respectful to everybody and get to a final solution. Alright? So hey. Excuse me. If you talk on the bleachers, you interrupt the meeting. I'm going to be very clear. I have no problem objecting people from this meeting. The board of selecting, the board of finance worked really hard. Please be respectful. Just sit here, listen, '22 is prepared by board finance. To approve the budget for the fiscal year 07/01/2021 to 06/30/2022. And number four, We do. Nominated Paula King. Do we have a second? Second. To All those in favor? Aye. All? Okay,
good evening. We're gonna start tonight with a presentation from the board of finance. So, with further ado, I'm gonna pass this off to Mark Breitmer.
Thank you, Paula. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you all of you for coming out. This is round four. We've done this four times, and I know all of us would rather be someplace else. I personally rather be home working on my motorcycles, but here we are. We gotta get this done. Right? Okay. Once again, I am not gonna go through the detail of this budget. There have been meetings after meetings after meetings. It's on the town website. We've got copies in front of you. And we've been through this. I know there probably are people here who haven't been in this meeting before. You'll have an opportunity to ask questions, but in the interest of moving this along, we just want to, hit the highlights. Okay? Okay. Here's the agenda. There's not much new that we haven't seen before. We do have a couple of things. We made a bit of an explanation of the bill rate calculation last time. I'm not gonna go over that again, but I am gonna talk about the assessment and evaluation very briefly because there's been some confusion on that. It's easy to have it. Thank you, doctor. Budget process, boy, this bullet list is getting longer and longer every time, isn't it? I think everybody knows we've been through this
in a lot of different, steps, and, you know, it's it's gotta get done. There's a top charter section. Okay. This is the key thing. What has changed from the last meeting? The board of finance met again last Thursday. Okay? After the budget failed at the last town meeting, we changed three things, or the three primary things we'll talk about. The one thing we did is increase the Andover Elementary School budget from the previous round, okay, we increased it to a level of $3,999,400. This is $97,000 more than last year's budget. Many of you will remember that this is the request from the Board of Education as the compromise from their originally requested budget. The second thing we did was we restored 25,000 to the road improvement fund that we had cut out of a previous budget. There's still a lot of concern that we need to fund the infrastructure of this town appropriately. And then the third grouping is we made several small minor line item changes to
department budget items. None of them were very consequential, but had a net decrease in the town expenditures of about $3,000. Okay? All of those details are in the last quarter finance meeting minutes. If you care to get them, you get them through the town hall or online or watch the YouTube video. It's a really enthralling process, Justin. This is a new budget. We have a budget of $12,574,430. Okay? That's the recommended budget coming out of the board of finance. Okay? Comprised of these four key components, the Andover Board of Education budget, which I just talked about. The AES debt service, this is the bond we took out for the schools a few years ago. That's the last year we're gonna have to pay for that, so that's good news. There's the RAM assessment. This is the funding that we have to pay for the RAM schools. And I'll just mention this. I think almost all of you are probably aware of it, but that budget was passed in a vote a few weeks ago, so it's locked in. There's nothing we're changing there. And then we have the town budget. The town budget is at total operating costs and capital costs of $3,455,273.
That's an increase of $50,108 over last year, or an increase of 1.47%. The school budget, I didn't mention that change, but that changed to 2449% increase. Talked about the RAM budget, talked about the Edinburgh Elementary School. Just a quick notice in the original request was that $4,122,000. It came to the Board of Finance, and we did reduce that by 122,600. We kinda went through here. These are the factors, increasing, decreasing the operating budget for the town. The town capital budget again increased back from where we were last meeting because we added that $25,000 back into the town roads. This is the breakdown of the capital projects that are in the budget. We've gone through them in great detail in other meetings.
And we talked about the town revenue. These are the fees, the grants, and the taxation that we get to offset the cost of the town. I already talked about the main differences this year being the reduction in the educational cost sharing grant from the state, and also in the use of the fund balance. We just don't have that, as much to spend out of our fund savings. Okay. This is a budget summary. Basically, lists everything here that we've already talked about. Alright? Various sources of expenditure, the fund balance is gonna offset some of that. That leaves a total amount to be raised for taxation of $9,954,425. It's an increase of about 5.8%. This is a bill rate calculation, I'm not gonna go through it in detail. The key factors are that the estimated mill rate this year at this
level of expenditures and revenue is 36.67 mills, okay, which is a 2.98% increase over last year in the mill rate. So here's the summary. We've got the town budget that includes AES and the ramp at $1,200,000,574,430, calculated no rate 36.67. As an example, if you have a house with a fair market value of $200,000, you would pay $5,134 of pound taxes. This represents a $148 increase from last year. Okay? Not a $200,000 fair market value home. Not your assessed value, but your fair market value. There's a slide about calculating taxes using the mill rate. I'm not gonna go through it this time. Now I do wanna address this question because it's come up several times in the past few weeks, there's a little bit of confusion about it. It's easy to get, not be uncertain about this. Everyone knows that Andover, well maybe you don't know, but we're undergoing a revaluation of our property taxes as required by law, Okay? I think everybody knows that property values in general are going up. Now this means that for those of you that own real estate property in town, it's likely that your fair market value,
and subsequently your assessed value, are going to increase. This does not mean your taxes are going up. Okay? Oops. It will not increase your taxes. The amount you pay is based on the amount required to be raised by taxes, divided by the total property value in town. It's calculated that way. So there won't be an automatic increase in your taxes just because the property goes up, necessarily. It's it's not it's an inverse calculation, so that's the point that is gonna happen. There's some timing issues there that's probably goes up. Could pay fine. That is something individual. Right. Adrian's house is worth a lot more. He he did some improvements. His might go up. You know, I don't take care of mine, so he's probably gonna pay more, he's the sucker.
I'm just different. True. Okay. So it's just important to recognize that there is no automatic overall tax income to the town just because the property values go up. Okay. So that's very quick. Again, I I don't know whether to apologize for the brevity for those of you who wanted to hear more or or maybe maybe please that I disagree. But we're gonna go ahead and have a question and answer period. You can direct questions to the board of finance or to maybe the board of select board of education, and we'll do our best to answer. And please respect everybody here. The last thing I do wanna say is we worked very hard on this, and we would like you to pass this budget at this town meeting. Not just because we worked hard on this, because we have had budgets that are higher that went to the vote that failed. We have had budgets that are lower that failed in the meeting. We've been up and down. We need to send this to the referendum, and at the referendum, there will be four questions. Four questions that will, if the budget fails the referendum, will give us some idea of what the townspeople are thinking, the voters are thinking. So we need that in order to zero in on a budget that will pass. And the town meeting and then votes as a town are two different things that we were having we need to find common ground, and this is the way we think we can do it. This is our strategy tonight.
So I will ask you to carefully consider that at tonight's meeting. Thank you. Thank
you, Mark. Just a couple quick reminders. When you come up to the podium, please keep your mask on and wear it properly. Just like it's been mentioned tonight, please be respectful. Whoever's talking has the floor. And we're looking for questions tonight or motions. So for example, if you have a question for the Board of Selective, the Board of Finance, or Jerry's up here representing the Board of Ed, please ask your questions from the podium. So for example, I have a question about blah blah blah, okay? Or if you would like to make a motion, please state, I would like to make a motion, and then whatever your motion is, okay? Alright, I think that's everything. So please raise your hand and I'll call on somebody. Celeste. Also please state your name and address so we can have that. Celeste Willard, 321 Lake Road. And I'd like to make a motion to call the vote. Okay, let's do a show of hands. If you are we doing yes? Okay, this is it. Okay, show of hands for yes. Okay, put your hands down please. Show of hands for no. Okay,
it's not two thirds I'm being told. Alright, so. Any, okay, if you have questions please line up at the podium at this time. A second? Okay, I've got a second right here. Krista Krista McGregor. Okay, so with a motion to cut from the AES budget. Okay? Hands down, please. With a show of hands, if you wanna say no to this motion, please raise your hand. Okay. The motion's been defeated. Moving on. Again, come up to the podium if you have a motion or a question. And we're gonna be timing everybody. So if I cut you off, it's because we wanna keep moving. Anybody else? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Alright, we're gonna use our paper now. The very first one, the official ballot. Okay. If we can just settle down and get the results here. If it passes tonight, we're gonna go to referendum on January 22. Sorry, June. I'm wishing for the cold weather. June 22. So there was 147 voters, 129 yes, 18 no. So, okay, thank you, no clapping guys. So that means that to to end end the the meeting? Meeting? Here. Shannon Loudon, motion to end the meeting. Do I have a second? Second. Okay, I'm gonna pick on, I can't recognize recognize you. You. Kraszewski, is that Kraszewski? Mike Greenhouse. Mike Greenhouse, thank you. All those in favor? Aye. All those opposed? All right, thank you.