Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Town Budget Public Hearing
April 21, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
07:00 and overtime. So I'm going to call this meeting to order. We'll say the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge of allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and Republic to for which it stands,
one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you.
Okay, I'd like to introduce this meeting by just kind of explaining a little bit about what we're doing here today. For those of you who may not be familiar with the process, any of you that have been following the budget process for the town school districts so far probably understand pretty well where things are. Tonight is our annual budget hearing as required by our charter. What this meeting does is it provides the Board of Finance one last opportunity to get input from the public in advance of our last meeting, or we will make last minute changes to the recommended budget for the town. As most of you probably know, once the board of finance makes this recommended budget, that goes to the town budget meeting. And that is actually where the
town budget will be decided that we'll move forward to referendum. So there's several steps yet before this budget is final. The big, probably most one is the budget meeting. Then of course, finally the budget vote at which we'll vote on the budget gets moved on to referendum. So tonight's meeting really is an opportunity for the Board of Finance to present to the residents what we have gone through so far and where we've landed in terms of the recommended budget. We can answer any questions you may have, listen to any further inputs you may have, and we'll that take into consideration as we finalize this recommended budget to go before the town and the town budget meeting. As was alluded to in some of the preliminary questions I got before we started, I'm actually in Germany on business, so I'm about six hours behind. I'm speaking a little softly so I don't wake up my colleagues in this rental we have. I hope you can all hear me clearly. Just wanted to make that point and apologize if I'm speaking a little more softly than usual. It's fine, we can hear you. Okay, good.
Okay, what I'm gonna be doing tonight is basically going through the high level view of the town and school budgets as they stand today. Okay, if anybody's again been following the process, there's been a lot of work done by both the Graham Board of Education and the AES Board of Education to come up with their recommended budget amounts. What the Board of Finance does at that point is take the recommended budget amounts from the departments, the various operating and capital budgets that Eric Anderson is the town administrator submitted. We then review those, come up with an overall recommended budget. I'm gonna present the high level of this budget today. The actual budget documents are all on the town website. If you wanna get into the detail,
it's all there and we can certainly answer any specific questions tonight. But I probably won't be going through line by line on every budget item. Okay. With that being said, do we have anything from our fellow board of finance members? Any input or questions about the process before we get started? Okay, Amanda, can you give me the ability to share my screen please?
Yes, you should be all set. Go ahead and give it a try.
Okay, should I be all seeing the slideshow now? Looks good. All right, good. Right, so what I'm gonna do is probably kind of go through each of these sections in turn, and I'm gonna stop from time to time. And I guess we may ask Eric to clarify some things. We'll also give the opportunity for the board members, if you have questions or clarifications that you'd like to ask as we go through, comments that you'd like to make, that's fine too. It's a little bit awkward with the Zoom meeting to take individual questions as we go through this. But if you do have them and you wanna ask them, there's two ways that you can do that. Zoom allows you to put some information into a chat. There's a chat function in Zoom that would probably be the best way to do it. You can also do it like a hand raise function, right? Amanda, you're gonna be looking out for that. Can you do that? Okay. And that'll give us the opportunity to kind of take a break and answer any questions in midstream. Barring that, what we'll do is we'll go through this presentation. It's about 14 slides long. It's not super detailed and it's not super long, but as we go through there, just make a note of any questions you have. I'll be happy to flip back through there and answer questions as we go along.
Once I'm done with the presentation, we're gonna go into the public comment portion of the meeting. We'll call on the public one by one and give you an opportunity to ask any specific questions or provide any input you may have at that time. Okay, let's go ahead and get started. Okay, just a little bit about the budget history. This is all done basically according to town charter and state law. There's a very specific process we go through here. First of all, in December 2020, all the town departments begin to develop their budgets for the fiscal year, which begins July 1 year. In January and February 2021, the administrator submits this capital investment improvement recommendations to the selectman. We also have a preliminary town budget for the operating budget that goes to Selectman. The RAM board presents their preliminary budget to the RAM, probably the superintendent presents it to the RAM board of education. The Board of Education works on their budget. And then the Andover Elementary Board of Education presents their preliminary budget. So there really are four significant components to the town overall budget. And that's the beginning of the process there. In this case, the mid February, the Board of Selectmen reviewed the town's
operating and capital budget as developed by Eric and his team over at the town. The budget originally overall included a 7.8% increase, which was a pretty significant mill rate increase of 338.31. Okay, we'll be going through the more detailed part of that a little bit. Okay. In March 2020, the Board of Finance received a sub budget. We began our review session. So that's really when the Board of Finance got involved and started asking questions and moving things around, expressed our concerns and gathered more information from the various departments and AES and RAM. The RAM budget was modified at that time. That's kind of a totally separate process, obviously from the Board of finance or the handover school district budget process. And in April, the board of finance voted to approve this budget for public hearing. Did I miss one here? I didn't. So the RAM budget, the Board of Finance public hearing was set for today and the town budget meeting was set for May 6, Okay. So we, again, as I mentioned last week, that the primary opportunity for the residents of the town to actually weigh in with their voice about updating or changing the budget in final budget that we're gonna put before referendum
for the public vote is gonna be on the budget meeting set for May 6. On May 6, as noted here, the Board of Finance is gonna present the budget to the town. And this is our recommended budget. And then the town vote to put it, or the town meeting that's gonna get voted to or pushed forward to the referendum for actual public vote as part of the actual voting process. Just as a point of information, I'm not sure we recorded it here, but there was a couple of steps there too with the AES vote where there was reductions and changes made to the AES budget as well. This is just a chart that kind of presents an overall view of the town's budget. So you can see exactly where the dollars are flowing. It's split between three main constituents. In the upper left corner, you can't see this doesn't actually, it does have a, I assume it was hiding the legend. In the upper left corner is the town's kind of operational capital budget. So all the yellow part is the town. That's 27% of our recommended budget. The blue in the upper right corner is the Andover Elementary School District that represents about 32% of the overall spending for the town. There's a continually decreasing orange slice there, which is the Andover Element School debt. And the fortunate thing is that's the last time we're really gonna see that on this slide because debt's going to be retired after this year. So that piece is getting smaller and smaller, okay? And then the big larger gray portion at the bottom, that is the RAM middle school and high school budget. That's 40% of our overall town spending. So just wanna make an important comment here.
This is a process that is not dealt with through the Board of Finance or the Andover Board of Education. This is a process that's handled separately. The RAM Board of Education votes votes on a final recommended budget, and then this is handled separately through vote in the towns. So it's really separate from this process, but it's an important one that people should be paying attention to because it is a significant, in fact, the largest single portion line item in our town budget. All right, so just talking a little bit about the RAM budget. The proposed operating budget overall is a 1.83% increase. Now, doesn't mean that our percentage is gonna be going up. We're gonna talk about that in a minute, but overall that's what the RAM budget is looking like this year. So slightly less than a 2% increase overall in their budget. Their capital budget, is an 11.77% increase, about $300,000 The percentage, however, actually going to be have to be That budget that's going to have to be paid by the Andover residents is going down. So that's the good news. So in effect, what we end up gonna have is we in Andover are actually gonna have to pay less out of our taxes this year for RAM than we did before. But it's not because their spending is going down. In fact, it's going up even though the people population, the students isn't really changing or it's not going up, but their operating budget is going up. But as you can see in that third bullet point there, the main reason that it's gonna go down for us is that our percentage of students is actually being reduced.
The overall population is coming down as well. So the actual per pupil spending at RAM is going up, but because our percentage of the students in Andover, Andover suits representing a smaller percentage of the towns or the Rams population, that's why our proportion is actually gonna be reduced. The other thing that was helpful is that RAM had a surplus at the end of last year. And I think at the urging of many of the town residents and some of us from the board of finance and elsewhere, they voted to return that unexpended funds to the town. So that helped offset the increase that they were planning for their operating budget for next year, which I think was the appropriate thing to do. Okay, let's talk a little bit about the Andover Elementary School budget. So we went through several phases here, but ultimately the Board of Education requested a final budget of 4,122,000. The Board of Finance voted to reduce this slight amount for four point down to $4,078,008 It was basically a straight percentage reduction we took out of there. This represents overall a 4.5% increase from the 2021 budget. So there's a significant budget increase that Andover Elementary School had requested. They then reduced that and the Board of Finance reduced it further. We're not going to talk a lot about the specifics behind that. I know Valerie's on the meeting today and saw her earlier on the participant list. But I think we'll want the AES district to where their budget's going probably at the May 6 meeting. Last bullet point here, as I mentioned earlier, the debt service on the bond was the borrowing we did for ADS several years ago, remains at 93,000. But as noted here, the debt will be retired in the next year. We're not gonna have to deal with this next year. So that's the good news there.
Okay, let's talk about the town operating budget specifically. So a few major factors that are gonna affect the towns and town budget and a decrease, they're gonna cause decreases in the town spending. And then we'll talk about the ones that are gonna affect or basically effect increases to the town budget in a minute here. The overall decrease from 2,536,002 million 483,900. So there's an overall decrease in the operating budget of about $52,000 As you can see from the next bullet point, this is mostly driven by a reduction in salary and benefits. So I think the Board of Selectmen working with Eric Anderson have worked pretty hard to find some efficiencies within the government
operations such that they were able to combine various positions. We worked closely with the school district to develop a combined town finance department. That had significant benefits, only in savings and salary, but also I think it's streamlining the town's financial operations. Good move there by AES in the town. The tax collector's position was reduced to part time and we combined the assistant town clerk and the building department administrative functions, also had a significant impact on reducing the cost for the town. And then the senior coordinator role was assigned to the assistant assessor on a long term basis. We also on the board of finance voted to reduce the snow removal budget by $10,000 We went back and forth on that in our last meeting. So I wanna emphasize that it's not our intent to reduce the services necessarily, but what we were trying to do is better reflect an average cost on an annual basis based on expected snowfall. But it doesn't leave the town any contingency spending. That means that if we do have a heavy snowfall year, we're going to have to find that funding either through the contingency funds funds or
some other mechanism because we do not expect it. We want to reduce our services to the town and we'd still want our roads plowed and things maintained. Okay. Couple of things, a few other bullet items that actually had a significant increase in the way the town budget looks. The first one is a little bit It can be a little confusing, this youth services. So from the town's perspective, when you looked at the town budget, the youth services is increasing from 46,000 to $88,000 roughly. And the reason for this is not because their spending or services went up that much, it's just because what was decided was that rather than having provided to the town and the services provided to the elementary school and the services provided to RAM, all billed out to those three entities separately, the AHMU services would present one bill to the towns in each of the served locations. So basically the budget moved from the schools to back into the town, which makes sense. It's just an easier way to understand where the costs are. It provides one budget line instead of having multiple budgets and being tucked into the school budgets. It's right there in the town budget. So that's why we took that action and that's true across all three towns there. And in fact, you can see by the bullet points there, the total budget
decreased. It's just now that all the is paying all the costs up upfront or as we're billed. Another thing that increased our operating budget this year is we did change the public works supervisor position. It's a non union position this year. It was changed from hourly to salary. So there were several benefits to doing it that way. And I think both the Board of Selectmen and Board of Finance approved that, but it did have some upward impact on the town operating budget. Lastly, we had election related expenses that increased significantly this year. This is primarily due to COVID and the way we had to handle some of the election processes in town. And I know that the registrars and others had to work extra and a lot of extra duties that they wouldn't have had to normally. And hopefully we'll be past that a little bit, but we'll see how things go.
Okay, just to review the town's capital budget. Now, this is separate from the operating budget. The operating budget is really what we spend, just providing the basic services to the town. The capital budget is more about planning for major infrastructure or major expenses. So we have several capital funds set up and we contribute to those funds each year. In some cases, we use a significant amount of those funds, expend them for various purposes. So as Eric put together this presentation in detail, which I appreciate. Thank you, Eric. So he's got the capital budgets broken out here and where they stem from. The capital budgets, as you can see, are derived from the town planning processes. Have the capital improvements planning committee that does work. We see first bullet there is the fire department. They've got a ten year capital plan. I think most of you are well aware that the fire equipment is very expensive and we have to plan well ahead to make sure that we're adequately funded to take care of the aging equipment there. Similar to the public works equipment, we have a lot of aging equipment there. It gets used pretty heavily in some cases. We have to plan well ahead of time to replace that equipment. We can't just do it in our annual budgets. If the town buildings and properties, we have to maintain, in some cases make major changes to and investments in. There's the Andover Culvert Inspection Reports. And any of you who have attended town meetings or Board of Finance meetings, Board of Selectmen meetings, we know how we have some significant issues with the town culvert and bridges, and those things just are gonna need to be addressed.
The DOT inspection reports on the town bridges, and we'll talk a little bit about the bridge and culvert funds in a minute. And as anyone who walks around Andover can see, we've had a lot of tree losses in the town roadways right away. ROW is right away. That means the town has to maintain those areas. We've got to cut down those trees. In most cases, it's the town's responsibility. So we've got to plan for that, be ahead of that. There's a lot of work to be done there. Anybody who's lived in Andover the last year or two knows we've had significant storms that have caused multiple power outages, often in some cases for several days for folks. So that's a direct cause of having a lot of dead trees up that we have to take care of in town. Lastly, road maintenance and improvement planning. Again, if you've attended any of the budgets or any of the budget meetings or any of the board of selectmen meetings, you know that we talk consistently about the state of the roads and bridges and things in town.
Just some comments here. Again, you've probably heard this before if you've attended any of the town meetings or the budget meetings, but the town of Anvilver had significantly underfunded our equipment and our infrastructure for several decades. We just have been getting behind. As we have said multiple times, we've been kicking the can down the road and unfortunately, that's just not sustainable path. So basically what we expect is going to happen is that this is going to increase the cost of the taxpayers over the next twenty years. We have a lot of catch up to do. We have not been maintaining maintaining the roads. And as we know, if you maintain the roads, you're basically gonna prevent them from degrading quickly,
but we haven't maintained them. And in some cases, the degradation is happening very rapidly and that's where we are right now. As the bullet points list here, we've got 42% of our roads miles are either rated poor or failing. We have two bridges over the Hop River that are going to need replacement ultimately. There's been some work and planning done around that, but as you all know, that is not going to be cheap. A couple of other smaller bridges indeed a significant repair. Three large culverts are rated poor or failing, and they're going to need replacement. And as Eric's noted here, this is going to cause future road closures. The DOT is going to one of these days tell us, Hey, look, we have to close this road. This is It's just not safe anymore. And that's going to be a big impact if we have that happen. That's pretty clear.
And then lastly, Eric's got a number here, and overheads between seven fifty and one thousand dead trees in the right of way, in the town's right of way, that they just have to be removed. So that's what's driving a lot of the capital expenditures. So this is where we've got it broken out in this year's budget. You can read through there and we're just gonna take a quick look. Some big ones for tree removal and then yellow is road improvement. And then cheap mill, we've got several of the bridge funds broken out separately, the Bunker Hill Road, separate bridge and culvert funds. Public works equipment's a significant one at 13%. So that just gives you an idea where their breakout is. So this is where the funds are going. What this is, these numbers are not the amount of money that's in any of these funds, what these numbers represent is the amount of money that in this year's annual budget is going to be contributed to these specific funds.
So number one on there at the top, can see is what we're calling the community center. This often gets referred to in town as the senior center. Many of you are probably aware that there's been some preliminary architectural work planning done to develop the senior center on the town property between AES and the town hall. So this is the planned annual contribution community to center fund. There's obviously a lot more that's gonna have to go into that in order to actually break ground and move forward with construction of the community center. But this is our planned contribution for this year. Fire department equipment fund, 75,000 there. Public works equipment, dollars 110,000 planned. Road improvement, 300,000. That's a significant piece, but again, it's going to have to be done. Tree removal, 50,000. Bunker Hill Bridge, $1.20 120,000, thousand. Bridge and Culver Fund, 100,000 and the building maintenance, 45,000. So that's the breakout of the capital funds in this year's planned budget. A little bit of light reading for everybody. So this is our budget summary. So it's a lot of columns here, but the key thing is the left hand column, which is the budget by entity. So breaks out our main contributing groups. Have the Andover Elementary, the Andover Elementary system or school system, the debt service budget, that $93,000 we talked about RAM, the town budget. And then we'll also talk about the fund balance. And at the bottom, of course, we have the taxation. So it's really And it's a lot of columns here, but I think what's relevant really is the
third from the right, the column that says fiscal year 2021 to 'twenty two, that is our recommended budget for this fiscal year. Column to the right of that, this is difference in dollars. That's the actual change versus last fiscal year. I'm sorry, yeah, the actual dollar change for last fiscal year, and then the differences in the far right from on a percentage basis. So I just wanna review those three columns quickly. The first item was the Andover Elementary. Again, Board of Finance is recommending a budget line item of $4,078,008 for this year for the Andover Elementary School. That's $175,000 increase roughly or about 4.5% as we talked about earlier. Next line item down is the AES debt service. Again, this is the last year we'll see this, but it's $93,000 to retire that bond for the borrowing that was done for Elementary School. The next line item is RAM. Again, the town doesn't have any direct control over this budget other than the town residents voting on this budget. And of course, our representatives to the RAM Board of Education who participated in the vote to pass this budget on to the town. So Rob, did you have a comment or Regis? No, okay. And again, you can see that that's at 5,119,757. It's a $108,000 decrease. But as I mentioned earlier, that decrease is not because they're actually cutting costs, their costs are actually going up. It's just that handover share of those costs is going down. And then next is the town budget. So the town operating and capital budgets, the total is $3,463,015 It's about a $57,000 $58,000 increase. So about 1.5% roughly. Then the last line item here, not the last line item, but the second to last, is the fund balance used. So I want to make some comments about this.
The fund balance is the The unexpended fund balance is the amount of, I guess you could call it contingency money that the town of And Over has available to it. So we have a significant fund balance. It's for various reasons that we target about 10% of our overall budgets to be in our fund balance. Anything above that, we're sometimes willing to use to offset annual costs. If you've followed any of the budget processes over the last few years, you know that in, I think of each of the last two, maybe three years, yeah, we've used some of the extra fund balance. Is that four, Rob?
So two, okay, yeah. I think it's really been two, yeah. Two years, yeah.
A couple of We've big used the fund balance to offset spending. The problem with that is is gone. We really cannot do that anymore. This has been a difficult issue, I think, for the Board of Finance to wrestle with. It basically is tapping into our savings, if you wanna think about it that way, in order to pay for our spending. We have had excess money in there. If you wanna think about it that way, it's a little bit of excess money, more over and above our target amount of 10%. And we have elected to use that to offset our spending for the last two years. This is gonna be the third year we are recommending that, but we cannot go to this bucket anymore. That well is dry for all intents and purposes. I know most of the members of the Board of Finance would agree, I think if not all, we're not gonna dip into that again. We just cannot do that. We've gotta have the contingency funds in place to take care of the serious fiscal things that might come up and we've got to have that ability to plan for the future. This is a tough decision to actually use this fund balance. We don't like to do it for ongoing expenditures,
but we also recognize that the budget we're presenting to the town is our recommended budget for the next year, has a significant impact. We're trying to lessen that impact, but this is the last year we really are gonna have this opportunity. It's a little esoteric stuff, but it is very important that we recognize that this is the last opportunity we're gonna be able to offset our spending with the use of the fund balance.
That's something really unexpected. Can I add something Mark, I have to just really quick? I just wanna say with respect to our capital budget, everybody probably remembers this, but if you don't last year this budget, last year's budget cycle was happening. It was right in the midst of COVID hitting and we slashed capital badly last year in an attempt as a board to avoid a major increase in a situation where we as a board were tasked with passing a budget unilaterally. Although we did our level best to get public comment and respond to it and whatnot. At the end of the day, the Board of Finance in 2020 passed a budget on our own, which is deeply uncomfortable to a lot of us. And we tried to keep it really as low as we could. And one of the ways we did that is we really cut capital. So when we talk about these long standing issues like the roads and the culverts and whatnot.
We have kind of a long term plan to get us caught up on those issues. And we kind of took a step back last year. So this year, we're not even really proposing a catch up, we're just trying to get back to trend. I guess that's what I just wanted to point that out because that's significant portion of our budget and that's a lot of where we're throwing that fund balance at is the capital expenditure. Using capital expenditure for ongoing kind of operating expenses is a terrible idea. And I think basically run the board of finance gets that. And what Mark said about the fact that the fund balance has been spent down is absolutely true. We started out with something like a 21% savings level, 21% of budget, and we're aiming to get to 10 and we're something like at 11 now. And we're just about, this is about it. Anyway, that's it. That's all I wanted to say.
Yeah, thanks, Rob. I think that's an important point. I think it was out of the expectation of most of us, if not all of us on the Board of Finance last year, that we were going to aim for significantly higher level of spending than we actually proposed. And if everybody remembers what happened last year with the pandemic, the government prohibited in person voting to control spread of the coronavirus. So the Board of Finance Finance was was tasked tasked with with the unenviable duty of just making the decision. Because we felt concerned about the lack of the ability of the town residents to actually vote on the budget, we were a lot more restrained in our budget than we would have been otherwise. That's a really good point. Thanks, Rob. And this is, as Rob says, really just putting us back on trend rather than just having ramping up for some new reason or anything. Have seen this coming and just
this is what we do. Yep. I just wanna mention, Georgette, I see your hand up. We're gonna get to public comment again, correct, Mark? Thank you.
Are gonna get to public comments. And so I'm sorry the way this displays on my screen, I can only see a few people at a time. I didn't see it, Georgia, but Eric just sent me a message saying you wanted to ask a question. Georgia, did you have a specific question you wanted to ask now or do you want to wait until we get the public comment?
It had to do with offsets and I was on the board of finance for eight years and we used offsets often. And one of the theories before I was on it was that if you have too much money in the fund balance, when it comes time for union negotiations, they say, oh, you have all this excess money, so they want more. So that's another balance that you have to figure in. But we always had, we always got money back from Andover Elementary School when Andy Managia was superintendent because he would get grants. And the following year after that, we would use that excess money to keep the taxes lower. So it's
not something new that you're doing to use an offset to keep the mill rate low.
Yeah, and I seem to remember there was also some reasons, Rob and David remember from being previously been on the board, that it also makes you a little bit of a target from the state in some cases, Yes.
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you. You lowered your voice.
Sorry, I understand also that there's some potential impacts from if you have too much of a fund balance relative to your overall town spending that it kind of puts a target on your back when it comes down to state grants and other reasons. So, state, that's big party, part of it. Not to have an excess fund balance there. Okay. That's interesting. I hadn't heard that other one, Georgia. Thanks. Okay. Mark, you're muted.
Thanks. As I say, often you think after doing this for a year, in business and other meetings, I'd be able to remember that one. I just wanted to say we are in we will be very quickly moving into the public comment section of this, so you'll also have opportunity to comment there. Okay, this brings us to the next section, which is the mill rate calculation. Again, if you kind of direct your attention to the far right column, this is really the fiscal year twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two. This is the budget we're referring to today. Total expenditures, $12,660,007.72. That is the overall budget including the schools and the town's budget.
Estimated revenues on the second line. So this is, all the different sorts of revenue that the town gets from various sources. Don't have that broken out here but there's a lot of things that contribute to that, fees, other grants, things like that. The third line is the use of the fund balance. As we discussed already, this is going to be zero next year. We authorize the use of $225,000 out of the fund balance for this year, but next year that will be zero, will not be available to us. We have some abatements and exemptions that roll into it there. Adding all that in together, the total to be raised by taxes is just a little bit short of $10,000,000. The next line is the taxable grand list. This includes the total value of the property in town.
As many of you know, we're undergoing a reassessment right now. I'm not sure how that'll all play into that. Think that's Talk to Eric. Eric, what's the timing on that assessment? That doesn't necessarily roll into the beginning of this, right? This budget year, when will we get that assessment?
Correct that assessment will be effective October of this year and will affect next year's grand list but not this year's. Okay, yeah that's all right thanks.
So basically the way the mill calculation is done is that one mill is a thousandths of that number. And the way we calculate the tax rate is basically we take our money to be raised by taxes. You divide that by one mil or one thousandth of the overall grand list and that comes up with your estimated mill rate. Okay, this will all be finalized once we have the final lists and the final budget. But in this current budget, the estimated mill rate for next year would be 36.83. And as you can see in the line below, this results in a mill rate increase of 3.43%. So that would be the applied mill rate increase to the property in town that is taxed for the budget purposes. Okay, So that is the budget overview.
You guys are not seeing my screen anymore, right? Amanda, you stopped the share? I just stopped the share. All right. Just wanted to make sure. Thanks. So now what we'll do is we'll kind of move into our public comment portion of the meeting. This is the opportunity for the public to provide additional input, make comments, and the last opportunity really for the Board of Finance to get some real good opportunity, the best opportunity for the public to provide input into the budget before we go to our final recommended budget. We do have one last board of finance meeting next week. We will be wrapping it up at that point. We have full intention to doing so and moving that final recommended budget onto the May 6 town budget meeting. Okay. Before we move on to the public speak, just wanna give the rest of the board members an opportunity to provide any more input. Does anybody have any? Okay, hearing none. I guess Amanda, if you could go around and see who from the public would like to provide some input or ask questions.
All right, here we go. First up, have Georgette Conrad.
Did you say that the mill rate would be 36.83 for the twenty one-twenty two budget year? Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay. Yep.
Yeah, sorry, I was slipping behind the screens and a small laptop, so I had to get back to it. Yes, that is the number Georgia. 36Point83, okay. Anything else?
Okay. Okay, thank you, Georgette. Next up we have Wally Barton. You're muted, Wally.
Well, there you go. I'm unmuted now. No comment. Thank you. Thank you. Scott Prasan. I'm all set. Thank you, Amanda. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for being here. Jed Larson.
I guess to provide my only input would be I'm concerned that the town capital and services budgets a little too low for what we need to do, And I'm still concerned about the increase in the Andover Elementary School. My personal feeling is, from what I can see, we've still got five classrooms with 10 people, 10 students per classroom there. And I'm not convinced that that's the best way to spend our money. That's it. Thank you, Jen. Jerry Cremay.
I would like to thank the Board of Finance for the hard work you've done. And I think the residents of the town need to appreciate everything that you do to put together a budget, present it and I think you look out for our interest and I want to thank you for all your work you that's it that's it
thank you jerry Cathy Palazzi and Mike Palazzi. Mike and Kathy, you are unmuted if you would like to participate.
Can you hear me, Amanda? Yes. I said that I wanted to thank the Board of Finance. I felt that they gave a best input they could. The budget was it's what it is and I wish we had more for the roads and the town. We have a lot of repair work to do. I would like to have seen that happen hopefully next year.
Do you have anything? No, I'm all set. Thank you.
Thank you. Elaine Bicard, may I also see Don there too? You're muted. Just unmute yourself, Elaine.
Sorry, having a hard time figuring out what to click. Anyway, know, because I've been doing this for several years, being on the board of Selectmen for nine, that this is always really tough, and we have a lot of things that have to get done and we don't want to kick things down the road at all. And I know that this will take care of, you know, what has to be taken care of. But as the chairman of the Economic Development Commission and a member of the Sustainable Connecticut group, it's really tough to not have any portion go toward growth of town, putting in some kind of environmentally safe solar panels, kind of doing things that go ahead and make the town attractive for people to move to and work in, there's never any money for that. And I hope that in the future, we'll be able to, at least through grants, working with the state, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, whatever, to go ahead and try to take care of those needs. But I know you have to do what you have to do. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Kathy DeRosier.
Hi, thank you. Thank you for your time. And again, thank you for all your work on the budget. I know it's grueling. It's grueling to put this stuff together, but you did it. I do think the school budget is high for the amount of children that are in the school system. You're half filled over there. And I believe in an excellent education, putting two kids through this program, but it's high. And the classrooms are small, too small. As a parent, I wouldn't want my children in classrooms that small, to be honest with you. I do think the school is becoming unsustainable for this small community. Regionalizing that elementary school is something we're gonna be faced with if we go down to a 100 kids. We're down to what, 140, 150 kids in the school now? It's a little higher, but yeah, it's small.
Right, and the school houses 400 plus kids. So we're below the halfway mark. So we have to be real about where we're going with that. I just wanted to say that piece. The other thing is, as you well know, when I was on the board of selectmen, the roads. I know the roads in some areas are being looked at and I know the other roads that need to be done are long, very poorly maintained roads, because it's my understanding through my conversation with Eric that we're fixing the good roads. We're not going to fix the bad roads. Makes more sense to fix good roads and not bad roads. So I don't understand that philosophy, but I'm hoping that over time we can see all the roads get fixed because
it's, you know, everybody deserves to live on a decent road, not just paving over and over and over the same roads. With that said, I don't understand, or I don't know if the board did this. Why aren't we bonding for the roads, the bridges and getting ourselves ahead of all of this? So you're not nickel and diming the community year over year. Being on the board of selectmen, you know, we couldn't move things forward. We asked for zero to 3% budgets primarily because there was no plan, to be honest with you. So it seems like this board of selectmen and Eric have a plan. Well, why can't we put that plan together and consider bonding?
Can I just make a comment on that? I mean, it's not that bonding is out of the question for a certain project, but I mean everybody should understand that bonding throws off a debt stream and then in our budget this year, right, we're just this year paying off the last bond we had on AES. So on the one hand, you can bond but then and interest rates are low, so I'm not against bonding but just understand that if you do that it throws off this debt service obligation. You're not actually saving necessarily saving any money doing that. One of the things we're trying to do with the capital budget is kind of two things we do with the capital budget, We do, we plug money into funds that kind of sit there until we need them. And then there's another portion of capital budget where we're pretty much going to spend it right away like the roads.
But something like the community center or a fire truck fund, we're putting money away so that we don't have to bond so that we don't have to pay interest on the debt. I mean, that's the thinking at least as far as I'm concerned. You could do it either way. I'm not clear on which one saves us more money though.
But I would agree with Rob and we have talked about bonding to some degree in the board of finance meetings. There's a lot of work and research that would need to go into that to figure out the cost benefit analysis. And I think everyone in the town who gets involved in this process should be very careful and consider, put under strict consideration in basically committing our future town residents to big tax bills. That being said, when you're looking at a major expense such as the senior slash community center, bonding may really be the only way to get over that hurdle to make sure that this gets done. And I think that we're all open to considering that. And in my view, that's absolutely something we need to look at in the next year or two. As Rob said, this is a great opportunity because interest rate or its historic lows. We don't know how long those are gonna stay and we've got some big things we wanna get done in this town. That's exactly, my
Oh, we lost you there. Kathy got muted. Oh, you're back. I'm sorry.
So yeah, I just think it's something I understand for this budget, you guys are already through it, but I do think it's something to move forward because I've lived in town thirty seven years and we've been crippled by money. We have not been able to do projects. We've not been able to move the dial. We've not been able to fix the roads. And, you know, we're always playing catch up. And I just think, you know, it's like buying an old house. Do you just say, we're going to fix it as we go, or we're just going to take out a home equity loan and fix the roof and get this done and bite the bullet.
I just think that smart financing, when you look at what other towns are doing, they are bonding. If that elementary school needed addition, we bond for it. Why are we afraid? And we have, why are we always afraid to bond for the town's needs? And I just think, you know, something you should consider in future years, just to get us up to a point where we're even the roads are good, the bridges are done, you know, before we even build a community center, we need to get these things done so people can support them because it's hard to support a community center when your roads are falling apart or there's so many dead trees or what, you know, I just think we just need to get to that point and we've never been able to do that in the town. So that's my recommendation.
Thank you. Thank you, Kathy. It's an important point. Thank you, Kathy. Diane Grineer. I'm all set. Thank you.
Thanks, Diane. Valerie Bruno? I'm all set. Thanks, Amanda. Thank you. Richard Repay? If you would like to participate. There you are. It's Ellen, not Rich. Oh, hi Ellen. Go ahead. I've just I'm just wanted
to listen because of what I've been reading in the paper. I'm concerned about certain things like the roads and the trees and the school, the school budget, but I'm learning that this is this is my first time at a town meeting like this and you know I just really came to learn so that I can make an informed decision and I want to thank everybody that volunteers to serve on all these boards. It's amazing so I have nothing else to say but thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, Leigh Ann Hutchinson. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, go ahead.
Okay, thanks. Yes, I had commented at one or two earlier meetings that one of my most main concerns was snow plowing in the winter and with the $10,000 cut the way it stands now, I'm not sure if I understand that it could or couldn't be taken from the contingency fund. If not, then where would this additional money come from if we had a snow event over and above what we planned for on an average year? As part of that question well again if someone could answer that because my other part of the question was going to be is hiring somebody who's not already a public works employee on an on call basis in the event that we have snow events that we're not planning for, is that a possibility?
Okay. I I think from the first question that yeah. There there are usually there's some contingency money available in just about every budget. So there's some planning that's available for that. And we can't go over the approved budget without going through some town requests, etcetera. But generally we're gonna have, I think money available to handle, especially that small, relatively small amount. It's not insignificant, but it's not that material to the overall budget. So yeah, I think the board of finance would not have reduced the budget amount by $10,000 if we didn't think we'd have the flexibility to authorize additional money into that fund. We just wouldn't have gone there. But what we did wanna do given the fact that we did have contingency money available to cover these unexpected or unusual snow years, for example. We just wanna reflect what the average year might be rather than budgeting for an excessive amount. Just prefer to have that practice. I think it makes a lot of sense and I think the board agreed
Eric do want to comment further on as far as the contracting question
so the first part about it is that there in any given year that is the snow happens early enough in the year, you know there's a chance you can cover it out of other parts of the public works budget. The second thing is in an absolute emergency, you could spend for that out of the town aid road fund, which is a separate allotment of money given to the town every year that's used for road maintenance. So we generally don't like to spend it, We wouldn't want to spend it on snow removal, but if we had to we would. As far as hiring outside people, we do per union contract. If there's a snow event, the union employees get called up first on a on a bigger snow event we do have one standby. Actually now to standby people to help us plow. And they would also take over if somebody was sick or out for some reason.
The public works supervisor also plows in the small truck. But you know if needed he would get in one of the big trucks and plow also. But we're obligated to use the public works employees first even though they're more expensive on an hourly basis than temp help, if that answers your question.
Yes thank you both that provides quite a bit more clarification and I wanted to make a couple of quick comments about the town meeting on the budget on May 6. Procedurally I believe it's correct that or German to referendum is not automatic the town meeting could vote the budget down and send it back to the board of finance correct
correct absolutely the case yeah that at the town budget meeting, that budget can be adjusted. So just because the board of finances recommended this specific budget doesn't mean that's even the one that'll get voted on at the town budget meeting. There couldn't be alterations to the budget made at the town budget meeting per the vote of the attendees. But yeah, absolutely. The town budget meeting proceeds and that budget, whatever comes out, whatever budget, final budget comes out of that town budget meeting, that will go to the vote on the referendum, which has been scheduled. If the voters turn down that budget, then we restart, we try to come up with a different budget that is more aligned with what the voters want so absolutely correct and so attendees at the town meeting can
reduce but not add, correct? That's exactly where I was going. Yep. You can reduce but not add at the town meeting. Yep. And what that means,
it's not department by department, but the overall number cannot be increased. And the board of finance took that very much into consideration with
this recommended budget. Right. So in theory, you could say, okay, you have a budget, you have two different line items and you're gonna increase one and decrease another by more and it adds up to a cut, nets out to a cut, that's okay. But what you can't do is increase the budget overall. That's just written in the charter, I believe. Okay, thank you. That's it.
Thank you, Leanne. The next phone number we have is (860) 977-3484. If you would like to participate just press 6 to unmute yourself.
Amanda it's actually Joanne Hebert. I had my phone as backup. Okay Joanne if you would like to go ahead feel free. Well can you hear me on the computer which is better? Yes we can. All right we'll go that route. Okay so first off, I just have to state that unfortunately, I don't think the almost 6% increase is going to fly. I realize a lot of work has been put into it. Cuts have been made, but he's trying hard, but 6% is 6% taking into consideration that the fund balance won't be used in the future as Mark stated and I get it it's been so high you know when I'm looking at your history there and February or whatever it is this year I think February I don't have it in front of me.
So that's more taxation. So again I've got to stay true to what I've been saying all along is I've got to follow a few of the people and I've been a leader in this. The education budget really can cut some more. I would like to see $100,000 cut there. I think they can do it. I really do. Whether they don't touch classrooms, whether they touch something I mean, we've all gone line by line. I won't go through it. There's places to cut. I know that the parents don't want to see regionalization. I'm not opposed to that. But listening to parents that are current parents my kids are in their 20s, so I'm good they don't want to see regionalization. So we've got to do a little cutting so we can keep our school. Again, I have a voice. I'm very vocal at RAM meetings as well. 30% of the budget is RAM. There's not any other town residents there. There I am sending emails, speaking up. Overall RAM budget is high. I mean, it's $30
They like to present their this, I know, isn't an Andover problem. I just want to speak to the public that's present. They do quote a $17,000 per pupil and some odd change. I don't have that in front of me. But they also, when you figure that out, they're getting an additional $9,000,000 almost in the budget over and above their per pupil. So something can be cut there as well. We've all got to band together and try to keep that going. Again, I know that the town roads and trees, especially I'm so afraid for the trees now. That's my main focus. I'm afraid something's going to fall in my car. We've got to attack the things. There's not a lot of whittling to be done here on that side. Good luck. I know you guys all work hard, so that's my 2¢. Thank you, Joanne. Okay, Cindy and Jeff Murray. We're all set, thanks. Thank you. We have Joan. I'm all set. Thank you. Thank you. Mercy Miner.
Hi, how are you? I got in late, so I don't really I haven't heard everything that you guys talk about. But I agree with Joanne Hubert that the school budget could be reduced a lot. It's been continually to gone up and the number of kids are going down. And we haven't really, doesn't feel like there's a lot of transparency there. I saw that there's flags on the lawn, so the lawn has been treated, but we don't really know by who, how much you're paying and what good is it doing. I haven't noticed any improvement and I know that they were doing it last year. So and that I'm in the business, I noticed things like that.
And I know that we have a lot of intelligent people in our town that could contribute as far as the budget goes, all these little details. So just my 2¢. And I do think that a 6% increase gonna be, that's gonna be a challenge. Can't imagine people agreeing to that. So.
Okay, thanks Marci. Yeah, just, yeah, the overall number increase isn't quite up there, but yeah, we'll, it's an increase for sure. Right. It isn't 6%, but it's not insignificant.
No. Thank you, Marcy. And let me just double check to make sure we are all set here. Oh, Georgette, go ahead.
I just wanted to say that having served on boards and the Board of Finance, I do agree with Kathy Derozier that we should think about bonding. But I wanted to thank all the members for their hard work because I know what a thankless job it is and I want to thank Amanda because she's always there to help us out when we need it So that's all I wanted to say. Thank you. Thanks, Georgia. Well, to yes to that. Yes.
Well, last but not least, I was going to just share that I wanted to thank the Board of Finance. Really hard work and everyone obviously appreciates your time and energy and thanks to Mark Brinker for hosting very nice meetings. That is all. Thank you, Amanda. Yeah, we had a great turnout tonight. I also wanted to share that the presentation that Mark and Eric put together will also be uploaded to the town website along with everything else on the budget page.
Amanda has done a nice job of kind of putting together and then there may have been other people involved too, putting together all of the documents from PES, RAM and the town that are gonna affect the spending plan and budget for next year. It's all on one page in the town website. So once you get there, everything that you'd wanna know and probably a lot more are right there. So good point. Thanks Amanda for bringing that up. Okay, we're all set with public comment then Amanda.
It seems like a Joanne Hubbard just put a question into the chat. Will you be putting up anything asking for town input on the website like last year?
Yeah, we do not have a plan to do that. Basically, I think that was done last year because the concept of this virtual meeting was so new to everybody that we didn't have a real, we didn't feel like we had a real good mechanism to collect enough input from the town. Other piece of that is we were being super careful to try to provide every opportunity for input that we could since it was the board of finance making the decision instead of the town residents. So we decided that that probably wasn't necessary this year but any town resident at any time obviously not only can you attend the meeting or if you can't attend the meeting you can always send an email to any of us that can be shared and
provide your input that way or a phone call or whatever mechanism works best for you. Okay, so if we're all set for public comment, we'll move on to the next item really, which is adjournment. But before we do, does any other member of the board of finance have anything they'd like to bring forward or comment on?
I'll just say this one thing very quickly. We've already hit on this point. Regardless of what you think of this budget, and I personally support it, I would just say that we all have to understand that the fund balance situation being what it is next year, all things being equal, which they may not be. We're not going to be pulling another quarter million dollars out of fund balance. Just know that wherever you go with that is your call, but just know that we're not going to be drawing down that much money again, unless some deus ex machina happens and we get a windfall. We are basically at our target now after this budget for our fund balance. And that's important to understand because that means that whatever the shortfall may be, or what have you, we're gonna have to raise other ways, whether it's grants or taxation, FYI.
Yeah, it's a good point and we'll be making that again, I'm sure when we do the town budget presentation on this text. Thanks, Rob. Okay, lastly, I guess I'd like to just appreciate everybody's patience. It's one in the morning here, actually later than that, it's now 02:15 in the morning. Yeah, you're pushing It's German. I'm usually an early morning person, not so much a lay person. This is just kind of a thing. So if I'm stumbling over my words, again, I appreciate your patience. Thank you everybody. Louise, did you have a question or I
did, I just want to let everybody know too about the YouTube presentations. If anyone has any questions from the town as to how we got to what we got to. They're very, very helpful. I've been listening to quite a few of them and a good resource as well. Good. That's a good point. Thanks. Thanks, Louise.
That's I guess a really good point. I guess, sorry, Mark. Just wanted to share that on our town website, we have a link where you notifications. You can choose from various categories, and we have been sending out budget information and other important updates through that. So spread the word, encourage people to sign up. It's a great way to get the information to our people.
Okay. Good. Good point. Thank you, Louise. Thank you, Amanda. Okay, unless any of the board members have anything else they'd like to add, we could entertain a motion for adjournment. I will so move.
Okay, Rob motions to adjourn. Do we have a Second. Kurt seconds. Any discussion? Okay, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay the motion carries this meeting is adjourned. I'd like to thank everybody for your attendance and I hope we'll see you in a couple of weeks at the town budget meeting. Mark, thank you so much for attending at two in the morning. Will
we see you on normal time zone next week? You will, I will be flying back to The States on Saturday. Nice. I will hopefully be adjusted fully. I hear you. Thanks guys. You.